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