August didn’t look round. Sober, August could see the futility of life and the faults which made people want to live it. It didn’t make him jovial company but Dryden enjoyed the edgy intelligence which underpinned his cynicism. August drew on the cigarette and sent the nicotine coursing round a few miles of narrowing veins.
‘Well?’ There was a note of impatience, directed not at Dryden, but at the world in general. Dryden rarely wasted August’s time, which was one of the reasons the American liked him. He also admired the un-English lack of stuffiness and envied Dryden’s ability to have four drinks and go home.
Dryden had met August a year before when Fleet Street’s news desks had got hold of a story that the US military were stockpiling nuclear weapons on the base in case they needed to be shipped quickly to war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan or North Korea. A couple of the quality broadsheet newspapers rang Dryden and asked him to check it out. As a reporter Dryden had always put more store in trusting his contacts than diligent research. In the long run his copy had turned out to be more accurate that way, and he delivered it quicker. In this case he had also been hampered by an inability to spot a nuclear warhead even if it had been riveted to the roof of Humph’s cab. But he could tell when someone told him a lie. He was pretty sure August was honest: before or after closing time. August might not tell him something that was true, but he liked to think he’d never tell him something false.
Dryden had killed the story. August said they’d had a shipment on the base for twenty-four hours and now they were clean. Dryden had charged the papers three days’ money for research and surveillance and £258 for a telephoto lens, the receipt for which Humph had forged after drinking two miniature bottles of Grand Marnier. Dryden had rung the papers and told them the base was clean. Only time, or a very nasty accident, would prove him wrong.
‘Well?’ said August again, lighting up a fresh Marlboro Light. He was tanned, with silver-grey hair swept back as though his days as a pilot had shaped his body for speed. The pupils in his blue eyes swam like coins in a fountain. An expensive French eau de cologne failed to mask the whiff of the ashtray and last night’s alcohol.
Dryden said: ‘I need some help. A woman’s dying. She wants to see her daughter. They lived at Black Bank Farm.’ Dryden held a compass in his head and never lost the ability to find north. ‘Over there,’ he said, pointing through the wooden panelling beneath the first station of the cross. ‘she’s on a break. A holiday. But her mother’s fading fast, faster than anyone thought. She’s going to die, August, very soon. The daughter is called Estelle Beck and she’s travelling with a family friend – a relative of some kind, I think. Lyndon Koskinski. He’s a US pilot here at Mildenhall.’
Dryden took a card from his shirt pocket. Major Lyndon Koskinski. c/o PO Box 569, Mildenhall USAF.
August nodded, trying not to think about families. His wife had left him ten years earlier, but in more conventional circumstances than Dryden’s. With dreadful predictability he’d come home to their clapboard house in Georgetown to find she’d flown to Hawaii with the family accountant. She’d remembered to take two things with her, their twelve-year-old daughter and her cheque book. The girl was called April and she must be a woman now, but whenever August thought her image might pop into his mind he conjured up a glass of Bourbon instead.
August stood and stretched. ‘So there’s a story in this, is there? Deathbed plea from dying mom – that kinda thing.’
‘I guess. But she asked me to do this. There may be a story, sure. It’s not the only reason I do things. I am capable of independent action. I’m bound,’ said Dryden. It was an odd phrase, but he meant it.
They walked to the door, their shoes slapping on the cheap wooden parquet flooring. There was a table to one side with a small pile of orders of service in the middle, some books for sale, and a small box with a slit in the top for coins. August shook it and was surprised to hear money inside.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘People are honest round here. Gives you the creeps.’
Dryden had spotted a locked door beside a utilitarian concrete font. August looked the other way as Dryden retrieved the brass key around his neck and tried it in the lock.
‘No go,’ said Dryden, genuinely surprised as he always was not to have unlocked Laura’s secret.
‘You’re mad,’ said August, with envy.
5
Dryden had been turning the microfiche for several minutes, struggling to focus on the tumbling blur of newsprint and headlines, before he finally caught sight of the picture for which he had been searching. Black and white, grainy even then, it smacked of an age when newspaper drama was still monochrome and flares were in fashion. It was from the Cambridge Evening News of 2 June 1976. A front-page picture showed a pall of smoke shrouding a distant line of poplars, while in the foreground the tail-fin of a plane stuck up from a field of wreckage. The fuselage lay twisted, melted like the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes incinerated in an ashtray. A house, clearly demolished by the impact of the falling aircraft, was blackened stone, with a few tortured beams exposed to the sky, and the single pine in the kitchen garden a narrow spear of blackened wood. A figure stood in the foreground with a clipboard, a respectful distance from what was, after all, a grave.
The caption was in the best traditions of stark news reporting: ‘The scene yesterday of the Black Bank air disaster in which 12 died.’
Dryden looked up from the microfiche as the cathedral bell tolled 4 o’clock. He had decided to refresh his memory about the crash at Black Bank Farm. Maggie Beck’s life had been unremarkable but for this tragedy, which had swept away her parents and her only son in a catastrophic accident. Dryden sensed that the torment of her dying was linked to this one traumatic event.
An ice-cream van played a version of ‘Greensleeves’ on a distant estate. Dryden’s medieval features remained immobile as he closed his eyes. His ten-year-old self had not been far away that night in 1976. He remembered the blast rocking the old farmhouse at Burnt Fen. Did he remember the orange glow in the sky and his father holding him at the open attic window? Or was it a family memory inherited? They hadn’t gone to gawp the next day with the others, but he’d saved the pictures and the newspapers until they’d been replaced by other obsessions.
He opened his eyes and went back to I June 1976.
PLANE CRASH KILLS 12.
The headline was set above the black and white picture of the scene of the crash. Below it a strap aimed at pathos: ‘Mother saves baby from flames but sees her own son die’.
Dryden turned the knob on the side of the microfiche reader and the page slid down. Most of the nationals were agreed on the main facts by the second day. The death toll put it on the front page of the broadsheets. The coverage was objective and largely avoided criticism of the US Air Force. It was thirteen years before the Berlin Wall would come down and still the height of the Cold War. The US was a trusted ally in a conflict which was, despite the absence of actual warfare, very real. None the less, the facts spoke for themselves. The Met Office at Norwich had issued warnings that night that dust storms would criss-cross the Fens. Light aircraft at Cambridge were grounded, but the tower at USAF Mildenhall let MH 336 begin its journey on schedule. In the aftermath of the crash the Civil Aviation Authority ruled, as an urgent priority, that all aircraft using the aerodrome should have filters fixed to air-intake valves.