Hook or Crook

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘So it would not be out of character,’ Tony said slowly, ‘if, after a quarrel, he returned to renew it a day later?’

  ‘A day later or a year later, either would be more in character than for him to pursue a quarrel at the time.’

  ‘This is very helpful,’ Tony said. ‘Believe me. Please . . .’

  He stopped as voices in the bar broke in on his flow. The door was thrown open roughly enough to bang against the nearest chair and DCI Fergusson made an ungraceful entrance. Jean Bruce could be seen hovering anxiously behind in the background. He slammed the door, blotting her out.

  Tony McIver jumped to his feet.

  ‘Sit down,’ Fergusson said. ‘I’ve come to take over.’ He scowled at Eric and me. ‘I might have guessed that you two would be here.’ He looked enquiringly at Helena Walton.

  ‘Mrs Walton is Mr Hollister’s daughter,’ Tony said. ‘As it was Mr Bell and Mr James who found her father’s body —’

  ‘I understand that you identified him,’ Fergusson said to her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps we should leave you to it,’ I suggested again.

  This time it was Mrs Walton who said, ‘Please don’t go.’ It sounded like a sincere cry for support. I guessed that she had recognized Fergusson as a bully and that Tony’s youth and rank were against him. Eric obviously had every intention of staying to lend her his support, so I sat back to await events.

  Fergusson shrugged and dropped heavily into a chair that Tony had placed for him.

  ‘You won’t have seen the report I faxed this morning, sir,’ Tony said.

  Fergusson held out his hand and took the offered pages. ‘You copied this to Aberdeen?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Carry on with whatever you were up to while I read this.’ He began to flick over the pages.

  ‘Please go on,’ Tony said to Mrs Walton.

  ‘But I don’t know what to tell you,’ she said, still plaintive. ‘I don’t know as much about him as I should. I loved him but we were never close, and now it’s too late. When I was young, he seemed remote. I see now that he just didn’t know how to speak to a young girl — a child and a middle-aged bank manager, we had no subject in common. And when I grew up neither of us could break down that barrier.’

  ‘Try,’ Tony said. ‘Tell us what you do know.’

  She looked reflectively up at the ceiling. ‘He worked abroad for most of his working life, but I expect you knew that. Almost entirely in the Middle East, managing branches of the English bank. They did a lot of ordinary high-street banking, but latterly he seemed to act as a pipeline for money between London and the sheiks, caliphs and oil companies. Mummy always went with him. So did I, when I was young. It made life very difficult when I was sent back to school in Britain. Fluent Arabic isn’t much use when you have to tackle your GCEs.’

  ‘How did he get along with the Arabs?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Very well. Very well indeed, most of the time. He had to be moved away from one of his first posts, he told me once, because he took the Arabs’ side against the Israelis in any arguments. In Haifa, it was. After that, they were always in the Arab countries.’

  I nearly interrupted, but Tony was up with me. ‘You said “most of the time”. Not always?’

  ‘No, not always. About four years ago, Mummy was injured. It was a terrorist car-bomb, one faction going after another they decided later. It went off just outside their house. At first, it was thought that they might have been after Daddy, but it turned out that it had gone off prematurely and they were never quite sure what the target was to have been. The terrorists couldn’t tell anybody anything, they were in bits.

  ‘Mummy wrote to me that what upset him most was that the kitchen was flattened and if she’d been in it she would certainly have been killed. They were a very close couple. After that incident, he was unsettled. They might not have been so lucky, next time.’

  Mrs Walton’s voice and her story were so compelling that it was only when she paused that I saw that the door had opened again. The newest arrival was a man, as tall as Eric but so lean that Eric would have made three of him. He had grey hair, a saintly face spoiled by a nose which had once been broken and badly set, and mild eyes which I realized only later missed nothing. His summer suit was made to measure, contrasting with Tony’s jacket and flannels and Fergusson’s ill-fitting tweeds.

  ‘McIver?’ he said. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Goth.’ He was so unlike his name that for a moment I disbelieved him.

  Tony snapped to his feet. Chief inspectors might only have been sent to try him, but it seemed that detective chief superintendents ranked only a little lower than God and were much less approachable. ‘I’m McIver,’ he said. He managed to remember our names. ‘Crucial witnesses,’ he said. He introduced DCI Fergusson last. ‘I was in the process of getting a statement from Mrs Walton,’ Tony added.

  ‘I came through to take over,’ Fergusson said.

  ‘Not on my patch, you don’t,’ Goth said, quite amiably. ‘Carry on, young man.’

  Somebody, possibly myself, made a small sound of surprise and amusement. Fergusson flushed darkly.

  ‘You explained that a near-miss from a terrorist bomb unsettled your parents,’ Tony said. ‘Please go on.’

  ‘The bank was very sympathetic. Anyway, he was coming up to the retirement age for overseas staff. The bank gave him his pension and he brought Mummy home. They settled in Surrey and they were happy.’ She dabbed her eyes again and blew her nose. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being silly. They were happy. They had a large garden which they were developing together. And they both enjoyed fishing. Sometimes they’d do trips together in the motor-caravan, visiting the famous fishing rivers.

  ‘And Daddy had some roe-stalking. When he went stalking, Mummy would go up to London for some shopping. Sometimes she came to visit me, but just as often she’d stay at the Overseas Club.

  ‘That’s where she was killed, in a stupid road accident and by a drunken driver, not many yards from the club. She had been to see a show with two old schoolfriends and she was crossing the street when she was knocked down by a car. She lived for another three days and Daddy was distraught. It was almost a relief to us all when she died.

  ‘He went very quiet after that, became a bit of a recluse. We tried to bring him out of it. I made an effort to get closer to him at last and I honestly think that it helped him, but he refused all invitations and was cold towards his old friends when they went to see him. So when he rang up and said that he was going on a salmon-fishing trip to Deeside, we hoped that he was getting over it at last. He could have had years left and . . . and people do manage to enjoy their lives when they’re left alone. Mummy would never have wanted him to be unhappy. She wouldn’t have minded if he’d married again. She loved him too much to grudge him anything that would comfort him. Then this goes and happens.’

  Her voice broke on the last word. We looked at each other and up at the ceiling, to give her time to recover. Eric was blinking furiously. The bar next door was open and the sound of conversation filtered into the room from a different world.

  ‘And the driver?’ Tony asked gently. ‘Was he ever caught?’

  She took a few more seconds to gather her wits and bring her voice under control. ‘Oh yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘Although there was even doubt about that. They stopped. They had to, she was being dragged along under the car. The boss-man had been at a reception and he had champagne where his blood should have been, but they swore that his companion was driving — chauffeur or security man or something — although the club night-porter, who saw the whole thing, was sure that the boss came out of the driver’s door. A whole lot of his compatriots turned up later, prepared to back up his story, but the porter said that the street looked empty when it happened. Not that it would have made much difference,’ she added bitterly. ‘They had diplomatic immunity, the pair of them. The Foreign Office sniffed around for a while, but they didn’t want a diplomatic
incident at what they said was rather a sensitive time and the whole thing was hushed up. Can you imagine that? They kill somebody, but because they’re diplomatic they can’t be touched! That, I think, hurt Daddy as much as anything — that justice couldn’t or wouldn’t even punish the culprit.’

  We were so taken up with the impact of her story that the implications of what she was telling us dawned only slowly. Her voice, choking again, had come to a halt before I caught Eric’s eye and then looked at Tony, to find that he was looking at me.

  The question that had to be asked hung, almost audibly, in the air, but before Tony could bring himself to ask it DCI Fergusson dropped the report carelessly on a table. ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘So the late Mr Hollister had every reason to hate Arabs. He had a fight with an Arab. He went to confront him again and ended belly-up in a river, begging your pardon, Mrs Walton. I don’t think that we need look any further.’

  ‘I think we should look a whole lot further,’ Tony said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, I think —’

  ‘Would everybody like coffee?’ I asked hastily, getting up.

  ‘Very much,’ said Goth. ‘Thank you. And would you ask the hotel if they can do me a late breakfast or a bar snack? I was fetched out of my bed at three this morning and I haven’t eaten since.’ Eric looked horrified at the very idea of such privation.

  As I escaped from the room, Fergusson was beginning a lecture to Tony. Acting detective constables, I gathered, were neither paid nor expected to think.

  A few minutes later, when I returned, DCI Fergusson was still winding himself up into a temper but seemed to be running short of words. Eric and Mrs Walton looked acutely embarrassed, the chief superintendent looked amused and Tony, only half attending to his superior, had written something in block capitals in his notebook and shown it to Mrs Walton. She nodded.

  ‘Breakfast had finished,’ I said, ‘but the bar is about to open. They’ll bring you a toasted sandwich whenever it’s ready.’

  ‘Thank you. Next,’ Goth said, ‘I’d like to hear the rest of what Mrs Walton has to say and I want McIver here while she says it. But I want to test this Mr Vahhaji’s version of events.’ He looked at Fergusson and then his eyes moved on. ‘Would you help me out by asking him to join us?’ He was looking at me.

  ‘Of course.’ It seemed for the moment that I was an honorary member of the team. I took the slip of paper with Vahhaji’s phone number that Tony offered me and left the small room again.

  The message was not one that I wanted to broadcast from the pay-phone in the hall. I asked Mrs Bruce for an outside line and went up to my room. Imad Vahhaji’s phone rang and rang but it remained unanswered. If he had not taken flight he was either lying very low indeed or he was listening to his hi-fi through his headphones again. I went in search of Jean Bruce and found her laying the tables in the dining-room for Sunday lunch. When I asked her to relay the Detective Chief Superintendent’s message, her voice shot up an octave in panic.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘Between ourselves I think there’s a good chance he’ll get his passport back today. And you needn’t pay too much heed to the threats. Any violence offered to him now would be counter-productive.’

  ‘What?’ As Bea had said, she was not very bright.

  ‘Nobody has any reason to hurt him.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Positive,’ I said, hoping to God that I was right.

  ‘This isn’t a trick? They’re not going to arrest him?’

  ‘If they were,’ I pointed out, ‘they’d have gone to his house, not invited him to meet them in the nearest pub.’

  ‘It isn’t a pub, it’s a hotel.’ She calmed down and began to remove her apron. ‘Very well. I’ll go and fetch him.’

  ‘Tell him to wait in the bar until I call him,’ I told her.

  ‘In the bar?’ I could hear panic back in her voice.

  ‘Tell him that if anybody bothers him,’ I said, ‘he only has to move through into the small coffee room. Or just shout. One yell, and five large men will come to his rescue.’

  She looked at me hesitantly, probably wondering if I counted myself among the large men and whether I was large enough, but in the end she went. Perhaps she was remembering that Eric was large enough for both of us.

  Chapter Ten

  I knew that somebody had visited the small coffee room during my second absence because the Detective Chief Superintendent was eating a toasted cheese sandwich with every sign of enjoyment, watched in silence by the other four. The coffee was almost finished but I managed to extract most of a cupful from the pot.

  Around Tony there was an air of suppressed jubilation. ‘Mrs Walton confirms it,’ he told me. ‘The car that knocked her mother down belonged to His Excellency Abdolhossein Mohammed Flimah.’

  ‘That doesn’t change anything,’ Fergusson said repressively. ‘So Hollister had even more reason to hate Arabs. What he may have intended to do is neither here nor there. We have more chance of getting a conviction against Vahhaji.’

  Goth finished his sandwich and wiped his mouth and fingers with a white handkerchief. ‘Not on the basis of what we’ve got so far,’ Goth said.

  ‘Let me interview him,’ Fergusson persisted. ‘I can get you the rest.’

  Goth regarded the Detective Chief Inspector with increased dislike. ‘Be careful what you say, Chief Inspector, especially in the presence of members of the public. Comments like that can be misinterpreted. A conviction at any price may look good in the statistics, but what we’re after is, first, the truth; second, justice; third, a conviction. If in the process we come out smelling of roses, that’s a bonus.’

  The Detective Chief Superintendent’s tone was mild and his words were no more than a gentle admonition, but I guessed that coming from an officer of considerable seniority they constituted a severe rebuke. Fergusson looked down at his fingernails in silence.

  ‘Let’s see where we’ve got to so far,’ Goth said. ‘I suspect, not quite far enough. Yet. Not that I’m decrying your work, McIver,’ he added. ‘Your fax was on my desk just before I left to come here. It’s a good report. You’ve used your initiative to good effect, you give credit to others when it’s due and when you haven’t had the help that was due you don’t bellyache or even make the point in writing. That’s a good attitude. Any time you want to transfer to Grampian, I can find you a place in the CID. I mean it and I’ll remember.’ Tony flushed with pleasure.

  Fergusson looked up sharply. ‘Mr Goth,’ he said. ‘I’m on your patch so I’ve had to take what you’ve dished out, whether I agreed with it or not, but you’re going too far if you think that you can try to tempt one of my best men away from me. Anyway, the boy’s an idiot.’ As soon as the words were out, Fergusson must have seen the conflict between his last two sentences. He turned brick-red and closed his mouth as tight as a trap.

  Goth smiled but refrained from scoring the point. ‘According to Mrs Walton,’ he continued, ‘her mother was injured by a terrorist bomb, which understandably put an end to her father’s love affair with the Arab people. Then her mother was killed, and by another Arab. To add fuel to the flames of his wrath, it seems that she could have jumped clear except that she was still lame from the earlier injury. It seems very likely that the ambassador was driving but, whoever was at the wheel, it’s enough that Mr Hollister believed that he knew who was responsible for Mrs Hollister’s death — and that the culprit was avoiding justice by hiding behind his diplomatic immunity.

  ‘So far so good. But all that we’ve shown is that Mr Hollister could well have had a chip on his shoulder where the Arab people were concerned which might have led him into conflict with one or more of them. We’ll see this Mr Vahhaji soon, once I’m quite sure what I want to ask him, but at the moment I don’t have the same hopes of him as a possible suspect as does Detective Chief Inspector Fergusson.

  ‘First, let’s consider the implications throw
n up by the last item in McIver’s report. The rifle.

  ‘Let’s suppose that Mr Hollister decided to take justice into his own hands. Mrs Walton, how does that square with your father’s character?’

  For what seemed a full minute, Mrs Walton sat with her head bowed. ‘He was a very gentle man,’ she said at last, quietly. ‘Normally, he wouldn’t have hurt a fly. But my mother’s death destroyed the father I knew. He couldn’t put it out of his mind. He was a different man; and that man, yes, given the time that would be needed for his anger to ferment he would have been capable of . . . what you’re suggesting. Is it . . . only a suggestion? I understood that there was some question of salmon poachers.’

  ‘I think not,’ Goth said. ‘I expect to hear shortly that the poachers have been accounted for.’

  ‘Very well, then. We can suppose that Mr Hollister found it difficult to get near his man in London. He had a rifle but no weapon that would be more easily concealed. The ambassador was in the habit of escaping up here and fishing the Dee whenever he could get away. It would not be difficult to find out when and where a man with such a public profile was planning to take a holiday, especially for Mr Hollister who was fluent in Arabic. The facts are that Mr Hollister booked the adjoining beat and arrived a week ahead, thinly disguising his identity with an assumed name. A further fact is that his rifle was found hidden, right at the boundary between the beats. Rather than have to carry it to and fro in full view, we can guess that Mr Hollister smuggled it into position by night and left it there, ready for use when opportunity arrived.

  ‘Thus far, we have some facts which go towards proving Mr Hollister’s intentions. No more than that.

  ‘By his own admission, Ibrahim Imberesh also arrived in advance of his employer, to check the security for the ambassador’s visit. He seems to have been good at his job. He penetrated Mr Hollister’s change of identity. It might be worth enquiring at the estate office as to how he managed it.’ Tony made a note. ‘We know that enquiries were made about Hollister by one of the Arab embassies. Somebody may know which.’ Another note.