A Shocking Affair

by Gerald Hammond

  How long I mused in that semi-soporific state is uncertain. I was jerked out of it by a shadow across my feet and a rough push to the shoulder.

  Arnold Drayne, alias Roland Chatsworth and sundry other names, stood glaring at me. He was dressed in full motorcycling gear complete with helmet but I could recognize his rodent features behind the visor.

  ‘You bugger!’ he shouted, his voice half muffled inside his helmet. ‘You showed her that message.’ His accent had lost the upper-class drawl and was frankly Glasgow.

  Perhaps because of the implied machismo, motorbike leathers and helmet radiate menace and invulnerability. There was no doubt as to his temper. He was quivering with anger. I tried to keep the atmosphere cool. ‘She found it on the computer for herself,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘I didn’t even know it was there until after she saw it. I wondered why she was so upset and looked at it for myself. It was just your bad luck.’ My voice had gone husky.

  The leather and studs did nothing to disguise his mounting fury. ‘Bad luck? And I suppose if you’d found it first you’d have said nothing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘Did you send messages with computer viruses in them, hoping to wipe it off?’

  ‘If I’d known it was there –’

  ‘Then you’d have known that Sir Peter knew all about you and the jig was up,’ I said. Then I realized that I was crediting him with a powerful motive for having committed the murder and I shut my mouth quickly.

  Fortunately, he was too angry to search for implications. ‘Like hell! You deliberately shopped me. It was going to be my once-for-all. I would have married the little bitch. Bloody hypocrites, the lot of you. Who the hell are you to judge . . .?’ He was going to go on and say more, much more, but the rush of furious words was more than his voice could cope with. The result was a traffic jam of words and an explosion of rage. He lashed out at me. I just got a shoulder up in time to save my face.

  I had no time for logical thought and yet in retrospect I can recognize a combination of reasoning and instinct at work. Some men may punch and the blow is barely felt, but this punch was like a hammer-blow. As an elderly man with arthritis and a heart problem, I knew that I must not get embroiled in a lengthy scrap. If I had had a weapon to hand I would have used it ruthlessly, but there was nothing. I thought of a swift kick to his crotch, but my kicks were less swift than they used to be. The sensible course seemed to be purely defensive and to hope that his fury had already run its course. I went with the blow and sat down, rolling onto my side.

  My hope was misplaced. Arnold Drayne, it seemed, had no inhibitions about hitting a man when he was down. He swung a heavy motorcycle boot and I just managed to curl up in time and get my soles to his shin. The impact hurt him but it drove my knees against my chest, knocking most of the wind out of me. He moved round and came at me from the back and I knew that I was done for. I closed my eyes.

  There came the sound of voices and the expected kick never arrived. I opened my eyes again. Hamish had arrived out of nowhere and Joanna was crying out something unintelligible in the background. Both men looked almost incredibly tall from my low viewpoint but Hamish seemed to tower over the other. They were shouting but I never absorbed the words. They closed and wrestled. The helmet went bouncing away across the tarmac. Then something mirror-bright sparked in the sunshine and span away after the helmet, rattling on the ground. Hamish said a rude word and jumped back, a dark line across his jaw spilling blood down his neck.

  There was an inarticulate roar. Ronnie had returned, carrying a tin of wax polish. At the same moment, Hamish recovered and closed in again. Outnumbered and intimidated, the intruder sought the only haven open to him, my car. He stepped over me quickly without further assault and dumped himself in the driver’s seat, slamming the door behind him.

  Ronnie had left the spare key in its slot and if my assailant had been quick he could have driven off; but he wasted a few seconds in locking each of the doors by hand against the vengeance of Hamish and Ronnie and another second in taunting them with a rude gesture through the glass. Then, before he could put his hand on the key in the ignition, I had managed to fish the premier key out of my pocket, pointed it at the driver’s door and pressed the button. My car was fitted with the latest security equipment. The remote locking device deadlocked the doors and also triggered the engine immobilizer. The attacker had become a prisoner.

  Ronnie put his tin of polish down carefully on the bonnet. From his belt he produced a much larger knife than the lock-knife now lying in the corner of the yard. ‘I’ve just washed this bloody car,’ he ground out. ‘You damage it, you bugger, and I’ll fillet you like a fish. Aye, and then kipper what’s left.’

  I was concerned for my car but I was more concerned about Hamish. In the heat of the moment I thought that his throat had been cut but a second glance assured me that it was little more than skin deep and placed relatively harmlessly along the jawbone. Hamish might hope to be left with a romantic scar, but his life was in no danger. Joanna, however, who had accompanied him into the yard, was in no mood to assess degrees of wounding. He had galloped to the rescue and his blood had been spilled. That was enough for her. She threw herself at him, nearly bowling him over, and, heedless of the blood, flung her arms round his neck.

  My breath had more or less returned to me. With a little assistance from Ronnie, I got to my feet. My mobile phone seemed miraculously undamaged. I keyed the Emergency Services and asked the police to pass a message to Detective Inspector Fellowes to come at once because we had something very interesting to show him.

  I dusted myself down and breathed deeply. Apart from an aching shoulder I seemed to be more or less unhurt. Hamish, I decided, was in need of sticking plaster and fatherly advice rather than an ambulance. On the other hand, while we were waiting for Ian Fellowes seemed to be as good a time as any to ask the burning question which had brought me out of doors in the first place.

  ‘Hamish,’ I began.

  But he and Joanna were in a world of their own, looking deep into each other’s eyes and so exchanging messages of love and lust. But for the blood which was being spread around they would have made a prettily romantic picture, fit for the lid of a chocolate box.

  ‘Hamish,’ I said again, louder.

  There was no reaction. Clearly each had been pricked by a tranquillizer dart from Cupid’s bow.

  Although I considered myself in large part responsible for this new romance, I was not prepared to be ignored in favour of it. I put my hand between their faces.

  This was a mistake. I had intended merely to interrupt their eye contact and so perhaps gain Hamish’s attention. But at that very moment the pair closed their eyes and moved in for a long, first kiss. It was a second or two before either of them realized that my fingers were not the expected lips. The sensation of having my hand kissed on both sides simultaneously, with tongues, was highly erotic. For a minute or two I wondered if there might not be life in the old dog yet.

  *

  I would have left them to it but Ronnie, stopping just short of throwing a bucket of water over them, took charge and almost wrenched the two apart. Hamish, his cut plastered, was dispatched in the Land Rover to the doctor’s surgery, at my insistence and just to be on the safe side. Elizabeth Hay’s former love was released from my car and removed, to be charged with assault with a deadly weapon, to wit one knife. A more serious charge, I supposed, might follow.

  Twenty minutes later I had washed, tended to one or two scrapes and scratches and was changing my slightly damaged clothes when Ronnie tapped on my door. He seemed to have switched into his butler role, in that he was carrying a silver salver bearing glasses of whisky. Two glasses, I noticed. I assured him that I was uninjured, accepted one of the glasses and invited him to join me. He subsided with a grunt into the one comfortable chair.

  ‘D’you think yon wee bugger killed Sir Peter?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘I don’t know. It seems possible. But t
hat’s not our business any more,’ I pointed out. There was another matter on my mind. ‘Ronnie, you’re Joanna’s father, aren’t you?’

  His eyebrows shot up. On any face less craggy than his, I would have interpreted the look as stark horror. He put down his drink and looked out of the door, closing it carefully behind him. ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked hoarsely.

  ‘I saw your face when she was kissing Hamish,’ I told him. ‘It had disapproving parenthood written all over it. Don’t you want Hamish to marry her?’

  ‘It’s Hamish not marrying her that racks me. I’ve just been speaking with her. She’s willing. If Hamish . . . Och, but he’s a good lad. He’ll do right by her or he’ll ha’e me to reckon with. But you’ll not say a word outside this room, about me being her dad? No’ that I’m ashamed,’ he added quickly. ‘But I’d not like my sister to know and Mary’d never let me hear the last of it. See, I was going wi’ Mary at the time. Then we lost touch and it was years later we met again and married.’ He sighed. ‘We never had a child of our own, except one that was stillborn.’

  ‘I won’t say anything.’

  He raised his glass to me and then drained it. We went downstairs together.

  Elizabeth, still subdued, joined us in the sitting room to hear the story. And Joanna, sponged but still slightly bloodied, had managed to provide Ian Fellowes, Elizabeth and me with soothing tea and sweet biscuits in the sitting room. Joanna had a private smile and the secret air of one whose mind is miles away and already indulging in intimacies too delicate for ordinary folk to understand. Peter Hay had asked me why the young always thought that they had invented sex. Joanna, I thought, could have told him.

  Ian Fellowes, on the other hand, was very much all there and walking a fine line in manner between being a friend and an investigating officer. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no and no. I’m obliged to you for offering me a villain caught literally red-handed. But, while the nasty Mr Drayne may be guilty of seducing maidens, of assault and quite possibly of polygamy, if he has murdered anybody it was not Sir Peter Hay. His alibi for that morning is beyond reproach.’

  Elizabeth had flinched at the tactless reference to maidens but she was still game. ‘He had a tutorial,’ she said, nodding.

  ‘Do try to remember that he was not actually enrolled with the university,’ I told her.

  ‘That’s right,’ Ian said. ‘Universities have a large and ever-changing population. It would be very rare for anyone of apparently suitable age and carrying a few books or papers to be challenged. In fact, he was in the Students’ Union of the other university, on a stolen membership card, having coffee with the daughter of Lord Bonnyrigg. So whatever else he may have been guilty of, murdering your grandfather, Miss Elizabeth, was not one of them. The attack on Mr Kitts must have been an ill-advised explosion of anger at having one of his more hopeful ploys spoiled. He may have extra cause to regret it, because there will almost certainly be enough publicity to cramp his style for good and all and, if he really has been going through forms of marriage, bring one or more of the young ladies to us. You really have been very lucky, Miss Elizabeth.’

  ‘I don’t feel very lucky, just at the moment,’ she said in a choked voice, and got up to leave the room.

  ‘Poor girl!’ said Ian with what seemed to be genuine sympathy. ‘Between loss and humiliation, she must feel terrible. But it could have been very much worse.’

  I had had more than enough of young and not-so-young love for the moment. ‘What other alibis have you managed to prove or disprove?’ I asked him.

  He regarded me reprovingly. ‘You know I can’t tell you that. If somebody were to assure you that they had been elsewhere and you knew that we had proved the alibi false, you’d be almost bound to let slip that you knew. And you will certainly be a prosecution witness. I could be put in an impossible position. You must know how defence lawyers operate. But here’s one little snippet that I can offer you in compensation. What seems to be the missing length of street-lighting cable has turned up. We were lucky. One of my men spotted the local scrap dealer with it on the back of his lorry. He swears that he found it on some waste ground by the canal. It may even be true. But if we’d missed him, the cable would have been cut up within the hour.

  ‘The street-lighting foreman is prepared to identify it because one end was still finished exactly in accordance with his technique. The snag is that the other end was hacksawn cleanly and couldn’t possibly have been attached to anything while in that condition. So perhaps it wasn’t used after all. Perhaps it was stolen and discarded to mislead, I don’t know. On the other hand, the cut end doesn’t seem to be a perfect match for the cut end on the big reel, so the thief may have used it and then cut off a piece, just to make it difficult for us – or a jury – to draw any inferences from the length he’d needed or the connections he’d made. For what it’s worth, the length was just under thirty metres.’

  As a clue, I decided, it was not worth very much. If the length of the cable had been significant, it would surely have ended up in the canal, not alongside it. Somewhere, perhaps in the canal, there would be another piece. I suggested this to Ian. He thanked me politely but said that a frogman was already at work.

  ‘How far is it from the Spigatt woman’s house to the fence?’ I asked him.

  He regarded me pityingly. ‘Please get rid of the idea that you can point out suspects to me,’ he said. ‘Miss Spigatt has been considered. Any cable from her house to the fence would have had to cross the public road. And, in case you’re thinking that she might have had the use of a neighbour’s house, I may as well tell you that we have spoken to Mr Enterkin’s secretary. Enterkin was speaking to Miss Spigatt while you were shooting rabbits with Sir Peter.’

  ‘But –’ I began.

  He rode over me. ‘But she could have phoned from home, you’re about to say. Well, she didn’t. She made the first call and left a message asking him to call her back, which he did. The number is still in the secretary’s notebook. It is the Edinburgh office.’

  While I had him in this peevish but semi-confiding mood, I intended to ask Ian whether he had ever put to Hamish the question that I had been forgetting to ask. Hamish had remembered hearing the sound of an engine at around the time that Peter Hay had died. Of course, it might have been the sound of some perfectly innocent vehicle going past on the road, but the driver might have witnessed something and I was curious to know how the engine had sounded. Large or small, petrol or diesel, most men could tell at least that much from the noise.

  But, before I could work around to the subject, we were interrupted. I had heard the sound of the doorbell without really noticing it. Now Joanna arrived at the door with the news that Mr Hastings had arrived.

  Ian made his escape and I asked Joanna to bring Mr Hastings to the study.

  Adrian Hastings turned out to be a man of around fifty with a calm, expressionless face spoiled by broken veins. He was dressed in good and apparently new clothes, his suit tailor-made for him and cut to accommodate the beginnings of a portly belly. He was accompanied by a younger man who he introduced as his assistant, Jim Frazier. Frazier was the more suitably dressed for scrambling around in old farm buildings and I guessed that any mucky jobs would fall to his lot. He was also, it transpired, along as Mr Hastings’s driver. Mr Hastings was quite open about the reason for this. He had lost his driver’s licence as a result of ‘one of those dinners that the professional man can’t avoid and so boring that he can’t get through without a good dram in him.’

  Hastings had brought with him a file of correspondence with Peter Hay, but I had come across several of the letters in the course of my wanderings around the computer’s unfamiliar filing system, so that I knew the documents to be genuine. Sir Peter, it seemed, had trusted the firm and made extensive use of them. Jim Frazier sat silently as his employer and I skirmished and haggled over the Conditions of Engagement sponsored by the RICS.

  ‘This is what I propose,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll en
gage you, at first, job by job. If we get along, you can do all the valuations required for Confirmation and for disposing of certain properties. And if we’re still on speaking terms by the end of it, we’ll probably leave the factoring in your hands.’

  ‘In that event, we would open a local office.’

  ‘That could be sound business,’ I said. ‘We’ve already severed relations with the previous factors and I suspect that others will do the same.’

  It seemed that Hastings knew about the Weimms and Spigatt debacle. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that was a sad business. I quite understand. And the arrangement you propose will be satisfactory.’

  I looked at my watch. The morning had almost gone. ‘If you’ll stay for lunch,’ I said, ‘you could meet Sir Peter’s granddaughter, who will be your client in the long run, and then look at the first two tasks that I want you to undertake.’

  Adrian Hastings accepted for them both. I rang for Joanna and sent her to Mrs Fiddler with the news of two guests for an early lunch.

  ‘Now,’ I said. I took the two pages of printout from my pocket. ‘You phoned me about an approach from Sir Peter which he had failed to follow up – for the obvious reason. I think that this may have had a bearing on the subject, but the information is again incomplete. Can you shed any light?’