Doghouse (Three Oaks Book 3)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘When he went off for the weekend by himself, I was more relieved than anything. I’d had him around for weeks and he was becoming a pain in the ass, if you’ll pardon the expression, and I was glad of the chance of a get-together with the lady who’ll be Wife Number Four if I get over my present indisposition towards the wedded state. I thought nothing of it.’

  ‘Not even when your passport went missing?’ I asked suddenly. ‘It didn’t strike me at the time, but there’s a similarity between the two of you.’

  Boyce looked at me as if I had offered an insult. ‘You don’t say that?’

  ‘You’re younger and better looking than he is,’ Beth said quickly. As far as I could remember, she had never set eyes on Fullerton. ‘But there’s enough resemblance that, if he smudged your passport photograph a bit and let his stubble come in, a passport control office would put any difference down to jet lag . . .’

  ‘Now that never did strike me,’ Boyce said. He seemed amused by Beth’s flattery. ‘I’m a mite taller than he is but I guess our faces are much the same shape. I never looked for the passport until I came to need it, and then it could have been in my luggage or in the office or at home. I thought at the time that it had been mislaid. You think he took it?’

  ‘That’s the way it looks,’ Beth said. ‘He wouldn’t want a record of his own passport being used. And he couldn’t put it back because it would have been stamped with a visit to Britain you’d never made.’

  ‘Looks,’ Boyce said. ‘Would. Could. Seems to me that there’s a lot of guessing going around.’

  ‘If you think that what we’ve said so far included a lot of guesswork,’ Beth said, ‘just wait! He may have come back to try for a reconciliation, but if – yes, I know, another if – if he borrowed a passport and told his colleagues that he was going skiing, it suggests that, at the very least, the death of his wife was on the cards. He’d been hurt once and now it was happening again.

  ‘I think that he flew over, on your passport. He hired another car and went home. His wife died, perhaps by premeditated murder or perhaps in a furious quarrel. He arranged it to look as if she’d slipped and fallen downstairs. He was in a highly emotional state . . .’

  ‘He’s an emotional guy,’ Boyce said. ‘Always was.’

  ‘. . . and my uncle was the man who’d come between himself and his happy, second marriage. Arranging accidents was becoming a habit. He drove over to Tarbet and waited his chance when the house was empty. He’d already seen the studio and he knew about Uncle George’s loading—’

  ‘Now hold on just a minute,’ I said. ‘We’ve been thinking about fuses and timers and remote controls and things. But he was going back to New York and he couldn’t hang around and wait for your uncle to start a reloading session. He’d have had to catch Sunday’s plane at the latest.’

  ‘If you’ll stop jumping to conclusions we’ll get on quicker,’ Beth said severely. (Boyce shot me a look and tried to hide a grin.) ‘I never liked any of the complicated ideas you came up with. I don’t know much about these things. I’d be no good as a terrorist’s do-it-yourself bomb-maker. I’m a simple soul and I was thinking along simpler lines.’

  ‘Simple ideas are often the best,’ Ken Boyce said.

  ‘Thank you. Uncle George was going to get around to his reloading some day, and Mr Fullerton left a trap waiting for that day. There was no hurry. Revenge can wait. Perhaps it’s all the better in prospect, I wouldn’t know. I’m not the vengeful type. I expect that he improvised something from what he knew was already available on the spot.’

  ‘That sounds like him,’ Boyce said. ‘Bruce always had a quick mind. When he was an engineer and a problem came up, he’d have it analysed and a solution improvised before the rest of us had appreciated the problem.’

  Beth looked at me. ‘John, didn’t you say something about a fishing reel in the top drawer under the work-bench?’

  ‘Two reels,’ I said.

  ‘I remember those reels. They were on a shelf over the door when I saw them last spring. Was there a nail or a drawing-pin or something?’

  ‘Yes there was,’ I said. ‘There was a drawing-pin stuck in the bottom of the drawer. The end of one of the fishing lines was tied to it. I decided he’d used it to anchor the end of the line while he wound it onto the reel.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound right,’ Boyce said. ‘That isn’t the way you do it. You wind the line straight onto the reel from the spool you bought in the store.’

  ‘Was the very end of the line tied to the pin?’ Beth asked me. ‘Or was there a tail left?’

  I called up a mental picture. ‘There was a tail,’ I said. ‘Not very much. Maybe a couple of feet, curled up beside the pin. Why?’

  ‘This is how I see it,’ Beth said. ‘The fishing reels were on the shelf. He took them down and put them in the drawer just as a reason for there to be some thin fishing line around. He used Uncle George’s tools to drill a tiny hole in the pot and he took the end of the fishing line up the back of the bench and passed it through the hole. He tied a match-head on the end and glued a piece of sandpaper onto the bottom of the pot.’

  ‘Jesus H Christ!’ Boyce exclaimed. I think that I was too stunned by Beth’s lethal ingenuity to say anything.

  ‘He’d need something to press the match-head down,’ Beth went on, ‘and I think he used some of the lead shot in a twist of thin paper. Then he topped the pot up with Uncle George’s explosive shotgun powder.’

  I came out of my trance. ‘No. He brought his own. Your uncle’s was a slow, progressive powder. He’d need something altogether faster.’

  ‘Pistol powder,’ Boyce said firmly. ‘That has to be fast enough to burn up before the bullet’s gone more than a few inches. Hell, you can wreck a rifle, using pistol powder.’

  ‘If you say so.’ Beth paused to recover her original train of thought after what had been, to her, an irrelevant digression. ‘The first time Uncle George pulled open the drawer or pulled forward his pot of powder, the match-head would scrape over the sandpaper and . . .’

  ‘Bang?’ said Boyce.

  ‘Just that. The paper would mostly burn and blow away, the shot would be scattered and the end of the nylon fishing line would melt. The rest of the line would take up its natural curl and coil itself down beside the drawing-pin.’

  ‘That would work,’ Boyce said slowly. ‘By Christ it would work! If I marry again, I’ll never do hand-loading without having a very gentle feel around for any bits of thin fishing line. That stuffs the next thing to invisible. But it seems to me, young lady, you’ve shown us how something could have been done, which is a hell of a way from proving that it was done.’

  ‘I think that it must have been done that way,’ I said. ‘It fits exactly what I saw in the studio and explains a whole lot of anomalies which had me puzzled. But that’s not to say that it was done by Bruce Fullerton. He looks guilty, but we don’t know that he took Ken’s passport. And ladies do sometimes fall downstairs in empty houses.’

  ‘Of course,’ Beth said impatiently. ‘That’s the whole problem. A man going around arranging accidents and being miles away when they happen needn’t leave a whole lot of proof behind. By the time there’s any investigation, the evidence has all been lost or covered up. Even if the wiring in the hedge-trimmer has been tampered with—’

  ‘It’ll probably turn out to be a loose wire,’ I pointed out again.

  ‘And nothing to show whether anybody loosened it,’ Ken Boyce added.

  ‘And,’ I added, ‘What has Isobel to do with it anyway?’

  ‘I was just coming to that,’ Beth snapped. ‘if you two will just shut up for a moment and stop jumping about and repeating yourselves. Just accept, for one credulous moment, that Mr Fullerton did what I say he did. He must have left a whole trail of evidence behind which a proper investigation by detectives and forensic scientists would uncover, but unless Sergeant Bedale takes a strong case to her superiors, that investigation may never happen.

>   ‘Now we’ll come back to Isobel. After everything was done the way we’ve said, he would still have had to deal with one loose end. He couldn’t just leave his favourite dog there with his wife’s body.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘I can tell you that,’ Boyce said. ‘Their house is way out in the sticks. No regular help, no nothing. When she wanted some help about the place there was a woman she called in, and the same for help in the garden. Rest of the time, she was on her own. If she wanted company, she went out for it. She could have lain there and nobody found her until the dog had starved.’

  ‘Right,’ Beth said. ‘So he put the dog into kennels. He couldn’t do it as himself. But he’s small for a man and quite slim. He put on his wife’s coat and some make-up and a hat and went, after dark, to the one kennels whose owners – the Springs – are notoriously short-sighted and absent-minded. It was his bad luck that Isobel happened to be there at the time and accepted the dog from him – or, at least, from somebody who she described afterwards as a very odd-looking woman with a husky voice. Mr Fullerton had been a client of hers, years ago, when she was working as a vet. And then, yesterday, he saw her looking at him and knew that she might be making the connection.

  ‘He must have come up here last night and had a good look around. He noticed that the hedge was only trimmed halfway along and he picked on the hedge-trimmer as a suitable weapon. The garden shed’s never locked. You remember who saw Isobel using the hedge-trimmer the other day?’

  I was still warm from my bath but I felt a deep chill. Beth could so easily have been the innocent bystander who stopped the wrong bullet. ‘Fullerton did,’ I said. ‘And he pulled forward, out of her sight, before he got out of the car. That clinches it as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Well, as far as the law’s concerned,’ Beth said scornfully, ‘it won’t do anything of the sort. If there was any tampering with the trimmer, which we may not be able to prove, it could have been by somebody who’d seen me using it and had some reason we don’t know about to want me out of the way.’

  Part of my mind had been sifting the facts and suppositions and trying to arrive at a possible timetable. ‘What about the dates?’ I asked. ‘Do they fit?’

  ‘They could,’ Beth said. ‘Isobel said that the setter was brought to the Springs’ kennels on the Saturday evening that one of our bitches went down with mastitis. I’ve looked in the kennel diary and that was four weeks ago yesterday.’

  Boyce fished in a waistcoat pocket and pulled out a small diary. ‘That’s the weekend that Bruce went skiing. They phoned him a few days later. From the body and other signs, his wife had her fall the previous Saturday.’

  Beth nodded energetically. ‘Gillian phoned a friend – a former boyfriend, I think – in the Fife CID and he looked it up for her. That’s what the report said.’

  ‘And he flew back immediately?’ I asked.

  ‘Within a few days,’ Boyce said.

  ‘Then,’ I said, ‘he took a hell of a time getting round to asking about the portrait and mentioning the dog. He seemed to imply that he’d only just arrived back in this country. If his wife had collected the portrait, why did he . . .?’ The answer hit me while I was still asking the question. ‘He span the tale about his wife and the dog to explain the dog’s absence. He had to keep the dog out of sight for a while to give it time to forget, because the dog had seen him kill his wife. When I saw them together in the car, the setter was in a very nervous state, not like a dog which had just been restored to a beloved owner. His own dog was a witness against him.’

  ‘Wild guesswork,’ Beth complained.

  ‘It may be all of that,’ Ken Boyce said. ‘But John here goes along with your belief that your uncle’s accident was rigged and he seems to know what he’s talking about. And that point about the dog’s a clincher. Folk would soon have started talking if they’d seen his own dog cowering away from him, just after his wife was killed.

  ‘I know Bruce Fullerton. I may not have been meeting him face to face for all that time, but we’ve worked together for years and it’s crazy how you can get to know somebody, even someone who you’ve never met, if you exchange enough correspondence and phone calls. After a while, you can guess just how they’ll react. Bruce is nervous, impetuous, ruthless, ingenious, vengeful – and he’s slippery. He has a knack of making sure that he never carries the can. Hell, you’ve just about painted his portrait more clearly than your uncle could have done it.

  ‘To me, as somebody who knows him and his character and his history, you’ve connected up all the known facts, right down to things like my missing passport, in a way that carries conviction. It might not stand up in a court of law, but it sure as hell stands up with me because that’s just the way he’d have acted.’ Boyce hesitated and made a gesture of unease. ‘As you said, your police would be able to uncover a whole lot more evidence if they set their minds to it, but you say you don’t have enough to make them re-open the case of your uncle. Or of either of the Mrs Fullertons?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Beth said. ‘I talked it over with Sergeant Bedale – while you were in the bath, John, and before we phoned you, Mr Boyce. She feels that if she hasn’t anything more solid by tomorrow morning she’ll be called off and given a black mark and Mr Fullerton will be safe for ever. Until somebody else offends him or he decides to have another go at Isobel or something.’

  I felt the cold shivers on my back again. Somebody out there might be deciding that I knew too much and be preparing to cut the car’s brake-pipes or electrify the wire mesh of the runs. And Beth might as easily fall the victim. ‘What can we do?’ I asked.

  ‘Gillian and I discussed that. We decided that the only hope would be to make him commit himself, one way or the other. She spoke to the Fife Police. Her old friend, a detective sergeant like herself, was on duty. He’s gone to watch the house and he’ll report by radio.’ Beth produced a sheet of paper half covered with her clear, round writing. ‘If you could ring him up, Mr Boyce, and make some excuse for phoning, and tell him something like this, but in your own words . . .’

  Boyce ran his eye quickly over the page. ‘Hell, I don’t need any excuse,’ he said. ‘This is made to measure. I was supposed to join him for a drink around five, for a few, final words before I go to catch my plane tomorrow.’

  The extension telephone was on a long enough cord to reach him where he sat. He dialled a number from memory and sat waiting, his brow puckered in thought. He stiffened suddenly.

  ‘Bruce?’ he said. ‘This is Ken. I find I can’t come over this evening. The local fuzz called me up a few minutes back . . . Sure, I’ll still come over if I get away in good time, but I think we’ve covered all the main subjects. I can phone you if anything else comes up . . . Nope, nothing to get in an uproar about. They want to meet me at Three Oaks Kennels around five. Something about that lady I went around with, last time I was over here. Seems there’s some pictures there and they want to know do I recognise anybody . . . No, not photographs, they said something about drawings by some man called Muir. His widow’s there now . . . Yeah, sounds crazy, but I can only tell you as much as I know. Listen, in case I don’t make it this evening, thanks for looking after me while I’ve been over here. We’ll be in touch.’

  He hung up and looked at the two of us in turn. ‘I sure hope we’re wrong,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll go and tell Gillian,’ Beth said. She left the room.

  ‘One thing I don’t get,’ Ken Boyce said to me. ‘Surely he’d have checked whether there was a sketch of his old lady while he was in the studio fixing up for the explosion?’

  It was a good point and it took me a few seconds to think of the answer. ‘He probably did check,’ I said. ‘But he may have expected a fire to follow the explosion. In the meantime, if George Muir had noticed that one particular sketch had gone missing, he’d have realised that there’d been an intruder and he might have looked around enough to spot other things out of place.’

  B
oyce was nodding steadily. ‘You may have been partly wrong about his motivation in visiting Tarbet, the time you met him over there. Mrs Fullerton had already collected the dog’s portrait for him, but when he heard that there hadn’t been a fire he went to Mrs Muir’s house anyway and span his tale so that he could ask for his photographs back and any sketches.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘That gave him a chance to look through the pile. It must have given him a jolt when he didn’t find them there. A neighbour had already helped himself.’

  Beth came back. She was carrying a small, police-type radio which she placed carefully on the coffee table. It was hissing softly. ‘Gillian gave me this. She can justify asking for Mr Fullerton’s house to be watched, but if anything goes wrong or if the whole thing’s a frost, she wants to be able to say that she knew nothing about it.’

  ‘She wants jam on both sides,’ I said, ‘and no bread in the middle.’

  ‘Which of us doesn’t? And now,’ Beth said, ‘there’s nothing to do but wait.’

  ‘You may not have to wait long.’ Boyce said. ‘Bruce was always a quick thinker and he’ll have to move fast. He thinks that the police are going to be here by five – and he’s only got a few miles to come.’

  Chapter Nine

  So far, I had been swept along by the decisions of others. Now, given time to think, I found that my mind was a jumble of conflicting logic. If the others were right, something was far wrong. But if I was right they were wrong and everything was all right. I went back to the beginning and started again. If . . .

  The radio squawked suddenly. ‘He’s leaving the house,’ it said. ‘Entering car.’

  ‘He won’t come here,’ I said. ‘It’s too obviously a trap. He’ll run for it, using your passport.’

  ‘You want to bet on that?’ Boyce asked me.

  ‘I’m not a betting man.’ Especially, I could have added, against Texans who, when they bet, bet big.