“I’ll have him frisked,” I said. “I’ll do the job myself.”
“If you talk to him, he’ll know it was me turned him over to the police.”
“He’ll know that anyway. If by any chance he doesn’t, he’ll see you in court. You can’t go in disguise. And while we’re on the subject of your appearance...”
“But it’s not just me he’ll turn on.” He swept an arm round the table. “You, your family, friends...”
“Sit down, Liam,” said Fairchild. He turned and looked at her, unsure of what she’d just said. “Sit down!”
She’d called him Liam and there was a wealth of meaning I could’ve read into that, but at least he did as he’d been told. He pushed his plate aside, then rested his elbows on the table, dropped his head forwards and covered it with his hands. He was sweating, still trembling, apologising. I’d never thought of him as especially streetwise but nor had I believed he was this naive, imagining that contact with Flaxman would put us all in more danger than we were in already. It was straight from another soap opera.
“I’ll think about what you’ve said,” I told him. “Meantime I’ve no intention of confronting him. Why would I need to? He’s facing the worst charges a man ever could.”
He nodded and calmed a little. “Murder. But is my evidence enough to put him away for it?”
“Chief Inspector Carew thinks it is, Henry Sillitoe thinks it is. Me, I’m not so sure.”
- 15 -
I waited up for Fee. She came through the door at one o’clock. After the cinema she’d gone to Laura’s house for a drink and a chat. But this was just like the old days, she said, as she squeezed half a glass of red wine out of the bottle left over from dinner. She would go out for the evening with Maggie’s and my blessing, return when she felt like it, but there one of us would be, waiting, no matter what godforsaken hour it was.
“What was the chat about? Me?”
She smiled. “Dad, not everything’s about you.” She sat down next to me. “Jodie Falconer. You sent me off to see her and Jaikie because you had something going on in Grimsby. It was a con.”
“Don’t tell me you found something wrong...”
“No, Jaikie’s fine. I pissed him off a bit by saying you thought there might be a problem...”
“Thanks for that.”
“Jodie’s fine too.”
“The word ‘fine’ doesn’t say a great deal,” I said. “Choose another.”
She flopped down in Maggie’s dad’s rocker, creaked back and forth a couple of times.
“Jodie Falconer is one of the nicest women I’ve ever met. Just what Jaikie needs. She supports him, slaps him down when he gets unbearably up himself.” She paused and nodded as she checked the truth in what she’d just said. “And he loves her. They’re talking about marriage, Dad. Children. So why don’t I feel over the moon?”
This was turning out to be more complicated than I’d foreseen, as most things with Fee did. And she wanted a response to the question. I simply asked if she’d phoned Yukito yet and got my head bitten off in the process. If we were going to talk, she spat, could we at least avoid the obvious? So she’d just broken up with somebody and Jaikie and Jodie were on cloud nine. Christ, it didn’t need a fucking psychoanalyst...
“Your baby brother’s checking out. If you thought Jodie wasn’t good enough for him, you’d step in and see her off. Like you did with Sophie Kent...”
She rocked forward and stared at me. “I had absolutely nothing to do with that!”
“Except that you couldn’t stand her and made it perfectly plain. He listened to you.”
“But I never said a word! Okay, she was a greedy, grasping, gold-digging bitch and thank God he realised...”
“Fee, you didn’t need to say anything. And now Jodie’s taking your place.”
She nodded. “He doesn’t need me anymore.”
She went over to the sink and threw her wine into it. Some of it splashed back onto her top. She swore quietly and ran a handful of kitchen towel under the tap, removed the stain.
“Things here okay?” she asked.
“Fine.”
She pointed at me for using the meaningless word.
“I’d like your opinion on something, Fee. I came back from Grimsby to find Fairchild teaching Kinsella how to use Facebook, using her laptop.”
She didn’t react adversely, like she was meant to.
“I blasted her,” I said. “What’s the harm, she said. I couldn’t really answer, just knew instinctively that it was a stupid thing to do. Was it?”
She thought for a moment. “Well, in theory, yes. He could memorise her passwords, break into her computer later on...”
I nodded, feeling vindicated. Why had he needed her to teach him how to use Facebook? The man was thirty-two years old. Facebook, Twitter, all that stuff went in with his mother’s milk.
She came over to me with a pitying smile on her face. “Come on, Dad, even people his age forget the details of it, specially when they don’t use it for a while. Remember you and me...?”
She was referring to the several goes I’d had at mastering Facebook, under her tuition, before getting the hang of it: the difference between profile and page, a timeline, newsfeed, events. And when it came to Twitter, we had to start all over again.
“Why does everyone have an excuse for this guy?” I asked.
“Because we can all see that he doesn’t have, say, Jaikie’s self-belief. He doesn’t know who he is.”
I slapped the table and stood up, never mind what time of night it was. “Then let’s help him find out. Over the next twelve days I’m going to change that little bastard, make him oven-ready for court.”
“Won’t he object?”
“I’m sure he will. Problem is, where to start? I mean it’s hair, beard, the clothes, the teeth...”
“Start with the hair,” said Fee. “Fairchild’s mother only lives in Ashendon.”
“So what?”
“She used to be a hairdresser.”
I was first up the next morning, six thirty, and anyone who knew me would have seen it as a bad sign. A project was about to be unveiled and those within striking distance would have a role to play in it.
Grogan and Kinsella appeared on the dot of seven, the one chirpy and chatty, his other half bleary and bad-tempered. Fairchild entered soon afterwards, the pink dressing gown corseting the life out of her. I set a bowl of porridge in front of her; she loosened the cord, stopped yawning and started eating.
“I’ve got a job for you,” I said.
She didn’t like the sound of that. I shouldn’t have been the one telling her what to do, but she still asked for the details.
“Phone your mother, see when she can cut Kinsella’s hair.”
“Now just a second...” Kinsella began.
“It’s a haircut, not a circumcision,” I said.
“To me it’s just as personal...”
“You have it cut by a pro or Grogan holds you down and I do it. Your hair, I mean. And that stupid bloody beard’s coming off as well.”
He started to argue, appealing to Fairchild. To my surprise she agreed with me, though the language she used was gentler, more diplomatic. If he looked clean and conventional, she pointed out, he’d stand a better chance of appealing to a court. It was all very well being a free spirit, an original, but juries weren’t renowned for their love of eccentrics. And he did want Flaxman convicted, didn’t he?
I sat in the passenger seat of the Focus, Fairchild driving with undue caution. Grogan was squeezed into the back handcuffed to Kinsella. I’d lent Kinsella a pair of Jaikie’s old walking boots which fitted him perfectly and completed the picture of a ‘gentleman of the road’, as my mother would’ve put it. He was silent throughout the five-mile journey, probably grieving for his human rights. Mind you, we had most of the windows open so it would’ve been difficult to hold a conversation.
Ashendon is a brick and flint village at the end of a road
that turns into a track which becomes a footpath and then disappears. It lies in a small valley and must once have been a farming community, and a hell of a lonely one at that. The early Victorian buildings, barns and animal shelters, were certainly not grand in their day, but were now highly sought after with price tags to match. If Mrs Fairchild was a hairdresser, then her husband must have had a more lucrative trade. It turned out he was ‘in property’, another molested phrase covering anyone from Peter Rachman to the Duke of Westminster. Jack Fairchild owned local houses, shops, pubs, factories and had a decent enough reputation.
As we pulled into the yard of the Fairchilds’ old barn conversion, the hairdresser came out to greet the policewoman and they embraced almost tearfully. It happened every time, they said, whether the absence had been a few days or several months. Grace Fairchild was clearly her daughter’s mother, though the pointed angularity of her body had been rounded at the corners with age and good living. She was an inch or so shorter than her offspring, as most of us are, and it came as no surprise that her blonded hair was immaculately done, a walking advert for her expertise.
When Petra turned to introduce her to the rest of us I saw Grace pause at the task which lay ahead of her as Kinsella emerged from the car. Whether exhilarated by the challenge or wishing she hadn’t been so ready to help, I couldn’t tell, but she invited us into the house and offered us coffee.
I’m not sure why she turned directly to me and asked if I’d noticed how time flew faster with age, but I agreed out of courtesy. Her observation had something to do with Danish apple bars. They were Petra’s favourite and if she hadn’t been so busy she would have set to and made some, but she hadn’t had time. She would make some today, somehow get them to us. Meantime there were only bourbons, digestives and Jaffa cakes. Could we manage with them? Kinsella said he loved Jaffa cakes, hadn’t had one for ages, and his apparent delight at the prospect of them brought Grace’s attention back to him.
We were in the kitchen by now, plenty of light from windows on three sides. Grace pulled a chair onto the central mosaic of tiles, gesturing for Kinsella to sit. He did as he was asked, breathing in her expensive perfume as she circled him. All we’d wanted was a short back and sides but given the starting point, a greasy mass of rats’ tails, it was bound to be less than straightforward.
“I was expecting something, well...” Her voice dwindled.
“Human?” I suggested.
“Easier to work on...”
“We all were. And, by the way, if he quotes the International Declaration of Human Rights at you, hand me your scissors. I’ll cut off more than his hair.”
Regardless of the tattered package he was, Grace Fairchild insisted on covering Kinsella with a protective sheet which, once in place, rendered him just another head at the barber’s. This helped her maintain an objectivity, I imagine, and over the next half hour a curious thing happened as she unearthed the original Liam Kinsella from the shallow grave of his hair. Though it pains me to say it, a good-looking man emerged. And as she started work on the beard, so the shape of his face became apparent. The only person in the room who wasn’t impressed was Bill Grogan, but mother and daughter were pleasantly surprised. I was more interested in this chance to now read Kinsella’s face without hindrance. It was youthful, certainly, though pitted by the sores of recent neglect. They would heal.
It was certainly a striking face, long and bony, like the rest of him. The nose and ears were untouched by violence or rough sport and, now we could see them, the eyes were grey and steady. But, along with the mouth, they were the things that betrayed him. They remained still until he moved them for effect, which may not seem worth mentioning, but most people under stress twitch their lips or move their eyes involuntarily. Those who don’t are almost certainly controlling their emotions and doing so for a reason that needs to be identified. As for his other talking points, the hair was jet black and mostly in the bin along with the beard. He was beginning to reek of ground-in sweat again, the clothes were still ragged and the teeth...
“Open your mouth,” I said.
“Why?” he said, tight-lipped.
I walked over to him, leaned down and he smiled. The teeth had been cleaned.
“When did that happen?” I asked.
“This morning. First time for three months.”
In hindsight, alarm bells should have rung, but at the time it seemed like a detail. Besides, Fairchild was already holding up a barber’s mirror for him to see the work so far.
“Recognise him?” she asked.
Kinsella looked at his reflection as he might have done a school photograph, recognising but not knowing his own face gazing back. He seemed to force himself to like what he saw, then smiled at Grace Fairchild and thanked her for her handiwork.
- 16 -
On the drive back to Beech Tree, talking above the wind rush from the open windows, Kinsella gave us a running commentary on the virtues of Grace Fairchild. She was warm and friendly, Grace by name, gracious by nature, stylish and non-judgmental, her classiness reminded him of his own mother, her obvious love for her daughter spoke volumes. Generalities, all of them, and as he began to struggle for further compliments I did him a favour and told him to shut up. In the peace and quiet which followed I noticed his minders stealing the occasional glance at him, Grogan with a head turn, Fairchild in the rear-view mirror. Perhaps they were wondering what to expect from this metamorphosis...
I wasn’t sure that a simple makeover would alter him at all. Change would imply a move from one position to another, whereas Kinsella still felt like a man in flux, someone who had literally dropped out of the night sky with an undeclared purpose and continued to throw into question my celebrated ability to judge people.
Back home, Fee looked at the work so far, then raised approving eyebrows.
“Promising,” she said. “He reminds me of someone. Who is it, Dad? Come on, you’re good at this stuff.”
And as she snapped her fingers, trying to bring a name to mind, some Hollywood star or other, a bolt of panic hit me, pit of the stomach. My daughter was a beautiful girl, on the rebound from a long-term relationship, and Kinsella was the good-looking enigma such women fall for. He smiled at her, clean teeth and all.
“Let me know when it comes to you,” he said.
I’d taken back the boots he’d worn for the trip and made a mental note not to tell Jaikie they’d been lent. He was odd about people’s feet at the best of times. But it wasn’t just his boots that needed keeping quiet about. Fee decided to search the loft, a cramped space beyond the attic rooms, home to a small colony of pipistrelle bats and family junk. In a box marked ‘Jaikie Clothes’, which she herself had packed when I’d moved house seven years previously, she found a selection of her brother’s cast-offs. She brought them down to the kitchen where Fairchild was boning a chicken and I was preparing vegetables for an evening casserole. Grogan had offered to help us and been declined. He sat in Maggie’s dad’s old rocker, evil-eyeing his refurbished charge who was basking in the growing effect he was having.
“They aren’t so much worn out as out of fashion,” Fee told the assembled company. “Being Jaikie’s, they’re top dollar.” She looked at Kinsella. “Before you try anything on, you’ll need another bath.”
“Of course. Care to join me?” He’d meant to say it with a kind of impish charm but it failed and came out as plain awkward and silly. He winced with embarrassment. “Sorry. Bath. Right.”
Exhibit one was a single-breasted jacket on a hanger which Fee hooked over an old cast-iron nail in one of the beams. There was a shirt to go with it and a pair of slacks, even a tie. What did everyone think? Fairchild was enthusiastic and said it would do nicely. Grogan nodded and looked away.
Sensing mistrust from my direction, Kinsella tried to include me in the conversation. “These belong to your son, right? Jacob Hawk, the actor? Will he mind?”
“He won’t know.”
“Not unless one of us tells h
im, eh?” He winked. It was another attempt at passing humour but it fell to earth unnoticed.
“There’s just about everything he’ll need up there,” said Fee. “Underwear, socks, trousers ... shoes, Dad?”
Grogan muttered with his usual brevity, “No shoes.”
Fee appealed to me as if I might countermand that. I shrugged, but no one got away from Fee that easily.
“So Liam walks into court in a Ralph Lauren jacket, Prada shirt and bare feet...?”
She too was using his Christian name. For me that marked the crossover from formality to friendship.
Fairchild had stopped work on the chicken. “Is it really a Ralph Lauren?”
“No, but you get my point!”
Fee could hear herself becoming short and cranky and she backed off a little.
I thought back to the evening when Kinsella had panicked at news that I was planning to visit Aaron Flaxman. Two days ago? Three? The fear he’d shown hadn’t lasted. Had it been real to begin with?
Given Fee and Fairchild’s reactions to the new, improved Kinsella, I was interested to see what Laura would make of him. I’m not suggesting that any one of them would have fallen prey to his good looks and awkward charm as he emerged from his derelict state, but on the other hand he knew how to use both to full advantage.
She arrived at Beech Tree, after a twelve-hour day, to join us for supper and, still in GP mode, asked me how Kinsella was. The lice were history, the nits had left the building, but was the ointment she’d prescribed working? I gestured to where he’d just entered from the living room and was standing in the doorway. I watched her body language as she approached him and could only see the doctor at work. He smiled, hands outspread, inviting her to give an opinion. She swallowed gently, searching for words, then said blandly, “Much better. And the ointment I prescribed has definitely worked.”
Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Page 12