The junior reporter made sure the editor was not behind his smoked glass partition and lit up a cigarette. The newsroom was officially non-smoking. He flipped open his notebook. ‘What’s a Fen Blow?’ he asked, sniggering. Dryden considered the obscene answer Garry was hoping for but thought better of it. The post-adolescent junior reporter had hormones that humped each other.
‘It’s a dust storm, Garry. In dry weather the fields in the Black Fen can lose their topsoil. Dry peat is effectively weightless. If a strong wind hits during a period when there’s no crop cover a field can literally take off, and once airborne the dust cloud can travel for miles.’
Garry nodded. ‘There’s one coming. I did police calls from the magistrates’ court. They said they’d got one out on the Fens to the west, near Manea, coming east.’
‘Great. Phone Mitch. I’ve got a job that way – I’ll keep an eye out.’ Mitch was The Crow’s photographer. He was a miniature Scotsman with a passion for fake tam-o’-shanters. Fen Blows made good pix but poor stories. Unless they hit town the only damage they did was to farmers’ incomes, which even for a paper like The Crow was a minority interest given that automation, and chronically low wages, had taken thousands of farm workers out of the fields.
‘And there was more on the Beck appeal,’ added Garry.
Dryden had told no one at The Crow that Laura was sharing a room with Maggie Beck. He tried to keep his emotional life separate from work. In fact he tried to keep it separate from the rest of his life. But he found it hard to disguise his interest in the increasingly frantic appeals being made by the police for Estelle to return home. His promise to Maggie haunted him. Was he doing enough to track her down? Would she get back in time?
‘They’ve had nothing from the radio appeals. Police say she could be dead in twenty-four hours. Apparently they think the daughter is away on holiday – north Norfolk coast. So they’ve contacted the tourist boards, RNLI, B&BS – the lot.’
‘Fine,’ said Dryden. ‘Knock out two pars for the front page. And three on the dust storm.’
‘According to someone at Black Bank – one of the farm hands – she’s travelling with some Yank.’
‘Name?’
Garry laboriously leafed through his notebook. ‘Kos-kinski. Lyndon. Apparently he’s based at Mildenhall on temporary leave or something…’
Dryden saw again the tall, willowy pilot standing by Maggie’s bed. ‘Knock it out,’ he said, and booted up his own PC. He wrote quickly and fluently in perfect, objective reportese. He had a court case about a man who stole cabbages at night and an appeal for a lost snake.
Then his phone rang: ‘Hell – oo…’ Inspector Newman’s voice always sounded as if it was ten feet away from the phone.
Dryden could hear evidence of birdsong in the background and guessed Newman had it on his PC’s Screensaver.
‘A bit more. The stud. His face. It’s on the records. Although his face wasn’t to camera most of the time. East Midlands Police have picked him up. Coupla hours ago, at his flat. Few hundred videos in the spare room – Vice Squad are checking them out now.’
Dryden scratched a note as Newman spoke. ‘Name? Charge?’
‘Can’t release. No charges yet.’
‘Local?’
‘Rushden.’
‘The girl?’
‘Says he can’t remember. Said it was all consensual. She led him on. Blah, blah.’
‘So he knew the cameras were running?’
‘Looks like it. Not surprised to see his bum in the frame, anyway.’
‘Occupation?’
‘Besides shagging? Long-distance lorry driver, apparently. Surprised he had the time. And, Dryden… Nothing sensational, OK? Just an appeal for information.’
‘Would I?’ It was one of Dryden’s favourite questions. The answer was ‘yes’.
There was a pause on the end of the line which was filled with birdsong.
‘Hold on,’ said Dryden, pulling up the PA wire online. Newman’s extra information warranted an update.
Dryden found a second take on the rare bird story which had run at 1. 16 pm: ‘Rare gull finds love on the beach’.
‘There’s an extra paragraph on your gulclass="underline" “Ornithologists at Holme Nature Reserve on the north Norfolk coast made a further plea for twitchers not to descend on the remote spot after news leaked out that a rare Siberian gull had been spotted by enthusiasts late yesterday. They said that two of the birds, which normally spend the summer in northern Scandinavia, had now been sighted and appeared to be a breeding pair.” ’
‘Thanks,’ said Newman. ‘I might run out and do some crowd control.’
4
The Sacred Heart of Jesus was about as spiritual as a drive-in McDonald’s and twice as ugly. This was brutally apparent because that is exactly what it was built next to. The two shrines crouched like colonial monuments up against the main wire perimeter fence which surrounded USAF Mildenhall.
Dryden hardly ever went to church, haunted as he was by a disastrously ineffective Catholic education, but he was prepared to make an exception to keep his promise to Maggie Beck. The police appeals might not work. He needed to do something else, and he needed to do it quickly. He let Humph take five minutes picking a parking spot in the otherwise empty lot the church and drive-in shared. There was enough room to re-enact Custer’s last stand but Humph cruised for a few minutes considering his options.
‘Who’s paying for the petrol?’ snapped Dryden. Humph ostentatiously took his time parking precisely between two white lines marked RESERVED.
On the far side of the base fence a smoke-grey military DC-10 sat motionless on the tarmac. The only signs of life were its winking tail-lights and a steady plume of hot exhaust which turned the horizon into a smudgy line.
The church lacked frills. It was a red-brick 1950s statement of solid devotion to dull values. Inside, it was even worse. It was so bad, Dryden concluded, it could have been Roman Catholic. But it didn’t even have the candles and the pictures. The only vaguely spiritual presence was the almost tangible smell of furniture polish.
Major August Sondheim was sitting in the front pew smoking, an act of calculated sacrilege that was typical of him. He was tapping the ash on to a copy of the Wall Street Journal laid out at his feet.
August and Dryden had two meeting places: the church, or Mickey’s Bar by the other public gate to the base. The church meant August was sober and intended to stay that way until nightfall, which was a sacrifice of supreme proportions because August was a major league drunk. His CV, however, was decked with glittering prizes: degree from Stanford, West Point, Purple Heart in Korea, Pentagon in the Gulf War. Who knows when the drinking started? August was head of PR: USAF Mildenhall, with oversight of Lakenheath and Feltwell, the two other US bases which ran north on the flat, sandy, expanse of Breckland. Three air bases with the capability to destroy European civilization. An arsenal of brutal power which could be flung into a war in Europe in the time it took to press a few buttons. It was a sobering thought: unless you were August.