Bloodlines (Three Oaks Book 8)

by Gerald Hammond

  Beth got up, dumped Sam on my knee and began to bustle about. She always speaks most confidently while she is busily doing something quite different. ‘I thought it might be Guffy long before that,’ she said. ‘He seemed to fit very snugly. On top of everything else, he was earning money as fast as he could, to save up for a pup, and then suddenly he didn’t need it any more. But I didn’t want to point the finger at him without any evidence because it could look as though I had a prejudice against him for being a bit dottled. Or else it was somehow a soft option. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I think I do,’ I said. ‘To pick on the mental underdog would be an easy way out.’

  ‘That’s just it,’ she said. ‘But then, after Ben Garnet dropped his bombshell, I knew that I had to do something. I came back here and sat down wondering how to be sure. And it came to me that you’d shown me one thing that was worth a try.’

  ‘I had?’

  ‘Don’t look so flabbergasted. Of course you did. So I started calling round people’s answering machines, those that have the same kind as ours, and listening to their messages. Some of them were really funny. I struck oil quite soon. But of course I couldn’t tell the Inspector that I’d got what I’d got by tapping into other people’s answering machines. I’m sure it’s illegal or something.’

  ‘I don’t think it is. But where was the oil that you say you struck?’

  ‘On the Garnets’ machine again. You remember that I hurried away from the hospital before the end of visiting time, so that I’d be home before she was?’

  ‘Who was it from and what did it say?’ I asked patiently. ‘Even better, play it to me.’

  ‘I couldn’t keep a recording because I didn’t have your tape recorder. It’s part of your radio, remember?’

  I counted slowly up to ten. For somebody so clever, Beth can sometimes be as daft as a Labrador puppy. With those threats hanging over us, she could have reminded me that my radio had another task to perform. For that matter, a few pounds would have bought another radio or a cassette recorder. I waited until I could trust myself to speak calmly.

  ‘Tell me what it said.’

  ‘It was Guffy’s voice and it said something like: “Mrs Garnet says you’re going to keep two pups and breed them yourself. You’re a wicked so-and-so to cheat me after all the work I did for you and you owe me nearly all the money for the puppy. You’re a rotten swine. I’m glad I hit you last time even if it was the wrong person and next time I’ll get you on purpose.” So, you see, I knew it was Guffy but if I said what I knew I’d have to say how I knew.

  ‘And now,’ Beth continued, ‘I’m going to give you something to eat after which you’re going to bed whether you want to or not and no arguments.’

  The programme was attractive but my conscience was pricking me. ‘With the others away, Hannah will be needing help,’ I said reluctantly.

  ‘She’s got help. She has Joe and Dave eating out of her hand.’

  ‘Dog biscuits? No, never mind.’ I felt a huge yawn coming. ‘You’ll get no argument from me,’ I said.

  ‘There you are,’ Beth told Sam. ‘That’s how to do it. Why can’t you be more like your dad?’

  ‘And remember those words,’ I told him. ‘We may need to cast them up to her.’

  Five minutes later she told Sam, ‘I did not mean you to copy your dad in your eating habits. Eat up and don’t be picky.’

  I had enjoyed my portion of sole with a poached egg, partly because it made a change from hospital food but more because I could see it. Now, my appetite satisfied, I pushed the half-finished dish aside. ‘I understand why you’re tense,’ I said. ‘The sword of Damocles may fall shortly.’

  She shook her head impatiently. ‘If I’m tense it’s because I’m thinking about proving who did all the naughties. I don’t want him walking around loose if he’s going to take another shot at you. I wouldn’t worry too much about swords and things,’ Beth said. ‘I think I’ve pulled Mr G’s teeth for him.’

  I let the mixed metaphor go by. ‘How?’

  Beth glanced at Sam but he was paying no attention. Even so, she chose her words carefully. ‘I let him have his form back, but not in front of witnesses.’

  ‘Hellfire Creek!’ I said. ‘I thought he was only to get it back over our dead bodies.’

  ‘There was no need to be quite so drastic.’ Beth’s internal smile escaped and grew into a grin. ‘I didn’t sign it. It had a signature that looks a little like yours but it can easily be shown to be a forgery. Somebody more or less unconnected with us did it for me.’

  ‘Who?’

  She glanced at Sam again. ‘Rex,’ she mouthed.

  I saw where she was heading but I could also see snags. ‘But if it comes to a court case, there will be fingerprints.’

  ‘We always have spare copies of Form One,’ she said complacently. ‘I took a clean one out of the middle. He took it away, wearing gloves, and retyped it on his aunt’s portable. All you’ve got to do is wait until Mr G has registered the pups. Then it’s your turn to make a threat. Both those pups instead of a stud fee or you’ll have him prosecuted for fraud.’

  I whistled. ‘And that’s not drastic? You play rough,’ I said.

  ‘No rougher than he’s playing. Leave it as long as you can so that he pays for all the inoculations and things. Then, any time that he gets uppity in the future, you could threaten to make him tell all his clients that their registrations are invalid. ‘That,’ Beth said happily, ‘will teach him to mess us around.’

  I was still sitting quietly, struck dumb in admiration of her sheer ruthlessness, when the doorbell sounded. Beth was still coping with Sam so I went to the door.

  The visitor was a technician from the police laboratory. He was a chubby, friendly man who seemed to be entirely focused on his high-tech activities. He had brought a load of electronic gadgets with him. I took him into the sitting room and showed him the Reply 120.

  ‘I’ll be glad to get it back into service,’ I said. ‘God knows how many messages we’ve missed.’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ he said in both apology and explanation.

  I watched as he knelt and hooked up to the telephone and then replayed the crucial message. He taped it and then began to fiddle with an oscilloscope and something that might have been a laptop computer but probably wasn’t. He said that the background noise was some kind of machinery, possibly a road drill. If he could find the two frequencies—the pitch of the sound and the intervals of the pulses—he could try to filter out those wavelengths.

  I heard somebody else come in. Beth must have handed Sam over to Hannah because, curious as ever, she had come to join us.

  The technician fiddled and cursed under his breath, listened to his headphones and made faces for a few minutes. Then he sat back on his heels. ‘I can try for a further improvement in the lab,’ he said, ‘but this is as good as I can get it here.’

  When he played it again, the buzzing had almost disappeared and the voice was much clearer. ‘That’s Guffy,’ we said together.

  ‘I can tell Inspector Burrard that you identify the voice?’

  ‘Beyond doubt,’ I said.

  ‘That’s that, then. Voiceprints will be more solid proof, but courts always prefer witness evidence.’ He switched our machine back into its answering mode and began to pack up his gear. ‘You can have your answering facility back. What a week! Two colleagues off with flu and a mini-crimewave in Kirkcaldy and Burntisland. I’ll tell you, I felt like sticking my head in the superglue cabinet for a quick buzz.’

  Beth frowned. ‘Somebody else said something like that,’ she said. ‘What is this superglue cabinet?’

  ‘We were only joking. Superglue gives a very poor buzz, little more than you’d get from any other vapour that was oxygen deficient. Not like a real solvent at all.’

  ‘But what is the cabinet?’ Beth persisted.

  The technician stood up and stretched. ‘There’s no secret about it,’ he said. ‘Not long
ago somebody discovered, quite by accident, that latent fingerprints can be brought up on nearly all previously difficult surfaces if the object was put in a confined space with a dish of superglue. The prints come up bright silver. What’s more, they’re absolutely permanent. Even sandpaper will hardly shift them, unless you rub down into the underlying surface. Well, good day to you both.’

  I saw him to the door and returned. Beth was staring into space, her expression so vacant that, seen side by side with Guffy, she would have looked the less intelligent of the two.

  ‘But of course,’ she said suddenly. ‘That has to be it.’

  ‘What has to be which?’ I asked reasonably.

  She snapped back and became aware of my presence. ‘You go to bed,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to rest. And I’ve got a lot to do. Give me the keys to your gun cabinet.’

  I detached the keys from my key-wallet and held them out. ‘You’re not going to shoot somebody?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re being silly, of course,’ she snorted.

  ‘That’s hardly an answer. Do you mean of course you are or of course you aren’t?’

  ‘I want to borrow your lamp,’ she said patiently, ‘that’s all. The bright one you use with a rifle. Is the battery up?’

  ‘It should be,’ I said. ‘I used it when that fox started raiding the rabbit pen and I charged it fully up afterwards.’ I thought of asking what on earth she wanted with a very powerful lamp which was normally only used mounted above the telescopic sight of a rifle, but I recognized her mood as one in which she always considered pausing to explain things a waste of valuable time. ‘Shall I put Sam to bed?’ I asked.

  ‘Could you? Can you see well enough to manage?’

  ‘He can do most of it himself,’ I reminded her. ‘He only needs to be supervised and to be told a story.’

  ‘All right then. You put him down. Don’t tell him any stories you wouldn’t have wanted me to hear. And after that you go off to bed. I’ll see you when I see you.’

  ‘Very probably,’ I said.

  *

  Much later, I was aware of Beth coming to bed. Later still, minutes later as it seemed, it was daytime again and I was alone. I could hear the usual working noises downstairs and out on the gravel. Suddenly I was wide awake and hungry, my eyes opened reluctantly but with no more than an annoying twinge, and my curiosity was overpowering.

  Beth, I thought, probably intended to sneak off without me in order to spare me what she regarded as unnecessary stress. I washed sketchily, skipped shaving, dressed hastily in yesterday’s clothes and, pausing only to pass a brush over my hair, hurried downstairs.

  I found Beth in the kitchen and in the process of handing over responsibility for Sam to Hannah and Henry jointly. She already had her coat on. ‘I’m going out in a minute,’ she said to me.’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘You’re not leaving me behind.’

  Beth looked hard at me. ‘You look awful,’ she said, ‘but not as awful as yesterday. Take some cereal. There’s still some toast and coffee. But get a wriggle on if you want to come. Inspector Burrard’s coming to fetch me in about ten minutes. We’re going to Freddy Crail’s shoot, where it all began.’

  ‘We could have driven there in fifteen,’ I pointed out.

  I was about to ask her what was going on, but she said, ‘That gives me ten minutes with those blasted cockers,’ and dashed outside.

  I took as much breakfast as I could manage in the time. Most of it I ate standing at the window. Beth was getting on much better with the spaniels now that she was concentrating on them. I was putting on a coat when Inspector Burrard arrived in a marked Range Rover. Gribble—I never did discover his rank—was at the wheel with the quiet Sergeant McAndrew beside him. There was another man beside the Inspector in the back.

  The day was dark, and damp as well as cold. I would have welcomed back the snow.

  Inspector Burrard opened a door but remained seated. ‘Come with us, Mrs Cunningham,’ he said. ‘You can guide us and explain as we go.’

  ‘All right,’ said Beth. ‘John, you could follow in our car. It’ll save the Inspector having to bring us back later.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Burrard said. ‘Go with him, Minnity, and give us some room.’

  The fourth man obediently got out and joined me. The Range Rover was already moving. I fell in behind but I stayed well back. I knew from experience that the spray being thrown up by the Range Rover would be laden with the rust-provoking salt which had been put down to clear the ice.

  ‘Do you know anything about what’s going on?’ I asked Minnity.

  ‘Damn all,’ he said. ‘I’m a frogman, if that’s any help.’

  The more I thought about it the more puzzling I found it. Police frogmen were associated in my mind with dead bodies, but nobody was missing. Correction, nobody connected with the case that we knew of. Of course, we had not yet met Charles’s wife. And no one would have bothered to mention it to me if somebody had disappeared—Charles himself or Mrs Campsie or Tom Shotto. Had Guffy been to his work? There might be others . . .

  We rolled up to the farm buildings and detoured around them. We took a track which brought us eventually near to the small loch. This covered no more than two or three acres. Crail was in the habit of releasing a few rainbow trout in the spring and pursuing them, usually in vain, during the summer.

  Beyond the loch, the ground began to rise into the small hills which gave the shoot its character. In almost any other conditions than the dank and overcast weather of that day the loch was a picturesque spot, though trees overhanging the water made casting difficult. Under that charcoal sky and with the bare branches dancing to a sodden wind, it looked only fit to contain corpses.

  The convoy stopped about a hundred yards short of the water. Minnity, we discovered, was already wearing his wetsuit under light clothing. While he was fetching his other gear out of the back of the Range Rover, I joined Beth and the other three men. A track, passable but rarely used except by Crail himself, crossed an unused area of stony ground which was ragged with grass and dead weeds. Beth was pointing along the track.

  ‘Even by lamplight,’ she said, ‘I could see tracks where the weeds had been crushed down.’

  The Inspector squatted down. ‘There’s been a vehicle along here, right enough. Within about the past week, for what that’s worth. It could have been a farm vehicle.’

  ‘I expect it was,’ Beth said, nodding as though the Inspector had said something clever.

  Burrard was too proud to ask for explanations. ‘I see,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Very well. Gribble, do your thing. You didn’t walk along the track, Mrs Cunningham?’

  ‘I cut across the stony ground,’ Beth said.

  ‘Then we’ll do the same.’

  Gribble, who was evidently more than a mere driver, fetched a video camera from the Range Rover. We left him recording the faint signs of a vehicle passing and began to stumble across the rough ground towards the water.

  We were checked by the approach of a Land Rover, which pulled up behind the police vehicle. Mr Fergusson eased himself out and came towards us, hurrying as much as his arthritis would allow. In his perturbation, his aches and pains seemed to be almost forgotten. If he failed to recognize the officers, the police livery on the Range Rover would have reminded him.

  ‘What the de’il’s adae here?’ he demanded. I saw him lick his dry lips and I thought that he had his own suspicions.

  ‘That is what I am waiting to find out,’ Burrard said. ‘Do you know where your assistant is now? Augustus Mason?’

  Mr Fergusson hesitated and then shook his head.

  The Inspector looked hard at the old keeper but must have decided that he was telling the truth. ‘I suppose you have a right to come with us,’ Burrard said, ‘but you’re not to interfere. Is that understood?’

  The keeper nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said.

  We set off again. The delay had enabled Minnity, now hooded and with his tanks on
his back, to catch up with us. He had kept on his shoes and was carrying his flippers.

  ‘What are they about?’ Mr Fergusson asked me in a troubled whisper. ‘Is’t the loon?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What’s come o’er him?’

  Suddenly I understood. We had seen no signs of Guffy recently. If he it was who had tried to kill me and failed, his next step might well have been suicide. ‘I don’t know anything for sure,’ I said unhappily. ‘But I think you should prepare yourself. It’s not going to be good.’

  He produced a sigh which seemed to come right up from his leather boots. ‘Aye,’ he said.

  Beth and the Inspector were standing where the track arrived at the water. The further side of the loch was still frozen, but here, near where the feeder stream entered, the water was open. ‘There was only one place I could think of to look for it,’ Beth said. ‘So I came here last night with a bright lamp and a pair of Polaroid glasses—they cut out reflections,’ she added.

  ‘I understand,’ Burrard said.

  ‘Oh. Well, anyway, I was sure that I could see it.’ She pointed into the water. ‘Just below where we’re standing.’

  ‘Minnity,’ Burrard said, ‘in you go.’

  Involuntarily, Fergusson and I took a step back from the water. I noticed that he was looking very white.

  The frogman placed his shoes neatly together, one sock in each, donned his flippers, climbed carefully down the bank and entered the water. He was only hidden for a few seconds before he surfaced again. He nodded to the Inspector. Fergusson swayed and I caught his arm.

  ‘It’s there all right,’ Minnity said when he had removed his mouthpiece. ‘If it’s what you were expecting.’

  ‘Who?’ Fergusson asked huskily. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s not a who, it’s a what,’ Minnity said, pulling himself up onto the bank.