With My Little Eye

by Gerald Hammond

  A question in both their minds was whether their affair had been a one-night stand or the beginning of something more lasting. Neither felt brave enough to confront the subject for fear of getting the wrong answer; but when the next day’s work was done they drifted – oh so accidentally – close. Talking feverishly about something quite, quite different, they kissed and soon found themselves back on the big, soft bed. The experience was as mind-blowing as on the previous occasion. Tash never bothered to return to sleep in her own bed and she never objected to words or symbols of love.

  From that moment on, there was no concealing the changed relationship. Every glance that they exchanged was so charged with emotion that even the dogs seemed to recognize it. There was a little gentle leg-pulling, but on the whole they felt that they were approved of. When Mrs Jamieson returned at the next weekend, before she had time to observe the changed sleeping arrangements, a mother’s instinctive insight into her daughter’s emotional development led her direct to the correct conclusion. As positively as a sheepdog, she shepherded Douglas out from among the interested observers and captured him alone in her unpretentious but comfortable sitting room.

  ‘You and Tash have become an item, haven’t you?’

  Douglas had been considering how he would meet the subject. Now was the hour and he had to make a rapid choice between three possible attitudes. She did not look as stern as he had feared, nor as angry. Mrs Jamieson was proving to be a much more modern mother than he had given her credit for. Frankness was his best option.

  ‘Yes. Not through any active manoeuvring on my part, but I’m a very willing party.’

  Mrs Jamieson nodded several times. ‘I won’t say that I should have expected it. I knew that it was bound to come. I’ve been watching Tash falling for you. I would have stepped in if I hadn’t been sure that you were well intentioned. You are being careful?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘So far so good. Promise me, you will let her down gently?’

  That came as a surprise but so also did his own reply. His thinking had not yet progressed so far. ‘I have no intention of letting her down at all,’ he said severely, ‘and I’m surprised that you should expect it. As far as I am concerned she is now a permanency in my life. I have not yet told her so.’ Even to his own ears he sounded pedantic but the occasion was one for formality.

  Tash’s mother sat back, her eyebrows up. ‘This I did not expect,’ she said. ‘I trusted you to behave like a gentleman or I would never have gone away and left you together, but in this day and age one has to move with the times. I’m sorry if I’m talking in clichés but the subject is as old as life itself. I was sure that Tash would become a woman soon and I hoped that it would not be with one of these mannerless youths who seem to be taking over the world. I was relieved to see her falling for a professional, educated man. Are you thinking of marriage?’

  ‘I’m waiting to see how Tash’s mind goes. But –’ Douglas’s mind recoiled from a picture of Mrs Jamieson advising Tash in one direction or the other ‘– I am certainly not inviting you to influence her. It must be her decision. I’m twelve years older than she is. It isn’t an unbridgeable gap but it’s a wide one. You’ve brought her up incredibly well and I congratulate you. Sometimes I get the feeling that she’s as mature as I am if not more so. Let’s just see how things develop.’

  ‘Yes, let’s do that. But nothing is a hundred per cent safe. Suppose she were to become pregnant …?’

  ‘I would offer marriage immediately.’

  She smiled suddenly. ‘I can begin to envisage you as a son-in-law.’

  ‘I have been looking on you as a future mother-in-law. Happily.’

  ‘One thing about you, Douglas, you always say the right thing. But you must be careful about the impression you give; and I depend on you to keep Tash’s reputation – what shall I say? – untarnished. I’ll tell you a story which you may find funny – to her dying day my mother could almost fall out of her chair laughing about it – but there’s a truth buried in it.

  ‘Between the wars, when these things were taken very seriously, my aunt was a nursing sister and it was known that she was in line for promotion to matron – senior nursing officer, they’d call it now. She was nominated to attend a nursing conference, in Paris of all places. Her colleagues thought that she had landed jammy side up, except that my sister always wore flannel pyjamas.

  ‘Her friends insisted that she couldn’t go to Paris with hairy pyjamas. What would the maid think? So they clubbed together to buy her something pink and frilly. Her train was about to leave so there was no time to do more than tuck it into her case and wave to her. She arrived safely at the conference and met some seniors over dinner, so she arranged for drinks to be put in her room and invited several quite important persons to come for a nightcap.’

  As the story progressed, Mrs Jamieson’s own amusement had begun to take her over and as she arrived at the climax her laughter rendered her barely coherent.

  ‘They all went together up to her room, where the maid had unpacked her bag for her and turned down both sides of the bed, putting the frilly nightie on one side and the hairy pyjamas on the other.

  ‘The point I want to make is that she was perfectly innocent but looked very guilty. She did not get that promotion to matron although she was later appointed SNO at a different hospital. Much of what happens to you in life may depend, not on what you are or what you do, but on what the world thinks you are and do.’

  Douglas had lived through the betrothal of a brother and two cousins and as his tender secret emerged into the light of day he was expecting his life to be turned upside down with giggles and hints and controversy on such vital matters as who were going to be bridesmaids. However, that area of discussion was drowned out for the moment by a subject of more general interest. On the next Sunday morning, inconveniently early, Chief Inspector Laird arrived, insisting that all those of the household who had reached teenage years or above should hold themselves ready for a round-table discussion as soon as breakfast was past and the washing-up done.

  Traces of breakfast could still be detected in the form of toast crumbs and the smell of coffee when the teenage and adult population of Underwood House assembled in the kitchen/dining room. The sky outside was black, so nobody resented the loss of their leisure time more than very slightly. Seymour McLeish had been booked to play golf despite the weather but he was glad of the excuse to remain warmly indoors and talk about murder. His wife had been hoping for a quiet day on her own but it now seemed that she must assist Hilda Jamieson in providing Sunday lunch. Professor Cullins and Hubert Campion were very smart in well-pressed slacks and shirts with cravats. George Eastwick turned up and, as usual, was making a show of bad tempter.

  Tash, who knew nothing of the talk between her mother and Douglas, had seated herself firmly beside Douglas where she could feel the comforting warmth of his thigh against hers. Her mother was seated on her further side, as if to lend propriety. DCI Laird was accompanied by his sergeant and by a woman sergeant equipped with recorder and dictation book. The big room was almost crowded.

  DCI Laird frowned at Tash, who had produced her own pen and shorthand book. ‘Sergeant Brownie will keep the record,’ he said.

  Douglas smiled at him. ‘We also like to keep a record,’ he said.

  The DCI’s nostrils flared slightly as at a bad smell. ‘Very well. I have asked you all to be present because we have been making little or no progress in the matter of the death of Stan Eastwick. There seems to be no doubt that he died of carbon dioxide suffocation, but beyond that we have no starting point. Usually we prefer to interview witnesses separately so that they do not influence each other’s accounts, but when an enquiry refuses to get started, like this one, sometimes the only answer is to gather people together in the hope that they will refresh each other’s memories.’

  ‘And contradict each other?’ Douglas suggested lightly.

  ‘That would be a bonus,’ said DCI Laird
more seriously. ‘Now, Mr Young, according to your own statements you and Miss Jamieson were here on the Monday and you were the only occupants to be here constantly, without a break. So you start off. Tell me all about that day.’

  ‘A tall order,’ Douglas said, ‘but we’ll do our best. Weatherwise I remember it as an ordinary sort of April day. Sunny with occasional clouds and a single shower around lunchtime. Tash and I were preparing a report on the Hamilton Building Society’s proposal to sponsor a housing and related development on a hundred hectare site near Gorebridge. They have it under consideration now but if they consider what we wrote I doubt if they’ll go ahead, so I feel free to talk about it. Our work entailed periods during which I was thinking or sketching and Tash was free to look out of the window, alternating with periods when I was dictating and we both had our heads down. Then she would be typing or doing sums on the computer while it was my turn to look out of the window. Between us I think that one or the other of us would have been looking over the back gardens for about two thirds of the time, discounting the time we spent making and eating a snack lunch.

  ‘But what you most want to know about is the comings and goings. Of course, our office looks out to the back gardens. Anybody could have arrived at the front of the house, if they came quietly, and have walked round to the back door without being seen by either of us.

  ‘Between eight thirty and about nine thirty, we settled down to work. During the same period most of the adult residents seemed to go off to their various businesses. Yes, Tash?’

  ‘While I was looking out at the back, Mr George Eastwick drove off in his brother’s van.’

  George Eastwick gave a triumphant nod as though he had been proved right in the face of argument.

  ‘Did you see him return?’

  ‘No. Mr Young wanted to dictate just then.’

  ‘Presumably,’ Douglas said, ‘Mrs Jamieson must have driven off in her people carrier. We wouldn’t know about that – it’s very quiet. She took her family with her – other than Tash, who was with me – and we knew they were back not long after lunchtime when we heard the children playing Vulcans and Borgs in and out of the trees.’

  ‘Vulcans and Borgs?’

  ‘From Star Trek,’ Tash explained.

  ‘Ah. I’m not at home often enough in the evenings to keep up with television.’

  ‘I was shopping for clothes, mostly for the children,’ said Mrs Jamieson. ‘They grow at such a speed. In some ways it’s been convenient, alternating boys and girls – girl, boy, girl, boy – but it does make handing down clothes difficult. And boys are so hard on clothes. Especially shoes. They’ll look you straight in the eye and swear that they never play football on the way home from school, when one toecap is worn away and the other’s hardly marked. We all had lunch in a burger bar and then we came home and we were in for the rest of the day.’

  ‘We’ll come to you in a minute, Mrs Jamieson,’ said the DCI when he managed to cram a word in. (Tash’s mother made a moue and mimed zipping her mouth.) ‘Mr Young?’

  EIGHTEEN

  Douglas’s brow was wrinkling of its own accord as he tried to remember details of a day that had not developed any special significance until later. ‘Stan Eastwick came out,’ he said at last. ‘His retirement had been finalized by then and he was trying to catch up with the tidying up in the gardens, which had rather been neglected during all the kerfuffle of his retirement and people moving in. The shrub roses were overdue for pruning and he went to and fro between the roses and the greenhouse, taking cuttings I think. I lost sight of him after that except that a baker’s van must have come to the front door because I heard Stan answer his door below our window and he said something about wholemeal loaves, so the man in the van must have walked round the house instead of driving round by road.’

  Tasha coughed and held up her hand. ‘I saw Stan again later,’ she said. ‘He was forking over the bed where he’d taken out the shrubs with the red berries. I think I told you about it when I made my statement.’

  ‘You did indeed,’ said the DCI. ‘Did anybody answer the front door to the baker’s man?’

  ‘I did,’ Betty McLeish said. ‘He caught me just before I left the house to go and have lunch with my husband. There’s a good little restaurant just along from the garage and if Seymour isn’t lunching with anyone else we usually lunch there together. I was just getting into my little car when he arrived. It was the usual driver and our order had already been placed by phone so all I had to do was to take the money out of the box that sits on a high shelf behind the sergeant there, and pay him.’

  ‘That’s not very secure,’ said the DCI. ‘Anybody could walk in and help himself. Or herself,’ he added fairly.

  ‘Well, it’s never happened yet. And there’s never very much in it, just enough so that whoever’s here can pay for any delivery that comes to the door. Nobody else came to the front door all morning except the postman and nobody need have seen him. He never rings the bell. The mail just appeared in the box at the outside front door and I suppose Tasha sorted it out and put it through the appropriate doors as usual.’

  ‘I don’t remember that particular morning but I always do that,’ Tash said. Now that her relationship with Douglas was generally recognized she had begun using his first name in company. ‘I’d have remembered if that day had been different. We were supposed to be going out that morning to check something but Douglas got the information he needed over the phone so we were able to stay in and get on with the report. Douglas needs to get his mail early and while I’m collecting it I may as well pop the rest of it through the letter slots. It only takes me a second or two but it can save the others a few minutes and I don’t think anybody minds. I mean, nobody gets a disproportionate number of angry-looking envelopes with windows.’

  ‘We seem to be running a public service,’ Douglas said. ‘But that’s all right. I think that that’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘We’ll see about that later,’ said the DCI. ‘Let’s finish the morning first. Mrs McLeish, who else did you see or hear between breakfast and answering the door to the baker’s van?’

  ‘Nobody,’ Betty said firmly. ‘It was a very quiet morning, which was good because it let me get on with the ironing. I knew that there would only be Douglas and Tasha for lunch and they always look after themselves when they’re going to be here. I just made sure that there was bread and eggs and cheese in the fridge for them.’

  ‘Thank you. Now, Mr Eastwick. Tell me about your morning.’

  George seemed to have decided that his connection, through Stan, with the university was now thoroughly broken and he was reverting to the dialect of his younger days further north. ‘You a’ready heard it. Stan was pottering in the garden and greenhouse. There was naebody came ’cept Jock Swithin as works for McColm the bakers. I’d waited in for him because we was out of bread and Stan walked down to the village to gi’e his pal some seedlings. He said his pal would gi’e him dinner.’

  ‘And what did you have for your lunch?’ the DCI asked.

  ‘I’d just had a jam sarnie when Jock rolled up, so as soon as I’d put the bread away I went out. I’ve been doing a wee electrical job for a wifie lives next to Seymour McLeish’s garage. She telled me you checked with her. I was home by around five but Stan was still no’ back, least I jaloused he wasn’t but I suppose he was maybe a’ready deid.’ George coughed and raised a hand as though to brush away a tear. ‘I made a fry-up, watched a whilie of TV and then bedded down on the Lilo on the sitting room floor.’

  DCI Laird moved on. Professor Cullins and Hubert Campion had been at work in the university and several witnesses had already attested to that. They had then attended a function in the staff club – a presentation to a retiring member of the senate.

  ‘That covers the morning – for the moment,’ the DCI said. ‘No doubt we shall have to return to it more than once but for the moment—’

  Tash had been looking concerned. Now she looked up from
her shorthand book and frowned at the DCI. ‘It’s not quite complete,’ she said. ‘You never came back to me. There’s one small missing piece. I don’t suppose it means anything but I’m sure you’d prefer to have the whole story.’

  ‘No doubt about that,’ Laird said. He sounded patronizing, as if to an intelligent child.

  ‘Well, I’ve only just remembered something.’

  ‘I already explained,’ said DCI Laird patiently. ‘That’s why we’re having a round-table discussion. Sometimes people refresh each others’ memories.’

  ‘Well, that’s what’s happened. While we’ve talked, the details of the whole day have been coming back to me. Mr Eastwick’s van came back during the afternoon. I didn’t see who was driving it, but it took the path behind the raspberry bushes as far as the greenhouse. That’s a tarmac path, it’s quite wide enough for the van and there’s space to turn it round by the greenhouse door. It came back and drove away just a minute later. I still didn’t see who was in it.’

  ‘Well, Mr Eastwick?’ said the DCI.

  George Eastwick’s skin had paled under its tan, ending with a grey tinge. He hesitated. ‘Aye,’ he said at last. ‘I’d forgot, ’cause we’d done it so often afore, but the quinie reminds me. Stan asked me to fetch him a fresh gas cylinder frae the uni.’

  DCI Laird exchanged a meaningful glance with his sergeant. ‘Who did you meet at the university, where did you pick up the fresh cylinder and at about what time?’

  George flared up – quite unnecessarily, Douglas thought.

  ‘I’m answering nae mair dashed questions until I hae my solicitor wi’ me.’ He heaved himself to his feet and glared down at Douglas and Tash. ‘You twa was supposed to be awa’, that day.’

  ‘I got my answer over the phone without going to look,’ Douglas said.

  ‘Ye bogger. Ye’re a’ fart and nae shite.’ George opened his mouth and closed it again quickly. It was dawning on him belatedly that whatever he said might only be digging a deeper pit. He glared at the three officers in turn. ‘You’ve naethin’ on me,’ he said. ‘Naethin’. An’ you’ll get your heids in your hands to play wi’ gin you try it on.’ He turned and stumbled out of the room, slamming the door behind him.