‘That’s a lot of motives,’ the sergeant said respectfully.
‘I’m not finished. Mr Grass was a clever businessman and made a braw penny himself, but he got a head start from his father and his grandfather. Grand-dad Grass was an Englishman who made a packet out of agricultural machinery. Maybe they named grass after him, I wouldn’t know. The point is, he settled up here and put his money into property. He didn’t bother with rents and feuholds, he leased it out on ninety-nine year leases and used the money to buy more property. Most of those leases are almost up. In a large number of cases, Mr Grass’s will permits the lessee to buy up the lease cheaply. But it’s easy to be charitable from the grave. If he’d lived, he might not have been so generous.
‘So you might find it easier to look for people who didn’t have a motive. Murders, after all, have been committed before now just for a few pennies. Even you, yourself –’
‘Oh, come on, now,’ the sergeant said.
‘I mean it. The police welfare fund comes in for a useful sum. The odds are that you’ll benefit from that at some time or another. And the buildings occupied by your force are subject to one of the leases, which runs out in a couple of years. How do you fancy working out of some hastily converted attic?’
The sergeant treated the question as rhetorical and asked one of his own. ‘Putting two and two together and coming up with a handful,’ he said, ‘can I take it that some of Mr Grass’s famous conditions are attached?’
‘You can. Any interference with the service next week, and the buildings are transferred to Civil Rights organisations and the welfare fund can whistle for its legacy.’
‘Ah,’ the sergeant said with satisfaction. ‘That explains a certain atmosphere of frustration hanging like a cloud over my superiors. You don’t seem to be doing much dog-training,’ he added.
‘I’m letting him learn for himself about scents and things.’
‘Then why carry a gun? Not that I object, I’m just curious.’
‘Because that black bastard,’ Brutus acknowledged the description by a flick of his tail, ‘doesn’t bother, otherwise. He knows too damn well what –’
A rabbit bolted from under Brutus’ nose. It was too much. He hurled himself after it, quite spoiling Keith’s chance of a shot. Eventually and reluctantly he came back to the whistle, was scolded and put to heel, grumbling to himself. His experience the previous evening had proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that he could catch rabbits more effectively than Keith could shoot them.
‘Ralph Enterkin wants to pass the hairy idiot on to me,’ Keith said. ‘He fancies getting himself some small pug whose idea of a walk will be much the same as his own. About ten yards. If I do take that beggar on, I swear I’ll make a cheese-wire collar for him on the end of a long check-lead. The first time he runs in, he’ll take his own stupid head off. The only certain cure.’
‘That’s the place up ahead, isn’t it?’ the sergeant said. ‘I haven’t approached it from this side before.’
At that moment it happened again. A rabbit fled almost from under their feet and Brutus took off like a greyhound. The rabbit outdistanced him easily along the path ahead of them. Where the path climbed the bank the rabbit bobbed to the right and dived into the brambles. Brutus crashed in in vain pursuit. Two hen pheasants squawked indignantly and whirred upwards while their chicks ran cheeping onto the grass.
Brutus came to his senses. It had been a lovely chase, but now the piper must be paid. He searched frantically for some placating gift. There was a familiar object under his nose. He snatched it up and turned back in answer to the approaching whistles.
Keith arrived, angry and half-winded. Brutus deposited his offering and shut his eyes against the wrath to come. Apart from a cuff across the ear that was almost a pat, the wrath never came. ‘Take a look at this,’ Keith said. ‘A spent cartridge, and it’s been reloaded in its time,’
‘You think it might be the fatal one?’ the sergeant asked, panting.
‘Who knows. But there’s a strict rule around here that you take your empties home with you. Did you see where he picked it up?’
‘I couldn’t see the ground. But he stopped and ducked his head somewhere near the base of that tall frond of cow parsley.’ The sergeant paused and mopped his forehead. The breeze had dropped and the day was turning warm. ‘You’ve had more experience of testing patterns,’ he said. ‘Suppose I go up to the fence and pretend to be Mr Grass.’
Keith nodded. The sergeant climbed the fence and then stood, with one foot on a lower strand of wire. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Come towards me until you think that a full-choke pattern would almost cover my face.’
‘All right.’ Keith opened his gun and showed the sergeant the empty chambers. He walked up the path and stopped. Against all his training, he raised his gun and sighted on the sergeant. He shook his head, walked another couple of paces and tried again. ‘About here.’
‘The gun definitely didn’t slide that far. Now do it again for a true-cylinder barrel.’
Keith came forward three more steps. ‘I’m guessing,’ he said. ‘But, with a plastic shot-cup, about here.’
‘That’s nearer where the gun fetched up. The cow parsley’s just a few yards from your right elbow. If the murderer shot from there, and then turned the gun across his body and opened it, the ejector might flip the spent case to about there.’
‘Not so fast,’ Keith said. He handed his gun over to the sergeant, climbed the fence and turned back to whistle Brutus away from the pheasant chicks. He produced the empty cartridge, and the two men studied it together. ‘You can often see the imprint of the ejector where the brass base was forced against it at the moment of firing. This one’s going rusty, but I’d expect to see it.’
‘Depends on the quality of the gun,’ the sergeant said. ‘In a best gun, the ejectors fit so neatly that there’s nothing to make a mark. So we may be looking for somebody with the money to buy a best English game gun.’
‘Bad guess,’ Keith said. He turned the cartridge and showed two scratches on the brass-coated base. ‘Extractor hooks. This has been fired out of an automatic shotgun, a repeater.’
‘It’s been fired more than once,’ the sergeant pointed out. ‘Must’ve been, if it’s been reloaded and fired again. Well, it’s a job for the lab and a microscope.’ He slipped the cartridge into an old envelope and stowed it in an inner pocket. ‘They should be able to match it to a particular gun. If we ever find a particular gun. And if this is the right cartridge. A repeater,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘ejects the cartridges high, to the right and slightly behind you.’
‘Forget it for the moment,’ Keith said. ‘We don’t know exactly where the cartridge was anyway. We can start thinking again when we’ve got a gun to think about.’
‘I suppose.’ The sergeant stared gloomily down the banking. The two hen pheasants were herding their chicks back into cover. ‘There’ll have to be an inch-by-inch search,’ he said. ‘Pity Glynder’s boys didn’t do a thorough job at the time.’
Bearing in mind the seasons of the year, Keith had to agree.
‘Onward,’ said the sergeant.
Seen close to, Joe Merson’s cottage was as well kept as any other building on Mr Grass’s property, but paint and cement could not hide the fact that it had been carelessly tenanted. The garden, which had never been cultivated with any enthusiasm, was now a jungle of weeds. Keith thought that it was just the sort of tangle that would attract a pair of partridges, and sure enough his practised eye picked out the hen, sitting tight beneath a canopy of nettles. Keith called Brutus firmly to heel.
Sergeant Yarrow tried the door. ‘Unlocked,’ he said.
‘People don’t lock doors much in the country.’
‘They do if they’re going away for a few months. I’m going to take a look inside.’
Keith circled the outside of the cottage. Brutus followed reluctantly, uneasy. There was an outbuilding at the back which might once have housed a pony. Inside
, on a rough but solid bench, were a large paraffin blowlamp, a perforated box of heavy metal, a large and rusty toffee-tin, a plastic carton almost filled with shot, several jamjars of powders and sundry other items of equipment which Keith could identify as being associated with shot-pouring. Beneath the bench was a small stock of scrap lead.
He shouted to the sergeant and received an answer. While he waited he looked around, deeper into the shadows.
When the sergeant arrived, his face was puckered with distaste. He pounced on some metal bars among the scrap lead. ‘Printer’s metal? More work for the lab,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t believe the state of that cottage. Squalid old pig!’
‘You’d better come and see this,’ Keith said.
A hutch in the corner of the shed held some remains.
‘What are . . . were they?’
‘Ferrets,’ Keith said. ‘There were three or four. They were left without food. There was some cannibalism and the last one starved to death.’
‘Let’s get out of here and find a breath of fresh air.’
Even in the sunshine outside, Keith was still oppressed by the scarecrow atmosphere of the place. The sergeant seemed to feel the same. By tacit agreement they walked back round the cottage and away. They were in an ancient farm-track, overgrown by blackthorn and rowans. When they came out again into the sun it was at the conjunction of four fields. For no better reason than that two of the fields were in crop and the third held bullocks which showed a dangerous interest in Brutus, and, because its gate was the easiest to open, they choose the fourth field, a vacant pasture, and walked aimlessly downhill towards the glint of water half a mile away.
‘He wouldn’t have left them like that, surely?’ the sergeant said.
‘Not on purpose. They’re attractive little beggars and people get very fond of them – especially antisocial old poachers who live alone. And a man in the village told me that Merson usually left them with him before a trip.’
‘He could have asked somebody who let him down.’
‘Or was dead. Or thought he was dead. Or he could have got jugged under another name, except that he’d have got a message through somehow, and he doesn’t seem to have been the sort of man to bother about covering up his identity. No,’ Keith said, ‘let’s stop kidding ourselves. And let’s stay out in the open where we can’t be overheard. I’m beginning to get the willies. Let’s keep moving.’
They trudged the length of the field in silence and passed through an open gate. ‘Subject to the lab confirming the guesses we’ve been making,’ the sergeant said, ‘I’m prepared to accept that Mr Grass was shot by somebody else. Accidentally or deliberately, I don’t know.’
‘Within a few days after that,’ Keith said, ‘the local poacher disappeared. He left his ferrets to starve. It’ll be easy to find out whether this was as uncharacteristic as I think it was.’
They covered a few more yards in silence before the sergeant said, ‘Coincidences do happen. Things are happening all the time. It would be extraordinary if none of them ever coincided.’
‘It may turn out that way. But, just for the moment, assume that there’s a connection. Your local Bobby saw Merson a few days after Mr Grass died. After that, nothing. Do you mind if I theorise?’
‘How could I stop you?’
‘With difficulty,’ Keith said. The two men had dropped into a state of easy friendship which admitted jokey, verbal shorthand. It helped to relieve the disgust that lingered from Merson’s cottage and the dead ferrets. ‘First, it’s possible that Merson shot Mr Grass and then decided to do a bunk. Was there a gun in the cottage?’
‘Not that I saw. You didn’t give me long for a search. But, if that’s how it was, why wait a few days before doing a bunk?’
‘It’s possible that he thought he was going to be suspected, but, in that case, why has he stayed away? As far as he knows, the whole case is closed.
‘Next,’ Keith went on, ‘it’s possible that Merson killed Grass, and then somebody else killed Merson, possibly out of revenge. I don’t like it much, but let’s keep it in mind.’
‘Let’s do that,’ the sergeant agreed.
‘Then again, there was a rumour, not a very serious one, that the body was Merson’s. The evidence as to the identity of the body seems to have been shaky, because of the damage to the face and hands. Would it have been accepted if, say, it had been brought out that another man of roughly the same build and colouring had gone missing?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t in the sheriff court when that part of the evidence was given. Probably it wouldn’t.’
‘There are all kinds of possibilities around that one,’ Keith said, ‘and I don’t like any of them much. The rumours all seemed to be based on the fact that Grass was a bit of a trickster. But his tricks were funny, sometimes malicious, but never serious.’ To the sergeant’s great amusement, Keith recounted the story of General Winter and the little coloured bubbles. ‘Then again,’ he went on, ‘I helped to sort out some of Grass’s personal effects, and I found a box of brand-new lingerie. Not Marks and Sparks but the kind of thing a stripper or a tart wears. The butler was shocked out of his wits when I asked whether Mr Grass went in for that sort of thing. He explained, as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world, that Grass had kept a stock of such trifles for hanging out on the washing-lines of any of the local ladies who happened to have annoyed him, especially if they were away from home for a few days at the time. I gathered that Merson usually did that little job for him. And that was the level of Grass’s pranks, not swapping blood-stained clothes on corpses.’
‘Very speculative,’ the sergeant said thoughtfully. ‘And inconclusive.’
‘Of course it is. I’m not presenting a case to a court, I’m thinking aloud, just hanging a few ideas on you to see if they look good, and at the moment they don’t. Somewhere out of the lot, you may get some sort of framework for all the routine investigation that I’ll thankfully leave to you.’
‘Thanks very much. So your idea of an investigation is to offer me a bunch of wild theories and then leave me to persuade my seniors, who only want me to confirm that it was an accident, that they’ve got to devote a whole lot of manpower, which is in short supply just now, to doing all the house-to-house enquiries and ground-searches?’
‘Now you’re getting the idea,’ Keith said. ‘Except that you – and your bosses – may like the next one a bit better. Let’s try introducing a third party from the beginning. Somebody . . . What shall we call him?’
‘Jimmy,’ said the sergeant.
Keith nodded. There was a trace of Glasgow inflection in the sergeant’s voice. In Glasgow, every man is Jimmy until proved otherwise. ‘Jimmy is misbehaving himself, round about dusk. Maybe lying in wait for Mr Grass. Maybe poaching – I found evidence of an old poacher’s trick not far from where Buggins picked up the cartridge-case. And maybe something quite different.
‘Raymond Grass, taking his evening stroll to visit a lady friend, but carrying a gun because it’s what men do around here on the off-chance of a crow or a rabbit, arrives at the top of the bank. He may have hung his gun on the fence by the trigger-guard, which is what I often do if I’ve a fence to climb. That would explain why his hands were empty. He looks down, and there’s Jimmy. “What the hell are you doing there, James?” he asks, or words to that effect. Either with what you’d probably call malice aforethought, or else on the spur of the moment, Jimmy brings up his gun. Grass puts his hands over his face. Jimmy lets one off and Grass drops dead. Jimmy doesn’t panic. He keeps his head – that’s not the happiest expression, but you know what I mean. He arranges things as an accident. If Mr Grass hasn’t fired a shot, he’d have to take a chance and let one off from Grass’s gun, and risk somebody hearing two shots; but he didn’t think to pop one of his own reload’s into Grass’s gun. Am I boring you?’
‘Not a lot,’ the sergeant said.
‘Good. Now we come to Joe Merson. He was a poacher, and dusk can be a
good time for a poacher to be out and about. He could have seen it happen. Or he could have found out some other way. He thinks about it. He’s not pleased. He’s lost a patron, and no new landlord’s likely to thole him and his nasty ways. But he may still be able to profit from it. He thinks it over for a day or two, and then phones Jimmy from the box outside the post office which is where your local cop saw him. He tells Jimmy that he wants umpty pounds, or some other consideration, to keep his mouth shut.
‘“All right,” Jimmy says. “I’ll cough up. Meet me under the blasted oak”, or wherever. But Merson’s put the figure too high, because Jimmy isn’t as prosperous as he looks. So Jimmy, having killed once, decides to do it again, and the shots that Winter says he heard from down this way were Joe Merson to join his crony. How does that grab you?’
‘Not exactly by the habeus corpus,’ the sergeant said. ‘It’s got more perhapses than a virgin’s promise. Who do you have in mind for Jimmy?’
‘The general,’ Keith said.
Sergeant Yarrow stumbled and recovered himself. ‘General Springburn? But he’s a highly-respected antique!’
‘He’s also remarkably fit.’ Keith thought about the general. ‘He could probably walk you or me off our feet. He loads his own cartridges. He’s the only person who ever suggested that Grass wasn’t always careful with a gun. He’s a confirmed poacher –’
‘The general? But he was a pal of old Grass. I’ve seen them around together a hundred times, at functions and things. He must have had permission to shoot here.’
‘Only pests,’ Keith explained patiently. ‘The species that man makes war on, because they multiply successfully in the wild and help themselves to crops. That kind of permission gets given away with a pound of tea provided that the person can be trusted not to take game, which are harvestable species, most of which have to be reared or conserved, and which are an expensive asset and get shot by special invitation only.’
‘Perhaps I ought to have known that,’ the sergeant admitted, ‘but I didn’t. I’ve never been involved in a poaching case.’
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