She appeared now beside them. ‘Tea?’ she asked, and Dryden nodded.
‘We can’t find him,’ said Alice, as soon as Jean was out of earshot.
‘We?’
‘Mum. I got back last night. She said he’d gone a couple of days ago – on Saturday. Said he knew what was going on. Who’d done those things to me, and taken the pictures. Jesus,’ she said, burying her face in her hands. ‘The pictures.’
‘How did he get to see them? The police normally keep that kind of thing pretty much under wraps.’
‘He had friends, didn’t he? He has friends everywhere, that’s how he does his job. He got an attachment by e- mail. That made it worse. He said they’d be all over the net, just like real porn.’
‘How’d he take it?’ asked Dryden, wishing he hadn’t.
‘Mum said he sparked out. Broke some furniture. He wouldn’t let Mum see them, carried them with him so she wouldn’t get close. Then he drank some whisky on his own. All night, Mum said.’
‘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
