Full Fury

by Roger Ormerod

  ‘Grain,’ he said, when I asked him. ‘I never did fancy a stock farm.’

  It couldn’t have been an antipathy for animals. He had an Irish Setter and a Golden Retriever absorbing the heat from the fire. They raised their heads and flopped their tails, and then went right on with it.

  The room was the focal-point of the house. It was long and low, with black and gnarled beams disappearing in vanishing perspective along the length, giving an impression of immensity. The fireplace was huge, built from sandstone blocks, the old andirons still there. He had a log fire going in it. Beside the fireplace was the long, leaded window which gave such a magnificent view over the hills, with beneath it a wooden settle, bearing a few scattered magazines. On the opposite wall a Welsh dresser carried a display of Crown Derby. There seemed to be no modern comforts such as radio and television. But he had a lot of books and some very large and comfortable chairs. The one he steered me into was a rocker.

  Even when I’d known him before, Crowshaw had been a widower. I’d have thought he’d be lonely, in that great empty house all by himself.

  ‘What brings you here?’ he asked pleasantly enough, but his eyes were sharp.

  I told him I was no longer in the force. He asked me what I was doing, and laughed shortly at that. ‘But there’s nothing for a private detective here,’ he said.

  ‘It was you I wanted to see, not the farm.’ He nodded. I went on: ‘I was rather surprised to find the two together.’

  ‘Not really surprising,’ he said, leaning forward and putting the tips of his fingers together. ‘That case—the Paterson murder—brought me into contact with the place, and I came to grow fond of it.’

  His eyes surveyed me calmly. I smiled while my mind scrabbled for it. What had there been to attract him? It had been a cold, rain-slashing November, visibility down to half a mile and no view of the valley. And Crowshaw, though a county policeman, was a city type. But the county police don’t get many murders, and Crowshaw had reached Chief Inspector without handling one—until Andy Paterson died. So perhaps he’d wanted to live on the scene of his triumph.

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘It came up for auction when they’d settled the estate. So I bid for it, and got it.’

  So he’d owned it long before he’d retired. How could he have worked the farm and run his job…

  ‘Drover’s still with me,’ he said.

  I was disconcerted at the way he’d read my mind. But of course. Drover, who had been Paterson’s bailiff—most likely bailiff for Paterson’s father—had been there.

  ‘But you’re not interested in this,’ he said, smiling.

  I was, intensely. ‘Not really,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s the Paterson business.’

  ‘Now? After all this time?’

  ‘They raise their heads.’

  ‘Best left alone, I’d have thought.’

  ‘I’ve been asked to look it over again.’

  He made an impatient sound and got up to poke at a log with his toe. ‘What’s there to look at?’

  ‘Mrs Gaines,’ I said, ‘is now remarried to a man called Finn. She’s had stirrings of something or other. You know how it is, they remarry, and the husband finds it’s a weight he’d rather do without.’

  ‘Prove that Gaines didn’t do it? Nonsense.’

  ‘Completely,’ I agreed. ‘But I get paid for it.’

  There was unshadowed contempt in the curve of his wide mouth. ‘You get paid for coming and talking to me?’

  ‘I’m not told how to go about it.’

  ‘There’s the trial transcripts, the reports—’

  ‘I’ve got all that. But you’re forgetting, sir, I was a very young constable then, and I never got in behind the scenes. I thought… well, if you gave me a background of how you saw it all, the things nobody can find out from all the reports in the world…’ I shrugged. ‘I could at least show her something for my time.’

  He looked at me for a long time, wondering whether to encourage me in my stupidity. Then at last he said:

  ‘There’ll be a lot to tell. I’ll go and make some tea. A sandwich, perhaps?’

  I agreed, a sandwich. He turned and went out, and I watched him all the way. There seemed to be a lift to his shoulders that was new. But perhaps he was only exhibiting defiance. A man like Crowshaw could be expected to resent anybody questioning the conduct of his greatest case. Was he displaying magnanimity in agreeing to discuss it with me?

  While he was away I got up and walked round the room, just from habit. I went and stared out of the wide window. A half mile away a tractor was crawling like a beetle across the green of a sloping field, scattering something. I picked up a magazine. The Field. It fell open to an article about the re-appearance of a rare swallow in Perthshire. In the margin was a doodle. It made nonsense until I turned it sideways and saw it consisted of those jagged and blocked symbols they use in radio. I was looking at an electronic circuit.

  I went and sat down again. The setter came and put his nose on my knee. I recalled that I’d left the magazine lying open, with the circuit visible, but before I could dislodge the brown nose Crowshaw came back with a tray.

  ‘You’ll need to excuse my memory,’ he said. ‘These things lie dormant, undisturbed, and you lose a few details.’

  So I excused his memory, which was as unreliable as a computer, while we drank tea and ate tomato sandwiches.

  In the end I was glad I had come.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Crowshaw didn’t need to remind me that the call had come through at about ten on that Tuesday morning. He sent a sergeant off—it was Freer, a cynical bastard if I’ve ever seen one—with a squad of men, and we followed an hour later in the Cambridge.

  It had stopped raining at last, but the place was drenched, sodden. There were about a dozen vehicles parked down the drive, because the man from the local station was good, and he’d stopped anybody from driving up to the yard. The medical examiner had pronounced Andy Paterson well and truly dead.

  Freer met us, grimacing. There had been an enigmatic footnote to the original report: better bring rubber boots. You could see what it meant. I’ve never seen such mud.

  ‘He’s over here, sir,’ said Freer.

  There was a stocky, intelligent-looking man at his shoulder, a strong man in his fifties. Freer said: ‘This chap found him. Drover’s his name. He’s the bailiff.’

  We went to have a look, plodding through the mud.

  ‘Is it always like this?’ said Crowshaw.

  Drover had a pronounced Shropshire burr in his voice. ‘Mr Paterson hardly ever came this side of the house.’ He inferred that Paterson didn’t care how it was.

  But he’d come there on Monday night. The yard was an irregular expanse, bounded at one end by the rear of the house. It had four entrances leading from it, and it was blocked in with buildings, some quite decrepit; a hayloft nearly full of squared bales, two barns with scattered machinery inside, a pig-sty in the corner—but no pigs—and an old cow byre that was no longer used, but hadn’t been cleaned out since it was. The byre had a large sliding door, which was stuck a matter of four feet open.

  Drover had been in Kidderminster all day Monday, at a cattle show. At the time of the estimated death, which turned out to be eleven to twelve at night, he had been over at a friend’s house there, discussing silage and yields and things. He had driven up to the farm early on Tuesday, and saw Paterson as soon as he drew into the yard. He was lying half in and half out of the byre doorway, looking like a hunched pile of old clothes, with the mud rather redder than usual all round him. Drover took a quick look, then backed out his pick-up and drove down to his cottage to phone the police, and returned to stand guard, I suppose having fine regard for footprints in his glorious mud. As it happened, his precautions were of little help, because in the night a couple of Jerseys had pushed through a broken hedge and tramped heavily round Paterson’s body, no doubt probing him with their wet and curious snouts.

&n
bsp; Paterson was full of bullet holes. There turned out to be six in his body, the last two being lethal. There was blood soaked into the rotted lower edge of the door frame.

  We looked around, six of us that first day, watching where our feet went. There gradually emerged a picture of what must have happened in that sodden darkness. There were drag marks, spent bullets in woodwork, and empty shell cases lying naked and gleaming on the mud surface, over a wide area. A pattern began to form. We discovered fractured twigs and a trail of blood from a shattered leg, the frantic finger marks of Paterson wrenching himself through the mud—and the pattern consolidated.

  Andy Paterson had been hunted to death.

  He had brought himself eventually to the cow byre, no doubt hoping to drag himself inside and survive in its obscurity. There the murderer had stood and emptied his gun into the huddled figure, while the cows lowed and red mud oozed round his ankles.

  The gun we found at once, tossed away in the yard as the murderer flew blind into the night. The shell cases were also easy. Two were beside the byre entrance, five more scattered near the trail Paterson had made as he crouched and scuttled. That was pretty good, considering the territory; seven shell cases for a seven-shot gun.

  But Crowshaw was looking bleak at that time. We were doing too well, and too quickly.

  By the time I drove Crowshaw home that night, Neville Gaines had been arrested. There hadn’t been much trouble about it. The car had been seen, parked by the gate. Drover said that such a car was owned by Gaines, and when we went to The Beeches he’d done nothing to cover up. There was a suit and shoes plastered with red mud, and he admitted the whole thing. He made a statement. He had gone up there with a gun with the intention of shooting Andy Paterson, and in the end he’d done it, finishing by standing over him at the cow byre and emptying the gun into him. His prints were on the gun we’d found, in spite of the mud.

  A couple of days later things started to go severely wrong. Seven empty shell cases had been bad enough, because it was a bit too good to be true. But now the experts got into their stride and started doing things with spent bullets, and bullets in the body, and whatnot. They sent Crowshaw a report, which of course I never saw, which showed that four bullets had lodged in the body, one had gone straight through, and three spent ones had not gone through flesh at all. That was eight, not counting a sixth hole in Paterson, for which no bullet was ever found. Nine in all.

  Crowshaw says he’ll always remember that report landing on his desk. They were in his office, he and Freer. ‘They must be crazy,’ he said, wanting desperately to reject it.

  Freer had a touching faith in science. He just smiled, and suggested they had another go at Gaines.

  ‘But it’s only a seven-shot gun,’ Crowshaw protested.

  They had Gaines in a cell below, and they had already seen him a number of times. But Gaines was already emerging as a vague and unworldly type of person, and anyway he was in a state of delayed shock.

  Neville Gaines was a massive man with great shoulders and a head of long and shaggy hair. I was there at the arrest, and I remember most his eyes, soft, dreamy and emotional. He had hard and strong hands, but they moved with persuasive and not aggressive gestures. There was nothing aggressive in him that I saw, and when they got to him that day he was weary and defeated—resigned. He had done what he had to from an intense inner urge, and it had drained him. Crowshaw told me that he had to go very carefully with Gaines, and I’ve tried to reconstruct the scene as he remembered it.

  ‘We would like to know,’ said Crowshaw, ‘how many spare cartridges you took with you.’

  Gaines took a long time to answer, dredging down into his mind. ‘Spare… no, there weren’t any spares.’

  ‘How many shots did you fire into him?’

  ‘All of them.’ He spoke dully, and there were twitches at the corner of one eye, one for each impact as he pulled the trigger. But going on and on. ‘I did what the man said. I pulled the trigger. I just went on pulling it.’

  Crowshaw tried again. ‘How many times?’

  Startled eyes came up. ‘On and on. Oh… a dozen times. Twenty. I don’t know.’

  ‘Twenty? There were only seven in it.’

  ‘It was a long time I stood over him. At the end. Yes... I remember, a long time—and I kept doing it. But there wasn’t anything happening. Not then. The thing wouldn’t do anything at all. I threw it away and ran off.’

  To Crowshaw it sounded so real and true.

  ‘But you managed to re-load it?’

  But they’d gone over all that before, when Crowshaw had been probing Gaines’s familiarity with guns. Gaines seemed not to remember. ‘I just bought the thing from this man called Lovejoy, and he’d said it would fire seven.’

  ‘Which seemed to you enough?’

  ‘Enough?’ Crowshaw watched as the brain struggled with the memory. ‘Enough for what? I don’t know.’ Gaines shook his head and his wild hair flew. ‘I didn’t think about that. The thing… that gun itself, was enough. Just the buying of it. Just having it. Yes, yes I suppose you could say it was enough.’

  Crowshaw left it at that. He was worried because this was a loose end in his case. The prosecution could prove—would undoubtedly have to prove—that at least nine shots were fired, and the defence could catch them in their own net by showing that Gaines had had only seven to fire. There’d be a complex argument about whether Gaines could have re-loaded. It wouldn’t help Gaines, not with the strength of the rest of it against him. But it would cast doubts. And with the question unresolved Crowshaw dared not take his case to the Public Prosecutor’s office. What had seemed to be a routine case was turning out to be very tricky indeed.

  ‘The devil of it is,’ said Crowshaw to the sergeant, ‘that there could well have been more than nine. You can’t tell me that an amateur like him would manage to get six shots into his man—in the dark—out of nine.’

  ‘I’m just thinking he maybe had two guns.’

  And as Crowshaw was aware that none of the bullets had distinctive markings, it seemed a good idea to proceed on those lines.

  ‘Let’s have Lovejoy in again,’ he decided.

  Gaines had been quite open about Lovejoy’s name and address, which had placed Lovejoy in an awkward position, because he was a well-known figure to the Birmingham City Police. Being a potential Crown witness he was protected from prosecution on this, at least, of his many faults. He was expected to reveal enough, though, but he was aware that revealing too much would undermine his reputation in the underworld. His attempts to steer a neutral course were already playing on his nerves, and when they got him in again he twitched noticeably in the chair in front of the desk.

  ‘Now tell me again,’ Crowshaw invited. ‘How many guns did you sell to Neville Gaines?’

  ‘Only one, Mr Crowshaw.’

  ‘I’ve got reason to believe it was two.’

  ‘Now why should I tell a lie?’

  ‘Maybe you think you’ve gone far enough, admitting to one.’

  ‘I didn’t have—’

  ‘Any alternative? Precisely. But if he’d asked for two… what then?’

  ‘He only wanted one.’

  ‘So I take it you’d got more? If he’d asked.’

  Lovejoy looked pained. ‘I’m not saying that.’

  ‘But you are.’ Crowshaw smiled. Sometimes he enjoyed himself. ‘Would there have been another, if he’d asked for it?’

  ‘No.’ Lovejoy shrugged. ‘Not another thirty-eight.’

  Crowshaw seized on the inference. ‘You mean,’ he said softly, ‘he asked for a thirty-eight? In those words.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It contradicted all that Crowshaw had learned about Gaines. That he should have gone in search of a gun at all was difficult enough to accept; that he should have been so specific seemed completely out of character.

  ‘One thirty-eight?’

  ‘He said—could I sell him a thirty-eight automatic.’

  �
�Which you could? And did.’

  Lovejoy made a shambling shrug. ‘I told you, Mr Crowshaw, it so happened I could put my hands on…’

  Shortly after that they threw him out.

  Crowshaw wanted time to think… and he hadn’t got it. A report had to go in every day to the Chief Supt., and what was he going to put in that day’s effort? No progress.

  Freer moved from the window. ‘I think you scared him.’

  ‘You heard what he said. Gaines specified a thirty-eight.’

  ‘So what? Maybe he’d been reading some thriller or other, and Gaines thought there was something magic in the words.’

  But Crowshaw was unconvinced. Instinct told him there was something he should understand, and logic told him that there were two guns and be damned to explanations. He was not sure which line to take.

  ‘What did you make of Mrs Gaines?’ he asked, wondering if it had been a good idea to trust that interview to Freer.

  ‘I think she tried to seduce me.’

  And Crowshaw tried to laugh it off. ‘On the sofa?’

  ‘With her eyes.’

  Freer was being funny, that was it. Crowshaw found the levity offensive, assuming as it did a familiarity that must come from Freer’s lack of confidence in Crowshaw’s ability.

  ‘I’ll go and see her myself,’ said Crowshaw. He had never liked Freer, and now he was beginning to understand why.

  He rang down for his car and I left half a cup of tea in order to take him to the Gaines residence. Crowshaw said nothing to me on the way. It was a fine November afternoon that made it difficult to recall the previous fortnight’s rain. The roads had dried under the warm sun.

  Crowshaw admits that at that time he was painfully aware that this was his first murder, and that it was going wrong. Somehow the nature of a murder case always demands special attention to detail. It’s not necessary to adduce a motive—though this one was obvious—only to prove the guilt. But a murder has to be sewn up with every detail neatly in place, and he knew that this thing was still awful ragged round the edges.

  The Beeches was hidden from the road. We drove in beneath a heavily overhung belt of massive trees. The drive at that time went straight on past what was the front of the house, and I parked in a paved yard in front of a row of converted stables. Gaines’s Morris Minor was in there, and a Rover 100 saloon which I supposed belonged to Mrs Gaines.