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

by Douglas Watkinson

  

  Half an hour later, we were seated at the kitchen table. Laura had made a pot of tea and Kate had begun to properly absorb the news of Jack's death and to realise some of its implications.

  “Is Jean alright?” was the first question she asked.

  “She's taken it on the chin,” I said. “But then she would. I think she'd like you there, though, when it comes to the funeral.”

  She nodded. “Of course, of course. I'll come back.”

  “Kate, I'm afraid I've other bad news,” I said.

  She looked at me, as if whatever I was about to tell her would be my fault. “Is it as bad as Jack dying?”

  “It's Gizzy and Tom. The police have arrested them.”

  Kate looked at me and mouthed: “Jesus, what for?”

  “Nor for anything. In connection with...”

  “You mean that's better?”

  “...in connection with Jim's Ryder's murder.”

  She reached out for the ball of tissues she'd fashioned and held it to her eyes.

  “Kate, they didn't do anything,” I said, taking her hand, “and you're the one who can prove it. That's why I'm here. They lied to the police, said they were at The Plough when they weren't. They were with you. You're their alibi.”

  “Will the police accept that as proof?” said Laura.

  “It's a start. It'll need more, but...”

  Kate twisted her hand out of my grip and said, angrily:

  “Why do I need an alibi as well? Do they think I had something to do with Jim's murder?”

  She stood up, sending the chair backwards, tipping it over. Laura stood up and righted it. Kate prowled back and forth. The Whitely strop had come into its own and I was pleased to see it.

  “I don't get you, Nathan. I don't understand. You're here and comforting me one minute, the next you're saying...”

  “So prove me wrong, Kate. Friday night, the seventeenth, Gizzy and Tom came over to see you. Why?”

  “They wanted to borrow money from somewhere. They thought I might know who to approach.”

  “Did you help them?”

  “No, I didn't want to.”

  “Why not?”

  She flared up. “Christ, is it really any...”

  I swung round in my chair and looked up at her.

  “Why not?”

  She was embarrassed to voice the reason, though far from apologetic about having it.

  “I don't want my little sister chained up to a moron for the rest of her life. We've all married the wrong men in our family. Can't one of us break the pattern?”

  A timer went off in the kitchen. Kate explained:

  “Supper tonight. Top oven, needs moving down to the bottom one.”

  “I'll do it,” said Laura.

  Kate flopped back into her chair at the table. I asked quietly:

  “So what time did they arrive?” She looked at me. “Gizzy, Tom, night of the murder. What time did they get to your house?”

  “Ten, just after. We argued a bit, of course. Never fails. They went at eleven. What time was Jim killed?”

  “Eleven thirty-five. Up on The Ridge.”

  She shrugged, presumably by way of saying they could hardly have performed a double shooting half an hour later.

  “You ride a motorbike, Kate?”

  “What's that got to do with it?”

  “Christ, you and Gizzy, two peas in a pod. Answer the question.”

  “I can ride one, if that's what you mean. Do I? No.”

  “So they left at about eleven,” I said. “What did you do then?”

  “I went to bed.”

  “Who knows you were there, between eleven and eleven thirty-five?”

  She thought about that for a moment, then said:

  “No one.”

  Laura came back into the room, nodded to Kate that the casserole was doing fine. Kate thanked her.

  “When did you move the shotguns?” I asked.

  “What shotguns?”

  “The ones that go bang and kill people.”

  The brief spell at the table had been as good as a rest to her. She was up on her feet again, prowling.

  “What bloody shotguns, Nathan?”

  “Kate, you think I drifted in on the last tide? The guns, up on your loft. Jack saw them, Tuesday, when he moved your famous boiler. Wednesday morning they weren't there and neither were you. We know where you went. Here. Did you bring the guns with you?”

  She turned and appealed to Laura.

  “I don't know what he's talking about. Do you?”

  “Purdeys. In a wooden case, the initials J.A.M. on it. What the fuck have you done with them?”

  Again she appealed to Laura, hands wide in a cry for help.

  “Don't look at her, look at me. Believe it or not, I'm trying to help you. Who's here with you?”

  “No one.”

  “There is. Are they upstairs, in the garden, or still out? Did they take their key with them or not?”

  She chuckled, nerves to the fore. “Oh, that. That was meant for Mrs. Meakin. She cleans and cooks.”

  “What does she clean? You've only just moved in and everything's freshly decorated. What does she cook? You do a nice enough casserole of your own.”

  “What makes you think there's someone here?”

  “Did whoever it is move the guns for you? Are they his? Did he shoot Jim in the first place? Does he ride a motorbike?”

  “Stop,” she yelled, placing her hands over her ears. “Stop. Stop.”

  She leaned back against the wall and eventually said, calmly:

  “There were no guns on my loft, and if there were I didn't put them there. I didn't move them. There is no man living here with me.”

  “So you pee standing up?”

  “What?”

  “Downstairs toilet. The door was ajar when I passed it. The seat is up. Anatomy. Go check.”

  She didn't, because she didn't need to. Laura did. While she was out of the room I said, quietly:

  “She doesn't like me talking to you this way. But then I don't like whoever it is that killed your uncle. I plan to have their guts for it.”

  Laura came back into the room.

  “You thought I was lying?” I asked.

  “Strategically.” She turned to Kate. “He wasn't.”

  Kate looked down at the floor for a moment or two, then said:

  “Come and meet him.”

  

  We walked, the three of us in procession, along the bank of one of the inlets. The tide was high, the water made choppy by a breeze coming in from the east. The Russian Steppes, no doubt. Over on the far side a large flock of birds, geese I think, flew close to the ground, the careless flick of a darkened brush on an otherwise perfect skyscape.

  “How did you find me?” Kate asked.

  “Turner's gave me your new business address. Blenheim Stalk. I went to it.”

  She smiled. “Did we fix you up?”

  I glanced back at Laura. “Kind of. Then I waited for Claudia to go to the post box. An hour later I intercepted the guy collecting.”

  “Can you do that?” she asked, indignantly.

  “You can do anything if your neck's long enough. Ask that swan over there.”

  A hundred or so yards off-shore, three sailing boats were moored to orange coloured buoys. Kate stopped at the nearest point to one of them and turned to us.

  “My turn to surprise you, I think.”

  “Nothing surprises me, Kate. Shocks me, yes, but nothing surprises.”

  She cupped her hands to her mouth and called out to one of the boats.

  “Ahoy there The Merlin! Show your face!”

  We saw the boat rock a little as a man emerged from below decks, a paint can in one hand, a brush in the other. He waved to Kate before he fully realised that we were with her. Then he recognised me. Kate turned to me and I said:

  “Is there a halfway point, between shock and surprise?”

  “Who is
it?” said Laura, pretending to not really care. “I've left my glasses in the car.”

  “It's Martin Falconer,” I said. “Sharon Falconer's husband.”

  Kate watched Laura for a reaction, hackles raised.

  “Good choice,” said Laura, maintaining the peace.

  On board The Merlin, Martin had padlocked the hatch and climbed into the dinghy tied alongside. He rowed the hundred yards to the shore, against an ever-stiffening breeze. When he reached the bank, he threw the painter to Kate and she tied it to a metal stake, angled into the grass verge.

  “So that's it,” said Martin, scrambling ashore, looking at me. “She's found me.” His tone of resignation was replaced by concern when he saw that something pretty dreadful was on Kate’s mind. “What's happened? Why the face?”

  As she told him about Jack, he wrapped his arms around her and muttered sympathetically. Finally he came over to us, shook hands with Laura first, then with me.

  “I thought it would be Sharon,” he said, “the reason for you being here, I mean. She'll catch up with me one day, I just don't want it to be... Why are you laughing?”

  “I'm not,” I said. “It's just that last week she asked me to track you down. Offered good money.”

  “So, now I suppose you’ll...”

  “Suppose nothing. Does anyone fancy a drink?”

  We all fancied a drink.

  

  We sat round a table in the warmth and comfort of The Bell and, with it being early afternoon, we had the place pretty much to ourselves. I tried to ask Martin and Kate the question uppermost in my mind.

  “How did you two ... well ...”

  Nobody was willing to complete the sentence for me, though they all knew what I was trying to say.

  “As a couple, you two...” I began again.

  I crossed two fingers, a universal sign of attachment, surely, but not to the three people I was with. They waited. Martin and Kate were even beginning to enjoy my discomfort.

  I don't know why I was being so reserved about the matter. Something to do with the age difference between them, maybe, or the fact that Laura and I weren't...

  I couldn't even finish the thought.

  “You and Martin...” I said, making a circular motion with my hand, an invitation for someone to pick up the story and run with it.

  “For God's sake!” said Laura, as anxious as I was to know the details. “How did you two become an item?”

  The answer to Laura's question was this: Martin and his wife had been together for twenty years and, halfway through the jail sentence, as he put it, the marriage had gone as stiff as a board. Rigor mortis of the heart. Not just in bed, he said, anxious to give us a complete picture, but in every other respect. They agreed on nothing about the farm, how to run it, politics, the children, what new car to buy, what colour to paint the front door. And the head on collisions were wearing them out. He began smoking, she began eating, which made things worse. Three years ago they decided to stop talking to each other, except for the bare necessities, on the understanding that as soon as the kids were old enough they'd call it a day. He wanted that badly, Sharon wasn't so keen but agreed reluctantly.

  God knows where that left their kids. Unable to form decent relationships for the rest of their lives, I imagine.

  Then, eight months ago, Martin saw The Foley Bridge Intros advert in The Oxford Times and it gave him fresh hope. It said that he wasn't alone, in fact it assured him that he was in very good company. If he went along to the agency, in confidence, and coughed up two hundred and twenty quid for the privilege, they would find him the Target Profile of his dreams. A woman in the same boat. Someone to talk to. Someone to make the last twenty years fade into oblivion.

  So off he went, dressed up, nervous as hell, cash in pocket. He arrived at Blenheim Stalk, rang the buzzer and was invited up to Studio 5. In through the door he sailed and wham! The poor sod came face to face with a neighbour. A beautiful, young, recently divorced neighbour. Right there, still holding onto the door-handle, he had three choices: run, bluff or see it through. He chose the latter and poured his heart out. By the end of the interview he and Kate were in love and who was I to doubt it? Here they were, in Walberswick eight months later, setting up house to prove it.

  “And Herondale?” I asked. “When did you buy that?”

  “I bought the cottage ten years ago. I paid for it with a win I had. A Premium Bond came up, nothing spectacular but enough. It was the first thing of mine that Sharon didn't know about.”

  He turned to Kate, looked all around her face. He had landed on cloud nine and didn't care who knew it. He added:

  “And one day, maybe, I'll have the guts to tell her ... that the last two weeks have been the happiest in my life.”

  To fend off embarrassment, I imagine, Laura raised her glass and said, awkwardly:

  “Here's to the next two. And as many after that as you wish, of course.”

  I drank to it, hoping it would change the subject.

  “So, what about you?” said Kate. “How long have you two been...”

  She smiled and put her two fingers together, as I had done. I searched for an ambiguous reply but Laura jumped straight in.

  “We're not,” she said, as unambiguous as you please. “We're the proverbial. Just good friends.”

  We glanced at each other, and quickly away again. Martin judged that this would be a good moment to buy another round of drinks.

  When he returned from the bar we talked about his probable future. He'd already made farming contacts round here, he said, and would never be short of a bob or two but that wasn't really the point. He fancied doing something less dogged by routine or blighted by uncertainty. It might involve the boat which Kate had recently bought for them, though he wasn't sure how. Trips to France and Holland, maybe, for budding sailors. Or maybe a pie factory, up in the sky, I wanted to say.

  “You're right about one thing, though,” said Laura. “Sharon will have to know.”

  Martin nodded, a far-off look in his eyes, all the way to a day of reckoning. A day of divvying up, accepting failure and paying lawyers to end one reality while, eyes closed, he leaped into another.

  “I'll come back with Kate,” he said. “Set things in motion.”

  We drank in silence for a few moments and then I asked:

  “The night Jim was shot. What time did you and Sharon leave The Plough?”

  He couldn't remember precisely. “Ten, quarter past?”

  “And you went home, back to the farm?”

  He chuckled, involuntarily. “Heh, just a second. You're asking me, in case I...”

  Kate came to his rescue. “Nathan, back at Herondale you asked me what I was doing between eleven and eleven thirty-five that night? I was talking to Martin. His mobile, my phone at Maple Cottage.”

  “The landline?”

  She nodded. “You could check.”

  “Good. Good. And where were you, Martin?”

  “The yard. I phoned to tell Kate how dinner with Sharon had gone. I'd meant to tell her the whole thing, about us planning to move up here but I bottled out.”

  I nodded. “There were two blokes in The Plough that night. Strangers. Sharon told me they were scruffy. What's your take on them?”

  He smiled. “Scruffy. It's a very Sharon remark. Fined thirty pounds for scruffiness. Next case.” He shrugged. “Navvies usually are scruffy. Bit like farmers.”

  Laura was fractionally ahead of me.

  “Navvies? How do you know they were navvies?” she said. “Did you know them?”

  “No, I didn't know them, but that's what they were. Their boots were white, ground-in white, the bottoms of their trousers too. Chalk.”

  

  In case you're wondering what happened that night, behind the closed door of Room 7, The Bell Inn, Walberswick, let me put your mind at rest. Nothing happened and that had not been the intention, on either of our parts, I think.

  I'd been worried, right from th
e start, of course. The last time I made love to a woman for the first time was in 1971 and that is a hell of a long time ago. It didn't help that the double room I'd booked us into had two divan beds, each no wider than a window sill. Then, over dinner there was a daft exchange. I won't call it an argument because it never really soared to those heights. I expressed a certain interest in Laura's description of us as 'just good friends'. She hadn't wanted the whole world to know our business, she said.

  We soldiered on and, after a few glasses of the necessary, things took a fluffier turn. Then, just as I was about to metaphorically fake a yawn, an old boy at the corner table pulled the plug on me. I'd had half an eye on him all through the meal, basically hoping that when I got to his age, sixty-five as it turned out, I'd look a damn sight healthier than he did. After downing his third brandy he stood up, clutched at his chest and keeled over.

  Wading through spilled wine and broken crockery, the Maitre D asked if there was a doctor in the house. Laura was already on her feet, hurrying across the restaurant and scattering intervening by-standers.

  “Ambulance,” she snapped to one of the waiters.

  Then, dropping to her knees beside the man, she told the potential widow to outline his medical condition. As the woman did so, Laura fell on the man and gave him the kiss of life through a napkin, with disappointing results: it brought him round. No sooner was he groaning in a chair and his wife hailing my date as a miracle worker, the old boy closed his eyes and hit the deck again.

  There was a problem with the ambulance, the waiter told Laura, who was again mouth to mouthing her patient. She came up for air and yelled at me:

  “Nathan, the car. We're taking this man to Lowestoft.”

  We returned to The Bell at about four in the morning, both shattered. Laura had saved another life. It was becoming a habit.

  

  We checked out of The Bell at about ten-thirty the next morning, with no charge and a bunch of flowers so big we could hardly get it into the car. We drove out of the village on the Blythburgh Road and stopped off at Herondale.