Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Watkinson, Douglas

  “How far from the shooting were they found?”

  “Crow flies? Both places four, five miles from Speaker’s Wood.”

  “Was there DNA, forensics, anything at the crime scene?”

  “Yes, well, the crime scene wasn’t known until three months after the event. Not much left. I mean enough is enough when it comes to a prosecution, but these men had been shot at close range and made a mess of...”

  “You’d have expected more.”

  He nodded.

  “Bullets?” I asked.

  “They were recovered, yes, 9mm, and before you ask the pistol used was a Luger, found at the farm. Tempting one to say ‘bloody Germans again’.”

  He scissored the air to withdraw the remark, then looked over to where Kinsella was still holding court, only now Dogge was playing the jester as he threw her an old tennis ball, she ran to retrieve it and brought it back. Nothing odd about that, except that Kinsella had taught her in ten minutes what I hadn’t been able to in five years. She was dropping the ball at his feet, stepping back to wait for the next throw.

  “Look at what I’m working with,” Sillitoe went on. “An anti-social, unhygienic Neanderthal. His story may well be true, but who’s going to believe it?”

  He fixed his eye on the hollyhocks for a moment.

  “His derelict state aside,” he said, “something about this case bothers me.”

  That made four of us. Blackwell, if Laura was right, Laura herself, me and now Sillitoe.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Does Kinsella’s evidence sound too prepared?”

  “You were the one who asked for detail.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t expect to get it. I thought I’d have to provide it!”

  “Coach him after all?” I said, as smugly as I could.

  He set his mug down on the wooden bench, took a business card from his top pocket and handed it to me. The name ‘Henry Sillitoe’ leaped off it in black scroll, with a bevy of phone numbers below it. “The mobile will always get me.”

  “Why should I need to?”

  “Would you be willing to do the Crown Prosecution Service a professional favour, Mr Hawk? Paid for at your usual rate?”

  I’d envisaged him picking my brains but not putting me on the payroll. “I’m sorry?”

  “Would you go to Grimsby, look over the crime scene, or what the Americans so vulgarly call ‘the kill site’, and after that ‘the dump sites’? See if anything’s been ... overlooked or wrongly used in your opinion.”

  He then asked if I’d mind doing it within the next few days. I told him I’d need to check with Commander Blackwell first but if OCC gave the all-clear, I’d leave as soon as possible. I’d only one question for him. Did he know what my current rate was? He didn’t, which was a shame because I didn’t either. We left it that his boss and I would negotiate.

  For the rest of the day, Sillitoe took Kinsella back and forth through his evidence, occasionally trying to trip him up on the finer details. To no avail. Kinsella was word-perfect.

  I tried not to make a song and dance about the proposed trip to Grimsby and, by and large, succeeded. When I phoned Blackwell he said he was ‘very happy about the idea’. A cynic might say that he’d been wondering when I’d get round to it.

  I told Grogan I was off to the original crime scene in the morning. He nodded approvingly. An image flashed through my mind of Kinsella handcuffed in my absence to every available piece of metalwork in the house, but I let it go.

  Fee wasn’t so easy to deal with, but I had to get her out of the house for a few days without her knowing the reason. She would’ve found my irrational fear that a branch of the IRA might descend on Beech Tree in my absence laughable. And even if they did, was I saying that she couldn’t handle them? Talk them out of whatever they had in mind? I asked if she would go and spend a couple of days with her brother Jaikie in Chiswick. I was concerned about his relationship with Jodie, I lied, and would value her opinion. That last bit gave her purpose but triggered a volley of questions. What did I think was wrong? Why hadn’t she been told about it before? Did The Others know? I waffled...

  I was more candid with Laura, the only trouble being that she was candid in return. I called on her at Plum Tree Cottage late that evening and found her trying to revive neglected house plants. The place still seemed half-empty to me, a far cry from its cluttered comfort before it was broken into and vandalised a year previously. Fee reckoned that Laura’s failure to replace certain items was a sure-fire indication that she expected to move into Beech Tree in the near future...

  “The CPS solicitor, Henry Sillitoe, wants me to go to Grimsby, check a few things out. He’s uneasy about certain evidence...”

  She smiled. “Any moment now you’ll tell me I was right all along. They wanted your help.”

  I held up a wilted leaf on a plant I recognised but couldn’t name. When I let go it drooped again. “It’s Kinsella I’m worried about.”

  “He’s filthy but fine,” she said.

  “I’m not talking about his physical state, Laura, and it’s not that I don’t believe what he says about the murders.” She stopped watering the plants. “I can’t work out if he’s playing us or if someone’s playing him. Maybe both.”

  “Maybe neither,” she said. “He’s an odd fish, certainly, and that sets him apart. In many ways he’s ... just like a child.”

  I agreed. And more out of courtesy than concern she wanted to know who I thought might be playing him. With him being the main witness for the prosecution there was only one real contender. The crime squad handling the case.

  - 10 -

  I’m developing a theory that car journeys get longer in direct proportion to ageing: what was a morning’s drive in your early twenties is an absolute slog thirty years later. On top of that the east coast of England has always seemed farther away than most other places in Britain, but I don’t have an explanation for that yet. In plain fact, according to Google Maps, Grimsby was 127 miles away from Winchendon and would take me three hours and thirty-nine minutes to reach. Pull the other one.

  I took a room in a small hotel in Wragby, one of those Lincolnshire towns more sky than land, like a badly taken photo.

  Next morning, I drove to Speaker’s Wood via Market Rasen and from there into the Lincolnshire hinterland. Sillitoe had given me a map which pinpointed the ditch where Vic Wesley’s body was found. It ran beside a quiet lane, no building within sight, and the field beyond went on forever. Ideal as it was from a killer’s point of view, it still seemed a strange place to have chosen.

  I’d also been given a couple of photos, taken on the day of the discovery. It had been chucking it down for weeks, evidently, and the find had given local police a dilemma: to move or not to move Vic’s remains. They made the wrong decision. They shifted them and the water drained away down the culvert taking with it any evidence, leaving us with photos of an empty ditch and a rotting corpse up on the verge beside it. Useless.

  I took a few photos of my own, up and down the lane, across the field, the ditch itself, and then headed for the slurry pit. It belonged to a small dairy farm, the buildings of which I couldn’t see from the lane, so again it was a safe place to have dumped Freddie Trent, if you didn’t mind him rising to the surface and going off bang, as Sillitoe had put it. As with the ditch there was no evidence of police activity here, past or present. I think if I’d been in charge of the case I’d have taped off both sites until the trial was over, just in case.

  Freddie’s body had been spotted by a dog-walker, apparently. Her labrador had made a bee-line for the pit, jumped in and then considered himself perfectly disguised, covered in cow shit. Dogge had gone through a phase of it, so I sympathised. I took a few photos, rid myself of the taste which somehow gets into the back of your throat with a strong mint.

  To be fair, I hadn’t expected to find much of any use at either of the dump sites, so I wasn’t disappointed, just mildly concerned. Speaker’s Wood was jus
t five miles from both, and Lincolnshire’s a big county. Why hadn’t Flaxman taken the bodies farther away, butchered them, buried them, burned them? This felt hasty and panicky. And there it was, nagging away at my guts, just as it had bothered Blackwell and then Sillitoe: the feeling that something didn’t quite fit.

  I headed for Speaker’s Farm and parked half a mile away from the main entrance and donned the walking boots. I must’ve taken roughly the same route Kinsella did, the shortcut through the wood, and I’d expected larger, more impressive trees. Some were okay but most were skinny, crooked apologies for the real thing. With autumn well and truly established leaves were falling, the grass and tall plants on the edge of the bridleway were dried out and skeletal.

  The bridleway itself consisted of two parallel tyre tracks with a grass mohican between them, suggesting it was used as much by farm vehicles as by horse riders. Over to my right was the Flaxman farmhouse, a groggy-looking seventeenth-century affair, and more of a scrap yard than a working farm. The high-tech chicken shed was a mile farther on but I could smell it from there.

  From the photos I identified the tree which Kinsella had reached just before he witnessed the shootings. I stood beneath it and looked across to imagine what he’d witnessed: three men, three friends, he believed, walking down the bridleway, twenty metres away from him. Talking bits and pieces, Kinsella had said. Acrimonious stuff. Insults, heroin, money, the Heritage IRA, all of it warning him to stay back. Then Flaxman’s smile as he shot his two companions. Enough to make anyone take to the hills as Kinsella had done. Not that Lincolnshire has any...

  I turned as I heard a vehicle approaching. It was a Land Rover and for a moment I gave way to an odd sense of fellowship when I realised that it was identical to mine. Then I saw that it was mine. I felt for the keys. They were still in my pocket.

  The Land Rover slowed down and I could see two men in the front seats, the older one driving, black leather jacket, heavy-framed glasses. The younger had more hair and was trendier, blue nylon zipper and jeans. The driver took his foot off the accelerator and stalled the engine. They got out and, as slowly as it’s possible to do without going backwards, they came towards me. The older man was smiling and stretching out a hand.

  “Never mind the big hallo,” I said. “How’d you get my Land Rover started?”

  “It’s a skill my colleague acquired in Traffic.”

  I turned to the nylon zipper. “You’d better not have damaged the paintwork.”

  “I’m Detective Chief Inspector Carew,” said the glasses, a smile wriggling across lips which were too wide for his face. “This is Sergeant Sweetman. And you are ex-DCI Nathan Hawk.”

  “I already know that.”

  Again he went to shake my hand. I ignored it, save to suggest that he keep both of his to himself. He held them up like he’d been arrested and assured me they really had come to assist. His colleague looked as if he’d come to have his prostate examined, narrowed eyes, grim set face. He left most of the talking to his boss, who reckoned he was pretty good at it.

  “We gather you’ve come to see where the murders took place. We can show you exactly.”

  He was relieved that I took him up on the offer. He led me farther along the mohican, eyes down, and stopped when he reached a blue peg marker in it.

  “Flaxman was here when he killed them,” Carew said. “Vic fell sideways there, bullet through one temple and out the other. Not a great deal to stop it. Freddie turned slightly, took it through his side, fell that-a-way. Bullet stayed inside him.”

  “You found Vic’s bullet where?” I asked.

  Carew walked over to a spot between the blue peg and a silver birch. “Two metres from the body, still there on the ground, three months after it landed.”

  “DNA?”

  “We recovered Richard the Third’s, 1485, from underneath a car park. Why not Vic the First’s, last year, from Speaker’s Wood?”

  The smart-arse answer was no answer at all. “Is that yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  I jerked my head at his colleague. “Does he speak or just stand?”

  “Sometimes you can’t shut him up.”

  Carew gestured that I should test his assertion.

  “Why take my Land Rover?”

  “Our car wouldn’t have got down the main track. The ruts are two feet deep, dried solid.”

  It was an accent that had been worked on with the object of losing it. Brummy, I thought, from the little he’d said. He was also fit, but even so I still fancied giving him a playful slap.

  I turned back to Carew. “Freddie must have bled quite a bit, chest wound. Where?”

  They looked at each other, wondering who should answer the question.

  I smiled. “You two wouldn’t be making this up as you go along, would you?”

  “He fell right there,” said Carew, pointing to a dip in the far verge.

  “So there was DNA from him too?” He waited for me to answer the question myself. “Don’t tell me you never bloody looked.”

  “We looked and found.”

  I put a few yards between us by going back to examine the Land Rover’s paintwork. It was a beautiful vehicle to drive but had never been much to look at, chipped, dented, well used. I locked and unlocked it with the key to test that it still worked.

  “Something else. Here am I asking all these questions and you’re just ... answering. All for the love of justice?”

  “Commander Blackwell suggested that we look after you,” said Sweetman.

  “Ah, the man from London, eh? Bloody cheek, muscling in on your territory.”

  “Not at all. He seems like a first-rate copper.”

  I never met a policeman who spoke well of the specialist squads. They tended to break up old allegiances, criticise bad habits and generally make the local fuzz resentful.

  “What’s the thinking as to motive?”

  “Money,” said Carew. “Fifteen million pounds. We’ve had crime analysts working on it since March, waiting to see if the heroin pops up anywhere.”

  “We’ve had? You sound like you own the bloody force.”

  “Humberside Crime Squad together with Organised Crime Command.”

  “Caring and sharing, eh? I take it you managed to find the weapon between you?”

  “We did, up at Speaker’s Farm among a load of crap in the attic room. Aaron said we’d planted it; Joe thought it might’ve been his father’s, a memento from the war; Carrie thought it was a water pistol. Take your pick. Fact is it was an old Luger.”

  “I wish my kids would do that. Use stuff, then put it back where they found it. Really, all you needed was an eye-witness to make it fit like a glove.”

  I could see him debating whether to turn nasty or stay friendly. He chose the latter.

  “Finding Kinsella was certainly a bonus,” said Carew. “We thought he was dead, Flaxman’s third victim.”

  “He’d been hiding out?”

  “On the farm. God knows there’s enough buildings to choose from and the old man, Joe, was known to be sympathetic...”

  “He shot him, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Fired at him. Big difference.”

  I smiled. “You must think I fell out of that tree. Kinsella may well have thought he was Aaron’s next victim, but he hung round the farm for one reason only. He was looking for the heroin.”

  “Looking but not finding. Best guess on that, I’m afraid, is the Heritage IRA snatched it and as we speak it’s being sold on the streets of New York.” He pulled out the bottom of his shirt and wiped his glasses. His eyes seemed lost without them, tired and sunken.

  “Flaxman moved the bodies in a pickup, right?”

  “The old man’s Chevy Silverado. Don’t worry, it was all there: blood, brains, bits of bone, all in among the chicken shit.”

  “Why didn’t he dump it?”

  He frowned. “That bothered me for a while, but you have to know Aaron Flaxman before it makes any sense. Arrogant bastard.
Reckoned he was untouchable.”

  “Known to police, then?”

  “Since he was knee-high.” He put his glasses back on and tucked his shirt in, then nodded over to the farmhouse. “Decent family, too. The old man always hoped he’d take over the business. Eggs. Dream on.”

  According to Carew, Aaron Flaxman took a familiar route for kids from well-heeled backgrounds. Expelled from school, he went into small-time crime, breaking and entering, dealing, which involved a couple of assault charges, and then he hit on the big money spinner of ten years ago, supplying non-EU labour to local farmers.

  “Is that what the trawlermen were doing when he met them?” I asked. “Bringing in people?”

  “We don’t think so. The received wisdom is the farmers started getting their own workers in, didn’t need a middle man, so Aaron turned to contraband.”

  “And found a mug with some venture capital in the shape of Liam Kinsella?”

  He nodded. “I think it was all a bit seventeenth-century in Liam’s mind, dodging the revenue men. They certainly made a few enemies, and we’re not talking flintlocks and cutlasses. Shotguns and cleavers, more like. We think at least two unexplained deaths are down to Flaxman.”

  I smiled. “So you won’t be sorry to see him go.”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “This gets tidier by the minute.”

  He shook his head. “Anything else we can help with? Before you go home?”

  “Are the wives being charged in any of this?”

  Carew said that would depend on the evidence they gave at Flaxman’s trial.

  “You want them to blame it all on Flaxman.”

  “I want them to tell the truth.”

  I climbed back into the Land Rover and Carew came over to the window. I rolled it down.

  “You couldn’t give us a lift back to the main gate, could you?” Carew asked.

  “I could, but the walk’ll do you good.”

  Sweetman came at me with the only thing he had left. “That Smith & Wesson in your glove box. You got a licence for it?”

  I laughed. “You’ll have to do better than that.”