“Tight-fisted? He wants to give you the business.”
He leaned forward across the table, closing the gap between us. “It already is my business. Not on paper, but I was the one who forced him into it. Without me there’d be no money for the old sod not to spend!”
I shook my head. “You’ll have to explain.”
He took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks before going into the well-worn story. “Fifteen years ago, he needed something new to get him out of a rut. Mum certainly did. For two centuries his family had been growing potatoes, cabbages and cauliflowers. I hate all three! Like bloody peasants they were out there dawn till dusk, digging in the earth, always dependent on the weather, the workforce, London prices. The eternal cry in our house was ‘come the spring it’ll all be okay’. Meaning the bloody cabbages will start growing. Roll on April! Only that particular April it pissed down for three weeks solid, then froze. Killed off the crop. We lived off anything the old man could shoot, trap or fish for.”
“What alternatives did he have?”
“Not many, but some. Mum’s brother had just died; she fancied taking over his farm in Cartmel. So did I. At least the view would’ve made up for being skint.”
“Never heard. Where is it?” I asked.
He looked at me reproachfully, as if I’d driven off the best thought he’d had all week.
“Lakes,” he muttered. “Anyway, the old man wouldn’t hear of it. Born here, lived here, so he’d die here. Then I met this Swedish engineer who’d designed a system for managing free-range birds. The old man went for it and 10 million pounds later, here we are.”
He must have realised that narrowing the distance between us had allowed him, maybe even encouraged him, to reveal a more telling side to his personality, albeit one that centred around vegetables and poultry. He’d spoken with a degree of passion; his manner had been so intense, an onlooker might have thought he was blaming me for that lousy spring fifteen years ago. He sat back again and resumed his remote cockiness.
“So what did you buy her?” I asked.
“What the fuck does it matter to...?” He calmed. “New settee, right? The old one was disgusting...”
“Dutiful son, eh?”
He looked at me, pure resentment. “I thought we were talking about my alibi? There isn’t one. I had a row with the old man after lunch.”
“About chickens?”
“I left, four o’clock, went back home.”
“Where’s that?”
“Over a shop in Churchill Street, Wragby. It’s on the market. You interested...?”
“No girlfriend, boyfriend to back that up?”
“No.”
“Well, I come back to saying the defence is rubbish, the prosecution story looks good.”
“Well, I say Henry Sillitoe can swing from my balls.”
“You know, I came here thinking you might have been a victim yourself, of Carew and Sweetman,” I said. “What do I find? Some arrogant git who reckons he’s untouchable – Carew’s words, not mine. Someone who thinks he’ll get off this murder charge for the half-baked reason that no one can prove he was there at the time. You daft sod, they don’t care where you were! They just reckon your time has come and you’re going down. And the whole thing is overshadowed by 15 million quid’s worth of heroin, one of the biggest hauls there’s ever been. If you brought that in, then as the father of someone whose addiction nearly killed him, I’m with Emma Jago. I hope they send you down forever.”
He waited to see if there was more. Satisfied that I’d said my piece, he did the gargling thing in his throat again, long and deep, finally hawking up. Then he leaned towards me and spat in my face, a mix of phlegm and nougat. It hit me on the mouth and I clenched my lips as a roll call of infectious diseases rushed through my mind, anything he could’ve picked up in prison from a common cold to HIV or hepatitis C. I remembered for a moment who I was, why I’d gone there in the first place. I reached into my inside pocket for The Map, spread it out on the table. I even lifted a finger to bring it down on a more agreeable place. The Map began to shrivel and then disintegrate...
I stood up, pushed away the table and Flaxman rose to fend off the oncoming attack. He was too late. I had my chair by its back, swung it and caught the side of his head with the legs. It wasn’t heavy enough to knock him over and he regained the balance he’d lost momentarily. Life in that room and beyond had slowed to crawling pace so I had plenty of time to plan my next move. I could hear a voice calling from over by the wall. I could see the prison officer approaching. I could hear an alarm bell ringing, voices beyond the door clamouring, none of this in sequence, all in a circle of time at the centre of which I grabbed Flaxman, kneed him in the groin and as he buckled forward I grabbed his hair and slammed his head down on the table, once, twice...
By the third attempt I’d lost my reach and strength. The prison officer had grabbed me from behind in a full Nelson and was pulling me away. Two of his colleagues had entered the room. One of them was backing Flaxman into a corner; the other came over, baton drawn, and jabbed me in the guts with it. He knew what he was doing. I wake at night sometimes, thinking I can still feel the pain.
The next I knew I was in handcuffs.
Twenty minutes after that I was sitting in the prison governor’s office, wondering what the hell had happened. The handcuffs had been removed and a secretary had brought me a cup of machine tea.
The governor, Stevens, was a man I remember thinking was too short for the job. He had fine silky hair that wouldn’t last much beyond his forty years. His face was pointed, not like Fairchild’s, whose sharp angles flattered her, but one whose features, birdlike as they were, denied him character. The Heinrich Himmler glasses were an unconscious attempt to be feared, I guess, but since his job was more administrative than hands-on these days, they’d been a waste of money. He was softly spoken and appalled at my behaviour: the baffled head teacher to my fourth-form rebel.
“I’ll have to make a report to the Director General,” he said, perching on the edge of his desk. “It’ll be up to him whether the matter’s taken further.”
“Where’s further?” I asked.
“Ministry. Charges against you.”
“He spat at me, for Christ’s sake! I can still taste nougat.”
“Tell me what happened.”
I recounted most of it, the stuff I didn’t mind him knowing, and when I reached the point where I’d lost control I thought that would be it. Man in prison reception room went berserk, beat the crap out of murder suspect, charges pending. Strangely enough, though, Stevens became sympathetic. He wanted to know just what it was like to be at the mercy of myopic anger.
I told him it was a terrifying business, losing your grip so completely that for five minutes you might be capable of anything. I’ve often been asked to describe it, to say how it feels to lose it. Nobody believes me when I tell them I can’t remember the rage itself, let alone banging heads on tables, can’t hear or see sounds or movement on the periphery. At best, I recall them later.
I hadn’t experienced an episode like the Flaxman one for a while; I’d come close but managed to use all the tricks in my repertoire to keep the anger at bay.
“Those tricks and devices...?”
“The most useful is The Map, only it didn’t work today.”
“The Map?”
I explained that it was an imaginary map of the world which I always carried with me. When I felt rage taking over – the real thing, not just everyday annoyance – I would mime taking it out of my pocket, spreading it flat, lifting my finger and bringing it down on ‘a far more agreeable place’. Not my words but those of the career criminal who bequeathed it to me just before he died. Roy Arthur Pullman. He recognised a kindred spirit.
- 18 -
When I stepped out through the door in the main gate to Stamford Prison I felt what a legion of cons before me must’ve while asking the same question: what next?
I walked ba
ck to the Land Rover, sat in the passenger seat as the surge of adrenaline which had fired my temporary insanity continued to subside. Gradually I would see things more clearly, be able to cut through the confusion of guilt, failure, depression, shame ... all of them easy handles to attach to what had just happened. But like all negative feelings they seemed at that moment to be an end in themselves.
As I sat there, mulling over what I’d done, my first thought was of Tom Blackwell. I’d had no contract with him, not even a verbal agreement, but we’d both come to believe that whatever was wrong with this case, I’d be the one to dig it out, give it a name, put it right. However, I’d returned from Grimsby with nothing more than a suspicion that Carew and Sweetman had bent a few rules. Hubris on my part, then. I’d fallen from the vain height of believing I was King Dick, the first person Blackwell turned to when a tricky job needed doing...
For a moment I flashed back to that one-sided row we’d had eleven years ago when I’d accused him of getting others to do his dirty work. Was this some belated revenge? The thought ran on and went haywire. Somewhere on the edge of the picture was that overweight copper, 220 pounds of heroin, still unaccounted for. Was he hoping I’d find it, or at least point the way? Did Blackwell have plans for it? I stopped. The man was a pain but as stiff and clean as the shirts he wore; his morals gleamed as brightly as his toe caps. If he had been using me it was for all the right reasons. I moved over into the driver’s seat, fired the engine and headed for home.
Kinsella was first in line, wanting to know how I’d got on in Stamford. Far from lording it, or saying ‘I told you so’, he was sympathetic.
“Aaron’s that sort of man,” he said, quietly. “A tactician with a plan for every occasion. Today he made you lose your rag.”
“Will there be repercussions?” Laura asked.
In spite of believing otherwise, I said, “I shouldn’t think so. He won’t want to spend more time in prison while his team file a case.”
She nodded with relief.
“And you learned nothing new,” Fairchild said, gloomily.
“He denied everything: the killings, the heroin, the link to the Heritage IRA. But then he would, wouldn’t he, as the lady said. Where’s Fee?”
Fairchild steered me towards a note Fee had left by the kettle. It was handwritten and overlong, sealed in an envelope for fear of others reading it. The gist was that an old schoolfriend, Tanya Miller, had phoned and invited her over to their house in Oxford. She was married now. Two kids. She might stay over. Was that okay? How did I get on in Stamford?
Grogan brought us back to the main business of the day.
“Flaxman is still without an alibi, right?”
“No family, wife, girlfriend to vouch...” I turned to Kinsella. “Did he have a girlfriend?”
“Only woman he ever smiled at was Freddie’s wife, Sarah. And that was on pay days.”
“So the heroin ... puff of smoke, so to speak?” said Fairchild.
“According to Flaxman, yes.”
The mood was getting heavier by the second. Laura stepped into the breach with a clap of her hands.
“Why don’t we turn our attention to blood sugar levels? Supper.”
“I don’t think you realise what’s just happened,” I said, rattily. “There was a slim enough chance of getting Flaxman sent down to begin with. By laying into him I’ve given him the moral high ground. His defence team will use it. The judge, jury will sympathise...”
She waved my assessment aside. “That’s you believing you’re responsible for everything.”
“No! That’s me having behaved like a bloody newbie.”
Blackwell phoned later on that evening. He’d heard from the prison governor about the day’s events and was sympathetic; indeed at one stage he even said words to the effect of ‘these things happen’. He said he’d like to come over in the morning to debrief me, bring Sillitoe since it had been his idea, see if we could glean anything useful from what Flaxman had said. Would ten o’clock be all right?
After supper, Laura received a call from Sheila Bright, who’d had a down day. Her chemo was giving her gyp; did I mind if Laura went round to her house for an hour or two and boosted her spirits? I thought it was a good idea.
Laura made an upbeat point before she left. Whichever way things went, Grogan, Fairchild and Kinsella would be out of my house on the due day. The place would be mine again and this little episode forgotten.
I smiled at the versatility of Chinese whispers, their ability to work both ways, up or down. In Laura’s mind, what I’d done had gone from being a criminal assault to a little episode. I hoped whoever received the prison governor’s report would see it that way too.
I remember precisely where everyone was at nine o’clock that evening. Fee was still with Tanya Miller, Laura was at Sheila Bright’s. Fairchild was upstairs having a bath, a long soak. She kept letting some of the water out as it cooled and then topping up with hot. It was one of my father’s pet niggles. Money down the drain, literally, he would say, relishing the perfect analogy.
Kinsella was in the living room, watching a football match on TV, yelling occasional suggestions to the players. Grogan was with him reading a book he’d recently bought about cacti: as many pictures as words, but it had inspired him to give more time to his collection once this job was over. We’d quizzed him about his spiky friends on several occasions and got very little. He had a conservatory, evidently, where most of the plants were housed. Small, medium, large? Fee had asked. He’d held out his hand, waist-high, and revealed that some of them were ‘up here’.
As Fairchild let the water out of the bath for the last time and a sense of relief brushed past me, Grogan came into the kitchen where I was still wallowing in the mistakes of the day.
“He wants to talk to you,” said Grogan from the doorway, his eyes wandering to the bottle of whisky, then the glass. “Alone.”
Kinsella was trailing behind him, waiting for the answer.
“If it’s okay with you, it’s fine by me,” I said.
I gestured for Kinsella to sit at the table opposite me. Grogan nodded at him, full of threat, and returned to the living room.
Kinsella was nervous and on a scale of true to false I thought it was pretty genuine. In spite of his new appearance, the frightened little boy was poking through the bravado.
“What is it, Liam?”
There it was. I’d called him by his Christian name for the very first time. I repeated myself. “What is it?”
“You reckon it’s my evidence that’ll do the trick?”
“If that’s a question, I don’t understand it.”
“Aaron. Depending on what I say in court, he’ll be done for these two murders or go free?”
I nodded and he lowered his voice to a whisper.
“You said earlier his brief would have the moral high ground, use it for all it’s worth, just because...”
“Because I thumped him? That was me being ... over-sensitive. Remember what he did to provoke me. He gobbed in my face.”
He clearly didn’t think that carried the same weight as my attack.
“You said I’d be dead by Christmas, if he got off.”
I poured a single measure over the ice cubes and vowed to make that the last one of the day. “I tend to talk like that. There are still charges against him involving the heroin, remember...”
“But no one can find it!”
I tried to sharpen up but it was too late in the day. What I said sounded as pathetic as it actually was. “True. Listen, I can’t change your personal history with this man. Just ... do your best.”
“You think my evidence is good?”
“I think you’ve had help in the way you tell it, but it stands a fair chance.”
That bothered him. He stood up and began to pace, small areas, then suddenly sat down again and leaned towards me, son to father. “Will you take me through it again?”
“Your evidence? No.”
&nbs
p; “So if this maniac goes free and by Christmas I’m dead, it’ll be your fault as much as...”
I pointed at him. “Don’t you play that fucking game with me. This is what you do in court: you tell them exactly what happened, no embellishment, no alterations, no hesitation. Otherwise they’ll have your guts...” He held his arms out wide as if about to be crucified. “Pull yourself together! I don’t mean they’ll lock you up for a mistake; they’ll just brand you an unreliable witness and Aaron will go free. Tell the bloody truth, Liam.”
I’d done it again, called him by his first name.
At lights out, round about eleven, Fairchild put the kettle on for her night-time camomile and manuka honey. Stuff made by expensive bees. Kinsella asked me and Grogan if we fancied a cup of tea. Grogan did, I didn’t, and when time was finally called everyone in the house crept off to bed, including Laura; she’d returned by then, looking more exhausted than ever, but having managed to cheer up her protégé. I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again in spite of an ice-to-the-brim nightcap.
Fee had texted me. She was still awake and close to getting thoroughly slaughtered. She was staying over at Tracy Miller’s. Tracy was married, she re-informed me. Two beautiful kids. In the accompanying photos they looked baggy and unsteady on their feet, but that’s how it is when you’re under three.
I went up to the cabin, took Dogge with me. One of the clocks on the wall told me it was nine o’clock the next morning in Tokyo. I didn’t have Yukito’s number on my computer, but Suteki wasn’t a difficult firm to locate. It was a long, expensive number to dial, but after a series of buzzing noises a female voice on the other end answered chirpily in Japanese, probably saying good morning and asking how I was.
“Good morning,” I said, voice bearing down on the foreigner who didn’t understand the lingo. “Do you speak English?”
“Perfectly,” came the reply. “How may I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Yukito Kagayama, please.”
Her response was so Western it was almost a pleasure to hear. “I think he’s in a meeting but I will check. May I ask who’s calling?”
Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Page 14