The Night Hawks Page 23

  There are lights by the entrance to the farm. They look very bright in the dark lane, reflecting the high hedges and the broken white gate. As Nelson gets nearer, he sees that there are also bollards across the road and a ‘Police Incident’ sign. How have the traffic police got here so quickly? Nelson stops his car and gets out. There’s a white van parked by the sign for the farm. Nelson walks towards it.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  The van door opens and a man gets out. He’s wearing a ski mask which startles Nelson so much that he doesn’t, at first, notice the gun in the man’s hand.

  Even when the gun goes off, Nelson’s first reaction is surprise.

  And then, nothingness.

  Chapter 31

  Ruth is glad when the day is over. Earlier in the afternoon she watched from her window as David Brown drove away, presumably to his interview with Nelson. The whole situation makes her twitchy. Is David an actual suspect for Alan White’s murder or is Nelson just after him because of the comment overheard by Ruth? She doesn’t know which scenario makes her more nervous. She finishes her last lecture on autopilot, then fires off some emails and prepares to go home.

  She doesn’t have to rush because Kate is having a sleepover with Tasha. This is unusual for a weekday but it’s Tasha’s birthday and she wants her two best friends to stay the night, as a pre-celebration before the lavish party planned for Saturday. Ruth is glad that Kate has retained her status as one of the best friends, but she is rather dreading the party and already feels slightly intimidated by Tasha, who has pierced ears and her own rose gold iPhone. Still, it means that Ruth can watch reruns of Time Team all evening and have a long bath with a glass of red wine. As she contemplates this, while loading her book bag into the car, she suddenly, for the first time in ages, misses Frank. He would have run the bath for her and poured the wine. He was a considerate partner, always understanding her need for space and privacy, commodities that are much easier to achieve when there are two adults, co-parenting. Frank was a good man in every sense and Ruth was very fond of him. Not fond enough to become Mrs Frank Barker though. No, she is Dr Ruth Galloway for ever. The thought cheers her up. It’s like a mantra that runs through her head as she drives slowly through the university grounds. Dr Ruth Galloway for ever. You’ve never been a bride, have you, Mum?

  She’s almost at the turn-off for the Saltmarsh when her phone beeps. She considers ignoring it – she’s nearly home, after all – but the Paranoid Mother voice in her head says: what if it’s Kate? What if she’s had an allergic reaction to Tasha’s birthday cake? What if a masked gunman has burst in and shot them all? She pulls over, into the forecourt of a boarded-up pub, and gets out her phone.

  It’s a message from Nelson.

  Can you meet me at Black Dog Farm? Might have discovered something important x

  She rings back but the phone is switched off. Typical Nelson, to demand her presence and then go incommunicado. She considers ignoring the message, going home and putting on the History channel. But Nelson needs her and, says another voice in her head – definitely not the Mother this time – she has the whole evening free. Potentially the whole night.

  Ruth turns her car in the opposite direction. Away from home.

  Michelle is preparing supper. She doesn’t know when Harry will be home, but she’s trying to eat at regular times to maintain her post-baby weight loss. George, no longer a baby, watches her from the kitchen table where he’s playing with his cars. Bruno is lying by the door, looking martyred. He wants his master, his food and a walk. Probably in that order.

  ‘Police,’ says George. ‘Nee naw, nee naw.’ Why is he making that noise when sirens now have a transatlantic whine? It’s like T for Train in his alphabet book, which shows a steam train puffing smoke. When did trains last look like that? Even the Telephone on the same page is a landline version when, to most children, a phone is that little rectangular object buzzing in Mum’s handbag. It irritates Michelle that George is playing police cars.

  It’s been a strange time, the first three years of George’s life. If Michelle were to describe it in one word she’d say, ‘Becalmed,’ remembering her mother’s description of sailing boats at Fleetwood Yacht Club. She and Harry are still afloat, and their little craft now contains George, as well as Laura and Rebecca. They are bobbing gently on a tranquil sea but are they going anywhere? She knows that Nelson was in love with Ruth – still might be – and she was, if not in love with Tim, then in something with him. But now Tim is dead, and Harry has obviously decided to stay with her for the sake of the family, for George in particular. And it’s fine. They get on well, they still have sex sometimes and it’s wonderful to share the surprising gift of a late baby. But they don’t really talk; about Ruth, about Tim, about Katie, even about what will happen when Maureen comes for Christmas. They just float on, looking after George and Bruno, taking one day at a time.

  ‘Phone,’ says George. The little rectangular object is buzzing in Michelle’s bag. She wipes her hands and goes to retrieve it. It’s Harry, probably saying he’s working late again.

  Can you meet me at Black Dog Farm? I need your help x

  Michelle looks at the message feeling mingled irritation, pleasure and curiosity. Harry needs her help. Her help, not the assistance of Dr Know-all Galloway. This must be a first. Typical of him not to say more. She rings back but his phone is switched off. This, too, is typical.

  ‘Nee naw, nee naw,’ says George. Bruno whines softly.

  Michelle clicks onto Laura’s number. ‘Sweetheart, do you think you could babysit for an hour?’

  Chapter 32

  It’s dark by the time that Ruth reaches Black Dog Farm but a full moon casts a silvery, diffuse light on the treetops. As Ruth bumps along the track with the louring hedges on both sides, she’s aware of feeling anxious, her chest tightening as she gets nearer and nearer the house. When she finally turns into the yard and sees Nelson’s Mercedes parked at an angle, she exhales with relief. It’s OK. Nelson is here.

  Ruth gets out of the car.

  ‘Nelson?’ she calls. There’s no answer. The weathercock creaks from the roof. She can hear the wind in the trees and, faint and far away, a dog barking. The front door is boarded up but open, there’s a dent in the wood as if it’s been kicked. Ruth approaches, her phone torch held in front of her like a shield. A light comes on and she stops in her tracks. But it’s only a security light. Nelson insisted that she install one outside her cottage but, when it’s activated by foxes in the middle of the night, Ruth finds it scarier than darkness. She doesn’t want to go inside the house with its grease-stained walls and stench of death. But that’s where Nelson is.

  She pushes open the door. She can hear a grandfather clock ticking and another noise, something that makes her skin crawl and all her senses start to send out alarm signals.

  She takes another step inside the house.

  And darkness falls.

  Michelle practically growls with irritation when she sees Ruth’s car parked next to Harry’s. Really, she tells him silently. Really? Does he really think that she won’t recognise Ruth’s car? She knows everything about Ruth. She knows her mobile phone number, her email address, her star sign, her parents’ names. She has looked up Ruth’s books on Amazon. The Tomb of the Raven King. The Shadow Fields. The Devil’s Number. She knows the few reviews almost by heart. She would stalk Ruth on Facebook if Ruth could be bothered to have an account. So yes, Harry, I do recognise her car.

  Michelle marches up to the open front door. It’s only when she’s inside the hall, a gloomy place with hideous wallpaper, that she feels the first glimmer of unease. Where is Harry? Where is Ruth? There’s a faint noise coming from one of the inner rooms, a sort of slithery, clanking sound. Michelle moves towards it.

  The house is silent when Judy gets home. Cathbad is collecting Michael from his piano lesson and he must have taken Thing with hi
m, as well as Miranda. Mrs Mazzini will not be impressed. But the peace is wonderful. Judy goes into the kitchen and sits at the table without turning on the lights. Outside, the moon is riding across the cloudy sky. A full moon, which means high tides and, anecdotally amongst the police, a rise in violent crime. Lunacy, as Cathbad is fond of saying, simply means affected by the moon.

  Judy sits, lit by this strange satellite, and thinks about the Black Dog Farm case. They haven’t charged Chloe Noakes with her parents’ murder but there’s no doubt that there’s a case against her. She had a motive, both financial and emotional, she has no real alibi and her fingerprints were on the gun. Judy thinks back over her encounters with the GP. When she first met Chloe Noakes, she’d thought her character rather closed and self-contained, but not abnormally so. According to the FLO, Chloe had been calm when identifying her parents’ bodies, but she hadn’t been unaffected. Judy remembers Chloe saying, when she first spoke to her on the phone, ‘I’m glad Paul didn’t see them like this.’ Was Chloe’s motivation a desire to protect her brother? She thinks of the siblings sitting side by side in Chloe’s flat, Chloe righting her brother’s upturned glass. She sees them entering their childhood home, when the SOCO teams had finished, the tall man and the small woman. It had been clear who was protecting whom. ‘Paul and I hate this place,’ Chloe had said, ‘and we hated our father. We’re glad he’s dead.’

  Had Chloe Noakes killed her parents? Had she shot her mother and then her father, calmly pressing her father’s dead hand to the gun? But surely, if so, she wouldn’t have used the wrong hand? And she would have been careful to wipe her own fingerprints off. Could the siblings have acted together? Or did Chloe have another accomplice?

  Judy tries to picture Chloe Noakes, something that often helps her when wrestling with a case. Brown hair, cut very short, hazel eyes, good skin. She’s attractive, Judy realises, but in a way that isn’t immediately apparent. Chloe seems to be single now but, aged eighteen, she had had an affair with a man twenty years her senior. It hadn’t been illegal, as Choe had pointed out, rather defensively, but the relationship was definitely inappropriate, in Judy’s opinion. Neil Topham had been Chloe’s teacher; there was a power – as well as an age – disparity. Maddie had a similar affair at a similar age and Judy thinks that it still affects her to this day.

  Judy gets out her notebook and flicks back to her last interview with Chloe. She doesn’t turn on the overhead light but uses her phone torch to see the page.

  He was so different from my other boyfriends. They were schoolboys, all spotty and jealous. Neil was cool. Or so he seemed to me.

  Why does this ring a faint bell? What is she remembering? It’s something the boss said, she’s sure of it. She’ll give him a ring. Nelson never minds being contacted at home.

  But Nelson’s phone is switched off.

  Chapter 33

  Ruth is floating on a black sea. She is being carried inland on an inexorable tide. The beach comes up to meet her, the rocks jagged and threatening, gleaming with moisture. She opens her eyes. She’s in a white room, with a smell that makes her think of hospitals. Ruth moves her head.

  And sees Nelson lying dead in front of her.

  Ruth opens her eyes again. She is in a sitting room, old-fashioned and dreary, green curtains and brocade sofas. The sound she heard earlier is in the background. A clanking noise. Jacob Marley’s chain. The Black Shuck dragging its shackles behind it. Ruth sits up and realises that she’s staring into the eyes of the devil dog. He is watching her intently and, as he moves his head, his collar clinks gently.

  ‘Don’t move,’ says a woman’s voice.

  ‘Michelle?’

  It seems incredible but no more incredible than anything else that has happened to her. Nelson’s wife is sitting next to her on the sofa. Nelson!

  ‘I saw him,’ says Ruth. ‘He looked like he was dead.’

  ‘Harry?’ says Michelle. There’s never any doubt which ‘him’ they would both mean.

  ‘I saw him. Lying on some sort of table,’ says Ruth. ‘Maybe it was a dream.’

  ‘His car’s outside,’ says Michelle.

  The dog growls in the back of its throat. Is it the animal that Ruth saw in the barn that day? She can’t be sure. It’s black with a narrow head and a brown muzzle, lying in front of the door, paws stretched out in front, obviously on guard.

  ‘What happened?’ she says to Michelle.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Michelle. ‘I got a text from Harry asking me to come to the farm. When I got here his car was outside. And yours. The front door was open so I came in and I saw a man with a dog. He said Harry was in this room but there was only you, lying on the sofa. The man told the dog to guard us and then he locked us in.’

  ‘A man? What was he like?’

  ‘Tall and thin,’ says Michelle. ‘I didn’t recognise him.’

  Tall and thin. Could it be David Brown? But why would David lure her and Michelle to Black Dog Farm? How does he even know Michelle? Ruth shakes her head, trying to clear it.

  ‘I got a text too,’ she says. ‘It said to meet him – Nelson – at Black Dog Farm because he’d discovered something important. I assumed it was about the case.’ She can almost feel Michelle disbelieving this.

  Then Michelle says, ‘I might have known it wasn’t from him. He never puts a kiss on the ends of his texts.’

  Ruth says nothing. Nelson never usually puts kisses on her texts either. Why hadn’t she noticed this earlier? Perhaps, subconsciously, she had thought it was a sign that he was softening in his old age.

  ‘Someone else must have sent them,’ says Michelle. ‘Someone who has Harry’s phone.’

  ‘But why?’ says Ruth. She stands up and realises that she’s very unsteady on her feet. She sits down again. The dog makes a warning noise in the back of its throat.

  ‘Don’t make any sudden movements,’ says Michelle. ‘The dog’s trained to spring at any time. I remember Jan telling me that’s how they train police dogs.’

  Michelle sounds admirably calm. Ruth had never imagined Michelle being like this in a crisis. If she’d thought about it at all, she would have expected her to start crying and having hysterics. Instead, Nelson’s wife is sitting up very straight, keeping one eye on the dog without making direct eye contact. She’s wearing leggings and trainers, Ruth notices. She’s suddenly aware of her head hurting a great deal.

  ‘I think he hit me on the head,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Michelle. ‘You were out cold when I came in.’

  Instinctively, Ruth puts her hand in her pocket for her phone. She was sure that she was holding it when she came in.

  ‘He took our phones,’ says Michelle. ‘At least, he took mine. I assume he took yours too.’

  ‘Why?’ says Ruth, hearing her voice shaking. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Michelle. ‘This is the house where those people were killed, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ruth. ‘I excavated the garden here. And I saw that dog too, when I was here with . . .’

  She stops. Michelle is looking at her. It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking. That’s the problem with symmetrically beautiful faces. They can look very blank.

  ‘Do you really think you saw Harry earlier?’ says Michelle.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Ruth. ‘I could have been dreaming. He was in a room like a hospital ward.’

  There’s nothing hospital-like about this room. It’s full of fringed lamps, antimacassars, gloomy oil paintings. On a table near the fireplace there’s a china vase, a photograph of a graduate in a gold frame and an old-fashioned Bakelite object.

  ‘Look, Michelle,’ says Ruth. ‘A landline.’

  They lock eyes.

  ‘I’ll distract the dog,’ says Michelle. ‘You phone.’

  Without waiting for an answer, Michelle clicks
her fingers. ‘Here, boy.’

  The dog turns its snake-like head towards her. Ruth makes a lunge for the phone. She’s half expecting it to be disconnected but a comforting whirr fills her ear. Shakily she presses nine, nine, nine. The dog comes towards Michelle, hackles up.

  ‘What service do you require?’ says a woman’s voice.

  ‘Police,’ says Ruth. ‘Police!’

  The door opens and a man enters the room.

  ‘Mum! Why haven’t you turned the lights on?’ Miranda comes dancing into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s very restful to sit in the dark,’ says Cathbad, following her in, laden with book bags and piano music.

  ‘How was your lesson?’ says Judy to Michael.

  ‘OK,’ says Michael. ‘Mrs Mazzini gave me two new pieces to learn.’

  ‘She says he’s getting on really well,’ says Cathbad. It was Judy who wanted Michael to have piano lessons but it’s Cathbad – himself opposed to formal music tuition – who gets to sit in on the sessions. Judy tries not to resent this.

  ‘Put the lights on, Mirry,’ she says. ‘I was just thinking.’

  ‘There’s a beautiful full moon over the sea,’ says Cathbad. ‘A ghostly galleon.’

  ‘Dad was telling us about the Norfolk Sea Serpent,’ says Miranda. ‘I wish I could see it.’

  ‘It’s a good story,’ says Judy. ‘I’m not sure I’d like to meet a sea monster though.’

  ‘I would,’ says Miranda.

  ‘Shall we just have scrambled eggs for supper?’ says Cathbad. ‘It’s nearly seven o’clock.’