Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (25 page)

I must’ve been unconscious for about five minutes and came round to find a young barrister type crouched down beside me, his face a blur, then sharp, then out of focus again. He and his companions hadn’t moved me; they’d simply wedged the door open with my rucksack and played everything by the first-aid book.

I groaned, which translated meant I wasn’t dead, and he told me to lie still. The paramedics were on their way. He called to his companion, “Charlie, take over, I’m bursting.”

Charlie kneeled down, readjusted my head minimally and we both heard his friend sigh with relief at one of the urinals. The third guy was evidently out on Newgate Street, waiting to flag down the paramedics. Distraction. The poor sod’s bladder must’ve been full to the brim, but it really was his problem, not mine. I tried to stand up. Charlie advised against it. I asked him where I was. People think that’s just a line from a film, but I’ve heard it twenty, maybe thirty times for real. First thing you need when you come round is bearings.

“Caffè Nero, Newgate Street,” said Charlie. “You’ve been assaulted.”

And only then did I remember what had happened. I made another effort to stand up. My head was already thumping, saying that tomorrow it would feel even worse. My guts, my sides, were freshly kicked, and in twelve hours’ time I wouldn’t be able to move them. Did that matter? Yes. I was heading off somewhere.

“Grimsby,” I said to Charlie.

He gave me a puzzled, ‘poor old sod’ look. “Take it easy.”

The paramedics arrived and took over from the three barristers. Dressed for combat, reflective jackets with pockets everywhere, trousers you couldn’t wear out, boots you could kick a door down with, they stuck their dials and meters all over me. The readings said I was alive. I’d tried to tell them that myself. I finally got to my feet, against their wishes. I swayed for a moment as my balance adjusted and using the walls I staggered out into the blood cell and took a break in a passing chair. The conversation with the paramedics was bitty and broken.

“We’re going to take you to a hospital,” the girl said.

“You’ve broken a couple of ribs,” her colleague added.

That was something else I could’ve told them. I was torn between playing along with their good intentions and heading for the stairs, up them and away. I tried to get to my feet and flopped back in the chair. Then the police arrived. I stood up and left. I made it to the entrance, and what puzzles me still is that while they were asking what had happened, how and who, they were helping me to leave. They should’ve held me back.

Out in the street I hailed a taxi with a low wave. One of the coppers even opened the door for me and helped me in. He explained to the cabby roughly what had happened and, just because a copper was saying it, it was believable. If I’d been on my own, the guy would’ve driven straight past, and who could’ve blamed him? No cabby needs a beaten-up, legless drunk at six in the evening, drizzle in the air and the light fading.

“Marylebone Station,” I said to the driver. “Easy round the corners.”

I knew the next few days would be difficult. In thirty years I’ve never made much fuss about getting kicked in, mainly because I’ve been reluctant to dwell on fights that I’ve lost. Obviously Laura and Fee deserved an explanation about my condition, but I wasn’t looking forward to the overdose of sympathy it would bring.

When I reached Haddenham Station I called Laura and asked her to come and pick me up. It must’ve been my faltering voice that aroused her suspicions. Why a lift, she wanted to know. Had the Land Rover I’d driven off in that morning died? Exactly, I said. She didn’t believe me and went into action, telling me to wait. Wait as opposed to what, I wondered.

Ten minutes later she drove into the circular pick-up point at the station and spotted me on a bench, face and head beginning to swell and discolour by then. I stood up slowly, ready to fend off her gushing concern. She looked at me clinically, then wearily, and said, “You’ve been in a fight, for God’s sake.”

Back at Beech Tree, sympathy from Fee came in the shape of a direct attack.

“Dad, what the bloody hell were you doing?”

“I keep telling you, I was having a pee, these two blokes...”

Tired of my evasiveness, she chopped her response into single words. “I know. What. You. Were. Doing! Who were they and why...?”

I waved her aside. “I’m going to sit here in your grandfather’s rocker for the rest of the evening, like the old git I feel. Meantime, get off my back. Yukito, how are things?”

“Things?” he asked, unsure of what I might be implying.

Fee rattled off something to him in Japanese, then turned to me. “He’s fine.”

“He can answer for himself,” I said.

Yukito gazed at me, no doubt wondering if this was how things worked in our family: I would get into fights, my daughter would have a go at me, my doctor friend would be on hand to deal with any injuries.

“Fee is right,” he said, quietly. “I am fine.”

That meaningless word again.

Laura stepped into the breach of silence. She’d been rummaging in her doctor’s bag for something and had finally found it.

“Arnica,” she said. “It’s a homeopathic gel for bruises, the ones you’ll wake up with tomorrow.”

“Quackery.”

“Lift up your shirt.” She groaned impatiently at the expression on my face. “I want to see the damage to your ribs, then I’m taking you to A and E for an X-ray.”

“No! They’ll try and keep me in overnight. Tomorrow, I’m going to Grimsby.”

She paused in her examination of my chest and her eyes roamed my battered face.

“To do what? Frighten the children?”

We did go to A and E that evening and spent less time there than most people do on account of Laura knowing the doctor on duty. The X-ray revealed two cracked ribs, no broken ones. There’s no treatment, Laura and the doctor told each other, just painkillers and rest. My ribs would be themselves again in two months.

In spite of that favourable diagnosis, I did spend the next three days confined to barracks, not purely on medical advice, but due mainly to difficulty in moving. The muscles in my back and chest seemed to burst into flames every time I reached out, coughed, ate, drank, swallowed or spoke in more than a whisper.

In a quiet moment one evening, when Fee had taken Yukito up to
The Crown
to get Annie McKinnon’s opinion of him, Laura said to me in her own sympathetic voice as opposed to her medical one, “Thank God for the call of nature, eh? They could’ve killed you if it hadn’t been for those three young men. It would’ve... you know...”

We were in the living room at the time, watching some medical documentary, young doctors in Sierra Leone. She’d muted the adverts halfway through.

“Upset you? I’m glad to hear it.”

“What I mean is ... well ... love’s the nearest word. Don’t ask me why.”

The last sentence was either an apology or self-defence. I wanted to say the feeling was mutual, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. She didn’t push me.

“Liam Kinsella,” she whispered instead. Her face said she wanted me to pull out of the whole affair and concentrate on getting fit again, but her voice asked, “So, what next?”

“Grimsby.”

She winced and was about to protest.

“I’m going to ask Bill Grogan to come with me,” I said. “And I’m taking the dog.”

She was pleased about Grogan, puzzled by Dogge and asked me to explain.

“She’s a drug squad reject, but that doesn’t mean she can’t sniff out a dragon when called upon to do so.”

It still didn’t make much sense to her. I hadn’t wanted it to.

When I phoned him, Bill Grogan came as near to being excited as I’d ever heard him. It was still only two words.

“Great idea!”

All I’d said was I was planning a trip to Grimsby, the crucible of all our troubles, and would he accompany me?

He drove to the house that same afternoon in a white Fiat 600, a begging dog sort of car, ten sizes too small for him. I watched him squeeze himself out of it, then turn to me.

“What happened?” he said of my face.

“A fight. I lost.”

We shook hands and I ushered him into the house.

He sat in his usual place at the kitchen table, rising when Laura entered to greet him.

“Sergeant Grogan, how lovely to see you again. How have you been keeping?”

They shook hands and he said he was extremely well. My guess is he was re-living the day she’d seen him in just his boxers and tattoos. In the silence which followed she gestured for him to retake his seat.

He stood up again when Fee entered and his eyes went straight from her to Yukito and back again. His expression was unreadable and I wished I’d checked on his family background, just enough to find out if a favourite grandfather had ever been in a Japanese POW camp. Prejudice is nearly always inherited and a week in Grimsby with a victim of it might be tiresome. Fee pecked him on the cheek, told him who Yukito was. Yukito bowed, Grogan muttered “Hi!” and sat down again. Then somebody made coffee.

As we drank it, Laura coaxed out of Grogan that he was on indefinite suspension, certainly until after Flaxman’s trial and no doubt beyond. He stooped to a brief outburst of self-pity, oddly expressed but keenly felt. He’d been a copper for fifteen years, he said. Never a foot wrong. Queen’s bleeding Police Medal. And for what? In the end, shrimp, prawn or lobster you get served up on a plate. Headless, legless, shell removed...

He stopped himself and apologised.

“Any news of Petra Fairchild?” I asked.

“I’ve heard on the grapevine they’re both in France.”

“So she fell, hook, line and sinker...” Laura muttered.

He nodded. “Comes from being stuck in the same place too long. Stockholm syndrome in reverse. Jailer falls for prisoner.”

Laura wanted to know how her parents had taken the news. As far as Grogan knew they were devastated on just about every count: running off with a villain, dereliction of duty, not even saying goodbye. The last didn’t surprise him. She’d have risked them talking sense into her.

“But she’s not in danger, as far as anyone knows?” Laura asked.

He shrugged. “Who’s to say? And Blackwell’s right. I didn’t see it. I should’ve done. And maybe I should’ve been kinder to...”

I intervened and told him the decisions Fairchild had made were hers alone. It was true, but he didn’t believe it.

Fee couldn’t resist embarrassing us all, it seemed. “Were they actually banging away in our house, Dad?”

I deferred to Grogan for an answer.

“They had time alone, if that’s what you mean. We had a kind of roster, she took the days, I took the nights...”

“So the answer’s almost certainly yes,” said Fee. “The idea of it, though, until recently at least...”

She shuddered. The silence which followed called for a complete change of subject

“So what have you been up to, Sergeant?” asked Laura. “I mean I know it’s only a fortnight since we last...”

“Decorating. The flat. Barley twist.”

“A kind of beige, if memory serves,” she said. “My mother used to say you can depend on beige...”

“I’m bloody sick of it,” he said. “And we’ve only done half. That’s one reason I jumped at the Grimsby offer, guv.”

So I was guvnor now, was I? I’d started off being ‘old-school’ and ‘way past it’. But it was Fee who’d spotted the most interesting word he’d used so far: the ‘we’ in ‘we’ve only done half’.

“Why go for barley twist if you didn’t like it?” she asked.

He paused, conscious that he was about to seem disloyal. “Viv chose it. My partner. How did we get on to paint, for Gawd’s sake? Wherefore Grimsby, Nathan?”