The Game

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘And that was why, partly,’ Illingworth said. ‘I was beyond any chance of straight thinking, but I remember what Hilary said. She thought that it was a toss-up whether she gave herself the best image by finding the chair quickly or to wait a while. She’d decided to wait. We swapped the chairs over so that she could have the bloodstained one, complete with bullet-hole, under her hand. That way, she could make the discovery in her own good time.’

  ‘But she didn’t.’

  ‘No. As I told you, my mind was . . . clouded. She helped me carry the chairs, because I was as weak as a baby and those chairs weigh a ton. In swapping them over, we’d left her chalet short of a chair-back. She went back to Number Fifteen to pinch one, but I’d pulled the door shut. An extra visit would have been recorded and might have been noticed later. We looked round some other chalets, but they were either locked or occupied. So we let it go. She said she’d use the missing chair-back as a reason for finding the hole and the stains. And one other thing she said. She said . . . that . . . if there was any question of my being blamed, she’d confess and take the rap.’ He blew his nose wetly, and surreptitiously wiped his eyes.

  Keith had run out of questions. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you decided to go one better. You were going to top yourself and leave a note taking all the blame?’

  Illingworth nodded. ‘I still am,’ he said. He got slowly to his feet and took the four paces to the open window.

  Keith stayed seated. A wrestling-match would not solve anything. His back felt cold. ‘No you’re bloody well not,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t stop me.’ Illingworth sat down on the sill of the open window and rocked gently to and fro. Each time he leaned back, his heels lifted off the carpet. He was eight floors above a paved terrace.

  ‘I could stop you,’ Keith said. ‘But there’d be no point. You could do it as soon as my back was turned.’

  ‘Right.’ Illingworth swayed back and nearly went for the long dive. Only an involuntary kick of his legs brought him back in balance.

  ‘I can only point out that if you kill yourself you’ll drop everybody in the shit head-first. And that includes your sister. Christ, we’ve all been covering up for you, suppressing evidence, burying bodies and committing blackmail, and if there’s any real investigation we’re done for.’

  ‘Hilary will be all right.’

  ‘Wishful thinking,’ Keith said. He could see Illingworth nerving himself for the last lean back. He sought frantically for more argument and, to his own surprise, found it. ‘It doesn’t matter how many notes you’ve left. If there’s an investigation, Hilary goes up the river unless you’re there to take the blame off her. And, don’t forget, you’re the one that was being blackmailed, not your sister. A court would go easier on you.

  ‘As things stand at the moment, it’s a billion to one against any investigation because we’ve stopped every hole. But if you’re stupid enough to take the quick way down to street level, and if you’ve left a note, and if I can’t find it and tear it up, then there’s going to be an investigation right enough. In among many, many other things, the fuzz are going to want to know why a big wheel in Humbert Brown told them that Foster had gone abroad. His only loophole would be to prove that he was being blackmailed by Mrs Heller. Next thing, the cops have most of the story and she has to give up the videotape of the scene between you and Foster. How long do you think it would take a trained detective to spot that handbag?’

  Illingworth made a sudden grab at the window-frame. He leaned forward into the room. ‘You could go back and destroy that tape,’ he said.

  ‘If you’re prepared to drop the rest of us in it,’ Keith said, ‘why the hell should any of us add to our crimes to protect your sister? No, if you jump our only course of action is to run screaming to the police, shouting “Look what we’ve just found”, and give them everything.’

  Illingworth stood up. He walked on quaking knees to where Keith sat, and stood irresolute.

  ‘Don’t try to jump me,’ Keith said, ‘or I’ll break both your arms. You said yourself that you’re no kind of a fighter. Your only way to protect Hilary is to come back and take up your life again. Then, if questions are ever raised, you can do your shining-armour bit. But it won’t come to that. Never.’

  There was another silence, longer than ever before. Illingworth collapsed back into his chair. Keith took one look at his face, got up in his turn and walked to the window. A tourist ship was coming to anchor in the bay. Behind him, he heard the first sob. He wanted to go and comfort the weeping man in his arms but his upbringing was against it. He stood where he was, sympathetic but acutely embarrassed. Even when the sobbing ceased, he stood where he was. But he kept a firm grip on the window-frame. After all, he was so far the only person to guess the truth.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chief Inspector Munro lounged at ease in the uncomfortable chair in his uncomfortable room in the very uncomfortable building which still, although in its hundredth year, served the Lothian and Borders Constabulary as its Newton Lauder Headquarters. Before Munro’s desk stood Sergeant Ritchie, and his discomfort outdid all the rest. For most of an hour Munro had been roasting him for his alleged favours to Keith Calder. Ritchie’s back was sore and his feet hurt, but his dignity hurt worst of all. Munro’s Hebridean tongue could flay like a razor. And Ritchie could not take comfort in his own innocence, for he was guilty and he knew it.

  Munro relished the English language for its wealth of epithets – so lacking in his native Gaelic – but even the longest-winded chief inspector must eventually exhaust them. ‘I do not suppose that you have made any progress in the matter of the two men hung on the tree?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘With Calder involved, I hardly expected any,’ Munro said, ‘so I have been researching the matter, by telephone, on my own account. We will just run over the facts.’ (Ritchie groaned softly and shifted from one foot to the other.) ‘The man in hospital, Bardolph, is one of those private investigators. You may well think,’ Munro said with grim humour, ‘that he deserved what he got, but even a . . . real-life private eye is entitled to the protection of the law, and he has it whether he wants it or not. He works usually with another man, Warrender, who answers the description of the other man at the tree. The agency for which they usually worked says that they are now freelance. The witness who released them was drawn to the place by the sound of a shot. There were pellets of shot in the sole of Bardolph’s shoe. The shotgun is Calder’s weapon.’

  ‘With respect,’ Ritchie broke in, ‘it’s his job and his hobby, no more than that.’

  ‘Whenever Calder makes an enemy, which is too often for my liking, we find to our great surprise that he is carrying around a shotgun – and a perfectly valid written permission from a landowner to shoot the land. And I have seen him kill a man.’

  ‘On your orders, sir, and to save your life.’

  ‘That may be so, but it has no bearing. Next, a lorry-driver who passed that way saw Calder’s car – very well,’ Munro said irritably, ‘a car the make and colour of Calder’s – by the roadside. A grey Citroen stood nearby with its bonnet raised. The other witness, the farm-hand, thinks that it was Calder who drove away. It is a great pity that neither of them noted the numbers of the cars. The Vehicle Registration Centre in Swansea tells me that Warrender owns a grey Citroen. Bardolph is in hospital and – mark you this, Ritchie – Warrender has not been seen again since he was let down from the tree. On a circumstantial level, the cars and the shot connect Calder with the two men.’

  ‘Circumstantial,’ Ritchie said, ‘and very speculative.’

  ‘I am aware of it. Now, going back in time but forward in logic, a grey Citroen was seen in the lay-by overlooking Millmont House on several occasions over a two-day period immediately prior to these events. That provides a loose but possible connection, through the two men, between Calder and,’ Munro flushed darkly, ‘that abominable establishment. Moving forward again in time, Calder vanished overni
ght, ostensibly to Dundee, and reappeared with his face injured. Mrs James, with whom he has long been as thick as any number of thieves, told us a cock-and-bull story about her husband being missing. We held Calder for three days, but we did not look for Mr James, only for his body. Mr James then reappeared, refusing to give any explanation as to where he had been.

  ‘Not even yourself, Ritchie, would suggest that that story was anything but a fabrication, although we can not prove that Mrs James was not honestly mistaken. It was intended to distract us. But to distract us from what? It had us looking in Dundee. Where should we have been looking, Ritchie?’

  Ritchie sighed. He was sick of Munro and his damned, pedantic Highland drawl. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Then I will see whether we can’t reason it out. We will ask ourselves a few questions and see what answers we get. How did Calder’s face get marked?’

  ‘In the fight with the two men,’ Ritchie suggested.

  ‘The witness who saw him drive away said that he seemed unmarked. And such bruising as Calder suffered would soon have made it impossible for him to drive. So he must have been in another fight. The man Warrender drove off as soon as he was released from the tree, leaving others to attend to Bardolph and get him to hospital. Where was he going?’

  Ritchie shrugged his tired shoulders.

  ‘In pursuit of Calder, of course,’ Munro said. ‘Calder had hitched them to the tree to prevent such pursuit, but he had not bargained on the sound of the shot attracting help to them so soon. And where was Calder going? That place is not on the shortest route between Newton Lauder and Millmont House, but nor would it be an unreasonable route. I think that Calder was going to that house of shame. And now, why has neither hide nor hair been seen of the man Warrender since then?’

  Ritchie came out in a cold sweat. He knew Keith Calder more intimately than Munro could ever do; and Munro’s insinuations were by no means beyond the bounds of credibility. ‘He could be in a different hospital under an assumed name,’ the sergeant suggested. ‘Or he could be in hiding, for fear of – er – Mr Calder.’

  ‘Or . . . he . . . could . . . be . . . dead,’ Munro said, stabbing at Ritchie with a bony finger to emphasise his words. ‘I think that he caught up with Calder, and there was another fight, and Calder killed him. And then why was such an elaborate red herring drawn across the trail? There was no apparent connection between Warrender and Calder, or not so far as we know. If Calder killed the man, he might well have left him lying. If it was self-defence, he might even have come to us himself. But there was a connection, probably a disreputable connection, between the man Warrender and Millmont House. I think that Warrender caught up with Calder there, and was killed in a second fight. But that establishment could never stand up to the scandal of a body, dead of foul play; and they have the money with which to bend others to their convenience. The red herring was dragged so that we would be holding Calder here and looking for his partner in the Tay, while all the time Mr James was driving Warrender’s body to some other part of the country and disposing of it.’

  ‘Wallace James is not a man I could see doing such a thing,’ Ritchie said.

  ‘It had to be James. Calder’s face was marked, so he had to be the stalking-horse.’

  Ritchie was becoming increasingly unhappy. Munro’s longstanding belief that Keith Calder would balk at nothing was leading the inspector to formulate theories to which no other officer would be likely to give credence – except Ritchie himself. ‘This is a matter for the C.I.D.,’ he said, ‘not for us uniformed lads.’

  Munro slumped back in his chair and scratched the back of his neck. ‘That is just the very devil of it,’ he said. ‘C.I.D. have had enough information out of that place over the years to fill a Bible – or a jail. They will want hard evidence before they make any move that will lose them that friendship.’

  ‘We do not have any,’ Ritchie said firmly. He looked over Munro’s shoulder and out of the window. Surely he would soon be able to escape for a good sit-down . . .

  ‘Not so hasty,’ Munro said. ‘I will tell you what I have been doing while you were sitting on your backside. It is a pity that people do not carry number-plates like cars,’ he said severely, as if that omission were all the sergeant’s fault. ‘It would make our work that much easier. But these businessmen go everywhere by car, and cars carry number-plates. The man on the beat never recognises a man from his description, but even you, Ritchie, can read a number-plate. So I asked Swansea for the numbers of the cars of every person I could think of as possibly being involved with this case. And I asked all forces to keep an eye out for them.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘It is,’ Munro said ‘It can be very interesting, what one can learn through car numbers. When Mr James came back to Newton Lauder he came back in an Edinburgh taxi,’ despite himself, Munro sounded impressed by such extravagance, ‘and unlike our various witnesses I had the sense to write down the number. Edinburgh police have spoken with the driver. He picked up Mr James in Waverley Station, and thought it almost certain that he had come off the train from Dundee, which started from Aberdeen. Now why, we wonder, was Mr James travelling by train?’

  ‘He’s missing three fingers,’ Ritchie said. ‘He might well prefer to do a long journey that way.’

  When Munro grinned his bony face became a skull, fleshless. Ritchie averted his eyes. ‘There could be other reasons,’ Munro said. ‘The Aberdeen police report that Warrender’s car, the grey Citroen, is abandoned near the docks up there.’

  ‘Abandoned, sir? Or parked?’

  ‘Parked, Ritchie, would suggest that somebody was likely to come back for it. I had them tow it to the police garage and force the boot. No body in it,’ Munro said with regret, ‘but their forensic laddies are giving it the going-over and we shall see what we shall see. Do you know what we will find, Ritchie?’

  ‘Aye,’ Ritchie said. ‘I ken what you expect to find.’ He shifted from one foot to the other again and eased his aching back.

  ‘Calder killed Warrender at Millmont House. I don’t know why, not yet, but there are enough women there for them to fight over, and I have been prophesying for years that one day Calder would kill a man over a woman. Perhaps Warrender was trying blackmail – he has that reputation. But, whyever, the deed was done. Now, Mrs Heller would not be standing for bodies at Millmont House at all. Calder went away. Mrs James reported her husband missing, believed murdered by Calder, while Mr James drove Warrender’s car, with its owner’s body in the boot, up to Aberdeen and came back by train.’

  ‘And took four days over it.’

  ‘From that,’ Munro said, ‘we may gain a clue as to how the body was disposed of Aberdeen City Police are looking into that end of it. And when I get evidence from Aberdeen . . . well, Calder may have fled the country, but C.I.D. will have to take action and they can squeeze Mr and Mrs James and that Heller woman until – what is the expression? – until the pips squeak.’

  ‘The Calders went to Madeira on holiday.’

  ‘A very sudden holiday.’ Munro paused and a bleak smile spread over his face. ‘I will tell you a funny thing, Ritchie. I knew all along that there had been a killing. I thought that it was the man Foster whose wife reported him missing. But that report was withdrawn. I spoke to the man’s employers, one of the biggest firms of contractors in the country. I spoke to the deputy managing director himself It seems that the man had gone abroad on the firm’s business, and having had a tiff with his wife he did not bother to let her know.’

  ‘Very funny,’ Ritchie agreed stolidly.

  ‘I have not come to the funny bit yet. It is that, because of my enquiries, I was able to help. Foster went abroad without saying where he had left the Jaguar car that he has from the firm. I was able to tell him that the car was parked at Inchgavie. He was very grateful. I think that we may have made a useful friend in that quarter.’

  Ritchie sighed. He was coasting towards his pension
and rarely volunteered for anything that could possibly be delegated to a subordinate. But well-developed instinct told him that he had better start being helpful or he would be on his feet until that pension matured. What was more, a similar instinct suggested that if Munro pursued his present lines of enquiry he might come up with something . . . not a murder, perhaps, but something discreditable to Keith Calder. But Munro himself had just suggested a possible red herring.

  ‘Inchgavie?’ Ritchie said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe the man was lifted from there by his murderer. Shall I just find out who lives nearby and see whether there is any one of them who might have a connection?’

  Chief Inspector Munro turned the question over in his devious, Highland mind, quite unaware of how much might hang in the balance. Then, regretfully, he shook his head. ‘No need for that,’ he said. ‘If the man’s employer says that he is alive and abroad, then that is an end to it. The firm is building some houses nearby. No doubt he left the car there for safe-keeping and got one of the site staff to drive him to Dundee Airport or –’

  The telephone made a noise which could stop even a chief inspector in full flood of speculation. ‘Answer it,’ Munro said.

  Tiredly, Ritchie picked up the phone, but as he listened his tiredness fell away and there was a new glint in his eye. ‘The Aberdeen City Police are on the line,’ he told Munro. ‘Mr Warrender has just stepped off the St Clair from Lerwick. He’s in a terrible taking, they say, about his car being towed away and forced open. Would you speak to them?’

  Chief Inspector Munro said that he would rather not.

  Chapter Sixteen