Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Watkinson, Douglas

  “No can do. Strict instructions.”

  “Who do I talk to, then?”

  “Me.”

  “Not good enough. I want the organ grinder, not the monkey.”

  He rose from his chair. He was certainly flabby but a little more dangerous than I’d first thought. For a start he had within reach all the bells and whistles that would lock the place down and bring armed security running.

  “You’re becoming abusive,” he said.

  “You’re the reason for that. I’ve been asked by the prosecution...”

  “And I’ve just told you, that’s been ruled against. Both sides have agreed.”

  “Any explanation?”

  “The judge doesn’t have to give one...”

  “All this is bollocks and you know it!”

  He pointed at me. “Language! Your presence would be prejudicial to the case, I’ve been told, but you’re welcome to observe from the public gallery. Out the door, turn left, twenty yards down, Warwick Passage.” He paused. “You can go now.”

  This minion, who hadn’t once addressed me as ‘sir’, was dismissing me. His junior colleague went back to the door and held it open. A ski mask of anger seemed to slip over my head and begin to tighten. The Kitchen Table would be a problem, the sweaty man behind the desk not so much of one: short fist to the nose across the counter, burst open his face. Would it be worth a day in the Old Bailey cells, though, white tiles with mouldy grouting like a lavatory on an old railway station?

  I walked over to the desk, heard the door clatter shut and the Kitchen Table walk up behind me. I reached into my inside pocket, at which point they should have leaped on me and tied my arms in a knot. They weren’t to know that all I’d take out was The Map. I spread it on the counter, then took out the imaginary spectacles and put them on. The two men stared at me. I wasn’t dangerous after all; I was just weird. I closed my eyes, raised a forefinger and brought it down on a far more agreeable place. Winchendon. My own garden.

  How anger can turn to sentimentality in a snap, I’ll never know. Maybe the two states of mind aren’t so very different to begin with. I could see Fee and Yukito, strolling beneath the big beech tree, hand in hand. She appeared to be laughing. So was he. I’d never credited the Japanese with a sense of humour.

  I took off the glasses, folded up The Map and returned both to my inside pocket.

  “Sorry, where did you say the public gallery was?”

  The Kitchen Table replied as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. “Out the door, turn left, Warwick Passage. Go in, up the stairs, knock and wait.”

  “Thank you.”

  I may even have dredged up a smile. On balance, I think it’s unlikely.

  Warwick Passage runs alongside the new extension, beneath the court offices. Halfway down there’s a doorway, a slab with a tiny window in it. ‘Public Galleries’, it says on an enamelled plate. The walls nearby are festooned with notices telling you what you can and can’t do in a gallery, what you can’t bring in. Some of the instructions are contradictory, there to disconcert rather than inform.

  I climbed up the stone stairs – Christ, there was even a notice telling me how many steps there were ahead of me – and when I reached the first landing I knocked on the wired glass doors to courts number 4 to 8. I waited and in time a gallery officer, a short, round Scotswoman of microscopic charm, came to the door and asked what I wanted. Court 4, I said. She told me to wait and disappeared. Ten minutes later she returned to inform me that Sir James Garrod was in the middle of opening for the prosecution; I would have to wait till he’d finished before I could enter. ‘Wait’ was fast becoming the word of the day. It’s a word I’ve never had much time for...

  In time the Scotswoman returned and repeated, in a Glaswegian accent, everything I’d read on various notices, then led me to the gallery above the court where Aaron Flaxman was being tried. She told me exactly where to sit, alongside thirty other people crammed into the gods of this second-rate theatre.

  Courtrooms are easy to read, once you’ve been in a few, and this one was pretty basic. The judge sat at the front, elevated. In front of him, lower down, was his clerk, a young black woman, her striking face ridiculed by the traditional wig. Facing them at floor level were the two barristers, pro and con, behind them the instructing solicitors. Sillitoe was leaning towards James Garrod, probably telling him what a marvellous job he’d just done, setting out the prosecution case with so little to work with. Behind them, in the glass-fronted dock, sat Flaxman with his solicitor, a middle-aged Indian. Aaron didn’t see me enter. He was more interested in staring out the multi-ethnic jury of seven women and five men who, after hearing Garrod, were beginning to wonder if this was going to be the fun experience they’d hoped for.

  Beside them, at a distance, sat the two people I’d rightly assumed were Flaxman’s parents. The mother was looking up at me; in fact she didn’t take her eyes off me until the defence barrister rose to speak. Her name was Charlotte Thornton, fifty years old and a couple of stone overweight, showing mainly in her face thanks to the black gown. Posh, pedantic voice which delivered a nice line in sarcasm disguised as reasonable argument.

  “My Lord, the defence’s case can be expressed quite simply. My client, Mr Flaxman, had no motive whatsoever for murdering Frederick Trent and Victor Wesley and furthermore could not possibly have done so because he was not present at the scene of the crimes when they were committed. He was at his parents’ house throughout the afternoon of March 12th, that being his mother’s birthday, and as your lordship knows I shall be calling Mr and Mrs Flaxman in due course. A lively business discussion ended at 4.00 pm, at which point my client returned home to his rented flat in Wragby. My learned friend has implied that, since neither Speaker’s Wood nor the village of Wragby is festooned with CCTV cameras, we have no proof that my client returned home rather than meeting up with Mr Trent and Mr Wesley, murdering them and then disposing of the bodies...”

  The judge’s body was certainly old, but his brain wasn’t. “Miss Thornton, it’s your case the jury needs to hear at this time. They’ve already heard what Sir James has to say.”

  “I’m grateful, my lord.” Like hell she was, but she’d managed to hint at the slapdash nature of Garrod’s evidence. She turned to the jury and elaborated. “Ladies and gentlemen, you will discover as we proceed that the evidence in this case is largely circumstantial. Allow me to explain, my lord, with just two examples, the first being the murder weapon itself. The bullets which killed both victims certainly came from the Luger pistol found at the Flaxman family farm. However, the absence of fingerprints and DNA on the weapon raises a number of questions. Secondly, the Chevy Silverado on which the DNA of both victims was found belonged to my client’s father. It was a vehicle which at least seven other members of the farm workforce used on a regular basis...”

  “I gather this is some kind of farm vehicle, manufactured by Chevrolet,” the judge clarified to the jury.

  “Precisely so, my lord.”

  She turned her Arctic charm on the jury again.

  “We will not be seeking to present Aaron Flaxman as a saint. He has answered to the law on several occasions down the years, but I submit that a police record does not prove culpability of the crimes we’re examining here.”

  She looked up, not so much thinking time as pregnant pause. The delivery seemed painful to her.

  “I shall also be questioning certain members of the Humberside Crime Squad. We have and propose to question two officers concerned in the investigation. Thank you, my lord.”

  So Charlotte Thornton had more up her sleeve than a bingo wing and, just like me, thought Carew and Sweetman were dodgy. She’d delayed seeding her doubts to the end of her opening. That made it stick in the jury’s mind. It hadn’t wrong-footed the judge, of course; it had simply dissuaded him from commenting further.

  “Right, well, let’s crack on, shall we?” he said.

  There was a host of witnesses to be call
ed over the next few days – a forensic pathologist, a scene of crime officer, a firearms specialist, all the usual talking heads – but for some reason Garrod first called the copper who’d found Vic Wesley’s body in the ditch, ten days after the murder. I couldn’t actually see the man; the witness box was directly under the public gallery, and I was sitting right at the back. I could hear him. I could hear his spotty face, his greasy skin, his close haircut all on top of his grim set defiance, as if he himself were on trial. His name was Eric Pine and by a quirk of rostering he and his partner had also found Freddie Trent’s body in a slurry, two weeks later.

  In Vic’s case he’d been called out to a flooded road near the Flaxman farm, donned his wellingtons and found the obstruction jammed into a culvert. It was Vic Wesley’s rotting corpse. Like a prat he moved it; the water ran away, taking with it any evidence. Then he called his duty officer, who called the local crime squad in the shape of Carew and Sweetman. There was more, but I’d lost the will to live by the time Pine had told us this in his slow, treacly voice.

  I looked round the public gallery, even though I could only see backs of heads and occasional profiles. It was a multi-cultural gathering of thirty people, a dozen of them twenty-year-olds, law students probably, plus an elderly couple there out of interest and some foreign tourists. The woman I was sitting next to was long-boned, her hands told me, and standing up she’d probably be taller than most. That wasn’t the only thing she had in common with Laura. She wore the same perfume, some Versace concoction. She fidgeted occasionally, drumming her fingers on denim knees. No one spoke. The Scottish barrel would have rolled on us if we had.

  Pine was now describing how he’d found Freddie Trent and Versace put a hand to her face, as if to hide behind it. Freddie was floating face down, the size of a domestic oil tank and just as combustible. Again Pine phoned his duty officer, who passed the information on. Meanwhile, Pine fished the body to the edge of the pit, rolled it over, whereupon it punctured and some of the gas seeped out.

  The judge was getting hungry and called lunch after Pine’s unchallenged evidence. We’d reconvene at two, he said. We rose at the usher’s command and off his lordship went to a three-course lunch in house.

  Warwick Passage opens out into a square behind the courts. In one corner there’s a small garden, no bigger than my kitchen, cast-iron railings on two sides fencing off four pillars, survivors of the lord mayor of London’s original entrance to the courts. Pomp and circumstance reduced to a garden ornament. There’s a marble bench beneath them and that’s where I went to consider what I’d just heard. Or hadn’t heard.

  There’d been no mention made of heroin. That was fair enough. It hadn’t been found; in strictly legal terms it might never have existed, so couldn’t be used as motive. There’d been no reference to Liam Kinsella either, but why should there have been if both sides fully expected him to turn up on the due day? They had his statement; they believed the man himself would follow. That led to the possibility that neither Garrod nor Thornton had been told he was missing. Tribute to Tom Blackwell. He’d wanted the disappearance kept under wraps and it had been. Meantime, at the behest of the Crown Prosecution Service, we had to go through the farce of trying Aaron Flaxman with evidence that a ten-year-old could rebuff.

  The thought pitched me downwards, not to any great depth, but to a consideration of the obvious. The truth was the last thing the law was concerned with, today or any other day. The manipulation of it sometimes fell to earth in the right place, but only by chance. From preparation in a police station to solicitor’s office, to barrister’s chambers, to the courtroom itself, it was always the best liar who won the day. And the bigger the lie, the more likely it was to be believed. Yet how could one plain fact be both truth and lie? The wrangling, the back-and-forth protocol, the use of a private language which only they spoke was simply a means for lawyers to get fat...

  I stood up to get away from my self-inflicted gloom and caught sight of Flaxman’s parents emerging from Warwick Passage into the autumn sunshine now falling on the square. They were walking towards me, eyes wide as if held in perpetual surprise. I smiled at them; Mrs Flaxman smiled back and walked past. I was slightly bewildered.

  “Excuse me,” I called out.

  They unlinked arms and turned.

  “Yes?” Mr Flaxman said.

  “I thought you wanted to talk to me. Nathan Hawk.”

  Slowly their faces cleared and I could see beyond the fear of their son going to prison yet again. They were country faces alright, lined with weather and worry. His was lean, sunken at the cheeks, drawn at the mouth, grey hair under his best cloth cap. His wife was more rounded, face, body, personality, but tell-tale signs of constant hard work were there in the hands, cracked and leathery skin, bones disfigured by hard knocks. They both looked ten years older than the sixty they actually were. He transferred the bag he was carrying to his left hand and cautiously reached out to introduce himself.

  “Joe Flaxman. This here is Carrie.”

  She shook my hand as well, once her husband had let go of it. “Were you in court this morning?”

  The woman had stared at me for a good five minutes from her vantage point in the courtroom, but now claimed she didn’t recognise me.

  “I was up in the public gallery.”

  “We wanted to thank you,” said Joe.

  “What for?”

  When it came to anything important, Carrie was the one who did the talking for fear that her old man would get it wrong.

  “Aaron said you visited him in Stamford,” she said. “You told him you thought he was a victim in all this.”

  I didn’t pick her up on the fine detail of the conversation I’d had with Aaron where I’d said he might be a victim of Carew and Sweetman. “You do know we had a stand-up fight that day, don’t you?”

  She smiled, raised her eyebrows, as if reminding me of a secret we both shared. “He tells me everything.”

  “Listen, we’re not supposed to discuss the case so near to the court. Why don’t we find somewhere...”

  “We’ve brought a picnic,” she said, pointing to the shopping bag.

  I gestured for them to follow me.

  People used to approach St Paul’s Cathedral, stop and gaze up at it in wonder: tourists, out-of-towners, Londoners themselves. They don’t anymore, mainly because they don’t see it until the very last moment. It doesn’t dominate the landscape anymore; it shrinks away from the steel and glass competition around it. Once you’re in the churchyard itself, the balance is slightly redressed, but the place never looks quite as magnificent to me as it did when I was a child.

  There were sightseers and local office workers aplenty in the churchyard, but winter clothes were taking over from summer ones and suntans were beginning to fade. We found a seat that gave us a distant view of the Millennium Bridge, built from the leftovers of a Meccano set, Joe observed. Of more interest to him was Edward Copnall’s sculpture of Thomas Beckett, moments before he was murdered. As Carrie unpacked the picnic, Joe went over to Beckett, reached out and laid a hand on his head.

  “No facial features, but somehow you can still see what he went through,” he said, eventually. “Going rusty round the neck.”

  Carrie patted the seat beside her and he sat down.

  “Would you like a ham sandwich, Mr Hawk?” she asked. “I’ve made plenty.”

  I shook my head. “You came down this morning, from the farm?”

  She nodded. “We’ll stay till it’s over. I said to Joe there’ll be lots of places we can get sandwiches, but he’s not keen. And he prefers tea,” she added, unscrewing the Thermos. “There only seems to be coffee in London.”

  She passed Joe his sandwich and he started peeling the crust off, throwing it to the pigeons.

  “Aaron tells you everything, you said. Like what?”

  “Well, the main thing is he’s going to get off.”

  She was smiling again at our shared secret, only I didn’t know w
hat it was.

  “How does he know?”

  Her voice was down to a whisper. “Because Liam Kinsella has disappeared and, according to you, he won’t be coming back. You frightened him off.”

  I stared at the ham sandwich she was about to bite into. Maybe Tom Blackwell hadn’t kept Kinsella’s moonlight flit under wraps as firmly as he’d hoped. Apart from Fairchild’s parents, the only people who’d ever been party to it were Blackwell and Sillitoe. And Laura. The idea that one of them had got in touch with Flaxman to give him the good news was absurd. And that’s when I went as cold as Thomas Beckett. There’d been a fifth person present. Marion Bewley. All ears, in my bloody kitchen, the morning Fairchild and Kinsella did a bunk. Had she been breaking rules? Was she the one who’d passed on the information to Aaron Flaxman, via his solicitor?

  I managed to chit-chat through the next half hour, learning stuff about chickens that according to Joe would stand me in good stead if I ever decided to keep some. At one point I tried to veer the conversation off in another direction by asking where they were staying. I expected him to give the name of some tall, narrow apology in Paddington.

  “The Savoy,” he said. “Nothing to write home about.”

  I’d forgotten they were loaded, money no object, but here she was clearing up the remnants of a picnic she’d made at crack of dawn. She muttered some generational thing about waste.

  At ten minutes to two I reminded them the trial was due to resume imminently. We went through the handshaking again, as if it were a new trick they’d learned. And off they went, arm in arm.

  - 23 -

  I wandered back to Caffè Nero and retrieved my rucksack, then texted Marion Bewley. I said I’d like to meet her, right there beneath the photo of Al Pacino. Four o’clock. She texted back immediately saying that would be fine.

  In the interim I took a long walk along the river and tried to answer a question I’d been asking myself all day. Why was I there? What was I hoping to achieve? If I’m honest I’d have to say it was to find Kinsella and the heroin, and shove both in Tom Blackwell’s face. How I could achieve that from the starting point of a trip to the Old Bailey, I wasn’t sure, but something had brought me to London that day. It may well have been for comfort, a trip down memory lane, but it sounds better if I throw instinct into the pot. They used to call it ‘copper’s nose’ when I was a kid. Coppers don’t have noses these days. They have iPads.