Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Watkinson, Douglas

  “He was on an inquiry I led, for less than a year.”

  A waitress brought a cake to the next table, four candles on it, one for each decade rather than a burning forest to emphasise the advancing years. The celebrant blew them out and his friends began to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ with such gusto that we fell silent. When it was over and the clapping had died down I sat up straight, hands behind my head, and tried to stretch Tom Blackwell out of my mind. He wouldn’t go. And then Laura jabbed me with a shot of feminine perception.

  “Why the uncertainty, Nathan? I mean it’s not just about the possible danger involved, is it? You invite that at the best of times.”

  I must have smiled, or something equally impetuous. She repeated her question. I explained as wearily as I could that I hadn’t wanted Liam Kinsella shacking up with me, especially after Blackwell had hinted at a possible IRA connection. Like he’d said, mention of those three capital letters has an effect, one where the listener imagines either a spent force or a re-emergent threat. Laura simply said that Kinsella was a hauntingly beautiful name and asked, for the third time, why I had misgivings. I told her about Graham Blackwell’s death and she was horrified by it, the more so probably because her own brother had died in a road accident at a similar age. She reached across the table and took my hand as if somehow that might convey her empathy to Tom and Karen Blackwell. I then came out with what I’d been reluctant to believe.

  “I think he used his son’s death to persuade me, to make me change my mind. He worked it into the conversation in order to get the result he wanted. What sort of man would do that?”

  She withdrew her hand and thought about it, then said, “That could just be you, thinking the worst of everyone as usual. And it doesn’t alter the fact that his son is dead.”

  On the way home to Beech Tree, Laura gave a more considered diagnosis. She was driving, being less over the limit than I was, and began her summary with the ominous words, “I’ve been thinking...”

  I turned and looked at her profile as she kept her eye firmly on the road ahead. I always homed in on her nose. A proper nose, my son Jaikie called it. Lips slightly forward, kissable, though not from that angle. Chin jutting. Above it all, the sizeable forehead shielding all those brains. If I’d been voicing those thoughts when we left The Thatch, no wonder she’d offered to drive.

  “Blackwell said he came to you for advice.”

  “Advice, my fanny!”

  She turned to me momentarily.

  “That’s what I said back to him,” I said.

  “Pupil goes back to teacher,” she quoted. “We always think our teachers know more than we do, and it’s usually true.”

  There was something definitely off about this case, she went on, and if she’d sensed it then Blackwell probably had and I most certainly had. Okay, we couldn’t put a name to it, but what did we have so far? One, the trial was being rushed; two, it was laughable that he’d run out of safe houses, and as for three, there being only two police officers available...

  “And one of them is evidently a girl,” I said, unwisely.

  She let it ride. Aware that something was skewiff, she continued, Blackwell wanted to bring his star witness into my presence to see if I could put my finger on it. More than that, however, he believed that when I discovered what was wrong I would do something about it, poke my nose in as per usual. I would cross lines, cut corners, break rules that he as a serving officer couldn’t afford to. She slapped the steering wheel and waited for my reaction. I told her that what she’d said made sense but I didn’t believe it. We fell silent, consideration on my part, a slight sulk on hers.

  “I know one thing he’s got wrong,” I said, eventually. “The murders were very amateurish and very messy, according to him. That doesn’t sound like the IRA to me.”

  - 3 -

  Later that evening I went up to my cabin to talk to my kids. I don’t actually talk to Fee, Con, Jaikie or Ellie, of course. We’ve developed this e-mail forum: one of us starts a thread, the others follow up, and if ever proof were needed of how powerful a misplaced word can be then our brief exchanges provide it. Two years ago, from their faraway laptops or mobile phones, they would ramble on about each other, themselves or maybe nothing in particular, assuring me that some invisible chain held us together as a family. Now, along with an entire generation, they’ve shortened their missives, shortened the very words they use, and left me fearing that the result will be estrangement.

  This particular exchange was going to be tricky and the smart thing would’ve been to say nothing. In a month it would all be over, Flaxman would’ve been sentenced and Kinsella would’ve changed his name. But I tried to persuade myself that something primal was at work as I sat down at my computer on that late August evening. Beech Tree was my kids’ home as much as mine and I was about to place it in jeopardy by letting a murder witness stay there. I hadn’t signed an agreement in blood with Tom Blackwell to keep quiet, so why shouldn’t Fee, Con, Jaikie and Ellie give their opinion? I made a pig’s ear of it by obscuring the real question with a trivial one which took on a life of its own.

  The clocks on the wall told me what time it was in their parts of the world. It was two in the morning in downtown Katmandu where my daughter Ellie worked in an orphanage alongside her American boyfriend, Terrific Rick.

  “Hi Ellie,” I began. “Just wanted to run something past you, you being the dog whisperer in the family. I’ve been offered another one. German Shepherd cross with a Labrador, young, male, biddable and good looking. You saw Dogge at Xmas. Can she cope? Dad x.”

  Even as I pressed the key to send it I was staggered by its cack-handedness. Nevertheless, over the next few hours I received a series of replies starting with Ellie’s.

  “Hi D! Sounds like my ideal man! It’s yr house. Hve as many dogs as you wnt. Crse Dogge can! E x.”

  As I’d expected Fee wasn’t far behind, having heard the news from her sister. No messing with Fee, she went straight for it.

  “Dad, what’s wrong? What do you want another dog for? Is Laura okay? What’s happened? Fee x.”

  With Fee I knew it was a fine balance: respond too soon and she’d suspect, leave it too late and she’d worry.

  “Absolutely nothing wrong,” I replied half an hour later. “It was a genuine question. I mean is it fair that I get a young, boisterous dog in when Dogge’s in her declining years? Will she feel pushed out?”

  Jaikie was next. “Dad, mate, Fee’s been on, yap, yap, yap. If you’ve got something wrong with you, get it checked out.”

  This was going badly. It had jumped tracks from being about a fictional new dog to me having a terminal illness.

  He went on to say that I should mosey on down to Chiswick next week for lunch, only not Monday, he was seeing the guys at Working Title (Four Weddings, Bridget Jones). Him and Keira Knightley in something together? Not Tuesday either, he was doing a voice over. Wednesday he was having lunch with the CEO of Cloud Eight (Slumdog Millionaire). Thursday was out as well, but it was reassuring to know that he was his usual self-obsessed self. He did have the grace to end with a PS. “Repeat, get it checked out immediately, okay?!”

  Ellie must have picked up on his concern along the way and it resulted in, “Dad, tweet from J earlier. This illness, what does L say?”

  I responded with attitude. J and L are the human beings known to me as Jaikie and Laura, are they, my love? Laura says the usual. Less booze, less coffee, more exercise. Maybe I did need another dog.

  There was one voice missing. It belonged to Connor, who’d become increasingly difficult to reach. To account for his silence, this departure from the family norm, his siblings had turned as one on his current girlfriend, a French Creole beauty from New Orleans called Marcie. None of us knew her, none of us had even met her, but we all disliked her. I put Con on a nearby shelf, to worry about in spare moments.

  - 4 -

  Blackwell and I didn’t meet again until his two Special Operations Unit officer
s moved in to Beech Tree four days later. We’d spoken on the phone a few times, though he’d have preferred an e-mail exchange. Fair enough, but with people who manipulate the truth for a living, such as policemen, e-mails allow the writer to disappear behind their style and the substance is always the loser, so I insisted that we iron out wrinkles ear to ear. We dealt with stuff like who was going to sleep where, the location of the temporary armoury and, most importantly, what the cover story would be.

  Basically, the male SOU officer would be a distant cousin of mine, staying with me for a few weeks along with his wife, the female officer. Kinsella would be her step-brother – the ‘step’ part would cover the lack of family resemblance. A gathering of the clan, then, should anyone ask, and on the occasions Kinsella was due in court they would all have gone out for the day to visit the likes of Blenheim Palace, Waddesdon Manor, Windsor Castle.

  When the two SOU officers arrived I was standing at the kitchen window, six thirty in the morning, waiting for the coffee maker to squeeze out a pot of wakefulness. I still hadn’t descaled it; I’d simply stopped listening to its agony. A Ford Focus drove down Morton Lane and paused outside Beech Tree. Detective Constable Petra Fairchild got out from the passenger side, opened the five-bar gate, the car drove in and she closed the gate behind it. Sergeant Bill Grogan emerged, slab by slab, from the driver’s side, looked up at the place and mouthed the words, “Fuck me!”

  I ground some more coffee.

  Grogan wasn’t just a large man; he was a cumbersome one as well. Throughout his stay I was to hear regular collisions between him and a low beam, an impact followed by reverberation and strangled expletives. That just about sums him up. He was someone who made his presence felt more than heard, a man of few words, at least in the beginning, and it’s a breed I’m not familiar with. He dumped a holdall on the kitchen table, nodded at me, then asked if I minded him looking over the house without me as a tour guide. I did mind, but it seemed unhelpful to begin our relationship with disagreement. That would follow soon enough. Off he went.

  I would’ve said the only thing he and his colleague had in common was that neither of them wanted to be there. Fair enough, I’d found myself in that situation many times and who was to say I hadn’t landed there again, but it was a month out of all our lives, no more. A job that needed doing. So why did Grogan and Fairchild worry me? Habit, pleasure or something real?

  For a start, I couldn’t see them as a married couple, certainly not in the same bed together. Beyond the fact that he was pug ugly, jowly before his time, and she was seriously attractive, age was the main stumbling block: he was late forties to her thirty at the most. His clothes were plain dull, hers quiet but expensive: a leather bomber jacket, burgundy in colour, jeans and what my mother would have called ‘plimsoles, probably from Woolworth’s’. My mother would also have gone to town on the spiky auburn hair which even I could see had been cut by someone who knew what they were doing.

  Fairchild placed her own sporty-looking shoulder bag on the table and felt the need to apologise for her partner.

  “Sorry, he’s not happy with the arrangements.”

  “D’you know why?”

  “Same reason I’m not. The place is miles from any backup and there’s just the two of us if anything goes wrong. It feels like a plan thrown together by someone who’s never done a day’s police work in their life.”

  I think she expected me to rear up in defence of Tom Blackwell at the criticism. The trouble was I agreed with it. I asked how she took her coffee. Black, no sugar.

  Grogan returned from his tour of the house, ducked into the kitchen from the hall and rocked his hand at Fairchild before turning to me.

  “Thought you had a dog,” he said.

  Picking up his style I replied, “Have. Neighbour.”

  Fairchild gave an inward hiss. “That may not have been such a good idea. It might be helpful to discuss any changes before you make them.”

  I rocked my hand in mid-air as Grogan had done.

  “Does this mean the house isn’t as bad as you feared?” I asked him.

  “Did I say that?”

  “No, and that isn’t what I asked you.”

  “Not much wrong with the house,” he said. “It’s the job itself: cobbled together, last-minute stuff.” It was a clipped voice with a Sarf London accent. “Who the hell is this Liam Kinsella, anyway? Who’s Aaron Flaxman, come to that?”

  “Well, if you don’t know that...”

  I stopped when I realised he wasn’t kidding. He really didn’t know either of the names, only that he and Fairchild were charged with keeping one of them safe until the murder trial of the other was over.

  “Maybe that’s Blackwell’s idea of security,” I said. “The less you know...”

  Grogan stared at me, no doubt wondering how he’d survive a month in the present company, plus Liam Kinsella. By way of a gesture, and to raise the falling temperature, I said there were beers in the utility room, ice in the freezer, spirits in the dresser, they should help themselves. That didn’t go down well either. Grogan said he didn’t drink.

  “I’m going to get the rest of the gear from the car,” Fairchild said. “Where’s the bread oven?”

  She hadn’t had a sudden urge to knock up a batch of granaries; she wanted the bread oven by the inglenook, which Blackwell had told her about, for storing four Glocks, a couple of Taser pistols and a Taser rifle. God knows how two SOU officers, with such a skinny assortment of weapons, were meant to tackle the Heritage IRA if they came calling, but that’s budget cuts for you.

  The call came at six o’clock that evening and was a hit-and-miss affair. Tom Blackwell spoke to Fairchild, who moved around the ground floor of the house asking the eternal question: why was it so difficult to get a signal here? I gave her the eternal answer: the walls are too thick. Whether it makes technical sense or not, I’ve no idea, but it usually sends people out into the garden.

  Fairchild returned thirty seconds later, saying that Blackwell wanted to speak to me, and after our own round of ‘can you still hear me?’ he asked if I would go with Fairchild and Grogan to pick up Kinsella. He’d be supervising the handover and had one or two things to say to me, face to face. The call finished of its own accord.

  “You’re meeting at Chestnut Farm,” I said. “The farmer’s a friend of mine, Martin Falconer.”

  Grogan nodded slowly as if the remark had been highly charged. “Blackwell didn’t say.”

  “Seven thirty, Bryant’s Lane.”

  For all its lack of planning, it seemed an over-elaborate handover to me. Why not bring Kinsella straight here to Beech Tree? It was hardly the middle of Trafalgar Square.

  “Last-minute decision stuff,” said Grogan, with the umbrage of an old-school copper being asked to keep pace with the times.

  He turned away, leaving any polite chat to Fairchild. She was trying to make light of a broken fingernail when in truth it was annoying the hell out of her.

  “Presumably Blackwell told you he wants me along for the ride?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, beginning to root around in her shoulder bag.

  “There’s one in the dresser, the apothecary drawer.”

  “One what?”

  “Emery board.”

  She thanked me and five minutes later the job was done. It was shorter than the others but just as round.

  We arrived at the bottom of Bryant’s Lane half an hour before we needed to, a habit I’m still trying to break, and Fairchild parked at a metal gate, chained and padlocked. The sheep beyond it seemed to log away our every move from that moment on and managed to upset Grogan almost immediately. After staring back at them for a while, he muttered, “Stupid fuckers.”

  It broke the ice, perhaps because it was the first thing all three of us agreed on, and for the next twenty minutes we small-talked our way round each other, trying to keep hackles down. We slipped just once when after some colourless chat about police pay and pensions, obligatory wh
erever two or three coppers are gathered together, Grogan asked if I knew why Blackwell had chosen my place as a safe house.

  “I don’t,” I said. “Do you?”

  “No, and I couldn’t care less.”

  “Why ask, then?”

  He hardened a little. “I’m being friendly.”

  Fairchild chipped in. “My guess is he knows he can rely on you.”

  That didn’t help any. “Rely on me for what?”

  She looked at Grogan for support but he was too busy examining the middle distance.

  “Well, in general,” she said. “He knows you from way back, so he’s thought...”

  Her explanation tailed off and we eased away from each other.

  I don’t think I’d ever been down Bryant’s Lane – it doesn’t lead anywhere – and unlike most of Martin Falconer’s land, this patch was dank and still, spooned out as if someone had once tried to create a lake there. Maybe they had and Martin had drained it for grazing. He was known to our resentful Parish Council for his earthworks.

  I became aware of a fluttering sound in the far-off stillness. It grew quickly into a recognisable clatter and yet still I asked, “What the hell is that?”

  Grogan nodded in a north-easterly direction and said sourly, “Chopper, by the sound of it.”

  We’d expected a car, but within two minutes a Eurocopter EC135 descended to Bryant’s Field with blades glinting in the sunset as if wielded by some demented samurai. The sheep rose and ran for cover, still chewing leftovers. Once the pilot had settled the aircraft the door opened and a skeletal set of steps unfolded to the ground. Blackwell was first down them, clocked us by the gate, then beckoned his travelling companions to join him.

  Grogan’s reaction to his first sight of Liam Kinsella was much as I’d expected: indifference to the man himself and contempt for those who’d made the arrangements. Kinsella was dressed head to toe in battered denim – jeans, shirt, jacket, stained and oily, as if he’d just been rolled out from under a lorry engine. He had shoulder-length black hair, greasy and matted like his beard, both adding ten years to the thirty-two he supposedly was. He was protesting, answering back to those around him, mainly out of fear, but with good reason given that he was meant to be Tom Blackwell’s star witness, not his prisoner. Surely a certain amount of trust should have developed between them by now and yet he was handcuffed to an Organised Crime Command poster boy, nattily dressed with not a mark on him, who, while holding his charge close, was also at pains to keep him at a distance. Kinsella was the shorter, slighter of the two and gave the impression of being dragged along like a manky child.