Silver City Scandal

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘His only gun is still an Armas Alicante sidelock, but that could be a second-hander he bought to replace the murder weapon. Sometimes buys cheap cartridges but also reloads his own. Reputed to be careless with a gun; fellow members of the syndicate have spoken to him once or twice about that.

  ‘His ex-wife seems to’ve had no reservations in speaking about him – I hope no ex-wife ever talks about me like that – and she also produced a good likeness of him.’ Keith pointed to a framed photograph of a balding man in tweeds leaning against the back of a car. ‘As far as I could judge, he’d fit that gun although he shoots off the right shoulder. Definitely right-handed, for what that is or isn’t worth. Not a smoker although he does very occasionally accept a cigar if pressed. He’s been on more than one Shennilco shoot. And, other than some comments by his ex-wife about his sexual habits, that’s all we know about him.

  ‘Rowan, on the other hand, is right-handed but shoots off the left shoulder because of a fault in his right eye. As far as we know he’s never shot with Shennilco. He also is a syndicate member, Donside this time, and in summer he fishes and sometimes shoots clay pigeons well enough to win the occasional competition. Primarily, he’s a driven pheasants man. Nobody commented on his style, but being very long armed his hand could be off the fore-end without his arm looking unnaturally straight. Pipe smoker. Aged forty-two. Married, no children and lives in a house in Cults. Described as irascible and inclined to ride roughshod over people. And he looks it.’ Keith nodded to a group of snapshots of a dark haired man who seemed to greet each photographer with an individual scowl. ‘He certainly buys cheap cartridges, loaded in Taiwan or somewhere.

  ‘Physically, he could fit that gun although the photographs seem to suggest that he’s got more chest than I’d expect. That gun might have bruised him on the pectoral muscle unless he adopts a leaning forward stance, which he may well do. He splashed out and had a new Dickson sidelock built to fit him recently, and nobody seems to know whether he still has his Armas Alicante gun.

  ‘He makes money and lives pretty high. He drew out a lot of money between August and November, but he’s known to gamble so that may not be significant.

  ‘Then there’s Tom Marstone, the only one to have a known connection with Glasgow where he was born and where he visits an elderly relative about once a month. Which means no more than that he had an improved chance of being put in touch with Harry Snide. Aged thirty-two. he lives in a flat, Duthie Park direction, with a young lady whom he refers to as his wife although Shennilco had him down as unmarried when he worked here. His withdrawals from the bank are highly irregular, probably because his lady friend is a freelance artist who makes her income in large lumps but not very often. So it’s impossible to say whether he’s still on the take and whether he’s been hiring thugs as well as making the contributions to Miss Spalding’s retirement fund which showed up on the disc. He doesn’t shoot, but he’s a compulsive smoker of anything that burns.

  ‘His cousin, Brian Smelly, fits the physical description adequately. He used to buy cheap, foreign cartridges but gave them up. Shoots vermin, wildfowl and clay pigeons and is reckoned a first class shot. Shoots off the right shoulder. He usually has about six or seven guns, to suit his different sports, and he’s always chopping and changing – nobody so far remembers seeing the Armas Alicante sidelock since last summer, but summer’s when he’d be using it for pigeon and rabbits; he’s the sort of man who’d go wildfowling with a magnum and have several trap guns to suit the different disciplines. He seems to have been a guest of Shennilco but, it’s thought, not until very recently. He paid some cash into his bank during September, which could have been the sale of any damn gun, not necessarily the murder weapon.

  ‘And,’ Keith said, ‘that’s about the lot that’s any use. We have a great deal more gossip which may come in handy if and when fresh questions arise but, for the moment, those seem to be the relevancies. And, as far as legal proof goes, it could still be any one of them, if it’s not somebody else.’

  Somebody sighed. There was a dispirited silence while a girl from the typing pool brought in a note for Rothstein and another for Keith. The others stared at the chart, hoping that the words and squares would form themselves into a face.

  ‘No help here,’ Rothstein said. He crumpled the note and threw it on the floor. ‘We’ve reached a man who was on the shoot with Naulty. He remembers everybody. Where he can’t remember a name, he gives a description or some other identification. It’s clear that neither Rowan nor Craill nor Marstone’s cousin were among those present.’

  The silence was longer and even less happy. Hugh Donald broke it. ‘Right back to square one,’ he said sadly. ‘You did your best, Keith, but it’s no go. I’d better start looking for another job.’

  ‘If you’re a quitter, you’d be better in another job,’ Rothstein said. ‘But you may care to remember that, before we underwrote this investigation, we had you sign an agreement to stay with the company for five years. The company’ll decide whether you go or not. And we’re not dead yet. There’s other ways guns get passed from hand to hand.’

  ‘True,’ Keith said. ‘But the traffic in second-hand guns is constant and unrecorded.’

  ‘Well, don’t give up yet,’ Sheila told Hugh. ‘I still think it’s Mr Rowan. Even in the good photograph, he looks as if he’d kill his mother if she annoyed him.’

  ‘You may even be right, honey,’ Rothstein said, ‘but, around here, you got no vote.’ Sheila reddened but compressed her lips in silence.

  Keith jumped in quickly. ‘I’d like to plump for Craill myself,’ he said. ‘After umpty years of fitting guns to men and men to guns, I can usually put my hand into the rack and pull out the one which will fit a customer. And without thinking about it. The one looks like the other, if you understand me. All three men look like that gun, near as you can judge from photographs, but Craill looks more like it than Rowan or Smelly.

  ‘But, on balance of probabilities, I’ve got to say that Rowan’s our boy. Even for a good shot, that gun would be unsuitable for either of the others; but it could suit a driven game man who goes in for high pheasants. Either of the others would have had the chokes opened out, to give a better chance at snap shots at closer targets.

  ‘Also, when I heard about his new gun, I phoned a friend at Dickson’s. That note was a telephoned message from him. He’s only just managed to look up the details of Rowan’s new gun. Heavily choked in both barrels, and the same angle at the butt as the murder gun. To my mind, that clinches it.’

  ‘You could be right or you could be wrong,’ said Rothstein, ‘but you sure as hell don’t have enough to persuade me to commit us to illegal surveillance.’

  ‘Shit!’ Hugh Donald said. ‘Begging your pardon, Sheila. But for Christ’s sake, Ken! Before you’ll sanction a real investigation, you want the sort of information only that sort of action will bring out. Morton’s bloody fork!’

  Rothstein shrugged. ‘That’s the way it is,’ he said. ‘The Old Man’s prepared to go all the way within reason, but there’s a limit.’

  ‘Agreement or no agreement,’ Hugh said very quietly, ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

  The silence came back. Keith could hear sounds on the floor below, traffic outside and the cry of a gull as it hung on the wind.

  ‘We do know one more thing,’ Jeremy said suddenly. ‘Something which we haven’t resolved and which might pin it down. Our man passed a note which carried an impression of the word Winnigstadt. We still don’t know what it means but it sounds German. Craill’s firm uses a German process,’ he added.

  ‘We’ll follow that up,’ Keith said. ‘But we need something new. A fresh fact. Or a deus ex machina.’

  ‘Would I do for that?’ enquired a voice from the doorway.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Bloody unlikely,’ Keith said.

  The Land Rover eccentrically parked below might pass, on its better days, for a machine, but anything less like a
classical god than his brother-in-law Keith had yet to see. Ronnie, who was unshaven and wearing a dirty old shooting coat instead of a dressing gown, was clearly in the terminal stages of hangover.

  And yet there was about him an air of placid satisfaction quite unlike the jubilant pride which usually marked a successful quest. It took Keith only a few seconds to recognise the symptoms. His brother-in-law had scored with a lady.

  Ronnie was quite unabashed at his deplorable condition. ‘You’ll just need to do the best you can,’ he said, ‘because I’m all you’ve got. I came down to tell you not to beat your brains out. Yon mannie Rowan’s your lad. Christ, you needn’t have fetched me a’ the way through a blizzard from Dawnapool to tell you that! I could ha’ telled you o’er the phone if you’d asked me and gi’en me what you’d got.’ Having said what he’d come to say he broke off and blinked around the room. ‘The one time I need coffee,’ he said, ‘and the first time I’ve seen this room and it no’ full of the stuff.’

  Sheila started to get up and then sat down again. Duty called, but curiosity called more loudly. Keith sympathised. ‘Coffee’s the reward you get after you’ve told us all about it,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, ye bogger,’ said Ronnie, but he lowered himself carefully into a chair. ‘It was this way. There’s a pest control action group right enough. The chairman’s a retired general who’s laird of a great skelp of useless land on the wrong slope of the hill, up by Forest of Birse. He put me onto his grieve, who does the real trauchle.

  ‘There was nae doubt I’d found the right man. That grieve knew all that was going on in Grampian and half Tayside, and what he didna’ ken he got out of the minutes. I’d fetched along a map and he’d soon marked off the areas where there’d been the myxy around just then. And he ticked them off by whether or no they used Cymag around those parts. For rabbits I mean, no’ for salmon.

  ‘After he made some phone calls, to check whether this laird or that would let a poisoned or myxied rabbit go off the place, and also crossed out those he was sure were on sandy soil, we’d narrowed it down to four patches.

  ‘He suggested I speak wi’ a big agricultural contractor who does the drilling on a whole lot of farms and who’d ken for sure where you’d find the heavy clay. He phoned the man’s home for me and found that, the time o’ year being quiet, the man wasn’t working but was taking his dinner in a posh hotel in Banchory. The grieve came wi’ me, just to be sure I found the place.’

  ‘I bet,’ Keith said.

  ‘We had a dram or two with the contractor mannie,’ Ronnie said. ‘An’ he telled us that, out of the places we’d picked, the likeliest was an area around Ellon which is worked by a pair of trappers.

  ‘I set off again – the roads was terrible – and I never did find one of those men, but I caught the other at last, in the back room of a wee pub near Oldmeldrum, and he could speak for the both of them – after I’d loosened him up with a few more drams.

  ‘He said that they mostly sold snared rabbits to the butchers, but they’re made to use Cymag when the infestation’s bad. And the shops’ll no’ take a rabbit that shows signs of the myxy. They’re not so keen on gassed ones either. So those were sold to a hotel which goes in for traditional foods — venison and the like of that.’

  Keith felt his stomach in revolt. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that a respectable hotel would buy rabbits which had got myxomatosis and had then been gassed with cyanide?’

  ‘Why not?’ Ronnie asked reasonably. ‘There’s neither of them does any harm to the meat. I eat them myself,’ he added, as if that settled the matter.

  Keith had once seen his brother-in-law eat a cowpat for a bet, so he was less than reassured. ‘It’s revolting,’ he said. ‘And I’ll bet the Environmental Health folk would do their bloody nuts. But never mind. Get on with the tale.’

  ‘You’re o’er pernickety,’ Ronnie said. ‘Anyway, I was off on my travels again and it was still snowing on the higher ground. I was glad I’d got the Land Rover. I was in four wheel drive the most of the way.

  ‘I found yon hotel at last, and had another dram for the cold before I spoke to the woman that does the buying of the game and suchlike. She’d been at the desk but she was just coming off, so we had something to eat together.’

  ‘And to drink,’ Sheila said.

  ‘That was later. By then, I’d barely had enough to wet my lips. I’d no need to show her the photies of Rowan, she knew the mannie fine. She’d never seen any of the other three afore. But Rowan had been to stay at the hotel for the fishing or shooting, and he’d been to dinner there with some businessmen just a day or two before the lady was killed. One of the men had had the rabbit pie, and afterwards Rowan spoke to her. He asked for the recipe and he bought just the one rabbit out of the hotel’s freezer although the recipe called for more.’

  Hugh Donald put back his head and looked at the ceiling. ‘That’s more like it,’ he said. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’

  Sheila slipped out of the room.

  Keith was frowning. ‘There’s got to be more,’ he said.

  ‘Not a damn bit,’ Ronnie said. ‘Not what you’re after.’

  ‘Then how did you get so snockered?’

  ‘Och well,’ Ronnie said bashfully. ‘The lady was glad enough to get a lift home with her bicycle, and she kens fine how to make a man feel good.’

  The penny dropped at last. ‘Bicycle?’ Keith said. ‘You don’t mean that that was Miss Carlogie?’

  ‘Aye, that’s the woman. A gran’ body. To look at her, you’d think her a dried up old towdie, but you’d be wrong. I’m thinking I’ll be back that way again.’

  Jeremy Prather was laughing. ‘You said you’d got everything she knew,’ he said to Keith.

  ‘I dined at the hotel the other night,’ Keith said plaintively. ‘I had the rabbit pie.’ But it came to him that any harm would have been over and done with by now, and he shrugged. ‘They do it in milk, with bacon and mushrooms,’ he said. ‘It was delicious. But what I meant, Ron, was that you couldn’t have told us this over the phone. You didn’t know it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ronnie said. ‘It was only when I walked in the door just now I heard you talking about Winnigstadt. That’d’ve been enough to put me onto the mannie Rowan who, you told me yourself, supplies food to oil rigs.’

  Keith fought aside an urge to tear his own hair or Ronnie’s. His brother-in-law often had that effect on him. ‘Stop blethering,’ he said, ‘and tell us. Do you know where Winnigstadt is?’

  Ronnie grinned unbeautifully. ‘This time of year it’s all over the place,’ he said. ‘Winnigstadt’s a winter cabbage. Aabody kens that.’

  ‘We can’t be sure that the note was made in connection with business,’ Jeremy said. ‘He could have been buying seeds for his garden.’

  ‘Rowan’s the only one of our suspects who has a garden,’ Keith pointed out. ‘The others live in flats.’

  Ken Rothstein got to his feet. ‘That’s good enough,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and see who we know who can tap phones.’

  *

  On the evening of that same day, Keith was back in the lounge of Gregor’s Hotel with a small and ostensibly sociable party.

  It had been a hectic afternoon. Jeremy Prather had vanished with Sergeant Tooker to meet some disreputable acquaintance of the latter who could arrange technical but highly illegal surveillance of Mr Rowan, his house and his telephone. Hugh Donald and Keith had gone in search of the most willing and suitable person to lay the bait.

  Ronnie, after an hour’s sleep, had joined two of Shennilco’s security men in keeping watch on the Rowan house. Sheila, protesting that she wanted to see some of the action and that, the day being Saturday, her time was her own, had wanted to join the watchers, but instead had been put in charge of the liaison arrangements which would be necessary if and when Rowan cast up at some suitable place.

  But they had encountered one of their rare strokes of luck. The first message intercepted by the wire tap
had been an arrangement by Rowan to meet a friend for a drink at Gregor’s during the evening. This had allowed the team a respite and, more importantly, had enabled the party to assemble convincingly in advance of Rowan’s arrival.

  Ronnie, as the unknown face, had been detached for shadowing duty and was yawning in a corner of the bar. Jeremy had asked to be excused – his help, he said, would be more valuable in rescuing the others from the consequences of actions which would undoubtedly stray far beyond the bounds of legality.

  Keith and Hugh Donald occupied a corner of the lounge. They were accompanied by Sheila and a pretty but silent typist from Shennilco, and by Mr and Mrs Handford. Mr Handford, an executive of middle rank from Shennilco’s Finance Department, was along as a mildly interested spectator. His wife, a statuesque woman of well-preserved middle age, was very much involved. She had provided many of the details in Rowan’s dossier and, although she had tried to be impartial, her mistrust of the man had been evident. In particular, she had damned his treatment of his wife. Keith had wondered whether she might not be a classic example of the woman scorned and so might refuse to move against him.

  Mrs Handford had soon put his mind at rest. ‘Emily would be better off without that bastard,’ she had said briskly. ‘He’s more than capable of all you’re thinking. And if he’s innocent – which I suppose is possible – there’ll be no harm done.’

  Keith had arranged the seating with some care, in a position where anyone heading for the bar must see them. Mrs Handford was to be the only person to meet Rowan’s eye, but he would see Keith and Hugh in profile.

  They had arrived early and Mr Rowan was late for his appointment. They nursed innocuous drinks while conversation faltered and died.