Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  As we stepped out of the lift, Jaikie was entering the building. He didn’t wait for applause from those around him, but came straight over to us, kissed Laura left and right and told her how wonderful she looked. He embraced me without comment but then, as he held open the big mahogany door for us, he whispered, “You too, Dad. The suit. Still looks great.”

  Out in the courtyard, Corrigan had replaced the Mini with a stretch limo in the back of which was Jodie Falconer, dressed to kill, slim and sparkly, hair piled high showing more of her face than she usually would. She was nervous about a host of things. Top of her list was the fear that she’d somehow barged us out of the way. She deferred to us more than she needed to, even addressed us as Dr Peterson and Mr Hawk until I threatened to call her My Learned Friend, Miss Falconer, QC, even though she was still a pupil. After a few failed attempts she settled on our Christian names.

  The Odeon at Leicester Square proclaims above its entrance that it’s “fanatical about film”. It clearly doesn’t feel the same way about architecture, being one of the ugliest buildings in London, its facade finished in slabs of black granite. When Corrigan dropped us off outside we were hit by strobing light from cameras, calls to Jaikie from shapes and faces behind them, wanting to know who the new girlfriend was. He paused to be gracious, introduced her as an old schoolfriend, now a London barrister so they had better watch their steps. They wanted to know her name. He told them. Somebody asked what had happened to Sophie Kent. He pretended not to have heard the question.

  We walked across the carpet towards the entrance, driven by the human sheepdogs of the PR company, prominent among whom was the blonde bamboo cane Jaikie had moaned about the previous day. The cameras followed us, so too the voices, until another car drew up behind the limo and left us blinking in sudden darkness.

  We followed Jaikie into the foyer where there were people to meet, hands to shake, names and faces to remember. He asked Laura if she and I could manage. She said that we’d try and looked round for the ladies’ toilet. He then all but arranged an escort to take her there, but at that point the bamboo cane did us all a favour and whisked him and Jodie away to meet people far more important than us. One of them was Richard Slater, a man with a bespectacled face that reminded me of a dozen others with its two clothes brushes of white hair either side of a bald dome and a bushy moustache trying to make up for the lack.

  It struck me, as I waited for Laura, that just 20 years ago the foyer would have been overhung by a cloud of smoke but tonight all that remained of that indifference to dying were a few hardened smokers outside on the forecourt, shivering as they grabbed a last cigarette. I shivered with them, not from cold but from recalling how much the habit had cost me. My wife.

  And that’s when I saw him. To me, with my practised eye and incipient paranoia, he stood out like a sore thumb. He too was waiting. Forty years old and dressed in a bog standard dinner jacket, white shirt and black tie, he could have been mistaken for any one of 10,000 men in London that night, but he was putting on a show of impatience with a few too many clicks of the tongue and glances at his watch, all for the benefit of the SO14 officers who made up the royal protection detail. I counted six of them and they were ignoring him. Had he been standing alone in the foyer he would have been an object of suspicion, but a man waiting for his wife to come out of a toilet has instant credibility. He saw me watching him and gave me a smile of mutual forbearance before looking away. And in that moment I thought I might have got it wrong. This was a film premiere, for God’s sake, not the starting point of a general strike, a revolution or a military takeover. So I left it at that, save for asking Laura when she finally emerged from the Ladies if there’d been many other people in there. Quite a few, she said, but she hadn’t bothered to do a head count.

  Once inside the theatre we were treated like aristocracy. Jaikie was a couple of rows in front of us and turned to point me out to the people next to him. They waved. I waved back. Five minutes later, and against all licensing laws I know of, I was brought a scotch with ice to calm my nerves. Laura said she hoped it wouldn’t send me to sleep. I told her there was every chance I’d never sleep again. I was back at Jaikie’s first school, watching him be a shepherd in the nativity play. He’d got his lines wrong and cried. There was nothing I could do for him then, there was nothing I could do for him now.

  Then it started, this film I’d heard so much about. I’d been told the story several times but hadn’t really taken it in. A young British Army Sergeant is taken hostage, along with two comrades, by a small band of Vichy French in Casablanca, November 1942. Being just after the allied landings at Safi, Port-Lyautey and Fedala, the collaborating Frenchmen try to use their hostages as bargaining tools to escape from Morocco, but one of them loses his nerve and shoots the captives. Drawn by whatever doubt, a young US Army Lieutenant who had witnessed the atrocity returns in the night to where the three Brits were killed. He finds the young Sergeant still alive, drags him through the dangerous city, and in doing so saves his life.

  By chance the British Sergeant and the Lieutenant meet again in 1945 in Italy, just after the battle of Ravenna. Each has changed in his different ways, but this time it is the American who needs saving, though not from his enemies. Three years of war have left him dangerously unhinged and his own men plan to murder him. The young British NCO uses everything in his power, from subtle argument to brute force, and saves his life.

  At the end of the screening, the audience rose to its feet and applauded. The lead actors were introduced individually. Josh Hartnett and Jacob Hawk had heard it all before, in Los Angeles and in New York, but there was something about hearing it in London, they later told me, which made all the difference.

  As the auditorium cleared, preparations were being made in the foyer for those involved in the film to be presented to the guests of honour, royalty from just down the road on The Mall. A girdle of onlookers formed and we were invited to the front of it. As the SO14 faction prowled between government ministers, high ranking civil servants, army chiefs and the US embassy mob, I resisted the urge to point out to those who didn’t yet know that the tall one, fair hair, army cut, was mine.

  The clatter of applause for the film and the performances resumed, led by the young prince and his girlfriend as they began to walk down the line. I saw Jaikie be introduced to them, step forward and laugh at something the prince said, a comment about army protocol. Jaikie turned to Jodie. She came forward, nervous but coping well in her role as the star’s new love interest. The prince liked the look of her. There were more words, more looks, more laughter.

  And that’s when I saw him again out of the corner of my eye, the man in the bog standard dinner jacket. He came from way over the other side of the foyer, breaking the circle gently as he squeezed through it. He paused for a moment, walked towards the prince. The SO14 blokes moved. So did Corrigan. So did I. But as the man approached, he veered slightly to his right. The prince wasn’t his target after all. He stopped, drew something like a mustard jar from his pocket, unscrewed the lid, then threw its contents in Jaikie’s face. Jaikie roared in terror and slapped both hands to his head. The sound was swamped by shouts and screams from those around. Within seconds the protection officers had the prince and his girlfriend out of reach, heading towards the exit, into a car and away. Only Corrigan seemed interested in the attacker. He drew his side arm, ran out of the building.

  One of Laura's aunts described her niece to me as being superb in a crisis - it was everyday life she found so difficult to cope with. I knew what the aunt meant. My youngest son had just been attacked, sulphuric acid had been thrown at him by someone I could have stopped. Within minutes it would break up his beautiful face, eat it away, quite possibly blind him, and although I was right in front of him now and had taken him by the shoulders, I had no plan for the next critical 30 seconds. Laura had. She stepped out of her shoes and ran to Jaikie. She pushed Jodie and me aside, one hand each, and took hold of him. She dragged him by t
he arm, causing him to stumble, but she was strong enough to prevent a fall.

  “Toilet!” she shrieked.

  Strange, I remember thinking, even at a moment like that. She usually called it a lavatory.

  “Move!” she said next and people in our path fell away.

  “Paramedics!” she yelled at the bamboo cane who instantly reached for her mobile and dialled. I opened the door to the Ladies’ toilet and in we went.

  “Water!” she yelled and before the word was out of her mouth Jodie had the nearest tap running at full force.

  Laura took Jaikie’s head in both hands and forced it down into the sink, sideways on. As water rose up on the right hand side of his face, she dowsed the other side with water she was cupping in her free hand. As it drenched him we paused for the first moment since the attack. Laura saw where the acid had spattered Jaikie’s jacket. It was still black, not bleached. She stooped and sniffed it, then said to Jodie, “Turn it off.”

  Laura pulled Jaikie upright and turned him to face us. The shock of the attack followed by being half drowned had reduced him to gasping for air. “Jaikie, it isn't acid,” she said. “It’s vinegar, cider vinegar I think. But it isn’t acid.”

  Jaikie stared at her, eyes red and watery, then fell into her arms with relief. Our three minutes of hell was over. I turned and ran out into the foyer. The crowd of onlookers was breaking up, moving on, but the film people had stayed to see if Jaikie was alright. I yelled at one of the protection officers.

  “D’you get him?”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Man who threw it. Age 40. Caucasian. Five ten. For Christ's sake, who do you think?”

  A colleague joined him, a thick-necked, early 30s man trembling with relief. “Thank Christ he didn’t get the Ginga or the bird.”

  Odd how sometimes rage quickens you, other times it slows you right down. It seemed to take an age for me to turn and face this man and mutter, “What?”

  “The prince,” he explained. “It could have been the prince.”

  “Never mind the fucking prince, that was my son.” He tried to move away. I grabbed his arm. His colleagues didn’t move to defend him. And he still hadn’t answered my question.

  “I said that was my son! Does that make a difference?”

  I was up close to him, but standing at a distance it seemed, watching myself, hearing myself insist on an answer.

  “Well does it?”

  Then I heard Jaikie, way out on the edge somewhere, calling, “Dad… Dad.”

  He’d emerged from the Ladies with Laura and Jodie to find me on the verge of ripping someone’s head off. He hurried over, placed a hand on my shoulder and turned me towards him. I didn’t see him too clearly but I heard him well enough. “Dad, you must have left The Map in your other jacket.”

  No one but Jaikie, Laura and I knew what he was referring to. The protection officer came into proper focus, more bewildered than terrified, yet pleased to have been spared the consequence of my anger. Jaikie’s eyes were still streaming but he was smiling. I threw my arms round him and clung on.

  The reception was held at the National Liberal Club in Whitehall Place, one of those rounded corner buildings the Victorians were so good at. Subsequent generations had felt the need to ruin the ground floor and turn it into shops, a bank, a small Tesco's, but once inside and up on the first floor you can still get a whiff of Liberal tradition. It’s helped by portraits of Liberal Party leaders all around the colonnaded main room, the most interesting of them being Jeremy Thorpe, cleverly concealed behind a massive pillar, along with the scandal that forced him to resign.

  The celebration itself was a select and expensive affair, animated and congratulatory, some people even congratulating me when they learned that I was Jacob Hawk’s father. First among them was Richard Slater, who descended on me as if we were old friends, took my hand and shook it even though it hadn’t been offered.

  “You must be so proud,” he said, a statement I was to hear over and over again in the next couple of hours. He introduced me to his wife. “Imogen, darling, this is Nathan Hawk, Jacob’s father.”

  Imogen Slater was more restrained than her husband, with a grounded sense of what was really important. “You must have been terrified when that maniac struck,” she said. “Some jealous nutter, no doubt, but your companion, where is she?” She glanced round to see Laura being introduced by Jaikie to the rest of the cast. She stood taller than most of them. “Such presence of mind,” Imogen Slater continued. “Such swift action…”

  “Just thank God it wasn’t the real thing,” said her husband. “If it had been, if it had been…” He took another glass of champagne from a passing waiter and offered me one as if the drinks were on him. I asked the waiter to get me a double scotch in a tall glass with ice all the way to the top. Slater beckoned to a tall man in his early 50s whose immediate features were his large nose and oversized ears.

  “Ralph, come and meet Nathan Hawk.”

  Ralph Askew, MP, was an old friend and a film buff, said Slater, adding with softly spoken regard that he was also Under Secretary at the Department of Energy.

  “Hawk. Nathan Hawk, 37 murders,” said the old friend, now revealing a mouth with too many teeth in it. “I read Richard’s piece about you in The Guardian.”

  “It was meant to be about Jacob,” I said.

  “That’s Dickie for you, all too easily side-tracked. It’s an honour to meet you, Mr Hawk.” He shook my hand for a second time. “Thirty-seven? My God, most people in this country have never seen one dead body, let alone 37 who’ve been murdered. And as for that performance your son gave? Reminded me of a young Michael Redgrave, if you know what I mean.”

  I wiped away the fleck of spittle that had landed on my cheek. “How far back do you and Richard go?”

  “Cambridge. Don’t see as much of each other as we’d both like, but this film was a perfect opportunity to put that right.” He lowered his voice as if to share a confidence. “I thought he might be able to get me through the door, to be honest. I’ve always been a bit of a film fanatic and my grandfather was in Italy during the war.”

  We had attracted some of Askew’s friends and colleagues who were equally dazzled by Jaikie’s performance and while I wanted to ask Slater why he’d featured me in an article about my son, I bore in mind that I’d already lost my temper once that evening. To do so a second time would smack of self-indulgence.

  Even so, as we chatted I began to see what Jaikie had meant when he said that Slater was so good at making him talk. He was asking, in his syrupy way, about me, Jaikie, Laura, the others, questions which on their own were of no account, whereas the sum of the answers might have formed a revealing profile. I fobbed him off with lies and under-statement.

  “He never stops being the investigative journalist of his youth, do you Dickie?” Askew chided at one stage. “Mr Hawk came here to enjoy his son’s performance, not to be grilled by you.”

  Slater apologised and was soon drawn away by people who valued his opinion about the film more than I did. Our little group broke up as Askew and his crowd moved on to the next guest on their network, the next drink being offered. The waiter brought mine, which I took downstairs and out into the stone canyon of Whitehall Place.

  The chauffeured cars were lined up, so close together they might have been one grotesque, segmented creature. Most of the drivers were chatting by their vehicles, a handful were crammed into the back of a limousine watching a football match on a laptop. Corrigan’s limo was the last in the line and he was on his own, stretched out on the back seat, asleep. I banged on the roof and in a split second he was up in a sitting position, fully awake, having drawn his side arm. He saw who was peering in at him through the smokey glass, holstered the Glock and got out. He gazed at me apprehensively, I like to think, but in the orangey darkness of that part of London I couldn’t be sure. He offered me a cigarette from a crumpled packet and I shook my head. He lit one for himself and the smoke from it
hung around us, no breeze to move it on.

  “You told your boss what happened?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I’d expected more than a one syllable answer. “And he said?”

  “Pity you didn’t catch the bastard.”

  I took a swig of the whisky, rattled the ice. “You knew the attack was on the cards, didn’t you?”

  It was there again, his trademark unflinching stare, and after a stalemate silence he got back into the limo, cigarette and all, and I went back to the party for a top-up.

  -5-

  Next morning, or rather later the same one, I phoned Jaikie and left a message saying I hoped he and Jodie had recovered from last night’s excitement and that Laura and I would be heading back to Winchendon after breakfast. As I spoke, Laura whispered that I should say again how wonderful he was in All Good Men and True, but I pretended I hadn’t heard her.

  The car ride home was subdued which, according to Laura, was hardly surprising. Laying aside that some jealous nutter had thrown vinegar in Jaikie’s face, the film opening, the celebration party afterwards, had been a glamorous, glitzy event. The M40 at its best is a length of tarmac.

  “Jealous nutter?” I said.

  “That’s what the morning papers are calling the attacker.”

  “That’s how Richard Slater’s wife described him. Why does that bother me? Who wants that attack made light of?”

  Laura hadn’t the faintest idea, she said. I reminded her that at least I’d been vindicated, that I’d been right to worry about Jaikie’s safety, even though none of my grim-ending scenarios had included a mock acid attack. I added that I intended to keep him close by me for a week or two.