Stray Shot, page 16
part #13 of Keith Calder Series
Earl was still ringing when I opened the door. ‘The place feels empty,’ I said. ‘It has the smell of a house which has been empty for some time. Somebody’s been wearing a powerful scent in here, but not for several hours. I think we’re in the wrong house. Either that or she hasn’t come home.’
He pulled the door shut. ‘We’ll look around anyway,’ he said. ‘It may not be her scent; could be the coloured maid’s. She could have come home and gone out again.’
But there was an internal door to the garage and, when we looked inside, the concrete floor was barren.
‘We made our play and we lost,’ Earl said dejectedly. ‘Let’s get out of here before some angry householder shows up and starts shooting.’
We reached the front door in time to hear the sound of a small car pulling up and when we ducked into the tidy living room we could see a red sports car in front of the garage.
She came straight into the living room and from either side of the door we grabbed her arms. She turned out to be a synthetic blonde with a face which had been around longer than a first glance suggested but a figure which, although ample, was very good. From my glimpse before I put my hand over her mouth, her features suggested a gentleness which would have been wasted on Dave Reece.
Her surprise and fear were such that she lost control and broke wind loudly. ‘Don’t make another sound,’ I said. It came to me that I could have expressed myself with more tact.
Earl passed me her other arm and I held both her wrists in one hand, still covering her mouth with the other while Earl opened the large handbag on her arm.
‘Nothing,’ he said. Behind the lady’s back he pulled a face and fanned the air. I knew what he meant. Her flatulence, combining with a less than delicate perfume, was beginning to make my eyes water.
‘Is there a receipt in there?’ I asked. ‘Bank or post office?’
‘Nope.’ He shifted his feet uncomfortably. ‘You want to search her?’
I was sure that the figure shuddering gently against me was not hiding anything hard and heavy. ‘Not a lot,’ I said.
‘You?’
He glanced at the thin dress and shook his head. ‘No point,’ he said. ‘She was dropping it off somewhere. There’s shops and a post office on the corner. Or she could have another friend. Where is it, honey?’
I uncovered her mouth. She was too scared to scream but she had a reserve of courage left. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she whispered.
‘You know,’ I said. ‘And you know Dave Reece is dead. Nobody ever survived a fall like that. These people play rough.’ There seemed to be no harm giving the opposition the credit for my deed. ‘We’re from the real owners. Give it back before you get hurt. Otherwise, you’ll never see a penny.’
She pursed her lips and said nothing.
‘Now you listen to me,’ Earl said sternly. ‘You’ll be watched from here on. If you look for a buyer, we’ll know. And you’re as likely to make contact with the same guys, who’d just as soon grab it for nothing. Give it to us and there’ll be a reward. Not as much as Reece was asking, but look where he is now.’
She looked from one to the other of us and shook her head again.
The telephone started to ring. It was all that was needed to remind us that our time might be running out.
We left her tied by the thumbs to a door handle with parcel string and got out of there, breathing deeply. Earl almost pushed me into the car and set off again in a hurry.
‘People!’ he said. ‘I guess God should have stopped at something he did well, like monkeys. Did you ever smell anything worse?’
‘Never. Where now?’ I asked.
‘Airport. You can still catch the B-Cal plane if there’s a seat left. I want you out of here.’
‘What about you?’
‘Hell, I didn’t knock anybody over with a slingshot. Worst anybody can say I did was to bust in on Mz Zuckerman. And she won’t be pressing any charges, not just for that. That’s why I didn’t accept your kind invite to search her. Could’ve been fun, though.’
‘Can you keep watch on her?’
‘We’ll try. But for the moment she isn’t believing that her lover’s dead. When that sinks in, she’ll be shit-scared. Also, she reckons that as long as she’s the only person knows where it is, nobody’s going to knock her off. She won’t go near the stuff for a year at least. If Keith’s lucky, his secrets will be obsolete before they see the light of day again. I guess we’ll give her a few days to recover and then have somebody phone her. He represents Winchester or Remington, somebody too big to have to play rough. He’s ready to pay her off just to prevent Keith’s new load competing with their product. Keith can tell me how high he’s prepared to go.’
He made another turn. I recognised the road. We were nearing the airport.
‘You’ll phone Keith for me?’
‘I’ll do that,’ he said.
‘He’ll be in touch. He’ll want to settle up with you.’
‘He can forget it,’ Earl said. ‘Hell, you paid most of the bills. We’d have spent more than we did, just keeping ourselves amused. Tell Keith I’m sorry we lost out and all we want’s an invitation to shoot your red grouse some time. I hear that they’re real tricky.’
It seemed to me that grouse were about to go out of season. ‘It won’t be until next August,’ I said.
‘Whenever. There’s no rush. All we’ve got is time. Then we’ll see if you’re as good with a shotgun as you are with a slingshot.’
At the terminal he parked on some forbidding looking lines. I got my bag out of the back. ‘Don’t forget this!’ He hung something over my shoulder. ‘The gun the fuss was all about, for God’s sake!’
The terminal was crowded. Earl knew the way. Moving at his deceptive pace, he carved a route for me towards the British Caledonian desk. Even among Texans he was large and a path seemed to open for him.
An hour later, I was boarding the plane. As I took my seat, a British Caledonian stewardess was stowing something in the overhead locker. Her elbow dislodged the Dallas Gun Club cap which I had forgotten that I was wearing.
She picked it up for me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
After the days spent talking with Earl and his friends, the proper response jumped onto my tongue. ‘It don’t make a shit, ma’am,’ I said.
She turned away to one of her colleagues. ‘Another damned Texan,’ she said under her breath.
Chapter Eleven
On the flight back I began to wind down slowly and even came to terms with the fact that I had killed Dave Reece. Illogically, the fact that I had instead intended to kill, or at least to maim, the man in the raincoat helped me by making my action seem less deliberate. I think that I slept a little. We landed at Gatwick at what had somehow become seven the next morning. Keith was waiting for me in Customs.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘Making sure you don’t end up in the shairn,’ he said. Shairn, I knew, was Scots for cow-dung.
‘Why would I?’
‘You’re a British national. You can’t come waltzing into the country with a shotgun and no certificate. But you can deliver it to me, as a licensed dealer. I came down on the last shuttle last night and dozed in a chair in the lounge.’
He had gone to some trouble on my behalf but I was rather off Keith at that moment. ‘Just to get your hands on Sir Philip’s gun?’ I asked.
‘You’ll get the reward,’ he said sourly. ‘You can pay my fare out of it.’
If I had succeeded in his other errand I would have told him to pay his own damn fare. ‘I’ll reimburse you,’ I said. ‘But I think you’ve got a bloody nerve.’
‘You too. And you look like hell.’
I knew what he meant. I was beardless but had again forgotten to shave. We were both tired and fed up.
The departure lounge for the shuttle looked squalid by Dallas standards. We managed a quick cup of revolting coffee.
During the flight to Turnhouse and again in his car, he questioned me closely about all that I had seen, done, heard, thought, felt and imagined while in Texas. Some of his questions had me puzzled. In the car, which still showed crumpled bodywork but seemed to be in running order, I played him the tapes of Reece’s phone calls, several times, but before I could ask what he made of them I noticed that we were not on the shortest route around Edinburgh.
‘I want to get home and to bed,’ I said.
‘This won’t take long. I played that tape over the phone to Charlie,’ Keith said, ‘and he phoned Cathcart and asked him to trace the phone number. Yesterday, he called Charlie back and asked him how he got the number. Charlie said that our agent in the States was hot on Reece’s trail and that Reece seemed to have phoned that number.
‘Cathcart hummed and hawed and Charlie told him that he wasn’t playing fair. In the end, Cathcart said this much. The number belonged to a house occupied by a woman. From what a neighbour told the police, a man who could have been Reece had been there most nights for the past few months.’
I was too tired to get excited about it. ‘Have you been to see her?’ I asked idly.
‘Cathcart wouldn’t cough up the address and he said that she’d died in an accident, early on Sunday morning. He said that the Lothians force were investigating and they were taking it seriously because she’d been mixing with a tough crowd. If we poked our noses in, the whole story would come out.’
‘Dead end,’ I said.
‘It was. Then it occurred to me to look in the local paper.’ Keith pulled in to the roadside. He handed me a cutting from a newspaper. I read it while he consulted a street map.
GAS BLAST KILLS WIDOW
Mrs Sheila Conran (32) was killed outright when a blast shattered her home early yesterday morning. Mrs Conran, a widow, is believed to have just returned from her work at a gaming club in central Edinburgh when . . .
The remainder of the story added few details but was padded with uninformative comments from the Gas Board, the police and several neighbours. On reading the story for the third time I pointed out that the address was not mentioned.
‘That hit me in the eye,’ Keith said. He put the map away and pulled out into the traffic. ‘But among the S. Conrans in the phone book I found the number Reece asked for. I want to take a look at it. It’s not far off our route.’
The street turned out to be one of those forgotten corners which have been left behind by the march of progress. A dozen or so run-down houses were interspersed with small workshops, a few lockup garages, some allotments and corners of derelict land so far undiscovered by the speculative builders.
There was still police activity in the street and when Keith tried to slow down he was waved on by a constable with a luminous green waistcoat over his uniform. We had seen enough.
Keith drove on and headed for home. ‘If that was a gas explosion,’ he said, ‘Krakatoa was a careless fart.’ But he seemed to put the almost demolished house out of his mind for the moment. ‘Earl was right,’ he said disgustedly. ‘That woman had got the package hidden somewhere. And you chickened out, the pair of you!’
‘It couldn’t have been in the house,’ I said. ‘You know how a place smells different when the dust’s had time to settle and the air’s changed. Besides, she was wearing a perfume that made your head swim but you could only smell a trace of it in the house. So she hadn’t been back. What would you have done?’ I asked him. ‘Torture? Kidnap?’
‘At least I’d have searched her for a receipt from the bank or the post office.’
‘I expect you would,’ I said. ‘But you wouldn’t have enjoyed it. She’s a bit overblown for your taste.’
He ignored my dig at him. ‘And I’d have put the fear of God into her.’
‘We tried that,’ I said. ‘That’s another reason why you wouldn’t have enjoyed it. I don’t know why they talk about getting the wind up,’ I added sleepily. ‘That’s not the direction it goes at all.’
‘The trouble with you,’ he said, unsmiling, ‘is that you’re too much of a gentleman and, even with you looking like that, she could see it.’
He fell silent and seemed lost in thought. I decided not to feel insulted. I dozed until we swept past the by-road to Keith’s house. ‘Alice went home,’ he said suddenly. ‘And Boss. They’re both fine.’
‘That’s good,’ I said.
‘Earl says that they thought a lot of you.’
‘They did?’ I had had the impression that Earl and his friends had thought me a bit of a wimp. And that Keith thought the same.
‘Earl wouldn’t say much about what happened at the end. I gather that Dave Reece has gone to Another Place, and is no doubt by now bugging St Peter’s gatehouse on behalf of the devil?’
‘You could put it like that,’ I said.
Keith turned out of the Square in Newton Lauder and headed out towards Tansy House. ‘Earl hinted – no more than that – but he hinted that you’d had more than a finger in Reece’s death. And that that’s why he put you on a plane in a hurry.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes. He phoned again to say that his friend John managed to get the papers out of Reece’s pocket. I told him to burn the cheque and any other papers and just to keep the letter, in case Cullingpepper and his friends ever tried to make trouble. Burning the cheque is as good as burning cash as far as they’re concerned, so it should keep them at each other’s throats until the dust’s settled.’
I was realising that he had more excuse than I had for feeling out of sorts. ‘I’m sorry I blew it,’ I said.
His mood, like mine, had softened. ‘You didn’t blow it. You just didn’t quite get there. You were beaten by a dead man who had thought one step too far ahead. To be honest, I never dared hope that you’d get as far as you did. You must be more on the ball than you ever let on. Oh, well! Earl thinks that the samples may never surface again. He may be right. Have breakfast and a bath and you’ll feel better. And shave, unless you’re going to go in for topiary again. I’ll come for you later.’
‘I’m going to bed. I’ve been on the go for twenty-eight hours straight.’
‘Less six hours time difference,’ he pointed out. He bit back a yawn of his own. ‘I’ll phone and tell you when I’m coming. Superintendent Cathcart wants to meet me at Aikhowe and he wants you along. He mentioned you by name. But unless your activities in the States could stand up to police scrutiny, say nothing about them except to answer my questions.’
‘What does he want?’
‘He didn’t say but it sounded urgent. Bring the tapes and your photographs and so on. And give Charlie his bits and pieces back.’
‘His bugs are still in place,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the rest.’
We were slowing for Tansy House. I could see Alice at the door and Boss at her feet. ‘Simon,’ Keith said plaintively, ‘what did happen to Reece? Not a word beyond this car, I swear it.’ I decided to leave him wondering. I had no objection to accepting credit for the work of the Texans, or to Keith believing that I had committed murder on his behalf. The truth was less glamorous than Keith’s mental images would be. I waited until the car had stopped and then let him see that I was hiding a quiet smile. ‘I always find that it’s better to let these things be forgotten,’ I said.
I left him exuding frustration and went inside to face another string of questions, this time about people and places and clothes and food and weather and life, with crime at the tail end of a long list. It even continued while I was in the bath. And Boss sat beside me and panted into my ear. We were all glad that I was back.
*
Although the local garage had restored Keith’s car to running order, Molly had made it clear that she had no intention of running around in a car which looked as if it had been rescued from a breaker’s yard and she had appropriated the jeep which was not only Keith’s shooting vehicle but contained most of his shooting gear.
So Keith had left the car at the garage again, for urgent attention to the bodywork, and we arrived at Aikhowe in mid-afternoon in Alice’s Mini – Keith, myself, Alice who had flatly refused to be left behind and Boss who was never abandoned if it was possible to take him with us.
A police Jaguar swept past as we neared Aikhowe, almost blowing the Mini off the road, and we arrived on the gravel to find Charlie speaking on the doorstep to Superintendent Cathcart. A police sergeant and Charlie’s security man were eyeing each other. They all looked at Alice in doubt but said nothing. Sometimes being an attractive girl has its advantages. Boss, locked in the car, settled down across the back seat in contentment.
Charlie led us through to his private quarters with Cathcart almost treading on his heels in impatience. A fire blazing in the grate was helping the central heating to raise the room almost to Texan levels of temperature.
The Superintendent was speaking almost before we had settled ourselves on to Charlie’s worn but comfortable furniture.
‘Your time ran out several days ago,’ he said. ‘Things have moved on. We have to open up a full investigation. I’m sorry.’
‘So am I,’ Keith said. He glanced at Charlie and back to Cathcart. ‘Our agent in America failed to recover our goods. Well, swings and roundabouts! At least it means that the time for secrecy is over. We can seek help from the Dallas police.’
Charlie, rather white in the face, looked down at the table.
‘So be it,’ Cathcart said. I had a feeling that he was watching me out of the corner of his eye. ‘Although they may not be as much help to you as you would be to them. I asked them for word of Reece, only to be told that he’d been killed in a fall. They traced him back to a motel. I made an enquiry – very guarded, you’ll be glad to hear – as to whether there was anything unusual in his luggage. Apart from some tools and electronic components, there wasn’t.’
‘What a pity!’ Keith said. He sounded sincere. I avoided his eye.
