could recall a visit from the Italian girl with the copper hair. He’d tried the two cottages out on Adventurer’s Fen they’d inspected during their long debates about moving out, starting a family. But the doors were rotten and the keyholes rusted. Ivy obscured the sign engraved in the bricks: Flightpath Cottages.
How many other locks had he tried since Laura’s accident? A thousand? Two? But nothing. Only Laura knew which door the key opened, and she hadn’t spoken since the night of the crash. It was a mystery which tormented him subtly because it seemed the perfect symbol of his life since the accident. That he should have the key, but not the door. An answer without a question.
‘Unbearable,’ he said out loud, and the heat seemed to intensify.
Eleven fifty-nine, and one minute to the news. He flipped open his mobile and rang Humph’s business number: Humphrey H. Holt, licensed mini-cabs for all occasions. Not quite all occasions. In fact, hardly any occasions at all. Humph’s cab, a battered Ford Capri, looked like it had been retrieved from a dump on the outskirts of Detroit.
Dryden’s face, normally stonily impassive, creased with pleasure as he watched the cabbie start awake and fumble for the mobile.
‘It’s me,’ he said, unnecessarily. They knew each other’s voices better than they knew their own. ‘Put the radio on. Local. Last item. I need to hear.’
They zoomed dizzily over the wavebands until Humph picked up the signal.
‘The headlines at noon on Radio Littleport…’
Dryden, for a decade one of Fleet Street’s sharpest reporters, listened with complete indifference to the usual tales of political intrigue, international violence, and lurid showbusiness before the station moved on to local items.
‘… with an entire lorryload of turnips. Meanwhile on the coast at Cromer the heatwave again brought havoc to the holiday beaches. A huge cloud of ladybirds descended on sunbathers by the pier. A spokesman for the local council’s environmental health department said the insects were breeding in huge numbers and were desperate for food. Apparently they can live quite happily on human sweat. And with that thought the time is now four minutes past twelve.’
There was a short jingle, a digital version of Fingal’s Cave. Dryden swore at it.
‘This is Radio Littleport. The Voice of The Fens. And now an important announcement from East Cambridgeshire County Police Force.’
Dryden had his reporter’s notebook ready on the window ledge. His fluid shorthand left an elegant scribble across the page. Elegant but unreadable: he was only fooling himself.
‘This is an urgent message for Estelle Beck, the only daughter of Maggie Beck of Black Bank Farm, near Ely. Please contact immediately The Tower Hospital, Ely, where your mother is gravely ill. I’ll repeat that –’
Dryden clicked off the mobile without thanking Humph. He brushed away a fly which had settled on Laura’s arm. Then he walked across the large, carpeted room and folded his six-foot-two-inch frame into a hospital chair beside the room’s only other bed. In it lay the curled, wheezing body of Maggie Beck.
‘Why now?’ he asked nobody.
There had been four radio appeals, each as urgent as the last. He hoped her daughter came soon. He had seen very few people dying but the symptoms were shockingly clear. She held both hands at her throat where they clutched a paper tissue. Her hair was matted to her skull. She seemed to draw her breath up from a pit beneath her, each one a labour which threatened to kill her. Her skin was dry and without tension – except for the single mark of a livid burn which cut across one side of her face in the shape of a corkscrew.
‘They’ll come,’ he said, hoping she’d hear.
In the oddly detached way in which he expressed almost all his emotions Dryden had come to love Maggie Beck. When his father died in the floods of ’77 Maggie, still a teenager and newly married, had moved in to look after his mother. Dryden had been eleven. Maggie had taken the spare room and helped his mother through the few weeks before the coroner’s court inquest, and then the excruciating absence of a burial. His father had been presumed drowned, swept off the bank at Welch’s Dam, and the body never found. For his mother this had been the final burden which Maggie helped her bear. The heartache of grief without a corpse to cry over. After that they combined their sorrows in often companionable silence. Maggie had her own tragedy to carry – the air