“Right, let me show you one of the houses that’s all but finished. It’ll give you a sense of what you can expect.”
She led the way across to what must once have been a milking parlour, now extended and converted into a single storey dwelling. She was proud of the work they’d done and emphasised the top quality fittings in the bathroom, kitchen and utility room. I could expect nothing less in the house that I chose. If I chose it. The company was known for its attention to detail, from the very latest alarm systems to the hedges they’d planted way back in the spring which were now flourishing.
I stooped to examine the floor in the hall. Distressed wood throughout, Tina said, sealed stone slabs in the kitchen, triple glazing at every window. Absolutely no expense spared. I smiled and asked if that fact was reflected in the prices. She smiled back.
I suppose a more practised eye than mine would have noticed similarities between the work here and that in Wotton House. This was on a more acceptable scale, of course, but there must have been the odd tell-tale signature a plasterer can’t help but leave, or a bevelled edge on wooden fitments unique to a particular carpenter. If they were there, they passed me by and as I feigned yet more interest in the living room, homing in on the wood burning stove, one of the workforce tapped on the back door and waited. Tina apologised and went to speak to him.
“Yes, Daniel, what is it?”
Between the hinges and the door jamb I could see her patting down the air to control the intruder’s voice level. He was a man in his mid-fifties who spoke in a soft voice but I caught the gist. Today was payday, for the week gone by. There was an envelope for Guy, yes, but less money inside. A mistake, perhaps? She didn’t make mistakes, she countered. The man in question had taken the day off. Fine, as long as it didn’t happen too often, but he surely didn’t expect to be paid for it?
He nodded compliance, thanked her and backed away, a courtier leaving the queen’s presence.
“They’re a good bunch,” she said, returning to me. “No business sense.”
“Where are they from?” I asked.
She pretended to think about that. “D’you know, I’m not sure...”
The hell she wasn’t. I said I’d like to see outside and she took me across the site, past the barn, to the other available dwelling, the farmhouse. Fifty yards beyond it on a rocky patch of scrub was a second portakabin, older, tattier than her office. She saw me register it.
“It’s a rest room for the lads,” she explained with a laugh. “We do give them coffee breaks, lunch breaks, tea breaks occasionally...”
I expressed jollied up interest in the old farmhouse and topped it up with enough praise and admiration for Tina Taylor to believe I was a serious contender. She gave me a brochure and her business card and told me I shouldn’t hesitate to phone her directly if I had any questions. I thanked her, nodding all the way, and returned to the Land Rover, still trying to give the impression that the deal was all but done.
More to the point, though, I’d managed to do a head count of the workforce. Including the one who was absent due to those pressing family matters, there were six of them. And I wondered if among them was the reason Maryan Kashani had wanted to pay them a visit.
- 14 -
The monosyllabic answer was typical, as was the pause before it.
“Yeah?”
“Bill, it’s Nathan Hawk.”
Another pause. Bill Grogan had never been good with phones and treated them as if someone was listening in. It wasn’t a bad strategy.
“How goes?” he eventually said.
“I’m fine. I heard tell you put in your papers.”
“Yeah.”
“Why, Bill?”
“I thought sod it.”
“You mean that business with Liam Kinsella, you being suspended?”
“Partly.”
“But that was wiped off your record when we caught the bastard.”
“Mud sticks.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, mate. Actually, I’m not. Are you free tomorrow?”
He thought about the question for a moment, feeling for the hidden traps.
“Why?”
“For Christ’s sake, Bill, yes or no?”
“Maybe.”
Was it worth it, I began to ask myself.
“I need your help with something. Shall I come over to you, or you to me, or shall we meet in some dingy bar in ... Budapest, say?”
“Eh?”
“Bill, I’ll come over to you tomorrow.”
“When?”
“Nine in the morning.”
“Right.”
I’d forgotten how many deep breaths were needed in a run of the mill conversation with Bill Grogan and was glad this one was over, but I was even more delighted that he was available and didn’t appear to have changed much. He was still his garrulous, charming self.
He lived with his partner, Viv, in a Victorian cottagey house in Summertown on the outskirts of Oxford. He’d grown up in it and when his parents died and left it to him, he moved back in. The place was too small for him, the door lintels too low as were some of the ceilings, but he loved it.
I’d never been there before and was surprised to find a well-ordered house, not especially blokish, either, in spite of being occupied by two middle-aged men. There were nice touches: designer crockery, delicate ornaments, family photos on the walls. Two families. His and Viv’s.
I was meeting Vivian Tomson for the first time. He was a nurse at Warneford Hospital but he looked as if he’d just stepped out of a 1950s war movie. Officer class, tall, chiselled face and what my mother would’ve called a refined voice. I'd never enquired about his background but my guess was he came from old money. He'd met Bill ten years previously at an international bunfight celebrating their mutual passion for cacti. The relationship had gone on from there, though neither was sure why, and Grogan wasn’t keen on talking about it. Wisely, in my opinion. If his colleagues in Special Operation Unit had known that his partner was a man he’d never have lived it down. They would have pushed and pushed, taking the rise, trying to get under his skin. And he would have let them. You had to go a long way before Bill Grogan lost control. But when he did...
Before Viv left for work they discussed dinner that evening and Grogan said he’d see to it. Evelyn was coming this morning, Viv reminded him, her money was under the kettle.
“Good to meet you, Nathan,” said Viv as he left. “Heard a lot about you.”
When the front door had closed behind him I said,
“Heard a lot about me?”
“We speak of little else, guvnor.”
He beckoned me to follow him through to the new conservatory and sat me down among some of the meanest looking plants I’ve ever met. The collection. All shapes and sizes, some dormant, others in exquisite bloom. Most of them as spiky as Grogan was.
“Coffee,” he said. “Keep talking.”
He went back to the adjacent kitchen and I leaned forward to tell him about Maryan Kashani. By the time we were on our second cup, both of which hit me like a train, he’d got the whole story under his belt, from gold watch to my visit to Hillside Farm.
“I guess that’s where I come in?” he said.
I nodded. “Muscle and insight, Bill. I was thinking of paying them a visit, two o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“They all live there?”
“Oh, yes. The builder’s wife called it a ‘rest room’ but I reckon these boys are shacked up in it. An old barbecue outside, minus its lid, tables and chairs with no backs, old washing line with underwear, T-shirts, socks.”
He got hung up on a detail. “How d’you cook on a barbecue with no lid? Defeats the whole purpose...”
I told him I’d no idea and he managed to get past it.
“I don’t think they were European, Bill. Or even from just beyond.”
“Why?”
“One of them’s female. We don’t use women as navvies in the civilised west. Goes against the g
rain.”
“Will I need my rounders bat?” he asked.
“I’m taking the Smith & Wesson. Yes, I know you think it’s a useless bloody toy...”
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to. But anyone looking down the wrong end of the barrel would disagree.”
He nodded. “I’ll bring something a bit more ... lively.”
“I’m grateful, Bill.”
“I’ll be over your place midnight. Will Dr Peterson be...?”
I smiled. “The only woman who’s seen all your tattoos, eh?”
He nearly laughed at that. “Most, not all. Only woman, outside the job, who’s seen me lose my temper. For real."
“I remember. Thank God she stopped you.”
***
There weren’t many people who could shrivel Bill Grogan on sight but Laura Peterson was one of them.
He arrived at Beech Tree on the dot of midnight. The dog barked, the security light flicked on and I watched as he squeezed himself out of the two door Fiat he’d driven up in. He looked across at the house and steeled himself as he approached. He knocked on the back door and Laura called out to him.
“Bill, come in, do.”
He entered cautiously and shook the offered hand.
“How you keeping?” he asked.
“I’m extremely well, thank you. Yourself?”
He replied with added vigour, as if to ward off any possibility of a medical check-up, there and then.
“I’m really, really well. Terrific. Thank you.”
“And ... I’m off to bed. All I ask is that you both take care. I feel responsible for things having come this far. If I hadn’t asked Nathan to go visit Tom Manners...”
“By the sound of it you were right to do so, Doctor.”
“That’s kind, Bill.” She paused at the door through to the stairs and turned to him. “There’s no chance you could call me by my Christian name, is there?”
He shrivelled even further. “I’ll try.”
As he heard her footsteps creaking up the stairs, he began to breathe more freely and returned to his original size. I gestured for him to sit at the table, told him that we’d leave in about an hour. He didn’t drink alcohol - I’d never asked him why because I feared the worst. If he’d been a boozer, though, my guess was he’d dried himself out. I couldn’t see him at an AA meeting, admitting to a weakness. I filled the kettle.
“What do we do between now and then?”
“We chat, Bill. Old times, new times, anything you like.”
That foxed him. He called the dog over to him and she lent on him while he stroked her neck.
“So, how d’you spend your days?” I asked. “Watering cacti?”
He gave me a silly bloody question look. “That’s the one thing they don’t need much of.”
“I know. It was an opener.”
He wondered whether to reveal this to me or not and decided in favour. His love of cacti stemmed from their independent nature. They could survive on very little of anything. If they sensed a barren patch in the offing, they made preparations to cope, turned into themselves for sustenance. And when the good times came again they flowered. He loved the idea of a plant that could skewer its predators, stab to death its attackers and then bloom with the most delicate fragrance. He broke off the eulogy, aware that I was looking at him.
“What?” he grunted.
“Nothing. Just interested.”
I was actually being taken aback. It was the first time I’d herd him speak rapturously of anything.
“To be honest, Nathan, I don’t do much of anything these days.”
He struggled to tell me that part of him regretted having quit his job in Special Operations, but once his integrity had been called into question there was no going back. He was unyielding, unforgiving on that. He asked how I’d coped after being ‘required to retire’. I went looking for trouble, I said. Sure, the first case I dealt with fell into my lap, just as I was about to go stir crazy. After that I ... made myself available, while always pretending I wasn’t interested.
He said he’d been offered a few security jobs. The latest was some half-baked singer living out near Blenheim who’d wanted him as a minder but it was mostly evening work, fighting off teenage girls and the paparazzi. He had no particular beef with either, he just couldn’t understand why they were nuts about this ... squawker.
“We need the Gods to walk among us,” I suggested.
He nodded. “I suppose what I’ve done most of is worry.”
“What about?”
“Viv. Psychiatric nurse. They say two years is the most you can take before you start losing your grip. Viv’s into year six.”
“Any sign that he’s affected?”
Again he wondered how much he should tell me and settled on quite a mouthful. “He forgets things. Not just names or words or where he left his car keys. Stuff I told him an hour before. Worries me.”
I nodded. “You should keep an eye.”
“We’ve talked about selling up, moving somewhere warmer...”
“Nearer to cacti?”
He smiled. The thing was he couldn’t leave Summertown. It was all he had by way of family stuff ... identity, roots, connection. He could see his parents in the house every day, feel their presence in every room. He turned up his nose and said that maybe he was the one losing the plot.
“You brought a weapon?” I asked.
“Glock, which I forgot to return to the armoury when I quit the job.”
I’d done exactly the same with the Smith & Wesson. We agreed it was unsettling that no one had missed them, then or since.
“Yours or mine?” he said, pointing at his car keys on the table.
“Land Rover, I reckon.”
“And the objective?”
He had this annoying trait of wanting things clear cut and straightforward. I gave him the best answer I had.
“I want to know who, out of the six people working at Hillside Farm, Maryan Kashani wanted to meet with. And why.”
It sounded fair enough to me but Grogan pulled a face. “You reckon they’ll tell you?”
“Why not?”
He pulled another face. Worse.
- 15 -
We drove in silence, not because Grogan felt we’d spoken too much already, but because he didn’t like driving. Or at least other people driving.
I took it slowly and it was nearly 1.30 a.m. when I turned down the lane to Hillside Farm. I switched off the headlights and a minute later reached the dead end. We got out and took stock. It was a warm night, clear and still, and the silence gave the development a sense of having been abandoned. Beyond it the outline of the Chilterns seemed more like distant clouds on the verge of rolling towards us and raining on our parade. Nothing moved, not grass underfoot, leaves in trees, insects hanging in the air.
As we entered the yard I pointed to the portakabin ‘rest room’ and described with my hand the circuitous route by which we should approach it. We trod like ghosts and as we reached the door I saw him pause at the answer to a question which must’ve been nagging him for 24 hours. The barbecue lid had been replaced by a metal dustbin lid. He nodded closure.
The windows were hooked open and from within the cabin we could hear the sound of sleep, not outright snoring but the scouring effect of concrete and brick dust rattling in throats. I looked at Grogan, he gave me a thumbs up. I clenched a fist and banged on the door three times. Inside, panic erupted and voices expressed it, not in words but fearful gasps and yelps. I shouted twice for someone to open the door and two seconds later a man did so, the one Tina Taylor had called Daniel. He stood with a blanket held to his chest and looked from one to the other of us until Grogan shoved him aside and stepped up over the threshold. I followed.
“Light!” Grogan demanded.
Another man, dressed only in boxer shorts, was already on his feet all set to deal with trouble, until he saw Grogan.
“I said light!”
/>
The man reached towards the rear wall, flicked a switch and a strip light fluttered into life. Eyes blinked hard and turned away from it. From the rich colour of his skin, the man who'd given us light was Ethiopian or Sudanese, more boy than man.
There were five men and one woman of varying ages, twenty through to sixty. Two were on their feet, the others still on the floor. They’d been sleeping on rolled out futons, each with a bag containing his or her worldly possessions for a pillow.
“Stay!” Grogan commanded, as the other four tried to struggle to their feet. They fell back and Grogan turned to me for the next move.
“Here’s hoping you all speak some English,” I said. “Otherwise it’s down to you, Daniel, to translate.”
Daniel was surprised rather than alarmed. "You know me,” he said. “But not so well as you think. Taniel, not Daniel.”
Cocky bastard, in spite of his predicament, needed watching. I glanced round at the other faces to make certain they were all fully awake.
“I’m going to say two words. Maryan Kashani.”
I’m not sure what I’d expected to happen but a young man at the end of the cabin tried to swallow an involuntary gasp. I stepped over the intervening bodies to reach him.
“What’s your name?”
He tried to sink away into the mattress. I stooped, as if I might slap his face and for a moment I thought he would burst into tears. Those nearest him threw off their covers and made a move to rise, maybe to take me on.
“Stay put!” Grogan yelled.
They fell back again.
“What’s your name?” I repeated.
He looked at Taniel for advice and I yelled, “Keep your eyes on me! You’ve been asked it a thousand times in a dozen languages. What’s your name?”
“Ghayas,” said the boy.
“Just Ghayas?”
“Ovadia.”
“So, Ghayas Ovadia, you know Maryan. Did you know she was dead? Killed? Murdered?”
He nodded, quickly.
“Who told you?”
He pointed to a television, fixed to an angle bracket in the corner. Their periscope to the outside world.
Jericho Road: A Nathan Hawk Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Mystery series Book 5) Page 10