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

by Douglas Watkinson

  “I’m afraid I’ve got some dreadful news.”

  I’d told maybe thirty people in the thirty years I was in the police service that a loved one had died - a child, a parent, a spouse. An annual event, almost. What they all had in common was the instant disbelief with shock hard on its heels and any differences between their reactions had been too subtle, even for another learned paper. The breath goes, the eyes widen and the limbs go to work. Flailing aimlessly. That’s to do with blood circulation, an increased need as the heart rate rises. I leaned forward, another nicety learned in my youth.

  “Maryan has died.”

  Kashani’s flailing got him to his feet and he began to pace in a small square. His wife remained seated, closed her eyes and dropped her head. Her hands tried to cover her face.

  “How? How?” were Kashani’s first words, uttered in anger, his way of expressing shock. I took it in gentle stages.

  “She was killed.”

  His wife’s face buckled into a mask of agony and she turned away instinctively, trying to exclude the rest of the world. She began to weep silently. Her husband didn’t go near her. Unsurprising. Most times the news of a death isolates the bereaved person completely, if only for five, ten minutes, but long enough to realise that when finality strikes you, you really are on your own.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to keep at bay my own guilt for not having told them earlier. “It’s her death that’s brought me here. I’m trying to find out how it happened.”

  “She was murdered?” Kashani asked.

  I nodded. He blinked hard as if trying to banish some horrific train of thought, but it was there when he opened his eyes again. He sat down beside his wife and took her hand.

  “You knew it?” I asked her.

  “I suspected,” she answered. “Why would they keep her alive?”

  “I believe she was killed because she had ... almost found you,” I said.

  “She came looking?”

  I nodded. What I said next wasn’t so much a confession as the need to make sure they heard it from me, on that day - not from someone else a few days later.

  “I knew she was dead when we met. I lied to you. But I had to ensure that you...”

  “That we stayed to help you catch her killer?” Mrs Kashani said. “I know. When was she...?”

  “I found her body five weeks ago,” I said.

  She wanted to know where, under what circumstances. I told her the truth. There seemed little point in doing otherwise. The doctor in her asked how long she’d been dead.

  “Three weeks,” I said.

  She tried to fend off the implications of that, Maryan’s body in an advanced state of decomposition. Far, far from the girl they had known.

  “How did she die?” Kashani asked.

  “Two hammer blows to the back of the head. From behind. She won’t have known anything about it.”

  He must’ve detected the copperesque, textbook compassion in that last sentence, trying to make the circumstances as easy to hear as possible. He scissored the air to stop the conversation.

  “Are you some kind of police?” he asked.

  “Was.”

  He reached out to his wife and she turned to him, looked him in the eyes for the first time. Their anguish for each other was almost as unbearable as the news itself.

  - 34 -

  What else is there to say? Plenty, I suppose, if the ceaseless argy-bargy of trials is your bag. For me, once a case came to court the anti-climax set in and down, down I went. Thank God for coppers like Ron Finchum, though, who seemed to relish the next six months trawling through a hundred defence stories to prove ninety-nine were downright lies and the one left over was probably the truth. I still think of him as lazy. In a way I’m sorry I can’t redefine its characteristics, make them sound positive, because I’d actually come to like the man. And his wife. But I’ve got this nagging feeling he’d have preferred me not to have stuck my nose in and left him to his easy life. The trouble is, they’d be hanging Tom Manners from the nearest yard arm by now.

  Over the next few months Finchum exploited the Leveques turning on each other, watching, recording, even enjoying it as they fought like ferrets in a sack. The one thing Rollo, Jenny and Edith agreed on was that Maryan had been murdered by Jean-Pierre Duchemin. They were bound to say that, if only because he wasn’t around to defend himself, but they disagreed on the details. It was Jean-Pierre’s own idea to kill her, Rollo insisted. No, it was Rollo’s idea, claimed Edith, hacked off by the loss of an oil field, blaming her brother for it staying in the hands of the people who rightfully owned it. Leonard Blake was behind it, said Jenny. Seizing on the fact that all three of them had different stories, but all had wanted Maryan gone, the CPS charged them with soliciting a murder and the lawn mower man, Henri Duypuy, turned Queen’s evidence and sealed their fate. His part in it had been to frame Tom Manners, which he’d done well enough to fool Finchum, but not me.

  Where exactly Duchemin and Dupuy fitted in was never really made clear, not just to me but anyone who followed the case. Their families had been old retainers of the Leveques and that somehow gave them a claim to the whimsical oil fortune, but it was never fully explained or explored. My own opinion is that Dupuy knew more about the vials of anthrax, still at large on the black market, than was good for either the British or US Secret Services so the imperative became least said soonest mended. In other words you can still buy batches of the stuff on some satanic version of eBay.

  A fistful of other charges were thrown at the Leveques, from terrorism, to attempted blackmail, abduction, coercion, and slavery. Rollo had even used the Hillside Six to rebuild Wotton House at two quid an hour. The Leveques haven’t been sentenced yet, there’s an appeal pending, but John Stillman reckons they’ll get thirty years apiece. And just to answer the obvious questions, five of the Hillside Six disappeared into the mist, Ghayas and his sister Amira, Sami and the old lady are in the process of becoming British citizens. Last time I saw Sami he had two enormous front teeth.

  I felt bad about Terry Baines but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Then, one morning, as I was writing a list of stuff I needed from B & Q, having at long last decided to tackle the back door and its reluctance to open, a Freelander pulled up the other side of the five bar gate and John Stillman stepped out of it and gazed across at my house as he might have looked upon a jury before persuading them to change their minds. He came to the kitchen door and I yanked it open.

  He was his usual inquisitive self. How was Doctor Peterson? How were the children, name by name? A grandchild on the way! He was delighted, though the pain of what he’d lost, what he’d therefore never have, must have twisted his gut underneath that gentlemanly exterior.

  He sat at one end of the kitchen table and I made him coffee. When I turned to set it down in front of him he was seated bolt upright and, in some way, appeared to have changed slightly. I thought I was mistaken, until he started to speak again.

  “I gather Leonard Blake won’t be charged.”

  “No.” I smiled. “I’ll get over it, I suppose, but there wasn’t enough evidence. And the Transit van, as I’d always thought, was in Terry Baines’s name.”

  “Yes, Baines is the reason I’m here. The Times reports that he will be charged. With trafficking. Weren’t you of the opinion that if he hadn’t phoned you, none of this business would have come to light?”

  “It’s true.”

  Stillman drummed his finger on the table for a moment or two. I knew roughly what he was going to say, of course.

  “Do you think he’d mind if I offered to defend him?”

  I laughed. “Mind? I think he’d ... believe there was some justice in the world after all.”

  “I can’t promise to get him off, of course, but I can guarantee he won’t go to prison.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes.”

  He took a first sip of his coffee and reached out for the sugar.

  “Joh
n, you’re not the cheapest of briefs...”

  He waved aside the vulgar subject of money. There wouldn’t be a charge, he said.

  He defended Terry Baines and called me as a witness. It was strange, being questioned by him, in his eloquent, icy style, but he asked if I’d tried to persuade his client to ‘make himself scarce, to abrogate his responsibility’ for what his learned friend mistakenly insisted on calling a crime. I said I’d told Baines to run for it, yes, but he’d refused. The judge gave me a bollocking for having made the suggestion but when it came to sentencing Terry he gave him 3 years. Suspended on account of a courageous war record and his decision to stay and face the music.

  - 35 -

  As for the ... object which had set all this in motion, the gold hunter, I didn’t want to see, or hear of it, ever again, regardless of its provy-nonce, as Tom still pronounced it. He asked me to oversee his release, shortly after the Leveques were charged, and I was happy to do so. Things have a nasty habit of disappearing when prisoners are handed back their belongings. I’m not saying I wanted Tom’s undying gratitude, for getting him out of a fix or for finding the bloody watch, but a nod in that direction would have been nice. No chance. When the warder at the secure psych unit handed it back to him, he stuffed into an inside pocket and then demanded that I drive him home, calling in at Sainsbury’s on the way. He didn’t even invite me in for a cup of tea.

  He phoned about three months later wanting another favour. The trials had just started, including that of the Kashanis, charged with the manslaughter of Jean-Pierre Duchemin who had died three days after Rollo and the others were arrested. Tom had decided the watch was too much of a responsibility. He was selling it. Would I go to the auction with him? I didn’t fancy it, some draughty local salesroom packed with wobbly tables and chairs only fit for kindling, but he moaned and groaned to Laura until I changed my mind. He came up to The Crown that same evening to give me details of the venue, in his own particular way.

  “Buy us a pint, I’ll tell you where it’s being held,” he said.

  It wasn’t worth pointing out that I was the one doing him a favour, not the other way round. When he was sure no one could overhear, he said.

  “Sotheby’s.”

  I looked at him over the faceted glass with proper handle that he’d insisted on.

  “Sotheby’s?”

  He nodded. “It’s a sale of unclassifieds, things they can’t put under a heading.”

  “Sotheby’s in Mayfair?”

  “Yes! Are you going deaf, or something?”

  ***

  We weren’t the best dressed people at the auction, but we certainly weren’t the worst, not even counting Tom who’d shaved for the occasion, dug out the suit jacket and washed a clean old shirt. He hadn’t bothered ironing it, since he was putting a jacket on over it, but you can’t have everything.

  As we sat in the auction room he whispered to me behind his hand that he’d never been in a room with so many toffs, or rather people who thought they were toffs. None of them could hold a candle to Lord Rothschild. All ages, too. He jabbed a finger at the catalogue and smiled.

  “And I can’t get away from you lot, can I?”

  Everywhere he went these days, he said, the police muscled in, serving coppers or retired. He was referring to a Constable sketch which, once the proceedings got under weigh, sold for £204,000. Tom’s only comment was if people would pay that for a drawing, what might they pay for the object he was selling?

  The auctioneer up on the podium was smarm personified, not much hair but what there was of it was slicked back, the oil gleaming in the overhead lights. He had on a suit that seemed to stand still while he moved around inside it, stretching here, reaching there, turning over pages, leching the pretty assistant whose job it was to dangle the smaller items up in front of the punters. Items like the watch.

  “We come now to lot number 146, ladies and gentlemen. A 24 carat gold hunter, with chain and lapel bar, by Castleford & Bowen. Fully provenanced by the maker’s reference, serial number 723/33. In itself, something of a gem, but this was especially crafted by the firm for Heinrich Himmler, in 1933. The firm still retains Himmler’s signature, given when he took delivery. He subsequently used the watch to try and bribe his captors at Lüneburg Barracks in May 1945.” He looked up from the spiel he’d just delivered and glanced round. “May I say thirty thousand poinds?”

  Tom frowned and turned to me, wanting to ask if he’d heard correctly. Somewhat taken aback myself I gestured him to keep quiet since a lady behind us had just raised the price to 35.

  “40?” enquired the auctioneer. “I have 45 on the internet. May I say 50?”

  He seemed as surprised as Tom and I were, but whereas we were speechless the auctioneer, thankfully, was not.

  “Seventy thousand on the phone, ladies and gentlemen. Eighty in the room, thank you, sir.”

  It carried on rising by tens, in the room, on the internet and the phone and ground to a halt four minutes later at £295,000. The hammer came down, the gold watch Tom had had kicking around the house and could’ve lost anywhere, anytime, had just sold for a small fortune to some nut job in Germany. After the next item sold, a bronze sculpture by an Italian artist, Lodovico Pogliaghi, a giant clam with a fish coming out of it, a mere £87,000, we stood up and left the room.

  We found the sellers’ lounge and helped ourselves to a cup of tea. It didn’t taste much like tea, Tom complained. In these places it never did. Wrong milk. Once you got used to skimmed, there was no going back to semi. You could taste the fat in it. He led me over to a table and sat down, scowling away the odd smile from fellow sellers. He wouldn’t have known what to say to them anyway, if they’d become pally. £295,000! Christ, he’d known it was valuable, he’d been telling people for the last year, but no one believed him, not even me .... especially me. That’s coppers, for you.

  An hour or so went by with more sickly tea and custard creams and the auction was over. Time to collect, said Tom. We sought out one of the Stewards in the main auction room and Tom enquired, layman’s terms, how and where he got his money ... he had a busy day ahead of him.

  The Steward explained, politely enough in my opinion, that things didn’t work that way. The money would be paid by the buyer, it would be validated, premiums deducted, and the balance transferred to the client’s bank account, minus the commission.

  Tom looked at me and held his tongue, but it was clearly written on his face. Did nobody earn their own living these days? Did they all skim the top off someone else’s?

  “I haven’t got a bank account,” he said.

  “Well, building society, post office...”

  “I told the girl this when I brought the watch in to have it valued. I don’t want the money going to me. I’m not interested in it.”

  The Steward smiled. This wasn’t the first eccentric he’d dealt with, doubtless it wouldn’t be the last, but it was certainly rare to find one who didn’t care about the proceeds of what he’d sold.

  “Mr...?” he began.

  “Manners. Thomas Manners.”

  “Why don’t we find a computer. I’ll log into your account and see what arrangements have been made. After you.”

  Mistaking us for father and son, no doubt, the Steward gestured us towards a side office and sat down opposite us at a desk. Georgian mahogany, late 18th century, I thought. He logged onto the computer and I think we both expected half an hoursworth of what you get paying a bill at the council offices - mother’s maiden name, how long have you lived at that address, have you got any tattoos...

  “Ah, yes,” said the Steward. “Mr Thomas Manners, gold hunter, serial number, yes, yes...”

  He gave his full attention to Tom, unlike the girl in the council offices did.

  “It seems we’re still awaiting your instructions as to where you’d like the money transferred to. Have you decided?”

  “Yes.” Without looking at me he pointed at me. “Him.”

  I spoke
for the first time, hands up, shunning the idea. “Hang on, Tom ... I don’t want your money!”

  “I’m not giving it to you! I want you to pass it on to the Kashanis. They’re the only ones owed in all this.” He lowered his voice. “But I don’t want them knowing where it came from, right?”

  I nodded. I knew there was a reason I had a soft spot for Tom Manners.