Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Read Free Page B

innocence.
    “Guvnor, I haven’t the faintest idea...”
    “I mean whatever job I give you, making coffee, counting body parts, you persuade some other poor sod to do it for you! And all for the pleasure of watching them jump through hoops that you’re spinning.”
    Control freak. I’m not sure how popular that phrase was then, or I’d have tossed it into my crude assessment of him. I gave him a week to change his work ethic (another modernism), or I’d have him reassigned. He stared at me, part respect, part defiance.
    “All I can say is I’ll try. Can I go now? Shall I leave the door or close it behind me?”
    I toyed with the idea of leaping across the desk and ripping his trouser pockets from their seams, given that his hands were still firmly in them. Instead, I said quietly, “There’ll always be a place for men like you in today’s police service, Tom, specially at the top.”
    Subsequently, he had gone up the career ladder like a window cleaner possessed and had reached the dizzy heights of Commander.
    I rattled the ice in my drink and he smiled again.
    “We had a theory as to why you took it with all that ice,” he said. “It made you drink it more quickly, before the ice melted and diluted it.” He raised his glass. “Absent friends.”
    He took the smallest sip I’ve ever seen qualify as one.
    “And a few enemies,” I added.
    He didn’t quite know how to take my acknowledging the humanity of some of our old adversaries and it may sound pious that I did, but a fair few of the villains I’d nicked in my thirty years weren’t evil men; they were just wrong. Not half as wrong as some of the coppers I’d known.
    Blackwell gazed round the kitchen, as if trying to see beyond the walls.
    “Big house,” he said. “I mean beautiful, but big. For just you.”
    I put the question he was trying to ask into a sentence for him. “You mean do I live here on my own?”
    He smiled. “The vase of roses on the window sill isn’t your style, Nathan, so I assume a woman’s hand.”
    “Her name is Laura Peterson and she’s a local GP. She doesn’t live here.”
    He badly wanted to know the reason for that but hadn’t the nerve to ask, so I indulged him. If Laura and I moved in together, I said, it would close a door on a crucial part of my life, one that I feared would never open again. He assumed I was talking about my days in the police service. I corrected him. My professional past, though unforgotten, wasn’t a place I was keen to revisit. My family, on the other hand, my four children who had flung themselves all over the world, were a different matter. I nodded to where my favourite photos of them stood out from plates, bowls, cups, saucers and everything else the kitchen dresser was designed to hold. Setting up house with Laura, I summarised, might finally cut the cord which I fondly imagined still held us all together.
    “And what about Laura?”
    “What about her?”
    “Does she have a past she wants to revisit or ... or is happy to keep secret?” In response to my off-key look he quickly added, “Sorry, sorry, I’m prying.”
    He certainly was and there was bound to be a reason for it. I explained that Laura didn’t have a past in the sense he’d meant, that her life as a GP meant almost everything to her, that her frustration with a National Health Service she both loved and hated never once made her forget why she’d taken up medicine in the first place. It went straight back to the Hippocratic oath. She had other interests, naturally, and that’s where I came in. Not as an interest in my own right, but as someone she could share hers with. A willing and responsive listener.
    “What are those interests?”
    “Poetry, mainly, but you know, painting, opera...”
    He was wise enough not to question me further about them. He took another sip which was hardly worth swallowing. I countered with a swig.
    “How are the kids doing?” he asked.
    He stood up and went over to the dresser,