swirled past.
She stopped when she got to Dryden. The drum beat climaxed and stopped dead as she raised the noose with a jolt and let her head loll on the broken neck. Snap!
It was a finale guaranteed to kill any applause. The crowd moved away with indecent haste. The Mollies were associated in local legend with what the locals called the Water Gypsies – drop-outs who lived in a line of damp, dilapidated narrow boats on the edge of town and grew vaguely exotic, and strictly illegal, substances in gaily painted decktop pots. According to whispers they indulged in pagan rituals, including naked moonlight dancing and group sex. The Water Gypsies struggled hard to live up to this reputation, but still spent more time playing Scrabble than dancing under the stars.
Dryden sipped his beer. ‘Hi,’ he said. The girl whipped the hood off and a bun of blonde hair dropped to her shoulders. She had several beautiful features, dominated by the hair, and the kind of brown eyes you can swim in. She was naturally tanned by her work – crop picking. Her figure was, like Laura’s, full and the lack of a bra always seemed to give her nipples ample opportunity to puncture her T-shirt. Etty, always just Etty, for all the Mollies who lived on the narrow boat had forgotten their surnames.
‘Dryden,’ she said, taking a gulp from his pint and wagging her tongue in the amber liquid. ‘You got my text message, then. Nothing like a throbbing pocket, is there?’ She smiled, revealing too many teeth, and extravagant laughter lines.
Mitch, who had returned with the drinks, gave Dryden a suspicious look and excused himself.
Etty flopped into a seat while Dryden went and got her a pint of cider from the bar. She downed a third of it, when it arrived, in a single gulp. ‘The people smugglers. We saw them.’
She eyed Dryden with thinly disguised lust. What she liked most was the emotional distance, the six-foot two- inch frame, and the Early Norman features. She imagined him scanning the sky for a comet in a long-lost section of the Bayeux Tapestry. That was the key to the New Age after all – a passion for the past.
‘What’s it worth?’ she said, her eyes wide from the effects of a plump spliff. She put her hand on Dryden’s knee and let it rest there.
Dryden pretended not to notice. He’d been a journalist long enough never to show interest when a good story surfaced. It simply upped the price, even if it was being measured in pints of cider. He turned his medieval features to the sun and closed his eyes. He heard water lapping against the bank and the gentle tinkle of wine-glass toasts from one of the floating gin palaces on the far bank.
‘A Friday night. Last Friday night. We were out in the van,’ said Etty, filling the silence.
Etty and the rest of the crew from the
‘There were two artics parked up by the lay-by on the A14 where the tea bar is. They let three out. They were black. Poor bastards. Imagine – around ’ere.’
They surveyed the crowd, which displayed about as much ethnic diversity as a stable of thoroughbred racehorses.
‘Time?’
She jiggled her empty pint. Dryden completed another bar run, aware as always with Etty that the more they drank the lower his defences fell. But for Humph’s brooding presence they were defences which may well have been breached some time ago.
Refilled, she took a glug. ‘One o’clock. The tea bar was closed but that creepy bloke was there who’s usually behind the counter. It looked like a drop. There were other people to meet the lorry, a group of them – all black, ’cept one. The driver was a white guy – really odd, he looked like NF to me. Shaved head, really mean looking. We buggered off in the van.’
‘Were they putting them back in the lorries?’
Etty nodded, slurping down the cider and letting her eyes swim over the Fen horizon. ‘Last thing we saw they were all back on except a group of them – half a dozen maybe. They went off overland. East from the lay-by, across Black Bank Fen. Like a chain-gang.’
9
The phone was black, Bakelite, and bang in the middle of the news desk. When it rang everyone jumped. Luckily it rang very rarely. It had been installed nearly fifty years earlier by Sextus Henry Kew, the present editor’s father and then sole proprietor of
The editor, ever vigilant on behalf of his heritage, had spotted the fault within a week. Thereafter Septimus Henry Kew would pick up the receiver, every Friday, and check the dialling tone as he opened up the office. Dryden had suggested mice were gnawing through the cable. Henry sent Garry out for a trap, and called an electrician. ‘The readers,’ said Henry, recalling an aphorism of his father’s, ‘must be heard.’
When the black phone rang, it was every man for himself.
It rang.
Garry, confidence buoyed up by his normal Friday lunch-time diet of four pints of India Pale Ale, picked up his own phone immediately and dialled an imaginary outside number, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes as if steeling himself for a particularly difficult interview. Charlie Bracken, the news editor, flinched. Charlie had got the job on the basis of Henry’s bizarre concept of inverse qualification. Being the news editor demanded an ability to make hard decisions under pressure: it took Charlie twenty minutes each morning to decide which side of the bed to get out of. But when the black phone rang he knew exactly what to do. He had his coat on in seconds and was heading for the stairs. ‘Ciggies,’ he said, patting a pocket.
Now that this week’s edition of
The phone rang again. Dryden failed to move, befuddled by the effects of a liquid lunch of his own at the Cutter
