Sauce For the Pigeon

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Twenty-one men,’ Keith said. He produced his sample cartridges. ‘I picked these up. All Rottweil and never been reloaded. So cross off anybody we know reloads, and put a cross against anyone we can remember buying Rottweils.’

  Five names came off the list and four crosses went on to it.

  ‘Sixteen,’ Ronnie said disgustedly. ‘And that’s not counting any we haven’t thought of. You spotted that he used an auto? You can see the wee marks of the extractor hooks.’

  Keith had not missed that point, but Ronnie needed encouragement. ‘Well done,’ said Keith. (Molly smiled secretly.) ‘Put a cross against anyone who uses an auto, or a pump twelve-bore. The firing-pin’s slightly off-centre, but I can’t hang about until he brings it in for overhaul. And next, he uses a flapper.’

  Ronnie threw down his pencil. ‘How in hell could you tell that?’

  Keith produced the scrap of string which he had picked up. It was tied in a loop of about eight inches circumference, and the tail had frayed and broken a few inches from the knot. He fetched his own flapper from his pigeon bag, a framework of stiff, green wire which formed a cradle for a dead bird. The loop of string proved to be the right length to go round the two lever arms which worked the wings, and the frayed end just reached to the ring on the supporting peg through which the string would be threaded.

  ‘We’ll give you that one,’ Janet said. ‘Who’s bought that model?’ And five more crosses went down.

  ‘There was a bit of line caught up in the tree, with a stone on the end. So he uses a lofted decoy. But it was a biggish stone. He doesn’t use a catapult, he throws a stone over.’

  Three crosses.

  ‘Notice,’ Keith said, ‘that his lofter was pulled up on a length of monofilament fishing-line. And his flapper was on braided fishing-line, although parcel string does just as well. I reckon he’s a fisherman.’

  ‘That’s g-guesswork,’ Wallace said. ‘He could have a brother or an aunt who fishes. Or he could have b-bought the stuff to use at the pigeons.’

  ‘It’s all guesswork,’ Keith said. ‘Some of these guesses may let us down. There may even be two men. But it’s worth a try. Who’s been buying fishing-tackle?’

  Janet and Wallace made eight crosses between them.

  ‘There were matches but no cigarette stubs,’ Keith said, ‘and some beer can rings. A cross for a pipe-smoker and another for a beer-drinker. And, lastly, he has a dog. A large, happy dog.’

  ‘Colour?’ Ronnie asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see any hairs. It’s the wrong season for a dog to be casting. But I noticed something I’ve seen a hundred times when I’ve had Brutus with me in a hide.’ Under the table, the dog snuffled at his own name, and they heard his tail swish across the carpet. ‘If he’s enjoying himself or he’s getting the scent of game, his tail sweeps from side to side, clearing away the leaf mould and dead grass until he’s brushed clean a quadrant of soil. That’s what I saw. And it was a big quadrant.’

  ‘Which rules out that b-bloody great retriever of Jack Smythe’s,’ Wallace said. ‘He had his t-tail docked after Jack backed the car over it.’

  When they tallied up, every man on the list had one or two crosses. Three men tied with five. But Willy Thyne – Keith’s ‘Small man with droopy moustache’ – had seven. ‘He lives up above the canal,’ Ronnie said. ‘I don’t know exactly where. But he drives for Barratt, the haulier.’

  *

  Primed with that information, it was easy for Keith to track Willy Thyne to his lair in a cottage where Newton Lauder dissolved into farmland by way of a fringe of sheds, greenhouses and pigeon-lofts. And there, the following evening, Keith found him washing up after a lonely supper. They had seen each other once or twice on minor shooting occasions. Thyne, although Keith remembered him as a reserved and introverted man, was quite willing to ask Keith inside and to offer him a drink of home-brewed beer.

  They sat on opposite sides of a coal fire, in sagging plush armchairs greasy with age. A massive golden retriever took up more than his fair share of the frayed hearthrug. It was a bachelor scene, yet homely. Molly would have itched to change it, but Keith appreciated it as it was.

  Thyne listened gravely while Keith explained. Yes, he remembered Neill Muir well. ‘I been shooting cushats on Haizert for years,’ he said. ‘Then Mr Muir did Bob Jack a favour, got him a load of concrete pipes for drainage, and for nothing. They’d have gone on the scrap heap otherwise. Mr Muir asked if he could shoot rabbit and pigeon on Haizert. Bob Jack was agreeable, but he asked me if I minded. I’d met Mr Muir, here and there, and he was all right. He was a big-wheel money man and I’m only a driver, but that never made a damn bit of difference to him. So I said that’d be fine.

  ‘He had permission to shoot half a dozen other places, so I didn’t see him all that often unless he asked me along with him, which he did once in a while. But when we met up we got along. Sometimes we’d take opposite ends of a field and keep ’em moving between us. We had good times. He liked to get out. Even after he married. . . . He said a man needed some time off. We got pissed together, once or twice.’ Thyne heaved a sigh. ‘Good times,’ he repeated.

  ‘But about a year ago he quarrelled with Bob Jack?’

  Thyne stared at him. ‘A year ago?’

  ‘Wasn’t it? That’s what Bob Jack let out.’

  ‘He was trying to throw you off. Six months, not a day more. Why would anyone be arguing about a thing like that in midwinter?’

  ‘A thing like what?’

  ‘I forgot you didn’t know.’ Thyne fell silent. ‘Another beer?’ he said at last.

  Keith handed over his tankard. He could have done without another pint of the ferocious brew, but he needed to continue the mood of quiet conviviality. He patted the dog while Thyne brought fresh supplies from the scullery.

  ‘I don’t want no trouble with Bob Jack,’ Thyne said suddenly. ‘I value my bit of shooting on Haizert.’

  ‘I value Jake Paterson,’ Keith said.

  ‘And you think he didn’t do it?’

  ‘Between ourselves . . .’ Keith outlined his reasons for disbelieving the police view of Muir’s death. To Thyne, a skilled pigeon-shooter, the arguments, which seemed only to make the lawyers’ eyes glaze over, were as clear as they were to Keith. Thyne had never met Jake and yet Jake’s innocence became, to him, incontrovertible. Keith thought that if they could only go before a jury of pigeon-shooters, Jake would be safe. A jury of maiden ladies would probably demand the return of capital punishment. Such are the vagaries of the human mind.

  ‘You think Bob Jack could’ve done it?’ Thyne asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Keith said. ‘And, frankly, I don’t care a lot. The prosecution has to convince a jury, beyond reasonable doubt, that Jake did it. If we can show a reasonable possibility that somebody else was guilty, then Jake’s home and free.’

  Thyne pondered again. ‘You’ll have a job with the timing,’ he said.

  ‘So will the prosecution. The police theory would require Neill Muir to have gone out at dawn and shot two dozen birds in the first hour over decoys.’

  Thyne leaned forward and put more coal on the fire. ‘It was this way,’ he said. ‘And, mind, I’m only telling you because Bob Jack doesn’t know I know, and you’re not to say as it was me as told you. Fair enough?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Keith said.

  ‘It must’ve been late June or early July, because I was decoying over a patch of laid barley near the west boundary. We had a nice little hide ready made, in the hedge that bounds the estate next door. I was comfortably tucked in there one Saturday morning. The birds were wanting to come in to my decoys, but they were swinging away while they were still half a field off, so I guessed that somebody was buggering about nearby where I couldn’t see him and spooking them. So I waited. There was no point in moving and adding to the kerfuffle.

  ‘Then suddenly I heard voices. I misremember the words, but Mr Muir was asking Bob Jack what Bob wa
s doing and Bob asked what he thought it looked like. And suddenly they was going at it like two dogs fighting over a bitch. I soon made out what it was about, ’cos Bob was trying to justify himself. He’d had enough of the rabbits breeding on Mowdiewort Estate and coming over the boundary to live off his crops, so ilka year he released a few myxied rabbits on that end of the land. They’d infect the others and that way he kept the damage down.

  ‘Well then, I’d no wish to be a’body’s body, but involved I did not want to be. That myxie, it’s a rotten thing, just rotten. And far’s I know it’s agin the law to spread it on purpose. If I did get involved, I’d’ve had to be on Mr Muir’s side, and then we’d both be looking for somewhere else to shoot.’ He looked into Keith’s face. ‘All right, so maybe I was a feartie. What would you have done?’

  ‘Something damn silly, most likely.’ Keith pushed aside his anger for the moment. ‘What about Mowdiewort? Do they know what’s going on?’

  ‘Not them, or if they do they don’t care. They do no farming to speak of, just a little forestry and some game crops for the pheasants. Dare say they’re just as happy to see the rabbits kept down. It’s just a commercial shooting estate with letting by the day to Continental guns. And they don’t do me any harm. Their pheasants come wandering on to Bob’s stubbles and I can count on two brace a week during the season. I may not like it but I can see Bob’s point of view.’

  Keith could only see the waste of sport and meat and the cruelty of controlling a species by means of a singularly unpleasant disease. He had seen too many rabbits crouched with popping eyes, blinded by myxomatosis, waiting for death. ‘There are procedures for forcing a neighbour to control vermin,’ he said.

  Thyne snorted. ‘There are,’ he said. ‘But from what I hear, by the time you get any joy that way, if the vermin haven’t eaten you out of house and home the lawyers have.’

  Chapter Ten

  There came another and more lasting thaw. Two days of rain were followed by weather so mild that, as Keith said, it would not have come amiss during the average summer. The ditches and burns ran full for a week and there was some flooding.

  The thaw brought an urgent reopening of the shooting season. Suddenly the shop was busy. Keith was loaded with guns overdue for attention but which had been forgotten during the big frost and the ban on wildfowling.

  The shoots also were busy. After a month spent nurturing the survival of the game birds they urgently needed to overtake their programmes, give their members some money’s worth, get birds to the market in order to defray the cost of keepering and feed, and reduce in particular the number of surplus cock pheasants which would be unnecessary consumers of food in the spring. Guns like Keith and Wallace, who could make themselves available to fill vacant places on extra days, were in demand.

  The thaw, and the sudden rush of activity, would seriously have hampered Keith’s efforts to learn any more from the ground, had he not already exhausted almost every line of enquiry which had occurred to him.

  Jake Paterson, far from being forgotten, seemed to have become the forgetter. At first peevish at his incarceration, he had been smitten by an inspiration for some further improvement to a solid-state radar system which he had once designed and which his previous employers were now selling worldwide. He was covering page after page with calculations in his precise script. His only immediate concern was for an adequate supply of pencils, paper and batteries for his calculator. His only grumble was at being separated from the computer facilities to which he was accustomed. Prisoners on remand, he found to his disgust, were not allowed access to the Police National Computer even if they had designed parts of it themselves. He also warned Mr Enterkin that his release must, repeat must, be obtained before he reached the stage for prototype work, of which he promised to give adequate warning.

  Christmas came and went, and the New Year. Jake was furnished with special treats by his friends. It was reported that he had laid his presents aside, to be opened when he was less busy.

  *

  Keith had been subjected to periodic inquisitions by Mr Enterkin, so when he heard the solicitor’s voice on the phone one morning early in January he expected to be summoned again to the latter’s office.

  Mr Enterkin, as was his occasional habit, managed to surprise him. ‘I wish to come pigeon-shooting with you,’ he said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Wish was perhaps the wrong word. Say rather “feel duty bound”. From what you tell me, it sounds like the last resort of a mind enfeebled by either sadism or masochism, possibly both. But counsel keeps asking me technical questions concerning the matters in your precognition, questions which I am quite unable to answer.’

  ‘You’ve briefed the wrong counsel,’ Keith said. ‘Many QCs do shoot. One of them came out to buy a pair of matched Dicksons off me last September.’

  ‘We tried to find one with suitable experience, but without avail. Advocates cream off the fat of the legal professions,’ Mr Enterkin’s voice said, with just a hint of wistful resentment. ‘I am told that the more expensive syndicates each contain at least one silk. Solicitors must content themselves with so-called rough shooting. That is the correct term?’

  ‘Rough is right,’ Keith said.

  ‘Ah. And so we decided that I would be better able to fill in the details of the brief if I had seen on the ground those esoteric activities which you have been describing with the enthusiasm of Rabelais, the clarity of Schopenhauer and the credibility of Baron Munchausen.’

  ‘You can come out with me and welcome,’ Keith said, ‘if only you’ll promise to shut up for a bit.’

  ‘When?’

  Keith was sick of indoors. His tape player was on the blink and was too expensive to entrust to anyone but Jake for repair. The radio offered him a choice between a religious programme and German songs – Take me to your lieder, he thought irritably. He was doing a fiddly job for his least favourite customer, but otherwise he had overtaken his backlog. ‘Like now?’ he suggested.

  ‘Today is quiet,’ Mr Enterkin agreed.

  ‘I’ll pick you up in the square. Warm clothes and no bright colours.’

  *

  Mr Enterkin’s enthusiasm, tepid at best, barely survived in the passenger seat of Keith’s car parked up a side road south and east of Newton Lauder. From the higher ground, Keith was scanning the land south of the town through his binoculars.

  ‘If God wanted to give the year an enema,’ he muttered, ‘this is when he’d stick the tube in.’

  ‘It’s a lovely day,’ Mr Enterkin said.

  ‘Too late for stubbles. The kale’s about gone. We’re just too early to catch them on oilseed rape, and seeding won’t start until next month at the earliest. There’s nothing in particular to attract them.’

  ‘I thought that’s what the decoys were for.’

  ‘The birds have got to be around before you can decoy them. The few I can see are on grass. So they’re taking clover, and one pasture’s as good as another. There’s a vestige of a flight-line down Kyneburn Strip. We’ll try there.’

  They drove down the hill. Mr Enterkin waited again while Keith walked across a field to confer with a man on a tractor. Then they rolled gently up a rough track and found a space to park between the track and a ditch, just clear of a gate. Keith collected a bag, a gun and the dog from the back of the car and they set off. Their route lay between a small stream and a hedgerow punctuated by occasional trees.

  ‘I thought you chaps carried a lot more gear than this,’ Mr Enterkin said.

  ‘Some do. Jake always humps about three bags, with hide poles sticking up like antennae. Me, I like to travel light. The farmer says there are one or two cock pheasants, by the way, and he doesn’t mind if we have a go. Gaudy birds with long tails. Now this,’ Keith said, ‘seems as good a place as any other.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  Keith pointed to a small group of hollies. ‘We have our hide half made. Pigeon feathers suggest that somebody else
has scored here within the last few days. And there are pigeon droppings around the bottom of that big fir, so that’s where they like to sit and take a look around. And if I were a pigeon I’d like the place.’

  Mr Enterkin looked around him. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know why. Just accumulated experience, I suppose.’ From his bag, Keith took a length of green garden-net of very large mesh and draped it over the more obvious gaps between the hollies.

  ‘That won’t hide us, will it?’

  ‘You are going to thread dried grass into it.’

  ‘But I don’t want to miss any of the – er – technicalities.’

  Keith sighed. ‘I’ll do it. You can stand and admire. Or try your hand at setting out decoys on their sticks. About thirty yards out on to the grass.’

  By the time Keith was satisfied with the hide he saw that Mr Enterkin had set out the dozen half-shell plastic decoys, each bobbing gently in the breeze on the rubber tip of its stick. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘They’re a bit tight-packed. And no bird ever stood with its arsehole up-wind, or followed directly behind another. You take the crow away out towards that thistle while I move one or two. Crows are canny beggars, so their presence reassures pigeon.’

  Mr Enterkin trotted obediently out into the field and back, puffing slightly. He studied the pattern. ‘It does look more natural,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know why.’

  ‘I’ll tell you why. It’s because it has the look of a real flock. How we get that difference over to a jury is for you to worry about.’

  ‘I’m worrying,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘What did you think I was doing?’

  ‘Now the lofter,’ Keith said. ‘This is how I do it.’ He reeled off many yards of nylon fishing-line on to the short grass, attached a lead weight to the end and with a practised flick of the catapult sent the weight over the tip of a high branch. ‘Some use poles and some throw a stone over. Catapults take a certain knack if your weight isn’t going to fankle itself up.’ Keith attached his solid-bodied decoy to the line, pulled it up and made it fast. ‘That looks pretty good. Muir’s lofter looked to be too high for stone-throwing, except by a giant or a cricketer. You’re sure it wasn’t cricket that Mrs Muir excelled at?’