Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  “Doesn’t mean what?” I prompted.

  “That he’s lost. But if he were to be, could you find him?”

  Jaikie glanced at me, wondering how much of a lie I was prepared to tell.

  “I’d need to know certain things about him,” I said.

  “Are you one of these private detectives?” Gerald asked, clearly not a fan of the species.

  I nodded and side-stepped. “I gather Belinda’s father came to visit you.”

  Gerald nodded and turned to include his wife. “Mike Hewitt, dear. Good-looking and well-mannered, was your verdict.” It meant nothing, so he gave her more. “He bought and sold paintings, took a particular fancy to the one of your father on the stairs? Said he knew the artist’s work?”

  That struck a chord and she was delighted. “So he did. He too thought Patrick was lost. Why does everyone believe that?”

  “People are worried,” I explained. “When was Mike Hewitt here?”

  She looked at me, trying to keep pace, unwilling to accept that it was a losing battle. I tried to help.

  “Belinda’s father, Mike Hewitt?”

  “Oh, last Tuesday,” she replied.

  She turned to her husband who said, “I think you’ll find that it’s longer ago than that, dear. He stopped coming about the same time as Belinda.”

  “A year ago?” I said.

  “But it was definitely a Tuesday,” his wife insisted. “I remember because Mrs Brennan was here…”

  “The cleaner,” said Gerald.

  “…she comes on a Tuesday.”

  I was nodding a great deal, not because I agreed with anything - there wasn’t much to take issue with - but a show of acquiescence can bring you closer to a goal in a fraction of the time spent frowning or, God forbid, shaking your head.

  “Belinda told me that Patrick lives in a flat here,” I said. “May I see it?”

  “If it will help you, I think you should,” said Marion, with a sudden burst of purpose. She realised that she’d made a decision without first deferring to her husband. “Is that alright, Gerald, if you take Mr…?” She faltered at the name, having thought she would remember it.

  “Hawk,” I said.

  “Hawk, Hawk, Hawk,” she muttered, trying to commit it to her crumbling memory.

  “Subfamily Accipitrinae, dear,” Gerald said gently.

  I’ve been called many things in my life, but this was the first time anyone had broken into Latin. Gerald pointed to the doorway through to the hall and I followed him, first suggesting that Jaikie stay and help Marion finish unpacking the shopping.

  The stairs were a wide, bannistered sweep that turned halfway up and then rose to a landing off of which were half a dozen bedrooms behind heavy oak doors. On the walls hung oil paintings, mainly portraits, including the one of Marion’s father Mike Hewitt had admired. He was an academic, Gerald told me, in fact Marion came from a dynasty of zoologists and had lectured in the subject herself. Her speciality had been siphonatera, better known to the man in the street as the common or garden flea, a creature she still held in high regard.

  A second, narrower flight of stairs took us to the attic flat. It comprised just three rooms built into the roof space: a bedroom, a living room and a small kitchen and, just as Belinda Hewitt had led me to believe, every wall was crammed with prints, maps and lithographs bought from her shop. In all other regards, however, it was a pretty anaemic place for a man in his early 20s, uncomfortably clean and well looked after. Patrick’s mother came up here every day, Gerald said, to check that the place was ready for his return and if something needed doing Mrs Brennan would see to it. As a result the dishes and cutlery were stacked on the drainer, the carpets were hoovered, clean clothes were folded on a freshly made bed.

  Gerald followed me round, hands deep in his pocket, as I strolled this crow’s nest to see if it had anything useful to tell me. Whatever it might once have revealed had been removed, not by Marion or Mrs Brennan but by Gerald himself, or so his confidence that I wouldn’t find anything suggested. Even so, once I’d made my brief sweep of the place he was keen to go back downstairs, anxious that in his absence his wife might have told Jaikie more than he wanted us to know. I perched on one of the stools at the breakfast bar and Gerald waited as patiently as he could.

  “So, have you never wondered what might have happened to him?”

  “Of course I have,” he said, quietly irritated. “Do you really think I took the disappearance of my only son in my stride?”

  “How did you cope?”

  He removed his hands from his pockets and laid them on the counter, fingers splayed. “I gave myself a fresh explanation every day as to why he’d gone, until I couldn’t bear it any longer. The speculation was exhausting, reducing me to a feeble old man. So I stopped.”

  “Belinda was the one who reported him missing.”

  “Yes, to be honest I thought he’d gone up north with her, but apparently not.”

  I’m not sure which of us was steering the other away from the obvious truth that Patrick was no longer alive, but we were avoiding it like the plague.

  “You liked her? You thought she was good for him? Along with her father, you thought they’d make a go of things?” He nodded. “Did Patrick see a future for them?”

  Gerald nodded. “He once told me so.”

  “Then why do you think he left without a word?”

  “We were in Cuba at the time.”

  “I know where you were, Mr Scott, and it has nothing to do with the point I’m making.”

  He stared at me, clearly offended by my implication that perhaps he hadn’t asked the right questions, of himself, of Belinda, even of the police.

  “I told you, I’ve a hundred explanations for why he disappeared, all of them leading me right back here to this very room where I last saw him. I came up to say we were off to the airport, October the 20th a year ago. It seems like 20. You’ve clearly never had anyone go missing on you, Mr Hawk. Oh, no doubt as a policeman you’ve overseen your fair share of disappearances, but that isn’t quite the same. When your only child … leaves, it’s absurd to say that a piece of you dies because that isn’t what happens at all. That essential part which is them doesn’t die. It lives on, in the sharpest of relief, only somewhere else where you can’t reach it. And while you picture it 50 times a day, this other life they might be living, you know you’ll never be part of it. That’s the hell you go through and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

  He stopped, turned away and headed to the door. He’d spoken movingly, to be sure, but I knew no more about his son now than I had done when I’d carried the shopping in.

  “What sort of lad was he? Was he sociable, arty, sporty? Did he have any particular interests? I mean I know he liked skiing…”

  “He was a rather reserved lad, as a matter of fact. Didn’t have many friends.”

  “He had a couple that I know of, apart from Belinda,” I said. “A chap called Kevin, a girl called Henrietta.”

  He didn’t like that for some reason. “If you’re suggesting that he was two-timing Belinda…”

  “Friends, I said, not lovers. So you’ve never met this Henrietta?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me that he wasn’t very clever either, even though I’ve been told he was a brilliant engineer.”

  He gestured to the door but I stayed put and tried to soften a little.

  “Please don’t think I can’t appreciate the jam you’re in, Gerald. Your wife.”

  “I can manage so long as people respect her right to fade in her own particular way and my right to stand by her while she does so.”

  “You’ll keep him alive and on the verge of returning home, until she’s forgotten him?”

  He paused for a moment. “That isn't a crime.”

  “Not one you can be charged with, no, but what about the young man who lives in that world you can’t reach? I think you and I both believe that he’s
dead. I think he’s been killed. If you like I can take you through my reasoning, I can describe the dreadful things that were done to his body…”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said sternly.

  “You’d sooner go on pretending it hadn’t happened? It’s not an option for me, I’m afraid, so I’ll ask you again, only this time the real question. Why do you think your son might have been murdered?”

  He shook his head in an end of tether show of despair. “I really don’t have the faintest idea.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’ve kept far too much back, from the police, the press, from me today. You’ve disinfected this flat till there isn’t a trace of him. And you want me to believe that it’s all for love, the altruism of sparing your wife the agony of losing her only child? Well, I think there’s another reason…”

  “I want you to leave now.”

  “…I don't know what it is but at least one other person has been killed to stop me finding out. His name is Charles Drayton. Does that mean anything?”

  He gestured once again to the open door and this time I fell in with his wishes and we made our way downstairs. On the main staircase I paused at the stone window and looked out over the gardens to the rear of Rushfarthing House, across the village rooftops of Clarebourne and onward into the cold haze of the horizon. The only thing that broke the view was a web of pylons fanning out from the changing station at Steeple Claydon, carrying electricity to Aylesbury, Buckingham, Milton Keynes and beyond. In the garden itself there was little colour, of course, with it being October, nearly November. The outbuildings, of stone like the house itself, were in reasonable repair, though the paths leading up to them were punctured by weeds. Set in the patio right below us was a swimming pool, accessible from the French windows no doubt. It was looking sorry for itself. However much water had been emptied at the end of the summer, the rains of late September had filled it up again. A winter cover had been applied but the central dip showed the water to be as green as pea soup. Gerald saw me notice it.

  “Patrick's the only one who uses it now,” he said, returning us to the charade of his son still being alive. “I shall open it up again in the spring, if need be. It’ll endorse the proposition that he might suddenly appear. You won’t tell her anything to the contrary, will you Mr Hawk?”

  Downstairs, Marion and Jaikie were getting on famously. They’d finished unpacking and she’d taken him through to the living room, a room furnished with baggy sofas and other furniture that Mrs Brennan had little regard for if the cuts and bruises on the table legs, the dresser and bookcases were anything to go by.

  Jaikie had been telling Marion Scott about All Good Men and True and she’d struggled to get a grasp on it. It was a film and Jaikie was an actor. Those two facts she could cope with. Where she came unstuck was over the story being set in the last war, 70-odd years ago, and Jaikie being only 30. He’d tried to help her, saying it was a kind of reconstruction, a snippet of history retold for the present day. The frowning began when she asked about the events that had befallen him in Casablanca in 1942 and he came up against her superior knowledge of history, locked away in her memory and now under attack. What she’d always accepted as fact was being retold to her as fiction and, unable to separate the two, she’d become distressed and tearful. I’ve never known Jaikie so pleased to see me walk in through a door.

  Marion herself turned to me and went off at another, brighter tangent. “Is this the man you told me about?”

  “My father, Nathan Hawk.”

  “Subfamily Accipitrinae. You didn’t say he was an actor.”

  “I’m the actor.”

  “Right…”

  She looked at her husband to see just how badly she’d got things wrong and he smiled benignly.

  “Mr Hawk and his son are just leaving, dear. Where did I put the handset for the gates?”

  She smiled. “Ah, so I’m not the only one who forgets things.”

  “It’s been a pleasure meeting you,” Jaikie said, giving her his smile.

  She remained seated, took the offered hand and gazed up at him and for a moment her life became simple and straightforward again, untroubled by the havoc in her mind as she flirted with a young man she liked the look of. “Likewise. I do hope we meet again.”

  She suddenly tensed up, raising a finger for us to listen to something outside in the front garden. I’d heard it a split second earlier, the sound of the wrought iron gates being rattled, not as if someone were trying to force them open, more as if they were climbing over them.

  Gerald excused himself from the room and it was obvious from the manner and speed of his departure that he was off to meet someone he didn’t much care for. His wife was resourceful enough to know that a situation like this required cover-up and began to speak in a loud voice about the history of Cuba. Encountering her usual trouble with time-scale, she rambled back and forth between the slave trade of the 1600s and the government of Fidel Castro.

  Inevitably, the conversation taking place in the kitchen began to reach us the more heated it became. There were three voices, including Gerald Scott’s. His side of the argument was considered and unhurried but his visitors were fully intent upon getting answers to their questions. One man had a high-pitched, rasping voice and he might easily have been mistaken for a woman but for the occasional heavy thump on the table. His companion, older by the sound of it, was simply coarse and loud.

  “Who are these people?” I asked Marion.

  She stopped her brief lecture immediately. “I don’t know.”

  I decided not to chase her down on the matter but moved closer to the door, in spite of a warning from Jaikie to take care. Through in the kitchen the younger man was now making the plates jump on the table in time with each of his points.

  “You know what we want. You’ve known all along. Why don't you spare yourself more grief.”

  “I gave you the computer,” said Gerald Scott calmly.

  “There was nothing on the bloody computer. Names, addresses, a glorified notebook.”

  I could picture Gerald’s grandiloquent shrug. “Well, I’m sorry, that’s all I ever had.”

  The elder of his two visitors rose from the table, scraping back his chair as he did so.

  “Where did you put the car?” he asked. “They don’t just evaporate. Have you sold it?”

  “I’ve told you before, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You do know the reason we’re asking, I hope?” This was the younger man again. “People up ahead of us are getting impatient and here are you and your wife out here all on your own…”

  “That sort of talk won’t get you far!” said Gerald, recognising the threat.

  “Nor will your cantankerousness. Last time we were here you said you’d have another look for a disc, you’d go through his things. Have you done that, or do we have to look ourselves?”

  Gerald assured them that he’d searched high and low but still hadn’t found anything. Through the gap at the hinges of the sitting room door and across the passageway, I had a glimpse of the two men. Both were on their feet now, both had their backs to me, but even so I could tell from the way they stood, the way they interacted, that I knew them. First thoughts always shoot back over 30 years of being a police officer; every villain I ever nicked is lodged in my memory but these two weren’t from those unhallowed ranks. They were later, possibly even recent. So where had I been and met two men, one with a squeaky voice and a heavy fist, the other his gofer?

  They still showed no sign of turning round. Instead they were leaning across the table to Gerald, who sat like an elderly cat, refusing to expend unnecessary energy while they continued to harangue him about a disc, a car and the possibility of another computer. His answer at every stage was the same. He didn’t know what they were talking about and, from personal experience, I can vouch for that being the most aggravating answer of all, liable to bring out the worst in the inquisitor.

  It was probabl
y the constant reference to the car that finally led me to their identity and just as I realised it, the elder of the two men turned away from his companion and confirmed my suspicion with a perfectly etched profile. He was the elder of the two I’d seen in the distance at Charles Drayton’s house in Tilbury. They’d been looking at the red MG Sports his wife had been left with and, according to her, they’d returned that same evening and bought it. I turned and went over to the French windows.

  “Where are you off to?” Jaikie asked, rising.

  “To get something from the Land Rover.”

  “Not the tyre lever?” he said apprehensively.

  “Something far more dangerous than that. Carry on with the history lesson, Mrs Scott.”

  As I stepped out onto the terrace I heard her pick up from exactly where she’d left off and she was still in full flood when I returned. I remember thinking what a fascinating place Cuba sounded, what a superb teacher Marion Scott must have been. However, her class of one was no longer listening. He was standing in my way.

  “Two blokes, Dad? Let me help.”

  It was an awkward moment at which to be torn. I wanted to impress him with my ability to handle a situation like this but didn’t want him to see me at my very worst, reducing two fellow human beings to a blubbering pile. He’d seen me lose my temper often enough, of course, but no one in my family has ever taken that seriously. I patted his cheek and declined his offer.

  In the kitchen an uneasy calm had descended following Gerald’s inability or, as the two men would have it, his bloody-minded refusal to help them. They were now planning to search the house, top to bottom, in spite of Gerald reminding them that they’d done so twice before, cellar to rafters.

  “On both those occasions, we left everything intact,” said the squeaker, “This time we might not be so careful.”

  It was an almost perfect cue, as I’m sure Jaikie would have agreed, and I muffed it. I’d meant to enter saying, “More careful than you were at Plum Tree Cottage?” and halfway through the sentence I forgot which fruit tree Laura’s house was named after. Or, to put it Jaikie’s way, I dried. The two men straightened up and turned to me, less alarmed by my presence, I think, than bewildered by my opening blunder.