The Fire Baby (7 page)

Issued on behalf of the chief constables of the
East Cambridgeshire, East Midlands and
West Midlands Police Forces

An 0800 number and an e-mail address followed.

‘Tempted?’ said Dryden.

Kabazo tried a smile. ‘It’s not a joke.’

‘Sorry. You’re right. Any interest in the reward among the workers?’

Kabazo picked up a wooden chair effortlessly with one hand and swivelled it round so that he could straddle it. ‘Not that I hear; it’s a dull place. Nothin’ happens at all.’

‘How d’ya hear about it – about Wilkinson’s?’

‘Good news travels fast.’ He must have been joking, but it was difficult to tell.

‘Family local?’ asked Dryden, enjoying himself.

‘Some,’ said Jimmy, biting his lip.

They talked about life in the shed. The six o’clock start, the mindless work, the wages. ‘The worst thing is the windows,’ said Kabazo, meaning the lack of them. ‘The summer goes, the winter comes, we don’t know. They ship in the stuff from abroad. We just work. Always the same.’

They shook hands. ‘See you again,’ said Dryden, somehow knowing he would.

Outside, Humph was asleep in the cab. Dryden leant on the roof and ate a packet of mushrooms he’d sneaked into the glove compartment and followed that with some small but perfectly formed Scotch eggs. He chased them down with a Grand Marnier. Now he felt even better. The evening sky was a stunning bowl of rose-tinted blue. He fished around for another miniature in the glove compartment and settled on a second Grand Marnier.

About a mile away an HGV cut the landscape as it powered its way on the arrow-straight back roads towards the Midlands. Dryden imagined the dark, fetid interior of the container and wondered what, or who, was on board.

7

Dryden drank some more on the way back to Ely while Humph, enthused by the general air of gaiety, made a spirited attempt to knock a passing postman off his bike on the edge of town on the off-chance it might be his ex-wife’s lover. The cabbie wound down the window as the postman’s bike mounted the pavement and embedded itself in a hawthorn fence: ‘Bastard!’

There was deep, satisfied silence between them. ‘It wasn’t him, was it?’ said Dryden.

‘Nope,’ said Humph happily.

They parked up at The Tower. Dryden’s life was largely marked by random motion, but at the end of each day he came back to Laura. He grinned stupidly at the nurse at reception, making a half-hearted attempt to hide the effects of the alcohol, and tried not to skip to the lifts.

He walked to Laura’s bed, touched her arm briefly as he always did, and checked Maggie, who was asleep, curled in the same tortured ball as before. Then he stood over the COMPASS machine, running a finger along its cream metallic paintwork. The specialists had brought it in two months ago. It consisted of a PC and computer keyboard. On the screen was an alphabet grid.

ABCD

EFGH

IJKLMN

OPQRST

UVWXYZ

The concept was simple, and familiar to anyone with a modern remote control. A small electronic trigger was placed in Laura’s hand which she could use to navigate the grid and highlight individual letters. Clicking on a highlighted letter printed it on a tickertape which chugged out of the COMPASS.

The first problem was random erratic movements and mishits on the trigger. These distorted the printout record. The second problem was much bigger. Laura was not ‘conscious’ in any accepted understanding of the word, although she could clearly see the COMPASS screen, if only intermittently. She drifted in and out of Dryden’s world to bring an occasional message; few made sense. For Dryden this had made her recovery painfully frustrating. On one level she was ‘back’, back from the coma which had so completely enveloped her after the crash in Harrimere Drain. But her visits were swift, unannounced, and often cryptic. A long line of tickertape lay folded in a neat concertina at Dryden’s feet, ready to be deciphered.

He’d met Laura while working for the
News
on Fleet Street. Her father owned a north London Italian café, Napoli, where the regular clientele squeezed themselves down a long corridor from the café counter to a small room with six tables decked out in checked tablecloths. The food was simple but sublime: fresh figs, golden balls of mozzarella, piquant ragu, and pungent Parma ham, all washed down with the Vesuvio her father prized. One evening Dryden had found himself in the suburbs on a job, doorstepping a politician who’d had to resign over allegations of fraud. He’d sneaked into the Napoli while the police were inside the house taking a statement. Hurrying, he’d spilt his pasta course into his lap. Laura had helped mop up the mess in an oddly erotic dance of embarrassment. Love, as Dryden liked to
recall it, at first fumble. Despite Laura’s long apprenticeship in food she had kept her figure, and avoided the fate of her plump aunts, by smelling food rather than eating it herself. While her mother helped run the business she had brought up three younger brothers, and cooked most of their meals, without adding an unnecessary pound.

So each evening Dryden tried to fill her room with the aromas of the past. It was a ritual he found deeply satisfying. Beside Laura’s bed stood a bottle of the same Vesuvio, the cork drawn and replaced. On a plate he put fresh fruit, cutting the figs to let them breathe. He poured out a glass of the wine and set it down beside her. And he lit one cigarette, a Gauloise, which he knew would remind her of their honeymoon. Then he would chat for half an hour. About his day, about Humph’s planned Greek holiday, about what he’d seen in the world outside The Tower. Then he’d tear off the tickertape, and take it out to Humph’s cab.

Tonight inspiration failed him: ‘Maggie’s dying.’ He let the silence hang, as he often did, trying not to rush and fill the gap where Laura’s voice should be. ‘You must know too. But the doctors… they say days. We’re trying to get Estelle back. Back in time, I guess. Forgive me, it’s been a distraction…’

He stood and walked to the wall beside Laura’s bed. The nurses had put up a cork-board and Dryden had pinned up most of the messages she’d been able to send using the
COMPASS
machine. He’d cut out the letters that made sense from the background jumble. He was acutely moved by the fact that he understood each as only a lover can.

SGDFDYFYJF FLIGHTPATI SGD PK ABI YCND

He ran his finger along it, enjoying again the thrill of deciphering this opening message. The first time she had
used the COMPASS to say anything other than her name. It said so many things about how well she was, at least in her mind. But for the missed H at the end the single word was perfect: Flightpath. Flightpath Cottages; the now derelict houses they’d discovered together on Adventurer’s Fen. A vision of where the future could be, if Laura recovered. A home, a family, and everything they’d wanted before the accident in Harrimere Drain.

SHSHFT ROSA SDGDU

Rosa was her mother. He’d photocopied the tickertape and sent it to Turin, where her parents had retired. He could only imagine the tears that had flowed. And he’d taken a copy to the family restaurant in north London, which was now run by Laura’s three brothers. They’d embraced him, cried, and promised to visit soon. When they came the brothers crowded in to Laura’s room with their families, while the children ran riot. When their time was over Dryden stood with them outside on the lawns, waiting while the kids climbed into the cars. There were tears then, too, and bitterness that this should have happened to Laura. Of all people. That was the phrase that Dryden always heard echoing around the family: of all people.

Dryden’s favourite was the simplest. It’s straightforwardness an echo of the life they had lost.

SGDHFYU MY HAIR SHDSIDK

He had then, and he did it now, because he was lost for words. He raised her head and ran the brush back through the auburn hair, feeling the warmth of her body through the nape of the neck. He kissed her once and left.

Humph was waiting in the Capri in the midst of an Athenian street wedding. Three tiny empty bottles of Ouzo
were lined up on the dashboard. Humph wasn’t a drunk driver, which meant they were going to be parked for a long time.

Dryden got in the cab but left the door open. Humph gave him a miniature bottle of Greek brandy and went back to the wedding. Dryden read the tickertape and spotted the four attempts at LAURA. The tickertape had a digital timecheck along one side. All four had come just after seven o’clock that night.

Then he saw it. At 8.08: a burst of nonsense with those two words. His hair stood on end despite the fact that he told himself it must be a bizarre, random chance.

PDGUT WLGHJKOR T HISKFOT HJKKDHSGSI

THGYUS GHJYOU JNKOWFGH THEY

WHISPERKKJTNFMR

AEWGHCMI GKIAKA JEJUOIFK

But even as he tried to dismiss it he had to ask himself: did she mean the nurses? Visitors? And what, he wondered, did they whisper about?

He led her through the trees to the cast-iron door and even as the blood pumped in her ears she noticed that when he turned the key in the lock it clicked over with a barely audible, oily ease. She remembered later, on the park bench, thinking that he’d been there before. That he’d done it all before, with others. She knew that now, when it was too late.

That was the first time that night she’d felt like crying for help, and the last time she could have. She watched his body move ahead of her with a sinuous sexuality which had struck her dumb despite the fear. She’d never craved sex like that, never found its promise so intoxicating. And only now, looking back, did she understand that it was the drug which had made her blood run hot.

But before the drugs she’d seen him, she had to admit that, and called him over with her eyes. He’d breezed through the door of The Pine Tree that Monday night with an easy, athletic, grace. Mondays: the quietest night of the week, with a few locals and the quiz team. She was bored, and she must have radiated that, like a lighthouse seeking a ship.

She got closer, collecting the glasses, close enough to see the tail of a tattooed dragon that curled around his collar bone before plunging back beneath the white cotton top. And the face. A face she’d seen a thousand times and never, the face of a comic book hero, her very own Action Man. Blond cropped hair, and pale fingers with spotless nails. She wondered then what he might do. And there was another question: how could he be interested in her? How could someone so beautiful, so clean, so perfect, be interested in her?

She should have known when he made the call, on his mobile, walking away from the bar, cupping his hand to smother the words. He winked then, something which normally made her laugh at men. But she just beamed, stupidly, knowing already that something wasn’t right, but not caring now she sensed that his body could be hers.

She washed the glasses, served the locals, and pretended to laugh at their jokes, but watched him at the end of the bar. She hated the Pine Tree, she told him that. Hated it, but needed it to pay the university bills, for the clubs, and the clothes, and the holiday to Spain with the girls in her house.

‘University?’ he’d said, smiling.

‘Yeah. East London. It’s great’ she said, shouting to herself to shut up.

‘The heat,’ he’d said, his smile confined to his red lips. ‘You want a drink?’

She’d taken for a vodka and tonic and left the drink on the bar beside him as she worked, returning, sipping, feeling lots of things which should have made her run. She’d been confused then, getting the change wrong a couple of times with the locals. And she dropped a glass: ‘sack the juggler,’ they’d all laughed. She felt her legs buckle but thought it was the vodka and the heat of the night.

He licked his lips and she sipped another drink and heard her laughter, overloud, in between the CD tracks. She sang too and the locals laughed again, eyeing the stranger at the bar. She never really drank much, even in the clubs, which is why she didn’t taste it, didn’t catch the metallic edge which laced the vodka.

She asked Mike, the landlord, to lock up and do the ashtrays. He was a friend of her dad’s from way back when they were together in the army in the Far East. But he’d been upstairs all night with his feet up in front of the telly. So he hadn’t seen, hadn’t sensed, as he surely would have, her disorientation.

‘Date,’ she whispered, and brushed a kiss across his cheek. He’d smelt it then, and kicked himself later for not stopping her. Not the vodka but something else, the drug sweating out through her skin.

The moon hung over the Pine Tree like a giant sunlamp. The car suited him, she thought, opening the silver-grey door and catching the sickly scent of the air freshener. Alfa Romeo? Perhaps, she told the police later, but she couldn’t be sure.

She got in the car, aware of her long legs, the tight jeans around her bum, and the tight T-shirt which tucked under her breasts. She couldn’t stop thinking about her body, and his, together. It almost happened then. In the car park in the long knife-blade shadows of the pines.