ARCHANGEL HAWTHORNE (A Thriller) Read online

  ‘We’ll do our best, sir. I will also want access to the members of your company who were involved in brokering this deal with the Germans.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be out there on the road, putting up roadblocks and the like, trying to stop whoever stole our money rather than question innocent men about something which is frankly a waste of time?’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Hawthorne said bluntly, turning his back on the managing director. ‘I’ll let you know when I will need to speak to you again. But before you go, can you tell me what this is?’ He took something small and metallic out of his coat pocket and held it out in the palm of his hand.

  ‘Grainger lowered his brows. ‘It looks like a toy angel,’ he said.

  ‘Made of lead,’ said Hawthorne. ‘It looks like a Christmas decoration.’

  ‘What has that got to do with me?’

  ‘It was found in one of the safes.’

  ‘Well I’ve no idea why it’s there. Is that really so important?’

  ‘Strange thing to put in a safe, don’t you think?’

  Grainger shook his head and breathed heavily down his nose. ‘Please don’t bother me with Christmas decorations. Just find the devils that did this.’

  Hawthorne put the angel into his pocket. ‘We’ll do our very best, sir, you can count on that.’

  ‘I hope so.’ Grainger turned to leave and then paused. ‘One other thing, Inspector…’

  Hawthorne sighed. ‘Yes?’

  ‘We’d rather this did not leak out to the press, not just yet.’ He coughed lightly. ‘It could prove to be something of an embarrassment to the board.’

  ‘An understatement, sir,’ Hawthorne returned flatly. ‘Sorry. The freedom of the press and all that,’ he said, shrugging. ‘And keeping it out of the papers is not always a good thing. We need people to know what happened, to see if anyone spotted anything, has information on the gang that did this.’

  ‘All the same…’

  ‘We’ll do what’s best,’ sir,’ Hawthorne said, his eyes non-committal.

  Grainger nodded quickly, seemed reluctant to leave it at that, and then dashed away, up the stone stairs, past a police officer on guard, and out of the door.

  ‘Arsehole,’ said Hawthorne to no one in particular. The young constable by the safe looked up at him. Hawthorne dropped the cigarette to the ground, hardly smoked. ‘They’re all arseholes. This company made a ruddy fortune out of the war, supplying stuff to the military. Now they’re making money out of rebuilding Germany, the very bastards we were at war with. I fought in Italy and in Africa, in the bleedin’ desert up to my bleedin’ neck in sand and blood, in order to defeat fascism. To hear that man talk about dealing with the ruddy Nazis really sticks in my craw.’ He breathed in deeply through his nose, knowing he’d allowed something of his private thoughts to leak out. Something they didn’t do very often, but today he felt like he needed to air them.

  ‘They’re not Nazis now,’ said the constable, rising to his feet.

  ‘What the hell do you know? You were still sucking on your mother’s tits while I was sweating it out in khaki defending your sweet mother’s little arse from the Nazi threat.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, stifling a smile.

  ‘Ruddy Nazis. Ruddy Russians.’

  ‘Russians, sir?’

  Hawthorne removed another cigarette from his Woodbine packet. ‘Yeah, ruddy Russians. They’re all the ruddy same.’

  ‘Where do the Russians fit in, sir?’

  The DCI struggled to get a light from his lighter. ‘This bastard flint needs changing again. See, cheap American trash!’ he said, holding out the battered silver lighter. Have you got a match?’

  The constable sought out a box of matches. ‘Got something against the Americans, too, sir?’

  ‘You young kids these days. It’s all transistor radios and that American rock-and-roll crap. I tell you, we’ll all be talking like yanks before the decade is over.’

  ‘They were our friends and allies, sir.’

  ‘Yeah? You seen the bloody films we’re getting from them recently? They won the bloody war if you believe that shit. Where were they in the first few years, eh? When we were on our ruddy knees fighting off that bastard Hitler and his mob? Then they swan in when it’s nearly over, with their fancy uniforms and silk stockings and chocolates for the girls, and everything’s Yankee-doodle-bleedin’-dandy. Some allies they turned out to be, when we’re going to be in hock to them for ruddy decades, lending us money so we could pay for stuff they built and sold back to us. They used the ruddy war to haul their arses out of their own ruddy depression, that’s what they did. And they wouldn’t have cared a hoot about us if we hadn’t borrowed their ruddy Yankee money. Did they have rationing until a few years ago? They bleedin’ well didn’t. And you kids encourage them by buying their ruddy crap music and wanting to be like them with your ruddy televisions and ruddy fridges.’

  ‘You use an American lighter, sir…’ he pointed out.

  He stopped his ranting and stared down at the lighter. It had a cowboy riding a horse on its silver surface. He swallowed. ‘An American gave it to be, a GI. He was a brave fella. Never seen a man like him. Saved my ruddy life and lost his own in the process. They were tough bastards, those Yanks.’

  ‘So you admire them really.’

  He harrumphed. ‘I hate everyone,’ he said. He pocketed the cigarette lighter, the constable noticing how careful he was with it. ‘Especially greasy little toads like that managing director Grainger. He doesn’t fool me. All that cash? Pah, he thinks I was born yesterday.’

  ‘So why have so much cash in there, sir?’ said the constable.

  ‘Tax.’

  ‘Tax?’

  ‘Cash-in-hand stuff, I reckon.’

  ‘Tax avoidance?’

  The DCI nodded. ‘That’s what I think. But time will tell.’

  ‘That’s a lot of cash-in-hand, sir.’

  ‘Sonny, you’ve a lot to learn about big business. They’re called big business because they do everything big, even bad things. But that’s not why we’re here just yet. I think it might have a bearing on the case, but first things first. Any fingerprints?’

  ‘No, sir. Completely wiped clean.’

  ‘I guessed as much. This has been a carefully thought-out job. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing, make no mistake. They knew there’d be this much money in the two safes, for one thing, so had to have insider knowledge. It wouldn’t have been in there for long, so they had to time the job just right. They knew how to get by the night watchmen and into the old storehouses, whether by bribing them or by other means, we’ve yet to determine. They had the skills and equipment to dig that ruddy great hole, shore up these heavy walls and then open the two safes, both with different combinations. Finally, they managed to haul out what was a huge amount of cash – had to be in a truck – without being seen or causing suspicion. And between the hours of six o’clock on the Saturday evening, when the place was last checked, and seven-thirty on the Monday morning, when the first employee arrives and sees the mess. My guess is they did it all in the one night. No one at the office, of course, because they’d all buggered off for the weekend. But the foundry can’t close its furnaces and so has to stay operating with minimal staff. So far, not one of the workers at the foundry has admitted to seeing anything suspicious going on over the weekend.’

  ‘But in fairness, the foundry is separated from the office buildings by walls ten feet high,’ said the constable. ‘They’re hardly likely to see what goes on over in this part of the complex.’

  ‘People see things all right. It depends whether they’ve been paid not to see.’ Hawthorne stooped down to the large hole in the wall. ‘They’re ex-army men, or at least some of them are.’

  The constable frowned. ‘How can you know that, sir?’

  ‘Gut instinct. They learned their trade in the army. See those supports? Seen similar used by the Royal Engineers during the war. Have you seen In
spector Fraser?’

  ‘He’s outside in the yard, sir,’ said the constable.

  ‘What’s he doing out there? I asked him to get his Scottish arse down here, pronto.’

  ‘Don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Damn Scots, they’re all the ruddy same. Insolent bastards. You can’t trust men who wear skirts and eat horse feed for breakfast.’

  The constable grinned. ‘Is there no one out there you like, sir, not one?’

  ‘I’ve told you: I hate everyone,’ he replied sullenly. His brows relaxed into thoughtful repose. ‘Everyone except my mother. I like my mother. And you’d better like yours too,’ he said as he swept up the stairs of the basement.

  ‘Get a move on, Fraser,’ he said. ‘I haven’t time to be hanging around this freezing-cold yard waiting for whatever feeble attempts at exegesis you’re about to raise above the parapet for me to take pot-shots at.’

  ‘Exegesis, sir?’ said Inspector Donald Fraser, his Glaswegian accent having a field day with the word.

  Donald Fraser was a lucky young man, thought DCI Hawthorne somewhat enviously: good looking, a frame any sportsman would give their right arm for, and he even wore the drab plain clothes expected of him in his line of work with a certain flair.

  ‘What have you got?’ said Hawthorne impatiently.

  They were standing in a large cobbled yard, a high brick wall some distance away, with lumps of metal and wood stacked against its side, behind which came steady thumps and grinding and clouds of billowing black smoke of the working foundry. The two men faced a series of blackened old stone-built buildings, somewhat dilapidated, the windows boarded up.

  ‘This is the old part of the foundry,’ said Fraser.

  ‘No kidding,’ said Hawthorne with a sniff.

  ‘Early Victorian,’ Fraser continued. ‘It’s not been used for a while now, apparently. The yard is walled off, as you can see, with a large gate which still has its padlock intact, though its been unlocked. Obviously the gate is the exit through which they took out what will have been a sizeable load of money, as it was in small denominations. There’s a door over in the wall,’ he pointed, ‘leading to the yard beyond and a line of outside toilets. That door is unlocked and was found wide open. The door to this storehouse was forced, too, though it’s not immediately apparent.’

  ‘Tell me something I can’t work out for myself, Fraser.’

  Fraser pushed open the door to the storehouse. ‘There are prints on this, but too smudged to make out. My guess is that they don’t belong to our friends anyway: they’ve been canny at clearing up after themselves.’ He went inside the dark, empty storehouse. Two police officers were searching the dirty stone floor for clues. ‘Follow me down into the basement, sir,’ he said, leading the way down a flight of stone steps to another door. ‘Once down here, they set about digging through to the room beyond to reach the two safes,’ he said.

  Hawthorne glanced quickly round the basement. He immediately saw the hole which had been made in the storehouse’s thick stone basement wall. Large, neat and square and shored up with steel girders. There were pieces of grease-proof paper, rolled up and tossed away into a corner, an empty tin of peaches with a spoon still in it, a pile of grey woollen blankets. He went up to the hole, bent down and peered inside. The wall of the old storehouse was at least five feet thick, he thought. They knew how to build things in those days, he thought. He saw the young constable going about his duty, one of the safes clearly visible, through the opening.

  ‘One other thing, sir. There’s no sign of the night watchman who would have patrolled this area. He’s missing. We sent someone round to his house, but his wife says he didn’t come home. She said that’s not unusual.’

  ‘What kind of man doesn’t go home to his wife?’ rasped Hawthorne.

  ‘The kind who does an occasional day shift at a brass factory to make extra money. We checked there: he hadn’t shown his face for work. They were really pissed off at him. It’s looking like he might have been in on the job.’

  Hawthorne grunted. ‘Maybe.’ He gingerly picked up one of the balled-up pieces of grease-proof paper and unfolded it. ‘There’s gravy on here, and onions.’ He shook his head. ‘The buggers brought beef stew along with them,’ he said.

  ‘Beef stew, sir?’

  ‘There’s a bloody echo in here.’ He rose to his feet. ‘They didn’t come here on the night and carry this out. They came and camped here for one, maybe two nights before.’

  ‘What, they were here before the weekend?’

  ‘That’s what I’d say,’ nodded Hawthorne. ‘The cheeky bleeders managed to get inside the yard unseen and hunkered down here until the time was right to make their move.’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Why risk being seen by coming in early?’ he asked.

  Hawthorne rolled his eyes. ‘You young ones think you know everything. It’s all to do with timing.’

  ‘We’ve got something, sir,’ said one of the police officers in the basement. He’d moved aside the blankets. ‘Four empty bottles of Mackeson stout.’

  DCI Hawthorne raised a furry brow and then wandered over. ‘I can see prints on them. Seems they’ve not been so scrupulous this time, eh?’

  ‘No, sir.’ The officer placed the bottles in a large paper evidence bag.

  ‘Get them dusted at once,’ said Hawthorne. ‘Maybe we can put a name to the bastards.’ But he didn’t look pleased.

  On the contrary, to Fraser his boss appeared to be frowning so deep his forehead was in danger of collapsing onto his nose.

  ‘What’s wrong, sir?’

  ‘Something’s bugging me. They spend all that time meticulously cleaning up after themselves, being careful not to leave any prints, and then they leave behind four bottles, each smothered in them.’ He shook his head.

  ‘It’s that kind of thing that invariably does for them in the end, sir, in my experience,’ said Fraser.

  ‘In your experience…’ Hawthorne said under his breath, but resisted saying anything sarcastic. ‘And what do you make of this?’ he said, holding out the small toy angel.

  ‘The Christmas decoration found in the safe? No one seems to know what it’s doing there,’ Fraser said. ‘I’m thinking it’s a calling-card.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Hawthorne, staring at the tiny figure. ‘Some of them are just too cocky for their own good.’

  They heard a shout. A constable came to the door of the basement. ‘Sir, we’ve found the missing night watchman.’

  ‘Where?’ said Hawthorne dryly.

  ‘Right under our bloody noses, sir. The old man’s been found tied up and gagged in one of the outside loos not far from here. He’s been beaten up and looks to be in a pretty bad way. We’ve already rung for an ambulance. The hospital’s close, so it won’t take them long to get here.’

  ‘Guess that rules him out of the equation,’ said Fraser.

  ‘No one is ever ruled out until I say so,’ said Hawthorne. ‘Can he speak?’

  ‘Barely,’ said the constable. ‘He’s in an out of consciousness.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ said Hawthorne. ‘Keep the old beggar awake long enough for me to question him. We got any reporters sniffing round yet?’

  The constable shook his head. ‘They’ve not got wind of anything.’

  ‘The managing director here wants us to keep quiet about it,’ Hawthorne said. He grinned. ‘Call my contacts on the papers for me, will you, Fraser? Tell them I want to make a statement.’

  5

  Burning Bright

  He slapped the newspapers down on the old pine table. A thin cloud of dust flew into the air.

  ‘Front page,’ he said. Callum Baxter looked briefly at the assembled men, all sitting silently round the table and staring up at him. He went to the small window and looked out upon a wasteland of tangled growth. The thin tendril-like branches of a tree scraped the grimy glass. It had taken him two hours to make the journey to collect the papers from his contact. Two hours – an
hour there, an hour back. He’d arranged to pick up papers so they could keep tabs on what the police were up to. They had a radio, but the reception was atrocious, so this was the only way of keeping up with the news. His contact didn’t know who he was dealing with; he hadn’t even seen Callum, everything being arranged through another contact, but Callum had paid enough to ensure the young lad left the papers and any other supplies they might need miles from anywhere behind a wall where no one could find them, no questions asked.

  ‘I know Hawthorne,’ said Callum, ‘he’ll have wasted no time in breaking the story to the press and having them swarm all over it like flies around shit. That’s the way he likes to work. Right now, he’ll be calling on his narks to see who might have carried out the job.’

  The men quickly grabbed a newspaper each.

  Jimmy Baxter grinned broadly. ‘We’re famous, Callum,’ he said. ‘It’s made the nationals.’

  ‘Course it’s made the nationals,’ said Callum calmly, ‘It’s no small deal.’

  ‘Nothing here about who might have done it though,’ said Spud.

  ‘And not likely to be either,’ said Callum. ‘Hardly likely to say they’re after George ‘Spud’ Wainwright, Tom Brody, Angelo Abramco and the Baxter brothers, is it? They haven’t a clue who did it. They’ll never find out either.’

  ‘I dunno, Callum; that guy Hawthorne is a ruthless bastard when it comes to getting his man,’ said Spud.

  ‘You doubting me already, Spud?’ said Callum, his eyes narrowing. ‘I told you; do as I say and everything will be fine. We sit it out here, like we planned. We just melt into thin air and leave Hawthorne chasing his old tail.’

  ‘It says here the night watchman is in a really bad state. Did you have to clout the man so hard, Jimmy?’ said Tom Brody. ‘He was an old man, for God’s sake.’

  ‘He should have kept his nose outta things,’ said Jimmy, his cheek sporting a painful bruise from where his brother had belted it, and a line of red from Trudy’s swipe with her fingernails.