A Brace of Skeet

by Gerald Hammond

  Mr McHarg decided against any further introductions and got down to business. He led me quickly through the reasons why Mr Tullos could not have died accidentally, or at least not in the place and manner which somebody had tried to suggest, and through what I inferred from the unbroken clays and fired cartridges which I had pointed out to the Sergeant. I had had a minor role in several of Dad’s court cases, so I was able to make a clear and succinct statement. When I had finished, he nodded.

  One of the men raised a hand, but the Superintendent frowned at him. ‘Questions later. Miss Calder, can you help us to identify any of these guns? If so, don’t touch them, point them out.’

  ‘For starters,’ I said, ‘I believe that the two muzzle-loaders belonged to the dead man.’ I pointed to a reproduction percussion shotgun by Pedersoli and a beautiful double flintlock by Rhoades. ‘He was a black-powder enthusiast and I’ve seen him practising with them. The modern gun which was found beside him looks very like the one he always used, and since there’s nothing similar here it seems a safe assumption that it was his.

  ‘The Beretta S Oh Three—’ I pointed it out in case some ignoramus failed to recognise the unusual side-plates and action-body ‘—was definitely a club gun. I replaced a broken striker in it only a month ago. The Winchester and the Mario Beschi look very like club guns which I’ve seen in general use for years – the Winchester was gifted to the club by a member who was going abroad and the other, I think, was a bequest. The Krieghoff I haven’t seen before; but it’s a twenty-bore, so if it’s a club gun it wouldn’t have seen much use. That only leaves the Browning. It may be a club gun or it may belong to a member who’s left it here for safe-keeping.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mr McHarg said. ‘Questions?’

  The man who had raised his hand repeated the gesture. ‘One thing sticks in my craw,’ he said. ‘Putting the body beside a trap-house where the accident could not have happened seems such an elementary mistake. Does it suggest somebody who was unfamiliar with clay pigeon shooting?’

  ‘That’s hardly a question for Miss Calder,’ Superintendent McHarg said. ‘If there’s nothing else . . .?’

  ‘I would like to answer the question,’ I said carefully. There was a sudden stillness in the room. ‘I did think that at first. I have since had time to go for a walk outside the club fencing while I waited. I noticed that the embankment between the club and the neighbouring development – the timeshare and the Country Club and so on – is flat-topped. It would make an attractive place for a picnic when no shooting was going on. There’s a sort of barbecue pit with fluffy wood-ash in it. Yesterday was windy until late afternoon so that, although there’s some screening by whin-bushes, the ash would have blown around if it had been there longer than last night. If somebody was up on the mound, they could see every trap-house at the lower level. But the Skeet trap-houses are screened by the safety walls. Of course, he might still have had to move the body there . . .’

  Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) Beamington was grinning all over his face.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Calder,’ Mr McHarg said with finality.

  Sergeant Fellowes touched my shoulder. ‘I’ll run you home,’ he said.

  This time, nobody stood up.

  Chapter Five

  Sergeant Fellowes, who had previously treated me as if I were a favourite but tomboyish younger sister, held the car door for me and closed it gently. The car, I guessed, was his own. It was a Vauxhall of dull colour, neither large nor new but clean and tidy and kept with a more personal care than the police would have given to a pool car, and the accumulation of odds and ends – sunglasses, tissues and scribbling materials predominating – seemed more like one man’s impedimenta. It was a car like a million others on the road – a car from which observation could be kept without attracting any attention.

  The Sergeant seemed amused. ‘That was a bit of a facer you gave the Super, about our murderer’s options being limited by an observer up on the embankment,’ he said. He drove well, I noticed.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ I said.

  ‘I know that. You have the sort of well-meaning innocence that catches other people flat-footed and red-faced. I rather think that Mr McHarg was waiting to spring it himself, in his best “Who would look after you idiots if I wasn’t there to blow your noses and wipe your bottoms?” manner.’

  If I did not recognise myself in his evaluation, at least the thoughts which he attributed to Superintendent McHarg accorded with my own impression of his superior. I gathered that Sergeant Fellowes liked him as little as I did.

  ‘I was only trying to be helpful. Did I steal his thunder?’

  ‘You did. And in front of the ACC. He’ll mention you in his prayers tonight.’

  ‘Maybe I need a prayer or two.’

  He chuckled. ‘And maybe I’ll say one for you as I kneel beside my lonely bed tonight.’ I thought that he placed a tiny stress on the word ‘lonely’, as if he dared to think that I might even be wondering whether he was married or cohabiting.

  Privately, I decided that the Superintendent was not the sort of person whose prayers would receive immediate attention. ‘It served him right for being such a grouch,’ I said. ‘And for having such a big audience. Does a murder always take such a big team?’

  ‘When there isn’t an obvious suspect. Ninety-nine per cent of all that information will turn out to be irrelevant but the other one per cent will be essential. If we knew which one per cent, we could save a lot of manpower.’

  ‘If I’ve got to run the place from midday Thursday,’ I said, ‘can I have the club’s guns back?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. It’s not as if gunshots figured in the case. Once they’ve been examined for prints and when cartridges have been fired out of them for comparison, we won’t need them any more. I’ll see if I can get them back to you by Thursday afternoon. Of course, if one of them fired the cartridges in that bin we’ll need to hold on to it.’

  ‘Just so long as I have guns for visitors to borrow,’ I said.

  He took his eyes of the road for a second. ‘Should you be lending firearms to visitors?’

  ‘The club has an Exemption Certificate,’ I said. ‘And a shotgun isn’t a firearm under the Act. Surely it’s better that one of the timeshare visitors uses a club gun instead of bringing his own gun on holiday to where there isn’t any provision for security?’ I waited to see whether he would ask any more questions. Some police officers know less about the 1968 Firearms Act than the average shooter.

  His mind was on another tack. ‘You needn’t worry about being alone up there,’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’

  ‘Oh? I thought that the idea of being on your own at the scene of a murder, with the murderer still on the loose, might have made you nervous.’

  If that was my cue to be fluttery and dependent, I let it go by. ‘It didn’t until you started going on about it,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it needn’t. There will have to be an officer with you, waiting to identify anybody who turns up, take statements and collect fired cartridges.’

  I sighed, loudly in order to be heard over the hum of the car. ‘Pretending to be a regular but holding the gun upside down?’

  ‘Very probably. How well did you know Mr Tullos?’

  I shrugged, for all the good that that would do. The Sergeant, like the good driver that he was, was studying the road ahead. ‘He was just a face,’ I said. ‘The face which sold everything from cartridges to snacks, took entries and arranged competitions. The face I told to go and boil its head when it tried to get me to keep my dog on a lead.’

  ‘All the same, if you shot there even once a month you must have been in his company, if only as part of the same crowd, for a total of some hours. What were your impressions of him?’

  I thought back to the living, breathing Herbert Tullos, who seemed to be fading from memory already. I wondered whether I was remembering him or the description of him which I had given to the Superi
ntendent. ‘Middle-aged, going on elderly,’ I said. ‘Sandy – he had managed to go almost bald without going grey first, unless he was touching up the pathetic remnant. Slightly rat-faced without looking nasty, if you can imagine it – but you’ve seen him, of course.’

  ‘He wasn’t looking his best.’

  ‘I suppose not. He was a good shot in spite of his disability. But, when you come to think of it, shooting’s one of the few sports at which a man with a damaged leg can compete on equal terms with others.’

  ‘But his character?’

  ‘Surly,’ I said. ‘Most of the time, he was a grumbler, the sort who puts your back up. And yet, when he let himself go, he could be entertaining. Telling stories.’

  ‘Do you remember any of them?’

  ‘Not really. Mostly, they were stories from his police days, Crooks I Have Known. The only one that comes back to me . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘. . . was the most recent, because it’s fresh in my mind. It was last Sunday. I only went along because I was getting out of practice. There’s a FITASC Grand Prix coming along next month and I want to compete. Then the season will be on us soon and my Dad won’t let me forget it if I let him down. We were having a fifty-bird Sporting shoot. There were about twenty men in it and me, but I’d have won it if I hadn’t gone to pieces on the last stand. Anyway, the trap in the tower had been going all weekend. The magazine ran out and clays had to be fetched from the clubhouse. While somebody went for them – Mr Tullos was always excused that duty if possible, because of his leg – he told the story of his last days in the police. Do you know about that?’

  ‘His police career and its abrupt end is almost the sum total of what we’ve found out about him, thanks to yourself, so far, but let’s have his version.’

  ‘The way he told it, he got a call over the radio that an intruder had been seen on the flat roof of a jeweller’s shop. He got up there just as a man came up out of a skylight carrying a plastic carrier-bag and a sawn-off shotgun. There was what he called “a bit of an argie-bargie”, and the upshot was that he took a load of shot in the leg. By that time, there were police around the building. The man tried to take a jump to the next roof and fell into the alley.

  ‘Mr Tullos – Sergeant Tullos he was then, I think – was carted off to hospital with a badly shattered knee. And who should turn up in the same ward but the man who’d shot him. Several beds away, he said, or there might have been more bloodshed. Why would a criminal be taken to an ordinary hospital?’ I asked.

  ‘At that moment he hadn’t been convicted of anything, so technically he wasn’t a criminal. A prisoner on remand in custody might be treated in a prison hospital, but not if his condition was serious.’

  ‘I see. Later, some of Mr Tullos’s police colleagues brought him up a huge basket of fruit. So he hobbled round the ward with it, complete with crutch and a plaster cast. By that time, he was beginning to feel a bit sorry for the man, who was having a bad time with some spinal damage. He hadn’t told the others in the ward who the man was, so he felt that he couldn’t leave him out. And then, he said, the bastard – that’s what he called him – went and took a large bunch of grapes, the only grapes in the basket. The other patients had been too polite to be so greedy and Mr Tullos had been looking forward to having them himself. He said that that annoyed him more than being shot, because it made it more personal.

  ‘Mr Tullos’s knee never recovered and he was retired from the police with a pension and a few thousand under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Act – which, he said, he blew within a few months. That’s all there was to it, but he made quite a funny story out of it. He was probably spinning a yarn.’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ said Sergeant Fellowes. ‘He was playing it down, but that’s broadly what happened. He left something out. He was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal. The man Cairns – he was known as “Joukie” – had been a partner in a whole series of bigger robberies, some of them with violence. He was a very tough character and Sergeant Tullos knew it. Some of his colleagues felt that Tullos qualified for the Queen’s Medal for Being a Bloody Idiot, but the highheidyins often prefer not to see it that way.’

  We were nearly home. I thought that I had never known Mr Tullos. The middle-aged cripple must once have been a young man with fire in his belly. ‘I wish I’d known that,’ I said sadly. ‘He gave the impression that the whole thing was one big accident. He said that the other thing that really made him angry was that Cairns would only have got a few hundred for his haul when he fenced it, if he’d got away, but he’d sawn off a stolen shotgun by W. and C. Scott which would have fetched ten times as much.’

  ‘And you sympathised with that viewpoint?’ the Sergeant asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘To me, that was equivalent to wiping his backside on the Mona Lisa. If you knew the work and artistry that goes into a Best English handmade gun . . .’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said. I could tell that he was trying to hide amusement. ‘Do you know anything else about Mr Tullos? There are still many gaps in his biography. Sometimes these little anecdotes help to plug a hole.’

  Another picture came to my mind, of Herbert Tullos, in perky mood, with his blue club cap pushed to the back of his head, leaning across the clubroom bar and keeping a group of members in stitches while the rain which had ended shooting for the moment bounced off the cars outside. ‘Sir Peter said that he spent most of the years between in a desk job for an oil company, but he must have been in Africa at one time. Zimbabwe, I think he said.’

  Following my directions, the Sergeant had brought us to the door of Briesland House, but he made no move to get out. It was warm and quiet in the car. The Sergeant smelled of fresh, male sweat, not displeasing. The garden was bright with flowers and the old house glowed in the sunshine. Sergeant Fellowes let his eyes rest on the stonework. I never usually noticed the house – it was where I had always lived. But now, seeing it through his eyes, I realised that it looked opulent, as if it never expected anybody to worry about money within its walls. If so, we must often have been a disappointment to it. Dad had bought the house with an insurance company reward before I was born and the place was his great pride.

  ‘We knew about the oil company,’ he said, frowning, ‘but there’s a year missing. What was he doing in Zimbabwe?’

  ‘That I can’t tell you. I know he made some money there because he still had it but couldn’t get it out. That was one of his tales. Another from that time . . .’

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Anything might help us to track him through that missing year.’

  ‘This won’t,’ I told him. ‘But it may help you to understand him, as he was after he was crippled. His stories usually had a cruel twist in them somewhere.

  ‘He said that he managed to keep up with his shooting. There was a lot of good sport to be had out there, but he was very dependent on a pair of pointers.’

  ‘Dogs, you mean?’

  The Sergeant, I was reminded, knew very little about shooting. ‘Dogs which seek out the game and then wait “on point” for you to come up. And then they flush the quarry. He said that his dogs were very good up to that moment, but once the quarry was up they broke discipline and chased it out of sight. A dangerous habit,’ I explained, ‘and not calculated to fill the bag.

  ‘Slowed down by his leg, he found all the usual retraining methods beyond him, so he resorted to the electric collar. That’s a gadget that you put round a dog’s neck and when you need to inflict punishment at a distance you press a button on a radio controller and the dog gets a painful electric shock. It’s frowned on by most trainers, but it does get results in some cases.

  ‘When he tried it out, the bitch yelped and came back to heel. In a fortnight, she was completely cured of chasing. But when the male chased after a guinea-fowl he paid no attention to the electric collar. Mr Tullos could hardly believe that the dog was so wrapped up in the chase that the pain meant nothing to him, so he sat down in
the shadow of a tall hedge and took the collar to bits. The circuitry seemed all right and there was still power in the batteries.

  ‘The native bearer who was with him seemed very much intrigued by all this technology. So Mr Tullos explained that this was “white man’s magic” and buckled the collar round the bearer’s neck. The bearer was as pleased as Punch and strutted off round the end of the hedge.

  ‘Mr Tullos pressed the button.’

  The Sergeant gave a snort of amusement.

  ‘It isn’t the sort of story you should laugh at, in this day and age,’ I said severely. ‘But he told it well. His description of the bearer, eyes popping and hair suddenly straightened out, coming back over the hedge with about three feet to spare, had his audience falling about. He told it in the bar when we were rained off, about a year ago. And when the rain stopped and the competition re-started, I don’t think that anybody hit anything. Every time somebody called for a bird, somebody else would snicker and he’d crack up again.’

  The Sergeant sat in silence for a full minute. He managed to control his laughter but I saw him wipe his eyes when he spoke again his voice was not quite steady.

  ‘You didn’t tell us that you’d been at the club on Sunday,’ he said.

  ‘Nobody asked me.’

  ‘Who else was present?’

  ‘When I think back,’ I said, ‘I see a whole lot of faces but I’m not sure which day I’m remembering. Mr Tullos always filed the score-cards, because we have handicap competitions sometimes. They’re in a big blue box-file. I’ve seen him bring it out when somebody quibbled about the handicap he’d been given. You’d find that a more reliable source than my memory. Why are you interested in Sunday?’

  ‘Who knows when it all began?’ he said. ‘Tell me, what were you doing on Monday evening?’

  ‘I was here, with my uncle.’ I tried not to sound hurt. From his viewpoint, I could have killed Mr Tullos as easily as anybody could. And if I had not, the sooner the police could clear me of suspicion the better.