Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (4 page)

After some deep breaths he returned to his main purpose. Aaron Flaxman, he said, was coming up for trial. It had been fast-tracked and was due to begin end of September.

“Trial where?”

“The Bailey. That aside, with Kinsella’s evidence it’s gone from being a possibility that he goes down to an almost dead cert.”

Was I familiar with the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act? I wasn’t and had no intention of becoming so. It was an overloaded ark of bureaucratic fence-sitting and back-watching, Blackwell said. It was designed by twelve-year-old lawyers to make the job of catching scumbags like Flaxman harder than necessary, but in so far as it applied to this case everything had been done; the evidence had been properly assessed and an Immunity from Prosecution agreement for Kinsella was in the pipe-line. Right now he was safely tucked away waiting for the trial to start. As for Aaron Flaxman, he was on remand in Stamford, an old prison near Grimsby.

Blackwell looked at me as if I knew what was coming next. I hadn’t the faintest.

“My advice?” I prompted.

He fumbled for words as I took down two mugs from the dresser, both of us aware of the irony that, having insulted him, I was now going to serve him coffee. I went to the fridge for the milk and once my back was turned to him, he blurted it out.

“I’d like to use this place as a safe house for the main witness, Liam Kinsella.”

I turned back to him, milk bottle in hand, and he waited, some time I imagine, for my mouth to close.

“You’d be paid, of course. Believe it or not, there’s a contingency fund...”

“You want me to put up a murder witness in my house?”

He said yes, that was the gist of it, but like all bare facts it could gave the wrong impression and the truth in this matter was only half the story. I suggested that was a contradiction in terms and asked for the other half. He searched for words that wouldn’t upset me, couldn’t find any.

“We think there a chance someone’ll come after Kinsella before he can testify.”

“Fantastic! When the Heritage IRA turn up, we’ll break open a few cans of Guinness, have a ceili. Who the hell are they, anyway?”

He explained that after the Good Friday agreement in Ireland, when everybody was meant to love each other, it didn’t quite work out that way and split the IRA into factions: Continuity, Real and Heritage. Flaxman’s family had tenuous connections to Heritage. He could see, from the look on my face, that none of that had put me in a better frame of mind. He held up both hands to fend off the immediate future.

“Nathan, if you don’t want it to happen, that’s an end...”

“Why weren’t you straight with me, right from the start?!”

He had an answer for that as well but I didn’t like it. There was a chance the current list of safe houses had been compromised. The situation here in Winchendon, quiet village, no through road, few callers, was perfect, but if at any point I’d said one of the kids was living here, or I was in a permanent relationship, he’d have called it off and I’d have been none the wiser. I translated that for him. He hadn’t wanted me to know that he was reeling me in.

I screwed the top back on the whisky, took the glasses to the drainer, then moved the odd item of furniture out of harm’s way. He must have recognised the signs from the old days. Any second now I would reach for someone’s head and slam it down on a hard surface, and since he was the only person in the room...

“I’d better go,” he said. He took his anorak from the back of the chair and stroked out non-existent creases.

“Before you do, Tom, hear this. Your family might not give a toss if a bunch of Paddies break in and blow your brains out. Mine would. They’d be...” I pretended to search for the word. “...upset.”

“It wouldn’t happen, Nathan. You’d have a top flight team here, armed, experienced...”

“Christ Almighty, now it’s a house party! Listen, you may not figure much in your kids’ lives. Each to his own.” He was shaking his head now, avoiding my gaze. “I mean all you’ve said is that Georgina got married, and you didn’t seem too chuffed about that! What about the boy?”

“Graham?”

“Not a mention. I never knew a man who didn’t boast about his son, no matter how well or badly they got on...”

“We lost him.”

Even though I’d understood him completely I still asked, “What do you mean, you lost him?”

“He was killed, just before Christmas. Big pile-up on the A34. Three cars. I just hope he died before they burst into flames. Strange thing to say, I know...”

I didn’t want him to stop talking because it meant the next words would have to be mine. He spared me.

“It’s difficult telling people. They’re sympathetic, of course, but most of them don’t know when to stop. For Karen it just relives the whole business. For me, I have to go right back to the first days, seeing her through it while grieving myself...”

“Fucking hell, Tom,” I said.

He smiled, faintly. “I knew you’d have the right words, Nathan.”

I slumped into the chair at my end and watched as he put the anorak back on and zipped it up. He gestured for me to stay seated as he stretched out a hand.

“Good to see you. You haven’t changed.”

He went over to the door and as he reached it, grabbed the handle, a hundred voices in my head were begging me not to say what came out of my mouth next.

“Hang on a second.”

The handle snapped back and he turned to me.

“This case is important to you, personally? Have you got drugs in the family?”

“Not that I know of. You?”

“Connor. He got a grip on it but it wasn’t easy. Sit down again.” He protested with a painful grimace. “Take your coat off, switch that bloody coffee maker off, pour us both some.”

He did as I’d asked and came slowly back to the table with two mugs. “This may sound trite, but losing a child does so many things. Graham’s death made me consider the morality of what we do in our job sometimes. I think we fall short too often...”

He broke off as if he’d said too much or maybe not enough. Either way, I could hardly challenge him.

“How long would this Liam Kinsella be here?” I asked.

“Four, five weeks at the most.”

“How many people apart from him?”

“Just two from Special Ops. Fewer the better, or at least that’s what I tell myself. Truth is, I haven’t got the resources.”

I nodded. “No spare box of coppers lying around.”

I asked him to give me twenty-four hours to think it over, which would involve putting the matter to Laura Peterson. He understood my wish to do so completely. She came to my house far too often to be left out of the loop. Besides, he added with a smile, it would give him a day to check on her, the gardener and Jean Langan, my lady who does.

As we drank our coffee he spoke wistfully about his dead son, the things he hadn’t done for him and with him. It wasn’t self-pity, but in the space of twenty minutes he beat himself up so badly that a decent referee would’ve stopped the fight after the first round. When he was done he gave me a couple of chances to backtrack, to say no to the whole dumb safe-house project. I didn’t take them. I had an uncomfortable feeling he’d known all along that I wouldn’t.

I took Laura to
The Thatch
in Thame that evening and we sat in a corner of the old restaurant, all low beams to crack your head on and sudden mirrors to record the passage of time. It was both the right and the wrong place to have chosen: good because the noise from other customers muffled what I had to say, bad because their conversation tested my legendary tolerance.

The clientele was largely mid-thirties, middle-incomers, and a dozen or so were celebrating a birthday at the next table. One of the women caught my attention immediately with her harsh, painful face, blonde hair framing it on three sides. She wore a black, silky dress that had seen younger, slimmer days, but her defining feature was the rapid gunfire laughter, ten degrees louder than anyone else’s, and the more she drank, the more easily it was triggered. I looked at her critically once or twice until I realised that her friends also found her annoying; indeed they were doing their best to sideline her, a fact which gradually made me change sides in this undeclared battle of wills. At eight o’clock, shortly after we arrived, I could have killed her; by nine I would have laid down my life for her. I digress...

Laura was intrigued to know why there’d been a departure from our normal routine on busy days of a quick supper at the pub in Winchendon. I told her that, much as I loved Annie McKinnon’s home cooking, a private conversation in
The Crown
always became public knowledge within twenty-four hours. Nobody knew how it happened; it was something to do with English village life being made that way.

She’d had a long, hard day at the surgery and was still concerned about one of her younger colleagues who’d had a lump removed from her breast a month ago. Laura was keen to support this newcomer to the practice and, rather than bring in a locum, she was sharing Doctor Sheila Bright’s workload with another partner. I’d voiced my opinion, in spite of it not being asked for, that the seventy-, eighty-hour weeks couldn’t go on for much longer. Laura said they could and would until Sheila’s health was restored.

Though tired she was looking pretty good, better than some of the birthday crowd close by. She’s one of the few middle-aged women I know who look decent in jeans anyway, and that’s mainly to do with the long legs. Above the waist she was wearing a black velvet jacket and a mass of her favourite silver jewellery.

Over one of the house specialities, devilled kidneys on toast, I told her about the murder of the two trawlermen, then explained what Tom Blackwell had asked for and I’d virtually agreed to. She blinked at me, troubled by some new contact lenses.

“You mean his star witness is coming to stay at Beech Tree along with two police officers for a whole month?”

I couldn’t work out if she was troubled or thrilled by the prospect but opted to assume the latter.

“What sort of chap is this Tom Blackwell? If he’s an old friend, presumably you can trust him?”

I corrected her quickly. Blackwell wasn’t a friend, he was an acquaintance, a man trying to do the right thing.

“So, you believe he’s a ... moral man. Isn’t it odd that we, the general we, find that word so difficult to use these days?”

She sat back in her chair, taking her wine with her. A few moments later she came forward again with another question.

“Why did he come to you, you in particular? There must be dozens of acquaintances he could have called upon.”

“I haven’t given it much thought.”

“Well, is there anything in your joint past that might explain it? A case you worked on, people you knew?”

“He was on an inquiry I led, for less than a year.”

A waitress brought a cake to the next table, four candles on it, one for each decade rather than a burning forest to emphasise the advancing years. The celebrant blew them out and his friends began to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ with such gusto that we fell silent. When it was over and the clapping had died down I sat up straight, hands behind my head, and tried to stretch Tom Blackwell out of my mind. He wouldn’t go. And then Laura jabbed me with a shot of feminine perception.

“Why the uncertainty, Nathan? I mean it’s not just about the possible danger involved, is it? You invite that at the best of times.”

I must have smiled, or something equally impetuous. She repeated her question. I explained as wearily as I could that I hadn’t wanted Liam Kinsella shacking up with me, especially after Blackwell had hinted at a possible IRA connection. Like he’d said, mention of those three capital letters has an effect, one where the listener imagines either a spent force or a re-emergent threat. Laura simply said that Kinsella was a hauntingly beautiful name and asked, for the third time, why I had misgivings. I told her about Graham Blackwell’s death and she was horrified by it, the more so probably because her own brother had died in a road accident at a similar age. She reached across the table and took my hand as if somehow that might convey her empathy to Tom and Karen Blackwell. I then came out with what I’d been reluctant to believe.

“I think he used his son’s death to persuade me, to make me change my mind. He worked it into the conversation in order to get the result he wanted. What sort of man would do that?”

She withdrew her hand and thought about it, then said, “That could just be you, thinking the worst of everyone as usual. And it doesn’t alter the fact that his son is dead.”

On the way home to Beech Tree, Laura gave a more considered diagnosis. She was driving, being less over the limit than I was, and began her summary with the ominous words, “I’ve been thinking...”

I turned and looked at her profile as she kept her eye firmly on the road ahead. I always homed in on her nose. A proper nose, my son Jaikie called it. Lips slightly forward, kissable, though not from that angle. Chin jutting. Above it all, the sizeable forehead shielding all those brains. If I’d been voicing those thoughts when we left
The Thatch
, no wonder she’d offered to drive.

“Blackwell said he came to you for advice.”

“Advice, my fanny!”

She turned to me momentarily.

“That’s what I said back to him,” I said.

“Pupil goes back to teacher,” she quoted. “We always think our teachers know more than we do, and it’s usually true.”

There was something definitely off about this case, she went on, and if she’d sensed it then Blackwell probably had and I most
certainly
had. Okay, we couldn’t put a name to it, but what did we have so far? One, the trial was being rushed; two, it was laughable that he’d run out of safe houses, and as for three, there being only two police officers available...

“And one of them is evidently a girl,” I said, unwisely.

She let it ride. Aware that something was skewiff, she continued, Blackwell wanted to bring his star witness into my presence to see if I could put my finger on it. More than that, however, he believed that when I discovered what was wrong I would do something about it, poke my nose in as per usual. I would cross lines, cut corners, break rules that he as a serving officer couldn’t afford to. She slapped the steering wheel and waited for my reaction. I told her that what she’d said made sense but I didn’t believe it. We fell silent, consideration on my part, a slight sulk on hers.

“I know one thing he’s got wrong,” I said, eventually. “The murders were very amateurish and very messy, according to him. That doesn’t sound like the IRA to me.”