The Worried Widow

by Gerald Hammond

  Gowrie was making notes. ‘We must ask Mrs Hendrickson whether his neck was weak after the stroke.’

  ‘M’hm. But,’ Munro said, ‘I am beginning to see another picture. Somebody hits him on the head. He slumps in the chair with his head lolling back. The visitor takes down the gun, loads it with a cartridge from his pocket, puts the muzzles in the unconscious man’s mouth and pulls the trigger, deliberately angling the gun so that the shot would remove the bruised part of the head.’

  ‘What did the fingerprints say?’ Keith asked.

  ‘The usual smudged mess,’ Gowrie said. He produced three more photographs, over-written in black. ‘This is the gun before we lifted the prints. Several of Hendrickson’s, rather more of Mr Albany’s, none of them overlapping, and a lot of smudges. Heavy engraving is bad for prints, and it’s easy enough to put a few prints from a dead or unconscious man on to the barrels of a gun.’

  ‘And it’s so easy to get the very thin, plastic gloves,’ Deborah said.

  ‘Where?’ Munro asked.

  ‘Almost any packet of hair tint. Suggestion,’ Keith said. He put his finger on the photograph. ‘You have a row of three prints here. They’re marked as being Hendrickson’s, but I can’t even tell which way up they are. Did you keep whole-hand prints from the body?’

  Gowrie nodded. ‘We did.’

  ‘Have them copied on to a stiff but not rigid, transparent plastic, cut them out and try moving them around to simulate that group of prints. That might tell you what angle the hand would have been at and whether those prints are in the right relationship to each other.’

  Gowrie made another note. ‘Worth a try,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose,’ Deborah said shyly, ‘that they really are left-hand prints? If not, there’s something wrong.’

  ‘It doesn’t say so,’ Keith said, looking at the photograph.

  ‘They are,’ Gowrie said. ‘Definitely.’ From his uncertain tone of voice, it was clear that he was guessing. But Munro let it pass. This time, Gowrie would check and check again.

  Keith skimmed through some more of the photographs. For the moment, they had no more message for him. ‘Could I see the cartridge-case?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ Gowrie said. He dipped into his box-file. ‘You’re going to love this.’ He produced a green shell and handed it over. On the brass base was stamped ‘Huddersfield 12’, and printed on the green plastic were the words, ‘Keith Calder Guns, The Square, Newton Lauder’.

  ‘We sell thousands upon thousands of these,’ Keith said. ‘They’re a standard cartridge. I pay a little extra to have my name on them, but it’s worth it for the advertising. Anyway, that’s my belief. My partner doesn’t always agree. If you can find me the wad and a few pellets, I’ll check to make sure that they could have come out of it.’

  Deborah turned a few pages. ‘The lab says that the wad and pellets were compatible with the cartridge and that the marks of the firing-pin and extractor match the fired barrel of that gun,’ she said.

  ‘Very likely,’ Keith said. ‘But being compatible doesn’t mean that they were ever together. Did anybody check that the marks were in register? I bet that they just opened the gun and the empty case scooted across the room.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s exactly what happened,’ Gowrie said. ‘As soon as the fingerprint man had finished, I opened the gun myself to make sure that there wasn’t another live round in it.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Keith, ‘you can forget it. What I was thinking, rather vaguely, was that somebody could, at any time, have picked up a case which had been fired in that gun. Then, if the only live cartridge which he had available was a give-away – a reload, perhaps – he could have done the deed and changed cartridge-cases.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Munro said, ‘But possible, surely.’

  ‘Not possible,’ Keith said. ‘Not without half-dismantling the gun. The case flew out when Inspector Gowrie opened the gun. That would only happen if the trigger had been pulled again. The lab would surely have noticed if the firing-pin had been struck twice.’

  ‘They would,’ Gowrie said, ‘and they didn’t and it hadn’t.’ He passed Keith an enlarged photograph of the head of the cartridge-case. The single imprint of the firing-pin was clear and sharp. ‘The whole question,’ Gowrie said, ‘hinges on two things. First, did Mrs Hendrickson move the wheelchair after she found him? Second, is Mr Calder correct when he says that there are no marks on the desk? I want to go and see and hear for myself before doing any more.’

  Superintendent Munro looked at his watch, a chromed digital model as plain and serviceable as himself. ‘We will all go,’ he said.

  Keith held up the cartridge-case. ‘If I can keep this for the moment,’ he said, ‘I’ll see what else I can find out.’

  Gowrie put out his hand. ‘I’ll mark it for identification,’ he said. ‘Now, shall we go?’

  There was no sign of Molly, but Keith knew that once she had vanished into the shops she could lose all sense of time. He left a message for her with the desk sergeant.

  *

  As they rode back up the hill to Boswell Court in the rear of the superintendent’s car, Deborah was anxious to talk but Keith shushed her. ‘I want to get my thoughts straight,’ he said.

  ‘One of these days,’ Deborah said, ‘you’ll find out that I’m worth listening to.’

  Munro made a sound which could have been affirmation or amusement.

  ‘I hope so,’ Keith said. ‘Until then, hold your wheesht, there’s a good girl.’

  If Mrs Hendrickson was surprised at the early return of Keith and Deborah, this time accompanied by an inspector and a superintendent of police, she showed it by no more than one enquiring glance at Keith. She took them into her living room and submitted patiently to a lengthy interrogation. The house had come alive with the muffled beat of rock music from somewhere in the further bedrooms.

  Gowrie asked the questions. He returned to the same points over and over again, approaching each time from a different direction, but Mrs Hendrickson was firm and unshakeable. She had not touched the body or the wheelchair which, when she first saw them, had been exactly where they were seen and photographed by the police. And her husband had been perfectly capable of holding up his head.

  The inspector seemed satisfied at last. He asked for the key of the summerhouse and Mrs Hendrickson fetched it. ‘You don’t need me with you?’ she asked. ‘Only it’s my family’s first day home since their father died, and I want their meal to be special. Mike’s out just now, saying hello to his friends,’ she added to Deborah. ‘But you could stay and meet Beth.’

  ‘I know them both,’ Deborah said. ‘I’ll see them again. Dad, can’t I come with you this time?’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll get any peace until you do,’ Keith said. The scene of Mr Hendrickson’s death had not been as unsavoury as he had at first expected. The dark, dry stains had become unreal, as if on the set of some filmed thriller.

  ‘Aye, let her come,’ Munro put in. ‘She’s shown that she has sense.’

  So Deborah, very matter-of-fact and older than her age, accompanied her father and the two officers to the summerhouse, where she confirmed Superintendent Munro’s opinion of her by pointing out, without a hint of squeamishness, that a small bloodstain still detectable on the tiled floor was at least eight feet from a point beneath where the shot had marked the ceiling. She had somehow possessed herself of several of the photographs – Keith could not imagine by what means but suspected that Gowrie had fallen for her blandishments – and was quick to demonstrate that the bloodstain corresponded to a position below the corpse’s head when it was found. ‘And if the wheelchair was moved,’ she finished, ‘it would have had to be moved quickly after the shot, before blood could drip.’

  The men made no comment. It was self-evidently true.

  Gowrie and Munro studied the desk and the top of the bookcase from every angle and finally agreed that there were no marks to suggest that either end of
the gun had been rested on top of or beneath the furniture for extra leverage.

  ‘There we are, then,’ Munro said. ‘We have a strong presumption of foul play but only the most circumstantial of evidence. A pity it is that we allowed Mrs Hendrickson to start cleaning the place. It may be locking the stable door, but we had better seal it.’

  ‘Before you do that,’ Keith said, ‘let’s take one more look. The only things which Mrs Hendrickson admits to touching before she sent for you were the radio and the computer. She says that she switched them off as an instinctive, final gesture. If he committed suicide, he would almost certainly have left a note on the computer.’

  ‘That is true,’ Munro said. ‘But, of course, any murderer faking a suicide would have done the same thing. If such a note was only in the computer and on the screen, it would have been lost when she switched if off?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Keith said. ‘But, being important either way, it just could have been put on to disc.’

  ‘We’d better get an expert,’ Gowrie said.

  ‘If you like,’ Keith said, ‘but I have almost exactly the same model. Has it been checked for prints? There’s no sign of powder.’

  Gowrie referred to his papers. ‘Mrs Hendrickson will have cleaned it off,’ he said. ‘The computer was checked. No prints found. It was badly splashed with material from the corpse.’

  ‘In that case, I can’t do any damage.’

  ‘If you’re sure . . .’ Gowrie said anxiously. ‘It would be tragic if we wiped something off at this late date.’

  Keith took the wheelchair over to the desk and settled himself in it. Habit took over. Without thinking, he reached over the computer to operate the switch at the back. A faint warmth on his wrist warned him in time. ‘Christ! I’m wrong,’ he said.

  ‘What’s up, Dad?’ Deborah asked.

  ‘Write down that I’m an idiot and I’ll sign it. I said I couldn’t do any damage, and I was on the point of moving the switch. The computer’s on. It may have been on all this time and I could have wiped it clean. Mrs Hendrickson only switched off the monitor, not the computer. Come to think, I should have known from what she said. Let’s see what the monitor shows us.’ He switched on the black-and-white television set. The screen came alive, showed fuzz and then settled. The menu of functions showed crisply.

  ‘That’s what Mrs Hendrickson thought she remembered seeing before switching off,’ he said.

  ‘Could it have been switched off and on again?’ Munro asked.

  Keith shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Not unless somebody’s altered the internal wiring. When it’s newly switched on, or after a power-cut, it only shows the computer state. Here, the word-processor program’s been keyed in,’ He touched the ESCAPE key. The screen flicked to a jumble of apparently random letters.

  Gowrie was looking over Keith’s shoulder. ‘It’s just rubbish,’ he said.

  Keith nodded sadly. He put his hand out again to switch off.

  ‘Stop!’ Deborah screamed.

  Keith jumped and held his hand back.

  ‘It’s not just rubbish,’ said Deborah urgently. ‘Leave it.’ They looked at her and she blushed faintly but persisted. ‘Remember, this would only be what went in last of all,’ she said. ‘It’d go in if the computer was switched on even if the monitor was off. I bet you anything that what you see here’s the result of Mrs Hendrickson doing her cleaning-up bit and wiping over the keyboard, starting and finishing around the ESCAPE key. And,’ she added, ‘if you say anything about babes and sucklings I’ll switch the damn thing off and you’ll never know what else it says.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say any such thing,’ Keith protested.

  ‘Well, you usually do whenever I get there first.’

  ‘Which isn’t all that often. I was only going to say that the young have an advantage when it comes to microchippery. They’re brought up to think in computer jargon and binary arithmetic. But well done, Toots. Very well done.’

  Keith simultaneously pressed the SHIFT and the UP keys. Instantly, the screen showed the beginning of the computer’s contents. They began with a date, the date of Sam Hendrickson’s death. Lines of type followed.

  ‘It’s a bittie guddled,’ Munro said.

  ‘More than a bittie,’ Keith said. ‘Ralph Enterkin told me that Mr Hendrickson wasn’t much of a typist, especially left-handed and after his stroke. So he didn’t bother with capitals and, if the person he was typing the message for understood him, he wouldn’t bother with corrections. If that person got the message before he’d finished, he’d stop right there. All that, plus only seeing one side of a conversation, as in Beethoven’s conversation-books, doesn’t make for easy reading.’

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ Gowrie said. ‘My son’s Christmas present list for one. Take the first line.’

  The first line read: clod shit door.

  ‘If there is sense there,’ Munro said, ‘I am not the one to see it.’

  ‘This would be when his wife brought him out here,’ Gowrie said. ‘Allowing for the U and the I being adjacent on the keyboard, he was telling her that he was feeling the cold and asking her to shut the door.’

  The next line was clear: cant reach radio. ‘Still to his wife,’ Keith said.

  ‘Presumably. So far so good,’ Gowrie said. ‘But what about p louis j natter cmg thispm?’ He did his best to repeat the line phonetically.

  ‘Beats me,’ Keith said.

  ‘No it doesn’t. You remember, Dad,’ Deborah said. She flicked through her notebook.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Of course you do. Mrs Hendrickson told us. He liked to listen to phone-calls and the first call was from her sister. This is his note of the call. P just means phone . His sister-in-law would be Louise J. She phoned up for a natter and she was coming “this p.m.”.’

  ‘Well done,’ said Inspector Gowrie. ‘I won’t say a word about babes and sucklings. Then we get p again, for another phone-call likely, and hr, which would be a person.’

  Deborah turned a page. ‘Hughie,’ she said. ‘That’s what Mrs Hendrickson heard. She left Hughie to talk to her husband.’

  ‘We should be able to trace a Hughie R among his acquaintances,’ Gowrie said. ‘Which is just as well, because just what bd ns jc tkng plod means, God alone knows.’

  ‘God and yours truly, not necessarily in that order. My turn to make a guess,’ Keith offered. ‘Plod’s slang for your outfit. I suggest that somebody with the initials J.C. is talking to the police. So bd ns may stand for bad news.’

  ‘Possible,’ Gowrie said. ‘And that’s the most you can say about it. Hughie can tell us when we find him. Who or what would iandta be?’

  Deborah looked on through her notes. ‘Ian and Terry Albany,’ she said. ‘Next-door neighbours. They came to visit and Mrs Hendrickson brought them up here for coffee.’

  ‘Which explains ok thanks. And ho,’ Gowrie said, ‘could be the start of almost anything, probably a sociable enquiry to which he got the answer before he’d finished. jst put 1 out sounds as if it refers to the offer of a cigarette. Then we get k-k-h-s-w-w-f, followed by ok just tired. The last bit speaks for itself, but is the earlier part just gibberish?’

  Nobody spoke.

  ‘We seem to be agreed that it is. But what would linseed stocks be?’

  ‘Exactly what it says. Mrs Albany and Mrs Hendrickson left,’ Keith explained, ‘but Ian Albany stayed on and gave the guns a clean for him. This is a request to give the stocks a wipe over with linseed oil. There’s a bottle and a cloth in the desk drawer.’

  ‘The barrels were greasy but I didn’t notice any oiliness on the stock,’ Gowrie said.

  ‘You probably wouldn’t. The trick,’ Keith said, ‘is to wipe nearly all of it off again. But it might be worth having his trousers examined. If there aren’t traces of linseed on the knees, it would confirm that he didn’t close the gun for himself. And the next words, snp caps nd trigs, suggest that he didn’t get Albany to leave one gun wit
h the triggers unpulled. Of course, he would have asked it and then wiped out the request so as not to involve his friend. I suppose that fancy br was asking him whether he’d like a beer.’

  ‘Or a brandy,’ said Munro. ‘We must persuade Mrs Hendrickson to tell us about her husband’s personal shorthand.’

  Inspector Gowrie raised his hand and Keith saw that a spectacular blood blister was developing on his palm. ‘Beer,’ the inspector said. ‘There were two empty tins and used glasses. Then there’s another phone-call – p ph tues.’

  ‘His physiotherapist phoned up to change an appointment,’ Deborah said. ‘Making a note of that doesn’t seem like a man who meant to kill himself, does it?’

  ‘He might have come to the decision later,’ said Munro.

  ‘In that case,’ Keith said, ‘it would have been too late for him to ask Mr Albany to leave the gun ready for use. Albany left while Mrs Hendrickson was taking the call.’

  They had reached the bottom of the screen. While he spoke, Keith keyed to lift the text. His eyes were still down on the keyboard and he heard the others make small noises of surprise or excitement. He looked up quickly.

  ‘my dsrling,’ read the screen, ‘you cant gonon like this tied to a cripple, ill never be mysrlf agaim. time i wasnt here. my love to mike and brth. bless yiu all.

  The remainder of the screen was occupied by the solid jumble of letters which they had already seen.

  Keith looked round at Deborah. ‘Run down and get Mrs Hendrickson,’ he said.

  Deborah looked at the two policemen. ‘Won’t it be an awful shock for her?’

  Munro nodded. ‘But only Mrs Hendrickson can tell us whether these could be her husband’s words,’ he said. ‘You can warn her.’

  Awed by the importance and delicacy of her mission, Deborah hurried out.