A Shot at Nothing

by Roger Ormerod

  It was with some surprise that I realised I was already caught in the web of the mystery, my senses stretched and my mind racing, and with even more surprise that I found I was assuming Clare had told the truth.

  Yet…if I accepted her veracity, I would also have to accept that the gunroom door had been locked. In that event, nobody would have been able to get in and fire that second killing shot. But Oliver had been able to get in. The squad had been able to get in. So where did that leave my belief that she had told the truth?

  I damned Oliver firmly for having embroiled me in this, though I had to concede that he had been reluctant to come anywhere near the place.

  Consequently, in a contrite mood, smiling to show I forgave him even if he couldn’t know for what, I opened the front door, remembered that Oliver still had the keys to both the door and the alarm system in his pocket, and closed it behind me.

  The little green light in the alarm box was no longer blinking at me; a little red light had replaced it and was glowering warningly. Duly warned, I turned to face the steps.

  A battered red Porsche was parked this side of the maze. The nose of a police car—I could just see its blue light on the roof—was parked to the right of the maze, and the bonnet of what must have been a second one was just visible on the left. I knew what that meant, and I found it a stimulating experience suddenly to feel like a criminal, caught in the act.

  Oliver was at the foot of the steps, chatting to a short, slim firecracker of a woman of about my own age, with close-cut black hair and huge brown startled eyes, dressed in blue denim jeans and a short russet jacket over a cream shirt. Oliver raised his eyes to me, his face caught in the half-embarrassed and half-enchanted expression of a man with two women to reconcile.

  ‘Ah, Phil!’ he cried, his voice too hearty. ‘Here you are, then. This is Clare Steadman. Clare, I’d like you to meet Philipa Lowe.’

  3

  I stood at the top of the steps, not willing to surrender this minimal advantage. She would have been about three inches shorter than me, I reckoned, and two-thirds of my weight, but she was crackling with the outrage of encountering a strange woman walking from her own home to welcome her, and her present control was perhaps maintained only because she was in the presence of what seemed to be a considerable phalanx of policemen, who might be poised to observe any breach of the peace by a convict, possibly out on licence. That they’d appeared so rapidly and in such strength indicated that they’d expected trouble.

  But I couldn’t stand there all day. I advanced slowly down the steps. Oliver eagerly explained.

  ‘Clare saw the green light was on, so she switched it to red. As we’d got the French windows open—’

  ‘I get the point,’ I assured him. ‘How do you do?’ I asked Clare, offering a hand.

  She touched it. ‘How the hell d’you think I do?’ she demanded. ‘Finding strangers in my own house!’

  ‘Oliver’s surely not completely strange,’ I suggested, trying to establish a proprietary interest, and at the same time expressing a certain amount of knowledge of how strange he could be.

  ‘Might just as well be,’ she snapped. ‘The bastard’s never been to visit me.’

  ‘Now, Clare…’

  He was afraid of her! Yet he glanced at her now with a tentative smile, fondness in his eyes, and, I thought, a certain amount of annoyance that he couldn’t in the circumstances whip her up into his arms and welcome her, like a noble welcoming his warrior lady back from the crusades. For this woman could have outraced Boudicca in a chariot; outfaced Helen to the tune of a few hundred ships. I was now convinced that if she did always confine herself to the truth, it would not be for the reason I’d guessed. No. It would be based on pride, from a certain amount of arrogance. ‘That’s the truth, damn you, and you can take it or leave it.’ She would feel it degrading to have to resort to a lie, or at least resent the pressures that forced her into resorting to one.

  And yet…there was, when she turned to face me, a light in her eye indicating that lurking behind it was a wicked sense of humour, which itself might produce a whole string of lies, if only for the fun of it.

  ‘And you…’ She left it hanging.

  ‘Philipa Lowe, a friend of Oliver’s. We’re here to see the house, as I was considering buying it.’

  ‘What idiot let you have the keys?’ she demanded. ‘I wrote to them six weeks ago, cancelling the whole thing. That was when I was told I was coming up for release on parole.’

  ‘You beat me to it,’ I told her.

  ‘Beat you? In what way?’ She cocked her head, interested, but with her lips twisted in a sceptical manner.

  What was now proceeding between us, though expressed as idle chat, was in fact deadly serious. We were probing each other’s intentions and involvements.

  ‘The possibility was,’ I explained, ‘that I might be able to prove your innocence, and get you a pardon.’

  ‘Well…I suppose I ought to thank you. But I can manage very nicely myself, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Oh…I see.’

  She eyed me with suspicion. ‘You see what?’

  ‘Your lawyers have put in an appeal. It’s quite the rage, these days. They show that the original verdict wasn’t safe, as they put it, and your conviction gets quashed.’

  ‘Oh…’ she said, flipping a hand and dismissing legal confrontations. ‘I don’t need them. Look what a cock-up they made of it last time! No, thank you. I’ll handle it myself.’

  Oliver cleared his throat in the background. As far as we two were concerned, this being intensely personal, he might not have existed.

  ‘You think you can discover the truth yourself?’ I asked, making it sound quite unreasonable. ‘I’ve at least had some experience.’

  ‘I don’t need experience. I already know who killed Harris. It’s just the question of doing something about it.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Then why haven’t you said something?’ Was the woman insane?

  She lifted her shoulders fractionally. ‘Nobody would believe me.’

  ‘I would believe you.’

  ‘You would?’ She tilted her head at me. ‘How very strange.’

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am.’ A sergeant was standing suddenly beside us. He might have been there a long while; we wouldn’t have noticed him. ‘Is everything all right now?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, thank you. I do apologise for bringing you all the way out here.’ She raised her voice, looking, as well as she could beyond his bulk, towards his fellow officers. ‘Thank you, gentlemen. You were very quick off the mark. Nine out of ten for efficiency.’ Then she laughed lightly, a tinkle of a laugh, and watched them leave, watched till the last vestige of them had disappeared. She then returned her attention to me.

  ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like—walking away from that place—driving away from it, rather. What a good thing I’d got Porky here. So I drove away. The head wardress waved. I’m so glad I’d left it garaged quite close…’

  ‘They let you drive yourself to prison?’

  ‘Not alone, of course. A big, fat policewoman sat beside me, and there was a police car on my tail. They thought I was a bit eccentric, but I found it amusing.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Indeed. And now all I’ve got to do is decide how to do it. I know who. It’s just a matter of how I’m going to go about it. And this time I’ll know what to say in court.’

  I wasn’t sure I understood her. She surely couldn’t be meaning what she seemed to be saying. It was part of what she might consider a bit of a laugh. Calling her Porsche ‘Porky’ was probably in the same spirit. Perhaps the whole thing had been untrue.

  ‘But you must come in and share a celebratory drink,’ she said. ‘After all, you’ve been put to a lot of quite unnecessary trouble. Come along.’ And she led the way back inside, remembering to switch off the alarm.

  I had walked out of that door with the fee
ling that I might be returning as the owner. I followed her inside feeling lost and useless, and an undesired guest.

  ‘But the house is empty, Clare,’ said Oliver. ‘I saw no sign of anything to drink—and you’ve got no food in.’

  ‘Oh, I expect I’ll manage. I’ll pop into Asherton later…and have a pleasant word with that blasted estate agent.’

  She marched with me, ahead of Oliver, not along any of the corridors but by way of a maze of doors, each of which needed to be unlocked, and through an assortment of rooms. She was telling the house she was back. There was no doubt as to each one’s purpose—a television room with a huge screen and soft, comfortable chairs arranged facing it; a lounge, as opposed to the sitting-room we’d seen, with luxurious lounging facilities; a library packed with books; even a bedroom or two—and eventually we were back in the sitting-room we already knew.

  ‘Father laid down a cellarful of wines,’ she told us. ‘Harris stocked it with spirits.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ said Oliver quickly.

  ‘No, no.’ She nodded to chairs. ‘Shan’t be a tick.’ Then, abruptly to me, she said, ‘You said…prove my innocence. What makes you think I’m innocent?’

  ‘If you’d been guilty,’ I told her, ‘you’d have invented another shot after your own, but you had to be prompted by the superintendent.’

  ‘True,’ she conceded. ‘He did try to help, the dear man.’

  ‘And when you agreed to a shot, you wouldn’t have doubled it up, for luck, and said there’d been two. That’s what got you sent down, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’

  She stared at me with wide, shocked eyes, her eyebrows climbing. ‘But it was the truth,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have had me telling a lie, now would you?’

  ‘A guilty person would have stuck to one extra shot.’

  ‘There you are, then. You’d still prefer brandy, Ollie?’

  Ollie? And I didn’t think he ever touched brandy!

  ‘If you’ve got brandy.’ He seemed restless.

  ‘Of course there’s brandy. Make yourselves at home.’ And she frisked away, her hair dancing and her pretty little bottom dancing with it. Mine doesn’t bounce, it just stays put. My hair does too. Oliver gazed after her without any expression that I could detect.

  ‘Well?’ he said, when the door closed behind her.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What d’you make of her?’

  ‘She’s a woman you can’t make anything of, Oliver. You never know whether she’s laughing at you or at herself. Everything’s a game, and nothing counts.’

  ‘The guns counted, otherwise there wouldn’t have been that performance on the lawn.’ He seemed very serious about that.

  I tried for an easy laugh, but it sounded a little sarcastic to me. ‘If it did happen. If she didn’t make up the whole thing. Rigged it as a background for a cold-blooded murder—for a bit of a laugh.’

  ‘Then the laugh was on her.’

  ‘She’d enjoy it, just the same. She gets it from her grandfather. Perhaps we’d better switch intentions, and try to prove she did do it. That’s the only chance I can see of ever getting my hands on the keys to this house.’ I nodded firmly, as though this could be a practicality.

  ‘Perhaps she was guilty,’ Oliver said moodily.

  ‘Oh no,’ I replied. ‘No, no. The jury just didn’t understand the significance of the three shots.’

  ‘And you do, Phil?’ He didn’t have to sound so sceptical, I thought.

  ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘Then when you get round to it…’ He sounded remote, and there was a little acid on his tongue. ‘When you do, maybe they’ll let you appear for her in the Appeal Court. It’d save paying a whole team of barristers.’

  ‘My fee would be calculated accordingly.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll even be able to prove she fired all three shots.’

  ‘Now, Oliver…’

  He gave me a sidelong, leery smile, then the door was kicked open and Clare swept in, her arms clasping a number of dusty, cobwebbed bottles.

  ‘Something else’, she said, ‘that my father collected. And while I remember, Ollie—where are all my guns?’

  He was helping her with the bottles, lifting them from her arms, an operation that required a far-too-intimate contact with her rather insignificant bosom.

  ‘They’ve got them at the County HQ, in their Black Museum. Made quite a good show of them, I believe.’

  ‘Well…of all the nerve!’

  ‘You ought to be pleased,’ he assured her. ‘Who else but the county firearms expert could’ve cleaned and oiled them properly? It was logical. You can collect them any time.’

  ‘Now,’ she decided. ‘I had a quick look in the gunroom. It looks bare. They made a good job of reglazing the cases, I thought. I got old Chas Wright to do that. From the village.’

  ‘Now?’ Oliver asked, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘After we’ve had a drink.’

  ‘It’s coming up to lunch-time,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Then we’ll have lunch on the way. Is she always like this, Ollie, seeing problems at every step?’

  ‘Not always. She usually takes them in her stride.’

  I could have wished he’d said that with a hint of pride, not ruefully and with a grimace of distaste, though this, I reassured myself, might have been caused by the sip of brandy he’d taken. I’d been certain he hated it. She had been wrong, and I treasured the thought.

  So, after the drinks there was once more the securing of her fortress. (I wasn’t sure I’d be so fussy about security if I took over.) Then we went out to the cars, hers this side of the maze, my BMW round the other side. At once it was clear that there would be difficulty over whose car Oliver would grace with his presence. He was with me, but Clare, with an expression of mischief on her face, went to her Porsche and unlocked the passenger’s door first. It was a proprietorial gesture, and I resented it. Accordingly, I tossed my keys to Oliver and called out, ‘You follow us, Oliver, and watch you don’t scratch it. We want to talk, Clare and I.’

  ‘Do we?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sure we do.’

  I expected her, after that, to drive furiously and dangerously, partly to scare me and partly to vent her annoyance. But that soon evaporated. She slowed, driving well, enjoying the car.

  ‘You timed it beautifully,’ I commented.

  ‘Timed what?’ But the lift of her chin indicated that she was ahead of me. She darted me a minimal glance.

  ‘Your arrival. Quite a coincidence, Oliver and I being there.’

  ‘Oh…’ she said, lifting one hand from the wheel and flipping it. ‘It wasn’t quite like that. To tell you the truth…shall I tell you the truth?’

  ‘Tell me, and I’ll guess how much truth there is in it.’

  She allowed a little silence to build up, then she went on. ‘I’ve been out a week. More—ten days. Just been touring around, stopping nights wherever I found myself. I mean…there I’d been, yearning to get out of that place and back to my own home—and when I finally got the chance…I couldn’t face it. Strange, that was. I was nervous. Don’t you think that was strange?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Once more I was aware that she’d glanced at me, but I kept my attention ahead.

  ‘Hmm!’ she said. ‘Anyway, I phoned Evelyn—that’s the estate agent at Asherton…’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Phoned her this morning to tell her I was…free, sort of, but that I was taking a holiday, and she said she’d given the keys to a couple…that’d be you and—well—him.’

  There was a pause. I knew what she wanted to hear.

  ‘Oliver,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ Giving away nothing.

  ‘I was furious. I mean, I’d…but never mind that, now. So I drove back. Fast. I’ve covered fifty miles in the hour.’

  ‘Less time than that.’

  ‘Whatever. And as it happened, I got there just in time.’

  ‘To t
rap us?’

  ‘Put it like that, if you like. To see Oliver again, if the truth be known. Just to see him. What’s the matter with his arm?’

  She was very quick, very observant. I wondered in what way he’d demonstrated the weakness or strength of his arm.

  ‘He tried to take a gun from somebody,’ I told her.

  ‘Typical,’ she said in disgust.

  ‘A shotgun.’

  There was a pause. ‘They keep cropping up in my life.’

  But Oliver wasn’t in her life now. Oh no. ‘It cropped up in mine, Oliver’s shotgun.’

  There was a pause as she scrambled down through the gearbox for a fast corner on a hill. I glanced over my shoulder. Oliver was keeping station meticulously.

  ‘You’re sharp, aren’t you,’ she remarked at last. ‘I do believe you could do it, after all.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Find out who killed Harris.’

  ‘But you told me you already know that.’

  ‘Tcha!’ Then she added a tiny laugh. ‘It might amuse you to confirm what I believe.’

  As I couldn’t understand that, I ignored it. ‘You said you knew who’d done it, and you knew what to do about it. Was there a hint of violence, there?’

  ‘Perhaps there was,’ she said. ‘They prepare you for the outside world, where I’ve been. They put me in a cell with a raving dyke, and I thought I’d go insane. So I took lessons in the gym on karate. The instructress was a slim little Eurasian lass, who was at Benfield for breaking her husband’s neck when he tried to stifle her baby with a pillow.’

  ‘They put her away for that?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t self-defence, you see.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ I mumbled. ‘And the baby…’

  ‘It’s with her mother. I promised to visit her when I got out.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘Of course. I have, already. Anyway…do you always do this, Philipa Lowe?’