Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (2 page)

Clare was shocked. She’d heard about the two bodies found on the edge of Speaker’s Wood and she couldn’t deny that since then she hadn’t fancied riding near there. But at least she now understood why Joe’s wife had wanted her to see him. She feared the repercussions from her son’s horrendous crime.

“That is a dreadful thing to have happened to you, Joe. The effect of it will run deeper than you know and Carrie, being a woman – your wife of ... thirty-two years, did you say? – can see the toll it’s taking.”

He looked at her and she passed him a box of tissues. He pulled out a couple and dabbed his eyes, then turned away to blow his nose.

“I don’t think there’s anything physically wrong with you, Joe, but I would like to see you again in, say, two weeks’ time.”

She was the first person he’d ever revealed his true feelings about Aaron to, and even then he hadn’t said much. He hadn’t needed to. The story, from his side anyway, was in the tissues Clare Harris had handed him and he’d used.

“So, I’m not seeing things, then, Doctor ... Clare?”

“You may well be seeing things, but I’d bet money they aren’t a figment of your imagination. You should tell the police.”

When he arrived home, Carrie was anxious to hear how he’d got on with Clare Harris.

“You never told me she was a woman,” he said.

“I thought it’d be a nice surprise for you. Did she give you anything?”

“To stop me seeing things, you mean? No need.”

She nodded. The doctor was always right in Carrie’s world, which raised the question: who was the man Joe had seen in the grain store, on the garage roof and in the middle back room? Joe had no idea, but he’d be ready for him next time. If there was a next time.

Carrie prodded him. It used to be her invitation to whisk her upstairs for an hour or two’s love-making. These days it usually conveyed her delight at what was on television that evening.

“It’s
Strictly Come Dancing
. Only two more weeks to go!” she said. “We’ll have supper on our knees, shall we?”

For some reason he suddenly felt very old, as if time had passed him by on so many things while he’d been building up the business.

“Nice idea, love,” he said.

They sat watching
Strictly
, seated on the new sofa. It was the size of a double bed. Joe preferred the old one they’d had, the big leather Chesterfield he and Carrie had picked up for a fiver when they were first married. It had been black with grease, worn through in some places, but at least it fought back when you sat in it. This one swallowed you whole the moment your backside touched it and it carried on digesting you throughout the evening. You had to rock back and forth to get on your feet again. But Aaron had thought it was high time his mother had a new sofa and bought her one, so Joe reckoned it was here to stay.

As
Strictly
started, they tucked into the steak and kidney pie which Carrie had bought from Newitt’s specially that afternoon. There were four couples left and, as usual, Joe fancied the girl with the best figure while Carrie rooted for the lame dog, some old lady politician who could hardly move, let alone tango. As she came on to do her bit, Bella raised her head from the flat-out position she’d been in at Joe’s feet and growled. She’d heard something in the distance, beyond the house, out in the yard or in the woods.

“Steady, girl,” said Joe.

He handed Carrie his plate and stood up.

“You think that’s him?” she asked. “Talk about picking his moment.”

“I’ll go see. You carry on watching and keep the dog from barking.”

He went through to the kitchen without turning the light on and at the back door slipped into his wellingtons. His work jacket was hanging on a hook in the alcove. He put that on and checked the pockets for cartridges. Then he reached back into the alcove for the Purdey, loaded both chambers and stepped out into the yard, the shotgun broken over the crook of his arm.

There’d been no rain for a couple of days, so it was firm underfoot. He paused and looked round and just as he was about to blame Bella for her wonky hearing he saw a flash of white, up by the attic window of the old barn where his grandfather used to stable the horses. He knew immediately what it was. It was one of the barn owls that returned most years to raise a family and live off the rats. He wasn’t sure if it was the male or the female but the flight was silent, not panicky like other birds. Then he saw its mate follow. Something had disturbed them.

He made his way over to the barn, staying close to the side of the house, then using the cover of the old grain store. He trod the last twenty feet across to the open barn doors, in open moonlight, as if he were ... walking on eggshells.

He entered and enough light followed him to see the inside of the building. Like everywhere else it was full of old machinery, old tools, old tackle corroding away rather than being scrapped. He stepped into the shadow cast by an old digger and looked round. Nothing was out of place and he knew these relics like the back of his hand, each piece a memorial to his family’s past. Whoever had disturbed the owls, if indeed anyone had, they were up in the attic, and as he started towards the stone steps on the far wall he heard something in the boarded loft above: creaking rather than a regular tread as somebody moved towards the stairwell. Joe retreated into the shadow and waited. Whoever it was took their time, moved cautiously as if feeling their way as well as seeing it. Eventually the feet appeared at the top, the legs appeared, the body appeared as the man he’d cast as a dosser descended the narrow steps, hugging the wall. Joe stepped into what light there was, closed the shotgun and called out.

“Hold it!”

The intruder flattened himself back against the side wall, eyes wide with shock, arms raised. Joe approached him and was about to issue another instruction when the man jumped, down off the side of the steps, and ran towards the door. Joe raised the Purdey and fired, aiming wide, and caught the man in his leg. It brought him down, screaming, cursing then pleading.

“No, don’t ... please, don’t shoot...”

Joe walked over to the man as he got to his feet, hopping on one leg while trying to nurse the other. It was bleeding, having taken five or six pellets, but he wasn’t mortally wounded and made a feeble grab for the shotgun. In response Joe whipped the butt of it across his face and felled him like a skittle, rolling and turning before he passed out. Joe took out his phone and called the police.

I never cared much for Tom Blackwell but at least I knew why, and that can’t be said of most people I’ve taken against down the years.

I certainly never expected to see him again, but there he was strolling down Morton Lane towards my house on a cold August morning. It was unlikely to be a social call, an old colleague seeking me out for a chat about the past, and in hindsight I should’ve pretended not to be in. Like a fool, I went out to meet him at the five-bar gate.

He was dressed against the British summer, quilted anorak zipped up to the throat in armorial fashion so I couldn’t see what he was wearing underneath. I reckoned it would be tweedy jacket over a crisp shirt and Police Federation tie. The grey flannels, which I could see, had turn-ups and knife-like creases. The shine on the shoes would have dazzled had there been any sunlight to bounce off them. It all meant that he was probably still married to the plain and pernickety Karen.

Our opening conversation had the sparkle of a spent match.

“Nathan Hawk, my dear friend!” Typical copper. Two lies in one sentence. ‘Dear’ and ‘friend’. “Keeping well?”

“Can’t grumble. Yourself?”

“Likewise, likewise.”

That was another of his peculiarities that had always annoyed me: his habit of repeating words or phrases. I leaned over the gate and we shook hands. His was warm, mine was cold: his high-tech anorak versus my jeans and T-shirt and a belief in weather forecasts. Warm, sunny with a light breeze from the south, the girl had said...

“Nice place you’ve got,” he said. “Quiet lane, no through traffic...”

“That’s the way it is with dead ends.”

“Right, right.” He looked away as he recalled my late wife. “I was sorry to hear about Maggie, Nathan. I kept meaning to drop you a line, but you know how it is, you wonder if people would rather be left alone. But I am sorry.”

“It was nine years ago, Tom.”

“Jesus, was it really?”

He held the sympathetic frown for a moment or two, then gazed past me to the house, wondering perhaps if I was going to invite him in or just carry on leaning. As it was, my curiosity to know why he’d suddenly appeared in my life got the better of me.

“Fancy a drink?” I said.

He glanced at his watch as if lightning might strike at the mention of alcohol before lunch.

“Yours was always a single,” I said, lifting the metal loop which held the gate. “And you could make the bloody thing last all night.”

He smiled. “Yours was a double, ice to the brim. And it lasted the best part of five minutes.”

I pulled the gate open a yard or so and in he came.

Once Blackwell had finished pretending that he liked dogs and had spoken kind but nervous words to my own drug squad reject, I pushed her out into the garden and invited him to sit at the kitchen table. He took off the anorak, hung it fussily over a chair and proved that I was still a master at judging people by their appearance. There was the tweed jacket, the immaculate white shirt and a tie you could turn a fried egg with.

From an ever-ready bottle of Bell’s I poured a single into a tumbler where it looked ridiculous. I went to the freezer for ice, added a few chunks to my own double, took my place at the other end of the table and waited.

After a series of nods and smiles he made a show of looking back on our brief working relationship with that wry amusement time uses to soften hostilities of the past. His memory was surprisingly detailed, which made me suspect he’d done some research. We’d first met eleven years and three months ago, he informed me, when I was a Detective Chief Inspector in Hamford and he was a young Detective Constable. I was leading the inquiry into a stomach-churning murder, the kind which had me phoning my daughters throughout the day to make sure they were still alive. A woman in her early twenties had been raped, strangled and cut into chunks so that her killer, an old boyfriend, could get her out of his flat more easily. Six bin bags in all.

Blackwell tried to skip over the occasion when I’d given him a verbal hammering followed by an ultimatum. He pretended to have forgotten the reasons for it, so I reminded him. I’d noticed, early on in the inquiry, that he was one of those people with a talent for getting others to do their work for them, clean or dirty. At first I’d thought it was laziness on his part, but if so why did he spend more time and effort getting the rest of the squad to carry his load than it would’ve taken to do the job himself? Something far more subtle than indolence was driving him. The skill, the finesse with which he operated, without his victims realising, was impressive. ‘Impressive’ is the wrong word, I know, but I can’t bring to mind its pejorative equivalent...

It was in the days before open plan and way, way before standing up became the new sitting down, so middle ranks and above still had their own offices. With chairs. I always left my door open but suggested that he close it behind him on this occasion unless he wanted the others to hear our one-sided discussion. Hands in his pockets, he hooked it shut with his foot, then stood looking down at me while I effed and feffed my way through a series of accusations, finally asking if he’d always been a lazy bastard or had somebody taught him. He didn’t so much as blink. Was he happy at home? Did he owe money? Was he ill? Had there been a death in the family? All the usual and necessary stuff. No to everything, so I asked if it went deeper. Was he maybe scared of turning over the stones in this murder? Frightened of the details chiming with his own darker side?

By then, in his shoes, I would have picked up the desk and thrown it at me, but all I got from Blackwell when I finally allowed him to speak was sweet reason, so elegantly expressed that it nearly had me wondering if I’d read him all wrong. And just as I was about to ask him to have a seat, maybe a whisky, talk things over reasonably, I put a name to his behaviour. Manipulative. It may be common currency these days, but in those days the word, the concept itself, hadn’t long been in fashion. I challenged him with my thought and he shook his head in bewildered innocence.

“Guvnor, I haven’t the faintest idea...”

“I mean whatever job I give you, making coffee, counting body parts, you persuade some other poor sod to do it for you! And all for the pleasure of watching them jump through hoops that you’re spinning.”

Control freak. I’m not sure how popular that phrase was then, or I’d have tossed it into my crude assessment of him. I gave him a week to change his work ethic (another modernism), or I’d have him reassigned. He stared at me, part respect, part defiance.

“All I can say is I’ll try. Can I go now? Shall I leave the door or close it behind me?”

I toyed with the idea of leaping across the desk and ripping his trouser pockets from their seams, given that his hands were still firmly in them. Instead, I said quietly, “There’ll always be a place for men like you in today’s police service, Tom, specially at the top.”

Subsequently, he had gone up the career ladder like a window cleaner possessed and had reached the dizzy heights of Commander.

I rattled the ice in my drink and he smiled again.

“We had a theory as to why you took it with all that ice,” he said. “It made you drink it more quickly, before the ice melted and diluted it.” He raised his glass. “Absent friends.”

He took the smallest sip I’ve ever seen qualify as one.

“And a few enemies,” I added.

He didn’t quite know how to take my acknowledging the humanity of some of our old adversaries and it may sound pious that I did, but a fair few of the villains I’d nicked in my thirty years weren’t evil men; they were just wrong. Not half as wrong as some of the coppers I’d known.

Blackwell gazed round the kitchen, as if trying to see beyond the walls.

“Big house,” he said. “I mean beautiful, but big. For just you.”

I put the question he was trying to ask into a sentence for him. “You mean do I live here on my own?”

He smiled. “The vase of roses on the window sill isn’t your style, Nathan, so I assume a woman’s hand.”

“Her name is Laura Peterson and she’s a local GP. She doesn’t live here.”

He badly wanted to know the reason for that but hadn’t the nerve to ask, so I indulged him. If Laura and I moved in together, I said, it would close a door on a crucial part of my life, one that I feared would never open again. He assumed I was talking about my days in the police service. I corrected him. My professional past, though unforgotten, wasn’t a place I was keen to revisit. My family, on the other hand, my four children who had flung themselves all over the world, were a different matter. I nodded to where my favourite photos of them stood out from plates, bowls, cups, saucers and everything else the kitchen dresser was designed to hold. Setting up house with Laura, I summarised, might finally cut the cord which I fondly imagined still held us all together.

“And what about Laura?”

“What about her?”

“Does she have a past she wants to revisit or ... or is happy to keep secret?” In response to my off-key look he quickly added, “Sorry, sorry, I’m prying.”

He certainly was and there was bound to be a reason for it. I explained that Laura didn’t have a past in the sense he’d meant, that her life as a GP meant almost everything to her, that her frustration with a National Health Service she both loved and hated never once made her forget why she’d taken up medicine in the first place. It went straight back to the Hippocratic oath. She had other interests, naturally, and that’s where I came in. Not as an interest in my own right, but as someone she could share hers with. A willing and responsive listener.

“What are those interests?”

“Poetry, mainly, but you know, painting, opera...”

He was wise enough not to question me further about them. He took another sip which was hardly worth swallowing. I countered with a swig.

“How are the kids doing?” he asked.

He stood up and went over to the dresser, the better to see a photo of my daughters, Fee before she went off to Japan, Ellie a year into her course at the Sorbonne.

“Good-looking girls,” he said.

Something happens when a middle-aged man makes a remark like that about your daughters, no matter how innocently it’s meant. I guess I’d whiplashed back to the squad room mentality where similar words would have been followed by declarations of intent, who would fancy doing what to the girl being ogled.

I went straight from there to wondering if there’d ever been another woman in Blackwell’s life, before or during Karen. I doubted it, even though for all his cramped personal style he was a good-looking man. First impressions for me always involve the other bloke’s hair, comparing it to my own diminishing head of the stuff. Blackwell’s was an upturned white scrubbing brush, at odds with dark eyebrows but enviable all the same. A closer look gave you the chiselled face and skin which looked a good deal younger than the man wearing it.

I was still no nearer to knowing why he was here, but assumed he hadn’t sought me out only to leave without telling me.