The Game

by Gerald Hammond

  Keith studied the photograph, puzzled. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said.

  ‘Imagine her with fair hair.’

  Keith called upon the sacred arsehole of St Bilda, the second from the left. ‘So that’s why she fancied the guns on her wall,’ he added. ‘Childhood memories.’

  *

  Mrs Heller’s reaction was framed less imaginatively. ‘That’s the wickedest thing I’ve ever come across,’ she said.

  ‘What is?’ Keith asked carefully.

  ‘I’ve known men come here for a variety of wacky reasons, but this is the first time a man hated his family so much that he’d come here and pay to screw his own sister.’

  ‘Yes, I thought we might be at cross-purposes. I think you’re looking at it upside down,’ Keith said.

  ‘It explains why he might kill the man who found out.’

  ‘It doesn’t explain why he’d take a boyhood friend along with him, if he didn’t want him to know. Look at it this way up. Illingworth had lost touch with his family. He got an occasional letter from his mother, but never replied He wouldn’t recognise his own sister, not with fair hair; she’d have been a child when the family split up. Then a boyhood acquaintance who had something to gain from getting Illingworth under his thumb goes over to Lewis to see what he can find out. And the luck’s running his way. He sees a photograph of Illingworth’s sister, and recognises her as a high-class –’

  ‘Tart,’ said Mrs Heller.

  ‘Thank you. Foster’s got what he wants. He looks up Illingworth, renews old friendship if that’s what it was. There’s no secret about Illingworth’s mode of life. It wouldn’t be difficult to tempt Illingworth into making a date for a visit here and then to book a particular girl for him.’

  ‘His sister? So that he could be blackmailed?’ For the first time, Mrs Heller sounded truly shocked. ‘I was right. That really is the lousiest trick I’ve ever heard of But don’t rush ahead too fast. We haven’t established a motive. Humbert Brown have shown an interest, but we’ve no evidence of a connection between them and Foster.’

  ‘We’re assuming Humbert Brown,’ Keith said. ‘Do they have a motive for getting Donald Illingworth under their thumb?’

  ‘By God they do!’ Wallace said.

  ‘Then phone them,’ Keith told Mrs Heller. ‘Ask to speak to Henry Foster on urgent business. See what they say.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s worth a try,’ she said. She used her intercom to tell the duty porter to place the call and then sat with her fingers drumming on the handset. ‘So,’ she said. ‘As we see it, Foster wanted a hold over Illingworth and found out that Hilary was his sister. He realised that the two of them wouldn’t recognise each other. So he brought him here, encouraged him to drink himself stupid and blow some pot as well, and threw him at her. Then he tried to apply the pressure. It was too much for Illingworth, who killed him and is now hanging about abroad, waiting to see what happens. Is that about the size of it?’

  ‘That’s about it,’ Keith said. ‘There’s room for variation here or there, but it’s a good enough working hypothesis for the moment.’

  She scowled, making a travesty of her usually lovely face. ‘I don’t like it. I’ll tell you –’ The respectful buzz of the intercom broke in. She picked up the handset and listened in silence for a few seconds. ‘Tell her no.’ She slammed down the handset and looked from Keith to Wallace and back again. ‘The telephone girl at Humbert Brown regrets that Mr Foster has been off work for the past week, presumed sick, and would anybody else do?’

  ‘It fits together,’ Keith said. ‘And I bet that what you don’t like is what I don’t like.’

  ‘I don’t like it either,’ Wallace said.

  ‘What?’ Keith and Mrs Heller said together.

  ‘Illingworth wouldn’t cave in, or get into enough of a tizzy to kill somebody, just at a threat that Foster would go around telling everybody that he’d committed incest, or even that his sister was a tart. Hilary would hardly confirm the story. It’d be actionable. He’d need good solid proof, or Illingworth would have told him to go to hell.’

  Keith nodded.

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ Debbie Heller said. ‘We’re not stupid, and neither was Foster. Those chalets are designed to be proof against Peeping Toms. I can’t see Foster lurking about outside with a camera, hoping they’d leave the door open; and Annette said that he’d given her a pretty thorough servicing, which would have been just at the time for proof-getting.’ Her voice fell silent.

  ‘Go on,’ Keith said. ‘It’s for you to say aloud.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. All right. In his shoes, I’d bribe one of the porters.’

  ‘To make a tape off the video system?’

  ‘Exactly. Damn!’ she said suddenly. ‘I can take almost anything else, but this . . . Any one of them could do it, because that’s what we did for the police last year when they wanted evidence about conspiracy over a bank fraud and the men had been meeting here. All he’d have to do would be to borrow the video machine out of an unoccupied chalet, put it under the desk, plug it in, and set the time-clock if he was called away. The machines are only there for viewing blue films on, but the recording part of them still works.’

  ‘It would have to be the duty porter,’ Wallace said ‘That makes it Bert. I’d put him down as trustworthy.’

  Mrs Heller’s grunt was unladylike. ‘So would I,’ she said ‘But having Donald Illingworth in their pocket could be worth a million or upward to Humbert Brown. They could well afford to lay out a thousand or two. Bert wouldn’t be proof against that sort of inducement.’

  ‘Not many would.’

  Wallace moved uneasily in his seat. ‘Assuming that there was a video-t-tape,’ he said, ‘Foster would’ve collected it before he started making any threats. In that case, Illingworth would have taken it off him. So it’s probably at the bottom of Funchal Bay.

  ‘B-but, just as you said, Debbie, Foster wasn’t stupid. He’d know that when you corrupt a man for a thousand or two he starts wondering where the next ten grand’s coming from. It would be only too easy for Bert to record any discussions in either chalet. The fact that Foster got killed suggests that he’d had his confrontation with Illingworth. Why would he do that here, when he could have waited until they were in the car to go home, or even some time next month?’

  ‘He may have asked him to come out for a stroll, or to sit in the car while they talked,’ Mrs Heller said.

  ‘Unless,’ Keith said, ‘he needed something extra, to hold over Illingworth or to convince his employers that he’d done his job. After all, they’d only have a bum and a couple of faces to go by. If I was ever bastard enough to pull a stunt like that, I’d make the deal include the second tape, to be handed over to me.’

  ‘Jesus wept!’ Debbie Heller said slowly. ‘If a second tape ever existed, it all depends on whether Foster collected it. If he did, he’d have put it with the other one and Illingworth would have taken them both. If not, the odds are that Bert’s still got it A bit of jam for the fuzz if they can find it.’

  ‘The fuzz?’ Keith lost the thread of discussion for a moment.

  ‘You’ve convinced me all over again. We know all we need to know. There was a murder committed here. We know who by. We know the motive. We’ve got enough evidence to cut short any investigation. We’ve got no option but to call the police. And you’re going to say “I told you so”,’ she added bitterly. ‘Well, you’ve earned your fee, so I suppose you’ve earned that too.’

  ‘I did tell you so, but that isn’t what I was going to say. You’ve swung round in your attitude, and I’ve swung round in mine.

  ‘Never mind where our financial interests lie, let’s look at this thing in the abstract. We’ve got a classic dilemma. A campaigner for good was deliberately manoeuvred into a position in which he can be shown to have gone to a brothel and shagged his own sister, and we presume that he was being blackmailed into throwing his weight on the side which he believed to be e
vil. All this when he had set out to do no more than be about as promiscuous as three-quarters of the human race. And, at the time, he was full of booze and pot. So he shoots the bugger. In his place I’d probably have done much the same.

  ‘We’ve got a case which could probably be proved in court, given the extra evidence that the police might dig up. Illingworth might get off, he might be convicted – either way he’d be ruined. And it wouldn’t do any of us any good.

  ‘Nobody knows much about this except ourselves, and we may decide that we can deal with any dangers.

  ‘That, I suggest, leaves the ball in our court, rather than in any other kind of court. The law wouldn’t agree, but then, the law and justice don’t always meet in the middle.

  ‘You can go along with me or not, just as you wish. I’m pointing out to you that Foster’s dead anyway and nothing can change that. Illingworth is still around, and still has a lot of potential to do good. I’m not only thinking about the corruption; we’ve seen some of the violence and blackmail that can follow in corruption’s wake.

  ‘It’s wrong to take no action out of inertia. But what I’m suggesting to you is that this is one case in which it would be right to take a positive decision to take no action, and that’s a very different thing.’

  Debbie Heller got up, walked to the window and stood looking out. The sunlight etched every soft curve of her figure through her thin dress. She might as well have been naked, and Keith thought that she knew it. He guessed that it gave her some comfort in a time of stress to be seen as a woman.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said at last. ‘And I’m not saying that out of self-interest. Sometimes justice is more important than law. But Donald Illingworth will have to go along with us.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Keith said carefully, ‘that you have no intention of putting pressure on him in your turn.’ He tried to keep any questioning note out of his voice.

  Without turning round she shook her head impatiently so that the red-gold locks flickered like flame in the sunlight. ‘We don’t play that some of game,’ she said. ‘If we lost our reputation for being above blackmail we’d lose all our customers the same day. And while we’re turning over the sort of money that we are, we’d have to be out of our tiny minds. Illingworth has to go along because there’s no point in our taking one hell of a risk if he’s going to lose his nerve and top himself, or run to the cops and confess. That’d just land us all in it. Somebody must go out and see him, convince him that it’s all over and that he’s got to get back on the ball.’

  ‘Not me,’ Keith said quickly.

  ‘I’d b-be no good,’ Wallace said. ‘The one thing I’m no good at is persuading hostile strangers. Keith’s bloody good at that.’

  ‘Send one of the girls. Send ten of them.’

  ‘He doesn’t trust women,’ Debbie Heller said over her shoulder. ‘You’re elected.’

  Keith, who had only flown once in his life and that on a backup aircraft on a short hop to Inverness, had an immediate vision of being lifted to the upmost stretch of vertigo in an aircraft built out of wet cardboard. He uttered a faint, negative croak.

  Mrs Heller resumed her seat and became again the Chairman of the Group. ‘Get this straight,’ she said. ‘You’ve earned your fee, and you’ll get it. But if Illingworth won’t play ball we can’t take a chance on covering this up. So there could still be a scandal, and we needn’t have bothered hiring you to do an investigation for us. You’ll have to find another lender, and it’d cost you a damn sight more than your fee. And you’ll get no bonus, and I personally will take that Ferguson popgun and chop it up for firewood.

  ‘On the other hand, if you do this for me and we can settle the whole thing without any scandal, you’ll get your bonus and your old gun.’ She eyed Keith in careful calculation. She was expert at judging a price. ‘And I’ll throw in something else. You can have any two other guns off that wall. Or how about the services of one or two of the girls for a night? I’ve already pledged enough of the group’s money to you.’

  Keith’s fear of flying began to recede in favour of a longstanding fantasy. ‘How about,’ he counted silently, ‘six of your girls?’

  ‘All at the same time?’ She did not seem at all surprised.

  ‘Yes.’

  She leaned forward and activated the computer terminal on the desk. ‘Nine-thirty Thursday,’ she suggested. ‘Make up your mind about Madeira. If you’re on, you’d better slip out to the porter’s desk and ask him to book you out and back through the travel agents. Phone your wife from the desk and ask her if she’d like a week in Madeira, all expenses paid by your client. Then come back in here and we’ll have a few words about how to keep Humbert Brown in line.’

  Keith got to his feet and walked very slowly to the door. In the doorway, he came to a complete halt. ‘Make it a very few words,’ he said. ‘I want Wal to get me out of here before I change my mind. I’ll take the guns.’ He closed the door behind him gently, as if on a favourite dream.

  ‘Poor Keith,’ Wallace said. ‘Flying scares him rigid.’

  ‘He won’t like Madeira, then.’ Mrs Heller chuckled suddenly. ‘The main runway looks like somebody’s garden path, fallen off a cliff. I went there once with a boy-friend.’

  ‘Me,’ said Wallace.

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘So it was! And we spent the fortnight working-out the constitution and financial structure of Personal Service.’

  ‘Not all the time,’ Wallace said.

  ‘No, not all the time. Those were good days, Wal.’

  ‘They were.’

  The two smiled at each other in comfortable nostalgia.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Keith, as a rule, was self-reliant to a degree which distressed his wife. Molly would have enjoyed being depended upon from time to time. Yet there was one errand which neither of them fancied, and Keith had held out the Madeira trip as bribe. As she walked down the middle of the long hospital ward she wondered whether a few days in tropical luxury would be an adequate recompense.

  Jim Bardolph was in an end bed, staring morosely out of the window at a cloudy sky. His belly was a mound under the bedclothes, dwarfed by his leg raised in the traction harness. He looked round as Molly took the chair beside his bed, and there was an appreciative twist to his swollen mouth. Molly was an attractive woman when she took the trouble, and she had taken the trouble today.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said, more brightly than she felt. ‘How are you mending?’

  ‘No’ so bad. Are you yin o’ they socialist workers?’

  ‘Not me. When do you think they’ll let you go home to Possilpark?’ Keith had been doing some investigating on his own account.

  ‘Twa weeks yet. I don’t know you. Just who are you?’

  ‘I’m Molly Calder. You know. You tried to –’

  ‘Whit! That –’

  She hushed him quickly and his voice trailed away. ‘Shout if you want,’ she said. ‘I can walk out of here any time I like. You’ve got to stay here and live with it.’

  Bardolph glowered, but he lowered his voice to a ferocious whisper. ‘Yon bogger! I’ll clour him. Just you tell him from me that as soon as I can walk right I’ll come and tear his gut out and tie –’ A new thought broke the flow of his rhetoric. ‘Hey! Whit d’ye ken about Possilpark?’

  ‘You live in Ravensrigg Crescent,’ Molly said quietly. ‘With Jeannie and the three kids. Keith said that if you ever set foot in Newton Lauder again he’ll burn Ravensrigg Crescent from end to end with them in it, before you’ve even got the length of the Square.’

  Bardolph was squinting with emotion. He struggled to get up on his elbows. ‘An’ you tell that cunt – beggin’ your pardon – that if he comes near Possilpark . . . if he . . .’ Bardolph fell silent and lay back on the pillow.

  ‘He won’t if you don’t. Remember, it was you who started all this.’

  ‘Me? Whit way was it me?’ Bardolph demanded.

  ‘You threatened Keith that you’
d harm me and Deborah.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it,’ Bardolph said plaintively. ‘It’s just one of the things you say.’

  ‘Well, you’d better not go on saying it. The last person who harmed me, Keith killed him,’ Molly said, not without a touch of quiet pride.

  ‘And he got off?’ Bardolph sounded respectful.

  ‘They couldn’t touch him. Keith put a scare into him and then chased him across the moors until the man dropped with a heart attack. But the point is, you’d have done the same yourself if somebody threatened Jeannie or the weans.’

  ‘But it wisna’ me did it. It’s me lying here and not a penny coming in.’

  ‘That’s what I came to tell you about,’ Molly said. ‘Keith’s fixed it that if you don’t make any trouble but help us deal with your mate Warrender, you’ll get paid by the day until you can work again.’

  ‘Including weekends?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘I’m in here weekends,’ Bardolph pointed out reasonably.

  ‘I’ll see if we can fix it.’

  ‘That’s great. Sundays are double time. You get a message to Cyril to come and see me, and I’ll call him off Sooner the better. Folk think I’m hard, but he’s the hard man. And your Keith blacked his eye for him.’

  ‘Both of them,’ Molly said. ‘But he did the same to Keith.’

  ‘Where’s Cyril now?’ he asked.

  Molly told him of Warrender’s travels in the Shetland Isles, and Bardolph shook with laughter until his knee pained him back into seriousness. ‘Youse just leave Cyril to me,’ he said. ‘Just so’s he gets paid up to when I tell him it’s over, he’ll be satisfied. Can you reach him and tell him to come and see me urgent?’

  ‘We can reach him,’ Molly said. ‘The Shetlands are several islands and you can’t move around far without crossing a ferry. A promise to the ferrymen of twenty quid to the man who tells him to phone a number ought to do it.’ She pulled a well-wrapped parcel out of her shopping-bag and transferred it to the locker. ‘Keith sent you a bottle. I was only to give it to you, to help your knee mend, if you were going to be . . . reasonable. It’s a very special whisky. I’ll have to be going now.’