‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.
I led the way again, but I had gone only a few yards when my thoughts came together and I stopped so suddenly that he bumped into me from behind. ‘GC!’ I said. ‘Sorry,’ I added.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed it.’
His remark threw me. Perish the thought, but I was probably blushing. And he seemed surprised at himself for allowing the words to escape from him unprompted. It took several seconds before my thoughts sorted themselves out again.
‘I was just thinking that there seemed to be fewer wads and broken clays lying around than I’d have expected,’ I said. ‘Most of them get scooped up by the grass-cutter. Grass doesn’t grow much when it’s dry at this time of year, but it seems to me that the place looks tidier than it did on Sunday. That’s what the GC is in the diary. Grass-cutting. They must have a contractor who comes in once a fortnight in summer, on Mondays when the club’s supposed to be shut.’
We were walking again and he had fallen into step beside me. He had to shorten his pace to match mine. He pushed back his ear-protectors in order to hear me better, although the high-tech ones are designed to allow speech to come through with very little distortion. ‘Well done!’ he said. ‘You must be right.’
My mind still had the throttle wide open. ‘What’s more, I bet the same contractor does the Leisure Complex and the golf course,’ I said. ‘They were working there on Tuesday, remember? If he had two clients up here, it would make sense to do them on consecutive days.’
We had slowed to a halt in front of the tower, too engrossed to think where to walk. ‘The diary entry was for the morning,’ he said slowly. ‘But I suppose the contractor might have needed most of the afternoon before he finished. He may have seen a visitor. But the pathologist put the death at evening up until midnight.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ I said, ‘which is that we’ve got a blank canvas. The grass-cutter would either pick up wads and throw them into the sort of hopper thing along with the grass-cuttings, or chop them up small – which is what it mostly does with the broken clays – they’re only made of pitch and they’re designed to be fragile – or it would tread them into the ground with the roller.’ I stepped onto the grass and retrieved half of a plastic wad. ‘Like this. So we have a sort of blank canvas, dating from whenever the grass-cutting finished.’
The Sergeant managed to look both pleased and disappointed. ‘Just as I was getting my eye in!’ he said. ‘Perhaps we can resume later on. They have a lot more grass next door. Will you be all right on your own here while I go and see if the grass-cutter’s still working?’
I refrained from pointing out that I had a gun in my hands. That sort of reasoning is not favoured by policemen, in whose philosophy only the criminal should be armed. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Lock your gun in the safe before you go. I’ll take a look round.’
‘Don’t shoot and don’t let anybody else shoot until I come back.’
I waited and looked him in the eye until he added the word, ‘please.’ Then I nodded. There are times and places for being masterful and he was not going to get away with jumping the gun – even if he had only been re-asserting himself.
*
I kept an eye cocked and an ear open, but it was still too early for shooters to arrive and the low-key publicity seemed to have been successful in putting the media off the scent. My search did not take long – I knew where wads were likely to collect from the various stands and I was familiar enough with their appearance for them to catch my eye.
There was no sign of the Sergeant when I unlocked the clubhouse. I filled and started up the coffee machine, checked the stores and phoned the week’s orders to the suppliers.
That seemed to exhaust my duties for the moment. My watch and my stomach combined to assure me that it was lunchtime, although the morning seemed to have slipped away unnoticed. There were still a few sandwiches sealed in polythene. They felt fresh but they must have been about a week old. I decided to pass them up. I got two TV dinners out of the freezer, changed my mind and put one of them back, microwaved the other and ate it.
Like Dad, I hate to hang about like washing on a line. (His expression for it is more graphic but much less polite.) Casting around for something to do, I remembered the gun that Wallace had brought me for overhaul. The tools that Mr Tullos had used for his muzzle-loaders were in the office. There was a set of good screwdrivers – ‘turnscrews’, to the trade – a small clamp for V-springs and one of those useful things like an inkrubber impregnated with some abrasive compound.
I spread some outdated posters over one of the clubroom tables. When the Sergeant came back at last I had the gun stripped and was scrubbing away at a fine mask of rust. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to own a good gun.
‘There are some sandwiches left,’ I said. ‘Or I could heat you up something. On the house,’ I added. ‘And there’s tea, coffee or soup in the machine.’
He laughed. ‘I wish I’d known you were going to be so hospitable. I had something while I was hanging around at the Country Club. The tractormen had vanished to some secret hideaway to eat their “pieces”.’ He had resumed his suit jacket for the important business of seeing witnesses. He slipped it off, hung it over the back of the chair, sat down and bent over my work. ‘So that’s what the insides look like!’
‘They shouldn’t, but some of them do.’
He watched my hands on the small components for a minute. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Same firm, and the grass was cut on Monday. The Leisure Centre and the golf course take most of the rest of the week. And they say that Mr Tullos was giving somebody a lesson on the lower level while they were working up above. B. Torry, presumably.’
‘Brian,’ I said. ‘Brian Torry.’
He nodded. ‘They finished and left around five. Nobody was here then.’
‘I had a look round while you were guzzling among the nobs at the Country Club,’ I said. ‘I found three different sorts of wads. I lifted one of each.’ I took them out of the pocket of my Skeet jacket and put them on the table. ‘The fibre wad is a twenty-bore, probably Eley to match the cartridges in the bin. It had been fired somewhere near the tower, I think at left-to-right crossers. This one—’ I pushed a plastic wad across ‘—comes from one of the club’s ordinary twelve-bore cartridges and it was on the Ball-trap layout. The last one is nineteen-millimetre G-wad from an Express cartridge. The mid-section’s quite distinctive. It was below the Skeet layouts.’
‘So three people came and shot here that evening?’
‘Probably two,’ I said. ‘Possibly only one. A keen shot may use different cartridges or even a different gun for different disciplines. You may be able to work it out when you’ve studied the firing-pin marks on those cartridges, but you may not. Mr Tullos could have lent his own gun to a visitor. He used the club’s cartridges when he was practising, but he sometimes used something more expensive when he had a bet on. I’d better come and show you where I found them.’
‘Draw me a sketch map if you’d rather get on with polishing up those bits and pieces.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s something else I want to show you.’
He sighed and got to his feet. ‘I’m doing more mileage on this case than I’ve done in years! I had to chase those damned tractors all over the golf course.’
‘We can take the guns along and finish your lesson,’ I said.
He brightened slightly. ‘That’s different,’ he said.
He bought another box of cartridges and I locked the clubhouse carefully. He fetched a camera from his car.
‘Another thing,’ I said, as we descended the steps. ‘I wondered where the acoustic release had got to.’
‘That’s the thing you use when you’re practising on your own?’ he asked doubtfully. ‘It makes the trap throw a . . . a bird when you call out?’
‘That’s it. I couldn’t find it. So I took a look round. It was coiled up and locked in the Ball-
trap trap-house.’
He stopped dead. ‘Remember that you’re talking to an ignoramus. What’s a Ball-trap? A trap that throws a ball?’
I kept a straight face. ‘It’s one of the going-away disciplines, but the direction of the bird varies both sideways and up-and-down. The Continentals love it. It’s not so well known here. It’s sometimes laid on for visiting Americans.’
‘They like it?’
‘They’ve never seen it before,’ I said. ‘It breaks their hearts.’
‘That’s vicious,’ said the Sergeant.
Chapter Seven
I showed him the wads. Those at the Ball-trap layout were widely scattered, as would be expected at a trap which oscillated to give random variations of angle in both planes. The twenty-bore wads were grouped as if the shooter had been practising on the very clays which we had found unbroken. The Express wads below the Skeet layouts were in two tidy arcs.
‘This boy’s good at Skeet,’ I told the Sergeant.
‘How can you tell?’ he asked, exasperated.
‘He takes the first of a pair early, reverses his swing and takes the second in the same place. And he shoots his singles just as consistently. Less skilled shots chase their birds all over the place.’
The Sergeant laid down his gun. I dawdled about, following up random thoughts, while he drew careful sketch-maps. ‘For all the use this’ll be in evidence . . .’ he said. ‘If these wads turn out to be relevant, the best evidence will be yours. But I’ll try putting a paper flag over each of them and photographing each scene . . .’
‘Before you do that,’ I said, ‘there’s something else.’ I led him to a position behind the nearest cage.’
‘This layout’s confusing me,’ he said. ‘Is this where we found the cartridges on Tuesday?’
The logic of the layout was so familiar to me that I had difficulty in realising that the network of paths and stands, which followed no geometric rules, could confuse the stranger. ‘Correct. Now look.’ I pointed out a deep spike-hole in the turf. ‘I haven’t seen any other imprints like this. I’d guess that foot-traffic plus the roller they hitch on behind the mowers would close them up.’
He squatted down and studied it carefully. ‘Three questions,’ he said. ‘One, what made it? Two, why is it significant? And, three, how did you come to spot it under the blades of grass?’
He had looked up from the grass but not so far as to meet my eye. I could only think that he was studying my legs. I didn’t mind. I am not ashamed of having legs, nor of the shape of them. ‘Taking three first,’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking over what people do here and what traces they leave behind. Skipping back to your first question, some of the older shooters, or the ones who have hip or back problems—’
‘Such as the late Mr Tullos?’
‘—take a shooting-stick round with them,’ I said, persevering despite his interruption and the distraction of his study of my lower limbs. ‘At most of the stands there’s a wooden seat to each side, back out of the line of fire, but those seats get green and nasty in damp weather. And a coach who’s giving a lesson, or someone who wants to see exactly how somebody else is getting it right or wrong, places himself behind the gun. Not too closely in line or you can’t see the shot in the air —’
‘Is that possible?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Anybody with quick vision can see it,’ I said, ‘except for the shooter, whose vision’s masked by hot and expanding gases. For a high bird, you’re better to be rather low. If you’re almost but not quite in line behind him, you can watch the shooter out of the corner of your eye but focus on the clay. You see a grey blur go whisking past it. Between the two pictures, you can tell exactly what he’s doing wrong. That’s what I was doing behind you earlier.’
He looked up at my face. ‘You think that Mr Tullos was giving a lesson after the grass-cutting finished?’
I raised my arms and let them fall in a sort of shrug. ‘He used to use a sort of folding stool which doubled as a walking-stick,’ I said. You’re the detective. You figure it out.’
‘The bent-tube thing? It was leaning against the gun-safe. Hang on a wee minute. I dare say that the exercise is doing me good.’
He dashed off. I stood where I was. Even in the dry weather the seats were rather grubby for a white cotton skirt. He came back shortly with Mr Tullos’s stool in his hand.
‘Was this the stool he used?’
‘That’s the one.’ I appropriated it and sat down.
‘It wouldn’t mark the grass in dry weather.’ He sighed. ‘As you say, I’m the detective. I suppose it’s up to me to figure out how we came to find twelve-bore cartridges and twenty-bore wads. Or do you have any more inspirations?’
‘My inspirations are all used up for today,’ I told him. ‘Ask me again tomorrow.’
I sat and absorbed the warmth of the sun while he bustled about, lifting each wad and replacing it on a half-page from a notebook. He must have used half a roll of film in ensuring that the scene was recorded in his remarkably expensive camera. Either the camera was police property or he made thrifty use of his police pay. I noticed that he was managing to include me in several of the shots. I stood up, smiled and took up a glamorous pose, skirt slightly raised.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said, smiling. ‘This film will be developed in the police lab and I wouldn’t like to think of the technician lusting over it. He’s a married man.’ The Sergeant’s words were weighted to confirm that he himself was single. I noticed that he had taken the photograph before he spoke out.
I had been aware of the sound of a car on the road. Now I heard it turn in at the Gun Club’s gates. ‘We seem to be in business,’ I said. ‘You’d better get your little markers out of sight if you don’t want your cover blown. Is that the proper expression?’
He pulled a face. ‘It’s the proper expression if you’re writing a TV script.’ He began to pick up his paper flags.
I climbed the steps. Like Sergeant Fellowes, I was getting plenty of exercise.
*
Beside the jeep was parked a very swish BMW. It was no mere standard model, but one from the very top of the range which had then been taken to a specialist for another umpteen thousand to be spent on it.
Outside the locked clubhouse doors, a man was standing. He was looking around in the manner of one who has strayed out of safe and familiar territory. When I appeared with an open shotgun hooked over my arm, he looked almost scared. He was in his thirties, handsome in a wavy-haired, tooth-flashing way which set my teeth on edge. Something in his body language suggested to me that if he had not had something heavy on his mind he would have made a pass . . . and, I decided, would have got his face slapped for his pains.
‘I take it that you’re not a member,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I . . . I’m looking for Sergeant Fellowes. You wouldn’t be . . .?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. But he’ll be here in a jiffy.’
The Sergeant arrived a few seconds later, breathing heavily. His time for gathering up scraps of paper and climbing a flight of steps would have qualified him for the Guinness Book of Records.
When he saw another shotgun, my visitor took a step backwards and looked around him – wondering, no doubt, what sort of police operation he had strayed into. When he saw no signs of a siege, his nerve came back. ‘I’m Basil Chambers,’ he said.
‘Sergeant Fellowes,’ said Sergeant Fellowes. ‘We’d better go inside.’
Mr Chambers must be the witness who had visited the noise attenuation banking on the day of the murder, and I was aching to hear what he had to say. But another car, a nearly new Jag in a pleasing shade of green, was turning in at the gates. If this standard was kept up, I thought, we would soon be as up-market as the Country Club next door. Duty, if not already calling, seemed to be clearing its throat.
‘Sit in one of the cars,’ I said. ‘Or go into the house. There are people coming.’
The Sergeant handed me his gun and got
into the BMW. I unlocked the clubroom and was waiting at the bar, which doubled as the business desk, before the three men from the Jag walked in. I had seen all their faces before at some time in the past, but if I had ever known their names I had forgotten them. The two who arrived in the lead must have been in their fifties and each had the sort of self-confidence which comes from security and a set place in the world.
‘I know that you’re Miss Calder, because I’ve seen you shooting here,’ the first said. He was a benign-looking man, rather puckish, with a balding head but a fine set of whiskers to make up for it. Sir Peter had said that he was in whisky wholesaling. ‘Peter Hay phoned to say that you were going to keep things going until somebody else was appointed. Sad about Herbert Tullos, wasn’t it?’
‘Very,’ I said.
His companion nodded mournfully. He was taller, grey-haired and slightly stooping and he looked as though he had never smiled in his life. ‘Peter said something about an accident. But the police have been asking questions, so it seems that they haven’t closed the file. What exactly happened? Not a shooting accident, was it?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ I said. ‘You’re both members, aren’t you?’
Enough had been said about the defunct steward. They produced their membership cards. The smaller man with the whiskers was James Torrance while the taller with the gloomy expression was Oliver Gray.
The third member of the party came forward, a thickset man in his thirties. ‘Charles Aiken,’ he said and waited.
‘Member?’ I asked. Then I gave myself a mental kick up the backside and told myself to think more carefully before succumbing to the habit of verbal shorthand. My enquiry might well have been taken for an invitation to lay his member on the counter between us.
He nodded, but behind his back Mr Torrance was grinning and shaking his head. ‘May I see your card?’ I asked.
He felt in his pockets. ‘I seem to have left it at home,’ he said. His accent was broader than that of the other two and he was wearing jeans as against their serviceable but tailor-made slacks. His manner was brash, but some people carry anxiety around with them, exuding it like body odour, and he was one of them.
A Brace of Skeet Page 9