Doghouse (Three Oaks Book 3)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘How can you think of food?’ Beth began disgustedly. ‘So’m I,’ she added, and looked at Sergeant Bedale. ‘You’ll join us?’

  The Sergeant nodded. ‘While you tell me a bit more,’ she said. Her clothes had picked up a whole lot more dog-dirt as she knelt over Henry, but she hadn’t noticed.

  ‘All right.’ Beth looked at me, about to say something else, and took in my appearance for the first time. ‘John, you’re frozen.’ She patted my clothes. ‘And you’re soaking wet. You’ve been hanging around out there without even a jacket on. You must be chilled through. Your lunch will keep a little longer. Go and take a hot bath and change your clothes.’

  ‘Not if there’s some nutter scattering accidents around and leaving them to happen,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody’s in any danger just now,’ Beth said in tones of exasperation. ‘Except that you’ll catch your death if you don’t do what I say. Take my word for it. Go, go, go!’

  Now that she mentioned it, I realised that my teeth were beginning to chatter. I was gripped by a chill which almost overrode my hunger. A hot bath followed by a meal and an explanation seemed a satisfactory programme.

  *

  As the water’s heat slowly found its way deep into my bones, the old tiredness came over me. I must have dozed. My mind wandered in and around the recent events, rambling freely beyond the confines of time and geography. My dreams strayed into the realms of the incredible. Half waking, I told myself that I was beginning to fantasise. Fanta’s eyes. It became a film title. The Eyes of the Phanta.

  The water was suddenly cooler. I renewed its heat. Hunger and curiosity began to take over. I had been aware of female voices below me, pitched just at that maddening level where only the occasional word can be understood. Twice, the phone was used and once I heard it ring for an incoming call. Then, while I was hurriedly towelling myself and dressing in the luxury of clothes still warm from the airing cupboard, the sound of more discussion. The tones of voice ranged through petulant, persuasive, incredulous and assenting. Beth’s voice and the Sergeant’s were similar, so that I could only sometimes guess which was speaking.

  Beth, despite her preoccupation with the Sergeant, must have followed my progress by the sound of doors and rushing water. As I came downstairs she was in the hall, holding a steaming plate but still speaking over her shoulder to the Sergeant in the kitchen.

  ‘Use the bathroom, if you like,’ she said.

  ‘I can manage,’ said Sergeant Bedale’s voice.

  ‘Would you like to borrow—’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said the Sergeant with irritation.

  ‘Just finish giving it a good sponge, then, and dry it on the boiler.’ The Sergeant’s problem settled to her satisfaction, Beth smiled at me. ‘You can eat this in the sitting room,’ she said. ‘We took ours on the trot but you’re going to have a sit-down meal.’

  Obediently, I carried the plate into the sitting room. The two Labradors were curled on the hearthrug. Jason avoided my eye. He knew that he was not supposed to be in the house, but he was going to enjoy the fireside until somebody noticed and expelled him. I let it go. Beth followed me up with cutlery and poured me a glass of beer. ‘I let Jason stay inside,’ she said guiltily. ‘He’s upset.’

  I had to sit awkwardly to eat off the low coffee table, but the slightly overdone roast chicken, mushy potatoes and cauliflower were worth the effort. Beth sat down nearby. ‘Hattie phoned. Henry’s out of danger. And you’d better hurry,’ she added. ‘We’ve a visitor coming.’

  I waited until my mouth was more or less empty. ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘No. Scrub that. First of all, if – and I’m not convinced yet – but if the trimmer was rigged to electrocute somebody, why not you? I could just about see your cousin knocking off first his uncle and then you, in the hope of getting his blasted tyke back.’

  ‘Jason is not a blasted tyke,’ Beth said firmly. ‘He is a well pedigreed, highly intelligent and very beautiful Labrador. And Edgar wouldn’t get him back that way. He knew that Uncle George had left Jason to me and he also knew, because I told him . . .’

  Her voice trailed away.

  ‘Told him what?’ I asked.

  Beth looked down at her fingers. ‘That I’d made a will on one of those form things, leaving you everything.’

  ‘Everything?’ I said. ‘Golly gee!’

  I had intended to speak lightly, but sarcasm crept through my embarrassment and into my voice. She pulled a face at me. ‘Apart from Jason, I know that there’s not much more than a few pairs of knickers and some wellies and you couldn’t get into them. Not the wellies, anyway. But when I inherited the picture and Hattie gave me the ring I realised that I was suddenly a woman of property and that I should do something about it.’

  I felt ashamed. I had never thought to make out my own will. ‘Thank you,’ I said gently. ‘That was very thoughtful.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘He’ll be here in a minute. Listen, John. If we can, we’re to handle this and to leave Gillian out of it—’

  ‘Mm?’ My mouth was full again.

  ‘Sergeant Bedale. She asked me to call her Gillian. She’s in a rather nervous state, poor thing. On tenterhooks, sort of. She daren’t get herself in any deeper, she’s already gone out on a limb up to her neck.’

  I managed to extract a meaning from the confusion of metaphors and swallowed hastily in order to voice my indignation. ‘You mean that she’ll be happy to make an arrest if you – we – can incriminate a murderer for her?’ I paused and found that I had to laugh. ‘Nervous state? That woman has the nerve of the devil. She comes here ordering me around like some sort of supercilious aunt. When the going gets tough, she flutters her eyelashes and gets out the soft soap. Now, when she’s really landed herself in it, she wants to keep her head down and let us do all the work while she grabs any credit that’s going.’

  ‘That’s about it,’ Beth answered cheerfully. ‘I said that we’d do it. Somebody has to do something.’

  Thinking it over, I decided that we owed the Sergeant a favour for saving Henry’s life. ‘But do what?’ I said. ‘Start from the beginning. Who was meant to be electrocuted?’

  ‘That isn’t the beginning. It’s almost the end. All right,’ she said as she saw that I was trying to clear my mouth again. ‘Isobel, of course.’

  I tried to wash my mouthful down with beer and nearly choked. Before I could find my voice again, tyres crunched in the drive and Beth said, ‘Ah, here he is. You stay here. I’ll get him to put his car in the barn. It wouldn’t do if it were to be seen, would it?’

  I shook my head. It seemed easier to agree than to ask why some unspecified person’s car should not be seen outside our door.

  As I finished working my way through my meal, I was also chewing on Beth’s words. I even began to make some sort of sense of them, to the point of not being taken altogether by surprise when the visitor turned out to be our Texan friend, Ken Boyce. He had exchanged his smart tweeds of the day before for a thin business suit, barely warm enough for a Scottish winter.

  Beth grabbed up my empty plate and went through to the kitchen, leaving me to attend to the courtesies. I offered him the most comfortable chair, he refused a drink and we sat looking at each other.

  ‘That,’ Mr Boyce said at last, ‘is a very remarkable young lady. Just what the hell is she up to?’

  ‘She is,’ I said, ‘and I’m damned if I know. Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better, because you know what she said to you and I don’t know even that.’

  ‘She just called up and asked me to get my ass over here – not in so many words, you understand. She was polite, but there was only one answer she was going to accept, and by God it wasn’t going to be “No”! The rest of what she said, well, it went right by me.’

  I nodded sympathetically. ‘She can get a bit obscure when she’s excited,’ I said.

  ‘That’s for sure.’

  Beth came back with a plate of Hattie’s apple pie for me and c
offee all round. She made another trip and fetched the package of George Muir’s drawings, which she laid unopened on the table.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘You’d better explain, slowly and clearly, to both of us, just what the hell you’re up to.’

  ‘All right,’ Beth said. She looked steadily at Mr Boyce with her spaniel’s eyes and I could see his slight irritation melting away. Beth’s eyes had that effect on people – especially men. ‘My uncle – George Muir, the painter – was killed in his studio in what the police at first accepted as an accident. He was hand-loading some shotgun cartridges and his pot of powder blew up in his face.’

  Ken Boyce nodded. ‘I read an obituary,’ he said. ‘I wondered. I do some loading myself and I had trouble believing that accident. A Class B propellant burns kind of slow, unless it’s confined long enough to get going.’

  ‘It was a heavy pot,’ I said, ‘with a very tight-fitting lid. To judge from the other pot, the one he kept his shot in, you had to jerk hard to get the lid off.’

  ‘I guess that could do it,’ Boyce said.

  Beth took up the tale again. ‘John was curious. He noticed that a tiny hole had been drilled in the pot. And there were one or two other things, such as there being some pellets of shot in with the remains of the powder. After putting two and two together and coming up with an answer as near to four as makes no difference, he decided that he had doubts and that he ought to let the police know.

  ‘We don’t have inquests in Scotland. The police just report to the procurator fiscal, who decides whether there should be an inquiry in front of the sheriff. In my uncle’s case, they’d already decided that it was an accident, so the police weren’t exactly falling over themselves to re-open it. They sent a woman detective sergeant to look into the evidence. They probably hinted that she should go away for a couple of days and then report back that it was an accident right enough.

  ‘Either she’s conscientious or John was convincing, or maybe both. She decided that more investigation was needed. So far so good. But she went off at half-cock, got a search warrant and searched a house.’

  Ken Boyce understood. ‘So now she’s got to make good or back off?’

  ‘It’s worse than that. She’d been told to handle it with kid gloves. When her bosses get back to work tomorrow morning, she’d better have something to back herself up. The pity is that she searched the wrong house and the owner’s not going to be satisfied with anything less than her head on a plate.’

  ‘The ultimate sin,’ Boyce said. ‘Being wrong.’

  ‘But she did find something,’ Beth said. ‘What she came up with isn’t direct evidence and yet it could be vital.

  ‘Then, just a couple of hours ago, Mr Kitts had an accident. His wife, Isobel, is a partner in the kennels. He was nearly electrocuted by a hedge-trimmer. I’m sure the experts will find that the wiring had been tampered with –’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I broke in. ‘Any fool could loosen a wire and leave it pressed against the metal handle. You could never prove that it hadn’t happened in the course of being bumped around.’

  ‘All right.’ Beth said, with irritation. ‘But the safety device in the shed had been nullified by having the handle of the lawn mower leant against it. Again, it could have happened through carelessness. But it was becoming obvious that too many accidents were happening around here.’

  Ken Boyce held up a hand to stop her while he took time for thought. Beth waited patiently. ‘I see who you’re getting at,’ he said at last. ‘And it’s right that I should know. But before we go into the matter of just how the hell he could have fixed it from way across the Atlantic, can you tell me why?’

  ‘You may be able to tell us,’ Beth said. ‘Mr Boyce, tell me something else first. Are you easily shocked?’

  Ken Boyce’s eyebrows shot straight up his forehead. He half smiled. ‘Why no, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I guess not. I’d say that I was the least shockable person you’ll ever meet.’

  ‘I hope that’s true. My uncle was a lady’s man, Mr Boyce. I’ve known it since I was a child, although I’ve only recently come to realise what an amorous old rascal he really was. And, being first and foremost an artist, he didn’t make diary notes or take photographs or collect little souvenirs. He kept a different sort of reminder. Don’t judge him too harshly. I don’t think that any of them were meant to be seen by anybody other than himself and perhaps that particular lady. Perhaps you can recognise somebody.’

  She opened the folder.

  Ken Boyce leafed through the drawings. His face was impassive except that his eyebrows seemed to have disappeared altogether. ‘It’s a pity that he never signed these,’ he said. ‘They’d bring a mint from the right sort of collector. As it is, you tell your aunt, if they’re still her property, that I know men back in the States who’d pay good money for—’

  He stopped dead. He was holding a water-colour sketch, in full colour, of a chubby blonde. She was wearing a necklace and earrings, long gloves and one stocking, and she seemed highly amused at being sketched in that state. The drawing had been carried out with a minimum of strokes and colours and yet it was almost magically alive. The artist had even caught the soft glow which a woman diffuses after love.

  ‘Mrs Fullerton?’ Beth asked.

  ‘The second Mrs Fullerton,’ Boyce confirmed.

  Something in his tone gave me the hint. ‘You didn’t exactly throw up your hands in horror at the suggestion that Bruce Fullerton might be arranging accidents,’ I said. ‘Does the reason why you aren’t surprised have anything to do with the first Mrs Fullerton?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Boyce said sadly. He dropped the sketches on the table and leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve known Bruce Fullerton for around twenty years. He was an engineer before he moved across into marketing and came home to Scotland. Worked for the firm back in the States. I remember his first wife well. A good-looking woman, but she had two problems. One was drinking and the other was messing around. You know what I mean? She liked men, any men. The marriage had been on the rocks for years. I reckoned it only lasted as long as it did because she’d brought some money into it with her.

  ‘Then, while Bruce was on the West Coast, solving a problem at our Californian plant, they found his wife lying dead. When she was alone and more or less sober, she used to do the gardening. She had a great touch with flowers, although sometimes she used to get stoned out of her mind and pull up her best plants in mistake for weeds. They figured that she’d mixed some weedkiller and put the leftover into an empty whisky bottle. Then, one day, when she was good and plastered, she forgot and drank from the same bottle. That’s what they figured.’

  ‘And you?’ I said. ‘What did you figure?’

  ‘Me? I figured that it’d be easy to fill a spare bottle with weedkiller and leave her to get around to it. None of my business, and if that’s what he’d done I couldn’t hardly blame him. Might’ve done the same myself, if I’d been stuck with a wife like that. And if I’d had the guts.

  ‘No, I’m not surprised – except that it seemed to me he’d struck luckier, second time around. What d’you reckon’s been happening over this side?’

  ‘That’s the big question,’ Beth said. ‘There are still some things we don’t know for sure. I’ll try to put it in order, John can help me and maybe you can fill in some gaps.

  ‘Mr Fullerton told John that he and his wife met my uncle for the first time in some hotel. The Fullertons were there for dinner, but my uncle was with a woman and they’d booked in for the night. John?’

  My mind had been racing ahead. I came back with a start. ‘The way Fullerton described Mr Muir’s companion, he made her sound remarkably like his own wife – to judge from that sketch. Of course, there’s more than one plump blonde around . . .’

  ‘God has been good to us,’ Boyce agreed, smiling.

  ‘. . . but Fullerton may have had a good reason to substitute his wife’s desccription. The last thing he needed was for Muir’s connection
with Mrs Fullerton to become public knowledge. If somebody had seen my fiancée’s uncle with Mrs Fullerton and had described her to me, I’d never have connected the two after that piece of misdirection.’ As I spoke, another connection jumped into my mind. ‘When I asked Fullerton the name of the hotel, he visibly jumped.

  ‘Anyway, Fullerton told me that he recognised George Muir and asked him to do a portrait of his dog. He took the dog to Muir’s studio for a sitting when Mrs Muir was out, so that’s probably when he found out that the key was usually left above the door. He told me that the dog had come to him from his late sister and meant a lot to him.’

  ‘That sure does sound like Bruce,’ Ken Boyce said. ‘He always was a sucker for a dog. I remember him getting into a fight in New Jersey once when a big trucker gave his dog a push with his foot, a mutt you wouldn’t have given doodlysquat for. But maybe he had the right way of it. Seems like he got more fidelity from his dogs than he ever got from his women. Go ahead.’

  ‘Then it was time for him to spend some time in America,’ Beth said, ‘learning the details of all the new products.’

  ‘If Uncle George had been taken with Mrs Fullerton when they met, it would be easy for him to pay her a visit on the excuse that he wanted to make some more sketches of the dog. And an affair started. I’m told,’ Beth said distantly, ‘that my uncle had a sort of old world charm which had the ladies falling over him. I couldn’t see it myself.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Boyce said. ‘That approach doesn’t work with young singles; but I’ve seen married women, whose husbands have forgotten about the little courtesies, fall for it every time.

  ‘I never knew who the other party was, but from the phone calls Bruce was getting and from what he said, I gathered that another marriage was going down the tube. I didn’t pay it much heed. I’d met his second wife on my previous trip and it seemed to me that they were very much in love. But honeymoons don’t last for ever. We don’t look on marriage as any too permanent back home, not the way you do here. Hell, I’ve been married three times myself. You know what they say – a change being as good as a rest. But Bruce sure did seem to be getting uptight about it.