He didn’t think it was going be as small a favour as I’d made out. But it was.
“Call me, next time Leonard Blake wants you to drive to Abbeville. Got a phone on you?”
He took out a battered old mobile and copied in the number I gave him as Zebrina came running towards him. Michelle still had the hawk under control and was slowly winding it in. Zebrina grabbed at her father’s free hand.
“Daddy, mummy says coffee ... come on, come on.”
“Hi, Zebrina,” I said with a smile, extra large.
She broke off to mutter some sort of greeting, then went back to pulling at her father, leaning out at an angle of 45 degrees
“Come on, come on.”
“You’d better go,” I said. “Just one thing. Did you ever go to Jericho?”
“No. Not Jericho.”
And suddenly I became really interested, though to begin with I wasn’t sure why and I could hardly quiz him any further. He added this, though, as he side-stepped away towards his wife.
“I offered to do the run, twice, but Lenny said no, he’d handle it.”
- 22 -
I’d been to Hillside Farm, I’d been to the circus, but I hadn’t been to Jericho, the third place Maryan had wanted to visit. It was too broad a brief. Jericho’s an entire suburb of Oxford and what I needed were pinpoints. The trip had to be made, though.
On the basis of any excuse to visit Oxford, Laura came with me and I parked on St Giles, that carrion site for a dozen traffic wardens with notices everywhere reminding you that the 21st century is watching you. However, the moment you turn into Walton Street, gateway to Jericho, you slip sideways into another world, one my parents would recognise with delight. There’s nothing olde worlde about the place, except the buildings, but even then you turn the corner and there’s the Blavatnik School of Government, a glass meringue of a building that oddly doesn’t look out of place. Maybe that’s because it’s cheek by jowl with the Oxford University Press, or overseen by the Radcliffe Observatory. Move further on and restaurants jostle with wine bars, cafés, pubs. There’s even a night club doubling as a restaurant, an art gallery, an old fashioned cinema, schools, churches, convenience stores and all of it jam packed into an area no more than two miles square. And teeming with life, not tourists who stick to the colleges beyond, but people who seem to belong there.
Laura headed for the secondhand bookshop, I drifted down an alley and found the art gallery. René Sharp was exhibiting that month and most of his pieces had already sold, though I’m not sure why. I’m more of a Greek God man myself, when it comes to sculpture, not someone who’ll pay two grand for a cross between a kettle, an iron and a watering can.
But the fact that Jericho was so alive bothered me. Could I see, among its galleries, bars, the OUP, the back entrance of Somerville College, a ‘gentleman’s club’ that Rollo was supplying girls for? Hillside Farm and the circus were isolated, Jericho was not only heaving with people it was dead centre of the city. I walked the entirety of the place, four hours, from canal to the Radcliffe Infirmary, from St Antony’s to Oxford Castle and wound up believing there was nothing here for me. Not today, anyway.
We met for an early supper in a Chinese restaurant in Clarendon Street. Laura was seated by a landslide of shopping and was reading one of the books she’d bought, a signed copy of Lonesome Dove by Larry MacMurty.
“I’ve been meaning to read it for years and there it was, pride of place in Albion Beatnik’s. I’ve ordered a hotpot, by the way.”
The waiter came over to ask what I wanted to drink. I wanted a double scotch, and then another, but instead ordered tea in a tall glass, ice to the brim. He went off to get it without a blink.
“You look glum,” she said. “Default position or bad day?”
I said I believed that Jericho was useless, too transparent, too busy-body a place for slavery to survive in. She thought that was naïve of me. And so did I, frankly, but if I was right and Maryan was trying to locate her middle-aged parents, where might they be hidden in such a place? Their daughter’s grapevine had been almost specific with Hillside and the circus. Why had it let her down by suggesting Jericho, a place that must’ve been home to 20,000 people?
Laura still hadn’t closed her latest acquisition, in fact she was still holding it open on the table which gave the impression of preferring the company of crusty, hard baked cowboys to mine. Thankfully, the waiter brought the hotpot and with it an extra spoon. For me. He’d guessed I wasn’t a chopsticks lover. She closed her book and returned it to the landslide.
“Something else ... interested me,” I said. “If you think I’m being naïve again do say, won’t you.”
She gave me the chin drop glance over the glasses and waited.
“Terry Baines told me they’d brought 40 people in this year. Price? Between two and four thousand pounds each so I reckon they made a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty grand at most. Divided three ways - Jenny, Rollo, Blake - having first paid Terry and various others who will have muscled in along the way, it doesn’t seem much of a business.”
Laura couldn’t get past the cynical horror of it and considered the price irrelevant. She even mentioned the name Finchum again, but I kept going.
“I think there’s something else going on that Terry doesn’t know about. Christ, the trafficking might even be a cover for it. Fits with with my belief that Terry Baines is a fall guy.”
“Is he?”
She began loading my plate with food from the hotpot and I reached across and skewered a dumpling with a chopstick
“His is the only face the Hillside Six, Amira, Sami, granny and any others would recognise. I’ll even bet you a fiver that Blake’s Transit is registered to Terry Baines.”
“Something Terry doesn’t know about, you said. Why haven’t they told him?”
“Simple. Any decent interrogator could get Terry to spill the whole story in half an hour, but what he doesn’t know he can’t tell...”
At least she hadn’t dismissed it as me squeezing facts to fit a theory, like coppers often do, instead of developing one from information available, the way doctors work.
“Is that yours or mine?” she asked.
“What?”
“Phone.”
It was mine, purring away in my jacket pocket.
“What’s wrong now?” I muttered out of habit. “Well, talk of the devil.”
I plugged my free ear with a finger.
“He’s going tomorrow, Abbeville,” said Terry Baines.
“Is it a market day?”
“No. And I offered to drive down with him. Company. No need. He was just going to chat up some jobsworth at the prefecture, to get more English stalls on the market.”
You don’t go all the way to France to do that, you do it on Skype or write a bloody letter.
“When’s he leaving, Terry?”
“First thing. Back the day after.”
“When he’s there, where does he stay?”
After a bit of wrestling with the pronunciation we pinned it down.
“It’s called La Maison d’Amelie.”
- 23 -
The days when you queued up at the ferry, showed the kids round the ship then stood at the bows waiting for France to loom out of a mist to the sound of groggy accordion music are gone. Maybe they never really existed for me, what with two of my children throwing up at the slightest ripple in the English Channel, but I never lost the childish belief that one day the journey would meet my expectation. Thanks to Eurotunnel it never will.
Thirty five minutes, give or take, and you pass from one urban jungle to another, riding in a metal tapeworm, a journey which has more in common with a day trip to Croydon than to a foreign country. There’s nothing wrong with Croydon, I hasten to add. In fact it has a great deal going for it. When you visit it you don’t expect to be thrilled, so how can you be disappointed?
I’d borrowed Laura’s Volvo for the journey, to avoid the possibility of the ne
w old Land Rover playing up and in case Blake knew it was my vehicle of choice: a Volvo disappears into the crowd in any country, a Land Rover stands out. The negotiation with Laura had been tricky, Why didn’t I drive down via Paris, she’d said, drop her off so that she could do one or two things there, then pick her up the following evening, or the evening after that? I scotched the idea with a string of excuses which didn’t make sense, but she took the hint.
The A16 coast road is about as ordinary as they come, yet I still expected that over the hill there it would be, the rural France of Van Gogh, the chateaux of Cézanne, the waterscapes of Monet. They weren’t and I sound like a tourist complaining to Thomas Cook that my package holiday hadn’t come up to snuff. I kept reminding myself of my destination and purpose, the first being La Maison d’Amelie. From the pictures on the website it could have been anything from a brothel to an old people’s home.
As for my purpose, it was less specific. Did I hope to catch Leonard Blake in the process of loading up six Croatian sex slaves, a family fleeing the wars in North Africa, disillusioned young men from anywhere in the world? Or did the fact that he was travelling alone, on a non market day, point to something else? And would I then phone Finchum and manage to electrify him with my discovery and have him waiting at Wotton for the delivery?
Abbeville was a compact town, no urban sprawl, at least in the north from where I approached it. There was one notable exception. On the left, still half a mile from the first junction, sat a low building more in the style of a nuclear power station than a working factory. It was made up of giant, grey boxes, 1950’s architecture, recent additions in the same vein. A curved driveway bore a sign - Siméon Deroy Robillard. Nothing ostentatious, no ‘we are the greatest’ self-publicity. At least that would’ve made it seem friendly, inviting, approachable, whereas its attempt to be inconspicuous gave it a sinister feel.
I found the campsite I was heading for on the edge of town and checked in. That too was pretty deserted, but middle of a fine day, why would it be otherwise? I pitched the bivouac Jaikie and Con has pestered me for, prior to a scout trip to the Cairngorms which was then cancelled. Until today, it had sat in a cupboard under the stairs along with other useless presents I’ve bought myself.
I took a shower, dropped a few necessary items into Ellie’s old rucksack and drove into town. The site owner had given me directions to Amelie’s. It was on Rue d’Accord, Agreement Street, very expensive, very ... he put a finger on the tip of his nose to raise it. Up itself? Not an English phrase he used a great deal. I decided to leave checking it out until later. No point in tempting fate.
There’s nothing like waiting for nightfall to make you feel like a criminal. I had about eight hours to kill. After a mosey round the town I sat outside a café and watched the buzz and hum of a small market town on a midweek day, coffee and a mille-feuille in front of me. I began to relax. It’s an unusual feeling, one that friends say I should try to cultivate, but it’s easier said than done. Just one small doubt intruded, probably spurred by the guilt baked into the French pastry, but I wondered if Terry Baines had sent me on a wild goose chase. Would I arrive at Amelie’s and find that elusive entity - nothing? I didn’t think so. Baines had been sweet on Maryan and he feared that Leonard Blake was behind her death. Was Terry clever enough to have played concern and innocence to hide his own guilt?
The notion passed and I returned to being pleasantly at ease, optimistic even about what the evening would produce. And then I did a foolish thing. I sent my children an email on the family forum. Since being congratulated by Con for asking Laura to marry me, I hadn’t heard from any of them for a couple of weeks, except Jaikie who’d been weird about Fee. It was a simple, pointless email.
‘Hi! I’m in France, would you believe. Spot of research. Dad x’
Jaikie was back to me immediately. ‘Have you and Laura called it a day?’
Bloody hell! No matter what I said these days they would read the worst into it. A family trait, no doubt, but annoying for all that. Losing weight would suggest I was at death’s door, putting it on would draw the same conclusion. Working on a case involving people trafficking would bring advice to be careful, to remember that I wasn’t as young as I used to be. I answered Jaikie.
‘Work’.
He WhatsApped a thumbs up.
The only one of them who was coherent that day was Ellie who emailed me, off forum. ‘Dad, slightly worried about Big Sister. I’ve not heard from her for a couple of weeks, in fact ever since you announced the old nuptials. I think it’s got something to do with Laura taking Mum’s place, just in Fee’s mind of course. I mean there she is, Tokyo admittedly, but queen bee to the rest of us workers and all of a sudden...? See if you can get to her. El x’
I was back to normal, worrying about one of my grown up, left home, self-possessed children. I emailed Fee privately.
‘Hi, Fee, need your advice about something...’
It usually works wonders, but not on that occasion.
***
I had dinner in a small restaurant tucked away up a side street. No booze and just a starter to eat so the owner was pretty anxious that I downed it quickly and got the hell out.
It’s an odd business, eating on your own in a place designed for couples or groups. You’re immediately cast as the dodgy loner unless you’re dressed in a business suit. I’d bought a paper to pretend to read. I always do when I’m on my own, it gives the eyes a refuge when they meet with questioning glances from other punters. I don’t suppose it was strictly necessary in Gerard’s on the inevitable Rue Charles de Gaulle, there being only seven of us there, but I was in a cautious frame of mind. I even sat the far side of a wooden pillar, one eye on the door, in case Blake walked in.
After the meal I strolled the mile or so to the eastern edge of town, an outcrop of buildings known as Mirmande. It must’ve been a village in its own right, three hundred years ago, and no doubt because daylight was fading fast, some of the France I’d believed was illusory became real. Looming over Mirmande’s web of cobbled streets and crooked houses, was a church, a sure sign of one time prosperity, though now seldom used according to the noticeboard on the front wall.
Amelie’s was a small place, leaning out into the street. It had always been some kind of tavern, I reckoned, and by acquiring nearby houses the business had grown, people stayed overnight. There was no car park, no room for one. Guests left their vehicles in nearby side streets, a tight squeeze whatever the make. Even tighter for a Ford Transit. It wasn’t difficult to find it, a hundred yards from the hotel, hugging the stone wall beside a long garden.
I suppose it should come as no surprise, after thirty years of eavesdropping, that at certain times the senses heighten of their own accord. As I approached the van I could see, in the near darkness, things I would ordinarily have had to squint at. I could smell the evening meal, the fresh paint, the coffee wafting out from the terraced houses I passed. I could hear the sounds from within, children’s voices, a door slamming, television news. I heard voices out here in the street as well, coming from behind the Transit, fifty yards away.
I ducked into a doorway to take stock, peeping out like an old lady from behind curtains. Male and female voices. As the conversation developed one of the participants lit a cigarette. I saw the glow of the lighter bounce off the car behind it, smelled the smoke a moment later. Then one of the girls laughed. One of four voices, if my ears were telling the truth. Two female, two male. Only one of them, a male, was English. Too young to be Leonard Blake. One of the girls stepped back into the road, catching her heel between cobbles. She stooped to curse it. Her friend came forward to comfort her. No damage. They laughed it off. But it was a cue to get the evening moving. The two girls and one of the men, young, mid-twenties, began to walk up the slight hill towards a car. The fourth man, the Englishmen, called out for them to wait. He came into view, checking the locks, the sliding door and the driver’s door. As he turned away, I saw him full face for a s
plit second. I knew him. I’d seen him before. I stepped back into the shelter of the doorway. Where? Where had I seen that face, that physical shape, that bulk? Thame market was as far as I could reach in the link-up game. Was it a crony of Leonard Blake, one of the boys on the meat stall? One of the others I’d seen but hadn’t registered?
There’d be time to go through my mental scrapbook later. Right now I needed to break into the van and when the four friends had driven off I reached into the rucksack for my lock-pick. The heightened senses were replaced by an adrenalin surge as I checked that I was alone in the street, put the key into the barrel and opened the sliding door. There was no squealing from Croatian sex slaves, no cowering by a Syrian family, no lip from young men seeking the promised land. There were only cardboard boxes, all shapes and sizes, plastic containers, crates of fluid. I stepped up into the van and closed the door behind me.
When faced with having got something completely wrong I begin by wanting to slit my wrists then gradually move to patting myself on the back for maybe having got it right. I’m not saying that in that pokey French street I’d had a damascene moment, suddenly got the answer to why Maryan had been murdered and Tom Manners framed for it, anymore than I knew what Rollo and Blake were really up to. But, having come to believe that the trafficking might be a cover for something more sinister, there among all that cardboard, with torch in one hand, phone on its record function in the other, I had the faintest whiff of what it might be. I would never have got there but for the winding trail that took me from a stolen watch, to a gang of six migrant worker, to a circus. I’d been led there by at least one ‘good’ man, Terry Baines, who’d confided in me. But enough of justifying why I hadn’t seen it straightaway.
The cardboard boxes, some of the larger ones battened and palleted, all bore the insignia SDR. If it was spare parts for Alicia Blake’s wheelchair, her husband had been sold a hell of dog in the first place. I went from box to box, recording what I read on the labels onto the phone. Pride of place was taken by a spectrometer de masse. Anyone who watches an American cop show knows they’re the Holy Grail, they hold the answer to everything, even though it’s rarely explained how. Beside it, tall and battened in, also on a pallet, was a congelateur, a lab freezer it said in smaller print. Beside it was an autoclave, next to that an incubateur and then a centrifuge. Tucked beside it was a microscope, one the size of a zimmer frame. Strapped to the side of the van were cylinders of various gasses, partially hidden by boxes of safety suits, gloves, boots, vizors. Even smaller stuff - pipettes, flasks, petrie dishes. And two oversized milk crates of disinfectant that could likely burn a hole in the earth’s crust if spilt.
Jericho Road: A Nathan Hawk Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Mystery series Book 5) Page 16
