Twice Bitten

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘And you think,’ said Henry, ‘that Inspector Ewell will surround the place with cries of, “Come out of there, Mr Macevoy, with your hands up,” and out will come Dougal Webb?’

  ‘Now you’re making it sound silly. But yes. And if you still think I’m wrong, think about this. Mrs Macevoy was buying courgettes and pork chops. You know how Dougal drooled at the thought of either of those foods. And now,’ Beth said, ‘we must move. There are dogs to walk and a ravenous mouth to feed—’

  ‘You mean Sam?’ I asked.

  ‘Who else? A ravenous mouth to feed and Isobel will be wondering if she’s lost a husband.’

  ‘My goodness, yes!’ said Henry.

  Chapter Ten

  Whatever might be the outcome of Detective Inspector Ewell’s activities, we could be assured of a visit from the police within the next day or two. We waited through the next day, but the only tidings to filter through to us came from a neighbour who had been told that somebody else had caught a mention on local radio of the arrest of some unspecified person on an unspecified charge

  The expected visit came on the afternoon of the following day. What was unexpected was that this time DS Bremner was not dancing attendance on DI Ewell but on Detective Superintendent Aicheson. The Superintendent was a stout man. His colour was high, his ears and nose almost scarlet. I guessed that there was a race on between retirement and a coronary. And they wished to interview Beth and Hannah and me, one at a time. Daffy was away in my car, fetching a supply of feed from a new source and some of the dried ewes’ milk which we swear by for pregnant bitches, nursing mothers and puppies. Henry had gone down with Isobel’s ’flu and Isobel was at home attending to him. Our resources were seriously stretched.

  I jumped to the conclusion that their mission was concerned with Beth’s advice to Mr Ewell. ‘Do you really need me as well as Mrs Cunningham?’ I asked peevishly. ‘I was just going to take a couple of dogs to the Moss.’

  ‘We’ll see you first,’ said Mr Aicheson in tones which suggested that he was doing me a great favour.

  Before I had time to think, I was whisked into my own sitting room. I met Beth’s startled eyes over the Sergeant’s shoulder and then the door closed between us.

  When I had met Superintendent Aicheson on a previous occasion I had gained the impression that he was the political and administrative guru rather than an involved member of the crime detection teams. It was soon clear that he was present mainly to lend authority to the Sergeant. Most of the questions were hers.

  Her line of questioning took me by surprise. She was brisk and businesslike and her manner was hostile. Evidently she was not yet willing to forgive and forget the incident in the farmyard involving her car. Instead of concentrating on the events leading up to our meeting with DI Ewell, she took me back to the evening of Dougal Webb’s disappearance. Had Beth and I been together for the whole evening? What corroborating details could I remember? I told her that we had watched the video of a film, hired in Cupar. What film? I had to outline the plot for her. Unfortunately, the film had proved a disappointment and my memory of it was patchy.

  She switched to the subject of Hannah. What did we really know of her movements that night? How could we be sure that her phone call had come from Ardrossie? Did she have access to Henry’s mobile phone, or any other? Had the sound of the connection been consistent with a public call-box? The questions seemed to follow a path of logic which was unmistakable yet not on my mental map. I gave up trying to orient myself and concentrated on recalling the truth. We were innocent and therefore had nothing to fear, that was my simple philosophy, and I hoped that Beth would be wise enough to follow it.

  We came back to the attempted blackmail. How had I really felt about Dougal Webb prior to that attempt? What grounds had I had for thinking him untrustworthy? I had rejected his first approach, that much was confirmed by the barmaid, but if he had not vanished, if he had come back with more specific threats, would I not have sacrificed my Dickson rather than have him approach the Kennel Club?

  At that point I got a little heated. When the Sergeant uttered the word ‘gun’, her tone made it clear that she considered my Dickson to be a trivial but antisocial toy. I explained in forceful terms that, firstly, there was no substance in Webb’s allegations and, secondly, that the chance to acquire a Dickson Round Action in mint condition comes but once in a lifetime to a man of limited means and it would have taken considerably more than Dougal Webb’s threats to part me from it. Even as I spoke I realized that I must be giving the impression that I would have killed to keep the gun, but I was still relying on truth and justice. Others have done the same and lived to regret it.

  The Sergeant brought us round to the story of Mim. Surely there must have been conspiracy with Quentin Cove? How else could he have hoped to get away with such a fraud? Had money changed hands? Or favours? Had the quarrel in the farmyard occurred because I was trying to deny my part in the conspiracy and leave Mr Cove to face the music alone? I pointed out that I had signed Mim’s registration over to Daffy long before Quentin Cove expressed any interest in the little bitch, but the Sergeant waved that aside as a palpable smokescreen.

  Part of my mind could see where the questions were leading while the rest of it was refusing to see anything of the sort. But one thing both parts of my mind were agreed on. No detective sergeant, even one as alluring as Detective Sergeant Bremner and supported by no less than a detective superintendent, was going to badger me with untrue and unsupported allegations. ‘I have one question of my own,’ I said. ‘Who or what did Detective Inspector Ewell find yesterday?’

  The Sergeant tilted her head back in order to look down her nose at me. ‘You’ll know soon enough,’ she said ominously. ‘For now, we’ll ask the questions.’

  I had had enough. I explained clearly and almost politely that, failing any questions which did not presuppose that I was guilty of something, I would only be prepared to continue in the presence of my solicitor. Beth, I said, could make up her own mind and usually did. And with that I made what I hoped was a dignified exit, no doubt leaving the two officers with the worst possible impression.

  Beth was somewhere upstairs. I could hear her clattering around angrily. Hannah, with Sam’s help, was washing puppy dishes in the kitchen but the Sergeant steered me past and I had the feeling of being watched until I had left the gate with two of the dogs.

  The weather gods had relented and given us one of those days that delude us into thinking that winter in Scotland isn’t so bad after all. Even the Moss was not quite as barren as usual. The dogs were enjoying it as much as I was and they wanted to romp, so I kept my mind on controlling them and saw no reason to hurry back.

  We returned to Three Oaks as dusk was falling, pleasantly tired and with three wood pigeon in the bag, taken on the flight-line to the pond for their evening’s drink before going to roost. Both dogs had pleased me by retrieving the pigeon – the loose-feathered birds are not to every dog’s taste. Quentin Cove’s car was parked beside the police Range Rover in front of the house but the man himself was waiting at the gate. My interlude of escape was over and reality came pouring in.

  ‘I must speak to you,’ he said. ‘Whatever you think of me, it’s high time that we compared notes.’

  ‘Hold on a minute longer,’ I told him. Hannah came out of the house to meet me. The dogs were wet and smelly but she took them over without demur while avoiding any glance in the direction of the farmer.

  I turned back. He met me beside his car. ‘You’ve got a bloody nerve,’ I said.

  He looked shamefaced and I noticed that he seemed to have lost weight, but he managed a shrug. ‘All right, so I’ve sinned. And I’m regretting it, every moment. I thought I could get away with it. Then I thought that I could live with it. But I can’t.’

  He had surprised and partially disarmed me by not being defiant, but I had no intention of allowing him to emulate the Prodigal Son. ‘I’m not talking about the fiddle. But Daffy,’ I sai
d. ‘You failed to get her banned from driving so you drove your car at her.’

  He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘I must have been horn daft. But – can you understand this? Something grand was disintegrating in my hands. I’ll make it up to Mrs Mearns if ever I can.’ The evening was cooling fast. He saw me shiver and remorse turned to compassion. ‘Come into the car,’ he said. We got in and he started the engine and turned up the heat. He sat looking out of the windscreen at nothing for a long moment. ‘I’ve had it easy for most of my life,’ he said. ‘Hard physical work, but you can take that if your health’s good and you’ve got security. My granddad was a thrifty farmer. He bought Ardrossie outright and worked it up. My dad added to it. It came to me as a going concern at a time when a farmer couldn’t lose money if he tried. I never faced a challenge, never achieved anything on my own.’

  I was damned if I was going to feel sorry for him. ‘There was the dog-food,’ I said.

  He shook his head. He was not to be coaxed out of his self-pity. Poor little rich boy, I thought. ‘That was no challenge. It was as if the set-up was there already, waiting to happen. The right men gave me the right advice and it worked. But all my life I’ve had dogs. I might’ve gone in for sheepdog trialling, but Ardrossie’s never been a sheep farm and gun dogs are the dogs I know. You heard of the man who said, “I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous”?’

  ‘I have now.’

  ‘Well, that’s how I felt. It was over the top, I can see that now. From here on, if I hear the word “obsession” I’ll ken just what it means. But I found myself with a dog that could win. I’ve had some good dogs in the past, but aye with some fault – sometimes an inherent fault but often because, when I was young and inexperienced, I tried to hurry the dog along too quickly. But this time the bitch and I were in tune. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said. I had experienced that supreme harmony perhaps a dozen times and lesser likenesses of it with two dogs out of three.

  He sighed. ‘Just for once, I could have gone in and matched myself against you and all the others. It drove me frantic that I couldn’t run my wee bitch because of some rule that you said was nonsense and even I could see was doing nothing but prevent improvement of the working breeds. For a while, that was all I could think of. When I came to my senses, I gave thanks that I hadn’t done more damage than I have. But I didn’t want to do Mrs Mearns any real harm. And I didn’t mean to land you in it.’

  I felt a prickling of my scalp. ‘Have you landed me – us – in it?’

  ‘I hope no, but I’m feared I have. Yon Inspector Ewell arrived this afternoon with a sergeant mannie I’d not seen before. He was polite as ever, the Inspector, but under the politeness he was rock-hard. He wouldn’t tell me a damn thing—’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ I said.

  ‘—but, reading between the lines, they’ve decided that no one person did the deed.’

  ‘But which deed?’ I asked. ‘I might be able and willing to help them if I knew what the crime was.’

  ‘Do you not know? I found out that much – no thanks to Mr Detective Inspector Ewell,’ he added bitterly. ‘I had it from Elsie Dundee. They went to Gifford House yesterday and found Mr Macevoy in a hidey-hole under the floor. She saw them taking him away. So it seems that the body must have been Dougal’s.’

  So Beth had been wrong for once. I must remember to crow over her. ‘Then what’s all this fuss about?’ I asked. ‘If Mr Macevoy killed his nephew . . .’

  ‘But he didn’t. They seem quite sure of that, I don’t know why.’ The light was almost gone. Quentin Cove’s voice was coming out of darkness but he sounded both plaintive and indignant. ‘They seem to have eliminated every individual – so far as they know of them – with any reason to resent Dougal. Likely they’re looking for other blackmail victims. But they’ve also decided that more than one person must have been involved.’

  I thought that over, liking it less and less. The field was wide open again.

  ‘It’s a bugger,’ he resumed suddenly. ‘They must have decided that either I killed him over the blackmail or your Miss Hopewell stabbed him in a fit of jealous rage. The fact that I have a rock-solid alibi up to the wee small hours seems to strike them as the most suspicious factor of all. Even if young Hannah was guilty, she could never have moved the body to Gifford Hill on her own. She’d have had to have help.’

  For a moment I considered myself as a suspect. Apart from the fact that I knew myself to be innocent, it made a tenable theory. ‘Goddamn!’ I said.

  ‘Takes a wheen of getting used to, doesn’t it?’

  I let that pass as irrelevant. ‘Do you know whether they’ve found where he was killed? Or where the knife came from? Or where the handle ended up?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem like it. I left them rummaging around the farm. I’ll tell you this – if I come across a knife-handle around the place, it goes in the bottom of the midden. That’s the one place they’ve shied away from. And they kept me away from the phone, so I decided the damage was done and I might just as well come here.’

  ‘They’ll have seen us comparing notes,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Guilty or innocent, they’d expect that.’

  We fell silent again. My mouth had dried and I could feel tension in my stomach and in my neck muscles. Bad events were in the wind. My mind wanted to rush off in all directions but I held it, by effort of will, to a pattern of logic.

  Could Hannah be guilty? It was physically possible. Would she kill a faithless lover? Unlikely. I would have expected her reaction to be hysteria rather than violence, but who knew the reaction of a woman scorned? Would Quentin Cove have helped her to dispose of a body? Very unlikely – unless, of course, she had inherited his secret from Dougal or deduced it for herself. She might have threatened to incriminate him with the murder. If they had been acting in concert . . . Immediately, the conundrum began to resemble the old riddle about two brothers, one of whom always tells lies while the other tells the truth. You have one question to determine which is which. The answer to the riddle, of course, is to ask one of them, ‘What would your brother answer, if I asked him whether he was the liar?’ Except that on this merry-go-round there was no brother who could be trusted to tell the truth.

  But again, Hannah had never been a competent liar. Her few attempts at pulling the wool over our eyes had been accompanied by so much blushing, hesitation, finger-twisting and contradiction as to be wholly transparent. As I remembered her voice on the phone and her behaviour the next morning, each had been more in accordance with puzzlement than with a terrible secret.

  Quentin Cove, now, was speaking from the standpoint of one who is innocent; but then, what else would he do? His story was confirmed by his friends and then by Hannah . . . up to around four in the morning. By then, time would be short. Dawn would still be several hours away but it had been a clear night and I recalled a rising moon. The sky had still been clear in the morning. In the country, even in winter, people are up and about early. Postmen, milkmen, lorry drivers, wildfowlers and others would have been on the roads. Elsie Dundee lived nearby. Easy enough, perhaps, to stop a vehicle for a few seconds and tuck the body away behind the hedge, to walk back after hiding the vehicle . . . but I could not visualize any murderer daring to carry a body up a hill that was overlooked by a road and several houses, except perhaps in the dead hours just after midnight or after waiting for an overcast night. Even then, the task would be impossible without torches which might attract the attention of passers-by.

  Suppose that Cove had killed Dougal Webb before leaving home, or that there had been another confrontation over the attempted blackmail when Webb returned home, after Hannah gave up and left. The factory would have been standing empty. I had been shown round it by the proud farmer. Most of the raw materials went up by conveyor into the silos and from there to top of the square tower. Nearly all the processing took place in the tower as the product progressed downwards under gravity, untouched
by hand and usually unseen by eye. The ground floor was given over mainly to storage and packing, and most of the human activity was on this level. A body, wrapped in polythene, could be hidden in the tower for a day or two in safety, especially if the proprietor was on hand to allocate duties. The polythene could then be used to wrap a large order, thus to disappear for ever.

  Also on the ground floor was an area given over to the preparation of animal products, in machinery derived from the fast-food industry. Originally, Quentin Cove had bought his animal products already prepared but later he had decided that he was being ripped off. Dog feeds are subject to scrutiny at least as stringent as that given to human food, and sudden trouble with the inspectorate had been the last straw. Cove had struck a deal with a large concern specializing in poultry for the human market, to buy their leftovers. To these were added a steady stream of rabbit meat. At first glance, an hour spent feeding the parts of a body through those machines would have seemed a safer means of disposal than moving it to the bonfire on Gifford Hill. But the police had not missed the point. They had checked for human tissue and Cove might well have anticipated their action. He was not a fool.

  ‘What did Inspector Ewell want to know?’ I asked.

  I felt Quentin Cove jump and thought that he might have been on the point of falling asleep. Stress often has that effect. The car was becoming hot. He turned the fan down. ‘Nothing very much,’ he said. ‘What I was doing every bloody minute since I reached puberty and who could bear me out. How I got on with you and those girls of yours. And then he was wanting to know about the blackmail.’

  ‘You didn’t give in to young Webb, did you?’ I asked.

  He grunted in annoyance. ‘It was all very well for you,’ he said. ‘Dougal was barking up the wrong tree. You really kenned damn-all about it. But he had me by the short and curlies and he knew it fine. He could get my trialling stopped dead before it had hardly started. But he was dashed queer about it,’ Quentin added. ‘It was as if he didn’t expect it to make a difference between us. He seemed to think that things could go on just as before.’