The superintendent rose from behind a desk which seemed to have strayed in by mistake and to be looking for a way out – or perhaps, Keith thought, it too was waiting to audition. He greeted Keith with unwonted affability and to Deborah was avuncular. ‘I always said that this young lady should be in the police,’ he said, in the careful lilt which always sounded as if he were still thinking in Gaelic and translating as he spoke. ‘She has been our star witness before now and may be so again.’ To the desk sergeant he added, ‘Ask Inspector Gowrie to bring the evidence.’
Keith and the superintendent had, over the years, enjoyed a relationship which had swung between comprehensive loathing and occasional, uneasy alliances. Now, finding himself courteously offered a comfortable chair and the state of his health solicited, Keith felt his antennae quiver with suspicion.
Detective Inspector Gowrie arrived in plain clothes, carrying Sam Hendrickson’s shotgun over one arm with the easy air of one walking between pheasant drives. The effect was spoiled by the box-file under his other arm. He was a chunky young man with a Lothians accent and a brisk and confident manner. Munro left him standing while brief introductions were made, only inviting him to sit at the last possible moment within the bounds of politeness between superior and subordinate.
The gun, Keith noted, was finished with a similar rubber butt-pad to the ones in the summerhouse. Sam Hendrickson, it was to be supposed, had been sensitive to the effects of recoil.
‘You steered Mrs Hendrickson in my direction,’ Keith said to Munro. ‘Why was that?’
‘She was dissatisfied with the sheriffs verdict,’ Munro said. ‘She was wanting a further investigation. You have often investigated firearms cases in the past. Who else would I suggest?’
‘You could have choked her off, as you’ve usually tried to choke me off before now. If you’d told her that the sheriffs verdict was final and correct, she’d have accepted it from you.’
Munro pointed a bony finger at Keith. ‘But do you, yourself, believe that his verdict was final and correct?’
‘With all respect —’ Gowrie began. Munro stopped him with a fearsome glare.
‘No,’ Keith said. ‘I don’t. But that wasn’t —’
‘No more do I,’ said Munro. ‘When the lady drew our attention to the remains of the cigarette —’
‘With respect,’ Gowrie said peevishly, ‘the cigarette could have been thrown away by the deceased. If he was about to take his own life, he would not be greatly concerned about the possibility – the very remote possibility – of a fire. We found no other evidence pointing to anything other than suicide.’
‘Wrong, wrong and wrong,’ Munro snapped. ‘Regrettably, I have had more than my share of experience. There are those who make apparent attempts at suicide, as a cry for help or attention. Occasionally the gesture goes wrong. The person who was to have found them in the gas-filled room or comatose with sleeping tablets fails to arrive in time. But those are the ones who allow things to continue in their usual untidy and unfinished way, because they expect to be around to tidy up. Such a one might well ignore a dropped cigarette.
‘But if a man can make an appeal for help by using a loaded shotgun, which I doubt, this was not such a case.
‘Your true suicide, except for a minority who act out of sudden desperation, is meticulous. He wishes to be well remembered. So he leaves all neat and tidy. He would not leave a cigarette burning under the furniture. If, as you say, no evidence was found to suggest anything other than suicide, that may have been because the investigation was inadequate.’
‘With respect, the opposite is surely more likely to be true,’ Gowrie persisted. ‘The man who is about to blow his brains out can hardly die in a fire, whereas the one who is taking a near-overdose —’
‘That is the third time that you have mentioned respect,’ Munro said angrily. ‘Do not use the word again while it is so clearly absent. You were confronted with a death by shotgun. If you had reported it as a mysterious shooting, a team from Edinburgh would have taken over and every detail would have been put under the microscope. You preferred to call it suicide from the very beginning, keeping the investigation in the hands of your sergeant and yourself, with the predictable result that you found nothing to indicate anything else.’
The two policemen scowled at each other. Inspector Gowrie had flushed red and his hand was shaking. Keith realised that he had been invoked as a result of a feud within the Newton Lauder police. He sat quiet and kept his eyes on a hideous and faded photograph of a younger Superintendent Munro with other members of some long-forgotten shinty team.
Detective Inspector Gowrie unlocked his eyes from those of his superior and looked coldly at Keith. He licked his dry lips. ‘Might one ask why Mr Calder excludes suicide?’
‘I was about to do so,’ Munro said.
Keith cleared his throat. ‘Somebody phoned me last night to tell me not to contradict the verdict of suicide. He made an ominous but unspecific threat against me or my family.’
‘If that is your only argument—’ Gowrie began.
‘My wife overheard the caller,’ Keith said.
A hot little silence was broken by the superintendent. ‘Inspector Gowrie was not doubting your word,’ he said.
The inspector seemed reluctant to contradict his superior yet again. ‘Are you asking for our protection?’ he enquired.
‘Not at the moment,’ Keith said. ‘And I do have other grounds for disbelieving the verdict. I visited the Hendrickson’s summerhouse this morning. Although there’s a thin layer of dust by now, I noticed that the furniture seemed to have been freshly waxed.’
Gowrie raised his eyebrows. ‘So?’
‘So nothing for the moment. Bear it in mind for later. I also noticed, in the desk drawer, a couple of twenty-bore cartridges, to fit the gun which a man in a wheelchair could most easily have reached down. Unless the police rearranged the order in which the guns hung on the wall?’
‘I checked that,’ Gowrie said impatiently. ‘The guns were as you saw them . Even from a wheelchair, he could have reached the twelve-bore gun. He may have preferred to use the heavier weapon, just to make siccar.’
‘The twenty-bore would have been just as certain,’ Keith said. ‘I once came back to my car from pigeon-shooting with a twenty-bore. A sheep was lying beside it, obviously at its last gasp, and under my windscreen-wiper was a note from the farmer. “Mr Calder,” it said, “please shoot this sheep.” So I did, and the shot drilled a neat hole clean through the sheep’s skull.’
‘Mr Hendrickson did not have the benefit of your wider experience,’ Gowrie said.
‘If he’d been shooting for some years, as his wife assured me was the case,’ Keith said, ‘he’d be in no doubt about the killing-power of a twenty-bore. What’s more, Mrs Hendrickson had taken his cartridges away to the house for safety. Obviously, she’d missed the two twenty-bore cartridges in his desk drawer.’
‘She could also have missed the fatal twelve-bore cartridge,’ Gowrie said.
‘Which I’m told was of a different make from all the others.’
‘And is this what you’re basing your conclusions on?’ Gowrie asked. His twisted smile was almost a sneer.
‘No,’ Keith said. ‘Of course not. Non-matching cartridges are part of the everyday scene. Just out of interest . . .’ He put his hand into his coat pocket, where there were usually a few cartridges to be found. ‘One Grand Prix,’ he said, ‘one Huddersfield and two Winchester. Much more to the point is the fact that the twenty-bore gun is a non-ejector.’
Gowrie grunted, frowned and then spoke. ‘But the cartridge was not ejected. I do not see what that has to do with anything.’
‘Then,’ Keith said, in unconscious imitation of Mr Enterkin, ‘I shall explain. Your chair is not unlike the wheelchair. Pretend that you’re paralysed down the right side, Inspector. I’ll put these two snap-caps on Mr Munro’s desk, within your reach. Don’t worry, they’re dummies and absolutely harmless. Let�
�s see you pick up the gun with your left hand, open it, insert the two snap-caps, close it and pretend to shoot yourself.’
‘Very well.’ Showing some familiarity with firearms, Gowrie picked up the shotgun left-handed. He pressed over the top-lever and the barrels dropped through an arc of twenty degrees. He set the gun down across his knees and inserted the snap-caps into the gaping chambers. When he pressed his left hand down, the gun closed with a soft click. He lifted it again and, after a little fumbling, held the butt between his knees and touched the muzzles with his mouth. His left thumb was on the front trigger but he refrained from pressing it. ‘Satisfied?’
‘So far so good,’ Keith said, ‘although I’m in some doubt as to whether Hendrickson could have gripped with both knees. Hand me the gun, please.’ He took and opened the shotgun, holding it so that the two policemen could see between the action and the barrels. ‘As you can see, when the gun’s opened the two extractors come up, pushing the cartridges to where you can take them out by hand. But shooting is usually a matter of a hell of a lot of walking or standing and a few moments of hectic activity now and again. So you want the fastest possible reloading time. A gun of any quality, such as this one, has selective ejectors which pop the fired cartridges right out. Like this.’
He closed the gun, slipped off the safety-catch and pulled both triggers. He opened the gun and, with the practice of years, caught the two snap-caps as they were ejected. He replaced them on the desk, closed the gun, pulled the triggers again and returned the gun to the inspector. ‘Now try again.’
‘Why?’ Gowrie asked, tight-lipped.
Munro had been watching in silence. He was as much in the dark as was Gowrie but he was content to await Keith’s revelations. ‘Just do as Mr Calder says.’
‘I’ll explain first, if the detective inspector insists,’ Keith said. ‘When a gun of this design, which is one of the most common, has been fired and opened, two different springs have done their jobs, the mainsprings and the ejector springs. Two of each, if both barrels have been fired. To be ready for use again, each has to be re-cocked. With any such arrangement of cams, levers and springs, the designer can distribute the work-load in a variety of ways over the opening and closing process, but the usual arrangement, as here, is that the mainsprings are re-cocked on opening and the ejector springs on closing. But I know this particular model well, and most of the load of cocking the ejectors comes at the beginning of closure. To make matters worse, the designer wanted a good throw from the ejectors and specified springs of a strength which is frankly excessive – unless you want to knock a third bird down with the ejected cartridges. In fact, when both barrels have been fired it’s stiff as hell to close at first and then suddenly goes “over the hump” and closes with a snap, often catching the skin of the unwary. As far as I know, I’m the only gunsmith who regularly does a modification on this model to make the fired gun easier to close, but this gun has never been through my hands. Now, try.’
‘I still don’t see the relevance,’ Gowrie said.
‘I see the relevance, and that is enough,’ Munro said.
Gowrie flushed a dull red. With slight difficulty, he opened the gun against his leg. He laid it across his knees again while he loaded the snap-caps. And there he stuck. Struggle as he might, the gun would not close.
‘You see,’ Keith said, ‘I noticed that the two guns still on Hendrickson’s wall had the triggers pulled. Some people prefer them that way.’
Gowrie paused in his efforts. ‘That doesn’t mean that the third gun was the same,’ he said.
Deborah, who had been listening raptly as her elders argued, stirred for the first time. ‘But it was,’ she said. She opened her jotter. ‘I spoke to Mr Albany this morning. This is what he said. “After our wives left, I gave Sam’s guns a clean for him. They didn’t need it, but he liked to see it done. I put snap-caps into each of them and pulled the triggers. Sam liked to feel that the mainsprings had been relieved. I’d told him several times that that was a fallacy. But if it made him happy, what the hell?”’
Gowrie grunted again. He picked up the gun, still left-handed, and turned it so that the butt was on the desk and the muzzles rested on his shoulder. Under the greater leverage the gun at last snapped shut, pinching a neat triangle of skin on the inspector’s palm. ‘There!’ Gowrie said, dabbing with a handkerchief.
‘And now,’ Keith said, ‘take a look at the mark of the rubber butt-pad on the inspector’s desk. That’s why I mentioned that the furniture in the summerhouse was freshly polished. There’s a good coating of polish and not a mark to be seen.
‘You might be able to do the same trick with the butt on the floor, or by hooking the gun under the edge of the desk, but I’ll tell you for nothing that the cartridges would fall out again before you could close the gun. And before you try it with the butt on your knee and the muzzles on the floor, let me point out that the floor of the summerhouse is of very hard quarry tiles and that the blacking on the muzzles of the gun is unmarked.’
‘Which,’ said Superintendent Munro, ‘is a long-winded way of saying that there is no way in which a half-paralysed man could load and close that gun without leaving traces which you are unable to find.’
‘That,’ Keith said, ‘is correct. And yet Mr Hendrickson would have known that the twenty-bore gun, which was closest to his hand and the lightest to lift down, would have presented no such difficulty and that there were cartridges to fit it in his drawer.’
Chapter Four
That two police officers of some seniority would give immediate acceptance to Keith’s view of the sheriff’s verdict was not to be expected. In the ensuing discussion, strangely, it was Superintendent Munro who was determined to probe for weaknesses in Keith’s argument while Detective Inspector Gowrie, once he had put behind him his initial chagrin, was eager to set off on the new line of enquiry.
Gowrie’s box-file, it turned out, did not contain the relevant photographs. He left the room to fetch them.
Munro sighed and leaned back in his chair. ‘I must confess,’ he said, ‘that I did not expect anything quite so dramatic from you. I had no more than a feeling in my water that the inspector’s investigation had been superficial and that I could count on you to find something which he had missed.’
‘Just to teach him a lesson.’ At Mrs Hendrickson’s expense, Keith added silently.
‘Aye. Well, no doubt he will be the better policeman in the long run over the heads of it.’
‘No doubt. So what happens now?’ Keith asked. ‘Do you drop the mess into Edinburgh’s lap?’
‘I think not. At the moment, we only have a few unexplained details to offset against an official decision which is presumed to have put an end to the matter. It may even be that some person aided and abetted Mr Hendrickson to commit suicide. Did you think of that?’
‘Yes. But I didn’t think much of it,’ Keith said.
‘As to that, we shall see. Just as long as Edinburgh is informed that we have found some unexplained discrepancies surrounding the sheriffs verdict and are continuing an enquiry, we will have paid lip-service to proper procedures. And then we will see what the inspector can do with a real investigation,’ Munro added smugly.
Gowrie returned with the photographs and began passing them to Keith.
‘May I see?’ Deborah asked.
‘No way,’ Keith said, his eyes on a glossy shot of the appalling wound. ‘I don’t want you waking me up in the night with the screaming horrors.’
‘Oh Dad!’ Deborah protested. ‘I’m not that soft. You’ve taught me to gralloch a deer before now.’
‘It’s different when it’s people. Be satisfied with reading the pathologist’s report. May she see that?’ he asked Munro.
‘I see no reason why not. It was read out in open court.’ They fell silent. The photographs were informative. They were also uniformly gruesome. Police photographers are not concerned with sparing the feelings of the viewer. Keith was glad that he had witheld
them from his daughter. The general shots, which would have been taken before anybody but the doctor had been allowed to touch anything, showed the guns placed as he had seen them.
Deborah looked up suddenly from the pathologist’s report. ‘It says here that the contents of the brain-pan were “largely absent”. But, Dad, you were telling us about a shotgun drilling a neat hole . . .’
‘There’s nothing in that,’ Keith said. He hesitated before deciding that words alone would not turn her stomach. ‘I shot that sheep from an inch or two away. If Mr Hendrickson had the muzzles in his mouth, the gas pressure would do almost as much damage as the shot. The exit wound looks surprisingly small. It was the gas pressure that did the rest. The old expression about somebody “blowing his brains out” is absolutely true.’
Deborah seemed quite undisturbed by these grisly details. She was reading on with a puzzled frown. ‘Oh. It also says that the shot seemed to have passed almost vertically through the cranium.’
‘The lassie’s as sharp as a knife,’ Munro said. ‘I had wondered about that myself. It suggests that he had his head back. That was common enough in the old days, when barrels were longer. A person had to tip his head back to reach the trigger. I’ve known them to push the trigger with a stick.’
Keith took up the thought. ‘With a modern gun, with twenty-seven-inch barrels, it’s not natural. Not if he was of normal size.’
‘Five feet eleven,’ Gowrie said. ‘Of course, we don’t know how it would be to be paralysed down one side.’
Each of the men, in turn, tried holding the gun left-handed and bringing the muzzles to his mouth while keeping fingers near the triggers.
‘We’re doing it all wrong,’ Keith said suddenly. ‘We’re trying to aim up through the top of the head by keeping the butt down. But the shot and . . . and grey matter hit a ceiling which was about six feet above his head, and hit it about – what? – eight feet behind his back, to judge from the photographs. So the gun was at an angle of about forty degrees to the horizontal. So his head must have been laid well back.’
The Worried Widow Page 6