With My Little Eye

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Just over a week. Go on about how much you remember.’

  ‘There was a coach following us and a camper van behind it. We thought whatshisname – George Eastwick, was it? – might be in the camper. They both turned off when we did. After that I’m not sure …’

  She put a slim finger to his lips. ‘Don’t struggle to remember. They say you just have to relax and let it come when it comes. I’ll tell you all you need to know. Yes, we thought it was probably George. I don’t know why we were so sure, but we were right. You whizzed ahead and swung round and he stopped behind the bus and you fired at him. And he shot at you. Well, I wasn’t having that. I went round the back of the coach and came up behind him and he was just taking another shot at you and I wasn’t quite quick enough. I swatted him with the barrels of your gun. I’m afraid I bent it badly, do you mind an awful lot?’

  ‘Not in the least. Anyway, it’s insured. Take it in to …’ He ground to a halt, quite unable to remember the name of his usual gun shop.

  ‘No problem, I just filed a receipt from them. So that’s all right.’ Tash looked deep into his eyes to see whether he was strong enough to discuss his own condition. Her voice became husky with emotion. ‘His bullet could have killed you but it ran round between your skull and your scalp; Honeypot says that they do that sometimes. Anyway, I thought he’d killed you and I was just going to do something awful to his body when a police car turned up, the result of my phone call to Honeypot. I thought I might be in trouble—’

  ‘But you’re not?’

  ‘No. You see, all the Japanese twitchers—’

  ‘The Japanese …?’

  ‘Birdwatchers. The coach was full of them, all with cameras, looking for the blue grouse. There were several video cameras and their what-d’you-call-ems, clips, were all over the TV news next day. They make it quite clear that he’d fired first and I think Honeypot had told the world that George was after your blood, because the papers had some of the photos with headlines referring to him as “assassin”.’ She paused and looked at her watch. ‘We’d better be quick – they want me to keep talking to you but they only let me in during visiting hours, did you ever hear of anything so silly? But it lets me spend hours at your desk. After all the publicity, work keeps rolling in and most of them say that it can wait until you’re better, and at least I can do the preliminaries for you. And, listen, do you know what you were talking about while they kept you anaesthetized because of your head injury?’

  ‘No idea,’ Douglas said. ‘I seemed to dream about all sorts of weird things.’

  ‘Honeypot’s delighted. She says you’re her golden boy and you can park on a yellow line any time you like. It seems that you solved the last bit of the Stan Eastwood case for her.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yes. You remember, we had it all figured out but there was no proof at all. But you kept babbling about pipes.’

  ‘It was the bagpipes I was dreaming about. A nightmare.’

  ‘I told Honeypot you’d kept mentioning the pipes and she realized that they’d never found the pipe that George had used to pipe the gas in through the wall. And they remembered that he’d been doing some work for a lady who lives next to Seymour’s garage. They’d been putting in a ventilator from an internal room through a fan and coming out under the eaves and they found a piece of the flexible ventilation pipe with clear signs of having been pushed into a hole in a stone wall. She says that the forensic scientists have positively matched the dust on it with the stone and mortar of the house.’

  Douglas had been waiting for a chance to ask a very important question but he knew that as long as she was sitting at his bedside the question was not urgent. However, at this point Tash fell silent, so he said, ‘Then I take it that George is in custody?’

  Tash shook her red head. ‘Oh no.’

  All Douglas’s fears came rushing back. ‘If George is walking around loose, I don’t like the idea of you sleeping at home. I want you well out of harm’s way.’

  Tash laughed and squeezed his hand. ‘He isn’t walking around anywhere, silly. When I hit him with the barrels of your gun the gun went off with the shock of it, Honeypot says they quite often do that. It took half his head off. He’s as dead as the dodo and I can’t say that I’m sorry – a man who would spy on my mum and kill his own brother and come chasing after us. His son seems all right, though, and doesn’t seem to be missing his dad at all. The two policemen who turned up were going to get quite stuffy about it but Honeypot turned up a few minutes later and she said that it was perfectly all right. She didn’t quite say that I had her permission to knock his block off, but that’s how she came over. I’m in some sort of custody but out on bail. She says it will be all right.’

  ‘How do you know George’s son?’ Douglas asked. His head was beginning to swim, but whether that was due to his injury or to Tash’s tendency to leap from subject to subject he could not be sure.

  ‘He’s been visiting. Apparently he inherits his father’s flat and he likes it much better than the grotty cottage that he’s living in just now. Mr Farlane, who owns most of the land around us, was advertising for a keeper, so he thinks he’ll go after the job and move in to the granny flat. And he enjoys gardening, isn’t that great?’

  ‘He must be off his trolley,’ Douglas said. Sleep was crawling over him again. Tash’s voice became a mere whisper in the distance. She would have regrets later. He must hurry and recover, get home and be ready to support her if she ever felt guilty.

  Douglas woke up again suddenly. ‘He may be tarred with the same brush as his father and his uncle. Get an electrician to come in and rip out the wiring.’