Doghouse (Three Oaks Book 3)

by Gerald Hammond

  Edgar had had enough of arguing his case to hostile faces. He put his head down and darted suddenly towards the front gates.

  Sergeant Bedale lifted her skirt and took off after him. In flat-heeled shoes she had a rare turn of speed for a woman, and Edgar may have been slowed down by some discomfort in his parts. She caught him halfway across the grass and attempted a very masculine Rugby tackle, but he handed her off and fled on through the gates.

  The Sergeant rolled over and sat up as I got to her. Beyond the gates we heard a car start. I helped the Sergeant to her feet. She was unhurt, but she had been unlucky in her fall and the neat grey suit, which had been painstakingly cleaned of the oily smudge, was now plastered with fresh dog-dirt. She hardly noticed. We walked back together to where the others were still clustered in a stunned group around the door.

  ‘Where’s your phone?’ the Sergeant asked urgently. ‘I must get on to the local force. If Edgar Lawrence murdered his uncle—’

  ‘But he didn’t,’ Beth said quietly.

  Hattie had appeared in the front doorway. ‘What are you saying?’ she demanded. ‘Of course he did no such thing.’

  I sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Hattie,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want you to hear it like this. We just didn’t want you subjected to any more harassment until we could be sure, one way or the other. But I was never satisfied that your husband’s death was accidental.’

  Hattie just nodded. ‘No more was I,’ she said.

  The Sergeant, now looking more complete with her eternal notebook in her hand, stared at Hattie. ‘You never said anything to the officers,’ she said.

  ‘I told them that George was far too careful to blow himself up like that. If they cared to ignore me, I’d nothing more to tell them. I could have been wrong. And if I’d set them thinking, they’d as likely have started to picture me creeping up behind him and tossing a lighted match over his shoulder or some such foolishness. So I told them what I was sure of and no more than that. My thoughts were my own until now. But if anyone harmed George, it surely wasn’t Edgar. George was speaking to him on the phone only minutes before it happened.’

  ‘Which one of them made the call?’ Sergeant Bedale asked quickly. She was still eager to get at the phone but hesitated to spread the alarm in the face of Hattie’s certainty.

  ‘George did. So Edgar was at home and he’d have needed to be in that Concorde to cover the distance in the time.’

  ‘But that doesn’t matter,’ Beth said unhappily. ‘He wouldn’t have had to be there.’

  ‘Well, then, there’s another reason,’ Hattie said. ‘George was thinking of changing his will. His paintings had been making good prices and he felt that he’d not be robbing me if he left Edgar a legacy of some money. I was agreeable. But George never got around to it. Every time he was on the point of doing it, the silly boy put his back up over something trivial and George would delay again.

  ‘Mind you,’ Hattie said warming to her theme, ‘I’m not saying that Edgar wouldn’t have been capable of killing his uncle. It’s my opinion that the boy’s a skellum through and through. But he’s too much notion of the value of money to have done it before the will was changed.’

  ‘Did he know that it hadn’t been changed?’ I asked.

  ‘He knew fine,’ Hattie said. ‘George had made a point of it.’

  ‘That seems to settle it for the moment,’ the Sergeant said unhappily. She looked around the faces until she found mine. ‘I need to have a word with you. In private. Can we use your sitting room again?’

  I looked at the state of the Sergeant’s clothing. ‘I think we’d better use the kitchen,’ I suggested.

  The Sergeant fetched a flat package from her car and followed me into the kitchen, where two pans were simmering gently on the stove and a smell of roasting hung in the air. She wiped her feet carefully before entering the house, although she might have removed more of the mess if she had rolled on the mat. When she made for one of the soft, fireside chairs, I headed her towards one of the Windsor chairs by the table. At least it could be carried outside and hosed down. She blinked at me, her mind elsewhere, and put down the package.

  ‘Hadn’t you better clean yourself up a bit before you sit down?’ I asked her. In the warm atmosphere of the kitchen the Sergeant, to put it bluntly, was beginning to offend.

  She glanced down and slapped absently at a stem of grass which clung to her skirt. She examined her fingers and seemed to realise her state for the first time. She uttered a mildly rude but apt word in the tone of voice which suggests that the speaker’s patience is being tested beyond endurance, moved to the sink and washed her hands. I gave her a roll of paper towels, but what she needed was a bath, a laundry and a visit to the dry cleaner’s.

  While she dabbed ineffectually at her person she spoke, still in the same strained tone. ‘I’m in a mess. You helped me to get into it and I hope you can help me to get out again.’

  ‘I will if I can,’ I said. ‘For starters, would you like me to clean your back?’

  She still had enough of her old spirit to look at me as though I were trying to get my hands on her for a cheap thrill. ‘I can manage,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that sort of mess.’

  She hung her jacket over a chairback and swivelled her skirt round on her hips. While she dabbed and wiped, she spoke over her shoulder to me. There was now no trace of the over-confident officer who had so much irritated me. Instead there was a woman, worried and uncertain, seeking help and even perhaps a little comfort. I thought that I could detect in her unconscious body language more than a trace of the small girl who had once expected the big, strong man to solve every problem for her.

  ‘You had me convinced that George Muir was murdered and that Alistair Young killed him,’ she said.

  ‘I agree with the first. I don’t think that I ever told you the second,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe not. But what you implied convinced me. Perhaps you . . . we . . . were jumping to conclusions, or perhaps not. I still think that he may . . .’ She broke off and took several deep breaths before stumbling on. ‘I don’t know what to think. But, anyway, I decided that although any evidence he’d left in the Muir’s house may have been scattered or destroyed, there might be some in his own. Wires, a detonating device, fuses, radio, anything like that. At least the tools and materials he’d used. If nothing else, I thought that he might still have a tin containing some pistol powder. He wouldn’t put such a thing out with his rubbish. A hell of a bang in the municipal incinerator would attract just the sort of notice he wanted to avoid.

  ‘None of my direct superiors was around on Friday so I took the chance to use what you might call the back door. The duty inspector knew no more than that I’d been told to look into George Muir’s death, so I span him a tale – I must have been out of my mind – and he went after a search warrant. And he got it.’

  ‘Ouch!’ I said.

  ‘Yes. God, how I wish they’d turned him down! Yesterday, I borrowed two men and a WDC and went out to serve the warrant. I thought, as you said yourself, that there had to be something.’

  ‘And you found nothing?’

  ‘I’m not sure whether we found anything or not,’ she said. There was a quaver in her voice. ‘We found nothing whatever directly related to the murder. But we did find something suspicious, tucked behind a chest of drawers. Mr Young was furious. I don’t think that I ever saw anybody in such temper. He swore that he’d had them for years. He even suggested that they were his own work, but when I said that no doubt his wife could confirm it he backed off a bit. But he insisted that he was going to make an official complaint and also sue me personally. He claims that he knows everybody in the hierarchy between my inspector and God. Even if he doesn’t . . .’

  ‘In other words,’ I said, ‘he’s going to kick up hell.’

  ‘Exactly. And if he does . . . well, I’ve stepped out of line. I was told to make tactful enquiries and to report back. But I tried to be too clever. I thought tha
t I could bring the case back to my superiors all neatly tied up with ribbon.’ It was sackcloth and ashes time. If her hands had not been full of messy paper towels, she would have been wringing them. ‘Now I’ve got egg all over my face unless I can stall him until he cools down enough to see that he’d be offering himself up to be pilloried by the media. Or . . .’ She stopped dead.

  ‘Or what?’ I said helpfully.

  She suddenly made up her mind and began again in a rush. ‘Or unless what I found had been stolen from George Muir’s house. That could start a whole new ball game. If nothing else, it would be evidence that he’d made illicit entry into the Muir house. That might not mean that he’d set a trap for George Muir – he can only have wanted them for his own gratification – but it would justify the search.’ She paused again and then lowered her voice. ‘I want you to look in that package on the table. Tell me what you think. And I’m not even going to look round while you have them out.’

  This was very intriguing. Without quite believing it, I could make a guess as to what was coming. Two flat sheets of cardboard had been tied together with tape. I untied the tape and opened the package.

  It held more than a dozen sheets of heavy paper bearing watercolours or ink and wash drawings, all meticulously finished and detailed. The ladies depicted would have been easy to recognise; indeed I thought that I recognised two of them although I had only seen them in passing. Every detail was erotic to the point of being—

  But no. I was on the point of writing that the pictures were pornographic, but somehow that would not have been true. They had been executed with charm and humour and even a sort of love. In their way, they were beautiful. If asked, I would have had to say that they were Art.

  ‘I think I need to ask my fiancée about these,’ I said.

  The Sergeant almost turned round but thought better of it. ‘Your fiancée? I’d forgotten that you were engaged to Miss Cattrell. I keep thinking of her as your daughter. Surely you won’t show her . . . those!’

  ‘She’s mature enough to take it. She’s twenty-six,’ I said. ‘No, on second thoughts, twenty-eight.’

  ‘You had to think about it?’ For a moment the old, superior amusement showed in her voice.

  ‘Time goes so quickly when you’re enjoying somebody,’ I said.

  ‘I thought that you were cradle-snatching.’

  ‘People do. But remember that she was George Muir’s niece.’

  ‘That will make it worse for her.’ The Sergeant sighed in the general direction of the window. ‘Well, I suppose that they stop just short of the boundary of hard-core porn – which makes it more difficult to justify my removal of them – so you may as well go ahead. Don’t blame me if she goes into shock. I was thinking that you might make a tactful approach to Mrs Muir.’

  The idea of showing the sketches to Hattie made me shudder. I opened the kitchen door and called to Beth. She came out of the sitting room, turned for a last word with Hattie and then joined me.

  ‘Isobel’s gone out to finish that hedge,’ she said. ‘It’s her form of doodling. I wish she’d leave it alone. I do it straighter than she does.’

  ‘You can straighten it up tomorrow,’ I told her. ‘It’ll recover in a year or two. Now, brace yourself and take a look at these. They were recovered from the Youngs’ house.’

  Beth looked down at the pictures which I had spread on the kitchen table. ‘At least Uncle George had the decency not to put my face on any of them,’ she said. She picked up an ink and wash monochrome drawing. ‘This is the one I saw in Uncle George’s studio.’

  The Sergeant, who was showing signs of a much more delicate upbringing than I would have suspected, glanced round, flushed scarlet and looked up at the ceiling. ‘You’re sure?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you think I could be mistaken?’ Beth retorted. She sounded amused.

  Sergeant Bedale was back at the sink, dabbing away violently. She shook her head. ‘But how can we be sure that Mr Muir or his widow didn’t give them away?’ she said.

  ‘That’s easy,’ Beth said. ‘I’ll ask her.’

  She left the room before I could stop her. I shuffled the drawings hastily back into their folder and waited for the explosion. Beth returned.

  ‘I don’t think Hattie knows about Uncle George’s lady friends,’ she said, ‘so I just asked whether either of them had given any sketches to Mr Young. She said definitely not. She said that, after Uncle George was killed, Mr Young asked whether he could help himself to one or two sketches to remember his old friend by, but she wasn’t giving anything away until the agent had been through them and advised her.’

  ‘That does it,’ the Sergeant said. But before she could get around to explaining exactly what it did, there was a loud scream from the garden.

  Chapter Eight

  We met Hattie in the hall. The four of us erupted onto the gravel together.

  An electric cable snaked across the grass to where, across the drive from the patch of jungle, the road swung away and the hedge separated us from the adjacent field. Henry was lying on his back with the hedge-trimmer still in his hand and Isobel crouching over him. The cable, I noticed, had been severed close to the trimmer.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Isobel was saying over and over again.

  Sergeant Bedale shouldered her aside and felt Henry’s pulse. ‘Ambulance,’ she snapped. She put her hands over his heart and pressed sharply.

  I raced back indoors and dialled the emergency services. When I returned to the scene, the Sergeant was administering the kiss of life. I thought, for a stupid moment, that it was a pity Henry wasn’t awake to enjoy it. I also thought that the Sergeant, although as anxious as any of us, was secretly relieved to be called on for decisive action.

  ‘An ambulance is on the way,’ I said. ‘They said that it wouldn’t take long.’

  ‘His heart had stopped,’ Beth whispered. ‘She says that it’s going again. I thought that she was going to bust his ribs.’ She sounded awed by the nearness of death.

  Isobel was wringing her hands. ‘He ran the cable out for me,’ she said, not for the first time. With another flash of insight, I thought that she was babbling just to give her mouth something to do instead of screaming again. ‘He plugged the trimmer in and gave it a buzz to be sure that it was working, and he just went down in a heap. I thought he’d had a heart attack but when I touched him I felt a shock. He was still holding the trimmer and it was still running. I knew the first thing to do was to cut off the current, but it seemed miles back to the shed. So I just rammed the cable into the teeth of the trimmer.’

  The Sergeant straightened her back. ‘That was sensible,’ she said. ‘Best thing you could have done.’ Henry made a snoring sound and breathed loudly.

  Hattie had vanished. I saw her struggling back over the grass with an armful of blankets and went to help. We wrapped Henry against the chill of a day which was turning bitterly cold. His breathing faltered and Isobel turned white and swayed against Hattie. The Sergeant went back to work.

  Beth pulled me aside. ‘I thought that new thing you fitted—’

  ‘The earth leakage circuit breaker?’

  ‘Yes, that thing. I thought it was supposed to pop out and cut off the current if anything like that happened.’

  ‘It is,’ I said.

  Henry was breathing again. Beth scuttled off across the grass. When she came back, she was grim-faced. ‘The handle of the mower was leaning up against it,’ she said. ‘Who uses a lawn mower in the middle of winter?’

  It seemed an odd question. ‘Nobody,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly!’

  An ambulance was coming through the village, flashing a blue light and braying uncertainly. I ran for the road and stood waving until they saw me and accelerated towards Three Oaks.

  Two minutes later, Henry, now breathing steadily, had been lifted by stretcher into the ambulance. I had never seen Isobel, my calm, competent partner, so disoriented. She was determined to go with Henry in the ambulance and had
little difficulty persuading Hattie to go with her for support.

  Beth, the Sergeant and I were left standing aimlessly, like stragglers after a party.

  I picked up the hedge-trimmer with its short, severed cord. ‘I’ll throw this away,’ I said. ‘It’s time that we had one of the newer, plastic bodied ones.’

  ‘No,’ Beth said quickly. ‘Save it. You might be throwing away evidence.’

  ‘Of what?’ I asked. I had had no time to think more deeply than of my anxiety over Henry.

  She looked at me as though I were stupid. I was ashamed to recognise the look as one which I had thrown at her more than once over the years. ‘Doesn’t it seem to you that this was one accident too many?’ she asked.

  I suppose that I was still being slow, but too much had been happening. ‘Who’d want to hurt Henry?’ I asked. Beth started to coil up the cable. ‘Be careful,’ I said.

  ‘I unplugged it at the other end. John, you’re not thinking straight. Nobody wanted to hurt Henry. Who’d expect him to use the trimmer?’

  ‘You, you mean?’ Beth usually undertook all gardening work – Isobel assisting, against Beth’s wishes, whenever she felt in need of fresh air and therapy. ‘My God!’ I said. ‘Somebody tried to kill you?’

  ‘Not me either,’ Beth said patiently. ‘Come into the house.’

  ‘I’ll take this apart,’ I said. ‘If somebody’s tampered with the wiring—’

  The Sergeant had been listening in rapt silence. ‘In that event,’ she said, ‘you’d be destroying the evidence. The girl’s right. Put it by.’

  We trailed after Beth. I locked the trimmer away in my junk room and joined them in the kitchen. Beth had turned off the gasses, but the smell of Sunday lunch dominated the room. My watch said that lunch was already overdue and suddenly I realised that I was starving. When my uncertain appetite recovered it was inclined to do so with a bang.

  ‘I’m ravenous,’ I said.