Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (14 page)

I turned back to Emma. “You were the one who brought Flaxman into the firm. You must’ve liked him to begin with. What changed your mind?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t say I liked him; he just had a bloody good idea for getting us out of the red.”

“No sign of what he was capable of?”

“He had a temper, yes, but so do I. Reckoned himself as an alpha male but I wouldn’t have said he was a killer. Then again, what do murderers look like?” She paused. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

I reminded her that two minutes ago she hadn’t cared who I was. I told her I worked for the man who would put Flaxman in prison for a very long time. She wanted to know my employer’s name. I saw no harm in telling her he was called Henry Sillitoe, the CPS solicitor.

“So you’re like some ... private investigator?”

“Right. Your sister was married to Freddie Trent...”

She leaped right in, big sister protecting the little one. “Don’t go bothering her. She’ll tell you the same thing I will, anyway.”

“At least tell me her name.”

She laughed. “If you don’t know that, you don’t know much at all...”

“Sarah?”

She flared. “If you bloody knew, why ask?”

“Pure guesswork. Emma and Sarah were two names that often went together, daughters of a certain generation. What are you, early forties?”

It works five times out of ten. “I’m thirty-bloody-four!”

“So she’ll be thirty-one, thirty-two? Too much to hope you’ll tell me her address. I mean I know she’s an ex-teacher, used to do a bit of smuggling on the side, charges pending presumably...”

“Our husbands did the smuggling.”

“Heap it all on them, eh, now they’re dead? Christ, you’ll tell me next you didn’t know about the heroin.”

She leaned forward and stared at me. “If you’re such a clever bugger, look right in my face and tell me if I’d bring in stuff that would kill kids.”

“Booze and fags kill. You brought in plenty of that.”

She sat back in the chair and looked at me with undiluted scorn. “Don’t go all righteous on me. D’you know how many trawlers were registered in Grimsby, 1960, when Vic’s dad went to sea? Seven hundred. Today? Eight!”

“All the more fish to catch for those who stuck it out.”

“Oh, fuck off! I’m done.”

She rose and, despite her anger, checked to see if she’d left anything. She even placed the chair back under the table before she walked off. I toyed with the idea of visiting the kitchen but decided against. I was forgiving my enemy and, according to Oscar, it would piss him off thoroughly.

I gave Grimsby the once-over before going back to the hotel at Wragby. I even took a guided tour up the Dock Tower, iron spiral staircase all the way. A guide who wouldn’t have known the head of a fish from its tail gave an exaggerated history of the building and told us not to lean over the edge, if and when we reached the top.

The Humber estuary dominated the view, container ships and ferries to Europe on the horizon. Closer in there was the beach, made of sludge and plastic bottles, with leggy wooden piers jutting out into the water but to no purpose these days. Below me was
The Amethyst
, none the worse for my lunchtime visit, and the dozen or so docks near to it were either marinas for middle-income yachts or plain empty.

I went down again feeling quite depressed and walked into town for the lunch I’d never had. Away from the docks it might’ve been any one of countless struggling towns in Britain. The big names were there, of course, nipping at people’s wallets – Tesco, Marks & Sparks, Shell. High-rise had replaced low terraces, shopping malls had put paid to corner shops, business parks had sprouted where factories once flourished. Christ, I don’t just sound like my father, I am my father. Except in one particular. He was a peaceable man, which proves I’ve inherited at least one character trait from my mother. I was still dwelling on Josh and whatever it was he’d slipped into my posh fish and chips.

While they were alive, Vic and Freddie had a certain amount of privacy, enough to enable them to go smuggling for a couple of years without being caught. The moment they died they became public property. Every detail about them could be found on the internet, and I don’t just mean their dirty laundry. Back at the hotel it took me three minutes to find Freddie’s, and therefore Sarah’s, address. A report in
The Grimsby Echo
told me it was a house in Freshney Terrace, Scartho Top. Admittedly it didn’t give a number, but sure as hell there was a photo and the solar panel in the roof marked it out.

I browsed further, one link leading to another, until I came full circle back to
The Grimsby Echo
and a weekly column by a woman called Angelica Carter. The main thing about her was her sympathy towards Emma and her sister, not in a series of journalistic platitudes, but something meatier. She warned her fellow reporters against jumping to conclusions, revelling in the horror, beating the story senseless while forgetting that two young women had lost their husbands suddenly and violently. She spoke in the same vein elsewhere, in the paper, on her blog and evidently on local radio. I logged the name away, or maybe it was the face, the passport-size photo at the top of her column. Middle-aged, hatchety, glasses, hair permed tight to the head. A script signature after every piece, ‘Angelica Carter’.

Scartho Top was south of Grimsby, and 17 Freshney Terrace was in a run of eighties new-builds. It was being lived in but nobody was there today. There was mail on the floor the other side of the wrinkled glass, but with no easy access to the back of the place I decided to wait for the occupant’s return.

I leaned back on the Land Rover and sipped a lukewarm coffee, tried to collate what I’d learned yesterday and today. There wasn’t much that added to the evidence Sillitoe already had, but I was starting to get the feeling that I’d missed something, that I’d seen it but it hadn’t registered. It jagged at me, every half hour or so, flicking me behind the ear like a kid in the desk behind at school. I tried to work on it. Dump site or kill site? I found myself sidetracked, critical of the quick and easy use of those two phrases, their virtual lack of any meaning. Men had been killed, for God’s sake, women had lost husbands, parents their children, children fathers, and then they’d been disposed of like so much garbage and left to rot...

I’d turned to get back into the driving seat when a lady who’d been supervising a small child in a front garden, a couple of doors down, called to me in the nearest thing to a regional accent I’d heard since arriving. She didn’t exactly call me ‘bonny lad’, but I’m not sure that I wanted her to.

“If you’re looking for Sarah, she’s gone to the new house.”

“Right,” I said, in a ‘forgetful old fool’ kind of way. “D’you know where it is?”

“Near her dad’s in Scotland, I think. My husband helped her load some of the heavy stuff into the van: washing machine, dryer, sofa. Even offered to drive there with her...” She shook her head, puckered face. “Since Freddie she’s found it very difficult. Their first house.”

I was nodding as if I knew the whole story. “Rest of the furniture...?”

“She’ll be back for that. Till then she’s asked me to feed the tarantula. Give it a cricket every other day.”

From the expression on her face she wasn’t looking forward to the task, but it meant she had a key to the house. Could I find a way of getting her to let me in for a poke around? Sarah’s sister didn’t want me to meet her, so maybe she knew something useful. If she did, though, the police would’ve known it too. Perhaps I should go back to
The Amethyst
, make up with Emma, then drop into the local nick, fire a few more questions at Carew and his boys...?

I could’ve carried on re-jigging my agenda till kingdom come in the feeble hope that whatever I’d missed might reveal itself. Instead, I decided to go home.

It was early evening when I drove onto the gravel beneath the big beech and I could’ve sworn I heard a tensing of muscles from within the house as they braced themselves for my arrival. It was wishful thinking.

Grogan, in an apron, was making supper, following a recipe from
Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook
. The woman was flawless, professional and long dead, but he still had a beef with her. This wasn’t the way his mother had made shepherd’s pie, but she was dead too so he couldn’t ask her. Dead or alive, right or wrong, it would be ready in fifty minutes. From the living room I heard Fairchild laugh. I went through to see what was so funny.

They say that if you live with a foul smell for long enough you get used to it, which is probably why the stench of Kinsella hit me afresh when I walked into the room. I’d been away for two days. He greeted me as if it had been a month. Then, with a smile that gave me his own opinion of the town, he asked what I’d thought of Grimsby.

“Never mind Grimsby, what the hell is going on here?”

They looked at me in utter bewilderment with a dash of fear thrown in. I gestured down at Fairchild’s laptop open on the coffee table in front of her. She and Kinsella had obviously been sitting side by side, working on it, playing on it, God only knew, and before I could make a further comment Kinsella gave me a jollified explanation.

“Facebook! Petra’s been trying to unravel its mysteries for me. D’you have a Facebook account, Mr Hawk? Can I have you as a friend?”

“Petra now, is it?” I asked, quietly.

“That is my name.”

I must’ve looked as if I needed more and with jerky little shakes of her head she told me there was nothing sensitive on her laptop, nothing work-related.

“He asked me to show him how Facebook worked, that’s all. Nothing he couldn’t have learned in a book.”

“Then you should’ve bought him the bloody book!”

Kinsella stood up. “Hey, listen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...”

“Shut up!” I pushed him back down on the sofa.

Fairchild snapped her laptop shut, zipped it back into its case and said, huffily, “The man hasn’t even got a computer here, so why you’re so pissed...”

“You want the male version or the female one?”

“Unisex.”

“This is the second gaffe you’ve made. You’re a fully trained police officer, he’s a crucial witness in a murder trial. You posted his mail for him, now you’ve allowed him access to your computer!”

The raised voices had brought Grogan to the room, untying his apron, trying to figure out what the problem was. I helped him.

“You’re more to blame than she is, you bloody fool!”

“What the hell are you...?”

“While you’ve been arguing the toss with Mrs Beeton, she’s been in here showing him how to use Facebook.” He was still trailing. “You know what Facebook is?”

“Sort of...”

“Computer access to the outside world.”

“Hey, listen, nothing’s happened, really, it’s just...” Kinsella began.

“I told you to shut up! If I need to again I’ll poke you, as they say on Facebook. Both eyes.”

He fell silent and all three waited to see what else I had to say. I don’t think any of us remembers in detail, but we all knew that I shouldn’t have been the one saying it. I was a civilian, for Christ’s sake. They were the police, members of an elite squad. I can remember yelling something about Grogan’s palpable lack of interest in the case, except when the chance arose to beat Kinsella up or cuff him to the wall. All while Fairchild twitted and pouted in the background, far more interested in the way she looked than in the job she was here to do.

And just as a matter of passing interest, I tacked on, there was no way this filthy bastard could go before a jury as a credible witness looking like he’d just been hauled out of a skip. What had they done about that? Fuck all. I think I flounced off at that point, and ended up with an oversized double, ice all the way to the top.

The shepherd’s pie was pretty good, as it turned out. Laura joined us for supper, having stopped off on her way to pick up Dogge from the neighbour she’d been staying with. Kinsella, with his Siamese twin Grogan, joined at the wrist, took Dogge out into the garden after the meal, leaving the rest of us to clear up. As we circled the open dishwasher Fairchild chose a moment to justify her carelessness.

“Okay, letting him near my laptop was a mistake, though I’m not really sure why. Thing is, while you were away I kept him with me as much as I could, to stop him and Grogan bitching. I mean you’ve both seen Bill lose his rag. The handcuffs, too...”

“What about them?”

“I know you didn’t approve and keeping them apart, well, less chance of Bill using them.”

Laura was well aware there’d been a contretemps prior to her arrival, but she’d made the best of it and hadn’t asked for details. Now she could sense peace in the air.

“I see Kinsella’s wearing shoes again,” she said, brightly.

“That’s because we don’t consider him to be a risk anymore,” said Fairchild.

“Since when?” I wanted to know.

“Since you told him that Aaron Flaxman would kill him if he got the chance. It’s terrified him.”

She was filling the cutlery basket in a way that drove me mad. Knives in one corner, forks in another, spoons ... why handle them when they’re dirty? Much easier to sort when they’re clean.

“So, I need the redraft of that Immunity from Prosecution agreement,” she continued. “I’ve been on to Sillitoe...”

She looked at me, hoping I’d offer to put some pressure on. When it became clear that I wouldn’t, she asked what I’d found in Grimsby.

“Nothing extra, nothing different.”

“When does the trial start?” asked Laura.

“Two weeks from today,” said Fairchild. “You know what still bothers me, though? The heroin. I keep chewing over what might have happened to it, where it could be, did someone take it...”

“It’s called future tripping,” I said. “According to the local crime squad, the Heritage IRA snatched it.”

“So that’s it? Gone?”

“I think so. Not that I looked everywhere, of course...”

Fairchild and Laura exchanged a cahoots glance, girls together.

“Are you going to leave us in the dark?” Laura asked.

I smiled. “Mind you don’t bump into the furniture.”