Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Read online

  “Nice to see you again, sir,” he said.

  The years concertinaed and he was back in John’s classroom, conjugating irregular verbs, hearing the myths and legends that had so enthralled him.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked Laura as I watched him cope with his admirers.

  “Jaikie is flourishing.”

  Pleased as I was to hear her speak with such confidence, she hadn’t really understood what I’d meant. Instead of asking me to explain, she waffled and said that Jaikie was tired and under pressure, but that’s all there was to it. When I showed signs of arguing the point, she waved it aside and told me that I worried about my children unnecessarily.

  A young woman I didn’t recognise had just walked into the bar with a male friend, same age, mid-20s. The girl was tall and slim, with masses of shoulder-length brown hair carefully disarrayed around a pale, bony face. She removed her black leather gloves and began to unbutton the long overcoat with its fake fur trimmings at the collar and cuffs. She paused and turned to her companion, he in a suit and tie off the peg but clearly hung up every night. They obviously hadn’t been expecting a crush and the girl seemed to be having second thoughts about staying until she saw what all the fuss was about. Her face lit up and she called out to Jaikie. He went over to her and they embraced, held onto each other longer than they needed to, more than just good manners on his part or a display of submission on the girl’s, who I now recognised as Jodie Falconer, Martin’s daughter.

  “I’ll grant you he can be self-regarding at times,” said Laura. “I doubt if it’s easy being famous, though. Anyway, the main reason I like him is he’s a young version of you and as with all your children, he’s different.” She added with heartfelt regret, “I see so much sameness these days, Nathan, I wonder how on earth the species will survive.”

  “Should that tell me you’ve had a rotten day?”

  “I have had an excellent day. I’ll tell you all about it over supper.”

  Jaikie came over to join us, leaning down to peck Laura on the cheek and laying a hand on my shoulder. He then announced that he was starving, having steered clear of reception food all day, but before supper he was off to wash his hands.

  “I’ve shaken hands with a thousand people today, some of whom I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. Honestly, you don’t realise how filthy people can be until you’re obliged to touch them.”

  When he returned from the Gents, a journey which took him longer than he’d bargained for on account of being waylaid by several more neighbours, he opened his satchel and took out an expensive bottle of red wine he’d been given earlier in the day. He asked the waitress to uncork it and pour and as soon as she’d departed with our order, he turned our attention to the titanium plate, asking Laura how she had got on today. She put on her glasses and took a post-it note from her handbag.

  “The inscription on the side of the plate is AD07FI673”, she said, passing the note to me. “AD identifies the maker, Ambrose & Dawlish in Corby. They've been making orthopaedic accessories since 1750.”

  She was clearly expecting enthusiasm from me but all I could manage was, “Good business to be in.”

  “What next?” asked Jaikie, taking up the slack.

  “I emailed them and after the usual blank wall of automatic responses, I sent another saying I wanted to place a large order.” She snapped her fingers to indicate just how quickly a girl in the sales office had responded. “An actual person with a real voice told me within two minutes that the rest of the serial number meant the plate had been made for The Chiltern Clinic, Amersham, Bucks in August last year.”

  “That is brilliant!” said Jaikie. In common with the rest of his generation, he was inclined to describe the simplest of achievements as “brilliant”.

  “I’m not saying I didn’t feel dreadful doing it because I did,” Laura went on. “I mean, people are so gullible. Hah! I’m telling you two that! Nathan, you’re an ex-policeman, for heaven’s sake, you depended on it, and you, Jaikie, an actor, you persuade people to suspend their belief for as long…” She paused and brought herself back down to earth with a sip or two of her wine.

  “So, presumably you got in touch with this clinic?” I said.

  “I phoned them, using my NHS credentials, and with no hesitation whatsoever this girl told me the number on the plate referred to a Patrick Scott, aged 24.” She was talking only to Jaikie now, assured of his support. “He came to them as an emergency, via the ambulance service. A skiing accident, badly fractured metatarsal.”

  She pointed down to her foot in case he didn’t know where the metatarsals lived.

  “Did you get an address?” I asked.

  “Well, no.”

  Regardless of me pointing out the shortfall, Jaikie went into overdrive. “That’s still one hell of a breakthrough, Dad. I mean this morning it was a plate found in a field, tonight we know who it belonged to.” And then, without a hint of irony, he added, “All you have to do now is track him down.”

  I beckoned the pair of them to lean in towards me. “Let me tell you where I’ve been today. Long Field with a metal detector. And I can assure you there isn’t a body buried out there.”

  They lowered their voices to object, as if whispering might keep the myth alive.

  “You sound very sure about that, Nathan.”

  “That metal detector is state of the art. It’ll find a needle in a haystack.”

  “You weren’t looking for a needle, Dad.”

  “The plate would have been held to the bone it was healing by four metal screws. I didn’t find one of them.”

  Jaikie took a swig of wine to help him think. “Then we’re back to pilots, balloonists, para-gliders, the bloody thing falling out of people’s pockets?”

  I shrugged. “I still can’t tell you how the plate got there, but one thing’s for certain: it didn’t involve blood and guts.”

  Jaikie tried to stand the whole business on its head, saying that there being no apparent crime was highly suspicious in itself. More so, perhaps, than if an entire skeleton had been dug up. He pointed out that many a Hollywood success had been founded on far less and went on to name obscure films that fitted the bill. I let him exhaust his own argument which, by the time our food came, he’d just about done. I broke the silence that followed.

  “Early start tomorrow, then?”

  He nodded. “Jamal’s picking me up at soppy o’clock. Five, I think.”

  I offered to get up with him, make some toast and coffee, see him on his way.

  “I wouldn't want to spoil your beauty sleep,” he said, smiling at each of us as if to emphasize that he'd put us in the same bed for the night.

  We small-talked our way through the rest of the meal and finally Jaikie beckoned the waitress and asked her for the bill. When she returned with it he launched into a display of feeling his pockets, presumably for the dollars he’d planned to cash earlier that day. He frowned as if suddenly remembering that he hadn’t done so and turned to me.

  “Dad, I’m sorry…”

  I held up my hand to spare him further embarrassment and reached for my wallet. He still hadn’t got any money, then. Had he become like the Queen and never carried any or was there another explanation for his lack of cash? One for me to worry about.

  -3-

  At 5.30 the next morning Jamal turned into Morton Lane, switched off his headlights and pulled up at the other side of the five-bar gate. A long silence followed, no sound from outside the house, nothing from within until Dogge went into her usual frenzy as she heard footsteps on the gravel. The house began to stir. Laura, who had indeed spent the night with me, in accordance with Jaikie’s instructions, reached across and mumbled an offer to come downstairs and help me. I thanked her and told her to go back to sleep.

  I put on a dressing gown and went up to the attic to check that Jaikie was at least alive if not exactly kicking. As I entered the room he threw back the duvet and knee-jerked out of bed, paused to get his bearings a
nd managed to say, “Dad, Jamal.” I took it to be a request for me to go downstairs and smooth ruffled feathers.

  At the front door, wondering how to knock without making any sound, stood a mahogany skinned man, black hair, black eyes, mid-30s. He opened his mouth to say something but smiled instead, shook my outstretched hand and followed me through to the kitchen.

  “Tea or coffee?” I asked.

  “No thank you, sir. We must leave as soon as possible. Sky Television, Isleworth, by seven. The M40. Terrible, terrible.”

  He adopted a classic at ease position, hands clasped behind his back, and smiled again. I took it to be a sign of his affable nature and as I tried to smile in return, Jaikie entered in a cabaret act of dressing and drying himself all with a toothbrush jutting out from the side of his mouth. He spat it into the sink and apologised to Jamal. Still drying behind his ears, he headed for his leather jacket, hung over the back of a chair.

  “Sky News today,” he said to me. “You’ll watch?”

  “Sure.”

  On his way out he grabbed the satchel from me and I flashed back to the boy who was always late for the bus and had to be driven to school by his mother or me. It took us a year to cotton on that he was late on purpose, preferring to be chauffeured. He paused, looked me over and smiled much as Jamal had done.

  “Real tough old copper, eh?” He could see that I had no idea what he was talking about. “The dressing gown, mate. Suits you.”

  I looked down at it. It was silk, it was lilac, it was Laura’s. I went back upstairs and got dressed

  It was an odd sensation, sat there a couple of hours later in Maggie’s Dad’s old rocker, itself a repository of our family history, watching my youngest son talk about the Second World War as if he’d been in it, about Hollywood as if it were his second home, about himself with just the right mixture of modesty and confidence to make him likeable. The only trouble was, I didn’t know this man. I knew the boy behind him, the 16-year-old who had sulked and fought his way through school and, when the time came, had taken his mother’s death harder than any of us. That vulnerable young man was still there, just below the surface, but before any of him could be revealed he was forced to give way to the news headlines. The presenter thanked him for his contribution, he thanked her for having him. Never mind 16, he was 12 years old again, thanking the parents of his friends for their tea-time hospitality. Impressed though I was by his good manners, I was finding it hard work being constantly wrenched from the present to the past and back again.

  “He’s so witty, so charming,” said Laura. She took my hand. “You must be so proud of him.”

  “His mother would have been.”

  I must have sounded reluctant, though I hadn’t meant to. It just came out that way. Nevertheless, I found myself wondering who he’d borrowed cash from that morning, Jamal or Laura. My money was on Laura.

  I spent the rest of the morning repairing a downstairs window and blaming the fact that it didn’t go well on my father. Laura said the reason I’d felt his presence these past few days was all too obvious. Jaikie was in England for the opening of All Good Men and True and the three of us - grandfather, son, grandson - were an unbreakable chain, no matter how we might have wished it were otherwise. My own view was less sophisticated. Dad was there to remind me of our mutual hatred for all things do-it-yourself.

  My father was the hardest working man I ever knew, by trade a fishmonger who in the evenings cooked and sold fish and chips. Not burgers, pies or chicken portions, but fish and chips. I turned at one point from my broken window to see him standing at the door of our shop in North London, long striped apron, arms folded across it. He was annoyed with me. He wasn’t a man given to fits of temper, that was my mother's weakness and one that I’d inherited from her, but there was Dad with his rarely seen anger directed at me. I’d fallen into bad company, he said, naming the two individuals with disdain. We were fifteen years old and had broken into the local cricket pavilion, with the intention of stealing a recent delivery of beer, five hundred bottles of it. God knows how we thought we’d hide it from our parents, who seemed to watch every move we made, but such was our faith in ourselves that we went ahead with the plan.

  “That boy,” he said to my mother, as if all of a sudden I didn’t belong to him, “needs something to occupy his mind.”

  He stopped short of saying he regretted the end of National Service or that a good war would teach my generation how to cope with life. Having suffered both, he didn’t believe a word of it. But here I was, nearly 40 forty years later, wondering if that’s what I needed now, something to occupy my mind. A decent murder, perhaps. Even as the thought occurred, so Laura came weaving down Morton Lane. I abandoned the window and went to greet her.

  As she leaned her bike against the wall she told me this was a flying visit, she had to rush back for more wrangling with the local Health Trust over money that she and her partners had once been promised but now apparently weren’t going to get. They wanted to build a new health centre to replace the shack they currently occupied, but recession, budget cuts and a U-turn in monetary policy were just three reasons for the Trust denying them the quarter of a million pounds it would cost.

  Once in the kitchen, Laura removed her helmet and shook out her hair. In his description of her, Jaikie had made no mention of her hair, so carefully cut and coloured, barley over grey, she called it. He’d made great play of the husky voice and her height and I’d admired both before, of course, but when your son remarks on the physical attributes of the woman you’re romantically involved with, you start to see her with a different eye.

  “This is about Patrick Scott,” she said. I must have groaned. “No, don't be like that. You'll feel the same way I do, when you know what it is.”

  I put my arms around her waist and slipped my hands under the belt of her skirt, pulling her close. It was probably all that bike-riding, but for 50 years old there wasn’t much spare flesh to get hold of. She stepped back.

  “Nathan, this is really important. I had a spare quarter of an hour this morning and with you being sniffy about me not finding an address, I did a search for Patrick Scott on the NHS data base. Guess what! I found several Patrick Scotts, yes, but none of them in their 20s with a fractured metatarsal!”

  She paused, as if expecting me to stagger with amazement, but I managed to stand my ground.

  “Nathan, medical records are the holy grail of my profession. Not only have I breached confidentiality, I’m also committing a crime by passing on what I’ve discovered to you.”

  “Then I’m arresting you and taking you upstairs…”

  “There is no longer any record of our Patrick Scott having been an NHS patient. All trace of him has been wiped out, almost certainly within the last 24 hours.”

  I asked her to repeat that. She said I’d heard it the first time.

  “There could be a dozen explanations,” I said. “Maybe the Chiltern Clinic got it wrong. Maybe he’s given them a false name, right back at the start when he broke his foot.”

  “I double checked with the Chiltern this morning. Just yesterday they told me who the plate was for, the date it was used and for what fracture. Today, the girl I spoke to can’t find any trace of it.”

  “You spoke to the same girl?”

  She shrugged. “I asked for the records department and got put through to whoever was manning the phone.”

  I’m not given to hot flushes of intuition or bouts of ESP, much less to drawing inferences from misread paperwork, but what Laura had just told me took me back to Long Field the night we found the titanium plate. I’d had a hunch then that it was important but no evidence to back that up. I still had no proof of … anything, let alone that a murder had been committed, but if records had been removed from a government database maybe all that was about to change. So, what had happened to make Patrick Scott suddenly disappear? We’d started asking questions about him.

  Just after five o’clock Jaikie phoned and with a
barrage of expletives told me that he was pig sick. The PR people and the film company had been at loggerheads all day and he'd been trying to referee their arguments. The film people should have had the final say on everything, but a new publicity girl, well over six foot tall, was so pushy, so domineering, she got her own way. She’d booked Jaikie to do an unskeduled interview with a journalist for a national paper, Richard Slater. He turned out to be a very nice guy but that wasn’t the point. There was a plan, a running order, agreed upon days ago by all parties so the blonde bamboo cane should have at least made…

  “What time will you be home?” I asked.

  “About nine. Will there be any food knocking about? Anything Laura-ish?”

  I said she’d made a tub of chicken in a wine sauce, the same day she made the chilli, that I would defrost a couple of bags and do some rice. He was delighted. It meant he could steer clear of the reception food again.

  It was just after nine when his car turned into Morton Lane. The headlights were on full beam, picking out threads of mist, turning them into a wall of light. The Mini stopped and I saw Jaikie get out. He'd obviously been asleep during the journey and stretched himself into life. He stooped to the driver’s window and exchanged a few words with him, then turned and walked across to the cottage, entering through the back door in his usual fashion, as if waiting for the applause to die down.

  “You look knackered boy,” I said.

  “I am. Bright side, though. Jodie Falconer’s coming with us to the opening tomorrow. I mean there you are, you don’t see people for eight years and all of a sudden…”

  “You wonder how you lived without them?”

  He dumped his bulging satchel, came over to the sink and started to wash his hands. I tore him off three or four sheets of kitchen towel.