Dead North

by Joel Hames

  But that was all I got. The look. An instant later the look was gone, replaced by the blank, uninterested mask of a man watching something he didn’t care about happening to someone he didn’t know, and I was left wondering whether I’d seen it at all. Clearly just sitting there with Roarkes wasn’t enough.

  “You and I know Detective Inspector Roarkes is exaggerating for effect, Mr Carson," I said, smoothly. “But I have to tell you, as someone with your interests at heart, that he’s not exaggerating as much as you might think he is. If you can’t dig yourself out of this I don’t reckon much for your chances.”

  He turned to me. The mask didn’t move. I continued.

  “Because you’d think someone who’s killed a couple of cops is going to have an easy time of it in prison, wouldn’t you? I mean, the screws aren’t going to be too friendly, but they never are. But the other cons, they’ll like you, won’t they? They’ll all want to be your friend.”

  Nothing. That was a leading question. I’d expected a nod, at least. That was the idea. Leading question, basic response. Get him used to that response. Get him engaging with me. Then move on. But I hadn’t even got the basic response.

  “And at first, for a week, maybe two, that’s just how it’ll play, Mr Carson. But give it that week, and they’ll start looking at you and wondering if you really are as tough as a cop-killer should be. You’ll be the man with the crown, and every other con in there is going to want to take it off you. And I’ve got to be honest, Mr Carson. You don’t look that tough to me.”

  A hint of a shrug, I thought, although again it was gone so fast I might have just imagined it. A twitch in a shoulder. A phantom hint of a possible shrug. That was the best I was getting out of Carson.

  “Let’s go to the pub,” said Roarkes, as we watched Carson making the same walk back to the same bright little cell. Serena nodded, and I asked him to repeat himself, because coming from Roarkes a social invitation was as likely as a warm and loving hug. I agreed, warily, caught between my desire for a decent drink and the suspicion of someone who knew Roarkes well enough to know nothing with him was ever straightforward. When we got there and I saw the huge windowless dirty-walled formica-tabled plastic-chaired hangar of a place with a tiny bar in the corner and the grease so heavy in the air you could almost feel it pushing you down, I saw the rub: even the First Quality Inn might have something better to offer. Serena took it in her stride. This was probably her local.

  “So, you’ve had your little chat with Serena’s client,” said Roarkes, his voice neutral, his expression deadpan. “Helpful sort, isn’t he?”

  Serena sighed, wearily. She’d known Roarkes for a matter of days, and already she was sick of him. I fought back a grin and shrugged instead, silent, a passable imitation of Carson himself. Roarkes nodded.

  “Any ideas?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Might as well go home, then,” he continued. “No point wasting any more time. You gave it your best shot.”

  I was astonished.

  “Hang on,” I said. “I’ve only just got here. Let me get my feet under the table, figure out what’s going on.”

  I stopped, wondering what I was talking myself into, thought about backtracking, and remembered how much I needed to make something of this.

  “Give me a chance,” I finished, somewhat desperately.

  Roarkes nodded. That was what he’d been hoping for. Serena was drinking and watching in silence.

  “So what do you need?” asked Roarkes.

  I didn’t know. That was the problem. I couldn’t unlock Carson without a key, and I had no idea where that key was. Unless…

  “What’s with the wife?” I asked, and Serena lifted her face from the vodka tonic she was slowly sipping to fill me in.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing you wouldn’t expect. Poor woman’s scared out of her mind, doesn’t understand what’s happened, keeps saying things like he’s never shot anyone before, you know, trying to keep it together in front of her lad, not really doing a great job of it.”

  “Any point me seeing her?”

  Serena shrugged.

  “Not really. But if you want to, knock yourself out.”

  “Go if you want,” said Roarkes. “But go easy. Don’t upset the woman. I’ll send someone along to keep you company.”

  5: Into the Forest

  I DIDN’T WANT the company. But I didn’t fancy any more time in the room with Carson until I knew a little more about him, and Roarkes wasn’t sending me alone. I wasn’t stupid enough to think the wife would give me anything obvious. But there might be something indirect, something personal, something I could use to chip away at Carson’s mask and get under his skin. I almost admired him, the way he sat there, locked inside his own head, just watching the world roll on outside and refusing to take part. But there had to be a reason. The guy wasn’t catatonic, he wasn’t in shock, the doctors had checked and double-checked and there was no physical reason for his failure to interact. He was eating and drinking, putting one foot in front of the other when he had to, using the toilet. The vulnerable person line was bullshit, but they’d started it. Thomas Carson was no more vulnerable than I was. He just wasn’t talking. There had to be a reason.

  The chaperon Roarkes had assigned me was a detective constable named Gaddesdon. It took nearly an hour to get to the house, from Manchester, but Gaddesdon seemed delighted at the chance to get out of Folgate for the afternoon.

  “Never been round here,” he said, big round face beaming at the patterns of sunlight and shadow bouncing off the hills. “Nice, in’t it?”

  After the rain and misery of the city, I couldn’t disagree. The last vestiges of my cold seemed to have disappeared, although that might have had something to do with the triple dose of ibuprofen I’d knocked back before we set out. The place was called Bowland. The Forest of Bowland, although I couldn’t see much evidence of trees.

  “It’s not that sort of forest,” he explained, still smiling. For all the glamour of the Criminal Investigation Department he was still more Police Academy than Life on Mars. Folgate hadn’t been willing to help Roarkes, to deploy any of their “local resources”, but they’d been happy enough to lend him Gaddesdon. I thought I could see why, It took me a few minutes to get used to his vowels, that grunted “u” and short, sharp “a”, a harsher version of the sounds Serena Hawkes made. Most of what he said was either irrelevant or so blindingly obvious there was no point saying it at all. But when it came to the Forest of Bowland, Detective Constable Gaddesdon had done his research. “Kings and that used to go hunting round here. That’s what forest meant in the old days.”

  I nodded. I didn’t care. It looked nice enough, and Gaddesdon was driving, so I could look as much as I liked. Turned out fifteen minutes was as much as I liked. It was the countryside. It was pretty. That was it.

  The Carsons lived in a small detached cottage in a village called Bursington, nestled between gently rolling hills, with a brook running through the middle of it, and a pub, and no doubt a wicker man for burning strangers who asked too many questions. They’d lived there for three years, straight off the plane from Argentina. Place like this, I imagined they could call themselves locals in another fifty.

  Sally Carson was a dark-haired, fine-featured woman in her mid-thirties with one son, one husband, and a touch of colour in her face from the years in South America, and apart from the tiny detail about that husband being stuck in a cell accused of murdering two police officers, there was nothing unusual about her in the slightest.

  That wasn’t strictly true. There was something. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. She was nice enough, fidgety, nervous, but that was understandable. She recognised Gaddesdon from the police station, which meant she clearly had an eye for detail and a half-decent memory, and she was happy to talk to me even though she understood Serena Hawkes was her husband’s lawyer and she didn’t quite understand what my role was.

  I thought I’d be hone
st, for once.

  “I don’t really know myself, Mrs Carson.”

  She relaxed a little and laughed.

  “Call me Sally, please. Fancy a brew?”

  We stood in the kitchen while she made three cups of tea and I tried to explain why I was there and what I was hoping to achieve.

  “I want to get enough out of Thomas to be able to show the police they’re wasting their time with him, Sally. But he won’t speak to me.”

  She turned to me, a teaspoon in her hand, and the bright, flighty nerves were gone. She just looked tired, wasted, done in. Exhausting, surely, keeping up the front, acting like everything was fine, or would be fine once a misunderstanding or two was sorted out. And she’d been doing it for a week.

  “He won’t speak to me either. He’s allowed calls, he’s even allowed visitors, but he won’t speak to anyone. Anything at all that you can do to help us, well, it would be wonderful.”

  There was no point going through the same questions the police had been through. She knew nothing about the shooting and could think of no reason her husband would be involved in something like that. Instead I asked her about her son, Matthew, and saw her face light up at once, as I’d known it would. There were photos of the boy on the walls and the mantelpiece and the kitchen table, the same tousle-haired four-year-old in school uniform and swimming shorts and a football kit several sizes too big. Sally Carson talked about him for ten minutes straight, with only the slightest of interruptions and prompts, but she didn’t give me anything I could use.

  I steered the conversation onto Argentina, where Sally had met Thomas on one of the wilderness trips he ran down there. She was from Manchester, she explained; he’d been raised in Blackburn. Two English northerners in the hills of Patagonia, with horses and campfires, glaciers and mountain lakes, bitter tea and the smell of charred chorizo. They’d hit it off immediately, and since Sally had no job waiting for her back home, she’d decided to stick around for a while. A while turned into thirteen years, during which time they’d moved in together, got married and had a child. But they’d never intended to stay there forever. Once they started thinking about schools, they realised it was time to come home.

  “What was it like out there?” I asked. It was about as general a question as they got, and Sally Carson could take it pretty much any way she wanted. She assumed I was asking about parenthood, doctors, that sort of thing. I gave her a couple of minutes on the state of Argentina’s public services, and guided her onto business.

  “Oh, the tourists were still coming, even after the recession. It was cheap, for them. Of course the money we made didn’t stretch so far when we decided it was time to come back, but it could have been worse. And by then Thomas was his own man, sole proprietor, he could make all the decisions, and I think that was good for us, good for him, it meant he’d been able to move the business in the right direction.”

  “So he’d been working for someone else before, right?”

  Sally turned to Gaddesdon, a confused frown on her face.

  “I thought you knew all this. I’m sure I’ve already told the police all of this.”

  Gaddesdon looked over at me, lost, and I apologised.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just, anything at all we can use to get through to your husband, you know, it might help get him out.”

  She nodded.

  “He’d been in business with a local guy. Partners. They put in half the cash each, and Alejandro had some land for the horses, and Thomas did most of the work, so it seemed a fair split. It worked well enough, but they did argue, especially when Alé…”

  She stopped, and looked at me closely for the first time.

  “Do you really need to know all this, Mr Williams?”

  I paused for a moment and remembered what Roarkes had said. Don’t upset the woman. But I was there and he was in Manchester, and I was there for a reason. Find the fact. Get under Thomas Carson’s skin.

  “It’s Sam. Please. And I’ll be honest with you, Sally, I have no idea what I need to know and what I don’t. The more you tell me, the more chance I’ll hear the one thing that’ll help me get through.”

  She pulled out a stool and sat at the kitchen island. Gaddesdon and I remained standing, and I tried to think myself into that still, steel-walled room in my head where I could remember every word she said, where the photographic memory I’d once possessed replaced the tired blur I tended to live in these days. Easier said than done. The brain wasn’t what it had been, and I was still a little light-headed from all the painkillers. If I ended up remembering half it would be a decent result.

  “OK then, Sam. His partner, Alejandro, he was a nice enough guy, but he was lazy. And – you know where Patagonia is, right?”

  I gave a half-nod. It was in Argentina. It was in the middle of nowhere. Like the Forest of Bowland, I thought.

  “Well it’s huge. It’s in the south of the country and it extends right up to the border with Chile. And sometimes things happen round that area that shouldn’t.”

  Borders can only mean one thing.

  “Smuggling,” I said. It wasn’t a question. Sally nodded.

  “Anything and everything, and it goes both ways. There’s big business taking the right things through the mountains.”

  “What did this have to do with Thomas?”

  “Well, it wasn’t Thomas, it was Alé. He was a local, he grew up in the area, he had friends up to all sorts. Friends in the police who ignored things they didn’t want to see, friends at the borders who didn’t search people they knew they were supposed to search, and friends crossing from one side to the other five or six times a week with something they shouldn’t have hidden away in their pockets or their backpacks or their saddlebags.”

  “So Alejandro wanted to help out his friends?”

  She nodded again. There was an expression on her face I couldn’t quite put a name to, her own unique border country where wistful, frustrated and resigned all met.

  “Just lending them horses, letting them camp in the field, it wasn’t much and it wasn’t like anyone was getting hurt. But Thomas didn’t like it, and neither did I. We were foreigners. We hadn’t grown up in the area. If people started looking into us – well – I just didn’t think….”

  She tailed off. She didn’t need to spell it out. The local guy would get the benefit of the doubt. The foreigners would get the benefit of a cell and whatever the Argentine equivalent of porridge might be. I nodded for her to continue.

  “So they argued about it. Alé said OK, it would stop, and the next week Thomas turned up with a tour group who’d been booked in for months, and five of the horses were off with Alé’s friends halfway to Chile. Thomas had to borrow some horses off a neighbour and he was furious, and Alé promised nothing like that would ever happen again.”

  “Don’t tell me, the same thing a week later?”

  “No, a week later something very different. Alé disappeared.”

  “What?”

  “He disappeared.”

  I turned to Gaddesdon, who was looking out of the kitchen window at the sheep in the field next door with the expression of a man who’d never seen a sheep before.

  “Did you know about this?”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t mean Roarkes didn’t, though. Doesn’t tell us much, the detective inspector.”

  Typical Roarkes. The man kept his cards so close to his chest he probably couldn’t read them himself. Mind you, I thought, if Gaddesdon was the one person I had to confide in, I probably wouldn’t be telling him much either.

  “I did tell the detective inspector,” Sally continued. “I told him all about it. Alé disappeared and no one’s seen him since. The local police spoke to Thomas and me. Some of them were his friends. They sent out search parties into the mountains, they looked everywhere. They found two of his horses on one of the mountains, some food in the saddle bags, but no sign of Alé.”

  “So what, he had an accident?”

  “That’s
the most likely explanation. The conditions out there can be treacherous. Seems bright and sunny one moment, and the next there’s a blizzard and you can’t see two feet in front of you.”

  “And the business?”

  “Alé had an ex-wife and two kids in Buenos Aires. She’d married again and she’d done a lot better second time round, so they were living on this huge estancia and playing polo with businessmen and diplomats. A million miles away from Alé and the life he led – he had led. They weren’t interested in him or his business. They had him declared dead, and said Thomas could keep the land and his share of the business.”

  “So it all worked out quite well for you?”

  She glared at me, shocked. The shock looked genuine.

  “Alé was our friend! There might have been difficulties, but we were close. He helped Thomas get on his feet, and we helped him when he was struggling himself. So no, Mr Williams. It didn’t work out well for us at all.”

  “Sorry,” I said, wincing at the Mr Williams. But only on the outside. Sally Carson might have been shocked, but she was defensive as well, more than she needed to be, and in my experience people who were more defensive than they needed to be usually had something to hide. And I was annoyed. It wasn’t Sally Carson I was annoyed at, but she was the one in front of me, so I didn’t really mind that glare. The one I was annoyed at was Roarkes, who’d told me he wanted my help, who was at least pretending he wanted my help, but hadn’t bothered to mention the missing business partner. Everything’s normal, he’d said, Serena Hawkes had said, they’d all said. Normal bloke, normal wife, normal life. I might not have cracked Carson but there was a crack in that everything’s normal line, a crack so big you could stuff a whole dead Argentinian in it.