Jericho Road: A Nathan Hawk Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Mystery series Book 5)

by Douglas Watkinson

  “She stole a gold watch,” Laura suggested. “She’s sold it and taken off.”

  It might’ve been as simple as that but I didn’t want it to be.

  “How d’you fancy going home via The Rising Bloody Sun?” I asked my possible future wife.

  She shook her head to say that it was neither here nor there, given how the evening was shaping up. We skipped dessert, I paid the bill and we left.

  - 8 -

  The Rising Sun was busy, but not so you couldn't hear yourself speak, or more to the point hear other people’s conversations. Laura entered ahead of me and drew some attention along the lines of isn’t that the local quack. And is the bloke with her a husband, fiancé, friend...?

  The main bar, with its selection of unmatching tables and sink-inable armchairs, was taken over mainly by thirty somethings in twos and fours, sipping their daftly named cocktails. Middle class aspirers with money to spend. Beyond them at the bar, as if to illustrate a cultural divide, sat a couple of old men, late seventies, beer in glasses with handles, ruddy, leathery faces. And in the distance was a queue in the Thai takeaway area, four or five customers waiting for their orders to be filled, pad thais, green the other and lemongrass something else. The thought of it, the smell, brought the trio of lamb rising in my gorge...

  Mary Parker was serving behind the bar handing change to a tall, skinny young man with an onion face who took his drinks by the rims of their glasses, a habit that’s always brought out the critic in me. Where have those hands been in the last few hours, few minutes, I think, as the microbes travel from fingers to rim to my lips. The trials of having a doctor for a lover. How bad might it get if, when we were married? The guy smiled at me as he turned away. I said nothing.

  “Mr Nathan Hawk,” said Mary, with a quick glance at Laura.

  I introduced them and asked for a Pinot Grigio and a glass of water, ice to the brim. Mary smiled and set about preparing them.

  She was wearing a dress in a material whose pattern defied the gaze to settle, sharp geometrical shapes forcing the eyes onward until they paused at the plunging neckline and dived in. Maybe that was the intention but I kept my own eyes firmly on hers when she set down the drinks and took my money.

  “I left a business card with you, last time I was here. Have you shown it to anyone?”

  She nodded without hesitation. “Terry Baines.”

  “Did he say why he needed it?”

  She paused to recall his exact words. “That bloke who was asking about Marianne, he said. D’you know where I can reach him?” She paused. “Nothing wrong is there?”

  “No, no,” I said with impatient sincerity. “When Steve’s got a moment, ask him to join us, will you. We’ll be at the table in the corner.”

  Steve came over to us five minutes later, sleeves rolled up all the way to his biceps when just past his elbows would have done. He treated Laura to his boomerang smile.

  “Hi!”

  Ever the doctor her eyes focused on a scar just above his left wrist as she introduced herself. I gestured for him to pull up a chair to our table. He leaned in on his elbows, leaving hands free to flap.

  “You heard that Marianne’s not been seen for three weeks?”

  “I did.”

  “Worrying, yes?”

  He could sense a trap being set: he’d be damned if he said yes, damned if he said no. He stepped sideways.

  “I told you before, I hardly knew her.”

  “You knew her better than you led me to believe.”

  He ducked his head down as if I’d said something highly amusing, then asked Laura, “How does he work that out?”

  “Last time we met,” I said. “I asked you to describe her. Brown hair, dark eyes, tattoos. Your boss added jeans and a sweater.”

  “And grubby,” he qualified. “It’s a favourite word of hers...”

  “So where were the tattoos? See where I’m going, Steve? I reckon you’ve seen more of her than most. And why not? Good looking man, roaming Europe, eye for the main chance. But why keep that from me?”

  He thought for a moment, then tried to turn all sharp and determined.

  “Because what business is it of yours?”

  I gave him two seconds of victory while I took a swig of my water. A pang of disappointment, that I couldn’t think it into being whisky, surged and fell back.

  “You’re right. Let’s do this another way. When does your work permit run out?”

  He leaned back and clasped his hands together. “Jesus, man, you are bloody desperate! Ask Mary, she’ll tell you I’ve worked here since last August...”

  “Before that?”

  “France, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Practising your conversation.”

  He was trawling his memory for other details he might’ve let slip. He couldn’t find any so I put him out of his misery.

  “You wound up at Twickenham, Rugby World Cup. 33-13. That gives me the date, Steve, and you have outstayed your welcome. What were you on, visa wise? Tier 5, two years?” I glanced across at Mary. “She’ll miss you.”

  Any bravado there had been slipped away and he sulked for a moment before leaning in again, hands under the table, probably wringing them.

  “What do you want?”

  “Where did she live?”

  He looked from one to the other of us, searching for a weakness he would play on later. Not finding any, he said,

  “The road from here to Dorton, just before you get to that poncy school, there’s a lane off to the right. Down there somewhere’s an old barn, half a roof gone, the rest corrugated iron. I never went there but you can just see it from the road.”

  “I know it,” said Laura. “It used to be a forge which may explain half a roof. A fire four years ago.”

  I snapped my fingers to get Steve’s attention back on me.

  “You never drove her home?”

  “She had a bike.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  “No. I never drove her home.”

  “So ... where did you see her tattoos?”

  Well brought up young man that he was, he lowered his voice. “Upstairs here. My rooms. Mind if I get back to work?”

  He took his hands out from under the table and went to stand up

  “Sit down! When?”

  It was the first time I’d raised my voice. The skinny rim gripper and his more fleshy girlfriend at the table beside us turned to log into a possible rumble. Steve leaned in as far as his pecs would allow and all but whispered.

  “Month ago.”

  “One night stand?”

  “No, we saw each other a few times.”

  I pointed at him. “You know, I thought I saw relief in your face when I said she was missing...”

  He was genuinely shocked by the implication and hissed his response. “She wanted me to drive her places. It wasn’t me she fancied so much as Mary’s car, the use I had of it. Even so, I promised her I wouldn’t say anything and here I am, you threatening me with that visa crap.”

  “Just name the places, we’ll call it quits.”

  He scanned my face to see if this was a genuine offer and must have decided that it was.

  “The main place she wanted taking to was Jericho, the one in Oxford, not Palestine...”

  “Did she say why?”

  “I didn’t ask. The second place was more local. Hillside Farm. Oh, and she wanted taking to a circus somewhere. When I said I’m not a taxi, she got shirty, then weepy, then sorry, then pleading. Christ, all I’d done was say no to giving her a lift.”

  I nodded and gestured that he could go back to work now. He stood up, eyes still on me and referred to his out of date visa,

  “And the other stuff?”

  “What other stuff?”

  - 9 -

  Laura was all for leaving it until the next morning but I said if we didn’t drive up to Dorton right now I wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink. Young girl, miles from home, living rough in a dereli
ct barn, hadn’t been seen or heard from in two weeks? How would I feel if it was my daughter?

  It was a still, clear night which may sound convenient given the task ahead of us, but it happens to be the truth. A near full moon cast a steel light, the kind in which you could switch off your headlights and still see the landscape, the road ahead, shadows and all. We spoke in a quiet, clipped fashion.

  “Was that all Steve Bellamy knew?” she asked.

  “I think so. Typical kid, really. All puff one minute, petrified the next.”

  “The business about his visa. That was guesswork?”

  “Educated guesswork.”

  She smiled. “And Marianne wanted a chauffeur. Not a lover. The number of times that happened to me after my father bought me a car...”

  “She didn’t want a lover or a car.”

  Laura turned to me and I glanced briefly at the quizzical frown.

  “Hillside Farm,” I said. “Local. She had a bike, she could’ve ridden up there. Oxford? Number 280 bus from Thame, forty minutes.”

  “So what did she want?”

  “Muscle.”

  Just before Dorton, I turned off down an unnamed track, the one Steve Bellamy had described. I switched off the headlights and as our eyes adjusted to the ambient light we could see that no one drove down there very much. Grass was growing in the potholes, the hedges on either side, untrimmed for years, were reaching out to each other.

  I parked on the concrete forecourt of the barn and we got out, again quietly but this time from a sense of foreboding. The roof timbers of the burned out half were still intact and stark against the sky, giving the impression of a huge toast rack. No slices left, just burnt crumbs. The undamaged half was less evocative. Two doors, one fully closed the other half open and bolted to the ground. No sound, no light from inside, but as we approached, the inevitable smell, the kind you can taste for days afterwards and takes every old copper straight back to the first time he saw a dead body. Mine was in the stair well of a block of flats, 12 storeys high. A Jamaican woman, Dolores Carter, fully clothed but pancaked on the stone floor, surrounded by her own blood which had spread, as a colleague was keen to point out, into a nearly map of her homeland.

  I stepped in through the open door and flicked on the torch. Two dozen eyes glinted in the beam, held for a moment, then turned and ran for cover, a gang of rats, all whipping tails and squealing panic. The meal I’d interrupted was lying on her back, dead centre, clothes torn by the diners in order to reach the meat within. And the entire feast was indeed movable, or so it appeared. At every point were off-white, black headed maggots writhing in their thousands with apparent indifference.

  “Life after death,” said Laura, as if to defend the maggots against any criticism I might make.

  My own response was more schoolboy than old hand, but each to his own means of coping. “He might’ve fancied her four weeks ago, but he wouldn’t fancy her now.”

  She turned and walked out of the barn and breathed in deeply, then headed back to the new old Land Rover, presumably to call the police.

  “Laura, just give me five minutes,” I called from the doorway.

  She nodded and I went back into the barn, T-shirt neck pulled up and held over my nose and mouth, torch in the other hand. I took another look at the body and could see that it tallied with three weeks missing and although decomposition was well on its way, this was almost certainly Marianne. Short dark hair, some of it having been pulled away from the grey green scalp. Wonderful teeth and highly visible. There was still bloating in some of the organs even though the main site in the stomach area had recently burst. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, she’d been well and truly murdered. That isn’t Coroner’s officialese, I know, though shooting back fifteen years I heard a favourite medical examiner be just as informal with his diagnosis. “Nathan, some bastard’s clumped her round the head with a flat, heavy object, caved her skull in. Go catch the fucker!” I was never allowed to leave his crime scene until I’d looked and better looked and he’d gone into gut heaving detail.

  I’d broken the sleep of a few flies with the beam from the torch and they were spitfiring in on me, hoping maybe that I was next on their menu. Their Eton Mess, their Bread and Butter Pudding. Who knows what goes on in a bluebottle’s mind?

  I made a cursory sweep of the place Marianne had called home. There were a few old bits of machinery, scrap value only, and the ancient bales of straw were turning to dust, rounded off at the edges and corners. I ducked under a pair of jeans hanging from an oak crossbeam, beside it two pairs of pants and a bra. They’d been washed and hung to dry. So there was running water? That made me wonder who came and went there, or had they just forgotten to turn it off at the mains when they abandoned the place. Had a resourceful Marianne turned it back on again.

  She had obviously bedded down on a stack of pallets in the corner where an old coat served as both mattress and duvet. A rucksack was the pillow. It was standard issue for a whole generation, colour red. Fussy though it might seem, I was keen to preserve the integrity of the crime scene and by complete chance had a plastic bag in my back pocket. Normally used for picking up Dogge shit, I slipped it over one hand and opened the rucksack. Its contents weren’t especially revealing. Clothes inside, underwear, tops, socks were all neatly rolled up, camping style. No shoes, her only pair were still on her feet, but there was a sweater, again neatly folded, and a bottle of perfume: Victoria’s Secret Bombshell. No phone, no wallet or purse – and no gold watch. That had been sold weeks ago, I reckoned, for hard cash to live on.

  As I closed the flap on the rucksack I noticed something written near to the zip. Capital letters, but fading. Its intention was

  to let other kids on that school trip, or whatever, know whose property this was. It was a name, ‘M.KASHANI’. Arab, I thought, as I flitted across the map of North Africa and on to The Middle East. Twenty countries. Not so much Marianne as Maryan, perhaps. No wonder she didn’t speak French. I closed the flap and left.

  ***

  It took the local police an hour and a half to muster and it was one of the sloppiest starts to an inquiry I’ve ever seen. Not that anyone was in a hurry, least of all Marianne. At 11.02 Laura dialled 999, still unwilling to accept that 911 does the job just as well, and a full half hour later we saw a patrol car crawl back and forth on the Dorton road, looking for the turn off down to the barn. I put the key in the Land Rover and flashed its headlights to solve their problem.

  The driver of the patrol car was a mid twenties uniform. His female partner was even younger. Jack and Jill of the law enforcement world, but for all their youth both seemed offended that they’d been called out.

  “Ms Peterson?” Jack asked.

  “Doctor,” said Laura.

  He wan’t sure if she was one or needed one.

  “You’re a doctor?” he tried.

  She smiled. “And you’re a policeman.”

  “There’s no need for that tone, madam,” said the girl.

  “I beg to differ. There is a dead body in that building and it’s been lying there for three weeks. There’s no call for immediacy, I agree, but efficiency, yes!”

  The two coppers stared at her, then at me.

  “I’m with her,” I said.

  Jack took a deep breath. Time to be the man he’d spent his months in the force pretending to be. He turned and went cautiously over to the barn door and shone his torch into the darkness.

  “Christ, there is!”

  His first dead body, perhaps, or at least his first in this condition. His partner hurried to join him as he turned away, choking on the smell. She had more stomach, held her gaze for longer, but was equally terrified when she emerged. When they’d recovered some of their composure Jack asked Laura,

  “Who is it, do you know?”

  “I believe her name is Marianne but that’s all I know about her. Except that in my professional opinion she is dead.”

  The pair had been suddenly reduced to their
bare essentials by what they’d seen and how they’d been spoken to. The boy turned away and stabbed at his mobile, hands beginning to tremble. Eventually he managed to raise his duty officer.

  “Sarge, it wasn’t a hoax. It’s for real. Needs Finchum.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said a weary, crackly voice. “He won’t answer his phone this time of night. I’ll send someone over to his pad. You two hold the fort.”

  The boy turned back to us, wondering what to say.

  “Who’s Finchum?” I asked.

  “Eh?”

  “You had your phone on speaker.”

  “He’s a Detective Chief Inspector. He’ll be with us shortly.”

  And now he was wondering not what to say, but what to do. I gave him the benefit of my experience.

  “You need to take our names and addresses.”

  “Right, right...”

  He scrambled for his mobile again and opened a file.

  “I’m Nathan Hawk, aged 94.” He looked at me. “Or I will be by the time you two get your act together. Start turning the place into a crime scene, for God’s sake, tape it off, get some light on the job, go up to the road and put a sign out for this Finchum, save him doing what you did!”

  The girl fell feebly back on her training and tried to get the psychological upper hand. “Sir, would you mind calming down...”

  “Just shutup and do what you’re told!”

  Suddenly galvanised, they hurried to the patrol car, opened the boot and started work.

  ***

  An hour or so later Detective Chief Inspector Ronald Finchum bowled up. He’d been levered out of bed and back into yesterday’s clothes and was still sipping tea from one of those screw top cups that taste more of the container than the contents.

  Laura and I were in the Land Rover. There’d been no need for us to stay, once Jack and Jill had swung into action, but the idea of leaving a young woman, however dead, to their mercy went against the grain. That’s the public version, anyway. The private one is more to do with murder being irresistible.