There were in fact eight compost sacks in the back of the car, bright yellow, pictures of flourishing plants on one side, instructions on how to achieve them on the other. Each had been emptied carefully and refilled with wrapped blocks of heroin, the sacks taped up with transparent gaffer tape. She’d been driving round with 15 million quid’s worth of heroin in the back of her car. Plain sight.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Like I said, we do things properly. You invite us into the house, we try to make it as painless as possible.”
“Are you police?” she asked.
I pointed at Grogan. “He is, I used to be.”
She thought about that, then looked me straight in the eye.
“You can take one,” she said.
“I’m not a gardener.”
I couldn’t tell what was going through her mind as she walked over to the front door. She displayed no sign of panic, so I reckoned she was planning her next move. She’d tried bribing me and it hadn’t worked. Next in the long line of manoeuvres would be an assortment of explanations: elaborate, tearfully delivered and ultimately ludicrous.
“Mind your head,” she said to Grogan as he ducked under the lintel at the front door.
It was an oddly caring thing to say, from which I deduced she still hoped to get us on side. Grogan leaned forward and took the key out of the door, turned to the car and re-locked it, then pocketed the fob.
We followed her through to the kitchen, where she behaved as if we were friends who’d just popped round for tea. She filled the kettle and plugged it in, opened a biscuit tin and started on a chocolate digestive, told us to help ourselves. As she reached up to a beam for three mugs on hooks I picked up her phone and she dropped one of the mugs trying to snatch it back.
“That is outrageous!” she said, with some of the family flare showing through. “Give it back.”
“We’ll compromise,” I said. “I’ll switch it off if you tell me when Aaron’s due.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” I began to flick through her text messages and she changed her mind. “Tonight. Late.”
“How’s he getting here?”
The kettle was boiling. Grogan eased her away from it and reached for another mug.
“Tea bags?” he said.
She glanced over at a caddy on a window sill.
“I said how’s he getting here?”
She was beginning to accept her position and answered sulkily. “Driving up.”
“From Speaker’s Farm?”
She nodded. I switched off her phone and placed it high on the corbeling beside the chimney.
“We’ll wait,” I said. “But you won’t mind if we gather up all the knives, all the heavy objects, put ’em somewhere safe? Meantime, you could answer a few questions, if you felt so inclined.”
“I don’t,” she said.
I went through to the utility room to fetch an empty laundry basket and a dustpan and brush. I swept up the remains of the broken mug while Grogan collected potential weapons that Sarah might have used against us. She twitched from one to the other of us with a mixed bag of facial expressions, still wondering if she could retrieve her lost cause.
At one point Grogan went out to the Volvo, moved it into the carport and then hid the Fiat behind the buildings. He returned with three tuna steaks, but while he was away Sarah tried, albeit half-heartedly, to bribe me again.
“I don’t know what 15 million divided by eight is, but the offer still stands.”
“Nearly 2 million,” I said.
“Change your life forever.”
“I like it the way it is.”
She flicked a strand of hair back over her shoulder and smiled. “Are you married? Do you have children?”
I smiled back. “Sarah, I used to interrogate people for a living. You’ve only seen it on telly. Asking nice questions isn’t the way to win them over.” I walked over to her and she went rigid. I leaned forward and nodded. “Versace.”
Without Mrs Beeton to interfere in the proceedings, Grogan knocked up a pretty decent meal. He pepped up a weary-looking cauliflower, whipped up a cheese sauce and, as he placed it on the top shelf of the Aga, he gave us the French name for it. Cauliflower cheese, I called it. With tuna. We finished eating at three thirty, so it could still be called lunch, but it meant we had six hours to kill before Aaron arrived. It’s a long time and Sarah did the expected squealing when it came to toilet breaks and the like. She got over it. She didn’t have much option.
Grogan was the most relaxed of the three of us, possibly because he thought he was on the winning side now. He’d brought his book on cacti from the car and sat in a kitchen chair reading it, marvelling at the photographic plates, occasionally trying to enthuse me about spiky columns of green which flowered occasionally. One that he planned to see before he died was a cactus called peniocereus greggii which flowered for just one night with a fragrance beyond belief.
I passed the time trying to squeeze information out of Sarah, who responded by not giving me any.
“I thought you’d be older,” I said.
“Did you? Sorry to disappoint.”
“Don’t apologise. It’ll mean you still have a life ahead of you when you get out of prison.”
She smiled away the comment.
“How come you got involved with a man like Aaron Flaxman?”
“You think it’s just money?”
I nodded. “He ain’t George Clooney.”
“That’s true. George Clooney’s taken, of course.”
“So were you, by Freddie. What is it? Excitement, danger, or is ugly the new beautiful?”
She said Aaron was one of the gentlest men she’d ever met, which I countered by suggesting she must’ve known some right bastards in her time. Her father was one, she said; Freddie was another. Grogan looked up from his book.
“Your kind of bloke, then, is he?” he said. “He’s turned you into a heroin importer; he’s murdered two friends, one of them your husband, the other your sister’s.”
She stared at him. He shrugged and went back to his book, leaving me to explain that just because charges against Aaron hadn’t stuck it didn’t mean he was innocent.
“You don’t know anything,” she said, calmly.
“I know this. He’ll get sixteen years for that much heroin. You’ll get six. Institutional revenge. With my help, though, you could walk away from it.”
She turned away, ending the conversation.
- 28 -
Just before midnight the house phone rang and Sarah made a move towards it. I held her back and the call went to message.
“Sal, it’s me. Your mobile’s out of range. Or, naughty girl, you haven’t paid the bill. Like we said, I’ll be there two o’clock.” He paused. “I love you.”
The dialling tone on speaker sounded harsh against the words he’d used, the way he’d said them. This wasn’t the Aaron Flaxman I’d met at Stamford Prison, the wide-boy who’d spat at me, the villain Carew and Sweetman had been after for two years. This was any man returning to the woman he loved.
I outlined the next couple of hours with particular reference to the last five minutes of it. We’d go into the living room, Sarah would sit on the sofa, Grogan would position himself behind the door. I would hover and keep the dog from joining in the fray.
It was gone two in the morning when, through the gap in closed curtains, I saw headlights approaching, carving up the night sky, taking an age to reach us. At the top of the drive the Chevy Silverado paused, engine still running. Aaron jumped down from the driver’s side, opened the gate and turned in. He paused again to close it behind him. As the Chevy made its way down the drive it triggered security lights, one on the outbuilding, another high up on the front wall of the house. He switched off headlights and engine and hurried towards the front door, some kind of holdall in one hand, a bunch of gesture roses in the other. He opened the front door, stepped into the hall and called o
ut, “Sal ... Sal, where are you?”
And that’s when she gave it the only thing she had left and screamed out:
“Aaron, run! Turn and run! Go, go, go!”
But all that did was hasten his entry into the main room. He barged open the heavy door, saw me ten feet away standing over Sarah. He came forward and, as bag and roses dropped to the floor, so Grogan slammed the door, stepped forward and punched him in the stomach so hard that he seemed to lift up on the end of his assailant’s arm before collapsing into surrounding furniture, bent rigid with agony, no breath inside him with which to scream. Grogan kneeled down and cuffed his hands in front of him. Sarah made a move towards him but I held her down on the sofa. There was absolute silence, even from the floor, lasting no more than ten seconds. It seems longer when you’re wondering if someone’s just been killed. Then Aaron groaned.
Grogan hauled him to his feet by the lapels of his jacket. He looked him in the face, daring him to spit, maybe, but more likely wondering what on earth a girl like Sarah Trent saw in him, the squinty eyes, the low-set mouth, the hairline starting way back on the top of his head. He pitched him backwards into one of the armchairs and told Sarah to keep away from him.
I went into the kitchen to phone Blackwell, who had rented a flat in Grimsby. He answered blearily and I apologised for waking him.
“No, no, I was still up,” he lied. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, recalling the word’s lack of meaning. “Well, more than fine, really.”
He waited, expecting me to elaborate with a request, a complaint, some idea of how much I was owed for safe-housing Kinsella. What I actually said came as a bigger blow than the one Grogan had just given Flaxman. He repeated the information several times as it filtered through to his consciousness. In time he asked, “When you say you’ve got the heroin...?”
“Tom, why don’t you drive over and see for yourself?”
“Where are you?”
“A farmhouse near Cartmel.”
“Cartmel, Cartmel.”
“No, just Cartmel. I’ll explain everything when you get here.”
He was beginning to wake up. “Jesus, if what you say is true I should have Aaron Flaxman arrested. If he gets wind of this he’ll take off...”
“He’s here too.”
“He’s there?”
“Don’t start all that again, Tom! Get some backup organised. The address is Stratton Farm, three miles out of Cartmel on the road to Howbarrow.”
“What’s the postcode?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! Ask a policeman.”
I hung up the phone. I won’t say I’d enjoyed unsettling Blackwell with momentous news. I won’t say I hadn’t enjoyed it either.
In the living room, Aaron was speaking with difficulty. Between them, Grogan and Sarah had explained the events of the previous eight hours and, just like his girlfriend, Aaron seemed unwilling to accept them at face value. It might be hindsight on my part, but as the conversation went on I sensed that something else was on his mind besides his ruined plans and bleak future. Maybe it was guilt, or a sense of karma, that he’d just been acquitted of two murders.
I looked around the room. “Nice place,” I said. “Not bought with drug money after all. Just eggs.”
“Bought it for my mother more than me. Came up for auction last year.”
“It’ll be worth a whole lot more by the time you get out of prison. You can work out when that’ll be. The CPS have guidelines for judges, depending on the role you’ve played.” I turned to Sarah. “Yours would be deemed a ‘lesser role’, providing your brief was canny. Three years, out in eighteen months. Aaron, yours’d be a ‘leading role’ and for Class A drugs that’s sixteen years. How old will your mother be by then? I spoke to her, you know, at the Old Bailey.”
“She told me.”
“She said you knew you’d be acquitted because I’d scared off the only witness. She thought I’d done it on purpose.”
He looked at me and either smiled or winced; I wasn’t sure. “Poor old girl, always believes the best in people. I got off because I didn’t do it.”
“So everything Kinsella said was lies, not just half a story beefed up by Carew and Sweetman?”
“I told you at Stamford, Liam was saving his own arse. I’d have done the same in his position.”
I think that was where I heard a tiny bell ring in the distance of my mind. ‘Tinkling’ isn’t my kind of word, but that’s what it was doing. Something akin to doubt must’ve shown in my face.
“You haven’t worked it out, have you? Go back to your CPS guidelines. I’m not the one who’ll do sixteen years. Liam will, if they ever find him.”
It was more of a handbell now, like the one the teacher used at school at the end of playtime – loud enough for everyone to hear. Aaron explained haltingly that it was Kinsella’s idea to bring heroin up from Afghanistan to Liepaja, across to Grimsby. He even had a customer, ready and waiting. The Heritage IRA. Kinsella? Irish name? Irish connections?
“So you nicked it,” I said. “Greed or altruism?”
“Bit of both, really.”
“You stuffed it in that bloody sofa, bought your mother a new one and for the last however long it’s been driving round in the back of a bloody Volvo!”
“Almost poetic, isn’t it?”
But at that moment it wasn’t the heroin or the journey it had made that was clanging in my head. It was the murder of the two trawlermen.
“So you killed Vic and Freddie...”
“No.”
“You nicked it and killed them, win all around as far as you were concerned. Fifteen million and a new girlfriend...?”
Sarah stood up, too quickly for either Grogan or me to prevent her.
“He couldn’t possibly have done it!” she said.
“Why’s that?”
Aaron tried to silence her. “Sal, no...”
“He was with me when they were shot. Or rather I was with him, in his flat over the shop.”
From the way he groaned and slumped back into the armchair, this was the one piece of information he hadn’t wanted to become public knowledge, let alone court evidence. I’d been told somewhere down the line he was an oddball of old-fashioned values, his police record notwithstanding, and Sarah was a married woman, albeit one with charges for smuggling pending. He’d wanted to protect her reputation. Even if she’d come forward with the truth, nobody would’ve believed her. Where was the proof? No CCTV showing her entering the flat. Aaron had made sure of that.
The bells were slow and deliberate by now, tolling the question I already knew the answer to. If Aaron didn’t kill the trawlermen, who did? If, as he’d just implied, the driving force behind the heroin was Liam Kinsella, then he was the only person I could think of with motive to kill two of his colleagues. Perhaps they’d objected to expanding the smuggling business into drugs, but they would never have dreamed he’d kill them to get his own way.
Any more than I would’ve done. And did. But surely I must’ve entertained the idea somewhere along the line, seen the signs and, what? Ignored them? Or had Kinsella been so clever as to hide his real purpose from me, from Carew and Sweetman, Tom Blackwell, Sillitoe? No, not clever, just bold enough to live a huge deceit. The bigger the lie, the more readily it’s believed.
I turned to Bill Grogan. “I’ve had a fucking murderer living under my roof for six weeks and I let him go.”
- 29 -
Tom Blackwell didn’t arrive until six o’clock and did so in ostentatious style. Two cars and a van, all with blue lights pulsing, four uniformed coppers and three lads from the Humberside Crime Squad, all of them pissed off at having been dragged from their beds. God knows what he’d expected to find, but I watched them emerge from their various vehicles and take up covered positions in the yard like something out of a bad film.
As I opened the front door I heard the tensing up of men on a mission, saw firearms raised and aimed at my head. Blackwell, like s
ome First World War general, was standing in full view, defying danger from the enemy. I called out to him.
“Bit over-the-top, Tom. It’s one man, restrained, and his girlfriend.”
He ordered his men to stand down, gestured two of the crime squad blokes to follow him, and walked over to me.
“You can never be too sure,” he said.
I suppose he was right, with the reservation that the whole county and beyond now knew that a contingent of police had swooped on Stratton Farm. They would invent reasons for it and blow them out of all proportion.
He came into the living room with his two minders and looked down at Aaron, who smiled challengingly. Sarah looked down at the floor. Grogan simply turned his back. I pointed through to the kitchen, led the way and closed the door behind us. The crime squad duo stayed in the living room.
“Who’s the girl?” asked Blackwell.
I looked at him. “Sarah Trent, Freddie’s widow. You’ve never met?”
“No.”
When I explained the dynamics of her love affair with Aaron, he drew the obvious conclusion. “Gave him motive to murder...”
“Leave that to one side, just for a moment.”
“Where’s the heroin?”
“This is my conversation, Tom. It’ll be one-sided, just like the old days.”
He perched on one of the bar stools at the island and gestured for me to rant away.
“You knew there was something out of kilter with all this. That’s why you involved me. You were right to do so and it’s always been in your nature to delegate work. The heroin was one of the biggest hauls there’s been in the UK and there were two murders to go with it and we’ve all handled it like a bunch of two-year-olds. Carew and Sweetman? I thought they were bent to begin with. They’re not. They’re just stupid, too anxious by far to put away some local oik who’d got rich; classic old-fashioned, old copper resentment. They got their teeth in like a pair of Staffies and then right at their feet fell a man so unbelievable they believed him.”
“Kinsella?”
Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Page 23