The Fire Baby

33

Humph drove him to Barham’s Dock as the sun fell. He left Humph rummaging in the drinks compartment and rang his landline answerphone: still no further word from Gillies & Wright. How could Maggie have miscalculated so badly? She’d been convinced Lyndon’s father would come forward. If there was no further news soon Dryden needed a new lead on the story to run the appeal again – this time in The Crow.

He checked his watch: 8.45pm – time for night calls. Every evening he did the round of six: police headquarters at Cambridge, local cop shop at Ely, fire station at Cambridge, county ambulance control at Histon, the coastguard at Cromer, and the AA regional centre at Peterborough. Most nights it was six blanks, which was a good job as Dryden usually made the calls having taken a series of nightcaps with Humph.

Tonight it was miniature crème de menthes. Sickly green bottles of alcoholic medicine.

Dryden waited a full minute with the bottle vertically poised above his lips to allow the last of the green slurry to seep out. Then he hit the mobile. He knew something was wrong when he finally got through to the duty officer at the county police HQ.

‘Yeah. We’ve got two units on the perimeter wire at Mildenhall. Request from the base commander. Fire. No other details at this time.’

‘Shit,’ said Dryden, cutting straight to fire HQ. Humph carefully screwed the top back on to his second bottle and started the cab’s engine.

‘We’ve got three tenders on the airfield,’ said the control room operator.

‘From…’ said Dryden, hoping his luck would hold.

‘Mildenhall, Ely and Soham.’

The military at Mildenhall had three tenders of their own on the air base. If they’d called for assistance something had gone off with a big bang. He flicked through his contact book. He knew one of the Ely firemen whose wife was a nurse at The Tower. They’d met at a fund-raising barbecue four years earlier, the summer before Laura’s accident. He’d been on the News then but could never let a social occasion pass without ruining it by asking someone for their mobile telephone number. He rang it now, it picked up, but all he could hear was garbled shouting and a mechanical roar like the sound of the sea, heard underwater.

‘… here. Darren Peake here. Darren…’

‘Hi. Hi. It’s Philip. Philip Dryden from The Crow. Sorry. We met at one of the fund-raisers. Are you at the Mildenhall fire?’

Generally firemen were press-friendly. They liked seeing the pictures taken from the at-scene videos in the local paper and The Crow covered all their sports sponsorship events. During the firemen’s strike Dryden had done a vox pop for the Express which had thrown up unexpectedly strong support for their claim.

‘Yeah,’ said Peake. ‘It’s a sight. Fire training facility has gone up, then a petrol tank. It’s right by the wire on the south side – near the road to Beck Row, half a mile north of the junction with the main Ely road. I’m officer in charge at the scene for the civil – give us a wave. The yellow hat. Ciao.’

Dryden checked the back seat for The Crow’s office cameras and a decent pair of binoculars. Humph already had the cab on the road going east, while overhead the sky was turning from blue to purple like a giant bruise as the sun set. They saw the single gout of fire ten miles short of the end of the main runway, a vertical eruption of fuel-blue flame closely followed by the crump of exploding metal.

The approach roads to the base were closed by military policemen with mobile road-blocks but Humph swung the Capri off down an unlit drove road around the perimeter wire. They big-dippered along the rock-hard farm track until they bounced out into a large field of unmown grass gone to seed. It was a camp site run by an enterprising local farmer exclusively for plane spotters. Their caravans and trailers stood well back from the twelve-foot security wire while in front of each stood a small fisherman’s tent from which the spotters could train their telephoto lenses on the arrivals and departures at Mildenhall. It was, Dryden had often thought, the village of the sad.

The entire population of this dysfunctional holiday camp was up against the perimeter wire including half a dozen kids in stripy pyjamas.

The fire was 200 yards beyond the wire. An alcopop orange flame curled up in a single sickly cone of ear-splitting combustion. Dryden pressed his face against the diamond-webbed fence with all the rest. The guy next to him made Humph look like a bathing belle. He could only dream of pressing his face against the fence. On his huge chest a pair of binoculars rested unused, as he shielded his eyes by pulling down a cap peak slightly smaller than a garage door.

‘Fucker,’ he said, burping. A small boy at his knee, with suspicious quantities of puppy fat still adhering to his tiny limbs, looked up with adoring eyes. There was a lot to look up to.

‘What happened?’ said Dryden, hoping the guy wouldn’t swing round and flatten him.

‘The fire house went up.’

Dryden realized immediately that the big man didn’t know he was not one of the brothers, one of that intimate band that knew the difference between an FK-109 and an FK-109XA, or even the secret society within that, which actually cared.

But being a reporter is all about owning up. ‘Actually. I’m a reporter. Just driven out – what’s a fire house?’

Dryden took an evasive step back as the big man swung round. He looked at Dryden as one would greet an alien life form, spitting effortlessly over Dryden’s head and then cracking his knuckles. It sounded like he was dislocating the legs on a turkey.

‘Fire house is where they practise fire fighting, OK? It’s just a brick shell – but with concrete floors. Only difference is they have metal hatches over the windows, doors, chimney – all the outlets. That way they can control the fire. This one’s got a fake fuselage attached, and a wing with an engine. They flood ‘em with high-octane fuel and then – Bang!’

Dryden jumped. The big man liked that. So he did it again. ‘Bang!’

They returned to the diamond mesh fence. ‘So what went wrong?’

‘Guess they didn’t have this one under control.’

Dryden saw Darren Peake’s yellow hat bobbing on the edge of the fire zone. He rang him on the mobile and waved, stupidly, from beyond the wire. Darren strolled over, removing the hat and the breathing gear, and Dryden took some pictures through the fence as he approached with the fire in the background.

‘There’s a body,’ he said, sucking water from a bottle attached to his protective suit.

‘In there?’

Darren nodded. ‘Guy’s a crisp. Not a lot left, even the teeth are carbonized.’ Dryden felt a crème de menthe ease itself into his lower gut. ‘How?’

He replaced the yellow hat. ‘Between you and I? There was a practice scheduled for tomorrow morning; they usually let us know, just in case, so we can stand by. So everything would have been ready. There’s a reservoir of aircraft fuel inside which was full. Looks like someone took their chance, dumped chummy and lit the fuel. Bingo – crispy bacon. There are ventilation grilles on all four outside walls which provide the fire with air – they were all open. Some sparks got out and lit the runway grass. That heated up the waste oil tank, which ignited.’

‘Bang!’ said the man-mountain, who had been listening intently.

They all looked back as a hissing sound overrode the screaming of the flames. Several jets of foam were being played on the flames which fluttered before dying in a cauldron of steam. The fire house was instantly buried under a snow drift.

‘Send us some prints, eh? Show’s over,’ said Darren, walking off.

But it wasn’t. The oil tank, capped with white foam, blew itself up. Darren, and everyone behind the wire, hit the grass, the big man going down with surprising grace. As cinders fell like black smoke Dryden left everyone else trying to pick him up.

He woke Humph up. ‘There’s a body in there. Human bacon. This place will be crawling with police when they get the call. Let’s go.’

Humph, horrified, fired the Capri into life.