‘Aye. I heard you was one for the women.’ Smiler jerked his head and backed out of the office. ‘Your job’s done. That’ll be twenty-five quid.’
Keith whistled. ‘That’s a bit steep, isn’t it, in your employer’s time and using his plant?’
‘That’s the price,’ Smiler said calmly.
Keith pulled out his wallet. ‘I’ll come to you again, next time I’m bloody desperate,’ he said. ‘Ten quid, take it or leave it.’
Smiler picked up a heavy hammer. ‘Twenty-five,’ he said, ‘or I’ll put it back the way it was.’
*
Below the canal bridge, Keith turned off into a side street and then into a terrace of small houses. At the end, incongruously tucked in between a church and its manse, was a small junk-yard, concealed and protected by a wooden fence and some rusty barbed wire. Keith drove through the open gates. The proprietor’s small figure was moving to and fro between the piles of scrap and a cauldron that stood over a flaring gas-ring. Dougie Cruikshank was reclaiming scrap lead.
Keith had at one time been accustomed to pouring his own shot, and he knew something of the chemistry of scrap lead. When he saw the source of Dougie Cruikshank’s scrap, he backed hastily out of the gates. Sounding his horn, he beckoned.
Little Dougie came trotting out. ‘Mr Calder!’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’
Keith got out of the car. ‘Dougie,’ he said, ‘do you realise you may be making poison gas there?’
Dougie blinked. His tight little eyes never gave anything away. ‘Never did me any skaith,’ he said.
‘Well, when you melt down old battery-plates, they give off some bloody toxic fumes. One lungful and you could be dead. You’ve got away with it so far because you’ve been doing it outdoors and in a bit of a breeze.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘No, it is not all right, you daft gowk. You may have killed your neighbours.’
‘The church is empty.’
‘The manse isn’t.’ But Keith remembered that he had no love for the minister. The Lord could be left to look after his own. ‘What’s more,’ Keith said, ‘you wouldn’t be bothering to melt it down at all unless some of it was stolen.’
‘I got those batteries honest,’ Dougie protested.
‘So what are you melting in with it? Roofing lead? If you’ve been up on either of my roofs,’ Keith said grimly, ‘I’m going to sit you down in that pot until the lead comes out of your ears.’
‘Nothing like that, MrCalder. I’ve not been near you, or anyone that you know.’ It might have been the heat of the cauldron, but the little man was sweating.
‘You’d better bloody well not. When did you clean out the spent bullets from the sand in the canal shed?’
Dougie looked puzzled. ‘Smiler told me I could.’
‘I do not,’ Keith said, ‘give a pig’s fart what Smiler told you you could do. When did you get them?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘Have you melted them down yet?’
‘Why do you . . .’ But Dougie saw the signs of Keith losing his temper. ‘Some,’ he said quickly. ‘Less than half.’
Keith let out a sigh of relief. ‘I suppose it’s safe in there by now. Let’s go and take a look at what’s left.’
In the yard, Keith stayed carefully upwind of Dougie’s melting-pot. The smaller man produced a heavy bag and Keith looked inside. There were fragmented bullets, and whole bullets virtually undamaged. One in particular caught Keith’s attention. ‘Here’s an oddity,’ he said. ‘Smaller than nine-millimetre. Could be a thirty-one. Have you seen anyone using an old Paterson Colt up there?’
‘I wouldn’t know one from the other, Mr Calder,’ Dougie said earnestly. ‘And I kept well clear of the shed when they were shooting. Dangerous. Did you not see the bullet holes, all round the place?’
‘I saw some new plaster,’ Keith said. ‘Who shoots there?’
‘All of them, even the women. They used to take whole cases of bottles in there on a Sunday sometimes, and hold their own competitions while they all got fu’. It’s a miracle nobody was ever killed.’
‘Isn’t it, just,’ Keith said. He looked down cautiously onto the top of the molten lead, but there were no copper jackets floating in the scum. ‘I’m taking these bullets away with me.’
‘Hey! Them’s my bullets. That lead’s worth money, and it’s mine!’
Keith ignored the little man’s agitation. ‘I’m still wondering why you’re bothering to melt it down,’ he said.
‘I get more money that way.’
‘No you don’t. I’ve sold scrap lead in my time. The dealers prefer to melt it down themselves, so that they know what they’ve got. I think you’re melting it so that you can lose the lead from something you’ve nicked.’ Keith prowled around the yard with little Dougie flustering at his heels. In a ramshackle shed he found a crude workbench with a vice and a hacksaw. Still clamped in the vice was a leaden arm and a chubby hand. ‘Thought so,’ Keith said. ‘I was just reading that lead statues had walked away from the grounds of one of the big houses over by Kelso.’
‘That’s none of it!’ Dougie protested.
‘Then you’ll not mind if I borrow it for identification?’ (Dougie closed his eyes and made an inarticulate moaning sound.) ‘So,’ Keith said, ‘now that we understand each other – we do understand each other, don’t we?’ (Dougie nodded, without opening his eyes.) ‘I thought we might. Now, you’re going to find a couple of slats of wood, and nail them together with the neck of the bag in between, and write your name on it – you can write your name? – just so that nobody can try to make out that I added or took anything out. And I’m taking it away with me, and the severed limb as well.’
‘You’re nae takin’ it tae the polis?’ Dougie’s accent got stronger under pressure of emotion.
‘Maybe not. Not if you’ll give me a little help.’
‘Whitna help?’
‘Do you get to wander around the canal shed?’
‘Whiles I do. I buy and sell a lot with Smiler.’
‘Are you ever alone in the office? Could you be?’
Dougie half-nodded, uncertainly. ‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘Look for anything odd, anything that shouldn’t be there or that should be there and isn’t. Keep your eyes and ears open for what’s said and done up there. And you might just drop an inkling that you know something, and see who’s interested in knowing what the police are doing and whether my wife’s going to . . . live or not.’
Scowling, Dougie drew himself up to his full height, somewhere in the region of Keith’s lower ribs. ‘And just when by would you be wanting all this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Keith said. ‘It depends on what pressures are put on me from elsewhere. You help me, and you can have everything out of the shop that the insurance company says is scrap. But if you give away anything to Smiler and his boys, I’ll whisper to the police about statues going missing.’
*
In the large farmhouse kitchen, Janet’s mother was preparing the evening meal for the menfolk. Janet, who was supposed to be helping, was being a hindrance.
Mrs Weatherby, who had herself been young not so very long before, knew the symptoms. ‘Tell me about the young man,’ she said.
Janet started and dropped a saucepan. ‘What young man?’
Her mother laughed, a happy, feminine laugh that had once set hearts fluttering and could still turn a head or two. ‘Give me that and stop scuttering,’ she said. ‘You know fine what young man. I only caught a glimpse of him when he came up about the horse. Is he as handsome as he looked?’
‘I don’t know that you’d call him handsome.’ Janet wrinkled her nose and leaned back against the table. ‘He’s tall with floppy hair, and he has a dark, brooding look and one of those clever sort of faces. And he doesn’t smile very often, but when he does it lights up the whole of his face.’
‘And that’s all about him?’
Janet thought. ‘H
e’s got one of those deep, well-modulated voices that sends a tingle up your back, if you know what I mean.’
Her mother said that she knew exactly what Janet meant. ‘But he seems an odd one just to be running an old barge.’
‘I think he’s had enough of the barge,’ Janet said. ‘He’s a qualified accountant.’
‘Your father found out that much. Your young man helped him with some accounts, something to do with tax, and your dad says he seemed to know more about it than old Yates from Edinburgh.’
‘I think he must be good,’ Janet said. ‘You should have heard him ticking off Keith Calder for being over-stocked in the shop so that he couldn’t turn his money over or something, and Keith took it like a lamb. I think Keith may offer him a permanent job, one of these days.’
Satisfied that Wallace need not be without prospects, Mrs Weatherby felt safe to pursue the matter further. ‘The point is, is he nice to be with? Lay the table for me, there’s a pet.’
‘All right. Well,’ Janet said, without moving, ‘he’s very thoughtful and considerate. He makes little jokes in a shy sort of way and looks relieved when you laugh. And he’s never boring, because he knows a lot and he can make it sound interesting.’
Mrs Weatherby adjusted the gas under the vegetables. ‘You’re falling for him, aren’t you?’ she asked, without looking round.
Janet slumped into one of the hard, Windsor chairs. ‘Can you fall for someone who’s never even kissed you?’
Her mother looked into the past. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course you can.’
‘Then I probably am.’
‘How does he feel about it?’
‘I don’t know for sure,’ Janet said miserably, fiddling with the cruet. ‘I’m sure there’s nobody else, that’s one thing. Sometimes I think . . . But he never says or does anything. Not anything at all.’
Her mother paused in her work. ‘Put that down before you break it,’ she said. ‘You’re sure he’s not one of those funny ones?’
Janet sniffed and then laughed. ‘Quite sure. Sometimes, when he looks at me, his eyes have a heat in them. Like a coal that’s almost out but it comes alive if you blow on it.’
Her mother sighed. She knew that look. ‘I’d better start saving for the wedding then.’
Janet’s head drooped again. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He’s so damned . . . respectful! It’s mad, it really is. There’s him, and what he really wants is to sweep me off my feet. I’m sure of it. And here’s me, wanting to be swept, and he treats me as if I were a piece of porcelain or a delicate fabric or something. Mum, what do I do?’
Mrs Weatherby made a final adjustment to each of her gasses and sat down opposite her daughter. ‘I hope you’re not asking me to tell you how to seduce the poor man?’
‘No,’ Janet said. She sounded undecided. ‘I want to know . . . Mum, I want to know how to make him want to seduce me.’
Her mother nodded. They understood each other perfectly. Mrs Weatherby had known the delicious agonies. If she was just a little bit envious, she suppressed it. ‘You’ll keep your hand over your ha’penny until you’re properly wed?’
‘Of course,’ Janet said. At the time, she meant it.
In her day, Mrs Weatherby had been the recognised beauty and heart-breaker for twenty miles around. She thought back. ‘You’ve shown him a wee bit of leg?’
‘Mum, he’s seen me in a bikini.’
‘It’s hardly a Stolen Glimpse, is it? A man’d rather see a forbidden inch up your skirt than the whole of you in the wee-est bikini ever made.’
Janet snorted with laughter. ‘You’re out of date, Mum. There aren’t any forbidden inches any more.’
‘Then there should be, or where’s the fun? Anyway, that may be true of your George Frazers and your Keith Calders, but not of your new boy-friend.’
Janet hesitated. She wanted to talk about Wallace and, unlikely as it seemed, her mother might yet produce some useful advice. But a sense of obligation to Keith and, truth to tell, her curiosity impelled her to follow up the passing reference. ‘Mum, did you know George Frazer?’
Mrs Weatherby blinked and came down out of the clouds. The late Mr Frazer seemed a poor topic of conversation compared to her daughter’s love-life. ‘Long ago,’ she said. ‘When we were young. Every lassie for miles around knew Dodd Frazer.’
‘The Keith Calder of his day?’ Janet suggested.
‘Aye, you could say that. His dad aye kept a pair of tweezers on the mantel, for when he came home with shot in his backside. Like Keith, he understood a girl. Your young man, now . . . You’re sure that he’s realised that you’re a girl, and not just another pal?’
‘He knows it all right,’ Janet said peevishly. ‘He just doesn’t do anything about it.’
‘Just treats you as if you were something fragile and precious? Aye. They’re the difficult ones.’ Mrs Weatherby cogitated. ‘Maybe you’ve been just a bittie too perfect, going around looking like something out of a fashion magazine, which’d be enough to scare any man off. Try being a little more ordinary, get a wee smudge of dirt on your face once in a while. That shouldn’t be difficult on a boat.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Janet said, ‘but I don’t think you’re getting the picture. Sometimes he seems scared to look at me at all. Poor lamb, he’s terribly shy under a crust of self-reliance that holds up as long as he’s on ground that he’s sure of. He could do anything, given the right person to boost his confidence.’
Mrs Weatherby hid a smile. ‘Somebody like yourself?’
‘Somebody exactly like myself,’ Janet said defiantly. She decided to turn the subject before her mother could start pulling her leg. ‘Mum, did you never see George Frazer again? After you were young together, I mean?’
‘Och, I’d see him from time to time, just to bump into in the street. The last time I saw him was about a year past, after your auntie’s funeral. I’d been doing a wee bit of shopping and I was going to collect the car from the St James’ Centre car park. He was heading for the bus station in St Andrews’ Square. I gave him a lift home and we had a chat about old times–’
‘Where’s last year’s appointment book?’ Janet broke in.
‘In the dresser drawer, I think, dear.’ Mrs Weatherby frowned, an expression that she usually avoided for fear of premature wrinkles. ‘You know, any girl can get any man if she sets about it in the right way. Does he ever touch your hand?’
‘Never on purpose. If we touch accidentally, he jumps.’
Mrs Weatherby sighed, but it was a sentimental sigh. ‘Could you not get him to take you dancing?’
‘I don’t think he likes dancing very much.’
‘He doesn’t have to like it, he just has to do it. Well, it’s a pity. Nothing gets a man over his shyness like having his arm around the girl and feeling her respond to his every move . . .’
Janet turned back from the dresser and snapped her fingers. ‘Come back, mum!’
‘Mm?’
‘You were away on a long trip down Memory Lane.’
‘Not so long, I’ll have you know, my girl. Anyway, it’s a pity. That’s what dancing’s for,’ she said. ‘Could you not trip, so that he had to catch you?’
Janet looked up from the diary. ‘Easily. He’d put me back on my feet and apologise. Mum, Aunt Emmy’s funeral was on August the twenty-fourth.’
‘Probably, dear.’
‘This could be important, because nobody’s seen him since about the twentieth. Did he say where he’d been?’
‘Losh!’ Mrs Weatherby looked dreamily at the wall while she pondered. ‘I’ve got it!’
‘What?’
‘Could you not manage to sprain your ankle?’
‘Mother!’ Janet said sharply. ‘George Frazer. Tell . . . me . . . what . . . he . . . said.’
‘He didn’t say where he’d been, just that he’d been visiting. And – I remember now – he said something about making a call at his head office.’
‘That�
�s not what the police said.’
‘The police don’t always know everything, dear. Anyway, I gave him a lift back to Newton Lauder and stopped for a minute in the square while he did some errand, and I dropped him at the end of Rowan Close. That’s all I can remember, except that he behaved himself better than he used to. But he still had the same old charm.’
‘Charm? He was a horrid old lecher,’ Janet said.
‘He wasn’t always old,’ Mrs Weatherby pointed out. ‘And he did have a lot of charm when he wanted to put himself out. You’re holding it against him for being just what you’re complaining your young man isn’t.’
‘It’s not the same thing at all,’ Janet protested.
‘Isn’t it? It’s time you faced the fact, my girl, that there’s only two sorts of men, and the one can become the other with a little push. If you sprained your ankle, now. You don’t have to sprain it for real, just give it a bit of a turn. You can’t walk on it, poor little thing that you are, so he has to carry you. And while he’s carrying you, he feels you soft and warm and real and alive in his arms,’ Mrs Weatherby said. ‘Maybe you put your arms around his neck, and your hair blows in his face, and your perfume . . .’
‘Mum,’ Janet said, half laughing, ‘you’re drifting away again.’
‘You’d have to choose the right place,’ Mrs Weatherby said briskly. ‘Just the right distance from people. Not so far that he’d collapse under the strain, and not so near that he’d fetch help.’
Janet was looking happier. If she was still only partly convinced that Mother Knew Best, at least she was beginning to believe that there might somewhere be a solution to her problem. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘you’re still a very dangerous lady.’
‘I hope so,’ said Mrs Weatherby.
*
The empty shop got on Keith’s nerves. It half-reminded him of how it had been when he and Molly had taken it over, but wherever he looked the fire damage spoiled the sense of familiarity. He had an appointment with the surveyor who had been sent by Sir Peter to organise the repairs. But Keith, after an hour spent watching Molly open her eyes and then close them again without any sign of recognition, a dispiriting session with his bank manager and a brief visit to the cellar (now pumped out but quite unusable) was in no mood for patient discussion. He gave the surveyor what amounted to carte blanche and got rid of him.
The Revenge Game Page 8