Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (3 page)

“Connor and Jaikie well?” he asked.

He spoke as if he knew them. He’d certainly met them when they were in their teens and I shouldn’t have been surprised that he remembered their names. I remembered his two. Georgina and Graham. Their mother brought them to the office one day and they made absolutely no impression whatsoever.

“Jaikie seems to live a charmed life...” I began.

He pointed, to interrupt me. “We saw that film,
All Good Men and True
. Christ, he was good in that!”

“So people keep telling me.”

He frowned. “You didn’t think so?”

“I thought he was bloody marvellous. It’s just that to me he’s still Jaikie, the kid who’s always late for school.”

He pretended that he knew what I meant, even though I wasn’t entirely sure myself.

“Can’t be all roses, though,” he said. “I mean America’s no place to live.”

“He would disagree. Besides, he’s also got a flat in Chiswick, the Beverly Hills of Britain. Shares it with an old schoolfriend. Female.”

“Ah, well, at least you see him...?”

“Occasionally.”

The conversation was beginning to rile me. There’d been too many questions, him to me, which I’d tried passing off as me being interesting, him being boring, wanting to hear all about my vibrant family.

He smiled. “Does Connor still have you spitting feathers?”

Con didn’t so much hack me off these days as worry me, serious middle-of-the-night stuff, bolt upright in bed, full sweat. Blackwell nodded as if, again, he knew what I meant, but I reckoned his kids were as prim and proper as their mother.

“Connor’s his own man,” I said, struggling to say it with pride. “Christmas, for example. The rest of us were here, no one had heard a word for over a month and, just as I started to worry, the bugger walked in Christmas Eve, asked if we were all going up to the carol service.”

“Where’d he been?”

“Haiti.”

“He works there?”

I laughed. “Generous of you to assume that he works, but Con has turned the gap year into a gap decade. God knows what he does for money. I’ve stopped giving it, he’s stopped asking for it.”

He sighed as if, on my behalf, he was juggling the pros and cons of having such interesting children. He nodded back at the dresser. “And the girls have both gone, by the sound of it?”

“Fee works in Tokyo, Ellie works in Nepal. You don’t get more gone than that.”

I thought it was high time I asked about his two.

“Georgina married three years ago.” He shook his head. “Nice enough lad, got his own business, something to do with pest control. At least he isn’t a copper.”

“Similar line of work, I suppose. More sociable hours.”

He lowered his voice as if to confide a shameful secret. “The police service you and I grew up with is dead and gone. It’s now the National Crime Authority, as I’m sure you know. In the reorganisation I found myself washed up in the OCC.”

There’s a whole list of character traits I can’t stand, but phoney self-effacement is right at the top. It’s as bad as full-blown self-importance. People didn’t find themselves ‘washed up’ in the Organised Crime Command. They were a chosen few, picked for their skill, knowledge and effectiveness. Tom Blackwell had all three attributes in spades and was exercising them right now on me.

“Trouble is I’ve come in halfway through this particular caper ... near the end, really. My predecessor keeled over, couple of months ago. I’m the new boy.” He jumped sideways, an old-fashioned device for securing the listener’s attention. “Your office was always a jungle, Nathan. Who keeps this place so spick and span?”

I told him that a lady in the village came once a week to do stuff around the house.

“A cleaner, you mean?”

“My father’s ghost won’t allow me to call her that. What caper?”

He sat down at the end of the table again and nursed his drink. After a moment or two’s heavy thought, as if wondering whether to proceed or call the whole thing off, he asked me to picture the fishing port of Grimsby, in particular two trawlermen who had battled the North Sea, the cod wars, falling prices, quotas, Greenpeace forever on their backs. They were running out of money. They were married to a couple of sisters who wanted families but were forced back to work, one of them as a nursery nurse, the other as a barmaid.

Two years ago, a local man walked into the pub, sat at the bar and struck up a conversation with the wife serving him. His name was Aaron Flaxman and he told her he was looking for a boat to import ‘an assortment of stuff, mainly from Europe and North Africa’. Verbatim. The wife put the idea to her sister and within a month they and their husbands were smuggling cigarettes, booze, perfume, designer clothes, car parts – you name it, they carried it, all under cover of the family business, all on a small scale, while they learned the trade. Then one of them got greedy.

“One of the men, we think. The women would’ve kept it as a perfect business partnership, everyone with a theoretical say...”

“Like John Lewis, you mean?”

He gave that a moment before nodding. “Anyway, into the partnership hustles a man, late twenties, Liam Kinsella. The kind of man other men don’t want hanging round their wives, especially if they work away from home. Handsome, polite but not quite sure of himself, according to the wives. Looking for excitement. And he’d just inherited a pot of money which he couldn’t wait to invest. So, cut a long story short, three months later an OCC crime analyst reported that an English firm had blipped onto her screen and was due to bring in a job lot of heroin from Liepaja, a town on the coast of Latvia.”

I shrugged my ignorance of both town and country.

“Baltic Sea, once a fishing port, now a mixture of everything. Very Russian, very windy, very dirty. The heroin was worth 15 million quid on the street and weighed in at 220 pounds. That’s the size of an unfit copper.”

There was a pause as we both thought back to colleagues of that size we’d have cheerfully seen ground into powder and sold for profit.

Blackwell picked up his thread. If an English team was handling this haul, the analyst wondered, how would they get it back to Blighty? Charter or cargo flight, heavy goods vehicles, container ship, overland by horse and cart?

“You smile, but it’s been done,” he said. “This stuff hailed from Afghanistan, came up through Russia wrapped in a consignment of handwoven rugs supposedly bound for some poncy furniture store in Oslo. And, as the rugs arrived in Liepaja, so did our Grimsby trawler, ostensibly to refuel before heading home. Question then for OCC was how to elbow aside the Humberside Crime Squad, and when and how to intercept the target.”

I couldn’t let ‘intercept’ go unchallenged. It was another of those handy euphemisms, a word with a fatter meaning now than it had twenty-five years ago. Back then, ‘to intercept’ meant to nick a letter or get the ball off an opposing player; now it meant to shoot down enemy aircraft or catch a serial killer.

Blackwell smiled and gestured for me to say it my way.

“When to jump in and nail the bastards.”

He nodded. “And OCC spent far too long faffing around, afraid of offending colleagues in Humberside, which meant the trawlermen sailed into Grimsby mid-November, unloaded a meagre catch and feigned disappointment. Later the same night somebody went back to the boat for the heroin, took it to Aaron Flaxman’s father’s farm.”

“Two hundred and twenty pounds of heroin’s a lot to sell,” I said. “How did they plan to get rid of it?”

“In one fell swoop and for half its value, to the Heritage IRA.” He smiled. “When those three letters enter a conversation the temperature usually rises, and this case was no exception. Understandably, the IRA quickly became favourites for the murders...”

“Hang on a tick,” I intercepted. “Have I missed something? What murders?”

“Sorry, sorry. The two trawlermen, up near the family farm. Couple of bullets, very amateurish, very messy, but still rendering the victims very dead.”

He’d hooked me in classic style by holding back a crucial piece of information, the two killings, then dropping it into a lull. In the space of twenty words he’d shifted the emphasis of his story: a family smuggling business had evolved into a major drugs trafficker with links to the Heritage IRA who in turn murdered anyone who got in their way. He reached out for his glass and knocked back what was left in a single gulp. I must have looked surprised and offered him another, but he declined. So did I when I offered myself a top-up.

“The wives had reported their husbands and Kinsella missing, but since they weren’t twelve-year-old kids, a file was opened and left dangling. Until the body of one of the trawlermen was found a couple of weeks later in a ditch. Ten days after that his brother-in-law rose to the surface of a slurry pit. Kinsella’s body still to be found. When questioned the wives didn’t know a thing about heroin, Latvia or the Heritage IRA. They gave up the name Aaron Flaxman willingly, saying he was a top dog sort of bloke, alpha male, gave the orders and woe betide anyone who didn’t follow them. But as for him being a murderer, well...” He smiled. “You know how the rest of it goes: unthinkable, can’t believe he would do that, he’s just an ordinary bloke. Be that as it may, the trawlermen’s blood and brain matter were found in the back of a pickup belonging to Flaxman and he was charged with their murders. He’s on remand in Stamford.

“Then one night, middle of April, the local police got a call to Speaker’s Farm. Aaron Flaxman’s father had shot an intruder, winged him. The intruder turned out to be Liam Kinsella and this was the fourth time the old man had caught him poking around the farm.”

“Looking for the overweight copper?” I asked.

Blackwell nodded. Kinsella had maintained he was just hiding out, had been for weeks, and when asked about the heroin he was deeply offended. He hadn’t signed up to bring in stuff like that, nor had the dead trawlermen. When they’d objected Aaron Flaxman had shot them. How did Kinsella know this? He’d seen him do it!

Blackwell thought he’d better boil all that down so that I could digest it more easily. “In other words, this scruff-bag Kinsella was manna from heaven, the best break the local crime squad had had. He’d been standing thirty feet away when Flaxman pulled the trigger. And for a case that didn’t have much going for it, bar some blood and brains in a Chevy pickup, Kinsella’s willingness to talk was a godsend.”

I’d retained most of what he’d said, aware that none of it was as important as the detail he’d left out. I stood up and went over to the sink, filled a jug and poured water into the coffee maker.

“So where do I fit in?” I asked.

He looked at me, scrunched up eyebrows. “Who said you did?”

“You mean you’ve come all the way from ... where is it you live?”

“Guildford, Guildford.”

“You’ve come all the way from Guildford-Guildford to tell me about two trawlermen who’ve been shot dead? You’ve taken me all round the bloody houses to find out if I’m living here alone and, if so, who visits.” He looked away, and I shifted to get back in his eyeline. “The first thing you mentioned at the gate was through traffic. You went on to Laura, the kids, my lady who does! Why?”

The only thing either of us could hear, once I’d stopped making the point, was the water pumping through the coffee maker, slowly, arthritically. I’d been meaning to descale the thing for weeks, never got round to it. Blackwell was chewing his bottom lip, wondering how to deal with the fact that I’d rumbled his technique if not his purpose.

Eventually he said, “Pupil goes back to teacher. I guess I came for advice.”

“Advice, my fanny!”

For a moment the man behind the long, drawn-out crawl towards me reared up on his hind legs. “For Christ’s sake, Nathan, you never could take anything at face value, never mind a compliment! Why else would I be here? The pleasure of your company?”