Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  There was a flurry of small talk about our journey, about London, about the resurgent warm weather and then he started to perform, becoming almost speechless with bewilderment.

  “Doctor, I cannot see for the life of me why your local Health Trust would not consider this a viable proposition.”

  Laura glanced at me, smiling. “I’m delighted to hear you say…”

  “I’ve had someone look the plans over. We have a few questions to ask, as you might expect. Another day perhaps.”

  We’d been in the room five minutes and he was already hedging. Questions? Another day?

  “So this meeting is just … broad outlines?” I said.

  “Precisely.”

  “May I ask a question?”

  The shrug was as French as they get. “Of course, Monsieur, but allow me to ask one first? The name Nathan Hawk is familiar.” He frowned as if bringing to mind some distant headline. “You are a police officer, I think.”

  “I was, but if you’re trying to place me, it’s either because of my son, an actor, or The Pollicott Shootings 2003.” He raised a finger at the mention of the latter, but allowed me to continue. “Six people killed by a single gunman, a farm worker by the name of Christopher Riley. Perhaps you remember his mother? I called her the seventh victim.”

  He remembered her only too well and asked if I knew what had become of her. It was the old trick of turning the burden of uncertainty back on the person claiming the original knowledge. I said I’d lost touch with Mrs Riley and returned him to my own question. What line of business was he in before he became Investment Facilitator for ASC?

  “I was the CEO of a tyre company, based in Marseilles. My daughters run it now. We make tyres for army vehicles, earth movers, combine harvesters.” He smiled. “We are not Pirelli, but if Pirelli isn’t careful we might soon be.”

  “And what exactly is Argent Sans Cordes?”

  He glanced at Laura. “Didn’t Dr Wilson explain?”

  “I’m not sure he knew either,” I said.

  Raphael’s English was perfect, I suspected, but he deliberately lost some of the flow when he needed to give half answers. “We are exactly how it says on the tin. Money with no strings. A group of European businessmen committed to putting back some of what we have taken out.”

  “And what have you taken out?” Laura asked, more to prevent me from doing all the talking than because she wanted to know.

  “Oil, gas, coal, metals, minerals, precious stones. Other things too, more human.” He smiled at her. “These things leave holes.”

  He was playing it with an air of regret, even a touch of guilty conscience, broken when his assistant brought in some of the best coffee I’d tasted in a month. As Laura sipped hers, seated on the edge of the chair, legs leaning to one side, I could sense her doubt that I was “seeing this from all angles”. When the assistant had left the room, she opened her mouth to speak but I beat her to it.

  “Why did Dr Wilson approach Dr Peterson and tell her about ASC?”

  “You must ask him,” said Raphael.

  “I see. It was his idea, not yours. Only you spoke as if you knew him.”

  He wasn’t sure if I’d tripped him up on purpose or bumped into him accidentally.

  “I know him certainly,” he said, with a smile. “He is an English eccentric, a man of values, a great friend of Argent Sans Cordes. For his own reasons, based on a lifetime healing the sick, he is appalled, as we are, that medical money is so hard to come by.”

  I sat back in the chair as if that answer, bristling with high moral tone, was a satisfactory one. Laura relaxed, as did Raphael, who then tried to steer the conversation towards his real purpose.

  “Doctor, as I say, it is amazing that your Health Trust denies you this essential finance. Your work is important, in order to do it you must have staff, equipment and, for God’s sake, a suitable building. I have a proposition. I would like to make something of a… test case of your project. I tread carefully here, but you come to us for money - not begging, no, but in need. Is this not shameful?”

  Laura wanted to take issue with that, a foreigner on the verge of criticising her beloved NHS; she was allowed to do that, others weren’t.

  “I agree with you, Monsieur Raphael,” I said, quickly. “It goes against the founding precepts of the Health Service. Test case, you say? What did you have in mind?”

  He turned to me, sensing reservation in Laura and hoping, believing, that I had influence over her.

  “We would film, before and after, but also as we build the new premises. We say it can be done at a reasonable price and look what you get for your money.” He gestured down to the plans. “The most up-to-date, cost-effective means of supplying medical care to a community.”

  “You have people who can bring this into the public arena?” I said.

  He smiled. “In my mind I look round the ASC board and I see men who have sold everything to the people of Europe, from cars to cuckoo clocks. We will have no trouble selling this Health Centre.”

  “I like the sound of it,” I said. “You say you’ve looked at the plans?”

  “Briefly. I’m not a qualified architect, of course…”

  “You had an architect look for you.” He nodded. “I wonder if he had the same misgivings that I did? I’m speaking as a policeman and my concern is security at the rear of the building.” I gestured down to the plans. “Pages 18, 19, 20.”

  “You never mentioned this before,” said Laura.

  It sounded as if she might want a response to that but something about my demeanour held her back. Raphael smiled as if some old woman was making a fuss and eventually he picked up the plans, flicked over pages 12 and 13, jumped to 16, 17. And then he paused, trying to turn the next three pages.

  “They seem to be stuck at the top corner.” He swivelled round to his desk and reached for a letter opener. “How has such a thing…?”

  “I glued them together,” I said.

  I heard Laura put cup to saucer, then saw her lean forward and place both on the table. Raphael stopped trying to ease the guilty pages apart, looked at me and then laughed.

  “You think it’s funny?” I said. “Or is it nerves?”

  “You can’t have done this,” he said. “We have had an architect…”

  “There’s been no architect any more than you’ve looked at them yourself.”

  “Nathan, what the hell do you…?”

  I held out my arm to her but she batted it away, rose from the chair and began pacing the office. Raphael was still looking at me.

  “Why?”

  “Because nobody gives away so much money without wanting something in return.”

  He flared his hands up towards the ceiling. “This is outrageous! You come here in friendly guise, you wait, you wait, and then reveal your little trick. And now you insult me.” He turned to Laura, who was pretty pissed off with me too. “Doctor, you should choose your friends, your ‘advisors’, more carefully.”

  “You’ve lied twice in 20 minutes,” I said. “First about the plans…”

  “So what? Diplomacy. I haven’t time for studying plans. You want your money or not?”

  It was a serious question and he’d fired it straight at Laura, who was about to answer.

  “Then you lied again,” I said. “You pretended not to know me, but I think you knew exactly who I was the moment you clapped eyes.”

  He gripped his head with the fingertips of both hands. “I had no idea! The name rang a bell. Nathan Hawk. Jesus, I remember the case, The Pollicott Shootings, six people…”

  “There was no shooting. I made it up on the spur, to get a measure of you. You followed me, lamb to kebabs, so anxious are you to get into this lady’s life, that of her colleagues, her patients, the building she works in, all to see if we’ve hidden what you’re looking for. And you’re now willing to pay through the nose for the privilege.”

  “What is this mysterious thing I look for?” he said in a last ditch
attempt at keeping the charade alive.

  “It has something to do with a young man called Patrick Scott who disappeared a year ago, murdered, I believe.”

  He walked over to the window, not to get inspiration from the view but to give himself thinking time. When he turned back to us he was no longer the front man of some philanthropic business cartel, all oily charm and diplomacy, he was his real self, the street thug from Marseilles who’d fought his way into money, power and respectability.

  “You don’t know anything about money, do you, Mr Hawk.”

  I admitted that I knew very little, never having had more of it than I needed.

  “It doesn’t mean much these days. You have a saying here. Made round to go round? It does that, faster and faster, moving so quickly that nobody values it. Ideas, they are the lasting currency of our age. You have an idea, it may make you millions, billions, but more than that it can change the future. I argue this: today there is not one idea…” He prodded his head at the side as if he were trying to punch a hole in it. “…not one single idea that cannot be brought to fruition. A hundred years ago, 50 years ago, we had big, fanciful ideas but not the means to realise them. Today we have the means but not the ideas. Have we reached the limit of our imagination, perhaps? I don’t know.”

  I didn’t know either, but I had an uncomfortable feeling that he was dropping into broken English again and leading me up some garden path. Laura was listening to him politely, not liking what she heard, which didn’t necessarily mean that I’d be in the clear when it came to a showdown about the quarter of a million quid. Nevertheless, something was telling me to grab her by the hand and drag her from the room but as I reached out to her she headed for the door without any help from me. Raphael followed.

  “I can make your Health Centre happen, Doctor,” he said, trying to regain her confidence. “Do not put it aside because of what's been said today. ASC has money to spend on ideas great and small, be they life changing or simply…” He stroked the plans, as if blessing them, and returned them to her. “…beneficial at a certain time, a certain place. Patrick Scott had an idea, something so revolutionary, so all-changing, that when we heard about it…”

  He had slipped Patrick’s name into the conversation almost casually, but he must have known that I wouldn’t let it pass without comment.

  “So, you knew him. Did you also kill him?”

  He spoke with a fair imitation of passion, marked by a classic French windmilling of arms. “ASC does not murder people! We provide finance and when something so important is in danger of being whipped away from its creator, it is our duty to step in. With money, yes, but much else besides to help him achieve his goal.”

  Laura doesn’t like waffle at the best of times and certainly not in deliberately awkward English. “What on earth are you talking about?” she asked. “What is this revolutionary idea you keep on about?”

  He stopped and smiled, then said quietly, “It was a pleasure meeting you, Doctor.”

  Laura looked at me, frowning, then back at Raphael. His half baked homily about ASC being the banker of ideas hadn’t been waffle at all, it had been carefully aimed at forcing her to reveal that she hadn’t the faintest idea what Patrick Scott’s creation was. And if she didn’t know, the chances were that I didn’t either. I had two choices at that point. One was to break a chair over the Frenchman's head, the other was to leave him wondering if I might still turn out to be a pile of trouble. I settled for the latter and with Laura too stunned too object, I pulled her from the room, across the Persian carpet in reception and out onto the street. It was a triumph of restraint on my part, achieved without the aid of The Map.

  I’d grabbed her coat on the way out and now held it open for her to slip into but she must have seen it as the bull sees the matador’s cape. She didn’t charge at me, she yelled, quite out of character.

  “What the bloody hell were you doing in there?”

  “Exposing him for the fraud he is.”

  “His morality is his affair. I came to see him because I want money which no one else is willing to give me.”

  “We agreed that today wasn't about money.”

  I flung her coat over my shoulder and crossed the road, dodging some bad-tempered traffic. She came after me, hampered by the daft shoes she was wearing, part of the impression she’d wanted to make on Julien Raphael.

  “Wait!” she shouted. “This is salvageable.”

  “You don’t want his cash, Laura. I saw you in there, the moment you decided to turn it down.”

  “We all know what a mind-reader you are. Pity you’re so often wrong. I need that money. Winchendon Health Centre needs it.”

  I was at the gate in the iron railings surrounding the small square, aware in the moment I turned to her of so many details, courtesy of a rush of adrenalin that was doubtless trying to forewarn me. A young man in his late 20s was crossing the park with a girl, laughing as they approached until they heard our raised voices. They stopped, fell silent, wondering what to do. Some children were playing on a slide 20 yards away, watched over my their mothers, one of whom turned towards me and alerted her companion. The children played on.

  “You’ve become one of those people who sees crime as incidental to another purpose, even expedient,” I shouted. “If you get your money, Patrick Scott’s death will have been worth it.”

  “How dare you accuse me of that!”

  She made a grab for me but I’d opened the gate and entered. She stumbled, again the fault of the shoes. The gate slammed before she could follow me. My mobile rang. I glanced at it. Jaikie. I didn’t answer it, just walked the path to the far side. Laura entered behind me, calling out for me to stop. People, other than the young couple, the mothers and children, were turning to me. Laura was catching up. Her own mobile rang. Jaikie, I presumed. She ignored it. I could see the cars on the other side of the far railings. One of them was a metallic silver Volvo saloon. They don’t come any more ordinary than that.

  “What if everything he said was as innocent as pie?” Laura yelled at me. “He didn’t have time to read the plans, he was being diplomatic. That is still what they do. They give money…”

  I stopped and turned to her. “And your friend Dr Wilson, how does he know about them? An enquiring mind? Or did somebody pay off the mortgage on his place in St Lucia?”

  She drew level with me, still shouting. “Why does everyone have to be a criminal?”

  “Because too bloody many of them are. Hardened or in the making. And age doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “He’s a doctor, for God’s sake!”

  “So was Harold Shipman!”

  I turned to carry on walking and that’s when I saw George Corrigan, approaching from the far corner. He was dressed in the sheepskin flying jacket, open to reveal a denim shirt. The check must have been in the wash, I remember thinking. I glared at him as Laura asked me what he was doing here. He came near enough for her to ask him herself.

  “Sergeant Corrigan, talk about an unpropitious moment. Would you care to explain?”

  “She means fuck off, George. This is private time, a day out with friends.”

  “Hold on a second,” he said.

  The strangest things put a stamp on momentous events, as if to give them ease of recall. For me that day it was a branch from one of the trees overhanging the footpath in the park, some leaves still on it from the summer gone, some buds opening for the spring to come, both anomalies of the volatile weather that marked out that year.

  I reached the far gate before Corrigan did and closed it behind me. I turned sharply and made off up the pavement, opposite The British Museum. I could see them, eyes in the back of my head, as he opened the gate and let Laura through first, then hurried past her to catch me up. More people stopped to observe.

  Not everyone. One man, mid-40s crossed the road at an angle way ahead of me. Old donkey jacket, hands in the pockets of it, jeans and Doc Martins, greying hair held close beneath a greas
y baseball cap. I stopped because I recognised him. And as Corrigan drew level with me, followed by Laura still berating me, so the donkey jacket stopped and took his hands from his pockets. He was holding a semi-automatic pistol and extended both arms. The whole combination locked - hand, elbow, shoulder - as he took aim and fired then turned with such agility that I remember thinking he must be a great deal fitter than his age suggested. He looked back as he ran, saw the mistake he’d made. Somehow he had shot the wrong man. He considered returning to put it right but his ride home was already braking in the stuttering traffic. The donkey jacket climbed in and sped off in the metallic silver Volvo saloon.

  As Corrigan bent at the waist and staggered forward, he dropped his own side-arm and clutched his stomach. He was falling. I’m not sure if people around were screaming or not, I would imagine they were, but I could have heard a pin drop. And in that collage of terror only Laura seemed to be moving, shoes abandoned as part of her trademark response to a crisis. As Corrigan fell into the gutter she turned him, pulled open the sheepskin, ripped the denim shirt wide, unfastened the belt to his jeans and leaned as if she were about to perform CPR. She was too low down on his body for that and, as it flashed through my mind to tell her so, she called for the plans to the surgery. I wanted to ask why but didn’t, just took them from her handbag. It wasn’t the plans so much as their polythene cover she needed and she placed it over his bare midriff and applied pressure. The blood foamed away beneath it as he exhaled.

  Sirens were already beginning to break up the unnatural quietness, allowing panicky chatter to build and people to approach. They stood back again when the paramedics arrived. When the police came they took control of people and traffic. All I could see throughout was our local GP, expensively dressed and shoeless, kneeling in the gutter, weight and effort all focussed on the man whose life she was trying to save.