Haggard Hawk: A Nathan Hawk Crime Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Crtime Mysteries)

by Douglas Watkinson

  He shrugged the subject away and pecked Bella on the cheek.

  “Good day, hon?” he said.

  “Reasonable. Charlie Travis was up to his old tricks again, speaking to some, ignoring others just cos he’s had a bad...”

  He wasn't really listening so she didn't waste any more breath on the subject. She turned to me instead.

  “Can I get you a cup of tea, Nathan?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She went through to the kitchen and filled the kettle for herself. Stef and I followed.

  I'd learned something during the past few days. Nothing useful, or even interesting, just ... new. When you've had the dubious pleasure of watching two people you know have sex together, you never look at them in quite the same way again. In certain cases that fresh regard will be one of admiration or excitement, I'm sure, even a touch of envy. But in Stefan's case, and for all his cleverness, my new impression was of a man lacking in imagination, semi-detached from his forlorn, disheartened and beautiful partner.

  “It's Kate I wanted to see you about, actually. You don't know where she's gone, do you?”

  They exchanged a glance before Bella said:

  “Didn't know she'd gone anywhere.”

  “I just wondered if you knew of a boyfriend, or any friends at all, come to that. When I think about her I see ... just her.”

  Stef agreed. “Loner. People to ask would be Will and Prissy when they get back.”

  “Heh, ain't it nice without 'em,” said Bella. “You don't feel that that every move you make is being watched.”

  “Every move indeed,” I said.

  Stef was gesturing at the fridge, asking if I wanted a beer. I said no with my hands. I was anxious to say what I needed to and leave.

  “Night before last, Jack phoned me. He'd been working there, Kate's cottage, during the day...”

  Stef looked at me, frowning. “Doing what?”

  “Moving the boiler.”

  Bella giggled, an Essex giggle. I couldn't have lived with a giggle like that for longer than a week.

  “Honestly, the number of times that boiler...”

  “Lots, I know. Jack said that up on the loft he saw a pair of shotguns.”

  They both stared at me for a moment, then Stef said, in a puzzled whisper:

  “Kate Whitely? Shotguns?”

  Once over his initial surprise he took another sip of his beer, eyes still on me.

  “That’s Jack talkin’ rubbish,” Bella suggested. “Been on the piss. Made a mistake.”

  “I don't think so. And I think seeing the guns cost him his life. Police disagree, of course.”

  Stef was still eyeing me, worried now. “Is this for real, Nathan? I mean bad enough that he dies. Now you say someone killed him?”

  “Blimey, what's happening to this village?” said Bella, like a woman twice her age. “It used to be such a nice, quiet place to live.”

  Stef shook his head. “Nowhere's really like that. Never was, right Nathan?”

  I nodded and took Will Waterman's tape from my pocket.

  “Since you're both in a philosophical mood, take a look at this.”

  “What is it?”

  “What you do about it is up to you but I suggest you do it through a solicitor. It's a tape of you two. Making love. I found it in Will's house.”

  Stef took the cassette from me. He wasn't angry, as I would have been. In fact he was faintly amused.

  “How's the cheeky sod done that?”

  “Miniature camera, size of a ball-bearing, up in the ceiling, near the light. I cut the cable.”

  “Blimey!” said Bella. “Some people.”

  They went through to their tiny living room to briefly watch the tape while I stayed in the kitchen. They joined me after ten minutes or so, even more amused than before but trying not to show it. Unsuccessfully.

  I couldn't understand it. I told myself it must be a generation thing.

  -9-

  I parked up at St. Anthony's College and walked down the Woodstock Road to St. Giles. At Brown's, the front windows were closed but the smell of coffee still drifted out into the evening air. Passers by paused to savour the aroma and, more often than not, were drawn by it to the menu in the glass-fronted box by the door.

  I liked Brown's for being a packed and lively place but never in your face, never marking your age. It had a colonial feel to it with its huge fans in the ceiling, feathered palms and leather seats. Above the clinking glass and posh-accented hubbub, the planked floor sprung back like a drumbeat with every footfall. The tall mirrors always took me by surprise but had a welcome knack of making me look better than I felt.

  I looked around the lobby for Laura. She was drinking coffee at the bar and rose from her stool to air kiss me, her soft skin brushing against my cheek. When we stood back, I half expected to see an angry graze where we’d touched but I’d left no mark. She nodded at the flashing number cruncher on one of the pillars.

  “That's us. Number seventeen. You came in the nick of time”.

  As we studied the menu a burst of laughter from the next table made us turn. A girl in her early twenties with long blond hair, once brown according to the roots, had recalled a funny moment in their recent lives. It involved a young man at the end of the table who blushed and acknowledged his part in the story. A trousers down story, I thought, one of mistaken identity or rudeness to a member of the faculty.

  They were distracted from it by the arrival of a young man in a dinner jacket who took his place at the grand piano in the centre of the room. He acknowledged his audience and began to play, something vaguely romantic and mercifully quiet.

  “So how about old Julie, then?” I said.

  Laura seemed pleased but not overly so. “Marvellous news, yes.”

  “Police reckoned she'd be a gonner. Gave her a week.”

  She smiled. “Where did Charnley do medicine? Hendon Police College? I'm going to have the butterfly prawns, twice, and no main course.”

  “Any idea when she'll be coming home?”

  She shrugged. “Shotgun wounds can be tricky. It's the depth of the lesion, needs plenty of time.”

  I ordered gigot of lamb and suggested a bottle of Cahors Red which, without discussion, Laura changed to two glasses.

  I said: “So ... conference, visit to Julie. Anything else?”

  “Bit of retail therapy. Some women buy shoes, I buy books, they don’t ruin your feet. Guess who I saw in the coffee bar of Blackwells?”

  “Er ... Jim Ryder?”

  She laughed and looked round, presumably to check that my irreverence hadn’t been overheard. “That is a dreadful thing to say! Well, it isn't really, I suppose, but anyway... Tom Templeman.”

  “I didn't think he could read.”

  “Come to think of it, he did look a bit sheepish when he saw me. How about your day?”

  I began telling her and her eyes lit up at news of Kate's disappearance. She leaned forward and lowered her voice.

  “Gone off with a chap? Do we know who?”

  “I don't think it's quite that simple.”

  The second button on her blouse came adrift, revealing the tops of her breasts, not tanned like her face but soft and white, pushing upwards at a black lace bra. Wherever she'd been on holiday that year, and it was certainly in the sun, she'd played the Englishwoman abroad and kept her top on. She saw my eyes hovering at the parted blouse. With a discreet smile she fastened the button.

  We clinked the glasses the waiter had brought us and agreed, in the conventional way of such toasts, that it was good to see each other, especially in a place like this. We should do it more often. And as prawns and lamb gave way to bread and butter pudding for me, and guilt free black coffee for Laura, so the kids at the next table provided a mild diversion.

  Their bill had arrived and they'd begun to dissect it. A calculator criss-crossed the table, the addition was checked twice and deemed to be correct. However, there were a couple of rogue vodka's itemise
d and no one was prepared to own up to them whereupon two factions emerged: those who drank spirits, those who didn't. In the subtle shifts from denial to accusation, I studied the faces, trying to pinpoint the guilty party. I settled on the dark-haired, thoughtful girl beside the pillar. The head waitress was summoned, an exotic creature from North African climes. Was she absolutely sure that these drinks were ordered by someone at this table? North Africa could not have been more certain. I turned to smile at Laura who was deep in thoughts of her own.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I'm sorry, I was miles away.” She paused before adding: “I should have told you this the other day, up at The Harrow. In fact it was the reason I asked you to meet me there but I never got round...”

  I expected at the very least to be told of an old flame who had appeared out of nowhere and re-kindled their dormant love affair. He would be younger than me, no doubt, with more hair and he'd probably have more money. He would leave my growing admiration for Laura stranded at the second button down.

  “And you're not sure whether to tell me now?” I offered.

  She grimaced, still searching for the right verbal route to take and finally chose the long way round.

  “Something's been worrying me. It's a matter of principles, I suppose. Hippocratic oath versus, well, my conscience. Sounds ever so grand, I know, but...”

  She stalled for a moment. The dark, thoughtful girl by the pillar had suddenly recalled the two vodka tonics she'd had when she first arrived.

  “Julie came to see me a couple of months ago,” said Laura, quietly. “High as a kite with worry. Blood pressure up, chest pains, dizzy spells, panic attacks, the works. It was all to do with Jim coming home, she said. She was dreading it. We talked it over. What could she do? I usually try to put people off chemical help but I suggested a course of Prozac. I mean she spoke with such vehemence I had to do something. She said she wished he wasn't coming back home at all. If she could possibly stop him doing so, she would.”

  Relieved at there being no mention of an old flame I'd entirely missed the point of her telling me all this.

  “I know what she meant about Jim,” I said. “Did you ever meet him?”

  “Of course I met him,” she said, slightly puzzled that I wasn’t aghast at her story. “Man was an utter creep. You said the other day that Julie persuading him to get a proper defence lawyer was academic. Suppose she persuaded him not to.”

  “She wanted him to go down, you mean?”

  “Well, yes. Suppose after eighteen months on her own she'd grown to so enjoy life without him and would’ve gone to any lengths to keep it that way. Suppose somehow she was ... involved in his murder and up there on The Ridge it all went horribly wrong?”

  I thought about it for a moment, reaching out for my wine glass. It was empty. Laura offered me hers.

  “Well, one thing's for sure,” I said, drinking from it. “I can't ask her straight out, given that she spoke to you in confidence.”

  “No, you're right, you mustn't,” said Laura, urgently. “I mean I wasn't going to say anything because, well, to be quite honest ... I didn't expect her to pull through either.”

  I smiled. “And it's your fault that she has. Let's go see how she's doing.”

  

  The church in St Giles struck nine as we left Brown's and strolled, arm in arm, down The Woodstock Road to The Radcliffe Infirmary. The chill I'd noticed that morning had persisted throughout the day. It had brought out sweaters and jackets on the wary but the autumn refuseniks, still in their single layers of summer, were toughing it out.

  The Radcliffe had always struck me as being more than a hospital. Built in 1770 with money left by its namesake, himself a physician, it had the bearing of a great institute, a museum or library, with its orange stonework, wrought iron gates and statued fountain on the forecourt. For all that it was a working hospital, it smacked of quadrangled privilege and sat neatly in the midst of second hand bookshops, river-bridges and posh-frock outfitters. It belonged to the Old Oxford of my alternative youth, the Oxford I would have come to had my ambitions been greater, my parents richer.

  Inside the Radcliffe it was a different story, one of vinyl floors, disinfectant and harsh strip lights. As for the working of the place, something just short of chaos seemed to be driving it. Perhaps visiting time, though nearly over, made it seem overcrowded, made the skeleton staff look weary and defeated. At the reception desk two manager types were speaking to the receptionist, trying to muffle their conversation. I picked up a simple yet urgent exchange.

  “How many? Two”

  “One. But that isn't the point...”

  “I know the bloody point! Where is he now?”

  I was usually good at snippets, taking them to bits and finding a larger meaning within the component parts. This was workaday stressful chat, a pair of admin wallahs at odds. About numbers, two or one. And if one, then his whereabouts.

  Laura guided me to the lifts. Both were stuck at a higher floor. A nurse with a bundle of x-rays in her arms was jabbing at the up button. She was looking to a Rastafarian porter, at the helm of a laundry basket, for explanations. He couldn't help her. Nor could a young Asian doctor who decided to take the stairs. We followed him.

  The click and shuffle of feet descending from above echoed in the stair well. People came into view. Some spoke of the friends or relatives they'd visited, others were complaining about the lifts and high taxation.

  Between the first and second floors a man in a boiler suit, carrying a toolbox, overtook us, taking the stairs two at a time on the upward side. We ourselves passed a couple of security guards, ramrod straight but well into their seventies. They had paused to get their breath.

  At the next landing there was another crowd, a more voluble one. They were demanding of each other why these lifts broke down with such monotonous regularity, offering reasons that made little sense. The lifts were foreign, old and over-used. Beyond them a young woman doctor was speaking on a wall phone. She hung up and ran past us, up the stairs. A few of the patients, there in dressing gowns to see off their relatives, knew her and said so. There was an odd sort of kudos in that.

  At the next landing, the third floor, another gathering of people had more to worry about, it seemed, than the state of the lifts. They turned to me and Laura as we crested the flight of stairs. Who were we, the glances asked. What was our business here? The woman doctor who'd passed us on the stairs was breaking through them, trying to reach the staff nurse waiting for her down one of the corridors.

  “Where's Doctor Rickson?” the staff nurse asked.

  “Operating. You'll have to make do with me.”

  The nurse bundled the young doctor into a side-ward.

  “What's going on?” I asked an elderly woman with a clear, bright face.

  She didn't know but nodded to where two other nurses were coming down the opposite corridor, opening cupboards as they went.

  “Where's security?” one asked the other.

  They're on the stairs, I thought. They'll be here by Christmas.

  “Phone them again?”

  “No.”

  “Can I help?” I asked but the offer was swallowed up in the cross-talk.

  The man in the boiler suit took a screwdriver from his toolbox and undid a small panel beside the lift door. He began to mutter under his breath, insults of a technical nature aimed at the manufacturer.

  “Did anyone see them?” asked a man in a dressing gown.

  The reply, of sorts, came from a porter. “Depends what you mean.”

  “Were there two?”

  “The lifts. They must have jammed the lifts.”

  “Pillow,” said a frightened voice. “They say they put a pillow over...”

  I looked at Laura. “Julie,” she said and without a pause ran to the side-ward the young doctor had entered. I turned to the two nurses.

  “Is it Mrs. Ryder?” I snapped. “Is Mrs. Ryder in trouble?”

  The a
nswer was in the frightened glance the two girls exchanged. The crowd fell back as I set off down the corridor they had yet to check, opening doors, leaving my two companions to close them. Boxes fell out at me, empty syringes, cups and packets of wadding. Another cupboard. Lights were flickering into life all around us. A third cupboard, a fourth, a fifth, all crammed with medical stuff. No place for an assailant, let alone two, to hide.

  We'd reached the main ward. News had broken through. Someone had assaulted one of the patients. It was touch and go. There were high pitched exchanges as I walked through, demands to know who I was.

  “It's okay,” said one of the nurses, “there's nothing to worry...”

  I dropped to the floor, scanned under the beds. Nothing. Up on my feet again, out of the ward, posse behind me.

  At the lifts, I heard questions with beginnings but no ends.

  “What's the...? Have you...? Will it...?”

  The ageing security guards had reached us, one of them wheezing badly. I snapped at his companion:

  “Get these people away from the lift.”

  “Now just a second, what's going on?”

  “Do it, George,” said the nurse.

  The security guards began to shepherd the crowd to safety. I turned to the man in the boiler suit.

  “Can you open the doors? Just enough to look in?”

  At a nod from the nurse, he took a dog-leg key from his pocket, reached up and placed one end of it in a socket in the overhang. He unwound the mechanism and the rubber edges of the doors parted with the stretching sound of a cartoon kiss. When the gap was four inches wide I raised my hand. The man in the boiler suit stopped. I peered in. Nothing.

  “Open them all the way.”

  He wound the key like mad and as the doors slid back so I caught my reflection in the lift mirror. It gave me a second's pause in which to ask myself what the hell I was doing here, taking charge, taking over... In the lift mirror I saw a louvered door open behind me, a cupboard, a fire reel inside, wound tight on a red drum and, emerging from beside it a dark figure. He saw me turn to him and he took off like a sprinter, down the stairs. I stooped to the toolbox, picked out a claw hammer, and followed.