The Revenge Game

by Gerald Hammond

  Keith went up to the flat, where he found Wallace James. Wallace, driven from his salvage operations on Merganser by the failing light, was busily organising his possessions in the hope of winning himself sitting, sleeping, cooking and storage space all in the one small room.

  Keith dumped some waders and a number of rubber decoy birds beside the door. He would have to make time to sort through the stock for items which he could take into his personal possession and write off as tax losses at stocktaking prior to reopening.

  But Wallace wanted to talk. ‘That skeleton,’ he said. ‘The one in the c-canal with the chain around it. What sort of chain was it?’

  ‘Just chain as far as I know,’ Keith said.

  ‘Calibrated?’

  To Keith, the word had an engineering meaning inapplicable to chain. ‘You mean, marked off?’

  ‘For going over a gipsy.’

  ‘I’m not with you,’ Keith said faintly. ‘Can we sit down?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where?’

  The chairs were heaped with clutter. Wallace took the camp-bed and Keith perched on the draining-board.

  ‘Now,’ Keith said patiently, ‘remember that you’re talking to an idiot.’

  Wallace took a deep breath. ‘A gipsy is the thing on a winch that the chain runs over. For the chain to run over it without jamming it has to be calibrated – that’s to say, each link has to be just the same size, no variation allowed. About a year ago I had five fathoms of calibrated, galvanised, three-eighths-inch chain nicked off the barge. And I want to know what to do about it.’

  ‘Do you know when this was?’

  ‘Only that it was about this time last year, maybe a bit earlier. I’ve sent the receipt to the tax office, but the chandler in Leith would have a record. I often moor up at Newton Lauder overnight and part of a day, to change my library books and do a bit of shopping. So I collected the chain from the bus office and humped it all the way up that blasted hill, unwrapped it and flaked it out on deck. Then I walked along to the pub. In the morning, when I went to shackle it on, it had walked.’

  ‘Where did you moor? Near the canal buildings?’

  ‘Just opposite. D-do you think they’ll think I did it?’

  Keith drummed his heels on the cupboard doors while he thought. Wallace, presumably, had a firearms certificate. On the other hand, Munro would know that Wallace could not possibly have attacked Molly. ‘Did you ever meet Frazer?’ he asked.

  ‘He used to complain if I moored near his house,’ Wallace said. ‘He called it an invasion of his p-privacy. I told him to get knotted.’

  Keith nodded. If he needed a red herring, Wallace might come in handy. ‘How are you getting on with Janet?’ he asked.

  Wallace flushed scarlet. He would have liked to break into blank verse, but he found himself quite unable to utter a coherent word.

  Chapter Eight

  When Keith got back to Briesland House, there was a smell of food in the air. Ronnie’s idea of a well-laid table was two forks, two knives, the salt-packet and most of the contents of Keith’s cellar.

  Keith washed his hands at the sink. ‘She left us a meal, then?’

  ‘Aye. But it was a near thing,’ Ronnie said laughing. ‘I came by here at midday, to feed the animals and see if I could scrounge some dinner, and those stupid tykes of Sir Peter’s had her treed up on top of yon press.’ Ronnie jerked his head at the big broom-cupboard in the corner of the kitchen.

  ‘Stupid buggers!’ Keith dried his hands and sat down. ‘Did they take any lumps out of her?’

  ‘No. They’d more sense. I jalouse they was only asking out for a pee. But you ken what they’re like. Up at the Hall, the only way dogs can get any attention’s by barking their heads off.’

  ‘She’s not coming back, then?’

  ‘Oh, aye. I smoothed her down.’

  ‘What are we having?’

  ‘A dram, maybe, and an export for a chaser. And then with the meal I thought . . .’ Ronnie looked meaningfully at a bottle of wine which Keith had been saving for a very special occasion.

  ‘I meant food,’ Keith explained.

  ‘Nothing much. Shepherd’s pie. I think she used real shepherds. It smells better than mine but not as good as Molly’s.’

  ‘Just as long as it’s not cottage pie made with real cottages.’

  ‘Aye.’ Ronnie served the pie and brought the food over. He grinned. ‘A comical picture she made up there! She was showing all she’s got, but she was past caring about that. A shade over a hundred quidsworth, I reckoned. A hundred quid in French silk and lace – real silk, not nylon – under a dress that looked like somebody’s castoff. And two-penn’orth of herself.’

  The shepherd’s pie was good. ‘This is all right,’ Keith said. ‘Since when have you been such an expert on lingerie?’

  ‘I’ve had my moments,’ Ronnie said blandly. ‘It bears out what I was saying before, though. Only a real bag would wear silk and suspenders under her working clothes.’

  Keith hid a smile. From his experience he could have contradicted Ronnie many times over, but the subject was better dropped. ‘How did you calm her down?’ he asked.

  ‘Och, I patted her bum and told her she was a brave little woman. I was going to give her some money from you, but then I thought that you were having a gey expensive time of it.’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ Keith said.

  ‘So I gave her three ducks out of the freezer, one each from you, me and Sir Peter. Well, it was your house and his dogs. And I poured her some of your gin. She went away quite happy in the end.’

  Knowing Ronnie’s hand with the drink, Keith could believe it.

  ‘We’ll have to have a real hunt through the place for that book. A small, black-covered notebook full of Molly’s writing.’

  ‘The police wouldn’t have missed it, would they?’

  ‘They must’ve done. I’m not surprised, the way Molly puts things away.’

  ‘Where’s the places to look, then?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ Keith said. ‘Molly has a system of her own. Maybe it makes sense to her, but I’ve never figured it out. If I want to find something in this kitchen, first I decide which cupboard’s furthest from where it’s oftenest used. Then I work on the principle that the oftener it’s going to be wanted the more inaccessible it’ll be, and seven times out of ten I find it.’

  Ronnie nodded. ‘She was aye the same.’

  ‘I’m always finding things in the damnedest places. So you take the downstairs – a visitor’s eye might spot something that I wouldn’t. I’ll go through the upstairs.’

  As soon as they had fulfilled, as they saw them, their domestic duties by stacking the dirty dishes on the draining board, they separated. Keith went through the upper storey almost inch by inch; the bedroom that he shared with Molly, two spare bedrooms one of them holding Ronnie’s gear, bathroom cabinets, airing cupboard. In a former pantry, now converted into a darkroom for Molly, some enlargements were curling on the drying-line; Keith switched on the safelight and went through the drawers of enlarging paper. He found a number of items, both business and domestic, in some extraordinarily inappropriate places, but no black notebook.

  Last of all, Keith unlocked the steel-backed door to the pair of rooms which housed an offshoot from the business, a collection of antique guns which would have done credit to a major museum. In theory, and for tax purposes, these were all stock-in-trade; but Keith had been content to let this side of the business break even with the aid of a high mark-up on less interesting pieces and much restoration of badly damaged or neglected specimens, and regarded the choicer pieces as his private collection. Keith searched his bookshelves and filing-cabinet and then browsed for a while among the racked guns, paying as much attention to the plum-brown Damascus barrels and the stocks inlaid with silver wire as to the search for a black notebook.

  Keith sighed. As Ronnie had said, he was going to need money. But did he really need two almost ident
ical pairs of Manton duelling pistols? And there were near-duplicates among the Scottish snaphaunces and the German wheel-locks. It was all very difficult.

  Sighing again, Keith descended. Predictably, his brother-in-law was carrying out a meticulous search of the dining-room sideboard. ‘You won’t find it in a bottle,’ Keith said.

  ‘I can hope, can’t I?’

  ‘No, you bloody well can’t. I’m going out to look through the car.’

  Outside the front door, the night was black. Keith’s eyes, unused to the dark, got little help from the faint glow behind the curtains, but he set off across the wide gravel sweep and a reflected gleam led him to his car. He fumbled his way to the driver’s door. As the courtesy-light came on, a sound on the gravel made him turn.

  Three dark figures were coming at him.

  A few years before, when Keith had had – and earned – a reputation as a formidable brawler, he would have reacted violently before the men could have laid a finger on him. But respectability had slowed his reflexes. He had time only to take a couple of quick steps away from the car before they were on him. Two of the men grabbed him, one to each arm. Keith launched a kick at the third man, but the other two jerked his arms and he only caught the man a glancing blow on the thigh. The man bored in, and before Keith could do more than brace himself he took a winding punch to the stomach and another under the jaw that seemed to rattle his brain.

  The third punch was intended to be a short, hard hook over Keith’s heart, and it should have finished the business. It hurt Keith more than the other two punches together, but it hurt his aggressor more. The man put his right hand under his left armpit and tiptoed round in small circles, whinnying to himself.

  Whatever the reason, the respite gave Keith his chance. If the two men had been twisting his arms, he would have been relatively helpless; but they were gripping his wrists as if pulling on a rope. Keith bunched his muscles and broke both grips with a quick, upward twist against the thumbs. He grabbed for a double-handful of hair but his fingers skidded over crash-helmets. He took a grip of the chinstraps. The lighter figure on his left swung a wild punch at him, so Keith replied with his knee. The man went down. Keith dumped the second on top of the first and then jumped up and down on top of the pair until he could be reasonably sure that the fight was out of them. Their leader was still concentrating on his own problem.

  Keith stood back, breathed deeply and took stock of the situation. All day, Keith had been hauling two pounds weight of revolver under his left arm. At first it had irked him. Then he had got used to it. Finally, he had forgotten its very existence; but now it came back into his mind, and his bruised ribs supplied the connection. His assailant had landed a punch on it. Keith pulled out the revolver. It seemed undamaged. Keith would not have been surprised to have found it folded in half.

  His night vision was coming now, and Ronnie seemed to have switched on some more lights in the house. Keith saw that his attackers were what he had called the ‘black leather brigade’ from the canal, led by the fair-haired youth who had become foreman, now nursing his damaged hand. The other two were making careful preparations for picking themselves up. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ one of them said. ‘Big bully!’

  ‘I haven’t started yet,’ Keith said grimly. He waved the revolver, in case one of them had poor night vision. ‘I am just about to begin to start to commence, and when I get going watch out! I’m going to start asking questions, and each time I don’t get an answer by the time I’ve said “Eetle-ottle-black-bottle”,’ (a Scots equivalent of ‘Eeny-meeny-miney-mo’), ‘whoever’s “it” gets a new hole in him. Understood?’ There was a brief pause. ‘That was the first question,’ Keith added, lifting the revolver.

  ‘Understood,’ three voices said, very quickly.

  ‘Right. Which of you three sods set fire to my shop, and which was it kicked my dog? And stabbed my wife? You, Goldilocks?’

  ‘Hey, for Chrissake. None of us! You can’t stick us with that!’ Goldilocks’ voice, Keith noticed, was not the near-Northumbrian accent of the Borders but secondhand Glasgow via the industrial belt of the Forth valley. ‘An’ look what you done to my hand.’ He held out a hand which was visibly swelling.

  Keith took the other’s hand in his left and pretended to look at it. Then he squeezed as hard as he could and held his grip. Goldilocks went up on his toes again, and his breath came out in a hiss of agony.

  ‘You’ve got Webley stamped on one knuckle,’ Keith said, ‘and Scott on another. You want to try for the maker’s number on the next one?’ He rapped the hand with the muzzle of the revolver and let go. Goldilocks backed away. ‘That wasn’t a question,’ Keith said. ‘The question is, if you didn’t, who did?’

  Goldilocks had his own preoccupations, and might have welcomed being shot as a blessed release. It was left to one of the others, still sitting forlorn on the gravel, to answer. ‘We don’t know,’ he said quickly. ‘Why would we do a thing like that?’

  ‘Why would you come here and belt me in the ribs? That was another question,’ Keith added. He began counting the youths with the muzzle of the revolver.

  The other boy, hitherto silent, had already worked out that the jingle was going to finish on himself. ‘Smiler said you’d been poking your nose in around the canal,’ he said shrilly. ‘We was going to tell you to keep off.’

  ‘Or what?’

  The boy got to his feet and helped up his mate. ‘Or . . . or we’ll come back,’ he said ominously. ‘There!’

  Keith fought back a grin. He was almost grateful to the three for introducing a comic element into the tragedy. Goldilocks might have been twenty-three, but the speaker was of little more than school-age. ‘You three may be big noises among school-kids and old women,’ he said, ‘but don’t let that kid you that you’re tough. Learn a lesson before somebody gets hurt. If any one of you comes near me again, I’ll pull him like a wishbone.’

  Goldilocks tucked his hand carefully away in the front of his leather jerkin, but he had recovered the use of his tongue. ‘It’s easy to be tough with a gun in your fist,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll put it away and take on all three of you,’ Keith offered. A good scrap would have suited his mood, but the opposition so far had been disappointing.

  Deliberately, Goldilocks turned his back. ‘You can’t shoot now,’ he said. ‘You could maybe shoot us from the front and say we was coming at you; but you shoot one of us in the back and the law’ll have you. Come on, you two, he won’t dare let it off.’

  The three ran for the gate. One was half-carrying another, but there was a gap between Goldilocks and the others. Struggling to keep the laughter out of his voice, Keith shouted ‘Halt, or I fire,’ and without thinking to do more than discourage any idea of returning, he put a bullet through the gap.

  Despite a convention nurtured by the film and television industries, any but the largest calibre of revolver fired out of doors makes a disappointing pop rather than a resounding boom, and Keith had expected only anticlimax from his gesture. He was as stunned as the three invaders when his shot was followed by an explosion, massive but somehow gentle, followed by a second and a third. A wall of flame roared up in front of the black leather brigade, who found themselves on the point of running headlong into the holocaust.

  Opposite the gates of Briesland House was a small patch of grass, and here three motorcycles had been parked. As nearly as anyone can ever tell, Keith’s bullet had found one of the petrol tanks. Whether the heat and compression generated by the arrival of a very hot bullet would be enough to fire high-octane petrol, or whether the resulting spray of fuel had found a bare wire, was a subject of spirited argument between Keith and Ronnie for months afterwards. But, whatever was the sequence of events, the result was instant inferno.

  The black leather brigade skidded to a halt and backed hastily away from the heat. For a few seconds they watched aghast as their transport went up in flames. Then they swung round on Keith. The youngest, Keith could s
ee, was close to tears. ‘What did you do that for?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Aw, Jesus! C’mon, let’s get out of here.’

  Keith kept the revolver trained on Goldilocks, and tried very hard to look as if his shot had been inspired marksmanship rather than a crazy fluke. ‘You’ll go when I say you can go,’ he growled.

  Quivering with rage, Goldilocks took a pace towards Keith and put his head down for a charge. In his fury he was ready to forget his damaged hand, the gun, everything. Rather than fire again, Keith made up his mind to put the pistol away, give Goldilocks a kick in the crotch that would split him up the middle and then bang the other two stupid heads together.

  He was spared the necessity. Ronnie came out of the house to investigate. With him came Sir Peter’s two black Labradors.

  The dogs came racing across the gravel, looking for new friends to jump up against. In the red light of the flames their eyes gleamed horridly and their fangs, bared in a friendly grin, seemed ready to tear at living flesh. Even Keith felt the hair crawl up the back of his neck.

  The boys’ nerve broke. They ran for the lowest point of the boundary wall, cleared it on the run, and disappeared.

  Keith, shaking with laughter, was left to soothe the dogs’ hurt feelings and to bring Ronnie up to date. ‘I’ve got things to do,’ he finished, ‘but you might care to follow them up in the Land Rover, just to make sure that they don’t think of coming back while the adrenalin’s still flowing. They’ll stick to the roads. As far as those three are concerned, roads are for travelling on. The countryside’s for viewing from the saddle of a motorbike.’

  *

  Keith sat down at his desk in the study. Unhappily (for it was like selling a favourite daughter into slavery, but money is money) he drafted a circular for sending to his list of top collectors, offering certain choice pieces for sale at less than his previous list prices. But temptation is temptation, and Keith had never been noted for his resistance to it. He added a paragraph mentioning that he was still in the market for a Fergusson rifle or good sporting copy, any condition.