With My Little Eye

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘By you, perhaps, but not by Miss Jamieson. She looks disapproving whenever his name’s mentioned.’

  As far as Douglas was aware the DCI had hardly ever looked directly at Tash. Either he could be observant out of the corner of his eye or he had brought telepathy to a fine art.

  ‘He was a bum-pincher,’ Tash said defensively.

  Now that the building was more or less finished and paid for, Douglas was only an owner-occupier among others, but he still felt a responsibility. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’ he asked. ‘One of us could at least have given him a good talking-to.’

  Tash was turning pink. She paused to order her thoughts. ‘It wasn’t serious enough for that. It was never anywhere you might call intimate. Just fleshy, if you see what I mean.’

  Douglas was distracted for a moment by the thought that he would have loved to see what she meant. ‘Did you catch him looking at you?’

  ‘Yes. But girls rather expect that. Most of us begin to wonder what’s wrong if men’s eyes don’t follow us.’

  While Tash was in this mood of unusual outspokenness, Douglas would have been interested to pursue the subject; but this was not the occasion. The chief inspector seemed to be of a like mind. ‘But he was on good terms with the residents?’

  ‘I never heard of any quarrels,’ Douglas said. ‘He was generally liked.’

  Tash shrugged her answer.

  ‘Did he have any special areas of interest outside horticulture?’

  Douglas decided that he could safely leave rumours of an amorous past to be mentioned by others. ‘Not that I know of,’ he said.

  ‘Very well. Let’s move on. George Eastwick. Tell me about him.’

  ‘A surly and evil-tempered man. If I had to sum him up in a single word, I think it would be “malevolent”. He rubbed along with his brother for most of the time, but even those two could snap at each other. Just let anyone else rub George up the wrong way and he can turn ugly. Of course, he had nothing to lose. The worst we could have done in return would have been to forbid him the place, which would only have cost Stan the help he was getting. Where we go from here, God alone knows! We’ll just have to wait until Stan’s will has been read, if he ever made one.’

  ‘What’s George’s job, trade or profession?’

  ‘I never heard him talk about it, but putting together bits and pieces of conversation, I think he must have been a gamekeeper or a general handyman on some sporting estate.’

  DCI Laird pondered quietly. Then he said, ‘Now tell me about the adult residents here.’

  ‘Very well,’ Douglas said. ‘Starting with me?’

  ‘I’ll hear about you from the others. Nobody ever has a clear vision of himself, and if he had he’d keep it under wraps. Give me your origin and CV in a nutshell and then tell me about the professor.’

  Tash seemed to be listening intently while he gave a summary of his upbringing in Perth, the move to Aberdeen to suit his father’s work in the civil service and his introduction into surveying by an uncle. Ah well. Curiosity was a woman’s perquisite.

  ELEVEN

  ‘I know about one per cent of damn all about the professor,’ Douglas said. ‘Mrs Jamieson introduced him, so perhaps she can wise you up. But perhaps not. I’m a bit nervous of homosexuals, for no good reason that I can think of, so I’ve been steering clear of him and his partner. I can only say that he’s been well behaved. He sometimes flavours his speech with minor swear words, but he explains that that’s to help the scansion. The rhythm of the sentence, you understand? I don’t think that anyone but himself would notice the difference. Apart from that, he and his partner are polite and friendly to everyone but they don’t go out of their way to be sociable. Mostly they keep themselves to themselves. They often go out in the evening but they never bring anybody back here.’

  The chief inspector shifted his eyes to Tash. She seemed to feel their arrival because she looked up from her shorthand book.

  ‘All I could add,’ she said slowly, ‘is that the professor seems to like young people. He always stops for a chat with any of the children and he bought me chocolates for Christmas, pushing them at me gruffly as though he was ashamed of it.’ She lowered her eyes to the laptop screen before returning them to her very neat shorthand.

  ‘Thank you. And now I’ll ask you not to interrupt while Mr Young tells me about your mother and Mrs McLeish. That’s if Mr Young doesn’t mind talking openly in front of you.’

  Tash mimed zipping up her lips.

  ‘I don’t have a problem. To me, they’re just two pleasant and very well preserved ladies,’ Douglas said. ‘They get on well together, which is a blessing. Tash’s mum is the more forceful and outspoken one while Mrs McLeish is the retiring sort. They go off to the kirk together on Sundays – not, I think, because they’re seriously religious but because it’s what one does. They do most of the cooking although they keep off the fatty foods themselves; they care about their figures. They represent the backbone of society, two ladies who don’t care about much beyond home and children, but when confronted with a problem come down on the side of common sense. Tash’s father was home on leave for a few weeks in … December, was it?’

  ‘January,’ Tash said.

  ‘January sounds right. I saw very little of him because he spent the whole time painting and papering. Betty McLeish’s husband is an old friend of mine. He owns and runs his garage, service and filling station and has an agency for new cars, but he’s surrounded himself with competent staff so he’s never too busy to take a little time off. He shuts everything down on Sundays except for a small team of part-timers manning the pumps. He keeps the day for himself. He has a temper but he’s learned to control it – he’d have to, running a business with a substantial turnover.’

  ‘And neither of you ever overheard a quarrel between the deceased and any of the residents, adult or children?’

  Tash shook her head.

  Douglas said, ‘Stan didn’t seem to be the quarrelsome sort. Between the gardens and his flat he was too busy to go out much and I don’t remember him ever having visitors. Whenever I had to call on him in connection with the flat he’d invite me in for a glass of his home brew. If George offers you a glass, be very wary. That stuff could blow your head off.’

  ‘I’ll remember.’ The detective chief inspector scowled at the window for some seconds. ‘Tell me, which of the residents here could you imagine getting angry enough or ruthless enough to kill somebody?’

  ‘Nobody,’ Tash said quickly.

  ‘Almost anybody,’ Douglas said an instant later. ‘There are very few people in the world who couldn’t be provoked into lashing out.’

  Tash looked at Douglas in surprise. This cynical side to his character was new to her.

  The DCI was nodding slowly. Evidently his experience was in accord with Douglas’s. ‘But this wasn’t a case of lashing out,’ he said at last, ‘this was something thought out, planned and carried through. Well, there will be more such questions, but I don’t know yet what they are. What can you tell me about carbon dioxide?’

  Douglas decided that the officer was interested in how much they would admit to knowing rather than seeking enlightenment on the subject itself. The answer was the same anyway. ‘Very little,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a poison like monoxide, it suffocates by replacing oxygen. We breathe it out all the time and plants breathe it in. That’s about the lot.’

  ‘A lot of it goes into fizzy drinks,’ Tash said. ‘It’s produced naturally in huge quantities. It’s used in firefighting and refrigeration. They use it for artificial smoke or fog in the theatre. Sometimes it’s used as the inert gas in welding processes and also for hardening the casting moulds for metals.’ She was hiding a trace of a complacent smile.

  Such a rush of erudition was unprecedented. There was a stunned silence. The detective chief inspector broke it with an effort. ‘How do you know all this?’

  She tapped the laptop. ‘I’ve just Googled it. Sometimes ca
rbon dioxide is used in greenhouses because carbon dioxide from the air is where plants get most of the carbon for growing, not from fertilizers in the ground. The oxygen part gets returned to the atmosphere. But that particular process is reversed slightly at night, which is why they take flowers out of a sickroom at night.’

  The detective chief inspector made an irritated sound. ‘And the deceased was a gardener! It’s used as the inert gas in welding and Mr McLeish has a garage and workshop. And I suppose the university uses it?’

  ‘I would think so,’ Douglas said. ‘They have an anechoic chamber for noise experiments and anechoic chambers are lined with foam plastic which is very flammable. I would expect there to be a system for flooding the chamber with carbon dioxide whenever the smoke detectors are triggered. I did some work for the other university,’ he explained. ‘It must also be used a lot in both teaching and research, but you’d better ask the professor about that. Or Mr Campion, his technician friend.’

  ‘I see. And does anybody here go in for amateur theatricals?’

  ‘I’ll save Tash the distress of having to be a telltale,’ said Douglas. ‘The two ladies do. I suspect that that’s a major factor in their care for their figures. Their club is putting on Oklahoma in the autumn, I believe.’

  The detective chief inspector sat back and closed his eyes for a minute. Douglas could almost believe that he was blinking back a tear. ‘That’s great!’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s just dandy! To look at it from the other end, is there anybody around here who couldn’t beg, borrow or steal a cylinder of carbon dioxide?’

  ‘If you’re going to start from the other end,’ Douglas said, ‘you’d better get on to the suppliers and find out who they’ve supplied it to.’

  That was too much. ‘Thank you for your helpful suggestion,’ said DCI Laird through gritted teeth. ‘I would never have thought of that for myself,’ He got to his feet and stalked out of the room.

  ‘Ouch!’ Douglas said. ‘I should have remembered how insulting it is to be told to do what you were going to do anyway. You’d better type up your notes and we’ll give them to him quickly as a peace offering.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Stop after the mention of Oklahoma!’

  Tash looked at her notes. ‘I see what you mean.’

  TWELVE

  Douglas’s major client had a job for him. It had lain fallow for months and then, when the client had at last made up its many minds, the job had been deemed urgent. He and Natasha took an early breakfast and escaped the clutches of their curious neighbours only to be bearded at the car door by a newspaper reporter. The media, it seemed, knew only that a man had been found dead. Under pressure by a practised interrogator to reveal who had found the body, Douglas had at length admitted that he had been present when the body was found.

  ‘But I did not see anything to explain the death,’ he said with truthfulness, ‘so bugger off. And you can quote me on that.’

  ‘That goes for me too,’ said Tash; but she glanced at herself in the car’s wing mirror before she allowed the reporter to photograph her. The photograph, delicately airbrushed, eventually appeared along with a hint that it had been Tash who found the body. It was then that she learned that, in the view of the media, any dramatic event or provocative opinion is attributed to the prettiest girl in sight at the time.

  Douglas and Tash spent the day carrying out a survey of a rambling industrial building that was now vacated and derelict. They had developed a teamwork aimed at minimizing their time spent working and maximizing their precious leisure time. Provided that Douglas drove gently and gave warning of any bumps ahead, Tash could take dictation direct onto the laptop in the moving car. Douglas thought freely while driving and while his recollection of the building was fresh. The buildings that they had been surveying could be converted into dwellings as the client hoped, but Douglas’s report pointed out that the neighbourhood had become almost a slum and that more than thirty old houses would have to be updated or demolished to restore housing values in the area. It might be essential to enlarge the project. The capital requirement would be greater but so also would be the profitability. He could produce or obtain more accurate figures if instructed.

  That conclusion had not taken long to reach. Expecting to run late, Douglas had said that they would not be back in time for an evening meal so they stopped at the Lothian Arms, a good quality pub not far from Underwood House, for a bar supper. The pub’s decoration was inoffensive and there was no jukebox.

  Over the scampi and chips he asked her, ‘Do you have any ideas about what might have happened to Stan?’

  Tash considered the question. ‘From what the police are asking, they still haven’t found a cause of death that they can be sure of. I think he just plain died.’

  The licensee was a huge man, built to a large scale and then enlarged further by obesity. His name was Swanson and Douglas had surveyed and valued the pub on behalf of the brewery owners.

  After greeting Douglas and his assistant, Swanson came and leaned over their table. ‘So you’ve lost one of your residents?’

  ‘That’s so.’

  ‘The fat little bugger? Stan something?’

  ‘Eastwick,’ Douglas said. ‘Yes. Did he come in here?’

  ‘From time to time. Not very often. Just as well. We can do without his sort in here.’

  Douglas was surprised. Stan Eastwick had always seemed friendly and without vice or malice. ‘He didn’t make trouble, did he?’

  Swanson sank his bulk into a chair that creaked in protest. ‘Not exactly, no. But it was only a matter of time, the way he looked.’

  Tash seemed to understand but this seemed very strange to Douglas. Stan Eastwick’s appearance had never seemed out of the ordinary. ‘Looked?’

  ‘At women,’ Swanson said impatiently. ‘As if he could see through their clothes. X-ray vision or something. My wife was complaining.’

  Mrs Swanson was a looker and she knew it; tall, brassy blonde, with long and shapely legs, she carried her large bust proudly before her. Her face, though, come to think of it, Douglas could not remember her face, if he had ever seen it. This was definitely a subject to be avoided.

  ‘And his brother?’ Douglas asked. ‘Did he seem to have X-ray vision too?’

  Swanson considered his reply. ‘Not that I noticed,’ he said at last. ‘He’s more like one who’s afraid of women. Looked away and cut it short if the wife spoke to him. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Where is Mrs Swanson today?’ Tash asked idly. ‘Gone out with the girls?’

  ‘She’s down in the cellar putting on a fresh carbon dioxide cylinder. I’d better go and see what’s keeping her.’ He rose and lumbered away.

  Douglas decided not to comment on the mention of gas cylinders. ‘I don’t think anybody ever just dies,’ he said. ‘There has to be a reason. Nothing ever happens without a reason.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  ‘Not a damn bit,’ he admitted. ‘That’s the sort of thinking that leads to the assumption of the existence of an all-seeing and all-deciding God.’

  They spent the rest of the meal arguing amicably over religion. It was a subject about which disagreement was all too easy so Douglas usually avoided it, but on this occasion he found that he and Tash had identically agnostic views.

  As they got into the car Tash said, ‘So they use carbon dioxide to push the beer up to the pumps. And to keep it from going flat. I think Mr Swanson did it. I think he set a trap for George Eastwick but his brother walked into it.’ Douglas had to look at her twice to make sure that she was joking.

  When they reached home, Douglas was pleased to see that there were no reporters besieging the front door. Police vehicles, he discovered, were discreetly parked at the back door and had not yet been discovered by the media.

  Tash went to write up the report from their morning’s meeting into Douglas’s distinctive format and onto email.

  Douglas was using the original drawing room as
his office. He never entertained more than a very few people at a time so that what had been a small dressing room was quite large enough for his sitting room. He had retained it for that purpose and was preparing to put his feet up when an uncharacteristically polite tapping at the door announced the arrival of George Eastwick.

  ‘Can I have a word?’ he asked.

  Douglas was tired and he had no great liking for George but he preferred not to get on bad terms with one who might well become a neighbour. There was nothing on the television that anybody with two brain cells could want to watch. Even the Discovery channel could only reveal an obsession with the sexual customs of early man. He was relieved to see that Tash’s siblings were playing Vulcans and Borgs among the trees. He found that he had already read his library book. He could hardly grudge George a word, especially after so polite an approach. He bit back the first word to spring to his mind and invited George to come in and sit.

  George seemed unimpressed with the room. ‘Why d’you squeeze yourself into this pokey wee hole?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve a grand room across the hall and you only use it as an office.’

  Douglas felt the need to explain – to himself as much as to George. ‘I need an impressive office. In here, I’m as often just myself or with one or two friends. If I ever get a live-in girlfriend again I might swap them over, if that’s what she wants. I’ll hope to hold meetings in my office when business builds up.’ In his secret mind, Douglas was determined that any lady planning to move in with him would be the sort who enjoyed intimate comfort above display. The other kind would be strictly a one-nighter. ‘Anyway, it costs less to light and heat.’

  George nodded. That argument he could understand. ‘I wanted to ask you … to ask you …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What did you tell yon chief inspector about me?’

  Douglas had no wish to start a list of his enemies with George’s name but he had no objection to giving him a heavily edited version of what he had said to DCI Laird. He decided that he might as well pick up some information in exchange. ‘I don’t remember saying much about you. He wanted a summary of everybody in the house. Of course, I had to tell him about how we came to find your brother. When do they say that Stan died?’