A breeze unsettled the tall grass at the verge, then lifted into the trees with a gentle hiss. A chilly breeze for August but then they were high up here. The road followed the backbone of a long hill before dropping down to Dorton where the Ryders lived. The radio was on, the same station he had been listening to, the coffee sipping presenter taking those who cared through tomorrow's front pages. The dullness of the headlines had a calming effect, something about French lorry drivers.
Julie got out of the car.
“What can you see?” she called out.
“Stay in the car.”
She approached him, drew level and for the first time in quite a while, she took his hand. They peered in through the side windows, Jim opened one of the doors and left it standing wide before announcing:
“Nothing.”
“I still don't like it,” said Julie. “We shouldn't have...”
They turned back to her car, alerted by a movement there. From the trees beyond it had come two figures, hooded with balaclavas. The taller of the two men leaned over the open driver's door, levelled a shotgun at them and asked as calmly as if he were asking the time:
“The money. Where is it?”
Only the radio presenter spoke, warning them of unsettled weather now that summer was nearly over.
The man asked again: “Where is it, lady? We mean business.”
A young voice. Twenties and Irish. Belfast. Unafraid.
“In the boot,” said Julie.
The man walked to the back of the car, yanked at the handle.
“Open it,” he said.
There was determination in the voice now. But they aren't going to kill us, Jim thought, or they wouldn't be wearing hoods.
“I said open it.”
The determination had become anger. Controlled anger. The man raised his shotgun. As Julie made to approach the boot, so Jim snatched the keys from her hand.
“Not on your fucking Nellie!”
He threw the keys as far as he could into the trees. The shorter man looked at him for a moment, took aim and fired. Jim fell.
“You got another key?” asked the taller man.
“No,” Julie yelled.
“Find his then,” said the man. “On your fucking hands and knees!”
Julie stared at him, fancying that she recognised the framed eyes, the moody mouth. She turned to run, the man steadied his shotgun and fired. Julie arched backwards and fell.
The shorter man stooped and took the bloodied tyre lever from Jim's hand, stepped over his body and went to the back of Julie's car. He tried to wrench open the lock but it wouldn't give. He threw down the lever, stood back and fired. The other man fired a second shot and the boot sprung open, as if aghast at the intrusion. He reached in and took Julie's bag.
They got into their car. The taller man started the engine and drove away.
-1-
All in all it had been quite a pleasant evening. The company was reasonable, food excellent and I'd managed not to upset anyone. In fact I'd been pretty friendly given that I'd put away a bottle and a half of Mouton Cadet, the life blood of village England. I hadn't meant to drink so much. I'd meant to stop at a couple of glasses but with Angie Mitchell's hand on the corkscrew you don't stand a chance.
We were saying goodbye to her in the yard at Hayfleet, a barn conversion just off The Ridge Road. There was a breeze whipping up and making straight for the alcohol in my face: that sting you get, half way between a slap and a palm full of aftershave. Angie was arranging people's lives for them.
“Laura,” she said, “I wonder if you could drop Nathan off. I'm not saying he's pissed but well...”
“Certainly,” said the prim and sober doctor. She was on call, she'd told us, not that she drank much anyway. “Where do you live?”
“Er, Beech Tree Cottage. I think.” I was trying to be witty but it was pearls before swine. “It's Winchendon. Are you going that way?”
“Apparently.”
“All settled then,” said Angie.
She turned to Allan and Petra Wyeth, the other two guests, and air-kissed them all the way to their car. I knew them as neighbours, a strange couple, at the back of the queue when looks were handed out but well to the fore on brains day. In fact between them they had enough intellectual power to launch a star fleet which is exactly what their Beetle sounded like as it pulled out of the Mitchells' yard.
“What was the name of his company, the word he kept saying as if we all knew what it meant?”
“Eruditio,” said Geoff Mitchell. He was more pissed than I was and had a slight tussle with the Latin pronunciation.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“No idea,” he said. “I was hoping you’d tell me.”
We collapsed, like real blokes, into a fit of giggles - we may even have hugged, I choose not to remember - until Angie slapped her old man over his bald head.
“Enough,” she barked and the world fell silent. She turned to me and I backed away. “Lovely to see you, Nathan. Goodnight.”
I got into Laura's car, a feminised Saab smelling unnervingly of both peach essence and surgical spirit. She rescued her medical bag from the front seat, just before I sat on it, and turned to me with a look devoid of all bedside manner.
“If you're going to throw up, give me notice. I'll stop the car, you can do it by the roadside.”
“I could always walk,” I said, huffily.
“Not in a straight line. And certainly not all the way to Winchendon. Seat belt.”
I scissored the air with my hands in protest.
“It's the law,” she insisted, “and you were a policeman, weren't you?”
She reached over and fastened me in and after we'd thanked our hosts repeatedly Laura Peterson hared off at a reckless twenty miles an hour.
At the Dorton observatory we turned onto The Ridge Road and I tried some polite conversation.
“Nice people,” I said.
She nodded and slowed down to take a bend, passing the wheel through her hands like they teach you at Driving School. Most people do it right up to the day of their test and then forget it, but Laura Peterson had more staying power.
“Geoff and Angie,” I said, in case she hadn't understood me.
“I knew who you meant.”
Maybe I had upset someone and just hadn't been aware of it. It wouldn't have been the first time. I rolled down the window.
“You want me to stop?” she said, anxiously.
“No, just fancied a breath of fresh air. Tell me, Doc, what's the best thing for a hangover?”
“Temperance,” came the stodgy reply. “Or, failing that, two pints of water before you go to bed. What was that?”
She'd heard the same thing I had. Gunshot, about a mile up ahead of us.
“Rabbits?” I said. It was meant to be another joke but came out plain daft. I tried to recoup by asking in a serious voice, as if I gave a damn: “Do people shoot rabbits round here?”
“Well, of course they do but not in the middle of the night. It's more likely to be an engine back-firing. Allan and Petra's Beetle.”
There was a second shot.
“Put your foot down,” I said.
She did, all the way up to thirty. We drove for ten seconds before I said:
“Try another gear.”
She was about to come back at me, tell me it was her car and she could drive it however she pleased, but she was side-tracked by two more shots in rapid succession.
“Phone?” I said, snapping my fingers.
“Why? We don't even know what's...”
“I know something's wrong. Where is it?”
“And I know you've drunk too much, so less of the snapping fingers.”
She mimicked the way I'd tried to bring a touch of urgency to the situation. Meantime, I'd found the phone on the dashboard and was dialling three nines.
“Good evening Doctor Peterson. Which service?”
“Police.”
“One momen
t.”
I could feel the disdain beside me and see, reflected in the windscreen, the shake of the school marm head despairing of the wayward pupil. It lasted until the final bend in the road. Coming out of it, Laura braked and I grabbed the wheel, steering us into the long grass.
Ahead of us a dark car, no lights on, unidentifiable, was pulling away all too carefully. It dipped out of sight below the brow of the hill, descending to the main Oxford road. The headlights came on and it tore like hell into the night. Give chase, I thought, but at twenty miles an hour we might just lose it. Besides, Laura was already getting out of the car, hurling instructions at me:
“Bring my bag! There's someone lying there.”
I reached behind for her medical bag and followed her, taking the phone with me.
She stooped to the lifeless body of a man lying in a slick of his own blood, his rib cage torn open by the shotgun blast, his face caught in the headlights of Laura's car. A hideous, carnival mask, mouth overshadowed by his chin, eyes blacked out by his cheek bones.
“I know this man,” I said. “Jim Ryder, The Plough. Where's his wife? They'll be together. Where's Julie?”
“She's here.” Laura said.
She crouched down in the long, dampening grass verge and put a hand to Julie's neck.
“She's still alive.”
She went to work as the emergency operator asked me for more details.
“It's a shooting,” I said. “Ridge Road, Penman Wood. Ambulance and police.”
“Could I...?” the girl began.
“Don't waste time taking my details. Just do it.”
Forget two pints of water. Give me a double shooting any day, guaranteed to render you stone cold sober in an instant.
A minute or so later I heard the ambulance leave Aylesbury and head towards us, followed by a police patrol car, both doing speeds Laura Peterson had only dreamed of.

I didn't arrive home until dawn and made the mistake of slumping into an armchair where I must have nodded off. I woke with a start, counting murders. I'd worked on thirty-three in some capacity or other, from DC through to Sergeant and onto Detective Chief Inspector. Jim Ryder's was the thirty-fourth lifeless body I'd stood over asking myself the same question: Why do I feel so alive now that this poor bastard isn't? I was asking it even though catching Jim's killer would be none of my business. I could stand over as many bodies as I liked from now on, get the same rush and it would all lead nowhere.
Maybe that's what woke me, the sense of leaving things behind, of going past milestones at Laura Peterson speeds, slow enough to read every last detail on them. I was on the verge of depressing myself badly when two pints of water started knocking on my bladder door.
He was there again in the downstairs toilet, The Stranger, watching me from the mirror. Not a bad looking bloke, even with the time-lines carving up his face and the greying hair cut short to hide its recession. But he'd chubbed up lately, maybe a stone or more, dispersed over his frame, yes, but easily caught in the glare of the bathroom scales. I breathed on him and he disappeared behind the mist.
In the kitchen Dogge awoke and looked me up and down.
“Fancy a walk?” I asked.
Across the meadow behind the cottage I could see the all night fishermen who'd escaped from their wives to sit in discomfort on the river bank. Stefan Merriman would be there, having deserted his exotic partner for the sake of a spliff or two and a flask of metallic tea. Most men in the village couldn’t understand why he left her alone so much, and prey to passing lotharios. I thought I knew why. It seems an odd thing to say about someone that all they have is beauty but in Bella’s case it was true. There was little more to her, saving an endearment born of familiarity, than her stunning good looks.
At the gate I looked back at the cottage which had cost me just about all I had. I wasn't sure how I felt about her these days, this old lady placed in my care until some other admirer rode by looking for peace and quiet. First thing they should do is repair the shawl of thatch before it fell any lower round the old girl's shoulders. I couldn't afford to. Did it feel like home yet, Beech Tree Cottage? Not really. Maggie would have loved it, of course. She would have done it all differently, but she would have loved it. I guess that's why I’d bought it.
Dogge growled, the street-wise rumble she reserved for other creatures she hated, in this case Will Waterman and his sister, Prissy. I wasn't too keen on them myself. Pass by Will and his sister's front gate any time of day or night and one of them would be out there in a flash to check you over, usually on the pretext of putting rubbish in the wheelie bin. They must've kept a stash of it by the door for emergencies.
This morning, though, they weren't being nosy, they were off on holiday. Prissy was herding the pygmy goats she kept tethered on the green into the horse-box. Will was hitching it up to the Range Rover.
“Morning, Nathan,” Prissy said. “Thought we'd get an early start.”
“Devon? You'll be there for breakfast, Priss.”
“That’s the general idea.”
Will began, as ever, to fill me in with bits of his life story.
“Only thing I really liked about National Service, the early rise. I remember one morning in Aldershot...”
The guy sure had seen the world
“Key, Will?” He looked at me. “You want me to keep an eye on the place?”
“Yes, yes, mate, thanks. I'll drop it in before we take off. Rotten luck about Jim and Julie, eh?”
It had happened just six hours previously but the Watermans already had chapter and verse on it, probably from Prissy's old nursing mates at The Radcliffe Infirmary. Be that as it may, it wasn't going to spoil their holiday.
At the far end of the slumbering village there was life in the attic rooms of The Plough. The curtains had been pulled back, young voices were chattering on the radio, water was running down a drainpipe. A police panda parked on the shingle at the front had a young copper fast asleep in the passenger seat, head back, cap over his eyes. As I slipped past him he smacked his lips, groaned like an old man and slept on.
Julie was fond of her nephew, Tom Templeman, and not simply because he'd run the restaurant for the past eighteen months. Her feelings went beyond that, partly to do with having no kids of her own, she once told me. Sure, Tom wasn't very bright, but he had a gentle warmth and a modesty you couldn't accuse most kids of.
So, Julie gave bean-pole Tommy the top half of The Plough and Jack Langan turned it into a bachelor pad for him. He made a nice job of it too. He built a set of spiral stairs, winding them round a central beam until they surfaced halfway along the attic. Behind a partition wall he managed to create a bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom. You could see his mark on the place wherever you looked, from the brushed plaster finish, to the oak flooring, to the carved hand rail at the stair well.
Tommy loved the place, of course, and things went well between him and his aunt Julie until Gizzy came on the scene. Giselle Whitely, eighteen years old, mouth like a well-oiled machine gun, legs like a giraffe, all topped off with a kind of Scandinavian beauty. She begged a job waitressing and Julie obliged, unaware of Gizzy's big plans, big laughable plans that she was dead serious about. She was going to make Tom the best chef in the world this side of Marco Pierre White.
Julie Ryder turned a blind eye to many things. You have to if you're a publican or life doesn't roll along smoothly but when Gizzy moved into the flat and started putting ideas into Tom's head, Julie decided to act. I don't think she'd got round to the fine detail but I know there'd been an almighty row a week or so previously and Gizzy's days at The Plough were numbered. My own view of Julie was one of respect more than affection. I couldn’t say I disliked her but I wouldn’t have wanted to cross her. But Gizzy had, though she seemed totally unaware of the fact.
I was met at the top of Jack's stairs by WPC Greene, teeth bared.
“Friend,” I said in a soothing voice, arms raised. “How are the kids?”
“I haven’t got any.”
Was she being funny, or were IQ levels falling in the police service?
“Not your kids. Tom and Gizzy.”
“They’re fine. Who are you? How did you get in?”
“You left the door open, so I turned the handle and pushed. I'm ex D.C.I. Hawk. I live in the village. I'm a friend of Julie Ryder.”
“None of that's a reason to be here. Leave.”
So much for my all-conquering charm.
“And what’ll you do if I refuse? Call a copper? There's one outside, asleep in the panda.”
She didn't like it but could see this wasn't the time or place for a confrontation. She glared at me and I walked round her.
Tom was half buried in a sofa, the cushions rising up either side of him like quicksand. A police surgeon had checked him over, Greene eventually told me, and then had knocked him stupid with something. Pity he or she hadn't done the same to Giselle Whitely who’d stood up when I entered, though not out of respect.
“What the hell do you want?” she asked.
“To talk to Tom without any help from you.”
She came at me with pure teenage strop. It's our own fault. We wanted them to stand up to authority figures and now we're rattled when they do.
“Go to hell!” she said. “He's not saying anything more till he's spoken to his lawyer.”
“Less of the Hollywood, Gizzy. The boy Delia could be in trouble and for Julie's sake, if not for his own, I plan to help him.”
“It's Nathan,” said Tom, with a slow, clockwork turn of the head. “Hi, Nathan, d'you hear what they did to...?”
“Why could he be in trouble?” Gizzy asked.
“Same reason you think he needs a solicitor. Someone gets murdered, the first place they look is home and family. Then someone tells them about the dust up you both had with Julie last week and well...”
The eyes were flashing, shoulders forward, mouth ready to savage all comers. “She told you about that? Is anything your own in this bloody place?”
“Welcome to village England, Gizzy. What was it about?”
Haggard Hawk: A Nathan Hawk Crime Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Crtime Mysteries) Page 2
