“No, you go first. Start with what you're wearing on the outside, work your way in...”
“Oh, for God's sake! I'm coming over.”
“No, please...”
But by then I was talking to the dialling tone.
She arrived on her bike about ten minutes later by which time it was dark. From where I was sitting I watched her front lamp light-sabre its way down Morton Lane as she wove between the potholes. She was getting to know them.
“You must be Hideki,” she said when he greeted her at the front door.
He bowed and took the offered hand and she towered her way past him to the kitchen. She paused at the archway and a look I thought I knew crossed her face. It asked if the notion she’d entertained of a long term friendship between us would ever amount to anything.
“Denim,” I said, referring to our phone conversation. “You're wearing denim.”
“And you're drinking...” She lifted the bottle, got the general gist of the label and glared at me. “Port? Clare College Port? You’re a copper. Aren’t you supposed to drink whisky?”
“It’s Con. Every time he couldn’t think of a present for me, or if I needed softening up, he gave me a bottle of that stuff. There’s about thirty in the garage.”
“I could tell you stories about Port that would make your hair stand on end.”
Her eyes drifted to the top of my head.
“Go on, say it. If you had any.”
She shook her head, denying that such a pathetic joke had even crossed her mind.
“You're not going to believe this,” I said. “I don't actually drink a great deal.” She raised an eyebrow, like Dirk Bogarde used to do. “No, really. Hideki'll tell you cos he's nothing if not honest. Hideki, I don't drink much, do I?”
“No...” he said.
I knew how he'd answer, of course. Being Japanese, and unerringly literal, he would respond to the question itself, not to the subject matter within it. “No, that isn't true,” he would have gone on to say, if I’d let him, “you drink like a fish.”
“See?”
Laura wasn't fooled. She screwed the cap back on the bottle until it squeaked.
“As your doctor...” she began.
“You're my doctor?”
“You're registered at The Health Centre so, as your doctor, stop drinking this stuff every time there's a hiccup in your life. It will kill you.”
“Now just a minute. Didn't we have this conversation once before? I'm fifty not fifteen...”
“I thought we'd settled on fifty-two not that age has anything to do with it.”
I looked at Hideki for support but he busied himself emptying a new packet of biscuits into the tin. He was embarrassed but damned if he was going to miss out on a good English row.
“Hiccup?” I said. “Hiccup? Yeah, well it's true that I've just eaten something indigestible because my friend here has yet to discover fire and it's ability to cook things, thereby making them edible. Supper tonight was raw swordfish. The bloody thing is still splashing around inside me. But of course, you're talking metaphorically.” I swung round to Hideki. “And here's a challenge for you, Doc. Explain the concept, first of a hiccup, then its metaphorical equivalent and then teach the bastard to cook!”
I brought my fist down on the table and looked up at them both. There was a pause before Hideki stepped towards me. He pushed coffee cups, biscuits and sugar to one side then took an imaginary map from his inside pocket. He unfolded it and, with meticulous care, laid it out on the table.
It was characteristic of him. Wise beyond his years, forgiving where others would take umbrage and as courteous a human being as you could wish to meet. Earlier I'd seen him talking to his two girlfriends from the village. They'd called at the cottage, all giggles. He’d met them at the gate and told them, I like to think, that he had a duty to look after me. They departed.
I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder but he stepped back quickly.
“Map,” he said.
Full of the emotion which only a gut full of Port can bring I said: “Yes, I can see that. Thanks, Hideki. Kind of you.”
“Map not for you,” he said. “Map for me.”
He sat down at the table, closed his eyes and brought his forefinger down on a coffee ring, somewhere in Japan, I imagine.
Laura said, with a touch of the school marm rising: “Would somebody care to enlighten me?”
“It's a long story,” I said.
“Yes, well, if you blow your top too often, like you just did, you won't live long enough to recount it. Any second now you're going to tell me you smoke forty cigarettes a day, eat fry-ups for breakfast and can’t pee without the aid of a pump.”
I took a deep breath. “My friend Jack Langan, you referred to him as a hiccup. Have I told you how Charnley warned me off poking my nose into Jim Ryder's death?”
“You have.”
“Yes, well, like a fool I did what I was told. I backed off and let them get on with it, regardless of John Faraday coming here to pick my brains. If I'd followed my instinct and started poking around, if I'd made Jack follow us down here yesterday and tell me what was biting him, maybe he'd still be alive.”
There was a pause while Laura thought of something positive to say in my favour. What she came up with wasn't spectacular.
“Well, I don't see what else you were expected to do...”
“Laura, you don't get it, do you.”
She bridled and rose a good two inches, looking down at me, slouched at a narrow angle in the rocker.
“If I don't 'get' something it's invariably because it has not been explained properly. In keeping with most drunks, Nathan, you're half as lucid, a third as funny and one sixteenth as attractive as you think you are. Forgive the assessment being in fractions, I'm something of an old-fashioned gal.”
“He was murdered.”
That shut her up. For all of five seconds.
“Murdered? As in ... killed?”
“No, murdered as in bouncing round the room on his fucking head!”
“I meant ... I'm not sure what I meant ... I meant has it got anything to do with Jim's death?”
“Two murders in a backwater like this? I'd say they were linked if they’d happened in the same century, never mind the same week. Hideki, I'm sorry, really I am ... pour me some more coffee, there's a good chap.”
He refolded the map carefully before feeling the coffee pot and deciding to make fresh. Laura sat down at the table in his place and reached across to take my hand.
Eventually I said: “I've got a reason for drinking today, wouldn’t you say? Jack Langan is number thirty-five in my catalogue of corpses, only no junkie's buzz in my head, no thrill, not this time. This time it was a friend, a man I'd grown to admire for his downright decency...”
“Just a second,” she said. “How do you know he was murdered. Jean says it was an accident.”
“Because that's what the police will have told her. And if that's what they really believe it means they've ignored a real humdinger.” I turned to Hideki, mindful that a new word had just foxed him. “Humdinger. Big, important thing. I nearly missed it myself. There was the yard, quiet as the grave, and there was Jack, spread across the saw bench, sliced in two. So, after he supposedly fell on it, who turned off the saw?”
She puzzled over that for a moment and came up with a reasonable suggestion, one I'd thought of myself and rejected.
“Maybe it had a safety device built in. Gets too hot, clogs up, cuts out.”
“Yes, well, not to put too fine a point on it I didn't smell any char-grilled flesh, or see bits of him bunging up the system. It was all a lot cleaner than that. Apart from the blood, of course, everywhere. No, poor old Jack was on the saw just long enough to die then someone switched it off. And they did so, not from the bench, or there'd be footprints in the blood. They did it from the fuse box by the door. And there were no granite setts there, either”
“What difference does that make?”
&n
bsp; “Someone phoned him at the house, got him to the yard on a pretext. Early delivery, granite setts. Like a fool he went.”
To my way of thinking it was all the proof we needed but instead of Laura's face clearing it was clouding over even more.
“I still can't imagine why anyone would want to ... do such a terrible thing.”
Hideki, who never spoke until spoken to, must have thought it crucial to butt in at that point.
“Nathan,” he said. “You leave out another humdinger. Guns.”
“Guns?” asked Laura.
I nodded. “That's what he phoned me about. He found shotguns up in Kate's loft but they ain't there anymore. I've checked.”
I rose from the chair, taxing my sense of balance, and led her across to the window. Over at Kate's cottage there were no signs of life. Usually I could see her making supper at this time of day, to the background flicker of the evening news.
I said: “Knowing Jack he's done something stupid like asked her to explain their presence, thinking she's still a kid and he could send her to her room if she got lippy. Well, I think she got more than lippy. She got lethal.”
“But they were so close,” said Laura, halfway between laughing at what I'd said and being horrified by its implications.
“Two million quid?” I said. “Drives a big wedge.”
“The money Jim Ryder took? Are you sure these things are all of a piece?”
“Line ‘em all up, Laura, never mind the order. Jim gets shot for twenty grand? No. Much more. Shot with pucker weapons, two of them. Two were found on Kate’s loft...”
“By Jack. He said.”
“Well, he knew a fucking shotgun when he saw one! Now they’re not there and he’s been killed. Of course it’s all of a piece.”
Eventually she asked: “So what are you going to do?”
“What I should've done a week ago, when Jim was shot. Find the bastard who killed him because whoever it is went on to kill my friend Jack Langan, right under my nose. The same fucking nose Charnley told me to keep out of his business. Well, from now on he'd better keep his out of mine...”
That was the point, Laura told me later, at which I passed out, turning awkwardly from the window, closing my eyes and crumpling to the floor. They tried to bring me round, they said. Believe it if you will. All I know is I came to about four hours later, in the spot where I'd fallen, body re-arranged into the recovery position, with a travel rug thrown over me and a cushion under my head. Hideki had gone to bed, Laura had gone home. A bacon slicer was carving thin rashers off my brain at every heartbeat.
-8-
I sat at the kitchen table, in virtual darkness for some reason, with a notepad and pencil and made a list. Maggie had often tried to persuade me of a list's cathartic properties. Faced with an Everest of tasks she would put them down on paper and thereby, in her mind, lay waste to half of them. Jobs that were written down to do were as good as done, bills that needed paying were all but settled, obligations nearly fulfilled.
This would not be the case with Jack Langan’s murder, nor that of Jim Ryder. My list was a head straightener, an agenda, and right at the top of it was Kate. How to tackle her? Head on collision or with a sympathetic line? The latter would be more productive, given that the guns were essentially hearsay. Sorry to hear about your uncle would be the line then, how are you coping, anything I can do?
Right below Kate I put Tom and Gizzy. True or false, this business about Julie leaving Tom The Plough in a will? And where the hell were they when Jim was shot?
Julie. Keep an eye on her. After all, if someone had tried to kill her up on The Ridge and she pulled through, wouldn't they try again? Charnley had a couple of men posted at her bedside, waiting for signs of life.
The two blokes at the pub. Someone could surely give better descriptions than the police had got from Sharon Falconer. Go see her. Tricky with her husband having done a runner but I was pretty sure I could get more out of her than John Faraday’s “Mid-twenties, five eight, built like a brick wotsit with curly dark hair, the other taller, six feet, fair hair.”
Petra and Allan Wyeth. They were the light relief. In dealing with them I'd be harking back to my days as a young detective when, rarely, we'd find ourselves with nothing to do. No trouble to sort out so we'd go and find some. Make some. Great days, not all of them to be proud of.
The Wyeths had taken no part in Jim's murder, I knew that, but something had happened to them up on The Ridge and they didn't want the rest of the world to know about it. So, straight to it and minimise their embarrassment? Or let them dig a bloody great hole, bury themselves in the exhaust story, at which point I'd reveal that I knew they were lying?
Funeral. Check arrangements with vicar, then undertakers.
Stef and Bella, the tapes, ask about guns on loft.
Jean. Visit. Sympathy.

By seven o'clock the next morning, Sunday, I was at the kitchen window, concealed behind the drawn curtain, binoculars levelled. There was no sign of Kate, though Stefan and Bella were shuffling into life.
At seven fifteen I rang Kate's number and there was no answer, not even a message minder. I wondered if she'd be round at Jean's offering tea and sympathy. I could strike two items off my list with one visit. Jean, sympathy and Kate, guns on loft.
A chill had descended on the village, not courtesy the Grim Reaper so much as the onset of Autumn. It had brought with it a clarity of air and light, the better to show us the passing of summer, I suppose. Leaves were turning reddish gold in its glow, a V formation of geese flew overhead, their choral squawking carried to the Chiltern scarp and back. And the police vehicles had gone. For the past few days they’d been buzzing back and forth, more in a show of strength that out of necessity. In the way of these things, life was returning to normal ... at least for those who weren’t involved in the murders.
I tapped on the door of the Langans' cottage and through the diamond of glass saw Jean emerge from the kitchen and glance at herself in the hall mirror. She was about to primp herself then clearly decided that she had every right to look a wreck, under the circumstances, and opened the door to me. She was grief-marked in every respect. Her eyes were red and swollen with tears, her hair lay lank and flat, make-up awry. If she had slept at all it was badly and she had probably done so in the clothes she wore now.
“I know it's a daft question, Jean, but ... how are you?”
She nodded, presumably at the daft question bit, and stood aside for me to enter.
It was a curious place, the Langans' cottage, two up, two down, beamed to excess and in every way, from the absence of a doorknocker to the bare plaster in the living room, a typical builder's house. Unfinished. It was also cluttered with furniture, all in Jack and Jean's particular taste. Hardest to take were the cast-iron kitchen stools, far from their natural home in a Burger King.
“Bloody old fool,” said Jean, once we'd settled on them. “The times I've said to him, get proper tools for the job, don't buy someone else's clapped out rubbish just to save a few quid.”
“Police told you it was an accident?” I said.
She nodded.
When you tell somebody that a loved one has been murdered you tread on rapidly breaking ground that at many moment might shift, plunging the listener God knows where. They're the bleakest words ever spoken and it's usually some young copper who has to say them, delegated to do so by a reluctant boss. I had no one to give the job to.
“Jean, there’s something you should know...”
A sudden thump from one of the upstairs rooms made me stop.
“Gizzy,” she explained. “There's a bedside table there and because of the sloping floor things fall off it.”
“Where's Tommy?” I asked.
“He's there too. They came over to be with me, insisted on staying.”
“And Kate?”
There was the faintest hint of resentment in her reply. “At home, I suppose.”
Gizzy came do
wn the stairs, in dangerously unsuitable shoes, tying a dressing gown at her hip. She gave me an arctic glance, went over to Jean and slipped an arm round her.
“You okay?” she whispered.
Jean nodded and Gizzy started on me.
“You're like one of them bloody vultures,” she said. “Not enough that your police mates keep pestering us, their cars buzzing in and out of the village like blue-arsed flies, we've got you, first on the scene whenever there's trouble...”
Jean was about to reprimand her but wasn’t quick enough. Gizzy rumbled on in a loose tirade about people's feelings and nosy neighbours and arrived at her belief that in a village like this you couldn't do a bloody thing, especially die, without it becoming everyone's business. As the invective petered out, Jean picked up our conversation.
“You were saying, Nathan?”
“I've something to tell you, not welcome I'm sure, but here it is. I don't think Jack's death was an accident.”
Gizzy spun round from the sink, kettle in hand. The tap ran hard against the stone sink, sending a spray into the air. I expected another drubbing but she was stunned into gawping silence. Jean stepped over and turned off the tap, then said:
“What was it then?”
“I think he was murdered. In fact I'm sure he was.”
She thought about it for a moment or two then shook her head. “Then you didn't know him half as well as you think, Nathan. He may not have had many friends, but he didn't have a single enemy.”
“You don't have to be killed out of hate, Jean. Mistakes, wrong time wrong place, lunatics on the loose...”
“Nathan, he's dead,” she said. “Let’s leave it at that.”
“What makes you say ... what you said?” asked Gizzy, in a smallish voice. She wasn’t meeting my eyes anymore.
I explained how I'd found him, how I believed he'd been lured to the yard with news of an imminent delivery of setts. I told them about the safety switch on the saw, how someone must've turned it off from the door. I mentioned also, for Jean's benefit, how peaceful he'd looked. Unafraid. Unsuspecting.
“That's Jack,” she said, faintly. “Never knew what was coming next.”
Haggard Hawk: A Nathan Hawk Crime Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Crtime Mysteries) Page 8