Doghouse (Three Oaks Book 3)

by Gerald Hammond

  An hour later, I was ready to set out after Isobel. But first, I felt the need of a hot drink. I went into the house and took off my heavy coat.

  We had at last got round to fitting telephone extensions through the house. Beth was taking a call in the kitchen. On the stove, the percolator was bubbling as usual. Our comings and goings were often too irregular for the proper preparation of tea. I poured Beth a cup and put it by her elbow. She thanked me with a nod.

  I was on the point of pouring a cup for myself when I heard a car on the gravel outside. Hoping for a customer, I went to the front door. A woman in her thirties, attractive in an Amazonian way, was getting out of a dusty saloon car. She had a haughty nose, a strong jaw and dark blonde hair which seemed to be held in perfect shape by strength of will rather than by any known lacquer. She was comfortably but smartly dressed for the cold weather, but I guessed that under the loose tweed coat there was a figure to set the hormones in motion. I was rather pleased with myself for the thought. It had been some years since I had felt unspecific lust.

  ‘Mr Cunningham?’

  I said that I was and asked what I could do with her. I meant to say ‘for’ her but my tongue made a Freudian slip.

  She smiled a faint smile of superior amusement, as an aunt might smile at a child, but let it go by. ‘Good morning, sir,’ she said briskly. She produced a card. ‘Sergeant Bedale. CID, Central Region. I want to discuss the death of George Muir. I believe you made some comments to the police in Tarbet.’ She was crisp, no-nonsense and, I decided, probably the bossy type.

  I looked round guiltily but nobody was in earshot and most of the windows were closed against the cold of the day.

  If Beth saw me alone with an attractive visitor we would never dislodge her, and I had no wish to share my doubts with any of George Muir’s family unless and until I had to. For one thing, I still hoped that I might be making a stink for no good reason. So I ushered the sergeant into the sitting room. She seemed to march rather than walk. When I took her coat, I saw that the wool dress did indeed show off the sort of rounded figure which, while owing very little to artificial aids, would be an irritation to other women and a temptation to men. I tried not to admire it too obviously.

  I indicated a chair. ‘I was just going to have coffee,’ I said. ‘Will you join me?’

  She nodded graciously. ‘Black, no sugar.’

  Beth was still on the phone. I poured two cups and carried them through. The sitting room was warm with the central heating, but its colours were cool and it always seemed bleak in winter with the fire laid but not lit. I put a match to the sticks and glanced for a moment at the blank wall above the mantel where George Muir’s picture would hang. We settled down.

  ‘I was expecting a reaction either much sooner or not at all,’ I said.

  ‘It went all the way to the top and came back down again,’ she said. ‘That took time. I’m told to look into it and to report whether it should be followed up further. You thought that it would be swept under the carpet?’

  ‘I expected the local chap to drop it in the bin as soon as I was outside the door. I rather hoped that he would. That’s probably what I’d have done myself, in his place. I certainly made it clear that I had no intention of taking it any further. Having doubts, I felt I had to report them. But I could still hope that I was wrong.’

  ‘That’s understandable.’ She looked at me, considering. ‘What you expected might well have happened. But I think that the officers who went to investigate may have been a bit high-handed with the local men.’ She opened a capacious leather handbag and flipped a large notebook out and open in a single movement. ‘Tell me about cartridge loading. Why do men load their own. To save money?’

  ‘Not entirely. The commonest shotgun is the twelve-bore and the mainstream twelve-bore cartridge is churned out by the million. If you buy in quantity you can buy good cartridges almost as cheaply as you can load them yourself. But I suppose the makers have to stop the production line to put other cartridges through, so you pay just as much for smaller cartridges. And the magnum cartridges cost the earth.’

  ‘Magnum cartridges, such as Mr Muir was loading, would be necessary for geese?’ she asked.

  ‘Arguably yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a matter of preference. Geese are big and they fly high. According to the pundits, you use your fieldcraft to be where you’ll have them within range, but that’s easier written than done. There’s a lot to be said for giving yourself a margin of range. It can make the difference between a clean kill and a pricked bird. The other reason for loading your own is that you can’t always buy the cartridge you want when you want it. But you can find a loading recipe which gives you exactly what you want and stick to it.’

  She was jotting rapidly in shorthand as I spoke. ‘And how is this piece of magic performed?’ she asked.

  ‘You can get a machine, but if you don’t load many cartridges it could take a lifetime to pay for itself. George Muir used hand-tools. Hang on and I’ll show you. I used to hand-load. I don’t keep the materials any more – the business buys me my cartridges – but I still have the tools.’

  I went through the kitchen. In my little workshop and junk room behind the ‘shop’ I got out my old hand-tools and a spent cartridge. I opened the gun-safe and dropped a live cartridge into my pocket.

  On the way back I noticed that Beth, who was still on the phone, had finished her coffee. I removed the cup and laid a knife and fork in front of her. ‘Very funny,’ she said. She returned to the phone. ‘No, I was speaking to John. He’s being sarcastic. Go on.’

  I kissed the top of her head and went on through to the drawing room. ‘Here are my own tools,’ I said. ‘George Muir’s were similar, except that his is a beautiful antique set with ivory handles and adjustable measures.

  ‘Here’s a fired cartridge case and here’s an unfired one.’ I put the two plastic cases in front of her. ‘The first step is to re-size the cases – using this—’ I showed her the re-sizing die. ‘And something has to make the thing go bang when the firing pin hits it, so you have to replace the primer.’ I went through an outline of the motions.

  ‘George Muir had already re-sized and primed his empty cases. It’s easier to do one step at a time with all of them. You build up a rhythm and you aren’t constantly switching tools.

  ‘His next step would have been to put powder into the cases, using a measure like this one, and push a wad down on top. He used fibre wads – miniature cylinders, rather than the moulded plastic wads. And the final step—’

  ‘You needn’t go on,’ she said. ‘I load for my husband, so I do know the basics of reloading. I just wanted to know how much you knew about it. Now tell me why you’re so sure that it wasn’t an accident.’

  I felt myself flush. Perhaps I had been using a patronising tone borrowed from children’s television. But she had led me to believe that she was starting from scratch. There had been no need for such a set-down. I decided that I did not like Sergeant Bedale. But, I reminded myself, I had invoked the police and she was their representative. I did not have to like her.

  ‘Have you been to the studio?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet. There would have been no point until I knew what you were suggesting.’ Something in her tone as well as in her choice of words let me know that my suggestions were of only faint interest and probably indecent.

  I held onto my temper. ‘I don’t know that I’m suggesting anything in particular,’ I said. ‘I noticed some anomalies and I’m passing them on. George Muir had two iron pots on the work-bench in his studio, one for powder and one for shot. They seem to have been small cooking pots, but they were ideal for his purpose – wide enough to get a hand into while holding a spoon or a measure, and with tight-fitting lids which couldn’t easily be dislodged. His powder would be perfectly safe in a pot like that while the lid was firmly on. You follow me?’

  She nodded without looking up from her notes.

  ‘The pot which had held his powder ha
d been pulled forward to the middle of the bench. There was a tiny hole in it.’

  That made her look up. ‘There was nothing in the original report about a hole.’

  ‘It was very inconspicuous. A very small hole in a black pot all stained with soot, seen against the shadow on the bench beyond it.’

  Her eyes – which, I noticed, were a surprisingly dark blue – were fastened on me, but as if I had been a fingerprint or a bloodstain rather than a living, breathing person. ‘How did it happen that you noticed what a trained detective had missed?’

  ‘I only spotted the hole because I happened to seat myself so that I was looking through it to where the light was falling on the pale bench beyond. Even so, it took me some time to realise that it was a hole and not a fleck of something pale. But if the hole had been there for any length of time, Muir would have noticed it. He’d have been bound to see grains of spilled powder on the bench – it becomes a habit to look for them and sweep them up. He could easily have changed over and put the shot into the pot with the hole in it – the hole was much too small to pass the Number Three shot which he was using. So the hole must have been new and he didn’t know that it was there.’

  Sergeant Bedale looked up again. ‘The explosion could have found a flaw in the metal. A piece of included slag.’

  The fire had burned up and was casting a flattering glow on her. Her face now looked as if it might sometimes be friendly, but I was not going to respond to it. She had been playing me along. Although I was doing most of the talking, she still had control. The one thing guaranteed to light my fuse was any reference to ‘the public’, suggesting that the speaker was somehow poised above an amorphous and common-place herd. Even while I was in the army I had seen the ranks of supposedly regimented and identical soldiers and had known that they were individuals, each with his virtues and his aspirations; but the police, I knew, often fell into the trap of this ‘them and us’ attitude. The Sergeant, treating me as a member of ‘the public’ and therefore of an inferior order, made me itch to smack her bottom.

  It took an effort of will to remain calm and polite. ‘It’s within the bounds of possibility,’ I said, ‘although the hole looked too neat and round for that. But next, how did a spark arrive at the powder? His wife was adamant that he had knocked his pipe out before going through and that the explosion occurred only a few seconds later. I can’t accept the idea of a spark strong enough to last the journey that was neither felt nor smelled.

  ‘Either the lid was still on the pot or it wasn’t. If the lid was off, the powder would have burned rather than exploded. Shotgun propellant is normally a comparatively slow-burning explosive. It has to be confined if it’s going to build up pressure for an explosion. The lid of the other pot fitted tightly. It took quite an effort to remove it. That would have provided enough resistance. What’s more, the lid must have been in place from the way it had fragmented and the bits of it were sent flying around the room. So whatever triggered the explosion was an internal mechanism or it was introduced through that small hole.

  ‘Finally, Sergeant, there had been shot pellets in with the powder. It had added to the shrapnel effect. No home-loader would ever allow that to happen. Sooner or later, he’d fire a shot while some pellets from the previous cartridge were still in the barrel. He’d end up with little bulges like pimples along the expensive barrel of his gun.’

  I ground to a halt at last.

  Sergeant Bedale put down her notebook and finished her coffee. She stared into the fire. I waited patiently. ‘You were quite right to bring this to our attention,’ she said. A pat on the head for a good boy. ‘It’ll have to be looked into. But, just off the top of my head, I can see other explanations for what you’ve told me – always assuming that your observations were accurate.

  ‘Consider this possibility. George Muir knew about the small hole in the pot, so he did as you suggested. He used that pot for his shot. On the occasion when he finished sizing and priming his empty cases, he decided to top up his pots ready for the next step in his reloading programme. It happened that the powder pot was empty, but there was still some shot in the other. By mistake he switched the pots over and decanted powder on top of the shot.

  ‘Then, on the evening of his death, he went through to the studio. He pulled forward the container which now held powder along with some shot. In the process some powder escaped onto the bench. At the last moment, he decided to do something else before beginning to reload – cleaning the tools or checking his measures perhaps. So he had time for another pipe. Or perhaps whatever he decided to do entailed a flame or the production of sparks from his grindstone. The powder on the bench ignited and . . . boom! After such a disturbance in the room, the signs of what he was doing might well be confused or even destroyed.’

  It was my turn to look into the flames. Her theory was ingenious and just as probable as my own. But there was something wrong. It took me a few seconds to remember.

  ‘There was very little sign of charring on the bench,’ I said. ‘It’s built of white wood, slightly grubby but unvarnished. There would have been random burns on the surface. But the only burn mark on it was a faint, straight line. That was what led my eye to the hole in the first place. It could have been made by the escaping flash from the explosion.’

  ‘But?’ she said. The damned woman could read either my tone or my mind.

  ‘But it did make me wonder, for a moment, about the possibility of a fuse.’

  ‘A burning fuse would have left a distinct but irregular burn mark,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps. I was thinking about a fuse made from a pipe-cleaner, one of those woolly wire things. The first fuses were made by soaking a piece of rope in a solution of saltpetre and . . .’ for the moment, memory failed me, ‘. . . and something else. You could do that to a pipe-cleaner. The wire would have entered the hole neatly and the pipe-cleaner would have stuck out horizontally just above the surface of the bench. It would probably be blown against the wall by the explosion and have fallen down the back of the bench. Who’d think anything about a burned pipe-cleaner among the mess?’

  She went back to her scribbling, but she must have been able to write shorthand and think logically at the same time. ‘A delayed action which caught him just as he arrived at the bench,’ she said. ‘Not easily judged.’

  That had been my own first thought. ‘He could have been drugged or knocked on the head,’ I pointed out. ‘Then the delay would only have been necessary in order to give his murderer time to get out of the room.’

  ‘That would seem to rule out any outsiders. You seem to be suggesting that George Muir was murdered by his wife.’

  I opened my mouth to deny it, but we were interrupted.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Beth’s voice said from the door. ‘Oh my God! John, what have you done?’

  I turned my head so quickly that I nearly ricked my neck. Beth was standing in the doorway, white-faced. I got up quickly and went to her. I held out my hands, but she hid hers behind her back.

  Sergeant Bedale’s head was lowered tactfully over her notebook.

  ‘How could you?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘don’t work up a head of steam until I’ve told you about it.’ Beth’s eyes were wandering, unseeing, around the room. ‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t think I’ve done anything that you wouldn’t have wanted me to do, or that you wouldn’t have done yourself if our positions had been reversed. I came across certain signs that your uncle’s death might not have been accidental. Would you expect me to stay dumb and let it be passed off as an accident?’

  ‘You could have told me,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘I suppose I could. But what was the point of upsetting you and Hattie when I wasn’t sure of anything? If you’d found something to suggest that your uncle was probably murdered, would you have kept quiet about it?’ I persisted.

  ‘Well, no. But I’d have consulted you before rushing off to the police.’


  ‘I didn’t want to worry you. I hope – I still hope – that there’s nothing in it. This is Sergeant Bedale. She’s come over to follow it up. I don’t think that she agrees with me. So that’s probably an end to the matter. This is Beth,’ I told the Sergeant. ‘My fiancée and George Muir’s niece.’

  ‘How do you do?’ Beth said politely and then turned back to me. ‘But you said that Hattie killed him.’

  ‘I said nothing of the sort. Sit down, calm down and listen for another moment.’ I persuaded her to join me on the couch although she perched at the far end like a nervous sparrow. ‘The Sergeant inferred that I was putting the blame on Hattie – the widow,’ I explained to Sergeant Bedale. ‘Harriet Muir. But I wasn’t, Beth. The Muirs seem to have been very careless about keys, leaving the front-door key above the door. I wondered about Hattie at first, but I couldn’t see such a houseproud woman letting off a bomb in her own house. And the unsold paintings in the studio represented a large capital sum for her to inherit. She wouldn’t have destroyed them.’

  The Sergeant waited. When Beth made no comment, she said dispassionately, ‘That might depend on how pressing her motivation was.’

  ‘They were fond of each other,’ Beth said. ‘Not stormy lovers but quietly fond.’ Her eyes filled with tears. I held out my handkerchief but she ignored it.

  Such subjective comment was beneath the Sergeant’s notice. ‘Are you sure that you want to stay here?’ she asked kindly. ‘You may find the rest of what we have to say distressing.’

  Beth nodded decisively.

  ‘Very well.’ Sergeant Bedale waited until she had made eye contact with me and then resurrected our discussion. ‘You suggested a delayed action device. It’s possible. A burning fuse would leave a smell in the air which Mr Muir would certainly have noticed if he had been conscious.’

  ‘Almost certainly,’ I said. ‘Although he’d just finished smoking a pipe.’