Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  I knew it couldn’t last and, with the inevitability of sunrise itself, early one bright September morning he caught me off guard in my own kitchen. A knock on the back door was greeted by Dogge with a series of barks expelled on a single breath and, like every man I’ve ever known, I asked quietly, “Who’s that?” My friend Dr Laura Peterson glanced up from The Observer and said that she’d no idea but since it was my house surely I should be the one to go and find out.

  Every time I see Martin, be it in a cloud of rape seed dust or pure daylight, it occurs to me what a good-looking man he is, especially for his age and for a farmer. Both take their toll. He owned up to being 53 the last time I enquired and in 30-odd years of adulthood has packed in enough emotional thrills and spills for any man, his latest adventure being an affair with Kate Whitely, a dangerously beautiful neighbour 20 years his junior. It ended badly, of course, and, unwilling to go back to his wife, he had moved into an empty house adjoining his land and was carrying on his business from there. So far as I knew he wasn’t seeing anyone but the youthful looks, the intelligence, the charm, the physique without an ounce of fat on it, the piercing blue eyes would soon put that right. Christ, I sound as if I’ve got a crush on the man but I’m actually quoting Laura who, like most women in the village, blames his dalliance with Kate squarely on Kate.

  “Martin, this really isn’t a good time,” I said, as we shook hands at the back door.

  “Nonsense!” said Laura. “Jaikie isn’t due till three o’clock, and I’ve just made coffee.”

  Martin thanked her but dithered until I beckoned him all the way in and sat him at the kitchen table in front of Laura’s paper, open where she’d ringed a piece about All Good Men and True. The film was opening in London at the end of the following week, having already premiered in Los Angeles and New York. It had drawn excellent reviews and the name of my actor son, Jacob Hawk, was now always seen in tandem with that of Josh Hartnett. Martin skim read the article.

  “I must tell our Jodie,” he said when he’d finished. “She always had a thing for Jaikie. Who’s this Josh Hartnett, though?”

  I told him that I knew the name, but the face hadn’t stuck.

  “Moody, intense and very beautiful,” said Laura.

  “That narrows it right down,” I said, putting a mug of coffee down in front of Martin. He took out his wallet. “It’s alright, mate, the coffee’s free.”

  “I should hope so, though I’d expect a bill for any work you did on this, Nathan.”

  He took a small polythene envelope containing the metal plate from behind one of his credit cards, placed it on the table and explained to Laura that I’d said it was the kind of thing used in orthopaedic surgery. I muttered the correction “possibly” but it fell on deaf ears. The romantic in Martin had been fired up and he'd assumed that whatever bone the plate had once been attached to was human, part of a skeleton which itself had once been a full-blown corpse. Ever since the harvest he’d been searching for human remains in the field and been undeterred by not finding any. He believed, he wanted to believe, that a body had been buried on his land. He even had an explanation for why the plate might have risen to the surface while the skeleton had not. It was all to do with the properties of titanium and he was about to tell us exactly what they were but Laura stepped in.

  “Why don’t I try and give it some provenance, as they say in the antiques world. If I can find out who made it, we’ll be well on our way.”

  “Our way to what?” I asked, as flatly as I could.

  “I don't know but information is never wasted, you always say.”

  She was right, I always do. I made a mental note to keep my mouth shut in future. One good thing about Laura’s pro-active interest in the plate, however, was that I no longer needed to avoid its current keeper. With any luck the maker would point us towards a reasonable explanation as to why it had turned up in Martin’s field and I could go back to answering his phone calls, showering less and having fewer urgent appointments. We could return to enjoying a Friday night beer together, putting the world to rights and alternately moaning and boasting about our children. I’d missed the friendship.

  I’d been picturing all kinds of cars from stretch limos to boxy people carriers but when it finally drew up the other side of the five-bar gate, it was a blacked out Mini Cooper. I watched from the window as Jaikie and the driver took two big bags and a school satchel from the back seat and set them down on the verge. The two men exchanged a few words, the driver made a three-point turn and departed. Jaikie stood gazing round at the garden, presumably checking that everything was just as he remembered it.

  As I went out to greet him, it struck me that, even with my children, I’m never sure what to say in those first few moments. He must have felt the same way if his own silence was anything to go by. When we reached the big beech tree, he dropped the bags and we embraced and I felt his strength, which always surprises me. I expect boyish weakness, but then my fixed image of him is as a kid of 16. I held him at arms’ length and looked him over. He appeared to be much the same as he’d been back in the summer in LA. His hair was still its natural colour, cut short and parted down the left side for the sake of the movie in which he played a young British gunner from World War Two. His face was still tapered, skin taut, bones visible, not buried beneath the effect of too much good living.

  Laura came out of the house, letting Dogge slip past her. She came tear-arsing towards us with Laura yelling in vain for her to stop.

  “I’m clean! I’m clean!” Jaikie said as Dogge tried to corral him against his luggage. “Hi, Laura, wonderful to see you again.”

  He gave her his smile and they kissed in a way I still haven’t got the hang of, air kisses left to right. She asked how his flight had been. It was perfect, he said, just three hours late but now, thank God, he was here. He put an arm round her shoulder and drew her towards him, did the same to me with his other arm.

  “This really is such a beautiful place, Dad. And it’s great to see you, both of you.”

  He was by nature theatrical, melodramatic if circumstances allowed, but this was him being real. He was genuinely pleased to be home.

  A while later Jaikie joined us in the kitchen, having taken a tour of the cottage and told me that he liked what I’d done to the place. I was surprised that he’d noticed I’d done anything and as I drew breath to give him details, Laura asked what we were doing about supper.

  “Supper?” said Jaikie. “I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

  Jaikie’s reaction to jet lag always focussed on meals lost or gained, never on sleep.

  “I thought we’d go up to The Crown,” I said.

  Jaikie pulled a face and went over to his satchel. From the front pocket he pulled out a stapled document, covered in war-like images, with the words All Good Men and True scattered over it.

  “My skedule,” he said. “You didn’t know schedule was spelled with a ‘k’ did you? I have to be on the road, seven o’clock tomorrow, whole raft of interviews. Then on Tuesday, breakfast telly, have to be out of here five o’clock.”

  “Supper here then,” said Laura. “I made your father a tub of chilli con carne the other week. I’ll defrost a few portions and do some rice. Or bacon and eggs, if you prefer.”

  “Chilli sounds good.”

  She went over to the freezer and found what she needed.

  “Is Sophie flying over?” I asked.

  I was referring to Jaikie’s long-term girlfriend, Sophie Kent, an English actress who had gone to the States just before he had.

  “Blimey, Dad, for a moment I thought I was back in LA, facing down some gossip hack. No, she isn’t.”

  “Dare I ask?”

  “You are a gossip hack.” He paused. “Sophie and I, we've called it a day.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. She had a problem with my success, found it difficult going out with someone who was being talked about all the time.” I’d been wondering when the Jai
kie I knew and loved would stick his ego above the parapet. “I went out there to get work and struck lucky. Soph couldn’t even get a part as an English maid in this remake of Rebecca they’re doing.” He turned to Laura. “Peter Weir, the director, said if I’d been ten years older he would have offered me the part of Maxim de Winter. When a guy like that says to you…” He must have noticed her fixed smile and stopped himself in mid-conceit. “Sorry, you can read about me any day of the week. I want to hear what you two have been up to.”

  Sensing that I might not be able to speak for a moment or two, Laura pitched in. “Since his so-called retirement, your father’s gained quite a reputation in these parts for solving other people’s problems. Only this morning…” She went over to the cutlery drawer in the kitchen dresser and found Martin’s plate among the teaspoons. “What do you make of that?”

  He removed it from its polythene envelope. “Metal plate, four screw holes, sharp and shiny, DIY stuff.”

  “Titanium,” I said. “Orthopaedic usage.”

  He raised what Maggie used to call his Dirk Bogarde eyebrow. It started life being forced, now it seemed to come naturally. “Broken bones?”

  He looked it over again while Laura explained how Martin and I had come by it. When she’d finished Jaikie said, “There’s a number etched into the side of it. I can’t make out if that’s a one or a capital ‘I’ or if that’s the letter ‘O’ or zero? Do you think I should have an eye test? I mean seriously…”

  Laura took the plate and examined it both over the top of her glasses and through them, but still couldn’t decipher what was inscribed.

  “Not to worry,” she said, putting the plate in her purse. “I’ve got something at the surgery that’ll do the job.”

  “That’s your disinterested face, Dad. I’ve known it for 30 years. But you must have some idea as to how it got there. A field, slap bang in the middle of nowhere? I see foul play, I see a body being buried, I see a leading role for me.”

  “As the body?”

  “As the hero who sorts it out. As you, Dad.”

  Egocentric that he was, he was sometimes difficult to resist.

  “Yes, well, that’s where it gets tricky. Explaining its presence in Long Field, I mean.”

  Laura tried to be helpful, if not sensible, saying that patients often have the plates removed, especially if they develop real or psychosomatic aches and pains around the fracture.

  “Then keep the plate as a souvenir,” said Jaikie, nodding. “That’s what I’d do.”

  “Take it out for a walk across Long Field? And drop it?”

  “No need to be sarky, Dad.”

  “Don’t worry, I did some sloppy thinking of my own. Came up with a pilot chucking it out of a window, it falling out of a balloon basket or a para-glider’s pocket. None of them really works.”

  He and Laura were both disappointed, probably because I was leading them back to the simple truth. There was no viable explanation for the plate having turned up in Long Field.

  Jaikie managed to smile. “I still see a leading role in it for me.”

  -2-

  I was woken the next morning by something shattering on the kitchen floor below me. The red numbers on the bedroom ceiling told me it was 6.23. I fought my way into a dressing gown and went downstairs to find Jaikie brushing milk and muesli into a dustpan. As a rule I get Dogge to clear the worst of any spill for me, but with pieces of the broken china bowl mixed in that wasn’t an option today.

  “Do the worst of it,” I said. “I’ll see to the rest later. Any sleep?”

  He smiled. “Kind of. Did I wake Laura?”

  “Laura's not here.”

  “Early start, like me, eh?” He poured himself another bowl of muesli and his expression changed as he did so. “Or do you mean she doesn’t live here?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Su business es mi business, the Italians say.”

  “It’s casa and it’s the Spanish.”

  He shrugged. “Answer my question.”

  “She goes home most nights.”

  “Why?”

  I wasn’t keen to discuss my love life with my youngest son. “Bugger off to work. Have a nice day.”

  “Honestly, your generation is so hung up about the really important things in life. That chilli con carne last night was fantastic. Jump in, for Christ’s sake, while you’ve still got the chance. Let’s face it, you're not the easiest man to live with. Mum used to say that about you…”

  “Really?”

  “…and I love that husky voice. The height as well. Tall women do it for me. What is she, nearly six foot? And big faces, proper faces. Okay, so she’s not a classic beauty, but in the right light she’s Julia Roberts.”

  “I’ll tell her that.”

  “Tell her this: Mum would have loved her. Mum would’ve said what I’m saying.”

  A car turned into Morton Lane and made its way slowly down towards us, headlights dipped. The driver must have seen the lights on in the kitchen and known that his passenger was up.

  “There’s Jamal. I’ll phone you.” Jaikie rose from the table, grabbed his satchel and turned at the door as if something had just occurred to him. “Heh, can you stake me two 20s? I’m sorry, but I haven't had time to cash any dollars.”

  I would have staked him a lot more than 40 quid at that precise moment, just to get rid of him.

  After breakfast I drove out to Chestnut Farm with Dogge for company and a metal detector I’d picked up at some auction on the pretext that it might come in handy one day. This was the day.

  I found Martin Falconer behind his big barn repairing a fence to the acre or so of grazing land which justified his Christmas turkeys being called “free range”. He stopped working and straightened up as I explained that the reason for my unskeduled visit was his wretched plate, once only four centimetres long in my mind but growing longer by the day, and the look of boyish excitement on his face was almost touching to see.

  “So you think there’s something to it?”

  “I don’t think anything. Call it force of habit, if you like, but I want to run a metal detector over where we found it.”

  “I’ve been over the whole area, fine tooth comb…” He stopped dead and, ever the farmer, said, “How much will it cost me?”

  “We’ll talk money if and when it becomes necessary. Today’s on the house.”

  We drove to Long Field, so called for too obvious a reason to dwell on. At its widest point it was no more than fifty yards across and on the far side there was an ancient woodland of beech and horse chestnut where Martin kept a herd of wild boar. Like his Christmas turkeys they were now famous and no local wedding, fete or birthday party was complete without one, “spit roasted over a charcoal fire to bring out the exquisite flavour”, his brochure declared.

  “I’m thinking of moving them on,” he said gloomily and gave me a short lecture about bleeding canker in beech trees and leaf miner in horse chestnuts, both of which spelt the end of the herd’s habitat. “And now I’ve thoroughly depressed us both, park up on the verge, mind the ditch.”

  He had taped off about half an acre on the other side of the hedge and banged in a fence post at the point where Jan Zawadski had actually spotted the metal plate. At first glance the place was more like a deserted crime scene than anything else, but the rest of the field had been drilled with wheat straw for thatching. He explained the reason for growing such an esoteric crop. A local thatcher had offered to re-thatch the farmhouse, which Martin’s ex had claimed in the run-up to the divorce, and he would do it in exchange for a year’s supply of straw. The man was an absolute grafter, he added, getting by far the better end of the deal, but with a slipping thatch and rain coming into the top room, now wasn’t the time to tell him.

  As I opened the back of the Land Rover and reached in for the detector, Dogge snuck past me, leaped the ditch and ran off into the field. Nose down, she began to quarter the area back and forth, clearly intereste
d in something.

  “What’s got into her?” Martin asked.

  “She was trained as a police sniffer dog. Failed the exam. I’m guessing that’s where you and Sharon hid the last consignment of heroin.”

  He shook his head as if I’d actually meant it. “Jan’s dog goes barmy over this place. She found something, back in the spring, and scoffed it. Threw up with a vengeance.”

  “And you’d like to think it was rotting human flesh?”

  “Makes you wonder.”

  “I’ll start the far side and work back. Don’t raise your hopes.”

  I’d arranged to meet Laura and Jaikie in The Crown as near to eight o’clock as we could all manage. The plan was that Jaikie would be dropped off, Laura would make her way there on her bike after a late meeting at the surgery, and we’d all go back to Beech Tree in the Land Rover after supper.

  I arrived long before the agreed time. It’s a habit I’ve tried to break over the years with no success, but to my surprise my fiercest critic and most stalwart ally in the fight against being early everywhere had already arrived. Laura was seated at the bar talking to the young licensee, Annie MacKinnon, and a close neighbour called Jean Langan. Jean does a few bits and pieces at Beech Tree and that’s as close as my father, who I should emphasize died in 1991, will ever let me get to calling her my cleaner, even though the lady herself has no problem with the word.

  When Jaikie walked in through the door, it wasn’t to the applause he always seems ready to receive but to a chorus of gentle mockery. He could hardly have expected star struck wonderment from those present. Before coming to Winchendon we’d lived in a village in the same catchment area, so he knew many of them from the grammar school. A middle-aged, tweedy man called John Demise, recently widowed, had taught him Latin and Greek, yet such is our need for the Gods to walk amongst us that by the end of the evening, he and Jaikie had almost reversed positions and teacher was deferring to student. However, before they parted company, Jaikie put things right.