Sting in the Tail (Three Oaks Book 6)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘I remembered what you said, John. Clarence refused to get out of the car at the bodywork shop. The smell of cellulose reminded him of the smell of nail varnish. So I looked back through some old snapshots until I found some with Clarence in them, and although photographs of dogs aren’t usually taken from behind they did seem to confirm what I remembered, that Clarence’s tail had had a white tip. That’s the bit that you can tell your Mr McStraun. And it seemed in turn to confirm what I’d been having vague thoughts about all along, because she’d said that she heard Clarence screeching when he came home, but what Mrs Bell told John suggested that her car had been going out past the cottages not much earlier.

  ‘What I think had been making everybody boggle at the edges, if that’s the phrase I want, was two extraordinary sort of things happening in the same place and around the same time – a murder and a tail-chopping. But here we had an explanation for the two things rolled together, which made them much easier to swallow.’

  The Sergeant was nodding happily, like one of those dogs in the back windows of cars, but they had left me far behind. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘No, of course you don’t,’ Beth said comfortingly. ‘I’ll explain. The Sergeant told us about the faked bank cards. Not credit cards, mind, which would require copies that looked just like the original.’

  ‘Because shop assistants handle them,’ I said, to show that I was still awake and not as far behind as all that.

  ‘Yes. A bank card works in the machine and nobody need see it at all if you’re careful, but – and here’s the big point – you have to have a Personal Identity Number that matches the card. And they make an awful fuss about keeping that number a closely guarded secret. Some people do write the number down in some hidden place and in a disguised sort of way, in case they forget it, and I expect that a clever pickpocket can often find or figure out the number. But these people weren’t picking pockets or snatching handbags, they were copying bank cards.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Detective Sergeant Waller. ‘And although there have been one or two very rare instances of a high-tech criminal managing to hack into a bank’s computer and collect PIN numbers, that information’s so heavily protected that it is very rare indeed, and when it happens it gets detected. With Jason Ricketts on our doorstep, and in view of his record, we wondered whether he hadn’t reached that or an even higher degree of sophistication, but he seldom left home except to get tanked up in the hotel, where he spoke to nobody in particular, and he didn’t have access to a computer.’

  ‘He could have had a personal computer and worked over the telephone,’ I said. ‘Or did you search the place?’

  ‘Nearn House didn’t have a telephone,’ said the DS. ‘Owing to a lack of lines, Telecom couldn’t give him a phone until the week before he died. So that knocked that idea on the head. Ricketts’s possible or even probable involvement was discussed endlessly; but I’ll remind you that the case was at an early stage and we had other and bigger cases to wind up.’

  Beth cleared her throat modestly as if to remind us that she had not finished answering the question. We waited. ‘It seemed to me,’ she said, ‘that the other weak point was that both the cards and the PIN numbers are sent through the post. A dishonest postman could get access to them.

  ‘And there was a postman nearby who had more money than you’d expect of a humble postie.’

  ‘Postman Pat!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Right,’ said the Sergeant. ‘And what none of us knew was that he already had a criminal record. He seems to have furnished a convincing if fraudulent background when applying for the job – probably furnished by Ricketts – and we only got onto him just before Ricketts died. As a postman, he did deliveries in one of the best areas of Dundee. He could easily hold back likely looking mail for a day or two. The way the mails have been, who’d notice? And it’s quite possible to guess whether what’s inside is worth taking a closer look at.’

  ‘I’m told that you can buy a solution for the purpose,’ I said.

  The Sergeant hesitated. ‘Don’t you go spreading this around, but common methylated spirit makes most papers go transparent for long enough for somebody to study the interior of an envelope,’ he said reluctantly. ‘And it leaves very little trace behind when it dries. Even the smell soon fades away. But confidential bank correspondence travels in envelopes which transfer coloured dye to the contents if any such trick has been used. Haven’s previous convictions were for theft. He was unlikely to know how to open and close an envelope without giving himself away and he certainly couldn’t copy a bank card.

  ‘The coincidence of a postman, with a criminal record, delivering in the areas in which lived most of the account-holders who had complained of the disputed withdrawals, was enough to make us sit up. Not far away from him lived another convicted felon, a high-tech villain who would be perfectly capable of doing all the rest. But, there was no sign that they even knew each other. In fact, we’ve since discovered that they were in Peterhead Prison at the same time, but that’s all, and we didn’t find that much out until two days ago.

  ‘Quite by chance, Postman Pat had come to live next door to Detective Chief Inspector McStraun. Just what the postman’s thoughts were when he first found out who his new neighbour was is a matter of guesswork; but he must soon have decided to turn it to his advantage. Mr McStraun, aided by his observant wife, was in a perfect position to swear that Haven went off to his work every day like a good little postman, returned at the end of his shift and rarely went out again. Most of his leisure was spent working in his garden and joining with Mr McStraun in complaining about the ravages of Clarence. On that subject, at least, they were on the same side.

  ‘Meanwhile, Mrs Haven was in the habit of going out several times a week, sometimes walking and sometimes driving. She had a bright yellow Metro which was unmistakable and has never been seen nearer to Nearn House than sweeping past the end of the drive. We now guess that she would pick up the van from its hiding-place, put on the hat and gloves and mackintosh which were left inside it and drive to Nearn House. There, she would wait while Ricketts made his copies and resealed the envelopes. She was very careful, judging from the scarcity of the traces she left behind, but her waiting around might easily extend to an hour or more. The one relaxation she allowed herself from her self-imposed standards of caution must have been to remove her gloves at the kitchen table and do her nails. The kitchen table was also where Ricketts worked, for the sake of the light and the availability of power and water nearby, so she would have been able to observe over and over again how he performed his magic.’

  The Sergeant was warming to his narrative. I would have enjoyed a cup of tea or coffee to go with it but I had no intention of interrupting the flow nor of missing a single word. I got up and helped myself to a beer and put another within the Sergeant’s reach. Beth shook her head at me but the Sergeant did not seem to notice.

  ‘There came the day,’ he said, ‘when their peaceful scene was rudely interrupted. We can date it accurately. The butcher’s van had called and Ricketts had bought a small shoulder of lamb. Mr McCulloch remembers making the sale and that the small van was there at the time. The lamb must have been left sitting on the worktop. We found a matching bone among the trees.

  ‘Ricketts had painted the outside door that morning but, because of the threat of rain, he had left it standing ajar so that it was sheltered by being inside the building. Clarence, exploring or drawn by the smell of meat, found his way inside, brushing the wet paint with his tail.’

  ‘He used to be such a friendly dog,’ Beth said sadly, ‘and he liked people. Even when he was marauding he could never resist rushing at them to express his affection. I don’t know that he’ll ever do that again.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said the Sergeant. ‘In his ebullience he must have arrived like a whirlwind, crashing against the kitchen table, knocking the nail varnish to the floor and in the process getting some on the tip of his tail. Traces were
found on the table-top and the floor when the lab got around to cleaning off the last of the blood.

  ‘At this point, Ricketts seems to have lost his head. By coincidence, the outermost half of Clarence’s tail now carried two distinct contact traces, one of Nearn House and the other of Mrs Haven, and if not knocked on the head he would be returning to his home next door to DCI McStraun.’

  ‘Not really such a coincidence,’ Beth said. ‘A happy dog’s tail thrashes around. If anything’s going to knock into things or get marked, it’s the tail.’

  The Sergeant absorbed this argument without losing his thread. ‘It’s very unlikely, in fact, that anybody would ever have noticed that the tip of Clarence’s tail had changed colour to match Mrs Haven’s rather unusual nail varnish. After all, that nail varnish was a good match for the liver colour of much of Clarence’s coat, and there was nothing to show that the paint and the nail varnish had been acquired at the same time and place. If Ricketts had repainted his own door a different colour, nobody would ever have known or thought anything, and even the door would have been better for it. But . . . what’s that phrase in the Bible?’

  ‘“The wicked flee when no man pursueth”,’ said Beth, who was well brought up. ‘Is that what you meant?’

  ‘That’s just what I meant. Ricketts was an unstable character anyway, and in the heat of the moment Clarence’s tail looked like a damning accusation pointed in his direction. It would be easier to hide the tail than a whole body, so he grabbed up his cleaver and lopped off the evidence, burying it later in the garden.’

  ‘Alas, poor Clarence,’ I said.

  DS Waller nodded without bothering to comprehend. He noticed the beer in his hand for the first time and took a long pull. ‘At this point,’ he said, ‘the statement by Mrs Turner, Mrs Bell’s friend, becomes relevant. She saw Mrs Haven returning home after the rain and thought that she looked upset. This was enough to make her keep an eye on the Havens’ house and she is certain that when Postman Pat arrived home his wife was waiting at the door in an agitated state and was pouring out some story before the door was properly shut.

  ‘The Havens must have had a conference that night. They had already collected a large number of duplicated cards together with their associated PIN numbers, ready for a coup, and Mrs Haven must have been confident that she could take over Ricketts’s role in the operation. Ricketts, on the other hand, was becoming a liability. We think that the trial runs with the fake cards which had alerted us were down to him – he was running out of money and he didn’t want to wait any longer.’

  ‘Also,’ I said, remembering the lecturer’s story, ‘he had come a cropper once before by trying for the one big coup instead of settling for a steady trickle of modest returns.’

  ‘The Havens, on the other hand,’ said the Sergeant, ‘would have looked on it as a long-term opportunity for the big coup, to be followed by retirement in some sunnier climate – not a chance to be rushed at. It also seems possible that they never had intended him to share in the proceeds.

  ‘We may never be quite sure who did the deed. But from the evidence of Postman Pat’s time-cards it seems likely that the female of the species . . . and so on,’ said the Sergeant, who seemed less than happy in the world of quotations. ‘Whatever, within the next day or two – the pathologist can’t be too precise – there was another card to copy and one of them took it to Ricketts. As soon as Ricketts had settled to work, he was chopped with his own cleaver. The machine, plus as many blank cards as possible, were removed in the freezer-bags which we found, heavily bloodstained, in the Havens’ dustbin. But there was one card lost under the puddle of blood and also the tell-tale stain of the nail varnish, so they returned together after dark, carried the table outside and started the unsuccessful bonfire.’

  ‘Wicked!’ Beth said under her breath. As she saw the Sergeant to the door, I was left to wonder whether she was referring to the murder or to the docking of Clarence.

  The Range Rover had only got as far as the gates when Beth was calling for Hannah. There was a pause while the girl washed her hands – an inflexible precautionary house rule after handling dogs – and then she joined us in the sitting room, smiling her serene smile, and sat down where Beth indicated.

  Beth chose her words carefully. ‘Hannah,’ she said, ‘you know that it’s wrong to listen to other people’s phone calls?’

  Hannah’s face froze. She nodded and looked away.

  ‘When I phoned the Detective Chief Inspector yesterday,’ Beth said, ‘I thought that I could hear somebody walking on gravel. At the time I thought that the sound was coming from the end of the line, but now I think that you were listening outside on the cordless telephone. Why did you do it?’

  Hannah took on a taut-faced, slit-eyed look which I recognized. I had seen it on Angus’s face just before an explosion of temper. ‘We’re just considering offering you a steady job here,’ I said gently. ‘But if you ever lose your temper, you’ll have to go. So learn to stay calm, and remember, any time that we ask you a question it’s because we want to know the answer, not because we’re necessarily getting at you. So we’ll ask you once more. Why?’

  Hannah took several deep breaths and then nodded. I felt myself relax. I had been preparing for a clash and a confrontation. But now the tension melted away, leaving a warmth behind. Hannah would do.

  She was looking at Beth. ‘I heard you say something about my dad. I wanted to know what you were telling the police about him.’

  ‘I see,’ Beth said. ‘But after that, you made a call, didn’t you? I thought that I heard it clicking, but then I thought that I must be mistaken. There’ll be a record of the call on our itemized phone bill,’ she added when the girl hesitated.

  Hannah nodded. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t send me away.’

  ‘You phoned Mrs Haven, didn’t you?’

  ‘Dad made me learn her number and Mrs Turner’s in case I needed to phone home some time and he wasn’t in,’ Hannah said.

  ‘You heard me tell Mr McStraun that he should search the Havens’ house? What did I say that gave you the idea that they had killed Mr Ricketts?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Hannah. ‘But I already knew that.’

  Beth frowned at me before I could speak. She paused and listened, but Sam was still swinging happily around. In addition, he was singing to himself. ‘You’d better tell us the truth,’ she said gently.

  ‘I don’t tell lies,’ Hannah said firmly. She thought for several seconds and then nodded again. ‘It was the day after Clarence’s tail was cut. We’d fetched him home from the vet and that evening Dad decided that Clarence must go out to his kennel, same as usual. But I thought that Clarence would still be upset and afraid so I stayed outside and sat with him.

  ‘It was dark and very quiet but quite warm. Mr and Mrs Haven forgot that their window was open, or else they didn’t expect anybody to be outside in the dark. Their kitchen window isn’t far from Clarence’s kennel. But I didn’t mean to listen. Really I didn’t.’ Her eyes brimmed with tears.

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ Beth said. She moved to sit beside Hannah and put an arm round her. I realized suddenly that for all her adult rebelliousness, Hannah was still very young.

  ‘You won’t send me away?’

  ‘Not if you keep your temper from now on,’ I said, ‘and tell the rest of it.’

  ‘I heard Mrs Haven say that somebody was grouchy. So I listened because I thought that they might be speaking about me. It’s the sort of thing they say.’

  ‘Well, we don’t say anything like that here,’ Beth said. ‘What were they saying?’

  ‘Mr Haven said that there was no doubt about it, Mr Ricketts was going off his trolley – look what he’d done to that poor bloody spaniel. “We’re going to have to deal with him.” Those were his very words. They really were,’ Hannah added anxiously.

  ‘Of course they were,’ Beth said. ‘But, Hannah, why didn’t you tell anybody all this?’

  ‘
I’d already asked Dad what we were going to do about the person who’d cut off Clarence’s tail and he shook his head and said that there was nothing to be done. He said that revenge wouldn’t do Clarence any good and that the best thing we could do would be to keep our heads down and wait and see; but that if he ever found out who it was he’d fix them good and proper.

  ‘I knew that he was angry. I didn’t want to make it worse and I was afraid that Dad might take some action and get into real trouble. So if Mr Ricketts had done that to Clarence and somebody else was going to do something to Mr Ricketts it seemed best not to say anything at all. And then –’ she looked at me ‘– later, when you said that you were going to try to find out things, you said that we’d all have to be careful and not say too much.’

  ‘I believe I did.’

  Hannah nodded emphatically. ‘Nobody told me that Mr Ricketts was dead until I heard you on the phone. Then I guessed what had happened. Perhaps it was right that Mr and Mrs Haven should be punished for killing the man who cut off Clarence’s tail but, privately, I rather hoped that they’d get away with it. It seemed to me that he had to be the sort of person who was better dead.’

  ‘So you phoned up and warned them,’ Beth said. We sat for a minute in silence broken only by the crackle of the fire, the crunch of Isobel’s feet on the gravel outside and the sounds of Sam in his bouncer, ‘You were right,’ Beth said. ‘Best not to say anything at all. Can you manage that? Say nothing at all about what you heard and did? Not even to your dad?’

  Hannah nodded happily. ‘It would only worry him,’ she said. ‘Can I go now? Mrs Kitts wanted me to help her.’

  *

  Charlie phoned that evening. ‘We’ve stopped off near Glasgow,’ he said. ‘We should be nearing home before lunchtime tomorrow. May we stop in and collect Hannah and Clarence?’

  ‘That’ll be all right,’ I said.

  ‘How is the old devil?’

  ‘Getting back on form. Beth had him out this morning and he knocked over the postman.’