The Fire Baby

37

If he hadn’t tried to track down Johnnie Roe’s wife he’d have never known the dog track was there. This was Thursday night out, Fen-style. The stadium was a little cauldron of electric light in the wasteland beyond the Mildenhall wire. Darkness was beginning to fall, but even in broad daylight it would have taken you a week to find the Billy Row International Greyhound Stadium. Flags of every nation flew, rigid in an imaginary wind, supported by hidden aluminium frames. But every other one was a Stars & Stripes.

Dryden sat on the cab roof eating a beefburger. The Capri’s windows were open in the heat and he heard the seven pips on the radio. She’d said 7.45 – after the first race on the card.

A couple of Fleet Street nationals were still interested in the bizarre pillbox killing – now they wanted family, friends, anything that could put a real life to a grisly death. He’d told Newman he wanted a telephone number to do some more background work on Roe’s life. Newman had given him the ex-wife’s full name and told him to find the number for himself. Luckily, she was in the book. A house on the outskirts of Newmarket, a council estate infamous for petty drugs offences. The call had been awkward but at least she’d agreed to meet. Her voice had been tough, disfigured by suspicion.

Already the punters were arriving. The Fens were a celebration of Americana, Mid-West variety. Stock-car racing was the most popular sport and large numbers of people had never seen the sea or the city, and were proud of it. Most of the cars rolling in for the dog racing were playing one or other of Dryden’s two least favourite forms of music: country and western. Humph had his headphones on and was reading the book that went with his language tapes: Greek Language and People.

Then came the real Americans. The state plates, the blonde wives and the kids weighed down with enough dental work to embrace the Golden Gate Bridge.

Dryden sipped Coke and burped for fun. He liked Americans. He liked the brash good humour, the lack of two-faced English subtlety and the simple determination to have plenty of fun as loudly as possible. Dryden slid off the roof, down the windscreen and across the bonnet of the Capri to land lightly on the hot tarmac. It was a good trick, and one the crowd in his head always cheered.

By the turnstiles was The Greyhound ‘Nite Spot’. Neon strip lighting picked out the shape of a racing dog. Class in spades, thought Dryden, as he ordered a pint of imported Bud at the bar and watched two US pilots playing pool on a table with a blue baize top. Two middle-aged guys at the bar played with their cigarette packs and vied, in a half-hearted way, for the attentions of the barmaid.

Dryden had another Bud and left at 7.29 precisely, but was still able to find an empty half-acre of terrace by the time the first race began. The bell rang. The dogs were paraded in their neat waistcoats. Handlers, in mock-lab coats, tried to look disinterested. The dogs were bundled into the starting gate with indecent haste, like murderers into the noose. The hare did a lap and Dryden laughed at its silly teetering progress, but as it lapped the starting gate the dogs exploded out of their traps. Their speed and beauty thrilled him, and they took the first bend in a tight hurtling pack of sporting colours. By the time they crossed the finishing line after three laps he was cheering with the rest. He didn’t know which mutt had won, and he didn’t care. The punters dropped their torn-up betting slips, a tiny snow shower of disappointment. The winners swaggered, but only as far as the bar.

She was beside him suddenly, with a tray of race cards and cigarettes. She was probably under fifty but she’d been given a double helping of wrinkles, and none of them were laughter lines. The hair was once blonde, but now it was grey and cut lifelessly short. She had the slight stoop of the habitual smoker and the nervous searching fingers of someone feeling for a filter-tip.

‘Well?’ she said, and sat down on the concrete terrace. She searched in her pockets for cigarettes, then stopped herself by clasping her hands in her lap.

‘Sally Roe?’ asked Dryden. She nodded, looking at her hands. ‘You were married to Johnnie Roe?’ he asked, trying to think fast and talk slowly at the same time.

‘In 1978.’

‘Thanks for agreeing to meet.’

‘Not a lot of choice once you had the number.’ She smiled in half-apology for the aggressive tone.

Dryden smiled back. ‘The police said you were divorced. Years.’

She nodded, watching the dogs being led towards the starting booths again.

‘Yeah. I got out in’ ninety-three.’

‘Any reason?’

‘Loads. Private now. Best forgotten. But one thing Johnnie never forgot was that kid. When he’d had too much that was what it all came down to. Every argument. Every fight. We never had children. So he grieved for Matt. It brought it all back – what you wrote in the paper.’

Dryden was thinking fast, but he’d just been lapped.

She turned to face him. ‘Johnnie and Maggie were quite an item. We all thought they’d stick together, you know – not like the other teenage flings. He really wanted the kid – that’s why he went back into the fire that night. That’s how he got the burns – you should have seen his back.’

I have, thought Dryden. ‘Johnnie Roe was the father of Maggie Beck’s boy?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Oh yeah. It made Johnnie what he was.’

‘And what was that?’ said Dryden, picturing the pillbox on Black Bank Fen.

Her resolution failed, she found the packet in her breast pocket and lit up in a single fluid movement. Then she took in the nicotine and waited that two or three seconds it takes before the effect floods the bloodstream.

‘A bastard, really. But he could have been something else. If he’d come out of that fire with that kid his life would have been worth something. He said that. Drunk, I know, but he meant it. As it was, he amounted to nothing, so he didn’t see the point in trying to be anything better. He said he was a zero. Mr Zero. Which was nice for me, of course, being Mrs Zero. But by the time I left him zero was an over-estimate.’

‘But at the start?’

She laughed. The bell for the next race was rung and those of the crowd still interested moved down to the rail.

‘The heat was bad then,’ she said, and pressed her hand against her forehead. ‘In 1976. I knew both of them. They broke up after the crash. I got the impression he’d offered to marry her. Anyway, the crash changed everything. We’d known each other before and we drifted back.’ She watched the dogs being manhandled into the stalls. ‘It was good at the beginning.’

The starting pistol cracked and a fresh set of dogs burst out of their traps. Dryden watched the dust the dogs kicked up drift across the floodlit sky.

She put her arms around her knees and drew them up. ‘She must have hated him. To do that. Give his son away.’

‘Any idea why?’

She looked at him then and he could see her eyes were in the past. A hot night more than a quarter of a century ago.

‘No. Johnnie was local. Webbed feet, the lot. He was even glamorous – for the Fens. Blond. What passed for trendy. And nineteen, with a good job driving vans for the building company. That’s glamorous round here.’

The race was finished and the dogs, suddenly robbed of the incentive of the speeding hare, milled about while their trainers tried to collar them.

‘And the baby – Matty – was, what? Rebellion, passion, a mistake?’

She laughed again, this time for real, and Dryden glimpsed the fifteen-year-old in the mini-skirt.

‘All three. Rebellion for her, passion for both of ‘em. A mistake, too: what a start in life.’

‘They were a couple, then. Everyone knew?’

‘No way. Her just sixteen? They met on the QT. That’s where Matty come from. She used to tell me, you know. Romance then, I guess. Moonlight meetings in the woods. They had a secret place. She wouldn’t tell me where it was – that was their special secret. So they made Matty. She was proud of that, it wasn’t a problem for her. She’d have brought him up on her own if she had to, but they wouldn’t have it at Black Bank. Her father was a tough man. Fen farmer. She brought the bruises to school sometimes. He wanted her to bring the father home. Any father.’

‘But Maggie didn’t want him?’

‘God knows why. There were worse; most of ‘em were worse. He turned out bad, but it didn’t have to be that way.’

There was a break in the racing. Kiosks were selling hot-dogs. Dryden bought two and they ate in silence. He tried to imagine the scene that night: the smoking ruin out of which Maggie had walked. ‘So she saw her chance, and gave the boy away. And she never said why? Even to you?’

She stood, smoothing down the cheap blue uniform with the sprinting greyhound on the shoulder. ‘She never visited him in hospital afterwards. She was out in a few days but Johnnie was in and out of hospital for weeks. Skin grafts, stuff like that. They didn’t get it right first time, made a hell of a mess of his hands. She wouldn’t go near him. So I visited him. I guess I knew what I was doing, but life isn’t fair, is it? And if she didn’t want him, why not? He was a charmer was Johnnie.

‘Anyway, she married the following year. A Breckland farmer. At Black Bank she was lonely, haunted. So she found herself a husband and a new home. He was in his fifties… a bachelor, I think. Don? Yes, Don. They moved away and got a manager in at Black Bank. Bit of a surprise when she came back with the baby – Estelle, wasn’t it? Don died young, so she sold up and returned home. I never understood why. I think she liked being haunted. Perhaps the ghosts were all she had.’

Dryden nodded. She stood, clipping on her sales tray with its race cards.

‘But they weren’t all ghosts. She knew Matty was still alive. Perhaps she thought he’d come back one day. Why do you think she gave him away?’ asked Dryden, rising. It was the only question without an answer. ‘Did you ever hate Johnnie?’

‘Constantly, and with a passion at the end. The only passion by then. But that was because of what he was. And he was what he was because of Matty.’

‘He got into trouble – the police.’

She laughed. ‘You could say that. After Maggie his life fell apart, really. I was there, and I think that helped, otherwise it would have been worse. But he was into anything that would make money fast – petty theft, porn, all sorts. He went inside a couple of times… but I was long gone by then, although I guess I got a cut – he never missed on the divorce payments. Odd sense of duty, he never showed it when we were married.’

Dryden scanned the crowd, looking at faces, looking for answers. ‘Did anyone else live or work at Black Bank who might know why she gave Matty away?’

She lit up a fresh cigarette. ‘Yeah. Early on. There was an aunt at Black Bank. The father’s sister. Spinster – that’s what we called them then. Constance. OK, really. In her forties then, I think. She’d be seventy-odd now. She came to help on the farm, in the house. But she was gone by the time the crash happened. I guess it didn’t work out… she was a lot smarter than Maggie’s parents. She didn’t fit in. She left for a job – librarian? Possibly… I’ve got it in my mind she got married in the end and emigrated.’

‘What was her new surname?’

She shrugged. ‘Tompkins I think. Thompson? They had family in Canada, the north.’ Dryden imagined the snow again, falling in ice cold flakes on to his upturned face.

‘Canada?’ he said, opening his eyes. She was ready to go, so he tried a last question. ‘Did you ever see Maggie again?’

‘Once. I was out in Ely, shopping. It must have been five years after the crash, more. She was with the daughter and I remember thinking how lucky she was. That kid was beautiful. Maggie wasn’t ugly, you know, but she was a Fen farmer’s daughter. Heavy bones, and the skin – potato white we used to call it at school. But the little girl was perfect, like kids can be. Cute, that olive skin, and the butter-yellow hair.

She stood. ‘Kids are a blessing,’ she said, and left.