She turned fully towards him. “This colleague of yours...?”
He smiled and gently cut the air with one hand. “Later, maybe. If and when.”
She turned up her nose and went over to the mantel above the mock fireplace. There were several photos in wooden frames standing on it and Carter looked down at one. She’d seen it before, I imagine. It was of both sisters at a party with respective husbands. Vic was the larger of the two men, powerful and pissed, with his wife twisted into him away from the camera, held by his one-arm embrace. He had a glass in his free hand and was saying something to the photographer. Emma was laughing and so was Sarah, barely out of her teens, but Freddie on the other end of the line-up was there under sufferance, loathing the party itself, or having his photo taken, maybe both. He was tall and wiry with one of those unmemorable, mask-like faces. Like Vic he was dressed in a suit, Sarah beside him was wearing a skimpy hat, so it might have been a wedding, and it’s my imagination, of course, but I felt I could sense the strain between him and his young wife.
Carter wasn’t looking for inspiration in the photo; she had simply removed herself slightly in order to weigh up her options. She turned back to us.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m game.”
“Couple of questions?” I said. She nodded. “Will the editor be a problem?”
“Sometimes I wish he would be. I love a good fight. The CEO of the group’s no trouble either.” She smiled. “I know more about his private life than I really want to, but it comes in handy sometimes.”
So, how would she pitch it? Slightly offended, she told me she’d been a journo for thirty years, in which time she’d become pretty good at it. Was there anything else I wanted to know?
Actually, there was. Did she have the contacts, the influence, the power to reach that I needed? I didn’t ask.
- 32 -
I decided it would be best all round if Emma moved out of her bungalow for the duration and, partly because she didn’t like living there anyway, she readily agreed. She went off to visit a friend in Spain with strict instructions not to confide the real reason for her visit.
Before she left she made up beds for us. I took her room, Grogan was in the spare. She left notes about how to use the oven, what to do if the shower suddenly cut out and how to manipulate the key in the back door to lock it. She drove off, early morning, and Grogan put the biscuit tin in the garage and locked it. It was then a matter of waiting three days for The Grimsby Echo to hit the stands, as they say.
Grogan was more relaxed about the delay than I was, partly because he’d found some obscure satellite channel that was re-running a series about desert wildlife which included cacti. I spent the time shopping for food, cooking it and walking the dog. There were fields nearby and very few neighbours, most of whom had been driven indoors by the approaching cold front.
The three-day wait felt like a fortnight, but it gave me time to dwell on Liam Kinsella’s affront to me, his belief that he could play me for a fool and win. Virtually every word he’d uttered within my hearing was stuck in my head, its meaning, tone and context defying me to find what Blackwell had asked for. Proof. Not evidential proof but enough for him to feel comfortable about pursuing the case against this principal witness turned prime suspect.
It was the second day of waiting and I’d risen early, made coffee, eaten some out-of-date cereal I’d found at the back of a cupboard, and by eight o’clock, with no sign of the kraken in the spare room awakening, I decided to go for a walk with the dog. I went to the front door and opened it to discover that, true to Grogan’s weather forecast, snow had fallen. It was disappointing snow, the kind I recall from childhood being just a centimetre or two deep and in no way fully covering rooftops, cars or distant fields. Might just as well not have bothered falling. A drop of sleet, my father would’ve called it, before promising that real snow was just around the corner.
It had turned even colder, though, so I went back to Emma’s room and in the bottom of a chest of drawers found a sweater, probably one of Vic’s. I donned it, put my jacket back on and stepped out again into the snow. Disappointing though it was in childhood terms, it was still enough to be wet underfoot and I wondered if Emma had kept any of Vic’s boots. As a trawlerman he must’ve had a few pairs. I went back indoors and, sure enough, in the hall cupboard found some wellingtons, too big for me but what the hell. I put them on and set off again.
As I reached the front gate the door behind me opened and Bill Grogan stood there, fully dressed, though not for winter.
“You alright?” he said.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”
“Lot of to-ing and fro-ing, that’s all.” He looked round. “Snow. Told you there would be.”
“I never doubted you. Fancy a walk in it? There’s another pair of boots in the cupboard.”
He clearly wished he hadn’t been so concerned about me and, stroking his chin, eventually said, “Alright. Give me five minutes to shave. Haven’t had a chance to since we got here.”
He went back inside and closed the door behind him. And there they were, lined up in perfect carelessness, a dozen or so words that would condemn Kinsella out of his own mouth. Far from being brilliant deduction it was a matter of ‘all things come to he who waits’, or in my case he who is forced to wait. Either way I turned and hurried back up the path, opened the door and leaned in.
“Bill!”
He came out of the spare room, electric razor in hand. “What?”
“Put that bloody thing down!”
It must have been the urgency in my voice that made him do as I’d asked and he placed the razor on the hall table, awaiting further instructions.
“Come back to the front door. Stand there on the mat. Don’t move.”
“Yeah, alright, but I mean...”
“Do it.”
He stood where I’d asked him to and I strode twenty deliberate paces which took me down the path, through the gate and out into the road. I stopped, turned and looked at him. He had his arms out wide as if he were being crucified and wanted to know why.
“You sure you’re alright?” he asked.
“Fine.”
Angelica Carter e-mailed me a copy of the piece that same evening, not for my approval, but headed ‘FYI’. The item looked even better on the front page of The Grimsby Echo the next morning.
It was halfway down, not garish or attention seeking, but unmissable. The headline read:
Murdered man’s widow charged with supplying heroin
The piece went on to say:
Emma Jane Wesley appeared in court yesterday, following the raid on a house by police in the Grimsby area on Wednesday.
Wesley, 36, of Montgomery Drive, Great Coates, is charged on two counts: supplying heroin and possessing heroin with intent to supply. She was remanded in custody ahead of a further appearance at Grimsby Magistrates’ Court next week. Wesley is the widow of Victor Wesley, who was murdered alongside Frederick Trent in woodland near Wragby last March.
I came back from the local shop with a copy of the paper and showed it to Grogan. He read it and nodded, then echoed my only concern: doubt that Angelica Carter had the contacts and the reach I hadn’t cared to ask her about.
I needn’t have worried. By lunchtime the following day, the editor on the local ITN news bulletin had broadcast an item about Emma to his audience of 180,000 people. Admittedly he harked back to the unsolved murders, with footage of the highly distraught Jago sisters. The piece was repeated later that evening, by which time the BBC were delivering their own version on their twenty-four hour news channel. It jumped easily from there to the local BBC news.
As I’d hoped, it wasn’t big enough, or gruesome enough, to warrant a press corps camping out on the front lawn in Montgomery Drive, although there were a few rings at the doorbell. The dog barked; we ignored them.
By Sunday it was on page five of a national tabloid and featured on a TV discussion programme which earnestly chewed over the p
light of middle-aged housewives who were turning to drug dealing. The state of the economy was blamed.
Carter phoned me on Sunday night, largely to boast that she’d achieved what she’d set out to. She also promised that, should nothing come of this pebble she’d chucked into the millpond, she would run an article suggesting that the paltry amount of heroin found at Emma Wesley’s house was just the tip of the iceberg. I said I didn’t think it would be necessary, but thanked her for the idea. Ever the journalist, she reminded me that I’d promised to let her know the moment anything newsworthy happened.
“I’ve been researching you,” she said. “Quite a tally, thirty-seven murders. Just out of interest, though, why did you hit that fellow officer? How hard and who was he?”
I laughed. “You’re breaking up, Angie,” I said, and ended the call.
From that point on we went into a kind of limbo. I’d hoped that Grogan and I might get to know each other better as we sat in that bungalow, virtual prisoners of our own making. Admittedly it was only a week but I came away realising that whereas he’d learned a great deal about me, I was as much in the dark as ever about him.
He was one of those curious people who barely acknowledge their past. He’d been brought up in London, born to parents late in their lives. No siblings. Educated at a school nearby. Joined the police at eighteen. This abundance of information was the result of me trying the usual conversation openers only to find he had a knack of closing them rapidly. In contrast he possessed the invaluable skill, at least in terms of our chosen profession, of getting others to talk. Maybe I did so in order to fill the silence, but the result was just the same: within the space of seven days Grogan had a full picture of my upbringing, my marriage and each of my children. He became party to my strengths and weaknesses, but as he did so it was always with deference to my superior rank. I was the officer, he was the company sergeant.
We spelled each other in terms of waiting. He would take eight hours on point, while I shopped, cooked, walked the dog, slept. I would take the next shift while he watched television programmes about far-off places he wanted to visit.
At night we turned in early, ten o’clock sometimes, having exhausted our mutuality. What I didn’t realise at the time was that his silence was due to something he’d mentioned just once, in front of Angelica Carter. He felt guilty about Fairchild. He should’ve kept a better eye on her.
Thursday evening was no different to any of the others. After dinner I e-mailed Laura, mainly to find out how things were going between Fee and Yukito. She replied that Fee was blaming me for holding up her plans. She’d decided to return to Tokyo with Yukito. Each had made promises to the other: Yukito would give Fee more of his time; she would give him, dare I say it, less of hers. She’d had a gradual revelation, she confided to Laura. With Ellie having found her true soulmate in Terrific Rick and Jaikie on the brink of marrying Jodie, it was time for Fee, like any mother, real or elected, to let her charges go. Yukito had dropped everything concerned with his business and followed her to England, a declaration of love if ever there was one. No mention was made of the part I’d played in this, which meant I must’ve performed with a degree of subtlety. There was no mention either of our wild card, Con...
I remember thinking, as I drew the curtains, that it was a particularly dark night, and that fact ensured that I slept just below the surface. Dogge heard it first. A noise in the kitchen. She rumbled her concern and I opened my eyes immediately, whispered for her to be quiet. The bedroom door was ajar, and dark though the house was I could see out into the hallway, kitchen appliances throwing their LED light, reds, greens, into the space. Something altered the intensity of it, for just a second, and then it returned. Someone was in the house and had probably entered via the back door, the locking of which Grogan and I hadn’t fully mastered.
I slipped out of bed and stooped for the Smith & Wesson which I kept on top of the bag beside me. I laid a hand on the dog, her instruction to stay put, and moved to the door, stood at the hinge side of it for what seemed like an hour but could only have been moments.
The door opened a little further and Liam Kinsella tip-toed in. He walked over to the bed. As far as I could tell he wasn’t carrying a weapon. He didn’t think he’d need one. He leaned down over the bed and said quietly, “Emma ... Emma, wake up.”
Receiving no answer, he leaned forward and prodded the ruck I’d left in the duvet.
“Emma, Emma, you’ve a visitor...” he said, in a normal voice.
I slammed the door, mainly to wake up Grogan, then reached across to the light switch and turned it on. Kinsella spun round. We were both blinded for the moment but I was the one holding the gun, aiming it straight at his chest. He stood there, eyes seemingly frozen in their sockets. Eventually, he spoke, breezily, almost matily, but surely without realising what he was saying.
“Hi! How you doing?”
The door burst open, though it didn’t need such rough treatment. Grogan entered, dressed as I was, boxers, T-shirt, socks.
“Man wants to know how we are, Bill.”
He went straight over to Kinsella, threw him to the floor, turned him and applied the handcuffs. He then frisked him in that position for anything he might be carrying, but, arrogant to the last, Kinsella had thought he could get what he wanted just by talking.
Grogan hauled him to his feet, by the collar of the black tracksuit he was wearing, and leaned towards him.
“We’re fine,” he said.
Grogan handcuffed Kinsella to a central heating downpipe in Emma’s kitchen and went back into the spare room. When he reappeared he was not only dressed but he was carrying his rounders bat. Kinsella looked at me.
“Your human rights?” I asked.
“You know what he’s like, don’t you?” he said.
I glanced up at the kitchen clock. “Three thirty. Too early to call Commander Blackwell, tell him you dropped in.”
“You’re right, that’s all it was. An old friend, coming to see...”
“You came because you thought she was dealing some of that heroin, to pay the bills. Wasted journey. I found it.”
He smiled, almost playfully. “Where, out of interest?”
I shook my head. “You’d kick yourself if I told you.”
He tried to fall back on one of his many personae, the apologetic coward who’d made mistakes out of fear for his own safety. “Alright, so I chickened out of giving evidence against...”
“Shut up! You murdered those two men...”
“Me?”
“...and you played every card in the deck, from terrified victim to bullied witness. Christ, you even had me believing Carew and Sweetman had written your statement for you.”
The handcuffs slid up the down pipe, taking paint off it, as Kinsella rose from the stool he’d been sitting on. He pointed at me with his free hand, offended now. “I was right there. I saw it all.”
“I believe you. You saw it because you were standing next to them.” I went over to him, right into his space. “As close as we are now.”
He was appalled. “Even if that was true, how could you prove such a thing?”
“I don’t have to prove it; I just have to give Blackwell justification for building a case against you. The evidence is up to him, but if he thinks you’re guilty he’ll find it.”
“And this ... justification?”
“That day at my house when Sillitoe took you through the evidence, you said you’d witnessed the murders from twenty metres away. Aaron was head and shoulders above the other two, you said. Vic was looking sprauncy, that was the word you used. And Freddie was Freddie, same old anorak, same old cords. And he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.”
He shrugged. “I can’t remember what I said yesterday, let alone six weeks ago...”
“That’s alright, because the whole thing is on tape. Marion Bewley. Her ‘career development’.” He still hadn’t drawn level with me. “You couldn’t have seen two days’ growth on his f
ace from twenty metres away. You had to be standing next to him.” I pointed two fingers at him, pistol fashion. “Bang, bang.”
He sat down again, leaned back against the wall.
Grogan came over to us, rounders bat in one hand, slapping it gently in the palm of the other. “I’m going to ask Mr Hawk to go and put some clothes on now.”
“No...” said Kinsella, trying to back away into the plasterwork.
“I want to know what happened to Petra Fairchild and, if you’ve any sense, you want to tell me.”
I made my way to the doorway through to the hall.
“Don’t go!” Kinsella called out.
“Can’t walk around all day like this.”
Grogan looked him over, then homed in on his right knee. As he raised the bat Kinsella yelled out, “She’s alright! Two days after leaving your house, she disappeared.”
“That’s a nasty word, Liam,” I said.
“Maybe she realised you weren’t Clyde Barrow after all,” Grogan suggested. “Where?”
“I don’t know. She just ... took off.”
I went back to the bedroom to get dressed, closed the door behind me. I heard one or two screams from the kitchen but Kinsella didn’t change his story. Fairchild had just vanished.
- 33 -
I arrived back at Beech Tree to praise and blame, the former for having found Liam Kinsella, to say nothing of the heroin, the latter for having taken so long about it. Fee and Yukito were anxious to return to Tokyo but she hadn’t wanted to do so without saying goodbye.
That night as I sat in the cabin, e-mailing Blackwell a receipt for a cheque from ‘the safe-house contingency fund’ and clearing up fifty or sixty details with Angelica Carter, Fee knocked on the door. They’d booked a taxi for eleven the next morning. Meantime she wanted me to know that she was going back with Yukito of her own free will, not because of anything I’d said, done or implied, not because of an emptiness brought on by Ellie, Jaikie and me moving on, not because of age creeping up on her, not because...
Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Page 25