Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  “One man’s minority party is another’s 70 grand a year plus expenses. Do you know, my father would be appalled to hear the way I’m talking to you. You’re someone’s Member of Parliament, for God’s sake. Their Harold MacMillan, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Callaghan. What happened to his belief that you’re all men of honour?”

  He shook his head. “So many reasons…”

  “Too many for you to pick just one? Try this instead. Did you authorise a team of technicians to search the grounds of Rushfarthing House, to look for the solar-powered car Patrick Scott built?”

  He’d been expecting me to deliver some kind of shock but he wasn’t prepared for so direct a current and it robbed him of yet another straight answer.

  “When was this?”

  “Two weeks ago at the most. So, in the absence of the word ‘no’ I’ll assume that you sent a bunch of white coats to find this car. They didn’t. Here’s another. Did you have Patrick Scott’s NHS records wiped when Dr Peterson began asking after his health - or lack of it?”

  He tried to maintain his poster image, honest, sincere, calm in a crisis with just a hint of future party leadership about him. He smiled and then spoke with a gentle scalding hiss.

  “It must be so wonderful being you. No dirty work to do anymore, just high-blown principles to shove down other people’s throats. Not simply retired but retired copper. That’s one step down from sainthood, surely.”

  He turned away and focussed on a painting of a local warehouse, Victorian and derelict, blackened stone and broken windows, just the sort of thing you’d want in your living room. His instinct was to drop the glib, personable front and blast me but he knew it wouldn’t make me go away. So he tried sweet reason.

  “Put yourself in my position for two minutes. You, Hawk, stand alone with your principles, I’m part of a global alliance that has to provide energy for seven billion people.”

  “I feel a well-rehearsed excuse coming on.”

  “And then consider that solar-powered car. The technology will come. I can’t tell you when: a year, two, ten, but it will come.”

  “I thought it was here already.”

  He laughed. “Oh, enough to boil a kettle or heat your baby’s bathwater, but I’m not talking about that.”

  “You mean the nanotechnology Patrick Scott claimed he was using. Did you ever see the car he made? Or any plans for it?”

  “That isn’t the point. I’ve just told you the technology will come, sooner rather than later, and when it does it will change the entire geo-political structure of the world.”

  He was now giving me the chance to share his horror, to be his equal, but I declined. He shrugged and continued.

  “It will mean the implosion of all oil-producing nations within five years. That doesn’t seem to trouble you much.”

  “I’ll consider it when I’ve caught the man I’m after, but don’t lose your train of thought.”

  He gave me a look which, in its sheer iciness, suggested that Richard Slater had been correct when he’d labelled Askew as dangerous. As I considered his options I remembered that someone had already tried to silence me. I’d christened him Bog Standard, on account of his M & S dinner jacket, and he’d begun by throwing fake acid at Jaikie and progressed to firing a real gun at George Corrigan. I wondered if he might be a friend of a friend of a friend of Ralph Askew.

  “The problem isn’t that the USA, or Russia, or the Middle East will all fold in half,” Askew continued. “The problem is that after the initial gold rush nobody will own the technology. After all, the fuel comes out of the sky 24 hours a day, buckshee and untaxable. So, if no one owns it, nobody can control it, or rather they can’t control the people who use it. And that, Mr Hawk, is perfect anarchy. Think of that next time you start your car.”

  “So, along with all those greedy bastards in ASC you tried to buy it, in order to kill it off?”

  “To shelve it, would be a better way of putting it. Solar power won’t be killed off, merely delayed for a few more years. Julien Raphael knows that, but I imagine that when your ladyfriend started quizzing the NHS computer about Patrick Scott, his radar bleeped.” He held up both hands to prevent oncoming questions. “Don’t ask me how he found out. Leak, leak, leak.”

  “Where does Edward Rochester fit in to this, or doesn’t anyone know?”

  “Tedious man, super rich, stuffed full of principles and yearning for The Greater Good. He put money into the venture because he genuinely wanted it to succeed. How on earth does one deal with people like that?”

  He smiled, hoping for harmony at least on that subject, then glanced at his watch.

  “Are the punters about to storm through the door?” I asked.

  “Sadly, no, they don’t really play anymore. When my father was an MP they came in droves, twice a month, the whole cross section in a day-long surgery. I used to go and watch him sometimes. Quite brilliant. London constituency, teeming with life.” He shook his head and returned to the present. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “At what point do men like Julien Raphael and you stop buying up ideas and start murdering the people who have them?”

  Askew finally gave up trying to get me on his side and stared at me in genuine disdain. “In other words, did I kill Patrick Scott? Her Majesty’s Government does not go round killing off those whom we find inconvenient.”

  “Please…”

  “I know it isn’t a popular belief but it happens to be true.” The hands were up, palms towards me, fingers splayed. “Besides, I don’t believe he was murdered by someone trying to get their hands on his invention, to use or stifle it.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “It was being offered on the open market. An auction where all the participants knew they were being gazumped. And I was the one who, on behalf of HMG, dealt with these would-be extortionists.” He smiled. “Ah, silence at last. That’ll be because you’ve been hunting the wrong fox.”

  “Who was the auctioneer?”

  The smile became a snigger, brought on by my discomfort. “At one stage I thought it might be Patrick Scott himself, or someone on his behalf. His name was mentioned often enough in the conversations I had. Brilliant young engineer, invented this, that and the other. I told the chap, as the price kept going up, that it wasn’t a great work of art he was flogging, a Van Gogh, a Picasso, a Cezanne. It was a car so ease up on the rhetoric. He laughed and said it was worth all of their work put together and more. And it wasn’t just me they were trying to squeeze. Ask Julien Raphael. I’ll bet he was approached.”

  “When was this?”

  “November 3rd to November 10th a year ago. Eight days of phonecalls, from all over the country, including London. Then they just - stopped.”

  “Maybe someone paid him what he asked.”

  He shrugged and glanced at his watch again but there was still no sign of constituents at the door. Mrs Eames had placed a china cup of tea, on a real saucer, at the hatch and now asked if I took sugar. I said I didn’t and thanked her.

  “I do hope you get to the bottom of it, Mr Hawk. What are the plans, if and when you do?”

  I told him that his friend Richard Slater would probably write the story up for me, no matter where it fell to earth. Askew said that was a generous choice on my part. Richard was never the most sparkling of journalists but he was thorough, dedicated and honest and his wife ruled him with a rod of iron. He watched me sip my tea.

  “I trust I haven’t given the impression of being disinterested in this engine,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, Ralph, I know you’d sell your own mother for it. Why else would you have sent people out to Rushfarthing to look for it?”

  He nodded. “If you do find it, or plans relating to it, we would be extremely interested. After all, someone has to get there first.”

  I allowed an almost indecent pause to elapse before saying, “Didn’t I say, Ralph? I’ve already found it.”

  I hadn’t bought Askew’s line that HMG we
re as innocent as lambs when it came to people who got in their way. Having looked him straight in the eyes again, I thoroughly endorsed Richard Slater’s theory that he was dangerous and telling him that I’d already found Patrick Scott’s solar-powered car was a means of making sure he would protect my back as opposed to having someone shoot me in it. The same would apply to Laura and Jaikie and over the next few days the SOU detail guarding them both was increased. Mark Granger, the hypochondriacal newby, was given company in the shape of two useful looking blokes, painfully short haircuts and even shorter conversations but apparently in perfect health.

  It was late when I got back to Beech Tree, but Laura and Jaikie had waited up for me, the latter to tell me that his meeting that morning had been fruitful. A film part was on offer. He’d think it over. I looked hard at him until he changed that. He’d already thought about it and decided to take it. For once Laura was more interested in Patrick Scott’s murder than in Jaikie’s career and wanted to know how things had gone in Selingthwaite.

  Askew had thrown a small spanner in the works, I said, by suggesting that the solar-powered car had been offered on the open market, Dutch auction style. He’d even thought, at one stage, the man at the other end of the phone might have been Patrick himself, attempting to cash in. I didn’t believe that for one very good reason. The demands for ludicrous sums of money, the argle-bargle which Askew, Raphael, perhaps even Rochester and others had been engaged in, came to an abrupt halt. Why would Patrick suddenly do that? A change or heart? Unlikely. A sale to an interested party? Surely we’d have heard something by now, the odd rumour of its development. No, negotiations came to a dead stop on the day Ralph Askew said, because somebody silenced Patrick.

  “Please say that Patrick wasn’t in on the extortion,” Laura said. “I don’t want that.”

  “Your wish is granted, I think. His girlfriend said she couldn’t reach him after she went up north on a buying trip with her assistant at the shop. So where was he between the 1st and the 10th of November? I think he was being held against his will.”

  “Where? Who by?” Jaikie said. “It would have taken someone close to him, who knew how the car worked and could explain what was on offer. He didn’t have friends, we’re told, he didn’t have enemies, except maybe Kevin Stapleton. I mean we thought Henrietta would turn out to be flesh and blood, not steel and silicone…”

  “He had a father,” Jaikie said.

  “I don’t like that either,” Laura muttered.

  “He did have one friend, of course, maybe not as friendly as we first thought.” I turned to Jaikie. “Will you drive me into London?”

  “Now?” he said, glancing at Laura to see if she had an objection.

  “Two hours’ time. Get some sleep.”

  Jaikie didn’t ask what we were up to until we were halfway to London. I encouraged him to have a guess. Why did he think I’d asked him to wear dark clothes and a pair of old trainers he wouldn’t miss? He agreed that it sounded as if we were going housebreaking.

  “Golborne Road, off Portobello. Belinda Hewitt’s antique shop.” He kept his eyes on the road ahead so I couldn’t tell if he was excited, alarmed or simply taking it in his stride. “Break another law for me. Use your iPhone. Bring up a map.”

  He did as I’d asked and handed it to me. At one end, Golborne Road crossed over railway lines and the shop was three or four down from there. A ground view showed the building backing onto a mews and, on both sides, it wasn’t overpriced living accommodation for once, it was lock-ups, garages, storage. That would be our point of entry.

  As we turned into Campbell Mews Jaikie’s nerves got the better of him and he waxed theatrical in order to cope. This was like stepping out from the wings onto a stage, he whispered. As the curtain rose an unknown world would unfold and no matter how well-rehearsed the players, it was the uncertainty of the next few hours that gave his life purpose. I told him to stop talking, especially like that, handed him some gloves, donned a pair myself and took the bolt cutters from the tool bag on the back seat.

  At the rear of Belinda’s shop I checked the metal garage doors, up and down the jambs, along the top joist. There was nothing, no alarm, no light, not even a tin plate saying burglar beware, just a padlock and chain. The cutters went through it in one, but I fumbled my catch and the padlock fell against the metal door and rang out like stage thunder. We waited. Nobody came to any of the 20 windows within view. Jaikie posted the bolt cutters through the open rear window of the Land Rover as I pulled back one of the heavy doors to Belinda’s and stepped in. Jaikie followed and closed it behind him.

  I shone a torch on a beaten up VW van that took up most of the garage, forcing us to walk sideways past it towards a door at the end. Through this was a small passageway with rooms off it, the first a utility room, stone floor, butler’s sink and a cupboard containing working coffee, tea bags and a packet of Bourbons. There was an electric kettle, milk in the fridge, and mugs on the drainer. Across the passage the toilet was in regular use, soap and towel at the hand basin, air-freshener and hand cream. A lined pedal bin was empty. At the end of the passage, stairs rose to the first floor with an ornate notice on the wall saying More Items Upstairs.

  The middle floor consisted of three rooms, each filled with the more portable stuff of an antiques business: mirrors, pictures, prints, chairs, benches, clocks. Above it was an attic reached via winding stairs. Another notice on the wall said Private. Staff Only. It was a studio flat comprising a cut down kitchen along one wall, a shower room and toilet backing onto it. Jaikie said he needed a pee. I stayed and examined the main room, starting with the bed, currently unused, but half made up. I hadn’t expected to see an image of Patrick Scott rise from the mattress, like the Turin shroud, but I had reckoned on finding something of use. I must have voiced the thought.

  “You think he was kept here?” Jaikie said from the shower room.

  “Not in this particular room, too easy to break out of. Maybe I’ve got it wrong.”

  “And maybe you haven’t. Take a look at these.”

  I went over to the doorway and Jaikie nodded to the far wall.

  “Recognise them?”

  He was referring to three framed posters, advertising forthcoming events of the MG Enthusiasts’ Club. They were similar, if not identical, to the ones we’d seen in Charles Drayton’s dying room.

  “These places have a cellar, you reckon?” I said, more statement than question.

  We made our way downstairs and into the main shop. Jaikie took one half of the floor, I took the other. Very little had changed since my last visit and the place was still dominated by the Easter Island type statues. A couple had been sold and as I strolled between those which remained, eyes glued to the floor, I suddenly heard the creak and felt the floorboards rock. Jaikie came over, we moved the Easter Islanders, and got down on hands and knees. It was a trap door sure enough, six foot square, iron hinges at one side, bolts on the opposite corners, securing it to the floor. We opened the door back on itself and I led the way down the stone steps. I paused halfway, turned to the joist at shoulder level and switched on the light.

  The entire cellar had no more than seven feet of headroom, broken by beams a foot thick that hadn’t moved a paper’s width in 300 years. The floor was half earth, half mortar. Belinda kept her stock here and the place was crammed full, but all in an orderly fashion. The metal items were on one side, an ongoing supply of Edwardian fenders, coal scuttles, fire irons. Wooden items were kept on the drier side. It was not only dry but cold. Like a mortuary.

  I don’t know what drew me to the far wall, probably the elevated space there with nothing on it. Against the wall a cast iron down-pipe stood solid. I shone the torch up and down it and, as usual, the delight at having answered a question no one else had bothered to ask was tempered by guilt. There was no reason to be pleased about anything here. At waist height the rusty down-pipe was scratched and gouged and whoever had made those marks had done so out of panic and desp
eration. On the floor, on crude stone flags, there were dark patches.

  “This is where they kept him. Chained to this pipe. Those marks on the stone are blood from his wrists.”

  “Jesus…”

  “Let’s go.”

  Since the refurbishment of Paddington Basin, night time no longer falls on it and yet somehow the 24-hour daylight doesn’t make it seem a safer place. Perhaps, on that occasion, our reason for being there had something to do with it, but when I think back to that mix of light that hovered above the station I can’t pick out a friendly colour. Halogen orange over the platforms, white light on the footbridge, blue beside the towpath and for all that we could see perfectly, the images seemed forbidding and other worldly, especially the boats.

  Scorpius was moored in the same place as before, at the end of the cobbled promenade behind the new Marks & Spencer offices and when we reached it I still hadn’t made up my mind how to play this. What Jaikie wanted, I believe, was for us to storm aboard in our party of two, commandeer the boat and clap Belinda Hewitt in irons. Whether she was actually there or not, whether she was alone or had company, seemed incidental to our purpose.

  “Come on,” I whispered, and set off again

  “Where are we going?”

  “Her father’s boat is just round the corner,” I said.

  “You need his help?”

  Sweet Lady Jane was moored on a spur of the canal, in a flotilla of five, and so isolating is the effect of still water, we might have been approaching it along any towpath in the world. The boat had a deadness about it, no one appeared to be on board this floating apology for a garden shed with its timber clad cabin, the roof of heavy tarred felt. I didn’t want to bang on it and wake the neighbourhood, but just as it began to seem like the only option, Jaikie stepped on the gunwale, halfway along it, and stepped off again. The boat rocked, the water lapped against the starboard side. He did it again. A third time until the boat was straining against its mooring. At the far end of Sweet Lady Jane, the bedroom end, a curtain over one of the windows drew back and Mike Hewitt peered out. I moved into view.