Over the next half hour we took that world apart in a superficial kind of way and I gradually homed in on her employers. Her poise, as I’d called it, began to teeter a little, and her discretion went with it. The only problem was she didn’t know much of substance about Rollo and Jenny and stressed that she was giving me her first impressions.
He was a barrister, yes, a member of that chronically dull and overpaid profession which, she said with a flowing gesture, he had clearly exploited. I said I’d done a little research on him, naturally, and had been unable to find much about him before the year 2000 when he’d set up chambers in London’s Gough Square. Before that he was a ghost. As for Mrs Leveque, well, who could tell?
Edith smiled. Her predecessor had spoken of Jenny as being a personal assistant, a catch all phrase, to an MP from the The Midlands but one evening he’d made a pass at her. God knows why, the gin commented, but shortly afterwards Jenny and the MP had parted company. She’d met Rollo at some House of Commons function and he’d made a bee-line for her, got himself stung, and here they both were in the Buckinghamshire countryside, living their separate lives, which was just as well in Edith’s opinion. They fought tirelessly over the silliest things, and at such times the Banshee emerged in madame and the French woman-hater in monsieur. Edith wondered if this was a little unfair of her but basically they couldn’t stand each other.
And yet ... and yet their intimacy was a strange contradiction. She mouthed her delighted disgust. Rabbits. There’d been a cooling down lately, but essentially they had ... ferocious appetites with only each other on hand to satisfy them. Did he have girlfriends? She didn’t think so, any more than Mrs Leveque had gentlemen callers. Nevertheless, she was sure it wouldn’t be long...
I asked how French Rollo actually was. Edith said she didn’t quite understand the question and seemed unsettled by it, even though the physical manifestation was nothing more than re-sloping her legs from one side to the other.
“Ex-pats are often far more nationalistic than those who’ve never left the country,” I said. “The New York Irish, for example, the West London Indians, Australian Chinese.”
“I see what you mean. I would say that apart from the accent he’s British through and through.”
My question had been prompted by a selection of photos on the mantlepiece above the stone fireplace. I went over to admire them, turning to Edith for her comments. She smiled and shook her head, saying she hadn’t been here long enough to know the complete family history, but she was working on it. The largest of the photos was of a man in a light suit and pith hemet looking out over a sea of army tents in a desert. Second world war, given the attendant cars and lorries. Another showed the same man receiving the Legion d’Honneur from Charles de Gaulle. A third was of a magnificent house in the Dordogne, a mother with two small children seated on the grass in front of it, turning to smile at the camera. The photos stood cheek by jowl with a series of bank vault sketches by famous artists, pride of place going to one by Vincent Van Gogh.
That brought me to the subject of security, if only in my own mind. The inside of Wotton House was a hotchpotch of CCTV, descending barriers, motion triggered alarms, smartwater sprays and direct lines to a police station, all left in the charge of a middle aged woman who was still on probation yet invited strangers like me into the house. Perhaps beneath all the poise she was a black belt Boadicea, but I reckoned she was just was plain lonely.
It must’ve been the booze that gave her the courage to ask if I’d care to stay for supper. And beyond. She laid waste to her third G and T by then and, even though she suspected I wasn’t quite who I’d claimed to be, I was reasonable company. That’s when I introduced my ‘wife’ to the conversation which softened her resolve.
I bade her goodbye at exactly eight o’clock, reminding her of Home and Hearth’s £2000 gratuity and advising her not to mention our meeting today. Instead, she should get in touch with me when Mr Leveque was primed and ready. I felt for a non-existent business card and ended up dictating my mobile number to her. Since I rarely answer my phone with anything but “Yeah?” I didn’t foresee a problem.
- 21 -
When I got home, the first thing I did was peel off the Italian suit and slide into jeans and T-shirt. At the kitchen table Laura and I ran through a your day, my day routine. She seemed overly concerned about mine so, with a dramatic sweep that Jaikie would have loved, I produced the makeshift envelope. She put on her glasses and took a pair of tweezers from her carpet bag, gripped the tooth and examined it, zooming in, zooming out.
“It’s a child’s mandibular incisor,” she said. “Bottom front. Where did you get it?”
“The attic at Wotton House. The only proof that anyone’s ever lived in it. How long does it take kids to lose all their milk teeth? I forget...”
“As much as a year.”
“I think this one belonged to Amira’s son, Sami. He’s still in the process of shedding them. Match the DNA and I can prove he was there.” I broke off. “Do teeth have DNA in them?
She smiled. “An excellent source.”
“I can prove those bastards use the attic as a staging post for the people they bring in.”
She nodded and suggested that I store the tooth in the freezer until I needed it.
“I was going to put it under my pillow, make a few bob. What’s wrong?”
I could see that her mind was wandering around an idea that was difficult to land me with. I expected it to concern my proposal of marriage.
“Nathan, I don’t mean to criticise your ... acting abilities, I mean it runs in the family even if it’s son to father, not the way round it should be...”
She was concerned that Edith Barrowman had let me roam the house at will, Emmerdale notwithstanding. When I asked her to elaborate she returned to praising my charm, to say nothing of my skills as an investigator. But the attic was clean as a whistle, not a mark, not a hair, not a shred of evidence. Had I considered the possibility that Rollo and Jenny had wanted me to see it in all its sterility? A bold move on their part, to pre-empt my suspicions that they were running a trafficking business.
“How did they know I’d go there?”
“I’m not sure they did. They were covering all bases.”
I didn’t like it but I could see her point. “So I’ve just made a bloody fool of myself?”
She went to the dresser, took a small polythene food bag from one of the drawers and tweezered the tooth into it. She then took the freezer pen and wrote ‘Tooth, Sami’ and the date, before she continued,
“At this very moment, they may even be congratulating themselves on having pre-empted your next move. You played their game. The trouble for them is, you won.”
She held up the tooth, went over to the freezer and placed it in the back, left corner.
***
I’d been looking for human weak spots in this case ever since I’d taken it on, and to some extent was leaving the best till last. As a kid, Con would always eat the vegetables on his plate first, then fall on the lamb chop or whatever, like a dog. Terry Baines, the man who’d phoned me to say that Maryan had been missing for three weeks, was my lamb chop.
They’re a strange breed, the ex-army crowd. Not many of them know why they joined up in the first place, though they tell you, as my father did, that it was a chance to see the world. The illusion of that is soon whipped away after a posting to Afghanistan, say, or the first time a comrade steps on a landmine.
I’ve often asked myself why I joined the police. Was it to bring a sense of order to my chaotic upbringing? Was it a sense of duty, a chance to right wrongs, or serve the disaffected? Nothing so lofty, I’m afraid, and it certainly hadn’t allowed me to see the world. My reason for joining was a lack of other options.
At least when coppers quit, though, they rarely do so with a baggage of psychological disorders. All too often soldiers do. The favourite these days is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It used to be know simply as ‘scared shi
tless of being blown to pieces’. As for the euphemism ‘finding life difficult back in civvy street’ that’s too clear cut for shrinks. They’ve divided it into issues: relationship issues, authority issues, adjustment issues.
There were no such problems on Terry Baines’s NHS records which Laura had taken a sneak peak at for me. He’d been in Iraq with the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, medically discharged in 2008 with a piece of shrapnel in his thigh as long as a kitchen knife. It had terrified him and the physical effect had lingered. He still walked with a slight drag of his left foot.
But it hadn’t scared him half as much as the prospect of having nothing to do back in Blighty. He had a pension, yes, and a wife and young child but he’d never really seen himself as heir to his father’s fruit and veg business. He’d helped him out on weekends and school holidays, travelling the markets around London, going to Covent Garden three times a week for produce. But Baines senior was by no means a gentle soul, which is probably why Terry had taken off at 18 and joined up.
He’d returned to the fold after his discharge to find his father much reduced in health so Terry set about turning the family business back into the first name on every housewife’s lips. He worked Greenwich, Brixton, Thame and Abingdon markets but his heart was never really in it and as his father dwindled so Terry took on a batch of young assistants. He lumbered them with the real work while he went pubbing to reminisce about his war experiences, like a man twice his age, hankering, disillusioned and trapped. Who could blame him, a bloke in his thirties looking for something more exciting in life than the straightest banana in Europe or the densest cabbage outside the House of Commons?
That’s when he came to Bagman Leonard Blake’s attention. I guess Blake thought if Terry could drive tanks, he could drive a van from France to England. Not only was he used to taking orders, he was fearless, powerfully built and had an honest face.
Terry’s wife, Michelle, worked part time in an Aylesbury florist, his daughter was six years old and went to the local first school in Longwick, a small village near Thame where they lived. Michelle did her shopping on the market, always had done. She and Terry had become friends, then lovers, then husband and wife just after Zebrina was born.
And from where did I get all this information? My voluptuous new friend at The Rising Bloody Sun - Mary Parker. If I’d learned one thing about British publicans, male or female, they know their customers’ business. And anything they aren’t sure about, they make up.
I drove over to Longwick the following Sunday and pulled up a good half mile from the house. I had qualms about confronting Terry, not because the physical odds were against me, but for fear of what I might do to him. He was obviously teetering on the edge, good man, bad man. Good because he had a conscience, which is why he’d phoned me, bad because he’d been suckered in by the wrong crowd. If I pushed too hard he would topple in to their camp, too softly and I wouldn’t find Maryan’s killer, never mind rescue Tom Manners from the charges against him.
As I sat humming and hawing over my options the Baines family moved the goalposts. They came out of the house, Terry first followed by Zebrina who was on the top note, bouncing, both feet, with excitement. In her hand she held a rolled up kite and as they waited for Michelle to emerge with a picnic basket I realised they were off to somewhere breezy.
I followed their Ford Focus at a safe distance and 5 miles later Terry turned onto the road up to Chequers. They weren’t having lunch with the Prime Minister, they were going to Coombe Hill, a vast geological promontory on the edge of the Chilterns from where, on a clear day, you can see Oxford, Bicester and Buckingham.
Terry pulled into the car park and I waited, half a mile back for the three of them to head off towards the monument, a tall cross in memory of those who’d fallen in the Boer war.
We weren’t the only ones flying kites today. There must have been a dozen or so in the sky, children and parents on the other end of the lines. One expert had tied off his box kite to a stake and was sipping tea from a flask. Most of the other kites were, well ... kite shaped with long competitive tails, their main bodies straining against the lifting breeze. Zebrina’s was made of a clear plastic on which was printed ... a kite, yes, but a red kite, the species re-introduced to the Chilterns 20 years previously and now living off its careless wildlife, its carrion and, allegedly, the occasional chicken leg from an unattended barbecue.
Zebrina’s kite took to the sky with ease and hovered there, a hundred feet up, looking down on us with the gentle patience most hawks have. I sat and watched for a while, wondering how I was going to break up this family outing for the ten minutes I needed with Terry. In time, though, he signalled to Michelle that he wanted a smoke. She closed her Kindle and went over to take charge of her daughter. Terry moved away, guiltily by the look of it, smoking doubtless being taboo in their family. I sauntered over to where he was gazing out at the view. When I spoke his name he flinched and turned to me, momentarily afraid but stoic, army style.
“Great day for it,” I said. “Flying a kite, I mean.”
The cigarette he’d rolled was burning faster than he wanted it to. They always do in a stiff breeze. He took a drag on it and exhaled. The smoke whipped away, in the direction of Bicester.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Just a chat. We both accept that you phoned me, right? To say Leonard Blake had lied? That he did know Maryan Kashani?”
“And?”
“You reckoned even then that she was dead and Blake knew something about it. That’s why you told me.” I glanced over to where Zebrina and Michelle were still totally absorbed by the task in hand. “Shall I put that down to having kids of your own? Or are you at bottom just a decent guy?”
He knew there was a crunch line to all this, that we weren’t simply having a conversation about his morality.
“You told me you drove for him,” I said. “You went ‘all over’. Why didn’t you come right out and say France, Abbeville, I bring in people.”
He turned his roll-up in his hand to hold it between all five finger tips, the burning end sheltered by his palm. From there he took another drag.
“It was a two minute conversation.”
“But I am right, you wanted me to pitch in and find her?”
He nodded.
“Thing is, you know a lot more than I do, Terry - stuff like numbers of people, names, destinations. I’ll tell you something you don’t know, though.”
He looked at me and waited.
“You’re their fall guy.”
“What does that mean?” he asked with a dash of fear.
“If anything goes wrong you’re the one who’ll take the rap. You’ll go down for trafficking, you might even get charged with Maryan’s murder.”
“Bollocks!”
I shook my head in paternal condescension. “You bloody fool! You’ve been trained in some Godforsaken garrison to take orders without question and that’s what you keep on doing. None of the people you’ve brought in from France have ever heard of Leonard Blake, let alone seen him. But they can describe you right down to the last pock mark.”
His free hand went to his face as if to hide the rough skin. He dropped his roll-up, trod on it and folded his arms to keep his hands under control.
“What is this to you?”
I told him it began with me trying to find someone’s pocket watch and went on from there, as things do. I hadn’t expected it to move on to people smuggling and murder, though.
“Do you know who killed her?” I asked.
“Police arrested Tom Manners, I heard...”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He shook his head and his face began to betray him.
“You found her, they say.”
“That’s right.”
“What did ... what had happened?”
“She’d been beaten with a hammer. Two blows to the skull. They went right in. When I found her she’d been half eaten by the local wildlife. The ot
her half was greeny blue, all stretched out and she had this toothy grin...”
“Please!”
I smiled. “And you an ex-squaddy? Tough guy? You were sweet on her, weren’t you.”
And there was the spontaneous flick of a glance, back towards his wife and daughter.
“Christ, you’re going to have to control those instant twitches, Terry. But I’m right, aren’t I. You liked her.”
He tried to persuade me of the obvious difference between liking someone and fancying them, let alone wanting to... He stopped himself and I nodded in agreement. A beat later he told me Maryan had asked him to do her a favour, to drive her places.
“How did you and Maryan meet?”
“On the market. She knew who I was, that I drove for Lenny.”
His hand went to his face again, his giveaway feature.
“So you brought them in from France, took ‘em to Wotton House. Nice attic there.”
The fact that I knew about the attic alarmed him. He needed another cigarette to calm his nerves, took the papers from his pocket and rummaged in a crumpled packet of Golden Virginia.
“You ferried them on from there? To Fielden Farm, for example, Hillside...”
“Lots of places. East European men to Lincolnshire. Farms. Girls to Bristol, Manchester.”
“How many have you brought in, this year?”
He thought about it. “Forty.”
“Not exactly big business.”
He shrugged, and placed the new roll-up between his lips. He took a common or garden lighter from his pocket and lit up.
“Does your wife know about it?”
“No!”
He stepped between me and her, an unconscious move. I’d found his achilles heel.
“Well, I won’t tell her, Terry. I won’t tell anyone, unless of course you killed her. But in return, one small favour.”
Jericho Road: A Nathan Hawk Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Mystery series Book 5) Page 15