by Bill Mesce
“What the hell’re you shooting at?” Kneece barked.
Calmly Macnee slid two more shells into the Purdy. “That one there.” He nodded at the sky.
Kneece and Harry looked up.
“Those?” Harry asked, pointing at the terns whirling about fifty yards down the beach.
“Not those,” Macnee corrected. “Him!” He made a motion with the muzzle of the Purdy in the direction of the birds. “That one there! The one’s laughing!”
“That’s yer Scotsman’s brain for yer, Cap’n Yank,” Donlay said. “Thinks a bloody bird is laughin’ at him! It’s this kind o’ brainstormin’ explains the lack o’ yer great Scottish empires!”
“That one there, Paddy.” Macnee raised the Purdy to his shoulder. “He’s the one almost went into the props yesterday, that bird did.”
“Oh, you reckanize him, do yer?”
“Aye, almost brought the whole business down! Now he’s followed me here, he’s up there laughing at me! Keep laughing, ya bloody bag o’ bird shit!” The Purdy thundered again.
As far as an Orkney December went, it was not so bad a day None of the many clouds puffing along were threatening, and in their interstices flashed bits of blue sky and a yellow — if unwarming — sun. The wind along the shingle beach was chill and steady, but tolerable. BOOM!
“Does he have to do that?” Kneece called up to Moncrief. The RAF major shrugged helplessly.
The freshly expended shells rattled on the shingle. Macnee thrust the Purdy out to Kneece. “You’d appreciate this, Yank. Feel the balance on that. You’ll not feel a curve that nice against yer hand short o’ some bird’s bosom, and I am not meaning the feathered kind!”
“Feel free to throw some cold water on him, Cap’n Yank. He gets like this about his bloody gun, makes me skin crawl! Next he’ll be marryin’ the bloody thing.”
“Piss off, Paddy He’s a Yank! From the American South, isn’t that right, Cap’n? Hooligans and cowboys! All Yanks appreciate a good firearm, eh, Cap’n? Blazing six-guns and the like! Wisht yer had one o’ these to do in the red men, eh?” Moncrief strode down the shingle. “Perhaps if we get on to the matter at hand… He laid a firm hand on the Purdy, lowering its muzzle. “Taffy, I believe our visitor has some questions. Do be a good fellow and pay attention, wot?” Macnee nodded and cradled the shotgun in the crook of his arm. He waggled a warning finger at the terns. “Don’t you be off nowheres, mate! I’ll be back to ya! Right-o, Cap’n Yank, let’s have at it!”
Kneece plunged in. “Where did you find Lootenant Grassi?”
“We’re there, Yank. Hereabouts.”
“I know that. I mean exactly.”
“Har! Exactly, he wants to know, Paddy. Were ya making maps that day, Paddy? Oh, I’m sorry. Yer can’t be drawing maps unless ya can read.”
Kneece turned to Moncrief. “That report you told us about; will that include the crime scene photos?”
“Afraid not, Captain. There weren’t any. At least none with your lieutenant in them. The people from the Yard didn’t arrive for three days after Lieutenant Grassi was found. We couldn’t very well leave him be all that time. When these two discovered the lieutenant, we had him brought back to the air station.”
“Nobody here thought to take any pictures? I’d think your local security people would’ve thought —”
“Were soldiers, Captain Kneece, not forensic specialists.”
“Where’s the body now?” Kneece persisted.
“First, it went to the Yard for a postmortem, I believe. After that I think it was transferred into the hands of your people in London.”
“It was here.”
Kneece turned: Paddy Donlay stood a few yards away, pointing to the gravel at his feet. “You’re sure?”
“There, over there, over here,” Taffy Macnee muttered. “What’s the difference, Cap’n Yank? He’d be no less dead if yer found him on the other end of the island.”
“Pretty sure,” Donlay insisted. “It looks right.”
“Where’s the high-tide line?”
Donlay pointed to a jagged line of kelp, dried sea salt, and broken shells running along the beach five yards below them.
“How’d you find him? How was he lying?”
“Horizontal!” Macnee said, punctuating the witticism with an explosive “Har!”
“On his face,” Donlay answered.
“Then you turned him over? Was the ground wet under him?”
“It’s always damp here, Captain,” Moncrief said. “Look round. The wind carries the spray from the ocean nearly to the road.”
But Kneece ignored Moncrief, focused on Donlay “Was it wet under him?”
Donlay was trying to remember. “We’re talkin’ weeks ago, Cap’n Yank.”
Kneece immediately dropped to the beach, pressing his cheek against the stones. “Was he lying like this?”
“Not quite.”
“How?”
Donlay obligingly adjusted Kneece’s limbs to approximate the way he’d found the late Armando Grassi.
Puzzled at the performance, Moncrief looked to Harry. Harry was smiling. He understood. It was a trick — like Harry’s note-card device — to kindle the brain.
“OK,” Kneece said. “You find the body —”
“What ho!” Macnee chimed in. “Paddy, do yer see it? Oh, my, it’s some deceased person —”
“Steady on, Taffy,” Moncrief warned.
“Apologies, Adj. Sorry, Cap’n Yank. As you were; yer dead, we discover your corpus.”
“You moved the body?” Kneece asked.
“We wanted to find out who he was. So I turned the body over like so.”
“It wasn’t wet under him like everywhere else,” Donlay said abruptly. “It was fresh wet all round, but not under him.”
Kneece put his arms under his head. The look of beachside repose was comically incongruous to Harry amid the context of parkas, Irvine jackets, ice-flecked shingle, and numbing cold. “Was the front of his body as wet as the back?”
“No.” Donlay shook his head.
“If yer want to know if he was in the drink, just ask us,” Macnee said.
“We’ve pinched enough out of the punch bowl to know,” Donlay added. “He hadn’t been in the water.”
“Was his body rigid?” Kneece asked. “Was it stiff?”
“Yer talking yer rigor mortis, eh? Yer not dealing with the ignorant here, except maybe for that dense Irish sod. Just ask it plain out.”
“He may be a berserker,” Donlay told them, nodding at Macnee, “but he’s a well-read berserker.”
“I was the one who turned him,” Macnee reported. “Not a fresh fish, but not all stiff.”
Kneece sat up. “How about his face?”
“Not a bad-looking blighter,” Macnee said. “But not my type at all. How about you, Paddy? Ya let him chat ya up, did ya? Aye, for a whisky and a plum pudding you’d do the whole naughty business with any half-handsome bloke in a uniform, wouldn’t ya, ya terrible little tramp?”
“I mean did his face look bruised?” Kneece pressed. “Any black-and-blue marks?”
“He did have a nice-sized hole in the middle of his forehead,” Macnee mused. “What do you think, Paddy? Moths?” Donlay reached down and picked up a nugget of ocean-polished sandstone. He tossed it to Kneece. “Except for the bullet hole, pale and smooth as that.”
“Was the bullet hole an exit wound?”
“In here” — Donlay tapped the back of his head — “out here.” Another tap low on the forehead.
“I want to thank you gentlemen,” Kneece said as he got to his feet. “You’ve been a big help.”
“Right,” Moncrief said. “Off you lot. Back home. And try not to get into any mischief on the way” As Macnee and Donlay trudged up the shingle to their jeep, he asked Kneece, “Done, are we, then, Captain?”
“I think —”
BOOM!
“ — so.”
“I’m not moving from this spot until tho
se two fruitcakes are a safe distance away,” Harry said.
“Quite,” Moncrief said.
Moncrief and Harry returned to the other jeep, leaving Kneece — at his request — alone on the beach.
In the shelter of the canvas-topped jeep, Moncrief offered Harry a cup of still-warm tea from a thermos. “We should save some for your colleague. He’s rather astute, isn’t he?” Moncrief watched Kneece pace idly back and forth on the beach, hefting the smooth stone Donlay had tossed him. Kneece brought out his notebook and began to flip through the pages. “I mean, he’s a bit misleading on first meeting, one’s thrown off by those rough edges, but he does seem to know what he’s about, eh?”
Harry said nothing, watched Kneece hurl the stone out into the frothing surf.
“They’re good joes really,” the RAF major told him. “Macnee and Donlay, that is. Hope they didn’t put you off. Blitz veterans, you know. Two of the few to whom so much is owed by so many. Put in the hours upstairs, each got their well-deserved gong. One hesitates to take too stern a line with them. As I say, so much is owed and so on. I put in for the flying service myself in those first days. Not quite up to the mark, I’m afraid. Seems admin’s more my line of country, my forte, one might say. Need the paper pushed? Give the bumf to Old Adj, he’ll put the paper right. But we also serve who sit and type, eh, Voss?”
Moncrief prattled politely on, but Harry’s focus remained on the low, gray form of a corvette a half-mile distant. The ship turned a white-trimmed wake as it made its sentinel’s rounds off Scapa Flow’s western access. Beyond that, the North Atlantic. Beyond that… home.
That drifting thought was interrupted by a crash as Woody Kneece climbed atop the hood of the jeep and called out: “Hey, Major Moncrief! What’s that?”
The rise upon which the jeep was parked provided a view a mile or more in any direction. Behind them to the east was Stromness. Immediately below them, the shingle beach began its turn away from Scapa Flow and then north up the Atlantic side of Mainland, changing from shingle into piled sandstone rocks. On their northern hand, the ground fell away into a snow-crusted field that, in better weather, served as pastureland for cattle and sheep. A half-mile beyond, the pasture was bordered by a thick wood running from the rocky oceanfront to a mile or more inland. It was to this wood that Kneece, from his perch on the jeep’s hood, now pointed.
“We call them trees,” Moncrief said dryly. “What do they call them in America?”
Kneece smiled and pointed again. “That fence. Is that one of your bases?”
Harry squinted. Almost lost in the thick underbrush that skirted the wood he could see an eight-foot-high steel fence topped by strands of barbed wire.
“That would be Sir Johnnies estate,” Moncrief said.
“Sir who?”
“Sir John Duff.”
“What’s he? Some kind of duke or something?”
Moncrief politely hid his amused smile behind his gloved hand. “Baronet, actually. Sir John’s a business wallah of sorts in England. Quite wealthy, I understand.”
“And he lives here?” Kneece sounded disbelieving.
“Oh, no,” Moncrief answered. “I don’t think he’s been here since the war. As I recall hearing, Sir John was supposed to build a manufacturing something-or-other down there. Never came about. The war, I suppose.”
“I guess that’s where he was going to put it; that open space,” Harry said, pointing to a large gap among the close-set trees.
“I imagine.” Moncrief glanced at his watch. “They’ll be serving luncheon by the time we get back. I’m told the Officers Mess has come into some fine salmon purchased from the local fishermen. Our cook may not be the head chef at Maxim’s, but I think you’ll enjoy it.”
“Somebody does live down there,” Kneece insisted, still atop the jeep, still pointing. “Isn’t that smoke?”
A thin, white tendril rippled up from the trees near the ocean.
“Oh, yes,” Moncrief said. “That’ll be Old Ted.”
“Who?”
“Sir John’s groundsman.”
Kneece hopped down. “A groundsman, huh? Can we talk to him?”
“If he’s of a mind to talk to us. You think he might know something?”
“That’s what I’d like to find out, Major.”
Moncrief started the engine and steered them along a track that was no more than a lane of frozen mud. The jeep bounced horribly over the narrow wagon ruts etched into the ground until it pulled to a stop in front of a gate set in the fence. Through the fence Harry could see thirty yards along the track as it wound through the woods. He could make out the shape of a small cottage, and beyond that a larger building.
Moncrief sounded the horn. It was a minute or more before a stubby form emerged from one of the outbuildings. Clad in macintosh, woolen watch cap, and mud-splattered boots, the figure threaded his way carefully among the icy ruts to the gate. He was a stooped fellow, a white-haired sixty-ish, with a face crowded with age, hard labor, and unforgiving weather.
“Oy!” the old man called from the gate.
Moncrief swung open the canvas door of the jeep and stood where the man at the gate could see him. “Old Ted, hullo!”
“Moncrief, is it? What brings the RAF round, eh?”
“I’ve some guests with me, Ted. Some Yanks who’d like to ask you about the lad found on the beach a few weeks past. Mightn’t we come in?”
Old Ted shrugged. He unlatched a padlock, unraveled a chain, and swung the gate open. Moncrief rolled the jeep forward, braking just inside while Ted closed and refastened the gate. The old man sat atop the jeep’s hood and beckoned Moncrief to proceed.
The track ended at a clearing under the canopy of bare tree branches. There was a tidy cottage of fieldstone, a few smaller outbuildings that looked to be for storage, and a large, stout building of corrugated metal, all looking fresh-built. The clearing ran to the rocks piled along the oceanfront. Through a gap in the rocks Harry saw a wooden dock extending out into the ocean.
“Ted Bowles, this is Captain Kneece and Major Voss of the American Army.”
Bowles touched a finger to his brow. “Morning gennul-men. Sorry took so long gettin’ down t’ the gate. Didn’t hear ye right away. I was oop inna bam there.” He indicated the corrugated metal building. “One o’ them damn wagon ‘orses o’ mine got loose, gettin’ into where he ain’t s’pose t’ be. Moncrief ’ere says you got soompin’ ye wanna ast me?”
“I don’t see why we have to do this out here, do you, Ted?” Moncrief asked politely “Why don’t you put on a cuppa and we’ll make ourselves comfortable.”
“I’m all fer comfortable,” Old Ted declared, and led the way to the cottage. He stopped and looked back. Kneece had remained behind, staring down into the frozen mud of the clearing. “Young gennulman! Are ye wi’ us?”
Kneece looked up and flashed a smile. “I’m sorry. It’s nice and quiet here. Very relaxing. I guess my mind wandered. You’re kind of far from everything out here, aren’t you?”
“On Mainland yer not far from noothin’, young squire,” the old man said.
Harry looked down at the ground where Kneece had stood. In its thawed moments, the earth had been turned by horse hooves, and flat, treadless wheels Harry guessed to be from a wagon. But there were also the treads of wide tires, and some of them led to the foot of the dock.
“How do you get to town?” Kneece asked, joining them. “Got ever’thin’ I need here,” Old Ted stated. “But I gots me wagon, me ’orses if I needs’em.”
The cottage was snug inside. There was a small front room with a stove, wooden table and chairs. Packing boxes of food tins were piled here and there, as well as peat for the stove. There was also a phonograph, and a commercial wireless, its varnished cathedral housing scuffed, some of the knobs missing. Two doors led off to still smaller rooms.
Through one partly open door Harry could see a narrow bed, and through the other more boxes and food tins.
There
was also a small army of cats. They seemed draped everywhere: perched on the piles of rations, on the one shelf that contained Old Ted’s few pots and pans, prowling among the roof beams.
“Make yerselves comfortable.” Old Ted stirred the embers in the stove and threw in some fresh blocks of peat. “T’ain’t mooch but I think there’s enoof places for everybody.”
There were, in fact, only two chairs. Moncrief diplomatically nodded to Kneece and Harry to avail themselves while he brushed a cat off a box and sat himself down.
“You have yourself a nice little lodge here, Mr. Bowles,” Kneece observed.
“Aye, well…” Old Ted set a kettle to boil on the stove. “It’s enoof fer me, ’tis. Never’ad this mooch to meself before, so I got no complaints. That one’s not botherin’ ye, is ’e?” He indicated the cat sprawled on the table before Harry, showing him his belly. “‘E wants a roob, that one does. Ye mind cats, Yank?”
Harry tentatively reached out a fingertip to rub the cat’s chest.
“Well, me, it’s noothin’ like a good dog, I gives ye that, but I’m gettin’ use t’ this lot. Started coomin’ round soon’s I set in. Beggars all, only in it fer the food. That’s right, eh, mates?” He bellowed this at the cats in the rafters.
The cat under Harry’s finger began to purr. Its claws slid out of their sheaths and round Harry’s hand, threatening a painful scratching if Harry tried to pull away.
“Ye got yerself a friend there, Yank. ’E nips ye, just nip ’im back.” Old Ted disappeared into the storeroom and returned with two tins of kippers. At the sound of his twisting the tin keys, the cats — from wherever they were positioned in the room — descended on the old man. He chuckled as he set the tins down on the floor and the dozen or so cats crowded against each other, each trying to get its muzzle into a tin. “That’ll keep ’em busy for a bit, it will.”
“Ted,” Moncrief began, “I was telling them how this all belongs to Sir Johnnie.”
“Oh, aye, the squire, all this is ’is, aye.”