Adverse report, p.10
Adverse Report, page 10
part #12 of Keith Calder Series
‘That doesn’t sound too good,’ was all I could find to say.
‘It isn’t. It could be the start of a minor landslide. So let’s see if we can’t do something towards reversing the previous bad press. Tell me everything that happened at your end.’
I gave him a detailed account of my experiences since the ambulance had hauled him away, omitting only my lovemaking with Alice Nicholson although I think that he guessed it from my placid reaction to his news. He listened with a still intensity which I found disconcerting.
When I had finished – rather lamely, in view of my omissions – he thought for a moment and then asked, ‘Did you drop off the films at Penicuik?’
‘We can pick the prints up on Monday,’ I said.
‘On your way back from Knoweheid Farm. Duffus said we could see the place, remember, and I can’t bend this leg to get into a car.’
‘But . . .’
‘Deborah can go with you,’ he said firmly. ‘She’ll know what to look for. Who was the man the dog snarled at outside the pub?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said weakly. ‘I was too interested in watching the dog. There was a Saab parked further along and I think the man got into that.’
‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Always watch the dog. He can tell you a whole lot more than you can see for yourself. Nobody’s ever been able to work out for sure how much stronger a dog’s power of smell is than a man’s, but a thousand times is a reasonable guess. When you were clearing up at Tansy House the other day, did you go through with the vacuum cleaner?’
I stared at him, looking, I suppose, like an idiot. ‘I did,’ I said. ‘But what’s that got to do with anything?’
‘What you’ve told me,’ he said patiently, ‘suggests very strongly that, if there was a substitution of cartridges, it was done at Tansy House. But the necessary tools to re-crimp a cartridge were also there. If somebody was going to enter and swap cartridges, why not do the tampering there as well? But shot is easy to drop and damned difficult to pick up again. When you Hoovered the study, did you hear a plinking sound?’
‘I did. Would that have been lead shot?’
‘I expect so,’ he said. ‘Were there any other signs?’
‘What sort of signs?’
‘I could guess, but I’d rather you remembered for yourself. Think, now. Did everything that you saw seem to have a rational explanation?’
‘Good God, no!’ I snorted. ‘Look round any house and you’ll find odds and ends, broken bits of this and that, which nobody but the occupants could explain. I haven’t thrown them out yet. I’ll bring you over a carton to look through.’
He nodded, not at all put out. ‘Don’t forget whatever’s left in the waste-paper baskets,’ he said.
His words triggered my memory. ‘There was something in the bottom of the waste-basket in the study,’ I said. ‘A half-moon of cardboard. Not even a half-moon, more the shape of a fingernail paring. Was that the sort of thing?’
The grin came back at last, all over his face. ‘You see what you can do when you try!’ he said. ‘We’ll make a detective of you yet. Did you find the piece of cardboard it had been cut out of?’
I thought back. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But there was a flap missing from one of the cardboard boxes I was using to collect things in. Does it mean something?’
He was still grinning. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘That’s exactly the way to talk to him,’ Deborah said. She came out of the french windows behind her father, carrying with some difficulty a tray loaded with several pistols and boxes of ammunition. ‘He’ll go on being all mysterious and enigmatic until you challenge him.’
‘Well, I’m challenging him,’ I said.
Keith threw up his hands. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘It just seems such a waste of time explaining things. It seemed to me that, whoever he was, he’d know that his effort and the risks he’d taken would be in vain if anything about the cartridge was noticeably different after his work on it. So he’d want to put the shot back, to equalise the weight and so that it would rattle. Even a factory-loaded cartridge usually has enough looseness to let the shot rattle. If he’d substituted a solid or a plastic explosive for the propellant powder, he would have solved one problem. Another powder would be easier to fit into the case, but then he’d have to separate it from the shot so that it wouldn’t mix through and possibly even start drifting out of the crimp. A proper cartridge has a thick wad to cushion the shock and to seal off the gases, but he wouldn’t want to give up some of his space for the explosive. So he’d probably use a card wad. And if he cut it out on the spot . . .’
‘He’d have to trim it to size,’ I finished for him.
‘Exactly. He carried away the rest of the piece of cardboard but missed the small trimming.’
‘And now that that’s settled,’ Deborah said, ‘let’s get down to a little shooting.’
‘You take too much on yourself, my girl,’ Keith said severely. ‘We haven’t finished.’
Deborah was quite unabashed. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What did you still want to say?’
Keith scratched his ear. ‘Until we get the analysis back, I’m not sure that there is anything more to be said.’
‘Yes, there is,’ I said. ‘Why did you expect, or want, my uncle to have some shot in him?’
‘Oh, that! I thought it was obvious. Somebody could have been careless among the rabbits and shot him dead. So they could have faked a different accident to cover up the negligence. But apparently not. Now, Deborah. Fetch the target frame and set it up against the wall and we’ll do a little shooting.’
*
For the next hour Keith sat at ease, occasionally taking a shot from his chair at the rank of targets or demonstrating some point about loading or handling. But for the most part he was happy to watch benevolently while leaving me at the mercy of his daughter.
That young lady was a protracted explosion of information. She knew her facts. In her view I needed to know them. And I was going to be force-fed with them or we would both die in the attempt. She was also an extremely competent shot. Under a bombardment of instruction I fired automatic pistols, revolvers both single and double action and, just for the sake of variety, the occasional shotgun or rifle, from every position short of standing on my head, until I felt that I was achieving, if not skill, at least a modest competence.
Molly at last gained me a respite by bringing out a tray of afternoon tea. (She also made me feel like a fumbling amateur by casually picking up a large revolver and hitting a swinging can six times from the hip.) By that time I was exhausted and, despite the ear-protectors, going deaf, and my mouth was foul with the taste of gunsmoke. But I had also decided that my next thriller would contain real guns . . . and a dedication.
We had finished our scones and were sipping the last of the tea when Keith looked up and said, ‘Trust a Highlander to smell when the kettle’s on.’
A uniformed superintendent of police was approaching from the front of the house. He was a bony, gangling man with a long face set in lines of despondency (although Keith told me later that he had once heard the superintendent laugh). He seemed to be known to the family. Molly gathered up the tea-tray and departed to make room. I stood to be introduced to Superintendent Munro.
‘What brings you out this way?’ Keith asked. ‘My accident? Or have the neighbours been complaining about our shooting on the Sabbath?’
‘Your neighbours are beyond earshot, as you very well know,’ the superintendent pointed out, ‘and some target-practice by a certificate holder on his own premises is neither here nor there. The matter of your accident I will happily leave to my men, in the hope that justice may be done. No, I came, for once, to seek your advice.’
His tone made it clear that he wished to speak with Keith alone. Deborah wanted to take me off to the coach-house to hear how shots indoors differed from those heard outside, but Keith stopped her. His left wrist was taped, but he managed one-handed to check that each pistol was unloaded, and while he did so he spoke to Munro.
‘Is it anything which Mr Parbitter shouldn’t hear?’ he asked. ‘If there’s any running around to do while I’m laid up, he’s doing it.’
Munro weighed me with a glance. ‘You can keep a confidence?’
‘Without any difficulty,’ I said.
‘What I’ve to say is not for publication, not without I say so. You understand?’ And without waiting for an answer, he went on. ‘I have your book about the McSween case. There was a small error about police procedures, but it was a competent job. When next you want information about police organisation in Scotland, telephone me.’
Scotland, it seemed, was full of critics. But helpful critics.
Keith snapped the cylinder back into the last revolver. ‘Right,’ he told Deborah. ‘Take them upstairs and clean them.’
‘You could have trusted me,’ she said coldly.
‘I know I could, Toots. But there’s no harm being doubly safe. Any time I’ve done the checking I won’t resent it if you check again.’
She gave her father a relieved smile, picked up the heavy tray and vanished through the French windows. Keith’s eyes followed her. So, I must admit, did mine. That girl was developing a walk which would turn heads within a year or two.
When I returned my attention to Munro, I saw that the superintendent was looking embarrassed.
‘I am in some difficulty,’ he said to Keith. ‘While I know exactly what you will reply I do not yet know what I am going to say.’ I looked at him but he was perfectly serious.
‘Tell me what I’m going to reply, then,’ Keith said. ‘That may be a start.’
‘Very well. You will say what you have said in the past, that the police are against private ownership of guns and are trying to reduce the numbers in private hands by making it difficult and expensive for the individual to buy or keep them. You will tell me, for the twentieth time, that the Firearms Act permits but does not require us to inspect the ground on which a rifle is to be used and that we do so only to inflate the costs of the system and of the issue of a certificate, and so to ration their ownership by cost and bureaucratic inertia – I think that those were your very words – all of which I will deny with my dying breath. And you will go on to say that the controls over the private citizen are administered by officers who often know less about firearms than the citizens concerned.’
Keith was grinning. ‘All right. I’ve said all that. What am I replying to?’
‘You have not finished yet,’ Munro said severely. ‘You will say that the citizen has a right to protect himself and that if he waits for the police to come to his aid he is likely to receive too little help and too late. You will go on – because you always do go on – to point to the instances when a trained police officer has shot an innocent person and to suggest that such cases outnumber the accidents occurring with firearms in private hands.’
The superintendent paused for a deep breath before resuming. ‘You will probably add that firearms should be kept out of police hands and that the military should be called on when armed force is needed.’
Keith’s grin had vanished. ‘Would I be wrong?’ he asked.
‘That is neither here nor there. You will only have dragged it in as an irrelevancy and because you can never resist the grinding of axes. You will also say that I have a bloody nerve – because you use that sort of language – asking for your help when one of my officers is in deep trouble over the use of a firearm.’
‘And what will you say to that?’
‘I shall apologise for having wasted both our times.’ Munro moved as if to get up.
Keith laughed briefly. ‘You devious old Hebridean bastard!’ he said. ‘You know that I can’t say any of those things now that you’ve said them for me. You’re talking about the aftermath of the robbery at Haliott Castle?’
‘I am,’ Munro said, settling back in the garden chair. He saw that I was baffled. ‘You did not hear about it?’
‘Scottish news gets very little coverage in the English media,’ Keith said. ‘It was the week before your uncle’s death. I only know what was in the Scottish papers and you can’t trust a reporter to get more than his own name right, if that. Tell us about it, Munro.’
‘Very well. Haliott Castle, you must understand, is nearer Edinburgh but falls within the Borders Region and my Division.’
‘It isn’t a proper castle,’ Keith put in. ‘More of an old fortified farmhouse.’
‘Aye, that is so. And fortified it may have been,’ Munro said, ‘but fortifications are no protection if folks will open their doors to a knock late at night. Lord Haliott was at home, with his family and three servants.’
‘There’s no Lord Haliott,’ Keith said irritably.
Munro looked surprised and mildly shocked. ‘That is how he is always known.’
‘Not by me. He’s Donald Farquhar who used to own the chain-stores. There was a Victorian convention that the owners of certain properties could style themselves “Lord”, but the Lyon King of Arms would never recognise them and if they tried to take a seat in the House of Lords they’d be slung out on their ear. At the most, he’s Farquhar of Haliott.’
Munro sighed and plodded on. ‘Be that as it may, there were eight folk in the place when the gang of four arrived, armed with three pistols and a sawn-off shotgun. The telephone line had already been cut. A manservant tried to make a fight of it and was killed, almost blown in half with the sawn-off shotgun. With that example before them, the remainder of the household did as they were told and were tied up and left on the floor of the hall.
‘The robbers moved without haste and seldom spoke above a whisper. They knew exactly what they were looking for and where to find it. The folk were bound with unnecessary savagery and lay there all night until the grieve found them in the morning.’
‘The grieve is the farm foreman,’ Keith told me.
‘Aye. One of the servant girls is in the hospital yet. The gang left with some paintings and other valuables and a large collection of jewellery belonging to the lady.’ Munro paused, perhaps expecting Keith to tell him that the wife of Farquhar of Haliott was not a lady, before going on.
‘They left no clue behind them and we had little to work on, although the MO suggested that this was the work of a gang which had carried out four other robberies in the past eighteen months. Next day, however, there was an anonymous ’phone-call to tell us that some of the men we wanted could be found at an address in Edinburgh.
‘Because of the killing of the manservant, the Regional Crime Squad had been invoked; but we were acting in close liaison with them and one of my constables who had been first to enter the castle was acting as a scene-of-crime officer. It was no more than a matter of routine to send him to witness the arrests and to agree the list of any property recovered.’
Keith had been listening intently with his eyes, half-closed, looking vaguely at a distant treetop, but now he brought them back to Munro. ‘The papers were giving his name as Allerdyce until the whole mess became sub judice,’ he said. ‘Would that be a youngish man, fair-haired, with an unusually gentle manner for a policeman?’
‘It would,’ Munro said.
Keith nodded. ‘He was sent to do the routine comparison of guns in stock with the books. He seemed more open to reason, and even a wee bit more knowledgeable, than most of your men.’
‘He’d been on the firearms course.’
‘I know about that course,’ Keith said. ‘Once a week for six months he’d go and spend the day queueing for a gun, queueing for ammunition, queueing for a chance to shoot, about fifteen minutes – if he was lucky – in being told how to point the gun and damn-all about how to handle himself in action.’
The superintendent surprised me by nodding slowly. ‘There is something in what you say,’ he agreed. ‘Be that as it may, although the Crime Squad was in charge they required the consent of at least an assistant chief constable of the local force before firearms could be issued. In my opinion, a handful of armed officers could have done the job, but the only available ACC is a cautious man and he would not give his consent without being satisfied that there were enough armed men present to conduct a full siege. Three men to go in, two cordons and a support unit.’
‘That’s a lot of men to assemble in a hurry,’ Keith said. ‘They’d have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.’
‘They did. There was no doubt who would be the leader and his number two in entering the house, they were both experienced men who had done such work before. Other men of experience were needed to head the other teams. When it came to picking the third man for the raid, it emerged that my man was young, fit and recently trained and he was invited to volunteer, in terms which made refusal difficult if not impossible.
‘The raid, you understand, was timed for three in the morning.
‘Sledgehammers were available, but it had been decided to enter by stealth if possible in the hope of overcoming any resistance before it began. The front door was not bolted and the leader was able to slip the latch and cut the chain without arousing anyone in the house.
‘Once inside, the leader and his number two checked the ground floor.
‘My man, Allerdyce, was left to guard the stair. He took up a position near the top, from which he could see both floors. He heard sounds from the downstairs room but took it that the others were hunting for weapons. He described the scene to me and I can well imagine it. A house silent but for occasional sounds which might have come from below or above. Waiting, wondering who or what might come at him and whether he would move fast enough to save his own life.
‘When it happened, it was with the suddenness of a mousetrap. At one moment there was nothing. He heard a sound and there was a figure at the stairhead. He could make out few details in the dimness. He swears that he thought he saw a gun, but he may have imagined it, or be imagining it now, or be inventing it to justify his action, I just do not know. He swears that his revolver went off without his conscious volition. The person above him was thrown back against the wall, lived only long enough to say the word “Basket!” and then fell forward on top of him and they tumbled down the stairs together. When his colleagues pulled him out, the other was a girl and she was stone dead.’
