The Curse of the Cockers

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘We’ll leave that to you,’ I said. ‘As far as I know, there’s only one laboratory in the country doing it privately and it costs a packet. Your forensic scientists can get it done, if and when you need it.’

  ‘And in the mean time,’ said Kipple gloomily, ‘one or both of them dies of distemper or some such ailment. I’ll make arrangements.’

  ‘You are not taking the dogs away,’ Beth said. ‘Send somebody here and Isobel can take tissue samples in their presence.’

  When the police had taken themselves off, I phoned Foleyknowe. A voice identified itself as belonging to Mr de Forgan and agreed to see me at four the following afternoon. ‘Take a look around before the light goes,’ he said. ‘That way, we’ll both know what we’re talking about.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I said. I nearly mentioned my previous visit and the damage to the shed but decided that the moment was not yet ripe. ‘Did Angus tell you that he’d asked me to look into the events of Hogmanay?’

  ‘The death of that petty crook? Yes, he mentioned it. I don’t think that anything I can say will be of any help to you and I’d prefer not to waste time with the police if it can be avoided. We can discuss it when I see you.’

  He sounded like a reasonable man.

  Chapter Seven

  Dogs sense when they are getting less than full attention and they soon start to play up. In the morning, my mind was on the questions which still had to be asked and where I should be asking them, and I soon saw that my training sessions were doing as much harm as good. In mid-morning I gave up, kennelled the current pupil, and went back to the house. Beth gave me a message from Angus to the effect that he had a noncommittal report on his Land-Rover from the main agent.

  ‘I’ll go over and see him,’ I said. Perhaps a drive and a talk with Angus might clear my thinking.

  ‘You could phone him.’

  ‘I’d rather see him face to face and maybe look at the Land-Rover again.’ I collected the keys and went out to Henry’s car, which was sitting on the gravel in front of the house and facing the gates as if impatient to be taken for a walk.

  Beth came out with me.

  As I strapped myself in, I was still sifting and rearranging the few facts that we had. If my mind had been on the car, events would have been different . . . and I would almost certainly have died.

  ‘Drive carefully,’ Beth said.

  ‘Don’t I always?’ I asked absently.

  I turned the key in the ignition and the world went mad around me, familiarity turned on its head.

  The engine fired and picked up and the car surged forward toward the gateway and the public roads.

  I switched off the ignition, to no effect. I stamped on the brake pedal and jerked up the handbrake, but there was no ‘feel’ to either of them. I had to snatch a quick look down at the unfamiliar controls. The gear selector was at P, but when I jerked it back towards R the handle came away in my hand. I dropped it on the floor. The automatic gearbox changed up.

  My thinking had been slow and it was too late to bale out into the bushes. The gateway with its stone gateposts was rushing at me. I could have slowed or halted progress while speed was still comparatively low by swerving into the shrubbery, but my mind was still disoriented and it was against my instincts to wreck Henry’s car. At least the steering still seemed to work. I shot out onto the road under the nose of another car. Our gate was on a bend. The village was away to the right but ahead the road ran on through open country.

  The engine was cold but, against that, the automatic choke was functioning and the car was helped by a slight downhill. The transmission shifted into top. The roadside was becoming a blur but the car held straight.

  The fear of death concentrates the mind wonderfully, as Samuel Johnson pointed out. Despite the mad circumstances and our headlong rush, I was coming out of my first reaction of stunned disbelief and a part of my brain, which at first had seemed eggbound, was thinking with icy calm. Too late now to bale out. To my right was the Moss where boggy ground would have slowed us gently, but the fence was solidly posted and would probably throw us back onto the road. On my left, a stone wall fronted by solid-looking trees.

  Ahead, I knew, the road rose again to a crest with a right-hand bend which I thought, given a little luck and a clear road, I could get round without too much damage. After another half-mile there was a sharp left-hander between stone walls. End of the road, for me.

  But just over the crest, on the slight bend as I remembered it, there was a break in the dry-stone wall and a wooden gate to a field that rose ever more steeply to a crown of gorse bushes. If I could smash through the gate I could put the car at the hill. At least it would slow us to the point where I might be able to roll out onto the grass without more than minor injuries.

  The crest was in sight. Beyond it, something was beginning to grow out of the road. A tractor and trailer. In the field beyond? No, by God! It was in the middle of the road, but even if it had pulled towards the side there would never have been room for the two of us to pass. Somebody was going to have to give way, and it was unlikely to be the tractorman.

  My one chance was to reach the gateway first. As near as I could judge, the tractor was almost there. If the driver saw me coming and stopped . . .

  We swept up to the crest and I had an instant glimpse, instantly absorbed. There was no time for thought. The tractor had stopped just beyond the opening and the driver was down and opening the gate. The gateway was slightly to the further side of the bend so that, although I did not have a straight run at it, my swerve was less than it might have been. I jerked the wheel. The tractorman jumped for his life. The engine noise beat back at me for an instant from the stonework. The car wanted to roll over but a hump in the ground threw us back. And then I was on blessed, open grass and heading up the steepening hillside.

  The car bounced, slowing as the hillside weighed us back. Part of the field had been dunged ready for spring ploughing, and a rear wheel spun for a moment, bleeding away more speed. The car changed gear once and again and doggedly climbed. The hill became steeper. Ahead was a bank, topped by bushes and peppered with holes, and I saw a wave of rabbits bolting for home. I steered straight for the bank, undoing my seat-belt and unlatching my door. If the engine stalled, anything could happen.

  The car came to a halt, quite gently, against the bank, at an upward angle so steep that I could feel it settling back on its springs. The engine laboured but held it from rolling back. I struggled to push the door open against the pull of gravity and managed to roll out. The tractor was following me up the hill and I could see a car below, but I was more concerned to fix the car before its engine died. I found a few loose stones and packed them behind the wheels.

  The other car had overhauled the tractor but had failed to make it up the steepest part of the slope. The driver was out and running and I saw that he was Constable Peel, in uniform. He dead-heated with the tractor.

  The two men, in their differing ways, were both asking me what the hell I was playing at, but the time for discussion was not yet ripe. I wish that I could remember what I said, because it stopped them dead.

  ‘Bring the tractor up behind the car,’ I shouted. The tractorman caught on and hauled his load of dung closer until the bonnet of the tractor was just behind the car’s boot. I nodded. Now if the car jumped my stones there would be some damage but not a catastrophe.

  Peel, meanwhile, had leaned into the car and turned the ignition key, without perceptible result. He shot one enquiring glance at me before turning back and groping for the bonnet catch.

  The tractorman wanted to bawl me out for scaring him, but I was in no mood to listen to him. Peel had the bonnet up. He jerked off the high-tension lead and the engine’s racket died at last, its place taken by the hissing of steam from the overheated radiator. The car settled back but my stones held it.

  Peel must have had an aptitude for things mechanical, because I had only begun to identify the main elements in the unfamil
iar layout under the bonnet when he grabbed me by the elbow.

  ‘You’d better take a look for yourself,’ he said. ‘Somebody doesn’t like you very much.’

  For the first time, I began to think about causes rather than effects. In what, for the placid Constable, passed for a frenzy of excitement, his finger was jumping around like a spaniel greeting a long-absent master, but when I managed to focus on one area at a time I saw that the throttle had been disconnected at the carburettor and the lever tied open with a scrap of string, an insulated wire had been added connecting the live terminal of the battery direct to the coil, and another wire led forward. My eyes followed where Peel was pointing. The second wire had been stripped of insulation where it had been led across the front of the car between the radiator and the grille. Two plastic bottles of some clear liquid had been wedged at either side of the same space.

  Working gently, Peel detached the two wires from the battery. ‘That should be a mite less lethal now,’ he said.

  The tractorman’s indignation had turned to technical interest. He was a youngish man who, I knew, pottered with old cars at the weekends. He touched the neck of one of the bottles and sniffed his fingers. ‘Petrol,’ he said. ‘By Christ! You weren’t meant to win through.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ Peel said. ‘If you’d hit anything, anything at all, and if the impact hadn’t killed you, the bottles would have been crushed, there’d have been a spark, and the fire would have finished you off.’

  ‘Nothing there that’d’ve taken more’n a minute or two to fix,’ said, the tractorman, ‘and not a lot to be seen after the fire.’ His foremost reaction now seemed to be admiration for the ingenuity of the trap. He lay down to look beneath the car. ‘A bolt cutter could have done this to the brakes in a wink. I wonder how he jiggered your gear selector.’ He seemed ready to dismantle the car on the spot to find out, but Peel checked him.

  ‘Don’t touch anything, either of you,’ he said. ‘Just wait.’ He descended the hill to his car and I saw him speaking over the radio.

  ‘God!’ said the tractorman. He moved away from the car before lighting a crumpled cigarette. ‘I thought you was going to kill the both of us. But we’re both here and hale. That’s cowped somebody’s hurly. If I was you, I’d caa canny.’

  I quite realized that somebody’s plans had been spoiled and I assured him that I had every intention of being careful. I found that my voice was a croak and now that the emergency was over my knees were shaking.

  ‘Clever, though,’ said the tractorman. ‘If I’d no been there and with the yett open . . .’

  I nodded. I had been trying not to picture being swept up the hill in a blazing car.

  Peel came puffing back up the steep gradient. ‘You,’ he said to the tractorman, ‘stand guard for a few minutes while I give Mr Cunningham a run home. If anybody comes, don’t let them near the car and tell them nothing.’

  ‘I can wait until reinforcements arrive,’ I said.

  He looked at me reprovingly. ‘Your wife will be frantic,’ he said.

  I had forgotten that Beth had seen my headlong departure. I hurried to the police Escort with him. He backed the car down the worst of the gradient before trying to turn. I could feel the car trying to roll over. Peel concentrated in a grim silence until he had the car heading safely down the hill in bottom gear.

  ‘That’s Mr Kitts’s car, isn’t it?’

  ‘He and Isobel are away in mine,’ I said.

  ‘Where does he usually get his work done?’

  ‘At the service station.’

  ‘When we’ve finished examining it, I’ll call them and have them collect it.’ Peel nursed the car onto the road and set off slowly back in the direction of Three Oaks. ‘Who was the trap meant for?’

  I had been wondering the same thing. ‘Me, I suppose. But the first driver could as easily have been Beth.’

  ‘Can you think of any motive for killing either of you, except that you’ve been asking the right questions?’

  ‘Damned if I can,’ I said.

  ‘So what questions have you been asking that might have spelled danger for somebody?’

  ‘Only about dogs and puppies, that I can think of.’

  A small figure appeared ahead, running towards us along the verge. ‘Better tell your wife as little as possible,’ Peel said.

  ‘She won’t let me rest until she knows it all,’ I told him. ‘And she wouldn’t be fooled by a pack of lies.’

  He pulled up just short of her and I got out. Beth threw herself into my arms. I could feel her heart pounding and she was gasping for breath. ‘What . . . what happened? What were you doing?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in the car,’ I said.

  ‘You’re all right?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘And Henry’s car?’

  ‘More or less the same, except that somebody buggered about with it. I didn’t drive off like that on purpose.’ I put her into the back of the police Escort and sat in beside her.

  ‘Somebody tried to kill you,’ Beth said in a small voice. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Peel said over his shoulder. ‘Somebody rigged an accident that could have killed or injured either of you. Or either Mr or Mrs Kitts if you didn’t use the car again before they returned.’

  ‘You make him sound like a maniac shooting into a crowd,’ I said.

  ‘He may have meant to frighten you off, or to keep you too busy and upset to mess in his business. You’ve been lucky. You haven’t been harmed, but the warning reached you.’ His voice changed gear. ‘Maybe Angus is asking too much of you.’

  I thought it over while Peel nosed up our drive and turned the car at the door. Daffy, with Sam strapped on her back and evidently asleep, was supervising a host of pups on the clean grass. When she saw that all was well, she gave us a wave and returned her attention to the pups.

  ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘If Angus needs my help, he’ll have it. Nobody’s going to talk freely to him while it’s known that he’s under suspicion, so he needs somebody nosing around who isn’t just trying to prove him guilty. Not that I seem to be doing a damn bit of good.’

  ‘If somebody thinks you are,’ Beth said, ‘that might be a starting point. If you’re sure you have to go on.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘I don’t want you to get yourself killed.’

  ‘I don’t want to be killed,’ I assured her with feeling. ‘But if somebody already thinks that I’m a danger to him, the quickest way to get safe is to help bring the whole thing to the right end. I just can’t think what the hell I’ve done that could worry anybody the least bit. I’m at a dead end.’

  ‘That’s what I meant,’ Beth said. ‘What’s happened tells you that something you’ve said or done or found out is very dangerous to somebody. All you’ve got to do is to work out what it is.’

  ‘You’ll be careful?’ Peel asked seriously. He turned round in his seat to watch our faces.

  ‘That’s what I was going to say,’ said Beth.

  ‘Believe me,’ I said, ‘I’m going to watch my back and stay out of the shadows.’

  ‘In that case,’ Peel said, ‘I’ll tell you what I was coming here to tell you when you came scooting past me. And, remember, you didn’t get it from me. My cousin isn’t the only man the police are taking a hard look at. The dead woman’s husband, Mr Wentworth, has a Land-Rover. He’s in agricultural chemicals. His Land-Rover’s been examined. It’s taken a lot of knocks in its time but it’s remarkably clean.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, or something equally penetrating.

  ‘Just listen. He claims to have been up north when his wife was killed. If that’s true, it’s hard to credit him with any motive for the killing at Hogmanay. DCIs Straun and Kipple have been using the police office here as a meeting ground between Dundee and Kirkcaldy, and Wentworth has to visit a farmer over here this afternoon, so they’ve arranged to see him here and go over his statement for the nth
time. He’s probably in my office now. It’s a fair bet that he’ll take a bar lunch at the hotel. If you happened to be taking a snack there yourself, you couldn’t miss him. A tall man, fair haired, and looks as though he got out of the wrong side of somebody else’s bed this and every other morning. At the very least, you could see if he jogs your memory. He may have shown his face in the bar that night.

  ‘And now, I see a blue light flashing beyond the village. I must go and get back to your car before they arrive. Somebody will come and take a formal statement from you later. Once again, be careful . . .’

  *

  ‘You are not going down to the inn on your own,’ Beth said shakily as we entered the kitchen. ‘I don’t want to sit here and wonder whether somebody’s bowling you over with a Land-Rover or something.’

  ‘I wanted you to come along anyway,’ I said. ‘Not for that reason – I can’t see you stopping a Land-Rover by sheer willpower and there’d be no point our both getting run over. But you might get more out of Mr Wentworth than I would.’

  That, apparently, was different. Beth looked terrified. ‘Me? I wouldn’t know how to question somebody.’

  ‘You have a natural talent for wheedling information out of people,’ I said.

  ‘Only you.’

  ‘And Henry and a dozen others I can think of. Also, he’s rather less likely to give you a punch up the nose.’

  ‘Thank you very much indeed,’ Beth said in a hollow voice. ‘That’s exactly what I wanted to be told.’

  ‘I’ll find a seat near by and leap to your defence if I have to.’

  ‘I’d rather put my trust in Jason.’

  Jason was her personal Labrador. ‘That soft lump?’ I said. ‘I suppose he could give an attacker a nasty lick.’

  Beth had been messing about with crockery. She gave me a mug of coffee and sat down opposite me. ‘But Mr Wentworth wouldn’t know that. Jason looks fierce, that’s the main thing.’

  ‘And I don’t?’ I felt mildly insulted. I had certainly been in more fights than had Jason.

  ‘Anyone could see at a glance that you’re a pussy cat,’ Beth said. ‘And you don’t look strong. How on earth would I open the subject? I can’t just walk up to the man and ask him if he killed his wife and a tramp.’