Dryden knocked on the cab’s bonnet and held up a cup of coffee. Peace offering. Normally Humph’s working hours began at 9.00am.
Humph was chatting to Nicos again about the village olive festival. Reluctantly he sipped the coffee: ‘No egg?’
‘No egg,’ said Dryden. ‘Full English at the Bridge after the interview.’ The Bridge was a greasy spoon in town which specialized in fried everything on fried bread. For Humph they did a drive-in service complete with an improvised in-cab food tray.
Humph wiggled in his seat by way of indicating mounting excitement at the prospect of such a feast. They pulled out into the busy A10, already nose-to-tail with sleepy drivers heading for the academic sweatshops of Cambridge seventeen miles to the south. ‘College sweater shops,’ said Dryden, and laughed at his own joke.
Humph remained in a silent, brooding world. Dryden imagined the cabbie’s sunrises were fried-tomato red.
Dryden flipped down the vanity mirror on the passenger side and looked himself in the face. His jet-black hair had been sandwiched in a strange cone towards the left, the result of sleeping heavily and avoiding early morning brushes and mirrors. He was fingering the sallow skin beneath his eyes when he saw a motorbike in the rear-view mirror. The bike was black, with cow-horn handlebars, and the early morning light touched the chromework in a series of minor sunbursts. The rider was in oxblood-red leathers with a matching helmet and a black tinted visor. A silver line of chrome crossed the helmet along the ridge of the cranium. A flag flew from the aerial which Dryden failed to recognize: a white star on a blue background took up one third, the others were red and white.
‘Easy Rider’s a bit close,’ said Dryden.
Humph made a point of never consulting his rear-view mirror. It was angled to provide a squint view of his own face. He felt too much information was confusing and a curse of modern life.
The motorbike trailed them at varying distances along the A10. Dryden guessed from the size of the air ducts to the front of the engine cowling that it was a 2,000cc at least. ‘Why the hell doesn’t he just breeze past?’ he asked.
‘I said…’ Dryden glanced back at the vanity mirror but shut up when he saw the bike had gone. ‘Where…?’
But then Humph swung the cab off the main road and on to a drove. Originally cattle tracks, the network of drove roads provided the Fens with a latticework of shortcuts and dead-ends the map to which did not exist. Dryden skewed round in his seat but couldn’t see the biker. Then he made a nearly fatal mistake. He told himself that only paranoid people think they’re being followed.
‘Only paranoid people think they’re being followed,’ he told Humph.
Humph considered this. ‘Who’d bother?’ he said – an eloquent insult.
The road to Black Bank was the loneliest Dryden knew in a landscape disfigured by solitude. It ran for seven straight miles through the fen. The drought had killed the midsummer crops and the soil had been left to the sun. Even a light breeze raised clouds of red dust. As Humph’s cab bumped along the drove it left in its wake a series of miniature crimson whirlwinds. Dryden wound the passenger window down as far as it would go and put his elbow on the already hot metal of the bodywork.
The sun was low into Humph’s face as he drove east, a disc of murky orange already weaving and rippling with the heat from the land. He flipped down the sun-shade and hummed tunelessly. Devoid of curiosity he never asked questions. He was happy going nowhere, as long as he knew the route.
A mile into the fen Dryden saw the tail-fins of the transatlantic fuel tankers parked on the apron of the main runway at Mildenhall US air base. It must have been six miles away but the tall, battleship-grey tail fins stood up like a glimpse of whales breaching the surface of a calm ocean. Then came the fields of landing lights. The inward flightpath was marked by formations of steel posts with green, white and red lamps. For the pilots of the Starblazer fuel tankers that had flown non-stop across the Atlantic this would be their first sight of Europe from under 30,000 feet, save for the illuminated Octagon Tower of Ely Cathedral.
Airport flotsam littered the landscape. Nissen huts from the war held hay and sugar beet and just short of Black Bank they saw their first Stars-&-Stripes, flying from a Dallas-style bungalow complete with a triple-doored garage which could have held the fleet cars of a platoon of travelling salesmen. And the Mildenhall Stadium. A dog track boasting US fast-food outlets, a bar with draught Schlitz, and popcorn stalls. Six days a week it was deserted, but its car park was big enough to take an incoming B-52 bomber.
With the sun now up, and the dust kicked airborne, they could have been anywhere west of the Mississippi. Dryden expected to see a wagon train threading its way across country surrounded by twenty thousand head of longhorn.
Black Bank Farm stood on a wide plain of Fen peat which stretched to the edge of sight. The farm’s façade had survived the air crash which had killed Maggie Beck’s family, but the stone had been burnt a deep carbon black. Foursquare, with a central doorway and Georgian windows, it faced south across a small kitchen garden. To the east end of the old house were the remains of a single pine tree, a pencil-black fossil, distorted into a twisted tapered finger. A new kitchen block stood to the west, an unadorned example of seventies utility, and beyond that a large steel-framed barn. A line of poplars grew in a natural shield at the rear of the house, protecting it against the north winds. The sash windows had perished on the night of the air crash, to be replaced with single-pane double-glazing which managed to unsettle the building’s otherwise classic proportions. Dryden felt it looked like what it was: a house with an ugly past.
Humph pulled up short of a cattle grid by a sign: ‘Black Bank Farm Ltd: Salad Crops’.
‘Bit grim,’ he said, and laughed. He really enjoyed other people’s misfortunes.
‘I’ll walk from here,’ said Dryden, throwing open the passenger-side door. Humph didn’t argue.
Dryden squinted east into the rising sun: 9.04am. The sweat popped on his forehead and he felt a rivulet of salty water begin a long journey down his back. Just inside the gate was a large granite memorial stone which listed the victims of the 1976 crash: the three UK civilians first, then the nine US citizens.
WILLIAM VINCENT BECK
CELIA MAUD BECK
MATTHEW ‘MATTY’ BECK
CAPT. JACK RIGBY
MAJOR WILLIAM H. HOROWITZ
MAJOR JIM KOSKINSKI
MARLENE MARY-JANE KOSKINSKI
CAPT. MILO FEUKSWANGER
LT RENE FEUKSWANGER
AIRMAN JOHN DWIGHT MURPHY
KYLIE PATRICIA MURPHY
JOHN MURPHY, JNR.
IN MEMORIAM, it said simply, followed by the date. Dryden fished in his pocket and found a round beach stone he’d picked up the last time he and Humph had run out to the coast. He put it on the top of the memorial and walked on.
Ahead of him he heard the engines first, and looking up from the dust saw the B-52 rise, heaving itself out of the distant haze like a swimmer breasting the pool. Its four turbines screamed and the pregnant black belly seemed to rear straight out of the fields: a nightmare crop. Dryden looked directly up as it went overhead, and saw the undercarriage enfold itself into the fuselage with a satisfying mechanical thud. It was so close he could see winking safety lights inside the undercarriage bay as they switched from red to green before the doors closed.
And then it was gone. A stream of grey fumes uncurling in the warm morning air.
He stood in the sudden silence before the front door of Black Bank Farm, which was green, varnished, and massive. Dryden looked at it from the gate of the kitchen garden and thought Dogs.
In the full litany of Dryden’s fears dogs were not in the same class as water, enclosed spaces, heights, authority, or emotional attachment. But they moved faster than all of these, and the bone-white teeth and chopped-meat gums had always held a potent power to terrify. Dogs stood, growling, in a long queue of terrifying dangers which pursued him with tenacity. But nothing he was afraid of was as frightening as looking like a coward, even to himself. This fear ruled all others and produced occasional acts of misunderstood courage which had earned him an unwarranted reputation for valour. So he pushed the gate open and walked up the path. Which is when he actually got to hear the dogs. Their claws skittered on quarry tiles on the far side of the door. Dryden knew what they were thinking. They were thinking they could smell fear, and they were right.