Silas Nash Book 1: Hush Hush Honeysuckle: Chapter 28

Max was meeting Nash at the station. He was in time to see the senior officer wrestling somebody further down the street. He heard the bloke asking for twenty grand. He took out his phone, held it up and pressed record.

‘Sandy, please.’

The man tried to move away from the wall Nash had pinned him against, and Max watched the detective grab him.

‘Get off me, officer, or I’ll scream.’

The man tried to run, but Nash refused to let go. ‘Why are you doing this? What did I ever do except love you?’

Max had seen enough. He ran down the street and grabbed Sandy by the shirt, slamming him against the wall. ‘I’m getting good at this, don’t you think, Nash?’

‘Is this the new boyfriend? You didn’t waste any time, Si.’

‘You nasty, unpleasant little worm. I was up the street and might not have caught everything, but the sound on my phone is exceptionally good. I can afford to buy good crap. What I saw was you blackmailing my friend, Nasher, here. Are we friends, Nash? I like to think we are. Semantics. I’m witness number one for the prosecution. My phone is witness two. You’ve already been in the jailhouse, as far as I could tell. I think you’re in trouble, my friend. If this piece of shit plays nice, can you make this go away, Nash?’

Nash nodded his head.

‘See? It all turned out nice in the end. Did you say you had a new boyfriend somewhere a long way from here? Give him our love, won’t you, knobhead? I think we’re done here.’ He gave the little snot rag a shake for good measure and let him go.

‘I’ll have you both done for this.’

‘No, you won’t,’ Nash said.

They watched him disappear. Max leaned against the wall with his hands on his knees, breathing hard.

‘I think I’m going to throw up. You are the only person apart from my previous relationships in the world that knows I’m gay,’ Nash said.

‘I feel truly blessed.’

‘If you’re just going to take the piss, you can shut up. I won’t bore you with my mess in future.’

‘No, carry on. My confessional is open for another three minutes until I get my breath back, and then we’re going for a pint and will go back to hating each other. Deal?’

‘Deal. Damn, why the hell am I confiding in you? Of all people. You. The thought of my ex-boyfriend being a prostitute on any level disgusts me, never mind anything else. I suppose I should be tested for something.’

‘Yeah. Suppose. Mate, you should be tested for everything. Bummer for you. Do you want me to come with you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Did you give him that graze on his cheek?’

‘Yes, when he was facing the wall.’

‘I’m not taking the rap for that, Hutch. Just so we know.’

And that was it. They were done.

Max moved down the street a few feet to the drain and vomited. ‘Sorry.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Apart from dying? I’ll live.’

He felt better, but Max had to admit that he was getting worse, and ramming the little rat against the wall had taken it out of him.

‘We’ve got two hours until the boys’ funeral. Are you well enough for it?’

‘If it helps to find the man who killed those innocent kids, I’d rise up from my coffin to be there.’

‘Dramatic, Jones.’

Max joined the briefing outside the church. For once, he felt pumped rather than sick.

‘Right, eyes on. Everybody pay attention. Jones, you worry me. You’ve had no reconnaissance training. I need you to be aware and scour every face in this pantomime. And that’s what it’s going to be. Everybody and his monkey will be out. We’re expecting most of the town outside the church and lining the streets. I need you to watch the crowd and know what their mood is. Most of all, I want you to do it with your head down and not draw attention to yourself. Reconnaissance takes years of training. Here’s your ten-second crash course. Eyes on. See everything. Listen to everything. Be observant, look, listen and find out what you can from clever conversation. Most of all, don’t be caught being observant. What I want is to know the person with no place being there. Somebody that’s being too helpful at the wake, getting in on the action too much. Saying all the right things but not feeling them. I want that gleam of joy in somebody’s eye. Got it?’ Nash said.

‘Yes, boss.’

‘No smart remark, Jones?’

‘Not this time.’

‘Right, everybody, going in. Please respect the family and those two boys at all times, but remember why you’re there. With the television cameras outside, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that our perp might try something today. Be prepared for anything, and if it all goes without incident, that’s a win. Team, around the perimeter. Undercover, get yourselves lost in the crowd. Jones, get in with somebody you know. You won’t be stuck for a choice. The church is heaving.’

Nash wasn’t wrong, and just about everybody Max knew was at the church. As far as he was aware, Mel didn’t know either of the families, but she was there, on the end of a pew a third of the way down the aisle. Given her penchant for theatrics, he was surprised she wasn’t front and centre. She wore a black pillbox hat—new—and a veil covering her face that made her look like a crazed killer. Her husband had the good grace to look uncomfortable, though that might have been the tie that was choking him, that he kept fiddling with. Max would have laid money on it that Mel had tied it for him. Windsor knot, big, showy. Mel saw Max and made hand gestures to get him over to them. She’d have had no qualms about moving the person next to Lawrence to make room for Max. He ignored her.

But he let out a sigh of relief when he saw a more friendly group to join. Jonathan, his wife, Emily, and Carter were in a pew towards the back of the church. He wanted to be on the end for a quick escape because churches made him uncomfortable, but he was glad when Nash squeezed in next to him. Lucy wasn’t with the family, and Max was pleased about that. This was far too heartbreaking for a little girl to attend. Emily explained in a reverent whisper that Lucy went to the same school as the boys. Carter was fidgety, and his dad had to tell him to calm down. It was his first funeral, and Max envied his youth and ability not to see the finality or sheer, miserable sadness of death. Carter asked if he’d be on television, and like any young boy would be, he was excited about seeing himself on the news. He nudged Max and whispered, ‘I’ve never seen a dead body before.’

‘Neither have I, mate. Good job, they’re in coffins, eh?’

‘Do they really go stiff and go blue when they’re dead?’

Emily leaned over and told them to shush, she glared at Max, and he grinned. Max loved winding the key in Carter’s back and watching him go.

At the other side of the church, Linda Lewis, Henry Watson’s personal assistant, sat at one end of the pew, and Max recognised Fiona, Jon’s sister, at the other. They looked like a pair of bookends. Max imagined them as painted novelties for sale in a shop. The artist would title the limited piece Delicious Mourning, and they would sell for a stupid price in craft shops around Windermere. People would show visitors their unusual bookends and call them charming.

Like Mel, they both wore black coats with hats and a small veil, but they wore them far less obtrusively and not as a fashion statement like Mel was doing. Most of the churchgoers were modern and opted to forego black in favour of clothing that wasn’t sombre as a celebration of the boys’ lives. Before the service started, Nash was humming a bloody tune, for Christ’s sake.

Max was aware of somebody trying to get his attention, and in a pew, on the other side of the church, he saw Hayley Mooney waving her order of service at him. Hayley was always smiling, and it was as though she wanted to now, not from a lack of respect but because it was her default mode. She kept her lips flat and her face closed. One smile from Hayley and the church would have been bathed in golden light over the two white coffins at the railings. Steve nodded at him.

Max risked a quiet look around. Jessica Hunter was there, and that voodoo woman. She was a strange one. He saw a lot of people he recognised. Most were acquaintances and people he knew enough to nod to in the street. Now, he looked at them again. He gave them the face of a child killer. The awful thing was that they all fit the part.

The funeral was the saddest thing that Max had ever been to.

It was sadder than Nanny Clare’s funeral. She’d had her life, and it’d been a content one. These little boys had never blown up a science lab or tasted their first beer. He would have donated the last months of his life to give those boys who were strangers to him their lives back.

He wondered how many people would attend his funeral. It would be nothing grand like this in terms of turnout. He made a list of attendees in his head and wanted to punch himself in the face because he’d let himself get distracted when he was supposed to be observant.

When everybody bowed their heads in prayer, Max looked around. He was startled when he turned and saw Jon with his head up looking right at him. Their eyes locked, and Max saw something shifting in his pupils. It looked like hatred. ‘Nice suit,’ Jon whispered, and Max jerked his head down to stare at his intertwined fingers. Emily shushed them like naughty schoolboys, and Max saw Carter’s shoulders shaking with silent laughter.

The wake was better for people-watching, and the finger food was fabulous. Everybody goes to a funeral for the buffet, the beer and the brawl at the end of the night. He saw Nash looking on. ‘We need a debrief before you go home tonight.’ Max walked past with a half-full plate to get some more of the excellent smoked salmon on crackers and said, ‘I can be sad, but I don’t have to be hungry.’ Nash was humming that bloody song again.

Linda was her usual walking efficiency, gliding around with a plate of vol-au-vents, and he took two on his way to the salmon. Mel was already tanked on sherry. He’d seen her take three over the course of half an hour. It was amazing what you saw once you opened your eyes and looked around. Carter’s aunt Fiona was insistent on comforting him, but he didn’t look as though he needed any comforting at all.

Max flitted between the grounds and the venue. He stood among hundreds of people, listening to conversations and picking up information that was of no use to the case at all. Jenny Ripley had new curtains in her lounge—maybe she’d used the old curtains for wrapping dead bodies. Colin Hyman had a market stall that sold vegetables from an allotment big enough to bury bodies in. He still had the soil under his fingernails. Fiona had a scratch on her neck and blamed it on Jon’s new dog. Peter Green just had an evil face. Everybody had something that stood out to Max if he looked hard enough.

‘I said to Jon, that bloody dog’s vicious. You should never have taken it in,’ Fiona told Molly Crompton.

Max took umbrage. Mia would never hurt anybody on purpose.

Molly said, ‘I made banana bread last night, but it had a soggy bottom.’ After two glasses of prosecco, how they laughed. Max nearly wet himself with the hilarity.

It was all just crap.

He wanted to sneak away from the mourners who were getting pissed. He wanted to talk to the dead boys. He needed to tell them how sorry he was for what happened to them and that he was a useless fool, but he was trying. He couldn’t do that. Both boys had been cremated. He looked at Jon and still couldn’t get his head around him being Nash’s prime suspect. His mouth was chewing a slice of buttered malt loaf, and Max wondered if their little bodies were burning as he chomped.

At some point, those kids would have been told, ‘Don’t talk to strangers,’ and that’s what he was, just a stranger. Max was a nobody. He had one fact to take to Nash, and it wasn’t an earth-shattering hypothesis. Nash would have worked it out for himself.

They knew him—Gareth and Jamie knew their killer.

When he saw Nash, he was still humming the same bloody tune. ‘What the hell is that?’ Max asked him.

‘What?’

‘That damn song. You keep humming it.’

‘Sorry. Wasn’t aware that I was. It’s a brain worm. 

‘Never heard of it.’