Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (29 page)

“Take twenty kilometres, eight centimetres, off the string, draw me another circle.”

Again, he wound the string to length and I asked what he’d got.

“You’re still in the North Sea one side, Irish the other. You just make Wales and south you hit London, for Christ’s sake. North you nick the Lake District.”

“Do it again, another twenty kilometres.”

We ended up with five concentric circles, meaningless names of towns, forests, national parks, and a sense, rising from the pit of my stomach, that I’d been mad to believe such a crude device would bear fruit. In spite of knowing its risks, we fell back on Grogan’s original idea, a trip to
The
Amethyst
to obtain from Emma Wesley her sister’s address. Maybe we could cajole her, frighten her, sweet-talk her into secrecy, into believing it was all for Sarah’s own good. We folded up the hearthrug map and cleared away the paraphernalia.

Grogan drove slowly to Fish Dock, presumably because he didn’t want us to get there. We drove in silence which he was the first to break. He turned and smiled at me.

“I never had the ears for that.”

He was referring to the pencil which I’d tucked between head and ear and forgotten. I removed it, dropped it into the side pocket of the car door. Then I took it out again and looked at it. I’m not claiming some kind of sixth sense or third eye, not even an exceptional gift for joining up dots. Even less do I know how the brain is wired when it comes to memory. I’ve always considered it to be a series of jagged lines, twisting, turning, sometimes going back on themselves, and if that sounds too rich a way of alluding to what happened next, too bad.

All I know is I kept looking at that pencil and for the next minute or so became the victim of a childhood flashback which, even as I tried to reject it, I knew was taking me somewhere useful. It involved a holiday in Keswick, world-famous for its mountains, lakes and ... pencils. I was nine years old and my parents could barely afford the break from their growing business in North London. On the very last day my mother took me into a local shop and bought me a tin of coloured pencils, a dozen in all. I didn’t use them for a month; I just opened the lid ten times a day and looked at them. Eventually she persuaded me to draw with them, pictures that would recall our holiday in the Lakes. On our trip to
The Amethyst
I could see those pencils lined up in perfect order, I could see the first picture I drew: mountains, a lake, trees, a few birds in the sky...

“Bill, pull over, will you?” I said.

He was more than happy to do so. We bumped up onto a verge. He even switched off the engine.

“That second circle you drew, you said it nicked the Lake District. Type into your GPS, Grimsby to Cartmel.”

“Why there?”

“It’s the only place Flaxman ever mentioned. I’d never heard of it, so I asked him where it was. The look he gave me, I thought it was reproof for cutting into a childhood memory. It was fear that I knew something he didn’t want me to.”

Grogan tapped my request into his GPS. “What’s Cartmel to the Flaxmans?”

“A family farm, belonging to Carrie’s brother. They could’ve taken it over at one point. Carrie wanted to, so did Aaron. Joe vetoed it.”

He showed me the screen, the heavy blue line of the route between Grimsby and Cartmel, a zig-zag of 185 miles. The spare seventeen, taking it to 202, could easily be accounted for with to-ing and fro-ing, Sheraton Hire to Freshney Terrace, turns off the motorway for a break, getting lost...

“This farm, you think they inherited it?”

“No idea, but take another five years off my life, I reckon we’re getting warm.” I waited. “Say something.”

He said he liked it, mainly because it wasn’t inspired ‘or any of that crap’. What I’d done was listen to Aaron, words and tone, then read between the lines. He fired the engine, made a U-turn and drove back to the hotel.

I’m sure the drive from Grimsby to Cartmel is a pleasant one, but for Grogan and me it was spoiled just before Scunthorpe when Marion Bewley phoned in a high old state of excitement.

“Guess what!” she said. “It’s over! He’s done it!”

“Who’s done what?”

“Aaron Flaxman, he’s got off!”

I’d been expecting it, of course, and from the barrage of detail she gave me I could picture what had happened. The judge had got a whiff of Garrod’s big problem, namely that he wouldn’t be able to produce his main witness, Liam Kinsella. So, in the spirit of old school friendship, judge and barrister had met over dinner the previous evening, the cat had been hauled out of the bag, and his lordship had just given his ruling. Aaron Flaxman no longer had a case to answer and was therefore a free man. He could leave the court and go about his business. I reckoned the bureaucracy of it, a bit of a celebration with his parents, would take a couple of hours maximum. Then he would drive north, to somewhere roughly 185 miles from Grimsby, where he’d slump back in that old sofa full of heroin, drink in one hand, new girlfriend in the other, and they could plan how to spend all that money.

I thanked Bewley and asked one more favour: would she get Carrie’s maiden name for me? Twenty minutes later she rang back with the surname Ellison.

We had another hundred-odd miles to go and Grogan stepped on it. Any arguments he had were with the disembodied voice of his GPS, which became chattier once we’d turned off the motorway forty miles short of our destination. I had my own grievances. I’d expected mountains to rise up before us, lakes to run beside us, rivers, bridges, forests and dry stone walls to take their places in the backdrop of my childhood recollections.

Nearer to Cartmel, I admit, the landscape began to rise and fall, but in a typically Northern way. The weather raised then dumped our spirits at will. When the sun came out from behind great continents of cloud, I was almost glad to be alive; when it disappeared behind furling rain clouds I returned to the present.

Cartmel is a beautiful village, and full of character I’m sure. Retail character. Gift shops here, delicatessens there, pubs turned into restaurants. We avoided it. Instead, without discussion, we drifted around the edge of the village and pulled up opposite a pub called
The Pig and Whistle
. It stood, boasting its Victorian origin, beside real homes, fifties council houses, laid out beside a triangular green. There was even a Spar supermarket nearby giving the place credibility.

That aside, I sometimes wonder if breweries pay old men to just sit all day at a bar to give an establishment character. The old boy we were about to meet, and whose name I didn’t bother to ask, fitted my theory perfectly. He was stocky and powerful, like a pit pony, and well into his eighties, perched on a bar stool nursing the remains of a pint and reading the local paper. He turned to look at us when we entered, made it clear that he didn’t like us or any other stranger who came through the door. Grogan nodded at him and he turned away again. He was definitely our man.

We ordered two coffees and a couple of cheese and pickle sandwiches, and as we waited for them I went over and tried to engage our new acquaintance in conversation.

“Afternoon,” I said.

He turned, nodded, and turned back to his pint and paper again.

“I wonder if you could help us?” I said.

“Might,” he replied.

Difficult to judge his accent at that point in the conversation but it turned out to be a local one, all squashed vowels and dropped consonants, several words running together to save breath.

“We’re looking for the old Ellison farm,” I said.

This was more to his liking for some reason and he turned fully towards me. He was dressed in a collarless white shirt, frayed at the edges, charcoal waistcoat, black trousers and boots. Plenty of undeserved hair, white near his scalp, yellow at the ends. “Jack Ellison? He’s dead.”

“Yes, I know...”

“What you want his farm for, then?”

I immediately turned myself into a tourist on a sentimental journey. “I used to stay there as a boy.”

He looked at me, sideways. “But you can’t remember where it is?”

“I can see it in my mind’s eye, can’t place it.”

He sniffed and washed his contempt down with the remains of his beer. I signalled the barman to pour him another.

“He were a miserable bastard, Jack Ellison. Not surprising, given his luck. Lost his entire flock to the black.”

It was obvious I didn’t know what ‘the black’ was.

“Liver disease. Runs right through ’em, quick as knife ... or did then. Broke him. Sold up. She didn’t help.”

“Who?”

“His wife. Never lifted a bloody finger. Left him for a chimney sweep.”

All I could think of to say was, “Poor man.”

The old boy got stuck into the refill I’d bought him and must’ve thought he owed me something. “Out the front door ’ere, turn right towards Howbarrow. Three mile.”

“What’s the name of the farm?”

“Can’t remember that either?”

I shook my head. “Weird, I know...”

“Stratton. Stratton Farm.”

I snapped my fingers. “Of course, Stratton! I’ve been trying to get it all day!”

“Well, now you’ve got it.”

I thanked him and he turned away for the last time, back to his paper.

I went over to a table where Grogan was making light work of the cheese and pickle doorsteps. The coffee wasn’t bad either. He flicked his eyes at the old boy and I nodded.

Stratton Farm was the picture-perfect retreat from life itself. It lay on the downward tilt of a fell, overlooking a small valley across which a flock of sheep were evenly scattered, chewing their way towards the late-autumn sun as it came and went. The farm buildings, the house itself, were all of local stone, more Lakeland here than back in Cartmel. The slates on the roofs were the size of breadboards, still gleaming from the last shower of rain. All of it was upstaged by the view which Aaron Flaxman had told me would’ve ‘made up for being skint’. He was right. Ten, twenty miles distant were the peaks of my childhood drawing, purple, grey, green, and just the tip of a lake like a shard from a broken mirror. There were even V-shaped birds in the sky.

This was no working farm, however, and it certainly wasn’t the run-down wreck Jack Ellison might’ve left behind him when he went broke. Money had been spent here and I had to keep reminding myself that the Flaxmans were wealthy people. If, as I was beginning to suspect, Aaron had bought this place recently, for his own use, for his and Sarah’s, then he’d thrown a heap of money at it, either drug money or egg money. Even the name plate on the wall at the roadside was quality, if a little garish, the words ‘Stratton Farm’ in elaborate scroll on a large piece of oak. The gravel on the winding drive down to the house was fresh and clean.

“We need to discuss this,” said Grogan. He had paused at the main gate, which stood open.

“I say we just knock on the door, take it from there. If there’s a sofa full of smack inside, the dog’ll go barmy.”

“Then what?” he asked with a smile. “Citizen’s arrest?”

I replied as I usually do when stumped for a decent answer. “Piss off.”

He stayed put, the engine still idling.

“We call Blackwell, make a deal,” I said. “Get you back on the payroll.”

He scowled. “Do we have to call him?”

“ ’Fraid so. D’you know what we’re doing, Bill?”

He guessed it was a trick question. “Yes and no.”

“We’re future tripping. Drive down to the house.”

He signalled and turned in through the gateway.

The place was deserted in the sense that no people, no dogs, no vehicles were to be seen or roused. If Sarah Trent had set up home here, as I’d so promisingly deduced, then she was out. Out shopping, out for a walk, out for tea with new neighbours? I doubted all three. But the place was definitely lived in and, it bears repeating, by someone with a bob or two to spare, obvious even from the outside. A pair of brand new garden seats, solid oak, were set on a stone slab patio to the side of the house overlooking the view. At an angle to them was an oak table. All three items had a four-figure price tag. I knew this because I’d looked into buying one of the seats myself. And passed. Half a dozen stone tubs were dotted around, not just the terracotta jobs that flake and break in the first frost, but antique, heavy-as-hell containers with elaborate carvings. Laura would have loved them, newly set out as they were with winter flowers, miniature box trees surrounded by pansies and cyclamen.

We stood like lemons in the porch at the front door and for the third, fourth time banged a cast-iron face of William Wordsworth against an elaborate striking plate. With a hint of righteous delight, I thought, Grogan pointed at Dogge, who had found a patch of sunlight and was preparing to curl up in it. “Not exactly going barmy, is she?”

“I was exaggerating. She needs to be close to the target.”

Why the hell I was defending her abilities I’ve no idea, except that part of me feared we’d come all this way just for the view.

“Get that gizmo from the car, Bill.”

I’m not sure he thought there’d be much point in breaking into the house, but he was willing to give it a go and went for the multi-tool. We walked round the house looking for vulnerable points and discovered the only viable one was a cast-iron latticed window with frosted leaded lights. I assumed that a downstairs toilet lay the other side of it.

It took Grogan a minute to identify the kind of catch holding it shut and another minute to release it with a stiletto-like arm of the all-dancing, all-singing gadget. He seemed disappointed that it hadn’t presented more of a challenge and criticised the window for being old and useless.

As the less bulky of the two of us I was the natural choice for climbing through the window, and with Grogan steering and shoving I entered, swam across the top of a cistern, down onto the lid of a toilet seat, into the room itself. My body’s bruises objected but once on my feet I went through to the hallway and unlocked the door. Grogan ducked under the lintel, Dogge followed him, and from that moment on we spoke only in the sign language of burglary.

I pointed at him, then myself, then the dog, and towards the church-like door that led through to the rest of the house.

Money. That was my immediate impression of the room we entered. Expensive carpets, antique furniture, a top-of-the-range sound system. Heavy, chunky brass at the fireplace, the latest in wood-burning stoves despite the underfloor heating ... and a sofa and two chairs, leather, pricey and almost certainly new. Dogge walked past them without batting an eyelid. I pointed at the kitchen.

On entering it I began to price it straight away, or rather the cost of it screamed out at me. A full range Aga, handmade fitted cabinets, refurbished floor tiles, an antique table almost too good to sit at. I reached £35 thousand in twenty seconds, by which time it was clear, from Dogge’s reaction onwards, that there was no heroin here.