The Fire Baby - By Jim Kelly Page 0,33

water back and forth across the intervening fields. The first rainbow of the day formed and appeared to end in Humph’s cab. Dryden doubted it ended in a pot of gold, recalling instead the murky glass specimen bottle the cabbie had collected to make sure the occasional call of nature did not result in him having to leave the car.

Dryden looked up and checked his watch: 8.10am. He’d arranged to get to Black Bank early. The call had been difficult: they were busy, said Estelle Beck, arranging for the next day’s funeral. He sensed animosity in her voice, even fear. Getting up early suited him. It was press day for the Express and he wanted to run Maggie Beck’s deathbed confession and the plea for Matty’s father to come forward. He was happy to follow Maggie’s stipulation that his story should run after the funeral – but he still needed an interview, and a family picture, to make sure it got the space it deserved.

‘Have you listened to the tapes?’ he’d asked Estelle.

‘At nine then,’ she said by way of reply. ‘At Black Bank.’

Dryden knocked on the cab’s bonnet and held up a cup of coffee. Peace offering. Normally Humph’s working hours began at 9.00am.

Humph was chatting to Nicos again about the village olive festival. Reluctantly he sipped the coffee: ‘No egg?’

‘No egg,’ said Dryden. ‘Full English at the Bridge after the interview.’ The Bridge was a greasy spoon in town which specialized in fried everything on fried bread. For Humph they did a drive-in service complete with an improvised in-cab food tray.

Humph wiggled in his seat by way of indicating mounting excitement at the prospect of such a feast. They pulled out into the busy A10, already nose-to-tail with sleepy drivers heading for the academic sweatshops of Cambridge seventeen miles to the south. ‘College sweater shops,’ said Dryden, and laughed at his own joke.

Humph remained in a silent, brooding world. Dryden imagined the cabbie’s sunrises were fried-tomato red.

Dryden flipped down the vanity mirror on the passenger side and looked himself in the face. His jet-black hair had been sandwiched in a strange cone towards the left, the result of sleeping heavily and avoiding early morning brushes and mirrors. He was fingering the sallow skin beneath his eyes when he saw a motorbike in the rear-view mirror. The bike was black, with cow-horn handlebars, and the early morning light touched the chromework in a series of minor sunbursts. The rider was in oxblood-red leathers with a matching helmet and a black tinted visor. A silver line of chrome crossed the helmet along the ridge of the cranium. A flag flew from the aerial which Dryden failed to recognize: a white star on a blue background took up one third, the others were red and white.

‘Easy Rider’s a bit close,’ said Dryden.

Humph made a point of never consulting his rear-view mirror. It was angled to provide a squint view of his own face. He felt too much information was confusing and a curse of modern life.

The motorbike trailed them at varying distances along the A10. Dryden guessed from the size of the air ducts to the front of the engine cowling that it was a 2,000cc at least. ‘Why the hell doesn’t he just breeze past?’ he asked.

‘I said…’ Dryden glanced back at the vanity mirror but shut up when he saw the bike had gone. ‘Where…?’

But then Humph swung the cab off the main road and on to a drove. Originally cattle tracks, the network of drove roads provided the Fens with a latticework of shortcuts and dead-ends the map to which did not exist. Dryden skewed round in his seat but couldn’t see the biker. Then he made a nearly fatal mistake. He told himself that only paranoid people think they’re being followed.

‘Only paranoid people think they’re being followed,’ he told Humph.

Humph considered this. ‘Who’d bother?’ he said – an eloquent insult.

The road to Black Bank was the loneliest Dryden knew in a landscape disfigured by solitude. It ran for seven straight miles through the fen. The drought had killed the midsummer crops and the soil had been left to the sun. Even a light breeze raised clouds of red dust. As Humph’s cab bumped along the drove it left in its wake a series of miniature crimson whirlwinds. Dryden wound the passenger window down as far as it would go and put his elbow on the already hot metal of the bodywork.

The sun was low into Humph’s face