‘Or anybody,’ the voice said with a tremor of laughter. ‘I’ll arrange it. Come up in about half an hour. Is that your friend? I can only see the top of his head . . .’ Keith leaned away from the mirror. ‘Thank you. Isn’t he good-looking.’ Keith leaned back towards the fireplace, hurriedly. That kind of comment from that kind of person made him nervous.
There was a faint click as the audio system switched off ‘You mustn’t mind her,’ Wallace said. ‘She just can’t break the habit. Do you want the last sandwich?’
‘I do, but you can have it.’ Keith drained his glass. ‘Remind me to find out which pub this came from – they keep it well. Now, I want to look over the rest of the place.’
The bathroom was just a luxurious bathroom with bidet and shower. The cosmetics and bath-salts seemed to be of high quality in wholesale packs. The kitchenette was well-stocked with convenience meals of luxury standard. In the main room, one cupboard held an excellent selection of wines and spirits, and a miniature safe with a slot-shaped opening in the top. Another cupboard was almost filled with clothing, and contained a laundry basket that was more than half full. ‘The laundry bill must be astronomic,’ Keith said.
‘It was, until we bought the laundry.’
‘You should own a lingerie factory as well.’
‘They do.’
Keith flipped through the contents of a third cupboard, which were personal to the usual occupant of the chalet and therefore of no interest. Or so Keith thought.
There was little in the chalet to indicate its usual purpose. The hard-core cassettes racked beside the television set and its accompanying video-recorder could, he decided, have been matched in many private houses. Beside the bed was an expensive transistor radio in an alligator-skin case.
As they went out, he looked at the door. It had no keyholes at all. They pulled it shut behind them. ‘Leave the car here,’ Wallace said. ‘It’s as easy to walk.’
*
Their path, which was too narrow for a car, led through the ubiquitous shrubs. The planting, Wallace explained, had been one of the attractions of the estate, but even so had been added to over the years. ‘Most clients prefer complete privacy,’ he said. They crossed another side-drive. A discreet marker pointed to Chalet Fifteen, another to Tennis Court Three. Through the trees, Keith glimpsed the court where two girls were locked in grim battle. The standard of tennis looked very high.
‘As I said, men like fit girls, not fat girls.’
‘Tell me about the girl in Chalet Sixteen,’ Keith said.
‘Hilary? Her real name’s Morag, or something like that. Comes from the West Highlands somewhere.’
‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ Keith asked.
‘I think it is. I get the picture of a girl reacting against an over-strict upbringing. Blonde.’
‘In other words, you don’t know a damn thing about her?’
‘Not a lot,’ Wallace said.
Nearer the house a J.C.B. was working on a large excavation. ‘Swimming-pool,’ Wallace said. ‘They’ll put a roof over it next year. Well, it all adds to the value of the property.’
The house was some Victorian baron’s vision of Scottish vernacular architecture, all stone with crow-stepped gables and occasional turrets, but it was well proportioned and in very good order. Their approach led past a yard where a dozen cars stood, mostly of models far beyond what he would ever be able to afford. ‘They have this many clients so early on a Tuesday?’ Keith asked.
Wallace paused and looked ‘The Rolls is a client,’ he said ‘Must be left over from last night. The Mini belongs to Lord . . . well, I won’t tell you his name. He’s almost permanently resident here. The family pays all the bills, just as long as he stays well out of their way. The rest of the cars belong to the girls. They don’t take them down to the chalets. It puts the clients off to see another car already outside the door.’ They walked on. ‘Most of the pocket-money goes on cars and jewelery,’ Wallace said. ‘And clothes. Then they can take days off and go on the hunt. A good-looking girl in tweed and pearls and a Ferrari, going to the races or the golf on her own, has a damn good chance of taking up with a rich man, even a rich husband. You’d be amazed how many men have no idea of their wife’s past history.’
Keith thought. No, he knew all about Molly’s past.
In the hall behind the classical entrance, at a desk dwarfed by mahogany panelling and vast oil-portraits of fierce looking gentlemen, the porter was using a carefully correct voice to the telephone while punching the keys on a small console and at the same time watching a high-level video-screen. Beside him stood a battery of television monitors, all of them blank. ‘Miss Lillian will be pleased to receive you at nine-thirty,’ he said. ‘Chalet Seven. Thank you.’
‘You’ve got a computer?’ Keith said incredulously.
‘Best way to keep track of who’s to be where when,’ Wallace said. ‘It’s only a mini, and it’s leased.’
‘You don’t have to explain it to me,’ Keith said. He saw that a small dining-room and a smaller bar led off the hall. ‘I was trying to think what this place reminded me of It’s like the better sort of man’s club.’
One of the monitors flickered on. A girl whose beauty was entirely on display was crossing her room, quite unaware of the intrusion of male eyes. Charlie, the porter, touched a switch. ‘Summink wrong, Miss Ursula?’
The girl was unperturbed. ‘For Christ’s sake, Charlie,’ she said, ‘I only farted’ Her voice could only have been Cheltenham-and-Girton.
‘No you never,’ Charlie retorted. He made a note in a big diary. ‘You slammed the bathroom door. If you could fart loud enough to throw the switch you’d be on real television. An’ you better get a move on. If your next gentleman’s on time, you’ve got six minutes.’ He switched the system off and winked ‘Farted, indeed! Mind you, I could have believed it of some of the others.’
*
When Debbie Heller came to the door of her office behind the reception desk, Keith was in no doubt about her identity. Her red-gold hair was as Wallace had described it, and her deep, musical voice was as he remembered – almost perfect, but marred by a vestige of Glasgow’s glottal stops. (He could be sure now, with the real thing fresh in his ears.) She added up to a woman of overpowering but apparently unconscious sexuality. Her face was soft but her eyes were observant and very sharp. She gave Keith’s hand a lingering shake, and kissed Wallace on the lips. ‘Hilary will be here in ten minutes,’ she said. She sounded positive.
Her office was elegant, sober and respectable as the rest of the place. The chair in the middle of the haircord carpet was the twin of the other except for a matching tartan chairback or antimacassar which Keith lifted off Underneath, the leather was palely stained.
‘He tried to wipe it off,’ Keith said, ‘but somebody lost a hell of a lot of blood. You’d better call the cops.’
She locked eyes with him. She reminded him of a girl he had once known. No, that was wrong. She reminded him of every girl that he had ever known. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘An hour or two can’t matter. Give us your conclusion first.’
‘You’re wasting time.’
‘I’ll pay you for yours.’
Keith shrugged, and saw Wallace watching him with malicious amusement. ‘All right,’ Keith said. ‘But we’re only duplicating what they’ll do again and better.’
He knelt down and probed the hole in the chair’s high back. The style was old but the construction modern, and he kept pulling out shreds of foamed plastic. As he worked he could hear Wallace describing their researches in Chalet Sixteen. ‘There’s no patch in here,’ he said at last, sitting back on his heels. ‘That’s a small wrapping, to make the ball a tight fit in the barrel. It must have stayed in the wound. Or he could have recovered it afterwards. He probably ripped up his own handkerchief I take it that you haven’t found a hole cut out of a curtain or such?’
‘Now, Wal, you sit down.’ Wallace sank into the chair with a certain relucta
nce. ‘You’re average size,’ Keith said, ‘or slightly above. On the safeish assumption that the victim was neither a giant nor a dwarf and was firmly seated at the time, the shot went through his neck. From the blood, it seems to have hit one of the big blood-vessels. My guess would be that he’d be unconscious from that moment, and dead in less than half a minute.’
‘The neck’s a poor sort of target,’ Wallace said. ‘And you’d expect him to aim where there’d be the least blood spilled.’
‘If he aimed for it. He may have meant to shoot for the head, and squeezed the pistol with his whole hand, as he might with a shotgun, instead of just using the trigger finger. That’d make him shoot low.’
Keith, for some reason of his own, was examining the chair’s wooden arms when a knock, timid and respectful, came at the door. Mrs Heller called to come in.
The newcomer was a brown-eyed blonde, tall and tanned, dressed, Keith thought, for attending the grouse moors by Bentley rather than for amorous commerce. Her face was pleasing but unremarkable. Her figure, in conformity with the local mode, was delicious; and her voice, like Mrs Heller’s, was almost perfect, the only perceptible trace of her origins being a gentle, euphonious cadence that suggested to Keith, as it had to Wallace, the Western Highlands. Keith held a chair for her, and she looked at Mrs Heller before she accepted it.
Mrs Heller sat down behind her desk. It was a big desk, almost bare of papers, but it confronted two big video-screens. ‘Tell us all you know about the chair,’ she said. ‘In fact, tell us all about Sunday evening.’
Miss Hilary moistened her lips and gripped her alligator handbag until her knuckles whitened. She started to speak, and paused to clear her throat. Keith thought that she was scared of Mrs Heller, and not without reason. Keith was beginning to appreciate that under a girlish shell was a formidable lady. ‘I’d had a visitor in the afternoon,’ she said. ‘As I told you, I think everything was all right then. At seven, I was with Annette in Chalet Fifteen. We had two gentlemen, and they ordered dinner down from the kitchen. They had two bottles of claret with dinner, but, honestly, Annette and I only had a glass each.’ She paused.
Evidently, Mrs Heller was adept at reading the signs. ‘What else?’ she asked ominously.
‘The men smoked a little pot. Leis an fhirinn innseadh.’ she added hastily, lapsing for a moment in her anxiety, ‘I took only one puff, just to be sociable. Truly.’
Mrs Heller looked severely at her. ‘You know I don’t like the girls to indulge,’ she said. ‘They didn’t get it from you?’
‘No.’ Miss Hilary looked terrified ‘Definitely not.’
‘All right, then. What next?’
‘I took my one back to Number Sixteen. He called himself Don Donaldson, but that’s not his real name. You can tell, when they’re slow to answer. I think he had a good time,’ she added modestly.
‘Anything unusual?’
‘No. He was straight.’
Mrs Heller sighed ‘I didn’t mean in bed Did anything unusual happen?’
‘Nothing at all. He thanked me politely and asked if he might stay and doze until his friend was ready. Well, I’d had his friend before, and he’s a slow starter. I had a late appointment – a musician who sometimes comes after the clubs shut, if he’s in the money. So I spoke to Bert, and Bert said to use Chalet Four, and I did, and I stayed there all night.’
‘And yesterday?’
‘I had a three o’clock appointment and I’d slept a bit late. I cleaned up in Number Four, came up here for an early lunch in the dining room and went back to Sixteen. I changed the sheets and dusted out and so on, and I was just away to take my shower and get prettied up when I noticed that the cloth was missing off one of the chairbacks. I thought that maybe Donaldson had taken it as a souvenir, some of them do the damnedest things. The other one was a wee bit –’
‘A little bit,’ Mrs Heller said.
‘– a little bit greasy, so I lifted it off to take up to the housekeeper and get two clean ones. I saw the stains and the hole so I called Peter and he came and took the chair away and I was just ready in time for my visitor,’ she finished breathlessly.
‘Number Fifteen’s usually empty,’ Mrs Heller said ‘Why did you use it on Sunday?’
‘Bert told us to. Annette said that she had another appointment just before, and she mightn’t have time to tidy up. We needed two chalets. Bert said to use Fifteen.’
Mrs Heller raised her eyebrows at Keith and then at Wallace.
‘When you got back to Sixteen on Monday,’ Keith said, ‘was the door shut?’
The girl nodded emphatically. ‘Peter had to let me in. It’ll be in the book.’
‘Did you notice a smell?’
‘Cigarette smoke. Don must have smoked two, because there were two stubs in the ash-tray. Tobacco, not pot. I left the door open and put the fans on while I tidied up.’
‘And you’re absolutely sure that both cloths were on the chairs the day before?’ Keith asked.
Miss Hilary looked at him with gentle reproach in her cow-like brown eyes. ‘I’ve already told you so. I always straighten them when I tidy the room, and I always straighten the room after a visitor, and I’d had a visitor during the afternoon.’ She turned to Mrs Heller. ‘It was the gentleman whose wife always pays for a visit here on his birthday.’
Mrs Heller raised her eyebrows again. Keith shook his head. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Wait outside. No, on second thoughts, when’s your next appointment?’
‘Not until this evening. Tuesday’s always quiet.’
‘Then go downstairs to the hairdresser. Get your hair done. Your parting’s beginning to show. After that, be available. And keep your mouth tight shut.’
‘Yes, Mrs Heller.’ Keith could have sworn that, on her way out, the girl almost curtseyed.
Debbie Heller looked at Keith. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Either you call the police, or you forget it.’
‘Tell me why.’
‘Because you still can’t be sure, and while you aren’t sure you can still pretend it never happened. You see, there are two possibilities. One, somebody was shot.’
‘And two?’
‘Two, somebody wants you out of business. Could that be to anyone’s advantage?’
Mrs Heller frowned, creasing an otherwise lovely brow. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it could. You mean we’re being framed?’
‘It’s possible. The girl, Hilary, couldn’t have mistaken black-powder-smoke for cigarette smoke. The carpet didn’t seem to be stained. And your microphone system would surely have come on.’
‘What do you think happened, then?’
‘I don’t think it happened,’ Keith said patiently. ‘I’m just offering you your last excuse to forget the whole thing. Suppose that somebody with the necessary skills drew off a pint of his own blood, or somebody else’s for that matter. In digging out the ball, you spoiled any chance of proving whether it was shot into the chair or pushed in through a stab-hole, and I made it worse probing for the patch. Suppose he splashed the blood around and mopped it up again, pinched one of your chair-back things, and beat it.’
For the first time, Debbie Heller smiled Keith could well see what Wallace might once have seen in her. ‘I like it,’ she said.
‘Don’t get to like it too much,’ said Keith.
‘Why not? It fits the known facts and explains the missing ones.’
Wallace, who had sat quietly in the background, decided to speak up. ‘Because the police haven’t arrived yet. That’s what you mean, isn’t it Keith?’
Mrs Heller pursed her lips. The smile was quite gone. ‘You mean, there was no point in framing us unless the fuzz were tipped off? So he could be giving us a day or two to incriminate ourselves? I don’t think I like that thought very much. Yet your friend thinks there’s a doubt . . .’
‘I think there’s room for doubt as to whether anyone was shot in that chalet. Are you sure you want to know any more? You cou
ld still get rid of the chair and forget it.’
‘I wish that we could, but we can’t.’ It was as if the attractive young woman had never been. Her eyes were hard and sharp, her manner decisive. She was a sexless decision-maker packaged in a chocolate-box shell. ‘If somebody’s out to get us we need to know. And if there was a murder, a fatal accident or a suicide on our premises which somebody tried to cover up, I want to know it. Murder seems the most likely, and I could neither condone it nor take the risk of covering it up.’
Keith nodded. He could have bowed, and she knew it. ‘Is the same type of chair in general use?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the colour of the tweed?’
‘The same,’ she said. ‘It makes for easier housekeeping.’
‘Then,’ Keith said, ‘we’d better think some more. I never could picture your client taking down the pistol, loading it and then waiting for somebody to come in and sit down. But if he were going after somebody else, it makes sense. He loads the pistol, walks to another chalet and does the deed. He doesn’t want a hue and cry. So he covers up his traces, and those that he can’t he scatters around so that the explanation is harder and later to arrive at. He swaps the chairs between the chalets, mops up the blood with the tweed cover that has the hole in it, and bungs it with the body into the boot of his car.’
‘Two theories,’ Mrs Heller said. ‘And apart from the non-arrival of the police, not an Israeli foreskin to choose between them. Or is there some evidence I don’t know about yet?’
‘I’m afraid there is,’ Keith said. ‘I held it back to give you a chance to back out with a clear conscience. Take a look at the back of the chair.’ He showed them the outline of what seemed to be a faint shadow down the side of the chair. ‘If you stand back and look at it,’ he said, ‘it seems to outline where the tweed cloth and the man’s shoulder might have been. It’s almost certainly part of the pattern of burned gunpowder particles.’
‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Heller said mildy. ‘So there was a shot. And if there was a shot, the whole thing isn’t a frame-up?’ She pressed a switch on the small console on her desk. ‘Charlie, I want the log-book for Sunday and a print-out of appointments for the same period. Pronto.’
The Game Page 3