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

by Douglas Watkinson

  “What?” I asked in a grunt worthy of Bill Grogan.

  “There’s a circus there. I’m sure it’s not the sort you and I remember from childhood, leastways I hope it isn’t, but Maryan wanted to be taken to one.” She tapped what I’d written on the whiteboard. “Not a circus in general, but this one in particular, at Fielden?”

  Helped by the coffee she made I began to join up the dots. Ghayas had met his sick sister at Fielden. Call her Amira, he’d said. Real name or not, it didn’t matter. She no doubt worked in the cafe there. Not picking, planting, milking for ten pence an hour as I’d imagined but serving the punters, three quid an hour?

  Maryan had cycled up to Hillside, asked for Ghayas by name. Was there any chance that the person she was really looking for was his sister, Amira?

  Laura sat down at the table opposite me.

  “I’ve been thinking...”

  It’s one of the most heart stopping phrases in the language, but on this occasion it marked Laura’s conversion to my point of view that Blake, Jenny and therefore Rollo were up to something.

  “It’s bothered me ever since you implied that Jenny might have ... had a hand in all this. The day Tom Manners brought down Blake’s canopy and I was in Rumsey’s with her...”

  She paused to collate her thoughts and eventually said,

  “Jenny was as high as a kite. Now I’m wondering if it was all an act, the neurotic front aimed at concealing a carefully planned inquisition. She kicked off with a girlie interest in our love life ... yours and mine.”

  I switched off for a second. So, it was love, as far as Laura was concerned? Had I ever used the phrase, or anything like? To my surprise, when I totted up, I’d only said the words ‘I love you’ a dozen times in my whole life. To a woman, that is, and never to Laura. Countless times to the kids. Laura reached across the table and squeezed my hand.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Jenny had wanted to know all about me, what I’d been doing in the past, what I was doing now and just who did I think the girl was who had stolen Tom’s watch. Laura had answered cagily but Jenny persisted. Why had I taken up Tom’s cause, was I going to continue or let it drop ... and then of Maryan did I think she was after more than a watch?

  “Tell me her exact words?”

  “Verbatim? Did I think she was a common thief or something more?”

  I was even more delighted when Laura added that her meeting up with Jenny wasn’t by chance. It was almost a dead cert. They crossed each other’s paths on most French market days, aimed for mutual avoidance, but on the day in question Jenny had descended on Laura, tracked her down to the Chocolaterie. Then invited her to a garden party, presumably so that Rollo could look me over. The fact that she didn’t tell her husband was incidental, a mark of the true scatterbrain woman Jenny was.

  But there was no doubt in my mind, or in Laura’s now, that underneath all the startled stares, the fluttering, flapping and gabbling, Jenny had wanted to know how much I’d uncovered about ... whatever they were up to.

  - 17 -

  Come Saturday, I treated myself to an afternoon at Fielden Farm Park. In doing so I stepped into two worlds. One was completely unknown to me, the other took me hurtling back thirty years to the ... joys of my own fatherhood.

  Fielden was the sort of place I used to dread, on account of there being too many other people there, but my children had always loved anything living with fur on it. And at the entrance, as I reached for my wallet to pay, I suffered a middle-aged moment, recalling the day when Fee discovered from some loud mother at her school that burgers were once creatures with fur on them. She was mortified, yes, but also furious with us for having allowed her to eat them. She became a vegetarian for about five or six months and refused to speak at meal times.

  Fielden Farm Park was a two hundred acre site just outside Wycombe and central to its billboarding assault on the eye was the circus which had identified the place for Maryan Kashani. Rainbow Circus it was called and endorsed a shaky belief I’ve held for some time. If you want to give credibility to an event, an activity, anything involving young kids, put the word ‘rainbow’ in whatever you call it. It stood at the far end of a long path which took the visitor through all the other attractions and was housed in a large tent, more marquee than big top from what I could tell. But the lights were already flashing, signalling the countdown to the first performance of the day.

  I went into the main building, bought a coffee, and sat gazing round at the play areas, some covered, some open to the skies, with slides, slides and more slides. Swings and rope meshes were set out alongside cafes selling a cunning mixture of children's and adult food. Tables and chairs were dotted around, allowing weary parents, grandparents to sit and keep half an eye while kids went berserk.

  When enough steam had been let off they moved on to the animal section or the circus and to go anywhere, especially back to the car park, punters had to weave their way through the inevitable gift shop. It was the retail trade at its finest. Clamouring kids, doting grandparents, food galore and toys to remind you of the day out.

  It was all extremely well policed with enough twenty somethings dressed in the dark green livery of Fielden Farm. I counted thirty of them, just from where I sat. If Amira was among them surely she wouldn’t be difficult to spot? I was looking for someone who vaguely resembled Ghayas but I couldn’t see her. Two options: one, she worked in in the animal section, two this was her day off.

  In a lull I went back to the ticket office and fancied that the girl taking money looked askance at me. It was bad enough that I’d been a fifty something man here on his own in a place mainly for kids but here I was now asking if a young woman called Amira worked here. My attempts at smiling probably heightened her suspicions.

  “That name doesn’t ring a bell,” she said with false earnestness. “Excuse me just a moment.”

  In that moment she slipped into a side office, and emerged seconds later with a tall man in Fielden Fram green who bristled with suspicion.

  “You’re looking for ... who was it?” he said, leading me away from a new queue of punters.

  “Amira Ovadia,” I said.

  Relief was all too visible in his blockwork face. “I’m sorry, I know all my staff and no one of that name works here...”

  A name is just a name, Taniel had told me. Maybe she was known here as someone else. In spite of the manager’s gesture towards the gift shop and then the car park he realised I’d no intention of leaving just yet.

  “May I ask the nature of your business with this young woman?"

  “Ask all you like, don’t expect an answer.”

  I turned headed off towards the animal section, on which front Fielden Farm was a Noah’s ark of domestic creatures, everything from guinea pigs and rabbits, to shire horses and cattle and if you wanted to feed the smaller species - cleverest retail trick of all in my opinion - you had to buy, at inflated prices, bags of food. The only creatures you weren’t allowed to feed were the racing sheep. Yes, racing sheep. I had difficulty with the concept and gave the daily itinerary a second look only to be reassured that at eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon there was a sheep race. Rare breeds hurtled round a track four hundred yards long, taking fences with unimaginable grace, arriving at the finishing line to be fed.

  For the less sporty there was a milking parlour with raked seats for children to watch Jersey cows being milked and to ponder the received wisdom that milk came from plastic bottles, woollen jumpers grew on coat hangers and chickens laid eggs in blocks of six or twelve, one of them always broken.

  There were plenty of twenty somethings tending to the flow of visitors, the welfare of the animals, but again there was no one who reminded me of Ghayas. I asked an overweight teenage girl if she knew of a co-worker called Amira. She didn’t. Where was she from?

  “From Syria,” I said.

  That turned her head, towards the onward door and the path leading t
o the circus. The unspoken revelation took a moment to absorb and this poor, chubby kid was desperately trying to think of a way to unsay what she hadn’t even said. Amira worked in the circus.

  “What time?” I asked, quietly.

  She looked at her watch. “Five minutes.”

  I thanked her, turned and hurried away.

  Out on the path which led to the Rainbow Circus, now pulsing ever more garishly with light, I overtook pushchairs, toddling kids, and dawdling parents and at the central flap in the marquee I reached for my wallet. A stringy, glittery young woman in a flesh coloured body stocking told me, in pure Essex, that I’d already paid for my seat with my entrance ticket.

  The tent was filling up, the expectant audience on raked seats arranged on three sides of a portable stage. Above it was a metal gantry, hanging from which was an assortment of rings, ropes and satiny curtain material. There were lights by the Hinckley Point load, throbbing and flashing, and background music wowing and fluttering, numbing the senses...

  I know I’m given to being hyper-critical but for God’s sake when you sit across from someone who’s just carved up his girlfriend and slung bagfuls of her into the waste-bin, you have to be sceptical about his answers. So the kindest thing I can say about Rainbow Circus is it was entertainment on a shoestring. I glanced at the programme I’d been handed at the door. There were photos, yes, but not of trapeze artists swinging through the air without a safety net. There was no tightrope walker flirting with death. No clown. No acrobats. No trick cyclist. No animals, thank God. Just a handful of young performers trying to scratch a living.

  The lights dimmed, the music swelled and in cantered two oversized, inflatable horses, each attached to the front of a performer. The horses performed a poor man’s dressage, back and forth, then bowed and rose up. The applause was muted, dulled by the knowledge that we’d all committed an hour of our lives to this. On came a bejewelled man in his thirties who did remarkable things with a dozen hula hoops. He slipped up once but his embarrassment was quickly overcome by another man who boasted stunning control over a giant yo-yo. Up and down, round and round it went. He even stepped over it a couple of times. Such applause as there might have been, was drowned out by the music swelling and the lights pulsating to signal the entrance of the next act.

  And there she was. And in spite of my doubting nature I wasn’t surprised to see her. Somewhere in my head I must have dispelled all the half-empty reasons why I wouldn’t find her today, the best of which was still that it was her day off. She had what was once known as a perfect figure and what is still known as a beautiful face. Amira Ovadia, if that was her real name, bore an unmistakable resemblance to her brother, long, black, silky hair tied at the moment as she performed her routine on the rings which hung from the gantry. I think it’s fair to say the audience was taken aback, not having expected this level of expertise, strength and beauty.

  She was the reason I’d seen relief on her brother Ghayas’s face that night at the portakabin when he dodged a leading question which might have been “And what does your sister actually do at Fielden Farm?” Would he have said that she was a world class acrobat now performing locally and expected me to believe him? But that’s what Amira was, a top dollar performer no doubt with a story to tell of how and why she’d wound up in a third rate circus.

  - 18 -

  I didn’t see the rest of the show but made a quiet exit between acts. On my way back to the Land Rover I asked a timid looking member of staff for the way out. He gave me directions only for me to ask if he was sure, if there might be another exit, my voice slightly panicky. Perhaps I’d got separated from the rest of my family, I wanted him to think. He reassured me that I could only leave the farm via the gift shop. Presumably, that applied to the workers.

  I had a decent view of the home-going throng from the Land Rover and would be able to pick out Amira from among them. I’m not sure why I hadn’t stayed to confront her in The Big Tent, but something told me I wouldn’t get much of her story if I'd asked for it in front of her fellow performers. Besides my credentials here already dubious and the first raising of a voice would have brought the tall green manager running. He would have called the police and rendered my day fruitless.

  At just after 5.30 Amira appeared, no longer dressed to perform, but wearing jeans and an anorak, a holdall slung over one shoulder. She didn’t have a car, which didn’t surprise me. She was going to walk to wherever she called home.

  I got out of the Land Rover and followed on foot, keeping far enough back that had she decided to hop on a bus, or been given a lift, I would've lost her. Luck was on my side. She walked the whole way home, a distance of nearly two miles.

  She stopped twice, the first time at a fruit and veg shop where a young man came out to greet her and offered her a plastic carrier of produce. I assumed that since she gave him no money, indeed he waved away her offer of some, the contents of the bag was end of day stuff, no more use to him. He watched her walk away, his eyes flashing up and down her disappearing form, imagining the beauty beneath the baggy anorak. Perhaps he thought that one day his reward for being so generous would be... He shook the notion from his heads and went back to work.

  At a convenience store, closer to where she lived, I watched from a parallel aisle as she picked out some staples: rice, a loaf, a carton of milk, some flour and a plastic tray of minced beef. This girl was on a tight budget and knew how to make it work.

  I left the shop a minute after she did, having bought a paper I didn’t want, and I shortened the distance between us as she turned down a narrow lane. We were on the outskirts of town, yes, but the place was still High Wycombe enough to be supporting a run down car bodyshop and a shop that sold tiles and carpets. Either side of the road willow-herb, thistles and cow parsley were blooming and gave the otherwise drab setting colour. No pavement. Anyone on foot had to take their chances with passing traffic. There was none...

  She turned into an un-gated yard at the bottom of the lane and the now defunct Kellogg Farm seemed to loom out of a Dickens novel, the dark dust of the rutted yard sucking the light out of the place, the buildings themselves in dire need of repair. Made of brick and flint, however, the basic structure would last another thousand years. Some enterprising Russell Taylor would swoop down on it one day and turn it into an enclave of unaffordable houses, like the ones he’d built at Easington.

  Amira had made her way across the yard and down towards a low, choked up stream which had been taken over by bullrushes. This side of it stood a single storey building, certainly not intended for habitation. At least, not by humans. I followed her, one eye on the main house. Two old bangers outside it, a Renault and a Ford, told me it was being lived in.

  I went to the door of the low building, its black paint in the final stages of peeling back to bare wood. The bottom of it was rotting away, the hinges had slipped. I can’t say I’d heard voices from within as I’d approached, but when I struck the door with the side of my fist I sensed whoever was inside tense up in readiness. Readiness for what, though? To be kicked out, moved on, sent back to where they’d come from?

  Eventually Amira opened the door just eight inches and peered out. I smiled at her but I guess she’d seen men smile before and nothing good had ever come of it.

  “Amira Ovadia?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  I pushed gently, she pushed back but I had the advantage of size. I slipped in through the gap I’d created and closed the door behind me.

  The place was a pig-sty and I don’t mean figuratively: in that sense it was the opposite. Pin neat, my mother would’ve said. It had been built as a pig-sty, divvied up into territorial stalls where sows gave birth and suckled their young. A central channel ran down the centre of the building and at four yard intervals there were drains down which the muck would have washed. The windows were high and narrow, barely allowing light into the place. The walls, the stall dividers, the food troughs were grey concrete, hard as iron, and yet this g
irl had somehow managed to create a home here, an almost acceptable place to live in. There was a bright carpet in the end stall. The walls were hung with childish drawings above an old school desk with its built in chair, seated at which was a small boy, six, seven years old. He didn’t move. He just stared at me.

  An old lady stood over him, protectively. She was eighty years old at least, dressed head to toe in black, flowing garments, her arms and hands like the branches of dead trees. I smiled a greeting with as much sincerity as I could muster. The boy and the woman still didn’t move. I turned back to Amira.

  “You speak English?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Nathan Hawk. I met your brother a few days ago.”

  She struggled for a moment or two with that, no doubt wondering what Ghayas had revealed. I looked over at the old lady and the boy and back at her.

  “Will you introduce me?”

  She had no choice.

  “My grandmother, my son.”

  I walked down towards their living quarters and in a separate stall were mattresses on pallets, beds made. In another was a kitchen, with a dripping tap on the wall overhanging a plastic bowl and an old gas barbecue for cooking. The bathroom was farther on still, the toilet being a stool placed over a drain.

  I pointed at a multi-coloured bean bag in the corner of the living room stall.

  “May I?”

  She clapped her hands at her son. “Sami, Sami.”

  The boy fetched the bean bag and placed it near me. It had been a long time since I’d sat in one of those ridiculous things, but I wanted to get myself below her eye-line to give her confidence. I smiled at Sami but he didn’t smile back. On his jumper there was a streak of blood which Amira saw me notice.