Sting in the Tail (Three Oaks Book 6)

by Gerald Hammond

  I was still deep in thought when I arrived home, to be met with the news that Clarence had jerked his lead out of Hannah’s hand and made a quick raid on the kitchen, making off with a parcel of meat which was only partly thawed. We barely had time to recapture him and for Isobel to determine that he seemed to have escaped without deep-freezing his intestines, when Angus showed up.

  Angus was sleepy-eyed but triumphant. He hoisted the corpse of a huge dog fox from the back of the Land Rover and held it aloft, rather like an obstetrician with a freshly delivered baby.

  “What do you think of that?”

  I shrugged. I always regret the necessity for killing a wild creature other than for food, but there is no way to train a fox to confine his depredations to the rabbit population and to leave lambs and game-birds alone. ‘You’ve shown the farmers?’ I asked.

  Angus nodded, yawning. ‘Duggie McKillop says he’ll buy us both a dram. My own opinion is, don’t hold your breath. Albert Dodd was pleased but he wasn’t going to let it show. I’ve left the snares, but if there’s no sign of another customer tomorrow, you may as well lift them. And for now, I’m awa’ to my bed.’

  After so much distraction it was small wonder that I quite forgot about the sausages, which had found their way under the driver’s seat. They only came to our attention a fortnight later when their aroma rose high above those of dead pheasants, damp fur and dog fart.

  *

  A phone call to the ever helpful Mrs Bell confirmed that the butcher’s van could be expected in her neighbourhood shortly after eleven o’clock. I could have intercepted it earlier in the village, but if my suspicions turned out to have any foundation in fact, I might need to ask the sort of questions which are better asked without an audience – or witnesses.

  So I spent an hour filling the feeders along the valley bottoms. The work would have been quicker if I had had Henry’s help, but Henry had come down with a slight cold, and at his age, as Isobel was quick to point out, colds are not to be trifled with, especially on a day which was windy, cold and damp.

  It was possible – at least in the Land Rover which had again been substituted for my car – to get from the dam via Albert Dodd’s farmyard to the road near the cottages. The old farmer waved at me as I went by. He may have been shaking his fist, or else he wanted me to stop for an argument, but I gave him a regal wave in reply and drove on, cheered by the thought of his fury and frustration. Angus, who disliked the old devil as much as I did, nevertheless had a remarkable knack for smoothing his invariably ruffled plumage and could safely be left to cope.

  I reached the end of the farm-road in time to see the butcher’s van to my right, turning off into an opening between the trees on the other side of the road. This, I could assume, led to Nearn House, the abode of the strange Mr Ricketts. I decided to follow. I needed to make the man’s acquaintance anyway.

  The entry was narrow. The van must have found it a tight fit. Even the Land Rover resounded to the twigs scraping its sides as it passed under the tunnels of trees on either side of a humpbacked bridge.

  The trees continued around the back of the house but the driveway emerged through an archway into an open space, part courtyard and part garden, framed by a stone-built two-storey house, a single-storey extension and on two sides high garden walls. The house, although not very large, had been built to a higher standard of detail than the usual small farmer’s house and I thought that it might have been built to house a minor landowner or the manager of an estate.

  The van was drawn up near the front door and the driver was sounding what was evidently not the first blast on his horn, but there was no sign of life from the house.

  At the sound of the Land Rover, the driver got out of the van. I sat where I was. Clarence was loose on a dog bed in the back of the Land Rover and I reached back and hauled him onto my knee where he made strenuous efforts to lick my face. The driver came to my open window. He was a ferret-faced individual in a striped apron over a brown linen coat. The van, I noticed, was identical to the one that I had studied so closely the previous day.

  ‘Doesn’t seem to be in,’ he said. He looked at Clarence without any sign of interest and Clarence, after one curious sniff in the direction of his apron, ignored him.

  ‘People do go out,’ I said, wondering whether it was still worth introducing the subject of dogs.

  ‘But something’s no’ right,’ he persisted. He pointed to a door of a singularly ugly plum colour which stood slightly open in the single-storey wing. ‘It was just the same last week. He’s aye been here before that. Yon door was just the same, I don’t believe it’s moved.’

  ‘In more than a week?’ This was beginning to sound ominous. ‘What about the milkman?’

  ‘No delivery. See, he buys UHT milk, gets it delivered once a month – I was here when it came, one time, but I’ve never been inside the place,’ he explained hastily. ‘And he’s not a man as would leave the place unlocked. You ken what they say about him?’ He looked at me anxiously, as though I might never have heard of sexual deviation.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. He’s aye been quite normal wi’ me,’ the van-driver said, as though any practising homosexual would be bound to make a beeline for his wizened charms. ‘My guess is that he’s feared some o’ the locals may have it in for him. They do, sometimes, when they think a man’s queer.

  ‘I mind once I couldn’t get over the wee brig for the snow so I blew my horn and he came to meet me – in yellow wellies, believe it or no’. Point is, I saw him locking his door just for that wee minute. There’s folks around here never locked a door in their lives. And another thing. There’s nae reek at the lum.’

  I thought that he was letting his imagination run away with him but I looked up. There was indeed no smoke at the chimneys. ‘Doesn’t he have central heating?’

  ‘He has the electrics but he said to me once it was o’er dear to run so he kept log fires burning most of the day. I never saw the place, outside of summer, but that there was a whole cloud of wood-smoke abune it. I was just thinking that maybe I should ha’e a look, only I didn’t want to take it on mysel’.’ He looked at me hopefully, anxious for someone to share or even lift the responsibility off his narrow shoulders. ‘The mannie may be lying there in a fit, or maybe he’s been duffed up.’

  ‘It’s more likely that he’s gone away for a few days and somebody’s broken in,’ I said, ‘but we’ll have a look. Both of us,’ I added as he showed signs of wanting to get into his van and drive off. ‘We can be witnesses for each other.’

  ‘Well, a’ right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘But I hae nae broo o’ this.’

  I had no great liking for it myself, but the butcher was right. If the man had been lying, unconscious or incapacitated, long enough for his log fires to burn out, I wouldn’t give much for his chances, but we had a duty to go and see. ‘Come on,’ I said.

  He came to heel reluctantly.

  The half-open door showed no sign of violent entry, although the paint, which was new, seemed slightly marked. But an intruder might have entered at the other side of the house and left by what turned out to be the kitchen door. It opened the rest of the way when I pushed it and a wintry chill came to meet us. The fires had been out for more than an hour or two. The door opened onto a short passage. Another door let us into a large kitchen, old-fashioned in style but with a superficial gloss of modern décor and gadgets.

  In the middle of the floor, a man’s body sat in a Windsor chair. I was never in any doubt that it was a body. His head was down on his knees, and it had been partly severed from his shoulders, probably by a blow from the kitchen cleaver on the floor nearby. The huge wound gaped wide open, showing the severed ends of bone.

  ‘Is this him?’ I asked the butcher. ‘Mr Ricketts?’

  My companion seemed to be making a great effort to hold himself together. ‘It’s his colour hair,’ he said faintly. ‘Lift him so’s I can see his face and I’ll maybe tell
you.’

  I had no intention of touching the body or anything else, if I could help it. ‘I’ll call the police,’ I said. ‘You wait outside.’

  There was no answer. The van-driver had vanished. I heard the sound of retching. I found that my stomach for gruesome sights had deteriorated since my army days. I would dearly have loved to join the unhappy butcher.

  There was a modern, cream telephone on one of the worktops. I walked carefully around the outermost of the blood splashes, took a pen from my pocket and flicked off the receiver. I knew better than to dial out immediately. It is by no means uncommon for a criminal to use the telephone before leaving the scene. But the Last Number Redial facility only fetched an answer from a large Dundee department store. I broke the connection and dialled with my pen.

  During the few seconds that it took for the emergency switchboard to answer, I took in a little more of the scene. Dried blood splashes radiated around the kitchen floor from the position of the body.

  The telephone suddenly asked me which service I required. I bent down and told it that I wanted the police.

  Immediately in front of the body there was no blood; indeed the man might have been bending forward to study the pattern of the bright linoleum. But that clean patch was outlined in a partial and uneven rectangle of thicker bloodstain, long congealed.

  Another voice came on the line and I began to report a violent death.

  When I emerged into the cold fresh air a few minutes later, to my relief the van-driver was still hunched, white and shaking, over the flower-bed. He could so easily have panicked and driven off, leaving me to face the police alone. I knew from previous experiences that two independent witnesses corroborating each other face much less suspicion and harassment than a single finder of the corpse in question.

  Since leaving the army I had lost the knack of patiently awaiting my turn for duty or a call to action. Instead, I had developed the habit of filling odd moments with useful tasks. This, I decided, might be a good time to give Clarence a walk among the trees. If the police should conclude from their searches that a dog had been present it would be no more than the truth. I opened the Land Rover and attached a lead to Clarence, but he sat tight, shaking with fear and making it clear that brute force would be needed to get him down to the ground.

  This was strange, when I remembered that he had shown no fear of the van-driver. Of course, it might or might not be significant. A dog can be very perceptive of human fear and he might be reacting to our reaction. Or it might be a different driver, although from what he had said I was entitled to assume that he was the same man.

  The van-driver seemed to be recovering. I closed the Land Rover and approached him. ‘Is your name McCulloch?’ I asked him.

  ‘That’s right.’ He seemed uncertain whether to shake hands. I patted him on the shoulder and left him to his renewed heaving.

  As one would expect, the first arrival was the dour local sergeant, who came in his panda car and seemed disappointed to have only two of us to order around.

  He told us to wait in our respective vehicles. I could have got technical about it – unthinking officialdom takes me that way now that I am free of the army methodology – but in fact I was happy to comply. I had already made a necessary second phone call, while keeping my face turned to the kitchen wall. The second call had been to Beth at home, explaining to her that for reasons beyond my control I would be unable to complete my tasks. The pheasants would not starve if left for another day but both the law and common humanity required that the snares be lifted or at least visited. Would she, I asked, try to get hold of Angus, failing which phone Mr Strachan and ask him to lift the snares. I spelt out how many to look for. And no, I said, I had not suffered injury or a relapse, the car was undamaged and Clarence was fit and well. I was perfectly all right and would come home in due course under my own steam to tell her all about it.

  Having made my arrangements, I was content to sit in Angus’s Land Rover and try not to look at the hideous door while listening to the radio. The sergeant, after one look into the kitchen, paced importantly to and fro on the gravel. From his colour I guessed that he was hard put to it not to add his contribution to the flower-bed.

  Over the next half-hour the team began to gather. The van-driver and I were told to move our vehicles out onto the road so that the gravel could be searched. Soon we were engulfed in a row of police vehicles, to the great interest and inconvenience of the few passers-by. I kept my mind off the grim realities and instead amused myself by trying to identify the new arrivals – the photographer, the police surgeon, the pathologist, the scene-of-crime officers, the detectives, the forensic scientists. A large caravan arrived and, after much argument, was parked in a field on the other side of the road. For this it was necessary to remove a section of fence and the general disturbance soon brought Dodd the Father down, fuming, on the local sergeant, who was fussing around as a general arranger and confusion spreader. The sergeant had the weight of the law behind him, but Albert had the advantages of bad temper and irrationality, so that the honours were fairly even. The caravan stayed where it was although I suspected that some rental, or at least a quid pro quo had been agreed. Detective Chief Inspector McStraun passed through my field of vision and I assumed that he was to be the senior officer in charge of the investigation.

  Mr McCulloch, the van-driver, must have made a fuss about the needs of his customers and the perishable nature of his goods, because he was interviewed in the caravan and then allowed to depart. My time came a little later. An athletically built man with a friendly face but an unbending manner, who introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Waller, fetched me to the caravan where I found the Detective Chief Inspector waiting, complete with shorthand writer and both tape and video recorders. The intent that not one of my words should escape I found rather flattering.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector McStraun,’ said the DS formally.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘We’ve met.’

  The DCI looked at me sharply. Since I had last seen him he had cultivated a military moustache which, taken with his very upright bearing, gave him an assured look at variance with a strong Dundee accent. He must have been trying to place my face among those on the criminal files because the connection evaded him. ‘I know the face,’ he said, ‘but you’ll have to remind me.’

  When I reminded him of the cases in his area which had spilled over into Fife and merged together, he relaxed visibly. ‘I remember you now,’ he said. ‘The spaniel man. You were helpful.’

  ‘And my wife more so.’

  Mr McStraun looked pained at being reminded that a member of the public, and female to boot, had shown the police where to look for the truth. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘We never did make an arrest. And now we find you on the scene of another sudden death – a murder, unless somebody can explain how a man could hit himself on the back of the neck with a cleaver, hard enough to half sever it.’

  ‘You didn’t find me on the scene,’ I pointed out. ‘I called you to it.’

  ‘That’s true,’ he said. He looked at me solemnly for a few seconds before deciding to abandon that line. Briskly and efficiently he took me through my encounter with the van-driver and our discovery of the body.

  ‘Apart from the body and all the blood, did you notice anything different about the room?’ he asked me.

  I hid my amusement at the ploy and pointed out that I had never been at the house before. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I did notice from the shape of the bloodstains, as I’m sure you did, that a kitchen table seemed to have been removed after the killing.’

  He nodded. ‘We found it behind the house. An attempt had been made to burn it. Can you think of an explanation?’

  ‘Beats me,’ I said.

  He nodded, as though to say that that was only to be expected but that he knew better. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘tell me how you came to be there at all.’

  I could have pitched him a tale about wanting some meat from the butcher’s
van and it would have been impossible to disprove. But I decided that I had nothing to conceal. ‘I’ve been carrying out an investigation of my own,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose that there’s any connection—’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘I was just going to,’ I pointed out. Some may regard senior police officers as omnipotent and only one rung lower than God. They themselves usually pretend that the public should speak only when spoken to and should then confine themselves to answering questions. But as far as I am concerned the police are men with jobs to do, as much bound by the law and the rules of courtesy as anybody else. I waited until he made a face which expressed some sort of apology. ‘You may have heard,’ I said, ‘that your neighbour’s dog suffered a rather brutal tail-docking, two weeks ago today?’

  He frowned, but he was becoming interested. ‘I heard something. Spell it out for me.’

  ‘Charlie Hopewell, who I think lives two doors from you, has a springer spaniel, name of Clarence, a confirmed wanderer and a bit of an escape artist. You know him?’

  ‘Only too well.’

  ‘Two weeks ago, on that very rainy day, Clarence took off and came home later with about half his tail lopped off. Charlie was very upset, not least because your local sergeant and the SSPCA man seem to have got together to suspect either him or his daughter of committing the act for obscure reasons of their own. As a result, no help was to be expected from either of those quarters. I was looking for an explanation, partly for Charlie’s sake but also because, as a kennels owner, I always hear very loud warning bells when animals are gratuitously attacked.’

  ‘It may not have been so gratuitous,’ the DCI said gruffly. ‘If I’m thinking of the right dog, he has a knack of making enemies.’

  ‘Attacked without obvious reason, then,’ I conceded. ‘There are instances when some nutter takes a spite at some particular class of animal. Gundogs could be the particular target of some anti-field-sports fanatic, in which case, as a specialist breeder and trainer, my dogs could be at risk. So I’ve been looking around, more in the hope of putting my own mind at rest than anything else.’