‘Dad, sorry for going AWOL for a bit but I was angry, not just with you and Laura, but The Others and Yukito. He thinks I don’t know that all he wants is me to be on top of my game...’
Poor little multi-millionaire, he’d come in for it as well, just for trying to calm her down.
‘He’s been having talks with this American bio-tech firm who want his help with 3D printing hair, for men like you who’ve lost it. By the way, how would you feel about 3D printed hair that included the follicles?’
‘It would depend on the colour’ I wanted to reply, facetiously.
‘Point is, though, you marrying Laura and her taking Mum’s place. I didn’t think it would bother me, but it does. See, Dad, I know you pay lip service to it, but I brought Con, Jaikie and Ellie up after Mum died. I looked after you as well, for God’s sake and that was no picnic ... actually, it wasn’t too bad most of the time. But in swans Laura and all of a sudden I’m redundant. No word from her about it, no asking me for my blessing. Just straight in. I know she hasn’t said ‘yes’ yet, but she will, she will. God when I think back...’
And that’s where she rambled a bit, recalling details of mothering The Others, naming successes and failures. When I’d finished reading it I emailed her straight back but all I could think of to say was,
‘I love you. Dx’.
It didn’t seem enough.
“Oi, you in some kind of trance?” Russell Taylor asked.
I folded The Map, put it back in my inside pocket and looked at their puzzled faces.
“The last time I took anything by way of a sweetener was 20 years ago. A bloke I was tailing offered me his half used parking ticket.”
Russell smiled. “And you refused it.”
“No, I sent it to the lab, got his fingerprints off it. Matched him to the car to the crime and he got 18 months.” Like all of them, I’d recognise him instantly, the years between notwithstanding. “David Graham Calder. Bit of a rogue, but not half as mean as you two.”
Russell sat down opposite me, leaned forward, arms dangling between his knees. Tina stood where she was, shifting from one pinched foot to the other.
“So, if it’s not money you’re after...?” she asked.
“Whoever killed Maryan Kashani, the girl you threw off the building site. If it was you, I’ll be back for more than money. I’ll be back anyway, Tina, for a chat about wages, places to live in, that sort of thing.”
She nodded. “What guarantee have we got that you won’t walk out of here tonight and....”
I sneered as far as my top lip would take me. “Shutup.”
I turned to her husband. “Just tell me what you did at the house in Jericho Road.”
Reluctantly, and first checking with his wife, he told me. The house was owned by some French woman, a friend of a friend, kind of thing. I suggested that one of the friends might be Leonard Blake or Rollo Leveque and he paused, realising that I knew more than he’d thought.
“Leveque,” he said.
He’d never met the woman, but the project was overseen by a man, probably French, who knew exactly what she wanted. The cellar turned into a laboratory. Russell demurred to begin with. This wasn’t his kind of thing, but the plans for it were so well drawn up, what could go wrong. And nothing did.
“What was the lab for?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but it was all top dollar and ultra secure. Took us about a month.”
“And all done under the radar? Cash payment?”
He smiled. “Is this where you tell me you’re the tax man? Yeah, cash.”
I stood up. “Believe it or not, that’s all I wanted. Be seeing you.”
- 27 -
The horse chestnut trees, like a guard of honour either side of the drive up to Mayfield House had fallen prey to the leaf miner, an insect which in sufficient numbers half kills, wrinkling leaves into a rusty brown long before the end of summer. For want of a a strong wind the leaves clung to the branches, falling one by one, like boats sinking in an ocean of still air.
I’d helped John Stillman some years earlier by finding the body of his missing daughter, Teresa Marie Stillman. At the beginning of every month since, I’d promised myself that I would re-visit him to exercise the righteous belief that I could understand, and perhaps mollify, his grief. And to feel lucky that such a tragedy had never befallen me.
The house itself was the same as I remembered it, the housekeeper just as tall and ferocious, bearing down from the front step.
“Mr Hawk, is Mr Stillman expecting you?”
“No, I came on the off-chance, Mrs Jenkins.” I smiled. “But your question tells me that he is at home.”
She’d either forgotten how to smile, or had never known in the first place. Her greystone face didn’t alter one jot as she gestured for me to enter. I showed myself into the library. A brown place. Brown furniture, brown carpet, brown curtains, brown books - most of them - and unlike my original visit, when stale tobacco smoke was the dominant smell, now it was chemical sweet peas, puffed out from plastic containers whenever they sensed movement.
John entered in a rush and came straight over to me, hand outstretched far ahead of him.
“Mr Hawk, my dear fellow, how wonderful to see you!”
Whether or not he meant that, and I suspect that he did, he had the barrister’s gift for courteous deceit.
“Sit down, sit down. Mrs Jenkins, coffee if you please. Sugar for me, of course, although Mr Hawk doesn’t take it.”
The barrister’s talent for recalling trivial details. He looked older, which is like saying the sun always sets at the end of the day, but I mean that he looked older than he should’ve done. Late sixties, he had the first folio skin created by all those years of chain-smoking and he’d retained the cough which went with it. He turned away to cough now and in profile was the familiar stoop.
“How is your good lady?” he asked, with the discretion of generation. The question so neatly replaced is she dead or alive, still with you or a distant memory, or maybe even are you married yet or still living in ... domestic harmony?
“She’s well and sends her regards.”
“Mine to her, if you’d be so kind.”
After Mrs Jenkins had poured us coffee he nodded towards a portrait of his daughter, painted from a series of photos and hung directly opposite his place at the vast library desk. Whenever he glanced up, from work or reading for pleasure, she was there.
“Caroline Tunstall painted it,” he said, naming a famous portrait artist I’d never heard of. “You didn’t know Teresa, of course, but it’s a wonderful likeness. The eyes captured perfectly, their ability to bestow ... grace.” He took a breath. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”
“Your help, John.” He gestured for me to elaborate. “Rollo Leveque.”
“Ah!”
I must have laughed and he pointed at me, setting off a burst of sweet pea from a nearby bookshelf.
“I know what you’re going to say, Mr. Hawk. Ah! The smallest of words, but so full of meaning.”
I nodded and chided him. “So unlike you John to reveal your hand straightaway. And I should tell you the reason I’m asking what you know about him. He claims ... friendship with you.”
He listened as I outlined my suspicion that Rollo was involved in a small scale people smuggling operation which I suspected had links to a case I was investigating - the murder of Maryan Kashani. Being John he knew about it and believed that a man had been charged. When I’d finished I thought I saw, just for a moment, the brotherhood of law link arms to defend one another, but I must have been mistaken.
“I never liked the man,” said John. “But is that an elderly Q.C exercising his right to prejudice? Perhaps.”
“A particular reason?” I asked.
“He was openly disdainful of my council house origins. You, Mr Hawk, know full well that the portraits in the hall and on the stairs were bought at auction ... absorbed into my heritage. Rollo came to lunch on
e day, with his ... fascinating wife and examined each portrait in detail, knowing full well that the subjects were nothing to do with me. Basically he took the piss...”
For his language to stoop, even to such a mild colloquialism, I could safely assume that Rollo had upset him badly.
“He could see the family resemblance, he said, the jawline in this one, the nose in another, the eyes in Madame Betty, as I call her, on the landing. Rollo, of course, is descended from French aristocracy. Of a kind.”
He saw me home in on that last phrase and explained that Rollo’s great grandfather was indeed a duke of somewhere in the Pyrenees and was appointed marshal of a region in Algeria, during the early years of the French mandate. He moved the entire family out there, along with thousands of other Frenchmen.
“How do I know this, you may ask? Twenty years ago I had a young colleague research Rollo Leveque when a client of his sued a client of ours. I so like to know my enemy. The trouble was, I became rather too fascinated by his past. It took the boredom out of the case itself. No matter, we won.”
Rollo was brought up in Algeria and France, studied law at Cambridge and the Leveques gradually retreated back to France after Algeria’s independence. But in the course of a hundred years they’d stolen land from local tribes and land being one of the few commodities you can’t take with you when you move, it was left to its fate.
“A glorious fate,” said John. “Lo and behold, five years after leaving Algeria, the NAOC - the highly dubious North African Oil Corporation - struck liquid gold, right beneath the land the Leveques once ‘owned’. A thousand barrels a day.”
“And Rollo thought he was entitled to a share of it?”
“Precisely. He’s tried every legal move in the book to assert his family’s claim to the land, he even consulted me at one point. The judgements have gone against him in every court from Algiers to the Hague.”
“It’s not as if he needs the money...” I said, feebly.
“Takers, Mr. Hawk. You know as well I do takers believe that too much is never enough.”
Right there and then, in John Stillman’s library, I couldn’t join up the things he’d told me to what I already knew and thereby solve Maryan’s murder, but money - and in this case oil money, tons of it, would almost certainly be the key.
“He blamed his attempts on someone else, of course. The nagging family were pushing him, especially his sister.”
I nodded. “D’you know anything about her?”
“Not really. A gold digger, I imagine, if you’ll forgive that vulgar phrase. She worked for a film company in France - Gaumont.”
He laughed and said that, just like me, he’d always thought it was the name of an occasional local cinema, not the outlet of a vast corporation. Rollo’s sister had worked on the shop floor, as it were, been noticed by the boss for her beauty, and a year later she had married him.
“You don’t remember her name, by any chance?”
“No, but her trade was costumes, I believe.”
Our chat drifted off into other areas. He asked about my children, by name, by detail, yet more proof of his phenomenal memory. He was happy to talk about Teresa as well, in fact I think he was grateful to have a willing listener. Death, he maintained, did not close the book, it merely finished the chapter, and yet so few of his acquaintances were willing to turn the page. They preferred to linger in that fateful day even though John had moved way beyond any need of their sympathy. He wanted to rejoice in the life his daughter had led, short though it had been.
When I left Mayfield House, hours later than I’d intended to and with some of his excellent whisky on board - he’d even remembered ice all the way to the brim - I promised myself again that I would visit him regularly and immediately began to worry about how, if and when I could do that. The logistics were simple enough. He was always at home and lived just 12 miles away from me. But logic has rarely held sway in my family.
-28 -
What John Stillman had told me about Rollo Leveque was and wasn’t, in equal measure, surprising. The enterprise I’d stumbled on, via an old man’s pocket watch, was always bound to reveal itself in detail, so long as I kept pushing. But it was the nature of it that frightened me. Real fear, not just the popular kind, the overstatement of common or garden concern. A laboratory in an isolated house on the Jericho Road? The host of possibilities as to its purpose, were unlimited. And one day I would have to walk up to the front door, knock on it and ask what the hell they were up to...
‘I so like to know my enemy’ John Stillman had said. I was of the same mind. I had five days left in my agreement with Laura before she, quite rightly, made public the existence of Amira, Sami and the old lady. That evening I discussed my plans for the next few days with her. It involved an old fashioned stake out of the house on Jericho Road. I’d taken stock of the land opposite, a field with cattle beyond which lay woodland, oak and sycamore from what I could tell. From the edge of it I would have an uninterrupted view of the house so I planned on taking Jaikie and Con’s bivvy, setting up camp and waiting. Laura must’ve seen the boy in me trying to break out of the man.
“Two things occur,” she said. “The tent is bright orange and for a good reason. So that it can be seen for miles around.”
“Yes, well, I’ll get another...”
“Stake out the place if you must, and I agree that you need to, but why not ask Bill Grogan to spell you?”
“To what?”
“You each do twelve hours.”
Despite him having ‘found’ the place, by virtue of putting a barbecue kettle and its lid together, I could hear his sceptical grunt. He’d want to know in detail what the purpose of this observation was, the targets involved, the ins and outs of my growing suspicion. I wouldn’t be able to grunt back with satisfactory answers. Who comes and goes, guvnor? I can tell you that from am armchair in Summertown. The postman, the Tesco delivery van, the milkman if such a person still exists. And in deciding not to ask for his help my mind flew back to my one persistent doubt. People were being trafficked from Abbeville, and Maryan might well have been alive but for my interference.
***
The following morning, Laura dropped me off about a mile from the house on Jericho Road and we agreed that she’d collect me from that very place twelve hours from then. Before she drove off she appealed to me to be careful and far from being a casual farewell it was heartfelt. Laboratory, she said with a questioning frown. Take care.
I climbed over the style from where the footpath led back towards Oxford. I struck out right across a scrubby piece of land, tall with every attacking plant the English countryside can offer, thistles, nettles, brambles, but once I reached the wood I could walk in straighter lines. It was home to all manner of wildlife, I’m sure, but I would guess that no human had walked among these magnificent trees for years. Planted too close together, there were few low branches to get in my way and a springy feel underfoot made so by years of falling leaves and twigs. And it was silent. Just my own tread snapping an occasional twig underfoot, sounding like muffled gunshot.
I’d marked the spot I was heading for, in my mind and on a paper map, and when I reached it I went to the very edge of the trees and looked across at the house, an uninterrupted view marred only by the roadside hedge. Nothing had changed but today there was a car parked on the grassy slope towards a wooden garage. A small car, an outsize scone of a thing, even smaller than Bill Grogan’s. I noted its number and set up camp for the day, folding stool against a sycamore, flask of coffee, sandwiches and salad in a polythene tub.
Even through binoculars the house looked unhelpfully quiet but then at 9.30 on a weekday morning so did every house in the country. There were occasional 4 x 4s, mothers returning from the school run and by ten o'clock the rattle and groggy engines of builders’ pickups and trailers took over. Farm traffic? Not a great deal but the cattle in the field between me and the house had found me interesting. Looking down their tagged noses and jostling
for prime position it took them half an hour to realise that I was an ungiving, permanent fixture and they went back to their ordinary lives.
My phone pinged with an email, one to one, from Ellie.
‘Dad, did you ever look into the Fee being pissed off thing? E x’
‘I did. She basically feels her nose is out of joint, with Laura stepping in. Not that I’m sure she is yet. Fee says it makes her feel redundant...’
‘That’s bollocks, Dad,’ came the immediate response.
I replied, trying to make it a joke with serious undertones.
‘One man’s bollocks are another man’s worry beads, Ellie. Pardon the gender specifics. But just think back to what we all owe to her. D x’
A while later I received this from Jaikie,
‘What’s wrong with her, Dad? Is she ill?’
‘Christ, that’s her line, boy!’ I snapped back. ‘Don’t you bloody start! This is just for you, Ellie and Con, right. Why not mail her, tell her how much you care.’
‘That’s daft. She already knows...’
‘Come off it, Dad, have we all joined some lovey dovey cult or something...?’
I left it with them, or rather they left me.
By lunchtime I was rewarded for my four hours of doing nothing other than taking the occasional stroll in a ten yard arc around my base. I heard a door slam over at the house and immediately fell sideways on behind a tree. Two people had emerged from the house with mugs in their hands and a plate of sandwiches. A man and a woman. Middle-aged. Arabic. Dark hair and the skin tone both my daughters had longed for. They were dressed in grey track suits and went to sit on a garden bench with only a word or two passing between them. They came to life momentarily, as a bird landed on the table nearby and made its presence felt. The man threw it a crust from his sandwich, the woman smiled. But that was as racy as it got. Twenty minutes later they’d finished their lunch and went back inside. That was it for me, for the next six hours, apart from the same 4 x 4s driving past in the opposite direction. And then I received an unexpected visitor.
Jericho Road: A Nathan Hawk Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Mystery series Book 5) Page 18