Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Read Online Free Page A
Author: Douglas Watkinson
Crime Authority, as I’m sure you know. In the reorganisation I found myself washed up in the OCC.”
There’s a whole list of character traits I can’t stand, but phoney self-effacement is right at the top. It’s as bad as full-blown self-importance. People didn’t find themselves ‘washed up’ in the Organised Crime Command. They were a chosen few, picked for their skill, knowledge and effectiveness. Tom Blackwell had all three attributes in spades and was exercising them right now on me.
“Trouble is I’ve come in halfway through this particular caper ... near the end, really. My predecessor keeled over, couple of months ago. I’m the new boy.” He jumped sideways, an old-fashioned device for securing the listener’s attention. “Your office was always a jungle, Nathan. Who keeps this place so spick and span?”
I told him that a lady in the village came once a week to do stuff around the house.
“A cleaner, you mean?”
“My father’s ghost won’t allow me to call her that. What caper?”
He sat down at the end of the table again and nursed his drink. After a moment or two’s heavy thought, as if wondering whether to proceed or call the whole thing off, he asked me to picture the fishing port of Grimsby, in particular two trawlermen who had battled the North Sea, the cod wars, falling prices, quotas, Greenpeace forever on their backs. They were running out of money. They were married to a couple of sisters who wanted families but were forced back to work, one of them as a nursery nurse, the other as a barmaid.
Two years ago, a local man walked into the pub, sat at the bar and struck up a conversation with the wife serving him. His name was Aaron Flaxman and he told her he was looking for a boat to import ‘an assortment of stuff, mainly from Europe and North Africa’. Verbatim. The wife put the idea to her sister and within a month they and their husbands were smuggling cigarettes, booze, perfume, designer clothes, car parts – you name it, they carried it, all under cover of the family business, all on a small scale, while they learned the trade. Then one of them got greedy.
“One of the men, we think. The women would’ve kept it as a perfect business partnership, everyone with a theoretical say...”
“Like John Lewis, you mean?”
He gave that a moment before nodding. “Anyway, into the partnership hustles a man, late twenties, Liam Kinsella. The kind of man other men don’t want hanging round their wives, especially if they work away from home. Handsome, polite but not quite sure of himself, according to the wives. Looking for excitement. And he’d just inherited a pot of money which he couldn’t wait to invest. So, cut a long story short, three months later an OCC crime analyst reported that an English firm had blipped onto her screen and was due to bring in a job lot of heroin from Liepaja, a town on the coast of Latvia.”
I shrugged my ignorance of both town and country.
“Baltic Sea, once a fishing port, now a mixture of everything. Very Russian, very windy, very dirty. The heroin was worth 15 million quid on the street and weighed in at 220 pounds. That’s the size of an unfit copper.”
There was a pause as we both thought back to colleagues of that size we’d have cheerfully seen ground into powder and sold for profit.
Blackwell picked up his thread. If an English team was handling this haul, the analyst wondered, how would they get it back to Blighty? Charter or cargo flight, heavy goods vehicles, container ship, overland by horse and cart?
“You smile, but it’s been done,” he said. “This stuff hailed from Afghanistan, came up through Russia wrapped in a consignment of handwoven rugs supposedly bound for some poncy furniture store in Oslo. And, as the rugs arrived in Liepaja, so did our Grimsby trawler, ostensibly to refuel before heading home. Question then for OCC was how to elbow aside the Humberside Crime Squad, and when and how to intercept the
There’s a whole list of character traits I can’t stand, but phoney self-effacement is right at the top. It’s as bad as full-blown self-importance. People didn’t find themselves ‘washed up’ in the Organised Crime Command. They were a chosen few, picked for their skill, knowledge and effectiveness. Tom Blackwell had all three attributes in spades and was exercising them right now on me.
“Trouble is I’ve come in halfway through this particular caper ... near the end, really. My predecessor keeled over, couple of months ago. I’m the new boy.” He jumped sideways, an old-fashioned device for securing the listener’s attention. “Your office was always a jungle, Nathan. Who keeps this place so spick and span?”
I told him that a lady in the village came once a week to do stuff around the house.
“A cleaner, you mean?”
“My father’s ghost won’t allow me to call her that. What caper?”
He sat down at the end of the table again and nursed his drink. After a moment or two’s heavy thought, as if wondering whether to proceed or call the whole thing off, he asked me to picture the fishing port of Grimsby, in particular two trawlermen who had battled the North Sea, the cod wars, falling prices, quotas, Greenpeace forever on their backs. They were running out of money. They were married to a couple of sisters who wanted families but were forced back to work, one of them as a nursery nurse, the other as a barmaid.
Two years ago, a local man walked into the pub, sat at the bar and struck up a conversation with the wife serving him. His name was Aaron Flaxman and he told her he was looking for a boat to import ‘an assortment of stuff, mainly from Europe and North Africa’. Verbatim. The wife put the idea to her sister and within a month they and their husbands were smuggling cigarettes, booze, perfume, designer clothes, car parts – you name it, they carried it, all under cover of the family business, all on a small scale, while they learned the trade. Then one of them got greedy.
“One of the men, we think. The women would’ve kept it as a perfect business partnership, everyone with a theoretical say...”
“Like John Lewis, you mean?”
He gave that a moment before nodding. “Anyway, into the partnership hustles a man, late twenties, Liam Kinsella. The kind of man other men don’t want hanging round their wives, especially if they work away from home. Handsome, polite but not quite sure of himself, according to the wives. Looking for excitement. And he’d just inherited a pot of money which he couldn’t wait to invest. So, cut a long story short, three months later an OCC crime analyst reported that an English firm had blipped onto her screen and was due to bring in a job lot of heroin from Liepaja, a town on the coast of Latvia.”
I shrugged my ignorance of both town and country.
“Baltic Sea, once a fishing port, now a mixture of everything. Very Russian, very windy, very dirty. The heroin was worth 15 million quid on the street and weighed in at 220 pounds. That’s the size of an unfit copper.”
There was a pause as we both thought back to colleagues of that size we’d have cheerfully seen ground into powder and sold for profit.
Blackwell picked up his thread. If an English team was handling this haul, the analyst wondered, how would they get it back to Blighty? Charter or cargo flight, heavy goods vehicles, container ship, overland by horse and cart?
“You smile, but it’s been done,” he said. “This stuff hailed from Afghanistan, came up through Russia wrapped in a consignment of handwoven rugs supposedly bound for some poncy furniture store in Oslo. And, as the rugs arrived in Liepaja, so did our Grimsby trawler, ostensibly to refuel before heading home. Question then for OCC was how to elbow aside the Humberside Crime Squad, and when and how to intercept the
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