Jericho Road: A Nathan Hawk Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Mystery series Book 5)

by Douglas Watkinson

  “Tom Manners,” I said, his face coming into memory’s view. “Walks like a sailor, full head of hair, late eighties.”

  Laura reached for a cobweb Jean Langan had missed. She was beginning to relax and reclaim her territory.

  “88, though he’s inclined to drop the odd decade off it. And the rolling gait’s the result of a hip replacement. I asked what I could do for him today and he said ‘Nothing. But your ‘fella’ can.’" She smiled for the first time since her arrival. "To him, as to many others I’m sure, you are ‘my fella'.”

  She kissed me on the cheek, on her way to the fridge.

  “Why not ask me himself?”

  “Ironically, he doesn’t trust policemen, serving or retired.”

  She took out a carton of milk and shook it, heard the rattle inside and poured the cottage cheese into the sink. A moment or two later she set a mug of black coffee down on the unopened mail which had stacked itself up on the window ledge beside me.

  “So, what can I do for Tom Manners today?” I asked.

  “You can find his gold pocket watch. He’s had it stolen.” She smiled. “You’re thinking of something cutting to say, aren’t you, but it won’t come.”

  “Actually, I’m waiting to hear what you told him.”

  She frowned and drifted away in professional concern.

  “He’s 88 years old, what my mother would’ve called ‘set in his ways’. He sulked and bullied me, even toyed with one of those ridiculous cards we force on people asking ‘How did we do today?’”

  “Well, unless he’d swallowed it, made it a medical issue, there wasn’t much you could do. And as for your fella...”

  That brought out the medic in her. People came to her, men especially, with a mole on their chest. She would examine it and assure them it was perfectly harmless. They would thank her, button up and leave. Then at the door they’d turn and slip into their farewell the incidental and ever so slight belly-ache they’d developed recently which turned out to be bowel cancer.

  “So, you’re wondering if Tom’s lost more than his watch?” I said.

  She nodded and asked outright if I’d mind dropping in on this crotchety patient and see if the watch was real, as valuable as he claimed and now missing. Or if we were really talking about his marbles. I should’ve refused. After all, with thirty seven murders behind me had I now been reduced to finding old men’s watches? But I agreed to help and that was something to do with her smiling at me and saying,

  “How about dinner tonight, on me, down at The Thatch.”

  At least I was quick enough to add, “It’ll take more than dinner.”

  “Hot chocolate afterwards, back at my place. With milk.”

  - 2 -

  I left it a couple of days before I went to see Tom Manners and spent most of the time regretting that I’d offered to help. Then again, I did get to see more of Laura and yes she did nudge me once or twice, but in doing so gave me some background information about her curmudgeonly patient. He had two children both in their sixties which always sounds implausible to me. His wife died four years ago. Trisha. Cheerful little soul, according to Laura, keeled over in Morrisons by the fish counter one day, apologised, asked for a pound of sardines then shuffled off.

  “Was it her death turned him okkard?”

  “Nature not nurture, I fear.”

  For some reason I was beginning to like him. Call it a distant mutuality.

  Anyway, it was a bright, sunny spring morning, as they say, when I parked the new old Land Rover on a corner of Chearsley village green. It’s an oddly laid out village, lying in a shallow bowl of land at the top of a hill and were it not for the raised rim all around it there’d be an uninterrupted view across the Vale of Aylesbury. The original dwellings, including the pub, are set in a right angle and front onto the triangular green. Beyond that is a curved, cut through road to Long Crendon which at various times of the day turns into a Formula One race track with middle management saloons and school run mothers jostling for poll position. With it being after 9.30 the morning grand prix was over.

  Tom’s cottage, Birds Eye View, was easy to find thanks to its obscurity. Like Laura, I’ve never understood lleylandi’s popularity and I hate the smell, more pine disinfectant than pine itself.

  I opened the front gate and as the sprung hinge closed it behind me so Tom Manners came to the front door with a cheerful greeting.

  “About bloody time.”

  I offered him my hand, even said words to the effect of ‘good to see you’ but he’d set off on a rant.

  “No wonder the National Health Service is in trouble. If I was mid-thirties and went to the doctors I’d be dealt with there and then. Over 65 go hang yourself.”

  “Yours isn’t actually a medical problem, Tom,” I tried. “Nathan Hawk, by the way.”

  He shook his head with the know-it-all weariness of his generation. “Doctors, coppers, teachers...”

  “I’m not police. Was.”

  He looked me up and down then straight in the eyes. He was dressed in baggy grey flannels, part of a suit, and the collarless shirt was frayed at every seam giving the appearance of a badly plucked turkey. He hadn’t shaved for at least three days and his chin was a worn down scrubbing brush, though the hair on his head was jet white, not a hint of baldness. Which I resented.

  “Shall I come in?” I asked.

  “Pub,” he said, reaching behind the front door for a jacket.

  “I don’t drink before seven. New rule.”

  He smirked with just one side of his mouth, a natural expression not contrived. “That doctor friend of yours, eh?”

  “No. Self-imposed.”

  He turned away with a sigh and left me to close the front door behind me.

  Birds Eye View wasn’t the dingiest place I’d ever been in but it was certainly one of the ... saddest. That said, I could picture its sparkling neatness when his wife was still alive and running the show. Four years later most of the curtains were closed, may not have been opened since that fateful day in Morrisons, and most surfaces had dust on them you could write your name in. There was one exception. An oak dresser in the hall was home to a collection of china horses, fifty or sixty in total, and they and the surfaces they stood on were spotless. I paused to admire them.

  “Don’t touch ‘em,” he said.

  I stepped back and followed him into the kitchen. That too might once have been spotless, in all its 1950’s glory, but these days it was more of a garden shed than a focal point. There was an oven, yes, and a butler's sink, but in the centre of the quarry tiled floor stood a push along lawn mower, its blades recently sharpened. There was a compost bin in the corner, reeking of old salad and grass cuttings. A garden hose-pipe, running in through the open window, was clamped to the cold tap.

  I perched on a nearby chair beside a table piled high with junk mail. Next to that was a stack of The Lady magazine which he’d been meaning to cancel, ever since ‘she’ had gone.

  “Trisha, you mean?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Doctor Peterson.”

  He nodded, even though he clearly considered my mentioning his wife’s name an intrusion into his privacy.

  “Tom, this watch...”

  He held up a claw of a hand, broken fingernails and rough skin, hardened by years of physical work. He leaned back against the sink, arms folded.

  “One or two things first. You were a copper. I don’t trust coppers.”

  “So I gather. Doctor Peterson again.”

  “Chatty, ain’t she. How long were you?”

  “In the police, you mean? Thirty years. Detective Chief Inspector.”

  He gave a nasal grunt and turned away. “Officer class. How many murderers did you catch? Any I’ve heard of?”

  I rattled through a list of the inquiries I’d been involved in and he nodded at the names he recognised. When I’d finished he said,

  “‘Spect you had a team to fetch and carry? Do the donkey work?
" He gave me the one sided sneer again, bigger this time, lifting his lip to meet his nostril. "Coppers, all swagger and swank."

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or shout him down. I stood up.

  “Tom, like I said: good to meet you.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Home.”

  “What for?”

  “I came here to see if I could help, not to be insulted by you.”

  He stepped between me and doorway to the hall. “And I hear you’ve got a bugger of a temper.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  He tapped his nose. “Up my right nostril."

  "You mean you did some research. Up at The Crown in Winchendon?"

  I was known for my pretentiously named Anger Management Disorder, though I’d noticed recently the phrase had gone out of fashion. Too many people had claimed it, used it as an excuse, and those of us who really suffered from it were going back to basics. Short fuse was my preferred description.

  “I’ve been glad of it occasionally,” I said. “Other times it’s got me into trouble.”

  He smiled, showing crooked, worn down teeth but undoubtedly his own.

  “Got you the sack,” he said with a superior nod.

  “I was ‘required to retire’ for slapping a fellow officer. Moving on, what kind of watch are we talking about?”

  “Solid gold, 24 carat hunter.” He came right up close to me and lowered his voice presumably in case there was a blabbermouth among the horses. “Worth a fortune. It has ... provy-nonce.”

  It was an interesting way of pronouncing the word and, regardless of how he might’ve spelled it, he certainly knew what it meant. He lowered his voice further to a near whisper.

  “It used to belong to Heinrich Himmler.”

  I glanced at the doorway, subconsciously checking my escape route, but Tom was already searching the tower of junk mail from which he removed an envelope filed halfway up it. He took out a type written note on dirty cream paper and handed it to me. John Robinson Antiques, said the top line, New Street, Dover, Kent. The date was 27th March 1978 and it was addressed to whom it may concern. It went on to give an account of the watch’s origins. Whether through ignorance on the writer’s part, or intentionally to cover himself, the name Himmler had been spelled with only one ‘m’ though he appeared to have kept his title Reichsfuhrer-SS. I stopped reading, looked at Tom.

  “It doesn’t say how an English antiques dealer came to be in possession of it,” I said.

  “Himmler gave it to this British Tommy when he was arrested at the end of the war, a bribe to let him go. Being a Scot this bloke kept the watch and told Himmler to shove it. He topped himself soon after. Himmler not the Scot. I mean I know he was a right bastard but that watch is a piece of history.”

  I’d nodded my way through most of the account, to assure him that I was still listening, not because I necessarily believed it. He now waited for me to be gobsmacked by the watch’s credentials.

  “What was Heinrich Himmler doing with a gold English pocket watch?” I asked.

  “Best in the world. Buy British.”

  “How much did you pay for it?”

  He took back the letter of provenance and muttered, “Two hundred quid.”

  “Forty years ago that was a lot of money.”

  “Worth ten times that now!”

  I sat down again, mainly because I wanted him to do the same, but instead he kept pacing the room, stooped at the shoulders, moving from the sink to the back door, stepping over the lawn mower. His face was reddening, breath shortening.

  “Tom, where did you have it stolen?”

  “Thame. In the Rising Bloody Sun, market day two weeks ago. I was having a pint with a couple of friends and it was hot, so I hung my jacket over the chair.” Still talking, he strode to the front door, grabbed the jacket and returned. “Two o’clock we left and ten minutes later I reached for my watch and it was gone."

  He threw the jacket across the handles of the lawnmower and only then did he pull up a stool and sit down, his exertions getting the better of him. He picked up the story again, emphasising relevant points by chopping the air with synchronised hands.

  “So I went back to The Rising Bloody Sun to see if it had fallen out or something. Then I remembered! While I’d been sat at the table, this girl tripped and bumped into the chair, banged her knee. I asked if she was alright, she hopped around a bit and then she took off.”

  “With your watch, you think. How did she know where to look for it?”

  He puffed himself up a little, delighted to be able to answer such a pertinent question. “Because I’d seen her before, so it follows she’d seen me.”

  “You know her?”

  “No, but she works on the market for that ponce who sells bags, suitcases, satchels, women’s handbags.”

  “You mean Leonard Blake?”

  That forced him to his feet again, pure excitement. “Friend of yours?”

  “I just know the name.”

  “Well, he’s a right bastard an’ all, not in Heinrich Himmler’s league, just ordinary.”

  He had a way of saying ‘right bastard’ that was destined to linger in my head. The word bastard came out Lancashire, flat vowel sound, like cat, sat and mat. It gave the phrase greater meaning.

  “Why is he a right bastard?” I asked, with rounded vowels.

  “I went down to his stall to have it out with him. I said that girl who works for you, fetching and carrying, where is she?”

  Leonard Blake had obviously looked at Tom the way I was tempted to now. Incredulous pity tempered by a glimpse into his own future. He denied that any girl had ever worked for him, so he couldn't help. Tom shook his head.

  “Twenty years ago, I’d have pulled his stall apart, lying sod. I kept myself fighting fit for as long as I could, but...”

  He shrugged away the rest of the sentence, accepting that he was no longer the street fighter he used to be.

  “Mind if I take a look upstairs?” I said.

  I was probably the first person to have asked such a favour since Trisha had departed.

  “What for?” he asked.

  I explained that it was force of habit, to check that all the doors and windows were secure, but he wasn’t buying it.

  “There’s only two windows upstairs,” he said. “Bathroom, bedroom.”

  “That doesn’t make the place any safer...”

  He came uncomfortably close to me, treating me to roll-up breath, while he formed his sentence. “You think I’ve left it up there, maybe didn’t take it out that day?”

  He waited for an answer which I didn’t give him, that answer being yes.

  “Or is ‘force of habit’ just plain bloody nosiness, see how the other half lives?”

  “Tom, I have to know what I’m dealing with,” I said, pointing upwards.

  It sounded reasonable on account of being meaningless and he scowled from beneath the hanging eyebrows, turned and opened a door which led straight up the narrow stairs. He flicked a light switch and a 40 watt bulb swayed in a slight upward draught from the kitchen window. The treads were painted at the edges, bare in the centre where a carpet must once have lain. On either side, the walls were staggered with pictures of wild flowers, the kind you recognise but can never name.

  Tom was right behind me and with ancient grudge in his voice told me to turn left at the top for the bedroom, right for the bathroom.

  The bedroom was another toolshed, with every available surface laden with carpentry tools. On a dresser was a clump of chisels, on the window ledge a collection of planes. Hammers, heads upward, jostled in a wastepaper basket like walking sticks. Small handsaws filled a wicker Canterbury, while larger ones hung from nails on the wall. The man had no idea that a whole revolution had taken place in carpentry during his lifetime, that all the jobs most of these tools once did could now be accomplished at the press of a button.

  “My father’s,” said Tom, abrogating the responsibilit
y for the clutter.

  Dead centre of the room was the bed, a double. The sheets and pillows on the right hand side were neatly stretched or tucked in as if at any moment Trisha might enter from the bathroom across the landing and slip into bed beside him. His own side was the crumpled mess he’d climbed out of that morning or the last time he slept.

  “That window,” I said, pointing to a small, leaded affair between two cheeks of the thatch. “Anyone could get through it. At least a proper catch, Tom, even a lock for...”

  He led the way across the meter square landing to the bathroom which seemed normal, compared to the bedroom. Antique, yes. A cast iron bath which must’ve been hoisted up through the floor, since it wouldn’t have made the stairs, served as Tom’s laundry basket. As I crossed to the sink beneath the window, the floor creaked enough to make me freeze and then step sideways. The window was a wrought iron lattice that had warped over the years and now showed an inch gap between it and the ledge. I pointed at it, without comments.

  There was one cupboard in the room, with an ill-fitting door than opened inwards. I flicked the catch, pushed and found the only empty space in the house. There was an immersion heater blinking against one sloping wall, but that was it: the cables from it ran across beams and through a wall to God knows where. I closed the door and nodded that I’d seen enough.

  “What’ll you be telling your doctor friend, then?” he asked, once we were back in the kitchen.

  “Nothing. There’s nothing to tell.”

  He tilted his head back slightly and stared at me.

  “This will all be on the National Health, right? I mean Lord Rothschild paid a stamp for me all my life...”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “I’d worked for him, over at Waddesdon Manor. Gardens.”

  I nodded. “Tell me one thing. This girl who bumped into you, if she works for Leonard Blake what was she doing in The Rising Bloody Sun?”

  “Getting coffee and sandwiches. And it’s just Rising Sun. No Bloody. So you’ll help? You’ll find my watch?”

  I meant to say ‘Sorry, Tom, there’s not much I can do’, but it came out rather differently.