The Worried Widow

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘That I have,’ Keith said grimly.

  ‘Well, I haven’t,’ Molly said. ‘He was away at one of his shops when I called in, although he usually takes Saturdays at home. His wife’s a pillar of the Red Cross and Meals on Wheels and that sort of thing. She was indoors all morning when Sam Hendrickson died. She says that her husband was out pottering with the cars until lunch.’

  Keith frowned. ‘Somebody – Strathling it was – told me that Kechnie crossed the road before the shot. It might not be true, of course.’

  ‘He was probably going to see his sister,’ Molly said.

  Keith nodded and was about to move on when the impact of her words hit him. ‘Sister?’

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you know? He’s Mrs Beecher’s brother.’

  ‘Is he, by God! And both the Kechnies and the Beechers had cause to hate Sam Hendrickson. And Beecher tried to scare us off.’ Keith stared into space for a full minute and then gave himself a little shake. ‘For the moment, it looks as if Kechnie might be the front-runner, with his sister as an accessory – which would please Wal no end –, followed closely by the Albanys and Ben Strathling, then by the Ortons, the window-cleaner and a mysterious lady who might possibly be Mrs Griegson from the union and who seems to have the only real motive which has shown up. And I thought that this was going to be a one-horse or at the most a two-horse race. Any thoughts so far?’

  They looked at each other in silence. Molly laughed suddenly. ‘Three minds without a single thought,’ she said. ‘Poor Jenny, she may never know what happened to her Sam. Wouldn’t anybody have noticed if the window-cleaner vanished for a minute? Or are window-cleaners sort of invisible, like policemen and posties?’

  ‘I think Mrs Orton Senior would have noticed,’ Keith said. ‘I’m going to ask her tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something that’s been bothering me all along,’ Molly said. ‘However shocked she was, Jenny Hendrickson wouldn’t have turned off the monitor of the computer if it had shown a message from her Sam. So why would a murderer leave it only showing the menu? The only reason I can think of is that he was afraid that she’d be more likely to switch off the computer if she saw a suicide message, because of the insurance. But that doesn’t seem to be good reasoning.’

  ‘I think I can tell you why,’ Keith said.

  ‘So can I,’ Deborah piped up.

  ‘All right, Toots. You go ahead.’

  ‘No, Dad, you first. I’ve got a tickle. I’m not used to talking so much without being told to pipe down.’ She fetched herself a glass of tonic from Keith’s drinks cabinet.

  ‘Very well.’ Lightly, Keith touched the ESCAPE key. At each touch, the screen flicked across between the list of functions and the text which they had been preparing. ‘I was going to test my theory tomorrow. I’d do it here except that it’ll make a mess. It hardly takes a breath to work one of these keys. I’m going to fire a shotgun in the summerhouse, into a bucket of water, and see if the sudden pulse of gas pressure wouldn’t be enough to key it. Is that what you were going to say?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Deborah said. ‘I don’t think that it would work, not on a key half an inch square. Think about it.’

  ‘Now who’s sounding patronising?’ Keith said.

  ‘Sorry. But what you said wouldn’t explain why the keyboard was one of the first things Mrs Hendrickson cleaned. There’s a simpler explanation. A great dollop of blood and brains and chips of bone landed on that part of the keyboard,’ she explained cheerfully. ‘I noticed it on one of the photographs. Assume that it hit the ESCAPE key. Wiping it off, Mrs Hendrickson would have been keying it to and fro and also putting in all the gibberish. If she’d switched off the monitor, she wouldn’t notice anything.’

  Keith pointed a finger at her. ‘Babes and sucklings,’ he said. ‘Babes and sucklings! You may be a clype, but you’re a clever clype. That’s exactly what happened.’

  His daughter put her tongue out at him.

  Chapter Eleven

  Saturday fishermen quit their beds early, to make the most of the day and in the hope of a dawn rise. Keith slipped out of bed while Molly was still sleeping, scribbled a note, filled a flask with coffee and left home before dawn, re-setting the alarms behind him. He parked the jeep near the entrance to Kenny Stuart’s farm and settled down to wait with the patience of the experienced stalker.

  The sun was coming up and the flask was almost empty of coffee when a white Volvo estate cruised along the road from Boswell Court and turned towards the town. If he found himself spying on an innocent angler, he told himself, it would only be a few hours of sleep and some petrol lost down life’s plug-hole.

  In Newton Lauder, the white car turned south. Rather than alert the other driver, Keith tucked in behind a milk-float. A sudden, short crocodile of traffic, probably early golfers, kept him there, and when he managed to get past the milk-float his quarry had vanished.

  In a burst of irritation, he uttered a word which Molly had absolutely outlawed and put his foot down. But when the town was behind him and he could see the road for half a mile ahead, there was no white car to be seen. There was no other road to the south and no trout stream within walking distance.

  As he turned in a field-gate, he considered. Of course, James Beecher might be picking up a friend. In which case, he might return to the main road and leave the town to the north or go back up the hill to eastward. Or they might take the friend’s car. Or the fishing-trips might be no more than an excuse to visit a lady, which would explain the fact that Mr Beecher often purchased cartridges in the shop but never fishing tackle.

  Before choosing between trying the impossible or giving up, there was one other cast he could make. He turned off into a side-street which curled uphill round the back of the Post Office and then, after serving some tiny, Victorian houses for a quarter-mile, arrived back at the canal beside a large, blank-faced industrial building of red brick and heavy slates. A sign, much newer than the building, announced that this was the ‘Panmure Printing Works. Prop: J.Beecher.’ The white Volvo estate stood haughtily apart from two lesser cars, within the mesh-fenced yard. The gate was padlocked.

  Keith let the jeep roll back until it was hidden by a rickety wooden garage and parked while he thought again. Jim Beecher might be using his own yard as a secure place to leave his car while going off with a fishing friend, but Keith had not met another car as he came up the hill. If Beecher were merely catching up with a backlog of desk-work, why would he padlock the gate? And if he was in the habit of spending his Saturday mornings in innocent toil, why pretend to go fishing?

  Keith got out and locked the jeep. Then he unlocked it again to get out his lightweight binoculars. He began to circle the fence. There was no sign of life in the print-works except for a faint hum of machinery. No other gates were evident, but from the raised canal bank it was an easy vault over the wire on to a stack of crates and pallets.

  In the back of the Volvo he could see waders and a rod-case. The most propitious time for fishing would soon be past. But perhaps the fishing tackle was a permanency in the car, just as his own pigeon decoys and hide-nets were never removed from the jeep.

  The massive building was flanked by a lower run of what Keith took to be offices, with clerestory windows showing above. Keeping well out of sight from the office windows, Keith fetched three boxes and with their help reached the lower roof. It sloped, but his rubber soles gripped well and he blessed the long-dead builders for their solid slates and heavy timber. He made his way up and crouched against the edge of one of the high windows, keeping very still rather than attract eyes to a moving silhouette.

  He was looking down on to the main floor of the print-works. Most of the machinery was idle, but a man was attending to one of the smaller presses and on the other side of a separating partition two women were putting the finishing touches to some bound volumes, while another stowed them in cardboard cartons. A man who, from the bald head and red moustache, Keith took to be James Beecher, came i
nto view, spoke to one of the women and walked out of sight again.

  Keith watched for a few minutes longer. It seemed that Beecher, with a small selection of his staff, was attending to some rush job; but, before climbing down, out of no more than idle curiosity as to what work was so urgent as to bring them in at the weekend, he pulled the binoculars from his inner pocket and focussed them on the stacks of pages which awaited binding.

  The print was still just too small for him to read, but the one full-page photograph came up sharp and clear. It showed a nearly-nude girl in the hands of three men, and embraced almost the whole spectrum of male fetishes. Before he tore his eyes away, Keith could feel an erection coming.

  ‘I think,’ said a voice, ‘that it would be better if you came down for a closer look, Mr Calder.’

  Keith looked down. The man looking up from the yard was undoubtedly Beecher. Without answering, Keith stowed away his binoculars and climbed down by the way he had gone up. He felt foolish and aggrieved and at the same time much amused. Beecher’s emotions seemed not to be dissimilar.

  ‘You’d better come inside,’ Beecher said. He led the way through a hall and into a spartan office lined with shelves of files and printing and pointed to a chair. ‘Coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m already awash with the stuff,’ Keith said, ‘after waiting an hour for you to leave home. I wanted to know why you tried to warn me off, and where you got to on Saturdays when you said you were going fishing. You never bought any tackle from the shop.’

  ‘I could have been tying my own flies.’

  ‘Nylon line needs replacing every year or two,’ Keith said. ‘And it’s a rare fisherman who doesn’t treat himself to a new gadget now and again.’

  Beecher smiled wryly. ‘Stupid of me,’ he said. ‘Well, now you know. At least, I take it that you know?’

  Keith nodded. ‘You’ve been running off a little porn at the weekends, with a few of your more trusted staff.’

  ‘When we could get the work.’ Now that it was out in the open, Beecher had relaxed a little, but although he had settled into his chair Keith could see that his muscles were still taut. ‘It’s a good earner. It was the only way I could keep the rest of my costs low enough to compete with the bigger firms. We only do the printing, you understand,’ Beecher added anxiously. ‘We don’t write the stuff, or take the photographs.’

  Keith, who had been on the point of getting interested, remembered his grievance. ‘You phoned up and threatened me,’ he said. ‘And then you sent a thug to rough me up.’

  Beecher nodded slowly. ‘I won’t admit a thing to anyone else,’ he said. ‘But, between ourselves, that was a mistake. I only told him to give you a fright.’

  ‘I don’t take kindly to threats.’

  ‘Nobody ever threatened me, but I don’t suppose I’d take it kindly myself. I just couldn’t think of any other course. But there’s no harm done,’ Beecher said reasonably. ‘He didn’t frighten you off. All he did was get a dunt over the head from you. I was so damned annoyed I gave him a fiver for his petrol and sent him off without a fee.’

  Despite his annoyance, Keith found that he was beginning to like Jim Beecher. ‘If you’d paid him off, he might have been a bit more reticent about who’d employed him. After I ignored your phone-call, why did you send him? The damage was already done.’

  ‘If you stopped stirring up the mud, I thought that the police would soon lose interest. Nobody likes working hard to prove that they blew it first time around.’ Beecher paused and scratched his ear. ‘So what happens now?’

  Keith was wondering the same thing. ‘Tell me about you and Sam Hendrickson,’ he said.

  He spoke only to fill a gap and to take advantage of having Beecher at a disadvantage. He expected nothing but a puzzled denial. Beecher surprised him. ‘It was several years ago,’ he said. ‘Hendrickson, representing the union, came after me for a rise for my workers. I refused and had a strike on my hands. I met Hendrickson and took him through the books and showed him that the business couldn’t stand it. I thought I was wasting my time; that wasn’t the sort of argument Sam Hendrickson was known to accept. But he asked, quite mildly, whether I’d pay the increase if he brought me in some profitable extra work.’

  ‘He introduced you to the porn-publisher?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Exactly. And the workers got their rise and Hendrickson took a percentage for one year as we’d agreed. And I’ll say one thing for him. He stuck precisely to the letter of our agreement.’

  ‘I ought to tell the police,’ Keith said.

  ‘Please don’t. It might not come entirely as a surprise to them,’ Beecher said. ‘As long as there’s no complaint, I can stay afloat as a local employer. I don’t think they or my workforce would thank you for drawing my activities to their official notice.’

  That was probably true. Keith remembered Gowrie’s amused dismissal of Beecher as a suspect. For his own part, he had no strong views about pornography and experience had shown him that any form of censorship was counter-productive. ‘Well all right,’ he said grudgingly. ‘I’ll keep my mouth shut, unless and until your sideline turns out to have a bearing on Sam Hendrickson’s death. But don’t you ever try threatening me again.’

  The other brightened. ‘You’re a good sort,’ he said. ‘I don’t know whether you like that sort of thing, but would you like a free copy of what we’re working on today?’

  On the point of indignant refusal, Keith realised that it would make a perfect Christmas present for his brother-in-law. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said.

  Back in the jeep, with his acquisition safely shrouded in brown paper on the seat beside him, he realised that nothing said that morning need have cleared Jim Beecher as a suspect. Keith would not have put blackmail beyond Sam Hendrickson.

  *

  He was home in time for a hasty breakfast. He let his wife and daughter think that his early expedition had failed. He was in no mood for Molly’s feminist ire nor for Deborah’s curiosity.

  Molly took the car and went to open the shop. She would join them if and when Janet and Wallace returned. Keith took Deborah in the jeep.

  Most of the cars at Boswell Court were tucked away in large garages or were pulled off the road into broad, well-screened driveways, but there was a glossy Daimler at the kerb outside the Kechnie residence. Mr Kechnie’s string of shops, which stretched through the Borders, must be doing better than the old bastard deserved, Keith told himself.

  Keith turned the jeep and parked it outside the Hendricksons’ gate. He hoped that it would not make the place look too untidy. A small van was already lowering the tone.

  ‘I see the window-cleaner’s here,’ he said. ‘It’s the chap who comes out to do our windows. I’ll talk to him and then visit Granny Orton. If your fisherman’s there—’

  ‘He is,’ Deborah said. ‘I looked along the canal when we crossed the bridge.’

  ‘See if you can pin him down about the extra wifie. First get hold of Mrs Orton. Ask whether I could visit her mother-in-law a little later. Meet me Chez Pollock.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ said his daughter. A blonde teenager, very sexy and well aware of it, came out of a gate, crossed the road and vanished through another. ‘That’s Aimee Albany,’ Deborah said. ‘As if anybody cared.’

  Keith decided to be careful, but Deborah was waiting for a comment. ‘Pretty hair,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Pity the roots are a glorious mud-colour.’ Deborah gave her father a sly look. ‘Like it, do you?’

  ‘Hoy!’ Keith said. ‘You’re not thinking—?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. Keith began to relax. ‘She’d think I was copying her,’ Deborah added. ‘When my cheque’s cashed, I might consider going redhead. A sort of golden auburn.’ She hopped down, gave him a cheerful salute and vanished between the gardens in the direction of the footbridge.

  The window-cleaner, a stout and cheerful man known to all the town as Gus, was ready for a break. They took seats in his van while Gu
s filled a large mug with tea from his vacuum flask. He balanced his mug over the dashboard and the windscreen began to steam up. Gus’s memory was good and he loved to talk. Keith could have learned volumes about the bedroom habits of the town’s residents, but he limited the discussion to matters bearing on the day Sam Hendrickson died.

  ‘You’ve always had a helper with you when I’ve seen you before,’ he said.

  ‘Yon was my brother while he was out of work,’ Gus explained. ‘He got taken on at Selby’s Warehouse. The day you want to know about was my first on my own. I found I could manage fine. It’s slower that way but the money’s all mine and I can do with it. O’er many folk do their own windows these days. But not up here, they’d not want to be seen soiling their hands – except in the garden. Gardening’s ladylike, you see, and a gent can polish a car if he feels like it, but cleaning windows is work. Being on my own for the first time is how I can keep that day clear in my mind. It was different, you see, having to handle the ladder by myself.’

  ‘Did you go round the houses in sequence that morning?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Gus said. ‘Mrs Beecher likes to get away early, some Saturdays, so I aye do her windows first, else I’d likely have to wait a week to get paid. The McLaings was away, but she’d left word to do the windows anyway – she thinks dirty windows is an invite to burglars, the same way she has a man come up and cut the grass – so I did her next. Then I crossed the road and started working back the other side and round to finish at the Strathlings. I was doing the last of their windows when I heard the shot.

  While he thought about his next question, Keith wiped clear his side of the windscreen. The girl, Aimee, was crossing the road again. Seeing Keith’s eyes reappear, she gave an extra flick of her bottom as she walked. Ian Albany was going to have problems there within a year or two. The thought bothered Keith not at all.

  ‘Did you see much of the comings and goings of that morning?’ he asked.