Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  [Sirens sound in the distance. Serena moves us upstairs. She carries on talking, even as she’s fiddling nervously with her gun and adjusting the curtains by the window.]

  After that I said yes, OK, I’d help them, and I thought they just meant, you know, defending them if they were arrested, that sort of thing, but there was nothing for a while, and then I get a call saying we might need your help shortly, and I said what for, and the guy said you’ll know when you need to know. I said I want to know now and he said you’ll be hearing from us and next day – Jesus Christ

  [Sirens now closer, and footsteps outside the house]

  You were saying?

  There’s a letter and in it there’s just a photo, here.

  [Serena reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out a photograph of a girl, five, maybe six years old, wearing school uniform.]

  Who is this?

  And then Tarney, that bastard, do you know what he said, he said it didn’t matter what happened with Lyons, not any more, or Carson. He said you’d better keep your bitch mouth shut or there will be trouble, and not just for you. For the little girl, too.

  Who is the girl?

  [As I look closer at the picture I notice it has been drawn on in red pen. A faint cross, right where the child’s head is. A circle in the middle of her forehead. And a jagged line across her neck. I ask again.]

  Who is the girl?

  Tarney was an animal. The things he said.

  [Shouts from outside bring the interview to a close. Less than two minutes later, Serena Hawkes is dead.]

  After the third, or maybe the fourth reading, I put the paper down and closed my eyes. Claire reached out and put her hand on my shoulder. She wanted to know if I was OK.

  Of course I wasn’t OK.

  The child was Serena’s niece.

  I remembered the call from her sister – Everything OK? Is Bella OK?

  I remembered other calls, the way she jumped when her phone rang, the brittle breeziness when she answered.

  I’d thought she was just that kind of person. Sharp. Fragile.

  I’d sat and spoken with this woman for hours. I’d sat there in Roarkes’ office and smiled with her and watched her chew him up and spit him out. I’d sat with her in my car, listened to her tell me – what was it? – I don’t remember the last time I had a client I actually wanted – and thought she was talking about Carson, just Carson, and I was giving her sound advice. I’d heard her on the phone, I suddenly realised, heard her talking to Lyons, heard her say you shouldn’t have done that – and now it hit me what it was she was talking about. I’d just got back from London and a punch in the face. The day before I’d been given a scare outside the hospital. That was all. Just a scare. They were doing me a favour. They were doing her a favour, or they’d have shot me and that would have been an end of it.

  I’d sat in that Indian restaurant with her and spent more time thinking about my unusually-hot chicken jalfrezi and where the evening might end up than I had thinking about what was on her mind and why. It’ll all be over soon, I’d promised. A cast-iron, Sam Williams promise. I hadn’t realised how right I was.

  Should I have known?

  Could I have done more?

  Claire decided to take my mind off my problems by giving me chapter and verse on her own. She’d reached yet another dead end. For all the work she’d done, the police weren’t playing ball. They’d listen patiently to her story, and then they’d come back to her after a few hours, or a day, and their hands were tied, or there were other priorities, or departmental politics, or other factors to consider. It sounded like bullshit to me, and Claire agreed, and I reckoned between us we had more than a decent nose for bullshit. But up here, lying around in a hospital, all we could do was smell it.

  What it came down to was this: Claire had hit a brick wall, and she was anxious to get back to London and smash it down. She didn’t say anything, didn’t openly resent being stuck up in Manchester wasting time with a not-particularly-sick invalid, but I could tell. A selfless, decent man would have let her go.

  I’d given up trying to be selfless or decent a long time ago.

  It took them a week to sort out Serena’s funeral and the whole time I wondered if I should go. I’d ignored half a dozen calls from Elizabeth Maurier and spoken to Hasina Khalil several times until finally she’d broken down and told me the truth.

  There was no money. Her husband had spent every penny of it on his “other wives” and real estate in Cairo that had been expropriated by the army. So I told her to find herself another lawyer, and I washed my hands of her.

  Except, of course, I didn’t, because (as Claire would have put it), that wasn’t what Sam Williams would have done. Instead, I listened to her crying and begging, and I realised that through all her lies, the one constant had been her desperation. That was real enough. She was stupid, and a crook, and she couldn’t afford to pay me, but if I didn’t act for stupid crooks without a penny to their names then my client list would have dried up a long time ago. She was desperate. She needed my help.

  The funny thing was, she’d helped herself after all. I’d put in a call to Michael Slaney at the Home Office, and asked him if there was anything he could do to delay her next hearing, which was scheduled for two weeks’ time. Not a chance, he told me, but it didn’t matter: “between ourselves”, the authorities wouldn’t be fighting this one too hard. Hasina Khalil’s opening gambit had paid off. Various organisations had got wind of her story, the lesbian-fleeing-for-her-life one, and the fact that it wasn’t true wouldn’t be enough to stop them shouting it out as loud as they could. The government didn’t have the stomach for the fight. So there was no rush to get back to London, not for Hasina Khalil, and when I did get back I’d be bearing good news. Not perfect news, mind. Michael Slaney thought it might be a good idea for her to shave off all her hair. To embody the role, as he put it. That was Slaney’s idea of a joke, in part, but only in part. He was right. It was a good idea. Hasina Khalil would hate it.

  As for Atom Industries, I’d decided I didn’t care. They could shove their job in one of their test tubes and heat it until it rained fire and poison down on the earth. I’d told Claire the truth about my temporary cashflow problem, and she’d smiled wearily at me, the way you smile at the drunk who’s just introduced himself to you for the third time in fifteen minutes. She’d known. She’d always known. She wasn’t an investigative journalist for nothing.

  So there was nothing forcing me back to London, nothing urgent, at least, and now the Carsons were on the books I had a pair of clients I’d have killed for just a week earlier. But whenever I turned my mind to Serena's funeral, I found myself staring at the same two questions.

  Should I have known?

  Could I have done more?

  I wondered, out loud, whether I should just skip the funeral and head back down south, and Claire said she’d stick around and come along with me if it would help. That was my chance to let her go. Instead, I smiled and said, “Thanks.” I needed Claire with me. And then Roarkes showed up like a breath of stale air.

  “About time,” I said, and he gave me that reluctant half-grin with a long, slow nod of the head that told me things weren’t perfect. Not by a long shot.

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I really am. As you can imagine, there’s been a lot to sort out.”

  There was a man standing behind him, a man I didn’t actually know, but certainly recognised, a bald man with glasses. Roarkes gave a quiet cough and beckoned him forward.

  “This is Detective Sergeant Miller,” he said. “DS Miller’s a friend from way back. He had the misfortune to relocate up here a few years ago. I believe you’ve come across one another before.”

  Miller stepped up to the bed and offered his hand. Without taking my eyes off Roarkes, I shook it. Roarkes was watching the floor, and I was reminded of Gaddesdon, in this very hospital, avoiding Roarkes’ own glare.

  “Well?” I said, after a few seconds’ silence.

>   “It was the flat. Your flat. I didn’t like it. I’m sorry.”

  And then he explained.

  It wasn’t just simple, it was obvious, and far more plausible than all those corridors of conspiracy Serena had led me down. After I’d been attacked in my own flat, Roarkes had decided I might be in danger after all. And instead of telling me this, he’d mocked me when I made the same point, and asked the only friend he had in the area to follow me all over Manchester in his little red Astra, and beyond, and make sure I didn’t get into the kind of trouble I wouldn’t be laughing about a few days’ later.

  “Why didn’t you tell Sam?” asked Claire, and Roarkes coughed again, and shrugged.

  “Why?” she asked, a little harder, a little sharper, and I realised it wasn’t my glare Roarkes was avoiding.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, finally. “I thought I had it covered. And it’s not like you didn’t need the work,” he added, turning to me. He had a point. He was wrong, of course, because I might have needed the work, but not as much as I needed to be two hundred miles away from the fists and boots and bullets and guns that had come my way since I’d answered his call.

  “Nice stunt that, in the car park,” said Miller, and shook his head ruefully. “Boss here was fucking furious when I told him you’d got away.”

  Roarkes was still staring at the floor. Claire was staring at Roarkes, and I recognised the look on her face, fury softening to mere anger on its way down to frustrated acceptance. Detective Sergeant Miller was still shaking his head, but smiling, as he let the door swing shut behind him. I decided I rather liked Detective Sergeant Miller.

  Claire was the least of Roarkes’ problems, as it turned out. It had been bad enough before Mia Arazzi pointed the heavy artillery in his direction, what with the fire at the farmhouse and the man with the tyre marks all over him (self-defence, they’d bought that, so at least I was in the clear), what with Serena’s death, and Gaddesdon’s injury, what with Tarney’s murder after Roarkes had taken personal command of his custody to keep the bastard safe. Roarkes had been getting heat from the men upstairs before anything had even gone wrong. And then everything that could have gone wrong did.

  Malhotra was waiting outside the door, I spotted the top of her head through the window while Claire was listening to Roarkes with that sympathetic head-to-one-side look I’d learned to take as seriously as a used car ad. I levered myself up, hobbled to the door and told her to get the fuck in before Roarkes made us all kill ourselves. He heard me, stopped, and laughed.

  Malhotra had news of her own. Tarney, it turned out, hadn’t been the Corporation’s first inside man. Operation Blackbird might have been clean enough, but DS McTavish wasn’t. He’d left the force a year after he’d written that memo, in serious but unspecified disgrace. It didn’t take too great an imaginative leap to figure out who’d told Derek Lyons about Luca Moretti’s trip to the police station.

  On a more positive note, Serena’s family and friends were a little more forgiving than Mia Arazzi. Her sister and mother had been in touch with Roarkes directly, before he’d had a chance to contact them himself, to tell him that whatever the press were saying, they didn’t see how the police could have been expected to prevent the tragedy, and then again to let him know that his presence at the funeral would be welcome. Malhotra was going, too. Gaddesdon wasn’t well enough.

  That decided it. I was going. Claire was free to go home and smash down her brick wall, I told her, when Roarkes and Malhotra had left.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Oh, OK,” I said. “You’d better stick around.”

  She nodded, and then she saw the look on my face and snorted. We made love one last time on that high, narrow bed, with the door wedged shut and a binliner over the window, twisting our bodies around levers and bars whose positions had imprinted themselves into our minds as firmly as they had our backs and thighs. By evening, Claire was back in London.

  The sun shone on Serena’s funeral. It had been raining all week and most of the week before, and now I was walking away from a freshly dug grave with fifty other people and probably the same number of umbrellas, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Roarkes broke away from the man he was talking to and walked towards me, gathering Malhotra on the way like a piece of plastic caught in a current. It was all a little unfair, I thought. Roarkes had been right on the dead ends, Argentina, the field. He’d known there was good meat on Tarney, but the idiots at Chetwood had shut the door and told him the kitchen was closed. He’d got no help from anyone at Folgate past Gaddesdon and Malhotra, and even then he’d managed to find Brian Betterson. Everything else had come from that. He’d come closer than anyone else to putting all the pieces together, and he’d ended up getting slammed for it. But that was the way it went. People had died. It had to be someone’s fault. Roarkes would do.

  “I see your clients have shown up, Sam,” he said.

  I’d been surprised to see the Carsons, but I shouldn’t have been. Serena’s sister and mother had been in touch with them, too. I was starting to feel a little left out.

  The truth about Sally and Thomas Carson had begun to filter out – the new truth, anyway. But the press were being uncharacteristically quiet about Francis Grissom and Chiara Moretti. Partly because they’d got Thomas Carson so badly wrong in the first place. And partly because a certain foul-mouthed lawyer with a sore arm had been playing fast and loose with the libel threats. The police had confirmed the Carsons would be facing no charges, and all the newspapers had were dead Derek Lyons and a bunch of D-list twentieth century gangsters crawling their way into the twenty-first like beetles from under rocks, anxious to get their hands on a few thousand quid for a ghost-written column. They even had Boris Crick, who I recognised from his grainy silhouette, although he’d chosen the no-less-convincing pseudonym of Mister Zed. They could live without Thomas and Sally. In the space of a week, the Carsons had gone from being the biggest story in the country to last month’s drunken one-night stand: some hazy memories, some bright spots, sure, but not really worth getting back into.

  I still had some questions, though. I’d seen them three times since we’d sat together and rewritten history in my hospital room, once alone, twice with the police. They’d both been discharged the next day, gone home, started to put their lives back together. They didn’t really need a lawyer any more. They certainly didn’t need me hanging around Manchester for them.

  But I still had questions.

  I made an excuse to Roarkes and Malhotra and ambled over to where Sally and Thomas stood, talking to Serena’s sister Pauline and nodding seriously.

  Pauline spotted me first, extended a hand and a genuine smile.

  “Mr Williams. Thanks so much for coming. Serena would have appreciated it.”

  If I hadn’t known the woman was dead I’d have thought it was Serena I was talking to. Less brittle, perhaps, I could tell that from all of three seconds’ meeting, a year or two older, four or five years heavier, happier, more sure of herself. But for all the differences, it was like Serena was standing there in front of me, and for all the appreciative noises she was making, it was like she was asking those same two questions.

  Should I have known?

  Could I have done more?

  “It was the least – I’m sorry for your loss,” I stammered. I looked down and away, and found myself locking eyes with a child, a little girl I hadn’t noticed at first, half hidden behind her mother’s leg. The child gave a shy, awkward smile, which I managed to return, no less awkwardly, before looking back up at her mother.

  Pauline smiled again. Her daughter’s smile. Her sister’s smile.

  “I’ll leave you to talk to your clients.”

  There was a quiet spot in the corner of the churchyard, and we made our way there, to a bench under an ancient yew with the sun bouncing bright off the dewdrops still lingering around the graves. I didn’t waste any time.

  “Tell me about Alé.”


  Thomas set his mouth in a line and fixed me with a hard stare, and for a moment I could see the man he’d been all those years ago.

  “You know about that. He disappeared.”

  “Like Grissom,” I shot back. “Like Francis Grissom and Chiara Moretti, right?”

  He shrugged. The hard stare hadn’t shifted an inch, but Sally had a softer look on her face.

  “We can trust him, you know,” she said.

  Thomas nodded and got up from the bench.

  “Tell him, then. Tell him whatever you want,” he muttered, and walked over to where Roarkes was standing alone. Sally noticed me watching him go.

  “Don’t mind him,” she said. “Guilt. Survivor guilt, they call it. And he blames himself for keeping that bit of paper.”

  And then she told me the truth about Alejandro Lopez.

  “It was the smugglers. They weren’t exactly pros, Sam. The police found out what they were doing, customs found out when they were doing it, half the town knew, they might as well have put a Bat Signal up every time they crossed the mountains. They lost a shipment or two. They decided it was Alé’s fault.”

  She stopped, for a moment, back there in border country with her friend’s life in her hands. I took advantage of the pause to push things along.

  “So he had to disappear, right? And who better to help him than you two. You’d managed it yourselves well enough.”

  She nodded.

  “It took us a couple of days and we spent every second waiting for the bastards to show up at our door. But nothing happened. I guess we got lucky.”

  “And in return, he handed over the business, right?”

  “There wasn’t time for the formalities. We just had to hope his family wouldn’t contest it. Again, we were lucky.”

  “And the monthly payments?”

  “He had nothing. He left with a horse and a saddlebag and the clothes he was wearing. He’d helped Thomas get on his feet when he’d stumbled off the bus in Patagonia in a pretty similar position.”