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

by Douglas Watkinson

  “I’ve been to the police,” I said.

  Laura was of a generation, and from a family, that believed any problem could be sorted by the boys in blue. She was even more relieved to learn that I’d made my peace with Finchum and he was now in charge of the inquiry.

  “So, I’ll be spending most of the day with him,” I added.

  She glanced at her watch and started to check the contents of her carpet bag. I stood up and headed back upstairs with my half drunk coffee.

  “Oh, about the marriage thing,” she said.

  Talk about caught off guard. I turned to her and said, stupidly, “What marriage thing?”

  “Me marrying you? I’ve decided not to. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Right.”

  “But I would like to move in with you. If that’s okay.”

  I tried to be as casual as the mood demanded. “It’s fine. Has Fee been getting at you?”

  “No.” The question had puzzled her but there wasn’t really time to go into it. “I really must dash.”

  She stood up and made to clear the table.

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  “Thanks.” She swung the carpet bag over one shoulder and paused to kiss me on the cheek on her way to the back door.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Over the next few days. Talk more this evening.”

  She went. I stood there for a full minute waiting for something to hit me. Nothing did, but after a moment a hideous picture began to form in my mind, emblematic of our entire relationship. I went over to the cutlery drawer, opened it cautiously and looked down. Knives, forks, spoons. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  ***

  I heard a well-known writer say once that he preferred writing scripts for radio to any other medium. His reason was that the pictures on radio were far better. I’d thought it was an odd thing to say, but as I sat with Ron Finchum in the mocked up Thames Water van, in a lay-by two hundred yards down from the house on Jericho Road, I began to understand what that man had meant.

  A distant colleague of Finchum called Bernie, a man with ear-phones grafted to his head, had gone into the house around midday, in full kit of mask, impenetrable safety suit and wellingtons and set up an array of microphones. He’d offered us cameras as well, but Finchum said time was of the essence, he couldn’t spare any to install them. Bernie sulked for a bit, but that’s the way with specialists. They end up believing they’re the centrifugal force of any investigation.

  When Bernie joined us in the van, five o’clock-ish, he brought news that Jean-Pierre, visible through the triple security doors, was stretched out on an inflatable mattress, covered with several blankets and seemed ‘at a low ebb’. For my part I was just relieved the Kashanis had stayed but when I weighed up their options it was hardly surprising. If they’d made off during the previous night, they’d have spent God knows how long on the run and, when eventually caught, they’d have been returned to Syria.

  Finchum had instructed them to make the call using Duchemin’s mobile. On the dot of six in the evening Kashani came close to one of Bernie’s microphones and dialled the number, opening the conversation with a simple,

  “Hallo.”

  He must then have waited while the person at the other end got their bearings, then asked how he’d come by that number and what was he now calling for...

  “The phone is Monsieur Duchemin’s,” Kashani said. “He is very ill, proof that the vial you bought contains the Ames strain.”

  The person on the other end asked for a more detailed account. The radio pictures that settled in my mind were of a nervous but determined Kashani, with nothing to lose, and Rollo Leveque, seated in his library, like some latter day judge in chambers, leather studded furniture and brandy from a decanter, turning over the pages of his failed case against the French government.

  “He is almost dead,” said Kashani. “I will need him removed. The point is, you bring the letters to send to your targets, I will prepare them.”

  Then Kashani added a request that made Finchum and I cringe.

  “You will bring my daughter with you?”

  Two minutes later he phoned Finchum to say that Rollo had promised to be at the house at eight o’clock.

  “Do you need to go over our plan, Dr. Kashani? The words we need to hear?”

  Kashani simply said, “No” and finished the call.

  Finchum sat looking at his phone as if he’d been suddenly jilted by a lover. “Can he be trusted, do you think?”

  I nodded. “Of course. He’s expecting to get his daughter back.”

  He flinched away from the implications of that and fell silent, leaving me with close on two hours alone in his company, some of which I decided to fill by telling my children that Laura wasn’t marrying me. What I really wanted to do was ask Fee why she and Laura had been phoning each other. Had Fee dissuaded her from taking the plunge? It came out less directly.

  ‘Fee, Laura’s moving in over the next few days. It makes me feel 25 again! She’s not going to marry me, though. How are things your end?’

  I scrubbed out the ‘not going to marry me’ sentence because it sounded like failure. Then I deleted the ‘makes me feel 25 again’ sentence because it sounded like a star struck kid, full of the joys of playing house again. That left me with the lukewarm news that Laura was moving in so I wiped that too. It left me with,

  ‘Fee, how are things your end?’

  It was three o’clock in the morning in Tokyo so I hadn’t expected to hear back from her till morning but I got a response five minutes later.

  ‘How did you know? Has Laura been talking to you?’

  Something told me this needed careful handling, though I wasn’t sure why, and I would have welcomed input from The Others. Con was the unknown quantity, as ever, but it was half eleven in Nepal and six in Ireland.

  ‘How did I know what, love?’

  ‘You mean you just emailed me on the off-chance? No chat with Laura? I asked her not to say. ‘Scuse me, must throw up again.’

  I sat back, mystified, and re-checked what I’d typed to see if a mis-spelt word or two had altered the sense. Nothing.

  Ellie was the one who banged it on the head a minute later, proclaiming to one and all, ‘You want me to draw you a picture, Dad! She’s pregnant!’

  ‘Eight weeks,’ said Fee. ‘Morning sickness be damned, I get it 24/7. Laura’s been helping.’

  There was a brief silence while Ellie, Jaikie and I, if not Con took the news on board but our response wasn’t fast enough for Fee.

  ‘Well, somebody say something!’

  ‘Congratulations, Big Sister,’

  Jaikie wasn’t so careful. ‘At least it explains why you’ve been in a weird mood lately.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ replied Fee, hackles aloft. ‘I’ve been my usual self. If anyone’s been out of sorts it’s...”

  I’d gone from wanting to interrogate her about interfering in my life to being a heap of paternal jelly in the back of a converted Thames Water van.

  ‘I say beautiful looking grandchildren. xx.’

  - 33 -

  At a few minutes before eight o’clock a white Mercedes with greyed out windows passed by the van with that syrupy sound they make and I thought I glimpsed four people in it. Possibly, said Finchum, to remind me of his authority.

  As it pulled onto the driveway at the house, whatever Bernie had fitted the place up with caught the sound of tyres on gravel and he reached across in the van to twiddle a few knobs, allowing the three of us in the back to hear every detail. There were voices as the occupants got out of the car and four doors slammed shut. Four people, then. We heard footsteps cross the gravel and a moment later a knock on the door from another angle and Kashani opened it. The first person to speak was Rollo Leveque, less conscious here of maintaining the Chancery Lane accent and courtroom syntax.

  “We don’t want to be here all night,” he said. “Tell my sister here what you told
me on the phone.”

  There was a pause, no doubt an exchange of dubious looks, Kashani wondering just who he was about to confide in.

  “This lady is my sister, Edith Leveque,” Rollo growled.

  “Where is our daughter?” asked Mrs Kashani.

  “You daughter is safe at my house. When this business here is finished, we will take you to her.”

  Another pause, for Kashani to weigh up the sincerity of that promise. Finchum and I exchanged a glance.

  “The sooner you get to work, the sooner we can all forget this episode in our lives,” said a woman with perfect BBC tone and modulation.

  “Edith Barrowman,” I said to Finchum. “I wish I could say I’d never been taken in by her...”

  Finchum hissed me to be quiet.

  “Where is Jean-Pierre?” asked the other male voice.

  I shrugged to Finchum that I didn’t recognise the voice.

  “He is in the laboratory,” said Kashani. “I will show you.”

  Rollo chimed in again, very much in control. “Doctor, take my colleague to the lab. Jenny, show the letters to Mrs. Kashani.”

  Jenny was in a calmer mood than usual, a mega dose of librium perhaps, and asked Mrs Kashani to take a seat. They must’ve sat down in the sofas either side of the coffee table and after the raw slither of a zip unfastening, papers rustled and Jenny produced the documents in question. We heard Mrs. Kashani snap on a pair of plastic gloves and begin to perform exactly as Finchum had asked her.

  “Three letters,” she said as she set them out in front of her. “Three letters on good paper, yes, but how do you know a a girl in the office will not open them?”

  Edith replied smugly, “No trained secretary would open a letter from the taxman to her boss. See?”

  We sensed that Edith was seeking approval for such convincing forgeries and in response Mrs Kashani must have taken a closer look at them.

  “The IRS to Mrs Jasmine Carlisle in Park River, North Dakota,” she said. “That is very good, very good indeed.”

  She laid it aside, picked up another

  “From the Ministère de l’Agriculture to M. Claude Brunel. And the third to Emmerich Franke, an address in Heidelberg, from the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern. These three people are directors of NAOC...?”

  “Why so interested in them,” asked Rollo.

  For a moment I thought he might have rumbled us, but such is the blind arrogance of men like him they believe no one dare cross them once the ultimatum has been given. Mrs. Kashani gave him a smart answer as opposed to an apologetic one.

  “I like to know who I’m murdering,” she said.

  There was a hiatus during which she obviously held her nerve.

  “Let’s get on,” said Rollo, eventually.

  “How are the spores delivered?” asked Edith.

  “In a powder in the fold of the letter. The spores are coated with silicon, an element which allows them to hang in the air and thereby reach the lungs of the recipient more...”

  “I don’t want a fucking science lesson,” said Rollo. “If it worked on Jean-Pierre, that’s good enough for me. Now I just want these three bastards killed.”

  Finchum shifted in his flip up seat, mentally preparing his next move. He dug for his phone made a call, a pretty standard one about counting down, but he was insistent about one thing. Masks, suits and boots. He repeated it. Masks, suits and boots. Meanwhile back in the house, an unscheduled argument was brewing.

  “I want to know two things,” Edith said.

  Her brother sighed. “Christ, here we go. Ask, then, ask.”

  “Is the powder visible?”

  “Minimally so...”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what I say. The powder can be seen but it isn’t immediately obvious, like a line of cocaine is, or talc, or...”

  “If whoever opens sees it...?” Jenny began.

  “By then I would say it was too late. The spores will be in the air...”

  “And will reach their lungs and kill them,” said Rollo.

  “How sure are you, that’s all I want to know?” said Edith, more as one-upmanship against Rollo than a question to Mrs. Kashani.

  “That can never be one hundred percent,” said the latter. “But the odds are so strong that once ingested...”

  “So all this is something of a gamble?”

  “Edith, for Christ sake, we’ve been through the odds, made a mutual decision that this was the way. It has worked before. There are dead senators in the USA to prove it!”

  “Rollo, you were always one for believing what you were told, even when people said only what you wanted to hear!”

  Rollo reacted with a curse and they continued their spat in French, roughly translated to the effect of,

  “Now we’re going back to our childhood! For God’s sake, you the overbearing perfectionist...”

  “One of us had to be.”

  “But your pickiness took up so much time, like it’s doing now!”

  “You will be sorry, having gone to all this trouble, if it does not work...”

  The argument was cut short by Doctor Kashani and the unidentified male re-entering after their trip to the lab. Rollo turned to them immediately.”

  “Well?”

  “Duchemin, or what’s left of him, is lying on the floor in a pool of his own sweat.”

  “Alive?”

  “Hard to tell.”

  Rollo must have turned to Edith as if this was all they needed to hear. “Satisfied?”

  “I will take the letters to the lab, add the spores and seal the envelopes,” said Kashani.

  “Henri, go with him.”

  “No need...” said Kashani.

  “Go with him!”

  “You must wear a suit, a mask...”

  “He can wear a fucking tutu if he likes! Just get the letters prepared and in the bloody post!”

  I knew why Rollo was impatient and time had nothing to do with it. It was the nature of the conversation, the uncomfortable other worldliness of talking about dead men, people you’ve killed, the ones you’re about to murder. I’ve dealt with men and women who’ve killed but I can’t think of one who didn’t have a ‘reason’, albeit their own perverted logic manifesting as either pure evil or insanity. This was the first time I’d come across killers who’d murdered simply for money. Lots of it, yes, but still just money.

  Finchum glanced at me and I nodded my agreement. He took out his phone again and dialled the number he’d called before, spoke in the same matter of fact tones.

  “Time to go,” he said, casually. “No heroics, nothing off-plan without my say so.” He turned to Bernie. “Keep recording.”

  It was almost dark outside the van. As we walked towards the house Finchum’s men, and there were ten of them at most, also began to converge on the place from a field behind the house, a vehicle farther up the road and a car parked alongside us in the lay-by. They were in no hurry and for that reason made a sinister picture, white from head to toe in their safety suits. Had the masks been pointed we could’ve been a faction of the Ku Klux Klan descending on a Mississippi chapel, planting our cross and setting fire to it, prior to murdering those within.

  Finchum hadn’t worn a suit, in spite of his insistence that his men did. Needless to say, I’d foregone wearing one as well. At the front door he tried the handle. The door was locked. He gestured to one of his men to solve the problem. The officer put his shoulder to it once, twice and it gave. In we went. In classic style, from the rear of the house, through the kitchen door, four more white suits entered.

  Rollo saw me immediately and I kept my eye on his reactions. Resigned weariness, I would’ve said and I fancied I saw in his eyes that flash of relief that criminals often show when caught. It’s over. Thank God. Edith wasn’t so pragmatic and started to lay into her brother verbally, hurling accusations that were not only unfounded but plain barmy. How could it possibly have been the case that if they’d left Wotton
House earlier in the evening, when Edith had wanted to, they wouldn’t have been caught? Jenny went into a hysteria of defending him and they were off on a family row. The other man looked on. I wouldn’t have recognised him, but for the context. He’d been in the garden when I’d visited Edith Barrowman. Duchemin had been raking up leaves, this bloke was riding the lawn mower. Here, in this modest living room, I stared at him hard enough, long enough, and he looked away.

  Finchum called an end to the mud slinging and said,

  “I expect you know why we’re here, Mr. Leveque. If you’ve any doubts we’ll talk about them at Thame police station. Essentially, though, it’s over.”

  Maybe it was those very words that caught me on the hop, had the effect of grabbing me like an old can, tipping me up and emptying me out. God knows what I’d wanted to happen instead. Perhaps to find another dead body hanging from a beam, or to spend a few more days anxious that we catch them in a full confession, anything just so long as it wasn’t over like Finchum had said. It meant I’d no excuse to not go back home and tomorrow morning repair the back door which had swollen up in the damp weather and now wouldn’t close properly. Strange how and when things like that occur to you.

  Never mind the door though, there was one thing that needed dealing with as soon as possible and Finchum, the crafty bugger, had every intention of leaving the task to me. I was going to have to tell the Kashanis that their daughter had been murdered.

  I waited until The Leveques and their lawn mower had been hauled away to a larger nick than Thame which was lacking in accommodation. Wheatley and Oxford were the alternatives, I believe. It took a full hour to make the arrangements, another hour to get a response unit to come and seal off Duchemin’s car and haul it off somewhere, to say nothing of carting the barely breathing Duchemin off to an isolation unit at the John Radcliffe. It was almost ten o’clock and although I wasn’t alone with the Kashanis it sure felt like it.

  I summoned them to the kitchen and, most oddly if you consider the circumstances, I put the kettle on and offered them a cup of tea. Their hope that she was still alive was only matched by my own that they knew, deep down, that she wasn’t. I sat them down at the table, lowered my voice, just as I’d been taught all those years ago on a course at Bramshill Staff College.