The Fire Baby

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.’