Adverse Report, page 16
part #12 of Keith Calder Series
‘If you don’t untie my hands straight away,’ she said slowly and grittily, ‘I shall ask my father to kill you.’
Ronnie passed me a knife and I cut her wrists free. I had brought along a thin golf jacket but the day was too warm for it. She pulled it off the back of the seat and spread it over her lap.
‘Why did you two idiots have to drive all over the countryside and not stay put in one place?’ she demanded.
‘We were looking for you,’ Ronnie said plaintively.
‘You’d have found me a dashed sight quicker if you’d stopped still for a bit.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I’ve had the worst time of my life, that’s what happened.’ She flounced in her seat and gave a sigh so violent that I felt it reflected from the windscreen. ‘Dragged into that smelly van and my wrists tied, by men with hands like sandpaper. And we’d hardly got on to the road before a tyre went and we were into the ditch.’
‘That was Ronnie shooting out a tyre,’ I said. ‘Could you describe them?’
‘I thought it might be. I never saw any of their faces. They kept their masks on, all but the driver. He was the one who’d fallen in the shairn somewhere . . .’
‘The what?’ I asked.
‘Dung. He couldn’t get his mask off quick enough, it seemed to be bothering him far more than the blood on his hands, but his back was to me. When we stopped, he just said “Run for it”, and they jumped out and ran. So I jumped out too. I used a bit of my skirt to wipe the number-plate and then got over the fence the other side. I was going to head back for the farm through the fields. But I found there was a dashed great bog in the way. And I tried to get my hands free but I couldn’t. You must have gone by while I was behind the trees.’
‘We went after them,’ I said, ‘in case they’d taken you along for a souvenir. Ronnie saw them in the distance and they hadn’t bothered, so we turned back.’
She sighed again. ‘Well, I got back on to the road and decided to make for the farm. There was no way I could go except through the village. I thought that if people saw that my hands were tied they’d want to call the cops and Dad might not want that and anyway my skirt was so badly torn it was useless so I took it off to carry and hide my wrists. I thought that I might just look like a girl in shorts. Did I?’
Pink nylon, bordered with lace and so nearly transparent that I had been sure that her curly tuft had shown, would hardly pass for shorts but she seemed desperate for the reassurance. ‘Exactly like,’ I said.
She looked at me suspiciously but nodded. ‘I got within sight of the farm and there was no sign of the Land-Rover,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d have stopped where you could see the road, so you weren’t there. I turned back. There’s a ’phone-box at the end of the village so I went in and called Dad, reverse charges. I gave him the number of the van and the ’phone-number of the box and he’s going to call back. And you must have gone back to the farm while I was inside, because I was just ready to come out when I saw you go back the other way and I had to follow you right through the village again. And there didn’t seem to be anybody much about but I could feel eyes on me like little clammy hands.’
‘It’s over now,’ I said. ‘We’d better go back and take Keith’s call. And we’ll have to go back to the farm. I dropped the walking-stick gun there. And Boss.’
‘And my gunbag,’ Ronnie said.
‘And the camera,’ I added.
‘And Dad’s metal detector and things. Only,’ Deborah said, ‘could you give me something to put over my head as we go through the village? I’ll never be able to show my face there again.’
‘Why not?’ Ronnie said. ‘You’ve shown them everything else.’
When I stopped at the ’phone-box, the phone was ringing. Keith’s voice came on the line.
‘We’ve got Deborah safe,’ I said.
‘Is she all right?’
‘All but her pride.’ I explained about Deborah’s two strolls through the village. ‘She says she’ll never forgive us.’
‘She’ll get over it,’ Keith said. He sounded amused. I wondered whether Molly would pass it off so lightly. ‘She’s just at the age to take her newfound femininity seriously. Now listen. I’ve been on to Munro and he’s checked the number of the van through the Swansea computer. It was stolen yesterday, so there’s nothing to be got from that. I take it that the men are miles away by now?’
‘That’s for sure,’ I said.
‘So there’s nothing to be gained by invoking the police where you are.’
‘The men have got some pellets in them,’ I told him.
‘So Deborah said. Which makes them easier to find later. It’ll be natural enough, and much better, if you run for home now and I’ll report to our police here.’
‘Meaning Superintendent Munro?’
‘Of course. He’ll be able to smooth it over.’
‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘I never shot anybody before.’
‘Now you’ll be able to write about it with knowledge,’ he said. ‘And Munro tells me that some of the miniatures from Haliott Castle have been turning up in Glasgow.’
We collected our gear, taking the Land-Rover right to the foot of the knoll where the van had stood. Boss was extravagantly relieved to see us return. He was limping but not, Ronnie said, seriously injured.
Now that the excitement was over, our mood was ebullient. Even Deborah came out of the sullens into injured dignity and announced that she was hungry. On the way home, I pulled up at a fish and chip shop. We teased Deborah, daring her to go in for our order. She refused, but seemed to enjoy flirting with the idea. In the end, Ronnie relented and went inside, and he stood us our belated lunch.
On the way back to Newton Lauder, we collected the photographs from Penicuik.
*
At Briesland House, neither Ronnie nor I lingered to face the wrath of a mother whose darling had nearly been kidnapped under our noses and had been returned minus an expensive skirt and having been seen abroad in panties which she had first been forbidden to purchase and then told never to wear outside the house. We handed over the camera, the photographs, the captured shotgun and Deborah, and fled.
I dropped Ronnie, refusing the offer of beer or food, and drove home. There was no sign of Alice. I fed Boss and settled down to work. The first rush of inspiration was over. From now on it would be slog, slog, slog, referring back always to that first outpouring of ideas. I started with the events of that day, an account which could double as a statement for the police and a record for myself, patiently typed on my uncle’s old Remington, and yearned for my word processor now gathering dust in the London flat.
Soon I was engrossed. I surfaced in mid-evening, took Boss for a walk and got down to work again. I was interrupted by a call from Keith. Alice had tried to ’phone while I was out and had left a message that she was on the trail of something and would not be back to Tansy House that night.
I worked on, but the mood was broken. And I was sleepy after the day’s exertions. I gave up at last. Without the comfort of work, the house seemed empty to the point of eeriness. I made a milky drink and went to bed.
Sleep was slow to come. I was anxious about Alice. She might be blundering about around people who were ready to kill or kidnap, a bondage fetishist among them. Or she might be spending the night with some former lover. And I would have hated that. She was already under my skin.
And yet my last thought before sleep came was of Deborah striding along a country road, humiliated but brave.
*
Derek Onslow, always as compulsively an early riser as I was a late one, arrived soon after I had breakfasted. I saw his Porsche at the roadside and found Derek on the doorstep when I returned from walking Boss – a small and sandy-haired man, his hawkish face enhanced by thick glasses.
I gave him coffee while I ’phoned Keith, who said to bring Derek over straight away.
‘Have your ladies forgiven me?’ I asked.
‘Ronnie’s here,’ Keith said. ‘He’s taken the brunt of the attack. After all, he was supposed to be the bodyguard. And Molly’s confined Deborah to barracks until she learns a little obedience and until the Scottish rural public has forgotten about seeing her knickers. You’ll be quite safe.’
‘Don’t let them be too hard on Ronnie,’ I said. ‘I told him to keep the rifle in its bag.’
‘He should have had more sense than to listen to you.’
Boss made it clear that he had no intention of being left behind, so we took the Land-Rover and put the Porsche in the garage. Derek, whom I had always suspected of being a countryman at heart, admired the scenery, the dog and Tansy House.
Chapter Twelve
There was a police car not far from the by-road to Briesland House and I spotted a constable lurking among the trees. I was careful to leave the walking-stick gun in the Land-Rover and was not surprised to find Superintendent Munro, in uniform but for his hat, sitting with Keith. They were in the garden again, making the most of the continuing sunshine between the shadows of the trees.
On the table between them were the photographs of Kirkton Mains Farm and prints of the shots I had taken the day before. I knew that Molly had a darkroom in the house and guessed that she had been busy. The captured shotgun lay, dismantled, beneath Keith’s chair.
I introduced Derek and fetched more chairs from the summerhouse where I knew they were stacked.
Munro had a dark flush on his brow and I guessed that he was torn between angry embarrassment at our escapade of the day before and the hope that we would save his bacon for him. Ire triumphed for the moment. ‘Just what did you mean,’ he began, ‘by running about the place and shooting folk? And on some other body’s patch,’ he added, as though that made it worse.
Keith held up a finger before I could retort. ‘What were they supposed to do?’ he asked. ‘Find a ’phone-box and call the police, while my daughter was carried off and used as a threat to make me suppress evidence?’
Munro hesitated and was lost. ‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘But a fine lot of smoothing-over you’ve left for me to do.’
‘And you’ll do it,’ Keith said. ‘Or we’ll let your Constable Allerdyce go down the plug-hole.’
‘I may not be needing your help, now that Mr Onslow’s here.’
‘Dr Onslow,’ Derek said, keeping a straight face. ‘And I’m not saying a word unless Simon and his friends want me to.’ I knew that a recent prosecution for speeding still rankled.
Munro grunted and glared at me. ‘I’ll be needing a full written statement.’
‘I have it here.’ I took out the top copy of what I had written the previous evening. Munro held out his hand but I passed it to Keith.
‘Give it to me,’ Munro said sternly.
‘I’ll deliver it to you once Keith has seen it,’ I said. ‘Until then, it’s confidential.’
Keith read it through and then looked up and smiled at the seething Munro. ‘It’ll do,’ he said. ‘Use of reasonable force in the circumstances.’
Munro, in his turn, read through the statement. He took his time weighing the words. ‘Aye,’ he said at last. ‘It’ll do. Almost. Write it again and leave out the bit where Mr Fiddler shoots at the van’s tyre. There’s been no bullet found so far, and I’d as soon not fash my colleagues with the reckless discharge of a rifle towards the public highway. We’ll let them put it down to a Heaven-sent blow-out.’
‘If they’ll believe that,’ Keith said, ‘they’ll believe the rest of it.’
‘Likely they will.’
I put the statement back in my pocket.
A bird, which I took to be a pigeon, settled on a bare branch among the trees which ringed the garden and began to coo. Derek stretched and settled in his chair. ‘What a beautiful spot you have here!’ he said. ‘So much peace after the racket of the city . . .’
There was a loud bang and the pigeon toppled out of the tree in a cloud of feathers. Boss rose and moved purposefully into the depths of the garden.
‘Ronnie’s keeping the birds off my vegetables,’ Keith explained.
‘He’s armed and patrolling the garden,’ Munro said angrily. ‘It seems that my officers are not enough.’
‘They’re not,’ Keith said. ‘Not while armed men are robbing houses and trying to kidnap my daughter. Now, do you want our help or not?’
Boss came back and handed me a pigeon before resuming his place under my chair. Not knowing what else to do with it, I put the dead bird on the table.
‘You know that I do,’ Munro said, ‘and you think it funny. But I’m warning you, Mr Calder, not to push me too far.’
‘And how far would that be?’ Keith asked.
‘That I don’t know. But you’ve been damned near it at times,’ Munro said. ‘Dr Onslow, have you been told what my problem is?’
‘Broadly,’ Derek said. I had given him a summary in the Land-Rover.
‘It is simple enough,’ Munro said. ‘One of my men was taken on a raid on a house where armed thieves were known to be in residence. He was left to guard the stair for a period’ – he looked at Keith – ‘which the officer in command timed at twenty-two minutes. During the whole of that time, he was expecting an armed man to appear at any moment. He was armed with a revolver. When, at last, a figure suddenly appeared at the head of the stairs, his revolver fired – without, he insists, any conscious intention on his own part. An innocent person died. My constable stands accused of recklessness.’
‘Whereas,’ Derek said, ‘you believe that a nervous young man who has been nerving himself for some minutes to react quickly in his own defence if an armed man should appear would pull a trigger without conscious decision?’
‘That is it in a nutshell,’ Munro said. ‘Can you help us?’
‘I expect so,’ Derek said. He sat for a few moments in thought. ‘You could call me to give evidence,’ he said. ‘A lot of experimental work has been done recently on reaction times and signal detection thresholds, mostly in respect of radar operators and air traffic controllers – high-stress jobs in which you just must not be wrong. I could dig up plenty of data, but much of it would be over the jury’s heads and the prosecution could bring rival experts to confuse them further. Better that your counsel should conduct a simple experiment with members of the jury.’
Derek paused, and the sun flashed in his spectacles. ‘Best of all if he times it for the afternoon, so that the jurymen can try it again at home. It entails no more than being able to catch a coin and it goes like this.’
He arranged Munro with his elbow on the table and himself sat with his left wrist on a chairback – to produce a consistent distance, he explained. In his hand, which was above Munro’s, he held a coin. Three times he let it fall from his fingers and each time Munro was quick enough to close his hand and catch it.
‘Och,’ Munro said, ‘this is just child’s play. I don’t see . . .’
‘You will,’ Derek promised. He began to lay traps, misleading the superintendent by a small movement of his hand just before letting the coin drop. Munro caught the coin four times out of the next six. Twice the coin bounced off a fist which had already closed.
‘Now,’ Derek said, ‘we’ll tabulate some results.’ He took a sheet of Keith’s paper and a pencil. For what seemed an age, they persisted. The pauses before the coin dropped became longer. Derek made abstruse notations on the paper with his spare right hand. At last he drew a line on the paper and sat back. ‘I think that’s enough, although we can repeat with Mr Calder or with Simon if you wish. The results are quite clear. The longer the wait, the lower your score. In fact I’ve drawn a rough graph. At twenty-two minutes, if we extrapolated the line, your score would have been down to zero.’
Munro was scowling in his effort to follow the argument. ‘But surely,’ he said, ‘that is not the result we want.’
‘It’s exactly the result you want,’ Derek said. ‘Remember, we’re not graphing the catching of coins. What we’ve graphed is the incidence of your involuntary premature movements. You’d told yourself to grab, the moment I released the coin. The longer the wait the greater the nervous tension and therefore the virtual certainty, if I kept you waiting long enough, that you would close your fist the instant you saw any movement at all. I’ll meet your counsel and instruct him in more detail if you wish.’
Munro scratched his bullet-shaped head while he thought about it. ‘I’ll speak to counsel,’ he said. ‘My guess is that we’ll need both. Counsel having a wee game with the jurors and you backing him up with science. But I’m easier in my mind, now that we’ve got some kind of a defence. Until this moment, we were expecting that counsel would have to do his best with legal technicalities and a plea to the emotions. Except . . .’ He stopped and looked at me. ‘Did Mr Calder mention that minor items from the robbery have been turning up in Glasgow?’
I said that he had.
‘Aye. This is in confidence, mind. Wee things, easily slipped intill the pouch. Miniatures and suchlike. The principal witness against my laddie was in Glasgow. There’s nothing firm yet, but it’s coming. We’ll get him.’ He stirred his loose-knit frame. ‘I’d best be getting along, then.’
‘Don’t go yet,’ Keith said quickly. ‘There’s more to come. Your constable may not even have a case to answer at all. And I think we can help with another case. I’d like Mr Parbitter to stay, but I think we’ve finished with Dr Onslow . . .’
‘I could run Derek into the town and come back,’ I suggested.
‘I’d rather stay,’ Derek said. ‘If nobody minds. There’s professional interest as well as mere curiosity.’
‘Stay by all means,’ Munro said. ‘Keith, man, what are you saying?’
‘I suspect,’ said Keith, ‘that the very first statement you made contained a serious error.’
Munro bristled.
We had been aware of the sound of a car but had tried to ignore it.
