Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (11 page)

“Freddie Trent, Vic Wesley and Aaron Flaxman.”

“You’re absolutely sure it was them?”

“Well, yes, I’ve known them long enough. Aaron head and shoulders above the other two, soppy haircut. Vic was looking pretty sprauncy, actually. Jacket, collar and tie. He’d been to lunch with his wife, I heard later...”

“And Freddie?”

“Freddie looked, well ... Freddie. Same old anorak, same old cords, hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.”

“And the three of them were heading from the farmhouse, top right of the picture, towards the farm buildings, top left.”

Kinsella nodded. “Where the chickens are. Vic on this side, Freddie the other, Aaron in the middle.”

“I want you to mark exactly where you were on your copy of the photo.”

He gestured for Bewley to hand Kinsella a marker pen and with no hesitation Kinsella put a cross about an inch from the edge of the bridleway, beneath the tree.

“And where were Wesley, Trent and Flaxman?”

Again with no second-guessing, Kinsella drew another cross about three inches from where he’d placed himself.

“That puts you roughly twenty metres away from them. Do you agree?”

Kinsella nodded.

“You have to voice your answers at all times.”

“Yes!”

“You said you could hear their voices. What exactly did you hear?”

“Well, it was only bits and pieces...”

“Tell us the bits and pieces.”

Out of coy respect for Marion Bewley, Fee and Fairchild, Kinsella whispered the expletives, twisting his lips to soften the impact. “ ‘Who gave you the fucking right?’ said Vic. Freddie kind of parroted him, as usual. ‘Yeah, who gave you...’ His voice tailed off there because Aaron came straight in. ‘You fucking dick, I’ve struck a deal already! Got us a buyer. Heritage IRA. They’ll give us 7 million!’ ‘Well, we’re not helping any IRA murderers,’ said Vic.”

Kinsella paused while he contemplated the moment which had changed his life forever. He spoke quietly and again his words were slow and deliberate, as if he’d thought about it many times and was still puzzled by it.

“Some kind of instinct must’ve taken over the moment I heard their voices. Fear, I guess, but I’ll never forget Aaron’s face, smiling, suddenly reasonable. Then he took a pistol from under his jacket, shot Vic in the head, turned to Freddie, who’d started to move away, shot him in the side. Neither of ’em saw it coming. It was all over...”

He tapped the table twice. Sillitoe gave him a moment to compose himself.

“How many shots?”

“Two, for Christ’s sake!”

“What did you do?”

Kinsella smiled, glanced at me for a kind of matey understanding. “I don’t remember doing it, but I dropped to the ground, face down in the grass. Then I started praying...”

“There was enough cover?”

“A low bough from the tree I was under, and the grass was...” He held out his hand, eighteen inches above the carpet.

Sillitoe nodded, made some notes and then suggested that we take a ten-minute break. Kinsella tried to take control again and asked if anyone wanted more coffee, whereupon Fee offered to make it.

“Before we break, did you see what Flaxman did immediately after he fired the shots?” Sillitoe asked.

“Well, I raised my head once or twice and there he was, dragging Freddie to the other side of the bridleway. That done, he shifted Vic to this side, into the grass.”

“And then what?”

Kinsella shrugged. “He walked off, back towards the farmhouse. Once he was clear I legged it to my car.”

“Why did you go into hiding after that?”

“I’d seen what Aaron was capable of. To be honest I wasn’t that keen on the heroin thing myself, or selling it to the IRA.”

“But you raised no objection?”

“It was too late. The deal had been done, this bloke had been over from Fermanagh and Aaron said he was a hard, nasty bugger. If he didn’t get what was agreed we’d all be in the shit.”

Sillitoe gestured for Kinsella to answer his next question in the affirmative. “Are you saying that you feared for your life, at the hands of both Aaron and the Heritage IRA?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Then don’t forget to say it in court when you get the chance.” He paused. “Right. We’ll take that break.”

It was quite a decent spring day for mid-August, at least warm enough for Fee to insist that we have coffee out on the lawn. It isn’t really a lawn, in spite of the gallons of reviver the bloke who does my garden has thrown at it. It’s an irregular patch of grass, green in some places, mangy in others and downright mossy throughout.

I’d taken my coffee over to a clump of hollyhocks and begun picking off dead flowers. Pottering, I suppose you’d call it. More displacement activity than gardening. The ’hocks grew as weeds in most of Winchendon, but had refused to do so in my garden, so Laura had planted some out as seedlings the previous year. She had promised they’d give a show from April to November with their trumpet flowers and powerful colours. True, by the look of it. Not that I really cared if they lived or died, and God knows why they’ve crept into my account of that day, the ten-minute break. Odd how the unlikely pairing of objects and events works, one helping to recall the other.

Sillitoe came over to me, holding his coffee mug by the rim again, slurping occasionally.

“Hollyhocks,” he said. “Magnificent, aren’t they?”

I followed his gaze across to where the others were gathered. Kinsella was entertaining the crowd and Fee and Bewley were laughing out loud at something he’d said. Fairchild wanted to laugh but held back. Grogan sat at a distance on a stone bench beside a tub of surfinias, also planted by Laura. After a moment I realised that Sillitoe wasn’t taking in the view so much as checking that the others were out of earshot.

“What do you make of it all?” he asked.

“I don’t make, I provide. Evidence. You’re the guys who make, usually a pig’s ear.”

He nodded, as if he agreed. His height and large frame suggested a fitness not often associated with lawyers. For the most part, by fifty, they’ve grown fat on the proceeds of ‘humbugging the public and pocketing the fee’. That’s the caption to an eighteenth-century cartoon about doctors but, given my relationship with Laura, I’ve applied it to lawyers. It describes them perfectly.

He stretched and gave himself another two inches, head tilting backwards, looking up at the pillowy sky. “Give me your opinion on the evidence.”

“Kinsella’s the only witness you’ve got, which means Flaxman is almost a free man.”

He began to cite the other evidence, without conviction. There was the pistol, recently fired, found at the farmhouse, Flaxman’s fingerprints over it. I shrugged.

“Where were the bodies found?” I asked.

“Vic, just off a road which skirts the Flaxman farm...”

“What does ‘just off the road’ mean?”

“In a ditch. He was discovered after that heavy rain. Two feet of water flooded the dip, somebody went to check if anything was impeding the run-off, found a corpse blocking a culvert. Freddie was in a slurry pit on a neighbour’s farm, blew up and floated to the top. Went off bang when moved.”

“How far from the shooting were they found?”

“Crow flies? Both places four, five miles from Speaker’s Wood.”

“Was there DNA, forensics, anything at the crime scene?”

“Yes, well, the crime scene wasn’t known until three months after the event. Not much left. I mean enough is enough when it comes to a prosecution, but these men had been shot at close range and made a mess of...”

“You’d have expected more.”

He nodded.

“Bullets?” I asked.

“They were recovered, yes, 9mm, and before you ask the pistol used was a Luger, found at the farm. Tempting one to say ‘bloody Germans again’.”

He scissored the air to withdraw the remark, then looked over to where Kinsella was still holding court, only now Dogge was playing the jester as he threw her an old tennis ball, she ran to retrieve it and brought it back. Nothing odd about that, except that Kinsella had taught her in ten minutes what I hadn’t been able to in five years. She was dropping the ball at his feet, stepping back to wait for the next throw.

“Look at what I’m working with,” Sillitoe went on. “An anti-social, unhygienic Neanderthal. His story may well be true, but who’s going to believe it?”

He fixed his eye on the hollyhocks for a moment.

“His derelict state aside,” he said, “something about this case bothers me.”

That made four of us. Blackwell, if Laura was right, Laura herself, me and now Sillitoe.

“What?” I asked.

“Does Kinsella’s evidence sound too prepared?”

“You were the one who asked for detail.”

“Yes, but I didn’t expect to get it. I thought I’d have to provide it!”

“Coach him after all?” I said, as smugly as I could.

He set his mug down on the wooden bench, took a business card from his top pocket and handed it to me. The name ‘Henry Sillitoe’ leaped off it in black scroll, with a bevy of phone numbers below it. “The mobile will always get me.”

“Why should I need to?”

“Would you be willing to do the Crown Prosecution Service a professional favour, Mr Hawk? Paid for at your usual rate?”

I’d envisaged him picking my brains but not putting me on the payroll. “I’m sorry?”

“Would you go to Grimsby, look over the crime scene, or what the Americans so vulgarly call ‘the kill site’, and after that ‘the dump sites’? See if anything’s been ... overlooked or wrongly used in your opinion.”

He then asked if I’d mind doing it within the next few days. I told him I’d need to check with Commander Blackwell first but if OCC gave the all-clear, I’d leave as soon as possible. I’d only one question for him. Did he know what my current rate was? He didn’t, which was a shame because I didn’t either. We left it that his boss and I would negotiate.

For the rest of the day, Sillitoe took Kinsella back and forth through his evidence, occasionally trying to trip him up on the finer details. To no avail. Kinsella was word-perfect.