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The editor, ever vigilant on behalf of his heritage, had spotted the fault within a week. Thereafter Septimus Henry Kew would pick up the receiver, every Friday, and check the dialling tone as he opened up the office. Dryden had suggested mice were gnawing through the cable. Henry sent Garry out for a trap, and called an electrician. ‘The readers,’ said Henry, recalling an aphorism of his father’s, ‘must be heard.’

When the black phone rang, it was every man for himself.

It rang.

Garry, confidence buoyed up by his normal Friday lunch-time diet of four pints of India Pale Ale, picked up his own phone immediately and dialled an imaginary outside number, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes as if steeling himself for a particularly difficult interview. Charlie Bracken, the news editor, flinched. Charlie had got the job on the basis of Henry’s bizarre concept of inverse qualification. Being the news editor demanded an ability to make hard decisions under pressure: it took Charlie twenty minutes each morning to decide which side of the bed to get out of. But when the black phone rang he knew exactly what to do. He had his coat on in seconds and was heading for the stairs. ‘Ciggies,’ he said, patting a pocket.

Now that this week’s edition of The Crow had gone, ‘ciggies’ was code for the Fenman bar, which stood opposite The Crow’s offices and offered customer-friendly opening hours. They wouldn’t be seeing Charlie again that day.

The phone rang again. Dryden failed to move, befuddled by the effects of a liquid lunch of his own at the Cutter and Etty’s frank offer of an afternoon of sex on water. He had also been trying to work out why he was so unsettled by the news that the people smugglers used Black Bank Fen. Just when he was trying to put Maggie Beck out of his mind, the scene of the 1976 air crash seemed to be haunting him.

The phone rang again. If it rang four times Henry would be out of his office. Dryden, who liked nothing but a quiet life, walked over and picked up the receiver, leaving a slight imprint of sweat on the cool black Bakelite. Despite having spent more than a decade as a reporter, Dryden retained a deep-seated fear of meeting any member of that mythical but terrifying group: the readers. He had long since realized that advancement in his profession relied on the simple truth that journalists wrote newspapers for other journalists to read. The readers? Who cared what they thought? Who cared, that was, until they turned up on your doorstep demanding to talk to a reporter.

‘Hi. Newsroom. Philip Dryden speaking.’ He always hit a confident tone. That way he had plenty of room for what was, inevitably, an occasion for abject apology.

‘Hello now. I didnae think this thing would actually work,’ said a voice dipped daily in nicotine. ‘The name’s Sutton. Bob. It’s no’ really a complaint about yon paper. It’s the polis I’m after complaining about.’

‘I’ll be right down,’ said Dryden, who loved little more than landing a well-judged boot upon the idle rump of the local constabulary. He clattered down the newsroom steps with enthusiasm. Bob Sutton turned out to be the human incarnation of the Tate & Lyle sugar man: a cube of muscle with arms and legs hung from the corners of a barrel chest. Each fist resembled a solid two-pound bag of sugar. He wore a cheap security man’s jacket in black. He was in his forties, with sandy thinning hair and a dollop of an accent which Dryden guessed originated somewhere on the Clyde; somewhere with a big crane. He would have looked menacing if he hadn’t clearly spent most of the last twenty-four hours crying. He rubbed butcher’s fingers into reddened eye sockets.

‘It’s my dau’ta. Alice. She’s gone missing. I’ve had the polis round. Bloody useless, man. They seem tae think she’s run off. It’s crazy.’ He spread his hands out on the counter as if they were proof of his determination to find his daughter. ‘She’d not go with a fella like that. You know? She’s a good girl,’ he added, taking a cigarette from behind his ear and gripping it between his teeth.

Dryden reflected that it was every father’s lament, that his own daughter could not fail but be a grown-up extrapolation of an innocent five-year-old. But he took a note. Alice, aged twenty-one, had last been seen leaving her job as a bar maid at the Pine Tree pub, three miles west of Ely, five days ago shortly after closing time. The landlord had told her father, and later the police, that she had spent most of the evening chatting with a young man in a white T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of wrap-around reflective sunglasses which were held in his short blond hair. The landlord had described the man as late twenties, with an athletic build and a confident manner. The landlord’s wife, who had seen him briefly on popping down during the evening to put out sandwiches and hot sausage rolls for the quiz teams, said he looked like a male model. She’d seen him walk over to the bar from a one-armed bandit by the door and told the police that his movements were ‘silky’.

Later, said the landlord, Alice had asked to go early, explaining that she had a date. He’d watched her get into a car beside the Pine Tree. It was silver, he said, a sports car, with an expensive badge on the bonnet. He was sorry, he told Bob Sutton, but he was bad at spotting cars. She’d been seen sitting in the front with the bloke: kissing, he said, trying to find euphemisms for what he’d seen.

‘He chatted her up,’ said Bob Sutton. ‘No way she’d just be going after someone. It was him that made the first move – no question.’ He produced a box of matches and moved to light the cigarette. Dryden pointed timidly at the ‘No Smoking’ sign that Jean had knitted herself.

Sutton glowered.

‘Done it before?’ asked Dryden, judging the moment badly.

‘Never,’ said Sutton, thumping a fist on the counter, which jumped on the rebound. ‘Can you do anything?’

Dryden shrugged. Missing teenagers were two a penny, the small change in the currency of the disappeared. He could do something for the Express, but that didn’t publish for four days. And a freelance paragraph on a missing adolescent would sell nowhere on Fleet Street. Alice was probably having the time of her life with her dream man; either that or he’d dumped her and she was making her way home, pausing only to delay the inevitable humiliation.

Sutton searched his jacket pockets and flipped a passport-sized snapshot over the counter.

Dryden felt the hairs rise on his neck. He knew immediately, but took a long second look. The last time he’d seen those eyes they’d been glazed and staring out of one of Inspector Newman’s X-rated snaps. It was the girl in the pillbox, but this version was quite different: college scarf, excited smile, and the sheepish grin that said ‘Daddy’s Girl’.

He calculated rapidly and decided Inspector Newman needed to hear first. ‘I can try to find her, Mr Sutton. Perhaps use the pic? Would that be OK?’

‘Sure, laddie. You do that. Anything comes up, ring me.’

The card said: Bob Sutton Security, The Smeeth, Wisbech. Dryden considered, not for the first time, the ability of the Fens to add a sense of mystery to English place names.

Sutton paused in the doorway letting the sunlight flood in behind him. ‘Meanwhile, I’m lookin’ too.’

Dryden wondered what Bob Sutton would do if he knew that the place to start looking for innocent Alice was under the counter at the local backstreet video shop.