Hook or Crook

by Gerald Hammond

  Vahhaji suddenly folded down almost into a foetal position and his voice came muffled. ‘Must I repeat it?’

  ‘Write it down if you can’t say the words aloud,’ Goth said gently.

  ‘No. I cannot run away from memory for ever.’ Vahhaji sat up, squared his shoulders and wiped his eyes. ‘Mr Hollister said that the explosion that killed my sister took place near the house he then lived in. He said that he found pieces of her flesh in the garden.’

  Mrs Walton opened her mouth but Goth frowned her into silence. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘I can hardly bring myself to say it. We had never recovered any part of her body for sacred burial. I asked him what had become of . . . of those pieces. I hoped that he would tell me that they had been decently buried even if not in ground that I would consider to be sacred.’ Vahhaji’s voice choked. ‘He said that he gave them to his dog. To eat.’

  The sounds of the drinkers trickled in from the bar but in the small coffee room the silence was absolute. The thought in my mind was that I had betrayed Vahhaji. We now had more than enough motive for a dozen murders. In his shoes, I would have killed if I could.

  Mrs Walton broke the silence. As Imad Vahhaji’s tears had dried, hers had broken. ‘That was a terrible thing to say,’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t true. Bernard Hollister was my father. He never lived in Jerusalem and he never had a dog in his life. He disliked dogs.’

  Vahhaji slowly uncurled. ‘So he told me when he came to see me. I did not know whether to believe him but I am glad to know that it was so. Your father visited me the next evening and apologized most graciously. He said that he had had a great fondness for the Arab peoples, but that his wife, your mother, had been injured by a terrorist bomb. He said that if her leg had not still been stiff, she would not have been caught by the car that hit her — a car that was driven by another Arab. This he was told by the one witness he could trust. So when I told him of my sister’s work with Islamic Jihad and the accident which was so much like the one which had led ultimately to the death of your mother, his rage exploded and he sought only for words which would hurt as he had been hurt. Later, when he remembered exactly what I had told him, he realized that I had not supported the Jihad but had been a victim as he had.

  ‘He was weeping as he told me, we were weeping together. I said that, although I could not forgive his words, I hoped that he would forgive the Arab peoples. We parted on good terms. If he had lived, I think that we might in time have become friends. We had much in common.’

  Mr Goth waited in silence until the scratching of Tony McIver’s pen came to a halt. ‘Thank you,’ he said, quite gently. ‘Go home now. If you are in any doubt about your safety, one of us will come with you. But I think that the threats made to you, through Miss Bruce, were intended to do no more than induce you to incriminate yourself, which you very nearly did.’

  Imad Vahhaji got to his feet. ‘I have been foolish,’ he said. ‘I will not trouble you further.’

  ‘Don’t. And go to your work by bus tomorrow. Leave your car keys with Mr McIver.’

  ‘Do you want your passport back?’ Tony asked him, accepting the keys of the Porsche. He put a hand on his briefcase.

  ‘There is no hurry,’ Vahhaji said. ‘I shall not be leaving Britain for some months.’ The door closed softly behind him.

  ‘You didn’t believe that load of bull, did you?’ DCI Fergusson demanded.

  Goth remained calm and polite. ‘There are two levels of belief,’ he said. ‘Officially, I don’t have to believe or disbelieve anything until all the evidence is in, and not even then. But unofficially and personally, yes, I believed him.’

  ‘But think of the motive, man! All the talk of an apology was a clever blind.’

  ‘Few men go through life without being given a dozen motives for murder. Thankfully not everybody acts on them. If Hollister had died that same night I might have been persuaded to agree with you.’

  ‘Mrs Walton tells us that her father needed time to work himself up,’ Fergusson persisted.

  ‘Given time,’ said Mrs Walton, ‘he would have seen that he was in the wrong. He had struck the first blow, even if it was a verbal one.’

  ‘So you’re letting it go at that?’ Fergusson asked Goth.

  ‘For the moment,’ Goth said.

  ‘He should be in custody.’

  ‘We have his passport.’

  ‘Which you would have given back to him.’ Realizing that he was making no impression on the Detective Chief Superintendent, Fergusson heaved himself up by the arms of his chair and held out his hand towards Tony McIver. ‘Give me the passport.’

  Goth also held out his hand. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said, ‘for return to its holder.’

  Tony hesitated for only a second. Goth was the senior officer and he was on his home territory. Tony placed the passport in Goth’s hand.

  ‘So that’s how it goes,’ Fergusson said grimly. ‘I don’t have to stay here to be thwarted at every turn. I’m going back now and I’ll meet my procurator fiscal tomorrow. We’ll see about starting proceedings. And you, young man,’ he turned his glare on Tony, ‘be in my office at nine a.m. on Monday.’

  He slammed out of the room.

  Goth glanced at his watch. ‘Well now,’ he said. ‘We think that we know what happened, but proof, so far, is sadly lacking. It may be that the Forensic Science team can produce some evidence of the body having been transported in one vehicle or another.’ He finished his whisky. ‘I’m getting too old for being jerked out of my sleep in the small hours, but I’m beginning to revive. We’ll take a break. I need to do some telephoning — and to grab an early lunch if the hotel is so obliging.’

  ‘Use my room,’ I said. ‘Mrs Bruce will give you an outside line, if you ask her.’

  ‘Thank you. Shall we meet again, here, at say two?’

  ‘Does that include us?’ Eric asked.

  Goth considered. ‘If you can spare the time,’ he said. ‘McIver seems to have leaned heavily on you already. It’s a point in his favour. A good policeman should be able to enlist the public’s help, not invite their active hindrance.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Tony, ‘I think I know where we might get some evidence, but I could be wrong.’

  ‘Go and find out,’ Goth said.

  ‘I may not be back at two.’

  ‘If you’re not,’ Goth pointed out, ‘you’re not. And don’t worry about DCI Fergusson. I can spike his guns for him. Do you want to transfer to Grampian, and into Criminal Investigation?’

  ‘Very much,’ said Tony.

  ‘I’ll arrange to borrow you on secondment until we can fix a transfer. Run along now.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Bea walked to the hotel for a snack lunch and found me toying with a pint and a sandwich at a table in the bar. Despite the weekend, she seemed to have obtained the services of a hairdresser. I thought I could detect the faint complacency of a woman who knows that she is looking her best.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said. ‘May I join you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Shall I —?’

  ‘Don’t get up.’ She put a friendly hand on my shoulder, pressing me back into my chair, and went to collect from the bar a half pint of shandy and one of the individual steak pies which were a speciality of the house. She sat down opposite me. ‘Where is everybody?’

  Among the babble of Sunday lunchtime drinkers we were as private as we would have been on a mountain top. ‘Tony McIver’s gone hunting for evidence,’ I told her. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Goth arrived and is eating and telephoning upstairs. The dead man’s daughter, a Mrs Walton, also turned up, exhausted by travelling, and she’s taken a room and gone for a lie-down. We’re to meet again around two.’

  ‘I really meant Eric,’ she said, ‘as you very well know.’

  I took note of the fact that she considered Eric to be ‘everybody’. ‘He went through to the dining-room for a proper lunch.’

  ‘Gorging again?’
/>   ‘He seems to have lost at least some of his appetite,’ I told her. ‘For all the breakfast he took, I could almost have managed it.’ I nearly added that he must be in love but I had the sense to hold my tongue.

  She looked pleased. ‘And the great mystery?’

  ‘Seems to be nearing a solution but without proof.’

  I expected a dozen questions about the investigation but she seemed to be satisfied to know that progress was being made. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Eric,’ she said. ‘After all, you’re his best friend.’

  I must have let my surprise show. I liked Eric even if I was sometimes hard on him. It was a sad reflection on his lonely existence that I should be counted his best friend while he would barely have made it into my top ten. ‘Well, that’s the impression I get,’ she said. ‘He thinks a lot of you. And you don’t say very much but you seem to notice a lot. I wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘Ask me what?’

  She took refuge in her meal while she gathered her thoughts. ‘You remember the present he gave me?’ she said at last. ‘It was clothes. You probably guessed. I opened it up yesterday and went through it, even tried some of it on. It’s beautiful stuff and well chosen even if some of the lingerie is a little young for one of my age. The rest of it suits and even fits me. It must have been very expensive.’

  ‘Wholesale to Eric,’ I said, ‘and before tax.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ She hesitated and I thought that I detected a faint, becoming blush. ‘I expect I’m old-fashioned. I was brought up to believe that a lady didn’t let a gentleman put anything on her that she wouldn’t let him take off her again. Gloves were acceptable, or a hat. Shoes only just.’

  I kept a straight face. ‘I don’t suppose that Eric saw it quite like that. It just happens to be the line he’s in.’

  ‘He said that there were no strings. But there are always strings,’ she said. ‘He walked me home last night after you went to bed, and on the way he was hinting. No, not so much hinting as . . . fishing. There’s an apt word for you!’ she said, smiling. ‘He was fishing to know how I’d react if he suggested a closer relationship.’

  I hoped that Eric had fished with more delicacy than he showed at the river. ‘He’s afraid of rejection.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘His wife didn’t die on purpose, but deep down I think that he feels that she deserted him. Under all that flesh he’s very vulnerable,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be unkind,’ she said severely. ‘He only eats because he’s unhappy. He misses Amy terribly. I think he sees the clothes thing as a sort of language, a way for me to give a sign without having to say it all aloud. But I really like him. I wouldn’t want to get into anything I couldn’t get out of — don’t grin like the Cheshire cat, I’m talking about relationships, not clothes — anything I couldn’t get out of without hurting him. Not unless I was sure.’

  ‘I can’t tell you whether you’re sure.’

  ‘No. But at least you can give me an opinion. Could Eric ever be happy with somebody else, after Amy?’

  That was an enormous question. She had hardly touched her shandy. I fetched another pint for myself while I thought about it.

  ‘Your voice throws him,’ I said.

  ‘Amy and I did sound alike. The family were always being confused, on the phone. Would it matter?’

  ‘It would pass,’ I said. ‘It’s your voice too and he’d soon come to accept it as such. His only reservation is that he thinks that you might starve him.’

  ‘No fear of that,’ she said, laughing. ‘I enjoy my food too. I just don’t like to see him overdoing it. I’d rather have a gourmet than a gourmand.’ She became serious again. ‘But if we had a relationship, if we married even, would I just be an Amy substitute?’

  ‘Does any second wife start off other than as a substitute for the first? I think he’s seeing you as a separate person already,’ I said carefully. ‘As I understand it, you look very different. He chose clothes to suit you, not Amy.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said, looking happier.

  I hesitated before going on. Advice that seems good at the time can turn out to be disastrous. ‘It’s none of my business to advise you,’ I said. ‘I don’t know whether either of you would be happy. But Eric’s face, in repose, used to depress me, it looked so miserable. Since he met you, I’ve caught him smiling to himself. Looking at it from Eric’s angle, he desperately needs somebody else in his life. He’s free to please himself — but that’s a difficult thing to do, to ask yourself “What do I want to do?” You might as well ask yourself “Am I happy?” or “Would I be happier if I did this or that?” The question is unanswerable or self-negating, because if you have to ask it you aren’t. So he ends up doing nothing very much and hating it. One of the multinationals has been making offers for his string of shops, but he keeps putting them off. He could retire in comfort, but he can’t visualize himself filling a whole lot of empty time. Not on his own.’

  She had finished her pie and her shandy while this, for me, very long speech was in progress. ‘The much-vaunted “pursuit of happiness” is a delusion?’

  ‘Happiness is either there or it’s not. You fall into it almost by accident. All you can pursue are favourable circumstances. But when you have somebody else to consider and to share with, the . . . the happiness boundaries are pushed further apart. Much further. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘What you’ve said applies as much to me as to Eric. I think . . . I think I’ll go and try my new clothes on again.’ She pushed back her hair with her fingertips.

  On the phone the previous night, Janet had told me that her old friend had decided that a quiet Borders town bored her and had gathered up her brats and departed. Bearing in mind my hunch that the fishing was about to deteriorate, I found that I was eager to go home. But if I was too forthcoming I would lose the other half of my fee and Keith would boil over.

  ‘Before you go,’ I said, ‘think about this. Eric still has a week here. He doesn’t need me — he takes instruction better from you. Why not invite him to stay with you? You could have a splendid week, fishing together. Who knows? He might decide that he could bear to retire here.’

  ‘But what about you?’

  ‘I could go home.’

  ‘You wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘I should be happy to know that you two were having fun. Bless you, my children. Just don’t let him know that it was my idea.’

  We rose. Before she left she said, ‘He did admire my house.’

  *

  I was back in the small coffee room before two o’clock. I had tidied away the debris from the morning’s session and was making another attempt to read my paper. The first to join me was Helena Walton. She made a careful entrance, balancing a cup of coffee and a plate with another of those individual steak pies. I placed a chair for her.

  ‘Did you sleep?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. There were dark smudges under her eyes and the flesh was puffy. ‘I’ve gone past my sleep. And my mind’s too agitated, wondering whether those men are going to get away with it all. I don’t think that I’ll be able to sleep again until it’s over. What do you think is going to happen?’

  ‘I could have made a guess,’ I said, ‘except that there’s something else I wanted to tell the Chief Superintendent. Or Tony McIver. Or anybody else, for that matter. There just doesn’t seem to have been a chance to get a word in. Try to relax and leave it to the police. Once they know what they’re looking for, they usually find it.’

  ‘And what then? Diplomatic immunity and a safe passage home?’

  It seemed to be my day for handing out unsolicited advice. ‘If that’s the way it goes,’ I said, ‘then accept it. Mr Goth was trying, very gently, to warn you away from following in your father’s footsteps. Do you have any family?’

  She did not even blink at the apparent change of subject. ‘A boy and a girl,’ she said.
r />   ‘Then your father had very much less to lose, at his time of life, than you do at yours. And even so, it cost him dear.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true,’ she said, too readily. She fell to picking at her steak pie, crouching awkwardly over the low table. Something was going on in her mind. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that when her husband arrived back in Britain he would be invited to take up the sword, a one-man crusade against injustice with all the forces of law ranged against him. I only hoped that he would have the sense to tell her that the days of personal revenge were over, warming her bottom to emphasize the message — or else that he would hire a professional who would do the job properly.

  The Detective Chief Superintendent and Eric came in together having met, apparently, in the bar. Goth was carrying a small whisky and Eric, to my surprise, brought with him only a half-empty class of wine from his lunch.

  Goth saw me glance at his drink and was not offended. ‘My driver will come back for me when I call for him. No sign of young McIver?’ he asked as he settled down, facing the three of us.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘I hope that that means he’s onto something. We won’t wait for him. I shall have to get back to Aberdeen shortly, but first,’ he said to Mrs Walton, ‘I thought I’d bring you up to date. And you two gentlemen have been so deep in our confidence that you may as well know the rest, what there is of it. It may also help you to understand why there is a paramount need for confidentiality. Besides, you might be able to help. I would rather like to see this thing wrapped up by tonight.’

  I began to feel rather sorry for the middle ranks. With Tony below striving to impress, and Goth above determined to make a point, they were in a nutcracker. And, if I was any judge, their nuts were going to get cracked. They might well report for duty on Monday morning to find that their chief and a very junior outsider had between them done what they should have done for themselves.

  ‘Before you go any further,’ I said, ‘there’s something else I should tell you. I didn’t feel that I’d be doing you any favours if I’d produced it while Mr Fergusson was here to muddy the waters.’