Nomads

by Dave Hutchinson

  “It was in the family for over a hundred years,” he said.

  That was all I needed: an already-annoyed Dave Beck returning to his family’s dispossessed property. The headlights swept across a series of neat, new-looking buildings. As I pulled up in front of what seemed to be the main building the car set off an infra-red sensor and was suddenly pinned in a huge pool of blue-white light.

  The door of the house opened as we were getting out of the car and putting on our caps. A tall young man wearing a dressing-gown over jeans and a teeshirt stepped out.

  “What do you want?” he shouted.

  It was hardly the worst reception I’d had since I joined the police service, but it was late and I was tired and my shoulder hurt and it was an effort to remain equable. “Mr Hallam?” I said.

  He came over to the car. “What do you want? What are you doing here?”

  I put on my best smile. “Are you Mr Hallam?”

  “Of course I am.” He was about twenty-five, tall and slim and good-looking, with tousled blond hair. Now he was close enough, I could smell alcohol on his breath.

  “I’m Sergeant Grant. This is Sergeant Beck. You reported a prowler.”

  He stared at me. “No I didn’t.”

  I managed to internalise a huge, world-weary sigh. It wasn’t unusual for us to get prank calls. Most of the time it was kids, sometimes it was someone with a grudge against someone else, but you had to answer them all, just in case.

  I said, “I’m afraid we received a call an hour or so ago reporting an intruder on your property, Mr Hallam.”

  His expression hardened. “Well, that wasn’t –”

  “It was me,” called a voice from the direction of the house. “I called them.”

  We all looked over to the front door, where a figure was standing. Hallam said, “Oh, bloody hell, Leonie.”

  Dave and I exchanged glances. For the merest fraction of a moment, we had both thought we could chalk this up to a prank call and go home.

  “You take the statement,” Dave said wearily, reaching into the car for one of the big torches. “I’ll check the outbuildings.”

  “Right,” I said. I turned to Hallam, who was shuffling uncomfortably from foot to foot, as if he needed to go to the lavatory. I looked down and saw that he was barefoot. It was quite a chilly night; the flagstones in front of the house must have been freezing. I said, “It’s a bit nippy out, sir. Shall we go inside...?”

  “I’ll check the outbuildings,” Dave said again.

  “Yes, okay, Dave.” I turned back to Hallam. “I’m sure it’ll be the work of a couple of moments to sort this out, Mr Hallam, but shall we do it indoors before we all catch our deaths?”

  He looked at me, at Dave, at me again, and I saw a look of anger cross his face so quickly that I almost thought I’d imagined it. Then he nodded and said, “Yes, this way.”

  The figure at the front door had gone by the time we reached it, and we stepped inside into a long, wide, flagstoned hallway with a ribbon of grey carpet running up the middle. About halfway along was a huge pair of glass doors, each with an oak tree etched on it. There were half a dozen white-oak doors along the white walls; one was half open and I peeked in as I went past and saw a large downstairs loo.

  The hall ended in four wide, deep steps leading up to a space that seemed to have been fitted out like a consultant’s waiting room with luxurious-looking black leather sofas arranged around a big green-marble-topped coffee table. In one wall a pair of french windows looked out onto darkness. To left and right, short corridors led off to other rooms.

  “This is just a misunderstanding,” Hallam said. “My wife’s been a bit…”

  “A bit what, sir?”

  “Yes, Rob,” said a voice I recognised from outside. “A bit what?”

  I turned and saw a gorgeous young woman with the kind of strawberry-blonde ringlets that the pre-Raphaelites used to dream of. She was wearing jeans, an Oasis sweatshirt with mysterious multicoloured stains on the front, and a pair of Garfield slippers, and she was holding an immense chunky glass that contained about an inch and a half of an amber fluid I presumed was whisky. Her face was flushed and she seemed a little wobbly on her feet.

  “Leonie,” Hallam said to her. “What have you done, dragging the police out here at this time of night?”

  She barely glanced at him. “Fuck off, Rob,” she said. To me she said, “I don’t know you, Constable.”

  “Sergeant Grant,” I said, barely restraining the urge to touch the brim of my cap. “And you are…?”

  “Yes.” She took a big drink. “Yes, I am.”

  “This is Leonie, my wife,” Hallam said. “We were…”

  I looked around the living room. There was no sign of a fight – no overturned furniture or smashed crockery – but the Hallams’ body language and general atmosphere in the room suggested that this was not, at the moment, a happy home.

  I took out my notebook and said, “Perhaps you could tell me what happened, Mrs Hallam?”

  She looked at me as if wondering where I’d come from all of a sudden. Then she seemed to remember. “Yes. I was working.”

  “Working…?”

  She took another big drink. “I often work late, Constable.” This time I didn’t bother correcting her. “I illustrate children’s books; I do a lot of my best work late at night.” And she tipped her head over to one side as if daring me to disagree. Beside me, I could almost hear Hallam becoming more and more annoyed.

  “What time was this?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Around two, I think. Maybe a little later. I heard something outside. I thought it was the wind rattling the outhouse doors at first.” She turned and walked over to one of the doors and opened it. Looking through, I saw a cosy little beige-walled room full of flat-pack shelving and a single bed. In the middle of the room was a big draughting table and a high stool, and beside them a sort of cubical drawer-unit on castors with pens and bottles of ink strewn across its top. The lighting was arranged so that it mimicked daylight streaming through the windows, which didn’t help the sense of unreality I was experiencing at the moment. There was a sheet of paper attached to the table, with a half-finished drawing of a tubby black cat talking to a jolly rosy-cheeked milkman. The milkman bore a disturbing resemblance to the local milkman, Alan Hall.

  “I heard a noise outside,” Mrs Hallam said again. “I got up and looked out of the window, but I couldn’t see anything, so I thought it was the outhouse doors.”

  “Rattling in the wind,” I said.

  “Rob keeps saying he’s going to fix them,” she said, as if her husband wasn’t in the same room with us. “But he never does.”

  “It’s not windy tonight,” I pointed out.

  “It’s always windy here,” she told me. “Comes off of the fucking steppes and doesn’t stop until it hits the Pennines. Would you like a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Not while I’m on duty.” I added, “And I’m driving the patrol car.”

  “Not from around here, are you,” she said.

  “Can we get back to the –”

  “London?” she said. “I can hear London in your voice.”

  “I’ve lived in a lot of different places.”

  “But you’ve been here long enough to pick up an edge of accent.” She beamed at me. “It’s my hobby. Accents.”

  I blinked at her. Maybe I should have let Dave handle this.

  Hallam sighed and said, “Leonie.”

  She barely glanced at him, but what glance there was told me everything I wanted to know about the state of the Hallams’ marriage.

  “I couldn’t see anything outside with the lights on,” she told me, cradling her glass in both hands. “So I turned them off.” She looked into the study and her brow furrowed. “Then all of a sudden the security light went on and he was just standing in the courtyard.”

  “And?”

  She shook her head, thinking. “He was just standing there, bli
nking. I think the light must have taken him completely by surprise because he was just... standing there.”

  “Can you remember what he looked like?” I asked. “How tall was he? Taller than me?”

  She looked at me. “Don’t patronise me, Sergeant. He was a little over six feet tall, quite well-built, with dark hair greying at the temples. He was wearing a light grey suit, a white shirt and a dark tie. He had dark shoes, probably black. He was about forty-five and fit-looking.” Her lips twitched in a faint smile. “I have a pretty good memory too.”

  Well, there was nothing wrong with that. “And what did you do when you saw him?”

  “I just stood there at the window. I don’t think he saw me; he must have been blinded by the light. After a few moments he turned and ran away.”

  “All right.” I took off my cap and scratched my head. The description didn’t ring any bells.

  “You’re going to think I’m mad,” she said.

  I already thought she was a little out of touch with solid ground, but the drink might have done that. “Why?”

  She took another sip of her whisky and seemed to be thinking about what she was going to say next. “I know him,” she said finally.

  Hallam looked at the ceiling in exasperation. “Good grief, Leonie,” he said.

  I could safely say that I had never had a night quite like this one. I said, “You know him, Mrs Hallam?”

  All of a sudden she seemed unsure of herself. “Well, not know, exactly. I recognised him.”

  “Well that’ll make our job a bit easier. Who was it?”

  She looked straight at me and said, “It was Cary Grant.”

  “You were in there a long time,” Dave said when I got back to the car.

  “Something rum about the whole thing.” Dave was sitting in the driver’s seat so I went around and got in the passenger side. “I think they’ve been having a row.”

  “You think she made the whole thing up to get us out here?”

  “Could be.” I did up my seatbelt and looked at the house. “Nobody’s hurt and there’s no sign of a fight. I got the impression she’s more likely to thump him. Did you find anything?”

  He shook his head. “I could spit, the things they’ve done to this place.”

  “What about the prowler?”

  Dave sighed. “Nah.”

  I looked out through the windscreen. The buildings of Dronfield Farm were beginning to come up out of the night as the sky lightened fractionally. Away in the distance I could just see the shapes of the hills against the sky.

  “I’m off in an hour,” Dave said, nodding at the dashboard clock.

  “Back to base,” I told him, settling back in my seat and suddenly feeling very very heavy. “And for Christ’s sake drive carefully. I’ve had enough excitement for one night.”

  Three

  By a combination of thrift and some small, unobtrusively lucrative investments, I had been able to afford to buy some land on the edge of the moors outside the village. It wasn’t much, just a couple of acres of overgrown grassland that had once been part of a much larger farm. Ronnie Talbot, the estate agent, had walked me around it, waist-deep in grass, one drizzly Saturday morning with the clouds seeming to boil across the sky just above our heads, extolling its virtues and its possibilities.

  Its virtues were a lovely view down into the valley on one side and what seemed like an infinite vista of moorland on the other, its relative inaccessibility with a single narrow winding track leading down to a barely-wider B-road that joined the Huddersfield road five miles outside the village, and the fact that it was very cheap because no one in their right mind would want to live here.

  Its possibilities... Well.

  “You have chosen to build your house in the worst place in fifty square kilometres,” said Mr Keoshgerian. “Congratulations.”

  Mr Keoshgerian always told me something like this, so I just shrugged and tried to appear harmless.

  “We are nowhere near connecting up the sewage and water services,” he told me. “And we will not be unless you pay us another three thousand pounds.”

  I looked down at him. “I beg your pardon? How much?”

  Mr Keoshgerian was an almost spherical little Armenian Cypriot who had come to West Yorkshire via a couple of decades in North London. His accent would have provided Leonie Hallam with hours of innocent study.

  “We have underestimated the amount of sewer-pipe we shall need to connect your house to the main sewer,” he said, fiddling with his pipe.

  I looked about me and said, “Well.”

  We were standing at the end of the narrow twisty track that led to what would one day be my home, God and Mister Keoshgerian willing. The immediate surroundings had changed since the day Ronnie Talbot first drove me up here in his tubercular little Simca.

  The day after putting down the deposit on the land, I had come back in John Weller’s Honda van and literally staked out the property, driving posts down at each corner and then stringing a couple of strands of wire between them, with smaller posts along the way to support them. It had taken me the whole of my day off and had been the best day’s work I had ever done.

  Now my land looked like a section of the Western Front dropped down onto the moors. My dream was a sea of churned mud and piles of brick and parked cement mixers, out of which a house was slowly rising.

  The walls were up, the roof was on. There were no windows yet, and the floors were still rough unfinished concrete, but I could walk from room to room – I could even go upstairs, if I was careful – and imagine what it was going to be like when Mr Keoshgerian and his sons finally left.

  It wasn’t a big house, just five rooms on the ground floor and four upstairs. I had plans for one single huge room in the loft, but that could wait.

  A strong gust of wind blew towards us across the moor. I could watch it coming, blowing the grass and heather, until it plucked Mr Keoshgerian’s pork-pie hat off and bowled it across the ground. I watched him waddling off to catch it, thinking of Leonie Hallam talking about the wind last night. All the way from the steppes, and it doesn’t stop until it hits the Pennines.

  “And the gas and electricity,” Mr Keoshgerian said, coming back to me with one hand clamped to the top of his head to stop his hat blowing off again. “Three thousand pounds. I have to hire a trenching machine.”

  “A what?”

  “A trenching machine. Like a baby JCB. It will dig the trench for the sewer pipe.”

  “That’s a lot of money for one trenching machine,” I told him.

  He gave a great shrug, a small, vivacious, olive-skinned man in his seventies dressed in Oxfam tweeds and a pair of green Wellingtons. “Mr Franks,” he said around his pipe. “My son Kevin has a house which he would be more than willing to sell to you.”

  I laughed. Mr Keoshgerian had eight sons, all named after characters in the Bible, except Kevin, the youngest. He had been trying to sell me Kevin’s house ever since we first met.

  “It’s a nice house,” I said. “Kevin could get more for it than you’re offering it to me for.”

  “Ah,” he waved a hand. “Kevin hates his father. All he wants to do is move to London and go to rave parties.”

  Kevin didn’t have to go to London for that, but I knew what he meant. I said, “We’ve already done a lot of work here, Mr Keoshgerian. It would be a shame to waste all that.”

  He bit down on the stem of his pipe and looked up at me. “I tell you what, Mr Franks.” He tapped me on the chest. “We finish this house here, then we sell it to some fool from Sheffield for twice what it’s worth and you buy my son Kevin’s house. How’s that?”

  “It’s an interesting plan,” I admitted, and it was true. I could make a tidy profit on this place and Kevin’s house was rather nice. It was just in the middle of the village, and I’d had enough of neighbours. There was another reason for my wanting to live here, but I didn’t think Mr Keoshgerian would believe me, even if I felt inclined to tell him what it
was.

  Mr Keoshgerian said, “Ah,” again and slapped my chest. “You policemen.”

  He always said that at some point, and I still had no idea what he meant by it. I looked around the building site. Four of Mr Keoshgerian’s sons were working on the house, and eight of his employees. They’d built my dream precisely to my requirements, in all weathers, and I was going to miss them when the house was finished.

  “This thing,” I said.

  “Trenching machine,” said Mr Keoshgerian.

  I was sure that wasn’t its real name, but that didn’t matter. “Try and negotiate the price down a little bit, Mr Keoshgerian. It sounds like something you should have considered when you tendered your estimate.”

  His entire face seemed to puff up around his pipe in indignation. “Are you accusing me of cheating you?” he demanded.

  “No I’m not,” I said. “But connection to the main services does seem rather a fundamental thing to have overlooked or underestimated, don’t you think?”

  He thought about it. He sucked on his pipe. He even took the pipe from between his lips momentarily, to show how serious he was, before returning it to his mouth.

  “It seems to me,” he said, screwing his eyes up against the wind, “that you want this place built bloody cheap.”

  “It’s already twelve thousand over our original budget,” I protested.

  He nodded sagely. “And you have argued every penny with me.”

  “Not true,” I said. “Every few hundred pounds, perhaps, but not every penny.”

  Mr Keoshgerian smiled. He loved his life and his work, and I had the feeling that setting obstacles up for me played a major part in his enjoyment. “It’ll be right, Mr Franks,” he said, reaching out and squeezing my bicep. He winked. “Just you worry about catching bad lads like the Hinchcliffes. Leave your house to me.”

  I scowled. “Word got around about that pretty bloody quickly,” I said.

  He beamed at me. “It’s all over the village. You’re a hero, Mr Franks.”

  Which was somewhere near the bottom of my list of things I wanted to be. “Wally Mole was there as well,” I pointed out.