Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  “It’s the same every year,” she said, without looking up from what she was doing. “I forget how to forward the damn thing so it’s back to the instruction book and…” I leaned over her and pressed the forward button. “…and then along comes a hero.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “I forget his name. Some kind of bird, I think.”

  “Mr Dove from number 14?”

  She smiled dutifully and stood up, knee joints clicking to her embarrassment.

  “How’ve you got on?” I asked.

  She beckoned with a crooked finger and I followed her through the back door into the house. In the kitchen, lined up and ready for a tip run, stood a dozen black bin bags, full. I glanced through to the living room and from what I could see the armchairs, the coffee table, the books were back in their places. I went to check.

  “Jesus, you’ve done it.” I said in disbelief. “In eight hours.”

  “Plus inventory for the insurance company,” she said, nodding at her laptop.

  She explained that items beyond repair had gone into the bin bags, things that were still in one piece went back in their original places. Certainly she’d had a few pangs of sadness on the way, brought on by specific items. The china dogs which had sat on her grandmother's mantelpiece for 50 years and then on hers another 20 had finally been put down. She would miss their company, but on the other hand they weren’t flesh and blood. A carriage clock that had stood on her father’s desk had been smashed beyond repair, but there were far too many other ways of telling the time these days. A mirror she was fond of had gone, leaving only a pale impression of itself behind. Her mother had used the mirror to check her face, just before leaving the house. Laura did the same, but in recent years had begun to see her mother looking back at her, so it was time for a change anyway.

  I asked about the family photos. There weren’t many but the few there had been she treasured: several of her younger brother, killed in a road accident at 25, her parents in youth and old age, herself as a girl, then a young woman. They were all on disc, she said, so those here that had been ripped out of their broken frames could be replaced.

  We stood for a while and in time we heard the central heating pipes creak into life.

  “I began to feel cold when I stopped working,” she said.

  The house wasn’t cold, it had simply been robbed of a particular kind of warmth.

  “Where's Jaikie today?” she asked.

  “At home. You haven’t lent him any more money, have you?”

  “No.”

  I smiled. “So you have lent him some.”

  “I should've been ready for that, shouldn’t I. Fifty pounds, until he can change some dollars.”

  I looked round again at what she had achieved in so short a space of time. It was, as she’d promised in her note, up and running again but all too raw and recent to be lived in for a while.

  “It’ll take time to become yours again,” I said. “You’d better spend the rest of the week with me.”

  She came up close, took my hands and put my arms around her waist. “Is that you at your romantic best?”

  My phone trilled that I’d just received a text message. It was from Martin Falconer and said: “Hole dug. Bodies found.”

  “Bodies?” said Laura. “Plural?”

  I called Martin, who told me that he’d found the skeletons of two foxes which must have been ploughed in last winter. At least it explained why the dogs had been so interested in the place.

  “No human remains?” I asked.

  “Sorry, mate, no.”

  We arrived at Beech Tree as Jaikie was returning from a hike along the Winchendon Valley, delighted to have been on his own for an hour or two. Nobody had followed him there, wanting to know if he and Jodie were an item, if Sophie Kent really was history. It was refreshing, invigorating, liberating, he went on, it had taken him back to those halcyon days when he was an ordinary bloke, out for an ordinary walk, with an ordinary dog…

  The lad was protesting too much, methought.

  Meantime, Laura had found three tuna steaks in the freezer and, together with vegetables she’d been given by one of her patients, was turning them into a five-star meal. As we sat down to eat it Jaikie said for no reason whatsoever, “Dad, d’you remember that bloke Jack Blundell?”

  “I do, though I never had the pleasure of meeting him.”

  Jaikie explained to Laura that 15 years ago, when Fee was determined to Save the World, to feed the poor and hungry, she’d met an ageing tramp in Thame and invited him to live in a rusty old caravan at our previous house. Maggie and I had no idea that he was there, though she did say she thought the kids were eating more these days. Stuff that was in the fridge overnight for tomorrow’s lunch kept disappearing. So did an old jacket of mine and a few T-shirts.

  “How long did he stay?” asked Laura.

  “Only three weeks,” said Jaikie. “Left in a bit of a hurry one evening, halfway through a cottage pie Mum had made. He casually asked what sort of man our father was and Ellie, aged eight at the time, said he was a policeman sort of man. Jack put down his knife and fork, packed his carrier bag and 30 seconds later was gone. We never saw him again.”

  “When did you find out?” she asked me.

  “Two years later.”

  Jaikie smiled. “Dad was always slow on the uptake. He bought Mum this set of casserole dishes…”

  “Her 39th birthday…”

  “One day, Con laid the lids down on the floor and walked across an imaginary river using them as stepping stones. All of them broke. Mum stuck them together and swore us to secrecy. Christmas Day, Dad takes off the lid to the sprouts and says, “Maggie, this lid’s been broken.” She confessed to having dropped it. It took him another year to realise they’d all been broken, by which time he could hardly lose his rag.”

  I wanted the family stories to end right there and apologised to Laura for the two we’d already had. “They’re like dreams,” I said. “Your own are fascinating, other people’s are plain boring.”

  “I’d hardly call what Ellie did boring,” said Jaikie.

  Indulgent as ever, Laura asked him to elaborate.

  “She swallowed Mum’s engagement ring. Our GP said that if she didn’t throw it up within an hour they’d have to wait for nature to take its course.”

  Perhaps drawn to the medical implications, Laura seemed interested. “And did she?”

  “Half an hour later she threw up like a real pro and there it was.”

  I wish I could say that it was a eureka moment, but it was more a case of Jesus Christ why didn’t I think of that before. It must have shown on my face.

  “What’s wrong, Dad?”

  “I may not know the who and why of this murder yet, but I think I know how they disposed of his body.”

  Laura stopped loading the dishwasher and came back to the table.

  “I said it didn’t involve blood and guts, right? That’s exactly what it does involve.”

  As we drove to the Zawadskis’ house I asked Jaikie to phone Martin and tell him to meet us there. Martin wanted to know why.

  “Just be there!” I yelled at the phone.

  The place had once been two cottages in a terrace of eight and was small enough now so God knows how any family could have lived in the originals. Victorian and built of stone with slated roofs, their main advantage had always been their closeness to the office, standing as they did overlooking the valley half a mile from the main farmhouse. We parked on a cinder lay-by behind a second-hand Audi and a BMW, tokens of the upward aspirations of Jan’s neighbours.

  The night was cold, remarkable for being the first one of an approaching winter, and our breath seemed to drift from our mouths as if trying to drag us away from our purpose. I knocked on the door and set off the Zawadskis’ German Shepherd. The front door opened six inches and Katya Zawadski peered out into the darkness, concerned to see three people on her doorstep at this time of night. Doubtless in he
r family history a visit at this time of night was never friendly. This one wasn’t exactly affable.

  She relaxed when she recognised Laura and removed the safety chain in a fluster of embarrassment at her initial suspicions. Jan had come up behind her by now, having taken the dog into the kitchen, and he recognised me from the night I’d been combine harvesting in Long Field. I stepped over the threshold, shook his hand and some of the tension caused by our arrival fell away.

  Jaikie, for once the only person in the room nobody recognised, introduced himself as my son and gave them his professional smile before turning it more gently on the two little girls who were descending the open stairs to see what the fuss was about. Both were in their pyjamas, one of them clinging to a soggy piece of blanket, the other clutching a tattered teddy bear. Jaikie waved to them, Katya turned and spoke with a soothing voice in a mixture of Polish and English.

  “Back to bed, my darlings.”

  “I woke them,” I said. “Forgive me.”

  She was a tall woman, a fact made all the more apparent by the low beamed ceilings. Her blonde hair was tied back in a pony-tail, fully revealing her face, straining it a little. Her eyes were pale blue, intelligent eyes, seeking an explanation as to why we were there. Her husband removed a couple of soft toys from the sofa, dropped them into a basket and Laura and Jaikie took their places. Now that I saw him in more detail I can only describe his looks as Eastern European, a smooth, square face with untrusting eyes betraying a nervous disposition. Over my shoulder he spotted the headlights from Martin’s pickup pulling up outside and went to greet his boss.

  “What’s all this about, Nathan?” Martin asked. The dog in the kitchen, hearing another strange voice, barked again. Jan called in Polish for her to be quiet.

  “Actually, it’s her I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. “Mr Falconer told me that you and he were in Long Field with her, one day in spring, and she threw up.”

  Jan frowned and looked to his wife for a translation. Her English was good, but throwing was still something you did with a ball.

  “She was sick,” Martin said, miming the act of vomiting. “We thought she might have found something in the field and eaten it.”

  “Did you see what it was?”

  “She was 50 yards away, Nathan. She came running over to us afterwards, clearly feeling a great deal better. As one does.”

  “When do you feed your dog, Jan?”

  “Morning, evening.”

  “And this particular day, did you stick to the routine?”

  “That day was no different,” said Katya.

  “What do you feed her?”

  “Dog food from the internet. We buy 50 cans each time, much cheaper.”

  “Always from the same place?”

  “Ever since we got her.”

  Behind me on the sofa I could sense disquiet from Laura. “Nathan, if you’re saying what I think you’re saying…”

  “I think the titanium plate was in a can of dog food. Jan fed her that morning and when she got to the field she threw it up.”

  The implications were becoming obvious, but we avoided putting them into words, perhaps out of regard for the Zawadskis whose pet dog, to put it bluntly, had eaten some of Patrick Scott. If it hadn’t been so gruesome it might have been laughable. Jan was catching on, but frowning in disbelief.

  “She was sick in one place,” he said, “We find the plate in another.”

  “By then you’d drilled, you’d raked, you’d rolled and God knows what else. Moved it. Fetch me a can of the dog food.”

  He went through to the kitchen, allowing the German Shepherd to enter the living room. Jaikie looked at her warily, the Hollywood part of him no doubt wondering if eating human flesh had altered her in any way. Had she developed opposing claws, perhaps, could she blow up a building or be the getaway driver in a car chase? When he finally stroked her she became just another family pet with a bark worse than her bite and a healthy respect for Katya’s instruction to go and lie down.

  Jan returned with a can of dog food. It was called Fivestar and the label on it boasted of its health-giving properties. At the bottom the name of the company who produced it was given in small type. The address was in Tilbury, East London.

  We drove back to Beech Tree in silence with Jaikie and Laura trying to resist all thoughts of Patrick Scott’s disposal, but inevitably they kept returning to the details, as did I. Had his body been butchered into manageable chunks, or had he been left in one piece and processed along with other carcasses? And what of the blood? Had that been let in some other place? And the entrails? It said on the can of Fivestar that it contained “everything your four legged friend would find in the wild including meat, heart, kidney, tripe and bone”. There were no additives, it stated in bold type. Little did they know. And who had turned their back when this horrific act was carried out? Who else, apart from the murderer, knew that Patrick had been fed to the dogs?

  As we sat in the kitchen, having exchanged the bare minimum of words, Jaikie looked down at Dogge and asked, in a fiendish whisper, “What does he feed you, little one?”

  It brought us back to earth again and Jaikie was surprisingly objective, saying that with Patrick being transmogrified we’d never find a body, surely an essential starting point in any inquiry. He warned that Patrick’s fate, being crushed and cooked by some small time pet food manufacturer, was still supposition, at least in terms of due process. Since renewing his friendship with Jodie he’d begun to bandy the odd legal phrase about.

  “That’s why you and I are going to visit their factory tomorrow. Unless you’ve anything else skeduled?”

  “No, no, I’d like that.”

  He went to fetch my laptop from the living room and brought up a Google map of the area we were talking about. The address on the tin was Shoreline Industrial Estate and as Jaikie zoomed in on the plant itself, it gave off nothing but innocence. It was an ordinary factory on the edge of a 20-acre site where the main venture was re-cycling. Close by were other businesses that hadn’t survived the credit crunch. A packaging manufacturer, a gravel supplier, an engineering plant. Their buildings were to let and even from the perspective of a Google street map they seemed forlorn, desolate, hopeless.

  I looked across at Laura. I would have Jaikie close by me tomorrow, but not her. She and her colleagues were due to hear the final decision of the local Health Trust with regard to funding but even I couldn’t be in two places at once.

  -7-

  When I came down for breakfast, Jaikie was already there with my laptop open, researching dog food. With the blast furnace of a stomach he was known for in our family, he slurped away at a bowl of cereal while describing some of the illegalities of the trade. He offered to show me YouTube proof of what had been called meat by-products, but I declined to view it. Most of it, he said, was veterinary waste, regularly dumped at the gates of rogue manufacturers and used in upcoming batches of their product. Things had changed, he assured me, at least in the UK. Pet food companies were now regulated to the point of paralysis.

  “Anything more on Fivestar?”

  “They sound like a decent company. Started life as a family business, late 1940s. Two brothers. Now run by a direct descendant, William Stringer.”

  We left the house at seven, having wished Laura all the best in her last ditch attempt to squeeze money out of people who didn’t want to give it to her. The traffic up on the main road was hissing through fine drizzle with its uncanny knack of making people like me feel morose and taciturn. Actors are different, being eternally optimistic and terrified of silence.

  We’d been driving no longer than three minutes when Jaikie said, “Dad, what do I say to people if they recognise me? I mean seriously…?”

  “What do you usually say?”

  “Hi!”

  “Then say hi!” He nodded, gratefully. “You may even get a chance to say it to George Corrigan. He’s three cars behind us.”

  For some reason it cheere
d me up, especially when Jaikie followed it up with, “Can you lose him, Dad?”

  “It’s a 20-year old Land Rover, but I’ll try.”

  I turned off into a lane that ran from Dorton back down to Winchendon and soon afterwards Corrigan made the same turn, switching off his running lights in the hope of being unnoticed.

  The land to either side of us was farmed by Martin Falconer though not owned by him. It belonged to a man called Jessup, a relic from the days when farming was a law unto itself. The rules and regulations of the past 50 years had robbed him of his livelihood, he moaned, and as a result he’d allowed any land he didn’t rent out to fall into disrepair. Come the height of winter, a tributary of the River Thame would bring down topsoil from higher ground, which would settle as a black, unyielding sludge in the dip I was heading for. I slowed to a crawl and the Land Rover took the 18 inches or so from the previous year in its stride. As I climbed the hill on the other side, Jaikie looked back to see Corrigan’s dainty little Japanese hatchback reach the quagmire. He must have thought the car could handle it, but as it hit the deepest point the engine stalled. He tried to restart it, but in vain. I pulled on the hand brake.

  “Call him, Jaikie.”

  I’d assumed he would do so on his phone but Jaikie got out of the Land Rover, turned to look down at Corrigan and called effortlessly across the intervening pasture, “Hi, George, how’s it going?”

  Corrigan had wound down the driver’s window and now stuck his head out but he didn’t answer. Jaikie relayed a message from me.

  “Dad says flash your headlights if you can hear.” Eventually, reluctantly, the lights pulsed. “The man you need is Martin Falconer. After he’s pulled you out, do us a favour. Keep an eye on Dr Peterson.”

  I remember Tilbury from childhood. My mother’s sister lived on Canvey Island with a man called Santiago who worked in the docks. It sounded so romantic: docks, islands, tall-masted ships from all over the world, and yet it never lived up to that promise. The island didn’t have waves crashing on its shore, or mysterious creatures roaming its hinterland, and although in keeping with childhood memory it never rained there, I don’t recall the sun shining either. Not that it mattered because Aunt Auria made up for any disappointment, being carefree and witty and, unlike her older sister, blessed with an even temper. My father maintained that he came away from a day spent in her company feeling … better. At ten years old I wasn’t sure what he meant, never having felt anything but good, but I know now.