Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, aware that none of it was as important as the detail he’d left out. I stood up and went over to the sink, filled a jug and poured water into the coffee maker.
    “So where do I fit in?” I asked.
    He looked at me, scrunched up eyebrows. “Who said you did?”
    “You mean you’ve come all the way from ... where is it you live?”
    “Guildford, Guildford.”
    “You’ve come all the way from Guildford-Guildford to tell me about two trawlermen who’ve been shot dead? You’ve taken me all round the bloody houses to find out if I’m living here alone and, if so, who visits.” He looked away, and I shifted to get back in his eyeline. “The first thing you mentioned at the gate was through traffic. You went on to Laura, the kids, my lady who does! Why?”
    The only thing either of us could hear, once I’d stopped making the point, was the water pumping through the coffee maker, slowly, arthritically. I’d been meaning to descale the thing for weeks, never got round to it. Blackwell was chewing his bottom lip, wondering how to deal with the fact that I’d rumbled his technique if not his purpose.
    Eventually he said, “Pupil goes back to teacher. I guess I came for advice.”
    “Advice, my fanny!”
    For a moment the man behind the long, drawn-out crawl towards me reared up on his hind legs. “For Christ’s sake, Nathan, you never could take anything at face value, never mind a compliment! Why else would I be here? The pleasure of your company?”
    After some deep breaths he returned to his main purpose. Aaron Flaxman, he said, was coming up for trial. It had been fast-tracked and was due to begin end of September.
    “Trial where?”
    “The Bailey. That aside, with Kinsella’s evidence it’s gone from being a possibility that he goes down to an almost dead cert.”
    Was I familiar with the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act? I wasn’t and had no intention of becoming so. It was an overloaded ark of bureaucratic fence-sitting and back-watching, Blackwell said. It was designed by twelve-year-old lawyers to make the job of catching scumbags like Flaxman harder than necessary, but in so far as it applied to this case everything had been done; the evidence had been properly assessed and an Immunity from Prosecution agreement for Kinsella was in the pipe-line. Right now he was safely tucked away waiting for the trial to start. As for Aaron Flaxman, he was on remand in Stamford, an old prison near Grimsby.
    Blackwell looked at me as if I knew what was coming next. I hadn’t the faintest.
    “My advice?” I prompted.
    He fumbled for words as I took down two mugs from the dresser, both of us aware of the irony that, having insulted him, I was now going to serve him coffee. I went to the fridge for the milk and once my back was turned to him, he blurted it out.
    “I’d like to use this place as a safe house for the main witness, Liam Kinsella.”
    I turned back to him, milk bottle in hand, and he waited, some time I imagine, for my mouth to close.
    “You’d be paid, of course. Believe it or not, there’s a contingency fund...”
    “You want me to put up a murder witness in my house?”
    He said yes, that was the gist of it, but like all bare facts it could gave the wrong impression and the truth in this matter was only half the story. I suggested that was a contradiction in terms and asked for the other half. He searched for words that wouldn’t upset me, couldn’t find any.
    “We think there a chance someone’ll come after Kinsella before he can testify.”
    “Fantastic! When the Heritage IRA turn up, we’ll break open a few cans of Guinness, have a ceili. Who the hell are they, anyway?”
    He explained that after the Good Friday agreement in Ireland, when everybody was meant to love each other, it didn’t quite work out that way and split the IRA into factions: Continuity, Real and Heritage. Flaxman’s family had tenuous connections to Heritage. He could see, from the look on my face,