The Fire Baby - By Jim Kelly Page 0,98

were other girls.’

She tapped Dryden’s knee firmly with her book. ‘Then I picked up the one she’d torn up. I knew, of course… I was putting them together when she came back out. I knew it was her this time. Just like the others. Naked with Johnnie.’

‘What did she say?’ asked Dryden, the scene Connie had brought to life as vivid as a memory of his own.

‘We never said anything. I just gave them to her and said something reassuring and bland – something about fish in the sea, or experience, or such rot. She took them and went back to her room.’

‘And Johnnie didn’t come back after that?’

‘Apparently. Not for some time, anyway. I left within a few weeks. I’d got a job – a library assistant in Peterborough. I was glad to go. They’d shown charity but never bothered to disguise it as anything else. I wrote to Maggie often. She wrote back. Guarded, of course, but she told me things, about the baby. About how Bill – my brother – wanted her to bring Johnnie to Black Bank, to give the baby a father. I think she was in despair, actually. I even thought she might take her life. I told Bill not to push. But he was quite rude, told me to leave family matters to the family. Very pointed.’

Dryden stood and dropped the blind on one of the windows so that a slatted shadow fell over them.

‘What do you think the pictures meant?’

She pushed a call button on the wall beside her. ‘Does it matter? Johnnie was always decked out with a camera. He was a pornographer – that’s clear, I think. Perhaps he thought the pictures were funny. Perhaps he sold them to his friends. Perhaps he thought it didn’t matter. But it did, Mr Dryden. And Maggie made him pay for it in the end by giving away the one thing he really wanted – a son. I don’t think she could have faced life with Johnnie, so she gave Matty away and there was no need to marry any more. She’d give Matty a life away from Johnnie, and herself a life away from him. It was very neat, but she paid a terrible price, didn’t she? And the worst thing, of course, is that the price went up as the years went on.’

The proprietor came up behind them.

‘Goodbye, Mrs Tompkins,’ said Dryden, rising. ‘One last question. You didn’t keep in touch with Maggie, or Estelle?’

‘We move on, do we not? I told my husband about my life at Black Bank and he was horrified – he said it sounded Dickensian. He didn’t want anything to do with them, and Maggie moved anyway – from Black Bank. A few Christmas cards… then it was easier to send nothing.’

‘Lyndon needs to know why… Perhaps, could you?’

She took his hand for the last time. ‘You tell stories for a living, Mr Dryden. Tell this one for me.’

Back in Humph’s cab Dryden sat and tried not to think. He flipped down the vanity mirror and looked again at the picture he had downloaded to his PC that morning: a happy wedding-day shot, confetti on the groom’s smart pilot’s uniform, brother kissing sister. The visceral age-old revulsion swept over him again, and he tried to imagine what it felt like for them.

He found Maggie’s last tape in the glove compartment. ‘Black Bank,’ he said, and hoped it was for the last time.

41

‘Dry lightning,’ said Dryden, as Humph’s cab bumped through the gates to Black Bank Farm.

The bolt struck some trees at Mons Wood with a crack like an artillery shell, the light and sound in almost perfect harmony. The tallest pine torched itself, a crackling suicide of sudden purple flame. The sight of fire seemed, incredibly, to deepen the heat. The featureless horizon appeared to pulse, the hot air on the fen boiling over the shadowless fields.

Humph’s Capri skidded to a halt in the red dust before the old farmhouse. Estelle was at the door, one hand clutched defensively to her throat. She looked a generation older, but nothing like her mother. Maggie’s almost Victorian stoicism was beyond her reach. She looked very modern in the timeless surroundings of Black Bank. And very frightened.

Dryden produced the tape from his pocket and held it up like a trophy: ‘I think we should listen to this. It’s the last one. She said everything would be explained.’

‘Everything is,’ said Estelle, her voice crackling like the air. She turned on