Dead game, p.11
Dead Game, page 11
part #1 of Keith Calder Series
‘That’s me.’
‘Are you some sort of a “private eye”?’
‘I’m acting as one. I’m a gunsmith by trade.’
‘Oh? You must look at his guns for me before you go.’ She sounded bored, as if that departure might not be far distant, but Keith noticed that her posture was always a mirror-image of his own. ‘I don’t know how I can help you.’
‘No more do I,’ said Keith. ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have to bother people and ask questions. Does the name David McNeill convey anything to you? One of your husband’s friends, perhaps?’
She shrugged. ‘If he’s the man I’m thinking of, my husband brought him to a cocktail party here several years ago. Tall, with a beaky nose and not enough chin?’
‘That’s the man,’ Keith said. ‘I believe he’s in the building business.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘But my husband didn’t usually cultivate anybody who wasn’t in building.’
‘Remember anything about him, or anything your husband said?’
‘Ron said he was a bully, but that he collapsed if you stood up to him.’
Keith nodded. That had been his own impression of McNeill. ‘What about Andrew Payne?’ he asked.
‘What does he look like?’ she asked after a moment’s thought.
‘Tallish, wrinkled, bald, always beautifully dressed.’
She nodded. ‘We met him at some reception or other. One of those pompous professional affairs with people wearing chains of office. He seemed rather sweet. I was going to ask him to dinner but Ron vetoed him. He said that if I’d shaken hands with Mr Payne I’d better count my fingers. And he said that Payne was one of those people you could turn your back on or not, it didn’t matter, he’d just as soon stab you in the front.’ Mrs McLure seemed to enjoy recounting her late husband’s more slanderous comments.
‘Derek Weatherby?’
‘Doesn’t ring any bells.’
‘Janet Weatherby?’
‘I don’t know the name.’ She raised her eyebrows.
‘She’s only about sixteen anyway,’ Keith said with a smile. ‘What about Hamish Thomson?’
‘That’s the man that brought her back.’ She pointed her toe at the springer bitch. ‘He needn’t have bothered.’
‘Sir Peter Hay?’
‘Invited him out that day. It was the first time I’d ever heard of him. Then he came to pay a duty call. Nice old boy, but thick as a plank.’
‘Ron Fiddler?’
‘Isn’t that the man they’ve arrested?’
‘Yes. Had you ever heard of him?’
‘I couldn’t forget a name like that. No, never.’
Keith took her through the names of the shooting-party. Apart from William Hook, who had been to dinner the year before and whom she had disliked intensely, she said that she had never met any of them and as far as she was aware her husband had met them for the first time at the shoot. Keith had an acute ear for the truth in a woman’s voice, and recognised it in hers.
‘How would you describe your husband?’ he asked.
‘Did you ever meet him?’
‘Yes. But he had his social face on.’
She laughed. ‘You’ve met him all right,’ she said. ‘That sounds just like him. A social face, a business face, an enemy’s face, the face of a husband or a lover or a friend. A multi-faced man. He could put them on and take them off to suit himself. Like a hat.’
‘And behind all the faces?’
She sighed deeply. On a bustier woman it might have been interesting, but it did nothing for Keith. ‘I never saw behind the faces. When I thought I was seeing behind, each time there was just another face but not a real person. The only characteristic that came through that wasn’t assumed was . . . inconsideration. He didn’t give a damn for anyone else’s wishes unless it suited some damn purpose of his own. He was a good provider, though – I’ll say that for him. Would you like a drink?’
‘Something very small.’
‘Help yourself, and make me a Martini.’
Keith did as he was bid. The glasses were Edinburgh crystal. The stock of drinks would have been worth the price of a thousand cartridges. ‘Did you fancy going abroad?’ he asked as he poured.
‘Not a lot, no,’ she said. ‘He had a sudden opportunity – overall consultant to a new capital city, with a chance to build an enormous new practice of his own. Money and power galore. So he was busting to go immediately. I didn’t really want to go out there – one of these new African states, all sweat and sandflies probably – away from my friends and civilisation. But we agreed that he’d go out first, and I’d fly out and join him for a bit, and if I thought I could tolerate it I’d come back and see to the house and so on. I was quite willing to give it a fair try.’ Keith recognised that the last statement was either a lie or a self-deception.
‘I’m afraid the problem seems to have been solved the hard way.’
‘It does, doesn’t it,’ she said. ‘Well, it may seem a hard thing to say, but perhaps better now than after we’d uprooted ourselves.’
The callousness of the remark would have been shocking except that Keith had already decided that, of all the hard women that he had known, she came within the top three or four.
He was saved from any need to reply when the dog wheezed in her sleep. ‘That was his dog, of course,’ Mrs McLure said. ‘Would you like to take her?’
‘She’s quite valuable,’ Keith said. ‘She works well. You should sell her quickly – it’s a good time of year.’
‘There’s no pedigree with her. Nobody wants an unpedigreed and unregistered bitch. Anyway, she’s been down in the dumps since he died. Nobody’s interested in a lackadaisical gundog.’
‘Why doesn’t she have a pedigree?’ Keith asked.
‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps she was the result of an accidental mating.’ And Keith was quite sure that this was a lie.
‘Did he have any particular men-friends?’
‘Not intimates. Just men who were in a position to be useful to him, at any given time.’
‘Girl-friends?’
He could see the struggle between the woman-of-the-world taking pride in her permissiveness and the woman who could not bear to admit that any man might prefer any other woman. ‘If he had any, he’d hardly discuss them with me,’ she said at last; and even that obvious statement failed to ring true.
‘Did he have his own secretary?’ Keith asked.
‘At the office, yes.’ She smiled sardonically. ‘I chose her.’
Keith decided that he would visit the secretary when next he was in Edinburgh. A secretary would be more likely to know about a boss’s amours, which might provide some motive; and she might also know about any affairs in which Mrs McLure was indulging. He, himself, could not imagine any man killing in order to obtain the slim and chilly widow for himself, but there might be such a man.
‘Did you know any of his shooting cronies?’ he asked.
‘He brought one or two of them back for drinks occasionally. Boring people, and never the same one twice. I wouldn’t even remember their names.’ Keith judged this to be true.
‘Will you marry again?’ he asked loudly.
He had hoped to detect some flicker of expression that might give him a clue to whether there were any loves in her life, but her immediate reaction was to apply the question personally. ‘Is that an offer?’ she asked.
‘I might do worse,’ he said laughing.
‘You might not do at all,’ she said. But she crossed her legs, and she must have known that those low chairs did not allow legs to be crossed in short skirts unrevealingly.
‘I doubt if I could afford to keep you in the style you’ve become accustomed to.’
‘You have a point there,’ she said. But before he left he bought one of her husband’s guns and some loose gear, and when she saw the thickness of his wallet she brightened, and there was warmth in her invitation to return if he had any more questions.
*
Before leaving Edinburgh Keith found a phone-box and compared diaries with his sister. He went for a snack in a small café, and returned in time for his call to Molly.
She answered on the second ring, and they chatted for a few minutes. She seemed to have adjusted to the strain, and Keith was happy to listen to her voice.
‘Do one thing for me,’ he said. ‘See Mr Enterkin in the morning. Tell him that McLure was hearing an arbitration, A. Payne and Company against Lothian Flooring. Got that? It may be the A. Payne who was on the shoot. Ask him to find out all he can about it.’
*
Keith drove north through the night with the radio playing. As he crossed the high arch of the Forth Road Bridge he was listening to Kabalevsky’s piano concerto Youth, and then he became interested in a talk on astro-physics which kept his mind occupied for much of the length of the M90. But the talk gave way in due course to the Brahms variations on a theme by Paganini. At the second repetition of the tedious chords he shut it off.
In the near-silence, and under the hypnotic influence of the advancing lights, his mind turned to a train of thought which he had been avoiding.
Why, he wondered, had the police been so shy about investigating the question of who had converted the rifle? The fact that Mr Enterkin had warned him, in Munro’s presence, against answering any questions should not have prevented those questions being asked.
Acting Detective Chief Inspector Munro, Keith thought, was likely to follow a line of reasoning which ran:
I have a body with a bullet.
I have the rifle that fired that bullet.
The rifle belonged to the accused, was reported lost, but turned up again still in his possession.
In the interim, it had been converted from a conventional deer rifle into a folding and silenced rifle suitable for poaching and other naughtinesses.
The accused is a stalker by profession and has no need to poach, but he might be a spare-time poacher for money or for the sake of the challenge.
The conversion was carried out by a skilled metal-worker. Who?
The most probable culprit is Keith Calder.
Calder may have been the intended victim, but when the rifle was lost they were still on speaking terms.
Why did Enterkin advise him not to say whether or not he did the work? If Calder admitted converting the rifle, the defence could make some advantage out of the admission.
Do I care who did the work? Yes, I do. Very much.
Firstly, the knowledge might help to prove the case against Fiddler.
Secondly, offences have been committed. The insurance company was defrauded, and the Firearms Act smashed to smithereens.
Thirdly, I do not like registered gunsmiths who convert honest rifles into unregistered, silenced, folding weapons. Such people should not hold dealers’ licences.
The gun looks like new so the work may have been recent, in which case traces may be left in the culprit’s workshop.
But if the work is recent, it was done after they quarrelled.
Damn.
Either way I still want to know.
So I think we’ll just take another wee look in Mr Calder’s van and see if we can’t match any traces.
At this stage in his thinking, Keith began to get seriously worried. He was not afraid that traces might be found, for he was exceptionally careful when engaged in matters of doubtful legality. He had disposed of all off-cuts, and had swept the van out thoroughly and several times. But why, oh why, had Munro not been after him or the van before now?
In Perth, Keith stopped for a cup of coffee, and he and Hebe stretched their legs and relieved themselves. Then it was north again and the last stretch. Keith tried the radio again. Stravinsky was sampled and left to pulse in the ether unheard.
It was almost the first time in Keith’s life that he had felt other than completely self-contained and self-reliant. It would be nice, he thought, to be able to share this worry with someone close. The life of a loner was losing its charm.
Was the prosecution reserving a challenge, to throw in his face during cross-examination of the defence’s expert witness? If so, the substitution of a different expert would be a disappointment to them. Keith occupied himself for a minute in considering possible nominations for the alternative expert, but his nagging mind came homing back, like a tongue to a sore tooth.
Next, Keith tried putting himself in the place of Munro who, in his turn, was putting himself in the place of Enterkin. What would Munro think Enterkin thought were the most desirable shades of truth to the defence. Keith thought about it until he almost ran into the back of a lorry.
It was a relief to arrive at the van and to find two patient constables waiting beside it in their panda car. With great politeness they presented a warrant, and for the third time the van was searched. This time, the police knew what they were looking for, and samples were taken of materials. They also vacuumed every corner of the van. Then they thanked him politely, accepted a cup of coffee apiece and drove off.
Keith went to his bunk and slept easily.
Chapter Nine
Another grey, misty day, and Keith set off north again in the van, cheered by the laughing melodies of Weber.
His usual tour of customers in the north and west was a leisurely and sociable affair, business being well diluted with the pleasures of shooting, drinking and chatting with old friends, and dalliance with his ‘comfortable arrangements’. This round would usually extend to two months – or even more, depending on the weather, the availability of game for the bag and the comfort of the arrangements.
On this trip, however, Keith intended to complete his circuit in a quarter of the time, by concentrating mainly on business, or at the least by confining his pleasures to the hours when business was not available. He made a few shooting forays, mainly wildfowling trips on the firths, but while these were both fruitful and (to a case-hardened hunter prepared to rise long before winter’s dawn and brave the mud-banks and a wind with the breath of the arctic) enjoyable they were primarily aimed at making contact, on their own ground, with the most industrious gossips in the shooting fraternity. These contacts were mostly unproductive, discounting a vast volume of scurrilous allegations quite unrelated to his enquiries, and only on one occasion was he given food for thought.
On the shore of the Cromarty Firth, within sight of the giant aluminium complex, Keith was ready to go back to the van for a late breakfast. Three geese were already in the bag, and Hebe was away after another which was hard hit but had gone on away over the sands, first planing and then running. Keith was not displeased with his outing, although the omniscient chatterbox he had hoped to meet had not made an appearance. While he waited, Keith fell into conversation with another fowler, a man he had not met before, and who was on holiday from a small town in the Strathclyde region – ‘to get away from the wife’, as he put it.
This man went by the name of Hardy, and lived up to it too, Keith thought, since his upper half was clad only in a khaki shirt and that with the sleeves rolled up. He rose to the bait as soon as Keith mentioned that he had been present at a shooting fatality.
‘Down by the Borders?’
‘That’s right.’ Keith managed to sound surprised.
‘I saw it in the papers,’ said Hardy. ‘Funny, somebody else I know was on that shoot. Bill Hook.’
‘Muscular sort of chap? Big wheel with one of the district councils?’
‘That’s him all right. He lives quite near me. My wife’s friends with his.’
Keith had made this kind of second-hand contact on previous occasions, and it had never produced anything more useful than a little shading-in of the background; but at least he had learned how to keep people talking. ‘Seemed a nice, reliable sort of chap,’ he said.
Hardy snorted. He had a long chin and a short upper lip, so that his mouth seemed to be climbing up his face as he talked. ‘I can’t stand him. Or her. Matter of fact, I can’t thole any one of the three of them.’
‘You saw that there’d been an arrest?’ Keith asked.
Hardy nodded. ‘It’ll be manslaughter, I suppose?’
Keith shook his head. ‘They’ve charged him with deliberate murder. I think it’s a load of nonsense, myself. Matter of fact, being a gunsmith to trade, I’ve been consulted by the defence . . .’
At this point the subject became mislaid, as Hardy wanted a free consultation as to the cost of having his gun tightened and fitted to him, and having a number of dents removed. As Hebe chose this moment to return, mudstained and exhausted but happy, with the now dead goose in her jaws, Keith suggested an adjournment to the van.
Over a breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast and coffee – the kind of breakfast, in fact, that spells heaven after a morning’s fowling – Hardy agreed to help if he could.
‘I don’t think I can be much use to you,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you this, for some months Hook’s been a worried man.’
‘What about?’
‘Well, he wouldn’t tell me, would he? But a friend of mine who’s a surveyor says that he was playing patsy with McLure for years, and the fraud squad people who’re chasing down corruption are looking at him pretty hard. I think he might have been glad to see McLure where he couldn’t let any cats out of bags. What do you think?’
‘If he did it, I can’t see how,’ Keith said.
Breakfast over, Keith tightened the action of Hardy’s gun and removed the dents for him, and was careful to get paid for the work before producing another gun in visibly sounder condition and a much better fit. After the customary period of haggling, Keith accepted a cheque for a substantial cash adjustment.
Hardy went on his way, a happy man, and Keith gloated alone over his new acquisition. It was a Dickson Round Action, and after a little more cosmetic work would be almost the most valuable gun in the van.
*
In a late afternoon, and in a deserted quarry near the shores of Loch Lochy on the Caledonian Canal, Keith was tired, sick of the smoke from the nitro-powder, and half deafened. This last effect annoyed him most. He was still subject to moods of divine discontent coupled with a sense of insecurity. He had searched out from his collection of tapes those that cheered and comforted him most – Schumann’s Carnival, the Lanchberry ballet music and tape after tape of Haydn and Mozart and of Beethoven in his jollier moods – but the music that was lilting from the van’s speakers was marred by a singing in his ears and a loss of sound in the higher frequencies.
