Silver City Scandal

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Look at it this way,’ Donelly said, becoming more human. ‘You could leak it to each of your suspects that you’ve passed such a message in Snide’s name to those toughs of his and then see who runs to the phone to get the order countermanded.’

  ‘What a devious bugger you are!’ Keith said admiringly.

  ‘Aren’t I just!’ said the inspector. He decided that he was now coming off duty and accepted a large malt whisky.

  ‘Would you give me a call if any of Harry Snide’s other playmates leave Glasgow, heading this way?’ Keith asked.

  The inspector thought it over and then nodded. ‘That much I can do,’ he said.

  ‘And you’ll persuade the super to lay off for a few days?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Three days,’ the inspector said. ‘And then you cough up everything you’ve got. You’re holding a lot back, but if I lean on you now I may spoil your working along a line which, for the moment, suits my book. In three days, you tell all, or else. And the super will back me.’

  *

  The Shennilco building was a new and glossy structure of many floors, faced in polished granite and bronzed glass, set in an industrial estate which was still in course of development. Keith had once seen an exquisitely dressed duchess picking her way through a farmyard. Among the cranes and chewed earth, Shennilco House gave him the same impression of disdainful skirt-lifting.

  In the visitors’ suite, the bedrooms were hardly more than small cubicles, but as well and comfortably fitted out as any hotel room. Keith felt at home at once. Tired from his efforts of the night before, he took himself early to his bed and was asleep within seconds.

  He was awoken in the small hours by a knock on the door and it took him a great effort to drag himself up the slippery hill to full consciousness.

  He found the bedside light. ‘Who’s that?’ he called thickly.

  Hugh Donald looked round the door and then came in. Apart from his blue chin he looked dapper in a silk dressing gown and striped pyjamas. ‘Sorry to wake you,’ he said, ‘but I’ve just had a phone call.’

  Keith turned on his back and covered his eyes with his fore-arm. ‘Presumably it couldn’t wait until morning.’

  ‘Judge for yourself. Following up the last thing you said in Jeremy’s office, I had two of our security men go back there to stand guard. They’ve just caught somebody pussy-footing up the stairs. From the description, it’s Galway.’

  ‘Tell them, “Well done!”’ Keith said. He began to drift off again.

  ‘Stay awake,’ Hugh said urgently. ‘There’s an important question. Do we hand him over to the police or send him out to join his pal McHenge on the rig?’

  Keith fought his way to the surface again and thought about it. ‘’S a pity to lose the proof of him trying to steal the evidence.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Hugh said.

  ‘Other hand,’ Keith said, ‘if we chuck him to the fuzz, he’ll have a good story. They’ll bail him again.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘If we turn him loose and watch him, his actions might tell us whose interests he’s looking after.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘But,’ Keith said, ‘he’s probably better at watching us than we are at watching him. I’d prefer that our man doesn’t have anyone helping him. Inspector Donelly promised to ring me if any more of Harry Snide’s boys headed this way. Send Galway out to the rig, and tell them to keep him and McHenge apart. We don’t want them comparing stories. You agree?’

  ‘I think so,’ Hugh said doubtfully.

  ‘If you only half agree, only send him halfway out to the rig,’ Keith said. ‘G’night.’ He was asleep again before the door closed.

  Chapter Eleven

  Keith, as was his habit, awoke early and completely. He showered in the miniature bathroom, dressed and took the lift to the ground floor. A guard directed him to a large dining hall where a small throng of early arrivals, mingled with some departing night staff, was eating breakfast. Most of the table talk was oil industry gossip.

  The same guard gave him the room number of the office which had been cleared for them, and Keith found it for himself, a high up and spacious room with a wide view reaching to a forbidding seascape. The computer and their papers were on the long table and Keith settled down.

  He was still reading and note-taking an hour later when Hugh Donald came in with another man. ‘This is Ken Rothstein,’ Hugh said. ‘The Old Man’s depute.’

  Keith got up to shake hands.

  Rothstein was a short man with a round, Mediterranean face and a huge moustache. His accent was American but not aggressively so. ‘My orders are to see that you get whatever backup you want,’ he said. ‘So when Hugh asked for a run-down on your short-list of three, we got down to it. Four copies.’ He handed Keith a heavy buff envelope.

  Keith took a look inside. At first glance, the reports looked remarkably full. ‘How on earth did you manage it in the time?’

  Rothstein shrugged. ‘No great sweat,’ he said. ‘Personnel still had a fat file on Tom Marstone. And the others do some business with us, so Finance had an angle. We put questions to anyone who’d dealt with them, and the wives of anyone who lived on the same block. Then it was just a matter of an overnight typist taking messages as they were phoned in. I dragged myself in at dawn to edit it.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ Keith said with truth.

  ‘Tell the Old Man, when you meet him later. He thinks I spend my time sitting on my hands. Those notes are no more than general background. Anything else you need, just ask. The wife network makes a good information-gathering machine, we’ll have to make more use of it. But for now, I must go. We’re meeting one of the union bosses at eleven and I got some preparing to do. Boy, do I!’ He smiled wryly.

  In the doorway, Rothstein crossed with Jeremy Prather. They exchanged cold nods.

  The solicitor placed a heavy package and another envelope on the table and stretched a cramped arm. ‘From Tooker. He’s been gathering up photocopies of statements and other papers in police hands – I’d rather not know how – plus the photographs which weren’t put forward as evidence. His forensic pal was up all night, doing an autopsy on that blasted rabbit. And Sheila says she’ll be down in a minute. She’s washing out my socks. I didn’t ask her to,’ he added. ‘In fact I asked her not to.’

  Keith was already opening Tooker’s envelope. He spoke absently. ‘It’s hard enough to get them to wash your socks,’ he said. ‘But when a woman’s made up her mind to wash them, the only way to stop her’s to set fire to them as soon as you take them off. Yours should burn nicely. Well, hullo!’

  ‘Something useful?’ Hugh asked.

  Keith passed him a photograph. ‘Sergeant Tooker’s pal got this off the indentations on that note our man sent to McHenge. Some partly legible numerals, which could be a date or time or quantity or almost anything else, and one word. “Winnigstadt”. Is it a place?’

  ‘Not that I ever heard of,’ Hugh said. Jeremy shrugged.

  ‘Job for Sheila. Let’s take a look at these dossiers.’

  Sheila made her appearance a few minutes later. ‘Look who’s here,’ she said brightly. A figure loomed behind her which might have been carved in haste from granite. Somewhere within that frame, Keith suspected, lurked a heart of gold, but he had never been able to find it.

  ‘My brother-in-law,’ Keith explained. ‘Come in, Ronnie.’

  ‘I was half expecting your message,’ Ronnie said. He threw himself into one of the empty chairs with a violence which nearly shattered it. ‘When I saw in the papers about you putting a bomb under those lawyers, I kenned you’d not manage without me.’

  ‘If you know that much,’ Keith said, ‘you’ll know who I mean when I introduce you to our client and the defence solicitor.’

  Ronnie stretched a long arm across the table to shake each man’s hand and then collapsed back with a yawn. ‘What can I do?’ he asked.

  ‘Not as much as I’d hoped,�
�� Keith said. ‘I thought the thaw might be here by now. Even so, any evidence on the ground is several months old. You may have to work from these photographs.’

  Ronnie thumbed through the batch. ‘Photies is no’ the same as being able to move your heid and catch the light,’ he said. ‘Did you fetch me a’ the way from Dawnapool for that? I had to dig my way through Strath Oykel yestreen and when I looked round the bloody snow plough was following in my tracks!’

  ‘If you’ve been driving all night,’ Hugh Donald said, ‘you’d better go and sleep.’

  ‘I’ll do fine for now,’ Ronnie said gruffly. ‘A stalker soon learns to manage on a few hours now and again.’

  ‘Just listen for a while,’ Keith said. ‘I’m going to summarise what we know. Then we’ll see if you can’t add something.’

  Sheila opened her shorthand book.

  Keith stared at the lowering sky for a few seconds while he arranged his thoughts. ‘We could have made a good case against McHenge and Galway,’ he said. ‘But that would not have cleared Hugh’s name, because it could be argued that he could have been their client. So we’ve put both men into store and thus mucked up some of what might have been evidence against them. Sergeant Tooker reckons that if we can nail the client, the client will shop the hirelings. I hope Tooker’s right. If not, we may need all you can get from the ground and from those photographs, Ronnie.

  ‘We’ve got to go after the man who hired those two. We think, without being sure, that his is one of three names. Craill, Rowan and Marstone.

  ‘Getting enough evidence to determine which of those three is our man, let alone seeing him prosecuted, is going to be about as easy as pulling elephants’ teeth. Evidence exists – it always does. But our hands are tied. The police could get search warrants. Jeremy, what are our chances of getting search warrants? Negligible?’

  ‘Less than that,’ Jeremy said. ‘Nil. We could apply for a Commission and Diligence, but it would have to be in respect of specific items in the possession of one particular man. And even then, he’d be given the chance to answer us in court and give reason why it shouldn’t be granted, which would give him the chance to get rid of whatever it was.’

  ‘So much for that, then,’ Keith said. ‘For the next step, we must narrow it down to one man. After that, we can look for evidence which will put him in the dock.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll get it,’ Jeremy said. ‘Not with our hands tied as they are. I’ve been giving it some thought. What we’re going to need in the first instance isn’t a prosecution but a libel action.’

  ‘We sue somebody?’ Hugh asked incredulously. ‘The police, you mean?’

  ‘We don’t sue anybody. They sue us. Remember the Oscar Wilde case? As soon as we have an identity and a little evidence, we announce very loudly that Mr Craill-Rowan-Marstone caused Miss Spalding’s death. And we go on repeating it until he has to start an action for libel. Or if he doesn’t, we’ve made our point. But once he starts an action, the burden’s on us to prove that it was true and that it was in the public interest that the truth be known. And, immediately, whatever we’ve got becomes admissable in evidence and we can get the court’s help to obtain more. Access to his bank accounts, for instance.’

  The silence while they digested this proposal only lasted a few seconds. Then Hugh Donald nodded. ‘We’d better get on with identifying our man,’ he said. ‘Keith, would you like to run over what we know or can infer about him?’

  Keith spread his notes out on the table before him. ‘First off, we know that he’s been in touch with Harry Snide and through him he hired Galway and McHenge. Money must have passed, and we can look for evidence of that.

  ‘Obviously, he had a motive; but all three of our suspects seem to have been amply provided in that respect.

  ‘We believe that he was on a particular shoot, but the records are lost and we’ve no idea who was present that day.

  ‘None of that is very helpful, but at least that’s the negative elements out of the way.

  ‘We know that the gun which killed Miss Spalding was for some time in the hands of a man of certain characteristics which I’ve listed for you. Stringy rather than squat. Eyes relatively wide apart compared with the lower jaw. Careless over his gun and given to buying bargain cartridges. Possibly left-handed. And he may shoot with what I’ll call his non-trigger arm straighter than is fashionable nowadays.

  ‘Jenny Carlogie says a man with a deep voice made an upsetting phone call to Miss Spalding. That may or may not have been our man. McHenge thought that his client’s voice was deeper than the ordinary. Maybe a woman would notice the depth of a man’s voice more than a man would, or maybe not. Make what you like of that.’

  Keith fell silent.

  ‘And that’s about all we’ve got, so far,’ Hugh said gloomily. ‘And if we ever get around to thinking that we’ve narrowed it down to one man, what do we do then?’

  ‘We try to prove it,’ Keith said. ‘We start by making sure we’ve backed the right horse. Probably we set a trap.’ He outlined his discussion with Inspector Donelly.

  ‘We haven’t much to go on,’ Hugh said. Jeremy frowned and nodded agreement.

  ‘Damn all,’ Keith said, ‘and none of it good evidence. It just shows you how easy murder can be. Hire a pro, pay him with untraceable cash, the deed’s done weeks later and the only evidence points to the pro, who needn’t know who you are and wouldn’t talk about it anyway. There’s no link with the real culprit. We’re working ninety per cent from motivation, which is the weakest link of all because crimes are very often committed for reasons nobody would have believed sufficient. What we’ve got so far is mostly nothing trying very hard to pretend to be something.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s a lot, considering how little time there’s been,’ Sheila said hotly. She put down her shorthand book and looked over Jeremy’s shoulder. ‘From his photograph, that man Rowan looks just the type to be a murderer. That’s as evil a face as I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘It’s a snapshot,’ Keith said. ‘You can’t go by that. I’d hate to be judged on the way I come out in snaps. And it’s taken from a bad angle and badly lit. I can’t even make a guess as to whether that gun would fit him.’

  ‘The photograph shows him as left-handed,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Only that he’s holding something in his left hand. Not quite the same thing.’

  Hugh had been leafing through Rothstein’s folders. ‘The dossier describes him as irritable and probably ruthless,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, I don’t remember him on any of the Shennilco shoots after I took over. He’s been around Aberdeen for years, but he only came into C & W Foods recently, so we wouldn’t have invited him unless there was some earlier connection I don’t know about.’

  ‘My choice would be Henry Craill. He’s just the shape Keith described, his voice is deeper than average, he’s careless of his gun, I remember him being on one of the shoots several years ago and he was using some funny looking foreign cartridges.’

  Keith leafed through more papers. ‘We’ve only got one set of dimensions of alterations to a gunstock,’ he said. ‘That’s Marstone’s cousin, Smelly. The gun conforms, near enough.’

  ‘And Marstone took his dismissal badly,’ said Hugh. ‘He’s a weak character.’

  ‘Guesswork,’ Keith said, sighing. ‘Wasting precious mental energy. Beating the water with a stick. We’ve got to narrow it down.’

  ‘One of our stumbling blocks,’ Jeremy said slowly, ‘is that we don’t know who was on one particular shoot five years ago. I’ve spoken to several men who’d been invited at one time or another, but only one of them could say whether he’d been out that particular day, and he hadn’t. Unless they’ve kept a game book or hung onto their diaries, they just don’t know after all that time. But suppose that we got somebody started phoning everybody we know of who’s ever been on one of those shoots, asking the question, “Did you ever meet Mr Naulty while a guest of Shennilco?”’

 
‘Go on supposing,’ Keith said. ‘Suppose that Naulty knows something. Suppose that he’s back in this country. We don’t know it but the killer does. Might we be provoking another phone call to Harry Snide?’

  Jeremy thought for a moment and then shook his head. ‘If anybody among them knows anything, we’ve no reason to believe that it’s Naulty. And, obviously, we don’t phone our three.’

  ‘True,’ Keith said. ‘But I’ve a gut feeling against naming names. I’m beginning to regret mentioning Naulty to the press. And we can’t be positive about our short-list. I’d go along with phoning everybody bar our three, and asking, “Who do you remember ever meeting on a Shennilco shoot?” The computer can sort them into groups. If Naulty’s name pops up at all, we should be able to pick on the right group. Then we can start to fill out the list for that day. If only one of our three names pops up, we’re halfway home. And we can start praying that at least one of the others has a sharp memory.’

  ‘That seems reasonable,’ Hugh said, scribbling. ‘I’ll get Rothstein to start it going. What else can we do?’

  ‘We can get a whole lot more details about our three candidates. Get Rothstein’s team to start again with the same neighbours as before and work on from there to any acquaintance of each of them who isn’t so pally that he’d tip off our subject. We want every scrap we can get to fill out the three pictures. Physical description. Height. Character. Previous history. What does he smoke? Where does he shoot and in what style? What gun does he use and how long has he had it? What cartridges and where does he get them? Does he have any connection with Glasgow? I’ll make out a list in a minute, but let’s have every known fact whether it seems relevant or not.

  ‘Then contact your friend, the OM on the rig. Get him to put some pressure on McHenge. And on Galway, who may know more than we think. McHenge isn’t the garrulous type, but he opens his mouth if he really believes his neck’s in danger. I want him squeezed dry on the subject of the man he met in the dark. How tall? How did he sound, smell, walk? You know the sort of thing. Oh, and what did McHenge do with the matches he’d scrounged off his client?’