‘The police will find him,’ said Dryden.
‘That’s what we’re afraid of,’ she said, pushing her chair away.
17
Humph pulled into the Ritz lay-by and stopped the Capri in a cloud of red dust. The cab reeked of overheated plastic. Humph, disturbed in the middle of his afternoon nap to make the run, moodily flicked through his language tapes. ‘I need my sleep,’ he said. Dryden could see the logic in this in that it was one of the few times Humph could be sure he wasn’t putting on weight.
‘Well take a nap now. Be my guest. I’m paying.’ Dryden, irritated, gazed pointedly out of the passenger-side window at a mechanical irrigator standing in a field of burnt kale.
Sometimes he wanted to tell Humph how he felt. How the cabbie’s immobile insolence pissed him off, like almost nothing else pissed him off. He turned to face him but Humph had the earphones on for his tapes – not those little plug ones that tuck inside the ear, but the big ones, like rubber dustbin lids.
Dryden thumped both palms as hard as he could on the dashboard but Humph didn’t move. So he braced himself for the shriek of rust and pushed the door open with his foot.
He’d wanted to visit the Ritz ever since Etterley told him about the ‘people smugglers’ using the lay-by as a drop-off point. Now Alice Sutton had given him another good reason to get a cup of tea and a carbon monoxide sandwich. If Bob Sutton had been checking lorries passing through the Fens he’d have got to the Ritz eventually. Perhaps it was here he’d been offered some dirty pictures which featured his daughter.
But the Ritz was closed. The shutters were down and a note stuck on it in childish capital letters three inches high said: SHUT ’TIL FURTHER NOTICE.
Dryden noted both the apostrophe and the motorbike which had pulled up on the opposite side of the road. It was black, and the rider wore oxblood-red leathers. He thought about walking over to confront his uninvited shadow but an HGV rolled into the lay-by and obscured the view. The driver got out and walked over to read the note. It took him quite a long time.
‘Bastard,’ he said, kicking one of the wheels of the kiosk with a boot the size of a horse trough.
It rocked for a few minutes, red dust slurping off the roof.
‘Closed, then?’ said Dryden.
The driver wiped a hand across the stubble on his chin. ‘Fucking thirsty too.’
‘Odd.’
The driver read the note again. Up close. ‘Never closes, Johnnie, not while it’s light. Never.’
Dryden tried to modify his personality to suit that of his prospective interviewee: a professional trick made considerably more difficult by the need to look shifty, man-of-the-world, physically tough and permanently stupid. The fact that the lorry driver achieved all of this without trying, and no doubt on a daily basis, made Dryden’s task only more challenging.
‘Johnnie runs quite a business,’ he said, offering the lorry driver a jelly bean.
Nothing. Lights out. The driver looked at the sweets as if Dryden were peddling ecstasy tablets to nuns.
‘Worth a fortune.’ Dryden stepped closer. ‘And what about the immigrants, eh? People smuggling must pay,’ he added, edging closer and catching a whiff of industrial-strength BO. ‘Bloke told me those poor bastards pay six hundred quid a time. He runs the lorries through,’ he said, tilting his head towards the empty T-Bar. ‘Gets ’em jobs. Amazing, eh? Wonder what his cut is?’
The driver looked both ways, and used his T-shirt to wipe sweat from his chin. ‘Should drown the fuckers.’
Dryden hesitated before executing his next tactic, sensing at some subliminal level that he might have already stepped outside the strict etiquette laid down by the Road Hauliers Association. ‘Then there’s the dirty pix, of course. Hmm? You had any of them, have you? Apparently they get stowed away with the immigrants. Sort of reverse trade. I’d be interested. You know, to get a cut too.’
Dryden leered hugely and tried a wink, which in the circumstances was a bonus. It meant he got to see the fist which hit him with just the one eye. He heard rather than felt the thud of the bunched knuckles pushing his eye back into its socket. The pain came a second later. A red-hot electric pulse which collapsed his spine and knees with frightening efficiency.
Then the guy picked him up by the shirt and pushed him hard up against the metallic side of the Ritz. Dryden’s vision blurred. His assailant was so close he could smell the scraps of food between his teeth.
‘Who told you that?’ he said, surprisingly quietly. Over his shoulder Dryden could see Humph in the Capri, eyes closed, headphones still on. The motorbike had moved on. Cars swept past like they always do, innocent of any crime.
‘Just heard it,’ he said, and the guy laughed in a friendly way which made Dryden’s heart freeze. Then he took Dryden’s arm, twisted it round his back and began to apply his weight. The elbow joint began to give with a series of plastic pops. Dryden screamed but the passing cars drowned him out.
The bloke was whispering in his ear now. ‘Let’s keep that to ourselves, yeah?’
‘OK,’ said Dryden, pathetically eager to comply. The vice-like grip was released, so he sank to his knees and threw up. He kept his eyes down, viewing the puke, until he heard the lorry rumble back out on to the A14. He knelt there for some time while he waited for his breathing to return to normal, and for his little fingers to stop vibrating like windscreen wipers.
Out of the hot dust of the road Inspector Andy ‘Last Case’ Newman’s battered Citroën appeared. He got out, walked over and rattled the roller-shuttered front of the Ritz before turning to Dryden. He gently opened the fast-closing left eye, looking for broken blood vessels: ‘That’s gonna be a corker. Care to tell me who did it?’
‘A driver. I suggested he was after buying porn. He took exception.’
‘We can put him down as a “No”, I think, don’t you?’ said Newman.
Dryden wanted to laugh but still felt too sick. ‘Bob Sutton. Little Alice’s father, picked up something about the pornography racket in a lay-by, according to his wife. But I guess you know that already.’
Newman nodded, thumping the roll-up shutter one last time. He peered in through a gap between the door and its metal frame. A green parrot lay silent in an ugly little bundle.
‘Parrot’s a stiff,’ he said. ‘Shame, he could have told us where the proprietor’s gone.’
There was a whiff of putrid beefburger on the air so they moved up-wind. Newman took out his notebook and flipped over the pages. ‘Ex-wife of the T-Bar owner came in yesterday. Sub-station at Shippea Hill. She hadn’t seen him for a month – six weeks.’
‘Why’d she wait so long?’
Newman shrugged and watched with rapt attention a swift dipping over a field of burnt celery. Then he remembered that he knew the answer: ‘They were separated. Ten years. But he paid her some cash, every month. He missed the date, she smelt a rat and went looking for him.’
‘Smelt a rat,’ said Dryden, and they moved even further up-wind. ‘It’s like the Bermuda triangle around here. Alice Sutton goes missing, then Bob Sutton goes missing, now this guy.’
Newman stretched his arms above his head, revealing two large splodges of sweat. ‘Doesn’t bother me. People lose themselves. It isn’t a crime. Alice Sutton is back. I’d like to find her dad but my guess is he’s still on her trail, and it led to London. When it goes cold he’ll be back.’
‘And this guy?’ said Dryden, circling the Ritz, massaging his shoulder.