The Fire Baby

30

Humph pointed the cab south across the Great West Fen. Dryden peered out through a windscreen made greasy with the bodies of eviscerated insects which had begun to multiply alarmingly in the continuing heat. The drought was frying the landscape now, anything left alive in the fields was sizzling on the dry, baked earth. At one crossroads an orderly line of OAPs stood dutifully waiting for the social services to take them off to the civic baths in Ely. The drought had resulted in mains supplies to several villages being cut off indefinitely.

‘Great at queues,’ said Dryden. ‘Old people.’

Humph grunted. ‘Why bother to wash?’

Why indeed? thought Dryden, lowering the window still further. The smell would have embarrassed a skunk.

A text message had been waiting on Dryden’s mobile when he got back in the cab outside Bob Sutton’s home. He’d rung Garry straight back. The Crow’s junior reporter had been monitoring emergency calls and had picked up a violent incident at the City Mortuary, outside Cambridge, where Emmy Kabazo’s body was waiting for an official ID.

They pulled off the main road at a sign which said MORTUARY with brutal simplicity. The building itself was a long, brick two-storey block in 1930s fascist style. It could have been an abattoir, and in an odd way it was. Two ambulances stood silently at a ‘goods in’ entrance. The place reeked of blood, and violence, thought Dryden, like a bull ring.

Jimmy Kabazo was standing outside the plate-glass entrance foyer with a crowbar in his hands. Even from fifty yards Dryden could see that sweat bathed his blue T-shirt. As Humph pulled the Capri up beside a police car Jimmy ran at the plate-glass doors of the main entrance and delivered a shattering blow with the iron bar. The reinforced glass splintered in a complex pattern, like expanding crystals.

Dryden got out of the cab, but carefully left the door open so that he could retreat. He understood Kabazo’s rage. If he’d read the national newspapers or listened to the local radio he’d know about the body found in the van at the container park at the coast. He’d know it was the body of the only sixteen-year-old in the human consignment abandoned by the people smugglers. In other words, he knew, almost certainly, that it was his son.

Kabazo waited for him as Dryden walked the fifty yards between them. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sure they’ll let you see him…’ said Dryden.

Tears bathed Jimmy’s face. ‘They said I had to wait – talk to the policeman.’ The water was pouring out of Kabazo’s eyes like a river over a weir. Dryden knew that anger and despair were a high-octane human emotional cocktail, so he kept a safe distance from the crowbar.

‘I was there when they found him,’ he said.

Kabazo dropped the crowbar, and in the silence they listened to it roll away. Dryden noticed that it left a thin trail of arterial-red blood in its wake.

‘It is him?’ said Kabazo.

‘I think so,’ said Dryden honestly. ‘But you must see him. You will.’

Then they heard a car skid off the main road and head towards them across the tarmac. At the wheel was DS Peter Crabbe, Newman’s sidekick, and pushy enough to be after his job once retirement had claimed a willing victim. Crabbe was insensitive, brusque, and lacked people skills to the same degree that deserts lack water.

Jimmy ignored him. ‘You were there?’

Dryden nodded and held out his arms. ‘We should talk. Inside?’

‘I must see him,’ said Jimmy simply, seeing DS Crabbe advancing, accompanied by the two PCs from the squad car. Some of the anger had washed out of him, and his shoulders sagged. Crabbe left the PCs to take Kabazo into custody and led the way towards the mortuary doors. He pushed a button to one side which opened up an intercom to the desk inside. ‘OK. Open up now, please – the situation is under control. DS Peter Crabbe.’ He held up his warrant card to the glass.

An orderly edged forward to read it before the doors slid electronically open, spilling shattered glass as they did so. One of the PCs from the squad car slipped handcuffs on Jimmy as they waited in the reception area. He didn’t resist, his eyes set on the interior doors to the mortuary. One of the two medical orderlies behind the foyer counter held a bandage to his head, from which a thin trickle of blood had run down to his collar.

‘I’ve radioed for medical,’ said Crabbe, turning to Kabazo. ‘While we’re waiting, Mr Kabazo – I presume?’

Dryden nodded. ‘Mr Kabazo wished to identify the body of his son,’ he said.

Crabbe turned to him. ‘Mr Kabazo. Are you responsible for this?’ He gestured towards the orderly with the head wound.

‘They wouldn’t let me see him,’ said Kabazo, his eyes still on the mortuary doors.

‘We called at Wilkinson’s, Mr Kabazo, to invite you to a formal identification. They said you were sick.’

Great stuff, thought Dryden. His son is dead and you’re lecturing him about taking a sickie. But he said: ‘Perhaps. While we are waiting, detective sergeant?’

Crabbe decided that he might as well press ahead with the ID while he had Kabazo in the building.

One of the mortuary assistants hit some security buttons on the desktop and the interior set of doors swished open. Beyond that Crabbe led them through two sets of industrial doors, the kind that have plastic sheeting attached to stop draughts. The floors were concrete and streaked with stains which turned Dryden’s stomach. There was a smell in the air, a scent really, which Dryden could not identify. It was sweet, and medicinal, and it brought a lump to his throat. They stopped in front of a door marked: ‘Autopsy Unit’. They were there too quickly. Dryden didn’t know why he was there at all. Inside, the room was lit by sunshine from skylights, while metal boxes, like those in left luggage, were in serried ranks on either wall. A row of surgical tables stood in the centre. There was a body on one and the sunshine fell on the zip-up hospital-green bag in which it was wrapped.

A woman in a white body-suit appeared out of the blaze of light and stood by the table with her hand on the zip. Crabbe took Kabazo’s arm, marched him forward to the table and nodded briskly, almost cheerfully, and the bag was unzipped to the chest of the child. Dryden had waited too long. He felt rather than heard the breath leaving Kabazo’s body. He watched as Kabazo bent stiffly to kiss the child on the forehead. When he stood, Dryden noticed Emmy’s face was splashed with tears, as if turned up to a summer shower. Kabazo sank to his knees by the table and they all stepped back, even Crabbe feeling it was time to release his custodial hold.

Dryden fled the room, and so he only heard the scream of despair. He waited outside in the car park in the long silence that followed, and thought about Johnnie Roe, staked out in the pillbox. What did his torturer want to know? Did Jimmy Kabazo track him down when his son failed to turn up with the people smugglers?

They put Kabazo in the back of the squad car and waited for Crabbe to appear. He came out clutching some paperwork and a plastic zip-up bag. Dryden guessed it was the boy’s clothes and other belongings retrieved from the HGV container. He could see a green T-shirt and a pair of trainers and what looked like a notebook. Kabazo took it and as they drove him off he bowed his head and hugged it to his chest, as if it were the son he had lost.