Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  “He sure is keen to spend that money. You know, I wouldn’t mind seeing these famous plans myself.”

  She nodded across the kitchen to her briefcase. “Help yourself.”

  I took them up to my office to scan them into my computer. The 40-page document comprised surveys, drawings, reports, permissions, promises, recommendations and every damn thing you can think of to keep pocket Hitlers in work. And still the Trust had denied Laura and her colleagues funding. I printed off a copy for Raphael and then put a dab of glue on the top right hand corner of pages 18, 19 and 20, placed the document in an A4 envelope and sealed it.

  -10-

  It wasn’t a day for visiting antique shops, whatever your purpose. The sky was as leaden and full of threat as only a late autumn sky in London can be. The weather was reflected in people's mood and pace. Those on foot hurried to get indoors, those in cars snarled at each other. I had a minor confrontation myself on the Shepherds Bush roundabout with a kid in a Peugeot but it was such a lousy day neither of us wanted to stop, get out and take it any further.

  Belinda’s shop was easy enough to find. It was set in a mid-Victorian terrace, the original building flat and square in design but oddly beautiful for all that, even on a day like this. When I entered, the brass bell on a copper arm rang and a middle-aged woman looked up from her den in the corner. She’d been reading a book and must have reached an important point in the story if her barely concealed irritation was anything to go by. Even so she bade me good morning and asked if she could help. I said I wanted to look round. She smiled, told me there was more stuff upstairs and went back to her book.

  As Kevin Stapleton had said, the place was more suited to interior designers wanting to historify modern penthouse flats, than to serious antiques collectors. My father would have called it a junk shop and refused to go near it. Times had changed beyond his belief. There was hardly a price tag below £200 and that for the type of stuff he would have thrown out 40 years ago.

  It wasn't all brass fenders, pine furniture and gilt mirrors, however. In the centre of the shop stood a dozen wooden replicas of Easter Island statues, arranged in a circle as if to repel marauders from all angles. Their grim faces were no more inviting to a potential buyer than their prices. Each of them was marked up at more than £1000 and as I was gazing back at one, trying to fathom the appeal, I received a text message from Jim Kelloway. It simply said, Guv, no report of a Patrick Scott missing on the Police National Computer. JK. The news itself hadn’t surprised me: officially Patrick still didn’t exist. And I’m not saying I’d expected kiss, kiss and a smiley face from Jim, but an implied offer of more help wouldn’t have gone amiss. It seemed that the deeper I delved into this case, the more isolated I became. Was that my imagination or was there a grain of truth to it?

  I finished my browse and went over to the lady and her book. The den she was in was fenced off and pokey, no doubt with a cash tin down out of sight and an alarm straight through to the local nick: two tin cans and a length of string, by the feel of it. The pin board behind her was covered in business cards, taxi numbers, a few newspaper cuttings about the shop, and the inevitable family photos. Again she stopped reading and smiled up at me.

  “See anything you like?”

  “Plenty.” I nodded at the snapshots, specifically at a photo of her holding a toddler in her arms. “Yours?”

  It was routine flattery but she smiled appreciatively.

  “Grandson.”

  I held back from saying that she didn’t look old enough because, frankly, it was far from the truth, but I did ask if Belinda was around.

  “She’s taken the day off.”

  I turned away and called upon the spirit of Jaikie to deliver my disappointment. “The first day I travel into London for over a year. Will I ever learn? I should have checked.”

  “I could call her, but it’ll only go to message.”

  “Or I could just drop round?”

  The years may not have been kind to her face but they’d made her into a wily old bird. “If you know the address.”

  I nodded and played the only card left in this particular hand. “Does she still live on the boat?”

  I pointed to one of the photos on the pin board. It was of a red-haired young woman in T-shirt and shorts, sitting at a table on the roof of a narrowboat.

  “She does,” said the book lady. “She’s a regular water gypsy these days.”

  “You mean she moves about, she might not be there?”

  “She’ll be on the boat today alright. Her father's coming back from Turkey, been away a whole month. She likes to be there for him.”

  “They were always close.”

  A remark too far, maybe. For all I knew they might have hated the sight of each other and Belinda could have a dozen other reasons for wanting to be there when he arrived home. That aside, the Grand Union Canal is 137 miles long but this particular photo pinpointed exactly whereabouts on it the boat was moored. In the background I could see the re-vamped Paddington Station. Belinda was tied up in Paddington Basin.

  “I’ll drop round,” I said.

  “You want me to phone, see if she answers?”

  “No, let me surprise her.”

  There was nothing antique about Paddington Basin except the water itself, which smelled a thousand years old. The whole area either side of the canal had been ripped apart and turned into a pastiche of its former self. The towpath and surrounding walkways were a mixture of brand new granite cobbles and machine tooled paving slabs. On the far side of the canal stood the back wall of Paddington Station, on the near side rose the new offices of Marks and Spencer. The firm had evidently subsidised the re-jigging of the area and in return now had something mood-enhancing for their staff to gaze at as they continued to flog the world its underwear.

  I’d parked up in North Wharf Road and walked down to the basin. It was nearly lunchtime and people were out and about. The stationary, gawping ones were late season tourists, those on the move were office workers heading towards the plethora of cafés and bars farther down. All the big names were there, Costa, Subway, Starbucks, trying to push out their smaller competitors who still seemed to be making a decent living, but then at £2.60 a cup minimum that wasn’t surprising.

  There were no more than a dozen narrowboats moored on the stretch I could see and for a moment I considered calling out Belinda’s name and waiting for a response.

  I didn’t have to, she was expecting me. The book lady had obviously phoned ahead to warn her and, as I approached, she emerged through the cabin door and stood in the rear well of a boat called Scorpius. Dressed in jeans and a thick Scandinavian cardigan several sizes too big for her, she was tensed up against the drizzly breeze, arms folded, hands hidden, and even from a distance I could tell that Kevin Stapleton was right. Belinda was a natural beauty and her hair was just one of the features that made her so. My mother would have called it titian if she liked the woman, ginger if she didn’t. She had the pale skin that often goes with that colouring and what most would consider to be a perfect face, slightly tapered, with a nose Jaikie would describe as “proper”.

  But it was her lips that said most about her. There was no twitching with nerves, no pouting for effect. At her age, and with the kind of questions I was about to ask her, there should have been.

  She called out to me. “Hallo, there! Who are you?”

  “I’m Nathan Hawk.”

  “Chrissie at the shop said you knew me.”

  “Ah, Chrissie the Reader?” I was all smiles and it was getting painful. How the hell did Jaikie manage it? “I’ve come about Patrick Scott.”

  She closed her eyes and lowered her head. “Oh, dear. You’d better come aboard.”

  They aren’t called narrowboats for nothing. This particular example was six feet ten inches wide and 50 feet long, and try as you will there isn’t much you can fit into 349 square feet of living space. At the far end, the pointed end, was the bedroom evidently and just this side
of it the bathroom. I didn’t use it, imagining it to be much like that in a caravan we once owned. Maggie and I had tackled a few holidays in it with four children and the horrors came flooding back.

  The kitchen was next, compact and fuelled by bottled gas. The living area, in which we were now both standing, was half the size of my garden shed, with walls that sloped inwards, giving the impression that at any moment they would fall in. Belinda invited me to sit down on what she referred to as a sofa. I perched on the edge of it while she went through to the galley to make coffee. She lived here on her own, she said in answer to my enquiry, but didn’t feel lonely. Her father had a boat round the corner in Little Venice, called Sweet Lady Jane. The name said more about his taste in rock music and hankering after the 60s than about history or even his taste in women, she added with a laugh. Jane was twice the size of Scorpius but he used it as both home and office. He had an open offer to go back and live in the flat above the shop but reckoned she needed it more than he did. Probably true.

  She stopped babbling only when she brought the coffees through and placed them on top of the gas fire. As she settled herself on a floor cushion opposite me, the spectacular hair fell around her face as if to curtain off her emotions.

  “I just know you’re going to tell me something dreadful,” she said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re a policeman so you’ve either come to tell me that he’s turned up or that he’s dead.”

  “Neither. I’m looking for him.” I smiled again as reassuringly as I could. “And I thought I’d junked the policeman look ages ago.”

  Policeman or not, it had been unprofessional of me to offer hope by implying that Patrick might be alive, and the trouble with an opening lie is that the follow-up has to be bigger, the one after that bigger still.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Kevin Stapleton.”

  She nodded, unsurprised by the source of my information, but for all her acceptance she was still curious to know how much detail he’d gone into.

  “But he didn’t give you the information you needed?”

  “He said he knows and likes Patrick, but not as well as you do.” Present tense, further confirmation from me that he was still in the land of the living. She opened her hands towards me, inviting questions. “I know this sounds cheesy, Belinda, but what sort of bloke is he?”

  “He’s a one off,” she said, without hesitation. “I mean I know you need a really high IQ to be one, but I think he’s a genius.”

  It was another of those words like ‘brilliant’, dying on its feet from misuse by people who apply the term to football players, dress designers and chefs when the only ability they need is to kick a ball, sew a hem or read a recipe.

  “A hundred and eighty plus,” I said. “That’s the beauty of it, at that level it can’t be measured, but you can still fall in love with it.”

  She laughed. “Is that what I’ve done? Fallen in love? It’s the last thing I wanted to do, I assure you. Clever men are not the best people to throw your cap at. They’re difficult, temperamental and selfish. Those are euphemisms for cruel, unforgiving and egomaniacal, but once you’ve come under their spell, there’s no going back.”

  “You sound as if it happened against your will.”

  She shook her head. “I knew exactly what I was doing. I might have backed off if people like Kevin Stapleton hadn’t persuaded me not to.”

  “Matchmaker, eh?”

  “He wasn’t the only one.” She tossed her hair back and screwed it into a loose knot. “Once my dad took a liking to Pat, that was it. Sat me down one night, gave me the facts of life; the real ones that asked who I’d rather be talking to in 40 years time, Patrick Scott or Kevin Stapleton?”

  “I agree with him. Were you and Kevin ever an item?”

  She smiled. “I assume he’s told you about our one night stand?”

  “Only insofar as it applies to a woman called Henrietta. Have you ever met her?”

  Mention of the name made her pause, not so much to invent, it seemed, as to dredge up a prepared response to this intrusion into the conversation. This competition?

  “I don’t think Henrietta ever existed. He made her up to get me jealous. More fool me, he succeeded.”

  “Why would he want to do that? Or are we back to the cruel, unforgiving egomaniac?”

  She was quick on the defence. “He’s not like that all the time. Mostly he’s insecure, vulnerable, easily damaged.”

  “Maybe that’s what you fell for?”

  “No, but it made me tread warily. I was all for telling Pat about me and Kevin, for example, so we could start afresh, no secrets. Dad reckoned it was all too easy to hurt someone with a truth like that, then blithely ask for their forgiveness. Why risk losing the person you love with some girly confession?”

  “Especially since you’d already cleared the first hurdle. You’d got your boyfriend past your father.”

  “Funny, because they didn’t get on to begin with,” she recalled with affection. “They grew on each other. Like Dad said, Pat was so interesting, so downright clever.”

  “Ah, that’s why you fell for him.”

  “You won’t pin me down, Mr Hawk,” she said with a laugh. “I fell for everything.”

  She reached out for her coffee, took a sip of it, then gestured for me to ask more questions. In answering those I’d already asked she had brought the man she clearly loved back into her life and that had been comforting.

  “Kevin thought you might know where his parents live?”

  She crawled over to a locker beside the door and took out a neat bundle of papers.

  “I used to have their address on my phone but every time I searched my contacts, it would come up and I’d go mental all over again. The fact that he just walked out on me would…” She’d found their details on an old Google map print out. “Here it is. Gerald and Marion Scott, Rushfarthing House, Clarebourne. It’s one of those little villages in the no-man’s land before you reach Milton Keynes.”

  “At which point you turn back?”

  She acknowledged my aversion to Milton Keynes with a smile and I copied down the address in the notebook I still carry.

  “When he disappeared my life kind of halted. Business has been okay, it runs itself, but I haven't felt like making new friends or pitching into a new relationship.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “He came into the shop one day looking for prints for the walls of his new flat.”

  “Where was that?”

  She pointed to my notebook. “At his parents’ house. He kept coming back, bought paintings, old maps, lithographs, far more than he could possibly have needed. One day I asked how big this flat was. Not very, he said, and asked me out to lunch. That was it.”

  “Do you have a photo of him?”

  She thought for a moment and frowned. “No, I don’t, not even on my phone. That’s weird, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not a great one for photos myself.”

  “My dad’s got one,” she suddenly remembered. “He’ll be back from Istanbul today, I can ask him.”

  “When's he due?”

  She glanced at her watch, even though it couldn’t give her an answer to my question. “Any time between now and midnight. Flying in via Amsterdam. Peculiar people, the Dutch. Take off and land when they feel like it.”

  “All that funny tobacco. When did you last see Patrick?”

  “October 31st, day before I went up north on a buying trip. I was hoping he’d come with me, I needed a driver, but he’d broken a bone in his foot a couple of months earlier. It was on the mend but he hadn’t looked after it properly.”

  “When you say you needed a driver…”

  “Never passed my test. Chrissie came with me in the end. We did auctions in Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow.”

  “Did you call Patrick while you were away?”

  “Twenty times. Called his mobile and the ho
use, left messages to no avail. His parents were away too: Cuba, of all places. Do you know what I think?”

  “No, but I can tell you were hacked off with him.”

  “I think he waited till we were all safely out of the way and then disappeared into the sunset.”

  It was an explanation that I’d listed and then struck out. “Did you have any inkling beforehand that he might do that?”

  “No, but then people who are left behind never do, I gather.”

  “You’ve thought about it since? Any explanation?”

  “Not really, no. I was just trying not to face the obvious.”

  “All the more reason why someone should have reported him missing.”

  She raised a hand. “Someone did. Me, the day after I returned from the north. Buckingham Police Station. November 12th.”

  Her answer took me by surprise, being a direct contradiction to what Jim Kelloway had told me an hour previously. I said rather feebly, “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. He was my boyfriend.”

  If his disappearance had been reported to police, it meant the details of it had been removed, probably at the same time his NHS records were scrubbed. I was just about to come clean and help her “to face the obvious”, as she’d put it, when there was a knock on the cabin roof and Belinda’s demeanour changed completely. The distressed beauty, who perversely had enjoyed reliving the agony of being dumped, became in a flash the child who’d just been told that Daddy was home. She leaped to her feet and rushed out of the cabin, up onto the towpath. I heard snippets of the exchange between two people, one of them Belinda squealing and wanting to know what he’d brought back for her. I peered out through the window, a genuine porthole, and up on the cobbled walkway she was embracing a man slightly taller than herself dressed in a long, dark overcoat and leather gloves. They clung on in silence and then separated to look at each other. He said something along the lines of “what a welcome” and suggested dinner that evening. She wanted the Palestinian near the shop, he was fed up with Arab cookery, preferred somewhere Italian.