Twice Bitten

by Gerald Hammond

  Ewell ignored the doubt in my voice and nodded. ‘They’re checking over the possibilities of conspiracy while I’m relegated to searching for the murder scene. If we find that, we’ll have the case cracked, I’m thinking. If not, then it may hang over us for years.’

  ‘You don’t have a lot to go on,’ I agreed.

  ‘We’ve nothing,’ he said disgustedly. ‘A body largely cremated. Its immediate vicinity also burned. A knife-blade that could have come from anywhere. A victim who has been practising extortion by menaces, which means that damn near anyone might have a motive for killing him, but who’s to know? And to cap it all, men and dogs were scampering round and around the body,’ Ewell said bitterly, ‘before we got there and even afterwards. Not a footprint to be found that didn’t belong to one of you men or Mrs Dundee or the foresters or your damn dogs. Or the rabbits, of course.’

  ‘They surely can’t blame you for that,’ said Beth. ‘The night’s rain would have washed any older footprints away.’

  Anyone but Beth would have received a sharp retort. ‘I’d like to think so,’ the Detective Inspector told her. ‘But when your message said that you could give us a fresh lead . . .’

  ‘I only said that I hoped that I could make a contribution,’ Beth said. ‘Mr Aicheson won’t find the truth by looking at us. And that’s all we want, the same as yourself – the truth. And we have a right to make our own investigation in order to establish our innocence, don’t we?’

  ‘As early as this, I doubt it,’ Ewell said. ‘It may depend what you had in mind.’

  Beth smiled at him winningly. ‘Nothing outrageous. But it’s our only starting-point. You’ll have searched Mr Webb’s cottage up, down and sideways. But would you have known if something had been removed or shifted or put back? Or even added? You didn’t ask Hannah, and she’d be more likely to know than anyone.’

  ‘Well, it’s a thought,’ Ewell said doubtfully.

  ‘So I phoned you. The seals are already broken. If Hannah says that something isn’t where it belongs, you can tell us whether the police took it or moved it. And if we find something useful, we’d rather find it in your presence. Otherwise somebody could say that we’d put it there.’

  Ewell raised a tired eyebrow. ‘They could say that anyway. As you remind me, the seals were broken.’

  ‘We’ll worry about that if it happens,’ Beth said firmly. ‘First, let’s try to find something, if it’s there to be found.’ As she led the way imperiously to the cottage door she beckoned to Quentin Cove, who followed obediently in her train, producing a large old-fashioned key. The door opened directly into a compact living room.

  At first glance the cottage seemed to have been the habitation of an untidy man leading a slovenly, bachelor existence; but I heard Hannah draw in breath in a disapproving hiss and when I looked again I could see an underlying orderliness. I realized then that a police search followed by any number of more amateurish searches could have disarranged even the British Museum. If everything was not in its place, at least there was a place for everything. Cupboards and shelves had been made or adapted by a loving hand to suit the intended contents which had now been replaced higgledy-piggledy or dropped on the floor.

  Inspector Ewell had been carrying a large envelope. ‘I was coming here anyway, one of these days,’ he said. ‘We took away his video cassettes for study.’ He produced four cassettes and set them on a shelf which had evidently been made for them under the video recorder. There was room for many more. It seemed that Dougal Webb had intended to tape whatever took his fancy.

  ‘Did they hold any interest?’ I asked the Inspector.

  He grunted and shook his head. ‘They didn’t interest me. Sitcoms, and I’d seen most of them.’

  Beth decided to begin at the top and work down. The small cottage would only have had one small bedroom and possibly a boxroom tucked under the slates. Beth, Inspector Ewell and Hannah would have filled the available space. I could hear Hannah protesting that she had never seen Dougal’s bedroom but to no avail. Quentin Cove stayed with me.

  Most of the furnishings were utilitarian and slightly shabby, as befitted a young and newly qualified farm manager, but one exception stood out. I drew Quentin Cove’s attention to a small but handsome Victorian dining table which took up more than its share of the limited floor-space. I stroked its deep gloss and it seemed to purr. ‘This is a bit up-market compared to the rest,’ I said. ‘The product of blackmail? Or was there a legacy?’

  Cove shook his head. ‘The product of a roup. We were at a farm sale together. I bought some calves and he paid about a fiver for the table. It was in a barn, covered with chicken-shit. It took him a month of evenings and weekends to clean it up and restore the finish.’

  So another promising lead was a dead end. I decided that if the table came to Hannah I would make her an offer for it. The cottage was very cold. The electric heating had been turned off by some frugal busybody. Even through my favourite sheepskin coat I was becoming chilled. Between that and the nervous tension, I was soon in dire need of a pee.

  I could have stepped outside but I would have been under the windows of the house or the cottage, possibly both. ‘Is the bathroom working?’ I asked the farmer.

  He shook his head. ‘Water’s drained down in case of frost. Go over to the house. It’s open and the water’s on again.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I hurried across to the house. I could hear voices. But Beth always insists on my drinking several mugs of tea with my breakfast in order to ‘keep my fluids up’, whatever that may mean, and I was in too much of a hurry to worry about visitors or even intruders in the farmhouse.

  When I emerged some little while later Mrs Dundee, complete with pinny and duster, was in the hall together with a large young man in jeans and several heavy sweaters. He was bronzed and looked fit.

  ‘It’s Mr Cunningham, Jimmy,’ she said delightedly. ‘You can tell him. He’ll ken fine what you should dae.’

  The young man – Jimmy – shuffled his feet. ‘I don’t know, Ma,’ he said.

  ‘Weel,’ said his mother, ‘ye maun clype to somebody some time. Ye canna gang back tae your boat and leave us a wanrestfu. And it’ll a be waur, gin they airt it oot an ye’ve no said.’

  Ordinarily, I would have made an excuse and my escape. But the farmhouse was warm while the world outside was not. I unbuttoned my coat, to let some more of the delicious warmth inside, and waited.

  Evidently his mother’s words were not only comprehensible but convincing to the young man. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said at last. ‘Mr Cunningham, can you spare a few minutes?’

  I said that I could. But I had no intention of receiving his confidences while standing in a hallway which, for all its warmth, was distinctly draughty. I led the way into Quentin’s sitting room, shed my heavy coat and got us comfortably seated.

  It was a relief that Jimmy was a much clearer speaker than his mother. Dialects in Scotland change radically over comparatively short distances and my Edinburgh upbringing had not prepared me for Elsie Dundee. I had no doubt that when the two were alone he would go a long way towards matching his mother’s unspoiled rural dialect, but school followed by work away from home had taught him the sort of English that passes muster anywhere. Looking at him, I could understand why there had been rumours about his parentage. I could see in him the image of a slimmer Sir Ian Bewlay but without a trace of the expressions of arrogance and guile.

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘my mother tells me you were good to her while I was at sea. I want to pay you back and perhaps you’d square with Mr Kitts?’

  He produced a healthy little roll of notes and pushed a Clydesdale tenner into my hand before falling silent. I guessed that he would be offended if I refused the money so I put it in my pocket, with the mental reservation that it would be available for Mrs Dundee if she should fall on hard times again.

  ‘What did you want to tell me?’ I prompted him.

  He was silent for so
long that I thought that he must have changed his mind, but eventually he stirred. ‘The last time I was home, about two months ago, I was broke. I’d been cleaned out.’

  ‘By a lassie. The leddies was aye taen up wi him,’ his mother said proudly.

  ‘Well, whatever,’ said her son, avoiding my eye. ‘I reached home in the afternoon. Mum wasn’t in but I knew she’d be up at the Big House so I walked up there. Mrs Wartle, the housekeeper – she’s the only steady staff Sir Ian keeps – she gave us a cup of tea in the kitchen. When she left the room with a tray, Mum asked if I had any money for her and I had to tell her that I was skint.

  ‘I left soon after that and I walked along the front of the house, on the grass. As I came to a partly open window at the corner of the house I heard voices, and what they were saying stopped me as if I’d walked into a wall. “I’m sorry I made you show it to me now,” Sir Ian’s voice said. “And I certainly wouldn’t want anyone else to see it. I hope you were damn careful with the editing.” And another man asked him what he thought – just being sarcastic, you understand? And Sir Ian said that he’d better chuck the master tape away, and the unedited copy, because they could be worth money in the wrong quarter.

  ‘I managed a peep in at the window without being seen. The two of them were watching the TV screen. The other man was that wee feller that hangs around with Sir Ian.’

  ‘Timothy Pratt?’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s the one. Just then there was a knock on the door and Sir Ian switched off the video and the telly damn quick. It was Mrs Wartle, telling them that their afternoon tea was set in the drawing room. She stood holding the door, so they upped and went, leaving things as they were.

  ‘Well, Mr Cunningham, I’m not a dishonest man. But it seemed to me that Sir Ian had been taking advantage of my mother for years and not paying her a proper wage. And I was needing a wee bit of cash to leave with her. So I pushed up the window and hopped over the sill. They had to have been talking about the video. I ejected the cassette – we have one on the ship, so I knew how to work it. Sir Ian had a whole shelf of cassettes, some of them unused, so I put one of those in the video recorder instead and put the real one in my pocket and slid back out of the window and pulled it down after me. My heart was knocking so’s I thought they’d hear it in the drawing room.

  ‘I was away back to the road before I thought how I was going to get my hands on any of the money Sir Ian had talked about.

  ‘It would be some little while before Ma got home. The other person I always saw on my leaves was Dougal Webb, so I walked to Ardrossie. Dougal was ready to finish for the day, and he took me in and gave me a dram.’

  Jimmy Dundee paused in his tale and looked me in the eye. ‘They tell me that Dougal was going in for a bit of blackmail. I can’t say I’m as surprised as I might have been. I’d thought about borrowing some money from him to give to Ma, but I put that out of my mind. He could be good company, but when it came to money he was hard as stone. And he was impatient. He was ready to work for what he wanted, but he wanted a hell of a lot and he expected it to drop into his lap straight away instead of after years of sweat. But I never knew that he was a wrong ’un. I thought that he was just clever at driving a deal. That’s how he explained away his car to me and he seemed to believe it himself.’

  ‘I think he probably did,’ I said.

  ‘Likely. He certainly had me convinced. And he seemed just the sort to give me the advice I was needing. So I told him the story and he said to leave the tape with him and he’d take a look at it.

  ‘I saw him again just before I went back to sea. He slipped me fifteen quid and told me that he was going to give Sir Ian a fright. He wouldn’t say what was on the tape. I left it at that and off I went, but first I made him promise to do nothing for a while, so’s nobody could guess that it was me that took it.’ Jimmy looked at me anxiously. ‘Mr Cunningham, I’m in no hurry to go and tell the police that I nicked something out of Marksmuir House. But Dougal’s been killed and if this has any relevance they’ll have to know. Right?’

  ‘Absolutely right,’ I said. All of a sudden my head, from being a vessel filled only with despondency, was buzzing with ideas. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll keep you out of it if I can.’

  ‘There now!’ said Mrs Dundee.

  I hurried back across the yard. Was it too much to hope that the compromising video cassette was still around? That it had been missed by the police and by other searchers? Probably, yes, much too much. But at least we had the possible starting-point that we had lacked.

  The whole party was again crammed into the small sitting room. Hannah looked at me as I entered. ‘His new jacket’s missing,’ she said sadly. ‘So he did mean to come and meet me.’ She seemed to take some comfort from the thought that her lover had not deliberately stood her up.

  Beth resumed questioning a now peevish Hannah about the source of every object of any value, about most of which Hannah had not the least idea. I drew Detective Inspector Ewell aside. ‘Are you sure that there was nothing missed on those video tapes?’

  ‘Positive. I watched them myself, every inch, even the blank bits.’

  I approached the video recorder, studied the switches for a moment and turned it on. There was no little symbol to indicate that a cassette was in place but I pressed the Eject button anyway. Nothing happened. My new-found optimism sagged. The compromising cassette had either been recovered or it was too well hidden even for a police search.

  ‘Try it again,’ said Quentin Cove. ‘There’s a fault. That’s why I didn’t mind parting with it. The little symbol doesn’t light and it usually takes three or four tries before it’ll eject.’

  ‘You never mentioned that to our officers,’ Ewell said bitterly.

  ‘They wouldn’t let me be present during the search,’ said Quentin Cove.

  I tried the rewind button and got leftward arrow symbols and a whirring sound. I switched on the television set and picked up the remote control. Usually the highest numbered channel is tuned to a video recorder. As the tape clunked to a halt, I tried Channel 9 and pressed ‘Play’ on the machine. A series of images flashed and vanished. Then the screen steadied. There was no soundtrack.

  The others gathered round.

  We were looking through the windscreen of a car just coming to a halt. Then the camera was carried out of the car and set down carefully on the bonnet, looking ahead. It showed a motorbike, damaged and lying on its side in the road, close beside a stone wall. The rider, still helmeted, lay pinned beneath it. He seemed to be unconscious. From the marks on the verge and the positions of bike and rider it seemed that the rider had lost control and slammed at speed into the wall.

  The picture moved slightly as another person got out of the car. Then into the frame came Sir Ian Bewlay and Timothy Pratt. Sir Ian was already speaking into his mobile phone.

  The two men examined the unconscious rider and gently felt his limbs for fractures. Their faces were always in sight and I had no doubt that a show was being put on for the camera. Sir Ian took off his coat and spread it over the rider. Pratt, in his turn, folded his own coat and slipped it under the man’s head. He checked that the man’s tongue was forward. They stood back, satisfied. Pratt glanced at his watch.

  Sir Ian took out a cigar, lit it and dropped the match.

  The motorbike must have been spilling its fuel. Immediately, the rider was enveloped in a spectacular ball of flames.

  Sir Ian jumped back, out of the frame, and was not seen again.

  To do him justice, Pratt did what he could. The flames were rising as more fuel leaked from the motorbike. Pratt grabbed the man by his clothing and pulled him away from the pool of burning fuel, but the man’s leathers must have been soaked with the petrol. Pratt ran out of the picture. He returned in a few seconds carrying a rug with which he tried to smother the flames that still enveloped the man. This was the sequence that had appeared on television and attracted to Pratt such favourable publicity. The film ran on unt
il the arrival of the ambulance and the fire brigade. By then, I was in no doubt that the man was as good as dead. Pratt, who had himself been burned, had behaved with courage; but he would undoubtedly be damned when it was known that he had suppressed the part of the film showing the origin of the fire.

  The sequence gave way to a dark frame with white speckles, indicating no signal.

  There was absolute silence except for the faintest whisper from the machinery. Nobody wanted to be the first to speak. I stopped the machine. At the third try, it ejected the tape. I handed it to the Detective Inspector. He nodded.

  ‘Wow!’ Beth said at last under her breath.

  The moment passed. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk at the same time.

  ‘It’s a powerful motive,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t prove that either of them killed him.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Ewell said. ‘Whenever you get a miscarriage of justice it’s because a motive has been mistaken for real evidence. But it gives us what we badly needed, a new direction. It gives us grounds for enquiry. We applied for a search warrant but it was turned down. Sir Ian Bewlay has a lot of clout and some powerful friends. What goes for him goes for Mr Pratt too. With this, we can move ahead.’

  ‘So it was all right to search our house,’ Beth said scathingly, ‘but not the houses of those two pompous . . .’ Her voice tailed away for lack of the mot juste.

  Hannah furnished it. ‘Arseholes,’ she said, amazing herself as well as the rest of us. She covered her mouth. I guessed that she had spoken from the heart.

  ‘That’s not a nice way to speak about anybody,’ Beth warned. ‘But you’re close,’ she added.

  ‘There was a direct and immediate connection between you and Mr Webb,’ said Ewell, reverting to where our discussion had been side-tracked. ‘His only connection with Sir Ian and Mr Pratt was that each admitted to having sold him something at a bargain price, some time in the past.’