The Fire Baby (23 page)

‘Said he was near. Close to finding her. Her,’ she flicked her chin upwards. ‘And all the time she was in some fucking bedsit in Camden Town.’ She regretted swearing but felt better for it. ‘Some fucking bedsit,’ she said again, but louder, prompting a nervous movement from the top of the stairs.

‘She’s OK?’ said Dryden.

‘She can’t remember. Not the pictures. So she ran away, and I don’t blame her. What did anyone expect her to do – the police said she’d almost certainly been given that drug – the date-rape thing. She can’t believe it’s her in the pictures either.’

‘And he went out again when?’

‘Next night. The Saturday. He wasn’t scared. I know when he’s scared, it wasn’t like he wasn’t in control of whatever it was…’

‘But he didn’t come back…’

She lit a fresh cigarette with the onyx boulder. ‘You could see his office… the police did,’ she said, standing. It was the spare room next to Alice’s. There was a PC, a card file box, and a telephone and fax. He clearly liked to bring his work home. Dryden flicked through the card file. Each one was for a separate job – the client’s details poorly spelt out in childish capital letters.

‘Bob Sutton Security,’ she said, and at last began to cry. ‘The job was the best he could get after the army. He didn’t have much of an education – no certificates. Nothing. It’s tough when you’re his age.’ Alice came in and wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck.

‘In the blue folder,’ she said, leading Alice away.

And they were. The same stud. Different girls, but all in the pillbox. But they weren’t pristine, like Alice’s shots, they were dog-eared, they’d been through many grubby hands.

And police statements, photocopied transcripts of taped interviews. Dryden guessed Sutton’s police contacts had come in useful again. He’d used his contacts in the lorry trade to pick up the trail of the people smugglers who’d traded in the pornography at the same time as illegal immigrants. He’d almost certainly identified the Ritz as a dropping-off point. Then he’d made contact with the police about the man they’d arrested in connection with the pictures of Alice – which in turn had led to other interviews, other raids. In the end he’d had enough information to act. He’d gone out and found something that Saturday night. Was it the pillbox? Had he confronted Johnnie Roe and got a confession? Or had he dragged Johnnie there himself? Whose blood had been on his handkerchief? According to his wife he’d then returned the next night – the Sunday. Did he return to kill Johnnie?

Dryden picked up the blue folder and chose a page at random.

DS John Tucker: I’d like you to describe the picture if you would, Mr Shah. It’s one of those recovered from under your bed at the house in Tomkins St, Nuneaton, on the day of your arrest.

Panjit Shah: There’s a girl, isn’t there?

DS Tucker: Yes. There is, Mr Shah. What age would you say she was, Mr Shah? You have a sister I believe… aged 12. Would you say the girl in these pictures is older or younger than your sister, Mr Shah?’

Mr G. Evans (
suspect’s solicitor
): Is this really necessary, detective sergeant? We can all see the pictures.

DS Tucker: It would be helpful to me, Mr Evans. I think your client wishes to be helpful, does he not? His passport is a forgery and he’s no right being in the country. If he doesn’t answer the questions he’ll be back on a boat and retracing his journey… He understands that, does he?

Mr Shah: She is the same age, yes?

DS Tucker: Yes. She is – or thereabouts. Does the girl look happy, Mr Shah? Do you think so? Do you think she wanted to have sex with this man, Mr Shah?…

Dryden replaced the pictures in the folder with the statements and washed his hands before going downstairs. The two women were standing at the door, still locked in an embrace: ‘You showed the police the documents?’

‘Yes. Yes,’ said Elizabeth Sutton. ‘They took some. They seemed to be more worried about where Bob had got the stuff,’ she laughed. ‘Bob could teach them a thing or two.’

‘When he went out the second time, Mrs Sutton, what did he take?’

She shrugged. ‘Torch, I think. That’s usually in the car but he changed the batteries. It’s one of the torches they give the Red Caps, it’s got a heavy rubber covering so it can double up as a blackjack… And his nookie kit.’

‘What?’

Alice and her mother laughed. ‘His nookie kit,’ said Alice. ‘He did a lot of private detective work – mainly husbands cheating on their wives. He had to spend a lot of time sitting in the car watching, with his cameras. So he had a nookie kit – chocolate bars, sandwiches, crisps, cake… a bit of a feast.’

Dryden was standing outside now in the sunshine. The temperature was rising. ‘Anything to drink?’

‘He always took a flask of tea. But that night he took water too. Which was odd – he doesn’t even like it in his whisky. Two big bottles, Evian.’

30

Humph pointed the cab south across the Great West Fen. Dryden peered out through a windscreen made greasy with the bodies of eviscerated insects which had begun to multiply alarmingly in the continuing heat. The drought was frying the landscape now, anything left alive in the fields was sizzling on the dry, baked earth. At one crossroads an orderly line of OAPs stood dutifully waiting for the social services to take them off to the civic baths in Ely. The drought had resulted in mains supplies to several villages being cut off indefinitely.

‘Great at queues,’ said Dryden. ‘Old people.’

Humph grunted. ‘Why bother to wash?’

Why indeed?
thought Dryden, lowering the window still further. The smell would have embarrassed a skunk.

A text message had been waiting on Dryden’s mobile when he got back in the cab outside Bob Sutton’s home. He’d rung Garry straight back.
The Crow
’s junior reporter had been monitoring emergency calls and had picked up a violent incident at the City Mortuary, outside Cambridge, where Emmy Kabazo’s body was waiting for an official ID.

They pulled off the main road at a sign which said MORTUARY with brutal simplicity. The building itself was a long, brick two-storey block in 1930s fascist style. It could have been an abattoir, and in an odd way it was. Two ambulances stood silently at a ‘goods in’ entrance. The place reeked of blood, and violence, thought Dryden, like a bull ring.

Jimmy Kabazo was standing outside the plate-glass
entrance foyer with a crowbar in his hands. Even from fifty yards Dryden could see that sweat bathed his blue T-shirt. As Humph pulled the Capri up beside a police car Jimmy ran at the plate-glass doors of the main entrance and delivered a shattering blow with the iron bar. The reinforced glass splintered in a complex pattern, like expanding crystals.

Dryden got out of the cab, but carefully left the door open so that he could retreat. He understood Kabazo’s rage. If he’d read the national newspapers or listened to the local radio he’d know about the body found in the van at the container park at the coast. He’d know it was the body of the only sixteen-year-old in the human consignment abandoned by the people smugglers. In other words, he knew, almost certainly, that it was his son.

Kabazo waited for him as Dryden walked the fifty yards between them. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sure they’ll let you see him…’ said Dryden.

Tears bathed Jimmy’s face. ‘They said I had to wait – talk to the policeman.’ The water was pouring out of Kabazo’s eyes like a river over a weir. Dryden knew that anger and despair were a high-octane human emotional cocktail, so he kept a safe distance from the crowbar.

‘I was there when they found him,’ he said.

Kabazo dropped the crowbar, and in the silence they listened to it roll away. Dryden noticed that it left a thin trail of arterial-red blood in its wake.

‘It is him?’ said Kabazo.

‘I think so,’ said Dryden honestly. ‘But you must see him. You will.’

Then they heard a car skid off the main road and head towards them across the tarmac. At the wheel was DS Peter Crabbe, Newman’s sidekick, and pushy enough to be after his job once retirement had claimed a willing victim. Crabbe
was insensitive, brusque, and lacked people skills to the same degree that deserts lack water.

Jimmy ignored him. ‘You were there?’

Dryden nodded and held out his arms. ‘We should talk. Inside?’

‘I must see him,’ said Jimmy simply, seeing DS Crabbe advancing, accompanied by the two PCs from the squad car. Some of the anger had washed out of him, and his shoulders sagged. Crabbe left the PCs to take Kabazo into custody and led the way towards the mortuary doors. He pushed a button to one side which opened up an intercom to the desk inside. ‘OK. Open up now, please – the situation is under control. DS Peter Crabbe.’ He held up his warrant card to the glass.

An orderly edged forward to read it before the doors slid electronically open, spilling shattered glass as they did so. One of the PCs from the squad car slipped handcuffs on Jimmy as they waited in the reception area. He didn’t resist, his eyes set on the interior doors to the mortuary. One of the two medical orderlies behind the foyer counter held a bandage to his head, from which a thin trickle of blood had run down to his collar.

‘I’ve radioed for medical,’ said Crabbe, turning to Kabazo. ‘While we’re waiting, Mr Kabazo – I presume?’

Dryden nodded. ‘Mr Kabazo wished to identify the body of his son,’ he said.

Crabbe turned to him. ‘Mr Kabazo. Are you responsible for this?’ He gestured towards the orderly with the head wound.

‘They wouldn’t let me see him,’ said Kabazo, his eyes still on the mortuary doors.

‘We called at Wilkinson’s, Mr Kabazo, to invite you to a formal identification. They said you were sick.’

Great stuff
, thought Dryden.
His son is dead and you’re lecturing him about taking a sickie
. But he said: ‘Perhaps. While we are waiting, detective sergeant?’

Crabbe decided that he might as well press ahead with the ID while he had Kabazo in the building.

One of the mortuary assistants hit some security buttons on the desktop and the interior set of doors swished open. Beyond that Crabbe led them through two sets of industrial doors, the kind that have plastic sheeting attached to stop draughts. The floors were concrete and streaked with stains which turned Dryden’s stomach. There was a smell in the air, a scent really, which Dryden could not identify. It was sweet, and medicinal, and it brought a lump to his throat. They stopped in front of a door marked: ‘Autopsy Unit’. They were there too quickly. Dryden didn’t know why he was there at all. Inside, the room was lit by sunshine from skylights, while metal boxes, like those in left luggage, were in serried ranks on either wall. A row of surgical tables stood in the centre. There was a body on one and the sunshine fell on the zip-up hospital-green bag in which it was wrapped.

A woman in a white body-suit appeared out of the blaze of light and stood by the table with her hand on the zip. Crabbe took Kabazo’s arm, marched him forward to the table and nodded briskly, almost cheerfully, and the bag was unzipped to the chest of the child. Dryden had waited too long. He felt rather than heard the breath leaving Kabazo’s body. He watched as Kabazo bent stiffly to kiss the child on the forehead. When he stood, Dryden noticed Emmy’s face was splashed with tears, as if turned up to a summer shower. Kabazo sank to his knees by the table and they all stepped back, even Crabbe feeling it was time to release his custodial hold.

Dryden fled the room, and so he only heard the scream of despair. He waited outside in the car park in the long
silence that followed, and thought about Johnnie Roe, staked out in the pillbox. What did his torturer want to know? Did Jimmy Kabazo track him down when his son failed to turn up with the people smugglers?

They put Kabazo in the back of the squad car and waited for Crabbe to appear. He came out clutching some paperwork and a plastic zip-up bag. Dryden guessed it was the boy’s clothes and other belongings retrieved from the HGV container. He could see a green T-shirt and a pair of trainers and what looked like a notebook. Kabazo took it and as they drove him off he bowed his head and hugged it to his chest, as if it were the son he had lost.

31

The US air base at Mildenhall lay somewhere near the heart of the mystery of Black Bank. Humph edged the cab forward in the queue at the security gate, behind a Cadillac with two rear exhaust pipes like the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. The air-base wire ran into the distance like the edge of a giant chicken run. A Doomsday-grey B-52 was coming in to the main runway leaving a streak of lead half a mile wide hanging like a dirty washing line in a ceramic blue sky. His request for an interview with Captain Freeman White had got a prompt response from August Sondheim by text message: INTERVIEW NOON. Dryden wondered what was in it for August.

‘No wisecracks,’ said Dryden, as they edged towards the heavily armed military guards.

‘Where are we?’ said Humph, looking around him with indignation.

‘It’s not a hijack. You drove here. Where do you think we are? Vladivostok?’

In truth Dryden shared his disorientation. USAF Mildenhall was a world of its own. The Stars & Stripes hung from a flagpole with no enthusiasm. They could have been on the Great Plains. The sentry probably thought he was. He ambled up to Humph’s cab dragging a size-10 arse behind him in combat fatigues. Then he made the mistake of tapping on Humph’s window, a little military two-tap.

The cabbie wound it down. ‘Wing Commander?’ he said, beaming.

Dryden leant across with his wallet open to show a press pass. ‘Excuse me. Major Sondheim is expecting us.’

The guard wore 100 per cent reflective dark sunglasses which meant Dryden could only guess how vacant his eyes actually were.

The barrier went up and the sentry barked. ‘Follow the red lines, sir. To the red car park. Major Sondheim will meet you there, sir.’