Haggard Hawk: A Nathan Hawk Crime Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Crtime Mysteries)

by Douglas Watkinson

  “This your mob, then, guvnor?” he asked, referring to the photo of my kids, pinned to the cork notice-board.

  “Mob's about right.”

  “Good looking bunch. I mean in big families you get the odd one or two but rarely the whole gang.”

  He knew the right things to say.

  “You married, Sergeant?”

  “Nah! My sister's got a couple of kids, though. I kind of stand in for their old man since he upped and left her.”

  I took a couple of cans from the fridge and slid one along the table towards him.

  “What can I do for you? Statement?”

  “No, no, that can wait, if it's okay with you.”

  His face shifted into an anxious frown as, from a set of rehearsed possibilities, he chose the best way to say what he wanted to.

  “The other day...” he began and stalled.

  “When you were here with Charnley?”

  “Yeah, he shouldn't have said what he did. To you or to the boy. It was well out of order.”

  “I agree but he does have a point. We often get in the way. Old coppers.”

  He was still frowning as he pushed in the tab on his beer and sipped the foam.

  “What's really on your mind?” I asked.

  The frown broke away and his face relaxed into a grin.

  “Jesus Christ, old coppers, eh! You can't get anything past 'em.”

  He went over to the window to gather his thoughts. Eventually he turned and said:

  “I'm not saying he isn't a good copper. He is, that's why I’m still working for him after two years, but I think he's got this one all wrong. He's up at Grendon Prison every day, slogging through records, interviewing staff and prisoners alike to see who didn't like Jim and, meanwhile, time's passing.”

  “What's that got to do with me?”

  “Well, nothing, but like you said I reckon the answer's closer to home. Those two blokes in The Plough they weren't in prison with him, surely. I mean would they walk into his pub and risk him seeing them?”

  “I've got a variation on that,” I said. “Why risk anyone seeing them? Identifying them later?” He looked at me for an answer. “One, they're stupid. Two, they knew they'd be a long way off by now. Another country.”

  Faraday slid sideways onto one of the chairs at the table and looked up at me.

  “So what are you saying? Charnley's right, wrong, what?”

  “Charnley's looking for shortcuts, budget driven, wants to impress the guvnor with a quick solution. The answer isn't at Grendon, though, I'll bet money on it.”

  “So, where is it?” he asked, eagerly.

  I paused. The growing look of satisfaction on his face was that of a man halfway to reaching some target. I wondered if he'd been sent here by Charnley to pick my brains and I was allowing him to do just that.

  “I don't know,” I said.

  Reading his easy features again, I could see he was disappointed.

  “Oh, come on, guvnor, you must've given it some thought, old pro like you.”

  “I was told to keep my nose out,” I reminded him. “That's what I've done.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, well ... pity. You know there was a documentary on last week, how the Met are taking old coppers back to work on burned out cases...”

  “I saw it.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I think it would've been smarter not to retire us in the first place. By the way, did you ever find out who S was?”

  He flicked his head as if clearing it to cope with my question. I still had to explain it to him.

  “The note to Jim in his post, blue paper, the Monday after he died.”

  “Oh, that. No. Mind you, given that she wanted him to ring her we don't think she killed him first.”

  “It's definitely a woman, then?”

  Faraday shrugged. “The handwriting geezer says it is.”

  He picked a few more seeds from the bottom of his trousers and rose to leave, taking his beer with him. At the door he turned with a cock-eyed smile:

  “So, the boss telling you to mind your own business hasn't done the trick. Hasn't put you off.”

  Maybe that's why he'd been sent. To check that I didn't have my nose in their business, in spite of the warning.

  “I'm a casual observer,” I said. “Nothing more.”

  He tried to make that seem like a shame but the shrug was too contrived.

  “Well, if you casually observe any other bits and pieces, let me know, will you. I mean, Charnley reckons by the middle of next week we'll be looking at a double murder. Julie’s going to cark it, he reckons.”

  “Where's he get that from? Doctors?”

  “Nah, but it's the one thing we agree on. Cirencester, where I was before, there was this farmer, shot himself by accident. It wasn't the blast that killed him, it was digging the shot out afterwards followed by a nifty bout of M.R.S.A.”

  From the kitchen window I watched him walk to his car, parked on the verge in Morton Lane. As he drove away I turned to the ashtray and picked out one of the seeds he'd dropped into it. Sticky, the size of lead shot, ironically. I was forever picking them out of Dogge's coat at this time of year. Bindweed. It only grew in one part of my garden. Behind the cabin. It was a small detail but a telling one. John Faraday had been up there, on instructions from Charnley, I imagine. He'd tried the door then gone out of his way, round the back to look through the window. To get a glimpse into my privacy. I was glad I'd locked up before taking Hideki to the station.

  The phone rang. I didn’t recognise the voice at the other end to begin with.

  “You were rude to me,” she said.

  “Who’s this?”

  “You mean you’re rude to lots of people? I suppose that should be a comfort.”

  “Laura? How was I rude to you?”

  “You were hyper-critical of my driving.”

  “So I was.”

  I could sense her smiling.

  “If you were to buy me a drink at, say, The Harrow, I'd be prepared to forgive and forget. Shall we say half an hour?”

  

  She'd chosen The Harrow at Long Crendon for three reasons, she told me. First, she could cycle there in comparative safety. And get there a damn sight quicker than by car. Second, with it being a Victorian pub its high ceilings meant she wouldn't have to stoop beneath Elizabethan beams, cherished features of most local pubs. Third, you can get a nasty burn under the Winchendon microscope and in Long Crendon she wasn't known to anyone.

  Maggie had been beautiful. That isn't just my opinion, everyone said it. No one will have said it about Laura Peterson. When we'd met at Angie Mitchell's the other night I'd realised that she was a triumph of style over content. Elegant clothes veiled wide hips and broad shoulders, subtle make-up softened the more prominent features of her face. Then I'd got drunk and thought no more about it. Here, in the sober light of a Friday afternoon, in the bay window at The Harrow, the disguise wasn't quite so polished nor the lighting half so kind. The jeans had a deceptive cut to them, the angora sweater reached to her thighs hoping to diminish all beneath it but neither garment could work magic. Under a colourful bandana lay short-cut brown curls, highlighted at the ends, falling with unruly care over a prominent forehead and hugging the back of a boomerang jaw.

  There were plus points, however. First among them were the dark, dark eyes, not riveted to mine in some phoney display of self-confidence or trustworthiness, but scanning my face constantly, for signs of humbug and wrinkles, no doubt. Those eyes belonged in a more beautiful face. Then there was the voice. Her appearance prepared you for the boom of a dowager aunt yet out came the husky strains of seduction. Being asked where it hurt by Doctor Peterson must have sounded like an invitation to sleep with her. The voice, like the eyes, belonged in a different being.

  “You've bought a bottle,” she said when I returned from the bar. “I only wanted a glass.”

  I poured her some of the Fitou. “We can always finish it
later.”

  I could see her wondering if my getting canned at Angie's had been the exception or the rule.

  She said: “You know we were being set up the other night, don't you? Angie Mitchell's the local matchmaker. I've told her time and again not to bother on my account but she still pegs away.”

  “Are you widowed, divorced?” I asked.

  “Just never got round to marriage. I have had a couple of offers, not especially good ones. A surgeon twice my age - I was twenty-six at the time - and a barrister who knocked me off my bike with his Jag. He didn't propose as I lay there in the gutter, of course, he waited till his fourth divorce came through and to this day can't understand my reluctance to jump at the chance of him. Now, at forty, everyone thinks I'm a dyke which is annoying but people are slaves to popular myth.” She paused. “Okay, forty-three. You?”

  “Age? Fifty. Well, okay, fifty-two.”

  I went on to explain that I was a widower, that Maggie had died two years three months and seven days ago from a stroke. Laura tutted. Like me, but from a professional angle I guess, she deplored the waste. She waited to see if I had more to say about Maggie. Rather than go on all evening about her like some jilted teenager I topped up my glass and brought us back to Jim Ryder's murder.

  “Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Would you kill two people for twenty thousand pounds, especially if you had to divvy it up?”

  “You'll be pleased to know that I haven't given the matter a great deal of thought. Even though I have the means to kill people at my disposal and plenty of patients I wouldn't miss. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, say you're the proud owner of a shotgun. If it's money you want why not rob a post office or a building society, come away with five times as much? What I mean is, I think there's more at stake here than what Julie had in her handbag. I think this is about the two million quid which Jim relieved his boss of and hasn’t been seen since...”

  She interrupted. “Julie says Jim didn't steal that money.”

  “I refer you to the time-honoured response of Mandy Rice-Davies – she would, wouldn’t she.”

  “You and Mandy don't believe anyone, then, on principle?”

  “Whether Jim stole that money or not, and I think he did, he was an arrogant bastard. Thought he could handle his own defence. He came up against Georgina Hales, Q.C. and made the mistake of trying to charm her. She had him for breakfast.”

  For some reason that bothered Laura. “Didn't Julie try to persuade him? To get real help?”

  “I don't know and right now it's pretty academic. These two boys up on The Ridge, I'm guessing they were hired help to make it look like a robbery that turned nasty. And they were paid, or at least promised, a damn sight more than twenty grand for their trouble.”

  She nodded and offered me her glass to refill. “By whom?”

  “By someone who was expecting a big pay day.”

  “And you haven't told the police?” she said.

  I shook my head. “They told me to keep my fucking nose out of their business.”

  We carried on talking for another hour or so, a rambling sort of chat mostly but I know my kids came into it somewhere. How clever they were, how individual, and how proud I was of them. Then, true to form, I apologised for banging on about my family in the hope that Laura would say that it didn't matter and I should tell her more. She did and I did.

  At one point, when I must've been winding down, she said: “So, they're all true citizens of the world, Japan, Los Angeles, Paris, New Zealand.”

  “That's another way of saying they've all left home, all skipped the country. I took it personally to begin with but then I asked myself what would I do, time over again?”

  “And?”

  “I'd go. I don't know where, but I'd go.”

  It turned out that Laura would have gone as well, indeed it was still on the cards that she might. She'd studied medicine with all the usual hopes of making a difference and found herself washed up in Winchendon, attending the side-effects of human indolence and excess, not the problems of need. Africa, she thought. She might be of some use there. It was all to do with being of use.

  It broke the conversation. I'd only known her a few days, liked her for only a few hours but the thought of her disappearing to the other side of the world brought me down. Perhaps it was a series of sudden flashbacks that got to me: those last few days with Maggie or the following year saying goodbye to my kids, all of them within the space of a month. Keep in touch, e-mail very soon, phone if you need me. None of it - goodwill, strength, promises - makes up for being left behind.

  We put Laura's bike into the Landrover and drove back to Beech Tree Cottage to finish the bottle. As we turned into Morton Lane I could see Jack Langan loading tools into the back of his pickup. He was a physical man, Jack, with strains of Irish and Welsh running through him in equal measures, madness and pit pony his wife used to say. Reddish hair, not an especially tall man but strong and fit and, at this precise moment, only a fool would've picked a fight with him. Uncharacteristically he was fuming, clattering the ladder down among planks and poles in the truck, slamming shut the tail gate. Maybe he'd finally had a bellyful of indulging his niece, Kate Whitely, in the matter of her boiler.

  When he saw the Landrover coming he stood to one side and raised a hand for me to slow down. He motioned that I should wind down my window.

  “Nathan, need a word, mate...” He noticed my passenger and his manner softened. “Sorry, Doc, didn't see you there.”

  “Hallo, Mr. Langan,” she said. “How are you? How's Jean?”

  “No, no,” he said, as if a denial were called for, “we're both fine. Nathan, give us a call will you. Your convenience. Only make it this evening.”

  “You look fit to kill a rhino, man, bare hands. Why not follow us down, get it off your chest, help us drink the rest of this.”

  “No, don't want to intrude. It'll keep. But only till this evening, mind.”

  He raised a hand and turned away, in case I tried again to persuade him to join us. As I drove down to Beech Tree Cottage I glanced in the rear view mirror, saw him get into his truck and drive away too fast for such a narrow lane.

  Laura and I took the wine and some coffee into the garden and for another hour sat chatting beneath the silver birches. As the branches dipped in the breeze and the sunlight fluttered across her face, I caught glimpses of a beauty I hadn't noticed earlier. Not fashionable beauty but a more interesting, still waters kind.

  Jack Langan came up in conversation again. She knew his wife as a patient and liked her. She asked what I liked about him.

  “What makes you think I do like him?”

  “Your body language, when you spoke to him.”

  “He was here first,” I said. “In this village, I mean. Born in that cottage over there. Will Waterman's. Yet these ponced up marketing consultants we're overrun with, they treat him like a bloody foreigner.”

  She smiled. “So you treat him as a friend?”

  “Not just to buck the trend, no, but because when I tap him he rings true. Men like that should be on every quango, every magistrates' bench, every board of school governors in the land, speaking their good sense. But those jobs get snapped up by village Englanders looking for a hobby. Nobody wants to hear what the likes of Jack Langan have to say...” I stopped. “I'm sorry, I just went off on one. You must stop me. If I do it in the future, you must shoot me down.”

  She nodded and reached down to stroke Dogge.

  “I keep thinking about getting a dog,” she said. “You know, for company, letting me know when people are about. Where did you get her?”

  “She's a Drugs Squad reject. They were kicking her out so we rescued her. She's been rescuing me ever since.”

  She smiled and drank the last of the coffee.

  At four o'clock, before she left for the evening surgery, she reminded me that I'd promised to phone Jack that evening. I told her it was uppermost in my mind.

  As
I watched her pedal off down Morton Lane, the word powerful, as a description of her physique, became replaced in my mind with its slightly less derogatory cousin, sturdy.

  

  I was in bed asleep. Dreaming. I was back in the alley behind my father's fish and chip shop in Whetstone, North London, the smell of it overpowering me. Fish heads, old batter, peelings, all rotting quietly in greasy dustbins. But it wasn't the setting that bothered me, it was the people inside waiting to be served. Laura Peterson was one of them, deep in conversation with my mother. Just as I tuned in to what they were talking about, Hideki said:

  “Nathan, there is phone call.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Three o'clock.”

  In an instant I was out of bed, hauling on my dressing gown, heading for the door. It could only be one of the kids. Some foreign copper at the end of the line would go through the motions of sympathy...

  “Is Mr. Langan,” said Hideki.

  I stopped and my heart came back down out of my gullet.

  “What the hell does he want?”

  It was a question better directed at Jack, once I reached the kitchen phone.

  “Jack, what the hell do you want?”

  At the other end of the line was a drunken Jack Langan, apologetic in the extreme, slow beyond belief.

  “I'm sorry, mate,” he began. “I mean I really am. Three in the morning, you can imagine it must be something pretty big for me to phone you...”

  “It's me who should be apologising,” I said, softening, remembering the times he'd come to my rescue in the past year over blocked drains and leaking pipes. “I said I'd phone you. I forgot.”

  I beckoned Hideki to bring me a chair. Not only had it all the signs of being a long haul, the threat of a recently televised documentary was ever present.

  “What's on your mind, Jack?”

  “You know I moved Kate's boiler? From the corner back to the fireplace. Christ, the number of times I've...”

  “Jack!”

  “Well, it's not just a simple matter of moving it. The flue-pipe has to be re-connected. Being crafty...” He chuckled in appreciation of his own guile. “Being crafty, I left the old flue pipe up in her loft first time I moved it, just in case she changed her mind. So up I go into the loft, start working and over in the corner, I see this box. Long and narrow, mahogany, brass fittings, and I think “What's that?” I go over. On the front is a brass wotsit, what do they call 'em...?”