Suffice to say that she had a bagful of reasons and I listened to each one of them, nodding sincerely.
Before she went back into the house she looked at me intensely and said, “What’s wrong?”
I gave her the answer I thought she expected. “I’ll miss you...”
“Not that! Jesus, it’s Christmas in six weeks’ time. We’ll be back. I meant what is wrong?”
I must have a neon forehead or something. I smiled. “Petra Fairchild, if you must know.”
“Dad, if he killed her as well, go find the body. If he didn’t, go find the woman herself. It’ll give you something to do.”
It was a great plan, I said, mocking her, and so simple to execute. Did she have any suggestion as to where I might start the search? She thought about it for a moment, then answered with her gift for spotting the elusive obvious.
“If I were in really deep shit, and assuming I was still alive, where would I go? Back home to Mum. Or, in my case, Dad.”
Two days later I drove into the Fairchilds’ yard in Ashendon, with that gentle swish of old tyres on new shingle. I can only say that nothing looked out of place. Why that should have made me suspicious I’ve no idea; my jaundiced view of human nature working overtime, I guess. There were two cars parked in the thatched carport, a His Jag and a Hers VW. Nothing else. No tyre tracks in the gravel, no sign of a hasty retreat. Or advance.
I got out and as I stood looking across at the house a man my age, only better dressed, came out through the back door with a ‘who the fuck are you?’ look on his face. He was tall, with collar-length white hair but a complexion like overripe fruit, bruised here, shrivelled there. A drinker’s face, old before its time. His voice was smoky with a flat battery of a cough to go with it. “Morning. Can I help?”
“My name is Nathan Hawk.”
“Jack Fairchild.”
As we shook hands I explained that I was a friend of his daughter, that we’d brought a dishevelled young man here to have his hair cut a couple of months ago. He nodded.
“Is Grace about?” I asked.
“She’s hoovering, I believe.” He paused to listen. No sound. “Maybe not. Ah...”
Grace had come to the door and stepped out onto the patio. “Mr Hawk, how lovely to see you again.”
She was polite smiles and gentle manners and, taking his cue from that, her husband relaxed a little. Nevertheless, we stood unnaturally still, three points of a masonic triangle, the Fairchilds waiting for me to dictate the angles.
“I need to talk to you about Petra.”
She closed her eyes, maybe trying to squeeze out a tear. I wasn’t sure. “I can’t tell you how upset we’ve been by all this,” she said in a small voice.
“May I come in?”
“Yes, yes, please do...”
The kitchen was the same as I remembered it: pin-neat, everything put away after use, surfaces wiped, floor swept. And just as you’d expect from any mock farmhouse there was a pleasant smell of baking in the air. I moved slowly around the room, an old trick I’d learned from yet another ancient desk sergeant. The slower you move, the more likely it is that others will stay put. By the time you reach your destination it’s too late for them to stop you.
“Has she been home since ... you know?” I asked.
“Why would she have been?” said her father.
I shrugged. “Get some clothes, reassure you, borrow money, any number of things.”
“No, she hasn’t...”
Jack Fairchild couldn’t lie to save his life, never mind his daughter’s.
I’d reached the oven, picked up the mittens and put one on. They stood and watched, reacting only when I opened it, reached in and took out a tray of Danish apple bars.
“Your daughter’s favourite. I got a whiff of the cinnamon out in the yard. Go and get her, Mr Fairchild.”
As he passed me on his way to the hall he stopped and glared at me. “What would you have done, for your daughter?”
I shrugged. “The same. Only better.”
A few moments later Petra entered the kitchen ahead of her father. She must’ve been behind the door, listening. She stood perfectly still and I couldn’t determine her mood, if it was one of horror, surprise or fear. I settled for the last, rating it the kind which runs through you when you’ve done something so stupid it defies belief. It isn’t the act itself which terrifies so much as the knowledge that you did it willingly and, having done it once, the chances are you’ll do it again, then again...
I told her she wasn’t looking too bad, given the circumstances. It was true. The clothes were fresh, the make-up reasonable, the hair immaculate. The voice was small, though, that of a girl and not the woman who’d tried putting me in my place on more than one occasion.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I wonder if we’d all be better in the lounge,” said Jack.
No doubt that was where the booze lived. I said I preferred kitchens and sat at the table. Petra slithered down onto the bench opposite me.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“Worried about you.”
She believed me, but when I told her Bill Grogan was also worried she laughed, then from somewhere she dredged up some grit and flung it at me. “I suppose you want to know all the torrid details, how a police officer of eight years fell prey to a con artist?”
“I don’t want details, I can work them out for myself...”
“Maybe you’re worried that you should’ve stepped in and done something about it?” said her father.
“She’s thirty-two years old, for Christ’s sake! She may be a child to you, but to the rest of the world she’s fully grown and smart enough to be a member of SOU.”
He said he’d still like to know how it had happened right under my nose, hoping perhaps that when the time came it could all be blamed on me. Petra stretched a hand out to her father and he backed off.
She spoke carefully, haltingly, but the gist of it was that she’d started off feeling sorry for Kinsella and, yes, he had a talent for getting sympathy from the most unlikely places. So, before she knew it, she was helping him, buying presents and cards for his friends, posting them off. And why not? she insisted. He was meant to be on our side but Grogan bullied him, beat him up, cuffed him to the plumbing, kept him on a rope when we went for a jog. No wonder the defeated, bullied little boy came through, bewildered, frightened, vulnerable. Scared of Grogan, scared that Flaxman was out to kill him, scared of me, his reluctant host. Somewhere along the way he told her she was the only human being in the house. Then he told her he loved her.
I started drumming the table, both sets of fingers. “Then he told you he was rich?”
She nodded. “But I never believed he had money. It was a pipe dream, a way of impressing me.”
“But you still fell for him...”
“I wasn’t the only one he fooled. Doctor Peterson had him down as a casualty of the system; your daughter thought you’d abused his human rights. Jesus, you even pleaded his immunity to Henry Sillitoe.”
“Not quite the same as falling in love with him.”
“It’s exactly the same, just taken to another level...”
“How come you’re still alive, Petra?” I asked.
The idea that Kinsella might have killed her, had the chance arisen, the circumstances been different, still troubled her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “If we’d been on our own for longer...?”
She leaned forward on both arms and stared down at the table, took her time recounting. He’d got rid of her just an hour after leaving Beech Tree. They were four, five miles away from Ashendon. He stopped the car she’d provided him with, on a narrow, twisty lane, turned to her and told her to get out. She’d laughed, believing it was a joke, but then his whole demeanour changed, his temper flared. He screamed at her to get out of the fucking car and thank her lucky stars he didn’t have time to kill her and dump the body. He pushed her against the door; she opene
d it, stepped out and he tore off, knocking her onto the muddy verge. She saw him brake half a mile down the road and, out of fear that he was having second thoughts, she scrambled over the gate beside her and ran off across the field. She didn’t stop until she reached her parents’ house.
I nodded and leaned back.
“So now you know,” said her father. “She made a mistake, but she’s as much a victim in all this...”
“No! She believed he had 15 million quid in the offing.”
“She’s just told you, it was a pipe dream.”
“And who do you think will believe her? They’ll prefer the version where he offered her a cut to help him escape. And she took it.”
Petra sat rigid on the bench and stared at me. I half-expected a blast of invective but instead she began to melt into tears. That brought her mother back into the fray, bristling with unconditional love. She’d hardly said a word since we’d entered the house and now, with both hands on the table, she leaned into my face.
“You may have earned a few stars in the eyes of your cronies. Murder solved, drugs found, police officer tracked down? Just don’t expect us to be impressed.” She waited, eyes darting all over my face, and then cut me down to size. “You can go now.”
“Or what? You’ll call the police?” I stood up, reached into my inside pocket for an old business card, the only one I’ve ever been given and kept. I dropped it onto the table. “You’ll have to play ball with the system, sooner or later, Petra. Get in touch with that man there. He saved me from being charged with assault, then secured my pension in the wake of my, well ... having thumped a fellow officer for being a prize twat. Tell him it was me recommended him.”
I headed for the back door.
“So when?” she called after me.
“When what?”
“When will you tell Blackwell you found me?”
“Couple of years’ time.”
There isn’t much more to say about the case, really. Fairchild got in touch with my solicitor friend, who told her to go and stay in France for a couple of weeks, get her story straight, then return and face the music. He conducted the orchestra quite brilliantly, in my opinion. She wound up doing time but not as much as we’d all expected. Furthermore she served it in a prison he approved, one where she didn’t have to spend all day looking over her shoulder just because she’d once been a policewoman.
Other guilty parties were given sentences of varying lengths, thirty years being handed down for the double murder. No parole. Of the others I remember thinking they’d all be young enough to reboot their lives once they got out.
Angelica Carter told their stories extremely well, over and over again, and I admit to being irked by her laudatory prose about Tom Blackwell. She was quoted endlessly, on television and radio news, documentaries, blogs, newspapers. One sentence stood out. “The driving force behind solving this case was Commander Tom Blackwell, who carried out his search for the truth with courage and inspiration, reminding us yet again that our police service is the finest in the world.”
In other words he’d got someone else to do his dirty work for him. And taken the credit.
Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Page 26