A Shocking Affair

by Gerald Hammond

  Hastings read the unfinished letter and ran his eye down the list of buildings. ‘Not a glimmer,’ he said. ‘I can imagine several possible answers, but I’d be guessing.’

  ‘The only possible link that I can see,’ I said, ‘is that at least four of the farm buildings, maybe more, had work done on them within the last few years. But I’d like you to take a look at one or two of them after lunch and advise me.’

  ‘We can certainly do that.’

  Joanna returned to say that soup and an otherwise cold lunch would be on the table in five minutes. Miss Elizabeth would be joining us.

  Mary Fiddler’s talent for coping with sudden guests was noteworthy. The broth, followed by cold venison with salad and then a cheeseboard, seemed to be appreciated, as was only right. I was beginning to wonder for how long I could spin out my tasks in Newton Lauder. Adrian Hastings joined me in a glass of chilled white wine.

  Elizabeth had made at least a partial recovery from her megrims and fell into mildly animated conversation with Jim Frazier who, after maintaining a proper silence while his chief talked business, was now discovered to have the gift of amusing chat and a knack of coaxing sulky girls out of their shells. We finished with the coffee, after which Elizabeth went back to her studies, leaving me satisfied that there would be no objection on her part to Swinburn and Hastings acting as factors for the estate.

  ‘Two tasks, you said,’ Adrian Hastings reminded me.

  ‘That’s right. We’ll go and look at them. No need to take two cars,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with you if you’ll drop me back here when we’ve finished.’

  With Jim Frazier at the wheel I directed the big Japanese four-by-four back down the drive and out along the minor road that led to Home Farm. The car was remarkably glossy and undented for one of that type in that environment. We halted outside the Synott residence.

  ‘You walk on as far as the farm,’ I told Frazier. ‘The drying shed was supposed to have a mostly new roof two years ago but the farm manager’s complaining. I’d appreciate your comments. You and I,’ I said to Hastings, ‘will call on Mr Synott. He’s moving away and the estate has first refusal when he decides to sell his lease. I want a valuation. I was supposed to give notice before any visit, but he’s in a hurry to move so he may be accommodating.’

  But at the front door we met with a snag. The bell was answered by a lady who I guessed to be Mrs Synott. She was angular and rather masculine in appearance, dressed in a faded print smock. I introduced Adrian Hastings and myself, apologized for the lack of warning and asked that Mr Hastings be allowed to see over the house for valuation purposes.

  For some reason, Mrs Synott looked perturbed. ‘It’s most inconvenient,’ she said. ‘The house is in a mess.’

  ‘He will be looking at the fabric of the house,’ I said firmly. ‘He has no interest in the contents or the housekeeping.’

  ‘All the same, I was told that we would get some warning.’

  I felt that one apology was enough. I had conceived a dislike of both the Synotts and felt inclined to match any bloody-mindedness that was offered. Adrian Hastings, I was sure, was on the point of saying that Jim Frazier could carry out the valuation whenever it suited her, so I spoke quickly. ‘It may be some considerable time before Mr Hastings will be back in the area.’

  ‘I only need to make a few notes about the rooms and their condition,’ Hastings said, following my lead. ‘My assistant can run a tape round the outside when he rejoins us.’

  Mrs Synott took a few seconds for unhappy thought. ‘Would you wait here, just for a minute or two?’ she asked and without waiting for an answer she slammed the door.

  Hastings had learned to take such treatment in his stride. He studied the outside of the house and made a few notes in an electronic notebook. ‘An attractive property,’ he said, ‘and a good outlook.’

  There was no denying either comment. The house, which was stone built, was spacious and well proportioned. It had been built around the time of World War One and stood in a well-kept if severely set out walled garden. It looked over a small patchwork of farmland to the gate where Sir Peter had died. The front garden was not yet at its best, being mainly given over to roses – the resort of the unimaginative gardener.

  I thought that I heard a car’s door close. Surely Mrs Synott could not be getting rid of an inconvenient lover? But there was no sound of an engine and after another minute the front door opened again. ‘You can come in,’ she said sternly. I thought that she seemed flustered.

  We entered a hall and then a living room which were furnished in a tasteful if old-fashioned style although becoming overdue for decoration. But I was not concerned with visual effect. I was too busy sniffing the atmosphere.

  I had intended to accompany Adrian Hastings on his guided tour in the hope of seeing some sign of non-standard electrical connections, but I changed my mind. ‘You won’t want to be bothered with two of us,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait in the car.’ Hastings handed me the key without any more comment than a raised eyebrow.

  I would have liked to walk round the house but there would be windows overlooking the rear. Instead, I returned to the car and shut myself inside. Safe from eavesdroppers, I called the police from my mobile and for the second time that day asked for a message to be passed to Ian Fellowes. If he joined me quickly I might be able to show him something of interest.

  My afternoon lassitude was creeping up on me, but my shoulder was stiffening where I had been struck and a bruise on my hip was nagging at me. I opened my eyes. I could see Mr Synott in a door mirror, walking from the direction of the road. He was swinging a stick and lugging a plastic carrier bag, from which I deduced that he had walked into Newton Lauder for some minor shopping. Any temptation to sleep departed in a hurry. I could not be sure what he would do when he discovered that his house had been invaded, but I preferred to have Ian Fellowes at hand before I found out. I got out of the car and greeted him affably.

  He hid his surprise at my sudden friendliness, came to a halt and wished me a cautious good day.

  ‘I was just admiring the house,’ I said. ‘You’ll be sorry to leave, I’m sure.’

  ‘In a way,’ he admitted. He put his shopping down by the gate and rubbed his fingers. ‘We’ve been contented here. But it’s quiet. Rather isolated, in fact. And the locals keep themselves to themselves.’

  I considered the locals to be more forthcoming than any other Scots except, perhaps, Glaswegians. If the Synotts considered them stand-offish, the reason lay within themselves. But I pretended to agree, offered a little sympathy and led the discussion round to his directorship at Agrotechnics. ‘I thought that, while I was passing, I might call in and collect that letter,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t written it yet.’

  From that point on, our communion became less friendly. He avoided my eye. I concluded that he only forced himself to make eye contact when he was lying. His expression became crafty, his tone wheedling. He did not say so aloud but I was left in no doubt that he still hoped to be recompensed for the might-have-been profit from the buyout, either through the company or by way of an adjustment to the value of his lease, failing which he was going to be as obstructive as he could manage. I was even more determined that he would receive no such special benefit, but I was equally reluctant to say so outright.

  ‘I thought that you were in a hurry to sell your lease,’ I said.

  He looked me in the eye for once. ‘And I thought that you were in a hurry to settle the matter of the directorship.’

  Ian Fellowes must have been pursuing his investigations nearby. Before I could lose my temper and say something which would have had Synott hurrying into the house, I was relieved to see the blue Range Rover which was Ian’s usual official transport turning into the farm road. He parked nose-to-tail with the Swinburn and Hastings vehicle and dismounted.

  ‘You have something to show me?’ Ian asked me. Synott, I noticed, had turned white. Keith Calder followed Ian out of the car.
Synott and I looked at him in surprise. ‘Mr Calder is my civilian adviser,’ Ian said grandly.

  ‘I can go away, if anyone objects,’ Keith said.

  Neither of us said anything. For my part, if my suspicion was right I wanted as many witnesses as possible. If I was wrong I would rather be alone, but I had set my foot on the path and it was too late to retreat. ‘There is evidence,’ I said, ‘that either Mr or Mrs Snot –’ I was past caring for his wounded feelings ‘– visited the place where Sir Peter died within a few minutes of his death. And, of course, the other could have fed mains electricity into the fence, from the house or from the tractor shed. Anyone could slip from this garden and round the end of the gable of the tractor shed without much risk of being seen, whereas anyone arriving across the fields or along the farm road would be visible for miles.’

  A sizzling silence was broken at last by the shaking voice of Synott. ‘You’re mad,’ he shrilled. ‘Stark mad! I’ll sue you! None of it’s true. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’ll see you prosecuted for . . . for . . .’ He came to a halt, uncertain of his legal rights. I gained confidence. There was no doubt that Synott felt vulnerable.

  ‘Come round to the back of the house,’ I told the others. ‘I want to show you what Mrs Synott was in a hurry to shut in the boot of the family car when I asked her to let a surveyor see through the house.’

  ‘I don’t have to take this from you,’ Synott yelped. ‘You were supposed to give us notice before bringing in a surveyor. This is entrapment. You’ll hear from my solicitors. If any one of you sets foot inside this garden, I’ll prosecute.’

  ‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘There’s no law of trespass in Scotland and I represent the superior of the feu.’

  Synott glared at me for a second. Then, forgetting his shopping, he scuttled to the door of the house.

  ‘Come on!’ I said. My sprinting days are past but I managed a respectable jogtrot, following the grass rather than the gravel drive round the gable of the building so that we arrived without excessive noise at the corner. I slowed down, panting but with a great relief spreading through me. Had I been several decades younger, I would have leaped for joy.

  Behind the house, a polished but slightly rusty saloon stood outside a concrete garage. Synott, who must have bolted through the house like a whippet, was lifting Spin out of the boot.

  The man turned, snarling. I called softly to the dog. Spin took a second or two to recognize me and then began to struggle. A struggling spaniel rivals an eel for evasiveness. He jumped down and ran to me. His tail had been docked at birth, but he wagged the remainder so hard that he nearly fell over. He jumped up against my leg and then lay down and rolled over. When I bent and patted his stomach, he squirmed in ecstasy. He seemed to have been well looked after. He had even put on a little weight although I thought that the difficulty of exercising a stolen dog in the area of the theft might in part account for that, and also for the hurry to move house. When I straightened, slightly dizzy from bending down, Spin sat up and leaned against my leg.

  I said, ‘I identify this animal as the dog that was the property of Sir Peter Hay and was with him at the time of his death.’

  ‘This –’ Synott began. He stopped. Whatever unlikely story he had been about to concoct, perhaps disputing the identity of the dog, he must have seen that it would never pass muster. He began again. He had assumed a new dignity and I was sure that this time we might get the truth. ‘All right. If I don’t tell you, you’ll think that I had to do with something worse.

  ‘You remember –’ he looked at me ‘– I came across Sir Peter and his gamekeeper that morning. One of them had shot my cat.’

  ‘Marauding after young birds,’ I agreed. ‘Detective Inspector Fellowes has been informed.’

  Synott flinched but went on. ‘That’s as may be. I’m making no admissions. I went home, but I was angry. Frankly, I was furious. I told my wife about it and she was even angrier than I was. I suppose that we were working each other up into a state. You know what I mean?’ he asked me. He seemed to have fixed on me, as his accuser, to be the recipient of his explanation.

  I nodded. That is how riots are fuelled. Even two people in concert will act more rashly than one alone.

  ‘Anyway,’ he resumed, ‘when I had been suddenly confronted with the corpse of my old friend – my cat – I was upset and I went off without expressing my true feelings.’

  ‘What were your true feelings?’ Ian asked softly.

  ‘I’ve just said that I was furious. Of course I was. I . . . I did nothing to harm Sir Peter but in honesty I’ll admit that I was seething with rage and . . . and contempt.’ He paused and glanced away. ‘I had every right to be. Anyone would have been. I saw that I had been cleverly bluffed. But I had no thought of . . . anything physical. I decided to give Sir Peter a piece of both of our minds, that was all. I had thought better of him. Now I realized that he was no better than a murderer and I meant to tell him so. I could see the two of you coming back over the hill and I knew that he always went back through the iron gate, I’d seen him often enough in the past. So I set off to meet him. I went by way of the old railway line – not to be secretive but because it’s the only logical path if you don’t want to be climbing fences and picking your way along the edge of crops.

  ‘I was hurrying to catch him, but I was almost too late. If he’d still been moving, I’d have had to follow you through the wood.’

  ‘You’d have been in time,’ I said. ‘We stopped to have one last rabbit hunt in the bottom of the wood.’

  ‘I see. I never got that far. I reached the place where you have to climb a stile, about fifty yards from the gate, but I was still hidden in the old railway cutting when his dog – this dog – came through the fence and circled around me. He was whining. I couldn’t make any sense of it.’

  ‘Peter must have collapsed by then,’ Keith said. ‘The dog was looking for somebody to go to his aid.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know that,’ Synott said. To his credit, he sounded more defensive than he had over the dog.

  ‘It was already too late,’ Keith said.

  Synott glanced at him gratefully. ‘I’m glad of that small mercy. I wouldn’t want to think that I’d removed his last chance. You see, the way I felt, he owed me an animal. He’d killed my cat and I thought that it would be no more than justice if I took his dog and let him see what it feels like to lose a much-loved pet. So I put my belt on the dog as a lead and brought him home. Then I waited for the hue and cry to start. I was going to take the dog back to him and say, “How did you like it, losing a friend?” But later that afternoon I heard what had happened and that the police were asking questions. I felt that I couldn’t own up without inviting all sorts of suspicions.’

  ‘What sort of suspicions?’ Ian asked him.

  ‘Oh, not that I’d killed him. That never entered my mind. But it might have been thought that I’d found Sir Peter dead and decided to steal his dog. Or even that I’d found him dying and left him to die. I wouldn’t want that said of me.

  ‘Anyway, my wife had fallen in love with the dog. I suppose that I had, a bit, too – he’s a well-mannered animal, I hadn’t realized before what character a dog can have, quite different from a cat. I’ve drawn them often enough, for the children’s books, but somebody else wrote the stories and I never had one as company before.’ Synott looked round our faces and seemed relieved to see that we could understand his sentiments. ‘And Sir Peter wasn’t going to be missing him after all. We had already been considering a removal to the other house to be nearer to our relatives and this made up our minds for us. I suppose . . .’ he added sadly, ‘I suppose you’ll be taking Kinnock away now?’

  ‘Who?’ He had caught me flat-footed.

  ‘We call him Kinnock, after Neil Kinnock. We very much admired him.’

  I swallowed a sarcastic remark. One of the vaunted freedoms of democracy is that you can admire whoever you like. ‘He isn’t yours,’ I p
ointed out. ‘Under Sir Peter’s will, he will belong to the gamekeeper, who has no cause to love you.’

  ‘Perhaps he’d sell him. What would the value be?’

  I quoted John Cunningham’s price for a fully trained male springer and Synott’s face fell. ‘But the dog would never be happy in a non-shooting home now,’ I told him. Synott looked so miserable that I felt almost sorry for him. ‘And most of that price is in the cost of keep and training while turning a puppy into a working dog,’ I said. ‘You could buy a young pup of similar breeding much more cheaply.’ I nearly went on to suggest that he approach Three Oaks, but remembered in time that John never sells his puppies for pets.

  Ian Fellowes had been waiting impatiently for us to finish with what he considered to be a complete irrelevancy. ‘You can’t have been very far from Sir Peter when he died. Did you see or hear anything, usual or unusual, when you were walking along the old railway line?’

  Synott frowned. ‘I wasn’t paying much attention,’ he said. ‘Going, I was too angry; and, coming back, I was pre-occupied with the dog. But – let me think . . . There was something . . .’ He paused. My legs were tired and I sat down on a front wing of the car. ‘I remember,’ Synott said suddenly. ‘I don’t know whether it has any significance. On my way out, there was something, a rope or thin hose or a piece of electric cable or something like that, lying across the track. I’d never seen it there before and I don’t think it was still there when I came back. If I thought about it at all, I thought that children had been playing about in the wood.’

  Synott paused, wondering why we had frozen. He seemed quite unaware of having said anything remarkable.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ian stirred and straightened his back. ‘Could you show us exactly where it was?’ he asked.

  ‘I think so,’ Synott said doubtfully. He turned on his heel. ‘Come with me. This is the easiest route.’