‘Nor did I until the sticky tape in his case gave the game away.’ The man laughed gruffly. ‘It’s a good one, must have cost him an arm and a leg.’
‘You should ask him where he got it.’
‘Nah,’ the man said after a moment’s thought. ‘With me, what you see is what you get. He might have told me that much, but he wasn’t going to say a word about the other thing, no matter what I did to him. And believe me, I did plenty. Come on inside.’
He turned back towards the door. She took quick steps across the weedy surface of the drive, coming up behind him. As she raised her ladylike umbrella, I thought that she was in playful mood. I expected a light patting sound and shouts of laughter. But the umbrella moved ponderously. The man must have seen her shadow move. He turned quickly so that the round-arm swing met his throat instead of the back of his neck. He went down with a thump, choking.
She stooped, snatched at the envelope and tucked it away. Without stopping to think, I took aim at her rounded behind and let fly. The tranquillizer dart took her in the left buttock. She straightened up quickly and stared round without seeing where the sting had come from. She passed a hand over her hip and dislodged the dart, looking at it without understanding. She took half a dozen paces back towards her car. But the dose that I had prepared had been in expectation of a large man. Just short of the car she went down on her face, out for the count.
There could be others. I had a charged dart in reserve. When I looked up from re-readying the dart-gun, Henry and Mike were already standing between the two prone forms.
Henry produced his mobile phone. ‘Police?’
‘And ambulance,’ Mike said urgently as I arrived beside them. ‘Ambulance first. This man’s choking to death.’
Henry looked hard at the fallen man and pushed his phone into Mike’s hand. ‘You make the calls. Unless you’ve ever opened up somebody’s windpipe?’
‘Never. But have you?’
‘No. But I went on a first-aid course once and we were shown how to do it.’ He turned to me. ‘Have you got your little lock-knife on you?’
I was about to ask whether Henry should be embarking on a surgical career at his age, but the man on the ground, who I presumed to be Jake Spurway, had turned the colour of a stormy sky near sunset and was making strange noises. He would be dead long before we finished arguing. I produced my knife. As far as I could remember it had been washed since I had last used it to paunch a rabbit, but there was no time to worry about that.
Mike’s voice was engaged on the phone in a patient explanation of how to find the place.
As I watched anxiously, Henry felt for the Adam’s apple and then measured with his fingers a small distance below it. He hesitated. ‘If all goes well,’ he said, ‘I’ll get a medal; otherwise, I’ll be a reckless jackass who ought to be locked up, if not something worse. Decision time.’
‘Tracheotomy time,’ I said. ‘You have to do it.’ Henry sighed and moved the knife and I looked away.
Suddenly the choking stopped and there came the sound of somebody snatching breath, the sound distorted by slurps and wheezes. ‘Sod it!’ Henry said. ‘It keeps trying to close up. Have you got any kind of a tube that I can use? In the stories they use a pipe-stem although that would be on the small side.’
None of us smoked a pipe. I felt in my pockets. ‘Will this do?’ I asked.
‘For the moment. It’s still too small. See if you can find something bigger. More like the size of a pencil. The shell of a Biro might do. Try the house.’
Mike seemed to have finished his phone calls. ‘Come and help me look,’ I said.
I held the dart-gun at the ready as we entered. The accommodation was all in a single large room except that the door stood open on an obviously empty shower and toilet compartment. Kitchen units and a cooker stood against one wall. A corner held several bunks and a double bed, which seemed to have been an afterthought. There was an area devoted to comfortable chairs around a huge fireplace.
Noel’s attaché case or one very like it was open on a low table but there was nobody, living or dead, to be seen. Noel, I thought sadly, was unlikely to have been released alive, whatever the motivation of the man outside. Perhaps Noel had been buried in some nearby field or his weighted body dropped in the Tay. Meanwhile, my immediate concern had to be with the more or less living, if only to see that he stood trial for his sins.
I began a hasty search of the drawers and cupboards.
‘Quiet a moment,’ Mike said. ‘Listen!’
I listened but my hearing was dulled by years of shooting and I could only hear the blood in my ears. Mike homed in on a large oak chest and wrestled with the key. I noticed that a row of small holes had been punched through it and fragments of wood and sawdust littered the floor.
The lid came up. A man’s figure was crammed inside. He seemed unconscious but, to my relief, I could see that he was breathing. The square face looked battered like that of a boxer after losing a major fight and the head was unexpectedly bald, but beneath the blood smears I recognized Noel Cochrane.
Chapter Eight
Now with three unconscious bodies to worry about, I was beginning to wonder where it would end and how I should apportion my help. I was more friendly disposed to Noel but, although damaged, Noel was breathing of his own accord while the man outside needed all the help he could get and possibly more. The woman, on the other hand, was my personal victim and I was none too sure whether the dosage that I had given her, which had been prepared with the memory of Hector Tholess in mind, might not have been an overdose.
Mike had lifted Noel into a sitting position. The contents of Noel’s pockets had spilled into the bottom of the chest along with the displaced toupee. I saw a slim, gold ballpoint pen which seemed to be about the size I was looking for. I snatched it up. The metal was slippery, the mechanism unfamiliar, and nothing I could do would take it apart. Henry might be able to figure it out.
‘I’ll be back, maybe,’ I told Mike. ‘Do what you can for Noel until the ambulance comes.’
I carried the dart-gun outside again. And there I saw what I had been looking for all the time. The dart lay where it had fallen in the dust. It might be unhygienic but it was the right size. I recovered my knife from Henry and with its help I took the syringe apart and wiped the barrel out with an almost clean handkerchief.
The woman must have had the constitution of an elephant, or else I had spent longer than I thought inside the Bothy because she was already stirring. I removed the ignition key and locked up her car. There was a handbag on the back seat and, presumably, if she had a spare key it would be in that.
The scene had changed in another way. The tracheotomy patient breathing heavily and regularly through my silent whistle must have been sending signals far and wide. A long-haired mongrel was sitting, awaiting events, and I saw a collie come out from among the trees.
Henry was crouched uncomfortably over the man whose eyelids, I saw, were flickering. I squatted beside Henry and gave him the tube. ‘About bloody time,’ he said.
‘He was lucky that you were shown how to do it.’
‘We were also told never to attempt it,’ Henry said. ‘But how do you stand by and let someone die?’
‘You don’t,’ I said. I pushed aside a bearded collie which had made an appearance and was investigating the blood. ‘Not even somebody who had been knocking hell out of Noel Cochrane. He’s inside, battered but still alive.’
‘That’s who it was? I wondered.’
I could hear an ambulance approaching and, further off, a police car.
Henry, still squatting down, almost threw my silent whistle at me. His fingers were bloody and he had been further sprayed by his patient’s first breaths. My whistle was so stained with blood that I almost refused to pick it up. But it had done its job. With the new tube in place, Jake Spurway was breathing deeply and easily. Somebody would have to shoot him full of antibiotics and clean up the incision from Henry’s rudimentary trache
otomy, but we had done the best we could. And although the whistling had stopped, dogs were still arriving. I could see a German shepherd coming through the trees.
There was a sudden snuffling in my ear. I turned my head and found myself eyeball to eyeball with a black Labrador. Before I could move, he dropped the rubber doll which he had been carrying and gave my face a thorough lick. The Labrador was Jove. He was grinning idiotically, so pleased to be back with friends that his whole rear half was waggling, but not forgetting to pick up the rubber doll which he had abstracted from somebody’s garden. I offered him his red kangaroo and after a moment he spat out the rubber doll and grabbed for it with a grunt of delight.
It was a moment of heady relief. I am easily moved to sympathy for dogs, far more so than for humans, because dogs do not understand. There is no way to explain that you will return, that the vet will make it all better, that they cannot come shooting today because that is not what today is about. They cannot work out that their misery is finite and will some time end, and so their misery is magnified.
‘If somebody would find me some sticking plaster or masking tape or even Scotch tape,’ Henry said plaintively, ‘maybe a piece of string or I could get by with some Blu Tac, I could then fix this tube and allow myself the luxury of finding out whether I can still stand up. I’m too old for Cossack dancing.’
Jove pushed me over and tried to lean on me but I shoved him away and got up. ‘No time,’ I said. ‘Mike’s resuscitating Noel Cochrane and I must put Jove in the car before the police get here. That way, it’s as though he’d never been AWOL. Just grit your teeth and hold on.’
‘You’re sure Noel’s all right?’
‘How all right is all right? He’s been knocked around and cooped up in a wooden chest. But he’s alive and likely to remain that way.’
‘Good. And you’re sure that’s Jove?’
In my relief I was ready to laugh at last. ‘Positive,’ I said.
‘And you’re sure he doesn’t have rabies?’
My amusement deserted me. I had forgotten that possibility. ‘As positive as one can be,’ I said.
‘Then you can sit here and hold the tube in place while I take Jove back to the car.’
‘I don’t have a lead here,’ I said. ‘Are you certain that Jove would follow you? You’ve hardly met.’
‘Go then,’ Henry groaned. ‘Bring me back a physiotherapist and a chiropractor to straighten me out again between them. They can take a leg each.’
I started to put the dart-gun down beside Henry but he waved it away. ‘No need for that,’ he said. ‘If he turns stroppy, all I have to do is pull the tube out.’
I picked up the umbrella which was lying nearby. Although it was now looking distinctly secondhand, I could see that it had been dismantled and reassembled very neatly around a length of lead pipe. I dropped it beside him. ‘And the young lady?’ I asked. ‘Suppose she comes at you, foaming at the mouth?’
He glanced at Miss Otterburn, who was sitting up and shaking her head. She did not seem to be at peace with the world. Henry put out his spare hand for the dart-gun. ‘You have a point,’ he said.
I called Jove to heel and set off back through the trees by the way that we had come. As I loaded him into the travelling box I heard the ambulance go by. A car passed in the opposite direction while the klaxon of the approaching police car was still some way off. If I confronted the police with Jove in my car, I would be in contravention of the regulations and somebody might still make trouble. I reminded myself to press the security switch, started the engine and set off for home in a hurry. The new car sighed as though realizing that the honeymoon was over before it had begun.
There was an irreducible minimum of time that had to be spent telling Beth and the girls the bare bones of what had happened and handing out instructions for the care and incarceration of Jove and the notification of almost everybody in the world who had the least vestige of authority, but I managed to be on my way back within about twenty minutes. Even so, by the time I was nearing the Bothy I guessed that the driveway would be jammed with official vehicles. I left my car in the track where it had been earlier and walked.
The scene had changed again, this time radically. The wounded had been removed by ambulance. Henry had risen or been lifted to his feet on which he was now hobbling pitifully around the gravel. What seemed at first glance to be a whole battalion of police officers turned out on closer examination to be less than a dozen, of whom those who were not following Henry around and asking him questions were milling around in apparent aimlessness which on closer examination turned out to be a painstaking search of the landscape for something unspecified. A man with a medical bag was getting into one of the cars.
Our old friend Inspector Tirrell seemed to be in charge. He headed across the gravel to intercept me but I dodged him and shot a hasty glance inside the building and came back. One face was definitely missing. ‘Where’s Mike?’ I asked Henry.
‘God knows,’ Henry retorted unhappily. ‘He helped to bring Noel out to the ambulance and then shot off on foot before the police got here, leaving me to try and explain events which I only partially understand. My suspicion is that he’s gone to find a phone and sell the story.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘Was all well at home?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘How are the patients?’
Henry stretched and I heard a joint crack. ‘If you include me, I am in desperate need of a hot bath, strong drink, a massage, traction and some tender loving care, thank you for asking.’
‘I meant the others,’ I said.
‘Oh. Mostly they were in better shape than myself, having comparative youth on their side. The man – who may or may not have been Jake Spurway – was breathing. They had a proper tracheotomy tube for him. Noel was still woozy and he seems to have a couple of broken ribs to go with sundry sprains.’
I noticed for the first time that the Japanese hatchback had vanished. ‘And the girl?’ I asked.
‘Drove off. She had a spare key for her car in a magnetic box under the back wing.’
‘You let her go?’
‘What would you have had me do?’ Henry asked in exasperation. He gave me a meaningful look. ‘You left the dart-gun with me for purposes of self defence. Didn’t you?’
‘Of course,’ I said, belatedly catching on.
‘Well, then. I couldn’t leave my patient to die. I did threaten to ping her up the backside with your dart but that wouldn’t have been self defence and anyway she told me to get knotted,’ Henry said indignantly. ‘I don’t know what women are coming to! She was in her car with the door closed before I could bring myself to do it. It’s against my religion to shoot girls in the bum,’ he added, with an air of conscious virtue.
Inspector Tirrell had been waiting patiently, no doubt hoping that we would let slip some incriminating morsel. Abandoning any such hope he broke in on us. ‘If you’ve quite finished telling each other all about it, perhaps it’s my turn to be informed. Please come inside.’
When my eyes adjusted from the strong sunlight outside I saw that the interior of the Bothy was, if anything, rather tidier than before. The two constables who were still engaged in a search must have been inexperienced in the ways of the CID. They were meticulously replacing everything in an orderly manner, which was not in accord with my earlier experience of police searches. The fact that they were WPCs may have accounted for the unusual consideration. The oak chest had already been removed.
The stuffed leather armchairs were old and worn but had settled over the years into comfortable shapes. I thought that they had probably come from some hotel or club. Henry and I settled into two of them while Tirrell stood with his back to a large stone fireplace holding long-dead ashes. He looked displeased. It seemed that the days of informal chatting were over.
‘Mr Cunningham,’ the Inspector began sternly, ‘you left the scene of a crime.’
‘I left two perfectly good witnesses here,’ I said, choosing my words carefull
y. ‘It wasn’t my fault if one of them went off. On the other hand, I had recovered the dog which had escaped or been stolen from quarantine. I returned it to secure accommodation, which I was legally obliged to do, and came straight back here. What would you have preferred me to do?’
‘I will ask the questions,’ the Inspector said coldly.
‘I think you’ll find,’ I said, ‘that I have the right to ask questions too.’
Without commenting, the Inspector made a note. My arguments were sound as far as they went but he looked no less peevish. It is always annoying to be robbed of a good grievance. ‘Leaving that for the moment,’ he said, ‘Mr Kitts has given me an outline of the story but he admits that his knowledge may be incomplete. We’ll get down to a formal statement later. For the moment, please tell me everything. Everything,’ he repeated.
It was a tall order but I tried to comply with it. I told the Inspector everything of even marginal relevance I could call to mind that had happened since the previous evening.
‘You didn’t think to keep me advised of your activities,’ he said. He sounded more angry than hurt.
‘What activities?’ Henry demanded. ‘We had a report of a Labrador on the loose so we came to take a look. Miss Otterburn had paid us a call several days ago, we think in the hope of picking up information or triggering some revealing actions—’
‘Or to pass a message warning the young man Donald off,’ I said.
‘Or that,’ Henry said testily. ‘Where was I? Yes. During that visit she let slip something about a bothy. Our informant told us that this place was known as “The Bothy”. In view of the possible connection, it seemed that the dog might have fetched up near here, so we came to take a look. While we were looking, we saw the lady arrive and whack the occupant, who we believe to be Spurway, over the head. We called you immediately. At what earlier point do you think we should have called you in?’
‘What’s more,’ I said, ‘the only efforts I was making were directed towards recovering the dog. Alive,’ I added. ‘I was not going to issue you with an invitation to bring along another firing-squad. You saw the mood that Tholess was in.’
Mad Dogs and Scotsmen (Three Oaks Book 7) Page 13