The Worried Widow

by Gerald Hammond

  Keith had never taken kindly to threats, but he decided that the moment for confrontation had not arrived. He said that he had got it. He slammed the door and went back to calm the very disturbed widow.

  *

  Before he left Boswell Court he collected Herbert. He looked into the Strathlings’ garden, but his rabbits had vanished. He gave an amused grunt. With a bit of luck, Mrs Strathling might find herself with more than she had bargained for. Rabbit fleas do not normally attack any other host, but when starvation set in there would be no guessing what tasty mouthful they might be prepared to settle for.

  As a bonus, he saw from a distance that a pair of carrion crows had found his first rabbit where he had left it. With Herbert firmly at heel, he crept up the far side of the hedge and got both with a right-and-left. He hummed as he walked back to the car, wondering how many other birds’ fledglings would now be spared from being taken to feed a new generation of crows. Kenny Stuart would be pleased.

  *

  The phone rang that evening while Keith was preparing for bed. Keith sat down on the coverlet and took the call.

  Jim Talbot was on the line. ‘Hughie won’t talk,’ he said. ‘I’ve put all the pressure on him. He’s as thick as pigshit but he has his own code.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me.’

  ‘Don’t hang up,’ Talbot said urgently. ‘That’s not why I called. Hughie had another call from his former client.’

  ‘With the same instructions?’ Keith asked. He spoke absently. Molly was undressing and he always gave his attention to the important things of life.

  ‘Virtually the same,’ Talbot said. ‘In view of the new circumstances, he turned it down. But the client may go elsewhere. I thought you ought to know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Keith said.

  ‘No thanks necessary. If somebody duffs you up, you can’t work for us. Not if he does it properly.’

  Molly had left for the bathroom. Keith concentrated again. ‘Can Hughie be trusted?’ he asked.

  ‘All the way. He’s either for you or against you. He’s for whoever’s paying him at the time.’

  ‘Could he be trusted to bodyguard my wife tomorrow?’

  ‘Certainly.’ There was a whispered discussion at the other end of the line. Talbot came back on the line and quoted a fee.

  ‘Tell him to report to me, at home, eight-thirty a.m.,’ Keith said.

  Chapter Nine

  The first Friday of each month was Molly’s day for visiting an aged aunt some ten miles off and, since the old lady was not on the phone and was inclined to relish a pleasurable panic if her niece failed to arrive, it was easier to treat the engagement as the one fixed point in the month than to attempt to vary it.

  Before he set off for the shop. Molly gave Keith a purse containing some notes and a few coins.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Keith said. ‘You’re buying me lunch?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Molly said austerely. ‘If you want your lunch from me you’ll get sandwiches. There’s some cold mutton left over. Old Mr Rogers calls into the shop for the milk-money on Fridays. I usually give it to Janet.’

  ‘I thought it was on Saturdays that he made his collection.’

  ‘He does the middle of the town on Fridays and the outskirts on Saturdays.’ She checked her shopping-bag for cleaning materials. ‘Try to be good.’

  ‘I always do,’ Keith said.

  ‘But you don’t always manage.’ She kissed her husband. ‘Hughie should be here in a minute. I hope he’s quick. Deborah’s waiting in the car. Are you sure this is a good idea?’

  ‘It’s the only one I’ve got. I’m told that he’s absolutely loyal to whoever’s paying him at the time, and today that’s us. Remember, see if you can charm or bluff him into saying who his previous client was. Try him with Mr Kechnie’s name if you like. And don’t forget to set the alarms.’

  Keith drove the jeep into Newton Lauder. At the road-end, he passed Hughie in a late-model but already battered van. The big man gave him a cheerful wave and, grinning, rubbed the top of his head. Bygones seemed to be bygones.

  The spring weather had relapsed into chill and drizzle. As usual, a few customers looked in on their way to work and then all became quiet. Keith decided to look over the stock of modern guns, to make sure that all were in good order and properly lubricated. But he had only got as far as to put the kettle on when the bell jangled and Mr Rogers walked in.

  The old man was carefully dressed for the job in a blue overall and peaked cap. He counted the money, accepted Molly’s total as correct and stored the takings away in a leather satchel.

  The kettle decided to come to the boil. ‘You’ll take a cup of tea?’ Keith asked. ‘Or coffee?’

  ‘Tea would go down fine,’ the old man said. He lowered himself stiffly into the customers’ chair. ‘I was up at five to help load the floats and I’m getting past that sort of caper. Mrs James aye gives me a cup. That’s a fine woman.’

  ‘I just hope I can still rise at five when I’m your age,’ Keith said, ‘and have an eye for a fine woman.’

  ‘An eye’s all I’ve got left these days.’ Mr Rogers had a jolly face and there was usually a twinkle in his eye but now he was looking serious. ‘They tell me you’re back at looking into Mr Hendrickson’s death.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Keith said, wondering how on earth news managed to travel so quickly. He tested the tea. It seemed to have reached a respectable strength. He filled the two mugs.

  Mr Rogers accepted his mug gratefully. ‘I’ll be damned glad if you can sort the thing,’ he said. ‘My life’s been a misery this past week.’

  ‘How’s that, then?’ Keith asked.

  ‘That dratted man Gowrie. He’s made up his mind that no outsider could have shot Mr Hendrickson unless I’d brought him in in my van. But that’s my own fault, I told him myself that there were no strangers about the place. I told that daughter of yours too. There’s a grand lass, now! She’ll be a beauty in a year or two.’

  ‘You’re getting to be a dirty old man,’ Keith told him.

  Mr Rogers looked pleased. ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ he said modestly. ‘It’s not just that Gowrie’s been back and back at me, but he’s been asking folk about my movements and who’d looked in the back of my van and the like. It’s got so that my customers are talking.’

  ‘Why does he think you’d do a thing like that?’

  ‘Money. I bought a new van. But I can account for every penny I’ve spent, and so I told him. See, I was a member of the union up to five years ago, but that’s nothing to do wi’t. The union did me nothing but good, fought my redundancy for me and all like that. Gowrie makes out that I’d be known to the union, if so be as they wanted somebody to fetch one o’ them in wi’out being seen.’ The old man fell silent and took a long drink of tea.

  ‘But who, in the union, knew that one of their ex-members toured round Boswell Court every Saturday?’

  Mr Rodgers considered. ‘Only Mr Hendrickson,’ he said at last.

  ‘Right. And I don’t see him putting your name forward to the union, to help his own murderer. If your van was parked in the road,’ Keith said, ‘your man’d have had a hard job getting into cover unseen, what with gardeners and car-washers and the window-cleaner, not to mention old Mrs Orton at her window. You didn’t pull off into somebody’s driveway?’

  Mr Rogers shook his head violently.

  ‘Put it out of your mind, then. He’s clutching at straws. Tell me this instead. Do you know the noise a pheasant makes when it’s disturbed?’

  The old man brightened up. ‘I do that. Worked as beater most of my life until I could no longer swing my leg over a fence, let alone a woman.’ Mr Rogers chuckled happily and winked. ‘Great days, out in grand country, getting paid for it and aye a bird to take home! I mind seeing you on some of the shoots.’ Mr Rogers looked at Keith sharply. ‘Are there pheasants in the wee wood? You’re thinking that somebody might’ve lain up there from one night to the next?
I’d like fine to agree, but that’s not the way it could’ve been. The whirr of a pheasant rising or the chortling a cock makes, those are still sounds that’ll make my heart skip a beat. No, take my word, there were no strangers there except the laddie that cleans the windows, unless they were countrymen as could move through a wood without putting the birds up. And that’s not easy just after the season, when they’ve been shot at a few times. You’ll need to look closer to home.’

  ‘The neighbours?’ Keith asked. ‘You were talking to the widow at the time of the shot.’

  ‘I was, and nothing yon mannie Gowrie says can make me change my story. As if I couldn’t tell the odds between a shot and a squib after my years as a beater. And, as I said to him, if it was a squib I heard, what happened to the sound of the real shot?’

  ‘Was Mr Kechnie still polishing his cars when you reached Mrs Hendrickson’s house?’

  ‘He’d finished by then. But Mr Strathling was visiting wi’ Mr Albany and I watched him go back over the road.’ The old man finished his mug of tea and pulled himself to his feet. ‘Instead of going in by his door, he went round the corner of the house on the Hendricksons’ side. What would he do that for? Where was he going? You ask him.’

  ‘I will,’ Keith said. ‘Probably.’

  *

  Keith dealt with a phone-call, sold a pair of rubber boots and cleaned one gun. Then Detective Inspector Gowrie walked into the shop.

  Keith paused in the act of passing a cleaning rod through one barrel of the second gun. ‘Are you buying or talking?’ he enquired.

  ‘Talking.’

  ‘Then it won’t bother you if I go on with what I’m doing?’

  ‘If it does, I’ll tell you,’ Gowrie said placidly. He stood watching, easy on his feet like most policemen. ‘Thanks for your note. Not that it takes us very far. All we know is that Mr Albany could have had some matching cartridges. But so could anybody else.’

  ‘True,’ Keith said. ‘Especially Mr Beecher.’

  ‘We followed that up. He was thinking of buying a twelve-bore from Albany so he borrowed the gun and bought the cartridges for a trial. He didn’t like the gun and he gave Albany what was left in the box. Albany confirms.’

  ‘But you’ve no way of knowing whether Beecher kept back one or two cartridges or found them in his pocket afterwards.’

  ‘Forget about Beecher,’ Gowrie said. ‘Take my word for it, he’s clear.’

  Keith thought that the inspector was nursing a secret smile, but he decided to move on. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘why are you bugging the widow? She was with the milkman when the shot was heard. If, as you seem to have suggested, that bang was some sort of a firework, you should be going after Mr Albany. Did you test the place for noise?’

  ‘I’ve just come from there,’ Gowrie said. ‘We had a technician firing shots into a drum of water. We carved some turnips to represent a human mouth. Not very precise but near enough. According to Mrs Hendrickson, a shotgun fired in the summerhouse with the door closed was exactly what she heard. We’re trying to intercept the old milkman to repeat the experiment.’

  ‘You just missed him. Did you find any signs of a squib?’

  Gowrie shook his head and protruded his lower lip. ‘But there’d been plenty of time for some such device to be removed.’

  ‘Well, if it was, the widow didn’t plant it,’ Keith said. He applied a greasy cloth to the metalwork. ‘Why would she fake a suicide and then hire me to prove the reverse? You think she hates money that much?’

  ‘If she only heard about the suicide clauses after she’d done the deed. . . .’

  ‘Look at it this way,’ Keith said. ‘Somebody would have had to do the deed with a silenced shotgun. So he would have had a single-barrel gun and a cartridge made with the same components as the other. Was the wad recovered?’

  ‘I tracked it down. The pathologist had kept it. Twelve-bore.’

  ‘So the murderer would have had to have had a single-barrel, twelve-bore gun and a silencer to fit it. And one of the barrels had been fouled in Sam’s gun, so the gun would have been taken away, one barrel fired, the gun been replaced and that barrel missed out when the guns were cleaned by Mr Albany that morning. Who do you suppose that puts in the firing-line?’

  Gowrie nodded sadly. ‘Albany,’ he said. ‘But as far as I’ve been able to discover, he had no motive.’

  ‘Nor had the widow, for a faked suicide.’ Keith gave the gun’s stock a wipe with another cloth and put it back in the rack.

  ‘Assuming the suicide clause in her husband’s insurances was known to the family as she says. In which case,’ Gowrie said, ‘the money motive belongs to the children.’

  Keith felt a definite unease in his lower bowel. ‘You’re stretching it a bit, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Well, maybe I am. They both say that they were together all day. But there’s more to it than that. I’ve seen the sister looking at the brother. I just don’t know,’ Gowrie said. ‘The only useful fact I’ve got from the union so far is that they had Sam’s life covered. So any of the family could have had a motive for having him die before his sick-leave ran out.’

  ‘But not as a suicide,’ Keith said, polishing energetically at a gunstock. ‘The widow told me that the summerhouse was full of the stink of burned powder when she got there. The place has its own combined heating and ventilating system which would have cleared most of the fumes away before too long.’ Keith pulled out another gun and admired the engraving for a moment before taking it apart. ‘Also,’ he said, ‘I took a look around the wood yesterday. I could see where your men had been plowtering around—’

  ‘They found some faint tracks,’ Gowrie said.

  ‘Rabbits,’ Keith said. ‘And I saw where you tried to get over the barbed wire and couldn’t make it. More to the point, pheasants are using that wood and they make a hell of a noise when they’re disturbed. They’re almost as noisy as guinea-fowl. And nobody heard them that morning.’

  ‘Pheasants can sit pretty tight if the intruder moves softly,’ Gowrie said. ‘And it doesn’t take them long to realise that they’re out of season. I’m a country loon myself.’

  ‘How many did your men put up?’

  ‘Dozens. But they weren’t trying to sneak through unnoticed.’ Gowrie sighed deeply and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that anybody killed Hendrickson,’ he said glumly. ‘We tried your test on the fingerprints, by the way, and all it told us was that there was nothing to be learned that way. The local residents and the milkman and window-cleaner are all swearing blind that there was no stranger around.

  ‘But, just in case every one of them was mistaken, let’s imagine that somebody was lurking in the wood. He chose his time when the milkman was keeping Mrs Hendrickson talking. He killed Hendrickson. Then what? Either he hurled himself back over the fence before they could get there, and without breaking a twig or scaring a pheasant, or else he squatted down behind the summerhouse just when there were bound to be people milling around the scene for the rest of the day. It just doesn’t add up. Perhaps it was suicide after all.’

  ‘Definitely not,’ Keith said. He slapped the third gun back together. ‘There’s another point which has only just occurred to me. Let’s suppose that Sam Hendrickson had a cartridge in his drawer. He took down the twelve-bore although the twenty was handier and much easier to load. He solved the problem of closing it, although that part of the action, which was also re-cocking the ejectors, is very stiff.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ Gowrie said. He showed Keith his palm. The blood blister had hardened to a lump like a raisin.

  ‘But when he opened the gun,’ Keith said, ‘there’s no way that a man who was paralysed down one side could prevent the snap-caps being scooted all over the room. You need one hand to open the gun and at least one other to prevent ejection. Sam’s gun has particularly ferocious ejectors. Sit down and try it.’

  Keith put snap-caps from a drawer int
o the gun which he happened to be holding and pulled the triggers. Detective Inspector Gowrie sat down in the customers’ chair and tried for himself to open the gun one-handed while catching the expelled snap-caps. He was attempting the feat, as a last resort, with the butt of the gun on the floor and the muzzles against his shoulder while with his left hand he tried both to open the gun and to prevent the ejection of the snap-caps, when the door opened and a customer walked in, catching him in an undignified contortion with his right arm dangling as if useless and his tongue protruding in concentration. The fact that the newcomer was an attractive young lady did nothing for his composure.

  When she had bought her salmon-flies and, grinning over her shoulder at him, had departed, Gowrie stood up. ‘Sam Hendrickson could have picked up the snap-caps before finishing off his suicide,’ he said.

  ‘He could,’ Keith agreed, taking back the gun. ‘He could have wheeled himself around the room, although he found it difficult to direct himself one-handed. He might even have been able to retrieve them from under the furniture, which is where they’d inevitably have fetched up, Sod’s Law being what it is. But if you were half-paralysed, desperate enough to knock yourself off and half-expecting a visit from your wife who would strongly disapprove of self-slaughter, would you go to all that bother?’

  Inspector Gowrie almost slumped back into the chair. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’d have to be that desperate before I could make a guess. I’ll ask one of our consultant psychologists. It’s time they did something useful.’

  ‘The way it looks at the moment, you’ll be lucky to make a case for anything worse than aiding and abetting a suicide. I can see Sam Hendrickson asking somebody – Mr Albany, likely – to leave the gun loaded and then wiping that request off his word-processor,’ Keith said. ‘But it’s not a lifelike picture. The more I learn about Sam Hendrickson, the more I see him as having the kind of indomitable stubbornness which would never give in to anything. Mrs Hendrickson has asked me to do some more work on the case. Do you mind?’