The Game

by Gerald Hammond

  So what have I missed.

  Look at it the other way round. Somebody gets something they wanted. So what have they got? Me, out of circulation? A red herring?

  A red herring. Hold onto that thought. Nobody looking at Millmont House? Nobody looking at Wallace? Both.

  Police pricking up their ears, sniffing with long, Hebridean noses. Sniffing around Millmont House. Mrs Heller starts worrying. What would I worry about in her shoes?

  Yes, but what else?

  Got it! If they’re checking on us, the trail would lead through me . . . Wallace . . . Mrs Illingworth . . . Donald of that ilk . . . and right back to dead bodies at Millmont House. Give them a temporary explanation for Wal’s absence and for my face and they don’t look for him in Lewis. They look for him in the Tay, and by the time he turns up again the scent’s cold.

  So Mrs Heller has a quiet word with Janet. Crafty bitch!

  And all I’ve got to do is to sit tight and pray to God that I’ve guessed it right. Otherwise I’m up to my ankles in clag, from head-first.

  ‘I have nothing whatever to say.’

  ‘Splendid!’ Enterkin said. ‘You heard my client, Chief Inspector. Now, if I can have a private confabulation with him, we’ll see if we can’t be a little more helpful.’

  Chief Inspector Munro sighed the sigh of a man surrounded by unco-operative fools and knaves. ‘Use this room,’ he said. ‘I’ll get myself something to eat. And while I’m out of the room I’ll be phoning Dundee. A car just like Mr Calder’s was seen at Broughty Ferry Harbour, so they’ve got a diver down. I shall be wanting to hear what he’s found.’

  ‘A real diver?’ Keith asked. ‘Helmet and boots? Not just a frogman?’

  ‘A real diver.’

  ‘Give him my compliments,’ Keith said, ‘and remind him not to fart.’ He hated to waste a joke.

  Chief Inspector Munro slammed the door pettishly behind him.

  *

  Keith waited inside the black cavern of his head. Without seeing it he could visualise Mr Enterkin’s expression because, when given food for thought, the solicitor would purse and protrude his lips as if giving the kiss of life to a dormouse. Keith forced one eyelid up a fraction. Yes. Just so.

  ‘You’d better tell me all about it,’ Enterkin said at last.

  ‘When I said that I’d nothing to say, I meant to anybody.’

  Enterkin grunted. ‘Munro’s just fishing for information,’ he said. ‘Throw him some tiddlers and he’ll let you go. Otherwise, if I push it to get you out of here, he’ll throw some kind of charge at you.’

  ‘But as long as I’m here, just “helping with enquiries”, nothing’ll get into the press?’

  ‘It shouldn’t,’ Enterkin said doubtfully.

  ‘I like it here,’ Keith said. ‘You get Molly to pop me in my tape-recorder, and then get on up to Dundee and make sure that the hotel staff remember that my face was already banged up before Wallace got there. But don’t lead Munro there. I don’t want out of here just yet, and we can always add vexatious arrest to the other writs, when Wallace walks in unskaitched.’

  ‘You’re sure that he will walk in?’

  ‘Sure beyond all reasonable doubt.’

  ‘That should be good enough for one of my calling. And you’re not saying anything until he does? I think you’re quite right,’ Enterkin said with quiet significance. ‘Tell me this, though. Am I working for you or for Millmont House?’

  ‘Good God!’ Keith said. ‘You’re not supposed to know about Millmont House. You’re a married man.’

  ‘Recently married.’

  ‘Before that, you told me that you had a “comfortable arrangement”.’

  Enterkin chuckled. ‘And so I did,’ he said. ‘No arrangement is as comfortable as one that’s bought and paid for.’

  Keith paused for thought. Janet knew well who would be called to act as his solicitor. ‘You know more than you’re letting on, don’t you?’ he suggested.

  ‘Just a little.’

  ‘Well, keep Munro on the hop. Serve writs on him. Not Habeus Corpus –’

  ‘Habeus Corpus doesn’t run in Scotland.’

  ‘Well, whatever our equivalent is, not that. Assault and defamation. But don’t push him so hard that he’ll bring charges.’

  ‘You do understand,’ Enterkin said slowly, ‘that if it came to court and you wanted me to testify on oath, I’d have to say that I saw you fall down on purpose.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Keith said. ‘But it won’t go that far.’

  *

  ‘At this time,’ Keith said into the microphone, ‘when changes in warfare had made the once unbeatable Brown Bess musket obsolete, Captain Patrick Ferguson perfected a rifle, loaded through the breech by way of a threaded plug which screwed downward when the trigger-guard was turned. The ease and speed of reloading, and the range and accuracy deriving from the tight fit of the ball to the rifling, gave this weapon superiority even over its American rivals.

  ‘However, Lord North’s –’

  Keith was interrupted in full flow of dictation by the arrival of Chief Inspector Munro in his cell. He fumbled for the recorder and switched it off.

  ‘Is there anything that you’ve decided to tell me?’ Munro’s hissing Highland voice asked.

  ‘You’ll be glad to hear that the doctor does not expect any permanent ill-effects. On the other hand,’ Keith said, ‘I shall carry a scar for the rest of my days, which will count against you when we come to court. Did they find Wal’s body in Broughty Ferry Harbour?’

  ‘I think you know very well that they did not. The car that was seen there has been traced. It belonged to one of Thomson’s subeditors, doing his courting. I am becoming surer by the minute that you did not kill your partner, so why do you persist in wasting my time?’

  ‘I’m not wasting it. You’re wasting it. Tell me what law requires a man to clear himself of a charge that hasn’t been brought if he doesn’t want to.’

  ‘Perhaps there is no law,’ Munro said. ‘I shall have to find out. But the only reason I ever knew for a man not to defend himself at all when he was innocent was because he had committed a different crime on that day. I have been looking over the reports of yesterday’s crimes. I do not suppose that you robbed a bank in Kelvingrove, and as for a rape in Peterhead I would not put it past you but we got the man. In fact, once we eliminate house-breaking, we are left with the two men who were assaulted and left attached to a tree. That deed has your hallmark.

  ‘The man who is in hospital has stated that he has no intention of making a statement. But we now know his identity, and his usual companion is of the same description as the other victim. When we catch up with him, it may be that he will make a statement.’

  Keith fingered his swollen face. I wouldn’t count on it, he thought. Sauce for the goose. He said nothing.

  ‘Your wife was more co-operative,’ Munro went on. ‘She allowed us to look in your car. Your gun had been fired.’

  ‘I took a shot at a pigeon before I left.’

  ‘And there was an empty cartridge in your pocket.’

  ‘I pick up my cartridge-cases. Cattle can choke on them.’

  ‘Is that how your partner died? It is all very interesting,’ Munro said. ‘I have just had a report. The man who is in hospital with the broken kneecap. There was shot embedded in the sole of one of his shoes. Number six, the same as your cartridge-case.’

  ‘That might be meaningful except that my cartridges are reloads. The numbers printed on them don’t mean a damn thing. And,’ Keith added, ‘if the silly sod makes a habit of fluttering out of the treetops he must expect to get shot at occasionally. He probably broke his kneecap when he crash-landed.’

  ‘Very funny,’ Munro said sadly. ‘There are other ways a man could get shot into the sole of his shoe. For instance, somebody might have taken a shot at him while he was down on his face. Crawling away, perhaps, with a broken kneecap.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Keith said. He
picked up his microphone.

  ‘Put that thing down,’ Munro said irritably. ‘You are not out of trouble by a long way. The one crime is not an alibi for the other. I don’t think you killed your partner, but I think that you committed the most grievous of bodily harm on the man with the broken kneecap. If you are helpful about your movements for the rest of the day we just might not encourage either man to make a complaint. Well? Have you anything to say?’

  ‘Quite a lot,’ Keith said, ‘but not on the subject you’re wanting.’ He groped for the switch and turned on his tape-recorder, and with the microphone in his hand he slid the button. ‘– corrupt and incompetent administration,’ he said with relish, ‘seeking only the greatest opportunities for personal reward –’ he heard Munro flounce out of the cell and the click of the lock ‘–preferred to buy mercenaries from German princelings. Only a hundred Ferguson Rifles were ever made, and when Ferguson himself was killed at Kings Mountain the military project was dropped although Durs Egg continued to build commercial models.

  ‘It has been said that there was no one cause of the loss of the War of Independence. That may be true. But, had the British Army been properly equipped, the American colonies might to this day . . .’

  Keith paused and put down the microphone. Satisfactory wording eluded him. He wanted to add ‘. . . have been ours for the milking,’ but his publisher was hoping for sales in the United States. He would ask Wallace. When Wallace came back.

  *

  Keith spent nearly three days in Newton Lauder’s cells, helping the police with their enquiries in as unhelpful a manner as he could manage. His only talking was into the tape-recorder. The rough framework of his book took on shape.

  The original contours of his face began to emerge. He could keep his eyes half-open for minutes at a time although, as he frequently pointed out, it was hardly worth the bother.

  From time to time he laid the microphone aside and went again over his logic. Wallace’s continued absence was worrying. He imagined Wal buried under the heather and Janet walking under a bus or running off with the milkman. His, Keith’s, position would be awkward, to say the least. But if ever he doubted his logic, Molly’s manner, whenever she came to visit, reassured him. Molly, although she tried to hide it, was highly amused, and she acted so like a Victorian heroine visiting the condemned cell that even the humourless Munro was caught smiling. Keith would have demanded an explanation; but he admitted to himself that if he had been in Munro’s shoes the visiting room would have been dotted with listening devices.

  By the evening of the second day Molly’s act was becoming strained, and Keith was worried.

  Chapter Twelve

  Late in the morning of the third day, Keith was turned loose. He was given neither explanation nor information, and the officers present seemed to be avoiding his eye. He was offered a lift home, but declined it. The action would not be at Briesland House.

  He crossed the square. His car was parked, crookedly, near the shop.

  In the shop Minnie Pilrig, the maiden lady who helped out in times of stress, was coping single-handed with a rush of four customers. She raised her eyes from Keith to the ceiling. Correctly interpreting the glance, Keith ducked out of the shop door and in at the next, and climbed the stair to the flat where he and Molly had started their married life. Here he found his wife and daughter, the two dogs and Janet, all listening raptly to the wanderer returned.

  Keith’s arrival seemed to be amusing.

  ‘Here comes the gaol-bird,’ said Janet.

  ‘I asked them if they’d keep you another year or two,’ Molly told him, ‘but they said they couldn’t afford to, the way you eat.’

  Keith stooped and patted the dogs, fawning around his feet. ‘That’s all very well,’ he told Wallace. ‘I guessed that the whole thing was a put-up job to keep Munro off your trail. But what the hell kept you? I suppose you’ve been living it up in some plush hotel while I was eating dried camel-dung and sleeping on concrete?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Wallace said, ‘I was. Have you eaten?’

  ‘Yes. They feed you early in the nick.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that. I’ll tell you my tale in the car. No point boring the girls with it again, and we’d better see Mrs Heller as soon as possible.’

  ‘You got something, then?’

  ‘Come on.’ Wallace almost dragged him out of the flat and down to the street. ‘Which car shall we take?’

  ‘Yours,’ Keith said. ‘I intend to get stoned out of my mind. I think I’ve earned it.’

  *

  As soon as Wallace had the car in motion, Keith said ‘Well?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘I suppose you realise that I was shitting bricks in there, in case you met up with Warrender and never came back and nobody believed Janet. Did you bump into Warrender, by the way? You don’t look marked.’

  ‘I’m not. I was a couple of days ahead of him, and I told you that I use my head. The chopper was picking me up at Millmont House anyway. Debbie Heller dug out a letter from Humbert Brown and we Xeroxed the letterhead and typed up an authentic-looking letter to Warrender, telling him to get the hell up to Lerwick where a man answering Don Donaldson’s description had been making enquiries about holiday accommodation on a remote croft. We added that the police were sniffing along his trail, so he’d better use another name.’

  ‘It could take him months to search the Shetlands,’ Keith said. ‘All those islands.’

  ‘That’s what we thought. So last thing when the chopper pilot dropped me, I told him to leave the letter at Stornaway Airport for Mr Warrender, and ask them to announce its existence over the loudspeakers every time passengers came in from the mainland. I gave him twenty quid to back it up with. And I’d asked Debbie to phone the harbours at Stornaway and Tarbert, just in case he crossed by ferry, and promise a reward if they’d approach every passenger with a bruised face and pass on a message to Warrender that the letter was waiting at the airport for him. I checked up yesterday, and the letter was uplifted. They said he’d gone back on the next plane. But I warned Illingworth’s mother not to trust him, just in case.’

  ‘You found her, then?’

  ‘I found her. When the chopper took me over we could see one or two faint lights around Bernera, but the brightest group was what seemed to be an hotel on the mainland of Lewis, not very far away. So I had the pilot put me down on the beach near there and I walked up. Sure enough, it was an hotel and the night porter gave me a room. He was waiting up for a fishing-party.

  ‘After breakfast I found a woman behind the desk. She was a hard-faced old bag but done up to kill in satin and high heels. So I asked her where I might find the Mrs Illingworth who used to live in Dundee.

  ‘She gave me a look like a basilisk with a slipped disc. “I’m Mrs Illingworth,” she said. “What the hell can I do for you?” Not in so many words, of course.

  ‘Well, that caught me flat-footed and I got a bad case of the stutters, so I excused myself and went for a couple of stiff drinks. They alter the clock to suit the licensing hours over there. I gathered from the barmaid – a very gorgeous barmaid in that tall, big-boned Highland style – that Mrs Illingworth owned the place. It had been her family’s ancestral home, and she’s spent the past years working it up into a sporting hotel. There’s some nice old guns on the walls – her husband’s, I suppose.

  ‘When I felt a bit stronger, I went back and tackled her.’

  ‘With all the aggression of a cornered bathmat?’ Keith suggested.

  ‘Probably. You see, I wanted to know something but I hadn’t the faintest idea what I wanted to find out. Anyway, I bought her coffee in the lounge. I said that I knew her son, and I was worried because he seemed to have gone off in a hurry and somebody seemed to be trying to set him up in his absence. I kept it vague but ominous. She loosened up a bit. Not much of a bit, but a bit. Over the next day or so, I dug out of her that Harold Fosdyke, or somebody who sounded like his twin, h
ad been around about a month before, asking veiled questions about young Donald. He introduced himself as Henry Foster, a friend of Donald’s childhood in Dundee, and she said that she did remember him from those days because he’d been fat then and he was fat still. So Foster’s probably his real name. But what if anything he’d found out she couldn’t think. There’d been nobody else. Young Donald hadn’t contacted her. He never did, although she wrote to him from time to time.

  ‘Well, we weren’t getting any forwarder. Foster had been over, snooping. Presumably he’d dug up something. But what the hell? And what had given Warrender the idea that there was anything to be learned in Lewis?

  ‘I had one thing going for me with the old biddy. Along with the house and some fishing rights and a place where some geese come in the autumn, she’d inherited a big stretch of hill and moorland. It had been hung up in a dispute with the Crofting Commission, but now it’s all free and clear and she wanted to know whether she could do anything with it. Like stalking and grouse.

  ‘Well, I don’t know a damn thing about stalking. I said Ronnie’d go over later and advise her.’

  ‘You don’t know a damn thing about grouse either,’ Keith said.

  ‘I know enough, and I went out to look at it. There were a few starved-looking grouse, and mile upon mile of ancient heather. Most of the ground sloped away from the prevailing wind, so I thought she was in with a chance. She’d been asking about rearing grouse and I explained that you couldn’t and didn’t need to. I told her about heather-burning and grit. I also told her about predator control and she said that she knew just the man.

  ‘Suddenly we were buddies, and she invited me into her private rooms for coffee. And as soon as I walked in I saw what Foster, if that’s his real name, must have seen. This is the bit that I didn’t tell Janet and Molly.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me either,’ Keith said. ‘Come to the point.’

  Without taking his eyes off the road, Wallace took a photograph, framed in leather, out of his inside pocket. ‘I don’t suppose she’ll notice it’s gone. She had a thousand like it, but only one of her.’