The Fire Baby

36

In Dryden’s imagination a wounded Lancaster trailed black smoke behind a shattered tail, while Glenn Miller played on the Home Service. It was summer: summer 1940. The Battle of Britain. Overhead, fighter aircraft left a white cat’s cradle hanging in the blue skies. But if Dryden had actually been there in that pivotal summer he would have been too scared to do what he was doing now, which was putting his feet up on the wooden verandah rail and listening in his head to Glenn’s giddy dance numbers. Humph was in the parked cab about fifty yards away across the grassy overgrown runway. Dryden had an overwhelming urge to call him Ginger.

He’d been at Barham’s Dock supervising the cleaning of the PK 129 when he’d taken the call from August. A press conference had been set up to deal with enquiries over the fire-house fatality. ‘Is it linked to Black Bank?’ asked Dryden, knowing it must be.

‘Who knows?’ said August, and Dryden could tell he was sober. ‘We may never even know who chummy was. Anyway – one o’clock at the new press centre at the old RAF huts.’

Dryden checked his watch: 12.50pm. USAF Mildenhall lay on the far side of the wire, laid out like a giant picnic blanket. He was sitting outside Hut B: Squadron A. The sign smacked of a simpler world, a world where you could spot a swastika at 3,000 feet and Dame Vera Lynn at 100 yards. The huts had been in use since the September 11 attacks on New York. Outside the perimeter wire, they offered a convenient place for community and press liaison without testing the security on the main gates. The hut next to Dryden had been used for base staff education on water conservation. A huge poster twenty yards long shouted ‘Don’t be a waterhog!’

Dryden felt the globes of sweat forming on his forehead and turned his eyelids up to receive the ritual shower of imaginary snow flakes. He thought about his floating home awash with river water and asked himself again the pressing question: Why did someone so desperately want him to stop writing about Maggie Beck? Was it Freeman White? And if it was, why was it Freeman White? Freeman and Lyndon were close, a relationship fused during their incarceration in Al Rasheid. Was Dryden a threat to Lyndon Koskinski? Or were the attacks on Humph’s cab and PK 129 somehow linked to the murder of Johnnie Roe, or even to the people smugglers?

His brain swam, unable to compute the interlocking facets of three stories which had become fixed in a baffling embrace. Was there any way forward? He sensed that if he could find the last tape that Maggie made before her death he could begin to unravel the truth. He would visit The Tower that night, and begin his own enquiries.

When he opened his eyes it was to see a crocodile of walkers making its way across the grass runway from Gate B. Her Majesty’s Press had arrived en masse, and were being escorted by Sergeant DeWitt, August’s statuesque assistant. The bedraggled group were hot, bad-tempered and in search of a decent story. Sergeant DeWitt promised cold drinks, a buffet lunch, and best of all – alcohol.

Inside, the old hut had been turned into a mini-conference centre. Plush seats with flip-down note tables were set in rows. A generous spread of sandwiches and nibbles had been laid on a new pine table down one side of the room. A dozen bottles of wine had been provided – although Dryden noted with suspicion the usual trick: they’d been opened and then re-corked, the contents thereby being unlikely to bear any relation to the labels. On the opposite side of the room an identical table had a series of six PCs linked up to the internet with the base website permanently online: USAF Mildenhall: The US Gateway to Europe.

August had invited Inspector Andy Newman along to take questions too. Technically the base was sovereign US soil while the 120-year lease ran its course. In practice a suspicious death on a US air base had attracted the interest of the Home Office in London and the US Embassy. Discreet calls had been made to secure the cooperation of the local constabulary in clearing up the crime as quickly as possible. Newman’s first job was to settle nerves at HQ in Histon that the killing was not a terrorist act. Post-September 11 nerves amongst the top brass were still frayed.

Joey Forward, the local man for the East Anglian Daily News, played idly with his trouser zip as he considered his first question. ‘So, this body that was burnt up – like a cinder the camera man said. Nasty business. Any ideas, sergeant?’ He studied a briefing pack they’d all picked up on the way in.

‘Major. Major August Sondheim. The murder victim…’

‘Murder?’ cut in Dryden. ‘Why so sure?’

‘All windows and doors on the fire house were locked from the outside. We don’t know if the man died inside, or was dead before the fire was lit… we never will, I’m afraid. We’ll be lucky to get an ID off the dental records. Not a piece of flesh left on him.’

Mike Yarr, the PA wireman, was working a piece of gristle out of his teeth, having hastily eaten a beef sandwich. He burped loudly without covering his mouth.

‘Murder then,’ he said, still working at his teeth. ‘Any link with the Black Bank killing?’

August shrugged. ‘Local CID investigating, gentlemen. Inspector Andy Newman will take your questions on that.’

There was a short but audible groan.

Newman stood and pinned a large Ordnance Survey map on the display board at the front of the conference room. Red circles marked the pillbox in Mons Wood and the fire house on the air base.

‘For any strangers who may have wandered in, we are here,’ said Newman, pointing to the old RAF huts marked outside the base’s perimeter wire. ‘Clearly, two such incidents within five miles of each other give us cause for concern, gentlemen. At the moment we will be operating two incident rooms and two enquiries – but I shall head both. I shall keep Major Sondheim’s superiors briefed at all times. If there are links, I can assure you we will not miss them.’

‘Timing on the ID?’ said Dryden.

Newman consulted some notes. ‘It has to be forty-eight hours. This is no ordinary medical examination. The inside of the fire house is essentially a crematorium. We are dealing with bones and ashes.’

‘Any clues at the site?’ said Forward.

August shot the cuffs on his uniform. ‘All I can say is that there are no fingerprints on the metallic locks. The victim was male. Lot of bridgework on the teeth, which might help with the ID. Oh – and a metallic cylinder by the body could be the core of a heavy-duty torch.’

‘Racial type?’ asked Dryden.

‘Indeterminate,’ said August, who was beginning to lose a battle with a raging thirst. He fingered a bottle of Buxton water he’d brought into the briefing. Dryden might have been imagining it but the fluid inside seemed to leave a suspicious film on the inside of the bottle.

‘Anyone missing on the base?’ asked Forward, wandering over to the food to add to a plate already resembling International Rescue’s Tracey Island.

Good question, thought Dryden.

August didn’t miss a beat. ‘No member of the base complement is unaccounted for. Nor outside civilian staff.’

Lyndon Koskinski, of course, was neither: a nice distinction.

August ploughed on before anyone could delve deeper. ‘As to timing. The last fire exercise was two weeks ago. The building was cleared then. So any time between then and now.’

Mike Yarr had been told by PA’s news desk in London to get a terrorist line on the killings. That would ensure the copy was used nationwide. ‘Clearly there are concerns about terrorist attacks, Major. Can you comment on that?’ he asked.

August sighed. ‘We are ever vigilant here at USAF…’As August began to run through a tedious prepared line on the terrorist threat Dryden stood, stacked a paper plate with individual miniature pork pies and sat before one of the PC screens. He’d pulled the cork on a bottle of red wine and poured himself a large glass. The PC was logged on to the USAF Mildenhall site. He scrolled on through the site to the official ‘Welcome’ from the President, short statements from the USAF and RAF commanders on the base, and fifteen pages of on-base sport which proved to be fifteen too many. Local baseball teams lined up for pictures. Endless league tables read like a roll-call of Middle America from the Big Rock Busters to the New Jersey Fliers. The social pages pointed up a production of A Street Car Named Desire at the base theatre, and Die Hard 3 at the cinema. Ten Pin Bowling was now available twenty-four hours a day at the Lincoln Leisure Center.

And finally ‘Noticeboard’ – a message page dominated by vital events.

B Block Stateside congrats to Jaynette and Mike on the arrival of Mike Jnr. Go Fella!

Friends of Michael J. Doherty, base medic 1975–2000 will want to know that he died peacefully in his sleep here at home in Salt Lake on June 5. A long illness bravely borne.

Then he saw it. He read it three times before shutting the PC down to think. Then he booted it back up and took a verbatim note.

This is a long shot but it’s a message for the love birds. I was really privileged to be the witness – I guess it was the uniform that made you choose me. But look – the snapshots are great, especially the ones in the white Land Rover, and I thought that maybe one day you might want to share the memory after all. So just e-mail me and I’ll send them online, if that’s OK. The guy at the register office said I should do it this way coz you’d mentioned the base. So, no names! But e-mail me if you want to remember Cromer – I always will.

Dryden called up a fresh e-mail form and hit REPLY. The PC automatically reprinted the sender’s e-mail address: jon.cummings@norfolkconstab_cromer.

He typed:

It was great to hear from you. We’d still like to keep our secret here but we’d love the pictures. Please send them to the e-mail below – it’s a friend who’s online and he’s got a color printer. And thanks for being there!

Dryden added his own hotmail address and poured himself another large glass of red wine.

He wondered how many white Land Rovers there were in the Fens and was appalled by the consequences if there was only one. He rejoined his colleagues and tried to smile at August’s bad jokes. August was smiling too, but by then the Buxton water bottle was empty.