ARCHANGEL HAWTHORNE (A Thriller)

by D. M. Mitchell

  It was night, though the many windows of the towers in front of him were all lit up like the serried ranks of portals on the hulls of ocean liners at sea. But as for people, there weren’t that many to be seen. Most were probably cooped up in their tiny new rooms that still smelled of paint and Formica, watching Hughie Green on TV. One or two haunted the green spaces at the foot of the towers, black ghosts wandering between the uninspiring utilitarian street lamps.

  Okay, so life in the slums hadn’t been pretty, that’s why they called them slums. It had been hard. People live short lives, dying of pneumonia in damp, mould-blackened rooms, the kids filthy, scantily dressed, no shoes or socks, no inside loos, no bathrooms. That had been his upbringing. But he’d been happy. He couldn’t remember being poor. His mother used to wash down the front step every week, and sweep dirt from the front of the house. The curtains, rags though they might be at times, were clean rags nevertheless. But in their wisdom, Sheffield City Council deemed the houses unfit, and with it branded the people who lived here as somehow unfit and unworthy, too. That rankled. Most of the inhabitants didn’t want these monstrous high-rises to be built. They wanted to hang onto their homes, their memories, their friends and their communities. A lot of the young ones did hanker after change, though. It’s the way of life. The young constantly demand change, the new, until they grow old and realise change often wipes away all they ever knew, casting it aside as if it was worthless, and with that they lose a little of themselves.

  Hawthorne adjusted his trilby, pulling it down to shade his face from the biting wind and the rain that was still hanging in the air in a fine, soaking mist.

  The slums had been the breeding ground of criminals as well, and he knew it. Crime and poverty go hand-in-glove with each other. Poverty breeds crime, and crime feeds off the very thing that gave it life. There had always been gangs on the streets. Always trouble. Certain families renowned for it. The Baxter family among them. Hell, he’d even dabbled in petty crime himself, following the lead of older boys he used to look up to. One or two of them, he’d later help put away. By demolishing the slums and displacing the people, forcing new lives on them, Sheffield City Council had also sought to demolish crime and its source. But that hadn’t worked. It had been displaced, that’s all, and like a fist smashing into a muddy puddle it simply sent its filth sloshing in all directions.

  He left the car parked beneath a street lamp and went over to the base of one of the new blocks of flats, seeking out the elevator. It all looked clean and clinical, he thought, and faintly reminded him of one of those new hospitals. Gone were the flowing lines and decorations of old-style buildings, and in their place the harsh square and cheap-to-manufacture lines penned by a new wave of architects who thought they could draw up a new type of society to live in their concrete boxes. Hell, they were like pillboxes with windows. He wondered how long it would all last. The buildings had gone up too fast to be substantial, he thought as he stepped into the elevator and hit the button.

  As the lift doors closed, he thought he made out the shadows of three or four men lurking by his car. They wouldn’t dare touch a police car, he thought, knowing full well these days it being a police car wouldn’t carry that much weight. They wouldn’t touch it if they knew it belonged to DCI Hawthorne, though, he mused with some satisfaction.

  The lift doors opened and he stepped out onto a long walkway lined with many identical plywood doors, and over the metal railings the ground appeared far beneath him. He checked his car, looking like a toy now, and was pleased to see no one near it. Hawthorne looked at a piece of paper. On it was scrawled an address. He wasted no time in sweeping down the walkway, his coat tails flapping behind him as if trying to keep up.

  He paused by a red-painted door, its surface glossy and new, and he knocked hard. The room light burned behind the brightly flowered curtains and he heard the hum of a TV, so he knew someone was home. He knocked again, harder.

  ‘All right! All right!’ a voice shouted. ‘I hear you!’

  There was a sound of a key turning in the lock and the door swung open. An old woman’s face appeared in the doorway, the smell of fried onions accompanying her. It took a second or two, but recognition soon swept in and altered the old woman’s face from one of mild anger to one of intense fury.

  ‘Get away from here, copper!’ she screeched and started to slam the door on Hawthorne.

  He put his boot in the doorway and stopped the door from shutting.

  ‘Hello Mavis, how are you?’ he asked. ‘Can I come in?’

  He barged the door open and shouldered his way past the woman.

  ‘Get out!’ she yelled. ‘Get out, you bastard copper!’

  ‘That’s no way to greet an officer of the law, Mavis,’ he said, slamming the door closed. He turned the key in the lock behind him.

  ‘What do you want? You’re not welcome here!’ she said, her grey hair in tight colourful plastic curlers, the smell of perming fluid strong. A young woman came out of the kitchen wearing a miniskirt, an orange nylon apron and yellow rubber gloves. She looked shocked to see the disturbance.

  ‘What’s going on, Mavis? Who is this man?’ she said.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Hawthorne.

  ‘I’m perming Mrs Baxter’s hair,’ she replied. ‘You can’t come barging into someone’s house like this. I’m going to call the police!’

  ‘I am the ruddy police,’ he said. ‘Wait in the kitchen,’ he told her brusquely.

  ‘I will do no such thing!’

  He glared at her. ‘You will!’ he said, guiding her towards the door and pushing her into the tiny kitchen-diner. He closed the door on her. ‘And stay there!’ he said. ‘Or I’ll arrest you for obstructing the course of justice, or some other such charge like wearing an aggressive hair-do!’ He turned to the old woman. ‘Now then, Mavis, where is he?’

  Mavis Baxter wasn’t cowed by the large policeman’s presence. She was a small, squat woman, turned to fat many years ago, but she folded her arms over her ample breasts and glared right on back at him. ‘I’ve nothing to say to you, Hawthorne,’ she spat – quite literally, a green glob of sputum landing on Hawthorne’s left boot. ‘You’re a stinking turd, you bull-necked pig!’

  ‘Nice to see you haven’t changed over the years, Mavis. Your vocabulary as perfumed as ever.’ He went to her, grabbed her by the shoulders, spun her round and sat her down roughly on a sofa.

  ‘You can’t do that – I’m an old woman!’ she complained.

  ‘I can do whatever I like. I‘m a police officer and you’re a breeder of scum.’ He stood upright, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes. He took out his silver American cowboy lighter, but it wouldn’t strike up a light. ‘Blast!’ he said, bending down to an electric fire and sticking the cigarette onto one of the glowing bars. ‘Where is he, Mavis?’ he asked after taking a long, satisfying drag on his cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she replied sullenly.

  ‘Mavis, you all right?’ shouted the young woman from behind the kitchen door.

  ‘Shut your face!’ Hawthorne yelled. ‘This is police business you’re interrupting, you young tart!’ He turned to Mavis. ‘What is it with these miniskirts, eh? You can almost see their ruddy knickers. What kind of woman wants to show their knickers in public?’

  ‘I hate you, Hawthorne!’ she growled, her jaws grinding away, and she would have gnashed her teeth had she had any in place to do it with. Her saggy, lined jowls quivered.

  ‘Then the feeling’s mutual,’ said Hawthorne. ‘Where is he, Mavis? Where’s that boy of yours? What rat hole is Callum hiding in?’

  She lifted a finger and aimed it savagely at a point somewhere between Hawthorne’s eyes. ‘You murdered my husband!’

  ‘Ah, come on, Mavis, not that old line again,’ he said. ‘You know as well as I that your husband had a dickey heart. He was taking tablets for it, but he chose to keep it secret from everyone. He just happened to have his heart attack
in a police cell. But you used his death for your own purposes, didn’t you, Mavis? Got your Callum all wound up over it, so that he came to get me and got my girl instead.’ He bent forward, closer to her face. ‘Put that damn finger away, unless you want it biting off, you crazy old bitch.’

  She lowered it slowly. ‘Callum’s not here. Why would he be here? You know what he did. He’s a grasser now.’

  Hawthorne stood upright again, looked at the window. ‘Nice place they gave you, Mavis. I see you’ve got some new stuff, too – a new telly, new radiogram – where’d you suddenly get the money to buy all this on your pension, Mavis?’

  ‘I save hard,’ she said. ‘Or I take out HP like everyone else.’

  ‘Yeah? You get this stuff on tick? Pull the other one. Where are the broken windows?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She frowned.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘your son being a police grass, you’d expect the neighbourhood to take it out on his family, wouldn’t you? It’s what you would have done, isn’t it? Go round to their place, break a few windows, make their lives hell until they got the message and cleared out of the area.’

  ‘Get out of here, copper.’

  Hawthorne moved over to the fireplace. On either side of an old Deco-style clock there was a series of photograph frames. He picked one up and studied the black-and-white image. It was of a young, fresh-faced and attractive young boy.

  ‘This is Callum, right? I’d recognise that mug anywhere. Makes you wonder how they all start out nice little kids and some end up sewer rats like your Callum.’

  ‘He did his time for what he did.’

  ‘He didn’t do long enough,’ said Hawthorne. ‘He’s back, isn’t he? He’s involved with the Grainger Forges robbery.’

  She made a hissing sound through barely parted lips. ‘Load of bollocks. Look, he helped the damn rozzers; they sent him somewhere where he can’t be found. Last I heard he was in Spain. Anyhow, he isn’t my son anymore for what he did.’

  ‘But you keep his photo on the mantelpiece. Nice try, Mavis, but I’m not buying it.’ He lifted another off the shelf. ‘This is that other sprog you’ve got, what’s his name – Jimmy, right? How old would he be now, nineteen, twenty?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything to you,’ she said, turning her head away and folding her arms again.

  ‘Where is he tonight?’

  ‘You deaf, copper?’

  ‘He’s not been seen round these parts for some time. See, Mavis, I asked around. I still have contacts here, even if the old slums have vanished. They tell me little Jimmy’s been away for quite a while. What’s he been up to?’

  Her stare was venomous. ‘He’s a grown boy. He’s got a life of his own. He’s probably working somewhere. London, maybe. That’s where he was last.’

  ‘Working?’ Hawthorne laughed. ‘Baxters don’t know the meaning of a day’s honest graft.’

  The kitchen door opened a fraction and the young woman stuck her head tentatively round the door frame. ‘Mrs Baxter, that perm needs to be seen to soon or it’ll do something awful to your hair…’

  Hawthorne threw the photograph frame at the door and the glass smashed. ‘I said stay in there!’ he shouted.

  Mavis sprang from her seat. ‘That’s my property!’ she said.

  ‘It was probably lifted from some store somewhere anyway,’ he returned. Spinning round to face the fireplace again, he swept his hand across the mantelpiece and knocked all the ornaments to the ground, vases, photo frames, the clock, all landing in a heap. ‘Tell me where he is, you bitch!’ he snarled.

  ‘Go screw yourself!’

  He marched up to her and she slapped him hard across the face. He slapped her back. ‘I said tell me!’

  She looked shocked, but her expression soon solidified into hatred and defiance again. ‘So you hit old women. What a big man you are.’

  ‘Don’t come the old defenceless biddy, Mavis. Your kind is nothing more than poison, and you’re killing my city. Well, I’m the ruddy antidote. Where is he? Where is Callum?’

  ‘Like I said, go screw yourself!’

  He pushed her away so that she landed on the sofa with a thump. Taking up the fallen clock he threw it and it smashed through the window. Mavis Baxter gave a tiny squeal of alarm.

  ‘Now you’ve got a broken window, Mavis, like a grasser’s mother should have.’ He stared at the hole, the draught causing the curtains to flutter, his chest heaving. ‘I’m going to get him, Mavis. I know he’s stolen that money, just as I know you’re far from being persecuted by angry mobsters peeved at your Callum’s grassing-up key gang leaders.’

  ‘He paid for killing your daughter,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you leave him alone?’

  ‘When he’s dead and buried I’ll leave him alone.’

  ‘Is that a threat, Hawthorne?’ she said. ‘You threatening to kill my boy?’

  He glowered at her. The sounds of the city were spilling in through the broken window. Next second, he stormed out of the flat.

  What the hell had he to gain by doing that, he thought? What point was there? She wasn’t about to sprag on her son to a copper, let alone the one she held responsible for her husband’s untimely death while in police custody. So why waste the time and energy?

  Because it gave him some satisfaction to see a Baxter with fear in their eyes, even if that Baxter was an old woman.

  He took the stairs down to the ground floor, giving himself time to cool down. He paused at the entrance to the building, and tried to light up another fag, attempting to calm himself, but the lighter refused point-blank to cooperate. He really just ought to bin the thing, but he pocketed it all the same. The smell of fish and chips wafted over to him on the breeze and made him feel hungry. That was tonight’s supper, he thought. He sought out the car keys from his overcoat pocket and settled his trilby on his head into a more comfortable position, setting off across the green towards the police car.

  He didn’t see the men lurking in the shadows. They pounced from the cover of the walls and were on him in a second or two. His head received a succession of blows from some kind of cosh, and as he fell to the ground beneath a barrage of bodies, he felt a powerful kick to his ribs, knocking the breath from him. With some satisfaction, one of his flailing punches met someone’s face, but it was not enough to prevent him being overwhelmed. He began to black out with the pain.

  ‘You’re dead, copper!’ he heard a voice rasp close to his ear. ‘You’re coming with us and you’re gonna suffer and then you’re gonna die real slow!’

  Then Hawthorne heard a shrill whistle, some distance away, a sound he thought in his head until he became aware of his attackers peeling away and leaving him, the sound of their urgent footsteps pattering into the night.

  His vision blurred, Hawthorne, turned over to see someone running towards him. He recognised the sound of the police whistle immediately, trilling like a ruddy bird, he thought. He tried to lift himself, but collapsed to the wet concrete floor with a groan, clutching his badly beaten body.

  ‘Sir! Sir, are you all right?’

  It was Inspector Fraser looming over him. Hawthorne wanted to speak, but his world was fast becoming a smudge, fading, Fraser’s face growing ever more indistinct.

  ‘Call an ambulance!’ shouted Fraser to a uniformed police officer. The man ran off to the radio in the police car which had pulled up beside Hawthorne’s. ‘Don’t worry, sir,’ he assured, ‘we’ll get you sorted. Did you see who attacked you?’

  Hawthorne shook his head. ‘They were going to kill me…’ he stuttered. ‘Cowardly bastards.’

  ‘That doesn’t narrow it down any,’ said Fraser. ‘There’s a list as long as my arm of people wanting to do that to you.’

  Hawthorne closed his eyes. The dizzy blackness closed over him like he was sinking into a tub of molasses.

  ‘Christ, is he dead, sir?’ said a worried police officer over Fraser’s shoulder.

  ‘Dead? Hawthorne?’ Fraser gave a little ch
uckle. ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ he said.

  ‘Where the hell is he?’ said Callum Baxter, standing at the doorway and looking out into the dark of night, the rain easing but leaving the farmyard as if it was covered in thick black oil. ‘He’s taking too long.’

  ‘Trust an Italian to do the job…’ said Jimmy Baxter from the table where he played solitaire.

  Callum didn’t like it. Didn’t like it at all. There could be only one explanation: Angelo Abramco had decided to have a little fun with the woman before he carried out her disposal. The thought made his blood boil and he snatched his coat off the peg by the door.

  ‘It’s pissing it down,’ said Jimmy. ‘You really want to go out in that?’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Tom Brody, glad to have something to break the monotony.

  Callum slipped his arms through the coat sleeves and marched up to one of the lamps.

  ‘You’re not taking that, are you?’ moaned Jimmy. ‘It’s dark enough in here as it is.’

  Callum strode out into the rain, lifting the lamp to light his way. Tom Brody followed, caught him up.

  ‘I’ve got a torch, Callum,’ he said, proving it by taking it out of his coat pocket and turning it on. The beam did little to penetrate the dark.

  The moon was now smothered behind thick rain cloud, the two men heading off towards the track Abramco would have taken to the woods.