Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (15 page)

We met in a pub in Acton called
The Rocket
which Blackwell knew quite well and said would be safe. It was a long thin place on a street corner, near the railway station. Inside it was grey wooden floors and big sash windows, the woodwork freshly painted, racing green. It could’ve done with some new furniture; the leather chairs and sofas had paid their toll and the stuffing, presumably horsehair, was poking through wherever it could. It certainly wasn’t a copper’s pub, nor a lawyer’s, but the whisky was the same as anywhere else and nobody queried ice all the way to the top of the glass, which made a change.

Blackwell was already there when I arrived, cradling a single malt. He was dressed as ever, full turn-out, jacket, shirt and tie, creases that cut and shoes that blinded. Most people in the place, including me, had opted for T-shirts that day and the surrounding chatter was mainly about rain. There’d been a three-day run of unusually warm weather which could only mean one thing: a storm was brewing.

Henry Sillitoe arrived ten minutes late, full of apologies. The level crossing had caught him out. The gates had waited for no less than three trains to pass before allowing traffic through. Something really needed doing about that and a letter to British Rail was taking shape in his head...

“To thank them for not letting you be killed?” I suggested.

He smiled. “I suppose so. Solicitor’s first recourse, the loaded missive.”

He tried to poke back some horsehair before sitting on the Chesterfield, gave it up as a bad job and sank into it. He wasn’t a T-shirt and jeans man but the nearest you’ll get to it in lawyers of his generation: cotton jacket over a polo shirt.

“Are you chairing this meeting, Commander?” I asked.

Blackwell nodded. “Only one item on the agenda. How did it go in Grimsby?”

“I think you’re dealing with a very old problem,” I said.

I told them about my visit, missing out the trip to
The Amethyst
and starting with where the bodies were found. The only odd thing about both places was their nearness to Flaxman’s farm. I’d have expected a man with Aaron’s reputation to do more than just offload his problem in a ditch or a slurry pit five miles from his parents’ front door.

Sillitoe, who’d ordered a coffee which hadn’t come yet, finally caught the barmaid’s eye and mimed drinking from a cup. She waved back and I moved on to Speaker’s Wood and the appearance of two members of the local crime squad. A DCI Carew and his side-winder, DS Sweetman.

“Carew?” said Blackwell. “I rubber-stamped his request to assist you.”

I didn’t like that. “You mean Carew came to you in the first instance, you didn’t go to him?”

“Correct, correct.”

“He tells it the other way round.”

Sillitoe was floundering a bit, the names Carew and Sweetman being unknown to him. I explained that two coppers had stopped by in Speaker’s Wood, not because they’d wanted to help me but to check that I wasn’t finding out too much.

“I wouldn’t say they were directly threatening, but they were anxious for me to pack up and go home.” I turned to Blackwell. “Carew’s old-school. He’ll break the rules and the nearest head if need be.”

Blackwell sighed and decided to drink his whisky rather than just hold it. He knew, roughly, what I was going to say next. I spelt it out for Sillitoe.

“This is why I called it a very old problem. Carew and his team have been trying for two years to put an end to Aaron Flaxman. Two years! And everything comes to he who waits. In this case it was two murders and 15 million quid’s worth of heroin. Trouble was, there were no witnesses. Then along came Liam Kinsella with a perfect story. They doubtless threatened, cajoled and promised whatever was needed to give him a ‘crisis of conscience’. He turned on Flaxman.”

Sillitoe nodded, then asked my opinion on the evidence. I said it was the same as when he’d asked me in my garden beside the hollyhocks.

“All I’ve really got is Kinsella?” he asked.

“What he says may be the truth, but whether it’s enough is in the hands of your barrister.”

The barmaid brought him his coffee and he thanked her with his smile, thin, immobile and wishing they’d bring back the death penalty for bad service in pubs. She departed from our table with a noticeable shiver.

“So, you’ve nothing to add,” he said, once he’d taken his first sip. “That sounds critical, wasn’t meant to be. And why does coffee in places like this look like the real thing but never taste of it?”

“Another letter?” I took a few swigs of my drink and set it down on the table. “I should’ve said ‘nothing
yet
’
.”

“Meaning?” said Blackwell.

“I don’t think we’ve looked in the right places.”

“Where else is there?”

“Stamford Prison. Where Flaxman’s being held. I need to talk to him, like I would’ve done ten years ago.”

Blackwell smiled. “Slamming his head down on the table?”

“I might try being friendly this time.”

Sillitoe said it was out of the question. The man had been charged. God only knew what his defence would make of me, a third party, walking into Stamford, asking questions, using the answers to further our case.

“Or to shoot holes in it,” I said.

That made him even more uncomfortable. He started on about the bureaucratic difficulties, the wrangling, the crawling he’d have to do to set it all up.

I let him exhaust his excuses, then said, “You both think there’s something wrong with all this. Let’s see if Flaxman knows what it is.”

Grudgingly, they both consented.

Out of common courtesy I should have told them about my visit to
The Amethyst
but I knew there’d be questions, aside from the simple one of why the hell I’d gone there. I would’ve ended up dropping Fairchild right in it, telling her boss that she’d posted a present on behalf of the main witness. I’d have then had to say she gave Kinsella access to her laptop...

“By the way, Henry, have you re-written Kinsella’s Immunity from Prosecution agreement?”

Sillitoe play-acted the overworked professional, lost without his right arm, Marion Bewley. “No, I keep meaning...”

“No rush,” I said. “In fact, why don’t you move it right to the bottom of the pile?”

There were twelve days to go before the start of the trial, with Kinsella due to be called about a week after that. It was cutting it fine to see Flaxman beforehand, mainly because it took a whole week for Sillitoe to get permission for the visit. He’d made the purpose of it deliberately unclear, but that wasn’t the reason for the delay. It went up and down the bureaucratic ladder, almost of its own accord, as high as the Ministry of Justice, as low as the Prison Ombudsman, before it was sanctioned. A week is a long time in politics. A British prime minister said that. The man had obviously tried to visit someone in Stamford Prison out of hours.

But at least the delay gave a chance to do some research into Flaxman. He’d been brought up in Speaker’s Farm, the only child of an arable farmer. Then the chickens arrived and it turned from a cosy little homestead where you could stop by and get a dozen eggs into a real money spinner. The eggs were free-range, as near as dammit, and the old man, after years of hard graft, had become very wealthy. However, just like me, with my aversion to paying £2.60 for a cup of coffee, Flaxman senior remained a ‘cash flow cautious’ sort of man.

Flaxman senior had wanted, more than anything else, his son to take over the business. His son didn’t want to, endorsing an unpopular belief I’d held for years: the more you give your kids, the
less
they take. Obviously I’m not talking about straight cash. But capital assets that come with obligations and responsibilities? For example, 16,000 chickens?

Fair enough, Aaron hadn’t wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, but that didn’t give him the right to make the choices he did. By seventeen he was what the local worthies would’ve called a troublemaker. Fights in bars, and there can’t have been many in Wragby to choose from, but Aaron was always a contender. He moved on to burglary, but that didn’t provide the one-on-one satisfaction he was after. It was people’s belief in their fellow man’s inherent goodness he wanted to steal, not their money. His need to be seen as the local bad boy moved him on up to armed robbery. No surprise in that. He’d been using shotguns on the farm since he was twelve years old, so by twenty-four he was a dab hand.

The big event was robbing a jeweller in Lincoln, putting the fear of God into customers, passers-by, staff, even the bloke he tried fencing the stuff to. He was caught because he wouldn’t keep a low profile. And his father was sick of bailing him out. He got nine years and did six and, mainly because of estrangement from his parents, he then turned to the labour scam, bringing in non-EU workers for local farmers. It fizzled out. He turned again, this time to smuggling.

A search of his room at Speaker’s Farm shocked a few people. There was a computer there, naturally, but what did the officers dealing find on it? A few games, music, some porn like they might’ve expected? No, evidently Aaron was a bit old-fashioned when it came to women. What they found was a whole host of material about British mobsters, almost a historical collection. It covered people like the Krays and Richardsons, yes, but included lesser-known names like Billy Hill, the Sabinis, Jack Spot. This wasn’t a kid who’d seen romanticised versions of these men in films and wanted to be like them. This was a serious student, cherry-picking the best of various crimes. No wonder Kinsella was terrified of him.

A couple of days before the prison visit was due, Fee and Laura took Sheila Bright to the cinema in Aylesbury. All I know about the film is it starred Ben Affleck, so take your pick. It left just me, Grogan, Fairchild and Kinsella at home and it was my turn to cook supper, which meant it was a stir fry. Simple to prepare, quick to make, easy to clear up afterwards.

We started eating in silence, which was unusual. I looked across at Kinsella in my umpteenth attempt to answer my own question. Was he playing us, or was someone playing him? I’d cracked the second part, at least to my own satisfaction. Somebody was. The Humberside Crime Squad, in the shape of Carew and Sweetman. What about the first part, though?

Across the table he was shovelling his food in like someone who hadn’t eaten for a week. He realised I was looking at him and raised his head, peered out from behind the curtain of hair.

“I’m going to see a friend of yours tomorrow,” I said.

He carried on shovelling. “I didn’t know I had any left.”

“I’m going to see Aaron Flaxman in prison.”

The child in him came through straight away, rice noodles hanging from his mouth, catching on the beard, a prawn on the end of his fork as he stopped dead and looked at me.

“Why?” he asked. He swallowed what was in his mouth and then wiped his lips on the caked sleeve of his denim shirt. “I’m sorry ... I meant why do you want to meet with him?”

“Questions.”

“What about?” he asked.

“Well, if we’re going to put him away then every little helps...”

At the other end of the table, Grogan was nodding. “I think it’s a good idea. Word is, you’re a past master at the face-to-face.”

Kinsella stood up, his way of countering the rising fear apparent in his face. He clawed the hair away from his forehead and proceeded to walk back and forth in a space the size of a prison cell.

“You really need to think about this, Mr Hawk!” His arms were trembling and, for want of anything to do with them, he hugged himself. “Are you seeing him on your own? In the same room?”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

He leaned towards me, eyes wide, and tapped his head, knocking as if trying to get in. “He’s a psycho. He’ll pick a fight, no excuse. God knows what he might have on him at the time...”

Fairchild tried to calm things down, choosing now to dish out second helpings of the stir fry. I wanted things to stay up in the air. That way I might’ve learned why Flaxman’s name had sent a balloon up in Kinsella’s world. Sure, I’d said the man would kill him if he ever got the chance, but was that a reason to panic? Right there and then, I meant.

“I’ll have him frisked,” I said. “I’ll do the job myself.”

“If you talk to him, he’ll know it was me turned him over to the police.”

“He’ll know that anyway. If by any chance he doesn’t, he’ll see you in court. You can’t go in disguise. And while we’re on the subject of your appearance...”

“But it’s not just me he’ll turn on.” He swept an arm round the table. “You, your family, friends...”

“Sit down, Liam,” said Fairchild. He turned and looked at her, unsure of what she’d just said. “Sit down!”

She’d called him Liam and there was a wealth of meaning I could’ve read into that, but at least he did as he’d been told. He pushed his plate aside, then rested his elbows on the table, dropped his head forwards and covered it with his hands. He was sweating, still trembling, apologising. I’d never thought of him as especially streetwise but nor had I believed he was this naive, imagining that contact with Flaxman would put us all in more danger than we were in already. It was straight from another soap opera.

“I’ll think about what you’ve said,” I told him. “Meantime I’ve no intention of confronting him. Why would I need to? He’s facing the worst charges a man ever could.”

He nodded and calmed a little. “Murder. But is my evidence enough to put him away for it?”

“Chief Inspector Carew thinks it is, Henry Sillitoe thinks it is. Me, I’m not so sure.”