Hugh Donald arrived a few minutes later, in a large, new estate car. The two spaniels, Keith noted with approval, were comfortably bedded in the tail.
‘I brought a pair of boots for you,’ Hugh said. ‘I hope you can get into them.’
‘I have very small feet for my size,’ Keith said with dignity.
He knew the geography and had expected to leave Aberdeen by way of Bucksburn and over the Tyrebagger. But that route, Hugh explained, was nowadays clogged with traffic to and from Dyce Airport at all major and minor rush hours. They went out by Skene and cut over a minor road, where only the passing of other traffic had made an impression on the snow. Keith began to see the bulk of Bennachie dominating the further skyline, white against a sky which was darkening again.
Hugh coaxed the big car over slippery roads with practised skill. They were still in the flat valley of Donside when he brought the car to a halt in the mouth of a farm track. A permanent fence a few yards from the mouth suggested that the track was no longer used by farm machinery. ‘From here,’ Hugh said, ‘we walk.’
‘Don’t rush me.’ Keith looked around. The nearest house was several hundred yards away. ‘Is that where the car was seen from? Nobody could recognise an individual from there. And dogs, or the lack of them, would be screened by the hedge. Where was the cyclist when he saw the figure which he thought was you?’
‘About here, I think.’
‘Can you see Miss Spalding’s bungalow from here?’
‘If you crane your neck. It’s further up the slope and slightly behind us. To the left of that tract of gorse and below the pimple on the skyline.’
Keith craned his neck. The bungalow seemed to be the only other dwelling within a mile. It had a clear view of their parking place. ‘Was it the sight of your car that brought her down?’ he asked.
‘I doubt it. I sometimes tried parking where it was hidden from the bungalow, but she turned up all the same. I think she always took her morning leg stretch in this direction.’
‘Let’s do the same,’ Keith said.
The boots, without the customary extra pair of socks, were no more than slightly snug. They crossed the fence. The two spaniels waited until told and then took it in a leap. At a flick of their master’s finger they were off, tearing in wide circles and sampling the snowy ground, ecstatic after months in kennels. But soon they sobered and fell back into working pattern, quartering the ground, half a gunshot ahead of the two men. Their breaths smoked in the cold air.
Hugh Donald set a pace which Keith had to step out to match. They were following field boundaries. Under the snow, Keith could not tell pasture from winter barley; but occasionally he could make out the texture of ploughed land. Some woodpigeon went up from the remains of a cattle-crop and then a flock of grey geese – pinkfooted, Keith knew from the ‘wink-wink’ call.
They came to broken ground between dry-stone walls, where no farmer had found it worth his while to plough. It was a place where boulders and gorse showed above the snow, and Keith could see the tracks and droppings of many rabbits.
‘This is the place,’ Hugh said.
Keith produced the envelope of photographs and oriented himself. ‘She seems to have been found about where you’re standing,’ he said. It seemed to be an offence against Miss Spalding’s right to dignity in death that he should be studying a photograph, in full colour, of her last, ungainly sprawl. ‘Stay there and mark the place. Unless you’d care to lie down and simulate the body?’
Hugh Donald preferred to remain on his feet.
A few yards away stood a clump of elders. Keith could see the ground and the sky through them but in September, as the photographs showed, they would have provided perfect cover for an assassin lying in wait. Faint tracks, carefully recorded among the photographs, suggested that this was what had happened.
Keith spent several minutes wandering round with the photographs, looking this way and that until he had identified the place where the rabbit had been found, against a dry-stone wall and some thirty yards from where the body had lain. He squatted down and studied the rough granite stones carefully and then rose again. His knees annoyed him by creaking, a sign of the passing years. ‘What happened to the rabbit?’ he asked. ‘Did they keep it?’
‘They had it in cold store somewhere,’ Hugh said. ‘They asked me whether I wanted it, when they turned me loose. I said that it wasn’t mine, never had been, and they could keep it.’
‘Well, change your mind quickly,’ Keith said. ‘We want it. That’s a VIB.’
‘Huh?’
‘Very Important Bunny.’ Keith turned and leaned against the wall. ‘Look at it this way. The presence of that rabbit added a very strong presumption that you, the one man who shot rabbits around here, were there that morning. A visiting killer wouldn’t be expected to go out after rabbits; and the sound of a shot would draw Miss Spalding here with all her prejudices rising like hackles. I don’t believe that the killer was lucky enough to get the chance of a rabbit and took it just to make the story look better.
‘You can still see the marks of the pellets on the stones. The rabbit received a dose of shot against this wall where it was found. So he didn’t bring it here with shot already in it. You follow me?’
Hugh Donald nodded doubtfully.
‘My guess would be that the killer arrived here, put the rabbit against the wall and waited for Miss Spalding to arrive. He killed her and put his second shot into the rabbit and then departed.
‘The pathologist doesn’t seem to have done a post mortem examination of poor bunny, just pulled out a few pellets to make sure that they matched the ones in the body.’
Hugh was catching up. ‘He’d have noticed that the pellet wounds hadn’t bled,’ he said.
‘Not through fur. But the killer couldn’t risk two different lots of shot in the rabbit. I’d guess that he brought a dead but unmarked rabbit with him. And how do you get one of those in late August?’
‘From the butcher or game dealer.’
‘Probably. But the point is, how was it killed? Wrong time of year for satisfactory ferreting. If it has a broken neck or the mark of a wire snare, we’ve learned something. I have an idea about that. We’re lucky that the police photographer seems to have been an enthusiast – very good photographs, and in colour. We’d better have that rabbit collected before some daft bobby eats the evidence. If he didn’t have it for lunch today.’
Keith looked down at the photographs again. Only one showed even part of an identifiable boot print, in softer ground near what Keith took to be the rising of a small spring. He asked Hugh Donald, ‘Did the police ever match this to your boots?’
‘No. But, as they pointed out more than once, I have several pairs of Royal Hunters and I could have had more. My counsel was going to argue that I could have made the track days before, if I made it at all.’
‘It looks pretty fresh in the photograph,’ Keith said. ‘But a jury might not have known the difference. What other footprints were found?’
Hugh shrugged. ‘The farmer and one of his sons walked up this way and found the body,’ he said. ‘And it’s a common enough route for strollers. If they found more than you see there, they never told me. Or the court.’
‘These are only the photographs prepared for the trial,’ Keith said thoughtfully. ‘I bet they took a thousand photographs of other tracks, if we can only get our hands on them.’
‘But if the murderer wore Hunters—’ Hugh began.
‘I’m thinking of later. While your lady friend was being killed, it would seem that somebody else was stealing your cheque book from your car. So one of them had to make another visit here, to drop it where it would do you most harm, and preferably without being seen. Especially not being seen from where we parked the car. Which way would he have come?’
Hugh led him back and across their original route. Beyond another dry-stone wall was the head of a gulley. ‘That runs most of the way to the Don,’ he said.
There
seemed to be a burn, now frozen, following the bottom of the small valley. ‘It must’ve been damp down there,’ Keith said. ‘I wish to God I could have seen around at the time, not months later and under snow. Well, that’s the way it crumbles. We’ll just have to hope that Jeremy can get his hands on the rest of the photographs, and that the police were conscientious enough to make a record so far from the body.’
‘We’ll be lucky,’ Hugh said bitterly.
‘Listen, Sunshine,’ Keith said. ‘I don’t want to depress you but there’s something you ought to know. We’ve got to be lucky. If we aren’t, you’re going to carry the taint of murder for the rest of your days. We don’t have the resources of the police, they’re not going to offer us any help and if we get access to the statements they took it’ll be by way of the back door and Jeremy’s pal. The scent’s cold. The police depend on luck to help solve most of their cases. We’ve got nothing else going for us at all. But don’t let me worry you. Let’s go and see Miss Carlogie. Tea and scones wouldn’t come amiss after this walk in the cold.’
They returned, in depressed silence, to the car. Hugh raised his eyebrows. ‘Let’s try the hotel first,’ Keith said.
It was a bad guess. When they found Miss Carlogie’s place of employment, a former private mansion now functioning as an hotel and catering mainly for shooting and fishing guests, an elderly man in a dark suit which could have passed for a porter’s uniform was on the desk. It was Miss Carlogie’s afternoon off, he said. She would be on duty again at six. Keith phoned a message to Sheila for Jeremy about the rabbit and they faced the cold again.
‘Head for the bungalow,’ Keith said. And as they turned out of the hotel drive, ‘Is this the road she’d cycle on to work?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Do we pass near the bottom of that gulley?’
‘Quite near,’ Hugh said.
‘Let’s look at the nearest parking place to it.’
Hugh pointed to the bottom of the gulley, although the contours were indiscernible under the virgin snow and only the field boundaries gave any sense of shape. He drove on a few yards. The road had been routed to bypass a huge sycamore tree on one side and the fence detoured around the tree on the other, leaving a widened verge on which Hugh parked. Keith twisted his head round to take another good look. But even the wire strands of the fence were topped with snow.
‘If we get a thaw,’ he said, ‘I’ll come back with my brother-in-law. But even then I wouldn’t be hopeful after such a time. Drive on. You’d better park where she can’t see your face until I find out whether she has her knife into you.’
Hugh drove on, turned into a side road and parked in line with the gable of the cottage. Keith, who had changed back into shoes, picked his way carefully to the front door. He noticed cycle tracks and a few ladylike footprints, but most of his mind was taken up with the problem of how to make the best impression on a possible lesbian. Manly charm? Mildly effeminate? Little boy lost? He decided, as he rang the bell, to smile and improvise.
Jenny Carlogie answered the chimes and blinked at him. She was smaller than he had expected from the photograph, just as thin but, under concealing woollies, bustier. The anxious expression was emphasised by nervous hand movements.
He had expected a sexless woman, one of the near neuters who seek only the companionship of their own kind, but he was surprised to detect an extreme of femininity. It was not just in the delicate features and the articulation of her small bones and the fact that she was fluffy of hair and clothing. Something about her pleaded to be protected and cosseted. In addition, Keith could sense that she responded instantly to him. In his youth Keith had been handsome in a dark and gypsyish way and middle age had not been unkind to him. He saw her recognise his maleness. Simultaneously, they smiled. Her smile was shy and yet it was unreserved. He decided that Jeremy Prather would have to learn to smile at witnesses.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you at home,’ Keith said. ‘I called at the hotel. It’s about the recent trial. After a verdict of not proven some further investigation is necessary.’
‘But you’re not police, are you?’
Keith had hoped to imply that he was, but he switched tactics instantly. ‘Shennilco have engaged me to do a full and impartial investigation,’ he said. ‘Naturally, they hope that the results will clear their employee, but . . .’
‘You’d better come in,’ she said. She craned her neck towards the car.
‘Just my driver,’ Keith said. ‘He’ll do fine where he is.’
She took him into a sitting room, severely decorated but embellished with some discordant fripperies. As they sat down, Keith could feel the outline of a modern, Swedish chair through the chintz cover. There were several uninformative photographs of the late Mary Mae Spalding. The red eye of a modern burglar alarm winked at him.
‘You must be Mr Calder,’ Miss Carlogie said. ‘It came over on the news, that Shennilco had asked you to investigate. I don’t suppose I can help, but I will if I can.’
Even without Jeremy Prather’s report, Keith would have expected hostility rather than such co-operation from someone who might well think that Hugh Donald had killed her friend. He had to think quickly to find an innocuous first question. ‘Tell me about your friend, as a person,’ he said.
Her eyes brimmed immediately. ‘She was a really nice person. She could never do enough for me. I . . . I don’t know what else I can say.’
It was hardly an unbiased testimonial, Keith thought, but it had broken the ice. ‘Do you know anything about her work?’ he asked.
‘Very little. I know she was very good at it. They called her the Computer Queen. She got her firm to put everything onto computer and she oversaw the running of it, but she also did the accounts for some quite big firms herself. She even had her own computer here and she used to bring work home to do on it. She was terribly conscientious.’
Keith began to feel that Miss Carlogie was not only fluffy of hair and jumper but of mind as well. This was no great surprise, despite her job. In his experience simple-minded people, well instructed, often grasped the logic and method of their work when, outside of it, they hardly had the sense to scratch where it itched. Her comments on her dearest friend were as superficial as a topping of whipped cream. He struggled on.
‘Do you know who was her next of kin?’ he asked.
‘A cousin. In Canada, I think.’
‘And he or she inherits any money that Miss Spalding left?’
‘Oh no,’ Miss Carlogie said. ‘She left it all to me. What there is of it.’
There was a false note in her voice. Keith pricked up his mental ears. For the first time he felt that he was approaching something new. ‘Was she not the saving sort?’ he asked carefully.
‘We weren’t very extravagant,’ she said. ‘Of course, I get her half of the house. And she had a few hundred pounds in the bank. That was all.’
‘It surprised you?’
‘Well, it did. I knew that she had investments and things, because we were talking about retiring and going away. Somewhere warm and peaceful. So there must be more somewhere. I don’t mind too much,’ she added earnestly, ‘because I wouldn’t want to go away on my own. But it does seem a pity.’
Keith’s preference usually ran to self-reliant women, but Miss Carlogie was beginning to have for him some of the appeal of a shy labrador puppy. ‘Could she have had a box in a safe-deposit?’ he asked.
‘If she had, the police couldn’t find it.’
‘You asked them to help?’
‘They asked me if she’d had a safe-deposit box and I said that I didn’t think so. Later on, they told me that they couldn’t find such a thing.’
There was something there, but Keith pushed it aside for the moment. ‘I suppose you’ve looked among her papers?’
She hesitated. The nervous movements became more pronounced. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said at last. ‘The house was broken into, just a day or two after she was killed. Our jewels wen
t, such as they were, and all the silver. But they also took all her papers, every scrap. And even her gramophone records.’
‘You called the police?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘And didn’t they connect it with the fact that she’d just been killed?’
‘They said that there might be a connection. But it turned out that the man they arrested for the murder was making a statement at about the time of the burglary, so they said that it must just have been a coincidence, or that the news of Mary’s death might have called somebody’s attention to a lonely house which would probably be empty all day. The police kept an eye on the house for a few days, and when they stopped somebody came back. But by then the police had recommended a man who does burglar alarms, and I’d had the house protected. It cost me most of my savings, but that’s a small price for feeling safe, don’t you think? It’s linked right to the police station, you know. They don’t usually like having it that way, but because I’m a woman living on my own, and a bit nervous, they let me have it. So the local police got here before he could take anything else,’ she finished breathlessly.
‘But you never told the police that you thought a lot of her money was missing?’
‘No. But I think they knew. A different man, a senior policeman, asked me a lot of questions which I couldn’t have answered if I’d wanted to.’
There was the clue again. She was almost pushing the answers at him, consciously or not. He decided to come at it again from another angle. ‘You’re being wonderfully helpful,’ he said. ‘I can’t thank you enough.’
She turned pink. ‘It’s the least I can do,’ she said.
‘You think that Hugh Donald was innocent, don’t you?’ Keith said.
‘I thought that he might be.’
‘Was it something that happened just before Miss Spalding was killed?’
‘Not exactly.’ She stopped and stared out of the window. Snow was falling again. The room had become dark. She got up and switched on the lights before deciding to go on. ‘But she wasn’t her usual self. It was if she was afraid of something. She told me not to open the door to strange men, not even to say anything to them through the letter box. She went on and on about it, and I realised afterwards that she’d let me know, without saying it directly, that I wasn’t to say anything to the police if they came.’
Silver City Scandal Page 5