‘The cost of protective vaccination of domestic animals, and of wholesale broadcasting of treated bait to immunize mammals in the wild, has been beyond the means of some of the poorer countries especially in the Third World, so no matter what the West, Europe in particular, did to push it back there was always more than one reservoir spreading it out again. But now, at least according to the Cook and Simpson publicity, a dramatic reduction in cost and therefore in both the incidence of rabies and the mortality rate was promised but I can’t say that I’ve seen either reported so far. Of course, nobody ever reports good news . . .’
I looked at Mike Coutts. He shrugged.
‘All the same, it begins to add up,’ said Beth.
The two men had listened to this exchange with increasing perturbation. If some of the long words beat them, the general meaning did not. ‘Listen, Missis,’ said the first man. I was beginning to be able to tell them apart. This one had darker hair, an even narrower face than the other and the grooves that framed his thin moustache were more deeply cut. ‘You’d better can it right there. You don’t know what you’re breengeing into.’
I could hear a faint tremor in Beth’s voice which told me that she was taking the threats seriously, but she had too much courage to back down. As if he had not spoken she said, ‘Let’s see what we’ve got. Cook and Simpson produced a new rabies medicine. Noel Cochrane spent at least a year in India as their representative. Selling the new product must have been a large part of his job. Then he came back to Britain when he was elevated to being promotions and marketing manager, or whatever they call the job. There were furious rows up to board level. Could it be that the new product wasn’t as good as it’s made out to be?’
I looked at Mike Coutts again, remembering that he had warned me not to put too much faith in rabies vaccines. He wore the trace of a smile.
‘That could be it,’ Isobel said. ‘Mr Cochrane would have seen the product in use in India and would have been able to evaluate its performance. He may have seen that the product was less effective than its predecessor. I suspect that the changes made to prevent the sometimes serious reactions may have reduced its efficacy, and a slight reduction would be enough to allow the spread of rabies to continue. If he came home and found that the statistics had been massaged—’
‘You’re guessing,’ said the second man desperately. ‘The whole jingbang’s just bloody guesswork.’
‘So Noel had an attack of conscientious scruples,’ Beth said. ‘Very painful when it happens but it doesn’t happen very often.’
There was a danger in assuming that Noel was among the angels. I decided to be devil’s advocate. ‘Or else he saw a chance for a little blackmail,’ I suggested.
‘That wouldn’t be his line at all,’ Daffy said. ‘He’s as straight as they come.’ She saw us, even the men behind the wire, looking at her speculatively and she lifted her chin. ‘Call it woman’s intuition if you like,’ she said defiantly.
‘I call it sex,’ I said firmly. All the same, I hoped that she was right. Daffy had a natural talent for reading men. I could have used her as an NCO. But in my experience the less charitable guess at somebody else’s motives stood a good chance of being the correct one. ‘Conscience or greed,’ I said. ‘He took away some papers proving that the firm had gone on the market with an imperfect product.’
‘They wouldn’t whip up a storm over bad publicity for the product,’ Isobel objected. ‘There’d be no point. If it was less effective than it was made out to be, that fact would inevitably emerge anyway, given a little time.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘if there was proof that claims had been made which they knew at the time were unjustified, so that false confidence was generated and lives were put at risk—’
‘Or even lost,’ said Beth.
‘—or even lost, that could be much more serious. They could move heaven and earth to suppress that piece of intelligence. So they got a clue to Noel’s whereabouts through his mobile phone and the boss’s fixer was sent after him.’
‘Jake Spurway,’ Beth said, nodding. ‘It was Jake, not Noel, who decided on a little blackmail.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘We only have that on the authority of somebody who wasn’t exactly honest with us. Spurway may not be involved at all, or may be acting in his employer’s best interests.’
‘Possible,’ Beth said. ‘Either way, Harriet Williams, another of Noel’s colleagues, was definitely involved and ahead of him. Either she was acting for Cook and Simpson or else she had blackmail in mind—’
‘Or possibly a compromise between the two,’ I said. ‘Hope of a reward, in cash or promotion.’
‘Could be,’ Beth said. ‘But she intended to step outside the law, or why would she steal a scooter to get here? Whatever, she headed here, knowing that Noel would want to collect Jove. She saw his case being loaded into my car so she pinched the car, complete with Jove. But somebody had had similar ideas and was watching her. He or they caught up with her at the lay-by and tried to take over, she resisted and she was killed – accidentally or on purpose.’
‘They thought she was going to live,’ Daffy said quickly. ‘Otherwise they’d have put her in the car when they set fire to it.’ Daffy looked at the two men beyond the wire mesh. ‘You made a mistake there,’ she said.
Both men started to protest but the original speaker won the floor. ‘You can’t stick us with that,’ he yelped. ‘You wee headbanger!’ He continued in that vein for some time, but as his accent grew thicker with emotion I could soon understand no more than one word in three.
‘Right,’ said Beth when he had run down. ‘Donald Aggleton was on the same track and got knocked on the head, non-fatally, while Miss Otterburn, the secretary of the big wheel, was trying to catch up with him to warn him about Jake Spurway’s defection, or so she said.’ She glanced at the two men, wondering whether to accuse them of the attack on young Aggleton but preferring not to provoke another outpouring of incomprehensible protest. ‘These two charmers were sent to recover the documents and, in case they came back instead with the prospectus for a new worming powder, they were shown samples and told exactly what they were looking for.’
‘That makes sense,’ Isobel said. ‘So what do we do with these two?’ She looked as though she was quite prepared to take drastic action. I thought that she was bluffing but I was not sure. Nor were the two men. I could see that their neighbours, the dogs, smelled fear.
The darker one of the two began to say something but stopped abruptly.
‘You don’t need to do anything much,’ said Michael Coutts. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked the men.
‘How would we?’
‘Then I’ll tell you.’ Mike laid it out for them – his identity, his newspaper connections and some of his earlier successes. ‘Any nonsense from either of you,’ he said, ‘and I’ll give them a very funny story about how you got captured by a girl with a guttie and you coughed up the whole story when she threatened to hit you in the eye with a slimy slug—’
‘But that’s not what happened,’ the other man cried plaintively, as though that would be a conclusive argument.
‘Maybe not,’ Coutts said. ‘But it’s what the world and your boss will believe. The world will laugh until it busts a gut. Your boss won’t be laughing.’
‘In any case, we hand them over to the cops,’ I told Beth and Isobel. ‘Between us, we can witness that they came here, assaulted Hannah and threatened to burn the place down. But two can play at that game.’ While Beth was fitting the known facts together I had had a second look through the two wallets. ‘We have their addresses. MacClure, whichever one he is, has a woman – his wife, I hope – and two bairns in Pollockshields. The other one, Anderton, lives nearby. He has a photograph of an old lady, presumably his mother . . . Do you know what I was before I came here?’ I asked the men.
‘How could we?’ the second man asked sullenly.
‘He’s killed more men than either of you,’ Beth said stoutly
.
‘I never killed a soul,’ squealed the more talkative man. ‘Nor’s he.’
‘I was in the army.’ I decided to embroider the truth. ‘I served in the Falklands, in Northern Ireland and in the Gulf. And my wife’s not wrong. I’ve killed more men than you’ve had hot dinners and I was an unarmed combat instructor for years. Now, you can come out and fight me, one at a time, and if you can get past me you can go. If not, we’ll hand what’s left over to the fuzz, explaining that you attacked me. And I’ll pay a visit to Pollockshields afterwards. Now, which of you wants first go?’
I was bluffing. In my state of health I would not have been a match for either of them. I was banking on my underweight condition being taken for the leanness of perfect trim and on big city hard men being much less tough without their weapons.
The two men backed away from the wire. ‘Loupin’ Larry’ll stiffen you for this,’ said the more silent one.
‘Hah!’ Coutts exclaimed. ‘That’s what I’ve been waiting for. So Larry Gougan sent you. Just wait until he finds out – in print – that you two let his name slip. Guess who he’ll stiffen then?’
Chapter Seven
Throughout our confrontation with the supposed hard men, Michael Coutts had lurked in the background, silent and more or less forgotten until the moment when he produced the threat which finally cowed the men into abject submission. When I came down off my second adrenalin high of the day and remembered his intent presence I half expected him to dash immediately to a phone. Mentally, I began to review the possible inducements which might postpone the more damaging of his revelations. But apparently he was unique among journalists. For one thing, his word was good. He seemed both amused and sympathetic. He drew me aside, but his only comment was a suggestion that we get the shotgun out of sight before the police arrived.
We left Isobel in charge again, without the shotgun but with the padlock still in place, Irma for moral support and Coutts as a witness, while we had a council of war in the kitchen, apprised Henry and Hannah of developments, slaked our dry mouths with tea and decided that our only possible course was a full disclosure to the police of everything except the brandishing of firearms. Those incidents, we agreed, had never happened. The Dickson vanished with the dart-gun into my gun safe.
In response to my phone call, a car full of uniformed constables arrived to take over the immediate responsibility from Isobel. It was followed hotly by Inspector Tirrell.
Old Irma had by then been withdrawn outside the compound and we skipped as lightly as we could over her part in the affair. We had had no business introducing her into the quarantine area in the first place, but the Inspector’s mind was not thinking along the lines of the Animal Health Act 1981, or, it seemed, the Rabies (Importation of Dogs, Cats and Other Mammals) Order 1974 (as amended). The two captives, once they saw how fearlessly we handled the poor old bitch, never recognized their opportunity to make trouble for us.
Tirrell went through the motions of questioning us individually in the sitting room as a basis for formal statements to follow, but his manner was not censorious and it was clear that he was more amused than shocked by the incidents of the flying slug, the puppies’ meal and the bluff with Irma. When he had extracted every scrap of information we had gleaned about the whole business – or at least those details we were prepared to disgorge – he called us together in the sitting room, Mike Coutts included, and spoke less formally.
‘The facts seem to be clear,’ Tirrell said. ‘Your inferences are rather less so. What a pity that you saw fit to question the men yourselves!’
‘Could you have got more out of them?’ Beth demanded.
‘Probably even less,’ Tirrell admitted. ‘But I’d have made sure that anything I did get out of them would be admissible in evidence.’
That was unfair. ‘We’ve given you a little information,’ I said indignantly. ‘None of it except the admissions, for what little they were worth, came directly from those men, so whatever you can get out of them should be admissible. If you accept our inferences, your enquiries will be that much easier because you’ll already know what you’re trying to prove.’
The Inspector lost the last trace of his amusement and also of his pretence of being the dominating presence in full command. ‘You think that you’ve made it easier?’ he asked, and there was a querulous note in his voice. ‘Dream on! You’ve cooked up a tenable theory on the basis of faint hints and uncertain clues. Slanting an investigation towards proving a particular theory is a road to disaster.’ He sighed deeply and looked seriously put-upon. ‘Because the suggestion has been made, somebody will have to go and question a very influential industrialist, who probably plays golf with the Scottish Secretary, and ask him whether he has been perpetrating what could well be regarded as a monumental fraud. Unfortunately, this is not the sort of enquiry that can be passed to the local force. Somebody will have to go through and conduct an interview personally and I don’t see any of my superiors making a bid for that particular privilege. So I can make a good guess as to who that somebody is likely to be. And when Mr Heatherington denies it, as he will, and goes complaining to his important friends, I have nothing whatever solid to fall back on.’
There was an unhappy silence. Coutts broke it. ‘If you have a damn bit of sense,’ he said, ‘you’ll stay well away from Mr Heatherington and the rest of Cook and Simpson until you’ve done your homework properly. Start with the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. If they don’t have the statistics on rabies in Europe and the Third World they can certainly get them for you. So far, they’ve been cagey about letting me see them, but you should have more clout. If the real statistics contradict the figures put out by Cook and Simpson you’ve not only got your starting point; you’ll find HMG and the Fraud Squad spearheading your enquiries.’ Coutts paused. ‘If you care to share such information as you can get—’
Inspector Tirrell still had some pride. He drew himself up. ‘Leak it?’
‘Whatever you want to call it. If you let me see the figures I may be able to help you interpret them. My researches will then be virtually finished. I’ll be ready to make disclosures in the interval before the whole matter becomes sub judice, and my disclosures will certainly take the heat off you.’
The Inspector could hardly be expected to thank a journalist, but Tirrell went to his car looking a little happier. Before being driven away, he took a message over the radio and beckoned to me. ‘They’ve identified those two men,’ he said. ‘Just riffraff. You’ll have no more trouble from that quarter.’
It may have been because Mike Coutts was proving a man of his word or because he had turned out to be another dog-lover or just because he was a likeable person, but by then he was on friendly terms with Henry and myself, an honorary uncle to Sam and had become a favourite with the ladies of the firm. Henry and Isobel left to dine at home but at Beth’s insistence Mike, as he had become, stayed to dinner and later accepted the offer of our spare room for the night.
I wondered, as I dozed before falling asleep, whether such quick acceptance might not be due to the practised charm of the professional journalist, but Mike made no moves towards our telephone or the one in his car and the morning papers reported sparsely on the continuing investigation into the death of Harriet Williams and mentioned the finding of an unconscious man near Lindhaven without connecting the two. No mention was made of any later developments.
*
I had fallen asleep late, but after the excitements of the day I slept deeply for once and Beth left me sleeping in the morning. When I came downstairs, washed and dressed but still half disoriented, Mike had helped the girls with the chores and then, while Beth attended to Sam, had taken over the duty of making breakfast. He did so with a more lavish hand than any of the usual cooks. As I worked my way through the unaccustomed bacon, egg, mushroom and tomato, I felt myself coming fully awake with at least a partial resurgence of my old energy.
Henry came with Isobel and then, when Isobel
went off in his car to stock up with canine medicaments, he loitered in the hope of more dramas to break the monotony of retirement. Mike telephoned a contact in the police but learned only that Donald Aggleton, although now conscious, was suffering or feigning amnesia, that our two captives were maintaining a sullen silence and that there had been no sighting of Noel or of Jove.
We – Henry and Mike and I – were in the throes of debating whether there was any action that could usefully be taken when the phone rang. I had brought the cordless phone into the sitting room with me. I nearly left the call for Beth to answer in the kitchen; but I was half expecting a call from a shooting man whose wife had fallen desperately in love with one of our trained dogs but who had jibbed at the asking price. Beth might well have weakened in the face of her cajolery.
‘Captain Cunningham?’ said a woman’s voice with a pleasantly neutral accent.
‘Mister,’ I said. ‘Mr Cunningham. Speaking.’
‘My name’s Rodgers. Mrs Rodgers. I live in Ardunie.’ (I pricked up my ears. Ardunie was less than five miles upstream from Lindhaven.) ‘My nephew, Jim Phillips – he’s the secretary of the Gundog Club—’
‘I know him,’ I said, but she rolled right on.
‘—has only just told me that you’re on the lookout for a lost Labrador. Is that right?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘A large black Lab. A nice-looking beast. Male, no collar.’
‘That sounds as if it could be the one. He’s appeared at my back door the last couple of mornings, picking up the bread that I put out for the birds.’
Mad Dogs and Scotsmen (Three Oaks Book 7) Page 11