In the dry damp of the stone cellar she heard it coming. Machines, like people, can pretend to scream. But the pretence was gone in the final wail of the failing engines, the ripping metal, and the blow of the impact.
Sometimes she wished she had died then, as she should have.
Instead she saw the light and heard the sound that was the fire, the dripping fire, falling through the floorboards. The liquid fuel from the tanks, the quicksilver light that saved her life. So she found the stairs and climbed up to count the dead, hung, like game, from the burning rafters. Then the real horror, in the tiny swaddled bundle with the blackened limbs.
Outside, with her secret in her arms, she felt him kicking, and nudging with the jerky half-conscious movements only a child can make.
Even here, in what had been the kitchen garden, she felt the heat prickling her skin. She smelt her hair singe, as the black hanging threads turned to ash-white corkscrews. A lock ignited, and burnt into her cheek. She had a lifetime to feel the pain, but even now it terrified her with the slow, insidious intimation that the worst was yet to come.
A fire in her blood. And the baby’s.
A silent fire. The only sound a flapping inside her ear, like a pigeon’s wings.
She took a limping step towards the coolness of the night. These ashes weren’t cold like the ones in the grate at Black Bank. These were white with heat, an ivory crust beneath which breathed the cherry embers. She smelt flesh burn and knew, with the clarity of shock, that it was hers.
And then she saw him. A hundred yards from the house, shielding his face from the heat with an out-turned palm.
He’d been waiting to join the celebration. Her father had been confident Maggie would change her mind that night ‘Come at eleven. She’ll come round for Matty’s sake. It’s the baby. She’ll come round.’
And with the intuition of a lover Maggie knew where he’d been, knew where he’d been waiting in the night. The old pillbox. Their pillbox; the concrete hexagonal space that she had once dreamed of in the damp and guilty night, the place where they’d made Matty come to life.
She heard a siren then. The first. From the base. They’d be at Black Bank soon, but not soon enough to save him. Not soon enough to save him from the life she planned for him in those few seconds. It was the best decision of her life. And the quickest. Taken in the time it takes to light a match.
And then they were together. So she smiled as she trembled. The yellow-blue light of the kerosene was in his eyes and briefly she remembered why she’d loved him once. But she saw that he looked only down, at the baby. His finger turned back the fold in the blanket. He saw the face for the first time, the tiny red wandering tongue. And the fool smiled too.
‘Our boy,’ he said, wishing it was so. ‘He’s safe. Our boy.’
She let him believe it for another second.
‘Dead,’ she said, and pulled the blanket back to let him see the stencilled blue capital letters on the soft linen: USAF: AIR CONVOY.
He looked at the ruined farmhouse then: ‘Dead? You can’t be sure.’
He looked at the blanket again. ‘I’ll get him,’ he said. ‘stay here.’ She watched him run into the flames, until they closed behind him, like the hushed velvet curtains of a crematorium.
Saturday, 14 June 2003 – 27 years later
The single glass of water stood like an exhibit on the pillbox shelf. When the sun reached the western horizon it shone directly into the hexagonal room through the gunslit and caught the liquid, sending a shifting rainbow of incredible beauty across the drab concrete walls.
It haunted him now. He could see it with his eyes closed. Its cool limpid form was held for ever in his memory: but then he knew that for ever, for him, was not a long time. As the heat rose towards midday he could see the level of water drop, and he sucked in air to catch the memory of the moisture.
It was his life now, trying to reach the glass. But he knew, even as he stretched and felt the handcuffs cut into his wrist, that he would never touch it. He’d marked the full extent of his passion on the floor. On the first day he’d stretched out and left a line in the sand, three feet short of the far wall. By the third day he’d stretched until he heard his joints crack, a sickening pop of cartilage disengaged.
The next day he won six inches in a single panic-stricken lunge, the pain of which had made him swoon. When he came to, the blood had dried and the cut at his wrist showed the glint of bone, like a gash of knuckle glimpsed on the butcher’s counter. That night the fox came for the first time, circling, sniffing death.
His jailer noted his efforts to reach the glass with obvious satisfaction, smoothed clean the sand and re-filled the glass with bright water from the sparkling plastic bottle. Then he took the carved knife from its place, sticking out of the door jamb, and held it to his victim’s throat. A minute, maybe two, then he returned it, unblooded.
There was something familiar about the jailer. Something in the way he leant against the concrete wall by the glass and smoked. Something in the downcast eyes.
He yearned to hear his voice, but the jailer hadn’t spoken.
The routine was silently the same. He’d hear first his footsteps on the tinder-dry twigs beneath the pines. The iron door pushed open, the glass re-filled. Then he’d stand and smoke. A packet sometimes. How long does that take? An hour? Two?
Sometimes he came twice a day, the sound of his car suddenly loud as it parked beyond the trees he could see through the guns lit. But he’d always go without answering the questions. And then once at night. He was afraid then, for the first time, that the jailer would kill him before the thirst did. His tormentor was drunk, and the storm lantern put tiny red flashes in his eyes, but still he said nothing.
He’d speak before the end came. He felt sure of that. But he wanted to know now. Know now for which of his crimes he was being punished.
Nine Days Earlier Thursday, 5 June
1
Philip Dryden looked down on the taxi cab parked on the neat shingle forecourt of The Tower Hospital. In the front seat was a large sleeping figure encircled by an Ipswich Town sweatshirt. The driver’s delicate hands were clasped neatly over an ample tummy. The slumbering cabbie’s tiny mouth formed a perfect O.
‘How can he stand it?’ Dryden asked, turning to the figure laid out under a single white linen sheet on the hospital bed. ‘It’s eighty-four degrees. He’s parked in the full sunlight. Fast asleep. All that meat. Cooking.’
The figure on the bed didn’t move. Its immobility was a constant in his life, like the heat of that summer, and equally oppressive. He turned back to the large Victorian half-circle window and put his forehead to the glass.
Heat. Inescapable heat, like a giant duvet over the Fens. He felt a rivulet of sweat set out from his jet-black hair and begin a zig-zag journey across his face. His features were architectural. Precisely, Early Norman. The head of a knight, perhaps, from a cathedral nave, or illuminated on a medieval parchment. Illuminated but impassive; a dramatic irony which nicely summed him up.