Sting in the Tail

by Gerald Hammond

  Sam was coming out of his sleep and making enquiring noises. Beth joggled him gently. ‘There wasn’t anything psychic about it,’ she said softly. She seemed to be speaking to Sam. ‘I didn’t know anything about faking bank cards. It just seemed very odd to me that anyone should bother to try to burn the kitchen table when, from what John said, the marks on the top didn’t seem to be as significant as all that. Of course, there might have been fingerprints that I didn’t know about, but there would be easier and safer ways of dealing with fingerprints than trying to burn a whole table out of doors where the smoke or the firelight might attract witnesses.

  ‘It just seemed to me that if there was something under the blood, there could be all sorts of reasons why he might prefer to burn the table. John said that the blood had begun to congeal before the table was moved, so that happened some time later. If he’d worn overalls or something during the murder and then got rid of them and cleaned himself up, whoever-it-was would then have to clean up a whole lot of blood to get at whatever was underneath, probably getting all bloodstained again, or else carry the table outside and burn it. In his position, if I was strong enough or had somebody to help me, I think I’d opt for burning.’

  ‘It wasn’t a very heavy table,’ the Sergeant said.

  Beth nodded. ‘He just ought to have risked sticking around to make sure that it burned.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said the Sergeant. ‘I’m going to look a real wally, because I sort of hinted that I’d deduced that the card would be there and I’m going to have to show myself up as a bit of a chancer. Well, it’s my own stupid fault and I dare say that I’ll be able to live it down by the turn of the century. What about the van? Can you show me some way to redeem myself?’

  ‘All I did,’ Beth said, ‘was to think how it would be. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘No,’ said the Sergeant.

  ‘Oh. Well, look at it this way. If I was going to have a liaison with somebody – which I’m not,’ she added reassuringly in my direction, ‘– somebody who lived not far from home and a bit back from the road, and if I didn’t want everybody to know all about it, I certainly wouldn’t walk to his house oftener than now and again, usually after dark. And just as certainly I wouldn’t drive my own car to his house every day. What I’d do would be to buy an old car or van. Probably a van, because I wouldn’t be so visible inside it. I’d buy it cheap or steal it and I’d tuck it away up some forestry track or in an abandoned barn. Then I could leave home in my own car, go to where I’d left the van and drive on from there in it, wearing a false beard and a big hat so that nobody seeing me whizz by would get a proper look at me. That way, both the visitors could be the same man, which is much simpler and somehow less immoral than imagining him having two different homosexual lovers.’

  Beth spoke without embarrassment on her own part but she was beginning to embarrass me. ‘Should you be saying these things into Sam’s ear?’ I asked her.

  Beth smiled serenely. ‘Bless him, he doesn’t understand.’

  ‘He understands more and more each day.’

  ‘Well, I’m almost finished. I wouldn’t want to be seen driving off in the same direction every day. I’d want to be able to drive off along either road and still come round to my hidey-hole. That’s why I suggested that you should search around the whole triangle.’

  The Sergeant knuckled his own forehead. ‘Obvious,’ he said.

  Sam yawned and stretched and then began to whimper. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ Beth said. ‘This chap wants his feed and a dry nappy and, unlike the police, he isn’t going to be fobbed off with glib explanations.’ She got to her feet but stood looking down at the photographs on the table. ‘May we keep those copies?’

  ‘One moment.’ After a hasty search the Sergeant made one substitution. ‘There! Those are duplicates. But unless you want my blood on your hands, don’t let the DCI know that you’ve got them.’

  ‘We promise,’ Beth said. ‘And, to complete the set, could we have a copy of the one he showed us of the tail? Pretty please, to quote from a policeman I know.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ The Sergeant, I was amused to note, was now completely under Beth’s thumb. He searched again. ‘Here’s another duplicate. It shows the tail after a start had been made to cleaning it up.’

  Still looking down, Beth said, ‘I thought so.’ She seemed to have taken root.

  ‘She’s not going to make another leap into the unknown, is she?’ the Sergeant asked me.

  ‘Very probably,’ I said. ‘When she gets that fey look and dons her gypsy headdress, prepare to register amazement.’

  Beth seemed to ignore our frivolity. She was absently joggling Sam and her attention was on the photograph, but I thought that she was secretly flattered. ‘I was sure that there was something funny about the markings when we saw the earlier picture. But it was obscured by the blood and dirt. Now that you can see it properly . . .’

  The Sergeant laughed. He put his finger on the photograph. ‘Is that all?’ he said. ‘We did manage to notice that one for ourselves.’ I saw that among the liver and white markings was a streak of a more purplish colour. ‘The outside door that leads to the kitchen had just been freshly painted. Unfortunately we don’t know exactly when the work was done. But we found corresponding marks in the paint and some white hairs adhering, so it can be taken as certain that Clarence brushed against it on his way in. He didn’t have much of a tail to brush it with on his way out, poor devil! That, I suppose, is why his tail was cut off.’ The Sergeant stopped, stretched and took a drink. ‘What a relief! I couldn’t have borne it if Mrs Cunningham had got there first again. We policemen do have our pride. It would have driven me mad.’

  Beth looked at him rather oddly. ‘Why would that paint mark make somebody want to cut the tail off?’ she asked.

  ‘Because it proved that Clarence had visited the house.’

  ‘But why would that matter?’

  The Sergeant opened his mouth to speak. I was sure that he was about to suggest that Clarence’s visit had to be kept secret because the cruel attack on his tail might bring down the wrath of both the SSPCA and a loving owner, but just in time he saw the fallacy and closed his mouth again. Clarence’s tail could hardly have been cut off in order to conceal the place where his tail had been cut off . . . ‘I just gather facts. It’s not my job to explain them. We don’t know all the ins and outs of it yet,’ he said feebly.

  ‘No, you don’t, do you,’ Beth said. ‘John, you’d better tuck those photographs out of sight in case Hannah comes in here. Dinner in about twenty minutes.’

  She carried the now squalling Sam out of the room.

  The Sergeant seemed to relax. Apparently there was nothing threatening about me. ‘Clever woman, your wife,’ he said musingly.

  ‘One tends to forget it,’ I said. It was the truth. Beth looked so young and her manner was so modest that it was easy to think of her as the airhead which she certainly was not.

  ‘Attractive, too. But I don’t know that I’d want to have somebody so bright around me all the time.’

  ‘You get used to it,’ I told him. ‘In fact, she doesn’t usually let it show. Do you think you’ll be able to explain yourself tomorrow to the satisfaction of Mr McStraun?’

  The Sergeant turned a shrug into a stretch. ‘Given a little luck and some quick thinking. But it’s not easy to pull the wool over his eyes. He makes the same sort of half-intuitive leaps as your missis, with the same cat-like knack of landing right way up.’

  While Beth was present, I had felt inhibited about discussing the late Mr Ricketts’s possible homosexuality, although Beth herself would probably have joined in without a blush. ‘What have you found out about him?’ I asked.

  The habit of indiscretion had become ingrained. The Sergeant spoke out quite frankly. ‘He was healthy. From witness testimony and the evidence in the house, there’s nothing to confirm or disprove whether he was in fact gay. When the pathologist’s final report com
es through we should know more. All he could tell us from a preliminary examination was that there was no sign of recent sexual contacts.’

  ‘So the regular visitor can’t have been a lover?’

  ‘Who knows? Love and sex don’t seem to be inseparable. There are traces of the presence of a woman. Of course, one dark, female head-hair might have been carried in on somebody’s clothes just as a white dog-hair could have been carried into the van, but how it got onto the hairbrush that he kept in his hall is more difficult to explain. Along with minute traces of face powder under the hall mirror it’s certainly suggestive.’

  I thought back. It had been impossible for an army officer to remain unacquainted with some of the facts about homosexuality. ‘Assuming that he wasn’t bisexual,’ I said, ‘he may have been the passive partner?’

  ‘You think that it might have been his own face powder? As far as I know, none was found.’

  ‘It could have been taken away,’ I said. ‘And don’t forget that human female hair is used in the better class of wigs.’

  The Sergeant frowned. ‘There’s no sign that he was transvestite.’

  ‘They can be very secretive about it, even when they’re quite open about their sexuality. And very clever at hiding their alternative garb.’

  ‘The house has been searched,’ he said slowly. ‘But you’re right. We can do it again. And I’ll ask whether the hair seems to be fresh.’

  He seemed so relaxed and open that I decided to push a little further. ‘Wouldn’t you say that the signs are beginning to point away from Charlie Hopewell?’ I asked. ‘If he killed Mr Ricketts for chopping off Clarence’s tail, which is unlikely enough to start with, he wouldn’t have carried off the materials and the machine for forging bank cards.’

  The Sergeant’s face resumed its official mask. ‘That’s not for me to say. He might have decided to profit from an unforeseen opportunity. But we’ve agreed that somebody else could have come along and decided to help themselves to an easy source of revenue.’ He got to his feet. ‘It’s time that I wasn’t here. Thank you for the drink.’

  When he had left, it took Beth only a minute or two to wrest from me every word that we had exchanged after she left the room. She seemed to find in them some significance that I had missed. I thought that she was probably bluffing, but the arrival of Hannah prevented any further discussion.

  Chapter Nine

  We were granted another day of comparative peace and quiet. I had convinced myself that the assault on Clarence and the murder of Jason Ricketts had been one-off events, possibly connected, and that no threat was posed either to my dogs or to the Hopewell family.

  I was anxious to forget the whole business, but I noticed that Beth, who seldom sat down between dawn and the end of the working day, was spending time at the kitchen table, thumbing through the boxes in which our photographs were collected in the hope that some day one of us might get around to sorting them out and sticking the worthwhile ones into an album. She seemed to have something on her mind. When I asked her what was wrong, she was evasive, but her face, usually carefree, was thoughtful.

  On the Wednesday morning, Isobel and I were putting the younger dogs through the rabbit pen one at a time to teach them steadiness under temptation. Between training commissions for other owners and our own pups remaining unsold beyond our somewhat optimistic ‘Sell-By Date’, we sometimes had more dogs in training than could comfortably be managed, while still giving individual tuition, without resorting to production-line methods. So Hannah was fetching the dogs from their runs while Isobel and I took it in turn to walk them through the pen, sitting them on command or with a check-lead whenever a rabbit bolted. The latter event was becoming a rarity as the rabbits learned that on no account were they going to be chased. On the last point, they were deluding themselves. I had a feeling that it would soon be necessary to eat the present incumbents and restock the rabbit pen from the wild with the aid of the local ferreter.

  I had just come out of the pen and was lavishing praise on a pup who had got it right for the first time when Hannah returned, dogless but with a message from Beth. Mrs Bell had been on the telephone and would I call her back as a matter of urgency?

  There were only two young dogs still awaiting their turns, so I left them to Isobel and hurried indoors. A phone number in Beth’s neat writing was on the pad under the cordless phone in the hall.

  The ringing tone only sounded twice before the phone was snatched up. Mrs Bell’s voice gabbled a number and I gave my name.

  ‘Oh, Mr Cunningham. I didn’t know who to tell. I’m at Mildred’s house. The police are next door, at Mr Hopewell’s. I asked them what they were doing, but all that I could get out of them was sight of what seems to be a search warrant. They didn’t break in or anything, I think they got the key from Mrs Haven. I didn’t know what to do or who to call—’

  ‘I’m coming over,’ I broke in. ‘But do you know who Charlie’s solicitor is?’

  ‘Hold on a moment.’ There was a pause and muffled voices as though she had covered the mouthpiece. ‘I asked Mildred. He bought the house through Gillies and Fairbrother in Dundee, just as she did. They handle most of the houses around here.’

  I broke off the call. Luckily I had had dealings with Bill Fairbrother. He had bought a trained spaniel from us and later had pursued an unpaid debt through the Sheriff-Court on our behalf. I had his number handy and by shouting at his telephonist I got through to him. I compressed the subject into about fifteen words and he caught on immediately. ‘I’ll see you there,’ he said.

  I gave Isobel and Beth an even terser explanation, hurled myself into our car and drove off.

  There was single-lane traffic on the bridge as so often before. Instead of taking my usual advantage of the reduced speeds to admire the spectacular view, I fumed and fretted my way across and down onto Riverside Drive. For the first time in years I wished that my poor old estate car was capable of more than a dignified if noisy sixty.

  I drew up at last in front of Mrs Turner’s house. There were two police cars in front of Charlie’s house and I recognized Bill Fairbrother’s sports car further along the street. The more brazen neighbours were finding excuses for lurking in their front gardens; others were watching from their windows. This was not net-curtain territory.

  Bill himself was turning away from the front door as I cantered up the path. He shook his head at me before either of us had said a word. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve done all I can, but they have a perfectly valid warrant.’

  ‘Can’t you find out what it’s about?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ve as good a chance as I have, probably better. I have no real status. For all I know, he may have consulted some other solicitor since we last worked for him. I’m sorry, Cunningham, I really am, but I’m a broken reed.’

  I know when somebody else is beaten. ‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘How is . . .’ After a moment I remembered his dog’s name. ‘. . . Gainly?’

  Bill assured me that Gainly was doing very well, a prodigy among dogs, and went back to his TR7.

  A stout constable stopped me at the front door by the simple expedient of filling the doorway with his bulk. ‘Nobody is to be allowed in,’ he said.

  ‘Is DS Waller in there?’ I asked.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  I find that the best way to get answers to questions is to keep asking them, refusing to be diverted into answering questions myself. ‘Is DS Waller in there?’

  ‘Why do you want him?’ It was a good sign that the constable had shifted ground slightly.

  ‘Is DS Waller in there?’

  The constable looked angry but also confused. ‘Yes, he’s in there,’ he said curtly.

  ‘Please tell him that John Cunningham is here and wants to speak to him.’

  The constable, pleased to have a chance to resume his authority, smiled thinly and shook his head.

  I raised my voice. ‘Detective Sergeant Waller!’ I was pleased to discover that
my parade-ground voice, trained to get through to a company at a hundred yards, upwind and in a gale, had lost none of its quality. I could hear echoes coming back from the houses and then from the hills.

  Very few seconds later, Sergeant Waller erupted from the front door, blinking. ‘What the hell?’ he demanded.

  ‘You took the words out of my mouth. In Mr Hopewell’s absence and on his behalf, I want to know what the hell’s going on,’ I said.

  He shook his head at me almost as loftily as the constable had done. ‘No way,’ he said.

  ‘All right. Is Detective Chief Inspector McStraun in there?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspectors don’t search houses. They have minions like me for that.’

  ‘While they lounge on silken couches, I suppose, eating grapes from the fingers of scantily clad WPCs?’

  He refused to be diverted. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.’

  ‘I think I’ll go to his office. Or is he at Nearn House? I could do with a grape and I want to see him anyway to discuss the paint on Clarence’s tail. And the photographs thereof.’

  He came down off his high horse in a hurry, grabbed my elbow and hurried me out into the street. He wanted me to get into one of the panda cars, but I had no intention of being seen being bustled into a police car. I led him to my car and we sat down in privacy.

  ‘You bastard,’ he said furiously. ‘You promised!’

  ‘That was before you started gate-crashing my friends’ houses while they’re abroad. But I shall keep my promise,’ I said, ‘if you’ll just tell me what the hell’s going on. I thought we’d agreed that Charlie was ninety-nine per cent exonerated.’