Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Read Online Free

the better to see a photo of my daughters, Fee before she went off to Japan, Ellie a year into her course at the Sorbonne.
    “Good-looking girls,” he said.
    Something happens when a middle-aged man makes a remark like that about your daughters, no matter how innocently it’s meant. I guess I’d whiplashed back to the squad room mentality where similar words would have been followed by declarations of intent, who would fancy doing what to the girl being ogled.
    I went straight from there to wondering if there’d ever been another woman in Blackwell’s life, before or during Karen. I doubted it, even though for all his cramped personal style he was a good-looking man. First impressions for me always involve the other bloke’s hair, comparing it to my own diminishing head of the stuff. Blackwell’s was an upturned white scrubbing brush, at odds with dark eyebrows but enviable all the same. A closer look gave you the chiselled face and skin which looked a good deal younger than the man wearing it.
    I was still no nearer to knowing why he was here, but assumed he hadn’t sought me out only to leave without telling me.
    “Connor and Jaikie well?” he asked.
    He spoke as if he knew them. He’d certainly met them when they were in their teens and I shouldn’t have been surprised that he remembered their names. I remembered his two. Georgina and Graham. Their mother brought them to the office one day and they made absolutely no impression whatsoever.
    “Jaikie seems to live a charmed life...” I began.
    He pointed, to interrupt me. “We saw that film, All Good Men and True . Christ, he was good in that!”
    “So people keep telling me.”
    He frowned. “You didn’t think so?”
    “I thought he was bloody marvellous. It’s just that to me he’s still Jaikie, the kid who’s always late for school.”
    He pretended that he knew what I meant, even though I wasn’t entirely sure myself.
    “Can’t be all roses, though,” he said. “I mean America’s no place to live.”
    “He would disagree. Besides, he’s also got a flat in Chiswick, the Beverly Hills of Britain. Shares it with an old schoolfriend. Female.”
    “Ah, well, at least you see him...?”
    “Occasionally.”
    The conversation was beginning to rile me. There’d been too many questions, him to me, which I’d tried passing off as me being interesting, him being boring, wanting to hear all about my vibrant family.
    He smiled. “Does Connor still have you spitting feathers?”
    Con didn’t so much hack me off these days as worry me, serious middle-of-the-night stuff, bolt upright in bed, full sweat. Blackwell nodded as if, again, he knew what I meant, but I reckoned his kids were as prim and proper as their mother.
    “Connor’s his own man,” I said, struggling to say it with pride. “Christmas, for example. The rest of us were here, no one had heard a word for over a month and, just as I started to worry, the bugger walked in Christmas Eve, asked if we were all going up to the carol service.”
    “Where’d he been?”
    “Haiti.”
    “He works there?”
    I laughed. “Generous of you to assume that he works, but Con has turned the gap year into a gap decade. God knows what he does for money. I’ve stopped giving it, he’s stopped asking for it.”
    He sighed as if, on my behalf, he was juggling the pros and cons of having such interesting children. He nodded back at the dresser. “And the girls have both gone, by the sound of it?”
    “Fee works in Tokyo, Ellie works in Nepal. You don’t get more gone than that.”
    I thought it was high time I asked about his two.
    “Georgina married three years ago.” He shook his head. “Nice enough lad, got his own business, something to do with pest control. At least he isn’t a copper.”
    “Similar line of work, I suppose. More sociable hours.”
    He lowered his voice as if to confide a shameful secret. “The police service you and I grew up with is dead and gone. It’s now the National