Silver City Scandal

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘There’s no need for Mrs Calder to drive,’ Prather said. ‘A company car, with driver, can take her anywhere she wants to go.’

  ‘Will the roads be passable?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Good point. I’ll find out whether one of the company choppers is free. It can take you to fetch your daughter, and on to Dunoon or wherever you want to go.’

  ‘It must be confidential,’ Keith said.

  ‘It will be,’ Hugh Donald said. ‘Our pilots get paid not to talk.’

  Molly was beaming. Her few previous jaunts by helicopter had been hugely enjoyed, her pleasure being marred only by the fact that her daughter had not been along to share it. Keith was less happy. The safety record of oil company helicopters was less than perfect. But he could see that objection would be useless.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ Prather said happily. ‘I think our minds are too full for any more discussion tonight. Conference in my office tomorrow morning?’

  ‘All right,’ Keith said. ‘I’ll want to see the transcripts of the trial and all the precognitions. Bring any diaries, game books and so on for the period when you bought the gun,’ he told Donald, ‘and again for the time of the murder. Nine a.m.?’

  Jeremy Prather shuddered ostentatiously. ‘Legal diaries don’t have any spaces before ten,’ he said.

  ‘Ten, then?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Hugh Donald had finished his main course and refused a sweet. ‘I’ve always been an early riser and an early bedder,’ he said, ‘and prison hasn’t changed my habits. Also, I’ve got to settle back into my flat. You’ll excuse me?’ he asked Molly.

  Molly graciously agreed.

  ‘I won’t wait for the company car, then. I’ll get a cab. Ten, tomorrow.’

  With Hugh Donald’s disapproving presence removed, Jeremy Prather settled down to serious enjoyment of Shennilco’s hospitality. The Calders lagged far behind him, and when Prather hailed a friend they made it an excuse to escape to their room.

  ‘Why did you want to wish your cousin Sheila onto me?’ Keith asked as he undressed.

  ‘She’s efficient and she’s available,’ Molly said. ‘You don’t realise the job you’d have finding somebody like that in Aberdeen these days.’

  ‘Is she as big a chatterbox in Spanish as she is in English?’

  ‘Oh, Keith, she isn’t a chatterbox. Just because she doesn’t mind passing on news of the family . . .’

  ‘Compared to you, she’s silent as the grave,’ Keith said.

  To prove him wrong, Molly held her tongue for almost a minute. ‘How much would Hugh Donald be earning?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘At a guess, between sixty and eighty thousand,’ Keith said. ‘And most of it probably guarded against tax. They pay their big men enough to keep them honest. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered. According to the papers, he’s a widower,’ Molly added, with apparent inconsequence.

  ‘You just wondered whether he’d make a good husband for your cousin Sheila. So that’s what you’re up to!’

  He turned, intending to give his wife a reproving look and a lecture about matchmaking. But Molly, in her thirties, had matured from a pretty girl into a very beautiful woman. Reduced to a gossamer pair of pink panties, she looked . . . delicious. And they were about to be parted.

  Keith pounced. Molly squeaked and pretended to struggle.

  Chapter Three

  In the morning, Keith saw Molly leave for Dyce Airport in a luxurious Jaguar emblazoned with the Shennilco insignia. Jeremy Prather might not accord with Molly’s idea of a solicitor (Keith was experienced enough to be less sanguine) but at least he was as good as his word.

  Keith walked up Union Street and, not for the first time, regretted how the Silver City had changed. Banks and insurance companies seemed to have squeezed most of the shops out of the city’s centre and the traffic was now heavy and cut-throat with drivers chasing the oily dollar. The snow had stopped and the streets were swept but the temperature remained below freezing. A thin sun had broken through, and in the clear air it seemed that he could see each speck of quartz in the granite fronts shining a hundred yards away.

  Jeremy Prather’s office in Chapel Street was in a converted, two-roomed flat over a dry cleaner. Keith was early but the solicitor arrived on his heels and let him in, dumping a bundle of papers on a cluttered desk.

  ‘The final transcripts,’ he said. ‘I had to go and fetch them myself, at this ungodly hour.’

  ‘You poor sod.’ Looking again at Prather, Keith realised that the description was apt. The solicitor was clearly hung over. ‘Leave me to read them over. You go and get a hot bath, shave and change into something a little cleaner and dressier. We wouldn’t want Molly’s cousin telling her that you received us in that state, would we?’

  ‘Why would she mention a thing like that?’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ Keith said, ‘but she undoubtedly would. Can I use your tape-recorder?’

  ‘Help yourself. I think I’ll do as you say. Not to impress your wife’s cousin, but it might make me feel a little more human. I shan’t be long. I have the flat upstairs.’ He shambled out onto the stairway.

  Keith looked around. The office had once been somebody’s parlour and was still papered with faded roses. The carpet was threadbare, the furniture dilapidated. But, courtesy, presumably, of Shennilco, the business equipment was the latest and best.

  He moved a hard chair to the window and began to read. He was an adept speed-reader and made quick progress. From time to time he dictated notes into Prather’s tape-recorder.

  The opening speeches provided nothing of relevance and he skipped to the evidence of the witnesses. The story began on the first of September, with the discovery, by one William McKillop, a farmer, of the body of a woman on his land near Kemnay, ten miles north-west of Aberdeen. The witness had earlier heard two shots, some seconds apart, at about seven a.m.

  The corpse had been identified as having once been Mary Mae Spalding, a spinster aged thirty-six, who lived with a friend, also female, in a bungalow half a mile away. The late Miss Spalding had been a chartered accountant, a partner in the firm of Haydock, James and Spalding of Aberdeen.

  A pathologist had examined the body and clothing. He put the time of death at early that morning, perhaps seven a.m. Death had been caused by gunshot wounds, specifically number six shot from a twelve-bore shotgun fired from close range. (Keith smiled. Defending Counsel had picked the good doctor up sharply as to how he had determined that the shot had been fired from a gun of that bore. The doctor had admitted drawing an inference from the presence of a twelve-bore gun nearby. But the count of 302 pellets had agreed with the average for a standard twelve-bore cartridge and number six shot.) A rabbit, found nearby, had also succumbed to number six shot. The woman’s body was suitably dressed for a walk on a mild but cool morning. The clothing had not been disarranged and there was no sign of sexual interference.

  Well, that was a relief.

  A twelve-bore shotgun had been found near the body. One barrel had been discharged. The police laboratory had been thorough. The firing-pin and extractor marks on the discharged cartridge had been matched to the gun. The shot and the wad recovered from the body, and the shot from the rabbit, had been compared to those in other cartridges of the same, very common, brand and found to be identical. Ownership of the shotgun had been traced to the accused through the records of the dealer, who would be called later.

  Hugh Donald had been interviewed and later charged. After being cautioned, he had admitted being in dispute with the deceased. He could hardly have done otherwise. During the summer, he had applied to the Sheriff Court for an interdict restraining Miss Spalding from following him around while he was shooting on that land, disturbing his quarry and making the successful pursuit of rabbits or woodpigeon impossible. Support from the farmer being tepid, the application had been refused. He had absolutely denied being on the land that morning and claimed that he had visited the f
oreshore near Ellon, but no witnesses could be found to support that claim.

  The accused also insisted that he had had his gun with him that morning but had returned it to his flat before going to work. The same evening, he had reported to his local police station that his home had been broken into during the day and his gun stolen. He had seemed uncertain of its number and had only furnished it the following day, allegedly after making reference to his insurers.

  The accused had refused to make any further statements to the police, presumably having obtained legal advice. And, Keith thought, about time too.

  But two witnesses had come forward, neither of them damning but each adding a scrap of doubt to the scales. One, whose bedroom window overlooked the field-gate where Hugh Donald habitually parked his car, was sure that a car of similar size and colour had been there that morning, although under cross-examination had proved to be less than certain of the day. The other, while cycling to work, had seen a man in the distance dressed much as Hugh Donald was wont to dress and walking away from the place where Miss Spalding had later been found. Although he had been too far off to be sure that the figure resembled the accused physically, he thought that the man had not been carrying a gun.

  The police had made a thorough search of the area for a considerable distance around the body. Several trivia traceable to the defendant had been found, not surprisingly when it was remembered that he had been shooting regularly over the land. But the significance of one such item had probably, Keith thought, accounted for the jury’s verdict of not proven rather than not guilty. This had been Hugh Donald’s cheque book, containing the stub of a cheque which he had written in a hotel late the previous evening.

  That had been all the hard evidence on the prosecution’s side. But it had been enough. Keith decided that only his own evidence about the gun had saved Hugh Donald from a worse verdict than not proven.

  The only precognition which seemed to be on hand was that of Hugh Donald. Keith was about to skim through it when he was interrupted by the arrival of Donald himself, accompanied by two springer spaniels of the short-nosed working style. The dogs seemed remarkably well trained; at no more than a flick of their master’s finger they lay down under a corner table never moving but watching him with eager eyes.

  ‘Sorry if I’m late,’ Donald said. He took the other hard chair. A night in his own bed seemed to have relaxed him and he even managed a pleasant smile. ‘I collected the hounds from the kennels, and they were in sore need of exercise and a little discipline. So I’ve walked them round half the city. Prather can’t complain. A little dog hair can only improve this slum. I suppose he’s still in bed?’

  ‘He’s up, but he’s gone back to smarten up a bit,’ Keith said. He nodded at the dogs. ‘Nice pair. You trained them yourself?’

  ‘From six weeks old.’

  ‘And you shoot rabbits over them, using both dogs together?’

  ‘Usually.’

  Keith revised his opinion of Hugh Donald. Although he had liked his cast of features he had also wondered whether to agree with Jeremy Prather, who had made it clear that he considered the smaller man to be a bit of a prig. But, in Keith’s view, any man who could work two spaniels simultaneously among rabbits and remain in control could be forgiven anything short of regicide.

  ‘I’ve just been reading the transcript,’ Keith said. ‘Tell me about your tiff with Miss Spalding.’

  Hugh Donald laughed. His laugh was attractive and infectious and Keith could see why he had been predisposed to like him. ‘Tiff is about the right word,’ Donald said. ‘In many ways, I liked the woman. She was the sturdy, mannish sort, the kind who would like horses but despise hunting. I liked to go out there early in the morning and give the dogs a workout on the rabbits or do a little decoying for pigeons. She was an early riser like myself, and she used to attach herself to me. Her sympathy was with the rabbits. She was entitled to her opinions and I told her so, but she couldn’t see that that didn’t entitle her to ruin my legitimate sport. On any other subject we got along all right. Sometimes I’d give up all prospect of a shot and we’d just have a walk and a talk, putting the world to rights. And she loved to watch the dogs working, provided that it wasn’t on anything live. She was quite helpful about throwing dummies.

  ‘After I failed to get my interdict – which she took as a bit of a joke – I made up my mind that there was only one thing for it. I was going to start asking around until I had permission to go onto half-a-dozen farms and could take my pick on a morning or evening. That would have spoiled her little game. But with the arrival of oil-rich sportsmen from all over the world, there’s a lot of pressure on the land near Aberdeen. Up to the time of the murder, I hadn’t found anywhere else. I wasn’t in any hurry. With the season starting, I was going to be busy enough acting as host on the Shennilco shoot.’

  Keith glanced back through the transcript. ‘This business about the number. When did you insure the gun?’

  ‘I’m afraid I forgot about it until I was filing your receipt.’

  ‘And then you took the number off the receipt, not off the gun itself?’

  Hugh Donald nodded.

  ‘Who knew that you’d cashed that cheque, the night before it all happened?’

  Donald shrugged. ‘The bar was fairly full.’

  ‘You weren’t manoeuvred into cashing it?’

  ‘Lord no! That landlord doesn’t like credit cards, but he often takes my cheque if I want to buy another round.’

  ‘Could your pocket have been picked immediately afterwards?’

  ‘I think not,’ Hugh Donald said. ‘The police asked the same question and so did Prather, and I’ve only got the one answer. I think that I remember my cheque book among the things I put into my pockets the next morning. If that’s so, it would have been in my jacket pocket, locked in the car, while I was on the foreshore. There was no sign of the car being entered, not that I noticed, but a piece of wire would be all that a moderately skilful thief would have needed. I never noticed its loss until that night. And then I thought that I must have left it somewhere, until the police suddenly produced it.’

  Jeremy Prather, looking altogether fresher and brighter, had arrived in the doorway a few seconds earlier but had waited for Hugh Donald to finish speaking. Now, taking the decrepit swivel chair behind the typist’s desk, he spoke as if he had had a part in the whole discussion.

  ‘Which leads one to suspect a more organised and less impromptu crime,’ he said. ‘If the murder and the theft of the cheque book were more or less simultaneous, we have at least two men working in concert – one committing the crime, the other following you in the hope of stealing something which would put you on the scene at the time of the murder. Right?’ he asked Keith.

  ‘That’s how I see it,’ Keith said.

  ‘I’d made it no secret that I was in two minds whether to greet the opening of the wildfowling season with a visit to the foreshore,’ Hugh Donald said thoughtfully. ‘The geese wouldn’t have been here yet, but there was always the chance of a duck. My luck was out or I might at least have had a mallard or two to back me up. Suppose I’d changed my mind and gone rabbiting instead?’

  ‘Almost certainly there’d have been a murder and suicide,’ said Keith. ‘That may have been the main intention with the other plan as a back-up. Was anybody seen near the place where the body was found, between the time of the murder and the finding of the cheque book?’

  ‘Not that I could discover,’ Prather said. ‘The police weren’t too helpful.’

  ‘They usually aren’t, during the currency of the case,’ Keith said. ‘But now, their records will have been filed away as dead . . .’

  ‘Not dead,’ Prather corrected him. ‘Dormant. They can re-open the case against Hugh. We can’t, but they can. You see, he’s been neither cleared nor convicted.’

  This put into Keith’s mind a complicated plan to induce a fresh prosecution by means of evidence which would prove unsound during the new trial,
to be followed by the revelation of new evidence for the defence which had been cunningly concealed in the precognitions of the witnesses. But, unless Prather was remarkably open-minded about his professional responsibilities, it was a course to be pursued without the knowledge of the lawyers. He filed it away in his mind for later consideration.

  ‘Dormant, then,’ he said patiently. ‘By which I mean that the investigating officers will no longer be sitting on all the evidence. I’ll bet there were a thousand things found and a hundred statements taken which you never set eyes on. They’ll be shelved now.’

  ‘I could try for a court order,’ Prather said.

  ‘Bad idea,’ Keith said. ‘Things can vanish. D’you have a pet bobby who owes you favours?’

  ‘I do, but he wasn’t on the case.’

  ‘Try him anyway,’ Keith said.

  There was a knock at the door. Molly’s cousin Sheila put her head in, spotted Keith and came inside. ‘Here I am at last,’ she said.

  Sheila McDowell was a woman nearing thirty but looking less. Unlike her cousin she was spectacular without quite being beautiful, but the plainness of her features was apt to pass unnoticed, at least until the observer had got used to the well-groomed hair of flaming red, the large, green eyes, perfect complexion, with such little makeup as it needed being applied with subtle skill, and a figure which seemed noticeably designed to be cuddled rather than admired from a distance. The three men stood up, Keith less precipitately than the others. He could sense a whole new set of vibrations in the room as he performed the introductions.

  ‘Sorry if I’ve kept you waiting,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Molly told me what it was all about, but she said to go and see Shennilco before coming here. And – what do you think? – I start with them as soon as you’ve finished with me! So . . . where do I work and what do you want me to do?’

  ‘You can take over this room and we’ll go into my private den,’ Prather said. ‘I have a temp comes in occasionally to deal with my typing, but I can just as easily send it round to her.’ He moved away from the desk chair.