Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (32 page)

Next morning, Grogan was already in the breakfast room by the time Dogge and I had struggled downstairs. He’d ordered kippers, saying that he never had them at home because they stank the place out. And most hotels you went to served up those prissy little fillets, not the real McCoy. He hadn’t had a decent pair of kippers for...

He broke off, apologising for the lapse into a private obsession. I went for the scrambled eggs on toast, more as an analogy for what we’d done to Aaron yesterday than because I wanted them.

We drove down to the Fish Dock and parked. There was a fair old breeze coming off the North Sea, clouds scurrying inland pursued by weather from Siberia, Grogan claimed. Snow soon. Whether his weather forecast made sense, I’ve no idea. He stood by the car, as if it were his only link back to reality, and gazed around at the sheer abandonment of the place. He had a comment, naturally.

“Fucking government. Before we go in...”

He wanted to ask questions about
The Amethyst
,
presumably, but I set off towards the gangplank. He called after me.

“Nathan, this Mandela rugby club...”

“Football.”

“...will I need anything?”

I walked back to him, thinking it was probably best that he knew what we were up against. The owner was Norwegian, built like a balloon but quiet, formal, polite. The barman was an aggressive little sod with a knack for vaulting over the counter, the chef was dangerous and the customers loyal, didn’t like strangers.

He went to the back of the biscuit tin and took out his rounders bat. He turned away from me and slipped it down the inside of his trousers, left thigh.

“Just in case,” he said.

“Bill, a favour. Let me do the talking.”

He looked at me and smiled. “What makes you think I’ll suddenly burst into conversation?”

The Amethyst
was being laid out for lunch and as we reached the bottom step the ever-expanding Kristian came over to us, all smiles until he recognised me.

“Good morning, Mr Hawk. No offence, but I would rather you did not...”

He let the rest of the sentence articulate itself.

“And I would rather I did,” I replied.

I raised a hand at the Vaulting Barman, who had stopped setting out bottles for the boozers’ noon rush.

“Sorry,” I said to Kristian. “That was a bad start. Combative. I’d like a word with Emma, if you’d be so kind as to inform her that I’m here.”

“She is mustering the waiters. We have a new girl.” Since I didn’t respond, or budge, he eventually went on, “I will ask her. Who is your companion?”

“This is Sergeant Bill Grogan.”

Grogan nodded and Kristian rolled across to a door beside the kitchen. The embroidered words on the back of his shirt read, ‘The one way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Oscar Wilde.’ Where food was concerned, Kristian had yielded to the point of defeat.

A minute later, Emma appeared and strode over to us, arms swinging with purpose. She stopped and looked at me. “Yes?”

“Is there somewhere we can talk?”

She wasn’t keen on the idea but was curious to know what had brought me there. She asked Kristian if we could take a corner table for five minutes. I corrected her. It would be fifteen. He gestured to a faraway table and she led the way to it. ‘Oh, what fresh hell is this? Shakespeare.
Hamlet
,’ said the back of her blouse, prophetically, but of equal interest to me was Grogan’s slow descent into one of the chairs, given what he had down his trousers. He managed it and leaned back, away from the conversation Emma and I were about to have.

“You know Aaron got off?” I said.

She pursed her lips, deliberately, not naturally. “I also heard it was your fault.”

“No. It’s because he didn’t murder your husband or your brother-in-law.”

“Who did, then? The Man in the Moon?”

I said her question was partly the reason for my visit here today. I’d like us to talk things over. How was she, by the way...? I must’ve sounded like a doctor, oozing sweet reason before I told a patient they had some life-threatening illness which only I could cure. I cut to the chase.

“You know Aaron and Sarah are an item?”

The lips went back to their normal position on her face as she leaned forward, both elbows on the table. Whatever she was about to say, I got in first and told her they’d both been arrested.

She closed her eyes. “What for?”

“The heroin.”

I fancied I could see her mind clattering away behind the eyes, wondering how best to protect her younger sister while wishing she’d never been born.

“They’ve kept it at a farmhouse in Cartmel which Aaron bought,” I went on. “She will be prosecuted for her part in it.”

“If there’s evidence...”

“There’s plenty. Including us finding it.”

She stood up suddenly, gripping the edge of the table to maintain her balance. “I didn’t like you the first time we met! Now, even less!”

The Vaulting Barman had heard her temper surge and stopped work again. No doubt he had some sort of weapon under the counter – barmen usually do – but whether it would match up to a rounders bat was a lab test I didn’t want performed just then.

“I say you should hear me out, Emma,” I said. “Aaron will do time as well, though not as much as you’d like. Importing the dope wasn’t his idea.” I turned to Grogan. “How long do you reckon?”

True to my request that he let me do the talking, he raised four fingers.

“I agree. Four years, he’ll be out in two. So you might as well draw your horns in, welcome him into the family.”

She went into some kind of deep breathing routine to absorb that. When she’d finished, she re-took her seat at the table and over at the bar the bottles started rattling again.

“Did you love your husband?”

“What sort of question is that?” she asked, quietly.

“Would you like to catch the man who killed him?”

“I dream about it. Whoever he is, I’d like to ... like to...”

She grabbed at the air in front of her and twisted it, struggling to think of the worst thing she could possibly do.

“With Aaron you hoped they’d hack off his balls and lock him up forever.”

“Way too good.”

“So the answer’s yes, you’d like him caught.”

She was back fighting again. “And you, Mr Clever Bugger, you know who it is?”

“So do you. Liam Kinsella.”

Her reaction was a slow build to slamming a clenched fist down on the table, turning the heads of early customers, halting the work behind the bar, bringing Kristian into view.

“I knew it!” she hissed. “All that consideration, all that niceness. I bloody knew it!”

“No, you didn’t,” I suggested. “But like me, when the penny dropped, all the other coins came hurtling down the chute and added up to more than you thought. Kinsella brought the heroin in, killed Vic and Freddie and tried to have it pinned on Aaron.”

Emma sat back, nursing the side of her hand as the blood returned to it. She was still angry, but in a minute or two that would change to feeling stupid for having been taken in.

Grogan reached out to the table beside him, passed Emma a napkin. She dabbed her eyes, careful not to smudge the makeup.

“I’ll get some drinks,” he said. “We have coffee. What do you want, Emma?”

“VAT.” She nodded at the Vaulting Barman. “Tell him an Emma special.”

Grogan rose and went over to the bar.

“This is the difficult bit,” I said. “Well, easy, really, but difficult too, if you know what I mean.”

“Of course I don’t. Nobody would.”

“How well do you know Angelica Carter?”

She didn’t know Angie well, she told me, but in the end she was the only reporter she would speak to about the murders. Emma knew that empathy might just have been her journalistic front, but somehow it never felt phoney or intrusive and they’d remained in contact ever since.

Carter hated the way the police had treated Emma and her sister. Because they’d been involved in the smuggling, the police had left them to the mercy of a baying press who’d become creative with the facts and careless with verification. Carter had written a piece about that as well, slagging off the boys in blue. I liked the sound of her.

Grogan returned, carrying a tray, two coffees and a tall glass with vodka, something fizzy and a chunk of orange clinging to the rim. He set them down in front of us. Emma took a grown-up swig, making me wish I’d asked for whisky, ice all the way...

“What’s Angie Carter got to do with all this?” she asked.

“I’d like to meet her.”

“Phone her up.”

“No, I want the four of us together. First I want you to think hard about what I plan to do...”

“Which is?”

I held up a hand to fend off questions. “If it works, you and your sister could walk away from all this, you from the smuggling charges, her with almost nothing for the heroin. You agree, Bill?”

He nodded, even though he’d no more idea what my plans were than Emma had.

“If it fails?” she said.

“No harm done. Only to your reputation.”

I’d expected, maybe even hoped, that Emma would live in a terraced house close to the docks with all the romance of a once-flourishing industry around her. The noise, the bustle, the smell, the oversized characters, but it wasn’t to be. Not only had my imagined setting ceased to exist, but once the smuggling business had taken off Vic had bought a bungalow to the west of town, in a cul-de-sac called Montgomery Drive. It had been a birthday surprise for Emma and she’d played the game of being delighted with it. Secretly, she’d preferred their old terraced house in Nelson Street, she told me, and was pretty sure Vic did too.

Inside, the bungalow was efficient rather than homely, modernised to the point of sterility, but I was glad to see that it had two bedrooms and a substantial garden. Easy access from all sides...

Emma had taken some persuading to go along with my plans and, in fairness to myself, I hadn’t put undue pressure on her, merely mentioned that I intended to catch her husband’s murderer and only had a month to work with so I’d be grateful for an early decision, yes or no. She’d got back to me with a yes, twenty-four hours after our visit to
The Amethyst
,
and the day after that Angelica Carter arrived at Montgomery Drive nine o’clock sharp.

She was a well-preserved tall woman, probably older than she looked, but I put her at fifty. The photo she used at the top of her weekly column in
The Grimsby Echo
needed updating but by and large it was faithful. Blonde hair, tight to her head, and a face with few expressions other than indignation. Thin lips, I noted, and the twitchiness of someone who had recently stopped smoking and turned to the dreaded e-cigarette. She asked Emma if she minded her using it and produced from her bag a penny whistle of a thing whose role in life was to load her up with nicotine.

She and Emma talked quietly together in the kitchen for a few minutes, as if Grogan and I didn’t exist, and then Carter walked through to the lounge and introduced herself. She couldn’t quite abandon the journalist’s way of doing things and was full of questions for the first ten minutes. Gradually she showed signs of falling in with my plans and at the tipping point I reminded her there would be a cracking story at the end of it, an exclusive if ever there was one.

“If it succeeds,” she said. “What if it doesn’t?”

“No harm done, surely,” I said.

Emma looked at me. “Only to my reputation, you said.”

“And mine,” said Carter. “People don’t trust journalists at the best of times...”

Grogan, so far my considerate stone in the corner, thought it was time he spoke. “What makes you think it won’t succeed?”

She laughed. “What makes you think it
will
?”

“Because all Liam Kinsella ever wanted was the heroin. Fifteen million quid. He’s gone a hell of a long way to get his hands on it, committed two murders ... possibly a third, a colleague of mine I should’ve taken better care of. Why would he stop now?”

She turned fully towards him. “This colleague of yours...?”

He smiled and gently cut the air with one hand. “Later, maybe. If and when.”

She turned up her nose and went over to the mantel above the mock fireplace. There were several photos in wooden frames standing on it and Carter looked down at one. She’d seen it before, I imagine. It was of both sisters at a party with respective husbands. Vic was the larger of the two men, powerful and pissed, with his wife twisted into him away from the camera, held by his one-arm embrace. He had a glass in his free hand and was saying something to the photographer. Emma was laughing and so was Sarah, barely out of her teens, but Freddie on the other end of the line-up was there under sufferance, loathing the party itself, or having his photo taken, maybe both. He was tall and wiry with one of those unmemorable, mask-like faces. Like Vic he was dressed in a suit, Sarah beside him was wearing a skimpy hat, so it might have been a wedding, and it’s my imagination, of course, but I felt I could sense the strain between him and his young wife.

Carter wasn’t looking for inspiration in the photo; she had simply removed herself slightly in order to weigh up her options. She turned back to us.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m game.”

“Couple of questions?” I said. She nodded. “Will the editor be a problem?”

“Sometimes I wish he would be. I love a good fight. The CEO of the group’s no trouble either.” She smiled. “I know more about his private life than I really want to, but it comes in handy sometimes.”

So, how would she pitch it? Slightly offended, she told me she’d been a journo for thirty years, in which time she’d become pretty good at it. Was there anything else I wanted to know?

Actually, there was. Did she have the contacts, the influence, the power to reach that I needed? I didn’t ask.