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

by Douglas Watkinson

  I parked down by the church and we walked through the graveyard where Tom picked out various headstones of people he’d known. He didn’t have a good word to say about many of them. They’d drunk too much, eaten too much, never taken any exercise and paid the price, albeit mostly in their late eighties. He paused at one grave and pretended to spit on it. To say the least, Laura and I were ... interested.

  "Alf Riley,” said Tom, gesturing down at the slab. “Owed me £231.50.”

  As promised, Laura veered off towards the bank once we hit the town centre. Tom had a repertoire of scathing remarks about banks and Lloyds in particular. I didn’t contradict him about that either, mainly because I agreed with him.

  Approaching the market and conscious of a throng beginning to build I took him aside and suggested that once we reached The Bag Man he should let me do the talking. He asked if I was up to the task. I let it pass.

  Leonard Blake’s stall had pride of place in the general layout, a fact which reflected his position as representative in the Local Market Traders’ Federation. It was a big stall, two canopies joined together with a frontage of 15 yards, bags piled high, or hanging from an assortment of rails. As we drew level I could see that business was good, a dozen or so people under the canvas, one couple trying to knock down the price on a suitcase, Blake taking their money, letting them believe they’d outfoxed him.

  He caught sight of Tom, stopped work and waited for us to approach. He was a large man, fifty-five in both age and inches round the waist. He had a goatee beard to give his face much needed character. The disappearing chin was his main problem. Someone had either punched it right back into his head or he’d been born like it.

  “How do Mr Manners? You come to apologise?”

  Tom turned to me, keeping silent as I’d suggested.

  “Brought a friend, have we? Bags galore, chum, everything from purses to portmanteaux.”

  “Spoiled for choice,” I said.

  “The very word! Choice.”

  He acknowledged a couple of young mothers who’d wheeled in pushchairs. He waved at the occupants before turning back to me.

  “You won’t be after a handbag, I hope, but through the flap there’s a new range of leather briefcases, Polish, made for a man like yourself...”

  “And you run it all on your own, I hear?”

  He didn’t need elaboration in order to get the point and gave a hammy display of weary, pissed off tolerance in response,

  “If you’re asking have I got a young girl working for me called Fanny Adams, or whatever it was, the answer’s no.”

  “Marianne,” I said, stepping under the canopy and over to some garish rucksacks. Blake followed me, Tom stayed where he was.

  “I don’t know if you’re a mate of his,” Blake went on. “A relative, a son maybe, but I feel sorry for him. Or would if he’d bloody let me.” He tapped his head. “He’s got this all off kilter.”

  “Bolt missing, you mean?”

  “Well, I’d rather you said it than me, but yes. He stood here two weeks ago and slagged me off for ten minutes, every name under the sun. I said then, listen, chum, if I had someone working for me and I found out they were nicking off customers...”

  He gestured down the aisle, saying there must be 200 people there, all with phones, purses, cash in their back pockets. How long would his good reputation last with a thief on the payroll? He could see that I’d yet to be convinced.

  “Got an idea. Follow me, chum.”

  There it was, the sting in my guts that used to set me off in days gone by. I swallowed and it settled. “I wonder if you’d mind dropping the ‘chum’. Mate I can just about cope with, chum is pushing it.”

  He shrugged and led the way out onto the main drag and across to a butcher’s van, the side flap down, cuts of meat laid out on a mock marble slab, customers checking the prices. Blake called to the elder of two men in white trilbies and striped aprons.

  “Albie, tell my friend here, do I have anyone working for me, or do I work alone?”

  “Why’s he want to know?” Albie asked.

  “Just yes or no.”

  “No.”

  Albie returned to a lady customer whose chin barely reached the slab and started cutting a fistful of lamb chops for her. Blake crossed the main thoroughfare and beckoned one of the guys working a fruit and veg stall where the pineapples were twice the size of those in Waitrose. Terry Baines, his name was, thirty years old with a pock-marked skin, but handsome for all that. Fair hair parted down the side, almost military in style and steady blue eyes which he kept firmly on Blake as if waiting for a cue at which point he’d deliver a prepared answer.

  "Terry, do I or do I not employ a gofor, or am I a one man band?"

  “Pay wages?” said Terry with forced jolliness. “Too bloody tight.”

  And at that point Tom, who’d been hovering, broke our agreement and shouted.

  “They would say that, wouldn’t they!”

  “Why...?” Blake asked, breaking out his innocent face.

  “Because you’re the big knob round here. They get a prime position on your say so, you being so wangled in with the Town Council and Mr Big at the Traders Federation.”

  Blake spread his hands and turned to me for sympathy, conscious that Tom had drawn a slight audience with his passion and volume and now started playing to them.

  “Corruption, that’s what this is. Backhanders. If you don’t believe he takes a cut from these buggers, just to be up here, posh end, then you don't know greed when you see it.”

  He gestured towards Albie and Terry.

  “He’s briefed ‘em. ‘If that old bugger,’ meaning me, ‘comes back, asks about the girl and a watch, deny everything.’ Politics, that’s what we’re on about here. They’re all at it, from Thame Council to the Houses of Parliament...”

  I went over to him and reached out to take his arm. He flinched away.

  “Get your bloody hands off! You said you’d get my watch back...”

  “Tom, I never...”

  “You’ve come here today, kissed his arse and tried to fob me off. Well, I’m not having it!”

  He turned and stomped off, rocking from side to side with the hip replacement, but still berating politics local and national. The shoppers fell back to give him access. When he’d disappeared I followed Blake back to his stall. One of the two young mothers had chosen a chintzy clutch bag. He paused to take her money before turning to me with one of his many shrugs. His innocent face had given way to a concerned one.

  “If there’s any more of that from him, I’ll have to bring the police in. I mean the odd awkward customer’s one thing but a stream of accusations...”

  “Meaningless, eh?”

  “Of course they are! I’ve got no say in who gets what pitch. That’s down to the Town Council...”

  And, as if at the mention of that august body, the roof caved in, or at least the canopy we were standing under did, collapsing piles of bags and felling rails as it descended. The second canopy followed suit, dragged down by the first. The pushchair kids screamed, their mothers called out their names, passers by began shouting inanities, demanding to know what was happening.

  It wasn’t the accident of the century by any means, though it had shocked most people within range of it. The weight of the canvas had forced me to my knees and in the darkness I crawled to the edge, threw the hem of the canvas back over my head and stood up. The first thing I saw was Tom Manners with an open pruning knife in his hand. He’d cut through one of the canopy’s guy lines then found the main stay, tied off to the wheel of the Transit, and sliced through that as well.

  I lifted the heaving mass of canvas behind me and the pushchair girls found their way to the exit I’d created. The kids were yelling their heads off by now. Their mothers lifted them into their arms and began to comfort them.

  “For Christ’s sake, Tom...”

  He was still furious. “I told you he was a right bastard. I saw him tap his head
when you were talking. You think I’m bloody mad. Well fuck you, Mister sodding Hawk.”

  He turned and walked off. I called after him. “Tom, you can’t just...”

  I wanted him to stay and face the music but he must have thought I was offering him a lift home.

  “I’ll bloody walk!” he said. He pointed to the lumps under the canvas, one of which must have been Leonard Blake.

  “And tell that pile of shite I’m not done with him yet.”

  I’d left home that morning in two minds about Tom’s complaint and a couple of hours later I was convinced that not only had his watch been stolen, Leonard Blake knew the the girl who’d nicked it. Why had he lied about that? That single question left his bags rattling in my skull and gave me an overwhelming urge to take a look in the back of his Transit.

  As I stood watching him and his fellow stallholders heave the canopies back into the air, tie their half-hitches and offer false sympathy, I had a momentary one to one with myself. I nearly admitted that I’d been looking for any excuse to exaggerate a petty crime, to place myself at the heart of solving it, not for the reward or even the satisfaction of a job well done. Force of habit, perhaps? No. That’s far too overworked a rationale and doesn’t get close to explaining the danger of a retired copper with time on his hands or, more correctly, his fear of having too much of it. In lighter moments, I blame my mother. Always on the go, never willing to settle until she knew where the next bottle of vodka was coming from...

  But there was no blurred vision here. Blake had denied knowing Marianne and then made a second mistake, glaring to me, though maybe not to others. He hadn’t brought in the police to deal with Tom Manners. Felling that canopy was not only criminal damage it could’ve injured one of the pushchair kids or their mothers. Had he held off out of compassion for an old man on the edge of sanity? Like Hell. Blake had secrets that he didn’t want the boys in blue stumbling across. And they could only be hidden in the van.

  I sauntered down through the market until I reached Imram, so christened ‘after you know who’ he would say, as he swung his arms and sent an imaginary cricket ball up into the stands. We exchanged the niceties of salesman and customer and frankly I marvelled at his ability to recall the very day I’d bought my brolly and how much I’d paid for it. But to him I was a purse or wallet, depending on my gender, and his objective then as now was to open me and shake me out.

  “Just in from Pakistan,” he began, as he rolled out a tasseled hearthrug on the paving slabs. “Traditional pattern, local sourced fibres with a high percentage of wool, natural dyes, and a hand finish like no other. Yes, they’re seconds, but everyone makes mistakes. The trick is to learn from them, not to hide them.”

  Two youngish women stooped to the rug to examine it further and as Imram chatted with me he kept an eye on their every move, their slightest gesture, ready to pounce with a reduced offer. I steered him round to Leonard Blake.

  “Someone pull down the fat bastard’s canvas, right? Give him a medal.”

  “Don’t like him?”

  “I like everyone. ‘Cept him.” The young women moved position to allow an elderly couple to step in. “Madam please, walk on it, sit on it, kneel on it, pray on it, lie down on it. Treat it like a rug. Then buy it, take it home and love it...” He came back to me. “Thinks he owns this place, the people who work here.”

  He went on to say, in answer to my prompting, that Blake was doing less and less business these days. From choice. There was a time he’d be first off the market, end of day, and onto the next - Oxford, Abingdon, Dunstable. Not anymore. He’d pack up five-thirty and spend his evening in The Spread Eagle with his acolytes, then stay the night in the Eagle.

  “Where does he leave the van?” I asked

  He shrugged. “Their car park, I guess, not that he’s got much worth nicking.” He became the salesman again and addressed his gathering audience. “Unlike me, which is why they all need selling today. And these I can do for just 75 pounds...”

  - 6 -

  Laura wasn’t crazy about the rug but tried to hide the fact: it wasn’t her house, wasn’t her hearth and she doubted there was any wool in it. We settled for its newness being the main problem. Once that had worn off she would hardly notice it.

  As we stretched out on the sofa, another piece of furniture over which territorial rights had been established, mine at the wall clock end, hers the other, we lapsed into the small talk of a well fed and watered marriage. I asked if she’d accomplished everything she’d wanted to that morning in Thame. The dry-cleaning wasn’t ready, but she’d paid in her cheques and bought new oven gloves. She wouldn’t reveal how much they’d cost because, being from Aga, she’d no doubt had to re-mortgage her house to acquire them.

  “So while I was wrestling canvas where were you?”

  She’d been in The Chocolaterie, posh name for Coffee Shop, even posher for Cafe, where a medium latte is £3.20 in spite of costing just 19 pence, bean to cup. The price of coffee, a pet distraction of mine which I’m unable to get past some days...

  Talking of money, Laura went on, she’d met Jenny Leveque there. Or rather Jenny had followed her into the place. I could see she was fighting back a bitchy follow on, a battle which she lost. Jenny wasn’t one of her patients, but Laura hoped the neurologist she was under knew his stuff. Either that or the three week holiday they were about to take in the Bahamas did her some good. I gestured for an explanation.

  “Neurotic as hell, eyes like cups and saucers, startled by everything that crosses her path.”

  I’d placed this Jenny Leveque. She and her husband had bought Wotton House, Hall, Manor whatever it was called, from Sylvia Cornell. Rollo Leveque was a barrister, wasn’t he? Laura nodded.

  “Corporate only, which explains all the money. To be honest I try to avoid her but she’s there every French market day, as am I. She resembled a curious set of scales, a carrier bag hanging from each hand, full to the brim.”

  “Eye for a bargain?”

  “No, her husband’s French. Leveque? He has a passion for the food and wine of his homeland. I guess that explains her breath.” She was on a roll and I’d no inclination to stop her. “Garlic, it cuts through the air like a brand new Sabatier.”

  “I’m the one who speaks badly of people. You’re the nice lady doctor.”

  “Oh, and we’re invited to a garden party at their place, Saturday the nineteenth.”

  “Remind me not to kiss her. Are we going as a couple?”

  She reached across and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m going as me, you’re going as you, but we are going together.”

  ***

  Laura was sound asleep when I set off for Thame. It was late enough for The Spread Eagle to have gone quiet yet early enough to be passed off as a straggler by anyone who saw me. However, I’d ignored entirely the advice given me by a housebreaker some 20 years previously. Never go out on a job with a full stomach, James Arthur Bentley had said, and certainly don’t touch the booze beforehand. Always have a pee before you leave home, calls of nature being very difficult to answer in a house you’re not familiar with. Laura had cooked the two rib-eyes she’d bought at Newitt’s and with a few chips, some salad and several units of red wine I was about to round off a most peculiar day.

  I could never say that I joined the police in order to break the law, but I’ve often thought, since those righteous days at Hendon Police College, that flip the coin which is any copper and you’d be heads up with a career criminal. And even as I headed towards my date with Leonard Blake’s Transit, I relived the buzz, recalled the conversation that took place as I pocketed the souped up lock-pick given me by one of the last men I’d arrested. There was a touch of the masonic as he handed it to me, entry into a secret order, only for me to go home and see on You Tube, that such picks were ten a penny, part of a sophisticated cottage industry bursting with business. My fear as I approached Thame was that times had moved on, that Blake’s Transit was bang up to date with the latest sec
urity.

  I parked on the edge of town in an unlit car park attached to the monastic looking offices of a once famous sugar company. Thame itself, on a weekday night at one in the morning, is a town you would reluctantly allow your teenage daughter to walk through, largely assured that no harm would come to her. Bedrooms in terraced houses, flats over once Elizabethan shops hang low, well within hollering distance and help would be given if called for. It’s that kind of place.

  In the centre of town, at one end of the cake slice car park, the light is tall and wide and Friday, Saturday a kebab van glows like a camp fire, its flame grill attracting passers through and residents alike. I’ve never eaten a kebab. Never will.

  Farther along the Cornmarket and higher up the food chain The Spread Eagle exudes respectability, stands white, Victorian and slightly forbidding. An arched portico adjoining the bank beside it covers the entrance to the car park and first checking that I really was alone, I pulled down the overlarge cloth cap I wear for such undertakings and entered.

  There were a dozen vehicles parked there, one of them being Blake’s Transit, hugging the far corner, facing out as if prepared for a quick get away. I glanced up at the atrium of guest rooms, most of them now in darkness, one or two still showing signs of life, shadows moving between light and undrawn curtains. One of them went dark even as I watched. A CCTV camera, a fixed wide angle job, peered down at me and torn between giving it the finger, or turning my back on it, I settled for the latter. If attended at some remote point by a night porter, or come to that if even switched on, I had bulked up the image I presented, cap and all, gloves which I now put on, enough to be arguable in any court.

  At the far side of the van, between the sliding door and the wall of the bank, hidden from the camera, I slid the lock-pick into the barrel, turned the levers one by one, until all six had formed their shape then heard the lock give way with conspiratorial ease. No whining alarm, no flashing indicators followed.