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

by Douglas Watkinson

  I wanted to know how much all this was worth and climbed over to the driver’s seat, opened the central compartment in search of a receipt. There was nothing. A till receipt for diesel, from a place just outside Calais, but that was all. I took a photo of it, replaced it. I opened the side door and stepped down. It was deathly quiet now, my heightened senses were back in their respective boxes. I locked up and returned to the car.

  - 24 -

  When I got back from France, late afternoon, Laura was already there. I could see her on the kitchen phone, strolling the room excitedly and my arrival hurried the conversation to an end. When I’d dealt with Dogge being overjoyed to see me, after a 24 hour absence, Laura came over and kissed me on the cheek. I won’t say it was out of character, but it did take me by surprise. I kissed her back.

  “Who was on the phone?” I asked.

  “Sheila,” she said, in far too prepared a fashion for it to be the truth. I wanted to ask why she’d phoned Beech Tree, on my landline, not on Laura’s mobile but I could hear us wading through weak signals, thick walls and a host of other non-technical reasoning.

  “Is she okay?” I asked.

  Sheila Bright was Laura’s protege at the surgery and her life had been interrupted by breast cancer the previous year. She’d beaten it and was back working part time and anything she couldn’t manage, Laura filled in for her.

  She smiled. “Sheila’s great, sends her love.”

  She flopped into Maggie’s dad’s rocker and went with the gentle sway of it.

  “How was France?” she asked, anxious for a change of subject.

  To answer, I played the recording of the list I’d made and as it progressed her face went as still as I’ve ever seen it. At the end she nodded, doctor listening intently to the patient.

  “You were right,” she said, quietly. “There’s something else besides the trafficking.”

  I was pleased, though I forbore to share the reasons for that with Laura. I’d scotched a personal doubt that had nagged away since the day I visited Thame market with Tom Manners. Had I, in some perverse way, invented a crime to solve, used Tom Manners’s watch as a starting point, attached Leonard Blake, to whom I’d taken an instant dislike, and turned him into a trafficker and a murderer? No, the crime had always been there, I believed. I was simply the first person to realise it.

  “I recognised the Transit driver. Don’t ask me where from, but it wasn’t Leonard Blake. For all I know Blake wasn’t even there.”

  “Keeping out of harm’s way?”

  I nodded, pointed at my phone. “That list I read out, how much is that stuff worth?”

  She shook her head, trying to tot up sums of money that she wasn’t used to thinking about.

  “I’ve no idea,” she said at last. “Half a million pounds. Minimum.”

  “A sum worth killing for. I couldn’t find a receipt in the Transit, you see, which doesn’t prove much but I’m wondering if all that stuff slipped out through the back door of SDR.”

  She didn’t like that. The idea that anyone, however loosely connected to her profession, might be operating ‘off the books’ as she quaintly put it, appalled her. Carers, researchers, healers, in Laura’s world they were all meant to be above reproach. She’d given way on one area, in our many discussions. Pharmaceutical companies. They were the wolves in white coats, she agreed. Her brow creased in characteristic frown.

  “You’re saying they bring this equipment over once in a while and trade it on ... from somewhere in Jericho?”

  I shrugged. “There are clinics there, a hospital, research labs attached to the colleges.”

  “No, no...”

  “Laura, I don’t like it either.” For a moment she thought I was being flip. “I don’t mean it offends me, I mean it doesn’t quite ... make sense. I need to give Jericho another look, take Bill Grogan with me. Good pair of eyes, isn’t fanciful, knows the place...”

  I turned away to the sink, washed my hands and started to knock up a quick meal. Pre-cooked rice, tuna fish and broccoli done in the microwave. Laura sat where she’d fallen. After a minute or so of silence she said,

  “Want to know why I was late?”

  I turned and looked at her. “I’m sorry. Yes. How was your day?”

  “I went over to Kellogg Farm.”

  She waited for the eruption but all she got was a knowing grunt. She shook her head, irritated by the nagging sense of duty, the one that made her a true doctor. It had forced her to check on Amira and her family.

  “And?” I asked.

  She said there was a child there of six who hadn’t seen a paediatrician for two years. An old lady who hadn’t seen a doctor for 20. They were living in a damp, dark, mouldy building ... Heavens above, there was a fungus growing in tiers behind the door! Sami had a wheezy chest, which he shared with his grandmother, and if Laura had taken their bloods, God know what else she would’ve found.

  “And it gives me a dilemma,” she added.

  “I thought it might.”

  “If that child develops something like pneumonia and I’ve failed to report that I ... well, the ‘if onlys’ will plague me forever.”

  I nodded. “Give me one more week.”

  ***

  Something woke me in the night. To be honest, I’m not sure that I’d fallen fully asleep in the first place, but no matter the reasons I went downstairs and made a cup of tea. I glanced across at the phone, resisting its taunts for as long as possible, then gave in and whipped it from its hook and pressed the redial button. Up came the number of whoever Laura had been speaking to when I’d arrived back from France. I didn’t recognise it, but I recognised the foreign dialling code. +81. Japan. Laura had been talking to Fee.

  - 25 -

  I parked in the St. Giles herringbone and started plugging the ticket machine with money, only to realise I hadn’t got enough loose change on me. Just as I was about to rip the head off the parking meter, a voice behind me said,

  “Here you go, guvnor. Couple of quid.”

  I turned to Bill Grogan and took the money.

  We crossed the main drag, heading for Jericho and pretty soon we were bouncing off visitors from all over the world and crossing paths with students who believed they owned the city. It made conversation difficult and as usual Bill was in a finicky mood, wanting to know exactly what we were looking for. Resentfully, I hauled him into a cafe on Clarendon Street, sat him down with a coffee and brought him up to speed, ending with a list of what I’d found in the Transit. He listened patiently, then asked as if it had all gone over his head,

  “So what are we looking for today?”

  I took a deep breath and leaned across the table, all set to have a go at him. I pulled back at the last moment.

  “I don’t know, Bill. I’m trying to link Jericho to Maryan Kashani, to Rollo Leveque to Leonard Blake to a whole bunch of expensive medical equipment. Have they got an outlet for it here, middle man, a broker? I mean I’ve since discovered you can pay what you want for a spectrometer, six figures or seven...”

  He’d nodded along with me and then checked his watch.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “My car’s in for service, a place on the Jericho Road. Bloke said he’d have it ready for five o’clock.”

  “It’s not even lunchtime,” I said

  I think that’s when I accepted that I was on a downward slope. Jericho had proved unyielding the last time I was here. What made me think today would be any different, with or without Bill Grogan’s assistance.

  His local knowledge would’ve been useful in most other situations and he did what he could to help. Showed willing. He took me to every place he could think of that had some vague medical connection, not just the hospital or the GP’s surgery, but to a chiropodist, an acupuncturist and a reflexologist. They all knew and liked him but none of them could help. We wound up badgering one of his old informants, but the man’s expertise was drugs, electronic equipment and stolen high-end cars. He kn
ew nothing about medical equipment.

  We found another cafe and took more coffee on board. Bill had a salad, I picked apart an over-stuffed sandwich and thought I owed it to him to try and lighten the day. What I said was part jest, part desperation, but he did me the courtesy of listening. I’d been known all my life for being lucky, I said. Strokes of the stuff usually came when I acknowledged that I couldn’t do everything, solve every crime I took on. I wasn’t saying that all I had to do was damp down on the arrogance and fate would step in, lend a hand. What usually happened was more mundane. I’d step back from the problem, see it differently...

  “Sooner or later you’re going to have to got to this Finchum, guvnor. You know that don’t you.”

  Maybe I did. I also knew that Finchum would feign concentration on what I was telling him, then assure me he’d look into it. I’d have to break my word to the Hillside Six, my promise to Amira, and when Finchum piled in, blue lights flashing, Terry Baines would run. Blake and Rollo would close down their operation and all we’d be left with was a Transit full of lab equipment, brought in by the spikey haired bloke I’d seen in France. “I know him, I’ve see him somewhere before,” I’d insist, but no matter how vital I made it sound, how could Finchum take that to court as evidence? Besides, he reckoned he’d got his man, Tom Manners. He planned on keeping him.

  “What you’re lacking, Nathan, is intel on your man Leveque,” Grogan said. “You think you know him because you’ve been in his house, but all you’ve got is the housekeeper’s first impressions. I thought you had a mutual friend, the pair of you. John Stillman.”

  I nodded. “I’ll give him a call. Come on, I’ll drop you off at your car.”

  ***

  It had a been a bad day at the office, then, with no one to take it out on but myself. We walked up to St Giles and the Land Rover and Bill directed me down through Jericho, out of Oxford on the Jericho Road. I know why I drove slowly. I was defeated and pessimistic, a car accident waiting to happen. And I had the bad passenger Grogan beside me.

  The light wasn’t good, either. One of those freak heavy afternoon, evenings, starting to rain and an officious driver flashed me to switch on my side-lights. I obliged. And about a mile and a half out of Oxford, as the houses became farther apart, trees and fields more evident, something persuaded me to slow right down. It was the bloke behind, right up my backside, urging me to step on it. On too many occasions I’ve stopped when this has happened, had it out with the driver and not felt any better for it afterwards. That evening I rolled down the window and waved him on. He signalled, tooted his thanks and his banana of a car sped past me.

  But don’t anyone say that my father’s words are baloney. He’d maintained that his good fortune in surviving a stint in Northern Ireland, early eighties, was down to one thing: once a lucky bastard, always a lucky bastard.

  “Nathan, pull over,” said Grogan, all of a sudden.

  “Why, what’s wrong?”

  “Just do it.”

  I signalled and bounced us up on the verge. I tried again to get him to say what was wrong, but he wouldn’t. He got out of the Land Rover and walked back, maybe a couple of hundred yards and I followed. He stopped outside the house we’d passed and pointed down into the ditch. I wasn’t as bucked as I should have been. This was just another faint possibility on the end of a tiring day. It was upside down, half in the ditch, so it’s a wonder Grogan had seen it, but there it was. A barbecue lid. Same size, same shape, same cherry red colour as the one the Hillside Six were using to cook on. It was slightly misshapen, oval rather than round, so I could easily picture it on the back of a pickup, sliding off its other half as the truck pulled away.

  I looked up at the house. It was small, stone built with a slated roof and tiny windows, once an outlying worker’s cottage on a large estate. There were no signs of life within, no cars parked nearby, but there were definite signs they’d had the builders in. The verge was tyre rutted, the indentation of a builders skip was right up close to the hedge, and although the area had been cleaned up there were traces of broken glass and breeze block. There was also that inevitable worn path to the front gate, where heavy boots had gone back and forth all day long. The house had no name, no number, as far as I could make out and it was well hidden from the road, dense conifers baffling the sound of traffic.

  As the dominoes in my mind toppled and stopped falling at Russell Taylor’s door my only concern was the six days I had left in which to nail Blake and Rollo for whatever they were doing. I picked up the barbecue lid and took it to the Land Rover.

  - 26 -

  Russell and Tina Taylor lived in one of those places I’d heard of but never been to. I’m not talking about the likes of Timbuktu or The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but a village called Granborough just 9 miles away from where I lived.

  The house had once been a Methodist chapel and God knows where the congregation had come from, or how they'd got there 200 years ago, but the building was a fair old size. Only someone like Taylor could have seen its potential and he’d evidently picked it up for a song, then bought four acres behind it where his wife now kept horses.

  I’d learned all this from my farmer friend Martin Falconer who’d been courted by the Taylors with the object of him selling some speculative land to them. The piece they were interested in had some tin can barns on it that Martin never used and Russell thought he could get planning permission for a couple of houses. Martin disagreed.

  I drove to their house immediately after finding the barbecue lid and by the time I arrived it was dark. Security lights flicked on as I parked behind the brand new Range Rover and before I reached the front door it was opened by Russell. He took a moment to place me.

  “Mr Hawk. Good to see you. You’ve decided?”

  His smile was melon slice wide. He thought I was there to make an offer on one of the houses.

  “Still thinking. I’d like to ask a few questions, though...”

  Russell glanced behind him, hoping that Tina was nearby to direct operations.

  “Please, please come in.”

  It was quite a place. He’d extended it but kept the original chapel as was, complete with stained glass windows, winding stairs to the high pulpit, raked pews for the worshippers to get a clear view of the man guiding them to eternity. My first thought was of how much work had gone into it, my second was the cost of heating such a vast space. I voiced them both.

  “Double insulation, underfloor heating, triple glazing throughout. God, I sound as if I’m trying to flog it. Have a seat.”

  I sat in one of three dinky leather sofas clustered around a low, expensive table. Carved oak. He gestured over to a living room bar.

  “What can I get you?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  Tina appeared at the top of the spiral stairs and was less hospitable. She looked at me while informing her husband the meeting at the school was in half an hour. She clopped down the stairs in uncertain shoes and came over to me. I stood up and shook her hand. She knew I wasn’t there to make an offer on a house.

  “I won’t keep you,” I said. “So long as I like what you tell me.”

  Russell still hadn’t fully caught up. “That sounds ... well, not what I expected.”

  “Just tell me what the fuck you were doing on Jericho Road, the grey house, mile out of Oxford.”

  He stopped dead and drew level immediately. For all his athletic build, his fitness, he folded at the joints and slumped back into one of the sofas. His wife remained standing, staring.

  “We’re builders,” she said eventually. “We work in all sorts of places.”

  “You employ slave labour. And with that I will bring you down. Unless...”

  “Unless what?” she asked, coldly.

  Russell had found a voice, softer than his usual one, almost a whisper in case the world heard.

  “Why don’t you start by telling us who you really are?”

  “Ex-copper. Nathan Hawk. I headed up a
murder squad in Hamsworth.”

  “You look too young to be retired,” said Tina.

  “I was kicked out. I punched a fellow officer. Too hard.”

  Russell’s joints had come to life. He sprang up, arms flying out in knowing gestures, a garish smile for his wife and me.

  “All of a sudden it’s clear as a bell...”

  Tina tried to stop him. “Russ, leave this to...”

  “He reckons he’s found himself a money pit, don’t you, pal?” He laughed and came up close, beery breath, four inches taller than me. “So how much were you thinking I’d be mug enough to part with?”

  It was a face which had been in many fights and lost most of them, according to the broken nose, the cauliflower ears, the faint scar from cheekbone to lip. And it was such an inviting throat, bursting with veins and nerves which, if interrupted, would cause all sorts of ... incapacity. Whether I could reach them before he clobbered me was another matter. Besides, there was a child in the house somewhere. School meeting? 8.30?

  And to cap it all I’d already reached into my inside pocket for The Map. I took it out, sat down and spread it on the coffee table, raised a forefinger. I knew exactly where it was going to land. A ten million dollar apartment in Tokyo, where Fee and Yukito lived. I’d heard back from her. By God, I’d heard! An email three A4 pages long. I’d retained the best bits of it.