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.