The Fire Baby Read online

  ‘Do the police know he’s gone?’

  She nodded, snuffling. Jean appeared with a cup of tea. Just the one.

  ‘Any idea where he’d been looking? Did he say anything to your Mum?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing. He just said it was something to do with the lorries.’ She slurped tea noisily from the cup. ‘He works in transport security – HGVs – so he’s always talking to the drivers. I guess it’s his job. And he likes talking,’ she smiled, but it faded quickly. ‘He told Mum someone had said something. About…’

  Dryden let the silence lengthen.

  ‘About… the pictures.’

  The pictures. How could he forget? He held Alice’s hand.

  ‘And nothing else?’

  ‘Mum’s upset. She’s in pieces, really. I shouldn’t have gone away.’

  ‘What happened that night? The night in the pillbox…’

  Alice’s hand trembled slightly as she brought the cup to her lips. ‘You tell me. God. I… I sort of remember the sex, I guess.’ Tears welled up and plopped into her tea. ‘This bloke started chatting to me at the pub where I work – The Pine Tree. It’s dull, you know? But I need the money and the landlord is a friend of Dad’s, so it’s OK with them too. The police said he put something in my drink – but they couldn’t prove that. The dishwasher took all the traces off the glass. Anyway, it’s a drug, OK? It… makes you feel sexy.’

  ‘It’s used for date rape. It’s illegal. Do you think he’d done this before?’

  Her eyes widened. She hadn’t thought of that. ‘Yeah. Sure… he didn’t put a foot wrong. He just let me do what I wanted to do. He was good looking, I guess. Slim, with a tan.’ The embarrassment flooded back. ‘Jesus. How could I? Look – you ain’t gonna put this in the paper, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Dryden. ‘But I should write about your dad, yes? See if anyone has seen him.’

  She could have left it there but she needed to tell the whole story. ‘He took me to the pillbox. I must have slept… afterwards. I woke up on a park bench, on the river bank by the Cutter. There was a fiver in my purse which hadn’t been there the night before. I guess it was to get home. Thoughtful, eh? But I couldn’t. Mike, the landlord at the Pine Tree, had seen me leaving with that bloke, all over him. I’d been out all night. And… and they’d left me a picture. In the purse with the fiver. One of the snaps. I just sat there looking at that picture and thinking what they’d think, at home, if they ever saw it. I guess it was a threat. To keep me quiet. So I ran. Friends in London. I’m at East London University – Docklands. The halls of residence are closed – and Dad would have checked there anyway. I should have phoned but I was scared, scared Mum and Dad had found out…’

  Dryden nodded. ‘And you can’t recall anything else your mum said about your father? About the lorries…?’

  Then she remembered. Dryden saw it in her eyes.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Mum said something about a lay-by. Where the drivers stop. He spends a lot of time in them, watching, you know? It’s his job to make sure the drivers aren’t flogging the stuff or carrying cargo for other companies. Greasy spoons, that’s what he calls them. He hates them normally, always told me off for eating rubbish. Mum packs his sandwiches. But he said…’ and she bowed her head again. ‘He told Mum that was where you could buy the pictures…’

  ‘The police will find him,’ said Dryden.

  ‘That’s what we’re afraid of,’ she said, pushing her chair away.

  17

  Humph pulled into the Ritz lay-by and stopped the Capri in a cloud of red dust. The cab reeked of overheated plastic. Humph, disturbed in the middle of his afternoon nap to make the run, moodily flicked through his language tapes. ‘I need my sleep,’ he said. Dryden could see the logic in this in that it was one of the few times Humph could be sure he wasn’t putting on weight.

  ‘Well take a nap now. Be my guest. I’m paying.’ Dryden, irritated, gazed pointedly out of the passenger-side window at a mechanical irrigator standing in a field of burnt kale.

  Sometimes he wanted to tell Humph how he felt. How the cabbie’s immobile insolence pissed him off, like almost nothing else pissed him off. He turned to face him but Humph had the earphones on for his tapes – not those little plug ones that tuck inside the ear, but the big ones, like rubber dustbin lids.

  Dryden thumped both palms as hard as he could on the dashboard but Humph didn’t move. So he braced himself for the shriek of rust and pushed the door open with his foot.

  He’d wanted to visit the Ritz ever since Etterley told him about the ‘people smugglers’ using the lay-by as a drop-off point. Now Alice Sutton had given him another good reason to get a cup of tea and a carbon monoxide sandwich. If Bob Sutton had been checking lorries passing through the Fens he’d have got to the Ritz eventually. Perhaps it was here he’d been offered some dirty pictures which featured his daughter.

  But the Ritz was closed. The shutters were down and a note stuck on it in childish capital letters three inches high said: SHUT ’TIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  Dryden noted both the apostrophe and the motorbike which had pulled up on the opposite side of the road. It was black, and the rider wore oxblood-red leathers. He thought about walking over to confront his uninvited shadow but an HGV rolled into the lay-by and obscured the view. The driver got out and walked over to read the note. It took him quite a long time.

  ‘Bastard,’ he said, kicking one of the wheels of the kiosk with a boot the size of a horse trough.

  It rocked for a few minutes, red dust slurping off the roof.

  ‘Closed, then?’ said Dryden.

  The driver wiped a hand across the stubble on his chin. ‘Fucking thirsty too.’

  ‘Odd.’

  The driver read the note again. Up close. ‘Never closes, Johnnie, not while it’s light. Never.’

  Dryden tried to modify his personality to suit that of his prospective interviewee: a professional trick made considerably more difficult by the need to look shifty, man-of-the-world, physically tough and permanently stupid. The fact that the lorry driver achieved all of this without trying, and no doubt on a daily basis, made Dryden’s task only more challenging.

  ‘Johnnie runs quite a business,’ he said, offering the lorry driver a jelly bean.

  Nothing. Lights out. The driver looked at the sweets as if Dryden were peddling ecstasy tablets to nuns.

  ‘Worth a fortune.’ Dryden stepped closer. ‘And what about the immigrants, eh? People smuggling must pay,’ he added, edging closer and catching a whiff of industrial-strength BO. ‘Bloke told me those poor bastards pay six hundred quid a time. He runs the lorries through,’ he said, tilting his head towards the empty T-Bar. ‘Gets ’em jobs. Amazing, eh? Wonder what his cut is?’

  The driver looked both ways, and used his T-shirt to wipe sweat from his chin. ‘Should drown the fuckers.’

  Dryden hesitated before executing his next tactic, sensing at some subliminal level that he might have already stepped outside the strict etiquette laid down by the Road Hauliers Association. ‘Then there’s the dirty pix, of course. Hmm? You had any of them, have you? Apparently they get stowed away with the immigrants. Sort of reverse trade. I’d be interested. You know, to get a cut too.’

  Dryden leered hugely and tried a wink, which in the circumstances was a bonus. It meant he got to see the fist which hit him with just the one eye. He heard rather than felt the thud of the bunched knuckles pushing his eye back into its socket. The pain came a second later. A red-hot electric pulse which collapsed his spine and knees with frightening efficiency.

  Then the guy picked him up by the shirt and pushed him hard up against the metallic side of the Ritz. Dryden’s vision blurred. His assailant was so close he could smell the scraps of food between his teeth.

  ‘Who told you that?’ he said, surprisingly quietly. Over his shoulder Dryden could see Humph in the Capri, eyes closed, headphones still on. The motorbike had moved on. Cars swept past like they always
do, innocent of any crime.

  ‘Just heard it,’ he said, and the guy laughed in a friendly way which made Dryden’s heart freeze. Then he took Dryden’s arm, twisted it round his back and began to apply his weight. The elbow joint began to give with a series of plastic pops. Dryden screamed but the passing cars drowned him out.

  The bloke was whispering in his ear now. ‘Let’s keep that to ourselves, yeah?’

  ‘OK,’ said Dryden, pathetically eager to comply. The vice-like grip was released, so he sank to his knees and threw up. He kept his eyes down, viewing the puke, until he heard the lorry rumble back out on to the A14. He knelt there for some time while he waited for his breathing to return to normal, and for his little fingers to stop vibrating like windscreen wipers.

  Out of the hot dust of the road Inspector Andy ‘Last Case’ Newman’s battered Citroën appeared. He got out, walked over and rattled the roller-shuttered front of the Ritz before turning to Dryden. He gently opened the fast-closing left eye, looking for broken blood vessels: ‘That’s gonna be a corker. Care to tell me who did it?’

  ‘A driver. I suggested he was after buying porn. He took exception.’

  ‘We can put him down as a “No”, I think, don’t you?’ said Newman.

  Dryden wanted to laugh but still felt too sick. ‘Bob Sutton. Little Alice’s father, picked up something about the pornography racket in a lay-by, according to his wife. But I guess you know that already.’

  Newman nodded, thumping the roll-up shutter one last time. He peered in through a gap between the door and its metal frame. A green parrot lay silent in an ugly little bundle.

  ‘Parrot’s a stiff,’ he said. ‘Shame, he could have told us where the proprietor’s gone.’

  There was a whiff of putrid beefburger on the air so they moved up-wind. Newman took out his notebook and flipped over the pages. ‘Ex-wife of the T-Bar owner came in yesterday. Sub-station at Shippea Hill. She hadn’t seen him for a month – six weeks.’

  ‘Why’d she wait so long?’

  Newman shrugged and watched with rapt attention a swift dipping over a field of burnt celery. Then he remembered that he knew the answer: ‘They were separated. Ten years. But he paid her some cash, every month. He missed the date, she smelt a rat and went looking for him.’

  ‘Smelt a rat,’ said Dryden, and they moved even further up-wind. ‘It’s like the Bermuda triangle around here. Alice Sutton goes missing, then Bob Sutton goes missing, now this guy.’

  Newman stretched his arms above his head, revealing two large splodges of sweat. ‘Doesn’t bother me. People lose themselves. It isn’t a crime. Alice Sutton is back. I’d like to find her dad but my guess is he’s still on her trail, and it led to London. When it goes cold he’ll be back.’

  ‘And this guy?’ said Dryden, circling the Ritz, massaging his shoulder.

  ‘Is more interesting,’ said Newman. ‘We’ve had him down for the illegal immigrants for some time. It’s a drop-off point. Frankly we just let him carry on so we could get an idea of when the lorries were coming through. Try and spot the ones with the human cargo. Now it looks like he’s mixed up in the porn too. Perhaps he’s stepped out of line. They wouldn’t like that. These people are capable of anything… More.’

  Dryden fingered his swelling eye and walked back to the mobile T-Bar. He pulled at the gold chain around his neck, and tried Laura’s key in the lock of the chipboard door. Nothing. Newman watched with the exaggerated patience of a nurse on a psychiatric ward. ‘Johnnie Roe’s the name,’ he said. ‘Villain. You should see his file at the nick. Takes up a whole drawer. Petty in every sense of the word plus two really black marks, a GBH five years ago in a town pub. And procuring, that was ten years ago. Nottingham.’

  ‘Procuring?’

  Newman sighed. ‘He was a pimp. He sold girls. Got it?’

  They strolled back to the cars. Humph was just unscrewing the top of a glove-compartment gin bottle. He shared few pastimes with Dryden but baiting coppers was one. He waved the bottle at Newman and grinned hugely.

  ‘I’ll leave you two gentlemen to it, then,’ said Newman, getting slowly into his car.

  Humph waved him off with a feminine flutter of the fingers.

  Dryden slumped into the passenger seat and checked his injury in the vanity mirror.

  ‘Shit,’ said Humph, noticing the blackening eye for the first time. ‘Sorry. I was…’ and he weakly shook the earphones.

  ‘Not your fault,’ said Dryden. ‘Drink?’

  Humph fished out two Bacardis. The mood had changed and suddenly Dryden felt the uncomfortable certainty that their carefully concealed friendship had been exposed.

  Dryden looked for the maps in the passenger-side door compartment. He went for the OS four inch to the mile. The question was simple: Where was Bob Sutton? Like Inspector Newman he must have been searching for the pillbox in which his daughter had been raped. He came to the Ritz because he’d heard this was where you could pick up the pictures. Newman had said that the pictures had turned up in Nottingham during a raid on illegal immigrants. So there was more than a circumstantial link with the people smugglers. And Etty had told him the Water Gypsies had seen the illegal immigrants being decanted at the Ritz, and then setting off across Black Bank Fen.

  Dryden found the Ritz lay-by on the map. To the east, about a quarter of a mile, the tiny symbol for a pillbox stood in a stand of green shaded trees. But Newman had pointed out that it had a different roof from the one in the pictures. Etty had said the immigrants were led east which meant they were heading across Black Bank Fen. A single drove cut the fen in half and was marked on the map: The Breach. Half-way along, about three miles from the Ritz, a small plantation of pines was marked: Mons Wood. The OS map showed the wood as a stylized green rectangle shaded with little, childlike Christmas trees. And at its heart there was a small hexagonal symbol. A pillbox. Dryden tapped his finger on it. ‘There,’ he said. He tried not to notice that it was less than a mile from Black Bank Farm. He didn’t believe in coincidences, so he couldn’t believe in this one.

  18

  Dryden needed two things: a bag of ice and a copy of The Crow. Humph realigned the rear-view mirror so that he could see the black eye burgeon. ‘Corker,’ he said, swinging the cab out on to the main road and heading for The Crow’s offices.

  ‘Thanks for the bodyguard service,’ said Dryden unkindly.

  ‘If I’d known you were going to wink at a seventeen-stone HGV driver I’d have been keeping my eye out,’ said Humph, letting the smile take root.

  ‘I think his reaction points to more unsavoury motives than effrontery, don’t you? I’d guess he had a cab full of hard porn, or even a container full of it. That’s why he was looking for our mutual friend Johnnie Roe.’

  In The Crow’s front office there was a pile of Expresses for sale, the ink still wet. Dryden took one and jumped back into the cab. His story on Maggie Beck had made the splash – complete with the picture from Black Bank of Estelle and Lyndon with their mother. There was a chemist next door who advised him that he needed a cold compress for his eye.

  ‘Brilliant,’ he said, rudely walking off.

  Dryden knew exactly where he could get one. ‘Five Miles From Anywhere, quick as you can,’ he told Humph, getting back in the Capri. Humph tooled the cab down Market Street expelling a cloud of exhaust which would have looked extravagant trailing behind the Zeebrugge ferry.

  Five Miles From Anywhere was a pub at the confluence of the Ouse and the Cam. It stood on a lonely promontory accessible only via a dispiriting three-mile drove road. Most of the clientele were families from the pleasure boats which used the moorings beside the pub or the marina which had been dug out of the bank in the sixties. Most days there was dust in the bouncy castle and a small pyramid of empty Calor gas bottles in the car park. It was a place haunted by the ghost of holidays past. Dryden loved the ambiance of gentle disappointment and the spectacular view: directly north along the wide conjoined rivers Ely Cathedral patrol
led the horizon like a bishop’s battleship.

  They parked up on the tarmac forecourt with a satisfying screech of bald tyres. Humph killed the engine. ‘G&T please, and a packet of cashew nuts.’ He began to fumble with the language tapes.

  Dryden fingered the black eye in the vanity mirror and for once his infinite patience fled. ‘No,’ he said.

  Humph froze. Dryden pressed on. ‘No. I’m not getting your fucking drink and nuts. You’re coming with me. We’re gonna sit outside and have a drink and… and a chat.’

  ‘Chat?’ said Humph, horrified.

  Dryden wasn’t going to argue. He got out, but leant back through the open passenger window. ‘I’ll see you at one of the picnic tables. No hurry.’

  The bar was empty so Dryden rang a bell. He waited for a bleary-eyed barman to organize his trousers before ordering drinks, nuts, and a bar-towel packed with ice. He considered Humph’s lumbering progress from the Capri towards the picnic tables, as viewed through the bar window. Already he was regretting baiting his friend. Did he really want to talk? No: what he wanted was to sit on his own with a pint of beer and contemplate both the river with its immutable beauty and his bad luck in being thumped in the face by a thug in a lay-by. Now he’d have to talk to Humph instead. He cursed himself, and friendship, and upped the order to two pints for himself.

  ‘Medicinal,’ he told the barman, touching the eye. Humph, astonishingly, had reached the picnic table by the time he walked out with the drinks.

  ‘I hope you’re bloody satisfied,’ said Humph, wiping a curtain of sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase.

  Dryden sat back and held the ice to his eye, sipping from a pint at the same time. The silence between them deepened like a grudge until Dryden set the ice aside. He considered the normal rules of friendship, a pertinent subject as Humph appeared ignorant of the basics. ‘So,’ he said, heavily, ‘how are you? Who’s cleaning the house these days?’