Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (30 page)

Searching the rest of Stratton Farm was in marked contrast to the morning we’d spent at Flaxman’s parents’ place. There was nothing superfluous here, no junk, no chips or scratches on surfaces, indicating that the place had barely been lived in. The loft was completely empty.

We left the house exactly as we’d found it, not a footprint or paw print to say we’d ever been there. I was concerned that once outside Grogan would become sanctimonious, shrugging ‘I told you so’, but he was quite the opposite. Something of the old copper had stirred in him, brought to life perhaps by a resounding crack on his head from one of the upstairs beams, and now I could see in his eyes a trace of the illogical doubt our profession thrives on. He said the place was far, far too clean.

He walked across to the only outbuilding there was, a long low run of animal shelters now used for middle-class domestic life: a garage for two cars, a tool shed, a place for the spare freezer, which of course we looked in. It contained little besides a box of tuna steaks and some frozen veg.

Out on the front gravel again we stood, each with our thoughts, mine a slightly fraying belief that I could crack this case when others couldn’t, Grogan’s more optimistic. He left me and took a stroll round the sloping garden. I say ‘garden’ when it was a couple of acres of tufted grass between fading bracken and, at the bottom, what had once been a stone-walled sheep pen. He peered over into it, then turned and called.

“Nathan, you’d better come see.”

What he had found, though hardly a trophy to wave in Blackwell’s face, vindicated my bullish belief that I was on the right track. I’d arrived too late, maybe, but I’d been right. On one side of the sheep pen were stacked the composting remains of gardening: clippings, trimmings, leaves. There were even a few vegetable stalks and eggshells from the kitchen. But in the centre of the pen there’d been a bonfire, no longer warm, simply a pile of ash. In the white and grey remains were a hundred or more blackened brass studs, the kind used in leather upholstery. Grogan prodded the ash with a stick and flushed out a wheeled castor. The sofa, which almost certainly had once contained an overweight copper’s worth of heroin, had been burned to dust.

I walked away, back up the incline. Grogan followed. The dog kept her distance. After a moment or two, Grogan tried to give our fruitless search some dignity.

“It’s a find, guv,” he said, brightly. I looked at him. “No, really...”

“It’s a pile of ash, Bill. No wonder those bloody sheep look so happy.”

He stood back, mouth slack in disbelief. “You really think she set fire to 15 million quid’s worth?”

“Why not, if she didn’t know it was there?”

He shook his head. “He’s a lot smarter than that. And so is she, I’ll bet. Know your trouble, Nathan? You’re unwilling to think of women as evil bastards. That’s sexist. You ask your daughter...”

I told him he was half-right. I was unwilling to think of anyone, male or female, as downright evil, though God knows I’d met my fair share of villains, from petty thieves to murderers. They’d given me my suspicious nature which I constantly fought against and lost.

Grogan sniffed and said there was no need to get so bloody saintly about it, just accept the facts. Aaron had killed two blokes and got away with it; Kinsella had lied his way to immunity, buggered off with Petra Fairchild, who’d turned on her own kind, dereliction of duty. As for Sarah Trent, he reeled off a list of charges that would be thrown at her, ranging from stuff under the Drug Trafficking Act to aiding and abetting, illegal importation, conspiracy, shielding a known criminal...

The list went on but his voice had been overtaken by a distant hum that in time became the sound of an approaching vehicle. It was miles away and with no discernible breeze it was the only noise in the otherwise silent landscape. Why it should’ve put me on alert, God only knows. Grogan stopped listing charges. We glanced at each other and waited, waited some more and eventually a silver tank of a vehicle, a Volvo 4x4, turned in at the gateway. The driver stopped, got out, a woman with long blonde hair beneath a pink beret. She turned to close the gate behind her and that’s when she noticed the Fiat biscuit tin, then us.

And she made a
faux pas
. She toyed with the idea of getting back in the car and driving off again. Jaikie would’ve called it playing the end before the beginning, the mistake many an actor makes of appearing guilty before he’s even been asked a question. The rest of us call it giving the game away.

She realised the futility of trying to evade us, closed the gate and then drove down the rest of the drive. As she got out and slammed the door, the resemblance between her and her sister Emma was unmistakable, but I’d been wrong on one particular detail. Her age. She wasn’t thirty-two, thirty-three as I’d assumed that day on
The Amethyst
. She was a good ten years younger than that. A stringy girl, not so tall that she would crack her head on the beams in her new house but tall enough for my late wife to have called her a lucky bitch. She was wearing a gilet over a denim blouse, jeans and fur ankle boots: dressed for the winter to come. She leaned the top half of her body to one side as she addressed us.

“Good morning, gentlemen.”

“Sarah Trent?” I asked. “We’ve met before.”

She opened her eyes wide, almost coquettishly. “Really? I don’t remember.”

“Aaron Flaxman’s trial. Public gallery.”

She looked down at the fob in her hand and picked out a door key. “You must be mistaken.”

I assured her that I wasn’t. I would recognise her perfume anywhere. The remark spooked her a little.

“What do you want?”

“I’ll start with you and Aaron. When did you two get together...?”

I’d been distracted. Dogge had walked over to Sarah and sniffed her fur boots. She then lifted her head to get her bearings, went to the Volvo and walked round it. At the tailgate she stopped and put her front paws up on the rear bumper, sniffed again in jerky breaths. She turned to me and sat down, tail swishing across the gravel. Sarah looked at me in badly played bewilderment.

“Open the tailgate,” I said.

“I most certainly will not.”

She locked the car remotely, stepped back and took out her phone. She began to flick through her contacts. God knows who she planned on phoning, but she was thwarted by there being no signal.

“Don’t let’s piss about, Sarah. Let’s do this thing properly.”

“What do you mean? What thing?”

Grogan went over to the Volvo and peered in through the back window.

“Peat-based potting compost,” he said. “Six, seven bags of it.”

“From the garden centre in Cark,” she said, fiercely.

I glanced over at the stone tubs, recently planted out, then down at Dogge, still wagging her tail.

“Drug squad reject,” I explained. “They never gave me a list of what she could sniff out, but I’m damn sure potting compost wouldn’t have been on it. Open the car.”

She considered her options for a moment or two and realised they were limited, especially when Grogan took out his multi-tool and selected one of its more vicious-looking limbs. She pressed the fob again and he lifted the tailgate. Dogge jumped in immediately and was about to go mental over her discovery. I put the slip leash on her and pulled her back to earth.

There were in fact eight compost sacks in the back of the car, bright yellow, pictures of flourishing plants on one side, instructions on how to achieve them on the other. Each had been emptied carefully and refilled with wrapped blocks of heroin, the sacks taped up with transparent gaffer tape. She’d been driving round with 15 million quid’s worth of heroin in the back of her car. Plain sight.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Like I said, we do things properly. You invite us into the house, we try to make it as painless as possible.”

“Are you police?” she asked.

I pointed at Grogan. “He is, I used to be.”

She thought about that, then looked me straight in the eye.

“You can take one,” she said.

“I’m not a gardener.”

I couldn’t tell what was going through her mind as she walked over to the front door. She displayed no sign of panic, so I reckoned she was planning her next move. She’d tried bribing me and it hadn’t worked. Next in the long line of manoeuvres would be an assortment of explanations: elaborate, tearfully delivered and ultimately ludicrous.

“Mind your head,” she said to Grogan as he ducked under the lintel at the front door.

It was an oddly caring thing to say, from which I deduced she still hoped to get us on side. Grogan leaned forward and took the key out of the door, turned to the car and re-locked it, then pocketed the fob.

We followed her through to the kitchen, where she behaved as if we were friends who’d just popped round for tea. She filled the kettle and plugged it in, opened a biscuit tin and started on a chocolate digestive, told us to help ourselves. As she reached up to a beam for three mugs on hooks I picked up her phone and she dropped one of the mugs trying to snatch it back.

“That is outrageous!” she said, with some of the family flare showing through. “Give it back.”

“We’ll compromise,” I said. “I’ll switch it off if you tell me when Aaron’s due.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” I began to flick through her text messages and she changed her mind. “Tonight. Late.”

“How’s he getting here?”

The kettle was boiling. Grogan eased her away from it and reached for another mug.

“Tea bags?” he said.

She glanced over at a caddy on a window sill.

“I said how’s he getting here?”

She was beginning to accept her position and answered sulkily. “Driving up.”

“From Speaker’s Farm?”

She nodded. I switched off her phone and placed it high on the corbeling beside the chimney.

“We’ll wait,” I said. “But you won’t mind if we gather up all the knives, all the heavy objects, put ’em somewhere safe? Meantime, you could answer a few questions, if you felt so inclined.”

“I don’t,” she said.

I went through to the utility room to fetch an empty laundry basket and a dustpan and brush. I swept up the remains of the broken mug while Grogan collected potential weapons that Sarah might have used against us. She twitched from one to the other of us with a mixed bag of facial expressions, still wondering if she could retrieve her lost cause.

At one point Grogan went out to the Volvo, moved it into the carport and then hid the Fiat behind the buildings. He returned with three tuna steaks, but while he was away Sarah tried, albeit half-heartedly, to bribe me again.

“I don’t know what 15 million divided by eight is, but the offer still stands.”

“Nearly 2 million,” I said.

“Change your life forever.”

“I like it the way it is.”

She flicked a strand of hair back over her shoulder and smiled. “Are you married? Do you have children?”

I smiled back. “Sarah, I used to interrogate people for a living. You’ve only seen it on telly. Asking nice questions isn’t the way to win them over.” I walked over to her and she went rigid. I leaned forward and nodded. “Versace.”

Without Mrs Beeton to interfere in the proceedings, Grogan knocked up a pretty decent meal. He pepped up a weary-looking cauliflower, whipped up a cheese sauce and, as he placed it on the top shelf of the Aga, he gave us the French name for it. Cauliflower cheese, I called it. With tuna. We finished eating at three thirty, so it could still be called lunch, but it meant we had six hours to kill before Aaron arrived. It’s a long time and Sarah did the expected squealing when it came to toilet breaks and the like. She got over it. She didn’t have much option.