The Worried Widow

by Gerald Hammond

  An altercation, which reminded Keith for all the world of two dogs going after a cat, was cut off. Silence and stillness fell heavily, like snow off a roof.

  One man was built like a wrestler and roughly dressed in blue jeans, a black leather jacket and safety boots. He was leaning over the seated Mrs Hendrickson with a heavy stick between his two hands pressing against her upper chest, just below the throat. He turned his face as Keith entered and Keith noted narrow eyes, a blob of a broken nose and blubbery lips. The other man, older, smoother in appearance and more conservatively dressed, had Beth in a corner and was holding her there with a hand between her small breasts. Beth, like her brother, was dressing-gowned and, now that he knew, Keith could recognise the rash and the feverishness of rubella.

  At a first tasting of the atmosphere Keith thought that real violence was not intended; but it would take little to trigger an outburst and he decided to quell it before it could begin.

  Keith levelled his shotgun. His mouth was dry. ‘If either of you wants to live,’ he said, ‘come out into the middle of the floor and stand still.’ The men obeyed, taking their time about it, testing him. Beth collapsed into a chair.

  ‘Do you want the police?’ Keith asked Mrs Hendrickson.

  ‘Here,’ said the smaller man. ‘There’s no need for that.’ Keith noticed that his face, which he had at first thought unremarkable but for the thinness of the features, was etched with a cunning smirk.

  ‘Did they threaten you?’ Keith asked.

  Mrs Hendrickson moistened her lips and hesitated. ‘Not really,’ she said.

  ‘Oh Mum!’ Beth said tearfully. ‘You know they did.’ Behind him, Keith heard Michael breathe in sharply.

  ‘Not in so many words,’ Mrs Hendrickson said. She sounded calm but her hand was shaking.

  Keith thought that she was deliberately avoiding provocation. ‘Is that true?’ he asked. ‘Or are you saying it under duress?’

  ‘We’re making too much of this,’ the smaller man said pacifically. ‘Look, we’re going to sit down on the settee, where we won’t seem so threatening, and we can talk it out.’ He sat down quickly.

  The other stood, undecided.

  It was obvious that the large man was the dangerous one, probably with a reputation to lose, and Keith sensed that he was bracing himself to try something rather than sit down passively and lose all initiative. A bruised lump showed through his thinning hair.

  ‘Sit down like a good boy, Hughie, when you’re told,’ Keith said. ‘I’ve already bent one set of gun-barrels over your head. You want the same again?’ He was guessing, but the odds were heavily in his favour.

  The big man blinked twice. He started to make a hushing gesture and then decided that the moment had passed. He lowered himself carefully beside his partner. ‘It wasn’t all that sair,’ he said plaintively. ‘But loosing off that cannon in my ear could ha’ gi’en me a heart attack. Did you think o’ that?’

  ‘I thought of it, but no such luck. Right.’ Keith said. ‘Getting up before I tell you to will be treated as an act of war.’

  The smaller visitor was stiff with suspicion. ‘What the hell was that about?’ he demanded of his henchman.

  ‘Hughie paid me a visit.’ Keith told him. ‘He offered me a beating because I’d ignored a threatening phone-call telling me to leave Mr Hendrickson’s death alone. Was that your idea? Did you make the phone-call?

  ‘Bloody hell no!’ The smaller man rounded on his large companion. ‘What the devil did you think you were doing?’

  Hughie wriggled uncomfortably, for all the world like a small boy caught with his hand in the biscuit-barrel. ‘It was just something,’ he said. ‘Nothing to do with the union. Somebody paid me to scare him off.’

  ‘And a fine hash you made of it. Who were you working for?’

  Hughie clenched his fists and his face. ‘I’m not telling,’ he said. ‘You can’t expect it.’

  Keith wanted to know, but this was not the time to force the issue. He glanced at Mrs Hendrickson. ‘What did they want?’

  Mrs Hendrickson touched her face as if to wipe away fear. ‘They never got around to making that clear,’ she said. ‘They just seemed to be furious because Sam’s death had been going to be passed over as a suicide and then I got you to persuade the police to re-open their investigations. This is Mr Calder,’ she added.

  ‘I gathered that,’ said the smaller man.

  ‘The bogger,’ said Hughie. ‘I’ll remember you, Chiel.’

  Keith restrained himself from giving the big man a rap over the lump on his head with his barrels. It was too good a gun to abuse. ‘You may have good cause,’ he said. ‘Or again, you may never remember anything any more. Depends whether you’re a good boy. You came here for something. Tell us. Start with just who you are. Hughie what?’

  The big man flared up immediately. ‘See you, it’s nane o’ your bluidy business!’

  ‘Reynolds,’ Keith said patiently. ‘You see? It wouldn’t have hurt to tell me.’

  ‘I know the other man,’ Mrs Hendrickson said suddenly. ‘Sam introduced us at some reception but I forgot his name. The big one sounds like the Hughie who phoned.’

  ‘He is,’ Keith said.

  The smaller man nodded. ‘I’m Jim Talbot,’ he said, ‘and, as you say, this gowk is Hughie Reynolds. There’s no point being secretive about it, nor about our reason for coming. We came to say something and we’d have got around to saying it without any more nastiness if you hadn’t come in waving that thing around. We may as well spit it out.

  ‘We were associates of the late Mr Hendrickson. Close associates, with all that that means. We had a good thing going. Up to last year, we had the union like that.’ He showed a clenched fist. ‘And the employers as well. Then came trouble. All kinds of trouble. No need to upset Mrs Hendrickson by going into details. But the fact is that Sam could have gone to jail, and he’d have taken us with him.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Mrs Hendrickson said firmly.

  Talbot gave the shrug of a man who knows what he knows. ‘You believe what you want to believe, Mrs H. I’m telling it as we see it. Things looked bad. Then Sam fell ill. That was unlucky for you, and in one way it was unlucky for him and we were all very sorry, but there’s no denying that it was a blessing in disguise. Sam was safe enough, there’d be no point the law going after a man who was half-paralysed and couldn’t speak. He’d never see inside a jail, he was his own prison already. And, not to put too fine a point on it, any earlier irregularities could easily be laid at his door. The others in the union let up on us, because there’d be fresh elections when Sam ran out of sick-leave and they’d have their chance to take control.’

  ‘In that case,’ Keith broke in, ‘why did Hughie have to phone Sam Hendrickson to say that somebody – J.C. – was talking to the police.’

  ‘The filth don’t give up so easy.’ Hughie said in his deep rumble.

  ‘Sam died,’ Jim Talbot resumed. ‘The sheriff brought it in as suicide. We reckoned that Hughie’s phone-call must’ve pushed him too far. Jim Christie – well, there’s no point going into details, let’s just say that he was the one man who could really do damage. Sam would know damn fine that he’d be left to hold the baby. Damn it, that’s what he’d expect. Once he was known to have topped himself, it seemed to be all over.

  ‘But then, according to what we hear, you, Mrs Hendrickson, called in Mr Calder here and he showed the police that the sheriff got it wrong. We didn’t know about it at the time and we didn’t authorise any phone-calls or other action. And you fairly put the cat among the pigeons.’

  ‘Didn’t he just?’ said Hughie gloomily.

  ‘You weren’t to know that that was just about the worst thing you could do,’ Jim Talbot told Mrs Hendrickson generously. ‘We don’t blame you. From your point of view, it was only right. But, as for you . . .’ He glared at Hughie. ‘When you knew that Calder had been called in, you should have reported back.’

  Hughie sc
owled at the floor.

  Talbot returned his attention to Mrs Hendrickson. ‘But the fuzz think it’s down to one of us and—’

  The chime of the doorbell stopped him in mid-sentence.

  ‘I’ll see who it is,’ Michael said. He left the room and his sister followed him out. Keith heard faint voices at the door and then the sound of footsteps.

  The youngsters did not come back. There entered a woman of middle age. She wore a coat of a fur which Keith could not identify but which he was in no doubt was expensive. Her face was round and bland and cared for and her manner was businesslike. She could have been the kingpin of a fashion firm, or a wealthy man’s wife.

  ‘I might have known it,’ Jim Talbot said disgustedly. ‘Mrs Harriet Bloody Griegson.’

  Mrs Hendrickson sat up straight and lifted her chin. ‘You’re not welcome here,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard Sam talk about you.’

  ‘And nothing complimentary, I’m sure,’ Mrs Griegson said cheerfully. ‘But then, in union politics I could have been called the leader of the opposition. So whatever I did or said had to be wrong.’

  ‘Sam was sure that you were behind the break-in when his papers were taken.’

  Mrs Griegson seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Why would we do a bloody silly thing like that?’ she asked. ‘Sam was pulling the wool. We got his papers legally, what was left of them, and because of that we can use them. Papers get stolen for information or to suppress them. And I’ll give you three guesses who wanted them suppressed.’ She looked at Keith. ‘Would the gentleman with the gun be Mr Calder?’

  Keith had forgotten that he was still holding his shotgun although the danger of active aggression seemed to be long past. He laid it carefully on a table. ‘I would,’ he said.

  ‘You’d better hang on to it,’ Mrs Griegson said with a chuckle. ‘Either of these buggers would snatch your ears off, just to amuse the bairns.’ She seated herself, uninvited, and carefully checked the hem of her skirt before looking at Mrs Hendrickson again. Keith noticed that she had pretty legs. ‘What have they been trying to con you out of?’

  Mrs Hendrickson looked uncertainly at Keith.

  ‘Nothing, yet,’ Keith said. ‘They’d only got as far as telling us how satisfactory Sam Hendrickson’s suicide had been and complaining that I’d rocked the boat by suggesting to the police that he might not have killed himself after all.’

  Mrs Griegson nodded. ‘That figures,’ she said. ‘A renewal of police activity wouldn’t suit their book at all.’

  ‘See here, you —’ Hughie Reynolds began to rise but when Keith picked up his gun he subsided again.

  Jim Talbot jumped in quickly. ‘If you’re hinting that one of us killed him, you’re wrong. He’d become a danger, but I’ve been round every sod mad enough or frightened enough to do it, and none of them did. I know them and I know where they were, and it’s a fact. Not good enough for the police, though.’

  ‘And while they’re digging, they’re not going to turn a blind eye to any other irregularities they happen on,’ Mrs Griegson suggested.

  ‘You think that’s just great,’ Hughie Reynolds ground out.

  ‘You’re miles out,’ Mrs Griegson said. ‘I think it’s the biggest fuck-up since the Crucifixion. Anything they bring out from Sam Hendrickson’s day reflects on all of us. But what’s worse is the way they’re going about it. Instead of setting up a full-scale murder enquiry and getting the business over one way or the other, they’re using all the back doors. Fraud squad, tax inspectors, even the Health and Safety Executive. Every one of them digging through the files, backed by the appropriate legal steps, and carting away whatever takes his fancy.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Talbot said. ‘I’ve kept out of the office this past few days.’

  ‘You couldn’t’ve changed anything. In fact, they aren’t caring what they find. I can’t prove it, but it’s general harassment. It’s brought all union business to a standstill. And that man Gowrie took me aside today and hinted that it’d stop as soon as we became helpful in the matter of murder. One good nominee’s all he wants. Devious bastard!’

  Keith sensed a fine Hebridean hand in the background. From his experience, Superintendent Munro and not Detective Inspector Gowrie was the devious bastard. He would have recognised the description anywhere.

  ‘We can’t nominate anyone,’ Talbot said. ‘I’ll tell you again, nobody we know was involved.’

  ‘Since when were you so concerned with truth?’ Mrs Griegson enquired. ‘There’s at least one we could well do without.’

  ‘Hey?’ said Hughie.

  ‘No, not you. Not this time.’

  Talbot seemed to be in no doubt as to whom she meant. ‘We thought about him,’ he said. ‘But he was in a snooker club with a dozen friends.’

  ‘That’s it, then,’ said Mrs Griegson. ‘I came here this afternoon to tell Mrs Hendrickson to get her boy working again.’

  ‘Get him to implicate one of us, you mean,’ Hughie Reynolds grunted.

  Mrs Griegson sighed heavily. ‘Can’t you get it through your thick head that we’re on the same side for the moment?’ she asked. ‘The one thing we all need is for the heat to come off so that we can get back to union business.’

  ‘Back to the power struggle?’ Talbot suggested.

  ‘Struggle? We can talk about that – very seriously – once the police are off our backs.’ (Talbot nodded slowly.) ‘How about it, Mrs H?’

  Mrs Hendrickson looked at Keith. ‘I’d already asked for Mr Calder to come and see me. I want him – and his . . . assistants – to help me again. Inspector Gowrie,’ she said in tones of distaste, ‘has paid me three visits. His questions seem to assume that I, or a member of my family, killed my husband rather than have me spend years of my life nursing a cripple. He hinted to me – he’s good at hinting is Detective Inspector Gowrie – that if I pleaded guilty but made a case of euthanasia out of it I’d get off with a nominal sentence.’ Her voice, which had been rising higher and higher with indignation, ended in a squeak.

  ‘So he’s exploring two blind alleys.’ Mrs Griegson looked at the other two. ‘That one could be the best solution. But not yet.’ She switched her eyes to Mrs Hendrickson. ‘You knew, of course, that you were due for a substantial payment from the union’s insurance if Sam died in harness?’

  ‘But not if he died by his own hand,’ Mrs Hendrickson said. ‘It’s the same as with his insurance policies.’

  Mrs Griegson nodded approvingly. ‘Exactly. And so, you have a financial incentive to have Mr Calder solve the case. But we’ll make it easier for you. Between us,’ she said, ‘we carry enough clout to be able to promise that the union will pay half of Mr Calder’s fee and expenses if he’ll go back to work and clear the matter up.’

  ‘I’ll back you,’ Talbot said.

  ‘If Mr Calder goes back on the case,’ Mrs Hendrickson said, ‘I think I’d prefer that he was working just for me.’

  ‘Just a holy minute,’ Keith said. ‘Don’t I have any say in this?’ He caught Mrs Hendrickson’s eye. ‘If I take it on, I go after the truth. Unless that’s agreed I won’t touch it. So don’t turn down an offer to share the cost. Just get it in writing.’

  ‘The laddie’s talking sense,’ Talbot said. (Keith was at least five years his senior). ‘You’ll get on to it straight away, Mr Calder?’

  ‘I’m committed to looking after the shop tomorrow,’ Keith said. ‘If my partner gets back in time or if my wife will help out on Saturday, I’ll start then. Mrs Hendrickson had better warn her neighbours again. Can I count on full co-operation from the union?’

  ‘You want somebody to look after your shop?’ said Talbot.

  ‘I want your assurance that your members will talk openly, frankly and truthfully to me,’ Keith said.

  ‘If you wish it. But you’ll be wasting all our times.’ Talbot turned his attention back to Mrs Hendrickson. ‘You agree with his condition?’

  ‘Without hesitation,’ Mrs Hendrickson said.


  Mrs Griegson looked at her for several seconds. ‘I believe you,’ she said suddenly. ‘And yet, you make me wonder. By reputation, you and Sam were very close. Yet you were as different as chalk and cheese. What on earth did you have in common?’

  ‘Not that it’s any of your business,’ Mrs Hendrickson said, ‘but we had something for each other that was very special.’

  Mrs Griegson frowned. ‘Without a single view in common?’

  ‘Do you really think that a man and a woman have to agree about politics before they marry?’ Mrs Hendrickson retorted. ‘I know that Sam had several affairs. They never lasted. You see, I was all that he needed.’ She seemed unaware of her audience. Her mind was turned inward, looking back over the years. ‘In all the years we were married, not once . . . not once . . .’ She stopped abruptly, suddenly aware that she had been stung into revealing too much, and hid her face in her hands.

  ‘No need to go on,’ Mrs Griegson said. ‘I think I understand. That’s more than most happy couples could claim.’ She got to her feet. ‘If his heart had killed him I’d have known what brought it on. Come, you two, it’s time we left.’

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ Keith said. He escorted the three to the door. As a precaution he took his gun with him. Mrs Griegson made no bones about her right to walk first.

  When the other two were outside, Jim Talbot hung back. His manner was quiet, businesslike and utterly convincing. ‘Just in case you don’t understand what Mrs Griegson and myself were saying,’ he told Keith, ‘I’ll spell it out for you. You go back to work and you find out the truth or something near enough to be accepted for it. We don’t care who the villain is, not even if he’s one of us – anyone who matters a damn is bomb-proof.’

  ‘Find out who Hughie’s client was,’ Keith said. ‘That’ll tell us.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Talbot said. ‘Anyone with something to hide could have hired him. But I’ll try. Now listen. We want somebody nailed, and fast. Otherwise you may find Hughie coming up behind you some time you don’t have that gun in your fist. After which, we’d put pressure on the widow Hendrickson to do what the inspector said, plead guilty to euthanasia. Have you got all that?’