Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  “I talked it over with my boss. He said I should ‘pick away at the scab, see if there’s any pus underneath’.”

  I nodded. “I used to have one who spoke like that. Point is, do you trust him?”

  “Sort of. Mind you, he didn’t give me the resources I needed.” He broke off and, with a separate effort, smiled. “I called in one of ‘those’ favours. A girl who used to work on the Police National Computer. She got onto a friend who’s still there and you know what? Patrick Scott was reported missing.”

  “By Belinda Hewitt.”

  “How come you know that?”

  “She told me, I believed her.”

  He paused to compute the implications of that, the main one being that I’d found Patrick Scott’s girlfriend and paid her a visit.

  “If it’s on the Police Computer, how come Jim Kelloway didn’t pick it up?” I said. “Or is this where it gets out of my league?”

  “Mine too. There’s a database, tucked away behind a pack of firewalls, stuff that doesn’t get deleted so much as back-burnered. It’s the kind of crap that might jump up and bite police in the arse one day, so we need to know what it was all about in the first place.”

  “And me bringing Patrick to life falls into that category?”

  “He’s on the database sure enough but there’s precious little intel to go with him.”

  He was searching my face, wondering how much more to tell me and he needed prompting. “Precious little doesn’t mean nothing.”

  “One name attached. Maybe a suspect, maybe not…”

  “If not a suspect, then what?”

  He scanned my face again and I saw the moment when he decided to take me all the way into his confidence.

  “That’s where I was heading before yesterday. I’d fixed up to meet him next week, Monday, but as you can see I may not be able to make it. Why don’t you go in my place?”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Edward Rochester. He’s some kind of crank philanthropist, money to burn, no sense of how to put out the fire.”

  “Rochester?” I muttered.

  “Like the town in Kent.”

  “Like the bloke in Jane Eyre.” Maybe Marion Scott hadn’t simply drawn on her core memory for the name. The man really did exist. “Where will I find him?”

  He winced, though not with pain this time. “Easy enough to find, not so easy to reach. Sodding great security jungle between him and the outside world.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  I slid the bench back away from the bed and leaned forward, elbows to knees. I must have looked especially worried.

  “What’s wrong?” said Corrigan.

  “I’ve never been in this position before, needing to thank someone for saving my life.”

  He would have laughed out loud if he’d been sure that it wouldn’t damage him. “Don’t go thinking I wanted to do it, Hawk. It was Pavlov’s dog. The gun came out, I dived in front of it.”

  “Why were you there in the first place?”

  “I was protecting Dr Peterson and not, repeat not, because you asked me to, but because I was assigned. You went in to see Raphael, I did a sweep of the square on foot. Saw the same guy twice, thought I recognised him.”

  “You did. He threw vinegar at my son.”

  He nodded. “I went round a third time. He’d gone. That bothered me even more.”

  I could see the young police officer and the sister outside in the corridor, checking their stop-watches no doubt. I’d been there ten minutes at the most.

  “I’ll keep you posted,” I said, rising from the bench. “I meant more than just thanks, George…”

  He gave me a withering look and said, “Woof.”

  I said a quiet goodbye to his mother and left.

  -15-

  By Monday morning Corrigan had improved more than he’d been expected to in such a short space of time and was pushing to be discharged. With damned good reason, he told me in a text message. Having survived a bullet in the guts, he didn’t fancy being killed off by an in-house bug. They may well have sounded like second-rate university degrees - MRSA, CDiff, CRKP - but they still did for you. He then tacked on Rochester's address, Number Seven, Hyde Park Close, London, and the time he’d fixed up to meet him, 5 pm.

  He stayed in hospital. The brass at SOU clearly believed he’d been Bog Standard’s target and had upped the police detail guarding him which, in a subsequent text, Corrigan said confirmed his long held belief that he was working for a bunch of morons. It bothered me slightly that he hadn’t told his purple spouting boss the truth, that the real target was me. My best guess was that he knew it would bring my investigation to an immediate halt, never to be started up again. Then he found himself in a bit of a moral bind and started to worry about me. Hospital does that to you. He’d been assigned to look after us, not chuck us under oncoming danger. At first his messages were jokey, one stating that he hadn't saved my life only for some bastard to have another crack at it. He signed it Ivan Pavlov. I texted back saying that if somebody wanted to blow my brains out there wasn’t much either of us could do to stop them. He made the joke more serious. Listen, who the hell is going to jump in front if the bullets start flying again? What about Jaikie? What about Laura? Who’d keep an eye? That woman saved his life. Is this how he intended to repay her?

  I didn’t reply. However, I did make a gesture towards self-preservation by getting the Smith & Wesson I’d liberated from the Hamford Crime Squad armoury out of mothballs. I cleaned it, oiled it, took it up into Winchendon Woods and fired it a few times. Frightened the birds.

  I took Jaikie with me to meet Rochester, more to keep my eye on him than anything else. We drove to White City, parked in a multi-storey and took the Central Line to Lancaster Gate and walked. He said he missed the London tube. He probably did but more than that he missed the people who rode it staring at him, wondering if it really was him or just some bargain basement lookalike. The trouble was the more curious amongst them had a tendency to sidle up and check and I had a Smith & Wesson holstered under my jacket. I’m not saying that if one of his admirers had reached out an inch too far I would have shot them dead, but I wouldn’t have stood by and watched.

  We reached Hyde Park Close, which could just about be called a new-build, in that it hadn't been there long, though that’s where any comparison with affordable housing ends. Even Jaikie was silenced into disbelief as he looked up at the three jenga-like towers and for once had no Los Angeles comparisons to draw. A plush command post straddled the entrance to the complex with a Latin slogan in carved ironwork forming the arch. It said “Domus Est Ubi Cor”, roughly translated as “Home is where the heart is”. For all that it struck a welcoming chord it might just as well have said “Arbeit Macht Frei”. It certainly felt as if we were on the threshold of some Godless world.

  An expensively suited ex-SAS type came out to greet us like long lost enemies.

  “Name?”

  “Hawk, father and son.”

  “Who for?”

  “Mr Rochester.”

  He pointed for us to enter the habitable side of the archway where two younger subordinates rose from a sofa to cut off our escape. The man who’d greeted us so warmly told us to empty our pockets. The Smith & Wesson marginally increased their interest in us and they examined it by turn as if it were an early flintlock.

  “You usually carry this?” the older one asked.

  “No.”

  “Why today?”

  “Because three days ago somebody tried to kill me.”

  He looked at me as if at long last I’d spoken in a language he understood, then said to both of us, “Shoes off.”

  “What is this? Heathrow?” said Jaikie.

  They’d heard it before. They examined our shoes then told us to raise our arms.

  “You want me to bend over as well?” said Jaikie, getting hacked off. They’d heard that one before as well.

  “Jaikie, shutup,” I suggested quietly.
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  Our hosts seconded the motion and then returned everything to us except my keys, the pepper spray and the revolver. The older one went over to a computer and must have dialled a number, Skype maybe or something internal. He pointed at a screen on the far wall and after a few moments a man’s face flickered into view. He’d be 40 years old next month, he told us three or four times during the next half hour, but it wasn’t simply his age that didn’t tally with our joint preconception of a philanthropist. He was a deeply unattractive man, most of the off-putting details there by design, starting with the long, greasy hair and unkempt beard.

  “Yes, Sergeant?” he said abruptly.

  “There’s a Mr Hawk and his son to see you, sir.”

  “Never heard.”

  The screen went black, the sergeant turned to me and made to return my other possessions.

  “Call him up again and say the name Patrick Scott,” I said.

  I’ve often thought it unsettling that if you’ve been trained to obey orders and they’re issued in the right tone of voice, it doesn’t much matter who gives them – nine times out of ten they’ll be followed. There are limits. Had I told this sergeant to shoot his two comrades, then himself, I doubt if he’d have obliged. Nevertheless, without the slightest hesitation he went back to the computer and within a matter of seconds Rochester was up on the screen again.

  “What is it now?” he asked, irritably.

  It was an educated voice, once upon a time, roughened at the edges by affectation, a rebellion against all that money, perhaps – £836 million and rising, according to The Sunday Times rich list, according to Jaikie.

  “Sorry to trouble you, sir, man says to mention the name Patrick Scott.”

  After a brief pause Rochester said, “Bring ‘em over.”

  The sergeant flicked his head at us in a gesture that said fall in behind me, then led us out of the den and across to the three towers. They were set around a lawn of untreadable grass with flat screen waterfalls in serried ranks and fountains spraying shapes unknown in nature.

  At the first tower, the doors opened of their own volition to reveal another besuited ex-army type. He acknowledged the sergeant, though not us, and waited for orders.

  “Seven,” said the sergeant, then turned to me and Jaikie. “Collect your stuff when you leave.”

  He watched as the glorified doorman led us across the marble foyer to the lifts, or elevators as Jaikie now insisted on calling them. Lifts are apparently heels on a shoe or surgery to a fallen face. This outdated meaning of the word was lined with scented mahogany and silver-framed mirrors and took us up seven floors to the penthouse suite in three seconds flat. Our stomachs followed at a more leisurely pace.

  As we stepped out of the lift and began to glide across yet more marble, a wall up ahead of us opened, concertina-style, lest any visitor should find the business of entering through an ordinary sized door problematic. The other side of where the wall had been stood Edward Rochester, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans holed above the knee line, a complete picture of anti-social, early middle-age, hardly the dark, mysterious object of Charlotte Bronte’s and Marion Scott’s simmering desire. He raised a hand for us to stop, which our escort ensured that we did by thrusting out a beefy forearm. Rochester came right up close and looked us up and down.

  “Father and son, you say?” He nodded, as if he now believed what up until then was doubtful. “I see the likeness.”

  He flapped a dismissive hand at the glorified doorman, who stepped back into the lift, asked it for the ground floor and it fell to earth. Rochester raised a beckoning arm and we followed him into the penthouse, an exorbitant mix of mechanical utility and over-designed furniture masquerading as simplicity. Acres of space stood between one open-plan area and another, lights switched on, curtains closed and fires lit at the touch of a button. Jaikie was trying desperately not to be bowled over, and by and large succeeding. His main problem was attaching all this wealth to our scruffbag of a host, mine was keeping my father’s voice at bay as it condemned the excess.

  “Have a seat,” said our host, gesturing to a faraway sofa. “I don’t get many visitors, but only the ones who are after money usually say how wonderful the place is within the first three seconds.” He smiled. Yellow teeth, a colour match for the facial hair, both tarnished by nicotine. “You two clearly aren’t after money.”

  “No, but if you want me to be impressed I’ll try,” I said.

  “Start with the view which is absolutely stunning and the one thing I didn’t buy.”

  He led us over to the floor to ceiling windows and nodded out across Hyde Park to the river at Chelsea, visible in hundred metre stretches between competing buildings. “The girls don’t get so worked up about it as I do, but then they’re not British.”

  The girls he’d referred to were several of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Chinese ladies, mounted on a nearby wall, the colour of their skin quite in keeping with our height above sea level.

  “You want something to drink?”

  “Thanks. Scotch, with ice to the top of the glass.”

  He turned to Jaikie. “I know you, don’t I?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Jaikie, with feeling. “Orange juice, please.”

  Rochester yelled across to a far door. “Yi Ling, scotch with ice to the brim! Same for me straight! And an orange juice.” He tugged at the ragged beard for a moment, then flattened the strands he’d dislodged. “I was expecting Sergeant Corrigan.”

  “He was shot on Friday,” I said.

  “That doesn’t tell me why you’ve come in his place. Are you a cop too?”

  “I was.”

  He nodded, still weighing us up, still believing that he knew Jaikie from somewhere.

  “You’ve never come to me for finance? What line of work are you in?”

  “Actor.”

  Rochester snapped his fingers. “You’re in that war film, what’s it called?”

  “All Good Men and True,” said Jaikie quietly, no smile.

  “I saw you on telly, talking to that bunch of women, lunchtime. Christ, they were all over you, two of ‘em old enough to be your granny. I knew I knew you, it wasn’t just the old cogs slipping, now I’m 40…”

  We turned as a girl in her early 20s entered, Singaporean so Jaikie told me later, and discreetly immune to any of his charm. She was carrying a tray with our drinks on it and set them down on a low circular table. Rochester’s invitation for us to sit hadn’t been followed through with insistence, so the three of us stood, witches round some latter day cauldron, sipping our drinks.

  “Why did you agree to see me, Mr Rochester, but not until I mentioned Patrick Scott’s name?”

  It was only for a split second, but he thought about his answer to that. “I hoped you might know where he is. Haven’t heard from him for over a year. I’ve invited him to my 40th, he hasn’t replied.”

  “That’s because he’s dead.”

  Rochester nodded. “I did wonder, in spite of his old man insisting otherwise.”

  “Murdered.”

  He finally went onto the back foot and fiddled with the beard again. “And that’s what Corrigan wanted to see me about?”

  “No, he was going to ask if you’d lent Patrick any money lately.”

  “Twenty five thousand pounds.”

  “What for?”

  He shrugged. “It’s what I do. I give money away, but only to people with good ideas. Patrick had a brilliant one…”

  “You’re the second person I’ve met this week who’s sung the praises of good ideas.”

  “What was the brilliant idea?” Jaikie asked.

  “He claimed that it would make the desert bloom,” Rochester said. “He called it The Magic Carpet.”

  He looked from one of us to the other and, gambling that I didn’t know that he was lying, he went on to describe The Magic Carpet with boyish enthusiasm. It was a carpet like any other, to be produced in rolls and sold by the mile. He rose from the sofa an
d went over to a Georgian desk, probably worth more than the new Land Rover I was trying not to think about. He took a large pliable sheet of something from the central drawer and brought it back to us. This was it, he said handing it to Jaikie, but unlike the carpet you walk on, it was made of a peat-based compost with a bio-degradable, waterproof surface. Into the carpet itself, seeds would be set. In this example it was grass but the possibilities were limitless - grass for livestock, wheat for bread, sunflowers for oil - and all one had to do was to roll it out on barren land, waterproof side up and the moisture that is always present, no matter how dry the land seems, would rise and be trapped, the seeds would germinate and the desert would bloom. He paused, presumably for our appreciation.

  “You gave him money for that?”

  He smiled. “You sound like my father, Mr Hawk. I gave Patrick a cheque for 25K, told him to make a prototype.”

  “And a week later he disappeared?”

  “That’ll be the ex-policeman in you. You’re right, though, I didn’t see him again, but the cheque was never cashed either.”

  “Do you remember the date on it?”

  “November the first, last year.”

  “Odd that you remember such a specific date.”

  He shrugged at that. “You can’t have it both ways. You want information, so I tell you what I know.”

  “Why do you go back to visit the Scotts, Gerald and Marion?”

  “Courtesy, empathy.”

  “You’ve lost a child yourself?”

  “Never had one to lose.”

  “Then you mean sympathy, surely. And maybe you’d like an off-cut from The Magic Carpet?”

  He bridled at that and set down his drink on the table. “If the project goes ahead then the rights to it will belong to Gerald and Marion Scott and I will ensure that they get them.”

  “What’s the whisky, by the way?”

  “Glendaloch, bottled in 1968.”

  “Too good to drink, really.”

  He called out with a laugh, “Yi Ling, another scotch for my guest.”

  “No ice this time, Yi Ling,” I added. “In your sympathy trips to the Scotts did you ever come across two men, uncle and nephew, by the name of Gaffney?”