Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  I put his name in the Raphael column and headed column two Edward Rochester. There wasn’t room on the Great Wall of China, never mind my kitchen wall, for all that he was into but Jaikie read from the list Slater had given us and I added them.

  “Undersea Hotels Inc. Spray on skin. Body Part Farm. A Swedish company, Partikel Blanda, their game is teleportation. Cell regeneration, Time Light Inc. Kirkland Water Power, a car you fill up from the tap. My favourite, Luminette Co. a company who’ll light our cities in the same way a firefly glows in the dark. Vertical farms. Food pills.

  “The day we met him he gave us all that bullshit about The Magic Carpet because he was hiding something much bigger,” I reminded them. “Then he got snotty at the mention of Henrietta. Why does everyone curl into a ball at the mention of this woman’s name?”

  I drew a line for column three. Ralph Askew. Junior Government Minister.

  “Our new friends the Slaters reckon he’s dangerous and I’m inclined to agree. MI5 connections, if not full-blown membership, we learned today. Under Secretary at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. That at least gives him access to NHS records. And maybe the Police National Computer?”

  “Askew and Raphael have something else in common,” said Jaikie. “Ever since George Corrigan was shot, nobody’s heard from them.”

  It was a good point. Raphael didn’t even poke his nose out in Bloomsbury Square after the shooting. Perhaps he and Askew were trying to keep a lid on something, lower its profile.

  Column four. Patrick’s Friends and Family. Into it went Kevin Stapleton, girlfriend Belinda and Gerald and Marion Scott. I tacked on the Gaffneys, for want of knowing who they were working for.

  “Why not put them in a column five?” asked Laura, with her need for absolute precision. “Miscellaneous.”

  I was just about to do as she’d suggested when Jodie pointed both forefingers at the lists and said, “Does this have something to do with the motor industry?”

  I smiled at her. “It sure does. It hit me outside Madame Tussauds and you’ve seen it too. I knew you’d be good for this family.”

  “Explain,” said Laura.

  “It’s all there, on that wall. Toyota, Shell BP, BMW, Raphael’s tyre company, Rochester’s water-powered car, our friend Askew at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Stick my neck out? I think Patrick Scott invented some kind of automotive engine, far more viable than anything that runs on tap water, and it frightened the beJesus out of these guys. And they’re still anxious about it, enough to get Charles Drayton and me out of the way.”

  “So that’s the car the Gaffneys were looking for?” said Jaikie.

  I nodded. “Gerald Scott is the canniest man I’ve met in a long time. He not only knows what Patrick was working on, I think he knows where it is.”

  I hired a French biscuit tin to drive over to Rushfarthing House the following day and I would have put Jaikie on the insurance if it hadn’t been prohibitive. Thirty years old, you pay through the nose anyway, but if you’re a 30-year-old actor it isn’t only your nose. God only knows why I’d suddenly become conscientious about his insurance.

  Marion Scott came out to the iron gates in answer to our ring at the bell. She was carrying the console in one hand, secateurs in the other, and was dressed as we’d seen her a couple of weeks previously, sheepskin body-warmer, tough old shoes and gardening gloves, as if they were a second skin. She came right up to the gates, fully expecting to see her husband the other side of them, but when she saw me she froze in fear.

  “Marion, how lovely to see you again. How are you and Gerald?”

  She put everything I’d just said into one bag and shook it and out came the responses she’d intended, but the words landed in the wrong order like some diabolical crossword clue.

  “Where is Gerald? Fine. I don’t remember you. Thank you. Who are you?”

  “It’s Edward Rochester, Marion.”

  Her face cleared and slowly she smiled. “Oh, do come in Mr Rochester.”

  She looked down at the console in her hand and her face clouded again. She couldn’t press the buttons while holding the secateurs.

  “Allow me,” I said, reaching through the bars.

  I opened the gates and she led us into the house, trotting out the usual niceties afforded a visitor. How had the journey been, had we come far, had we had lunch…? She turned to us with an intensity that the subject matter didn’t warrant: she had made sandwiches for her husband, but there were plenty to go round. Ham with pickle.

  “And who is this young man?” she asked of Jaikie.

  “My son, Jacob.”

  He gave her his smile and she returned it. A car the other side of the gates hooted.

  “There he is, there’s…”

  His Christian name, which she must have used 100,000 times over the last 40 years, wasn’t there at the forefront of her mind.

  “Gerald?” I said.

  “Yes, Gerald.”

  “You stay and talk to Jaikie. I’ll go and let him in.”

  Gerald Scott was at the wheel of an old Skoda, the window wound right down ready for him to shout instructions to his wife. He saw me approaching from the house and, as far as I could tell, his expression barely changed.

  “Mr Hawk,” he said as he drove past me. “What news?”

  “Lunch is ready. Ham and pickle.”

  He smiled, wearily. “Oh, good.”

  Getting through those sandwiches was quite an ordeal for most of us, the exception being Jaikie. That was down to the pickle, homemade by Marion, who couldn’t remember having done so and, consequently, what it consisted of. The tea we drank was unstirrable but I persuaded Gerald that he and I should take it through to the living room and talk business. He was anxious at the prospect of leaving his wife unguarded in the company of a professional charmer, but by the time he’d fashioned an objection, I’d already left the room.

  The living room still embodied that sense of abandonment I’d noticed on my last visit, the result of a woman having lost her son and now losing her grip, the father caught in a pincer of his own anguish and duty to his wife.

  “How is she?” I asked as we settled.

  “Dementia is a strange affliction in terms of progress - sudden downward slides to a plateau that will stretch out for months. Why have you come?”

  “To tell you that I know what Patrick was working on when he disappeared.”

  I was hoping his face would betray relief or at least an understanding of what I meant, but Gerald remained as unreadable as ever. He waited.

  “I know the Gaffneys were trying to find it, that Edward Rochester kept returning to talk about it.” Gerard looked away in disinterest. “You told me Patrick wasn’t very clever but the opposite’s true, of course, and I think he was killed as a result of it. I thought it was just some tinny old MG they were after, but it was much, much more than that. It would help if I had details.”

  He took a deep breath, no doubt wondering how much of the concept would go over my head, and how little I would understand. He began by asking if I knew what photovoltaic meant. I confessed it wasn’t a word I used every day, but presumably it had something to do with light, the ‘photo’ part of the word, and electricity, the ‘voltaic’ half. He nodded approvingly. I was no doubt familiar with solar panels, he went on, monstrous looking sheets on the roofs of houses, and the fact that they were a collection of silicon cells, semi-conductors. My face must have betrayed a certain lack of familiarity with the subject. He tried again.

  “Sunlight hits the cell, a proportion of it is absorbed within the semi-conductor, electrons are loosened and they flow as electricity. Even if you don’t understand it can you hold it in your mind as a workable theory? Now place it to one side.”

  Easily done. He sat forward in his chair, hands dividing up the lesson he was giving me, saying that it was the use of nanotechnology that made Patrick’s motor a force to be reckoned with. Did I know what nanotechnology was? Again he was
impressed when I suggested it was the reduction of ordinary technology to microscopic levels. Apply it to silicon, he said, and imagine the number of surfaces light could strike. That dreadful mug of tea in your hand, which should be emptied forthwith into the ficus benjamina beside me, would hold a mile of surface ready to absorb light and transform it into electric current. I poured the tea away and waited for him to continue.

  “You don’t seem as bowled over as you should be, Mr Hawk.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought there was more.”

  “Isn’t that enough? Up until the present time a mere ten per cent was the most a semi-conductor could absorb; with nanotechnology we’d be looking at 40, 50 per cent. Far be it from me to suggest that perpetual energy is on the cards, it’s another concept altogether, but if it’s 50 per cent today, why not 60, 70 in five years’ time? Unabsorbed light reflected, absorbed, reflected, absorbed, reflected…”

  “So, what did he actually produce, Gerald? What are the nuts and bolts of all this work that might have led someone to kill him?”

  Gerald wasn’t keen to be drawn away from the brilliance of Patrick’s invention and back to the reality of his disappearance but I forced him.

  “He built a prototype. Here, in the back room.”

  “Where is it now?”

  He shook his head, again a convincing display of weariness at being asked the same question time and time again. “I’ve simply no idea what happened to her. Why is it that motor cars are always female?”

  “Because they’re an object of desire, I imagine. Was this one called Henrietta?”

  He nodded, then asked if I knew what had happened to his son, if I was certain that he’d been killed. I said, rather feebly, that in my opinion the car was motive enough for people to have wanted Patrick out of the way. And for all the usual reasons: envy, greed, expedience or perhaps to justify a hare-brained scheme of their own. The Kirkland Water Car, for example, which Rochester put cash into, might not have survived the competition…

  “But Rochester gave him money,” said Gerald. “I still have the cheque somewhere.”

  A sudden burst of laughter from the kitchen reminded him that Marion was alone with Jaikie and by the sound of it they were getting along all too well. He rose to go and join them. I remained seated.

  “When DS Baker at Tilbury said he’d charge Trader Gaffney and the uncle, why didn’t you co-operate?”

  “I told him as much as I knew…”

  “No. The day I was here they were asking for the car and a computer disc, one the finished article, the other detailed plans of how to construct it. You didn’t want them charged because you didn’t want the police tramping over the house and gardens again in case they found what everyone’s been looking for.”

  He’d reached the door by now but turned back and, for the first time in our acquaintanceship, raised his voice, which I took to be a sign that I must have drilled into a nerve.

  “They’ve all been here before,” he said shrilly. “They’ve examined every inch of the place. Why let them do it again? Marion could barely cope the last time.”

  It sounded as if there’d been more than just a few coppers strolling the grounds, looking for clues.

  “When was this?”

  “February before last. Cold winter, the ground was like rock but it was routine stuff, they said. When someone goes missing, sooner or later the police search his back garden.”

  “They weren’t looking for your son’s body, Gerald, and they probably weren’t police.”

  He shrugged. “Whoever they were, whatever they came for they went away empty-handed.”

  Believing that to be the last word on the matter, he hurried away to the kitchen.

  We stopped off on the way home, not at the place where we’d had the moules marinière but at a lay-by cafe, a caravan from which a guy with no smile, no idle chat, just please and thank-you, dispensed surprisingly good coffee and decent sponge cake. Presumably his name was Frederick, since the word Freddie’s was stencilled along both flanks of the trailer. We settled ourselves on fold-up chairs beside a couple of French lorry drivers who were taking a break before heading down to the channel tunnel, I guess.

  “Your game’s a lot like mine, Dad,” said Jaikie quietly. “It’s as much about brass neck as having any recognisable skill, a matter of getting people on side, persuading them you’re really interested in what they’re saying, then extracting the stuff you need. Sounds more like dentistry than acting or police work, doesn’t it. One-sided conversation and then yank it out of them.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “After giving me the life story of that pickle, or what she could remember of it, she suddenly dropped her voice to a whisper and said, ‘There are things I’ve been told not to tell you.’ Cruel, really, because I then asked her what they were and she told me as if still keeping a secret.”

  Evidently, Marion went downstairs early one morning, looked out of the kitchen window and there on the lawn were a dozen men in white coats. In her state of mind, she must have been terrified but she called for Gerald, who read their visitors the riot act and sent them packing. Thing is they weren’t exactly white coats, Jaikie said. From Marion’s description they were white overalls, and they weren’t psychiatric nurses but technicians, and it wasn’t rubber truncheons they were carrying but metal detectors. They were Men from the Ministry, she’d said. She didn’t know which one.

  “Department of Energy and Climate Change?” I suggested.

  Jaikie nodded. “She said it happened ‘just the other day’, which doesn’t help, given that everything she remembers occurred that recently.”

  I shook my head. “I think she might be right this time. It’s happened since the last time we were here. Gerald’s told her to keep schtum about it, hence the whispering. Well done, for extracting it. How goes the other little job I gave you?”

  He said he’d been in touch with Ellie, Fee and Con on Facebook. The girls were coming home for Christmas. Con hadn’t got back to him yet but then he’d always been unreliable in that way. He’d regret it this time because Jaikie had set Fee on him. No hiding place. She reckoned it was all the fault of the new girlfriend.

  “Looking at her, I can see the distraction,” he said.

  “You’ve met her?”

  “No, she’s on Facebook as well.”

  I stood up and made to go over and pay Freddie.

  “I’ll do this, Dad.”

  I looked at him, trying not to disbelieve. He smiled.

  “My agent, David Stanley, sent me a cash card the other day. He’s set up an account for me. Annie MacKinnon gave me extra money on it last night, up at the pub.”

  It was residuals from All Good Men and True, he explained, and although I wasn’t dead keen on a man I’d never met having control over his money, if it worked then who was I to quibble?

  “Has he said anything about your plans for a … new direction? Theatre, plays?”

  “He’s very interested, but thinks now isn’t quite the right time. He’s lined up a couple of interviews for film parts.”

  In other words I’d been right and David Stanley wasn’t prepared to kiss goodbye to future earnings. Jaikie took some money out of his breast pocket, peeled off a £20 note and replaced the rest. He patted it.

  “I’ve already paid Jodie but there’s 50 there for Laura, 25 for Jamal and 70 for George Corrigan.”

  My name wasn’t on the list, but then I hadn’t really expected it to be.

  -17-

  That evening I logged on to Ralph Askew’s constituency web page and found that it characterised him heroically, as ten years younger than he was, the perfect family man, clever yet of the people, charismatic but approachable, successful yet modest. The date of his next surgery was pencilled in for three days’ time and should any of his constituents, friends or acquaintances wish to meet him they should email, text, even tweet or simply drop in for a cup of tea and a chat. Jaikie had an interview with a fil
m producer that same morning and while the film star in him was all for re-skeduling the appointment, I persuaded the part that was $2 million short to stick to the original plan and I set off in the French biscuit tin alone.

  Selingthwaite Community Centre was one of those inexplicably octagonal buildings that made every room in it, even the toilets, an unnatural shape, uneasy on the eye and downright impractical. I arrived at about half eight, having left Winchendon at the crack of dawn, and found Askew already seated at a tubular steel table skimming through a clutch of morning papers. All around him was evidence of a recent jumble sale, a couple of empty clothes rails, wire hangers still bearing the odd T-shirt no one had wanted, the usual flutter of raffle tickets on the floor. Askew rolled the local Evening Telegraph tight, as if he would beat himself over the head with it, punishment for having been caught off guard.

  “Mr Hawk, how lovely to see you.” He was a great one for raising the hands, palms outward. He’d either been a clown in a former life or had read somewhere that it meant you were telling the truth. “I know, I know, it must seem as if I’ve been avoiding you but so, so, so busy…”

  “We never did have that lunch, did we. You sort of ducked out of sight after Sergeant Corrigan was shot. I expect you visited?”

  He tried being languid. “No, no, I didn’t. How is he?”

  “Improving. Where are all the people?”

  “Be fair, we don’t start until 9.15.” He rose and called through a hatch in the wall to a middle-aged woman who was firing up a tea urn. “It is 9.15 today, Mrs Eames, isn’t it?”

  Mrs Eames assured him that it was and asked if we wanted tea. He said no, I said yes, then set off round the odd shaped room, feigning an interest in pictures on the walls. I didn’t see any reason to continue being polite.

  “I’m surprised your party even got a look in here,” I said as I reached a beaming poster of him.

  “Slim majority, true, and were it not for the plethora of other parties divvying up the floating vote we’d have thought twice about fielding a candidate.”