by Joel Hames
NO ONE WILL HEAR
Joel Hames
Praise for Joel Hames
“In Dead North, Hames’ lawyer turned accidental sleuth, Sam Williams, finds himself far from home and neck deep in Manchester’s seamy gangster scene. But what stands out in this intelligent, intricately woven crime procedural - with a plot to make your brain hurt - is the undercurrent of slick and highly enjoyable humour reminiscent of Raymond Chandler, updated for the twenty-first century. Loved it.”
S.E. Lynes, author of Mother, Valentina, and The Pact
“I really enjoyed [Dead North]. The characters spring off the page with such natural ease. I was gripped by the story – I love a book that takes turns where you least expect. It's going to leave me with a thriller hangover for some time.”
John Marrs, author of The One, The Good Samaritan and When You Disappeared
“Hames is such a talent that he has created a white-knuckle, breathlessly-paced read that also has heart. Beautifully written and thrilling, Dead North deserves to go to the top of any chart.”
Louise Beech, author of Maria in the Moon, How To Be Brave and The Mountain in my Shoe
“A pacy thriller, rich in voice and with a gratifying degree of complexity. Hames knows how to deliver.”
John Bowen, author of Where the Dead Walk, Vessel and Death Stalks Kettle Street
About the Author
A Londoner in exile, Joel Hames lives in rural Lancashire with his wife and two daughters.
His works of fiction include the novels Dead North, The Art of Staying Dead and Bankers Town, as well as the novellas Brexecution, Victims and Caged.
When not writing or spending time with his family, Joel likes to eat, drink, cook, and make up excuses to avoid walking the dog.
You can find out more about Joel and sign up to his mailing list through social media or his very own website:
Facebook: facebook.com/joelhamesauthor
Twitter: @joel_hames
Website: http://www.joelhamesauthor.com
Also by Joel Hames
Dead North
The Art of Staying Dead
Bankers Town
Brexecution
Victims
Caged
NO ONE
WILL
HEAR
BY
JOEL HAMES
First published in 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Joel Hames
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover art by John Bowen
For My Wife
CONTENTS
PART 1: TONGUE
1: The Reading of the Will
2: Life Coach
3: You Think You Know Someone
4: The Writing On The Wall
5: The Board
6: The Collateral Damage
7: Lonely Den
8: Pain
9: Small Steps
10: How The Other Half Live
PART 2: TAPESTRY
11: Notorious
12: Crystal
13: Locusts
14: A Nice Drive in the Country
15: A Lonely Death
16: Forgiven
17: Not a Murder Investigation
18: Every Victory Is Tempered
19: A Short History
PART 3: SONG
20: Unwoven
21: A Good Man
22: Relics
23: The Centre of the Web
24: The Silent
25: Sig
26: It’ll All Turn Out For The Best
Still my revenge shall take its proper time,
And suit the baseness of your hellish crime.
My self, abandon'd, and devoid of shame,
Thro' the wide world your actions will proclaim;
Or tho' I'm prison'd in this lonely den,
Obscur'd, and bury'd from the sight of men,
My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move,
And my complainings echo thro' the grove.
Hear me, o Heav'n! and, if a God be there,
Let him regard me, and accept my pray'r.
Ovid, Metamorphoses
PART 1: TONGUE
1: The Reading of the Will
A LARGE, DARK room. Elegant. Brown. Wood panelling on the walls, a huge wooden desk, and a woman in a smart grey suit serving tea and sparkling water who might as well have been made of wood herself for all the expression on her face.
Not that the rest of the quietly-muttering vultures had tears coursing down their well-moisturised faces.
The man behind the desk held a glass of something that definitely wasn’t tea or sparkling water. Whisky, I thought, and took a sniff as I strode up to the desk. Not whisky. Brandy. Cognac. VSOP, no doubt. Very Special Old Preserve.
He frowned as I stepped forward and reminded him who I was, and then he nodded and smiled. If cats could smile, fat, murderous, evil cats, if they could smile before they sank their claws into their prey, that was the smile they’d use. Christian Willoughby’s smile. VSOP. Vile Smug Obnoxious Prick.
Christian Willoughby cleared his throat, and the dull murmur died out. Still seated – the rest of us were standing, but that was Willoughby’s style – he slowly surveyed the room, cleared his throat once more, and began his speech.
“Elizabeth Maurier is dead,” he said. The vultures nodded, and I found myself nodding with them. This wasn’t the time or the place to say that she wasn’t just dead, she’d been murdered. “Elizabeth has passed, but she has left much to remember her by. She has left a legacy of justice, of noble service to the law, she has left memories of the battles she fought and won and those she helped.”
Willoughby paused, surveyed the room again. I followed his eyes. Of the thirty-plus people in the room I hadn’t recognised a soul, when I arrived, but now I found myself locking eyes with David Brooks-Powell, which didn’t count, because he probably didn’t have a soul anyway. Same face, same hair. He hadn’t changed in a decade. I’d seen him at the funeral; I’d seen him a year or so back, when I’d shredded his professional reputation in a public courtroom, each event greeted with the same sombre scowl. The years, Elizabeth Maurier’s death, his own humiliation, nothing had got to him. He tilted his head in a barely-perceptible nod of civilised enmity, and went back to staring at Willoughby. After everything that had come out in court, the devil alone knew what he was doing here.
Mind you, the devil alone knew what I was doing here, too.
“She has left memories of her professional life, her cultural life, her personal life,” continued Willoughby, warming to his theme. “She has left memories as a lawyer, as a friend, as a mother.” He paused, again, nodded towards a woman standing directly in front of him, and I gave a start.
Lizzy Maurier. At the funeral she’d been anonymous among a mass of hats and black veils. The last time I’d seen her face, she’d been halfway through her twenties. She was shaking, slightly, drawn in, old before her time. The same ten years that hadn’t aged Brooks-Powell a second had done a job on Lizzy Maurier.
Perhaps I was being uncharitable. Her mother had recently been murdered, after all.
Willoughby held the pause to allow the restless fidgeting of his audience to subside. It was a cold wet December outside, but I couldn’t se
e the window for all the gathered vultures, and in here it was hot, close and still. He smiled into the newly-restored silence, and returned to his monologue.
“Of course, Elizabeth also left a legacy of a more tangible sort, and it is that legacy that falls into my modest domain.”
The vultures chortled, quietly, obligingly. I didn’t know Willoughby well, but I suspected modesty didn’t feature amongst his various vices.
Another pause. So many expectant people in the room. I wondered what they were expecting. For the most part, something simple, no doubt. Money. A house or a car. Shares and bonds and interests in complex offshore arrangements. A painting. A favourite tea service.
I wasn’t expecting anything like that. As for what I was expecting, I could no more have answered that than I could have decapitated Willoughby and Brooks-Powell with my bare hands.
And that would have been interesting.
Willoughby had “called on me” three days after the funeral. That was how he’d put it, when he rang the doorbell at nine in the morning and forced me from my bed. “I apologise for calling on you without notice,” he said, “but we really must discuss your attendance at the reading of the will.”
Willoughby was wearing a suit and tie, and went on to address me as “dear fellow”. I was in a dressing gown. Claire was in the kitchen hammering angrily at her laptop, so absorbed in whatever she was doing that she hadn’t even noticed the doorbell. I gaped at him, and stepped aside to allow him into the flat.
“I won’t keep you, dear fellow,” he continued. He smiled out of a face shining with oils that probably cost more than I made in a year. “It’s just that I do rather need a response, and the late Mrs Maurier did make it clear that she very much wished you to be present.”
He’d said as much in the letter I’d received two days earlier. The late Mrs Maurier requested your presence, and the date, and the time, and the address, and nothing else. The late Mrs Maurier had been my first employer, had raised me to the edge of brilliance, and fired me (at the urging of my colleague and nemesis, David Brooks-Powell), had ignored me for years, even after I’d sued Brooks-Powell and her firm, had tried, belatedly, to contact me in the week before she’d been stabbed to death. I’d had next to nothing to do with the woman for close to a decade, so I’d assumed Willoughby’s letter was either a mistake or something half of London had received, and thought no more about it.
Clearly I’d been wrong. Half of London wouldn’t have Christian Willoughby in their living room, smiling and gazing appraisingly at the furniture. I’d conceived an instant dislike for the man, and I wanted him out of my flat.
“I’ll consult my diary,” I replied, hoping for a break in the smile, but he nodded and “took his leave” with an exaggerated courtesy that deepened my dislike still further. I’d never liked probate lawyers, but that was a prejudice even I knew was unfair. Just because they harvested the dead like jackals didn’t make them bad people. But Willoughby was smug, and, by the look of him, unfeasibly rich. I’d have given good money to lock him in a room with Brooks-Powell and a single spoonful of caviar, and leave them there for a week or two.
I walked into the kitchen and sat watching Claire hammering away at that laptop for five minutes before I said a word, and when I told her what had happened and what I was inclined to do with Willoughby’s invitation, she finally stopped typing and turned to me with a sigh.
“It’s not like you don’t have the time,” she said, with a gentle smile that did little to moderate the sting of the words. “And what have you got to lose?”
She’d been right, of course. I didn’t want to see Brooks-Powell and I didn’t want to be reminded of Elizabeth Maurier and the past and what I might have been, had things not gone the way they did. But that wasn’t reason enough to stay away. Of course, Claire hadn’t left it at that. She’d told me to stop running away and face things, she’d told me that something good might come of it, she’d told me that Elizabeth Maurier must have had a reason to want me there, and it must have been a good reason or Christian Willoughby wouldn’t have trekked all the way from Mayfair to North London to request my presence.
All good points, of course. But still, I wasn’t expecting a Rolls Royce or a Rolex.
Willoughby was into his stride, now, declaiming loudly on “the estate” and “the beneficiaries” and “the various trusts which he was honoured to accept the responsibility of administering”. All those expectant beneficiaries were nodding solemnly and keeping their expressions neutral as their expectations were met or dashed with each announcement. Lizzy Maurier got her mother’s houses – the Holland Park townhouse, the Cotswolds manor, the gîte in the Dordogne, and most of the cash and other assets. Various items of artwork and jewellery went to nieces and nephews, cousins, old family friends, Willoughby himself. The items were shrinking in value as the list went on, and those who had yet to receive their wished-for boon were struggling to conceal their dismay. Nothing for me, of course. Nothing for Brooks-Powell, either.
A fly settled briefly on my collar, and I barely summoned the energy to sweep it away. On he went, the Volvo, the Nissan; her long-dead husband’s collection of classic cars had been donated to the appropriate museum decades earlier. The fly landed on Willoughby’s desk and hopped onto the rim of his almost-empty brandy glass. Perhaps it was bored enough to be contemplating suicide. It wasn’t the only one.
“And now we come to a separate and somewhat unique part of the legacy,” said Willoughby. “One which will be both an honour and a solemn duty to take possession of, should the beneficiaries choose to accept.”
Solemn duty. I blinked and tried to refocus my attention. This sounded bad. This sounded like me.
“The achievements of the late Mrs Maurier have been celebrated in print on numerous occasions, but as is the way with these things, there has, as yet, been no consistent record of her work and her life. Whilst Mrs Maurier was not one to glory in her own victories or wallow in her thankfully rare defeats, she did believe that there would be a benefit to posterity in the presentation of her life in, as it were, the round.”
I felt a sour taste in the back of my throat and swallowed. The fly remained motionless on the edge of the glass, and suddenly I found myself afraid to glance up and meet Willoughby’s eye.
“To that end, Mrs Maurier has asked that three individuals take on the task of assembling a full account of her career, from the notes and diary entries she meticulously made and retained, from the information available in court records and the public domain, and, where appropriate, from their own memories.”
From their own memories. Elizabeth Maurier knew what she was doing. Elizabeth Maurier always knew what she was doing.
The fact that I’d known Claire was right hadn’t been enough to stop me having second thoughts right up to the moment I put on my coat and stepped outside. All that morning I’d been trying to come up with reasons to go, and reasons not to, and the reasons not to won every time.
“Just say Roarkes calls?” I asked Claire, and she shook her head at me, slowly, sitting on the sofa and watching me with a look of quiet disappointment.
“If Roarkes calls, you’ll call him back. How long do you think you’ll be in there, anyway? Roarkes can wait.”
“How do you know?” I snapped, and instantly regretted it.
“Are you an oncologist?” she asked. I breathed out, slowly. This was a fight I wasn’t going to win. “Are you an expert in palliative care? A hospice director, perhaps? Are you any use whatsoever to your friend Roarkes and his wife?”
“No, it’s not that,” I said, for want of anything else. She stood, walked over to me, placed her hand on my arm.
“It’s precisely that,” she said, gently. “That’s exactly what it is. Helen Roarkes is dying. There’s nothing you can do about that, there’s nothing any of us can do about that, and I’m sure Roarkes will want to talk to you about it some day. But right now he doesn’t seem to want to talk to anyone, does he?”
> I kept my mouth shut. She was right. Of course she was right. That didn’t make it any easier to accept.
“Does he?” she repeated, and I shrugged at her and shook my head. It had taken her a long time to warm to Roarkes, I remembered, to push aside her distrust of the police, but she’d got there in the end. I should have been grateful she was looking out for him and for me. I should have been grateful she’d spoken patiently with me instead of snapping my head off.
I’d always found gratitude hard.
I left twenty minutes later, with Claire now shouting, but not, thankfully, at me. Someone had called, a Sergeant Jenson, and asked to speak to her about the case, which I’d thought might be something positive. She’d spent enough time trying to get someone in authority interested in it, after all. But now Sergeant Jenson was reaping the benefits of my mistimed words and silences. Sergeant Jenson would be wishing he’d waited an hour or two before making that call.
Silence had fallen, again. A roomful of vultures, all praying they wouldn’t be one of the three.
I didn’t even bother with the prayers. That line about memory had nailed me as sure as if Willoughby had said my name.
“The three individuals are perfectly within their rights to decline this bequest. I use the term bequest because, as the lawyer and confidante of the late Mrs Maurier, I advised her to frame it as such. The individuals will, if they choose to accept, receive a bequest of the records and rough memoirs Mrs Maurier compiled throughout her life, on the condition that they work together to create a full and proper account of her career. There will be a small retainer to compensate for their time and effort.”