Silver City Scandal

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Can do,’ Hugh Donald said. ‘Is that the lot?’

  ‘For you, yes. Jeremy, will you chase round the legal and financial network again and see what can be found out about the finances of each of them?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Jeremy said.

  There had been another paper in Sergeant Tooker’s envelope and Keith used a gap in the discussion to run his eye over it. ‘I’ll be here all day, going through this lot with Sheila,’ he said. ‘So let me know as and when anything interesting turns up. Well, sod me! That,’ he added, ‘is an exclamation, not an invitation.’

  ‘Something new?’ Jeremy asked.

  ‘A long shot paying off. A job for Ronnie, I think. That rabbit was shot after it was already dead. Gassed. Cymag suspected. And there was a myxomatosis sore beside its eye. Ronnie, start with whoever sells Cymag locally. Sales have to be recorded in the poisons book.’

  ‘I doubt that’ll help o’er much,’ Ronnie said. ‘Keepers are aye passing it from hand to hand – that’s how it falls into the hands of the salmon poachers.’

  ‘Try it anyway. Or try the chairman of the Pest Control Action Group if there is one. We want the names of everyone who may have been killing rabbits with Cymag around the end of August and who might have passed on a dead bunny to a friend or a customer. Hang on, there may be more.’ Keith read on to the end of the report. ‘Traces of a heavy, clay soil in the fur. Kemnay’s not on clay is it, Hugh?’

  ‘Not by about twenty miles,’ Hugh Donald said. ‘It’s a light, sandy soil.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Also in the fur, seeds . . . Not much help. Nettles and creeping buttercup, both seeding all over the place in August. Stomach contents, predictably grass.’

  ‘You don’t seem very surprised,’ Hugh said. ‘Did you suspect this?’

  ‘I thought of it. There seemed to be a total absence of blood, which needn’t mean much. But the photographs of the rabbit showed a blueish trace around the eye membranes, which suggested cyanosis. Anyway, that time of year there’s too much cover most places for shooting and too many young underground for ferreting. The other option is to stalk them in the open, but that’s better done with a two-two rifle and a bullet hole would have been obvious.’

  Hugh was still frowning. ‘If the rabbit had been gassed, it’d have had to be dug out,’ he said.

  ‘Not necessarily. Sometimes, when you lift the turf or whatever you used to cover the holes, you find one or two rabbits just below the entrance. Either way, there’d be soil in the fur. And I could see the myxy sore for myself.’

  ‘It’ll only lead us to a butcher’s shop,’ said Jeremy.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ Keith said. ‘People have gone off rabbits, even clean ones, since the myxy started. No butcher would take one with sores showing. And finally,’ he added, ‘could somebody go out to Kemnay and fetch my car? We’ll meet again tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Saturday,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Never mind if it’s Halloween,’ Keith said. ‘Let’s bring this to a conclusion before Harry Snide sends any more of his boys this way. Or Shennilco’s rigs will be getting overcrowded.’

  *

  Sheila went to hunt among the Shennilco offices for a large piece of graph paper. For a few minutes, Keith had the impersonal room to himself. He stacked the contents of Sergeant Tooker’s parcel but hardly glanced at them. Instead, he stood looking out at the chaos of the building sites nearby, the sparkling countryside beyond and the contrast of the sullen sea, while he juggled with his thoughts. The sun vanished after giving the first new snowflakes a moment of brilliance. Keith was restless and already claustrophobic. He would rather have been outdoors and on the hunt, but he knew that his present job was to co-ordinate.

  Sheila brought paper. She also brought coffee and distracting chatter. ‘Aren’t they taking an awful risk, locking those men up on an oil rig?’ she asked. ‘What happens when the time comes to let them go?’

  ‘No problem,’ Keith said impatiently. ‘They’re brought ashore and caught trying to stow away on an outbound plane or robbing the Shennilco payroll, whichever suits best at the time.’

  ‘But they’ll tell the police where they really were.’

  ‘And they’ll contradict each other all along the line. They’re being fed conflicting ideas as to which rig they’re on, they’re seeing different people and hearing different noises.’

  ‘But the police . . .’

  ‘Even if the fuzz believe two men who’re evident criminals, they couldn’t investigate every rig in the North Sea,’ Keith pointed out. ‘If they had the men, they wouldn’t have the powers. In theory, the rigs come under Aberdeen’s Chief Constable, but that’s only by courtesy. Strictly, they’re in the same class as a ship at sea.’

  ‘It hardly seems right,’ Sheila said unhappily, ‘to . . . to . . .’

  ‘To seek justice by perverting it?’

  ‘That’s it exactly.’

  ‘Those two were doing the perverting,’ Keith said. ‘While they were running around loose, justice would never be done. We’ll salt them away and any other of Harry Snide’s boys who may turn up, until such time as we’ve got justice for Hugh Donald. After that, we’ll start thinking about justice for everybody else.’

  ‘I can tell that Jeremy isn’t happy about it,’ Sheila said.

  ‘No lawyer was ever happy about any positive action. But Jeremy knows which side his bread’s buttered. And now,’ Keith said, ‘let’s get down to it. I’m going to make a chart. You go through the statements and put a red line in the margin against anything which wasn’t in the precognitions at the trial.’

  They worked steadily through the day, interrupted by a steady trickle of information, by visitors seeking to help or to check on progress, or by phone calls in request of further instructions. When Sheila felt hungry, she fetched food for Keith and forced him to eat, under threat of reporting him to Molly.

  Keith’s chart was divided into three main horizontal bands for the three main suspects, Tom Marstone and his cousin being lumped together, with blank bands awaiting any new names which might be added to the list. The many vertical columns were given over to facts or suppositions. As the squares were filled, Keith ringed any positive, matching evidence in red, hoping that a distinctive pattern would emerge; but, whenever the balance seemed to sway in the direction of one suspect, the next entries would tilt it another way.

  In mid-evening, Sheila, exhausted, threw in the towel but Keith slogged on. Rothstein was away and it was left to him to set the night shift of three typists working to make neat dossiers out of the flotsam of paper. Only long after midnight, when he had satisfied himself that order would impose itself on the chaos, did he make for his cubicle, swallow a couple of drams from the hospitality cupboard and fall into bed, only to lie awake until he could coax his mind away from its eternal perusal of a myriad unrelated facts and conjectures.

  Chapter Twelve

  When the new morning came alive Keith did not revive with it. He slept late and arrived back in the appointed room to find that even Jeremy Prather was there before him. The day being Saturday, the building was quieter than usual; but there was still traffic in the corridors and the lifts were busy.

  Keith had pinned his chart to the wall and surrounded it with the available photographs of all four men. Jeremy, Hugh and Ken Rothstein were grouped in front of the display. The room was already hazed with smoke. There were four cigarette ends in the ash-tray beside Jeremy, and Rothstein was puffing a large and expensive looking pipe. Sheila was busily tidying the fresh mass of documentation.

  ‘Any sign of Ronnie?’ Keith asked the room.

  ‘Plenty,’ Rothstein said. ‘Look from the window. You’re the whizz-kid at detection.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear him come in?’ Sheila asked. ‘At one in the morning?’

  ‘I went up long after that,’ Keith said.

  Keith looked down from the window, and indeed the signs were clear to be seen. Ronnie�
��s Land Rover was parked in the middle of the lawn which, Keith had been assured, lay beneath the snow. From it zigzagged a line of uncertain footprints. They paused once and a yellow stain suggested that Ronnie had tried to write his name in the snow, although neither his script nor his spelling had been at their uncertain best. Two other sets of footprints came from the vicinity of the front entrance and the three sets returned in line abreast.

  ‘A pity,’ Keith said, ‘that our murderer didn’t spread as many tracks around.’

  ‘He was singing The Ball of Kirriemuir,’ Sheila said, ‘and getting the verses mixed up together.’

  ‘Then he won’t be much help to us for a few hours yet. You aren’t supposed to know whether he was muddling the verses or not,’ Keith said. The Ball of Kirriemuir is a very rude song indeed, much favoured by Scottish Rugby clubs.

  ‘I wouldn’t count on any help from him ever,’ Sheila said.

  ‘You’d be wrong,’ said Keith. ‘Sometimes he reminds me of a certain kind of gundog. He may be hard mouthed, a runner-in and incompletely house trained. He may even bite. But give him a line and send him out and most times he’ll bring back the bird in the end. I only hope that this is one of the times,’ he added, ‘because we’re getting nowhere fast.’

  ‘We seem to have filled in a lot of the gaps,’ Rothstein said gently.

  ‘We have. But the one huge gap between the killers and the client is still very nearly a blank,’ Keith said. ‘No fault of your gossips, they’ve done wonders. How did you collect all the financial background, Jeremy?’

  The solicitor hesitated and then decided to relinquish the credit. ‘By giving your fat accountant friend a thousand quid to spread around,’ he said.

  ‘Even so,’ Keith said, ‘I can’t make anything conclusive out of it. If we can’t pinpoint our man from what we’ve got, we’ll have to move into the hard phase.’

  ‘Which is?’ Rothstein asked.

  ‘Illegal. Burglary and phone tapping. Do you have any contacts in that sort of field?’

  ‘Contacts, yes,’ Rothstein said. ‘But first you’ll have to get it down to a convincing short-list of one. Those activities can backfire, friend. They’re less likely to backfire if the party’s guilty, because he’s too busy trying to explain away what’s been turned up to kick up hell over the way it was got. But two, three or even four innocent men, no thank you very much. So let’s make sure that we’ve squeezed every drop out of what we’ve got first.’ He pulled a chair up in front of the chart. ‘At a first glace, it looks bad for Mr H Craill.’

  ‘He’s got more than his share of red marks,’ Keith agreed, ‘but some of those are about as speculative as backing horses you’ve chosen with a pin. I’ll give you a frinstance.’ Keith took another chair in front of the chart. ‘Some answers only came back from Marina Beta late last night, because they’d waited for the proper time to pull up the drill string before threatening to stuff McHenge down the hole.’

  ‘Right,’ Rothstein said approvingly. ‘Pulling up a drill string costs money.’

  ‘Your men seem to have been pretty convincing. McHenge, and Galway when his turn came, were more than anxious to help. Galway never met the client and couldn’t add a thing. But McHenge was positive that he’d smelled cigar tobacco on the man he met in the dark and he was almost sure that he finished the box of matches he’d bummed off the man and that he threw it away in the gulley when he went back up to drop the cheque book. Assuming that that was the matchbox Tooker mentioned – and I can’t find another one in the police list – the scorching inside it would suggest a man who shelters the match inside the end of the box. Rightly or wrongly, I think of that as a soldier’s habit. Craill had military service so I gave him a red mark, and another for being an occasional cigar smoker.’

  ‘I see what you mean about speculative,’ Rothstein said. ‘Most men smoke a cigar now and again. And you get pipe tobaccos made from cigar leaf – Balkan Sobranie in the yellow tin for one. And Rowan’s a pipe smoker.’

  ‘Good point. We’d better find out his brand. But,’ Keith said, ‘would you shelter a match in the end of a matchbox to light a pipe? I thought that it’d be too unhandy.’

  ‘Not with practice,’ Rothstein said. ‘You turn the pipe over. I do it all the time when I’m outdoors. But let’s not fret over details just yet. Run over the main headings.’

  ‘Right,’ Keith said. ‘Right . . . For starters, the full precognitions, before they were pruned down for use in court, are useful but they mostly don’t help us to pinpoint our man. What they do is to help convict McHenge and Galway. As, for instance, Miss Carlogie’s mention of the man she saw coming down the gulley. Her mention of the later burglary would probably have been deemed irrelevant. More useful – and I’m surprised that your counsel failed to dig it out on cross-examination, Hugh – is a mention by the cyclist that the man who came back towards the car definitely did not have any dogs with him.’

  Hugh Donald sat up suddenly. ‘Surely that lets me off the hook,’ he said.

  ‘You could have left the dogs in the car for once,’ Keith said. ‘The good sergeant missed one point. The copper who saw the girl in the shoe shop, where the man whom we can assume to be McHenge bought his calfskin boots, said that the same man had returned later the same day for a pair of green Royal Hunters, the same kind of shooting boots you were wearing the other day. And he took them a size too large for himself. That’s why she remembered him.

  ‘The most useful titbits are in the photographs and I suspect that the next judge, if only we can get that far, will take very serious note of the care taken to exclude anything which weakened the prosecution’s case. There are some good photographs of the rabbit, showing more clearly the blue colour of the eye membrane and the pattern of pellets on the wall. They should certainly have made your counsel, if he was on the ball, wonder whether the rabbit hadn’t already been dead when it was shot.

  ‘Another series of photographs shows tracks coming down the gulley, similar to the one near the murder site. All right, they could have been made the day before; but it wasn’t for the police to conceal the information. I want Ronnie to look at them. I get the impression that the walk was quite unlike yours, but he could say for sure.

  ‘Best of all, though, are some photocopies taken from your file with your insurance company, Hugh. You’ll remember that they produced one of your policies in court, to back up your ownership of the gun I sold you. But when you changed your policy a year or two later, you filled out another proposal form. You must have taken the number off the gun in your possession again. You quote the number as one-eight-five-four, which doesn’t show among the numbers we managed to get from the gunshops. Again, they could have argued that you’d made a slip. They preferred to suppress the information.’

  Hugh Donald was looking white. ‘But all this suggests malice on the part of the police,’ he said. ‘They were out to get me, personally. Why would that be?’

  Jeremy shook his head, shaking also the ash from his cigarette onto Keith’s papers. ‘It happens in the normal course of business,’ he said. ‘The Procurator Fiscal and the Advocate-Depute should only want to show the truth. But the police are evaluated on the basis of the percentage of crimes solved, which really means the ratio of crimes detected or reported to the convictions obtained. So you can see the pressure on them to make sure of a conviction.’

  ‘Whatever the reason,’ Rothstein said briskly, ‘it happened. Fine. We’re making progress. Let’s move on.’

  ‘Let’s not move on,’ Hugh said. ‘There’s an important point here. Can we use this new material?’

  Jeremy Prather scratched his head. (Hugh leaned away.) ‘I’m glad you asked that question,’ Jeremy said, ‘but I’d be gladder if you’d answered it for yourself. The answer, I’m afraid, is a qualified maybe.

  ‘In a libel action, probably not. But, if we could get the Secretary of State to order a re-opening of the case, then yes. But we’d need a lot more than we’ve got so
far. We could apply for a Commission and Diligence, specifying the items we want. The fact that we know of the existence of such statements and photographs might suggest to the police that we already had copies, which would surely deter them from quietly losing anything they were unhappy about.’

  ‘We could always get fresh statements from the cyclist and the girl in the shoe shop,’ Rothstein said. ‘And Miss Carlogie.’

  ‘If we can drag the police material out into the light of day,’ Keith said, ‘it’ll be a hell of a black mark for that supercilious, arrogant bastard who dragged me into Lodge Walk and told me to lay off,’ Keith said. He glanced quickly through his notes. ‘We don’t seem to have anything fresh about those who attended the Shennilco shoot on Hugh’s first day,’ he said.

  ‘Soon, I hope,’ said Rothstein. ‘We’ve several men to reach yet. Of those we’ve spoken to so far, several were guests more than once, and even those who’ve kept game books didn’t write down the names of their fellow guests. So, each time, you get a list of the names he remembers but no indication as to which of those names were out on the same day. The task goes on and today being Saturday we may catch more of them at home.’

  ‘Hope so. We need something new. Now we come to the information on the chart,’ Keith said. ‘Our suspects. We’ll take them one at a time.

  ‘Henry Craill’s in his early forties, divorced, father of two children but doesn’t see much of them. He’s described as a rather neutral sort of character. Managing director of Subaquagalv, so he must be making a good screw, but maintenance of his ex-wife and family seems to keep him broke. He lives a quiet life in a flat off Queen’s Road, but lady visitors aren’t unknown. Occasional, social drinker. Rarely writes a cheque, deals mostly in cash which he withdraws in large amounts at long and irregular intervals. That makes it difficult to guess whether he might or might not have drawn extra to pay blackmail or to settle with Harry Snide, but his withdrawals last August and September seem to have averaged more than his usual. He’s a member of a syndicate up Deeside and does a little wildfowling in season. He shoots pigeon and rabbits at other times. He’s reckoned to be a slightly above average shot, but very rarely shoots clay pigeons which is the only sure way to judge a stranger.