The Fire Baby by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group UK
Published: 2008-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

23

As the press left Black Bank Fen in a caravan of cars Dryden checked his answerphone. There was one message: ‘Hi. It’s Gillies & Wright, solicitors. You asked to know. Someone has contacted the office with a claim to Maggie Beck’s five thousand pounds. Name… Richard G. Mere. A farm labourer from Manea. We can’t check it against the name Mrs Beck gave us until tomorrow when the will is read. Then we’ll know if it’s a genuine claim. But it looks good – I’ve dropped a copy of his letter in at The Crow. He certainly knew Mrs Beck and the farm.’

Dryden slapped the dashboard. ‘The Crow, chop, chop.’ He’d phone Estelle from the office and tell her a claim had been made. Lyndon should be told as well – after all, it was his father. And the will? Had Maggie left Black Bank to her son, or her daughter?

They led the cavalcade along The Breach and watched the rest of the press turn south towards Cambridge and London. The Capri turned north towards Ely, where the cathedral’s distant image was already buckling in the heat of the day. A cloud was so unusual that summer that when a large shadow dashed across the landscape Dryden watched its flight like a hawk. Peering up through the Capri’s windscreen his eyes filled with cobalt. ‘Blue sky,’ he said, a seagull crossing it with motionless wings. Humph pulled the cab up by the side of the road. Dryden got out and scanned the horizon. The sun was behind them but it wasn’t a cloud which had blotted it out. It was a column of smoke, rising from the fen just west of the city, and widening as it rose into a chef’s hat a mile high.

‘Jesus,’ he said. It looked like an oil painting from hell.

Dryden rang Mitch, who was still at the scene of Johnnie Roe’s murder. ‘I guess it’s a field fire. On the peat. But it’s a biggy – get as close as you can, Mitch – I want to see the burn marks on that bloody hat of yours. The pix are for The Crow on Friday – so no rush.’

Humph slung the cab off the main road and headed south along a drove made of concrete slabs; the tyres thudding over the cracks as they traced a zig-zag route around parched fields.

‘It’s the old airfield,’ said Dryden, already tasting the smoke in his mouth.

Witchford Aerodrome had been a Lancaster bomber base in the war. Dryden had done a colour piece the year before after a farmer had ploughed up the remains of a German Heinkel which had come down in a raid. It had buried itself in the soft, wet peat of the winter of 1941. Dryden had been there when they’d got the pilot out of his sticky grave. He could see now the splayed bones of one of the hands in the mud, caressed by worms.

But Witchford’s days of glory were long gone. Now

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