Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn & Child

— Not really?

— Not at all. That I can think of.

— There are no … you don’t know anyone who drives, who owns, a vintage car?

She appeared to think about it for a moment.

— No.

Hawthorn nodded.

— Does Daniel own the house on Nestor Lane?

— Yes. He does. He inherited it from his grandfather. His father’s father.

— How long has it been in the family?

— I really don’t know. 1930s I think.

Daniel Field lay flat on his bed. His torso below the chest was bound in bandages. Various lines and tubes and cables came and went from his arms, and under the covers which lay on his lower body. There was dark bruising on his left shoulder. His face seemed slightly swollen. There was a scratch on his left cheek that Hawthorn didn’t remember from the morning.

Mrs Field and her daughter had already spent twenty minutes with him before the daughter came out and told Hawthorn and Child to come in.

— Did he tell you anything about the shooting?

— Just what you said. An old car. Then Mum got him to stop and sent me to get you.

He was pale. Dull blue veins were scribbled across his skin. His hands were clean.

His mother touched his arm above his wrist. He opened his eyes. It seemed to take a moment for him to focus on her. She kissed his forehead.

— Go on, Daniel.

— What?

— Tell us what you remember.

He looked confused for a moment, and he looked around her, into the gloom. He looked at Child and Hawthorn, and his sister, then back at Hawthorn.

— Oh, he said. Yeah.

He closed his eyes, and Hawthorn thought that he’d drifted off. But his mother stroked his arm, and after a moment he started to speak softly.

— There was … a black car. Low down. With those running boards. And those old silver door handles. Like in a black-and-white film. The window was down. I couldn’t see anyone. Just a flash. I don’t remember a bang. A flash, and I didn’t know … nothing happened. I thought it was a camera flash. I thought someone was taking my picture. The car was lovely. Silent, low down. Sweeping. Then there was another … flash and … boof … I felt like I’d been … punched in the stomach. Then I was on the ground, and the pain came, and I felt like something really bad had happened in my stomach, or somewhere. Inside me. Something had exploded. But I heard no noise. No bang … nothing. Like the sound was down. I thought someone was taking my photograph while my insides were exploding, and I hoped they’d call an ambulance, but then they were gone and my hand was covered in blood, and I realized that I’d been shot. By the car.

He opened his eyes briefly and looked at Hawthorn, as if to check that he was still there. Then he closed them again.

— I thought it was the stupidest thing that could ever have happened.

Child shrugged in the corridors.

— You’re not happy, are you? he said.

— He saw what he saw.

— He saw what he thought he saw.

— He’s been completely consistent.

— And vague. A low dark car. With running boards. A lovely car.

— Silver door handles.

— Silver door handles.

— It’s no more vague than descriptions we get from people who don’t know cars. We explicate.

— We what?

— Explicate?

— I don’t think that’s the right word, Hawthorn.

— We put them together.

— Extrapolate?

— Yeah.

— We work it out. But. You know. I’m not sure we have a model book that goes back to … whenever. If he insists on it the CPS will have a bit of a problem.

They wandered through the corridors. Hawthorn assumed Child knew where he was going.

— What it is, said Child, is that you don’t want to go back to Mishazzo.

Hawthorn looked at him.

— What?

— It’s a hallucination, or whatever. Rivers has it tied up. You want a loose thread so that we’re not back following that idiot all day long. Looking at windows. Going slowly insane.

— It’s not that.

— And Rivers is being a prick. I know that. It wasn’t our fault we lost the driver. So I get it. Really. If there was anything believable about it I’d go along. But what do we do with a vague description of some sort of vintage car, when we’ve got CCTV of the Hyundai, and two crack-high idiots weaving their way north? I wouldn’t put it past them to have just thrown the gun on the back seat.

— Still. We can’t just decide things that don’t fit are hallucinations.

— No. We usually don’t decide anything about things that don’t fit. They just don’t fit. So we leave them out. Least with this there’s an explanation why it doesn’t fit.

He hunched his shoulders and took a turn without looking. Hawthorn glanced at a sign board. He saw nothing about an exit.

— It’s like Jetters, Child said. He thought he heard ochre . We know he didn’t. But he was convinced that’s what he heard. So, should we start looking for an ochre-coloured car?

Hawthorn was hating this conversation now.

— It’s different.

— No it’s not. It’s people imagining things. We start investigating what people imagine …

He trailed off, looked over his shoulder.

— Where the fuck are we?

Hawthorn shook his head. They turned another corner.

— It’s not even plausible, Child went on. The vintage car. You know there was a camera pointing all the way up Plume Road? From down near the tube. Looking all the way back up. You can see the junction with Hampley Road. It’s in the distance, but you can see it. This is a traffic camera so it’s digital whatever. It has the timer on it, and it’s clear. And at exactly the right time, the Hyundai comes around that corner. Nothing before. Nothing after. No vintage cars. Just the Hyundai. And no vintage cars.

Hawthorn looked at him. He hated it.

— You know what those things are like.

Child laughed.

— No, I know what they’re like when they don’t fit. I know how suddenly when it’s the wrong thing on the camera the timer mysteriously gets scrambled, or a bird shits on the lens, or somebody deletes the wrong file. But this is straightforward. It’s simple. There are no other explanations.

Hawthorn looked at him.

— There are several other explanations.

— Such as?

— There are dozens.

They were near the café. They paused at the junction of three corridors and looked around.

— Name one.

— There are hundreds.

Hawthorn took the turning to the left, towards a flickering light.

— Do you know where we are? Child asked him.

— No, he said. There are millions of explanations. There’s an infinite number of explanations.

Child sighed and pushed his glasses up the ramp of his nose.

— Well you can do the paperwork then.

Hawthorn went online. He looked up film titles, book titles. He tried to discover the history of the house on Nestor Lane, and of Nestor Lane itself. He looked at cars. At pictures of cars. He found some that seemed about right. He printed off the photographs of seven of them. He tried to put all the photographs on one page but couldn’t work the software.

Child had gone home. Two men had been arrested in Bolton and were on their way back to London. No sign of the gun. They denied everything. They knew nothing about any shooting, they said. But Rivers had put them in separate vans with someone to talk to.

Hawthorn asked Frank Lenton to show him the CCTV footage. Plume Road looked long; a strip of grey with white highlights and black shadows. It was still as a photograph. He watched the wrong junction the first time. Frank replayed it. A speck of something half bright crawled around the corner from Hampley Road. It looked low down to Hawthorn.