Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  We shook hands on it and Baker called out to his colleague. “Neil, we’re taking these two back to the ranch. They’ve been tipped off to us, Drayton’s wife to my mobile. She remembers the older man calling the younger one by his Christian name. Trader. Name in a million, and a fucking stupid one too, but known to our brethren in Debden.”

  They loaded the Gaffneys into the van and Manning drove them away, pausing at the gate long enough for Baker to lean out and say, more to Jaikie than me, “Nice meeting you.”

  We didn’t say much during the first leg of the journey home, though Jaikie wanted to. He was full of what we’d accomplished so far and, given that it was only 2.30, what might the rest of the afternoon bring? He must have mistaken my reticence for tiredness and eventually stopped blathering.

  We were about 20 miles from home when, as if to break our silence, the Land Rover began to cut out and threaten to die.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Jaikie asked.

  “It started about four weeks ago, same night I went over to Long Field for the harvesting. You hear that, where it nearly cuts out? Does it more and more the hotter the engine gets.”

  “200,000 miles, Dad. Might be time to think about a new one?”

  I didn’t like his negativity. “Nonsense, they live forever! When it starts to play up like this, I pull over into a pub… Why are you smiling?”

  “I’m not.”

  “I get a coffee, bite to eat, let the engine cool down. An hour later it’s right as ninepence.”

  “There’s a place coming up on the left and we didn't have lunch. Maybe they’ll do us some grub.”

  It was one of those new country pubs, designed to look 100 years older than they are. Come the weekend they get overrun by 2.4-sized families from the suburbs but right now, mid-afternoon, mid-week, business was quiet, which suited me down to the ground. There were four couples still at tables in the restaurant, a handful of drinkers at the bar, even an old border collie curled up by the fake log fire. We ordered some food at the bar, two bowls of mussels, and took our drinks to a faraway table.

  After a couple of minutes, Jaikie said, “You alright, Dad?”

  “I just feel the day was hi-jacked by the Gaffneys. I’m not saying we could have played it differently but they weren’t part of the original plan.”

  I started picking at a chip in a veneered table mat. Jaikie moved it beyond my reach.

  “I didn’t even ask how it went with Gerald Scott,” he said.

  “He knows a lot more than he’s telling.”

  “Lying?”

  “No, avoiding the truth and not just about Patrick’s death. Course, the irony is, the longer the kid’s dead the more he comes to life, at least in what’s left of Marion’s mind.”

  “What was the flat like?”

  “Clean as a whistle. Too clean. I’m not sure what I expected to find there. At least a man who wanted to know what had happened to his son. To hell with it! I’m writing it off as one of those days. Feels like you’ve achieved but you look back and realise you’ve got nowhere.”

  “Dad, we caught the guys who murdered Charles Drayton!” he whispered.

  “Yeah, but you know…”

  He didn’t, anymore than I did.

  When the mussels arrived, re-christened moules marinière and accompanied by a basket of French bread, we realised how hungry we’d been and set to as if in competition. Jaikie, usually so untamed where food is concerned, has an irritating habit with mussel shells, inherited from his mother. Both would arrange them around the side of their plates, tucking them into each other and, unable to criticise them for being neat, the rest of us would make our feelings known by dropping our own shells into the bowls provided, as noisily as possible. Today, however, it wasn’t anyone’s finicky treatment of mussel shells that was getting to me.

  “Why can’t I just leave it, or at least push it to one side?” I said, slapping the table. “One reason? While Gerald Scott struggles to cope with a wife losing her marbles, he’d like me to believe that his son wasn't clever, didn’t have friends, enemies, secrets, something worth killing him for. And why has nobody been rattling the gates of Rushfarthing House, trying to find out what happened to this kid? No neighbours, no press, no self-righteous television crews?”

  “There’ve been quite a few people, according to Marion,” said Jaikie.

  “What people?”

  “Ah, well, the names eluded her, or rather boiled down to just one. Edward Rochester, I’m afraid.” He shrugged as if I knew what he was getting at, then put me straight. “He’s the hero out of Jane Eyre, Dad. I guess he got lodged in her memory as a girl and every time she needs a name and can’t find one, she falls back on his.”

  “What did she actually say?”

  “This friend of Patrick used to visit all the time and carried on long after he disappeared. First time she mentioned Rochester, though, he was young, second time middle-aged, then he was tall and good looking, then short, fat and ugly, so she was definitely talking about more than one person.”

  “Were they enemies, people he owed money to, what?”

  “They had ‘mutual interests’, she said.”

  “That could be anything from aardvarks to Zulus.”

  “She told me something else, something she wished she hadn’t.” Ever the ham when allowed to be, he paused for dramatic effect. “Patrick is always inventing things, she said.”

  Under the weight of a day that hadn’t gone quite as I’d intended, I’d slumped into my chair and now struggled back to a full sitting position.

  “What things?”

  “He invented the mechanism that opens those bloody gates, for example…”

  “He built it, maybe, didn’t invent it.”

  He smiled. “There’s a difference, yeah, and I picked her up on it. What has he actually invented, I asked. Long pause, wheels began turning. She couldn't remember. But you know what? I think she remembered just fine.”

  “And Gerald’s told her to forget it?” He nodded. “Maybe today hasn’t been wasted after all.”

  I pushed the Land Rover keys across the table to him and signalled the waitress for another drink, my third, and but for its effect on me I might have raised the subject of money when it came to paying the bill. I might even have done it in Jaikie’s style, slapping my pockets for non-existent cash, hoping that he’d take the hint and come up with an explanation. It would’ve meant doing it right there at the table, in front of an audience, the waitress, the chef who’d by now recognised Jaikie and come out to get his autograph. His name was Darren and, for some reason, I can’t forget him.

  -13-

  Rodney Taylor came to this country from Jamaica in the early 70s and set up a small business repairing cars in the nearby village of Ford. Not much has changed about him in the intervening years. The business is still roughly the same size, the prices he charges aren’t much different and he can still fix anything that used to move but now doesn’t, generally doing so with bits and pieces he finds lying around his yard.

  There is one thing about him that’s altered, however, and that's his attitude towards me. It’s warmed and it’s done so without us ever discussing the reason for his initial reserve. It doesn’t take a genius to work it out. In the 60s and 70s Rodney spent most weekends being stopped and searched by my colleagues on the streets of North London - Holloway, Archway, Islington - for no other reason than the colour of his skin. Truth is, we both know that it was the Met’s way of airing its prejudice, proving to demanding task masters that they had “the situation under control”. The attitude made no sense then and certainly didn’t do any good. Ask anyone who was at either of The Notting Hill riots. By the time I joined the police the tide was turning, very slowly, though it hasn’t yet made it all the way to the shore.

  Strange how in a friendship the taboo subjects are so clearly defined by their absence. I imagine Rodney and I have both wondered what the other’s take on the practice of stop and search is,
or was then, but we’re both too old and too wise to raise the subject over a pint. We’ll talk our way through anything else, but we never go back to those nights when he and his family could hardly poke their noses out without committing to a night in the cells of a London nick. He never holds back when it comes to my skills as a mechanic, though.

  “Heh, Nathan, how many times I tell you, man?” he said after a brief look under the bonnet of the Land Rover. “You change the air filter on this? Never. I show you how a dozen times, you don’t listen.”

  “You’re saying that all it needs is a new air filter?”

  “Leave it here, I fit you in. Phone me tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow, always tomorrow. And as usual it wasn't as simple as a straight air filter. Yes, the engine cutting out was down to that, so to that extent I was vindicated, but he also discovered that I needed “an adjustment link for the rear suspension”. Whatever that was it had to be ordered, delivered and fitted, but by the time I drove out of Rodney’s yard, the Land Rover that my family and other animals had said was a lost cause was running like a leopard. And all for £73.47.

  The three days it took to do the repairs gave us time to organise the trip to London, the main purpose of which was for Laura to visit Julien Raphael at the offices of Argent Sans Cordes. There they would discuss the plans for the new Health Centre, which he’d been sent a week ago, and once any wrinkles had been ironed out, Laura still believed there was every chance that ASC would hand over a quarter of a million quid.

  To our credit she and I managed to steer clear of the fundamental differences in our attitude to Julien Raphael, hers based on optimism, mine on the cynicism that came from my years in the service. One of us was going to be proved wrong but until that moment we settled for having a day out in London, decent lunch thrown in courtesy of Ralph Askew, plus the chance to find out what both men knew about Patrick Scott’s disappearance.

  I’m not sure at what stage Jaikie decided to join us, but I knew why he wanted to come. He was getting twitchy at not being recognised as often as he would’ve liked and the place to put that right was London. He arranged a meeting with his agent who, having taken a lush $300,000 commission from All Good Men and True, was only too happy to discuss ways of repeating the exercise. As with most successful actors, Jaikie was talking about “going back to do more theatre”. I reminded him that he hadn’t done much in the first place, there being very little on offer when he came out of Central School, and at a rough guess I didn’t think his agent would go for a 99.9 per cent pay cut. With the supreme confidence of youth, Jaikie assured me that his agent would be thrilled to oversee a change of direction in his career. I then made the mistake of asking what Jodie thought. He said he didn’t know because he hadn't asked her.

  “I thought we hadn’t seen much of her lately,” I said. “Lot of work on?”

  My question was misinterpreted as nosiness which, combined with my earlier remarks about going back to the theatre, brought on a spell of actorly introspection, otherwise known as a sulk. By the end of the third day I was forced to point out that he’d hi-jacked the build up to the Julien Raphael visit but, more importantly, none of us should forget that at the heart of this matter lay the murder of a young man whom nobody, not even his own parents, gave a toss about.

  On the day we were due to meet Julien Raphael, Jaikie appeared for breakfast, having emerged from his sulk without apology or embarrassment, and asked what the skedule was. Laura outlined it briefly and he nodded his approval before asking what we should do about George Corrigan. I looked at him for explanation.

  “Shouldn’t we tell him where we’re going?” he said.

  “Why?”

  “So that he won’t bother following. I mean how much looking after does Laura need? You one side, me the other, do we need George bringing up the rear?”

  It would turn out to be one of those remarks that lives on beyond its original insignificance which, according to Jaikie, was simply to give the guy a day off. He’d seen him up at The Crown the previous evening where Annie MacKinnon had remarked that he seemed to be on his eyelids. Her assessment bothered me, given that she was one of those licensees who kept a sharp eye on her customers, but since there was little I could do about George’s state of health I put it to the back of the queue and we set off for London in Laura’s Volvo, in spite of my renewed faith in the Land Rover. Jaikie sat beside me in the front while Laura, in the back, alternately nursed and re-read the file of documents covering the proposed Health Centre. She knew them by heart, of course, in her mind she had laid every brick, painted every wall, installed every new piece of equipment so that if Raphael had even the dumbest of questions, she’d be ready for him.

  Jaikie began smiling at Northolt, the traffic lights at The Polish War Memorial, to be precise. We pulled up at them beside a young family in a saloon car and the wife, an attractive if beleaguered-looking 30-something, thought she recognised him. She nudged her husband, who turned to check the proposition, at which point Jaikie played weary acceptance of being constantly spotted. He smiled his smile and gave a wave to the three kids in the back. The husband looked at him for a second or two longer, then shook his head. I’m no lip reader but the shape his made would have fitted the words, “Nothing like him.” The lights went green.

  We parked in an underground car park large enough for an entire civilisation to withstand a nuclear war and took the lift up to street level. It had those mirrors in it that make you look wonderful and as I caught sight of us, the picture froze to become part of my mental album from that day forward. There we were, in that moment of my irrational fear about the immediate future. One of us was looking straight back at himself without the slightest doubt that he was the best looking thing to go up in that lift since it was built. The second looked elegant, expensively dressed and nervous, and didn't pay herself the slightest attention. Her eyes were fixed on the floor numbers over the doors, her mind on the business of the next hour or so. The third looked older than he remembered, though pretty good for all that but, in spite of the darkened mirror smoothing out the edges, maybe Jim Kelloway had been right – a new leather jacket wouldn’t go amiss.

  Out in the street, I reminded Jaikie that at one o’clock we were all due at Ralph Askew’s office in Whitehall. Did he know where it was? No, but the taxi driver probably would, with it being the Department of Energy and Climate Change. He strode off, referring to his iPhone for directions to his agent’s office, busily ignoring passers-by, which was just as well since most of them were ignoring him back.

  Laura took a deep breath, the country GP’s equivalent of girding the loins. She thanked me for being with her, then added quietly, “You will try to see this from all angles, won’t you?”

  “You mean be nice to the bloke? You’re forgetting the agreement we made. This visit is all about Patrick Scott…”

  She said she knew exactly why we were here and took my arm, gripping it more firmly than usual, then apologising. It was the last day in October, a degree or two warmer here than in Winchendon, and a good deal sunnier. As we crossed Bloomsbury Square I remember thinking that people weren’t in their usual hurry for some reason. Or maybe that’s the way it seems looking back with everything in finer detail. At the far gate we crossed the road where even the traffic seemed more willing than usual to let us dodge it.

  Raphael’s office stood behind iron railings safeguarding a basement that ran the whole length of the building. A few stone steps led up to the ground floor and that was just about as Georgian as the building got. The rest of the frontage had been replaced time and again and, in its attempt to fit in with its surroundings, had lost all character. The double door entrance was black oak and overhung by a stone canopy. A brass plate at eye-level, nothing more, told us that this was the London office of Argent Sans Cordes.

  From the moment I entered the building I was looking for signs that the place didn’t ring true, that the organisation had been set up in haste, or was hiding tell-tal
e signs of its real purpose. Nothing grabbed me. Exotic plants and antique furniture knew their place. They were expensive, item by item, the Ormolu clock, the Paul Klee painting, the bespoke chaise longue. Way above them all, price-wise, was the Persian carpet, its design almost certain to lower the visitor’s gaze. Was that coincidence or hand to hand psychology at its most effective?

  The woman who rose from her leather-topped desk to greet us was expensive too, aged 30ish and French, I thought from the accent, though her politeness suggested otherwise. Laura introduced herself then turned to me.

  “This is Mr Nathan Hawk,” she said.

  The woman smiled, hoping for more than just my name, but it wasn’t forthcoming. She was Monsieur Raphael’s assistant and if we’d give her two seconds she would tell him that we’d arrived. She checked her on-screen diary and sure enough I wasn't there. She rang through to her boss and my schoolboy French could just about glean that she hadn’t really caught my name and what should she do in the circumstances? Her boss must have told her to leave it with him. I’ve no doubt that he would have kept us waiting longer, more psychology, had he not been slightly unsettled by my presence. He emerged from the nearest room and came towards us as if we were the only two people in the world.

  “Dr Peterson,” he said. “At last we meet!”

  Laura shook the offered hand and I could see that she was immediately struck by the good looks, the Parisian charm, even the way he turned to me and said, “Monsieur, you are most welcome. A friend of the doctor is a friend of ours. Your name, I didn’t catch…”

  “Nathan Hawk,” I said, shaking his hand.

  He gave a slight nod as if committing the name to memory and led the way back into his office. This too was rich and well ordered, though without a Persian carpet to make me feel penniless. That was achieved by another mirror showing the leather jacket, Jerome Gaffney’s bite marks and all, quite in contrast to this latter-day Yves Montand, so perfectly turned out, so absolutely French and about ten years younger than me. As with his lookalike he showed signs of a misspent youth but whereas in Montand it added to his mystique, with Raphael it showed itself as arrogant disregard. Furthermore, he dyed his hair. Nobody’s hair is that black at 40-odd. He ushered us to leather armchairs around a low table on which I could see a copy of the Health Centre plans we’d sent him.