Twice Bitten

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So I told the story of our day, with Henry interpolating when I missed out any details.

  At the end, Hannah asked, ‘How can they ever make sure who it is? I mean, if it’s so badly burnt . . .’

  ‘You’d have to ask the police about that,’ Henry said, ‘but the necessary information usually comes from dental records.’

  ‘They won’t help very much,’ said Hannah. ‘Dougal always boasted – boasts – that he’s got perfect teeth and never went to a dentist in his life.’

  ‘Then if they find that the body has fillings in its teeth . . .’ Beth began gently.

  ‘That might not help. You see, Dougal isn’t always very truthful about that sort of thing. He doesn’t mean to tell lies.’ Hannah looked earnestly at each of us in turn. ‘It’s just that he likes to brag a little. I can quite imagine him saying that he had perfect teeth because perfect teeth are better than teeth full of fillings and so from his point of view it was the right thing to say at the time, just to score points off the other person. Scoring points is important to him.’

  That, I thought, said quite a lot about Dougal’s humble origins.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Henry told her. ‘They can do a great deal with the length of bones, the shape of a skull and any old operations or fractures. They can even rebuild the features, just from the skull. They’ll find out for sure. Meantime, you can only wait and hope.’

  ‘I expect so.’ Hannah sighed shakily. She was turning palely green at Henry’s ramblings.

  I did not share Henry’s faith in forensic science. Skulls can burst in intense heat. But, for Hannah, a detailed description of the head of the corpse in the bonfire might be the last straw. ‘It’s a little early in the day,’ I said, ‘but I think we could call it knocking-off time. Hannah, you’d like a drink? A stiff one for a change?’ I had it in mind to give Hannah a good stiff mixture of port and brandy. Nothing can beat it as a settler for a queasy stomach.

  Hannah shook her head and got to her feet. ‘I’m going out,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Dogs to walk.’ She hurried out of the room.

  I looked at Beth, who shook her head. ‘The dogs have all been walked,’ she said. ‘But never mind. Hannah won’t want anybody to see her face for now. The light’s going. Walking dogs in the fresh air and twilight may be the best therapy for her. It won’t do the dogs any harm, either. What was that about a stiff drink?’

  ‘That was for Hannah’s benefit,’ I told her. ‘I’ll have to be going if I’m to fetch milk.’

  ‘Never mind about the milk,’ Beth said – or words to that effect. ‘Hannah can walk some more dogs up to the farm later. Did you mean to imply that the police think that Mrs Macevoy was trying to head you away from finding the body?’

  ‘That would be putting it a bit strong,’ Henry said. He was already at the side table and pouring our customary drinks. ‘All we can tell you is that the woman sergeant who took our preliminary statements seemed to think that it was one question that Mr Ewell would ask later, so she’d better have the answer.’

  Beth considered. ‘It could be,’ she said. ‘If Mrs Macevoy had carried the body from the house and hid it in the bonfire and then found today that it wasn’t completely burned – heavy rain woke me during the night, it could have damped down the remains of the bonfire – she could have been planning to go out after dark to bury it or move it, as soon as it was cool, or even to rekindle the bonfire.’

  ‘You haven’t seen the place,’ Henry said. ‘It had originally been planted ridge-and-furrow and then, so that the roots would be out and ready to burn, they’d taken down the trees by pulling them out with a tractor. That would be at the landowner’s insistence,’ he added, resuming his chair with a substantial whisky to hand. ‘The ground was like the aftermath of a major battle in World War One, all trenches and shell-holes. The woman could hardly get herself over it – in fact, I found it hard going myself.’

  ‘I certainly couldn’t carry a body over it,’ I said. ‘Especially in the dark.’

  ‘Would a barrow have made it easier?’

  ‘The reverse.’

  Beth was reluctant to abandon a nicely compact theory. ‘With a male accomplice . . . Oh well, we can think about it when we know a little more.’

  ‘I don’t want to think about it at all,’ I said.

  Beth seemed to accept what I said at face value. ‘You don’t have to think about it if you don’t want to. So what happens now? When will the rest of us know something?’

  ‘The media will know even less than we do, for the moment,’ I said. ‘The police will be asking questions. The more they find out the more questions they’ll ask. You know that, you’ve seen them in action.’

  ‘And they’ll be handing out information like a tiger giving up its kill,’ said Henry.

  ‘You can make a lot of informed guesses from the questions they ask,’ Beth said. ‘And sometimes even more from what they don’t ask. If it’s Sergeant Ewell—’

  ‘Detective Inspector Ewell,’ Henry and I corrected her in unison.

  ‘If it’s Mr Ewell,’ Beth began again, ‘I’ll pick his brains, just you see if I don’t.’

  *

  Once again we were in a state of limbo. From the media, I gathered that Jack Gilchrist, as the actual discoverer of the body, was giving interviews galore and would continue to do so for as long as the body was news and his stories continued to grow in dramatic appeal – or until an arrest was made and the whole subject became sub judice. Of hard news, there was none.

  I told Hannah that she could take time off, go home, do anything that would help her to get through the period of uncertainty, but she said that she would go mad if she had nothing to occupy her mind. That was all very well and quite understandable. I would have felt the same. But there is no helper more counterproductive than one who promises to do something and then forgets. As long as Hannah was liable to fall into a trance or suddenly hurry out of sight to hide a burst of weeping, she was more of a nuisance than a help. Beth and Daffy tried to comfort her, which usually made bad worse and also hindered their own labours. As a result, we endured two days during which the work of the kennels went forward, if at all, in fits and starts. The dogs soon knew that our minds were not on them and they began playing us up.

  When Detective Inspector Ewell arrived unheralded at mid-morning on the Tuesday, accompanied by his Sergeant – still glamorous though still in uniform – it was, more than anything, a relief.

  Ewell wanted to speak first to Hannah and Hannah asked me to be present. When Ewell made no objection, Beth, after a speculative glance at the Sergeant, managed to suggest that perhaps another woman, and not of the police, should attend in case comfort was called for. That also was accepted after a judicious pause, but when Daffy (accompanied by Sam) and Isobel tried to add themselves to the party, he drew the line. They were excluded, firmly but politely. Henry, who would probably have managed to include himself in the conclave by dint of the mere authority of his presence, was away.

  We settled in the sitting room. The hearth had not been cleared, which was a measure of our disturbed state, but two firelighters soon kindled a fire of logs above the old ashes. The flames performed their usual magic, transforming the sometimes cheerless room into a welcoming haven. I saw the Sergeant glance up at the painting above the fireplace, of a skein of geese over an estuary.

  Hannah was looking towards the Inspector as a rabbit might look at a stoat.

  ‘Mr Cunningham told you about the find on Saturday?’ Ewell asked her. The question seemed superfluous. I suspected that he had put off this particular interview until he could be quite sure that I had done the job for him. As a sergeant, I remembered, the breaking of bad news had been the only part of his work which he faced with less than enthusiasm.

  Hannah nodded.

  Ewell, who had seemed as apprehensive as Hannah herself, looked happier. ‘I still have no definite information for
you,’ he admitted. ‘So far, that body has not been positively identified. You’ll understand that we have to consider the possibility—’

  ‘That the body is all that’s left of Dougal Webb,’ Hannah said bravely. ‘I understand. Mr Cunningham explained. He also told me how badly burned it was.’

  The Detective Inspector looked still more relieved. ‘And that’s one reason I’ve come to you. We are in some difficulty. Mr Webb seems almost to have appeared out of nowhere. His employer knows very little about him. The job was advertised, Mr Webb applied. Mr Cove checked on his college diploma and left it at that. The addresses at which Webb was living when he took his course and when he made his application were both lodgings in Falkirk. Can you, for instance, tell us who Mr Webb’s dentist is?’

  Hannah repeated what she had told us, that Dougal Webb had boasted of his perfect teeth, and paused.

  ‘Hannah had her reservations as to whether that was necessarily true,’ I said.

  ‘From what we’ve been able to find out so far,’ Ewell said, ‘he seems to have been a model of truthfulness – at least in that one respect.’

  ‘And the body had good teeth?’ Beth put in.

  ‘Well, yes. We know which medical practice Mr Webb signed on with, but he never seems to have needed more attention than a bandaged cut or a prescription for cough mixture. They don’t even have a record of his height and weight. We can make an estimate of those from the clothes left in his cottage, but that’s a poor basis for an identification. The body, as you say, was badly burned and—’

  I saw Beth wince. ‘If that’s all you want from Hannah, can she go now?’ Beth asked. ‘Surely she needn’t hear the gory details?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Hannah said quickly. ‘Somebody’s died. That’s all I care about – that, and whether or not it was Dougal.’

  ‘I would never give what you call “gory details” to a member of the public,’ Ewell said with dignity. ‘I was only going to say that we recovered some of Mr Webb’s hairs from his hairbrush and there was a bloodied sticking-plaster in his bathroom. There should be no difficulty isolating his DNA – what they call “genetic fingerprinting”. That may take about ten days. But the body’s DNA may present more of a problem.’

  Despite the Inspector’s fine words, I was sure that he had been on the point of explaining that they had hopes of an identification by genetic fingerprint if the body was not cooked beyond the point at which DNA could still be isolated. And if that was not a ‘gory detail’, figuratively speaking, I did not know what was. Or perhaps Ewell did not count incineration as being gory but even quite the opposite.

  ‘You won’t want to lose that time,’ Beth said. ‘Is it true that the longer a case drags on, the less chance there is of solving it?’

  ‘So they say, and it seems likely. I’ve not been in CID long enough to speak from personal experience. But that’s why I’m looking to you for help, Miss Hopewell. You knew the deceased – Mr Webb, I mean – better than anyone.’

  ‘You’re sure that it’s Dougal Webb, aren’t you?’ Beth said.

  Ewell had flushed. He hurried to correct himself, speaking directly to Hannah. ‘Put it down as a slip of the tongue, please. I’m thinking along those lines, of course I am, and so are you. As Mrs Cunningham pointed out, the longer a case goes on the less chance of solving it there’s said to be. So we’ve got to make the best start we can even though we don’t have a positive identification. That means that we’ve got to start from the likeliest assumption. But I’ve no way of knowing for sure yet, one way or the other. With the young man’s next of kin not known . . .’

  Hannah frowned. ‘What? But I can tell you that,’ she said.

  Ewell tried to hide his surprise. ‘You can?’

  ‘I think I can,’ Hannah said cautiously. ‘I nearly said something when you told us about him appearing out of nowhere. I don’t know if he was still being – what did you call it? – a model of truthfulness. He sometimes says what he doesn’t really mean, just to build himself up a bit. Romanticizing, sort of. But, for what it’s worth, I’ll tell you. I was at Ardrossie one time, and we could see Gifford House sitting up on the hill and sticking up out of the trees. I said how I’d like to live in a house like that some day, or like this one, a house built when there was space and quality and with country round about it, not jammed in between neighbours on either side and front and back and a garden the size of a blanket. And he said something like, “Stick with me and you’ll live in that house some day. My aunt lives there and neither of them has any relatives closer than me.’”

  ‘Mrs Macevoy?’ Beth exclaimed.

  ‘It would have to be, wouldn’t it?’

  It happened that the Sergeant was sitting in my field of vision, at a corner table that usually only sported back numbers of magazines, and I saw her look up and frown. Beth must have caught the same look. She said, ‘Mrs Macevoy didn’t tell you? Surely you asked her about Saturday?’

  ‘Of course. She didn’t give you a very good press, by the way,’ Ewell added in my direction. ‘But Mr Webb’s name wasn’t mentioned and she might not have known that he was missing. She seems to live a rather isolated existence. We’ve been trying to trace Webb’s origins. This is the first indication we’ve had that he was local.’

  ‘He probably wasn’t,’ Beth said. ‘According to Daffy, the Macevoys had only lived here a very few years before the big scandal. Dougal Webb may have moved here to be near them. He may even have heard about the job vacancy from his aunt. But, of course, after his uncle was sent to prison, he wouldn’t have boasted about the connection.’

  ‘That’s true.’ The Detective Inspector seemed relieved by Beth’s reasoning. He returned his attention to Hannah. ‘You don’t know where he grew up? Or whether his parents are still alive?’ Hannah shook her head. ‘Never mind. One other thing. It would help if you could provide some photographs of him. As many as possible.’

  ‘I only have one or two snapshots. I’ll get them back in the end?’

  ‘I promise.’

  Hannah got up. When she was out of earshot, Beth asked, ‘Are you still in charge of the case?’

  ‘For practical purposes,’ Ewell said slowly. I guessed that it hurt his dignity to admit that he was no longer the top dog, but in the presence of his Sergeant he would have to be truthful. ‘Superintendent Aicheson is in nominal charge but he has other things on his plate.’

  Beth pounced. ‘So it’s being treated as a case of murder?’ An inspector might deal with an unexplained disappearance but murder would usually be the province of a more senior officer.

  Ewell very nearly smiled. ‘I would have come to that as soon as the lassie was out of the room. There was no need to creep up on it obliquely. Likely, I’ll have to take a further statement from her. But take a look at this, which has just reached us.’ He stretched out a hand. The Sergeant rose and handed him a large photograph. Evidently there were no concessions to gender in the Fife CID.

  Ewell passed it to me. The single transparency had been made up from four X-rays. On a reduced scale it showed a slim knife-blade which had been snapped off. It was still in place among what looked like human organs. Alongside it had been drawn a scale, according to which the blade was some twenty centimetres long. ‘Do you have a knife like that?’ he asked.

  ‘Probably,’ I said.

  ‘Do you still have it?’

  ‘If we ever had one, I expect it’s still around. You’re welcome to look.’

  He took back the photograph. ‘You’re very casual about a lethal weapon.’

  ‘Potentially lethal,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It wasn’t designed for use as a weapon.’

  Ewell blinked at me. ‘I’ve asked for a report on the knife-blade,’ he said, ‘but I won’t get it until the postmortem is finished and the blade can be examined. What can you suggest?’

  ‘You called it a lethal weapon. So is a teapot, if you brain somebody with it. This
wasn’t made as a weapon. A stabbing knife can be one of several different shapes altogether, quite unlike this. The point is usually in line with the handle. It would be made from heavier stock, a quarter of an inch or so thick, not steel that would snap off. It can be a plain dagger shape or a clip-point “bowie” with the clip sharpened. The blade would usually be dull or darkened – blued – which I don’t think is what you’ll find when you do get your hands on it. And the blade would usually be tapered or grooved to let air go past. A plain, flat blade like this with parallel edges would be gripped by suction. Stab somebody with this and you might not be able to pull it out again, though you might need to use it again in a hurry.’

  Beth made a little sound of protest. She had never quite come to terms with the violence of my earlier career.

  ‘I bow to your experience of weaponry,’ Ewell said slowly, ‘even if I wouldn’t want to have had it myself. So it’s a hunting knife? Or a kitchen knife?’

  ‘Probably not a hunting knife.’ I took back the photograph. ‘This has a curved sharp edge and a straight blunt edge. You do get hunting knives of that shape, but they’re not easy to use. The main purpose of a hunting knife is to open up a dead animal neatly. The knife in the X-rays would slit the skin but it would dig in and perforate the guts or the meat. That may be acceptable, depending on your technique and what the meat is, but not to me. A hunting knife usually has a blade shaped like this.’ I dug my lock-knife out of my pocket and opened it to show him the blade. ‘A curved cutting edge. A straight back edge but angled down by about ten degrees near the point – that’s the “clip” I referred to earlier. It gives a blunt edge to ride along on the meat without cutting into it. When you get it out, if the clip turns out to have been sharpened I’ll take back most of what I’ve told you.’

  From Ewell’s expression, he was suffering from an excess of information and needed to boil it down. ‘So this would be . . . what? A kitchen knife?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘Or a badly designed general-purpose sheath-knife. It’s longer than a stalker’s knife or a combat knife, and of thinner steel.’