‘You could?’ I said. ‘How?’
I thought that he smiled. ‘Word came through, just before you got here, of another of this make stolen near Perth.’
Noel had probably been somewhere nearby in the darkness. He materialized suddenly at my elbow. ‘There’s nothing to keep me here,’ he said, ‘but I won’t travel too far in the hope that Jove may turn up. I seem to remember that there’s a decent pub in Myresie Village.’
‘I can recommend it,’ said the Inspector.
‘I’ll walk along there,’ Noel said. I offered to drive him and return, but he declined. ‘Thanks, but it’s not very far—’
‘About half a mile,’ Inspector Tirrell said helpfully.
‘And I don’t even have a bag to carry. I’ll have to stock up again from the village shop in the morning – unless you’ve worked a miracle by then, Inspector. I can manage for one night. We’ll keep in touch.’
‘I’m sorry all your plans have been upset in this way,’ I said. I felt vaguely guilty for the loss of his dog and his case. I was relieved that we had not been obliged to offer him a bed. The house was crowded enough at the best of times and guests tended to disrupt the smooth running of the kennels. Noel’s presence would have been a constant reminder of the tension engendered by questions of guilt and blame.
‘Not your fault,’ he said gruffly. ‘Good night.’ And he trudged away into the darkness.
I turned to the faint outline of the Inspector. ‘As your constable was at pains to point out, my car was too old and tired to be wanted for the black market and not fast or reliable enough to be used in a robbery. We don’t get many joyriders around here, do we?’
‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘Not up here at what you might call the respectable end of Fife. Rather more in the southwest. Of course, they could have come over from Dundee.’
I rather doubted that. Even the helpful provision of a bridge across the Firth of Tay had not tempted the bad hats of Dundee to pay us much attention. Fife had always been as remote as the moon to them. ‘Why would they set a car on fire?’ I asked. ‘It seems so wanton.’
He leaned back against the nearest car and folded his arms. ‘Criminals do it to make sure they’ve eradicated all traces of themselves. That much I can understand. Joyriders do it because it rounds off the trip. With them it’s just what you said, wanton.’
I am always ready to be interested by the ins and outs of another person’s expertise and I would have kept him chatting if I could, but a Range Rover in some nondescript colour came through the tapes and my companion hurried away. I gathered that the Detective Superintendent had arrived to take over. I was left alone with the noises of the night. There was an owl in the distance. Nearer, a rabbit squealed suddenly. I tried the whistle again but this time got no response at all.
A few minutes later a small panda car made a much less impressive arrival. The interior light came on and I saw that Constable Buchan had arrived with Hannah.
I gave Hannah a pull to get up out of the car and she held on to my hand for reassurance. ‘I’ll fetch her home again,’ I told Buchan. ‘You get on back before your tea gets cold.’
He hesitated, wondering whether his defection would merit a black mark. Hunger triumphed over ambition. He reversed, turned and drove back the way he had come.
Inspector Tirrell excused himself and broke away from a group huddle. As he joined us, I said to Hannah, ‘They’re going to ask you to look at a body, in case it’s somebody you’ve ever seen before. Can you manage? It’s not a pleasant sight, but not too dreadful either.’
She swallowed. ‘Will you come with me?’
‘If you like.’
‘All right, then. Can we get it over quickly, please?’
Tirrell led us by the same roundabout route. The stakes and tapes marking the pathway had been extended and there were more lamps around the body. Hannah took one look and nodded. I drew her away, Inspector Tirrell following.
‘That’s her,’ Hannah said. ‘The woman who drove off in Mr Cunningham’s car this afternoon.’
‘You’re absolutely sure?’ Tirrell asked.
‘I’m in no doubt that she’s the same woman,’ Hannah said carefully, ‘although I can’t swear that she drove the car away. I’d have recognized her face. Even her clothes are the same.’
‘But no umbrella,’ I said.
We explained the umbrella to Tirrell, who went off to consult some of the lower ranks and came back. ‘No umbrella’s been found,’ he said. ‘It’ll probably turn up when we have daylight. Come and make a statement.’ His voice and manner were avuncular. Hannah could have been ten years old and shy. Before she let go of my hand I felt her relax.
I would have followed on their heels but the phone in my pocket began to make noises. I took it out and found the right key. Henry came on the line. ‘Your dinner’s in the oven and getting dried up. Your wife wants to know when you’re coming for it.’
‘Tell her that I said you could have it,’ I told him. ‘This looks like being a long night.’
‘What’s going on?’
I compressed the bare facts into the minimum of words.
‘But still no dog?’ Henry asked.
‘No dog,’ I confirmed. Everybody seemed to be more concerned about Jove than about me. Come to think of it, I felt the same.
I pressed the ‘hang-up’ key and settled in Henry’s car, broached the coffee and started the engine for the sake of a little extra warmth. The night was turning cold and I had left in too much of a hurry to think of a coat.
*
Our part in the investigation was finished more quickly than I expected. Hannah sat in the Detective Superintendent’s Range Rover and dictated her statement to a sergeant who, she said later, seemed more interested in establishing a flirtatious relationship. The Superintendent, a lean man with a suspicious manner, sent for me to answer a few pointed questions.
After that, we were free to go. It might be a puzzle as to why a woman who had made off with one stolen car should be found near the burned remains of another, but that mystery was clearly the exclusive province of the police and none of our damn business.
Inspector Tirrell, taking his line from his superior, confirmed that he would be in touch as soon as he had news of my car or of Jove. He was less forthcoming than earlier when I tried to pump him about the cause of the woman’s death and went so far as to thank us coldly for our cooperation and hint very firmly that we should now go and leave the real people to their real tasks. His reticence was of no real concern to me. My question had arisen out of no more than idle curiosity. I had seen more than my share of those dead by violence. A blow to the back of the head can have a very definite effect on the eyes. Among other incidents, one of my corporals had slipped and fallen down a rock-face, crushing the back of his skull. The signs were the same.
Hannah was unlike her usual communicative self as I drove slowly home. A first sight of death is a terrifying confirmation of one’s own mortality and a reminder of uncertainties about the fundamentals of existence. One’s own shell may be empty some day. Not ‘will’, please note, but ‘may’. Absolute finality is unacceptable, especially for the young.
I had used Henry’s phone to warn of our return, so a fresh meal awaited me in the Three Oaks kitchen along with Beth, Isobel, Henry and Daffy, each bursting with overt, and to my mind morbid, curiosity. Beyond confirming that she had recognized the dead woman as having been the thief of my car, Hannah seemed unwilling to talk and soon took herself off to bed. Daffy seemed to be torn between following her in order to extract a fuller account of her experiences, going off to bed, or remaining in the kitchen with us. Despite the early start that her job called for every morning, she opted for the kitchen.
If they expected startling facts or speculation from me they were doomed to disappointment. The signs of death from a whack on the back of the skull were not, in my old-fashioned view, for ladies – even for Isobel, who could discuss the detailed symptoms of pyomet
ra in a canine womb without turning a hair. I told them what little I knew and left it at that.
Isobel’s hideous spectacles flashed at me. ‘The whole thing would make some sort of sense if it had been your car that was found burning,’ she said. She glanced sidelong at Daffy. ‘The lady hadn’t been interfered with?’
To my mind a lethal blow constituted serious interference, but Isobel’s mind was running on more feminist lines. ‘If she had,’ I said, ‘she had been tidied up again.’
‘Then I’m baffled.’
‘I expect so,’ Henry said. ‘But then, you do baffle rather easily.’ Isobel, from the other end of the kitchen table, pretended to throw something at him and he chuckled.
‘You can offer us an explanation, I suppose,’ Isobel said.
Henry nodded cheerfully. ‘I think so, in the light of what we know so far. A theory, at least. Think about it. The modern car’s very easily and commonly stolen. It’s also very easily traced. So only the most rash or amateurish of criminals setting out to commit a crime uses his own car.’
‘Then you think that there’s a professional criminal involved?’ Beth asked.
‘Not necessarily. Lots of people know how to get into a car. Garage mechanics. Policemen. Private detectives. Security men. Plus, of course, anybody who comes across a car left outside the owner’s house with the doors unlocked and the engine ticking over.’
‘You don’t expect—’ Daffy began. She had flushed scarlet.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We don’t blame you.’
‘I certainly don’t,’ Henry said, beaming paternally. He had always had a soft spot for Daffy. Sometimes I wondered what sort of a young man Henry had been. ‘We’ve all left a car outside our front door with the key in it at some time. So,’ he resumed, ‘anyone embarking on a foray, during which he or she may have to step outside the law, is likely to equip themselves with a vehicle which has been – shall we say? – borrowed without the owner’s agreement. And, because recent advances in forensic science have made it easy to prove that somebody has been in a certain place or a certain car, as often as not they set fire to the car when they’ve finished with it.
‘The lady, whoever she was, may have been after one of several things. She was unlikely to have known that your gun was in the car although anyone keeping watch from the road or the Moss could have seen Daffy secrete the gun under the back seat. In order to transport something that couldn’t be carried by scooter, she may have wanted any old car.’
‘Mine certainly fits that description,’ I said.
‘How true! She may have wanted Jove, although that seems unlikely. I suppose it’s just conceivable that Mr Cochrane had sold him and then refused to deliver, but in that case she would hardly have chosen to arrive by stolen scooter, if that’s what she did. On the whole I think it’s almost certain that she was after something that she believed, rightly or wrongly, to be in the attaché case.’
‘But that doesn’t explain—’ Isobel began.
Henry rolled on. ‘Having got away with the car and its contents, she drove to the lay-by. She wanted to look for the item she was after. It may be that she had an alternative means of transport waiting there.’
‘In which case,’ I said, ‘where is it? Assuming that her killer drove off in my car—’
‘There may have been more than one of him,’ Henry said irritably. ‘Or her. Try not to interrupt. Where was I?’
‘At the lay-by,’ Daffy said.
‘Oh, yes. She may merely have stopped to check that she had got what she came after. Her killer or killers arrived in another stolen car. Either she had seen too much or else there was a fight over possession of the goodies. She got herself killed, poor girl. According to John, knocked on the head.
‘By that time, darkness was falling. Daffy had moved the shotgun to a hiding place under the back seat to make space, had put Mr Cochrane’s case into the underfloor compartment – a compartment that not everybody knows about although it’s a standard feature in that make of car – and had then dumped a heavy dog in a far from lightweight crate and a travelling box on top of it.
‘At first glance he, she or they, couldn’t find what they were after, which they may have seen from a distance being carried to the car. Rather than hang about with two stolen cars and a dead body, they preferred to switch to John’s car. And then they set fire to the other car in case their fingerprints – traditional or the DNA variety – proved their connection to what had become a murder.’
‘That’s quite good,’ Isobel said. ‘You’re turning quite logical in your old age. But . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Leave it,’ Isobel said. ‘We’re straying into the area of the macabre and I don’t want to upset any young stomachs at this time of night.’
‘I don’t upset very easily,’ Daffy said. ‘If I can help you sew up a dog that’s ripped its bowel on barbed wire, words are hardly likely to make me throw up.’
‘I suppose that’s true.’ The unsuitable spectacles, which made her look like somebody’s maiden aunt, flashed in the artificial light. ‘Well, my question is, if they were going to burn the car why didn’t they burn the body with it?’
Henry stretched and yawned. ‘Now you’re inviting me to make wild guesses as to what was in a murderer’s mind just after the deed. One guess might be that she seemed to have given up John’s car peacefully. She may even have met them by arrangement or arrived at a subsequent agreement. Then, after they had fired the other car and as they were about to drive away in yours, she made some extra demand. Perhaps she threatened them with John’s shotgun. It wouldn’t have been loaded, unless she happened to have a few cartridges in her handbag, but they mightn’t know that. After they’d killed her, it would be much more difficult to put her body into a car that was already on fire and would at any moment attract the attention of the emergency services. And now, it’s after our bedtime and I think we should walk home. We’ll leave our car with you, John, in case there are any more emergencies.’
‘Which God forbid,’ I said. I thought that somebody murmured a heartfelt, ‘Amen!’
Chapter Three
My illness a few years earlier had destroyed the sleep pattern which had been a vital part of my army life. I was slowly recovering the blessing of deep sleep, but after a day that seemed, in retrospect, to have been taken up by crime and the police, and with the legal implications of Jove and my gun to fret me, I slept fitfully that night, only falling deeply asleep at last as the dawn chorus began outside the window.
In deference to my still uncertain health I was sometimes allowed to sleep late. By the time I came downstairs, the work of the kennels was well under way. While I saw to my own breakfast Isobel, hurrying indoors to collect some veterinary product, explained that one of our brood bitches had brought back fleas from stud and passed them on to several of her colleagues. I had been favoured with a late morning because it had been decided by the ladies of the business – that is to say, everybody but myself – that there would be no training that day. Instead every dog, bitch and pup would be bathed, blow-dried, de-ticked and treated with a separate insecticide. (Due to yet another miracle of bureaucratic incompetence, there was not a single insecticidal shampoo with EC approval for sale in Britain that year.)
Henry had walked over with Isobel and he joined me for a second if smaller breakfast. ‘The technician at Cellfone rang me just before we left home,’ he said.
‘And?’
I had to wait until he had swallowed a mouthful of toast and marmalade. ‘That technician seems to be a real whizz,’ he said. ‘He could backtrack the movements of a phone and tell you the colour of the user’s socks, but unfortunately there’s no way to tell exactly where the phone is, only which cell it’s in.
‘Cochrane’s phone remained in this area until the small hours of this morning. Then it was switched off.’
‘A pity,’ I said.
‘Yes. Presumably it had been found – whether by the ki
ller, the current possessor of your car or some third party, we have no way of knowing.’
‘Or even by some passing tramp who found it where one of the others had discarded it.’
‘Unlikely at that stage,’ Henry said kindly. ‘Later, it was switched on again and a call was attempted, but the connection was never made and they have no record of the intended recipient. All he could tell me was that the phone remained switched on for some minutes, perhaps in the hope of a call that never came, and he was able to determine that the phone was still in this cell but was also detectable through another. He suggests that we look for it somewhere along the south bank of the Tay, roughly between Perth and the sea.’
It was my turn to empty my mouth before speaking. ‘That’s a hell of a lot of bank,’ I said. ‘And presumably he doesn’t mean just the foreshore.’
‘God, no!’ Henry said. ‘They’re cagey about the exact areas covered by their cells but I gathered that he narrowed it down by determining that the signal couldn’t be detected by the next base station to the south. He suggested a margin of twenty miles.’
‘Useless!’
‘Better than nothing. At least we know that it’s still in the area,’ Henry pointed out.
I could have replied that the phone might by now be on some rubbish dump, with my car and Jove five hundred miles away, but I decided that the mood was gloomy enough. Henry just managed to beat me to the last slice of toast. I got up to make some more. So it was going to be that sort of day!
‘I have more news,’ Henry said. ‘After my call from the technician was finished, my friend the boss-man of Cellfone called, sounding harassed. The police had been on to him for much the same information and of course he had had to give it to them. But then there was another request. He wouldn’t say who from, but he did let out that it was from a very big client. Having helped us, he could hardly not help somebody he depends on for a great deal of business; conversely, he agreed that if he wouldn’t tell us the identity of the other enquirer he wouldn’t tell them of our interest.’
Mad Dogs and Scotsmen (Three Oaks Book 7) Page 4