Humph’s home life was as non-existent as Dryden’s, in his case owing to an acrimonious divorce. He had a picture of his two girls stuck on the dashboard. Dryden and Humph shared an insular view of the world, if that is possible, for the most part without sharing a word.
In the lay-by the combination of the noon sun and the exhaust pipes of fifteen heavy wagons was headily reminiscent of Athens under a smog. Amongst the lorries were two Milk Marketing Board tankers, common now on the Fen roads, converted to carry water for irrigating salad crops in the drought. The air along the roadside was a shimmering blue advert for global warming. Dryden tried a cough and produced a strangulated lead-fuelled squeak.
The Ritz T-Bar was a regular meeting place for Dryden and the crew of stragglers he counted as his ‘contacts’. He noted that Inspector Andy Newman’s car was already parked up on a grass mound at the end of the lay-by. The detective drove a clapped-out Citroen with a sticker in the window for the Welney Wildfowl Trust. Andy Newman – ‘Last Case Newman’, as he was known to his fellow officers on the force – was more interested in catching sight of a sparrowhawk than a crook. Mentally he had been on the allotment for a decade. Or in his case, in one of the hides from which he could spy on his beloved birds. He had twenty-three days to run to statutory retirement age. He wasn’t counting, but that didn’t include two days’ holiday and a doctor’s appointment.
Dryden queued for a cup of tea. The Ritz was standard issue in the mobile tea-bar world. Sugar bowl with one teaspoon and several lumps of coagulated glucose. One copy of the
A blackboard on the rear wall of the kitchenette read: THURSDAY’S SPECIAL – DOUBLE SAUSAGE SANDWICH 99P.
The proprietor was tall, with blond hair tinged nicotine-yellow. His conversational powers, which Dryden had tested before, were strictly limited to Premier League football, female lorry drivers and the weather in a two-mile radius of the lay-by. He kept his hands in his pockets and smoked a roll-up with the lung-pulling power of a set of doll’s house bellows. As he pushed the styrofoam cup of tea across the counter Dryden noticed the livid raised mark of a skin graft on his hand.
‘Johnnie,’ said Dryden, putting his change on the Formica top.
‘Steamin’ again,’ said Johnnie, shuffling coins between the lines of five-, ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pence pieces on the counter-top he had arranged in the long hours of boredom which came with being proprietor of the Ritz.
Dryden left it at that. He got into Newman’s car and sat pretending to sip the tea for five minutes. Newman, binoculars pressed to his face, was scanning the vast field opposite. Eventually he placed them on his lap with a sigh. ‘Herring gull,’ he said. Even his voice was tired. Knackered. Ready for retirement with the rest of him.
‘Not long now,’ said Dryden, referring to Newman’s favourite topic – retirement.
‘Nope. Not long.’
Dryden produced a single piece of white paper. It was a five-paragraph story put out by the Press Association that morning.
He’d rung Newman that morning as soon as the story had appeared on the wire. It might make a paragraph in the nationals the next day, or even the local evening papers, but Dryden’s favour bought Newman the best part of a twenty-four-hour lead on his fellow enthusiasts.
‘Rare Siberian gull spotted’, ran the headline. The bird had been blown, exhausted, on to the bird reserve at Holme on the north Norfolk coast. Once the news hit the papers thousands of twitchers would descend on the spot, with enough photographic hardware to cover a Paris catwalk. This way Andy Newman got there first.
‘Thanks,’ he said, stuffing the paper in the glove compartment. He always seemed mildly embarrassed by what, Dryden had to admit, was a not very subtle process of police bribery. They had long since dispensed with any pretence that their relationship was anything other than cynical: Newman got the tips and Dryden got a story. It was as simple as that.
Newman retrieved a large brown envelope which had been stashed in the Citroen’s glove compartment. Dryden gingerly extracted some photographic prints from it. ‘They’re X-rated,’ said Newman, as he raised his binoculars to watch a flock of flamingoes rising from the distant waters of the Wicken Fen nature reserve.
And so they were. Twenty prints, black and white. Two bodies. One female. Her face was to the camera in a few, the eyes glazed. Dryden guessed she’d been drugged. The man’s face was crueller. A professional. A pornstar’s body. Hairless and smooth. But ugly. They were always ugly in these pictures, whatever they looked like.
She’d have been beautiful anywhere else. Blonde, bright eyes, leggy. Dryden guessed twenty – perhaps younger. The stud was older, late twenties; the cynical smile added another couple of decades. But it was the room that left Dryden uneasy. Walls, but no right angles. Bare concrete. Graffiti: layers of it, decades of it. Coats and clothes on the floor, and under that, what? Straw, perhaps.
The camera angle never changed. It was outside looking in, through a narrow horizontal slit. Night time. A peeping Tom by arrangement, looking in and recording everything.
Dryden put them back in the envelope and fished in his trouser pockets for the pear drops he’d bought that morning. He hardly ever ate a decent meal, preferring instead to graze on the crop he could harvest from his pockets. He wound the window down but it made no impression on the stifling heat. A fly head-butted the windscreen without enthusiasm.
‘It’s a pillbox,’ said Newman, lowering the binoculars and putting them carefully in a box lined with immaculate green baize.
Dryden nodded as if he knew what the detective was talking about.
‘Is that a clue?’ asked Dryden, fighting off an urge to yawn. Sometimes Dryden was aware that of the two he got the poorer bargain in their little game of bribery. Newman had to find a story at very short notice to get his tips, and sometimes the Fenland underworld failed to come up with anything even moderately exciting.
‘Not really,’ said Newman, already trying to work out if he could lose himself for a few hours driving north to Holme over lunch to get a snap of the Siberian gull. ‘There were thirty thousand built in the late thirties, forties. There’s probably ten thousand left. Most look like the one in the pictures. There’s a club – apparently – which spots them.’
