The Fire Baby

and it led to London. When it goes cold he’ll be back.’

‘And this guy?’ said Dryden, circling the Ritz, massaging his shoulder.

‘Is more interesting,’ said Newman. ‘We’ve had him down for the illegal immigrants for some time. It’s a drop- off point. Frankly we just let him carry on so we could get an idea of when the lorries were coming through. Try and spot the ones with the human cargo. Now it looks like he’s mixed up in the porn too. Perhaps he’s stepped out of line. They wouldn’t like that. These people are capable of anything… More.’

Dryden fingered his swelling eye and walked back to the mobile T-Bar. He pulled at the gold chain around his neck, and tried Laura’s key in the lock of the chipboard door. Nothing. Newman watched with the exaggerated patience of a nurse on a psychiatric ward. ‘Johnnie Roe’s the name,’ he said. ‘Villain. You should see his file at the nick. Takes up a whole drawer. Petty in every sense of the word plus two really black marks, a GBH five years ago in a town pub. And procuring, that was ten years ago. Nottingham.’

‘Procuring?’

Newman sighed. ‘He was a pimp. He sold girls. Got it?’

They strolled back to the cars. Humph was just unscrewing the top of a glove-compartment gin bottle. He shared few pastimes with Dryden but baiting coppers was one. He waved the bottle at Newman and grinned hugely.

‘I’ll leave you two gentlemen to it, then,’ said Newman, getting slowly into his car.

Humph waved him off with a feminine flutter of the fingers.

Dryden slumped into the passenger seat and checked his injury in the vanity mirror.

‘Shit,’ said Humph, noticing the blackening eye for the first time. ‘Sorry. I was…’ and he weakly shook the earphones.

‘Not your fault,’ said Dryden. ‘Drink?’

Humph fished out two Bacardis. The mood had changed and suddenly Dryden felt the uncomfortable certainty that their carefully concealed friendship had been exposed.

Dryden looked for the maps in the passenger-side door compartment. He went for the OS four inch to the mile. The question was simple: Where was Bob Sutton? Like Inspector Newman he must have been searching for the pillbox in which his daughter had been raped. He came to the Ritz because he’d heard this was where you could pick up the pictures. Newman had said that the pictures had turned up in Nottingham during a raid on illegal immigrants. So there was more than a circumstantial link with the people smugglers. And Etty had told him the Water Gypsies had seen the illegal immigrants being decanted at the Ritz, and then setting off across Black Bank Fen.

Dryden found the Ritz lay-by on the map. To the east, about a quarter of a mile, the tiny symbol for a pillbox stood in a stand of green shaded trees. But Newman had pointed out that it had a different roof from the one in the pictures. Etty had said the immigrants were led east which meant they were heading across Black Bank Fen. A single drove cut the fen in half and was marked on the map: The Breach. Half-way along, about three miles from the Ritz, a small plantation of pines was marked: Mons Wood. The OS map showed the wood as a stylized green rectangle shaded with little, childlike Christmas trees. And at its heart there was a small hexagonal symbol. A pillbox. Dryden tapped his finger on it. ‘There,’ he said. He tried not to notice that it was less than a mile from Black Bank Farm. He didn’t believe in coincidences, so he couldn’t believe in this one.

18

Dryden needed two things: a bag of ice and a copy of The Crow. Humph realigned the rear-view mirror so that he could see the black eye burgeon. ‘Corker,’ he said, swinging the cab out on to the main road and heading for The Crow’s offices.

‘Thanks for the bodyguard service,’ said Dryden unkindly.

‘If I’d known you were going to wink at a seventeen-stone HGV driver I’d have been keeping my eye out,’ said Humph, letting the smile take root.

‘I think his reaction points to more unsavoury motives than effrontery, don’t you? I’d guess he had a cab full of hard porn, or even a container full of it. That’s why he was looking for our mutual friend Johnnie Roe.’

In The Crow’s front office there was a pile of Expresses for sale, the ink still wet. Dryden took one and jumped back into the cab. His story on Maggie Beck had made the splash – complete with the picture from Black Bank of Estelle and Lyndon with their mother. There was a chemist next door who advised him that he needed a cold compress for his eye.

‘Brilliant,’ he said, rudely walking off.

Dryden knew exactly where he could get one. ‘Five Miles From Anywhere, quick as you can,’ he told Humph, getting back in the Capri. Humph tooled the cab down Market Street expelling a cloud of exhaust which would have looked extravagant trailing behind the Zeebrugge ferry.

Five Miles From Anywhere was a pub at the confluence of the Ouse and the Cam. It stood on a lonely promontory accessible only via a dispiriting three-mile drove road. Most of the clientele were families from the pleasure boats which used the moorings beside the pub or the marina which had been dug out of the bank in the sixties. Most days there was dust in the bouncy castle and a small pyramid of empty Calor gas bottles in the car park. It was a place haunted by the ghost of holidays past. Dryden loved the ambiance of gentle disappointment and the spectacular view: directly north along the wide conjoined rivers Ely Cathedral patrolled the horizon like a bishop’s battleship.

They parked up on the tarmac forecourt with a satisfying screech of bald tyres. Humph killed the engine. ‘G&T please, and a packet of cashew nuts.’ He began to fumble with the language tapes.

Dryden fingered the black eye in the vanity mirror and for once his infinite patience fled. ‘No,’ he said.

Humph froze. Dryden pressed on. ‘No. I’m not getting your fucking drink and nuts. You’re coming with me. We’re gonna sit outside and have a drink and… and a chat.’

‘Chat?’ said Humph, horrified.

Dryden wasn’t going to argue. He got out, but leant back through the open passenger window. ‘I’ll see you at