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

by Douglas Watkinson

  Freddie interrupted me, trying to end the discussion:

  “Well, I told you my thoughts on the subject...”

  I interrupted him back. “No, you told me that you didn't do it. You were too rich to care about two million and getting revenge on the person who stole it from you.”

  “Did you believe him, Mr. Hawk?” said Stella.

  “I can count the number of people I've ever believed on one hand and still smoke a cigarette. Listen, we could dance round this all day. I came here to check a few things and to let you know how far I've got.”

  Freddie glanced at his wife, an instruction, I thought, to let him do most of the talking if talking were needed . She didn't agree to it and smiled.

  “I don't think you know much at all,” she said. “I think you're a typical knockabout copper, barge in and bullshit your way round a few ideas, see what they bring.”

  “I know one thing. Your name begins with S. S for Stella.”

  She exploded in a giggle, over the top of the barley sugar. “No prizes for that.”

  “I've seen it written down. On blue notepaper. 'Jim, ring me, S'. Do I get a prize for that?”

  And at that she handed over the verbal side of things to her husband.

  “They were old friends,” Freddie answered on her behalf. *I told you that the other day. He'd just come out of prison.”

  “You were crying at his funeral,” I said to her.

  “I also told you, she's a very emotional person.”

  “You were Jim’s secretary. You tried to break him of his addictions and failed.”

  Freddie rose to his feet. “I think it's time we brought this conversation to a close...”

  Stella said: “He wasn't an easy man to persuade, Jim Ryder. He had a certain way of doing things and as much as I tried to alter...”

  “You weren't trying to break his habits at all,” I said. “You were getting the stuff for him. You wanted him high as a kite, right through the working day.”

  “Why on earth would she...?”

  I turned to Freddie at last. “She needed to keep him on another planet so that she could steal from the company. Write the cheques out. Forge his signature.”

  “Guesswork,” said Freddie, pacing the floor, avoiding the joins between the tiles.

  “One of the three G's, the kindling stuff of a good inquiry. Guesswork, gossip, graft.”

  “Why would I steal money from my own husband?”

  “I'd say that you were planning to leave him. If you'd simply walked out there'd have been no golden handshake. A divorce might've served you even worse, your husband's wealth being tied up in the business. So you stole. You wrote company cheques out to cash, signed them Jim Ryder, and banked 'em God knows where, in a private account for yourself.”

  She lowered her arms, the diamond disappeared from view as she held one hand in the other.

  “When did you work out what had happened, Freddie? Before or after Jim got sent down for it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Oh, yes. You could go to prison for it.”

  “I don't think so,” he said.

  His attitude was beginning to take its toll on me. He hadn't been able to buy me, either as a fishminder for his Far Eastern development or as an odd-job alibi seeker. He was going to smug me to death by way of punishment.

  “Are you above the law?” I asked him.

  “No, but everything said in this room was ... never said, if you get my drift.”

  “Then there's no harm in you giving me an answer. When did you work out that Stella had robbed you?”

  “Halfway through the trial.”

  He stopped pacing and perched on the edge of the table addressing his words half to me, half to the Aga.

  “Those three months, well, they represent the only time in my life when I haven't been in full control and, as such, they were uncomfortable. At the beginning I believed that Jim was innocent even though The Fraud Squad was telling me otherwise. I offered him the Barclays, to build a case for him, but he wouldn't have it. Said he didn't need it because he'd done nothing wrong.”

  He paused as if remembering a man with one great attribute which he himself had long forgotten the value of.

  “Jim was a man who couldn't lie. Not because he didn't want to, he'd have cheated his own mother if he could have got away with it, but every lie he told came up in neon letters on his forehead. So he didn't bother doing it. When he stood up in the court to defend himself he believed the jury would find him innocent. So did I.”

  “But the prosecution barrister had him for breakfast?”

  “Yes, being Jim he tried to flirt his way round her arguments and then she played her ace card. She let him browbeat her for a while and when, in the jury's mind he'd become not only a fraudster but a man who treated women with utter contempt, she lashed back and nailed him to the floor. To try and help him I started looking round for the real culprit.”

  Stella laid a hand on his arm and said:

  “And when he found me, well, he could hardly send his own wife to prison, could he?”

  “Where's the money now?”

  “Back in the company,” said Freddie. “Every last penny.”

  “And the tears at the funeral?”

  “Guilt,” said Stella. “It's a wretched thing when it hits you. Seems to come from nowhere and affects the most unlikely people. When Jim went to prison I thought that was an end of it and, in many ways, a good thing. At least he'd be dried out and go into re-hab. Then, because someone thought he, not I, had stolen the money, that he had it salted away somewhere ... they killed him for it.”

  “And Jack Langan in the aftermath,” I said. “The note said 'ring me'. Why?”

  “I was going to pay him for his trouble,” said Freddie.

  “How much?”

  He shrugged and flashed his money again. “Million? Two? Whatever he asked, I suppose.”

  Stella said: “What now, Mr. Hawk?”

  “I don't know. Must be strange having a wife who steals from you. Did you keep quiet about it, Freddie, so long as she agreed to stay with you? Is that how it went?”

  “I think that's beyond the remit of this court, don't you?” he said. “What Stella meant was...”

  “I know what Stella meant. She meant who will I be telling.”

  He looked at me steadily for a moment or two, trying to judge my likely reaction.

  “I can make it worth your while,” he said, quietly. “To forget what you know.”

  “How much worth my while?”

  “Name it. Half a million quid, start there.”

  I turned to his wife. “So, now you know how much you're worth.”

  She smiled, put her chin in her hands again and pressed the barley sugar well into her jaw.

  I'd been offered money before, usually in a brown envelope sort of way, a few thousand at the most, more usually a couple of hundred. This was riches beyond my wildest dreams. But then I never dreamed about money. I dreamed about my kids. And about women.

  I rose to my feet, the Great Danes slunk away feeling a rise in temperature. Freddie straightened as I walked round the table towards him. He stood his ground with difficulty. Fisticuffs weren't in his nature.

  “You're not in the police force now,” he said, trying to make a joke of impending danger.

  “No, and I'm just beginning to relish the beauty of that,” I said. “I don't have to be polite anymore to pricks like you. I can take offence as and when I please. And I just have done.”

  I stopped myself just as I was about to reach for those pricey clumps of nomadic hair and bring the orange head down on the acacia. I stepped back and took out The Map, unfolded it and laid it out, down table from the Taplins. I smoothed it, carefully ... it was getting frayed in certain places now, nowhere currently important, but best not to take any risks. Who knows where I might want to go in the future? I put on my imaginary glasses and down went the forefinger on an orchard in New Zealand via an
e-mail I'd received that morning from Con.

  “Dad, mate, guess what. This is not, I repeat not a request for money.”

  Did I say it might be?

  “Rosie and me, we're off to Los Angeles next month, to see Jaikie. He's paying the fare. Our kid's got money, mate! It'll be him I tap from now on. Joke. The serious bit is why don't you come too...?”

  You know, boy, I might just do that.

  “...if you feel you can leave the book, that is.”

  Oh, I think I can leave the book for a decade or two. There were no dates on your e-mail, dear boy. You know, forward planning as in when you're thinking of going and ... why don't we get Ellie and Fee to come along as well? Plus I have a friend. Doctor. Very clever.

  Sex, Dad?

  Well, not yet but ... oh, I see. Female. She'd love to meet you all, I'm sure.

  Stella's voice broke through. “Mr. Hawk, are you alright?”

  “Fine.”

  I folded The Map and put it back in my pocket, glasses too, and stood up.

  “Anger Management Disorder,” I explained. “It's a technique I use for controlling it. Where was I? Ah, yes, I was just about to beat you to a pulp, Freddie. Some other time, maybe.”

  -19-

  The rain had eased off by the time I got back to Beech Tree, so I decided to fix the crack in the Landrover roof. I hunted down the leftover gunge I'd sealed the yellow bath with.

  I climbed up onto the cab roof and sat, cross-legged facing the job in hand. I applied the stuff with an old dinner knife and ten minutes or so later I'd fashioned an angry looking yellow boil, just above the driver's seat. I'd considered the depreciation on the vehicle, of course. I'd even looked up the price in last year's guide. Sixty four quid. I'd just knocked a fiver off it at least.

  It really was high time I got myself a decent car. I could've bought one that very day if I'd taken Freddie Taplin's offer.

  I don't know how it happened. It must've been something to do with the sun coming out, warming the whole area but I stretched out on the cab roof to gaze up at the leaves falling from the big beech tree and nodded off. I dreamed about dreaming of women and my kids. And in that order, no offence to the kids. Laura was up front in the dream, saving somebody's life. Mine. I surfaced to the sound of Hideki's voice:

  “Nathan. Nathan. Where you are?”

  “I up am here,” I said and leaned up on one elbow, feeling guilty. “No, no, that was a joke. It's where are you and I am up here.”

  He didn't care. Something far beyond English grammar was troubling him and I wasn't anxious to pry for fear of him going all Japanese on me, stiff and proper.

  “I'm fixing the roof,” I explained. “Leak. Rain. Top of head.”

  I made all the right hand motions and he nodded. He was searching for the words he needed and eventually settled for a simple statement.

  “I go, Nathan.”

  I looked round, automatically, for Nicky and Liza. They weren't there.

  “Go where, mate?”

  “To Asahikawa. I go home Japan.”

  I sat up. “Why?”

  He frowned, the frown he'd learned from me.

  “I live there.”

  “Yes ... no,” I said, confusing him totally. “I meant ... is everything alright? Is your mother okay?”

  If anything the frown deepened.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “But you go.” He was leaving me. “Go when?”

  “Next week. Flight Wednesday, KLM. Heathrow.”

  He seemed all the smaller, the more vulnerable, for being seen from the top of the Landrover.

  “I shall miss you, Hideki.”

  “I shall miss you too, Nathan.”

  He turned and went back into the house.

  

  It must have been Hideki's decision to return home that sent a wave of melancholy through me. I hadn't realised how fond of him I'd become. I told myself to find a way of telling him before he left, a hands off way this time. No face patting.

  I whistled up Dogge and we set off for a walk through the village but somehow found ourselves heading to the outskirts of it, along with mothers driving to meet their kids from the school. Laura lived right next to the school.

  She wasn't there when we arrived so I decided to wait. Out in the flower-packed front garden I sat on the bench beneath an ageing plum tree with not a sign of fruit anywhere near it. I needed Charnley to tell me what kind it was. The only plum I knew was Victoria. Maybe that's the only plum there was.

  The house was a converted barn, a small one, single storeyed. The previous owner had bought it as a wreck and salvaged it, dragged it up from the depths of ivy and roses gone wild and had it completely restored by Jack Langan. At her husband's expense. The price he paid for having married carelessly. The price she paid was to live there alone. The result, though, was a pleasing mish-mash of old shell and modern fittings. However, no sooner had the garden been retrieved from its devolutionary state by a bloke called Dave than the lady moved, selling the place to Laura about three years ago.

  The kids were still being collected from school and that, plus Hideki deciding to leave, sent me reeling inwards. I wanted to tell these girls hurling their kids into big cars, these occasional blokes doing the same while answering their mobile phones, to make the very best of it. The kids you find a pain today will be on the other side of the world tomorrow and you'll be wondering who nicked the years in between.

  Laura drove up at around four-thirty and, as she entered the garden, she broke into a smile, pleased to see me. She walked over and sat down on the bench beside me with a cheerful sigh.

  “Good day?” I asked.

  “Not bad, not bad. Not over yet. We've a practise meeting this evening.”

  “When do you have the real one as opposed to the practice one?”

  She barged me gently and stayed leaning against my shoulder. I put an arm round her shoulders. A fair stretch.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Haven't seen you for a couple of days.”

  “I kept meaning to phone, but...”

  She nodded. “The phone isn't really our thing. We're hands on sort of people.”

  “Well, hands on was certainly my intention, but...”

  She giggled. Even her giggle was husky, throaty.

  “So, what've you been doing?” she asked.

  I told her what I'd done since returning from Walberswick. When I got to the Taplins, I might just as well have been telling her about people from Mars. Laura had nothing to say about a woman who might've stolen two million pounds from her husband, anymore than she had empathy with the husband who'd let her get away with it.

  “I can see it's brought you down a bit,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You're not quite as breezy as you usually are.”

  I laughed. “Breezy? I've been called a lot of things, Laura, but never breezy. And if I'm un-breezy it's to do with important people, not the Taplins or the Watermans. Hideki's going home. I don't want him to but I don't have a say in the matter. He's going.”

  “How long's he been with you?”

  “Five, six weeks. There's something about the kid, don't know what it is.” I turned and looked at her. “You know how people cross your path sometimes, you can't imagine why you bumped into each other and then ... something happens. It all becomes clear where you fitted into each other's lives.”

  She was looking back at me, like Fee would've done. Head slightly bowed, raised eyebrows. The waiting for me to come to my senses look.

  “Yeah, alright, so it's balls. The kid's just been a substitute for Ellie. I miss her like crazy since she went to Paris.”

  I stopped myself. She whispered:

  “Why don't we go inside, open a bottle of wine?”

  “Good idea.”

  The inside of Plum Tree Cottage was pure Jack Langan. Fussed over and loved for being the work of his forbears, and finished with such good taste and attention to detail that you ha
lf expected him to step through a door at any moment, trowel in hand and tell you about a documentary he'd seen. On trowels. Or plums.

  “Wine's in the cupboard under the sink, corkscrew in the drawer above. I’ll be with you in a tick.”

  She roamed through the cottage, doing several things at once, while I found a bottle of Rioja among bleach bottles and washing-up liquid. I sat at the kitchen table and opened it while Laura checked her mail, then went and changed into jeans and a sweater and returned with a wicker laundry basket.

  “You were right,” she said, on one of her journeys back and forth. “I did sleep most of the way back from Walberswick. Nothing to do with the speed you were driving at...”

  She took something out of the freezer and slammed it in the microwave to defrost.

  “...it was all to do with that wretched man collapsing. You feel you have their lives in the palm of your hand. It's true, of course, you do but your own life goes up the spout pro tem.”

  She came right up to me. I suppose one of us had to make a declaration of continuing intent and, being a doctor, she was good at sorting lives out. She put her arms round me, stooped, and her hair brushed across a thinnish patch on the top of my head. I could've died. At twenty years old I had hair like an Afghan hound and in recalling it I nearly missed what she said:

  “...and I had other plans that night. Hands on sort of plans. You need a couple of glasses.”

  She went to an old pine dresser set crookedly against a wall and from the bread bin on top of it took two goblets and brought them to the table.

  “Talking of plans,” I said. “How would you fancy a trip to Los Angeles?”

  She looked at me. “Very much. When?”

  “Next month. Can you square it at the surgery?”

  “I should think so.”

  She sat opposite me and I filled the glasses.

  “I'm going to meet my children there. All of them.”

  She looked away.

  “Well, maybe I shouldn't, not if you're...”

  “Maybe you should.”

  She paused. A month of being on approval? I could see how that might unnerve a person, even Laura Peterson.

  “Can I think about it?”

  “Sure.”