A BRACE OF SKEET
Gerald Hammond
© Gerald Hammond 1989
Gerald Hammond has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1989 by Macmillan London Limited.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
As far as I know, there is neither a Moorfoot Loch Reservoir nor a Pentland Gun Club. The latter and all its members are intended to be entirely fictitious.
While this story was in preparation, fresh legislation affecting shotguns was being bludgeoned through Parliament. Since the only thing certain about the final outcome was that the new regulations would have no downward effect on the use of firearms in crime, I have preferred to assume that the story dates from before the new legislation.
Chapter One
The task of telling this story seems to have landed in my lap. Dad, who, at the drop of a hat, will burst into print on such subjects as ecology, ballistics or the history of the firearm, never descends to what he thinks of as mere anecdotage and he was abroad when all this happened. Simon, who usually writes up Dad’s more spectacular cases, is dashing madly about, researching for a biography of the Reverend Alexander Forsyth. And, as the clincher, it happened to me. Or perhaps I made it happen to myself – and might have died for my stupidity. So I seem to be elected.
When I was a child, I thought that my Dad was the bravest man on earth. I still do in a way, although I also agree with Mum that his courage is made up with more than a smidgeon of rashness. Several times I have seen him face up to an armed man and once even to Mum when she had lost her temper with him. His pride never lets him back away. Perhaps that’s what rashness is.
Which makes it all the odder that this paragon of courage is terrified to fly. From the safety of the ground he can watch planes zooming past or scratching white lines across the sky without ever doubting their ability to stay up there; but on the rare occasions when he has been induced to go up in one he has known for a fact that nothing so cumbersome and illogical could possibly support his weight. This delusion is especially strange in a man who has made a lifelong study of ballistics and so should have some feeling for the effects of airflow, but when we did Physics in school and I tried to explain the Venturi Effect to him he only said that, if any competent engineer could prove that a bumblebee couldn’t possibly fly, no doubt he could prove the converse about aircraft.
The result of Dad’s phobia was that for years the few foreign holidays that he and Mum managed to take usually consisted of a long drive, a Channel crossing and another and longer drive down through France. And even then, Dad being Dad, the holiday usually turned into a business trip around the gun centres. Which was all very well for Dad but a bit hard on Mum, who would rather have lolled on a beach or hit the nightspots. Mum can be a swinger when she gets the chance.
It all came to a head earlier this year. Mum was more than a little run down after a dose of ’flu, and the doctor, a serious young man who had just joined the practice almost straight from college, told her that she was overdue for a proper holiday.
For years, Dad had been hankering to cross the Atlantic. He wanted to see Mexico, and some American friends had offered to fly down and take him on a dove hunt – which in Mexico, I gather, is really something.
Everybody decided that now was the hour for him to do it instead of talking about it and they ganged up on poor Dad. By everybody, I mean Mum, Dad’s partner Wallace and Wallace’s wife Janet. I stayed on the side-lines. I understand about phobias – I don’t mind flying, but no way could I take a spider out of the bath. And Ronnie, my only uncle, who doesn’t understand about holidays anyway, was not consulted. But the others were adamant. He was overdue for a holiday and he was going to have one and enjoy it whether he wanted to or not.
Dad gave in with a good grace and even volunteered to go and make the necessary arrangements with the travel agent. When he returned, his unusual compliance was explained. He had arranged the Atlantic crossings by way of a cruise ship, thus extending their absence by almost another month, and had charged the considerable expense against the firm. Wal was too relieved to complain; Dad is an excellent gunsmith and brings a lot of money into the firm by dealing in quality guns, mainly antiques, but he will insist on meddling in what Wal regards as his own province – the management of the shop and accounts. Mum, who was getting a lot more holiday than she had bargained for, was delighted.
I could easily have gone to stay with Janet and Wal, who have the flat above the shop in Newton Lauder; but Dad’s workshop and the stock of antique guns are in our home at Briesland House, about two miles outside the town. It was decided that, even after the best of the guns had been lodged at the bank, the house would still make too good a target for a burglar. I was to stay in the house. But Briesland House is rather isolated, a couple of miles from the small town of Newton Lauder in the Scottish Borders. So it was further decided that my uncle would move in with me to see to my safety. (When he objected that his cottage would then be vulnerable to any passing burglar, Dad retorted that any self-respecting burglar would have to be paid to take any of Ronnie’s treasures away.) Janet was appointed to supervise the physical and moral wellbeing of the pair of us.
Dad worked like a demon for a fortnight and, by the time of their departure, his side of the business was right up to date. From there on I was expected, in addition to helping Wal and Janet in the shop, to do my best to keep it that way; but Dad was insistent that anything difficult be farmed out to a friend of his in Edinburgh. Dad still forgets that, although I served my time as an engraver, I can polish a stock, make and temper a spring, do colour hardening, fit a new part or, if all else should fail, make and case-harden it myself. After following him around – ‘like a puppy-dog’, Mum always says – ever since I was old enough to toddle, insisting on joining in whatever he was doing and eternally asking questions, I could hardly have helped learning the tricks of the trade.
After spending money on a good education for me, my parents had been hesitant about letting me join the family business, but I can be as stubborn as Dad and they soon saw that I would never be useful at anything else.
If a preoccupation with guns seems to the more chauvinistic reader to be unnatural in a young woman, I can only say that, quite apart from Dad’s influence, my interest was first attracted by the sheer beauty of polished wood and engraved metal and the clean, functional lines. And that, I seem to remember, was before we had even discovered that I had the straight eye and natural co-ordination which go to make a good shot. Women may not have the same urge to gather meat as do men – although I can and do shoot game or wildfowl with some of the best of them – but they can certainly become competent shots. When I won my first medal at the clay pigeons, I was hooked.
*
The cruise ship could hardly have passed Fastnet Rock before it was made clear that my help in the shop would only be required for emergency cover. Janet and Wal could manage very well between them, thank you very much.
I don’t know from whom I inherited my innate honesty, the cause of the trouble. (Certainly not from Dad, who falls well within the definition of a lovable rogue.) It offends my nobler instincts to sell a refined and delicate product to a customer when his needs would be better met by
something cheaper and more robust. Such a deal seems to be an insult to the product as much as to the customer. Wallace came back to the shop unexpectedly, to overhear me gently but firmly steering a lady who wanted a birthday present for a wildfowling son, away from a very expensive and high-powered pair of binoculars – which he could never have held steady without a tripod – and towards a light but solid, rubber-covered pair of ten-powers at a fifteenth of the price.
With only a trickle of guns coming in for attention, I found myself more or less a lady of leisure; and this suited me admirably. I loved my parents, but the restraints imposed through their delayed realisation that I had at last grown up often rankled. There were many more interesting things to do than stand behind a shop counter or climb the ladder to the highest shelves in search of goods which the local lads had no intention of buying but had only asked about in the hope of seeing up my skirt.
Ronnie, my uncle, is usually fully committed to his job as Sir Peter Hay’s stalker-cum-ghillie. But the continuing fine summer had spoiled the fishing and Ronnie had already made his quota of culls. Sir Peter had other work for him. When the young policeman tracked us down, he found us killing rats around a chicken farm, aided by three terriers, twelve ferrets and a black Labrador – the last in a purely advisory capacity, because ratting can harden a gundog’s mouth.
We were having a lovely time, accounting for a whole lot of rats while at the same time winning and losing small bets on the performance of individual dogs as the hundreds of different holes were cleared. I was almost 25p ahead when the shadow caught my eye and I looked round. A uniformed constable was watching patiently from the corner of the nearest shed.
I ignored him until the immediate rush was over and the ferrets were surfacing again before pointing him out to Ronnie. ‘I think they’ve come for you,’ I said. ‘Not before time. Have you been on the rampage again?’
‘No’ for weeks,’ Ronnie said seriously. ‘I’m overdue.’
The constable approached us, stepping carefully through the dust and litter. ‘Miss Deborah Calder?’ he asked, as though he had difficulty believing it. ‘The Chief Super wants to see you. Urgent, he said it was.’ He was not exactly good looking, but he was well built and his face was round and friendly. ‘You missed one,’ he added. ‘It ran under yon wee shed.’
‘I saw it. Mousus tomandjerricus. You don’t often get them among brown rats,’ I told him.
‘I jalouse they’ve found out about you-know-what,’ Ronnie said in tones of doom. He spoiled the effect with a broad grin.
‘I doubt it. Mr Munro probably just wants a quick fumble in the back seat, same as usual,’ I said. ‘I’d better go. He gets fractious when he’s kept waiting for his fun.’
The constable looked slightly shocked at this lèse majesté, but Ronnie only laughed. My uncle is a rough diamond who looks much as one of the Easter Island statues would look if squashed down a bit. The general view of the family is that he should be kept in a dark cupboard and only let out to frighten children, but I like him. I can say things to him which would bring down the wrath of God if I said them at home.
I gave Ronnie my stick, gathered up one of his ferrets for him before it could go back underground, whistled up Sam the Labrador and then went to look for the constable, who seemed to have vanished. I found him using the radio in a panda car parked in the yard behind the farmhouse.
‘The Chief Super says we’re to meet him at Marthasfield,’ he said.
I put Sam on the back seat of the panda and sat in the front. Sam is really Dad’s dog, but Sam thinks that he is mine and I am inclined to agree with him. ‘I want to go home and change,’ I said.
‘Can’t keep the big chief waiting.’
‘Yes, I can. Easily.’
‘Uh-uh,’ the constable said.
‘Well, at least I can wash,’ I said. ‘Rats carry all sorts of diseases. Wiele’s disease, for one – the dreaded Ratter’s Yellows. Stop at the first pub or I’ll bite you and pass it on.’
He was turning out to be a bit of a prune. He was a polite young man but very shy and terrified of putting a foot wrong. He denied knowing what Chief Superintendent Munro wanted with me, although I’m sure that he could have made a good guess. He let me off at a pub but refused to park within a hundred yards of it. At least I was able to clean up a bit before we met Mr Munro at Marthasfield and the constable had lent me a comb.
Mr Munro was waiting at the roadside in the back of a police Jaguar. The car was complete with uniformed driver, so I knew that this was very official business. I said a polite goodbye to my constable and got in beside Mr Munro, who was in full uniform with silver bits all over it. The car moved off before I was properly settled. Sam, who had dived in at the last moment, sprawled across our feet.
‘What’s the hurry?’ I asked. ‘Has there been a murder?’
He smiled his twisted smile. I have known Mr Munro since he was a chief inspector, and Dad has known and squabbled with him for even longer. Sometimes you would think that they hated each other, and then, when it suited them and usually when you least expected it, they would form a sudden alliance against the rest of the world. Personally, I’d always got on well with him. I respected him and yet he always made me feel at ease. He was a tall and gangling Hebridean from the outermost corner of Benbecula or Harris, very stiff and prudish but with a tiny streak of humour like one of those streams running deep underground but finding a way to the surface when conditions were just so. I had always thought of him as nearing retirement, but here he was, still around and now the big cheese for our part of the Scottish Borders.
‘A murder?’ he said. ‘Perhaps that is for you to tell us. Some of my colleagues wish to speak with you.’
I reviewed the last few months and could not remember killing anybody, or even witnessing anything which could possibly relate to any crime. ‘Before I meet anybody,’ I said, ‘I must go home and change.’ I was dressed for ratting, in jeans, a T-shirt with a mildly rude logo on it and my hair pulled back with a rubber band.
‘You are better as you are,’ he said. ‘You may not be dressed up for a social occasion but at least you look for once like a serious and practical person.’ The quaint lilt in his voice emphasised, as always, the precision of his words. Dad swears that Mr Munro still thinks in the Gaelic and translates into English as he goes along, but Dad says that Mr Munro still has peat between his toes. I think that he has never lost the speech patterns learned from elders who spoke that way.
‘So what’s it all about?’ I asked.
He answered a question with a question, as is the habit of policemen. ‘What can you tell me about the Pentland Gun Club?’
As it happened, I could have told him a great deal. In my youth I had earned pin-money trapping, scoring and generally making myself useful while Dad was shooting there. Later, I had often practised and competed on their layouts. I had also read every book in Dad’s considerable library – even, during a convalescence, the ones whose footnotes had footnotes of their own. If I had to answer some of his questions in order to get answers to my own, so be it.
‘It’s a big club,’ I explained, ‘very old and very prosperous. It started out as a live pigeon trap-shooting club in Edinburgh, in the days when that was legal and there used to be huge betting on it. In the mid-nineteenth century it was one of the first clubs to use the newfangled glass balls filled with feathers as targets. In 1880 a man named Ligowski produced the first clay pigeons, but they were very hard to break because they really were—’
‘Very interesting,’ Mr Munro said patiently, ‘but could we not perhaps come a little more up to date?’
I seem to have inherited Dad’s habit of lecturing instead of telling the listener the little that he really wants to know. People never do seem to want to know much about anything interesting. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘The club owned a whole stretch of land and Edinburgh grew up around it. About twenty years ago, they were compulsorily purchased out of it for a sum which was huge eve
n then. There’s a hotel and a shopping centre standing on it now.
‘So the club took the money and ran. They bought their present site, on the bank of Moorfoot Loch Reservoir. Dad says that the Scottish Office leaned on the local authorities to give them outright planning permission, just to get them out into the wilds where the noise wouldn’t be bothering anybody. They built themselves a classy set-up – clubhouse, Skeet layout with stone trap-houses and safety walls, Sporting stands with a high tower, Down the Line, and electrically operated Laporte traps everywhere you look.’
Mr Munro was visibly struggling to keep up. ‘These traps,’ he said. ‘They are for throwing clay pigeons?’
‘That’s right. The nomenclature,’ I explained, ‘still comes from the old days of live pigeon shooting. They were released from one of three traps operated by a boy who pulled a string, so the call for a bird – they’re still called “birds” – is “Pull”. Actually, you’re supposed to call “Mark” or “Ready” in some disciplines, but “Pull” is accepted almost anywhere. The dead bird had to fall within the marked circle or it didn’t count.’ I saw from his face that I was lecturing again so I shut up.
‘It sounds expensive,’ Mr Munro commented. ‘Does it cost much to be a member?’
‘The subscription isn’t much,’ I said, ‘but the entrance fee’s heavy. It has to be. You can’t let any old tink walk in off the street, pay a year’s subscription and own part of all the assets. But clay shooting always costs. Cartridges aren’t cheap, good equipment costs the earth and entry into competitions has to cover prize-money except in the big-time when it’s sponsored.’
Mr Munro was looking a bit dazed. ‘These are rich men, then?’
‘Not necessarily. Dad’s been a member since the year dot. Of course, he joined before the club moved and the entrance fees went up. I don’t know if you’d call him rich.’ It occurred to me that the Chief Superintendent, coming from his background among the peat bogs and cottage weaving, probably would call him rich although Dad would have gone to the stake denying it. ‘Non-members can still use the facilities or get some coaching on a day-ticket,’ I added. ‘It’s frowned on by the CPSA but winked at by everybody else. Now, what’s it all about?’
A Brace of Skeet Page 1