Silver City Scandal

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Fair enough,’ Keith said. He guessed that the stout man was, for a few minutes, on Shennilco’s payroll.

  ‘You want to know about Mary Spalding,’ the stout man said. His accent, Keith thought, was Yorkshire, possibly Bradford. His voice whined.

  ‘That’s right,’ Keith said. ‘The Computer Queen.’

  ‘That’s what they called her, and she earned the name. She was a bloody well qualified accountant although she had an even better degree in computing. But she made fuller use of her expertise than most of us dare to do.’

  The stout man glanced suspiciously at a pair of elderly ladies at the far end of the room and lowered his voice before going on. ‘There’s a hell of a lot of money circulating in the oil industry, Mr Calder,’ he said. ‘Firms working for firms who are working for other firms, all going after the big expenditure of the oil companies. Everything from a new platform to a year’s supply of bread rolls. Contracts are being let by the hundred, and everybody wants the business. You know what that means?’

  ‘Slush funds?’ Keith said.

  ‘To put it crudely, yes. Sweeteners. Happens all the time. A present to a buyer in exchange for a favour. That seems innocent enough. But then you get the bribes to other people’s employees to buy commercial information. Not so much technical secrets, I don’t mean that, though it happens. The big money goes for advance information on how much the rival firm is going to bid for the contract they both want.

  ‘The oil companies are mostly above and beyond that sort of thing. Their slush funds are more likely to go to governments, to swing legislation their way. The other big operators, the rig constructors, shipping companies and so on, they do their accounting in-house and have their offices de-bugged once a month. But the smaller man uses an outside accountant. And he wants a bit more than the usual balance-sheets and tax-returns. He wants to be able to ask his accountant, “How much can I afford to bid for this contract?” and also, “How much can I afford to pay out in bribes, so’s I can find out how much the others are going to bid? And how do I cover up the cost of the bribes?” So most firms of accountants, whether they know it or not, have a member who can answer that sort of question. You follow me?’

  ‘I’m right with you,’ Keith said. ‘But surely his own estimator can tell him how much to bid?’

  ‘His estimator can tell him the net cost. His accountant tells him what overheads he’s got to allow for. Which makes the accountant the best person to buy the information off. You still with me?’

  Keith nodded. ‘Mary Spalding was selling her clients’ secrets?’

  ‘Such things happen all the time,’ the stout man admitted. ‘But she’d gone a whole lot further. If you think of her as a broker, you’ll get the picture. Clients were coming to her personally, because it was known that, whatever they wanted to know, she’d do the whole package for them – buy the information, figure out the bidding, cover up the bribes and present a nice series of accounts at the end of the day.’

  ‘And could they trust her not to sell their information on again?’ Keith asked.

  ‘If they did,’ the stout man said, ‘they were out of their bloody minds.’

  *

  The stout man left after exchanging significant nods with Jeremy Prather. The solicitor suggested a drink. Keith felt that he owed him that much of the companionship which he seemed to crave. And it would save time in the morning if Keith reported the findings of the day. This he did over a pint for himself and a large whisky for Jeremy in the quietest bar, laying stress on the presence of two very hard men on the opposing team.

  Jeremy was more interested in attack than in defence. ‘We’re beginning to see a very definite picture,’ he said.

  ‘True. But it’s not a picture I like very much,’ Keith said. ‘One of the men – presumably McHenge, being the smaller man and so the easier to be mistaken for Hugh Donald at a distance – did the killing. But with a professional killer acting for the man with the motive, how do we prove a damn thing?’

  ‘We’ll figure out something when we know who his client is,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Maybe. Until then, stay out of dark alleys.’

  ‘I always do.’

  ‘Don’t look for me this time tomorrow,’ Keith said. ‘I think I’ll have to go courting.’

  ‘Miss Carlogie? Sooner you than me.’

  ‘Who else? Mary Spalding kept records at home. Somebody burgled the bungalow and took all her papers away. Then he, or somebody else, tried to repeat the visit, but by that time Miss Carlogie had installed the latest and best alarms. It’s a reasonable inference that the real crunch document may still be there. Or, at least, our somebody thinks it is.’

  ‘It’s a wonder there hasn’t been another fire,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Keith said, much struck. ‘It is. If there’s some nut around who thinks he can purge his past mistakes with fire, and if he or his goons have twice failed to find whatever-it-is, why didn’t he try fire again?’

  ‘Suggestions,’ Jeremy said. ‘Either he didn’t want to destroy it, he wanted to have it. Or else he thought that it was so well tucked away that the risk of anyone finding it was less than the risk of drawing attention to the pattern of fires by starting another one.’

  ‘Good points, both of them,’ Keith said.

  ‘I’m not just an ugly face. Are you ready for the other half?’

  ‘In a minute. First I must go and wrestle with a python. That first one’s pressing on my bladder.’

  Rather than risk ambush in the hotel toilet Keith decided to go up to his room. The key was already in his pocket. He went up in an empty lift. No Glasgow tearaways were lurking in the corridor. He put his key in the door, hesitated, and then laughed at himself for jumping at shadows. Even so, after pushing the door open he stepped into the room quickly and sideways, flicking on the light as he went by.

  The vicious slam as the door flung shut missed him by an inch. He found himself face to face, in the cramped area between the bedroom wall and the bathroom door, with Galway. The man was wearing a cloth cap, but if his snub nose had not identified him Keith would have known by his size and by the merciless eyes.

  ‘This here’s a warning,’ Galway said and jumped at him.

  If Keith had not prepared himself mentally, he would have been caught and slammed against the bathroom partition, there to be held and pulped by the obviously stronger man. And if he had been more hasty, Galway would have died. Keith’s counter-move was ready in his mind and he was stabbing with straight fingers before he could think.

  In mid-blow, Keith changed his mind. It may have been that Galway’s words sank in and he realised that the man had come with a warning rather than with murderous intent. At least in part it was an awareness that the death of Miss Spalding’s killer would be the end of Hugh Donald’s hopes. Whatever the reason, Keith turned his hand and delivered a paralysing chop to the point where the other’s neck met his shoulder, stabbed the fingers of his other hand to the solar plexus and followed up, as Galway’s head came forward, with a vicious hook to the side of the jaw.

  The man’s fall shook the room. Shaking with reaction and nursing his hand, Keith looked down. The cap had fallen off, exposing a hairless scalp. Keith nodded to himself.

  Galway was still breathing, after a fashion. The man was probably not out for long. There was no time to waste.

  That reminded him. His first need was becoming urgent. He relieved himself. Then he fetched from his suitcase the pair of white cotton gloves which always travelled with him. Their more usual function was to save the blueing of guns from his acid fingerprints. Gloved, he went through the man’s pockets.

  He found a driving licence in the name of Galway, which was gratifying until he found three others in different names. Some cash. Several keys. A grubby handkerchief. A packet of cheap cigars. Matches.

  Keith’s pockets always held a supply of polythene bags which he used for occasional, unexpected gifts or acquisitions of gam
e. Into one of the bags he dropped Galway’s pocket diary and some scraps of paper. He returned everything else to the man’s pockets. He almost missed one item, a brass knuckleduster on the man’s right hand. If he had known that that was there, he might not have been so gentle. He decided to leave it in place. It would look well when the police arrived.

  *

  At his own request Keith was moved to another bedroom, comfortingly closer to the main comings and goings of the hotel, and in it he managed to sleep. But between the enquiries of the police into the night and those of more senior officers the following morning, he had little time to think about Hugh Donald’s troubles.

  Only one sequence stayed in his mind. At police headquarters between King and Queen Streets (and still referred to as Lodge Walk), a chief inspector, whose name Keith soon forgot, asked him whether he knew the man.

  ‘I’d never seen him before,’ Keith said.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’

  There was no avoiding the question. ‘I can guess.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I spoke to Superintendent Gilchrist at Strathclyde. He warned me about two hard cases who were in Aberdeen. This sounds like one of them.’

  ‘And what else did this Superintendent Gilchrist tell you?’

  ‘Phone him.’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘Are you going to take my word for it?’

  ‘I’m not that daft.’

  Keith’s hesitation before he replied did nothing to improve the atmosphere. ‘Then why should I waste my breath?’

  He was put out of the office while a call was made to Superintendent Gilchrist. Afterwards, the chief inspector was even less friendly.

  ‘So you think that there was a substitution of guns in the Spalding case?’

  ‘You know I do,’ Keith said patiently. ‘I said so in the High Court, and got quoted in all the papers.’

  ‘And you think two different gunshops have been fired, to cover it up?’

  ‘I thought that the possibility was worth looking into.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t.’

  Keith’s temper was beginning to go. ‘That’s very useful and interesting,’ he said. ‘On what do you base that conclusion?’

  The chief inspector refused to be drawn. ‘You think that somebody sent this man to warn you off?’

  ‘What the hell else? I’d be interested to hear any other explanation.’

  ‘He says that you attacked him in the corridor and must have dragged him into your room while he was unconscious. He denies uttering any threat or warning.’

  ‘And I suppose I put the knuckleduster on his fist?’

  ‘That’s what he suggests.’

  ‘Gilchrist will have told you his record, if you didn’t already know it,’ Keith said. ‘In the face of that, believe what you want to believe.’

  He was free by lunch-time without having to invoke a solicitor or even refer to his legal rights. But he had an unpleasant suspicion that official help from the city police had become even less likely than before.

  At two, he walked into Jeremy Prather’s office. Sheila was typing a legal letter on the solicitor’s notepaper.

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ Keith said.

  ‘I don’t mind, when there’s nothing else happening. I hate sitting idle. There are spare keys to Mr Prather’s flat here. Do you think he’d mind if I did some cleaning and tidying?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Too bad! What’s this we hear about a fight in your room at the hotel?’

  ‘Just that. You’ll read all about it when you come to type up my notes. I’ll dictate them now. Is Jeremy’s room empty?’

  ‘He went out with his policeman contact. And a right pair of oddballs they make! He said he’d probably be the rest of the afternoon.’

  ‘And Hugh Donald?’

  ‘He turned up for your meeting this morning,’ Sheila said. ‘Mr Prather told him what had happened and warned him that another man might still be on the warpath. Mr Donald thinks that the other man may have been watching him last night, because he saw a small and hatchet-faced man talking to one of the guards on the Shennilco gate, and the same man or one just like him was outside his house when he got home. Mr Prather told him to be careful and to stay out of dark alleys.’

  ‘That’s what I told Mr Prather,’ Keith said.

  ‘And they’ve got the shotgun back from the police. It’s on Mr Prather’s desk.’

  ‘I’ll take a look at it. And give me an outside line to Jeremy’s phone, please.’

  Keith carried the tape-recorder through and took possession of Jeremy’s desk and chair. Ignoring the temptation of the gun, because its time was not ripe, he telephoned to the hotel near Kemnay and invited Jenny Carlogie to dine with him. She sounded delighted and promised to book a table.

  He brought his notes up to date, and only then allowed himself to pick up the Armas Alicante gun which he had last handled in the witness-box. He found a small magnifying glass in Jeremy’s desk and studied the gun minutely, adding his findings to the tape as he went along.

  A lot could be learned from a gun about its owner. There was, of course, the risk that the gun had not been in the hands of the man behind Miss Spalding’s death but had been known to him and stolen or acquired at the last minute; but the contingency was remote. Keith wished that he could have seen the gun when it was found, before many small indications had been removed along with such fingerprints as the gun might have carried. Well, the fingerprints would be on record.

  Traces of rust showed. Some of these might be due to neglect by the police after a sojourn in the damp grass. But not all. And a well lubricated and protected gun should have withstood such treatment.

  Keith habitually carried a small leather case containing a handle and a variety of differently sized turnscrew blades. He detached and withdrew the locks. Inside, the gun was a mess of congealed oil blackened with gunsmoke and with rust well established.

  There was confirmation of its owner’s heedlessness in the numerous dents and scratches in the stock. These could easily have been lifted or filled. There were scratches in the finish of the barrels and the stock was in dire need of linseed oil or wax.

  One particular set of scratches, in the front of the trigger-guard and adjacent on the bottom plate, interested him. The man had been in the habit of hanging his gun on a fence before getting over.

  The handle for his turnscrews was tapered and marked for gauging the muzzles of shotguns. He found that the chokes were as they had been when the gun left the makers. They would have thrown a very tight pattern. Keith knew that the makers had supplied them thus because it was easier and cheaper to remove choke than to add it. The man had not bothered. Yet the gun showed signs of much use. So either he had not cared whether he hit or missed, which would make him unusual to the point of being unique, or else he was an excellent shot whose aiming errors were less than the small spread of the patterns. That he had had the gun altered to fit him but had not had the chokes altered supported the assumption.

  The interiors of the barrels were still perfect except for a haze of tiny pits extending for a few inches in front of the chambers. Keith had seen this disfigurement often on old guns but rarely in modern ones. Good modern cartridges have anti-corrosive primers, but cheaper, imported cartridges of dubious origin may still have corrosive, fulminate primers. So the man had been in the habit of buying ‘bargain’ cartridges, probably in bulk and by post.

  Prolonged and frequent contact between fingers and the finish of gun-barrels will remove some of the delicate blueing and leave a slight, silvery sheen. Keith found such traces. He guessed that his man had not been in the habit of wearing gloves while shooting. Most men hold a gun with the aiming hand at the front of the fore-end; but on this gun the sheen was clear of the fore-end and on the barrels alone. Its user, then, had had very long arms or had used an old-fashioned, straight-armed posture reminiscent of King George V. The worn area seemed to be more exte
nsive on the left side of the barrels than on the right, suggesting, again, the left-handed user. But of this he could not be quite sure.

  He stood up and mounted the gun to his right shoulder and then to his left. There seemed to be little difference. In neither case could he quite align his eye with the rib without adopting attitudes which were almost inconceivable in the shooting field. The man must have a thin face with broad cheekbones and wide-set eyes. And young rather than old; during the ageing process, the point in the eye from which vision is centred moves fractionally inward towards the nose.

  The gun felt wrong in another way. Because the cushioning of the rubber recoil-pad blurred his sensations it took him some seconds to recognise the discrepancy. The toe of the butt was catching him lower than he liked. The gun’s owner must have a flatter chest than himself or he would have suffered bruised muscles.

  He concentrated for another hour without finding any more clues to the user of the gun. But these were ample. Keith felt that he would almost know the man if he passed him in the street. He would know him at a glance if he saw him shooting. But where to go? Keith wondered whether he could enlist the aid of the local wildfowling and clay pigeon clubs. One of their members would surely recognise such a description.

  When he gave up at last, Sheila had already left for the night. There was a note to say that Jeremy Prather would not be back. He had gone to Lodge Walk in pursuit of the missing rabbit and also in the faint hope of persuading the police to oppose an application for bail which had been made on behalf of Galway.

  *

  It was already dark when Keith walked, by the best-lit route, to fetch his car from the long-term car-park where it waited for him. He was earlier than he had intended and he paused along the way to do some impulse shopping. The car started reluctantly after its short hibernation. He gave it a few minutes to warm up before he set off.

  There had been a slight thaw during the day, but the frost had returned with night and a fresh sprinkling of snow lay over the new ice. In places the roads were like skid-pans, but salt and sand helped the traffic to keep going with only an acceptable minimum of accidents.