The Curse of the Cockers (Three Oaks Book 5)

by Gerald Hammond

  Chapter Nine

  His plan deserved to succeed. If my back had not broken, I would have suffocated. Somebody would have had to use another jack to lift the tree off my body and any marks that he had left in the bark would have been attributed to that. It would have taken an observant investigator to read anything in the signs that contradicted his story. A painstaking pathologist might have noticed that the bruise on my head had preceded death by half an hour or so, but the circumstances would have been so plain that any post-mortem examination would have been cursory.

  But I had managed to take two tiny steps in the direction of survival. I had squeezed sideways to where there was a little more space at my disposal. And I had jammed the loose stone between the rock and the tree trunk. The crushing weight of the tree returned, no heavier than it had been in the beginning, but now that my stomach was in the dip I had made I was arched backwards. Breathing from the diaphragm was an almost impossible feat but it was essential.

  I still had the fragment of slate in my hand. I resumed my scraping at the earth beside and below me, working for a deeper hole that would let me breathe even if I could not crawl out of the trap.

  The ground was stony and soon I was reduced to digging out one small stone at a time and rolling it aside. The task was hopeless. I would first have to excavate a hole and then work under my body in order to get room to move. The work demanded breath that I did not have but at least it gave me some hope and a defence against the creeping chill.

  I seemed to have made no progress at all when I realized that another danger was looming. My old reaction to stress was taking over. All that I wanted to do was to sleep but, if I relaxed even for a moment, the conscious effort of breathing would stop and I would never wake up again. I dragged myself back towards wakefulness and scrabbled on with my piece of slate. I might as well have tackled the Channel Tunnel with a child’s bucket and spade, but I had to go on or accept death.

  Time ceased to have any meaning. The scene had become static or else an endless loop. Scratch, scratch, scratch in the darkness, always one-handed, breathe from the stomach, ignore the cramps in my twisted body, dislodge a small stone, and start again. I asked myself once whether life itself was worth such a prodigious effort, but when I remembered Beth and Sam and the new life we had made for ourselves I called on reserves of willpower that I never knew I had and scrabbled on.

  If I had lost consciousness I would have lost the battle for life. I must have been very close to blacking out because when I saw light and heard voices I paid them no attention but worked on, trying to make a dip into which I could slide away from that killing pressure. There were feet in front of my face. Somebody galloped away and came back. Then a jack was being pumped and the weight on my body became less and less until I found myself breathing in great gasps.

  Hands grasped my wrists and pulled me out from under the tree trunk. I curled up into a ball, content to relieve the strain on my stomach muscles and to gulp in lungfuls of precious air. Beth’s voice was asking questions but for the moment I was beyond answering.

  At last I felt strong enough to try to roll on to my knees. The hands lifted me gently to my feet. My every muscle seemed to have been stretched and my joints wrenched almost apart. The lights of Angus’s Land-Rover had been switched on and I saw another vehicle which I recognized as my own car. Beth was supporting me on one side. On the other, what I had first supposed to be the product of my feverish imagination turned out to be Rex, complete with Mohican haircut and a fringed leather jacket emblazoned with symbols of some voodoo cult.

  A third person, a woman standing apart, was a stranger to me. Beth aimed a few words at her which I failed to catch and then I was bundled into the blessed warmth of my car.

  ‘Morgan was de Forgan,’ I said. My voice came thickly but it was a joy to have it back.

  The sentence sounded like nonsense after I had got it out but Beth took it in her stride. ‘I’d already guessed that,’ she said. ‘Shall I take you to Ninewells Hospital?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I had had more than enough of hospitals for one lifetime. ‘I’ve no damage that rest won’t put right.’ Or, if I had, another day would be time enough. I wanted to be at home with Beth, where things were comfortable and familiar.

  Something else was on my mind. ‘He said—’ I began.

  ‘Yes?’

  There was a pause while I sorted de Forgan’s words out in my mind. ‘He said he’d let something slip when he came to buy the pup. And he said that he knew I was a danger to him when he saw me looking in the shed.’

  ‘Did he indeed? Just a minute.’

  Beth, who had settled herself in the driver’s seat and started the engine, got out of the car again and spoke to Rex. Then she came back, buckled her seat belt carefully and drove off. She went very slowly as far as the gates, but when the lights of Angus’s Land-Rover came up behind us she accelerated away and headed for home or the police or a hospital or somewhere, I was past caring. I was deadly tired and I seemed to have said everything worth saying, so I let myself slide into darkness.

  *

  My sleep was like floating in a black pit full of nothingness, but I drifted near the surface from time to time. Once, I was being helped up some stairs, in a void that held the familiar smells of home. Then I seemed to be in my own bed and somebody who sounded like Beth was adding hot-water bottles just where I needed them.

  Minutes later, it seemed, I drifted towards the surface again and there was daylight there. I turned over and let myself float. I was stiff and sore and there was a new ache in my back, but I had felt worse after an Inter-services Rugby match.

  Somebody had left the room. I came wide awake. The bedroom door was standing open. I was wondering whether I could be bothered to get up and do something about it when Beth came awkwardly in. She was balancing a tray in one hand while over the other arm she had my shot-gun. I sat up and took the tray.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Beth asked me.

  ‘Not too bad, considering,’ I told her. ‘For once, I seem to have escaped any serious after-effects of being cold. I must be on the mend.’

  ‘More likely you’re still awash with all the dope from last time.’ Beth put the gun down on the bedside table. She saw me looking at it. ‘It was there all night,’ she said. ‘And Henry’s downstairs now with his own gun. That man’s had two goes at you already and a third time is not going to be lucky for him if I know anything about it. I’d rather be gaoled for shooting him than have you killed.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said politely. ‘I appreciate the thought.’ The tray held tea, toast, and a boiled egg, my favourite breakfast when off-colour. I had not eaten since my light lunch the previous day. Suddenly breakfast seemed more important than a lot of questions.

  ‘Thank God you’re eating!’ Beth said. She put a cool hand on my forehead. ‘I thought you were going to be all right when you didn’t sweat in the night, but the doctor’s going to look in later.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Have you told the police about this?’

  ‘Not yet. It would have sounded like a wild accusation unless you could back it up, and I wasn’t going to have you badgered until you’d recovered.’

  ‘Bless you! How did you come to turn up in the nick of time?’

  Beth sat lightly on the edge of the bed. ‘I was beginning to wonder why you hadn’t come home when the car turned up with Henry and Isobel and Rex. They were telling me all about the championship when the phone rang and it was Angus, wanting to know if you were back and how you’d got on. That was the first time I knew that you’d gone to Foleyknowe on your own. I’d thought that Angus was with you and two of you together would be all right.

  ‘I phoned the Foleyknowe number and only got the answering machine. I was sure that I recognized the voice on the tape. It was nearly dark and I knew that you’d be indoors by then. So I got Rex to come with me and we drove to Foleyknowe. I was almost sure that I was making a fuss about nothing, and yet I knew fo
r certain that something was wrong.’ She paused. ‘That sounds daft, now that I’ve said it.’

  ‘I can understand it, even if you can’t,’ I said.

  ‘There was no sign of Angus’s Land-Rover at the house so we went on up to where we’d parked before. And there you were,’ she ended triumphantly. ‘Rex was just great.’

  I had finished the egg but there was some toast left and I found a small pot of marmalade on the tray. Beth watched with satisfaction as I put it to good use. She looked like a shy teenager but I reminded myself that she was a mature and intelligent woman.

  ‘But what made you sure that something was wrong? Why were you so suspicious of de Forgan?’ I asked. My mouth was full and on the word ‘suspicious’ I spluttered some crumbs over the bedclothes. ‘You never said anything,’ I added.

  Beth seemed to be preoccupied with picking up the crumbs. ‘It was only a thought,’ she said.

  ‘So were any of the world’s most brilliant ideas.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t want to confuse you. You knew as much as I did. In fact you knew more. You’ve been very good about telling me all about what everybody said, but that isn’t the same as hearing it for yourself.

  ‘I nearly suggested him when we were walking back from the inn and you said that you thought it would turn out to be somebody else and I said that I thought so too, and to cut a short story long . . . Or do I mean the other way around?’

  ‘I think you had it right first time,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘De Forgan . . . Morgan. The names were so similar that if he’d met you again he could easily have said that you’d misheard him. I’d wondered all along about the man Angus was to meet and then we heard that it was Mr de Forgan. Angus was so keen to get the shoot that as far as he was concerned Mr de Forgan was above suspicion but . . . when he came here, calling himself Morgan, I was at the door, remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He mentioned the road fatality and referred to the dead man as a jewel thief. The papers reported the death but they hadn’t said anything like that. And poor Mr Dinnet wasn’t a jewel thief. The jewellery found on him had been in the pockets of the stolen coat. And who would know that, except the murderer? I suppose he’d taken back his presents to her. I call that a bit thick,’ Beth added, as though recovering his presents had been a worse sin than the murder. ‘Cold blooded! Then, when you phoned Mr de Forgan, he said something about the “death of a petty crook”.’

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m more than grateful. But that seems a bit tenuous to send you galloping around the country to the rescue.’

  ‘I hadn’t quite finished,’ Beth said sternly. ‘You should try to listen more. What I’ve said so far is about what set me wondering. So when Angus phoned and told me that you’d gone on your own, I asked him a few questions off my own bat.

  ‘You see, what had been bothering me all along was about Angus’s Land-Rover. You were assuming that somebody ran over Mr Dinnet with another Land-Rover and then swapped bumpers with Angus. But Angus washed his Land-Rover thoroughly on Ne’erday. He wouldn’t have missed the bumper. So the bumpers must have been swapped over later.

  ‘I asked Angus about it and he said that most of the time either he was using the Land-Rover or it was locked in his shed. Except once.

  ‘When Mr Crae had the shooting at Foleyknowe from Mr de Forgan, Angus was keepering there and he lived in the keeper’s cottage. The de Forgan children and Mrs Todd became very close. So Mrs de Forgan used to leave them with Mrs Todd whenever it suited her, and she went on doing that after the Todds moved over here. She left them with Mrs Todd on Ne’erday. In fact, Angus said that they helped him to wash the Land-Rover.

  ‘Angus told me that they left the Land-Rover standing out to dry. Mr de Forgan came to fetch the children after dark in his own Land-Rover. I think that he’d already slacked off the bolts on his own bumper and that’s when he exchanged bumpers with Angus Todd.’

  I found that I was nodding. Even if we lacked proof we now had an alternative explanation for the stains on Angus’s bumper, if he ever came to trial. But something still bothered me. ‘He’d have been taking a hell of a risk, driving around with Dinnet’s blood on his Land-Rover,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Perhaps he hadn’t used the Land-Rover since he killed Mr Dinnett and he only noticed the blood and hair just before setting off. It wasn’t much of a risk, driving from Foleyknowe to Angus’s home in the dark. He’d have been hoping for a chance to swap bumpers with Angus – or anybody else. He’d have been much safer if the police had a conviction instead of a mystery.’

  ‘You should have told the police about this.’

  She shook her head. ‘I wanted to discuss first what we were going to say to them.’

  ‘But he’s still running around loose. He’ll know by now that I didn’t die. God alone knows what he’ll try next.’ Something else was nagging at me. ‘I seem to remember a woman there last night.’

  ‘Mrs de Forgan. She turned up while we were getting you out from under that tree.’

  ‘Does she know about her husband? Has she been protecting him?’

  ‘I don’t know. She seemed to be genuinely puzzled. I sent her packing anyway.’

  There was a rap at the door. Beth’s hand made an involuntary gesture, quickly checked, towards the shot-gun. ‘Come in,’ she called

  Isobel’s head came round the door. ‘You’re all right?’ she asked me.

  ‘No problems,’ I said, ‘except that I’m stiff and sore. Well done, the championship results.’

  Isobel came inside the doorway. She waved away my congratulations. ‘Of course, I don’t know a tenth of what happened last night,’ she said.

  ‘What happened was—’ Beth began.

  ‘Tell me later. There’s somebody downstairs, wanting to see John. Mrs de Forgan. I put her in the sitting room and lit the fire.’

  Beth got up quickly and went to the window. ‘The Jaguar,’ she said to me.

  ‘It would be,’ I said. ‘We’d have heard the Land-Rover.’ I glanced at Isobel. ‘Nobody with her in the car?’

  Isobel looked blank. ‘Not a soul,’ she said.

  ‘All the same . . .’ Beth said. She picked up my shot-gun. ‘I’d better see her.’

  Ignoring a myriad twinges, I struggled out of bed in a hurry and took it out of her hands.

  ‘You can’t go down waving a gun around,’ Isobel said. ‘And Henry’s already sitting in the kitchen making like the Spirit of Fort Apache.’

  I found that I was steady on my feet. ‘I’m coming with you,’ I told Beth. And to Isobel, ‘Tell Henry to come in quickly if he hears any loud voices. And . . . would you mind making coffee and getting out some biscuits?’

  Isobel knew that I would never have treated her as a servant without good reason. She nodded and went out. I shrugged into my warm dressing-gown and found my slippers.

  ‘We are not giving that woman coffee,’ Beth said indignantly. ‘Her husband’s a murderer. He tried to kill you last night.’

  ‘The coffee’s mostly for me. I’m still hungry.’

  Beth threw up her hands in despair. ‘That’s different,’ she said.

  Downstairs in the sitting room, where a log fire was glowing in the grate, Mrs de Forgan was waiting composedly, arranged rather than seated in one of the wingchairs. She was a woman in her thirties, very self-assured and with the square jaw to suit. Her dress, her hair, and a few touches of costume jewellery suggested both taste and money. A coat of expensive fur had been laid across the window table with a handbag on top of it. I could tell at first glance that she was a formidable lady. If Beth had indeed ‘sent her packing’, the fur might have flown.

  I paused just inside the door. ‘I’m sure you’ll excuse my déshabillé,’ I said, choosing my words, ‘but I expect you know some of what happened last night.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do. I rather think that I know all of it. You’re all right?’

  By then
, I was becoming tired of assuring everybody that I was more or less sound. I had also decided that she did not intend a physical mischief. I came forward, without offering to shake her hand, and took a seat on the settee. Beth joined me. Isobel had already put a tray with coffee on the low table. Mrs de Forgan shook a well-groomed head of dark blond hair when I offered her coffee. I helped myself and poured for Beth.

  ‘What can we do for you?’ I asked her.

  She was unperturbed by my bluntness. She even smiled faintly, showing very even teeth. ‘Do for me? Not very much. You sold my husband a springer spaniel puppy. There seems to have been some slight confusion about names and I’d like to have it corrected on the papers. I want to make sure that his registration is in order. Also, I understand that his dam became a field-trial champion yesterday. I’d like that added to his pedigree.’ She had a beautifully mellow voice and an effortless lack of accent.

  This was so far from what I’d been expecting that for the moment I was struck dumb. Beth stepped into the breach. ‘That should be easy,’ she said. ‘Who told you that Lob had been made up?’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Angus Todd, when I left the children with Mrs Todd just now. Was he mistaken?’

  This time, Beth was brought up short and I had found my voice. ‘He was correct,’ I said. ‘But . . . if you’re still leaving your children with Mrs Todd, I assume that you don’t think Angus is guilty of the various accusations that have been made against him?’

  ‘I’m sure that he isn’t.’ She waited, but neither Beth nor I had anything to say. She looked away from us into the leaping flames and went on. ‘You haven’t spoken to the police today.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

  ‘Not yet,’ Beth said. She started to say more and then clamped her mouth shut.

  Mrs de Forgan nodded slowly. ‘I came here because I wanted to meet you both. And now that I’ve done so, I think that we can trust each other. I ask you to believe that until last night I had no knowledge of my husband’s wickedness. Uneasy feelings which I hoped were unfounded, but never the least trace of proof.’