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

by Douglas Watkinson

  ‘All that and more. Dx,’ I WhatsApped him.

  Five minutes later I got a ping and Jaikie said, ‘Brilliant! How about a guy working for the Features Editor of some Homes and Gardeny kind of mag? You’re looking for potential subjects, like a location manager would. Trouble is you’d have to wear a suit. Christ, this house we’re working in, you would love it! If I had the money I’d buy it for you. Not that the guy who owns it wants to sell. Anyway, what do you think?’

  At first I thought it was insane, over-ambitious, even a bit corny, until I structured it a little, wrote the script around it. I told him I liked it.

  Ping. ‘Alan Ogilvy.’

  ‘Who he?’ I asked, trendily.

  ‘You mean who is he?’ I’d forgotten his obsession over bought and brought, less and fewer, either and neither. ‘Alan Ogilvy is you. It sounds like a failed journalist. Dad, have you heard from Fee lately?’

  I hadn’t but my response was the same one she would have made herself.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong?’

  ‘No, really, nothing. I mean it. Nothing. G’night.’

  So that left me with plenty to worry about, Jaikie haring back into the night when I’d asked after Fee. What was going on in her life? Lack of money? No. A bust up with Yukito? Possible. Trouble with siblings? Unlikely. I hesitate to say they were scared of her, so in deference to Jaikie’s language propriety I’ll change that to respected her.

  - 20 -

  Three days later, at five in the afternoon, I found myself outside the big oak gates to Wotton House, having driven there in Laura’s sweet smelling Volvo. I got out and went over to the security panel, or doorbell as they used to be called. It was redolent of dying, not that I’ve done that yet, but all of a sudden the events of the last three days flashed through my mind as I reached out and pressed the buzzer...

  I’d extracted from Jean Langan, the lady who does a spot of cleaning for me, some more information about the housekeeper I was due to meet. Edith Barrowman. Jean clearly thought she was a bit above herself. Rumour had it that she’d spent most of her working life at the BBC in the wardrobe department. Her daughter had followed in her footsteps, not into wardrobe but make-up. Edith had been married once and he'd died at 60 from a heart attack no one had seen coming. He’d left his wife penniless, having convinced her throughout their marriage that sufficient had been put aside to see them through their dotage. Finding herself skint, Edith answered the advert Jenny Leveque had placed in Country Life for ‘a mature lady of good character’. God knows how Jean had picked all this up, but the fact that Mrs Barrowman had confided such piffling details gave me hope. It meant that she was a chatty soul.

  On Monday I’d bought a new suit from a high class shop in Thame. It was Italian, which to those who care about such things, meant it was stylish. And it came with a bag that moths couldn’t penetrate. Laura said I looked good in it. I felt straight-jacketed, next stop a padded cell.

  Having paid seven hundred quid for it, I hadn’t worn it to court that morning, to see Tom Manners get remanded in custody to a secure psych unit near Banbury. He’d signalled to me from the dock, gestured to where a waistcoat pocket might have housed a gold hunter. When would it be returned to him? I looked away, turned my attention to his teenage solicitor and hoped she was standing in for someone far weightier than herself.

  After the hearing I’d phoned Jaikie’s girlfriend, Jodie, to see if she knew anything about Tom Manners’s solicitor. She said the firm was well regarded in the trade but as for the girl representing Tom, she’d never heard of her. Did I want her to dig deeper? I thanked her for the offer and said, brashly, that I didn’t think it would ever get to trial...

  “Can I help you?” asked a voice like ice being crushed, coming from the doorbell.

  “Yes, it’s Alan Ogilvy for Mr Leveque,” I replied.

  It was a critical moment. She was watching me on a CCTV camera, nailed to a nearby tree, and I was trying not to look back.

  “What is the nature of your business with Mr Leveque?” the buzzer asked me.

  “Sorry, is that Mrs Leveque?”

  The voice melted a little. “Good gracious, no. I’m the housekeeper.”

  The voice betrayed that she’d been flattered by me suggesting she might be the owner of this overdone pile.

  “Ah, sorry, sorry...”

  I don’t think Nathan Hawk had ever used the word ‘sorry’ twice in the same sentence, though it came naturally to Alan Ogilvy. I added that my secretary had made an appointment with Mr Leveque last month, on the 17th. We were doing a series about important houses that have recently been restored...

  “Who are ‘we’?”

  “Home and Hearth. I’m the assistant features editor and Mr Leveque kindly agreed to have Wotton House included in our November issue.”

  “There’s nothing in the diary and Mr and Mrs Leveque are in the Bahamas.”

  “Oh, dear. This visit was just a recce, a chance for me to take a few details and pass them on to our photographer for the actual shoot. I’m not sure I can ... when are they back?”

  “Two weeks today.”

  I fiddled about on my phone, pretending to bring up a calendar.

  “Which makes it ... and that week is absolutely crammed. Do you think he’ll mind if Wotton’s not included...?”

  To me it was beginning to sound as thin as a rake, but Mrs Barrowman must have thought otherwise. The voice became positively thermal.

  “Do you see the tree to your left? Turn and look up at the camera, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  I did as asked and tried to smile. There was a brief pause before the gate mechanism clicked and the pair swung open slowly, silently. I got back into Laura’s car and drove up to the house, the approach being a single S, curling between huge sycamores that appeared to sap the light from the surrounding area.

  Mrs Barrowman was on the front step to greet me as I got out of the car and began apologising. I was so sorry I was late but there’d been a dreadful accident on the M 25. I shook the offered hand and smiled at this immaculately turned out woman in her mid fifties, dressed mainly in Mrs Danvers black, with blonded hair scraped back into a tight clip behind her head.

  She wasn’t completely alone. There was a gardener and a spikey-haired hulk a couple of hundred yards away, the one mowing the lawn on a ride on, the other raking up fallen leaves. They both paused to have a good look at me, until the grass cutter moved his younger companion on on.

  “Do come in, Mr...”

  “Ogilvy,” I said. “And you are?”

  “Mrs Barrowman.”

  The double doors slid open and waited for us to enter. I looked up as if I’d never been in the house before, forcing my breathing into short gasps at the intricate plasterwork, the murals, the carved balustrade on the landing, the bannister curling downward in the form of a spiralling snake. I played my editorial delight at the prospect of the November edition for all it was worth.

  “Edith,” said Mrs Barrowman.

  “I beg your pardon?” I said, as if awoken from a dream.

  She couldn’t count the number of times she’d considered changing her Christian name, especially during her years at the BBC. So Edwardian housewife, didn’t I agree? Understandably, Alan Ogilvy thought it was a marvellous name. Besides, I told her, it was my late mother’s.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to...”

  I waved her impending apology to one side and smiled.

  “She disliked it too.”

  I wondered just how long I could speak in this foreign tongue, the language of official letters and classic novels, where ‘I beg your pardon’ replaces ‘What?’ and ‘she disliked it too’ stood in for ‘the old girl couldn’t stand it.’ At least when Jaikie played a role, someone else wrote the words. At the same time I was trying to place Edith’s occasional deviation from her perfect BBC accent and put her on the map. I’d homed in on Edinburgh but I wasn’t convinced.

  I follo
wed her through to a sitting room almost as big as the ground floor of Beech Tree and certainly better furnished. There were none of the marks of a life lived with four growing children and dogs, or of a man who drew on the walls and occasionally threw things at them. She sat me down on a sofa and reached out, touchy feely, withdrawing her hand from my arm almost immediately.

  “This sounds awfully like another of Mr Leveque’s ... blank spaces,” she said. “As my predecessor called them.”

  Evidently, she asked him time and again to write down appointments on a slip of paper, leave them in her office for her to add to the diary. It was beyond him, it seemed, and Mrs Leveque was even worse.

  “So you’re a fairly ... recent addition to the family?”

  She smiled at my twee way of putting it. “Yes, I’m living in while they’re on holiday, but whether I shall move here permanently...”

  Her voice tailed off in doubt before she frowned, slightly.

  “Just tell me again...”

  I snapped open my briefcase and handed her the August edition of Home and Hearth which I’d bought on my way here.

  “We’re planning a series of articles about restored houses and Wotton is just perfect.”

  I think my London-ish accent had softened and it was disturbing, more the stuff of theatre than investigation. But as I’ve told anyone who’s willing to listen, you can make people believe anything...

  “And he agreed to it?” she said, puzzled.

  It was the first hint of a problem.

  “Do you know, it’s funny you should say that. He was all for it at the time of asking, but later seemed quite dubious...”

  “Later?”

  “When I phoned him, at his chambers in London, to make this appointment...”

  “Ah,” she said, as if all was explained. She said it was typical of him, to say one thing one day, something else another. And Mrs Leveque had caught the habit. She had to say, though, the November project did sound interesting.

  It was my turn to frown and what I said could have gone either way, for or against me.

  “I’d hate to be intrusive, though, Mrs Barrowman, to try and persuade him of something his heart wasn’t in.”

  She smiled and sat down in the armchair next to the sofa, knees together, legs sloping to one side, hands clasped together in her lap, back straight. The perfect costume mannequin.

  “I might be able to help,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I don’t wish to speak ill of Mrs Leveque, but already I seem to have considerably more influence over her husband than she does. It comes partly from age and partly from, well...”

  She wanted me to supply the word, so I took another gamble.

  “Poise?” I suggested.

  She laughed, breathily. “Actually, it isn’t the word I was thinking of, but yours is rather better. Yes, Mrs Leveque is ... highly strung and her husband tends to disregard much of what she says. To whom does he turn as confidante?”

  She cocked her head to identify herself and sneaked a look at her watch. I wondered if Jaikie was ever as conscious of giving a performance as I was at that moment. The answer was almost certainly no. When he spoke the words of a Victorian poet, a war damaged army officer, an unfaithful husband that’s what he became for the duration. I gave a sigh, hopefully taken by Edith Barrowman as one of relief.

  “Well, if you think you could ... ease the way, I would be most grateful. And, not to be vulgar about the matter, so would Home and Hearth.”

  She turned away coyly, chin slightly down, an attractive profile or she wouldn’t have been careless enough to reveal it.

  “Facilitation,” I insisted. “Classed as a necessary expense. The going rate is in the region of two thousand pounds.”

  She turned back to me, saying she’d be only too happy to assist. She glanced at her watch yet again and asked, “What exactly do you need today?”

  “If I might simply ... walk the house, make notes, take the odd picture on my phone?” I pointed at her watch. “I’m conscious of taking up your time, so if you tell me where I can and can’t go...”

  She reached out to touch my arm again, left her hand there a fraction longer than before.

  “No, no ... it’s just that, well, Emmerdale begins in ten minutes and my daughter’s in charge of make-up. She values my opinion.”

  I gestured that our problem was easily solved, she could watch her soap opera, I’d walk round the house alone. I stood up.

  “I’ll start at the top and work my way down,” I said.

  Restraint and excitement aren’t really my bag, but I faked a mixture of both and hurried towards the door, anxious to get off stage. Halfway across the room she called to me.

  “Mr Ogilvy, I usually have a glass of something with Emmerdale.” She laughed, noiselessly again. “It takes the edge off the mawkish storyline and helps me concentrate. Would you care to join me?”

  “Thank you, but no. I’ll press on. Later, though, I’d be delighted.”

  ***

  Wotton House was three storeys high and the top floor, an arrangement of bedrooms and bathrooms, fanned out from a central landing below a clock tower. When the Cornells lived there, the clock was stuck at ten past nine for want of being wound. It was now digital. Rollo simply pointed a handset at it to make it do his bidding.

  To be honest, when he’d given me the guided tour, I hadn’t taken much notice of the details. There hadn’t been any need, I’d just wanted to be polite to my host. Once on the top landing I walked eastward first, to a dead end and a mural of Paris, then westward through more unbridled opulence. At every turn there seemed to be a priceless statue on guard, on every wall a painting from Rollo’s collection and ... I could sense my father’s apoplexy ... gold plated taps, chains and handles in the bathrooms. But when priceless objects confront you wherever you look, they cease to have value and I could understand Rollo confiding to me that he hated the place. It wasn’t home, it wasn’t even a museum or art gallery. It was a warehouse, a place to store wealth and for some reason the intrinsic value of Maggie’s Dad’s rocker came to mind. In a sale it was worth a few hundred quid, but if and when I died my children would fight like dogs to keep it for another generation...

  I paused at a floor to ceiling book case. I hadn’t noticed it on my first visit and real attempt had been made to hide its function from passers-by. It was hinged to the wall and a handle on the far side opened it back on itself to reveal a staircase. The stairs were narrow, steep, expensively carpeted and well lit by windows above in the roof. They led up to the attic, the space which Rollo had fobbed off as housing court papers, toys, old furniture...

  It was no penthouse, as Taniel had claimed. It was a bog standard attic, living quarters for servants or, latterly, workmen. In the vaulted, beamed roof, were dormer windows giving out onto the grounds below. Over in the far corner, at the doors of a low brick and slate building, the gardener and his boy were packing up for the day. In the far distance were the Chilterns, the blanket of beech trees giving a first hint of autumn, yellow into brown. It meant I was older than the last time I’d looked. I turned away quickly.

  The whole area, bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, sitting area was ... pristine to the point of sterility, but I set about examining it as best I could. Conscious of the noise of creaking beams and unsure if Emmerdale, three storeys below, could drown it out I stayed close to the wall and soon despaired of learning anything of advantage here.

  The bedrooms were singles and twins, set out as one might imagine expensive holiday accommodation to be. No sign of previous visitors. In the kitchen there wasn’t a mark on the wall, not a scratch in the furniture, not a scrap of food stuck to any cutlery. No rubbish with a story to tell. In the bathrooms there was no rim around the tub, no hair in the plug hole, no mould in the shower, no old bar of soap or half used tube of toothpaste. No smell except that of the chemicals used to clean the place.

  People might have lived here two years ago, or
as recently as last week, but it would take more than an ex-copper using only his eyes to prove it, first to Finchum then to a court. It would need forensic science to rip this place apart, get the DNA from the very dust mites in the carpet, and to set that in motion Finchum would need more than my suspicion that Rollo and his cronies had kept their ‘clients’ here when in transit. The fact that those who’d passed through it were unlikely to testify didn’t help either.

  Thank God, I was still an advocate of the finger-tip search, hands and knees. I don’t know what drew me to the carpet, except that it’s where everything winds up. Simple gravity, plus my lifelong habit of looking under sofas and between cushions for spare change or that missing biro. This wasn’t going to be my day...

  But as I stood up, something caught my eye. It was sitting in a shallow plastic cup, the kind placed under castors to prevent them digging into the floor or carpet. At first I wasn’t sure what it was but as I reached for it I could see that it was a tooth. A child’s tooth. And I reckoned I knew who it had once belonged to.

  I fashioned an envelope out of a page from my notebook and placed the tooth in it. And feeling less like autumn had arrived I turned and left the attic.

  ***

  As I walked into the living room I could tell that something had changed and it wasn’t the channel on the television. Mrs Barrowman had looked in my briefcase and been disappointed. There was nothing in it. I went over to it, flipped open the leather catch and dropped my notebook in. I smiled at her.

  “A prop more than a necessary tool of my trade,” I confessed.

  She relaxed, visibly, and all but fluttered her hand against her bosom. The hiatus passed when I reminded her of the drink she’d offered me. A whisky in a tall glass would be perfect, I said, with ice all the way to the top, if she had any. Naturally, she did and went through to the kitchen to get it. She poured herself another gin and tonic and re-took the armchair.

  “How was Emmerdale?” I asked.

  “Pallid. In my day, authenticity was the watchword.” She nodded at the now dark television. “These people are meant to be farming folk yet they look as if they’ve just walked out of Harrods, costumes and make-up. How the world changes.”