Dryden slapped the dashboard. ‘The Crow, chop, chop.’ He’d phone Estelle from the office and tell her a claim had been made. Lyndon should be told as well – after all, it was his father. And the will? Had Maggie left Black Bank to her son, or her daughter?

They led the cavalcade along The Breach and watched the rest of the press turn south towards Cambridge and London. The Capri turned north towards Ely, where the cathedral’s distant image was already buckling in the heat of the day. A cloud was so unusual that summer that when a large shadow dashed across the landscape Dryden watched its flight like a hawk. Peering up through the Capri’s windscreen his eyes filled with cobalt. ‘Blue sky,’ he said, a seagull crossing it with motionless wings. Humph pulled the cab up by the side of the road. Dryden got out and scanned the horizon. The sun was behind them but it wasn’t a cloud which had blotted it out. It was a column of smoke, rising from the fen just west of the city, and widening as it rose into a chef’s hat a mile high.

‘Jesus,’ he said. It looked like an oil painting from hell.

Dryden rang Mitch, who was still at the scene of Johnnie Roe’s murder. ‘I guess it’s a field fire. On the peat. But it’s a biggy – get as close as you can, Mitch – I want to see the burn marks on that bloody hat of yours. The pix are for The Crow on Friday – so no rush.’

Humph slung the cab off the main road and headed south along a drove made of concrete slabs; the tyres thudding over the cracks as they traced a zig-zag route around parched fields.

‘It’s the old airfield,’ said Dryden, already tasting the smoke in his mouth.

Witchford Aerodrome had been a Lancaster bomber base in the war. Dryden had done a colour piece the year before after a farmer had ploughed up the remains of a German Heinkel which had come down in a raid. It had buried itself in the soft, wet peat of the winter of 1941. Dryden had been there when they’d got the pilot out of his sticky grave. He could see now the splayed bones of one of the hands in the mud, caressed by worms.

But Witchford’s days of glory were long gone. Now the old hangars and conning tower were derelict and deserted except on Saturdays and Tuesdays, when the grass runways were used for car boot sales. The weekend sale was for general goods – white elephant and tatty; the Tuesday market for antiques or items which might be mistaken for antiques in a poor light. Entry was for ‘trade’ only – dealers, restorers, and general London or Brighton sharks. Hundreds jostling for the chance to buy 1920s china, Edwardian furniture, and First World War medals. As the cab got closer they could see the parked ranks of cars through a mirage of tumbling hot air at the base of the column of smoke. The drove road ran through a derelict section of the old perimeter fence and then across a mile of parched grass towards the runways. Heading towards them was a crowd of a couple of hundred bargain hunters pursued by the drifting, noxious cloud of straw smoke. And they were coming at quite a speed, most of them holding handkerchiefs or clothing to their mouths.

Humph pulled up and killed the engine. The silence was filled by a distinct sound Dryden knew well: panic, with crackling grass as a background motif.

Coughing, screaming, laughing and crying the crowd parted to sweep past Humph’s Capri and kept going.

Through the drifting red-brown smoke Dryden could see two fire tenders working their way towards the seat of the fire in a field beyond the car boot sale. Through the purple-red flames Dryden could make out the shape of a bright yellow combine harvester. They were death traps in hot weather, with sparks flying and enough grease and oil caked to the machinery to make sure the chaff and straw caught fire with a satisfying BOOM! The top soil had caught alight as well, a common danger that summer. The peat fields of the Black Fen were essentially a huge open fireplace waiting for a light. As Dryden watched the fire advancing traffic-light orange flames flared at the edges of the dense Brown-Windsor smoke.

The fleeing crowd re-grouped beyond the flimsy remains of the wartime perimeter fence, as if the criss-cross wiring was a magic shield against the drifting pall of smuts and dust.

Dryden grabbed a rag from the cab boot, poured the contents of a bottle of mineral water over it, covered his face and set off for the parked cars. Ten years on Fleet Street had taught him the value of on-the-spot reportage. If there was a story here he needed to go and get it. Even as he did it he knew it was an act of bravado designed, like so many, to conceal a profound level of physical cowardice. Humph had no such demons to struggle with. He sat happily watching the fire spread, munching a diet chicken sandwich.

Dryden walked 200 yards towards the blaze, his eyes streaming as the smoke swirled around him, before a fireman emerged from the gloom in full breathing gear, and grabbed Dryden by the arm muttering: ‘Idiot. Follow me.’ Dryden tried to say ‘Press’ but the breath of air he would have used turned out to be 60 per cent carbon monoxide. The fireman led him to a door in one of the vast 1930s aircraft hangars and pushed him in with enough force to leave him flat on his face. ‘Stay in there,’ he said, fading back into the smoke.

The open door faced west so the drifting smoke was slipping harmlessly round the building. Dryden lay still, catching his breath. He heard a muffled thud which could have been a car exploding, the echo bounded around him like a giant ping-pong ball. The hangar had skylights but the thick smoke from the field fire was cutting out the sun. Somewhere very close he heard the crackle of tinder-dry grass burning.

He stood and surveyed the building, which must have been nearly eighty yards long and a hundred feet high. The hangar’s floor wasn’t entirely empty. In one corner an old RAF fire tender stood, a leftover prop from a Will Hay film. Along one wall aeroplane tyres had been stored in tall rubber stacks. The decaying carcasses of trapped birds littered the floor, and an oil slick ran from a punctured tank like blood from a head wound.

Up against the vast closed hangar doors a white van was parked. Dryden walked over and put his hand on the bonnet.

‘Still warm,’ he said. The side of the van was painted a light green with a white-lettered sign: ‘Wilkinson’s For Celery’. On the passenger seat there was a clipboard and a mobile phone. He peeked inside the windows in the tailgate doors and estimated there were about fifty boxes of fresh celery neatly packed in cellophane. He looked round the hangar again, but it was still empty.

Where was the driver? In the far wall, which was almost obscured by piled tyres, there was a single door marked ‘Flight Group’. Dryden pushed it open and looked down a long corridor listening. He could hear music, African, with a solid rock beat.

He inched open the second door to find a Nissen hut: a curved corrugated iron roof over a concrete floor. The windows were all skylights again and high enough to give no view. Moss and lichen had covered them anyway, giving the whole room a sickly green tint. Rows of iron bedsteads crowded against the side walls. The springs were rusted and shot. At the far end Jimmy Kabazo, the foreman from Wilkinson’s celery plant, stood watching him.

Dryden walked in and decided to try easy informality. ‘Hiya.’

Jimmy turned and tried a door in the end wall, indicating that this ploy had failed. It was locked and when he turned back the smile had returned. He bent down and turned off a portable CD player. Dryden noticed that not all the beds were bare. Two or three on each side had sleeping bags on them, and fresh twenty-first century rubbish under them, from sandwich wrappers to tin cans and empty crisp packets. A modern Calor gas heater stood in the middle, with four plastic milk-bottle crates drawn up as seating.

Dryden picked one of the bare beds and sat where the pillow should have been, bringing his legs up off the floor. ‘Looking for someone?’ he asked, nodding to the sleeping bag on the next bed.

Kabazo grinned. ‘Nope. Just waiting.’ But he wasn’t listening.

‘Friend of mine saw them,’ said Dryden, knowing he didn’t need to spell it out. Evidence of the people smugglers was all around them. He guessed Kabazo was an illegal immigrant too, or at least mixed up in the trade.

‘We safe?’ Kabazo asked. Dryden couldn’t be sure if he was referring to the fire, or to the likelihood that he would go to the police over what he’d found.

Dryden decided innocence was best. ‘Just a peat fire – the combines start them. We’re fine – it’s mostly smoke.’

‘Saw dem where?’ said Kabazo.

‘Black Bank Fen. Going across country – east. From the lay-by on the A14. That’s where they took them out of the lorries.’

‘Ritz,’ said Kabazo, nodding, trying to calculate what Dryden knew and who he would tell.

Dryden folded his arms in a sign, he hoped, of patient informality. ‘This is between us, OK? I’m not after anyone – just a story. No names. No need for names.’

Kabazo nodded but didn’t move. ‘I’m waiting,’ he said again. ‘My boy. Today maybe. Tomorrow. Police mustn’t know.’

Dryden shrugged. ‘Sure. Why should they?’

‘Who you tellin’ den?’

‘Nobody. It’s not my job. I’m interested in the story. I mean it; I don’t need names.’

Kabazo nodded. ‘He’ll come. The skinhead said. Winston. He said last week, this week… maybe later. I don’t trust him.’

‘Winston?’

Kabazo stood at the foot of Dryden’s bunk. ‘The driver. Our people pay him, he does the dirty work. With the Ritz man – Johnnie.’

Suddenly sunlight blazed down through the green skylights, indicating the runway fire was out.

‘They’ve found a body. On Black Bank Fen,’ said Dryden, cruelly, but didn’t let the silence last more than a second. ‘A man. In his forties. I think it’s Johnnie – but they won’t say.’

Kabazo’s eyes widened. ‘How long?’

‘A few days – perhaps. What would they have done if Johnnie hadn’t been there? Where’s the next drop?’

Kabazo shook his head. ‘Nottingham. If the driver knew. Perhaps Winston doesn’t come, then they don’t know.’

‘I can ring you with a positive ID on the body at Black Bank. OK?’

Kabazo shook his head. ‘Yes? Ring the factory. Leave a message.’

They walked back to the main hangar in silence and stood in the sunlight at the door. Outside the crowd was being marshalled towards the cars. Two vehicles had been dragged away from the rest into the middle of a field where they smouldered still. The bones of the combine harvester were black and crumpled, fire still licking around the driver’s padded seat. A scene of incident officer in a bright orange jacket was examining the threshing mechanism, pulling scorched straw from the blades.

‘Can you contact them? Get Winston?’ asked Dryden.

‘They don’t like it. They got the money. And I left them a bag for Emmy. Food and his things. His music. I sit tight some days. Wait some more. Sensible boy, my boy. He’s the first I send for with the money. Emmy’s a good boy.’

Kabazo took a wallet from his jeans pocket and flipped it open to show a snap: a boy, maybe fourteen, stood grinning under an African sun. In the background a great river, too wide to offer a view of the far bank, swept past. But it was what the boy was holding that made Dryden’s blood freeze: a mongrel dog with a rope collar. They looked happy together: impossibly happy.