Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (17 page)

“Open your mouth,” I said.

“Why?” he said, tight-lipped.

I walked over to him, leaned down and he smiled. The teeth had been cleaned.

“When did that happen?” I asked.

“This morning. First time for three months.”

In hindsight, alarm bells should have rung, but at the time it seemed like a detail. Besides, Fairchild was already holding up a barber’s mirror for him to see the work so far.

“Recognise him?” she asked.

Kinsella looked at his reflection as he might have done a school photograph, recognising but not knowing his own face gazing back. He seemed to force himself to like what he saw, then smiled at Grace Fairchild and thanked her for her handiwork.

On the drive back to Beech Tree, talking above the wind rush from the open windows, Kinsella gave us a running commentary on the virtues of Grace Fairchild. She was warm and friendly, Grace by name, gracious by nature, stylish and non-judgmental, her classiness reminded him of his own mother, her obvious love for her daughter spoke volumes. Generalities, all of them, and as he began to struggle for further compliments I did him a favour and told him to shut up. In the peace and quiet which followed I noticed his minders stealing the occasional glance at him, Grogan with a head turn, Fairchild in the rear-view mirror. Perhaps they were wondering what to expect from this metamorphosis...

I wasn’t sure that a simple makeover would alter him at all. Change would imply a move from one position to another, whereas Kinsella still felt like a man in flux, someone who had literally dropped out of the night sky with an undeclared purpose and continued to throw into question my celebrated ability to judge people.

Back home, Fee looked at the work so far, then raised approving eyebrows.

“Promising,” she said. “He reminds me of someone. Who is it, Dad? Come on, you’re good at this stuff.”

And as she snapped her fingers, trying to bring a name to mind, some Hollywood star or other, a bolt of panic hit me, pit of the stomach. My daughter was a beautiful girl, on the rebound from a long-term relationship, and Kinsella was the good-looking enigma such women fall for. He smiled at her, clean teeth and all.

“Let me know when it comes to you,” he said.

I’d taken back the boots he’d worn for the trip and made a mental note not to tell Jaikie they’d been lent. He was odd about people’s feet at the best of times. But it wasn’t just his boots that needed keeping quiet about. Fee decided to search the loft, a cramped space beyond the attic rooms, home to a small colony of pipistrelle bats and family junk. In a box marked ‘Jaikie Clothes’, which she herself had packed when I’d moved house seven years previously, she found a selection of her brother’s cast-offs. She brought them down to the kitchen where Fairchild was boning a chicken and I was preparing vegetables for an evening casserole. Grogan had offered to help us and been declined. He sat in Maggie’s dad’s old rocker, evil-eyeing his refurbished charge who was basking in the growing effect he was having.

“They aren’t so much worn out as out of fashion,” Fee told the assembled company. “Being Jaikie’s, they’re top dollar.” She looked at Kinsella. “Before you try anything on, you’ll need another bath.”

“Of course. Care to join me?” He’d meant to say it with a kind of impish charm but it failed and came out as plain awkward and silly. He winced with embarrassment. “Sorry. Bath. Right.”

Exhibit one was a single-breasted jacket on a hanger which Fee hooked over an old cast-iron nail in one of the beams. There was a shirt to go with it and a pair of slacks, even a tie. What did everyone think? Fairchild was enthusiastic and said it would do nicely. Grogan nodded and looked away.

Sensing mistrust from my direction, Kinsella tried to include me in the conversation. “These belong to your son, right? Jacob Hawk, the actor? Will he mind?”

“He won’t know.”

“Not unless one of us tells him, eh?” He winked. It was another attempt at passing humour but it fell to earth unnoticed.

“There’s just about everything he’ll need up there,” said Fee. “Underwear, socks, trousers ... shoes, Dad?”

Grogan muttered with his usual brevity, “No shoes.”

Fee appealed to me as if I might countermand that. I shrugged, but no one got away from Fee that easily.

“So Liam walks into court in a Ralph Lauren jacket, Prada shirt and bare feet...?”

She too was using his Christian name. For me that marked the crossover from formality to friendship.

Fairchild had stopped work on the chicken. “Is it really a Ralph Lauren?”

“No, but you get my point!”

Fee could hear herself becoming short and cranky and she backed off a little.

I thought back to the evening when Kinsella had panicked at news that I was planning to visit Aaron Flaxman. Two days ago? Three? The fear he’d shown hadn’t lasted. Had it been real to begin with?

Given Fee and Fairchild’s reactions to the new, improved Kinsella, I was interested to see what Laura would make of him. I’m not suggesting that any one of them would have fallen prey to his good looks and awkward charm as he emerged from his derelict state, but on the other hand he knew how to use both to full advantage.

She arrived at Beech Tree, after a twelve-hour day, to join us for supper and, still in GP mode, asked me how Kinsella was. The lice were history, the nits had left the building, but was the ointment she’d prescribed working? I gestured to where he’d just entered from the living room and was standing in the doorway. I watched her body language as she approached him and could only see the doctor at work. He smiled, hands outspread, inviting her to give an opinion. She swallowed gently, searching for words, then said blandly, “Much better. And the ointment I prescribed has definitely worked.”

He counted off his other improvements on the fingers of his left hand. “Cleaned my teeth, had another bath, and the T-shirt and jeans are hand-me-downs from Jaikie.”

“Shoes?”

“No shoes yet. I don’t mind. I understand their reasoning.”

“You’re too understanding by half,” said Grogan, shoving him from behind, pitching him farther into the kitchen.

“Good evening, Sergeant,” said Laura.

He nodded. He was still embarrassed whenever she addressed him directly, especially with a smile. We thought it went back to the day she’d caught him off-guard in just his tattoos and boxers.

Having handled Kinsella, she went to the sink and washed her hands. The rest of us followed suit, mainly to spare ourselves the lecture.

During the week when Kinsella became human again, some other subtle changes occurred in our little commune, the one that surprised me the most being Grogan softening towards his charge. His excuse was that we needed Kinsella to feel secure in the days immediately before the trial and his way of achieving that was to occasionally utter the two words, “You okay?”

“Yeah, thanks, Bill,” Kinsella would answer, bewildered by the hint of concern. He was downright flabbergasted when Grogan went up to three words:

“Cup of tea?”

“Please, yeah. Thanks.”

“Apple bar?”

“Yeah.”

True to her word, Grace Fairchild had made a big tin box of them and her daughter had been over to collect them. They were good. Grogan and Kinsella would sit together under the big beech, working their way through them, the model of tolerant incompatibility. On one occasion Laura, Fairchild and I were in the kitchen and I caught Laura gazing out at them with a pleasantly bewildered look on her face.

“When you think back to what he was, just four weeks ago,” she said, “it’s nothing short of miraculous. A triumph of persuasion over pressure.”

I glanced at Fairchild, who hadn’t fully understood the remark either.

“We’ve brought him round with argument...” Fairchild began.

“And a few threats,” I said.

“Don’t fool yourself that if you’d simply bullied him he would’ve changed,” Laura said. “Four weeks ago he was filthy, self-obsessed and anti-social, riddled with lice and covered in sores. Now he’s good-looking, charming, confident ... a different man.”

Fairchild raised her eyebrows at me, behind Laura’s back, and, as usual, when I should have kept my mouth shut I opened it.

“That’s just your weakness for seeing the best in people.”

They were both taken aback by my remark, the way I’d said it more than the words themselves, and wanted me to expand on it. I said they’d forgotten one crucial aspect of this whole business. Liam Kinsella had turned on his friends in order to gain his own freedom, not because he’d had a change of heart, a moral awakening.

“I think you’re being grossly unfair,” said Laura.

“P’raps I am, but just consider what he’s managed to achieve, to gather round him in those four weeks, all with us barely noticing. He’s got his own personal physician, you, Laura, dealing with lice and impetigo. He’s got a legal adviser, me, securing his immunity from prosecution. A campaign leader in Fee, fighting for his human right to wear shoes. An armed bodyguard, Grogan and Fairchild, to say nothing of a bevy of housekeepers, cooks, cleaners and bottle washers: advice on what to wear, what to say, how to say it...”

There was a pause before Laura responded, as stalwart as ever but not quite as certain. “You can’t have it both ways, Nathan. The CPS needed a witness to a brutal murder; Kinsella turned out to be perfect for the job. All you’re doing is criticising the way it’s happened.”

I told her she was fudging her own argument. The way it happened was just as important as the result itself.

Fairchild was puzzled. “With us barely noticing, you said?”

I nodded. “And I do mean us, all of us.”

Laura had been taken in by him, I insisted. She’d sung his intellectual praises to me, bemoaned his missed opportunities. Gallant, she’d called him, because he let her win at chess! His sob stories had been believed, even though they contained no specifics, just generalities that could be seen on television most evenings of the week. Fairchild had said he was just a kid caught up in the justice system, then she’d become his gofer, doing odd jobs for him, buying and posting presents, teaching him how to use Facebook. Fee had dressed him up like a doll in her brother’s Bond Street clothes, when a Marks & Spencer suit would have done him just as well. Even Bill Grogan was now softening, actually talking to the guy...

A defender of any cause to the bitter end, Laura said, “I still think you’re regarding our achievements, his achievements, in the worst possible light...”

“Do you? I’ve known my fair share of turncoats down the years, a few of them women, most of them men, and not one of them possessed a single saving grace.”