‘If I knew that we wouldn’t have to wait,’ Keith said. ‘But I’m needing my bed. I think I’ll stir it up a bit.’ He slid down the back of the knoll, and soon they saw him walking on tiptoe up one of the garden paths. He disappeared. Wallace dozed off. Ronnie started on the last few inches in his bottle.
Keith reappeared and seated himself comfortably, leaning against Ronnie’s shoulder. Gently but firmly, he detached the bottle from Ronnie’s grasp, drained it and pushed it down a rabbit-hole.
‘We’ve been up and about for twenty-four hours,’ Ronnie said plaintively, ‘and boozing for twelve or more. It’s time we was away to our beds.’
‘It is,’ Keith admitted. ‘And I’m hungry. Is there a meal in the house?’
Ronnie shrugged. ‘Jessie Donald left us what she called a game pie, for yesterday. She made it out of the odds and ends in the bottom of your freezer. I think she used real snakes and ladders, but it’d heat up. Shall we go?’
Keith nodded, but neither of them moved. Below, a pair of curtains were opened and there was the banging of a door.
Wallace opened his eyes. ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ he asked.
‘There’s something bloody odd going on around this canal,’ Keith said, ‘and if we never watch we’ll never learn.’
‘What did you do down there?’
‘Hung that fox on Smiler’s door-handle.’
‘That’ll give him the shits,’ Wallace said. ‘It’s the most horrifying object that ever I saw.’
‘Serve him right.’ Smiler’s cupidity still rankled with Keith.
Ronnie was beginning to have difficulty following other people’s conversations. ‘You got blood on your coat,’ he said.
‘Only a couple of drops. It won’t show.’
‘Molly’ll see it in a wink,’ Ronnie said. ‘She’ll nail you to the wall.’
‘What I’ll do, I’ll buy a new one. Tell her I had it cleaned.’
Ronnie grunted. ‘This’ll help towards it.’ He pushed a wad of notes at Keith. ‘You won your bet, remember?’
Keith took the notes but glared at his brother-in-law. ‘This is the same bloody money you’ve been trying to give me all along. You meant this.’
‘I couldn’t know you were going to fluke those shots.’
‘I didn’t. All right, you’d better have this coat.’
Ronnie snuffled with laughter. ‘How the hell would I get into your coat? Give it to the lad.’
‘Would you like it, Wallace?’
Wallace nodded dumbly, stifling a yawn. He was becoming too tired for speech, but he remembered thinking that he would have to start collecting a new and respectable wardrobe. Another thought was competing for his attention. ‘Strue,’ he said thickly. ‘Su’thing odd about canal.’
‘That’s right. Mind you,’ Keith said, ‘what Janet’s mum said takes the pressure off. The police may care like hell who dumped George Frazer in the canal, but it’s no skin off my arse as long as they leave Molly alone. But if I was still bothered – which I’m not – I’d look for someone who knew the canal. Ex-employee, someone like that. Get them to look into accounts and things.’
‘Me,’ Wallace said. ‘Use t’work f’rem. S’where I lost fingers. Think I’m gone be sick,’ he added.
‘Be my guest. Pref’ably down in field.’
‘Something’s happening,’ Ronnie said.
Keith rolled over and peered through a gap in the gorse. A woman’s voice was raised, men’s voices joined in. Somebody crossed the green between the cottages and disappeared below the line of the nearest roof.
‘Should’ve had somebody across the canal,’ Keith said. ‘See who comes out of which door.’
A man’s voice rose above all the others. There was a quick babble. Then suddenly a group burst into view and went charging round the green. In the lead the two younger members of the black leather brigade. Goldilocks, usually their leader, was running third but nursing his bandaged hand. In hot pursuit, roaring with rage and swinging the corpse of the fox around his head like a battleaxe, came Smiler. His face was still creased in its natural smirk, but nobody could have called it a smile.
‘Why would he think that one of those three runts put it there?’ Ronnie asked.
The chase had passed out of sight again. There were sounds of argument and sporadic battle, but the words were unintelligible.
Keith yawned until his eyes watered. He was thinking through a layer of cotton wool. ‘Maybe he doesn’t think that,’ he said. ‘Would you say Smiler was angry about the fox? Or as if he’d found somebody in the wrong bed? Or did he look as if he’d just been told that three clever little dicks had paid me a visit and drawn my attention to some funny goings-on at the canal?’
‘If you want me to be psychic,’ Ronnie said, ‘I’ll be psychic after I’ve slept. Let’s go home.’
‘You can go home if you want. Molly needs visiting. Drop me at the hospital and I’ll walk the rest.’
‘You can’t go and see Molly in that state,’ Ronnie said.
‘Course I can. I’ll leave my coat in the sister’s office,’ Keith explained carefully. He got to his feet and staggered sideways.
*
Keith slept for fourteen hours and woke soon after Monday’s dawn. He felt tired but purged, and after a good breakfast he was ready to face another day. He planned to visit his wholesalers and to bring back enough new stock to permit some kind of resumption of the shop’s business from the flat above.
Ronnie was still flat out. Even in sleep, his head looked sore. Keith wrote him a note and placed it under his nose on the pillow. As an afterthought, Keith weighted the note with a kipper from the refrigerator.
Driving towards Edinburgh with the rhythm of the windscreen wipers competing with the music of William Boyce on a cassette, Keith reconstructed the events of the previous day and the night before that. He felt that he had probably enjoyed himself, if he could but remember. He was lucky to be feeling no worse than slightly jaded, because even those drinks that he could remember added up to most of a bucketful and the mixture, in retrospect, made his stomach heave. He drove carefully, because although he felt perfectly sober a policeman with a breathalyser might well disagree. He really must give up these high jinks, now that he was a respectable businessman and happily married. Which reminded him, he had better buy Jacinthe a little present and break it gently to the poor girl that yesterday – no, the day before, what did happen to time? – was definitely the last time. Probably.
That stroll up the hill, now. It had started off as no more than another jink, a relief for bottled-up feelings. Unexpectedly, it had proved rewarding. Apart from the pheasant and a valuable fur, it had produced some very interesting fragments of information, and useful, too – if the affairs at the canal had been any of his business. But they were not. He was in the clear. Revenge was an inadequate motive for the expenditure of valuable mental energy and of time that could be better spent working and drinking and . . . other things. The hell with it, Keith decided. Let the police solve the problem; if they failed to get a conviction, that might be time enough for him take a hand. Whoever’s nose it was skin off, it was certainly not his own.
Then why, he wondered, was he still humping a damned great pistol around under his coat?
Keith had been aware of a Land Rover coming up behind him, but his estate-car pre-dated rear window wipers and the other vehicle was usually out of sight of his wing-mirrors. Now, as he entered a right-hand curve, he was surprised to see the road behind him empty. At the apex of the bend, when he was running with his wheels almost on the central double-line, the Land Rover’s bonnet appeared with heart-lurching suddenness at his near-side window. There was a grind and a crunch, and Keith’s car was shunted full into the path of an oncoming lorry.
Rather than hit the lorry head-on, Keith spun the wheel and charged straight across the road.
Chapter Eleven
‘Come on, love,’ said the hard-faced nursing auxiliary.
‘I’ll help you into your dressing-gown and you can sit up and watch the view a minute while I make your bed properly and get the crumbs out.’
Molly had slept a drugged sleep and was still less than half-awake, but she was not going to be pushed around by anybody, not while being pushed around hurt. ‘There aren’t any crumbs,’ she said, ‘I’m still on slops. Make the bed with me in it.’
‘It’s not the same,’ said the nursing auxiliary.
‘And that isn’t my dressing-gown.’
‘It’s a nice one. I can’t find yours.’
‘Well, doctor said I wasn’t to get up at all yet,’ Molly said faintly but firmly, ‘and I’m not.’
The nursing auxiliary would have liked to slap her. ‘If you sat up in the chair,’ she said, ‘I could do your hair for you. Want to look bonny for when your man comes in, don’t you?’
‘He isn’t coming in today,’ Molly said with finality. She closed her eyes.
The auxiliary, her lips set in a thin line, hung the scarlet dressing-gown behind the door. She was tucking Molly in with unnecessary jerks that hurt Molly’s stitches when Ronnie put his head round the door. Ronnie was under orders, in Keith’s absence, to go and see Molly, to give her some flowers, to stay for not less than an hour, to listen when she talked, and when she stopped to keep chatting and to mention at least once what a sober and virtuous life Keith was leading in her absence. Certain incidents had been declared taboo.
The nursing auxiliary pushed past Ronnie on her way out. He looked after her, puzzled. ‘I’ve seen that quyne before,’ he said.
In a gorse-fringed hollow overlooking the hospital, the man waited patiently. He had already zeroed the telescopic sight on the deer-rifle over a distance which, according to the Ordnance Survey, was similar in range and elevation to the line from his present position to the top floor of the hospital, seventh window from the left.
He had plenty of time. If the scarlet dressing-gown did not appear today, it would be tomorrow or the next day.
*
The Hall (or New Hall, as it was properly known) was an elegant modern house standing on the site where a Victorian baronial monstrosity, now burned to the ground to the relief of all and especially of Sir Peter, had once stood. Sir Peter had accepted the insurance money with almost indecent enthusiasm. He had then chosen a first-class architect, briefed him in detail and left him, more or less, to get on with it. The result was not only handsome, it was also comfortable; and this was so rare a characteristic in Scottish mansions that even Her Ladyship was almost reconciled to the loss of the draughty and echoing pile.
In a living room which, by modern standards, was enormous, with large windows that looked down a long valley to the lights of Newton Lauder, Sir Peter, Ronnie and Wallace James were listening raptly.
‘The car hit the verge and jumped clean over the first fence,’ Keith said. He had a glass in his hand, but he was only sipping. ‘It rolled over at least once in the field – I wasn’t counting – charged through the next fence and buried itself in the wood beyond. If I hadn’t been belted in, I was dead. As it was, the Webley and Scott came out of my holster, hit the roof, went off and put a bullet through the back window.
‘The shaking-up had put a head on all the booze I’d had in the previous day or two, but I had enough sense to recover the gun and get the hell out of the car. I lay down hidden under a tree – that wood’s all conifers – and I waited to see if anyone was coming after me. There’s blackgame in the wood, Ronnie. We’ll have to go back some time.’
‘Get on with it,’ said his brother-in-law.
‘Somebody did come. It was a very nervous lorry driver, who nearly got his head blown off. When I reassured him that I was all right and wasn’t going to sue anybody, he was happy to get on his way. He hadn’t seen anything, in fact he read me a lecture about overtaking in a place like that!
‘The car’s a write-off; but it didn’t owe me anything, wasn’t comprehensively insured and wasn’t worth the cost of hauling it out of there. I just left it. There were one or two tools in the box, so I took off the number-plates and the plate under the bonnet and my radio-cassette-player, and if anybody ever finds it, which I wouldn’t bet on, they can keep it.’
‘They’ll trace you through the engine-number,’ Ronnie said.
‘It had a second-hand engine a couple of years ago, so they’ll be lucky. The second fence had sprung up again, so all I had to do was straighten up one of the posts and stand up a small tree that had snapped off, and you’d never know it was there.’
‘You will when the tree turns brown,’ said Ronnie.
‘The plantation’s mostly larch. It all turns brown. Then I gathered up my things and hitched a lift into Edinburgh. So that’s my news. Why the urgent summons?’
Sir Peter was standing in front of the fireplace on which he had insisted, despite his architect’s pleading that it made a nonsense of the entire heating and ventilation system. He had lifted the back of his shabby kilt to warm his thighs. ‘We know no more than Ronnie told you,’ he said. ‘I had a very guarded phone call from Chief Inspector Munro, made from a public callbox, to say that he wanted to speak to you and couldn’t get you anywhere. He’s on the way up now. He particularly wanted to meet you before that Edinburgh superintendent did, the one who’s handling that case up at the canal. Blackwood.’
‘Blackhouse,’ Keith said.
‘That’s the fellow. Keith, did you see whoever ran you off the road?’
‘Not a glimpse. Do you know where your two Land Rovers are just now?’
‘I was using one of them today, and the other’s out with the foresters. You don’t think I –?’
‘No, of course not,’ Keith said, laughing. ‘I dare say you were playing your usual game of Big Boys’ Dodgems, but not with me. Just stay clear of my new car, that’s all.’
‘You’ll have to see his fancy new car,’ Ronnie said. ‘Did you pay cash for it, Keith?’
‘I wouldn’t do a thing like that,’ Keith said. ‘Not with the V.A.T. man and two taxmen waiting to pounce. And it’s not new. My lift dropped me near Gordon Farquhar’s garage in Morningside. He wanted to buy that Dickson but it didn’t fit him, he’s built like a deformed yak. So I offered him a straight swap, the car for the gun, and I said I’d re-stock it to fit him, and that swung the deal. I took the car away, bought the stuff we need, and it was only by luck that I spotted Ronnie waiting in a lay-by, patiently watching for the old car.’
‘But Keith,’ Ronnie said plaintively, ‘you were going to have to put a new stock on that gun anyway.’
‘Gordon didn’t know that.’
‘But the gun’s a write-off.’
‘Nothing’s a write-off until you write it off,’ Keith said. ‘All right, so I have to replace the stock and this and that and the next thing, but it’s still a Dickson. Like granddad’s hammer. It had two new heads and three new handles, but it was still granddad’s hammer.’ He would have elaborated on the subject, rather defensively, because the Dickson had borne the brunt of the explosion of a tin of primers on his work-bench, but the arrival of Chief Inspector Munro interrupted him.
The chief inspector was alone. He was in uniform, but he had made a point of leaving his hat in the hall as if to emphasise that the occasion was unofficial. He accepted a chair but refused refreshment. His long face looked more harassed than ever, Keith thought, like a camel that was beginning to wonder if that hump wasn’t malignant after all.
‘It is a serious breach of discipline that I am – perhaps – going to commit,’ Munro said in his pedantic, Highland lilt. ‘I want an assurance from each of you that you will treat this as absolutely and totally confidential.’
‘You have it,’ said Sir Peter, and the others made sounds of agreement.
‘Gu math! Remember, then, that if one of my colleagues tells you anything of what I am going to tell you, you are surprised. Because this conversation never took place.’ Munro sighed deeply. ‘It is a terrible positi
on to be in. But I am feared of a gross miscarriage of justice.
‘I am not a local man, and I know that I shall never be accepted as one, but I have lived here for a number of years and I know something of the people. Superintendent Blackhouse is going by evidence, and he is right to do so. He should also be going by local knowledge, but he discounts it and goes by hunch instead, and that is bad police work. So when I find that he suspects somebody whom I know personally and would trust with my life, on evidence that I believe to be questionable, I am forced to take action which is strictly forbidden to me.’
‘Not one of us, surely,’ Sir Peter said.
‘Me?’ said Keith.
Munro switched his attention to Keith, and for a moment a flicker of his old self showed in the dark eyes. ‘With all due respect, Mr Calder, you I would not trust with my life. Not unless there was something in it for you.’
Keith was nettled. ‘You did so once,’ he said.
‘Not of my own will. No, Superintendent Blackhouse suspects Mr Weatherby. Mr Derek Weatherby.’
‘Janet’s father?’ Wallace said.
‘That is correct.’
Keith found that his mouth had gone dry. His tongue was like sandpaper. ‘But that’s ridiculous!’ he said.
‘Not so ridiculous when you know about the evidence. The conclusion may be wrong, but it is not ridiculous. Just for a start, they found an automatic pistol in the toolbox of one of Mr Weatherby’s tractors.’
Keith had known for years about Mr Weatherby’s Luger and had even provided ammunition for it, but he had no intention of making any such admissions in front of Munro. Ronnie had no such inhibitions. ‘Och, it’s just an old souvenir that he always carried on the tractor. Sometimes he could get himself a hare or a roe-deer.’
‘That may be so,’ said Munro. ‘It is what I would believe myself. But, then, why would he be wanting a silencer on it?’
Keith felt himself jump. This was a new one. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If he was using an unregistered weapon, it’d attract less attention.’
The Revenge Game Page 13