The Fire Baby (22 page)

Dryden had promised Jimmy Kabazo he wouldn’t go to the police. But that was before his son had turned up dead in the container on the coast. Dryden had always distrusted promises, and this one begged to be broken. He told Newman about his meeting with Kabazo at Wilkinson’s, and again at the old airfield, and the snapshot he’d shown him of Emmy.

‘It’s the same kid?’ asked Newman.

‘Pretty sure,’ said Dryden.

Newman made two mobile phone calls: one to the station at Ely to get out and interview Kabazo at Wilkinson’s, the second to a scene of crime unit to re-examine the Nissen hut the people smugglers had used as a dormitory. He’d visited it himself after Dryden had told him it was being used, but now he had a child’s death on his hands. Any forensic link between the hut and the HGV could be crucial in tracking down the people responsible for Emmy Kabazo’s death.

Dryden let Newman watch the flamingoes in silence for a few minutes, but he figured he was now owed some information. ‘The dirty pictures. Is it the same pillbox in which the pictures of Alice Sutton were taken. And if it is, where’s her father?’

Newman sighed, tearing his eyes away from the pink
splodges of the birds. ‘It’s the same box. I can tell you that detectives from the East Midlands force will be reinterviewing our friend the pornstar stud tomorrow morning. He’s already facing a holding charge relating to the possession of pornographic material. So far he’s not talking. The fact that a corpse has been found on the film set may loosen his tongue – but I wouldn’t bet on it.’

‘Name yet for the stud?’

Newman slipped out a notebook from his windcheater. ‘Selby. Peter. Aged twenty-six. No further charges as yet, although there are developments. I can’t be more specific. You want the address?’

Dryden was forced to produce a notebook.

‘Caddus Street, Rushden. Worked for a haulage company in the town: A. Ladd & Sons.’

Dryden produced a squiggle and snapped the notebook shut. Facts always made him nervous. ‘Thanks. So you think what…?’

Newman was listening, not to Dryden, but the rhythmic crack of the great wings and the plaintive cawing. The warden saw them too and stood in the grain boat to pebble the motionless water with more feed. They watched in silence as the cloud grew into a flock of forty swans. By the time they’d landed in a riot of flailing legs, feet, and wings, another flock had crept up behind them from the east, swinging suddenly overhead and obliterating the sun.

Dryden looked at Newman’s face. Joy had rubbed twenty years off it. He looked like a kid in the front row at
The Jungle Book.
The detective produced a camera with a telephoto lens and Dryden heard the automatic shutter whir.

‘What do you know?’ said Newman at last.

‘Well – I know Maggie Beck swapped the body of her own child for that of a US serviceman’s in the 1976 air crash.’

‘I can read the paper too,’ said Newman.

‘Should it be that easy?’

Newman shrugged: ‘It’s a thirty-year-old case. I need a statement off Koskinski for the record. We’ll accept written affidavits from the grandparents. Then we can authorize the change of passports. There should be no problems. Just red tape. But he shouldn’t travel until it’s been completed.’

Dryden nodded, watching the water crease with an early morning breeze. ‘And the pillbox killing? You found fingerprints at the scene,’ said Dryden.

‘Yup.’ Newman slipped the binoculars into their case. The entire flock had landed now. A jostling snow-white field of raised wings and necks on a purple sea. He sighed. ‘Beautiful,’ he said, pausing briefly before adding: ‘Bob Sutton. Don’t tell his wife. In fact don’t tell anyone until
The Crow
comes out on Friday. OK?’

It was Dryden’s turn not to listen, he was thinking too fast. So Alice Sutton’s father had gone looking for her and not come back. Now the body of Johnnie Roe had been found in the pillbox where the pornographic pictures had been taken. According to Alice, her father had been to the Ritz and was probably aware of Johnnie Roe’s role in running a depot for the people smugglers.

‘Jesus! Did Sutton kill Roe? If he did, he could run far enough we’d never find him.’

Newman shrugged. ‘It’s getting pretty crowded in this pillbox. Alice Sutton and the stud. Then Johnnie. Now Sutton looking for his daughter. If it had a turnstile they could have sold tickets.’

Newman pocketed the binoculars: ‘When you write the Bob Sutton story I’d like you to add an appeal for information. There’s no body yet – we can’t presume he’s dead. We can’t presume he killed Roe. Anything anyone knows
about him, and his recent movements. And that goes for Johnnie Roe too. He’s been a loner for ten years. Doesn’t mean his life was empty. Any information dealt with sympathetically – you know the form.’

A third flock of swans joined the mêlée around the grain boat.

‘Two things,’ said Dryden, following Newman down the vertical wooden ladder to the reed bed below. ‘Someone’s following me. Bloke on a motorbike. Red leathers, black bike. He attacked Humph’s cab, vandalized it, left a copy of the story I wrote about Black Bank. Not very subtle, really.’

‘Your mate all right?’

‘He wasn’t in the cab.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Newman. ‘I thought he was welded to the Capri – you know, like a luggage rack.’

Dryden ignored the insult. ‘Anyway, he was back last night. The biker. He tried to scupper my boat at Barham’s Dock. She’ll take a week to pump out and everything inside is a write-off.’

They’d reached the cars parked at the National Trust centre. Humph was in the Capri and immersed in his tapes. Newman got in the Citroën and wound down the window. ‘And you’re telling me for why? You’ve reported it in the normal way?’

‘Sure. Just insurance. A patrol car might make the occasional visit to Barham’s Dock – it might help.’

Newman snorted.

‘One other thing,’ said Dryden. ‘Someone stole a tape recorder from the room in which Maggie Beck died at The Tower, the room she shared with Laura. I’ve asked the staff, and it may turn up. If it doesn’t turn up in the next twenty-four hours I’d appreciate a visit from a uniform. It might do the trick.’

‘Anything else?’

Dryden’s mobile rang, so he let Newman drive off. It was Gillies & Wright, solicitors. ‘Mr Dryden? Just a courtesy call. The man who claimed to be Lyndon Koskinski’s father – the name does not match that left by Maggie Beck, I’m afraid. The £5,000 has been withheld. And I’ve informed the police. Clearly it was an attempt at fraud – although he did seem to have known Mrs Beck when they were teenagers.’

‘Thanks. I see.’ Dryden felt a wave of disappointment that Maggie’s last wishes had again been thwarted. ‘By the way – can you tell me how Maggie’s will dealt with Lyndon?’

‘Yes. Yes I can – it’s not usual, of course, but as you know Mrs Beck was very keen that all aspects of her estate should be above board and open to public scrutiny. And the will has now been read. The estate is left entirely to Mr Koskinski, as the eldest child. She stated quite clearly, however, that it was his duty to provide for his half-sister.’

Dryden rang off. He wondered how Estelle would take the news. She’d gone from only daughter and sole heiress to younger sister and dependant in a few days. Did she hate Black Bank so much she’d be happy to lose it?

29

The only things moving on the Tudor Hall Estate were the net curtains. The object of this twitching interest was obvious: Humph’s cab was lowering the tone of the neighbourhood. The legoland houses brooded in their suburban desert trying to rise above the image of the rusted Capri. Inside the cab Dryden slumped in the passenger seat and let the tune from ‘Little Boxes’ play in his head. It helped block out the sound of a Greek street party on Humph’s tape, for Nicos was celebrating and everyone in the village was invited. Even, apparently, Humph. Dryden hoped they’d ordered extra portions.

Dryden eyed the front door of No. 36, the home, according to the telephone book, of Robert L. Sutton, avenging father of Alice. A Barratt-style semi, it was adorned with fake carriage lamps and a couple of equally dubious Doric columns. Dryden tried to look like an insurance salesman as he rang the bell and stood smartly to attention. After fifteen seconds of that he peeked through the nets. Inside was a leather three-piece suite and a panoramic TV screen more than adequate for a short-sighted audience at a drive-in movie.

He tried to remember what Bob Sutton had looked like when he’d come into
The Crow
’s offices to report his daughter missing. Squat, muscle-bound, and industrial, the human cannonball. His house didn’t suit him, but perhaps it had been chosen to suit someone else. Sure enough the someone else opened the door. It was 10.20 in the morning but she
was dressed to kill: tall, dark and shaped like a model: and it wasn’t a Hornby Dublo.

Elizabeth Jane Sutton put one high-heeled shoe ahead of the other and let her knees kiss in a classic photo-call pose.

‘Sorry. Can I help?’

Her daughter Alice appeared behind her. She was a model too: a model teenager. She was wearing what Dryden guessed might pass for nightwear in teenage-daughter-land.

‘Oh, God,’ said Alice, recognizing Dryden from her visit to
The Crow
, and fled.

‘It’s Bob, isn’t it?’ said the mother. The make-up drooped and she looked her age instead of her daughter’s.

‘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?’