‘Whoo!’ said the doctor. ‘The legal eagle was probably only promoting himself a nice, profitable lawsuit with Tullos’s compensation money, but it turned out to be sound advice in the long run.’
‘Except that it got Tullos killed in the end,’ said the Sergeant.
It all seemed very neat and logical, but there was something missing. It took my tired mind a few seconds to pin it down. ‘That’s a better motive than a quarrel over the takeover of the club,’ I said, ‘but it applies to both of them. More perhaps to Mr Pender than to Mr Wyman.’
‘Tullos could have put their joint business into bankruptcy,’ said the Sergeant.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘So they had the same motive. Either could have gone back on the Monday, on the pretext of a round of Skeet but really to try for some reasonable settlement. After his Skeet, they spoke. A row blew up or Mr Tullos proved adamant and he was knocked on the head.’
‘With the spade which he’d been using to tidy up the bed of heather beside the Skeet ranges,’ said the Sergeant. ‘That much is clear. The spade had been put back in the soil, but the lab still managed to find traces of blood and skin. And a few grains of soil were impacted into the wound.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let me tell it. I don’t want to look stupid all the time.’
‘You don’t,’ the Sergeant said. The doctor, sensing something from the tone of voice, looked at him sharply.
I took a deep breath. ‘The killer, whichever he was, recovered his wits and decided to make it into an accident. He chucked his own Express cartridges into the big bin. He may not have realised how individual the firing-pin imprints can be, but most of the members use the club’s cartridges. According to Harry Noble, Mr Tullos was going to practise Ball-trap when the digging got too much for his back or his bad leg. He probably still had his spent cartridges in the pocket of his Skeet vest.
‘The killer went down to the lower level to look for the most appropriate trap-house, and while he was there he moved the unbroken clays to a different position and put Mr Tullos’s empty cartridges into the drum. He was just about to go back for the body when he heard voices and a loud laugh. A pair of lovers arrived and settled at the top of the banking where they could overlook the whole scene.
‘He could have waited until they went away —’
‘No,’ said the doctor. He had gone back to listening with such quiet intensity that he seemed to have become part of the room.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Post-mortem lividity,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Right?’ he added in the direction of the doctor.
Dr Hathaway nodded. ‘He’d have to move the body very soon after death. Once the blood begins to settle, there’s a permanent staining. If the body was moved after that process had begun and before it had finished, the signs would show that it had been moved. There would be other signs, of course, such as the disturbance of his clothing, but the postman admitted rolling the body over.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘So that’s why he couldn’t hang around. He made the best of a bad job. He hurried back to the Skeet layouts, stayed out of sight behind the safety walls and arranged the body in front of the Skeet trap-house. Then he ran to his car and drove away, without lights, to organise his alibi – hoping to hell that the couple were too busy with each other to be paying him much attention.’
I fetched more coffee. When I had sat down again I said, ‘I’ll accept the story. I’ll accept that either . . . Do you mind if I keep calling them Mr Pender and Mr Wyman?’ I asked. ‘That’s how I know them. I’ll accept that one of them did the deed. But why single out Mr Wyman?’
‘Good question,’ said the Sergeant. (If he had said it patronisingly, I would probably have poured his coffee over his head, but he was treating me as one of the grown-ups.) ‘Remember that the killer shot a practice round of Skeet while he prepared to open negotiations. Don’t you find that significant?’
‘I think I see what you mean,’ I said. ‘Or I see what I think you mean. From what I remember of the chat at last Sunday’s competition, Mr Tullos might not have known that they were partners. But Douglas Pender would have had no reason to be circumspect. Mr Tullos would know why he had come.’
‘And would have been very reluctant to let Pender use a shotgun in his neighbourhood,’ said the Sergeant. ‘A different sort of accident might have been arranged.’
‘But is that all?’
The Sergeant grinned and shook his head. ‘It’s just one of – to borrow your own words – a whole lot of things. The last entry on the paper roll in the club’s till was for an amount equivalent to six boxes of Express Super Competition. Douglas Pender bought one box of twenty-five cartridges off me this morning, two more at lunchtime and another before your challenge match. In other words, he buys them in penny numbers. But Wyman said that he had enough. I’m ready to assume that Wyman bought the six boxes and used one of them for the practice round. Then there’s the dog.’
‘But Douglas Pender told me that the dog would follow any man with a gun,’ I said.
‘A point. But it was Pender who your Club Secretary – Glencorse – spoke to, late that evening. Not a perfect alibi, but then, there’s no single clincher—’
‘Yes, there is,’ said the doctor. We had forgotten him again and the Sergeant visibly jumped. ‘Remember, I’ve just had the doubtful pleasure of examining Mr Pender’s naked corpse.’ The doctor glanced at me doubtfully, but I must have been looking rapt rather than shocked. ‘From what you’ve said, I gather that your witness referred to the murderer running back towards the steps and running to the car?’
‘Correct,’ said the Sergeant before I could contradict.
‘I haven’t seen the medical records of Mr Pender, from the time when he was Cairns, but you referred to a fall from a roof. The man whose body I examined had some curious scars on his back so I took a good look. He’d had serious spinal injuries at some time and the signs of major surgery were still evident. Why he didn’t end up paralysed is a modern miracle. Some orthopaedic surgeon had done an excellent job of patching broken vertebrae and fusing damaged joints. In my opinion, the man would be able to walk, if rather stiffly. But no way could he have run – or not, at least, without a rather limping, waddling action which your witnesses would certainly have noticed.’
‘Bingo!’ said the Sergeant. His face was tired but his eyes were still bright and lively. ‘And neither of the witnesses likened him to a pregnant duck. That ties in with what we know about their characters. Cairns was excitable, Webster was the calm, cold-blooded planner.’
‘I think you’re wrong,’ I said bravely. ‘An impetuous man would hit first and then come up with a half-baked pretence of an accident. And there are other things.’
I was about to tell him the other things. Mrs Hickson, for instance, had assumed that the hurrying figure was Mr Tullos – who had a severe limp. And Alistair Wyman had said something – what was it again? – something which suggested that his Skeet gun had been in Douglas Pender’s possession.
But the Sergeant was shaking his head and this time there was that in his manner which made me want to slap him. At that time, I suppose, I was sensitive to any suggestion that I was immature.
‘I think you should accept that the police, with their resources, are better equipped to arrive at the right answer,’ he said, and in his tone was a hint of Daddy knows best. ‘Miss Calder, for reasons of her own,’ he told the doctor, ‘dropped a bombshell on Cairns; and he was beginning to panic. It must have been clear to Webster, A, that we were closing in, and B, that Cairns would not stand up to questioning. If Cairns opened his mouth, Tullos’s estate could still press for enforcement of the court order. His own record would certainly come out. There were still some serious charges to be brought against Andy Webster. So the idea of Pender getting into his car and popping off with a heart attack is too convenient. It doesn’t convince me.’
‘It doesn’t convince me either,’ said the doctor. ‘There we
re none of the usual signs of cardiac arrest. Frankly, there were no signs of anything except death. The pathologist may find something, perhaps evidence that he was stabbed with a long, needle-like object from inside the mouth or up a nostril, although I think that I’d have found a trace of blood.’
‘The pathologist will find the cause,’ the Sergeant said cheerfully.
‘I hope you may be right,’ Dr Hathaway said.
The Sergeant stared at him. This, it seemed, was close to blasphemy. ‘But he must! If we can’t prove murder in the case of Douglas Pender, the murder of Herbert Tullos could go by the board. The evidence is too flimsy. Witnesses who saw him from too far off to make an identification. The imprint of the firing-pin of his other gun on cartridges which were found at the top of the waste-bin. He could blame it on Pender.’
‘He could be right,’ I said. They both ignored me.
The doctor sighed. ‘This isn’t going to help me to get back to sleep,’ he said gloomily. ‘You listen to me, young man, and you may be the better detective for it, some day. Pathologists like to foster the illusion of infallibility. And on some things the profession of forensic medicine has come a long, long way. But there are areas in the cause and time of death which can still be very uncertain. And, of course, any murderer with knowledge will take advantage of those areas. I’m told that the most popular books in a prison library are those on forensic science and medicine and on general criminology. And doctors, you may care to note, get away with murder all the time.’
‘You’re pulling my leg,’ the Sergeant said.
‘I wouldn’t touch your leg – Miss Calder might oblige. Perhaps I shouldn’t be saying this, but many of my colleagues are not opposed to euthanasia. Legally it may be murder, but I admit that I’m in favour of it myself. If my condition is ever beyond salvation and I’m in real pain, a nuisance to my family and a misery to myself, I hope that some colleague will have the courage to put me out of it. Would you want to linger on after all hope was gone?’
The Sergeant shook his head and managed a twisted smile. ‘There’s no future in that,’ he said. ‘But how . . .?’
The doctor shrugged. ‘Novelists used to refer to a “little-known Asiatic poison”, but they were referring to poisons taken by mouth. Poisons in the stomach are comparatively easy to detect. But a doctor with a moribund patient only has to give an injection among all the other needle-marks – and who’s to know what was in the syringe?’
The Sergeant sat, dumbstruck. It seemed to be my privilege to act as feed. ‘The pathologist,’ I said.
He shook his head at me. ‘From the moment of death, certain chemical changes begin. Even leaving out such unusual substances as succinylcholine chloride, which quickly breaks down into other compounds normally found in human tissue, an injection of almost any potassium salt into a vein would stop the heart immediately on arrival. And the first chemical changes after death produce potassium salts.’
‘But where would the layman get potassium salts?’ the Sergeant asked.
‘Any health-food shop.’
‘Wyman didn’t have time to go shopping.’
‘It could have been pre-planned,’ I said.
It was the Sergeant’s turn to shake his head at me. ‘Until you spoke up, he’d no reason to believe that he was going to have any need to kill his partner. But you showed Cairns that suspicion could fall on him, and he began to lose his nerve.’
I looked at the doctor. ‘What about gunpowder?’ I asked him. ‘That’s largely potassium nitrate. There’s a flask of it in the office.’
‘Which is locked,’ said the Sergeant gloomily.
‘You’re both rushing off up a blind alley,’ said the doctor. ‘When I mentioned potassium salts I was talking about my colleagues, confronted with a patient who was already like a pincushion. There were no needle-marks on Mr Pender – let alone a needle-mark containing the charcoal element in gunpowder, which would have made it as conspicuous as a spare navel.’
‘He’d only have to shake it up in water,’ I persisted. ‘The charcoal would float to the top and the sulphur would sink to the bottom. And he had a boil or something on the back of his neck,’ I said. ‘Could that have been used to hide a needle-mark?’
‘He had rather a nasty carbuncle which had recently burst,’ said the doctor slowly. ‘I got one of the medical technicians to remove the plaster after it had been photographed. There was a substantial crater. It would certainly be difficult to find a puncture there. And it’s easy to visualise the other man saying, “Let me clean it up for you. This may sting a bit.’”
‘Well, then—’
‘But,’ said the doctor (the Sergeant groaned), ‘a potassium salt would have to be injected into a vein if it was to reach the heart. There are no veins in the back of the neck. If the carbuncle had been on his throat or the back of his knee . . .’
‘But it wasn’t,’ said the Sergeant.
‘An injection of air?’ I suggested.
‘A vein again,’ said the doctor. ‘And it’s a common misapprehension that a little air in a vein will stop a healthy heart. Nonsense, of course. Rather than a hypodermic syringe you’d need a bicycle pump.’ He yawned vastly. ‘I think I might be able to sleep now,’ he said, ‘after our jolly little chat.’ He paused and blinked at the Sergeant. ‘If you’d said insulin, now, that could go straight into the muscle. The first chemical changes after death produce sugars. If either of them had been diabetic . . .’
I sat up in the hard chair. ‘Mr Wyman is diabetic,’ I said. ‘I found him giving himself an insulin injection soon after they arrived.’
The Sergeant sat still for a few seconds. ‘But if that’s what happened,’ he said, ‘could we prove it?’
‘I have my doubts.’ The doctor glanced at his watch. ‘I dare say that his blood sugar would be back to near normal by now. The only killers I can think of who were ever convicted of murder by insulin were convicted on other evidence – the confession of an accomplice, for instance.’
I broke into another silence. ‘One dose for a diabetic wouldn’t kill a healthy man, would it?’ I asked the doctor.
‘I doubt it very much. It might produce lassitude bordering on coma. But in this instance, death seems to have been fairly quick. I couldn’t put a figure on it, but a substantially heavier dose would have been required.’
I turned to the Sergeant. ‘Then you still have evidence. He needs his insulin to stay alive. If he goes back to his doctor and says, “I’m sorry but I’ve lost my last prescription” . . .’
The Sergeant grabbed me by the ears and gave me a kiss which chased such matters as murder into the back of my mind. ‘That might do it,’ he said. ‘I’ve already radioed to grab his other gun and keep a watch on his house. He’s to be invited to the station as soon as he shows his face. That should cut him off from his spare supply if he has one. I must get on the air again.’
‘You could suggest that a competent pathologist tests for insulin around the site of that carbuncle straight away,’ said the doctor. ‘Now if not sooner. You may be lucky, but don’t hold your breath.’
‘Right,’ said the Sergeant. He scrambled out to his car, slamming the door behind him.
‘An impetuous young man,’ said the doctor sleepily.
*
The Sergeant returned within a few minutes. He looked perturbed. ‘They fetched the Superintendent out of bed and he isn’t too pleased about it. He doesn’t believe me.’
‘What doesn’t he believe?’ I asked.
‘Any of it. That Douglas Pender’s dead. That he could have been murdered. That we know how. That we might be able to prove it. Wyman will be snapped up if he shows his face at home, but before the Super authorises the fetching of a pathologist out of his warm bed I’ve got to go and spell it all out for him. You’ll have to come in to Fettes Row with me,’ he told the doctor.
‘It’s almost on my way home,’ Dr Hathaway said. ‘I don’t know what I can tell him that I haven’t already
told you, but I’ll come and hold your hand. Unless you’d rather have it held by Miss Calder?’ He seemed to have some sort of Cupid obsession.
The Sergeant remembered me. ‘You’d better come with us,’ he said. ‘I can’t leave you here on your own. Wyman hasn’t shown up at home yet. He may have gone on somewhere gambling or drinking. Killers often feel the need to blow off steam. On the other hand, he may be keeping a low profile until he can see whether we’ve accepted his partner’s death as being from natural causes.’
‘I’ll have to stay here,’ I said. ‘My uncle hasn’t shown up yet and I promised Sir Peter that I wouldn’t leave the place deserted. The kids from the timeshare will be up and about soon and they’re devils. I’ll lock myself into the house and go home when Ronnie shows up.’
He hesitated. ‘A girl alone here at night? To hell with security! I don’t like it.’
I was divided between pleasure at his concern and indignation that he was treating me as a helpless little girl again. ‘Look outside,’ I said to him. ‘The sun’s coming up again already.’ And indeed the short night was over and the north-east was bright. Somewhere outside a bird was singing.
He looked at me for a long moment and I almost changed my mind rather than add to his worries. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll come back as soon as I can. Try to get some sleep.’
I walked out to the cars with them and watched them drive away. There was still no sign of Ronnie.
*
An hour or two earlier, I could have dozed off on the throwing arm of a clay pigeon trap, but for the moment I seemed to have gone past my sleep. It would catch up with me later, but by then there would be helpers around to run the place. I cashed up, swept and tidied, filled the coffee machine and switched it off. The lights were still burning. I killed them too, and the clubroom was filled with the colourless light of early morning.
The working diary was open on the bar. I took a look at it and was gratified to note that four men, including the Sergeant, had booked sessions for ‘supervised practice’ – cheaper than coaching but amounting to the same thing.
A Brace of Skeet Page 17