Bloodlines (Three Oaks Book 8)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Then what is it?’ the Inspector demanded querulously.

  ‘A telephone kiosk, all in one piece, complete with phone.’

  The keeper made a noise like a deflating balloon and sat down suddenly on a stump.

  Chapter Twelve

  Detective Inspector Burrard shook his head as if trying to deter an unwelcome insect. Then he made up his mind about something and hurried back to the Range Rover. I could see him speaking over the installed radio with emphatic gestures which would have been lost at the other end. I helped the keeper back to his feet and the rest of us ambled more slowly back towards the cars. We walked dumbly, silenced by anticlimax and, in most cases, puzzlement. Beth was nodding to herself but deep in thought.

  The Inspector had finished and restored his microphone to its place by the time we reached him. He got out of the Range Rover and we formed a small ring, our breaths steaming in the low sun and cold, moist air. I had the advantage of partial knowledge and I had a hazy picture of the truth; but the others were not so favoured and the baby-faced Inspector, in particular, looked as though someone had stolen his rattle.

  ‘Mrs Cunningham,’ he said, ‘is that what you were expecting?’

  ‘Yes,’ Beth said. ‘I didn’t want to say too much in case I was making an ass of myself. But it did seem rather obvious.’

  ‘It is far from obvious to me. You’d better spell it out.’ He nodded to his Sergeant, who produced the small tape recorder, set it to work and placed it carefully on the bonnet of the Range Rover.

  ‘You didn’t have all the facts,’ Beth said kindly. ‘I’ll go back to the beginning. Somebody threatened us, attacked Mr Garnet in mistake for my husband and poisoned a dog.’ As she spoke, Beth was avoiding Fergusson’s eye. ‘We’re not concerned at this moment with who or why, what we’re considering is the evidence you need and I think you have it now.

  ‘On the day of the keeper’s shoot, Guffy was sent to the phone and came back to say that the phone-box at Stouriden had vanished. John and I drove round that way before following Mr Fergusson back to our home and, sure enough, the phone-box had gone and there was the sole of a shoe stuck to what had been the floor. There was also a strip of new tarmac not far away, as though the road had been up not long before. That was two days after Mr Garnet was attacked and just before the dog was poisoned.

  ‘John got hold of that boy Tom Shotto, the glue-sniffer who you caught hanging around our place. He said that he’d been in the habit of using that phone-box for his sniffing but he’d dropped a tube of superglue and trodden on it. Last night your technician mentioned that fingerprints shut up in the fumes of superglue come up silver and are absolutely permanent.

  ‘What I think happened is this. Somebody used that phone-box to send us the threatening message. While he was speaking, some machine started up at the road-works nearby, but in his excitement he may not have noticed. Then, in order to ram the message home, he came to the roadway near our gate. Mr Garnet, who looks very like my husband in a poor light, was on his way to see John and he got in the way of a blow intended for John. It must have been a shock for the assailant, to realize that he had struck and possibly killed the man who he was trying to buy a pup from, partly by working for him in his spare time and partly by saving up what else he could earn.’

  ‘Guffy?’ Mr Fergusson said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. ‘Guffy did a’ that?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I canna credit it. Och, ye maun be mislearit—’

  ‘You promised not to interfere,’ the Inspector reminded him. The old keeper, a man well used to discipline, was silenced.

  ‘The fingerprints will tell you for certain who, among those who’d agreed to buy one of Mr Garnet’s pups, had used the phone-box recently,’ Beth said. ‘To go on, it must have been another shock to remember that he had made the threatening phone call to our answering machine from that box. There had been roadworks nearby at the time and he thought that the recording of that sound would enable the source of the call to be pinpointed. So he went back to the phone box, intending to polish away his fingerprints. In the meantime, however, Tom Shotto had trodden on his superglue and the fumes had then been confined for some hours in the little-used kiosk. Any fingerprints, including his own, were now bright silver and he found that no amount of polishing would remove them. If he was anxious before, he would be in a panic now. It must have seemed like a judgement on him.

  ‘What was he going to do? The wisest thing would have been to do nothing. There must have been the fingerprints of dozens of people in that box and he could quite legitimately have made a call from there at any time. He chose the one course of action that might focus attention on the fingerprints. He came to the farm and borrowed the fork-lift and a spanner from the tractor shed. That would be easy enough. He’s used to driving the farm machinery and nobody sleeps nearby. He unbolted the phone-box from its base, carried the whole thing back here and plopped it into the loch.’

  Beth seemed to have finished. We digested her words. It all seemed quite obvious, now that somebody had pointed it out.

  Mr Fergusson had always looked less than his real age, but now he might have been a well-preserved centenarian. He found his voice first. ‘You’re suggesting that my . . . that young Augustus . . .?’

  The Detective Inspector might be ruthless in pursuit of truth and the evidence to back it up, but I was to find that once a case had broken he was a compassionate man. ‘A recovery vehicle is on the way,’ he said gently, ‘and a fingerprint expert. We had best wait to see what they find. Mrs Cunningham has found the evidence for us but she may have drawn the wrong conclusions.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the keeper glumly. ‘Maybe.’ There could be no doubt that he was already convinced.

  As Beth neared the end of her explanation, I was distracted. Over the Inspector’s shoulder I was watching as a stocky figure on a heavy old bicycle came down between the trees from the direction of Stouriden, bumping and juddering over the ruts and potholes in a track intended only for forestry vehicles. I half hoped that he would turn around and go.

  I still had an irrational liking for Guffy. He had, it seemed, killed poor Accer and tried to kill me. Anyone else doing the same would have had my undying enmity. I would have waited a lifetime for the chance of revenge.

  But Guffy somehow did not fall within the rules. I could make allowances for his passionate desire for a dog of his own—an emotion with which I could fully identify—and for his damaged intelligence. His nature was usually cheerful and affectionate, two characteristics only too rare among much higher IQs than his. He would have to be placed under control, but I found that I had no wish to be present at an occasion which must inevitably be painful, not least for his putative grandfather.

  But there was nowhere for him to go and he must have known it. He stopped for a minute at the trackside. I could see by the stiffening of his outline that he had made up his mind. Whether he intended to face the music or to try and bluff it out I did not know, and nor perhaps did Guffy, but it was going to be one or the other. He was not going to run. He came on again.

  The movement had caught Mr Fergusson’s eye. He stiffened. I thought that he was going to shout a warning, but he saw the impossibility of flight and he beckoned the boy. Guffy rode his bike slowly up to us and put his feet down.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked. His air of innocent curiosity was unconvincing. Seen close to, the pinkness of his face was split into blotches of red and white and the shaking of his hands produced a sympathetic jingle from the bell.

  We had arrived at a supposition of Guffy’s guilt by way of logic perhaps tainted with the intuition which I had assured the Inspector never figured in Beth’s reasoning. Even if Guffy’s fingerprints should turn up in the telephone box, they could have been left there innocently. Until I saw the guilt that Guffy was trying to hide, I could still have believed him innocent.

  But Mr Fergusson knew. He had studied the boy for years and grieved ov
er his mental state. He had learned to read his moods and watched his comings and goings. Without pausing to reason it out, he was sure.

  ‘Why?’ he asked the boy gently.

  ‘Why what?’ The effort to be casual was itself a strain. Guffy did not have the talent to carry it off. His voice was throaty with tension and I could tell that his mouth was dry.

  ‘Why did you get tore into Mr Garnet? Why shoot at Mr Cunningham here? God’s sake, why poison a wee dog?’

  Guffy moistened his lips. He glanced around our faces and decided against a last attempt at denial. All colour was gone from his face now but he raised his chin defiantly. ‘I was sorry about the dog,’ he said. ‘There was no other way I could think of.’ He paused and we all saw his face change. The sunny-natured youth vanished and in his place was a creature capable of journeying to the furthest edge of anger. I thought for a moment that there was a keener edge to the breeze that ruffled across the loch. ‘The bugger!’ he shouted. ‘He promised me, Mr Garnet did! If I howkit—’

  ‘Dug,’ Mr Fergusson wailed. Even in the face of disaster, Guffy was not to let his upbringing slip.

  ‘—if I dug him a flowerbed and levelled the ground for a lawn, he’d allow me two quid an hour against a pup. He bloody promised. And I worked my arse off for him.’ Guffy’s voice dropped. He was crying unashamedly now. ‘And I had the pup chosen and damn near enough saved to make up the difference. Ah, but she’s a bonny wee bitch and came to me herself and settled in my hands. We could’ve made a rare team, I swear we could! I was going to be so patient with her, bring her along slowly, let her learn at her own pace the way you said.’ Guffy’s voice broke.

  The Inspector looked anxiously at Mr Fergusson, who stepped into the breach. I would have expected him to take the boy’s side, but truth and honour were dear to the old man. He chose his next question with care. ‘Had you chosen a name?’ he asked gently.

  It was the right question. Guffy sniffed but pulled himself together and the frown left his face for a moment. He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand, replacing his tears with smudges of dirt. He swung his leg over and stood his bicycle carefully at the trackside. ‘I meant to call her Pearl, she was so precious,’ he said. The frown returned. ‘Then’—he cast me a look of reproach—‘he wouldn’t sign the paper for registration. A pup would be no good to me if I couldn’t enter it in trials like the best dog-men do, like him and her’—he looked from me to Beth—‘and . . . and . . . I could’ve raised pups myself.’

  Clearly, Guffy had had his dreams. I felt a huge pang of misery on his behalf. He had been aspiring to the lifestyle that I had made for myself. Perhaps he had even hoped to model himself on me. Poor Guffy might even have been on the verge of the one activity, perhaps even the one living, that was open to him, only to have it snatched away by Ben Garnet. Perhaps, if I had recognized his ambitions, I might have let him work at the kennels and gain a grounding in the many facets of dogwork. Instead, I had been the first to dash his hopes—but at least I had not raised them first to the skies.

  The Inspector had a question on his tongue but Mr Fergusson was successfully coaxing his protégé to produce the truth. Burrard waited.

  ‘So you tried to scare Mr Cunningham into signing the paper?’ the keeper asked.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Say yes, Guffy. But it was Mr Garnet you hit?’

  ‘Aye. Yes, I mean.’ Guffy fell silent again but the need to explain overrode discretion. ‘I took him for Mr Cunningham in the gloaming. He turned just as I came up behind him and he moved and I hit him harder than I meant. I still thought it was Mr Cunningham and I thought I’d killed him.’

  Mr Fergusson shook his head sadly. ‘That was no’ wise,’ he said. ‘But what’s done is done. What came next? They’re saying a phone-box is down in the water. Would yon be the ane frae Stouriden?’ For the first time since I had known him, Mr Fergusson was slipping back into his native tongue in front of the boy.

  Guffy was nodding violently. ‘I thought of the message I’d put on Mr Cunningham’s machine, trying to scare him into signing the paper. There’d been the sound of a road drill not far off. I thought they might trace the call to the box at Stouriden. I’d heard of fingerprints and that they can match them to whoever made them, so I went back that night to polish them away. I could see them clear in the light of the torch, thousands of them and nothing to say which were mine. That didn’t matter a damn because I was ready to polish the whole box. But they wouldn’t shift, not one of them.’

  ‘You werena’ thinking,’ Mr Fergusson said. ‘Why would it matter if your fingerprints were there? I’ve sent you to make calls from that box often enough.’

  ‘I never thought of that,’ Guffy said wonderingly, impressed by such razor-sharp reasoning. ‘It just seemed that with them shining like that and not rubbing off whatever I did, that they were accusing me, sort of. You know what I mean? So I fetched a spanner and the fork-lift from the barn and dumped the whole jing-bang in the wee loch.’

  I glanced at Mr Fergusson to see how he was taking these revelations. When I saw the tears on his cheeks, I looked away. The Inspector, I saw, was doing the same.

  ‘You’ve done a’ the wrang things,’ Fergusson said sadly. ‘You puir, daft laddie, I doubt they’ll ever let you have a puppy now.’

  At this prophecy, Guffy threw his head back and let out a howl like that of a soul in torment, which perhaps he was. The sound wrenched at something atavistic in me and I felt it as a physical relief when the noise faded to sobs and died away. There was a silence but for his laboured breathing. ‘D’you mean it? Never?’ he said at last.

  Mr Fergusson nodded sombrely. ‘You should hae come to me the minute you kenned he was swicking you.’

  This reminder of his grievance brought Guffy back to the boil. ‘You . . . mannie!’ he said after a defensive glance at his mentor. ‘I cycled to his house late yesterday to finish the wee bit work—’

  ‘Little bit of work,’ Fergusson said. It was more a reflex than a correction.

  ‘Aye, that. The little bit of work. And Mrs Garnet came out to me and said she was to tell me that her man had changed his mind, he would be keeping two of the pups to hissel and my Pearl was one of them, and I could go hang.’ Guffy’s voice broke. ‘My wee Pearl!’ he wailed. He lifted the front wheel of his bike and slammed it down so that it bounced and every one of the many loose components rattled. And then he regained some control of himself. He lifted his bicycle and stood it carefully beside the track again. ‘When I asked for the money I was due for the work I’d done, she said her man had told her I was paid up to date. The bugger!’

  ‘Ye mauna’ cry the mannie a bugger,’ Fergusson said. ‘It’s no’ polite. But that’s a dashed dirty trick on a young lad. Fancy a man wi’ his siller takkin’ advantage of a puir loon that way. You were daft to trust a lang-nebbit man sic as yon. The bugger!’ he finished.

  ‘Aye. But I’m upsides wi’ Mr Bloody Garnet,’ Guffy said, proudly, calming down again. ‘I just been over there and I think maybe I killed him this time. He still wouldna’ pay me for the work nor let me hae the pup, so I upped wi’ a shovel and cloured him a good yin.’

  ‘Hit him a good one,’ Fergusson said mechanically. ‘Oh my God!’ he added.

  The policemen had been standing by, letting the old keeper carry out their interrogation for them, but Guffy’s last statement goosed them into action. Guffy, protesting only at leaving his bicycle behind, was swept into the Range Rover and I saw the Inspector using his radio as Gribble struggled to turn the big vehicle in the confined space left between my car and Fergusson’s Land Rover.

  I jumped to my car. Beth was ahead of me. ‘I’m coming too,’ she said. ‘Mrs Garnet may need somebody with her.’

  The old keeper was heading for his Land Rover but I was sure that his part was done. It would only pain him more to see the rest of the drama played out. I checked the car beside him. ‘You should stay here,’ I told him. ‘They’ll need you t
o direct the recovery vehicle. Otherwise they’ll break down the bank. I’ll see that you’re kept informed.’

  It was thin. Probably he saw through it but accepted the goodwill behind my reasoning. He nodded and turned back.

  As we took off after the Range Rover I saw a black figure in the mirror. It was Minnity, still in his wet suit, standing forlornly by the trackside with his flippers in his hand. His other clothes, I presumed, were still in the Range Rover. He seemed to be waving but perhaps he was shaking his fist.

  *

  Less than five minutes brought us to Garnet’s house—an old farmhouse now modernized into an upmarket residence set in a generous garden and, in my opinion, far too good for its owner. Several figures at work on Charles’s new house looked round in surprise as we swept past the paddock where three horses grazed. I glimpsed Charles himself with Hob in an adjoining stubble field. The spaniel seemed to be playing him up but I decided that this was not the moment to stop and pontificate. We arrived in the Garnets’ drive right on the heels of the Range Rover.

  Beyond the house and hidden from the paddock, a figure lay on the sodden ground.

  Mrs Garnet was crouched over her husband. She had covered him with a coat and rolled another to support his head. We ran to her. She was scared almost out of her wits but she had sense enough to say that she had called for an ambulance.

  ‘And so have I,’ said the Inspector. ‘One of them should be here within minutes. For the moment, let me help him.’

  Burrard and Beth between them drew Mrs Garnet to her feet. When she saw me, her eyes blazed and she looked to the Inspector.

  ‘You’ve arrested him?’

  Burrard was down on his knees. He looked up. ‘Mr Cunningham has been helping us all morning,’ he said.

  ‘Then who—’

  Sergeant McAndrew had stayed in the Range Rover with the prisoner, but Guffy managed to poke his head out of a partially opened window. ‘I learned him,’ he shouted, ‘he swicked me and I cloured him. He should have treated me right-like.’ McAndrew pulled him back. There seemed to be a scuffle developing in the back of the vehicle.