Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Read Free Page A

watch as if lightning might strike at the mention of alcohol before lunch.
    “Yours was always a single,” I said, lifting the metal loop which held the gate. “And you could make the bloody thing last all night.”
    He smiled. “Yours was a double, ice to the brim. And it lasted the best part of five minutes.”
    I pulled the gate open a yard or so and in he came.
     

     
    Once Blackwell had finished pretending that he liked dogs and had spoken kind but nervous words to my own drug squad reject, I pushed her out into the garden and invited him to sit at the kitchen table. He took off the anorak, hung it fussily over a chair and proved that I was still a master at judging people by their appearance. There was the tweed jacket, the immaculate white shirt and a tie you could turn a fried egg with.
    From an ever-ready bottle of Bell’s I poured a single into a tumbler where it looked ridiculous. I went to the freezer for ice, added a few chunks to my own double, took my place at the other end of the table and waited.
    After a series of nods and smiles he made a show of looking back on our brief working relationship with that wry amusement time uses to soften hostilities of the past. His memory was surprisingly detailed, which made me suspect he’d done some research. We’d first met eleven years and three months ago, he informed me, when I was a Detective Chief Inspector in Hamford and he was a young Detective Constable. I was leading the inquiry into a stomach-churning murder, the kind which had me phoning my daughters throughout the day to make sure they were still alive. A woman in her early twenties had been raped, strangled and cut into chunks so that her killer, an old boyfriend, could get her out of his flat more easily. Six bin bags in all.
    Blackwell tried to skip over the occasion when I’d given him a verbal hammering followed by an ultimatum. He pretended to have forgotten the reasons for it, so I reminded him. I’d noticed, early on in the inquiry, that he was one of those people with a talent for getting others to do their work for them, clean or dirty. At first I’d thought it was laziness on his part, but if so why did he spend more time and effort getting the rest of the squad to carry his load than it would’ve taken to do the job himself? Something far more subtle than indolence was driving him. The skill, the finesse with which he operated, without his victims realising, was impressive. ‘Impressive’ is the wrong word, I know, but I can’t bring to mind its pejorative equivalent...
    It was in the days before open plan and way, way before standing up became the new sitting down, so middle ranks and above still had their own offices. With chairs. I always left my door open but suggested that he close it behind him on this occasion unless he wanted the others to hear our one-sided discussion. Hands in his pockets, he hooked it shut with his foot, then stood looking down at me while I effed and feffed my way through a series of accusations, finally asking if he’d always been a lazy bastard or had somebody taught him. He didn’t so much as blink. Was he happy at home? Did he owe money? Was he ill? Had there been a death in the family? All the usual and necessary stuff. No to everything, so I asked if it went deeper. Was he maybe scared of turning over the stones in this murder? Frightened of the details chiming with his own darker side?
    By then, in his shoes, I would have picked up the desk and thrown it at me, but all I got from Blackwell when I finally allowed him to speak was sweet reason, so elegantly expressed that it nearly had me wondering if I’d read him all wrong. And just as I was about to ask him to have a seat, maybe a whisky, talk things over reasonably, I put a name to his behaviour. Manipulative. It may be common currency these days, but in those days the word, the concept itself, hadn’t long been in fashion. I challenged him with my thought and he shook his head in bewildered