Almost casually, as if trying it for size, he swung at me with the club. I jerked the woman off her feet and swung her round. If her partner happened to knock her brains out, that would leave me with only one to deal with. But the blow only parted her hair so that she screamed. The man nodded to himself and changed his grip.
There was a limit to how long this could last. I braced myself to throw the woman into his next swing.
We had both reckoned without Daffy, who was in such a state of fury that a trifle like having her hands still tied behind her was as nothing. She had struggled with difficulty to her feet. Now she dashed forward, leaped at the man and butted him. The sound of that clash of heads made me feel sick.
Cat-like, Daffy somehow landed back on her feet but the man was not so lucky. He was thrown two paces backwards. I saw the blood springing out on his face. Then he tripped and sat down hard, not on the ground but on one of the newly sharpened tines of the harrow.
The third car skidded to a halt nearby. I looked round just as it disgorged two uniformed policemen. I realized that part of the noise I had heard had been its klaxon.
Mike was getting shakily to his feet. ‘I should have known better,’ he said. ‘The first rule of journalism is “Get near, get the story, but never get involved”!’ He swayed and nearly fell.
The man was making a noise such as I had seldom heard before and then only on active service. I hope never to hear the like of it again. He was trying desperately to drag himself off the spike but without success.
The two policemen were very young. I know that that statement may be taken as implying that I was growing old, but they really were young. They were left in no doubt that the man was badly injured. One went to kneel beside him while the other, first carefully locking the police car which was blocking all chance of escape for any of the other cars, tried to take charge.
With the police more or less in control and no real hope of a rapid departure, Miss Otterburn stopped struggling and even began to relax. Daffy came to me to be untied but I kept my grip on the woman. God alone knew how she might react if I released her. She was a well-built girl and at another time the contact might not have been unpleasant but at the moment I was more interested in recovering my breath. Daffy turned her back to Mike and held out her hands.
The kneeling policeman was using his personal radio to call for back-up and an ambulance. The other approached our small group. ‘That man is badly injured,’ he told me severely, as though quite sure that it was all my fault.
I was in no mood for being ticked off by a juvenile bobby. ‘Serve him bloody well right,’ I said. ‘He beat up Noel Cochrane – you can ask Inspector Tirrell about that – and I believe he killed Harriet Williams as well.’
‘Here!’ said the kneeling constable painfully. He was still supporting a large part of the injured man’s weight. He had made one attempt to lift Spragg off the spike but the man’s protests had left me in no doubt that he would have to be removed to hospital with the harrow still attached. ‘I know that case,’ he said. ‘I was on the search team.’
‘The man didn’t do it,’ Daffy said to the policeman. I felt the woman in my arms tense again. Daffy’s hand were free now. She rubbed very gently at the raw welts round her wrists. ‘This . . . this harpy was the killer,’ she said. She was talking partly to me and partly to the bemused youngster. Her words were not easy to make out because she was fizzing with anger. ‘They caught me just short of the car. He held me while she tied my wrists and he wasn’t being as gentlemanly about it as you are,’ she added to me in a furious aside. ‘Then he searched me. Not her but him. Some day, if God is good to me, I’ll have his balls for that – I’m a respectable, married woman I’ll have you know. They took Noel’s piece of paper – the bastard still has it on him – and they dumped me in the back of your car and stood looking down at me.’
She returned her attention to the policemen, who were clearly dazed by the rush of unexplained information but doggedly trying to absorb it. The standing policeman had produced his notebook, leaving me to continue hanging onto Miss Otterburn.
Daffy was still spitting out her story. ‘“What in God’s name do we do with her now?” the man said. The woman said, “She’s a damned inconvenient witness. We shouldn’t have touched her. We could have blamed our visit on sheer nosiness.”
‘“We had to see if she had the original of that fax on her,” he said. “If she’d hidden it, it might never have turned up. But as it is, she could have produced it. And that would have been the last straw. Now, we can still come off clean. But she’ll have to go. How do you fancy a nasty car accident?”
‘“I like it, Harry,” she said – the bitch!’ Daffy exclaimed tearfully. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, the bitch!
‘And he said, “If we make it a real good smash, a knock on the head will pass as a result of it.”
‘“Will you do it?’ she asked him.
‘“You do it,” he said. “You’re the expert head-knocker. Do it just as you did to the Williams girl.”’
There was a moment of appalled silence.
I must have relaxed my grip on Catherine Otterburn’s wrists because her sudden movement caught me unawares and she wrenched herself out of my grasp. ‘You bugger!’ she yelled. ‘You had to open your big trap and now you’ve dropped me in it!’ She snatched up the club from where it lay in the grass. Her fury, I saw, was not focused on Daffy. She made for Spragg who was still crouched in pain over his spike, half supported by one of the constables.
The other officer dropped his pocket-book and managed to catch hold of the pick-handle. He began to recite the usual warning but she was intent on trying to wrestle the club away from him while pouring threats and curses on the agonized Spragg. Her wits seemed to have left her altogether. Suddenly, releasing her grip on the pick-handle, she tried to throw herself on top of Spragg to drive him down further onto his spike. The kneeling officer had to leave Spragg to support himself. It took the two of them to drag her away, apply handcuffs and lock her into the back of their car.
Daffy and I, meanwhile, had gone to support the unfortunate Spragg. In retrospect I can see a dozen reasons why we might have left him to suffer, but when a fellow human is in great pain it takes a callous spirit to stand back, unmoved. All the same, Daffy spared a hand to retrieve a folded paper from Spragg’s breast pocket.
Followed by a flood of muffled invective from inside their car, the two officers returned and took over the duty of supporting the man’s weight. Spragg, I saw, had lost enough blood to make a puddle under the harrow and some of it had soaked my knee.
Spragg had enough control of himself to adjust his weight and position until the pain was at its least. Then he managed to speak for the first time, low and huskily but perfectly lucid and intelligible. ‘I thought it might come to this,’ he said. ‘So I kept the evidence. She hit the girl – hit Miss Williams, I mean – with a small cosh, a fisherman’s priest we found in the Bothy. She thinks I threw it away as she told me. But, just in case, I picked it up in a polythene bag and hid it.’
Spragg fell silent. I thought that he had fainted. But he roused again, groaned once and then went on. ‘It’s under the driver’s seat in my car. If it was found, I reckoned that her fingerprints on the brass handle would let me off the hook. I guess there’ll be blood and hair on the other end.’
Mike Coutts, I noticed, had produced his pocket tape recorder and was taping what I thought a court could surely accept as admissible evidence in a case of murder.
Chapter Twelve
The police took endless statements from us. They were far less zealous about keeping us informed and we depended largely for information on Michael Coutt’s published revelations. He had his scoop and he kept it alive and kicking through the disgrace of Hector Tholess and also the criminal trials of Miss Otterburn and her colleagues – trials which resulted in substantial sentences, although the lady was lucky to be convicted only on a reduced charge of manslaughter.
But that was for later. Mike’s stories had told the world how we had been more sinned against than sinning and had also gone a long way towards exonerating Noel Cochrane; but we had heard nothing from Noel and our anxiety on his behalf was only relieved when he arrived suddenly on our doorstep one evening to pay an overdue visit to Jove. He looked, I thought, rather worn.
I let the two have a few minutes together before joining Noel outside the wire of the run.
‘No sign of rabies,’ Noel said. ‘And he’ll be out of quarantine soon.’
‘We’re beginning to breathe again. So what happened to you?’ I asked sympathetically. ‘Are you being prosecuted for blackmail? Charged with theft of documents? Sued for libel?’
He laughed and Jove swept the concrete with his tail. ‘None of those,’ Noel said.
‘What, then? Beth will want all the news when she gets back from Cupar. So spill the beans. Are you in work?’
He sat back on his heels. He was grinning. ‘Heads have been rolling at Cook and Simpson,’ he said.
‘Including yours?’
‘Mine was the first to go. But then the more responsible members of the board, the ones who had known nothing about the cover-up, took control and there was a big clearout of staff and resignations on the board. The new chairman decided that somebody had to clear up the mess and that I was the one person who had been right all along. You are now looking, rather incredulously, at the new chief executive.’
I decided that my sympathy had been misplaced. ‘And can you clear up the mess?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘The old-fashioned way. I’m just throwing money at it until it goes away. There had to be a new share issue, of course, to raise the wind.’
‘How on earth did you manage that, in the face of all the scandal?’
‘It was oversubscribed,’ Noel said complacently. ‘Word leaked out at just the critical moment that we had a new golden goose, a vaccination against BSE, the Mad Cow Disease.’
‘And have you?’
‘I expect so,’ said Noel. ‘In fact, we’ll have to or my head will be on the block again.’ He resumed giving Jove biscuits through the wire mesh.
‘And I thought that you were the only honest one among the lot of them,’ I said admiringly. ‘You’re as bad as the rest. Come and have a drink, when you can tear yourself away from Jove. I think Daffy wants to tell you all about what she suffered on your behalf.’
‘And I want to hear it,’ Noel said. ‘Give me ten minutes or so.’
He returned his attention to Jove and I left them alone together in the failing light.
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Mad Dogs and Scotsmen (Three Oaks Book 7) Page 19