‘Which was?’ asked Dryden, remembering the empty pint glass on the shelf below the pillbox window.
‘Severely dehydrated,’ said Newman. ‘The pathologist who got to him first on site reckoned he hadn’t had any fluid for at least six days. It was eighty-two degrees in the box at two o’clock this morning. In the day – a hundred and twenty, possibly more. In the pathologist’s words, the victim’s body tissue was about as moist as a Jacob’s cracker.’
‘But it didn’t kill him?’ asked Joey Forward. Joey was scratching his beer belly, his fingernails screeching on the white nylon shirt.
‘No. But it would have. I won’t go into the specific details, but let’s say it would have been a race between gagging on his own swollen tongue or drowning in his own stomach juices. His last meal had been taken even longer ago than his last drink. Two sausages with beans: pork.’
Several full english breakfasts rearranged themselves in the room. There was another fart, but this time nobody laughed.
‘When was his last drink – the poison cocktail – taken?’ It was Mike Yarr again.
‘About twenty-four hours before his body was found. Pathologist at the scene believed he would have died within an hour of drinking the poison. But in his case it would have been quite a long hour.’
‘And the body – found by a farmer it says ’ere,’ said Yarr, now ostentatiously reading a copy of the Mail. ‘No name given here.’
‘Those details we are withholding – for the time being – while investigations continue.’
The press corps examined Dryden, and he examined a wine gum he’d found in his pocket.
‘Further points of interest – and you can use all this, gentlemen. The victim was naked above the waist but fragments of clothes were found amongst ashes in the pillbox.’
‘What kinda clothes?’ said Forward.
‘White linen. With traces of animal fat. Tomato ketchup.’
‘Suggesting?’ said Yarr.
‘Anything you like. Now. There was also a lot of loose change on the floor, more than a tenner’s worth in coppers and silver.’
Newman pinned a black and white photograph to the incident room board. It showed a narrow-bladed seven-inch knife sticking horizontally out of a wooden door jamb. The hilt was gilded and decorated with raised, geometrical patterns.
‘And this. No traces of blood and no knife wounds on the victim. The designs are Arabic.’
‘Fingerprints?’ said a voice from the back.
Newman thought for a second. ‘Yes. Partial prints. We’re putting them through the computer now. I’ll keep you up to date on any developments.’ ‘Plus,’ he added, putting up another print. A plastic Tesco bag with its contents, presumably, laid out in military rows on the green baize of the pool table for the picture. Torch, pre-packed sandwich, apple, two motoring magazines, a small cassette player with earphones and two bottles of mineral water. And a cheap metallic picture frame. The quality wasn’t good enough to see the subject of the photo which sat inside, slightly off-centre, with one corner folded down.
Dryden leant forward in his chair. ‘The snap?’
Newman put a third print up on the board – it was the photograph blown up. A dog, a mongrel, with a piece of rope round its neck. There was a cheap plastic water bowl at its feet. In the background was a sluggish river, mulligatawny brown, and some tropical vegetation floating by. It was an astonishingly mundane image. A childhood pet perhaps?
Someone yawned. ‘Well, it ain’t the Thames, is it?’ said a voice at the back.
‘No,’ said Newman. ‘Our guess is tropical Africa, south of the Sahara. Which narrows it down to an area about twice the size of Europe.’
‘So what do we think happened?’ asked Yarr.
Newman shrugged. ‘He was tied to the wall. Left. Tortured? His wrist was broken in the manacle. Skin very badly cut. And the pathologist says his vocal cords were in shreds.’
‘Shouting?’ said Dryden, knowing he was wrong.
‘Possibly, but the pathologist said the damage was violent. Screaming, more like,’ said Newman.
Dryden closed his eyes and tried to imagine what that would have sounded like. A human voice, shredded, echoing across Black Bank Fen. And then he tried to imagine who would have heard it.
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 the old hangars and conning tower were derelict and deserted except on Saturdays and Tuesdays, when the grass runways were used for car boot sales. The weekend sale was for general goods – white elephant and tatty; the Tuesday market for antiques or items which might be mistaken for antiques in a poor light. Entry was for ‘trade’ only – dealers, restorers, and general London or Brighton sharks. Hundreds jostling for the chance to buy 1920s china, Edwardian furniture, and First World War medals. As the cab got closer they could see the parked ranks of cars through a mirage of tumbling hot air at the base of the column of smoke. The drove road ran through a derelict section of the old perimeter fence and then across a mile of parched grass towards the runways. Heading towards them was a crowd of a couple of hundred bargain hunters pursued by the drifting, noxious cloud of straw smoke. And they were coming at quite a speed, most of them holding handkerchiefs or clothing to their mouths.