Doghouse (Three Oaks Book 3)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘You said that somebody might have wanted to burn the studio,’ I said softly. ‘What was it you wouldn’t tell the Sergeant or Henry?’

  ‘I suppose there’s no harm telling you. But this is for your ears only.’ She closed her book on a marker and laid it aside. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

  ‘You know damn well—’ I began.

  She shushed me and pointed at the door.

  The house was solidly built and the doors fitted well, but I lowered my voice anyway. ‘You know damn well I can,’ I said.

  ‘And you won’t be funny about it?’

  ‘I don’t suppose so.’

  She put her book down and turned to face me. ‘Well . . . Uncle George was an awful man for the women.’

  I felt myself jump. ‘I knew that. I didn’t know that you did.’

  ‘I’ve known for years. How did you find out?’

  ‘Bruce Fullerton told me. He’d seen him with a chubby blonde once. That’s why he seemed surprised when he met Hattie.’

  ‘Uncle George thought that he was being very clever and careful,’ Beth said, ‘but I knew even when I was at school. All the girls at school with me knew that he was my uncle, and whenever one of them saw him with another lady they’d tell me – not to score off me but as something to giggle about. He had a fatherly sort of charm which seemed to make them want to roll over and have their tummies tickled. Not the schoolgirls – we were too young to see him as anything but an old man. But I think that some of their mothers and aunts used to think of Uncle George when they were making love with their husbands.’

  ‘It came over in that photograph of him,’ I said.

  ‘I bet a woman took that photograph,’ Beth said thoughtfully. She made one of her sudden and confusing changes of subject. ‘Did you know that there’s a gallery in Italy which has a whole wing devoted to the paintings that great artists have knocked off for the erotic amusement of themselves or their best clients? The public doesn’t get to go inside, it’s kept for VIPs. Typical!’ Beth murmured sleepily.

  ‘Do they have any George Muirs hanging there?’

  Beth elbowed me. ‘You promised you wouldn’t make any jokes!’

  ‘It was a serious question. I’ll ask a different one. Did your uncle do that sort of thing?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know that he did it often,’ Beth said. ‘But, as he got older, he may have needed a turn-on. When you went into the studio with Mr Fullerton, did you go through all his sketches?’

  ‘No. As far as I remember, Fullerton found what he wanted near the top of the pile. I think he glanced through the rest of them, but we were talking about something else at the time.’

  Beth snuggled up against me. Her voice was barely audible even at that small distance. Her breath tickled my chin. ‘You remember that I took a week’s holiday last spring? I went through by train and Uncle George picked me up from Dumbarton.

  ‘He used to let me come and sit with him in the studio while he painted, because I could sit quietly. I think that I was the only person he ever allowed inside the door. Hattie was forbidden the place. He said that she fidgeted and moved things around. Anyway, he used to get totally absorbed in his painting. I enjoyed watching him and seeing the painting grow under his brush.

  ‘Once, to while away the time, I glanced through the pile of sketches. And very good most of them were too. He looked round suddenly, saw what I was doing and told me to come away from there, quite sharply. But not before I’d seen one in particular. It was a finished drawing rather than a sketch. It was so good that I thought for a moment it was a photograph.’

  ‘A nude?’ I asked.

  ‘It was a bit more than that. Sort of soft porn. Nothing perverse, but it was – what’s the word I want? – lascivious, I think. Every fetish in the book and some I’d never heard of. It made me feel hot, and I’m not even a man.’

  ‘Was it anybody you knew?’ I asked.

  ‘No. But I’d know her again anywhere. And if there was a lot of that sort of material around somebody might easily want to bomb the place.’

  ‘Or even kill two Uncle Georges with one stone,’ I said. ‘I wonder what Grogan will make of them.’

  ‘Mr Grogan said that he could be very discreet,’ Beth reminded me. ‘I think that’s what he meant. So Uncle George’s habit of putting his randiest fantasies – if they were fantasies – down on paper couldn’t have been that much of a secret. Maybe some of them have found their way onto the black market before now. Or else he knew that all artists leave that sort of legacy behind. Anyway, Grogan didn’t get them. I sneaked into the studio and went through the pile on Sunday morning while you were still having breakfast. There was nothing I couldn’t have shown the minister in the presence of all the elders of the kirk and their mothers.’

  I tried to visualise such a drawing and failed. Another thought came to me. ‘A drawing like that would hardly be proof of anything. I mean, a competent artist could draw a body and put anybody’s face on it. For all you know, there’s an erotic drawing somewhere with your head on its shoulders.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Beth said. She snorted with laughter so that her soft shape jiggled against me. ‘So if one turns up, you’ll believe me when I tell you that I didn’t pose for it?’

  ‘Who’s making jokes now?’ I said. I found the thought distressful. ‘Well, we’ll cross that bridge if we ever come to it. I suppose your uncle was above blackmail? Think how easy it would be for him to paint a study of some prominent lady, wearing nothing but lace pants and a come hither smile, and threaten to put it in his next show. Most of them would buy it for a fancy price just to keep it out of circulation.’ I stopped to think about it and an immediate snag occurred to me. ‘But if he was getting fancy prices for his work anyway, he wouldn’t have needed to risk being sued or murdered, would he?’

  Beth said nothing. All the talk about erotic paintings had begun to put me in a certain mood but I realised suddenly that she had fallen asleep.

  *

  Henry, of course, had told the whole story to Isobel, who arrived next morning in a mood in which curiosity and suspicion were nicely mingled.

  Hattie, as she had admitted, was no hand with dogs; but she was a willing worker, had a sturdy Highland physique and did not turn up her nose at such tasks as clearing dogs’ messes from the grass. She could also throw a dummy further than any of us. Isobel soon forgot, or had never accepted, that Hattie was suspect. The two older ladies became as thick as thieves.

  It was hardly to be expected that Sergeant Bedale would leave us in peace. She turned up, late on the Wednesday morning, very neat in grey flannel, while I was teaching a small group of youngsters on the grass. Her air of being in command had diminished and she was even conciliatory to the point of patting any dog who came within reach. Hattie and Isobel had gone off to The Moss together and Beth was out in the car, fetching supplies of biscuit meal. I kennelled the dogs and took the Sergeant through the shop into my junk room.

  ‘I saw the burn mark on the work-bench,’ she said. ‘You were right – it looks too tidy to be the result of spillage. And that was all that I managed to see,’ she added, more in sorrow than anger. ‘Everything else, every other damn thing, had been tidied away, carried off or swept up. Sometimes I wonder how the human race has managed to make even such little progress as it has, with every second member of it too stupid to come in out of the rain.’

  ‘Well, don’t rage me about it,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do it and it wasn’t my idea. Presumably you’ve collected the contents of her dustbin?’

  The Sergeant, who was in a fractious mood, threw up her eyes. ‘I have. And somewhere among the cabbage stalks and rotten tomatoes there may be some tiny item like your burned pipe-cleaner. And I was told not to go for any help from Forensic until after my report’s been considered and accepted. It’s a lovely life!’

  ‘Let me bring a little sunshine into it. Mrs Muir brought me her husband’s shooting and reloading gear, so you may find som
e of what you want in this lot.’

  I lifted the heavy carton onto my own work-bench and opened it. The two pots and a bag of shot accounted for most of the weight.

  ‘Shall I leave you to it?’ I asked.

  ‘You stay.’ She meant it for a command but it came out as a request. Adversity had humanised the Sergeant. ‘You’ve sown the wind which brought me this impossible and thankless job. If somebody has to reap the whirlwind, you’re elected. Where’s this celebrated hole?’

  I could easily have told her to do her own snooping but, in truth, I was becoming interested. I lifted out the lidless pot and rotated it until I could point out the hole. She studied it from all angles, including lifting it to look through it at the light.

  ‘It’s round,’ she said at last. ‘Perfectly round. It was drilled. And it’s sooty. What size is it?’

  I got out my set of twist drills. She took them from me and probed gently. ‘I don’t want the soot disturbed more than necessary,’ she said. She satisfied herself that a drill of 1/16 inch diameter seemed to fit exactly, made a note in her ever-present book and peered gloomily into the bottom of the pot. ‘I suppose we have to be thankful that it hasn’t been scoured out with a Brillo pad,’ she said. ‘Without destroying any evidence, what do you make of this guck in the bottom?’

  ‘Mostly burned powder,’ I said. ‘You must know what that looks like as well as I do, if you’ve been helping your husband. I thought that it seemed to be mixed with the ash of paper plus a few pellets of shot.’

  We stood, peering into the pot like two of the witches in Macbeth. The Sergeant poked the sooty bottom with the blunt end of her ballpoint. ‘There’s a little lump of something stuck there,’ she said.

  ‘Probably melted pellets among the burned powder,’ I said. ‘You’d better save it for the lads from Forensic, if it ever gets that far.’

  ‘If.’ She tore a page out of her notebook, laid it on my work-bench and tipped the pot over it. A few grains of powder drifted down onto the white paper. ‘It doesn’t look quite right,’ she said. ‘When we push a wad of paper through my husband’s gun, as a first step towards cleaning it, the soot looks very much like this but not quite the same.’

  ‘Well it wouldn’t,’ I said.

  Her dark blue eyes shot a suspicious look right through me. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect it to be the same powder. What does your husband use?’

  ‘Nobel Eighty,’ she said.

  ‘For geese . . .’ I looked deep in the carton and found the white tin which I had seen in the drawer in the studio. It was cross hatched with blue and pink lines. From the weight, it was nearly full. ‘I thought so,’ I said. ‘French Poudre T. A large-grained, progressive powder, more suited to magnum loads. Unburnt, it’s a silvery colour, quite unlike the usual black or dark grey.’

  The Sergeant had a habit of not seeming to listen, although I was sure that she would be able to quote my words against me if the occasion should arise. She had taken the tin from me and was weighing it in her hands. After a careful look around, in case some naked light should be waiting to pounce, she unscrewed the lid and peered inside. ‘Silver,’ she said. ‘And nearly full.’

  I rooted again in the carton and found a few spent magnum shells, presumably cartridges which George Muir had fired since he began the reloading process on the rest, but they were internally clean. A cartridge is in the area of greatest pressure and combustion is usually complete. I tipped a little of the silver powder into the lid of a tin and struck a match. The Sergeant retired as far as the confines of the room would allow. The powder flared spectacularly but harmlessly. I tipped the remaining burnt grains onto another page.

  The Sergeant peered at the tiny grains. ‘Similar,’ she said at last. ‘I think, without being sure, that there’s a difference in colour. I’m rather more certain that the grain size is different. But I don’t understand.’

  ‘If the powders are different –’ I said, ‘and only forensic examination could tell you for sure – then either the murderer didn’t know what powder George Muir used or how much of it he had available—’

  ‘And who would or wouldn’t know such a thing?’ the Sergeant asked.

  ‘I hadn’t finished. Or,’ I said, ‘the murderer knew that Poudre T is a rather slow-burning powder. He’d want something a bit livelier if he was going to build up pressure for a good bang before the lid blew off the pot. Possibly H Two-forty or Hercules Bullseye, intended for pistols.’

  ‘And plenty of it?’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ I said. ‘If George Muir killed himself accidentally, or if somebody else used his powder to do the job, he or they probably finished emptying one tin and opened another.’

  ‘So where would the other one be? The widow removed it in her orgy of tidying?’

  ‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t open tins. She’d have lifted what there was, very gingerly, and dropped it into this cardboard box. If George Muir killed himself accidentally, he probably threw away the empty tin himself. The dustbin’s probably been emptied several times since then. If he was murdered, the killer carried the empty tin away with him.’

  ‘Or with her,’ said Sergeant Bedale. She leaned back against my work-bench and looked me in the eye. ‘I’m not convinced by theories involving fuses and timers. I find it easier to visualise a thin electric wire leading through that hole. Can you point me towards anybody other than Mrs Muir who could have set up a trap and removed the evidence before we came?’

  ‘Easily,’ I said, without thinking.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  It was too late to retreat. I spoke up reluctantly. ‘Alistair Young,’ I said.

  She nodded. Evidently she had read the earlier reports with care. ‘First on the scene after the widow,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Motive?’

  I explained that George Muir’s will had provided for an exchange of houses. ‘Mr Young tried to foist his own pet surveyor onto Mrs Muir,’ I said. ‘If he’d got away with it he’d have been able to move his family into a bigger house – which they sorely need – at very little cost to himself. Indirectly, he expected to benefit to the tune of some thousands of pounds.’

  ‘Anybody else?’

  Some silly reticence, or a mistaken sense of male loyalty, restrained me from mentioning George Muir’s amorous tendencies. I preferred to interpret the Sergeant’s question as being directed towards opportunity rather than motive. ‘Not to my knowledge. But the Muirs were very careless about keys. The front-door key was usually on the ledge over the door, ready for the handyman or the daily woman. That sort of arrangement usually becomes public knowledge. Anybody could have got in and out.’

  The Sergeant came away from the bench, revealing a streak of grease across her grey flannel backside. ‘So anybody could have got in to set up such an arrangement while the house was empty,’ she said. ‘Anybody could have lurked outside the window, to make an electrical connection at the moment George Muir arrived at the work-bench. But how could anybody other than Mr or Mrs Young count on getting in and out again to remove the evidence? The studio windows can’t be opened more than a few inches.’

  ‘The evidence would only be a wire,’ I pointed out. ‘It could be pulled out through the window within a few seconds. No need to go inside again. With so much paint and turpentine in the place, one of the windows would have stood open much of the time.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She dropped the tin of powder back in to the carton and picked up the pot. ‘I’ll have to take this lot with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you a receipt.’

  ‘All right.’

  I expected her to pick up the carton and make one of her ungracious exits, leaving me standing around like a prat. Instead, she stood looking at me uncertainly.

  ‘Captain—’

  ‘Mister,’ I said.

  ‘Mister Cunningham . . .’ She paused, in the grip of some internal struggle. ‘What . . . in your personal opinion . . . what do you think I should do now?’r />
  The question took me aback and I wondered whether she was testing me again. ‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘Ask one of your colleagues. Or your husband.’

  ‘My husband wouldn’t be a whole lot of help.’

  ‘Isn’t he in the Force?’

  ‘He is. But he’d rather see me out of it. He wants me to stay at home and be a good little housewife and slipper-warmer. You set this ball rolling and now I’m supposed to pick it up and carry it. What would you advise? What would you do in my place?’

  Her troubled look and the surprising uncertainty in her usually positive eyes were appealing. I was a long way from succumbing to her new, plaintive femininity, but I found myself disliking her rather less. ‘I know damn all about rules and procedures,’ I said carefully, ‘and even less about the personalities you have to cope with. I can only say that I think, on balance, that George Muir was probably murdered. If you decide that you agree, I don’t see that your conscience would allow you to report otherwise. Or are you afraid of being unpopular?’

  ‘I’m unpopular enough already,’ she said wryly. I could believe it. Her usual self-confidence would make enemies, especially among male colleagues competing with her for promotion.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ I said. I stopped, uncertain of what I had been going to say. I went on, picking slowly through the maze. ‘Assume that there was a murder. It wasn’t one of those casual, roadside killings which must be the most difficult to solve. But it wasn’t a habitual criminal’s murder, so you can’t expect any help from informers. Somebody wanted George Muir dead, that’s a starting point. That same somebody must have taken some deliberate steps and he – or she, if you like – couldn’t have done so without leaving some evidence somewhere. My advice would be to go on a bit further before making a report. You might find enough evidence to justify asking for forensic backup.

  ‘It seems to me,’ I finished, ‘that your choice lies between that and taking the easy option . . . confirming George Muir’s death as an accident.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s just what I was thinking,’ she said. She paused and then added, ‘Thank you.’