The Fire Baby

The phone rang again. Dryden failed to move, befuddled by the effects of a liquid lunch of his own at the Cutter and Etty’s frank offer of an afternoon of sex on water. He had also been trying to work out why he was so unsettled by the news that the people smugglers used Black Bank Fen. Just when he was trying to put Maggie Beck out of his mind, the scene of the 1976 air crash seemed to be haunting him.

The phone rang again. If it rang four times Henry would be out of his office. Dryden, who liked nothing but a quiet life, walked over and picked up the receiver, leaving a slight imprint of sweat on the cool black Bakelite. Despite having spent more than a decade as a reporter, Dryden retained a deep-seated fear of meeting any member of that mythical but terrifying group: the readers. He had long since realized that advancement in his profession relied on the simple truth that journalists wrote newspapers for other journalists to read. The readers? Who cared what they thought? Who cared, that was, until they turned up on your doorstep demanding to talk to a reporter.

‘Hi. Newsroom. Philip Dryden speaking.’ He always hit a confident tone. That way he had plenty of room for what was, inevitably, an occasion for abject apology.

‘Hello now. I didnae think this thing would actually work,’ said a voice dipped daily in nicotine. ‘The name’s Sutton. Bob. It’s no’ really a complaint about yon paper. It’s the polis I’m after complaining about.’

‘I’ll be right down,’ said Dryden, who loved little more than landing a well-judged boot upon the idle rump of the local constabulary. He clattered down the newsroom steps with enthusiasm. Bob Sutton turned out to be the human incarnation of the Tate & Lyle sugar man: a cube of muscle with arms and legs hung from the corners of a barrel chest. Each fist resembled a solid two-pound bag of sugar. He wore a cheap security man’s jacket in black. He was in his forties, with sandy thinning hair and a dollop of an accent which Dryden guessed originated somewhere on the Clyde; somewhere with a big crane. He would have looked menacing if he hadn’t clearly spent most of the last twenty-four hours crying. He rubbed butcher’s fingers into reddened eye sockets.

‘It’s my dau’ta. Alice. She’s gone missing. I’ve had the polis round. Bloody useless, man. They seem tae think she’s run off. It’s crazy.’ He spread his hands out on the counter as if they were proof of his determination to find his daughter. ‘She’d not go with a fella like that. You know? She’s a good girl,’ he added, taking a cigarette from behind his ear and gripping it between his teeth.

Dryden reflected that it was every father’s lament, that his own daughter could not fail but be a grown-up extrapolation of an innocent five-year-old. But he took a note. Alice, aged twenty-one, had last been seen leaving her job as a bar maid at the Pine Tree pub, three miles west of Ely, five days ago shortly after closing time. The landlord had told her father, and later the police, that she had spent most of the evening chatting with a young man in a white T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of wrap-around reflective sunglasses which were held in his short blond hair. The landlord had described the man as late twenties, with an athletic build and a confident manner. The landlord’s wife, who had seen him briefly on popping down during the evening to put out sandwiches and hot sausage rolls for the quiz teams, said he looked like a male model. She’d seen him walk over to the bar from a one-armed bandit by the door and told the police that his movements were ‘silky’.

Later, said the landlord, Alice had asked to go early, explaining that she had a date. He’d watched her get into a car beside the Pine Tree. It was silver, he said, a sports car, with an expensive badge on the bonnet. He was sorry, he told Bob Sutton, but he was bad at spotting cars. She’d been seen sitting in the front with the bloke: kissing, he said, trying to find euphemisms for what he’d seen.

‘He chatted her up,’ said Bob Sutton. ‘No way she’d just be going after someone. It was him that made the first move – no question.’ He produced a box of matches and moved to light the cigarette. Dryden pointed timidly at the ‘No Smoking’ sign that Jean had knitted herself.

Sutton glowered.

‘Done it before?’ asked Dryden, judging the moment badly.

‘Never,’ said Sutton, thumping a fist on the counter, which jumped on the rebound. ‘Can you do anything?’

Dryden shrugged. Missing teenagers were two a penny, the small change in the currency of the disappeared. He could do something for the Express, but that didn’t publish for four days. And a freelance paragraph on a missing adolescent would sell nowhere on Fleet Street. Alice was probably having the time of her life with her dream man; either that or he’d dumped her and she was making her way home, pausing only to delay the inevitable humiliation.

Sutton searched his jacket pockets and flipped a passport-sized snapshot over the counter.