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

by Douglas Watkinson

  “Of course not,” said Claudia, ticking another box. “What age range?”

  “Forty-three. Or thereabouts.”

  “And large or petite?”

  “On the ... chunky side.”

  “Blonde? Brunette?”

  “Dark hair. Very dark eyes”

  She smiled at me. Her own smile, I think, not the business one. “You seem very sure of what you want.”

  “I didn't know I was but ... yes.” I was coming out of my shell a little. “I'd also prefer someone professional. A doctor, say, someone like that?”

  She leaned back in her chair and tapped her posh biro on the leather edge of a redundant blotter.

  “You know, we can't always guarantee to match expectations precisely but we do have quite a selection of ladies in your Target Profile range. If anything stumps us it'll be the doctor, the professional thing, though we do have a beautician, a lady farmer and a chiropodist on our list. Would they be professional enough?”

  “I’m sure they would.”

  “Perhaps at this stage we should talk about how it works?”

  “Let’s do that,” I said. “You know I could do with a bit of a holiday myself right now. I was thinking ... Japan, somewhere like that. Where's Kate gone?”

  “Europe. Round and about.”

  That could mean anything from Finland to Turkey via Galway Bay but I nodded enviously. It was beginning to look as if Kate was still alive and Claudia had been told to keep her trap shut about where she was staying.

  “The way it works is this,” she said. “We publish your details, together with a photo if you think that's appropriate, in a monthly magazine, posted to all clients. The Foley Bridge Bulletin. This contains between two and three hundred contacts, male and female, at least a hundred of whom are new every month. All correspondence between clients who wish to meet each other is done through this office...”

  She patted a tray of letters beside her. They were ready to be signed and sent.

  “... that's for security reasons. You'll know all about that, being in fish. Once you've exchanged the first letter, obviously, what follows is up to the clients concerned.”

  “When do I pay you? Only I haven't got my credit cards with me.”

  My eyes went back to the correspondence tray. Some of the letters were already in envelopes. Some of the envelopes had been stamped.

  “You can phone the card number through to me when you get home. As soon as you've paid, your details will be included in the Foley Bridge Bulletin and a copy will be sent to you.”

  “And what do you charge?”

  “Two hundred and twenty pounds a month, plus V.A.T.”

  I went right back into my shell again. In genuine amazement I asked:

  “Jesus! Who owns this business?”

  “Kate does. She bought it about nine months ago when it was on the ropes and she's turned it around. You must've seen our advert in The Oxford Times.”

  I shook my head. Kate had kept Foley Bridge Intros a secret, at least from most of her family and the Winchendon Gestapo. That was just as well given the nature of it, planned adultery. But Gizzy had obviously caught a whiff of the money Kate was raking in which is why she'd asked her sister's advice about borrowing the stuff.

  So, was Kate in Europe, round and about? Or was there more to her sudden disappearance than getting a late sun tan? As the boss of this outfit she'd want to keep in touch, surely, wherever she'd gone, for whatever reason. She could do that by phone or e-mail. But there'd also be things to physically check, cheques to write, letters to sign...

  I spent another quarter of an hour giving Will Waterman's details to Claudia and, when it came to his hobbies, I told her about the goats but left out the photography. Claudia's summary was that I'd be intro'd within the first month. I left on a cloud of superfluous hope, promising to ring her with my credit card details the moment I reached home.

  On the bridge, maybe fifty yards from Blenheim Stalk, there was a double pillar-box. I walked along to it and checked the collection times, in the childish belief that the Post Office still sticks to them. The next was two fifteen. There was a clear eye-line between the box and the Italian restaurant, down on the riverfront, and with it being lunch time I was feeling peckish anyway.

  Spinatori's did food in the modern style. Very little of it and served on a plate you could put to sea on. I went for the cannelloni and twenty minutes later wondered if they'd understood me. Can you mistake the words: “I'll have the cannelloni, please” for “Nothing for me, thank you”?

  Out on the river, Salters the boat people were having a good day. An armada of punts was slopping up and down, manned by day-trippers, mainly couples with teenage kids of seventeen or eighteen. I guessed there was an open day at some of the colleges. These hopeful parents would be passing off life in this golden stepping-stone city as a matter of boating, boozing and opposite sex-ing, with an occasional essay thrown in for good manners. They would confess, with half-embarrassed smiles, their own misdemeanours all those innocent years ago.

  The view inside the restaurant was pretty gentle too. The place was busy with hurrying scoffers from nearby offices and an easy going bunch of academics discussing the wine they were drinking. A sedate, elderly couple, fresh from the shopping malls, were smiling on a good looking girl and her partner with a small baby. Closer to me an open day family was on its best behaviour. The proud father was chatting to three late summer visitors. They were Dutch, the bald one told him. They were told in return how clever the English daughter was and that she'd been offered a place at Somerville. The Dutch guy said something about The Communards and I stopped listening...

  The focal point of the place, especially to everything male in the room, was tall with dark skin, dark hair and dark eyes. Her Italian was perfect though not so her English. Maybe that's why I was still waiting for the cannelloni. As a waitress she made a beautiful, full-figured reminder of the things I'd lost when Maggie died. I guess I felt that partly because of what I'd been through, albeit in Will Waterman's name, up at Foley Bridge Intros. The woman I'd described as being ideal had been Laura Peterson. I glanced round for Fee and Ellie. No sign. But they would be there, in Maggie's name, the first time I tried to kiss Laura. I knew it. They would stand in a corner, arms folded, while I unbuttoned her blouse and tried to re-run some youthful night, thirty years ago. They would turn to each other, in amused disbelief, and say: “But he is our father!” They would stop me, dead in my tracks, at the second button down.

  The cannelloni still hadn't come. I took my glass of Lambrusco and a bread-stick out onto the pontoon. A family of swans came over to scrounge haughtily from me and then moved on with never a word of thanks. I took out my phone and dialled Laura's number. All manner of clicks and ticks re-routed me to the phone in the surgery.

  “Doctor Peterson?” said the husky voice.

  “It's Nathan,” I said. “Didn't you recognise me?”

  “How could I have done? You didn't say anything.”

  “I meant my number. Didn't it come up on the L.E.D? I always recognise yours.”

  “If I knew what the L.E.D. was, or where I might find it, I'd be able to tell you but, as of this moment, no.”

  “I'm sorry. Start again. Laura, it's Nathan. What are you doing tomorrow, Saturday?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Would you like to go out for the day?”

  “Where to?”

  “I don't know yet. Europe definitely.”

  She interrupted with a giggle. “That could mean Milan or Milton Keynes. What are you drinking?”

  Up on the bridge I saw Claudia leave Blenheim Stalk with an armful of post and head towards the pillar box.

  “I'll call you tonight.”

  I switched off the phone and watched as Claudia reached the box and began to feed Foley Bridge Intros mail into it. I glanced at my watch. One fifteen. I went back into the restaurant where the cannelloni had finally arrived.

  The waitres
s had also brought me another glass of wine, compliments of the house, to apologise for the long wait. She was beautiful, no doubt about it, but she was hardly my Target Profile. She had dark hair and very dark eyes but she wasn't forty three. She wasn't professional and on the chunky, awkward side... with something about her.

  

  The postman arrived to empty the pillar box, ten minutes late. I wanted to point that fact out to him but it didn't quite go with the anxious clerk I was trying to impersonate. I hurried up to him as he reached in and started hand-shovelling mail into a sack.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, “I've made a balls up. If you could just...”

  I was reaching into the mail myself now. The postman was puzzled but easy.

  “Problem?”

  “I've sent the letter, didn't include the contract. They'll think I'm mad... Ah! There it is.”

  I'd seen the name Kate Whitely above an address. I grabbed the envelope and held it close to me as if my life, or at least my job, depended on it.

  “Next post, five thirty,” said the postman. “Should still get there tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, mate. Take care.”

  I headed back to Westgate and the Landrover.

  

  It wasn't Milton Keynes and it wasn't Milan. It was an address in Walberswick, on the Suffolk Coast. When I phoned Laura that evening to tell her, she was delighted.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “I love that part of the world. What time do we leave?”

  “Well, it's not quite that simple.”

  “Oh?”

  “It depends on you and how presumptuous you think I'm being.”

  There was a pause while she tried to break that down into understandable parts. It didn't make things any clearer.

  She said: “The telephone isn't a good way of us communicating, is it.”

  “The problem is this: it's too much of a slog to go there and back in one day. We'd have to stay over.”

  There was another pause, quite a long one for Laura, while she considered the implications of a night on the East coast with me.

  “Fine,” she said, eventually. “So what time do we leave?”

  “Eight o'clock. There was one other thing...”

  “Yes?”

  “Can we go in your car? It's a bit of a long haul in a Landrover. And can I drive?”

  “I'll pick you up, ten to eight.”

  The phone went dead.

  -15-

  I can remember going to Southwold as a kid, eight years old, with my parents. There's not much I do remember from childhood but I could guide you along the path from Southwold to Walberswick as if I'd walked it yesterday.

  It ran in a shallow curve behind a grass covered dyke, twice as tall as my father. We could hear the waves breaking on the shingle beyond it and on a windy day the spray would gust over the defence, flatten our hair, sting our faces and dowse the old man's cigarette. He'd curse and my mother would laugh.

  To our right, draining a bunker-studded golf course, ran a wide ditch, alive with frogs and tall with reeds. Warblers clung to them, gorging themselves on the feathery heads as they swayed in the breeze. In the dense undergrowth beneath, my father told me, there would be golf balls, knocked there by ponces who had never done a day's work in their lives. Sure enough, as we prodded with our sticks, we'd uncover them, pluck them from their muddy hiding place. With a wipe on the grass verge, a final polish on our trousers, they would shine like new stars.

  As we approached Walberswick, and the mouth of the River Blyth, the dyke sloped away and gave us, fresh each day, that thrill which comes from a first sighting of the sea. If the wind was cold my mother would blame the Russians and their Steppes. The path began to wind its way around sculpted inlets, spurred off from the estuary, all tongues and loops, like the unfinished edge of a jig-saw puzzle. The incoming tide brought with it the smell of ozone and seaweed to our North London noses and as the water rose it lifted from the mud the stranded wooden boats, angle-beached along the high tide mark. As they regained their upright dignity, so they were filled with the promise of places I'd only seen on postage stamps, or heard my father talk about as places he'd been to in The War. Hoist the sail on any one of those tiny craft, slip the muddy chain that held them to the bank and by nightfall I could have been in Malaya, Indonesia, The Cocos Islands.

  Near the river bank the stone path gave way to narrow wooden planks held up by rough oak timbers. The path reached all the way to the water's edge, where it became a jetty, and took us over the silt brought down each day from the hinterland. Mum would take my hand in case I fell into it, Dad would speak of a Bailey Bridge farther up river, left there by the army like the tank traps still standing on the beach itself. I didn't know what he meant. It just sounded so good.

  At the end of the jetty a ferry waited, a simple rowing boat owned by two brothers, the oldest men I had ever met. I can see them now, one large and jolly, the other slighter and bad tempered. Ernie and Bob. They would help us into the boat and row us across. My father would pay them sixpence.

  At the other side, two girls used to come running to meet us, heavy shoes clumping on the broken concrete road, cardigans flying behind them like tail feathers. They had green eyes, both of them, and pudding basin haircuts and yet I could sense it, even at eight years old: their dawning femininity.

  They would walk up to the pub with us. The Bell. There was a forge near or beside it, where horses were shod in the traditional manner. I can still hear the sizzle of bone as the red hot shoe burned into the hoof, I can taste the sickly smoke as it rose...

  There it ends. I've no other memory of the place apart from the wife of an old army friend my father had come to see. She was tall and seemingly built of incongruous parts: long thin legs, wide hips, a short and narrow torso. The head was small and fierce with black hair cut short either side of a bony face. She had small eyes and an accent I didn't understand.

  Could Laura and I find that wretched path, the dyke, the bridge my father talked about? We could not. But we did find The Bell Inn and had lunch there, after which we found the cottage Kate Whitely was living in. It was called Herondale and was out on the road to Blythburgh.

  It was the smaller of a pair of semi-detached cottages with a sharply pitched roof covered in big, shovel-like tiles. A square bay window stood out from the front of the house, so large that it took up most of the front garden. The front door, enclosed in a glass porch, was round at the side, giving out onto a narrow driveway.

  Somebody was definitely at home. The local radio station was blathering away with the lunch-time news. The smell of a casserole drifted out through an open window. I rang the doorbell. A moment later we heard Kate's voice:

  “Who's forgotten their key then? Who's a silly Billy?”

  She flung open the door and was about to say something witty, or teasing, to whoever stood before her. Instead, she gawped, from one to the other of us.

  “Hi, Kate!” I said.

  The gawp turned to anger as, no doubt, she scoured her mind for the name of the person who'd betrayed her. Claudia must've been top of the list.

  I said: “You know Laura Peterson, don't you?”

  “Hallo, Kate,” purred Laura. “How are you?”

  “Is that a medical question?” she asked, frostily.

  Laura smiled at her. “It's a small-talk, personal question. How are you?”

  “I was just fine, till a few seconds ago.”

  “Can we come in?” I asked.

  She didn't reply, in fact she stood stock still, in a kind of limbo, as if there were still a chance that she could deny her presence here. As if her quip to someone about forgetting their key had been a sound bite on the radio. As if the casserole in the oven were meant for someone she'd never met. As if Laura and I might go away and forget that we'd ever been here.

  She stepped aside and gestured for us to enter.

  The house was markedly different to Beech Tree, or Maple, Kate's own in Winchendon. There
was light here. Daylight, through larger windows than ours, hitting white walls which, in this instance, had not yet been hung with mirrors and pictures. In fact they were freshly painted, or so the smell and the sheen on them told us. There were cardboard boxes all over the place: in the hall, under the stairs, on the stairs. There were even a few in the front room Kate led us to.

  “Setting up house?” I said.

  She wasn't answering leading questions. “Why are you here, Nathan? It is me you want to see, I take it?”

  “Who else?” I asked, as pointedly as I could manage.

  “Well, I don't know,” she said, fiercely. “You're the one who's travelled all this way...”

  “For several reasons,” I said. “First is, I have bad news.”

  “For me?”

  If she'd had it tattooed on her forehead, it couldn't have been clearer. There was someone else knocking about in her immediate life and she was hoping to keep them a secret.

  “It's about your Uncle...”

  “Jack?”

  “You have other uncles?”

  “Nathan, please, what has happened?”

  I paused and lowered my voice. “Listen, Kate...”

  Unable to bear the thought of me using Kate's impending grief as a weapon against her, to determine guilt or innocence, Laura stepped in.

  “I’ll do this bit, Nathan. Kate, I'm afraid Jack has passed away.”

  Kate stood for a moment, staring into Laura’s face. Then she screwed up her eyes and whispered:

  “You mean ...died?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Kate began to shake her head. Her hands went up to her face and she tried to cover it, as if forming a cave in which to hide.

  “No, no... please.”

  “I’m afraid it's true.”

  Laura went over to her, opened her arms and Kate stepped back, holding up her hands as a barrier. In a whisper she asked what had happened and Laura explained the circumstances of Jack’s death more tactfully than I could ever have done.