The Fire Baby

‘Philip Dryden. The Crow. There’s no news,’ he said, lying effortlessly. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you but it might help to get some more publicity in the paper. Five minutes?’ Dryden felt like a fraud. He had little choice but to claim ignorance about the fact that the police had found Bob Sutton’s prints inside the pillbox. The police would be round that afternoon to break the news. Either way, events had taken a disturbing twist: the chances were that Sutton was either Johnnie’s murderer, or another victim yet unfound. In the meantime Dryden needed an interview and a picture of the missing man. And, much more importantly now, he needed to know what had happened in that pillbox.

Thirty seconds later he was standing by the leather sofa. ‘Nice,’ he said, lying again, and sat down.

Mrs Sutton sat down herself and went out of her way not to offer Dryden a coffee.

‘Bob’s gone,’ she said, and nervously played with an earring.

‘I know. He came to see me at The Crow about the pictures, the pictures of Alice. But she came home, didn’t she? What did your husband say?’

She looked away and lit a cigarette with an onyx lighter the size of a beach ball. ‘He was gone. He hasn’t seen Alice – I doubt he knew… knows… she’s back. That’s the bloody stupid…’ She was either blinding herself with cigarette smoke or beginning to cry.

Dryden studied the seascape poster framed over the gas fire so that she could cry unobserved, never contemplating the possibility that she wanted an audience. ‘I need to find him too,’ he said, still looking away. ‘Did he say what he was doing exactly, how he was going to find Alice?’

On the wall hung a picture of Bob Sutton in uniform. Dryden guessed it was the military police. It was a sunny picture, with the white light bleaching out the edges, and a colonial mansion in the background fringed with palms. He nodded at the frame. ‘Overseas?’

She lit up. ‘Yes. I was born in Hong Kong. Dad was Royal Engineers. Bob was MP. It was a glamorous life – then.’

‘Could I borrow it? I’ll get it back within twenty-four hours, I promise. If we run a story appealing for witnesses, it would help,’ said Dryden.

She nodded and Dryden carefully took the picture down. There was a long silence in which he could hear the kitchen fridge humming.

She stood up and came over to take the seat next to him. ‘You married?’ she said.

‘Yes. Five years. But there’s been an accident – in a car. She’s in a coma. She probably won’t come out of it. Well, that’s what they say.’ He considered just how easy it was to tell strangers the truth.

They smiled at each other. ‘He found something,’ she said at last. ‘One night. He went out and when he came back he was…’

‘What?’ said Dryden, beginning to like her.

‘Excited. But he wouldn’t talk about it. He never wanted to talk about what had happened to Alice. I was angry about that, still am. It wasn’t up to him to put it right. It was up to both of us.’ She stubbed out the cigarette and lit a fresh one with surprising grace.

‘One of his so-called mates in the force sent him the pictures of Alice. Jesus!’ she said, thumping the onyx football down on the table top where it left an ugly dent. ‘He couldn’t take that. He sat on that sofa and cried like a child. Clutching the pictures. As if it mattered. At least it showed she was alive. Sometimes I think he was more interested in proving she’d been made to do those things, than finding out if she was alive. That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? I’ve never seen him cry before. I was frightened… frightened about what he’d do to make things right again.’

‘Frightened he’d hurt someone?’

She nodded twice, taking two lungfuls of nicotine in and expelling the smoke in a fierce downdraft which almost reached the shag-pile carpet. ‘I begged him to tell me what he’d found – not the pictures, what he’d found out there,’ she said, nodding out through the fake mullioned windows towards the fen. ‘He said he would, the next day…’

She took a magazine from the coffee table and put it on her lap. ‘Blood,’ she said, flicking the pages. ‘There was blood – all over his handkerchief. I found it later – after he’d gone. He’d chucked it in the bin in the kitchen so I wouldn’t see. Lots of blood, really. I checked his clothes, it was just the handkerchief.’

‘So when was that? The first time he came home?’

‘The police asked that,’ she said, unblinking.

‘And what was the answer?’

‘Last Friday night. We were going out, that new Italian on Market Street. I’d dressed up.’

Dryden tried to imagine it.

‘He dragged himself in at midnight. Sober. I could always tell – can always tell.’ She looked out through the windows at the empty driveway.

‘What did he say?’

‘Said he was near. Close to finding her. Her,’ she flicked her chin upwards. ‘And all the time she was in some fucking bedsit in Camden Town.’ She regretted swearing but felt better for it. ‘Some fucking bedsit,’ she said again, but louder, prompting a nervous movement from the top of the stairs.

‘She’s OK?’ said Dryden.