Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  “Who the fuck are you?” asked the older of the two.

  He was a smartly dressed slab of a man, grey suited over a navy blue shirt and tie. In its time his face must have been an impressive one but here, in its late 50s, it had developed unsightly skin markings – moles they used to be called but these days nobody’s quite sure. His hair was still its original off-brown, receding from a broad forehead more used to head-butting than to thinking. The eyes were narrowed beneath brows that should have been trimmed ages ago.

  “Gerald, do me a favour,” I said. “Go back to the sitting room, look after Marion.”

  “Why?”

  “Just go!”

  He didn’t move a muscle apart from those in his jaw. “My house! I shall do whatever I please.”

  The squeaker smiled at me. “Everything going to plan so far, then?”

  It didn’t take Sigmund Freud to work out that he’d been at the mercy of his vocal chords since puberty. When other kids’ voices had broken, his had continued to whistle away at the same pitch as his sister’s. At school, where no doubt he was weedy and underdeveloped in other ways, they’d given him no quarter. When he was old enough he’d hit the gym and the result today was a man of average height with muscles straining at every seam, not one of them part of the original blueprint.

  “How can we help you?” he said.

  “Tell me what you’re looking for. I might be able to help you.”

  He was trying to work out where he knew me from but we hadn’t got close enough at Tilbury for him to be sure. He reached out and gently karate chopped the table.

  “We were having a private conversation, the details of which are none of your business.”

  The voice had aspirations to be posh and its owner could put a reasonable sentence together, which meant that somebody had taken the trouble to educate him. I doubted it was his companion, who said, pure Sarf London, “Fuck off before you get hurt.”

  “I’ve got a few questions first.” The squeaker looked at me, daring me to put them to him. “Who paid you to push Charles Drayton over the edge?”

  He held out an arm to restrain the older man from launching himself at me.

  “I refer you back to my uncle’s previous suggestion,” he said.

  Uncle and nephew, then, not father and son as I’d assumed at Tilbury. Still a family business, though.

  “Who paid you? And what’s this disc you’re so keen to get your hands on? Is that what you were looking for at Plum Tree Cottage?”

  He lowered his arm. “You really are one for sticking your neck out, Mr…?”

  “Hawk.”

  He nodded as if it meant something to him. “So nice to know the name of those whose bones you’re about to break. One last chance, which I don’t expect you to take for a moment, but manners, you know. Leave.”

  I was feeling in my pocket for the spray. I’d bought a batch of them from an internet site in The Czech Republic and given Laura one to keep in her car, stored the rest in the Land Rover’s map locker. I’d omitted to tell her that it was illegal to either buy or own anything that contained Oleoresin Capsicum in the UK even though, in the States, the police use it on students regularly. I’d bought it to reassure myself that, were she ever attacked in the dark and dangerous streets of Thame, she’d be able to put up a crippling defence. So far she hadn’t had occasion to use it. This, the device’s first outing, was something of a gamble.

  I was locating the nozzle, releasing it from its sideways on locked position, turning the small canister in my hand and settling my forefinger on the spray button when the nephew, having tired of waiting for me to respond, casually gave his uncle permission to beat me to a pulp. The uncle took two steps towards me, I drew and fired. A two-second burst of brown liquid hit him right between the eyes.

  It was the fact that I’d used such a delicate weapon on him that took him by surprise, juddered him to a halt. He stood wondering why I was counting down aloud. Five, four, three, two, one … and at that point my attacker roared with agony, bent forward at the shoulders the quicker for his hands to reach his eyes and start rubbing them. Big mistake. All that does, according to the accompanying leaflet, is deliver the contents of the spray to the mucous membranes even faster and while the eyes start to burn and the breath begins to shorten, so fluid pours from every hole in the head. The assailant is as neatly disabled as if I were to fire my old Smith & Wesson revolver at him. Yet still he kept advancing, arms flailing trying to grab me, missing me by yards, buckling by degrees until he fell to the floor.

  The effect of the spray on the uncle gave the nephew a change of heart. For all his muscle-bound fitness he backed away, afraid of what was to come, certainly, but even more terrified by the prospect of handling it alone. Lost for words, he scissored his arms as I shortened the distance between us then sprayed again like some vengeful racoon.

  The fluid hit him on the bridge of the nose, I counted out loud, and within five seconds he was screaming his head off. He called out for help. He thought he was going blind. He would kill me. He wanted water. Jesus Christ, what had I done to him. He too kept rubbing his eyes when he’d have been better holding them open and allowing them to water. He stumbled and fell to his hands and knees, sapped of energy and the will to stand up again.

  “Jaikie! In here!” I called.

  Jaikie was already there beside me, drawn by the screams, and now wanting to know what I’d done to the two visitors. I showed him the spray, re-locked it and put it back in my pocket.

  “Gerald, have you got any carpet tape?” I asked.

  “Erm…”

  “We’ve got half an hour before the spray wears off. Masking tape, gaffer tape, any tape?”

  He got his amazement under control and turned to his wife, who had entered in Jaikie’s wake.

  “Have we any tape, dear?”

  “What have you done to them?” she asked, both amused and horrified.

  The easiest course of action was to give all three of them a brief run-down on the properties of Oleoresin Capsicum, the effect it had had on uncle and nephew, then look for tape.

  Once uncle and nephew had been bound hand and foot with masking tape I was able to rummage through the younger one’s pockets and discover that his name was Trader Gaffney, poor bastard. On top of a high-pitched voice he’d been given a daft Christian name to cope with. He was aged 25, with an address on his driver’s licence somewhere in Debden, the Essex end of the Central Line. I questioned him as best I could, given that he was lying on the kitchen floor with concentrated chilli broiling his face in the fluid streaming out of his eyes, nose and mouth. I asked what his association with Charles Drayton had been. There wasn’t one, he said. Right, so had he been paid to bring Drayton’s life to a premature end? If so, by whom? His response to that was to ask what the fuck I was talking about.

  He begged me for water. I said he could have water in return for his first truthful answer. What were they doing there today? What did Gerald have that they wanted so badly? The question was met with a deep-seated, spluttery cough and some calling on Jesus, Mary and Joseph for mercy. A Catholic seam ran through the Gaffney family, I surmised. What had they expected to find on the computer Gerald gave them? I asked when the coughing and beseeching died down. Ask Gerald, Trader replied, but Gerald was already shaking his head in bewilderment. What car were they talking about? The MG? And who were the people he’d described as being up ahead of him? With his eyes tightly closed he asked again for water, as if to trade it for an answer. I went over to the sink and ran the tap. The uncle piped up.

  “He ain’t giving you water, Tray, he’s taking the piss.”

  I stooped down to the uncle and reached into his jacket pocket. With his wrists bound in front of him, ankles taped all the way up the shins, the only part of him that was vaguely mobile was his upper body: head, neck, shoulders. Prone though he was, when I got within range he launched himself at me with the snarl of a Japanese fighting dog and bit me on the arm. He
didn't catch the flesh but it did rip a three inch gash in the sleeve of my beloved leather jacket. I could have killed him.

  “Give me that roll of tape!” I said to Jaikie.

  We turned uncle onto his front and while Jaikie knelt between his shoulder blades I wound a length of tape around his head at mouth level. When I stood up again, Trader was already asking me to be reasonable and not do the same to him.

  “His name is Jerome Gaffney,” he said, panicking. “He’s 58, unmarried, lives in Loughton.”

  I thanked him, rolled him over and taped up his mouth.

  “Now what?” asked Jaikie with his irritating need to have life spelt out for him.

  I took him to one side and told him that by close of play we’d have the Gaffneys in police custody, ready for questioning about Charles Drayton’s death. With any luck, forensic evidence, maybe even fingerprints from Drayton’s dying room, would tie them to Charlie’s premature end. In practical terms it meant throwing them in the back of the Land Rover and driving over to Tilbury.

  “Alan Baker?” said Jaikie.

  I nodded. “Jim Kelloway’s friend. Jaikie, I shouldn’t be doing this to you…”

  It was a half-hearted attempt to say sorry and to thank him, all in one go, and maybe offer him a way out even though I didn’t expect him to take it.

  “Bit late for that,” he said, looking down at the prostrate Gaffneys. “Which one first? Uncle or nephew?”

  “Uncle. You take his legs, I’ll take the arms.”

  -12-

  I phoned Detective Sergeant Alan Baker from somewhere on the M25, in the molten lava of heavy traffic, which meant that I spent much of the conversation asking him to repeat what he’d said. The gist of it was this:

  “Alan? My name is Nathan Hawk. I’m an old friend of Jim Kelloway?”

  “I haven’t seen Jim for must be four years. How’s he keeping?”

  “Fine.” Haven’t seen him? How about spoken to him? Didn’t he get in touch one evening two weeks ago? Subject a murder, young man called Patrick Scott? “He said you were just the guy I needed.”

  Baker laughed, and yes I’d say that it was a womaniser’s laugh, one always in search of the innuendo.

  “Quite a few people agree with him. What can I do for you?”

  “He said he’d talk to you about a death on your manor, Charles Drayton.”

  “Charlie, yes. No great loss to humanity, but painful way to go. Oesophageal cancer.”

  “Three weeks ahead of time. Crucial fact. Didn’t he mention it?”

  “Who?”

  “Jim Kelloway.”

  “It could be my filing system, or … when was this?”

  And round we went until I was forced to accept that Jim hadn’t been in touch with his old friend. Was that to be taken personally? I wondered. Had Kelloway made all the right noises that night I called in at Thame nick, only to dismiss my proposition that Drayton had been murdered as bad luck for Charlie Drayton but nothing to do with Patrick Scott?

  “You think he was given a shove, then?” said Baker, making the first hopeful remark in our conversation. “He had enough bloody enemies, I know that.”

  “I not only think it, I’ve got the two blokes responsible tied up in the back of my Land Rover.”

  “Jesus Christ! Sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”

  “Nathan Hawk.”

  I cited a few of the cases I’d been involved in and gradually he began to take me seriously.

  “Who are they, these two?”

  “Jerome Gaffney and his nephew, Trader. Know ‘em?”

  He chuckled with sour delight. “We know ‘em alright.”

  As I’d expected, he was the kind of copper who had a special place where non-office work could be carried out and he gave me directions to it. It was a farmhouse off the B1040, three miles beyond East Tilbury. He’d make his way there right now and looked forward to meeting me.

  Nobody in our vehicle spoke much during the journey, which was understandable in the Gaffneys’ case. For the best part of an hour they did the sensible thing, conserved energy and gradually the 70 per cent chilli factor, or more correctly the pain that went with it, began to wear off. It took longer than the leaflet said it would, but isn’t that the case with everything?

  It was one o’clock when we left the M25 and made our way towards the Thames Estuary and as we neared our destination it became clear why Alan Baker had chosen this spot for his non-office work. Thirty miles from the centre of London, we could have been on Exmoor, the Shetlands, even the west coast of Ireland, if isolation was the yardstick. This was deepest Essex, though, north side, the only place you get those square pebble-dashed bungalows, one small room either side of a recessed door, kitchen and a bathroom at the back. And, at the roadside, a domino rally of signs saying that Eggs and Potatoes are for sale, just about all the surrounding land is good for.

  Coalfort Lane rose and fell, rose and fell, and after each peak we expected to see the river mouth stretching out way before us. When it finally appeared, Baker had told us, we would know we’d reached Fort Farm. I turned into it, through the open metal gate and pulled up beside a block-work pen, concrete floor, gully along one side to a drain, a place that once held animals. Not anymore. The land around us and down to the Estuary was arable, more potatoes I guess, and the farmyard itself was used as a storage facility. The house beyond, 1940s and rendered grey, was ramshackle: the onshore breeze whistled through broken windows and collapsing doorways.

  I opened the tailgate and hauled the Gaffneys into sitting positions. Jerome seemed pleased that his unpredictability was a major concern to me, that I took extreme care as I unwound the tape from his head. The last 12 inches of it tore at his lips but he barely flinched. I handed him a bottle of water I’d bought on the motorway. He pretended not to care if he drank or not, then downed half a litre of it.

  Trader wasn't so proud. When I removed the tape he thanked me, grabbed at the bottle with his bound hands and drained the rest of it. I told them to take a pee, over by the drain. Jerome asked how they would reach it. I told him to pretend he was in a sack race and jump. As he stood relieving himself, Trader asked if there’d be any long term effects from the spray. I said that so long as neither he nor his uncle was asthmatic, had a heart condition or was pregnant, there was no real danger … other than me being willing to use it again.

  We didn’t bother re-taping their mouths, simply closed the pen gate on them and said they could scream their guts out. The nearest human being was a mile and half away. And if Jerome bit me again, I would knock his fucking teeth out.

  It was another half-hour before Detective Sergeant Alan Baker arrived, along with a side-kick 15 years his junior but clearly a willing pupil. The rain came with them, ahead of a rising tide, and the Gaffneys hunkered down into a corner of their pen to spare themselves the worst of it. They stood up when they heard the police van pull up beside the Land Rover. Baker walked over to me, hand outstretched and introduced himself.

  “Sorry I’m late, guvnor. Stuff came up. You know how it is.”

  I did. It had taken him longer than he thought it would to check me out.

  “This must be your son, yeah?” He held back from asking what the hell he was doing here and turned to his side-kick. “This isn’t my son, thank Christ, though it often feels that way.”

  We chuckled dutifully as DC Neil Manning introduced himself.

  Alan Baker had the cheap good looks and meticulous preservation of a ladies’ man. Late 40s, fair hair and a gold chain at his throat. There’d be more bling back home in the jewellery box, I imagined, not the kind of stuff you wear in a squad room unless you want the piss taken interminably.

  He wandered over to the pen, zipping up his waterproof, leaned on the wall and looked at the Gaffneys much as a farmer might weigh up livestock before buying it.

  “Jerome bloody Gaffney,” he said, eventually. “You and me met ten years ago. I was in Vice at the time. I don’t think there is
a Vice Squad anymore. Specialist Crime, they call it. Blurred edges, eh? Anyway, you’d turned your hand to money laundering, using that club in Chingford, remember?”

  The uncle smiled. “I remember what a pig’s ear you made of it.”

  Baker turned to me as he opened the pen and entered. “He’s right, we fucked up and Jerome here got off. Jacob, look at that ship down there.”

  Jaikie was the only one present who didn’t know why he’d been asked to look at the long container ship a couple of miles away, stacked high, making its way upstream, and as he turned towards it Baker swung his fist and caught Jerome’s jaw with a perfect right hook and, without legs to move with, arms to balance, he fell 90 degrees, upright to zero, out cold.

  “All things come to he who waits,” said Baker, turning to Trader. “And you must be his brother’s boy?”

  Trader held up his hands, insofar as he could. “You’ve nothing on me, officer, no history…”

  Baker smiled at me. “When they start calling you officer, you know you’re halfway there. How d’you come by these two?”

  I told him most of what I knew about Charlie Drayton’s role in Patrick Scott's disappearance, how I’d seen the Gaffneys at 34 Clarke Road, ostensibly sizing up the Red MG Sports they’d bought from Mrs Drayton, how she’d expected her old man to live another three weeks. Baker turned and looked back at the Gaffneys.

  “We knew they’d got into some heavy shit lately, they even did an English Channel drop three years ago - people, money, drugs - so none of what you’re saying really surprises me.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Keep us up to speed about the rest of it, will you. Meantime, if these bastards were in Charlie’s bedroom the night he shuffled off, I’ll get it out of them.”

  “What about Drayton’s wife?”

  He looked at me to see how far I was prepared to go, then said tentatively, “If it turns out she pulled the plug, not them, we play God and drop it. Agreed?”