Silver City Scandal

by Gerald Hammond

  Mrs Handford took the bull by the horns. ‘Suppose,’ she said, ‘that he believes me. He thinks that two baddies are after him. What do you expect him to do?’

  Keith had been bending his mind to the same question. ‘I expect him to get on the phone to Glasgow in a hurry, to get the dogs called off,’ he said. ‘You see the little man sitting near the public phones, nursing an attaché case? That case is full of electronic gear, and he swears he can record both sides of any conversation. I just hope he’s right.’

  ‘If I were in Hector Rowan’s shoes,’ the lady said, ‘and if I were guilty, I’d take a room for the night and phone from there. What then?’

  ‘We’ve got the telephonist in our pocket,’ Hugh said.

  ‘And if he changes hotels and does the same?’

  ‘Then we’ve got to hope that their telephonist fancies a fistful of fivers,’ Keith said.

  ‘Suppose he stops at a call-box in the street?’

  ‘We’ll have to get our little man close in a hurry and hope for the best,’ Keith said. ‘But it’s not likely. If you had two Glasgow killers after you, would you stop in a lighted phone booth on a dark night?’

  Mrs Handford started to speak, broke off and stared over Keith’s shoulder. ‘There he goes,’ she said.

  ‘Did he see us?’

  ‘He caught my eye and he gave you a good looking over.’

  ‘That’s good. You move into the hall now, but stay where he can’t see you. My brother-in-law – the man who looks like a hairy tree trunk – he’ll fetch you if and when Rowan’s on his own. Otherwise, try to catch him on his way out. You know what to say?’

  ‘I have it off pat. I heard one of you on the phone, using a rasping voice and a Glasgow accent and saying that Mr Rowan wouldn’t settle his debt and is to be dealt with. As a friend of his wife, I thought that he ought to know.’ She rose and swept out.

  They had only sat in tense silence for a few minutes before she was back and taking her seat. ‘His friend hadn’t turned up yet,’ she said. ‘I gave him the message.’

  ‘How did he take it?’ Hugh asked quickly.

  ‘I couldn’t tell. He just grunted. What will you do if he doesn’t bite?’

  ‘We’ll be in for a long slog,’ Keith said, ‘and with the odds against us. Now we just sit tight. Ronnie will give us the nod if he moves.’

  Mrs Handford nodded. ‘We’ll sit it out with you,’ she said. ‘But, now that I’ve done my bit, perhaps I could have a proper drink?’

  Keith got up again. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Anything you like. .You’ve earned it.’

  He left an order with the waiter and then crossed the hall to the gents. Excitement, and restricting himself to the weakest beer, had put a strain on his bladder. Relieving himself at one of a row of empty stalls, he fell into deep thought and was only vaguely aware that he had company until a hand between his shoulder blades pressed him forward and a voice spoke in his ear.

  ‘Try your tricks on somebody else, Mr Calder.’

  Rather than wet his feet, Keith put one hand out to the wall to balance himself. He glanced over his shoulder and without surprise saw Rowan’s face looming angrily above him. He recognised the rodent-like teeth and peevish lips in the photograph, but he could now see what the inadequate photograph had hidden, that the eyes were wide-set over narrow jaws.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Keith said.

  He felt the other’s impatience through the hand in his back. ‘Don’t give me that,’ Rowan said. Over the smells of germicide and air freshener, Keith smelled a blast of stale pipe smoke. ‘Sending the Handford woman to me with fatuous tales won’t get you anywhere.’ Keith thought that the voice was a few tones deeper than his own. He wondered whether to give Rowan an elbow in the gut. The man’s absolute confidence suggested that he had been in touch with Harry Snide recently and knew that McHenge and Galway were out of touch. He hoped without much hope that the phone tap had caught that call.

  ‘What a pity!’ he said mildly.

  ‘As for tapping my phone, you know that’s illegal. I could have you for that.’

  ‘It’s less illegal than conspiracy to murder,’ Keith said.

  Rowan snorted disgustedly. ‘You can’t prove a damn thing and you know it,’ he said. He leaned more weight against Keith’s back.

  ‘We can prove corruption and conspiracy,’ Keith said. His position was becoming acutely uncomfortable. ‘We broke the code on Miss Spalding’s discs. And the information’s safely stored, so don’t bother sending your friends after it again.’

  ‘I should worry! I can prove that whatever I’ve done is normal business practice in this industry. The only thing that bothers me is having it known that that bitch had me for a sucker.’ Rowan paused and then rushed on. ‘If you’ll suppress the discs, I can supply you with evidence against the two real killers. How about that?’

  ‘We’ve enough evidence against Galway and McHenge,’ Keith said, ‘but it’s no use to us on its own. We’re out to clear Hugh Donald, and it could still be presumed that he’d hired those two instead of doing the job himself. Sorry, my lad, but it’s you that’s for the high jump.’

  He felt the hand between his shoulders quiver with fury and he braced himself for a physical assault. He reminded himself that he must not kill the man, even in self-defence, or Hugh Donald’s name might never be cleared.

  Rowan hesitated again, but the fury in his mind did not find an outlet in simple violence. Instead, he leaned forward and spat copiously into Keith’s ear. Then, as the door opened and two men clattered into the echoing room, the pressure eased and he was gone.

  Keith washed his ear carefully and returned to the hall of the hotel. It was his turn now to quiver with fury.

  He stood in the hall for a minute, to get his breath, recover his temper and plot the next moves in the game. If he reported the failure of their trap while he was still angry and unprepared, Hugh would be sure that his battle was lost.

  And yet, they had taken a step forward. They could now be sure that they were in pursuit of the right quarry. Now the real grind could begin. He would lose the joy of the chase in the chore of guiding hounds.

  Manpower would be needed, to visit every gunsmith in the country, to research every minute of Rowan’s past life, to monitor his comings and goings and to follow up every tiny lead which might or might not lead anywhere. More traps must be set in the hope that Rowan would slip and convict himself. And, eventually, if they went on long enough and if Shennilco’s budget could stand the strain, somebody would say the right word. The lucky break which they so much needed would arrive, provided that someone recognised that word instead of letting it slide away again into limbo.

  Just one piece of real evidence, he thought. Give them that and they could rock Rowan off his pedestal or persuade the legal system to do it for them. But where could it be? With professional killers interposed between the real culprit and the victim, how in God’s name could guilt be proved?

  His reverie was interrupted by the appearance of the hall porter at his side. ‘It’s Mr Calder, isn’t it, sir? There’s a caller on the line for you, from overseas. Transatlantic, I think.’

  ‘I’d better take it,’ Keith said. It was probably only a customer referred from the shop.

  ‘You can take it in the last booth,’ the hall porter said.

  Keith ducked under the plastic hood and picked up the phone. ‘Hullo? Calder here.’

  The voice on the other end was unmistakably Scottish. ‘Mr Calder? I’m calling from Houston, Texas. I just flew in from Caracas. My daughter in Ayr phoned me this morning. She tells me that yesterday’s paper had an item in which you said you wanted to get in touch with me. My name’s Naulty.’

  ‘Mr Naulty, I’m delighted to hear from you,’ Keith said. ‘Can you shed any light on how the gun which Hugh Donald bought in Newton Lauder passed into other hands? You were with him at the time of the purchase, I think.’

  ‘That’s right,’ sa
id Naulty’s voice. ‘And I can tell you exactly what happened. Mr Donald kindly invited me to a shoot a few days later. Afterwards, I noticed that we seemed to have swapped guns. I intended to contact him about it but, before I could do it, the opportunity arose to come out here. Somebody who heard that I was going abroad made me an offer for the gun. The two guns were virtually identical, so I just accepted the offer. The purchaser was a man named Rowan. I explained to him about the accidental exchange and he said that he would see Mr Donald about it, but it seems that he didn’t bother. . . . Is that what you wanted to know?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I wanted to know,’ Keith said. He found that he was looking through the open doors into the bar where Rowan, in expansive mood after working off his spleen, faced him. Rowan lifted his glass in ironic salute and Keith beamed back at him.

  ‘Was the gun still as standard?’ he asked into the phone.

  ‘I’d only had the gun a month or two,’ said Naulty’s voice. ‘I was going to have the chokes opened up and the bend altered – the gun shot slightly high for me – but before I got around to it, my time in Scotland was over.’

  ‘Would you make a statement to that effect and sign it in front of a notary public?’ he said into the phone.

  ‘If you like. But I’ll be coming over to see my daughter very soon.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Keith said. ‘But let’s have the notarised statement anyway. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, would we?’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Keith was on the phone to Molly. ‘I’m coming to get you,’ he said.

  He heard her giggle, all the way from Aberfeldy. ‘I seem to have heard you say that before,’ she said. ‘Promises, promises. Can you get here? The Devil’s Elbow’s still blocked.’

  ‘I’ll get through somehow.’

  ‘Have you solved the problem of how to prove Mr Donald’s innocence?’ Molly had been kept at least partly informed through Keith’s occasional, guarded phone calls.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Brilliantly as usual,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you! Never mind, you can tell me again. But Keith, from what I read in the papers there were some Glasgow toughs after you.’

  ‘That’s all finished,’ Keith said. ‘The first pair vanished—’

  ‘Keith, you didn’t . . .?’

  ‘They’re due to make a miraculous reappearance shortly, and in highly incriminating circumstances,’ Keith said. Molly’s anxiety would not be satisfied with so bald a statement, so he went on. ‘Meantime,’ he said, ‘a friend in the Strathclyde fuzz phoned to warn me that Harry Snide had sent off a bunch of really hard cases in this direction. I asked him to have the word dropped in Harry Snide’s ear, quite truthfully, that several kilos of statements proving his client’s guilt were on the way to the Attorney General, the Secretary of State and, under embargo, the newspapers, so that Harry’s chances of getting paid for any further work were less than good. The men were back in Glasgow the same day.’

  ‘Thank the Lord for that!’ Molly said. Keith could hear the relief in her voice. ‘And will Mr Donald get a fresh hearing?’

  ‘No doubt of it,’ Keith said. ‘Prather said at first that they wouldn’t re-open the case because Hugh hadn’t in fact been convicted of anything. But we’ve tracked down some large sums of embezzled money, and the litigation required for its recovery will be impossible without the whole story being proved in court. Add the fact that we can prove conspiracy to murder against somebody else and there’s no way they can avoid a fresh hearing.’

  But it seemed that Molly’s interest was in Hugh’s prospects rather than in the intricacies of his case. ‘How’s Sheila getting on with Mr Donald?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s Jeremy Prather she seems to be setting her cap at,’ Keith said.

  ‘That lawyer with soup stains all over him?’

  ‘That’s our boy. She’s cut down his smoking, and now she’s trying to get him to go jogging with her.’

  ‘Whatever can she see in him?’ Molly asked.

  ‘He’s efficient in his way,’ Keith said, ‘once you get him going. He put together a superb set of papers for the Secretary of State almost on the nod, and now he’s already got the nuts and bolts of preparing the brief for Hugh’s counsel well in hand. That’s how I can get away.’

  ‘He may be efficient,’ said Molly’s voice, ‘but he isn’t a catch to compare with Hugh Donald.’

  ‘That’s for Sheila to worry about. And, by the bye, the woman who shared with the murder victim has a good chance of a fat reward and she’s spending it on a holiday in the Greek islands and – guess what – taking your brother Ronnie with her.’

  ‘I thought that she was supposed to prefer the company of other ladies,’ Molly said.

  ‘She seems to fancy a change. God knows, women seem to fall for the most extraordinary men at times.’

  ‘Don’t we just!’ Molly said.

  It took Keith several seconds to think of a suitably crushing retort and by that time Molly had disconnected. She knew when to make sure of the last word. Keith put his tongue out at the phone and went back to his packing.

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