Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (33 page)

I decided it would be best all round if Emma moved out of her bungalow for the duration and, partly because she didn’t like living there anyway, she readily agreed. She went off to visit a friend in Spain with strict instructions not to confide the real reason for her visit.

Before she left she made up beds for us. I took her room, Grogan was in the spare. She left notes about how to use the oven, what to do if the shower suddenly cut out and how to manipulate the key in the back door to lock it. She drove off, early morning, and Grogan put the biscuit tin in the garage and locked it. It was then a matter of waiting three days for
The Grimsby Echo
to hit the stands, as they say.

Grogan was more relaxed about the delay than I was, partly because he’d found some obscure satellite channel that was re-running a series about desert wildlife which included cacti. I spent the time shopping for food, cooking it and walking the dog. There were fields nearby and very few neighbours, most of whom had been driven indoors by the approaching cold front.

The three-day wait felt like a fortnight, but it gave me time to dwell on Liam Kinsella’s affront to me, his belief that he could play me for a fool and win. Virtually every word he’d uttered within my hearing was stuck in my head, its meaning, tone and context defying me to find what Blackwell had asked for. Proof. Not evidential proof but enough for him to feel comfortable about pursuing the case against this principal witness turned prime suspect.

It was the second day of waiting and I’d risen early, made coffee, eaten some out-of-date cereal I’d found at the back of a cupboard, and by eight o’clock, with no sign of the kraken in the spare room awakening, I decided to go for a walk with the dog. I went to the front door and opened it to discover that, true to Grogan’s weather forecast, snow had fallen. It was disappointing snow, the kind I recall from childhood being just a centimetre or two deep and in no way fully covering rooftops, cars or distant fields. Might just as well not have bothered falling. A drop of sleet, my father would’ve called it, before promising that real snow was just around the corner.

It had turned even colder, though, so I went back to Emma’s room and in the bottom of a chest of drawers found a sweater, probably one of Vic’s. I donned it, put my jacket back on and stepped out again into the snow. Disappointing though it was in childhood terms, it was still enough to be wet underfoot and I wondered if Emma had kept any of Vic’s boots. As a trawlerman he must’ve had a few pairs. I went back indoors and, sure enough, in the hall cupboard found some wellingtons, too big for me but what the hell. I put them on and set off again.

As I reached the front gate the door behind me opened and Bill Grogan stood there, fully dressed, though not for winter.

“You alright?” he said.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Lot of to-ing and fro-ing, that’s all.” He looked round. “Snow. Told you there would be.”

“I never doubted you. Fancy a walk in it? There’s another pair of boots in the cupboard.”

He clearly wished he hadn’t been so concerned about me and, stroking his chin, eventually said, “Alright. Give me five minutes to shave. Haven’t had a chance to since we got here.”

He went back inside and closed the door behind him. And there they were, lined up in perfect carelessness, a dozen or so words that would condemn Kinsella out of his own mouth. Far from being brilliant deduction it was a matter of ‘all things come to he who waits’, or in my case he who is forced to wait. Either way I turned and hurried back up the path, opened the door and leaned in.

“Bill!”

He came out of the spare room, electric razor in hand. “What?”

“Put that bloody thing down!”

It must have been the urgency in my voice that made him do as I’d asked and he placed the razor on the hall table, awaiting further instructions.

“Come back to the front door. Stand there on the mat. Don’t move.”

“Yeah, alright, but I mean...”

“Do it.”

He stood where I’d asked him to and I strode twenty deliberate paces which took me down the path, through the gate and out into the road. I stopped, turned and looked at him. He had his arms out wide as if he were being crucified and wanted to know why.

“You
sure
you’re alright?” he asked.

“Fine.”

Angelica Carter e-mailed me a copy of the piece that same evening, not for my approval, but headed ‘FYI’. The item looked even better on the front page of
The Grimsby Echo
the next morning.

It was halfway down, not garish or attention seeking, but unmissable. The headline read:

Murdered man’s widow charged with supplying heroin

The piece went on to say:

Emma Jane Wesley appeared in court yesterday, following the raid on a house by police in the Grimsby area on Wednesday.

Wesley, 36, of Montgomery Drive, Great Coates, is charged on two counts: supplying heroin and possessing heroin with intent to supply. She was remanded in custody ahead of a further appearance at Grimsby Magistrates’ Court next week. Wesley is the widow of Victor Wesley, who was murdered alongside Frederick Trent in woodland near Wragby last March.

I came back from the local shop with a copy of the paper and showed it to Grogan. He read it and nodded, then echoed my only concern: doubt that Angelica Carter had the contacts and the reach I hadn’t cared to ask her about.

I needn’t have worried. By lunchtime the following day, the editor on the local ITN news bulletin had broadcast an item about Emma to his audience of 180,000 people. Admittedly he harked back to the unsolved murders, with footage of the highly distraught Jago sisters. The piece was repeated later that evening, by which time the BBC were delivering their own version on their twenty-four hour news channel. It jumped easily from there to the local BBC news.

As I’d hoped, it wasn’t big enough, or gruesome enough, to warrant a press corps camping out on the front lawn in Montgomery Drive, although there were a few rings at the doorbell. The dog barked; we ignored them.

By Sunday it was on page five of a national tabloid and featured on a TV discussion programme which earnestly chewed over the plight of middle-aged housewives who were turning to drug dealing. The state of the economy was blamed.

Carter phoned me on Sunday night, largely to boast that she’d achieved what she’d set out to. She also promised that, should nothing come of this pebble she’d chucked into the millpond, she would run an article suggesting that the paltry amount of heroin found at Emma Wesley’s house was just the tip of the iceberg. I said I didn’t think it would be necessary, but thanked her for the idea. Ever the journalist, she reminded me that I’d promised to let her know the moment anything newsworthy happened.

“I’ve been researching you,” she said. “Quite a tally, thirty-seven murders. Just out of interest, though, why did you hit that fellow officer? How hard and who was he?”

I laughed. “You’re breaking up, Angie,” I said, and ended the call.

From that point on we went into a kind of limbo. I’d hoped that Grogan and I might get to know each other better as we sat in that bungalow, virtual prisoners of our own making. Admittedly it was only a week but I came away realising that whereas he’d learned a great deal about me, I was as much in the dark as ever about him.

He was one of those curious people who barely acknowledge their past. He’d been brought up in London, born to parents late in their lives. No siblings. Educated at a school nearby. Joined the police at eighteen. This abundance of information was the result of me trying the usual conversation openers only to find he had a knack of closing them rapidly. In contrast he possessed the invaluable skill, at least in terms of our chosen profession, of getting others to talk. Maybe I did so in order to fill the silence, but the result was just the same: within the space of seven days Grogan had a full picture of my upbringing, my marriage and each of my children. He became party to my strengths and weaknesses, but as he did so it was always with deference to my superior rank. I was the officer, he was the company sergeant.

We spelled each other in terms of waiting. He would take eight hours on point, while I shopped, cooked, walked the dog, slept. I would take the next shift while he watched television programmes about far-off places he wanted to visit.

At night we turned in early, ten o’clock sometimes, having exhausted our mutuality. What I didn’t realise at the time was that his silence was due to something he’d mentioned just once, in front of Angelica Carter. He felt guilty about Fairchild. He should’ve kept a better eye on her.

Thursday evening was no different to any of the others. After dinner I e-mailed Laura, mainly to find out how things were going between Fee and Yukito. She replied that Fee was blaming me for holding up her plans. She’d decided to return to Tokyo with Yukito. Each had made promises to the other: Yukito would give Fee more of his time; she would give him, dare I say it, less of hers. She’d had a gradual revelation, she confided to Laura. With Ellie having found her true soulmate in Terrific Rick and Jaikie on the brink of marrying Jodie, it was time for Fee, like any mother, real or elected, to let her charges go. Yukito had dropped everything concerned with his business and followed her to England, a declaration of love if ever there was one. No mention was made of the part I’d played in this, which meant I must’ve performed with a degree of subtlety. There was no mention either of our wild card, Con...

I remember thinking, as I drew the curtains, that it was a particularly dark night, and that fact ensured that I slept just below the surface. Dogge heard it first. A noise in the kitchen. She rumbled her concern and I opened my eyes immediately, whispered for her to be quiet. The bedroom door was ajar, and dark though the house was I could see out into the hallway, kitchen appliances throwing their LED light, reds, greens, into the space. Something altered the intensity of it, for just a second, and then it returned. Someone was in the house and had probably entered via the back door, the locking of which Grogan and I hadn’t fully mastered.

I slipped out of bed and stooped for the Smith & Wesson which I kept on top of the bag beside me. I laid a hand on the dog, her instruction to stay put, and moved to the door, stood at the hinge side of it for what seemed like an hour but could only have been moments.