Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  “Anyway, it’s true, Thomas did well with the business after that. Brought in enough so that we could sell it and buy this house when we decided to move back home.”

  “And Thomas runs an outdoor business here, too, is that right?”

  “Yes. We both do. I do the admin. Thomas takes people climbing, in the hills, camping, does trips with schools, stag weekends, some of those corporate bonding activities.”

  It all sounded innocent enough. But everything sounds innocent the first time you hear it.

  “And how’s business?”

  “Unbelievable. I never realised so many people would be happy to sleep outside in the rain. We can barely keep up with demand. We’ve bought one of the fields just outside the village – you can see it, that one, there, with the oak tree in the corner.”

  I looked as directed. It was a field. There were sheep in it. Couple of farmhouses and a barn or two nearby. Could have been any other field within fifty miles.

  “We’ve got to get rid of the moles first, it’s a bloody nightmare, full of hills and holes, they’ve been digging the place up for years. Then we’ll try for permission to use it for camping, and maybe some training exercises, perhaps a little climbing practice for the younger ones.”

  It was a field. It was horizontal. I had to ask.

  “What would you climb?”

  “You can get a decent outdoor climbing wall cheap enough. But that’s down the line. We need to get rid of the moles and get permission for the camping first. And yurts. People like yurts these days. Makes them feel like they’re not in England any more.”

  It would take more than a yurt to make the place look like Mongolia, I thought, but there wasn’t much point saying it. And, I’d noticed, she was speaking in the present tense. Sally Carson didn’t seem to think her husband’s arrest was going to stop him putting people in yurts.

  I hoped she was right.

  6: Half a Million Ifs

  WE DROVE BACK in silence. For about three minutes. After three minutes, with Bursington dropping out of sight in the rear-view mirror and the rain still holding off, Gaddesdon started talking, and talking was pretty much all he did for the next hour. Roarkes, Manchester, Carson, the police station, his ex-girlfriend, his pool club, his mates, his favourite beer and favourite curry, the guy couldn’t stop. And the whole time I was trying to think, because there was something about Sally Carson that didn’t seem right to me, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was.

  The defensiveness, I decided. The way she’d reacted when I said the wrong thing about the business partner. The expression on her face when she spoke about him. There was something there. It could be anything, maybe she and this Alé had been sleeping together, maybe the relationship had been more than just business. And in that case, even if it wasn’t important, it might have made her nervous. Or it could be something big. If Alé had carried on helping his smuggler friends and Carson and his wife hadn’t been able to talk him out of it, maybe they’d tried to stop him some other way. I remembered the photo the police had found in Carson’s wallet, the men and the horses. All pale and young and very European, except one, the guy at the front, a little older and darker and wearing a hat with the ease of a man who wore that hat every day, not just when he was on holiday. A decent-looking guy. Not that Carson was ugly himself. But who knew what might have happened way down in Patagonia. I’d drop Alé’s name in next time I spoke to Carson. And Roarkes hadn’t seen fit to mention it to me. I’d have a word with him, too.

  He kept me waiting for fifteen minutes while he finished a meeting, which didn’t do much to improve my mood. The moment he walked back into his office I was on my feet, finger in his face, asking why the hell he’d thought the small matter of the suspect’s ex-business partner disappearing in suspicious circumstances wasn’t worth telling me about.

  He placed his hand around my finger and guided it gently down to my side, smiling the whole time. Like most of Roarkes’ smiles, it said a lot, and what it said wasn’t all that friendly.

  “I said I’d told you everything that was important, Sam,” he said, still smiling. “This wasn’t important.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. I wanted to shout it in his face but it came out petulant, the pitch and volume falling as I spoke so that even as the words dropped out I could tell I sounded more like a moody teenager than a crusading lawyer. That wasn’t the impression I’d been aiming for. At least Serena Hawkes wasn’t there to see it.

  “Because the Argentine police are satisfied the chap’s dead, they’re satisfied he died in an accident, and they’re more than satisfied he has nothing to do with our case.”

  I sat back down. The Argentine police could be as satisfied as a cat with a dead bird. So could Roarkes. I wasn’t, but it looked like I was on my own.

  “So what else have you got?”

  I couldn’t believe he was asking me that. What did I have?

  “Oh, we’ve got leads coming out of our ears, haven’t we, Gaddesdon?” I replied. Gaddesdon opened his mouth and stared at me like I’d just grown an extra head. I carried on.

  “We’ve got nothing, Roarkes. If you say Argentina’s a dead end then I guess I’ll have to let it go. Have you looked into Carson’s business?”

  “No. Anything there?”

  “Nothing I can point to, no. But he’s got a field and he wants to build stuff there and you know how uptight people can get about their villages.”

  Roarkes laughed, suddenly and unexpectedly, and the anger I’d brought into the room with me dropped away.

  “I’ll get some people to look into it. Gaddesdon, you can make a start, can’t you?”

  The DC nodded and trotted out of the room like he’d been told it was time for his walk. I liked Gaddesdon, he seemed a nice enough guy, but I didn’t think he was going to be the one to crack this case. And I didn’t see much sign of Roarkes’ other “people”.

  “How’s Claire?” asked Roarkes, as he handed me a drink. We were in a different pub this time, more beer, less bacon and eggs. The beer was a local one, and after a tentative sip I found, to my relief, that it wasn’t bad at all. Earlier, in his office, Roarkes had played me a recording of the call that Milton and Ahmet had responded to, the call that had sparked everything off. Forgettable, all of it, the voice, the accent, even the words. And they still hadn’t found the phone. So it was beer and crisps with Roarkes in a half-decent pub, and for a little while this was Roarkes at his best and we could have been anywhere.

  I eyed him carefully. Even at ease, Roarkes always had another question hidden under the one he was asking. I decided to answer them both.

  “Yes, she’s fine, thank you very much, and no, she doesn’t know how bad business has got.”

  Roarkes raised one eyebrow, like he didn’t approve, and shrugged, like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Even his body language had undercurrents. A smile came unbidden to my lips, and I asked after his wife. I’d never met Mrs Roarkes, all I knew about her came from the occasional complaint from her husband, the month she’d risen at six every morning to pick the egg out of his egg-and-cress sandwiches, the mysterious disappearance of the cigars he kept for a special occasion, the way his scotch seemed to taste weaker every time he drank it. Mrs Roarkes wanted to prolong her husband’s life as far as possible, even at the cost of his enjoyment of it.

  “Mrs Roarkes is supposed to be visiting her sister in Winchester,” he said, a frown on his face.

  “Supposed to be?” I asked, and he leaned forward and lowered his voice to a whisper.

  “If I bolt all the doors and get uniform to search everyone in here, I’ll bet you fifty quid they find her in a wig at the next table noting down every drink I’ve had.”

  He sat back, wearing the look of someone who’d just solved the Times crossword in ten minutes and was about to tell me how, and I rolled my eyes. Sometimes I wondered if Mrs Roarkes really existed, or whether she was just a convenient fictional wife for the man Roarke
s pretended to be. And then he’d say something surprising, a moment of concern, a rare flash of honesty, her loneliness, her long, slow recovery from breast cancer, the constant, nagging worry over money, even when there was no need for it.

  We slid, from there, into easy recollections, people we both knew, cases we’d worked and the fools on the other side. Most people saw the miserable Roarkes, the man who made their lives hell until he got what he wanted. This was the other Roarkes, the rare one, the one who told jokes with actual punchlines that weren’t about bankruptcy or divorce or a dead pet. The one who opened up, a little, not like normal people open up, but Roarkes wasn’t normal anyway. The one who brought a bonus pair of whisky chasers back from the bar when it was his round. For about forty-five minutes I forgot about the fact I was two hundred miles from home on a case without any decent leads. And then he asked me what I thought of Sally Carson, and I opened my mouth to tell him she seemed straight enough and certainly pleasant enough but there was something about her that jogged something somewhere else and made me feel just the tiniest bit uneasy, but before I got a word out Gaddesdon was stood in front of us, panting like a dog on a hot day.

  “What brings you here, detective?” asked Roarkes, and Gaddesdon grabbed for the nearest drink, which was mine, took a great gulp, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and stopped panting long enough to speak.

  “It’s Carson, sir. He’s tried to top himself.”

  Carson was in hospital. He wasn’t dead, he wasn’t going to die, but what he’d be like when he woke up was anyone’s guess. He’d tried to hang himself using a belt, a chair and a door handle, and the moment Roarkes heard about the belt he changed from a calm, middle-aged detective inspector into a spittle-flecked madman.

  “How the fuck did the stupid fucker get hold of a fucking belt?” he roared. We were standing in the corridor next to the custody desk back at Folgate, just a dozen gleaming tiles from the cell Carson had come close to dying in, and four police officers were stood in front of Roarkes looking at their shoes and trying not to catch his eye. I’d slipped into the station behind Roarkes and Serena, flashed the card they’d given me at the woman on the enquiry desk, and she hadn’t batted an eye. The same woman had made a big show of checking that same card when I’d arrived that morning, nearly ten minutes of grunting and staring at me, but right now the officers of Folgate Police Station had more on their minds than pissing off a lawyer from London.

  “You!” shouted Roarkes, pointing to the big bald sergeant who’d greeted me the previous day. “You’re in charge, right?”

  “I’m the shift custody sergeant, sir,” he replied, with a quiet deference that didn’t suit him.

  “So what the fuck was Carson doing with a belt?”

  The sergeant didn’t blink. “Didn’t have it when I booked him in, sir. Don’t know where he got it.”

  “And he did this himself?”

  “Reckon so.”

  Roarkes narrowed his eyes. I could see his jaw trembling. I didn’t think he was buying it.

  “What’s your name, sergeant?”

  “Tarney, sir. Sergeant Russell Tarney.”

  “Sergeant Tarney, you were the fucking custody sergeant when Carson first arrived, and you were the fucking custody sergeant when he tried to kill himself, and you’re telling me you don’t know how he got hold of the fucking belt?”

  By the end of the sentence Roarkes was all but screaming, and even though I was standing behind him and well away from the direction of his anger I found myself flinching. Tarney just nodded. The guy hadn’t been particularly friendly when I’d first arrived, but I felt sorry for him now. I was impressed by his stoicism, too, his complete refusal to react, like an iceberg with an angry ship bouncing off it. I’d never seen Roarkes like this. I hoped I never would again.

  Gaddesdon was running around the place looking for access records and CCTV footage. Serena Hawkes had rushed in looking shell-shocked, her face blank, her head turning from side to side whenever anyone spoke, like she knew something was going on but couldn’t figure out where. One of the constables took her to Roarkes’ office to make her a cup of tea. I joined her a few minutes later, with Gaddesdon and Roarkes just behind me.

  Gaddesdon couldn’t find anything, and somewhat surprisingly, that wasn’t his fault. The CCTV wasn’t functional – just like the CCTV at the farm, commented Roarkes with more than his usual growl, while Gaddesdon confirmed what I’d already guessed: it had been down for a while, but it took a lot more than a while for things to get fixed in Folgate. Sergeant Forrester had hinted as much that morning. They’d spent all their money building the place. There was nothing left to actually run it. The access records weren’t much better. The last people to see Carson had been me and Roarkes, and I knew neither of us had given him a belt.

  “You know, I was never searched,” I pointed out. Roarkes nodded. It didn’t sound like anyone had been searched, except for Carson himself, and he’d only been searched on arrival, which meant as long as he could find somewhere decent to hide it, he might have had that belt for up to a week. If there had been a belt at all. If Folgate’s friendly officers hadn’t decided to take matters into their own hands.

  “What kind of a fucking police station do you run here?” shouted Roarkes, again, and this time it was Gaddesdon I felt for, as the only local officer in the room, but hardly responsible for what had gone wrong. Gaddesdon looked sheepish and didn’t try to answer, and Roarkes collapsed into a chair, sighing but calmer already.

  Serena Hawkes had finished her tea and was twirling a strand of long dark hair about her fingers and shaking her head.

  “I don’t understand it,” she said. “I’d never have thought. I mean, it wasn’t like he told us anything. But whatever it was, we could have helped, right?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t think Thomas Carson wants our help, Serena,” I said, and she stared at me for a moment before picking up her empty cup and focussing on that.

  “So how does it work round here?” I asked Gaddesdon. “Big station, lots of cops. You have half a dozen who take turns on custody desk, right?”

  Gaddesdon shook his head. “No. There’s only two. Russell Tarney and Elaine Forrester. If neither of them are around then we just kind of fudge it, do what needs to be done between us, make sure everything’s OK.”

  I heard a muttered “for fuck’s sake” to my side, and saw Roarkes shaking his head.

  “This Tarney, what’s he like?” I asked. Gaddesdon shrugged.

  “OK, I suppose.”

  Shrugs and shakes. The most high-profile criminal suspect in the country had just come within an inch of taking his own life and all we had were shrugs and shakes. I thought I’d look into Elaine Forrester, with her elfin face and her PACE and her generally obstructive behaviour. But I thought maybe I’d look into Tarney first. My brief sympathy for the man had evaporated quickly enough. I didn’t like him. Someone round here had done something very wrong indeed, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if it were Russell Tarney.

  I’d left my car in the same spot as the day before. The police station had its own car park, and Roarkes had assured me I could use it, but I’d seen what happened to vehicles identified as frequent visitors to police stations, and I didn’t fancy tracking down bits of my car all over Manchester. Besides, the boys were out on the street again and they hadn’t done any harm last time.

  “Right, lads?” I ventured as I strolled past them. Nothing. Not even a nod. They could smell the London on me.

  I’d left the building with Gaddesdon, who was so completely unshaken by Roarkes’ outburst that it was like it had never happened. Without thinking to ask why I wanted to know, he’d told me when Tarney’s shift would be over and described the Peugeot he’d be leaving in, but better than that he’d told me which pub he’d be in later that night and what time he’d be there. Russell Tarney, apparently, had a routine, and when he wasn’t on duty he could be counted on to spend the best
part of every night knocking back pints in the Bull out on Blackmoor. Being shouted at by Detective Inspector Roarkes wasn’t the kind of thing that would shake that routine. The Bull, clearly, was a pub. Blackmoor was “a bit of Manchester”, added Gaddesdon, in a way that made it clear it was a bit of Manchester he didn’t think much of. I moved my car forward and across the road so I had a better view of the station car park, and now the boys on the street were watching me. I couldn’t blame them. It was obvious enough what I was looking at. Maybe they thought I had a bomb in the car. They were going to be disappointed.

  My eyes were fixed firmly on the car park, so the sudden tap on the passenger window took me by surprise. I glanced up, expecting bad news. Serena Hawkes was there, looking at me and smiling. Even through the rain-streaked window in the semi-darkness I could tell that smile wasn’t real. I leaned over, opened the door and she climbed in.

  “What are you waiting around here for, Sam?”

  I thought about it for a moment, and decided what I was planning on doing probably wasn’t appropriate behaviour for a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales.

  “Just thinking. Are you OK?”

  She nodded.

  “Because, you know, you don’t look OK.”

  She smiled again, a little more realistically this time, and I gave myself a mental pat on the back for making her feel that tiny bit better. Serena Hawkes, I decided, was looking at all this the wrong way. She was seeing the glass half-empty when from where I was sitting it still looked three quarters full.

  “You know this isn’t your fault, right?”

  She nodded. “I know. It’s just – this case. I was so happy when I landed it, you can’t imagine, I was over the bloody moon.”

  I could imagine it all right. I’d spent most of the previous week imagining it. She went on, the words tumbling out so fast I couldn’t have interrupted her if I’d wanted to.