‘Something’s wrong,’ she said. ‘Is it just because the local rag printed a few lines about you taking Anon to America?’
‘I didn’t even know about it. How in hell did they find out about that?’
‘Not from any of us. What’s wrong?’ She looked me in the eye. Sometimes it seemed that she was able to read my mind. ‘It’s your arm again, isn’t it?’
I gave her a big kiss and tried to pretend that my shoulder was doing no more than nagging slightly after the long plane-ride; but she soon had it out of me that I had taken a fall. After that, there was no resisting her.
All that I wanted in the world was an enormous meal, a bath, a shave and a sleep. There had been no breakfast on the plane and I had been in my clothes for two days and nights. Instead, I was forced into our car, which seemed very old and drab all of a sudden, and whirled off to the hospital. The doctors confirmed my diagnosis, that I had torn the muscle again. They wanted to readmit me but there was a sotto voce argument beyond the screens, of which I could hear enough to realise that the nursing staff had strong views on the subject. I could be treated as an outpatient but only over their collective dead bodies would I be admitted for anything short of a total headectomy.
I was sent home again with orders to rest. There are certain advantages in being a bad patient.
Isobel and Henry wanted to badger me with questions about my trip but, beyond saying that the client had indeed been the widow, I made it clear that my lips were, for the moment, sealed. Beth supported me. I had promised, and that was that. I got to bed at last during the afternoon, thinking that I need never worry about being cuckolded. If Beth should ever fall from grace, she would undoubtedly, in her uncompromising honesty, subject me to a stroke by stroke account of something which I would have preferred not to know.
Next morning I surfaced, feeling very fit provided, once again, that I did not attempt any movement of my left arm. At least jet lag was no problem. Three days and two nights of intermittent sleep had not been enough to set back my body-clock.
We slipped back into the same routine. Isobel and Beth continued to do all the real labour while I looked after the paperwork, taught kindergarten and saw any visitors. But for sudden jolts of pain I could have believed that Bubba and sudden death had been a dream, no more than the memory of a random thought.
But Jess Holbright had mentioned Lord Crail. Crail was a regular client. It was his sensible habit to vanish abroad soon after the shooting season ended, leaving his dogs with us for much-needed retraining. I looked in the diary but he had not yet made a booking.
After some hesitation, I picked a moment when I had the sitting room to myself and telephoned him. I expected a long argument with his manservant, who considered me to belong among the tradesmen, but Crail himself answered the phone.
‘Hello, John,’ he said. I made an inarticulate noise. Lord Crail was rather less than my age and I knew him well enough to pull his leg or to tell him a blue joke, but although he always used my Christian name he had never invited me to use his. Luckily, he went on speaking. ‘I was going to phone you. We thought that we wouldn’t be able to get away this year, but Linda’s aunt made a miraculous recovery. Or else the old bat was swinging the lead all along. Can you still take the dogs?’
‘We’ll be up to our backsides in pups before much longer, but we’ll fit them in somewhere,’ I said.
‘That’s fine. Day after tomorrow?’
‘No problem.’ I was about to mention the widow when I heard Beth in the kitchen. Beth would not deliberately eavesdrop, but if she happened to pick up the other extension to make a call I could hardly break off in mid-sentence. ‘Can you bring them over yourself?’
‘I usually do,’ he pointed out.
He arrived two days later in his new Range Rover, immaculate in new tweeds. (Crail was permanently and notoriously broke but he managed a lifestyle to which I could never aspire, largely, one gathered, by playing one creditor off against another. But he usually paid our bills more or less on time.) He was accompanied by a Labrador and two spaniels. I met him at the door as Beth was leading away the dogs.
‘I suppose you’ve been shooting rabbits over them again,’ I said severely. ‘Come on in.’ I probably sounded like a wife greeting her husband on his return from the pub. Nothing unsteadies a dog like hunting rabbits for a lax owner.
‘Don’t knock it,’ he said, smiling. ‘It’s your bread and butter. And there’s no sport as much fun as rabbiting over dogs. I haven’t the heart to check them, they enjoy it so much. If you happen to be blessed with four legs, chasing fur must be the nearest thing to heaven. You’ll have them steady for me again before the grouse season opens. You always do.’ He looked at my sling and my fading bruises. ‘I heard that you’d been attacked. Are you on the mend?’
We fetched coffee. He carried the tray for me. We settled down in front of the fire in the sitting room. His mention of grouse had given me an opening. ‘I don’t know how you can afford to shoot grouse these days,’ I said. ‘You don’t have any heather of your own.’
Crail is a cheerful young man and his face is usually split by a broad grin, but he nodded sombrely. ‘Christless, isn’t it? Of course, a good moor takes a hell of a lot of keepering and you have to cut down heavily on the number of sheep you can graze over it. All the same, I think that supply and demand have taken over. I only went once last year and I only managed that by renting a whole moor near Perth for a day and advertising for paying Guns.’
‘And I’ll bet you made a profit out of it,’ I said.
His grin came back. ‘Not quite. I couldn’t cover my own costs out of what the others paid me. But I took Gus Brown along with the other beaters—’
‘You swore to me that you’d never have him in the line again,’ I broke in. ‘You told me you wouldn’t even let him beat a carpet.’ Angus Brown was a notorious local poacher, a ferreter and an occasional and disreputable wildfowling guide. It was quite common for a landowner to find a party of visiting Italians shooting geese over his potato or stubble fields under Gus’s aegis and without the least shadow of permission.
‘So I did,’ Crail said. ‘I’d found that he was going home with more pheasants than the guests and the game dealer put together. He has a bloody good dog.’
‘I know,’ I said. I had often regretted selling Gus the pup which had turned out to be one of the smartest spaniels around.
‘We were paying thirty quid a bird between us. That meant that every bird shot and picked up cost us about four quid each. Any pricked birds that Gus got away with were birds we didn’t have to pay for,’ Crail said simply. ‘And then the owners had wanted to send Horace along with us. “An extra Gun to share the cost,” they said. Huh!’
‘Fair comment,’ I said. Horace – Sir Horace French – was a devastating shot at driven grouse. Landowners had been known to add him to a party of Guns, free of charge, for the sake of the increased bag.
‘On an open moor, Gus didn’t have quite the same scope for hiding a dead bird and going back for it later, but I knew that he was marking down any that he reckoned were pricked and which had been missed by the pickers-up. I could count on him going back over the moor by moonlight. And that dog of his wouldn’t miss a thing. When he got home to his hovel, just before dawn, I was waiting for him. I relieved him of fourteen brace and got a damn good price from the dealer.’
‘You’re as big a crook as he is,’ I said, trying to keep the amusement out of my voice.
‘The bottom’s dropping out of farming,’ he said sadly. ‘You can’t afford to miss a trick these days, if your money’s all tied up in the land. I’d sell some of it off, only I’ve left it too late.’
‘Also, your pickers-up ought to be shot for missing so many.’
‘I only took two pickers-up to serve the whole line. I was going to invite you and Beth along, but you were under the weather at the time. And Gus’s birds didn’t all have shot in them. As I said, that’s a clever dog.’
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br /> Rather than risk moving again I asked Crail to pour more coffee. ‘That must have been the occasion when you had an American couple along,’ I said.
He put my cup where I could reach it without stretching. ‘That’s right. The man was the first to answer my advertisement. He only wanted one gun at that time, but he phoned me later wanting a second and I was able to fit his wife in. And how that lady could shoot driven birds!’
‘Better than Sir Horace?’ I asked.
‘She started where he leaves off. Her husband said that she was red-hot at skeet and I believed him. I’d like to get her over here again,’ Crail said wistfully, ‘and match her against some of our gambling men. Then I could maybe afford to shoot grouse again this year. I had to send her with the beaters as a walking gun, to stop her pushing up the cost of the day too far. We were all getting worried. I remember that she seemed to get as much fun from working their spaniel as from the shooting. Just my kind of girl in fact!’
‘What else do you remember about them?’ I asked.
‘Not a thing. It was about six months ago,’ he pointed out. ‘Why?’
‘There’s a strong possibility that he was the man whose body I found in the Eden.’
Crail looked at me in surprise for a few seconds. ‘I thought that they’d identified that man as a crook.’
‘They did,’ I said.
I expected him to say that the man had not looked like a crook, but Crail’s mind tended to follow other tracks. ‘He paid his whack. Or, rather, she did. In traveller’s cheques, as I remember. Why would they spend good money on grouse shooting while he had a good scam going? The two things seem incompatible somehow.’
‘Even conmen need a little relaxation,’ I said.
‘I suppose so. Wasn’t that his wife? Don’t tell me that she was in it with him?’
‘That was his wife, and I think she’d come over to try and persuade him to turn over a new leaf.’
‘If I were not a happily married man,’ Crail said, ‘I’d rush over to the States and pay court to the widow. All that charm and money too. So that was the same spaniel that you took to the States? There was something in the local paper about it. “Murder victim’s dog flies out.” That sort of guff.’
I wasted several minutes in trying to stimulate his recollection of the American couple but it was only when I asked whether they had seemed to know any of the other Guns that his memory produced anything new.
‘They didn’t know any others in the party,’ he said. ‘I had to introduce them around. But . . .’ He fell silent.
‘But?’ I said hopefully.
‘But, yes. It’s only an impression, mind. But after one of the drives, the second I think, when the beaters arrived at the butts, I got the impression that Gus Brown knew the man. It was no more than a nod and a couple of words.’
‘Couldn’t it have been something like “Good shooting, sir”?’
‘Possible,’ Crail said slowly. ‘Just possible, although Gus Brown doesn’t usually go in for these little courtesies. I certainly thought that it looked more like “So we meet again!” or “Up yours, Charlie.” Neither of them was looking too pleased to see the other. But it was a nothing, over and finished in less than a second. I only noticed because I was keeping an eye on Gus. They seemed to avoid each other after that. Should I tell the police about it?’
The police would undoubtedly want to know how Lord Crail had come to realise that his guest was the man who had come floating to our feet on the Eden several months later; and I had no wish to be questioned further until Jessica Holbright had made her escape from Texas.
‘I wouldn’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ll pass the word on when the time seems right. Your impression that the American had bumped into Gus in the past doesn’t mean a lot, unless Gus had seen him in the company of the man they’re still looking for.’
‘He’d probably hired Gus as a wildfowling guide at some time.’
‘But not necessarily alone. Do you know Gus well enough to find out from him?’
Crail forced a sardonic laugh. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he said. ‘Gus doesn’t take kindly to being beaten at his own game. He hates my guts. And he’s such a spiteful beggar that I told Mr Wallace to watch out for him. Wallace caught him sneaking around one of the farms.’
Mr Wallace, Lord Crail’s keeper, was a former warrant officer in the Scots Guards. Crail would certainly get no favours from Gus Brown.
‘I’d better see him myself,’ I said.
‘And the best of British luck to you,’ Lord Crail said. ‘Stand well back and try not to catch anything off him.’
*
After one painful attempt I decided that I could not manage the car’s manual gear-change for myself. Henry was away on an overnight visit to his niece in Oban. Beth and Isobel each refused to chauffeur me on the grounds that, one, they were too busy, two, I wasn’t fit to travel and, three, who on earth would call on Gus Brown if they didn’t have to? My lips still being sealed I could not argue.
There was, however, an alternative. Gus was either too mean, too broke or too used to operating on a shoestring to own a telephone, but it was widely known that messages left for him at his local pub would reach him, and with remarkable promptness except when his credit had run out. He must have been in funds that week but in need of work, because I phoned the pub that morning and Gus arrived the same afternoon.
The day was wet but warm, so I had made an excuse to take several young pups into the barn for some elementary humanising and training. This was partly in expectation of Gus’s arrival. Beth would have been furious if I had taken him into the house. Not only was he notoriously light-fingered but his arrival was usually marked by a gust of beer-fumes overlying certain less forgivable personal odours.
Gus stood in the barn’s wide doorway, glowering at me, the epitome of male scruffiness. He reminded me strongly of Jess Holbright’s description of Bubba. It was all there – the beard, in his case trimmed to a ragged fringe around his round face, a spare tyre bulging over the belt of his jeans, even the grubby plimsolls; but he was wearing a crumpled tweed hat instead of the giveaway baseball cap and a donkey jacket over his workshirt. He had loose lips and eyes like gas bubbles on a swamp.
I called the pups to me. There was only one canvas chair in the barn and I was damned if I was getting out of it, especially for Gus. I pointed to one of the straw bales which serve as hiding places for planted dummies and invited him to sit on that.
He sat down heavily. His eyes went from my sling to my face. ‘I heard you’d been in the wars,’ he said. It was a flat statement, not intended to convey sympathy. ‘What’s this you want doing?’ My message had hinted at casual employment. Outside the shooting season, Gus would have had no objection to continuing his poaching. His market soon dried up, however, so he turned his hand, quite competently, to doing odd jobs for anybody who was prepared to risk petty theft or fleas.
As it happened, I wanted a new water-pipe laid to the kennels and two new kennels and runs erected. Gus would do the work well and more cheaply than any contractor; and the human flea does not readily transfer to dogs. While I outlined the work I was wondering how to approach the other subject. The pups had settled down in a snoring huddle beside my chair.
When I had finished, Gus nodded brusquely. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘When do you want me to make a start?’
‘The materials are on order. I’ll let you know when they’re here. But first,’ I said, ‘I want you to tell me something.’
He looked at me in silence. Giving away information was not in Gus’s nature.
‘What do you know about the American?’ I asked.
‘Which American?’ he retorted. I could tell from his little dark eyes that he knew the answer to his own question; he was being contrary on principle, or wondering what quid pro quo he could extract.
I had hoped to avoid mentioning the thorny subject of Lord Crail’s grouse-shoot. ‘There was an American shooting near Perth,’ I
said circumspectly. ‘You were among the beaters. You seemed to know him.’
He bristled. ‘Who telled you that? It was yon bogger Crail.’
‘It doesn’t matter who told me. There was an American there and you spoke to him.’
‘Never saw him before. Never in my life. I just telled him that his woman had a bird down behind him and he’d best send the wee dog.’
Gus was avoiding my eye. Moreover, if he had seen a bird down and unpicked he would have kept the information to himself. He slipped a hand under his donkey jacket for a good scratch.
‘I think you’d met him before,’ I said.
‘You calling me a fleggar to my face?’
He got up to go, a picture of injured dignity. The light from one of the high windows fell on his face. ‘You’ve got the remains of a shiner beside your left eye,’ I said. ‘About the same vintage as mine. Did I put it there?’
He sat down again slowly. ‘Dinna’ ken what you mean.’
Did I remember, from before I was stabbed, a sudden waft of body odour? I could not be sure. But it seemed unlikely that any foul deeds had been committed in northern Fife without Gus’s knowledge if not his active participation. Such at least was the strength of his reputation. The bluff seemed worth following up anyway. ‘You know damn well,’ I said. ‘Somebody came here to steal the American’s dog. Before he stabbed me, I caught him a clout across the face.’
With a visible effort, he met my eye. ‘Not me,’ he said.
‘I could say that it was.’
‘Just you do that. I never laid finger on you. I mind reading about it in the papers. I was in a cell that night, drunk and disorderly. And you can do your ain fockin’ work.’ He got up again and stamped towards the door-way.
His bluster did nothing to convince me of his innocence but his flat denial left me, for the moment, weaponless. Gus accepted harassment from the police as philosophically as he accepted his fleas. It came to me that there was another area in which he might be vulnerable. ‘Where’s Nella?’ I asked him.
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