Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (7 page)

“And if you’d allow me, Mr Kinsella, I’d like a quick look at those lesions around your mouth.”

Grogan moved away to give her access.

“Now would you turn your head and part the hair at the back of your neck for me?”

He did so. The hands were filthy, the nails black and broken. The neck was ground-in grey. We’d missed it at bath time. As for the sores on it, some were scabby and peeling, others were fiery red and suppurating.

“How long have I got, Doc?” he asked.

“The two often go together, though it’s some time since I’ve seen it in an adult. It’s a result of scratching, which itself is a result of the lice. Impetigo.”

“You filthy bastard,” Grogan muttered.

“Not at all, Sergeant. The cleanest of people can...”

Realising that any defence of Kinsella along those lines was futile, she broke off.

“Treatment?” said Fairchild, plaintively.

“Yes, I’ll deal with it this evening. Porridge, everyone?”

She and Kinsella were the only ones who ate the porridge with any indifference to the creatures roaming his head, the eggs they had laid and the weeping sores on his face and neck. I looked across at the radiator where he sat, hunched up and spooning from the bowl on his lap. His left hand was still clipped to the down pipe. The punches he’d taken from Grogan were swelling up. The whole effect was positively Dickensian, made all the more so by the yellow smile he gave me.

And then the front doorbell rang. It was seven fifteen, so God alone knew who it was.

“I’ll see to it,” said Grogan.

He felt for his Glock. It wasn’t there. He’d left it upstairs in the rush to get dressed. Fairchild rose. She wasn’t wearing hers either, not under the pink dressing gown. Again they exchanged a glance.

“Bodes well for when the Heritage IRA get here,” I said, then called out, “Who is it?”

“Dad, it’s me,” came the reply.

“Come round the back, love.”

It was my oldest daughter Fiona, or Fee as she’s more affectionately known. I’m usually so pleased to see any one of my kids. Usually. She entered, closed the door behind her and, never one to admit she didn’t know what to make of a situation, she smiled round, hoping it would become clear without her needing to ask.

“Fee, you’re just in time for breakfast,” said Laura, brightly. “There’s plenty left.”

“Thanks, yes. Where’s Dogge, Dad?”

“Jean Langan’s.”

I didn’t get time alone with Fee until ten o’clock, by which time everyone in the house was fully dressed and Laura had gone off to Oxford with Sheila Bright. Grogan and Fairchild hadn’t the nerve to question Fee’s presence here, or ask how long she intended to stay. Shame, really, because I wouldn’t have minded knowing myself.

We’d gone to sit on the bench under the big beech tree and for some peculiar reason, certainly to do with my house guests, we spoke in a whisper. She said I was wrong to think she’d been worried about me, based on the ‘new dog’ ruse. She’d been in touch with Laura immediately afterwards and discovered I was as fit as a flea. A favourite description of her mother’s, she reminded me, applied to just about anyone who wasn’t dying.

So why had she come home? She was taking stock of her life, she said, and the terrifying fact that she hadn’t done much with it. She intended to give herself time to rethink, to reappraise, to reinvent...

“In other words you’ve dumped him,” I said. “Why, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Is it mean to say that he’s too short?”

I turned to her and smiled. “Well, he is Japanese.”

As a girl she’d had masses of dark brown hair which she had cut short at sixteen, and there it had stayed. People could see her face better that way, she maintained. She was enviably tall, though never as tall in the flesh as she was in her e-mails. Whenever she wrote to me she projected the height that goes with a terse verbal style, the extrovert efficiency that marks out a violet who never shrinks.

“His height can’t be the only reason,” I suggested.

She said there were cultural differences which hadn’t been apparent when they’d first met in Tokyo’s Electric City, just after the earthquakes, when Yukito was trying to establish his electronic gadgets business. She’d set up the marketing side of the company, selling stuff to Australia, New Zealand, America, Britain. However, she’d come to believe that flogging torches which shone brighter or duller at the verbal request of the person holding them wasn’t really her life’s ambition.

“I mean how many murderers had you caught by the time you were my age, Dad?”

“Four, though I’d had help. Correction, at your age I
was
the help.”

She smiled and looked over at the house. “Now you’re the fount of all wisdom, the one they come to when they’ve got a problem?”

“Who told you that?”

“Laura. Anyway, isn’t it what you do these days? Sort people out? Even unwashed cavemen?”

“Apparently.”

“Don’t go all coy, Dad. Doesn’t suit.”

Rather than defend myself against the coyness charge I explained that I’d had the situation dropped on me by an old acquaintance, Tom Blackwell.

“I remember him,” she said, and she proceeded to give me a younger, over-flattering description of the man.

I told her about the pending murder trial and how Kinsella was the star witness who had turned against his associates.

“Why was he chained to a radiator?”

“He tried to make a run for it this morning.”

She wanted chapter and verse on that as well and wouldn’t rest until I’d given it, then stood up and went close to the spot where I’d brought Kinsella down. She stooped and examined it, like a girl guide.

“Here’s where you caught up with him?”

I nodded and she looked over at the house again, specifically at the extension roof.

“Where were you when he jumped?”

“By then I was out of the door, hot pursuit...”

I thought she was going to ask how a man more than twenty years my junior hadn’t managed to outrun me. She must have read my mind.

“That makes sense. You’re a fit guy; why wouldn’t you catch him? And he is out of condition.”

“Faint praise,” I muttered.

She cautioned me to be serious.

“Where was he going, Dad? To a rendezvous, a car, a push-bike? What were his plans?”

I stared at her for a moment, then turned and hurried back to the house.

All three of my unwanted guests were in the kitchen and something about my demeanour when I entered must’ve put them
en garde
. Kinsella was handcuffed into Maggie’s dad’s rocker, reading a magazine. The greasy hair didn’t move as he looked up at me; only the beard parted as he smiled at Fee. The teeth still hadn’t been cleaned. Fairchild was seated at the table, working on her laptop. She closed it. Grogan was descaling the coffee maker. It felt like a fair exchange, given that I was taking over his job. I stood in front of Kinsella at a reasonable distance from the smell.

“Uncuff him,” I said to Grogan.

“Hang on a second...”

“Do it!”

He went over to the rocker and unlocked the handcuffs.

“Empty your pockets,” I said to Kinsella. “Whatever’s in them, place on the table.”

Kinsella smiled again. “You mean loose change, hanky, the good luck charm...”

“I mean the keys to their car.”

He stopped trying to be smart, smiled at Fairchild and then reached into his back pocket for the keys to the Ford Focus. He tossed them onto the table and raised his arms in a bang-to-rights gesture. I glanced at Grogan. His eyes were roaming the room, trying not to settle on anything he might grab and break, but eventually he gave way to anger and swooped on Kinsella, who backed away. I stepped between the two of them and pointed at Grogan, who all but took his clenched fist in his free hand and moved it to a place of safety. I turned back to Kinsella.

“Take your shoes off.”

He gave me the smile. “Denying me footwear? That’s surely a human rights issue...”

“Take them off,” said Fairchild.

Delighted to be the centre of attention, he pulled off the tattered trainers and handed them to Fairchild, who held them at a distance.

“Bin ’em,” I said.

Fee toed the pedal bin, the lid yawned open and Fairchild dropped them in.

“Socks?” Kinsella asked.

“I’ll ram them down your fucking throat...” Grogan began.

“Shut up, the pair of you! Kinsella, you were described to me as a ‘terrified down-and-out who’d had a crisis of conscience’. Maybe that’s the game you play on Saturdays. Sunday you’re a pushy little piss-taker. Monday? Tuesday? What are you then?”

I asked Grogan if he’d be informing his boss of Kinsella’s bid for freedom. He didn’t see any need to bother Blackwell, since the matter was being dealt with. He hoped I agreed.

I said to Kinsella, “So you’re their star witness?”

He smiled, gelatinous teeth. “Well, I...”

“Only, if you’re having second thoughts, there’s a way out. I’ll suggest to Commander Blackwell that he cuts you loose, then tells Flaxman all about it. Without your testimony he’ll get off and you’ll be the first person he goes looking for. The man murdered two trawlermen, cold blood. Police reckon he was after you too. You’ll be dead by Christmas.”

About an hour later Fee knocked on my cabin door and entered. She gazed round, her eyes coming to rest on the four clocks.

“Tokyo, seven in the evening. He’ll be going off to Elio’s. Italian restaurant. You’d love it.” She took a deep breath and changed the subject. “So ... this is your hidey-hole. I don’t think I’ve ever been in it.”

“It was here when I bought the place.”

She smiled. “You don’t have to apologise for having it, Dad.”

She went over to a photo on the wall, all six of us a century ago, and straightened it. It hadn’t needed it; she’d just wanted to put her hands on it.

“What’s going on in the house?” I asked.

“Breast beating. Grogan accusing Fairchild, Fairchild just about holding her own...”

“Accusing her of what?”

“The car keys. Her responsibility, he says.”

“He’s the one at fault!” I said, too loudly. “Senior officer.”

“Kinsella’s loving it.”

She came to the desk and started to tidy it, straightening the piles of bills in their clips. It’s genetic: her mother used to fiddle with paperwork, unfold it, straighten it, put it in a different order to mine.

“Loving it how, why?” I asked.

She shrugged. “They disagree, he plays on it, they argue even more. You know what their trouble is?”

“Cabin fever.”

She shook her head. “Future tripping. Know what that is?”

I answered as best I could. “A journey one will take sometime in the, well ... future?”

“It’s the habit of trying to deal with a problem long before it happens. You do quite a bit of it.”

“I call it forward planning,” I argued.

“That’s different. Forward planning’s a straight line to an objective. With future tripping you come at something from all angles and never reach a conclusion. Fairchild’s an expert at it.”

Fairchild’s latest future trip, Fee told me, involved the visit by the Crown Prosecution’s legal team, due sometime next week to interview Kinsella. Did he understand what was being asked of him? Would he keep his word and give evidence at the trial? Should she and Grogan be present for the questioning?

“What does Grogan say?”

She smiled. “Basically, fuck everyone.”

There aren’t many things which bring all human beings down to the same level, unless you count war, plague or famine, but being treated for head lice is one of them. I won’t dwell on it, but Laura lined us up just before lights out and made us douse our heads with an oil that boasted a double-barrelled name. We had to wear it all night. By morning the lice would be dead. Then, she said, we would need to shampoo our hair, even those of us who didn’t have much, and wet comb each other like gorillas to remove any remaining nits, the eggs which had the power to cling to their hosts no matter what. She’d bought a selection of nit combs for us to choose from and tried to make the process sound like fun. And I said a moment ago that I wouldn’t dwell on it...