Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (26 page)

He listened with a permanent frown on his face as I explained that Carew and Sweetman had attacked me, the day I attended Flaxman’s trial. But it wasn’t revenge I was after. I wanted to follow a hunch.

He shifted in the chair. He wasn’t deadly keen on hunches. Did mine come with anything concrete? I told him about Sarah Trent. He wasn’t bowled over by that either. I resorted to the ‘you and me’ treatment, forefinger wagging back and forth between us, the professionals.

“Bill, you and I know that ‘follow the money’ isn’t just a handy mantra. It works every time. There’s 15 million pounds’ worth of heroin out there. If we can find that we can find Liam Kinsella, France or no bloody France.”

“You think he’s got it?”

“No, but I think he
wants
it. No disrespect, Bill, and no hard feelings, but with or without you I’m going after it.”

“And the hunch part?”

“Freddie Trent’s widow. This Sarah. She and Aaron were ‘close’. So close she came to the trial. Didn’t stay.”

He nodded his way through what I’d told him, made his decision. “Fair enough.”

“Thing is you’ll have to do the driving. I mean we’ll take the Land Rover...”

He said it wasn’t reliable and nodded out through the window to the white Fiat 600. Viv’s car. We’d take that. I asked if it had a back seat. The answer was yes, but why?

“I want to take the dog. She’s ex-drug squad.”

“Long time ago, Dad,” Fee chipped in.

Grogan shrugged. If I wanted the company, let her come. I reached across the table to shake his hand, turning the sudden rush of pain into a smile.

“First stop, Speaker’s Farm, the Flaxmans’ place.”

He pointed out that Joe and Carrie Flaxman wouldn’t be there. Weren’t they at the Old Bailey every day, dossing down at the Savoy? I nodded. He smiled at the possibility of some good old-fashioned breaking and entering.

I sat back again and turned to Yukito. “How are things, Yukito? God only knows what you make of all this...”

Fee started to translate into Japanese but he raised a hand to stop her.

“Things are fine, Mr Hawk. I hope you catch your man.”

We left for Grimsby early the following day and were instructed many times by Fee and Laura to look after ourselves and the dog, to drive carefully, to keep in touch and not to get into fights. I’ve occasionally wished I was a child again, and by the time Grogan turned into Morton Lane I felt like one.

We returned to being adults when Grogan asked in a faraway, detached manner, “Brought anything?”

I nodded. “Smith & Wesson, had it for donkeys’ years. You?”

He said he’d brought a Glock. In spite of all the bureaucracy surrounding his suspension, no one had asked him to surrender his firearm.

“And a baseball bat,” he said. “In the boot.”

I laughed. “Baseball bat?”

“Well, rounders really. You never know.”

We must’ve seemed an odd couple, trio if you count the dog, two large men in the front seat of a Fiat biscuit tin doing no more than sixty miles an hour, at my request. We didn’t talk much, with Grogan being taciturn by nature and me reacting to every bump in the road. He was at his most vociferous when any vehicle overtook him. ‘Fucking wanker’ was the usual epithet. When he found himself stuck behind someone doing forty the insult changed to ‘doddering old tosser’. Apart from that, silence.

It hardly needs saying that nothing ‘relevant to my inquiries’, as police jargon has it, occurred on the overlong drive to Grimsby. Relevant isn’t the same as memorable.

We were approaching Lincoln on the A46 and were both feeling peckish so Grogan pulled onto the battered gravel front of an eating place, the kind you see in American movies. Isolated, with large swinging signs, the name in neon capitals. It was called Polly’s Diner and the clientele were mainly lorry drivers going to and from the east coast. It was nothing fancy, my father would have said. A good-value place. And dogs were welcome, another sign proclaimed.

The lady who ran it, no doubt Polly herself, was just as I’d imagined her in the minute or so before we met. She was in her fifties, blonde, with a large bust which wasn’t an overt selling point though she obviously knew its value, otherwise she wouldn’t have dressed so tightly. The decor, the tables and chairs were cheap and cheerful, the menu aimed at shortening the customers’ lives: pies, chips, a few veg, stodgy puddings, tea in large mugs. We went for the homemade chicken and ham pie.

After she’d taken our order, Polly glanced over at us in spare moments, probably because we didn’t quite fit. When she put the plates down in front of us she tried to dig deeper, starting with an observation about my bruises. I’d been in the wars, she said. Fell over, I replied. Where were we heading? The coast. Where had we come from? Oxford. What was the dog’s name? Dogge. I think that’s when she cut her losses and went back to her other customers.

Once more I took up the challenge of conversing with Grogan. Politics, current affairs and family were non-starters. Any talk about the job would have depressed him, so I fell back on decorating.

“Bit of a win for you, this.”

“How so?”

“Well, we accomplish what Blackwell couldn’t in a million years, our reputations are restored and Viv’ll do the rest of the decorating.” I smiled to indicate that a joke was coming. “Or will she leave it till you get back?”

He stopped eating and I could read his face immediately. He was challenging me, all but saying if I didn’t like what came next I could tie it round my neck and jump.

“He,” he said. “Viv is a he. Nurse at John Radcliffe. Vivian.”

He carried on staring, searching for any sign of that old copper’s raised eyebrow, the hand-me-down prejudice, the squad room contempt we both knew so well. He didn’t find it.

“It just kind of ... happened,” he said. “We don’t talk much about it, just get on with our lives. Busy lives.”

This may sound overblown for such a commonplace revelation, but when someone tells you their biggest secret they don’t just share it with you, they give you a key to their very soul. You can either use it or lose it. I planned on leaving mine right there on the table at Polly’s Diner. That doesn’t mean I knew what to say next, so I just kept looking back at him, hoping he’d move the conversation on, claw some other subject out of the air. But this was Bill Grogan, listener more than talker. Then, luck of the devil, one fell at our feet.

The door to Polly’s opened and a couple of boiler-suited blokes entered, one in his thirties with an unnecessary beard, the other ten years older, unmemorable. I’d seen two Bowker lorries pull onto the gravel a few minutes earlier. These guys must’ve been the drivers. They were well known to Polly and her face lit up as they greeted her with pecks on the cheek, flirtatious remarks and laughter. She took them over to their usual table.

But all that was peripheral to what had really grabbed my attention. Dogge, who’d been lying under the table, stood up soon after they entered, nose twitching from side to side. She approached the younger of the two drivers, wagging her tail. He was flattered.

“Hallo, doggy! What are you? Girl or boy?”

“Girl,” I said.

I went over to him as he stooped to make a real fuss of her. She sat down, turned and looked at me. I called to Grogan, “Bill, get over here.”

I turned back to the driver. “I have to tell you, mate, it isn’t you she likes, it’s the weed in your pocket. Least, I hope it’s just weed.”

He tensed up, guilty as hell, then suddenly remembered his right to have in his pockets whatever he damn well wanted.

“So what if it is?” he said.

“So nothing. Enjoy your lunch.”

Grogan looked down at Dogge and smiled. “You can’t teach ’em new tricks, but they don’t forget the old ones, eh?”

We arrived in Wragby around seven that evening and took rooms in the hotel I’d used before. We turned in early, had a full English breakfast at eight the next morning to set us up for a day’s sailing close to the wind.

As we made our way up what could loosely be called the driveway to Speaker’s Farm, Grogan did his best to avoid the ruts and cuts made by the heavy August rain. The ground was dry now, hard and axle-breaking, the surrounding trees bare and skinny, and when the house itself came into view it did so all of a sudden, as if we’d flicked through a slideshow and arrived at some post-apocalyptic amphitheatre.

We drove into the yard and got out. I’d only seen the place this close up in photos and I suppose we’d taken a risk in just bowling up. After all, someone might’ve been house-sitting, or a worker from the chicken farm could’ve dropped in. There might even have been a dosser living in one of the outbuildings. However, the absolute stillness told me the place was deserted. Grogan looked round, from the barn to the grading shed, grain store to the house itself, and his reaction was much as I’d expected.

“Fuck me!”

The words echoed back to us, bounced off one of the buildings.

“Place talks back,” I said. “How shall we do this, Bill?”

“A better question would be ‘
what
are we doing?’ ”

I still hadn’t got a satisfactory answer for that, or at least one that went beyond a hunch.

“Dunno. There’s no heroin here, that’s for sure. If Kinsella didn’t find it, if Carew and Sweetman haven’t...”

“Then why should we?” he said, flatly.

“That aside, I’ll stake five years off my life that by the end of the day we’ll know where it is.”

He wanted to call me a fool, or so I interpreted the stony face, but instead he took a deep breath, clenched his fists and waited for further orders. I suggested that we work together, take the dog with us and start on the outbuildings since the doors to all of them were already open to some degree or other. We began at the grain store, a place the size of a village hall and bang opposite the back of the house.

Against the will of its rusted hinges, Grogan hauled open the massive door to its full extent and leaned it back against the outside wall. Inside it was gloomy rather than dark. He cast around for a light switch and found one above the lintel. The forty-watt bulb gave us everything it had.

“Mean old sod,” said Grogan, building a profile of Joe Flaxman.

“Careful with his money,” I defended.

We split up. Grogan took the left half, I took the right and we edged our way between the artefacts in that petrified museum. Most of the exhibits had been made long before either of us was born.

An old Ferguson tractor had been driven skewiff onto a flatbed trailer to make room for an early combine which dominated the building. Central to Grogan’s side was a disc roller, rusted to immobility, bedecked with an array of hand tools, scythes, ploughs, an old bailer. Dogge worked back and forth between the two of us and the only thing that grabbed her interest was the largest rat I’ve ever seen. She chased it under an old cart where it went to ground. I’ve never been good with rats, all to do with their watchful silence, then sudden rush in all directions.

We had to shift some of the smaller objects. I pulled aside an old hand plough, for example, only to have it virtually disintegrate in my hands. Grogan lifted part of a spiked harrow, threw it onto another pile, collapsing it with the extra weight. More rats. It took us an hour to find nothing.

In a way it was dispiriting, not that we had any right to complain. If we didn’t know what we were looking for, what made us think we might find it?

“One of those places you push from the front,” said Grogan, looking at the grain store from the doorway. “You run out of room, you pile the front stuff on the back and start again. Must be a hundred years’ worth of scrap metal here, an absolute bloody fortune.”

I reminded him there was an even larger fortune in free-range eggs a mile down the track and that was one reason all this had been left unsold.

We crossed the yard to the grading shed, stepping over broken slates from its roof. The double doors stood wide open and seemed to flutter in the occasional breeze. Just inside, a small Peugeot stood beside a beaten-up Toyota pickup.

“I thought he had a Chevy,” said Grogan.

I nodded. “That’s in a police warehouse, West London. Evidence.”

We didn’t need a light here thanks to a ten-foot hole in the roof. Crooked slates hung at the edge of it, ready to fall and guillotine the unsuspecting intruder. A vent, dead centre of the roof, gave us the only noise we’d heard thus far, apart from those of our own making. Two pigeons who’d been using it as a home clattered in panic and took off into the woods.

At one side of the building stood a vegetable grading machine, powered once by electricity, long since de-commissioned. The channels down which potatoes, turnips, carrots and the like had been hustled to their doom were covered in dust, bird and bat droppings, leaves which had sought refuge from the autumn gales. Against the far wall stood a row of hoppers on stilts, beneath which sacks were once filled and fastened. There was a device for boxing up the more fragile stuff: cauliflowers, broccoli, cabbages, anything that needed to look well cared for on supermarket shelves. Beside it was a stack of folded cardboard containers, saturated and held in place by the rainwater which had leaked in from above.