HOME TO ROOST
Gerald Hammond
© Gerald Hammond 1990
Gerald Hammond has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1990 by Macmillan London Limited.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter One
The Pentland Gun Club was usually quiet on weekday afternoons. The end of the game and wildfowling seasons had brought out a few fanatics, but a sky the colour of the local stone and a wind coming down the valley straight from the North Pole had sent some of them home in short time. We were paying dearly for a fine summer which had followed a winter so mild that gardeners had complained of having to mow grass. But summer had ended in the wettest autumn on record and since then the rain had alternated with frost and gales and occasional snow.
When a sudden shower of sleet put an end to the afternoon’s activity, I would have been relieved at being driven back into the warm clubhouse, except that I was on form while Deborah, who suffers from cold fingers but hates to shoot in gloves, was not. We had been neck and neck on the Sporting layout with only my favourite Springing Teal to come when the sleet, and the squally wind on which it arrived, had driven us indoors.
Sometimes it seems inevitable that Deborah and I will marry. At other times that seems, if not impossible, at least a recipe for disaster.
Our relationship must fall somewhere within the many definitions of love. Yet twice we have turned back from the very brink of becoming engaged. Once, she balked at the idea of attaching herself permanently to a detective sergeant – not, I honestly believe, because of any uncertainty about pay or prospects but because her background had taught her only too well the risks to which a police officer, who must expect at least once in his service to face up to an armed criminal, is exposing himself.
On the other occasion, it was I who got cold feet. Deborah is a delightful person to have around. As a girl, she is a magnet for male eyes. Even when she is dressed for ratting or ferreting – as I first saw her – there is no doubt of her gamine charm, but when she takes trouble over her appearance she is, in a youthful way, much more than pretty. There is a hint of beauty to follow on when she loses the last traces of puppy-fat. (They say that you should look at the mother, and Molly Calder is a lovely woman.) Deborah’s figure is all girl, the soft roundness belying the well-developed musculature beneath. At times there is twined around us a net of mutual desire – we know it and others can see it. And yet it is not desire that draws us together but simple pleasure in each other’s company. And a shared sense of humour. We can reduce each other to tears of laughter over some ridiculous piece of imagery.
Looking back over what I have written, it reads like the specification for a long and happy marriage. So why did I hesitate? I asked myself the same question and did not like the answer, which was quite simply masculine pride. The uncomfortable fact was that marriage to Deborah would entail a high risk of role reversal. Not that I would be left at home in a frilly apron, minding the baby and collecting recipes. I may be a better cook than Deborah, but she has a well-developed nesting instinct. Her earning capability, although good, is sporadic. On the other hand if Keith, her father, should ever decide to retire – a contingency which looks at the moment to be remote in the extreme – she is more than competent to inherit his half of the family business. For the moment, she is content to divide her time between helping her father in the shop and at the workbench, and sharing the running of the Pentland Gun Club with a retired schoolmaster who looks after the daily management while she organises the competitions and undertakes the coaching.
Problems are for solving, and I dare say that I could have come to terms with having a wife who would one day bring money into the family. Deborah has a strong personality, but I could accept a marriage which was a partnership rather than a relationship between master and slave.
The real barrier, I am ashamed to say, is deeper and yet more trivial. We had hardly met before Deborah infected me with her own passion for the sport of clay pigeon shooting. Unfortunately, she is very good at it. According to Keith a young girl with good reflexes, properly taught, can become devastatingly good, and Deborah is the living, breathing, shooting proof of it. She had been shooting since she was first old enough to swing a cut-down four-ten and Keith is a first-class coach. She rarely enters a ladies’ match at Skeet or Sporting without lifting a prize or a trophy; and even among men in open competition she is usually fighting it out with the leaders. Some of them resent it and, against my own better instincts, I am one of them. I could be proud of a wife who bested me in art or at chess; but shooting is a male preserve, bound up with the male prerogative of gathering meat, and my ego rebels at the idea of a wife who can shoot better than I can.
I said as much to Deborah once, just before we went out for a round of Skeet. I said it lightly, hoping that she would take it as a joke, but she probably saw through me. She shot a clean round, twenty-five straight, besting me by four, and said that she supposed that she would just have to die an old maid.
‘That’s the risk you’re taking,’ I said.
She hid her teeth behind her lips. ‘You rang, my lord?’ she asked in a quavering voice. A few seconds later, we were giggling together over a vision of her as an ageing version of the maid in a French farce. The moment had passed by but my pique had not.
Some day, I promised myself, I would beat her, just once. Then and only then would I let her sweep me off my feet.
There were only four of us, a small group in the big room. Deborah had been booked for a coaching session on the high tower. Her pupil, a sturdy man in tweed trousers and a well-worn Goretex coat and hat, joined us at the bar and offered us a drink. He laid a good quality over-under across one of the tables. Without the hat I saw that he had wiry grey hair above a round, red face.
Sam Pollinder, the retired schoolteacher who shared the running of the club, was tending the bar between fussing with some papers. He was a mediocre shot – after only a few months of practice and with the benefit of Deborah’s tuition I could nearly always improve on his scores – but an asset to the club. Round, balding and squeaky, he came over as a fusspot; but he was a heaven-sent administrator. Anything that he took on, including the Pentland Gun Club, ran on the proverbial oiled wheels.
‘I doubt there’ll be any more shooting today,’ he said. ‘Non-drivers can have a proper drink.’ Until shooting was over, the club served – and permitted – only low-alcohol drinks.
‘I’d be on my own,’ I said. Deborah had brought me in her father’s jeep. But beyond the broad windows I could see only the jeep and the ex-teacher’s red hatchback.
‘My wife dropped me off,’ the other man said. ‘She went on to the Country Club for a sauna. She’s making one last-ditch attempt to get her weight down below mine. She’ll pick me up later. Her sister’s looking after the . . . the place,’ he explained unnecessarily. ‘You’ll take a dram, lad?’
I accepted a dram, which turned out to be a large Glenfiddich, and made a mental note to avoid his company in future whenever the usual restriction was lifted. He could prove to be expensive company. Sam Pollinder accepted his usual alcohol-free lager and Deborah the same, diluted even further into a shandy.
‘Are you turning out again on Saturday?’ Sam asked Deborah.
She shrugged. ‘Are you on duty, that day, Ian?’ she asked me.
‘Not if the citizenry behaves itself,’ I said.
‘The club
will be closed anyway. It’s the second and final day of the Borders Pigeon-Shoot. Your chance to try yourself out against the real thing, if you want to. Don’t expect too much, though. We drew a stretch of low-ground forestry which hardly attracted a single bird. We could see them dropping into the beech-woods half a mile away.’
I gave the question some thought. I had been conditioned by my upbringing and by my police background to believe that all gun-owners were irresponsible sadists if not actively criminal. My involvement with the clay-shooting fraternity had driven a wedge into that belief. There had remained a gut feeling that to kill a living creature had to be wrong, although when challenged by Deborah I was unable to explain why that should be so if it was acceptable to eat meat killed by somebody else. Several days spent in her company, beating at various shoots, had shown me some of the magic of a winter’s day spent in the pursuit of pheasant or partridge and the artistry which went into presenting the birds as suitably challenging targets; and I had found that the participants were individuals not greatly different from myself. They were prepared to work for their sport and they respected their quarry. But while I began to appreciate their way of life I had so far not lifted a gun against a live target.
While I thought it over, Sam was speaking again, rather defensively. ‘It was the luck of the draw,’ he said. ‘And that area can be good, some years. You’d have been all right if the beech-woods had been better covered.’
‘But they weren’t,’ Deborah pointed out. ‘The gutless wonders you put there went home before roosting time. It was too cold for them. Can you promise me that it won’t happen again?’
‘No,’ Sam said frankly. ‘But I can do better than that. I can move you. How would Nuttleigh’s Farm suit you?’
She lit up as another girl might have done at the sight of a diamond ring. ‘Great!’ she said. ‘I passed there yesterday and the barley’s still drawing them. But the shooting there belongs to the McKimber Estate. I think it’s let to Jeffries, the game farm man. Don’t tell me that they’ve given up the shooting rights? Because Dad would—’
‘Nothing like that. But some of the men who drew McKimber last week have gone off for a winter break and I’m having to move people around. I have to keep the best woods covered or the birds will go plop in there and the Guns round about will do their nuts.’
‘Hey!’ said the other man. ‘If there’s room for a little one, I’ll have some of that.’
‘You, Mr Kerr?’ Sam said. ‘I thought you had a farm of your own thereabouts.’
‘Next door,’ Mr Kerr said. ‘But I’ve no roosting wood on it. It’ll be twenty years before the trees I’ve planted are used as a roost. I’ve had some sport with the cushies, but the stubbles are ploughed now and the rape’s betwixt and between.’
Dark clouds had blotted out the daylight. Sam got up and switched on the lights. The big room, which had looked funereal, cheered up immediately.
Deborah, who would have been hard put to it to name her Member of Parliament, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local farms. ‘Who farms Nuttleigh’s these days?’ she asked.
‘Nuttleigh, I presume,’ I said.
She looked at me in scorn. ‘The last Nuttleigh died around the time of Bannockburn,’ she said. ‘Brian Dunbar, isn’t it? You used to be as thick as thieves with him,’ she told Mr Kerr. ‘Surely you can shoot there any time.’
Mr Kerr looked out of the window. The sleet had turned to rain. ‘The way things are,’ he said, ‘I’d rather not ask for favours.’
It seemed to be time to turn the subject. ‘I’ve got nothing against pigeon,’ I said. ‘They’ve never done me any harm.’
The others flinched. Evidently I had uttered a heresy. ‘A woodpigeon can fill its crop with about four ounces of grain, more than once a day,’ Deborah said. ‘The last estimate I saw reckoned that there were about ten million in the country. They can raise two or three broods a year, two squabs at a time. It takes about a pound and a half of grain to make a loaf. Work it out for yourself.’
‘And that’s not counting incidental damage,’ Mr Kerr said gloomily. ‘Like the seed they knock down when they’re feeding on rape before harvest time. Far more than they eat.’
I bought him a drink to cheer him up and told Deborah that, all right, I’d try myself out on real pigeon. If I didn’t like it, I could always go home.
‘What’ll we be doing?’ I asked.
‘Roost shooting,’ she said. ‘Pigeon aren’t easy to control. You can decoy them. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Or, if you’re lucky, you can get under a flight-line. Or you can shoot them when they come in to roost. The only way to make a real dent in their numbers is to have all favourite roosting places covered at the same time. When it’s beginning to get dark, they make up their little minds that they’re going to come in somewhere. If they’re shot at in one place, they move on to another.’
‘It sounds too easy,’ I said.
‘We’ll see if you’re still saying that on Saturday night,’ she retorted.
*
When I first met Deborah, I was a detective sergeant with the Lothian and Borders Constabulary, stationed in Edinburgh. With her help, I arrived at the solution to a murder case in advance of my superiors. Or, to be more honest, she arrived at it with minimal assistance from me, although she insisted that I take the credit.
A month or so later, I was posted to Newton Lauder. This, I suspect, was not a reward for my zeal but a banishment to the local equivalent of Siberia. Superiors in general, and Superintendent McHarg in particular, do not appreciate being beaten to the punch by junior officers – or ‘having their eyes wiped’ in the language of the dog world which I was rapidly learning from Deborah and her family.
The posting pleased me until the snags began to surface. Newton Lauder is a charming old town in the Scottish Borders. Deborah lived with her parents in Briesland House, a mile or two outside the town, so that my relationship with her – call it an affair, a courting or just friendship, whatever you will – no longer suffered the impediment of distance. And I was a long way from Superintendent McHarg.
Although Newton Lauder was the headquarters for the policing of a large area, it was not a hotbed of crime. The CID was represented there by a sergeant and a constable, the rare crime of any seriousness being handled from Edinburgh. I was now that sergeant and the constable’s post was vacant. Which suited me very well. Newton Lauder might experience the occasional murder or serious assault, but the general run of crime was represented by petty pilfering or an outbreak of graffiti on the walls of the secondary school.
The snag was that I had to serve two masters – and, worse, two masters who disliked each other intensely – and each used me as a stick with which to prod the other. To McHarg, in Edinburgh, I was responsible whenever a crime occurred, but I looked to the local Chief Superintendent, a Hebridean teetering on the edge of retirement, for matters of administration; and by longstanding agreement Chief Superintendent Munro was to make use of my time whenever no local crimes required my attention.
Over many years Mr Munro and Deborah’s father had overcome the mistrust inevitable between a conservative policeman and a dealer in guns, and had arrived at a state of truce bordering on real friendship. Never one to miss a chance, Mr Munro had decided to capitalise on my friendship with the Calder family and, taking advantage of his local responsibility for crime prevention (as opposed to detection), had appointed me as his Firearms Officer to oversee an otherwise civilian staff; thereby, at a single stroke, infuriating Mr McHarg, obtaining expert advice free of charge and going some way towards meeting his obligations under the new firearms legislation.
It was this duty that took me out to the McKimber Estate on the day after our visit to the Gun Club. Nothing in the new Act required such a visit to inspect the storage of shotguns, although some chief officers were stretching their powers with the intention of discouraging the private ownership of guns; but the head keeper at McKimber had made on
e of the first applications on the new form and had been as confused as everybody else as to how to present a clear listing of his guns. A visit seemed to be called for.
My predecessor (as Firearms Officer) had left a map pinned to the wall of what was now my office. Many of the boundaries of farms and estates were marked on the map. I glanced at it to make sure of my route. The McKimber Estate, I noticed, included several thousand acres of mixed woodland, giving way gradually to farmland on the boundary. Miscally, Ian Kerr’s farm, caught my eye, lying just outside the boundary.
Frost had returned overnight. I used an aerosol to clear a patch through the fern-pictures on the windscreen and left it to the heater to do the rest. Once off the main road, ice lay wherever the tarmac was shaded but the gravel road to the big house offered a better grip. A woman in an apron answered the doorbell. She made it clear that policemen were expected to come to the back door, that the keepering staff had nothing to do with the household and in any case were far below the dignity of her attention, but she managed to direct me to the head keeper’s cottage which was tucked out of sight beyond gardens which, even in the dead of winter, could be seen to be in need of regular professional attention. The keeper’s house turned out to be a small villa, probably once a dower house, and in considerably better taste than its larger neighbour although the layout was marred by a rambling assembly of kennels and sheds.
Mrs Brindle, the head keeper’s wife, was younger than I expected, a fluffy blonde with a chubby body and come-hither eyes. I identified myself and explained my errand.
‘He’s away out around the pens,’ she said, ‘catching up birds for next season’s rearing. You could find him. But if it would save fetching him back, would you like to see his guns?’
I followed her into the house. She fiddled with a combination padlock to open the door of a small room where the guns were racked. The window was stoutly barred.
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