“Who’s done what?”
“Aaron Flaxman, he’s got off!”
I’d been expecting it, of course, and from the barrage of detail she gave me I could picture what had happened. The judge had got a whiff of Garrod’s big problem, namely that he wouldn’t be able to produce his main witness, Liam Kinsella. So, in the spirit of old school friendship, judge and barrister had met over dinner the previous evening, the cat had been hauled out of the bag, and his lordship had just given his ruling. Aaron Flaxman no longer had a case to answer and was therefore a free man. He could leave the court and go about his business. I reckoned the bureaucracy of it, a bit of a celebration with his parents, would take a couple of hours maximum. Then he would drive north, to somewhere roughly 185 miles from Grimsby, where he’d slump back in that old sofa full of heroin, drink in one hand, new girlfriend in the other, and they could plan how to spend all that money.
I thanked Bewley and asked one more favour: would she get Carrie’s maiden name for me? Twenty minutes later she rang back with the surname Ellison.
We had another hundred-odd miles to go and Grogan stepped on it. Any arguments he had were with the disembodied voice of his GPS, which became chattier once we’d turned off the motorway forty miles short of our destination. I had my own grievances. I’d expected mountains to rise up before us, lakes to run beside us, rivers, bridges, forests and dry stone walls to take their places in the backdrop of my childhood recollections.
Nearer to Cartmel, I admit, the landscape began to rise and fall, but in a typically Northern way. The weather raised then dumped our spirits at will. When the sun came out from behind great continents of cloud, I was almost glad to be alive; when it disappeared behind furling rain clouds I returned to the present.
Cartmel is a beautiful village, and full of character I’m sure. Retail character. Gift shops here, delicatessens there, pubs turned into restaurants. We avoided it. Instead, without discussion, we drifted around the edge of the village and pulled up opposite a pub called The Pig and Whistle. It stood, boasting its Victorian origin, beside real homes, fifties council houses, laid out beside a triangular green. There was even a Spar supermarket nearby giving the place credibility.
That aside, I sometimes wonder if breweries pay old men to just sit all day at a bar to give an establishment character. The old boy we were about to meet, and whose name I didn’t bother to ask, fitted my theory perfectly. He was stocky and powerful, like a pit pony, and well into his eighties, perched on a bar stool nursing the remains of a pint and reading the local paper. He turned to look at us when we entered, made it clear that he didn’t like us or any other stranger who came through the door. Grogan nodded at him and he turned away again. He was definitely our man.
We ordered two coffees and a couple of cheese and pickle sandwiches, and as we waited for them I went over and tried to engage our new acquaintance in conversation.
“Afternoon,” I said.
He turned, nodded, and turned back to his pint and paper again.
“I wonder if you could help us?” I said.
“Might,” he replied.
Difficult to judge his accent at that point in the conversation but it turned out to be a local one, all squashed vowels and dropped consonants, several words running together to save breath.
“We’re looking for the old Ellison farm,” I said.
This was more to his liking for some reason and he turned fully towards me. He was dressed in a collarless white shirt, frayed at the edges, charcoal waistcoat, black trousers and boots. Plenty of undeserved hair, white near his scalp, yellow at the ends. “Jack Ellison? He’s dead.”
“Yes, I know...”
“What you want his farm for, then?”
I immediately turned myself into a tourist on a sentimental journey. “I used to stay there as a boy.”
He looked at me, sideways. “But you can’t remember where it is?”
“I can see it in my mind’s eye, can’t place it.”
He sniffed and washed his contempt down with the remains of his beer. I signalled the barman to pour him another.
“He were a miserable bastard, Jack Ellison. Not surprising, given his luck. Lost his entire flock to the black.”
It was obvious I didn’t know what ‘the black’ was.
“Liver disease. Runs right through ’em, quick as knife ... or did then. Broke him. Sold up. She didn’t help.”
“Who?”
“His wife. Never lifted a bloody finger. Left him for a chimney sweep.”
All I could think of to say was, “Poor man.”
The old boy got stuck into the refill I’d bought him and must’ve thought he owed me something. “Out the front door ’ere, turn right towards Howbarrow. Three mile.”
“What’s the name of the farm?”
“Can’t remember that either?”
I shook my head. “Weird, I know...”
“Stratton. Stratton Farm.”
I snapped my fingers. “Of course, Stratton! I’ve been trying to get it all day!”
“Well, now you’ve got it.”
I thanked him and he turned away for the last time, back to his paper.
I went over to a table where Grogan was making light work of the cheese and pickle doorsteps. The coffee wasn’t bad either. He flicked his eyes at the old boy and I nodded.
Stratton Farm was the picture-perfect retreat from life itself. It lay on the downward tilt of a fell, overlooking a small valley across which a flock of sheep were evenly scattered, chewing their way towards the late-autumn sun as it came and went. The farm buildings, the house itself, were all of local stone, more Lakeland here than back in Cartmel. The slates on the roofs were the size of breadboards, still gleaming from the last shower of rain. All of it was upstaged by the view which Aaron Flaxman had told me would’ve ‘made up for being skint’. He was right. Ten, twenty miles distant were the peaks of my childhood drawing, purple, grey, green, and just the tip of a lake like a shard from a broken mirror. There were even V-shaped birds in the sky.
This was no working farm, however, and it certainly wasn’t the run-down wreck Jack Ellison might’ve left behind him when he went broke. Money had been spent here and I had to keep reminding myself that the Flaxmans were wealthy people. If, as I was beginning to suspect, Aaron had bought this place recently, for his own use, for his and Sarah’s, then he’d thrown a heap of money at it, either drug money or egg money. Even the name plate on the wall at the roadside was quality, if a little garish, the words ‘Stratton Farm’ in elaborate scroll on a large piece of oak. The gravel on the winding drive down to the house was fresh and clean.
“We need to discuss this,” said Grogan. He had paused at the main gate, which stood open.
“I say we just knock on the door, take it from there. If there’s a sofa full of smack inside, the dog’ll go barmy.”
“Then what?” he asked with a smile. “Citizen’s arrest?”
I replied as I usually do when stumped for a decent answer. “Piss off.”
He stayed put, the engine still idling.
“We call Blackwell, make a deal,” I said. “Get you back on the payroll.”
He scowled. “Do we have to call him?”
“ ’Fraid so. D’you know what we’re doing, Bill?”
He guessed it was a trick question. “Yes and no.”
“We’re future tripping. Drive down to the house.”
He signalled and turned in through the gateway.
The place was deserted in the sense that no people, no dogs, no vehicles were to be seen or roused. If Sarah Trent had set up home here, as I’d so promisingly deduced, then she was out. Out shopping, out for a walk, out for tea with new neighbours? I doubted all three. But the place was definitely lived in and, it bears repeating, by someone with a bob or two to spare, obvious even from the outside. A pair of brand new garden seats, solid oak, were set on a stone slab patio to the side of the house overlooking the view. At an angle to them was
an oak table. All three items had a four-figure price tag. I knew this because I’d looked into buying one of the seats myself. And passed. Half a dozen stone tubs were dotted around, not just the terracotta jobs that flake and break in the first frost, but antique, heavy-as-hell containers with elaborate carvings. Laura would have loved them, newly set out as they were with winter flowers, miniature box trees surrounded by pansies and cyclamen.
We stood like lemons in the porch at the front door and for the third, fourth time banged a cast-iron face of William Wordsworth against an elaborate striking plate. With a hint of righteous delight, I thought, Grogan pointed at Dogge, who had found a patch of sunlight and was preparing to curl up in it. “Not exactly going barmy, is she?”
“I was exaggerating. She needs to be close to the target.”
Why the hell I was defending her abilities I’ve no idea, except that part of me feared we’d come all this way just for the view.
“Get that gizmo from the car, Bill.”
I’m not sure he thought there’d be much point in breaking into the house, but he was willing to give it a go and went for the multi-tool. We walked round the house looking for vulnerable points and discovered the only viable one was a cast-iron latticed window with frosted leaded lights. I assumed that a downstairs toilet lay the other side of it.
It took Grogan a minute to identify the kind of catch holding it shut and another minute to release it with a stiletto-like arm of the all-dancing, all-singing gadget. He seemed disappointed that it hadn’t presented more of a challenge and criticised the window for being old and useless.
As the less bulky of the two of us I was the natural choice for climbing through the window, and with Grogan steering and shoving I entered, swam across the top of a cistern, down onto the lid of a toilet seat, into the room itself. My body’s bruises objected but once on my feet I went through to the hallway and unlocked the door. Grogan ducked under the lintel, Dogge followed him, and from that moment on we spoke only in the sign language of burglary.
I pointed at him, then myself, then the dog, and towards the church-like door that led through to the rest of the house.
Money. That was my immediate impression of the room we entered. Expensive carpets, antique furniture, a top-of-the-range sound system. Heavy, chunky brass at the fireplace, the latest in wood-burning stoves despite the underfloor heating ... and a sofa and two chairs, leather, pricey and almost certainly new. Dogge walked past them without batting an eyelid. I pointed at the kitchen.
On entering it I began to price it straight away, or rather the cost of it screamed out at me. A full range Aga, handmade fitted cabinets, refurbished floor tiles, an antique table almost too good to sit at. I reached £35 thousand in twenty seconds, by which time it was clear, from Dogge’s reaction onwards, that there was no heroin here.
Searching the rest of Stratton Farm was in marked contrast to the morning we’d spent at Flaxman’s parents’ place. There was nothing superfluous here, no junk, no chips or scratches on surfaces, indicating that the place had barely been lived in. The loft was completely empty.
We left the house exactly as we’d found it, not a footprint or paw print to say we’d ever been there. I was concerned that once outside Grogan would become sanctimonious, shrugging ‘I told you so’, but he was quite the opposite. Something of the old copper had stirred in him, brought to life perhaps by a resounding crack on his head from one of the upstairs beams, and now I could see in his eyes a trace of the illogical doubt our profession thrives on. He said the place was far, far too clean.
He walked across to the only outbuilding there was, a long low run of animal shelters now used for middle-class domestic life: a garage for two cars, a tool shed, a place for the spare freezer, which of course we looked in. It contained little besides a box of tuna steaks and some frozen veg.
Out on the front gravel again we stood, each with our thoughts, mine a slightly fraying belief that I could crack this case when others couldn’t, Grogan’s more optimistic. He left me and took a stroll round the sloping garden. I say ‘garden’ when it was a couple of acres of tufted grass between fading bracken and, at the bottom, what had once been a stone-walled sheep pen. He peered over into it, then turned and called.
“Nathan, you’d better come see.”
What he had found, though hardly a trophy to wave in Blackwell’s face, vindicated my bullish belief that I was on the right track. I’d arrived too late, maybe, but I’d been right. On one side of the sheep pen were stacked the composting remains of gardening: clippings, trimmings, leaves. There were even a few vegetable stalks and eggshells from the kitchen. But in the centre of the pen there’d been a bonfire, no longer warm, simply a pile of ash. In the white and grey remains were a hundred or more blackened brass studs, the kind used in leather upholstery. Grogan prodded the ash with a stick and flushed out a wheeled castor. The sofa, which almost certainly had once contained an overweight copper’s worth of heroin, had been burned to dust.
I walked away, back up the incline. Grogan followed. The dog kept her distance. After a moment or two, Grogan tried to give our fruitless search some dignity.
“It’s a find, guv,” he said, brightly. I looked at him. “No, really...”
“It’s a pile of ash, Bill. No wonder those bloody sheep look so happy.”
He stood back, mouth slack in disbelief. “You really think she set fire to 15 million quid’s worth?”
“Why not, if she didn’t know it was there?”
He shook his head. “He’s a lot smarter than that. And so is she, I’ll bet. Know your trouble, Nathan? You’re unwilling to think of women as evil bastards. That’s sexist. You ask your daughter...”
I told him he was half-right. I was unwilling to think of anyone, male or female, as downright evil, though God knows I’d met my fair share of villains, from petty thieves to murderers. They’d given me my suspicious nature which I constantly fought against and lost.
Grogan sniffed and said there was no need to get so bloody saintly about it, just accept the facts. Aaron had killed two blokes and got away with it; Kinsella had lied his way to immunity, buggered off with Petra Fairchild, who’d turned on her own kind, dereliction of duty. As for Sarah Trent, he reeled off a list of charges that would be thrown at her, ranging from stuff under the Drug Trafficking Act to aiding and abetting, illegal importation, conspiracy, shielding a known criminal...
The list went on but his voice had been overtaken by a distant hum that in time became the sound of an approaching vehicle. It was miles away and with no discernible breeze it was the only noise in the otherwise silent landscape. Why it should’ve put me on alert, God only knows. Grogan stopped listing charges. We glanced at each other and waited, waited some more and eventually a silver tank of a vehicle, a Volvo 4x4, turned in at the gateway. The driver stopped, got out, a woman with long blonde hair beneath a pink beret. She turned to close the gate behind her and that’s when she noticed the Fiat biscuit tin, then us.
And she made a faux pas. She toyed with the idea of getting back in the car and driving off again. Jaikie would’ve called it playing the end before the beginning, the mistake many an actor makes of appearing guilty before he’s even been asked a question. The rest of us call it giving the game away.
She realised the futility of trying to evade us, closed the gate and then drove down the rest of the drive. As she got out and slammed the door, the resemblance between her and her sister Emma was unmistakable, but I’d been wrong on one particular detail. Her age. She wasn’t thirty-two, thirty-three as I’d assumed that day on The Amethyst. She was a good ten years younger than that. A stringy girl, not so tall that she would crack her head on the beams in her new house but tall enough for my late wife to have called her a lucky bitch. She was wearing a gilet over a denim blouse, jeans and fur ankle boots: dressed for the winter to come. She leaned the top half of her body to one side as she addressed us.
“Good morning, gentlemen.”
“Sarah
Trent?” I asked. “We’ve met before.”
She opened her eyes wide, almost coquettishly. “Really? I don’t remember.”
“Aaron Flaxman’s trial. Public gallery.”
She looked down at the fob in her hand and picked out a door key. “You must be mistaken.”
I assured her that I wasn’t. I would recognise her perfume anywhere. The remark spooked her a little.
“What do you want?”
“I’ll start with you and Aaron. When did you two get together...?”
I’d been distracted. Dogge had walked over to Sarah and sniffed her fur boots. She then lifted her head to get her bearings, went to the Volvo and walked round it. At the tailgate she stopped and put her front paws up on the rear bumper, sniffed again in jerky breaths. She turned to me and sat down, tail swishing across the gravel. Sarah looked at me in badly played bewilderment.
“Open the tailgate,” I said.
“I most certainly will not.”
She locked the car remotely, stepped back and took out her phone. She began to flick through her contacts. God knows who she planned on phoning, but she was thwarted by there being no signal.
“Don’t let’s piss about, Sarah. Let’s do this thing properly.”
“What do you mean? What thing?”
Grogan went over to the Volvo and peered in through the back window.
“Peat-based potting compost,” he said. “Six, seven bags of it.”
“From the garden centre in Cark,” she said, fiercely.
I glanced over at the stone tubs, recently planted out, then down at Dogge, still wagging her tail.
“Drug squad reject,” I explained. “They never gave me a list of what she could sniff out, but I’m damn sure potting compost wouldn’t have been on it. Open the car.”
She considered her options for a moment or two and realised they were limited, especially when Grogan took out his multi-tool and selected one of its more vicious-looking limbs. She pressed the fob again and he lifted the tailgate. Dogge jumped in immediately and was about to go mental over her discovery. I put the slip leash on her and pulled her back to earth.
Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Page 22