Home to Roost

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘You reckon?’ Ronnie said. ‘I thought you were havering when you spoke of it. But there was a whole lot of his barley uncut.’

  ‘That’s what was drawing the birds. We’d better get over to Nuttleigh’s.’

  This speaking in riddles was beginning to infuriate me. I was about to insist on an immediate explanation, but Mrs Kerr chose that moment to return, stamping the snow off her wellingtons. ‘That’s who it was, all right,’ she said quietly. She gave the boy’s ear a gentle pull. ‘So you’re the man of the house, at least ’til your uncle can get here. Go and make a start to feeding the beasts.’

  The boy went out without a word.

  Keith and Ronnie had slipped out but I hung on my heel for a moment. ‘I’m sorry to pester you at such a time, but how many shotguns did Mr Kerr own?’

  She looked at me dully. ‘Just the one. The police have it now. It was in the pond with his body.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’

  When I had the door open, she spoke once more in the softest voice I had ever heard her use. ‘Wherever he is, do you think he kens that I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ I said. I almost ran to the jeep. The tears of such a huge woman would certainly be larger than life.

  *

  Those few words with Mrs Kerr, and a quick call on the radio to tell Control where I was going next, satisfied police routine but they also allowed Keith and Ronnie to pile into the Land-Rover and get well ahead of us. Deborah set off after them. In my impatience I told her to get her skates on, but to my relief she ignored me and drove with care over the slippery surface.

  ‘What the hell was that father of yours talking about?’ I asked. Even to me, my voice sounded petulant.

  ‘I don’t know. Dad doesn’t mean to tantalise,’ she said in tones of apology. ‘It’s just that his mind goes shooting off ahead and he thinks that people are keeping up with him. Huh! I think that he thinks wrong – at least as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think that you think that he thinks he knows how Ian Kerr was spirited away.’

  ‘I do and I bet he does,’ she said. We were twisting along the road between the two farm entrances. She slowed for the by-road to Nuttleigh’s. ‘What’s more, I think I’m beginning to catch up with him. That piece of pipe in the trailer. Was it straight and about – oh – four feet long and sort of shaped? I mean, two different diameters?’

  ‘That sounds about right,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really notice the diameters. What was it?’

  ‘And the round thing, was it blue or red?’

  ‘Red,’ I said as we pulled up in the farmyard. ‘You’re as bad as your father. Explain, for God’s sake. I can’t go into this, stone cold.’

  The Land-Rover was parked beside the back door of the farmhouse. Ronnie was speaking to Mrs Dunbar at the door and Keith was beckoning to us urgently. They vanished inside, leaving the door ajar.

  ‘I think we’d better go in,’ Deborah said. ‘But it’s up to you. If we stop out here and have a debate about it, he won’t wait for us – and he’s quite capable of rushing ahead, conducting an interrogation, making accusations and even arresting somebody. Anyway, I could be wrong. It just doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s Dad’s story. Let him bring it out.’

  I made a last attempt to get the whole thing back on its proper course. ‘If he knows all the answers, he must tell the police. Tell me, in fact. He mustn’t go charging in—’

  ‘Dad usually knows that he’s doing.’

  The word ‘usually’ was less than reassuring, but Deborah was already at the door. I bit back my protests and followed.

  The back door led directly into the kitchen. To my eyes, coming direct from the kitchen at Miscally, it looked shabby. It lacked the latest gadgets, but its more old-fashioned utensils were arranged purposefully and to hand, I noticed, as though the room were a machine for the creation of meals rather than an entity existing for its own sake. Brian Dunbar, in his usual overalls, was washing greasy hands at the sink.

  Mrs Dunbar, in a clean floral pinny, was fussing at the stove. ‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘It’s fine when folk just drop in. We’re the same party as we were the night of the pigeon-shoot. You’ll take tea? Or something stronger?’ Her welcome was meant to be warm, but it was more reserved than it had been a few days earlier.

  ‘We’ve just had breakfast,’ I said. ‘In fact, Keith and Ronnie have had two.’

  ‘The tea’s already in the pot.’

  ‘Tea would be fine,’ Keith said. Ronnie looked as though he would have preferred the ‘something stronger’.

  Brian dried his hands and went for more chairs. When we were seated, he said, ‘What brings you over this way again so soon?’ It seemed to me that the Dunbars both froze, waiting for the answer.

  ‘We went to call on your neighbour,’ Keith said. ‘Mrs Kerr. Her husband’s body was found in one of the ponds at McKimber. He seems to have died of poison.’

  ‘He’s been identified?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Yes. By his wife.’

  ‘The poor woman,’ Mrs Dunbar breathed. She sat down beside her husband and leaned against him. They had seemed to be a very close couple. Now I noticed that they seemed to be drawing comfort from tiny physical contacts.

  There was silence in the room, so that I could hear a faint hum from the refrigerator.

  Ronnie was the first to speak. He looked out of the window. ‘It’s not been a good year for you,’ he said. He seemed to be fishing for comment rather than for a change of subject.

  Brian Dunbar shook his head. ‘Times are harder. It’s not like it was a few years ago, with the grants and subsidies. Prices are well down.’

  ‘It’s just terrible,’ Ronnie said. ‘One bad year can break you. And you didn’t get the most of your barley in before the big storm in September. That low ground of yours is badly drained.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Brian said. ‘I’m hoping that the water main track will improve the drainage.’

  ‘You’ll have it easier next year,’ Keith said comfortingly. ‘The insurance money will help.’

  Mrs Dunbar looked at him sharply. ‘Insurance?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Tell me if I’m wrong. As I understand it,’ Keith said, ‘you and Ian Kerr equipped yourselves with a combine harvester, a drier and the latest in machinery by raising a joint bank loan. With interest rates shooting up, you must have had a sore trauchle keeping up with the payments. But you were each insured for enough to pay off the debt if one of you died. The premiums would be another heavy outgoing which’ll stop now.’

  ‘That’s quite true,’ Brian said unhappily. ‘But this is not the time to talk about such things.’

  ‘The man’s not long dead,’ Mrs Dunbar said.

  I had slipped down in my chair so that I could scribble surreptitiously on my knee. I thanked God that I had once taken the trouble to learn shorthand. The Dunbars were sitting close together on the other side of the table. From my low viewpoint, I could see that they had linked hands under the table and were gripping tightly.

  In a high voice, Mrs Dunbar broke another silence. ‘He must have taken his own life. God knows he had his troubles. But it’s a mystery why he would do it at McKimber. I suppose he stayed late at the shooting and then walked over there.’

  ‘There are witnesses who say not,’ Keith said.

  ‘Well, it’s a sad business,’ Brian said. ‘And I suppose we’ll have a new neighbour soon.’

  ‘Likely her brother will come and run the place,’ Mrs Dunbar said.

  Keith ignored the attempt at a new subject. ‘If that had been the way of it,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t explain why your Thunderbird was missing from the trailer when we went down in the dark and was back there again in the morning.’

  In the silence which followed, Keith looked round our faces. Brian’s face was scarlet but his wife’s lips were white. When Keith’s glance reached me, he realised that I had been left far behind. ‘You m
ust have seen and heard the bangers that farmers leave out to protect their crops?’ he said. ‘There are more sophisticated, electronic bird-scarers these days, but one of the simplest and cheapest is the Thunderbird. It’s little more than a long tube with a timer at one end which sparks a flint, at intervals that you can set between a minute or so up to perhaps a quarter of an hour. You couple it up to a gas cylinder. There’s a small reservoir which mixes gas and air together. When the mixture fires, it sounds pretty much like a gunshot.

  ‘It’s my guess that Ian Kerr left the wee wood in the back of Brian’s Land-Rover.’

  ‘But that couldn’t be,’ Brian said hoarsely. He looked at me. ‘You know that he was still shooting after I left him. You could see for yourself.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Deborah said.

  ‘Not quite,’ Keith told her. ‘You heard a shot and Brian called your attention to it. What you saw was a few feathers hanging in the air. It would look just as it looks when a pigeon has been killed overhead. But you’d get the same effect if somebody had hauled the Thunderbird up to the high seat, stuffed a handful of feathers into the mouth of it and set the timer for a long delay. That would be when he noticed your lofted decoys, of course, and realised that he’d have to bring them back to you. Otherwise, you’d have gone back for them and found Ian Kerr and the Thunderbird.’

  Deborah looked as though she were being torn between doubt and enlightenment. ‘But, Dad,’ she said unhappily, ‘that’s not possible. As the light faded, everybody would see the flash high in the treetops.’

  ‘Not if he knew that the gas cylinder was almost empty,’ Keith said, ‘or, more likely, if he opened the valve and let nearly all of the gas escape. As the gas runs out, those things start misfiring some of the times the timer sparks, because the mixture’s too weak, until they soon stop firing altogether.’

  Deborah was still unconvinced. ‘But . . . but . . . I suppose the plank may have been wide enough that I wouldn’t see the scarer when I shone the torch up there. Not if it was lying flat along the plank. But, Dad, a red gas cylinder? I couldn’t have missed that.’

  My mind was getting its second wind and I suddenly saw an answer that Deborah had missed. ‘The first time Mr Dunbar came down, he brought the food in a green carrier bag,’ I said. ‘When he came again, he was carrying the thermos flask in his hand and the sausage rolls in the paper bag. Among the evergreen branches, by torchlight, would you have noticed a carefully placed, green carrier bag?’

  Deborah thought about it, her smooth brow furrowed. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t believe I would.’

  ‘You came back during the night, of course,’ Keith said to Brian Dunbar. ‘You returned the scarer and the cylinder to the trailer. And you also took Ian Kerr’s body round by road and pushed it under the ice. He had to be found, for the sake of the insurance, but not on your land or his own. Somewhere else, and later, when the motivation and the sequence of events would be less obvious. A delay would – literally – muddy the evidence.’

  The Dunbars had been sitting quietly, looking from Deborah to her father and back again as if they were spectators at a tennis match, awaiting an outcome in which they were interested but not concerned. Now Brian Dunbar stirred in his chair. ‘It’s a good story,’ he said shakily. ‘It has a ring to it. But where’s your evidence?’

  ‘Under the snow,’ Keith said. ‘Feathers.’

  I began to see a little more daylight. ‘Is this why you kept asking me how I’d killed any wounded birds?’ I asked him.

  Keith seemed surprised that I should have to ask the question. ‘Of course. I noticed that one or two of the feathers which were lying around showed signs of scorching. If you hadn’t been giving wounded birds the coup de grâce with a shot at point blank range, then how else, I wondered, could feathers have been exposed to flame? Those feathers will still be there,’ he added. ‘Come the thaw, they can be found again. And I don’t suppose Brian thought it necessary to replace the gas cylinder with a full one.’

  ‘That seems to be that, then,’ Brian Dunbar said slowly.

  His wife twisted round to look into his face. ‘Brian, are you sure?’

  He nodded. ‘Let’s not prolong the agony. It’s over.’

  I remembered that I was a policeman. ‘I must warn you,’ I said, ‘that anything you say—’

  ‘I know all that,’ Dunbar said impatiently. ‘It was just as Keith said. After I’d killed him—’

  ‘Brian, no!’ his wife said.

  ‘I know what I’m doing, Chrissie. It’s best that we get it over. I knew that there were other men, up on McKimber ground, but mostly they were back among the trees. Even if they weren’t, I could get the stuff out of the trailer and the body into the Land-Rover without being seen, they were parked so close to the fence. I let all but the last wee puff of gas out of the cylinder. The risk I had to take was that one of the men would see the feathers come out of the treetops, or know that there wasn’t a bird there when the banger fired.’

  ‘You had a busy night after that,’ Keith said.

  ‘Aye, what with getting the stuff down from the high seat and then moving the body round to McKimber.’ He looked at me. ‘What happens now?’

  I was about to say that I was taking him into custody when his wife spoke up. ‘What he’s been telling you is just moonshine,’ she said. ‘He knew nothing until Ian Kerr was dead.’

  Brian took her by the arms and shook her tenderly. ‘Chrissie!’ he wailed. ‘Hold your wheesht. It’s better my way.’

  ‘It’s not,’ she said bravely. ‘And I can’t let you. Brian knew nothing. It wasn’t for the sake of the money, not directly. That never entered my head,’ she told me and it seemed important to her that I believed her. ‘I knew how sick to his heart Brian was, watching all that we’d worked for going down the drain. And Ian could have spared us that if he’d cared to bend a wee bit. Last year it was his turn to have first call on the machinery. Back at harvest time, when the forecast was of heavy rain to come and the charts were showing great swirls of black cloud coming in from the Atlantic, he’d got the best of his barley in. His soil’s sandier than ours, it drains in a day, but ours is clay and those lower fields can go like a pond. When the rain’s heavy, water drains off McKimber and we’re flooded.’ She paused and heaved a long sigh. ‘It was good barley, it’d have gone for malting.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ Brian said.

  ‘Aye, I do. It wouldn’t have cost Ian more than pennies to let us have the use of the combine. We could have got most of it in before the rain arrived. But he insisted that we stuck to the letter of our agreement. I went and begged him, but it was no use. Then we tried to hire from outside, but a’body else was in the same boat. So we lost the best part of our year’s income and we still had to pay up for the insurance and the bank loan.

  ‘Brian was so miserable he was hardly sleeping a wink. I was worried for him. Even so, we might have ridden it out.’ A furious scowl took command of her usually placid face. ‘But then Ian had the chowk to come and shoot here, because the birds were coming in to our barley – which was still spoiling in the ground because he was too thrawn to help a neighbour. That made me mad. Not just angry, I mean, but really mad. I must have been out of my mind.’ She pulled her hand out of her husband’s grasp in order to hide her face. Her voice continued, muffled, from between her fingers. ‘I was making up the flasks and food to send down to our guests – because that’s how I thought of you, as guests, all except Ian. And it came over me why should I feed him?’ She looked up and laced her fingers again with Brian’s. ‘And yet I couldn’t not. You see, he was a visitor,’ she explained shyly.

  ‘I understand,’ Keith said.

  ‘I think you do. I took the wee bottle of stuff that Brian used for the moles and I tipped it into one of the flasks and I told Brian that that one was for Ian and to make sure that nobody else drank it, because that was the way Ian liked his coffee. I was sorry, after.’

  ‘Chri
ssie, Chrissie,’ Brian said. ‘It was better my way. They’ll have me anyway as an accessory.’

  ‘There, pet.’ I saw her give his hand a squeeze. ‘They’ll go easier on you than if you’d done the whole of it.’ She looked at Keith rather than at me. Keith was the one who would understand. ‘When Ian drank the coffee and died, Brian guessed at once what I’d done. He decided right then how to cover it up. He can be very quick,’ she said proudly.

  ‘It was an awfu’ way for a man to go,’ Brian said. ‘That’s terrible stuff. But she wouldn’t know that,’ he added quickly. ‘I nearly picked up his gun to put him out of it. But then he just . . . went.’

  ‘If I’d known how it would be,’ she said, ‘I’d have thought again. As it was, I was sorry after Brian had gone and I ran after him.’

  ‘That’s so,’ Brian said. ‘I met her running down the track as I was coming back here. Too late, of course, by far. But at least she tried.’

  ‘You don’t need to fret any more, love,’ Chrissie Dunbar said. ‘The worst of it’s over, the not knowing. It won’t be so bad. And I couldn’t have borne to have you put away and to have to carry on with folk talking behind my back. We’ll just have to live it out. We’ll be together again, in time, and there should be some money left after the farm’s sold up. No’ a lot, but we’ll have the pension soon after. We’ll get by.’

  They were both looking at me as the symbol of the law. ‘If you’ve made up your minds,’ I said, ‘would you care to write out statements in your own hands and your own words? Start by saying that you’re making them of your free will and without threats or inducements and then just tell it as it happened.’

  ‘I don’t think that you should,’ Keith said. Now that the riddle was solved, he had turned his coat. ‘Not until you’ve seen a solicitor. I could fetch Mr Enterkin.’

  They shook their heads in unison. ‘We’ll not make a last-ditch battle of it,’ Brian said.