Adverse Report, page 3
part #12 of Keith Calder Series
‘They were his guns. They were in proof.’
‘But for black powder only.’
Calder bit back a sharp answer and took several deep breaths. ‘The law does not make a distinction,’ he said carefully. ‘It’s hard to see how it could, while reproduction guns are still being made for black powder shooting. I warned Mr Hatton, several times, that he should send his guns for nitro proof, or use black powder cartridges only, or retire them. I had no power to do more. If I had retained his guns and he had come to this court, his lordship would . . .’
‘His lordship knows better than you do what his decision would have been,’ the depute fiscal said quickly, ‘I now hand you the remains of the cartridges out of the gun. What can you tell me about them?’
Calder picked up a damaged but recognisable yellow cartridge. ‘This appears to have been a standard cartridge from the Huddersfield Cartridge Company. From the printing, it was sold through my shop. Not enough of the other cartridge is left for the printing to be seen, but the base, though totally flattened, seems to have been similar.’
‘They would have been loaded with modern nitrocellulose powder?’
‘As originally sold, yes. They could have been reloaded. The owner of a black powder gun will often load new or used cases using gunpowder.’
From a case beneath her table the depute fiscal produced a cartridge belt. About half of the pockets were empty, the others containing a dozen or so cartridges. ‘I show you the belt which the deceased was wearing. You would agree that the remaining cartridges all bear the imprint of your shop?’
‘Yes.’
‘And show no signs of having been reloaded?’
Calder studied them carefully. ‘True,’ he said.
At that moment I realised that his apprehension had been justified. The lady was gunning for him, or why had she taken so much trouble with her homework?
‘So,’ she said, ‘knowing that Mr Hatton’s guns were proved only for black powder, you sold him modern cartridges loaded with smokeless nitro powder?’
Calder was looking as black as the gunpowder under discussion and about as explosive, but he still held himself from bursting. ‘That does not necessarily follow,’ he said. ‘I spoke very seriously to Mr Hatton about the dangers. I even hand-loaded some cartridges with black powder for him to use and to satisfy himself that he was losing little or nothing in performance. After that, if he ran short of cartridges while in residence at Newton Lauder, he might well have preferred to have somebody else buy them for him. I certainly don’t remember selling him any. But even if I had done so, I would not have been contravening the law. There are many such guns in use, and mishaps are rare.’
‘But they do happen?’
‘They do.’ Calder paused and then plunged on. ‘But I’ll tell you this: such bursts as I’ve seen in similar guns have been minor affairs. Often, only the first twist of the Damascus barrel is sprung out. The user gets a fright and loses his eyebrows, maybe even a little skin. I have never, ever, seen a gun destroyed like that one, nor anything like it.’
The sheriff stirred again and looked at the depute procurator fiscal. ‘You still have not qualified Mr Calder as an expert witness,’ he said.
‘I was not giving an opinion, my lord,’ Calder said. ‘I was stating facts within my own experience.’
His lordship ignored him and spoke to the depute fiscal. ‘I have no wish to hurry you,’ he said, ‘but do please bear in mind that the hour of adjournment is almost upon us and we have another case called for this afternoon.’
The depute fiscal swung back to Calder. I could not see her face but I could hear the triumph in her voice. ‘Briefly, then, Mr Calder, you’re suggesting, from your experience, that not only was Mr Hatton using cartridges emanating from your shop which were unsuited to his gun but, in addition, that the fatal cartridge must in some way have been exceptional or faulty?’
Calder hesitated again. ‘You would have to put that question to the Huddersfield Cartridge Company,’ he said.
‘Thank you, Mr Calder. That will be all.’
A few minutes later the sheriff was giving his decision, that my uncle had died by misadventure. In summing up the facts he managed to imply, without quite stating, that Keith Calder had been careless if not downright negligent.
The gunsmith was fizzling with fury as we left the room.
Chapter Three
I only half-listened to Calder’s hissing plaint. The stocky man with hair like a coconut mat broke away from a group which included the witness Duffus and caught me by the sleeve as I walked by. ‘It is Simon Parbitter?’ he said. ‘I’m Alec Hatton. Your cousin.’
So that was why he had seemed familiar. I shook his hand. ‘It must be twenty years,’ I said.
‘Nearer thirty. I suppose we’ve both changed.’
‘We’d be oddities if we hadn’t,’ I pointed out.
‘That’s true.’ He paused to look at his watch. His clothes, I noticed, were off the peg, heavy and serviceable, not new but well kept. ‘I wanted to talk to you, but I’m with Uncle George’s shooting pals and we’re just going to lunch. Join us?’
‘I’d like to,’ I said. ‘But I’m with . . .’
He looked round. Enterkin and Calder had stopped a few yards away. Alec nodded a greeting. ‘I don’t think our uncle’s solicitor or his gunsmith would be out of place,’ he said. ‘Shall we all join up and hold a mini-wake?’
Enterkin seemed to have doubts but Calder was keen. ‘Strame House?’ he suggested.
‘We’ll see you there, then.’
The others moved off but Calder turned to the solicitor. ‘The law’s finished with those bits of gun, hasn’t it?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘Ralph, as the deceased’s executor,’ Calder said urgently, ‘could you claim those bits before they get dumped in the bucket or somebody else thinks of grabbing them?’
‘I could. But . . .’
‘Let’s not argue, let’s do it.’
The solicitor threw up his hands and went back into the courtroom, muttering to himself.
‘I’m not happy about this,’ Calder said. ‘There’s something not right.’
‘It’s no skin off your nose,’ I said. ‘He was my uncle, not yours.’
‘Then you should be even less happy than I am. Hang on a moment, there goes the pathologist. I met him in the witness room. A useful lad. Gabbie.’ He darted off, leaving me to kick my heels in the empty corridor. ‘Gabbie’, I had learned from my friend in the hotel, meant talkative.
In two minutes, he was back. ‘The pathologist tells me that there was no shot in your uncle,’ he said. ‘Damn!’
I gaped at him. ‘Why would there have been?’ I asked.
‘Think about it. That bloody woman set me up,’ he added indignantly. ‘You wait and see what the papers make of it tomorrow.’
‘I don’t suppose they’ll print more than the bare verdict,’ I said.
He humphed. ‘Cameron’ll make sure they do. He hates my guts.’
This seemed to be going a bit far. ‘To the extent of telling lies?’
‘There’s lies and lies. He’s probably convinced himself that he’s right and I’m wrong.’
Enterkin returned with a paper sack which rattled. We walked to the car. He dropped the sack into the boot and took the driver’s seat. I was relegated once more to the rear. I could see why Calder had insisted on taking the wheel that morning. The solicitor drove very slowly and yet gave the impression of being quite out of touch with his car. It was as if he expected it at any moment to take the initiative from him, perhaps by sprouting legs or wings.
Calder spoke over his shoulder to me. ‘At lunch, find out what you can. Your uncle’s life-style, his last few days, that sort of thing. If I ask all the questions, it’ll look too obvious. Don’t let on that we know anything’s wrong.’
‘Do we really know that something’s wrong?’
‘No, we don’t. We have a verdict,’ Enterkin pointed out.
‘Not necessarily a correct one,’ Calder said.
‘As far as the law is concerned, the facts are contained in the verdict.’
‘And if those facts happen to be wrong,’ Calder said, ‘would you, as his executor, still want to proceed? For God’s sake, don’t slow down any more,’ he added as Enterkin took his foot off the accelerator, ‘or they’ll be serving dinner by the time we get there. Look at it this way. If the sheriff was misadvised, which he was, it’s not out of the question that one of the beneficiaries arranged for death. Would you want to go ahead and distribute their legacies in those circumstances?’
‘Well, thank you very much,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t been out of London for six weeks until the day before yesterday and I haven’t been in Scotland since I was a boy.’
Enterkin met my eye in the driving mirror but said nothing. We drove for a mile in irritable silence. Enterkin nerved himself and overtook a tractor and trailer. ‘H’m,’ he said. As a comment, I found it lacking in precision.
Another subject seemed overdue. ‘What did you do to Cameron to get up his nose like that?’ I asked Calder.
The solicitor chuckled and the gunsmith gave a small snort of amusement. ‘There’s a disreputable little gun-dealer called Moray. Christian name Abraham, if that can ever be called Christian. He sold a gun and the purchaser showed it to Duncan Cameron, who smelt a rat and ran to the procurator fiscal with it. That . . . that unfeminine female prosecuted and called Cameron as a witness. Unfortunately for them, Ralph here, who was for the defence, consulted me. Abe Moray certainly deserved to be put away – but not for that particular sin, of which he was quite guiltless.
‘The gun had originally been built undersized and proved for gunpowder as a thirteen-bore. They used to do that sometimes, to allow a margin for lapping out the pitting which was common with the corrosive primers they used in those days. Then, around the turn of the century, it had been re-proved for nitro as a twelve-bore. Cameron and the Beastess with the Leastest tried to convince the sheriff – not Dougall, it was the other one sitting that day – that Abe had falsified the proof-marks, largely on the grounds that the Proof House stamp looked slightly different from the usual run.
‘My wife, who’s a photography nut, went chasing around the country photographing proof-marks, and we came up with half a dozen which matched the other exactly, and on guns which Abe had never been within a mile of. The Proof House had been using several different punches, that was all. It would hardly have made a ripple except that Cameron, conceited slob that he is, had tipped off some friendly reporters that he was going to be sensational, and the reporters turned out not to be so friendly after all. It did his reputation a lot of no good.’
‘And that’s the understatement of the year,’ Enterkin said. ‘From what I heard, his customers got nervous about being landed in losing court-cases. Word goes round.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ Calder said. ‘Word going round. I don’t want to be thought of as a muck-stirrer.’
‘No doubt,’ Enterkin said, ‘you would prefer that the more recent purchasers from your stock of antique guns were not encouraged to look too closely at them.’
‘Say that outside this car,’ Calder growled, ‘and I’ll find another solicitor and sue you. Privilege only stretches so far.’
Strame House Hotel, when we came to it, was a gracious old building which had been extended in a modern but sympathetic style. It looked strangely opulent to my eyes, being set in wide gardens in open country instead of hemmed by houses.
My cousin, together with our uncle’s shooting friends, was already at a table in a svelte lounge-bar and I found a large glass of whisky in my hand before he had completed the introductions.
Where I had lived for most of my life the gender roles are becoming softer-edged, so I was not as surprised as I might have been to realise that a woman had been among the guns. Mrs Emily Grant was tall, past forty and severely dressed. I could imagine her handling a gun with ruthless efficiency and yet she was one of those women who manage to look feminine and even sexy despite age and every self-made obstacle. In part, this was due to a rich figure and large, bright eyes, but it was enhanced by a voice which was low for a woman’s but soft and insinuating. I thought that a man could go to bed with that voice and never mind the body, firm though that still was. I gathered that she had been a widow for some years, inheriting both a farm and a place among the men from her late husband, and that she ran her farm with the aid of a manager.
The other two men, Jim Fergus and Neil McDonald, were near neighbours to each other. Although not as old as Hector Duffus, Fergus resembled him in that nobody could have taken either of them for anything but what they were, Scottish farmers too long rooted in the land ever to be transplanted.
Neil McDonald, introduced simply as ‘the builder’, was a large man, just as broadly spoken but without that patient calm which farmers learn. He chain-smoked, so that his hands and even his chin were stained yellow. One of his arms was in a sling – the result, he explained, of a fall from scaffolding. It was he who had cried off from the shooting party.
Another huge whisky appeared while I was still trying to get everyone straight. I muttered vague thanks in the hope that they would fetch up with whoever had bought the round, and turned to my cousin who was on my left. ‘Where do you live these days?’ I asked.
‘Edinburgh, until this week.’ He looked at me shyly, as if about to reveal some delicate secret. ‘But I’m moving out to Kirkton Mains Farm, anticipating the settlement of the estate. The farm has to be managed.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘I’ve moved into Tansy House. You fancy the rural life, do you?’
He blinked but nodded and his face took on the faraway look of the Buddhist nearing nirvana. ‘I acted as Uncle George’s manager for years, off and on, whenever he wanted a break,’ he said. ‘The place has become part of me. I graduated from agricultural college, but there was never the capital to set me up. I’ve been selling farm machinery for yonks but I’d have given both arms and a leg for a crack at the real thing.’
‘And now you don’t have to,’ I said. Here at least was one person with a motive to put Uncle George under the ground. But would he have talked so openly if he had done so? Thinking it over, I decided that he would unless he were a fool – which he was not. Naïve, perhaps. The cunning looks which I would have expected of a machinery salesman were lacking, unless that blandness was itself a subtle disguise. Even after the sheriff’s verdict, to have pretended a lie might have invited suspicion. ‘Did you know that the farm was coming your way?’
‘He told me last year, but I never expected . . . I thought that he’d have at least twenty years to go. Of course, I’ll have to sell off some land to capitalise it, but twelve-fifty acres is a bit unwieldy for a small farm. Either too big or too small. Trouble is, it’s a rotten time to sell land.’
‘Why?’ I asked. He could apply the question to whatever he liked.
‘Two pissing wet summers in a row,’ he explained. ‘Farmers with well-drained, sandy soil got away with it. Anybody on clay was doomed. Most arable farms are loaded with debt for the next few years . . .’
‘Not Uncle George?’
‘Thank God, no! He was too good a farmer and too thrifty. Even so, he was almost into the red and the place needs re-stocking and some new machinery. He could have borrowed – the banks are extending loans to prop up the price of land rather than lose their security – but I’m a newcomer as far as the banks are concerned.’ He sighed and made a polite effort to forget his own troubles. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ve been able to keep track of you more easily than you could of me. The flyleaves of your book jackets kept me up to date. I liked the historical novels.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. I was glad that the talk had left agriculture, which bored me, but I always found it difficult to respond to comments about my books.
Calder had been sitting quietly, taking in the talk of the two farming men about the chances of barley going for malting, whatever that might mean, and to the advice which Enterkin was giving to Mrs Grant about how to make her will; but he must have caught Alec’s last remark. ‘Gatling gun,’ he said suddenly.
I said, ‘What?’
‘Gatling gun,’ he repeated. ‘You had the Union army using Gatling machine-guns during the Civil War. You weren’t far out. Gatling had designed it in the first year of the war, but the Union army didn’t adopt it until eighteen sixty-six, the year after it ended.’
‘I’m terribly, terribly sorry,’ I said, and turned back to my cousin.
Alec was grinning. ‘I enjoyed it anyway,’ he said.
I was half-way down my second drink. I had never been very fond of whisky, but this was something different and I said so.
‘A double malt, laddie,’ Duffus said, ‘and fifteen years old.’
‘I could learn to like it.’
‘With perseverance,’ Enterkin said, ‘you might even learn to appreciate it. Bring it with you. Our table’s ready.’
We moved into a dining room which was expensively understated, muted in colour and sound, hygienic without the use of plastics. It was the kind of place to which I could imagine rich men taking girls out from London and telling them to ignore the prices down the margin of the menu just to be sure that they would look and be impressed. I looked and was frankly terrified. I hoped that I was somebody’s guest. If local custom decreed that the heir picked up the bill on such occasions, then surely my cousin. . . .
After we had ordered, one of those sudden silences came down like a great fleecy-lined candle-snuffer. More to break it than to please Calder I said, ‘I hadn’t seen my uncle since I was a child. How old was he?’
Old Hector Duffus grinned maliciously. ‘I doubt he’d changed much in the last few years,’ he said. ‘He was sixty-two.’
‘An’ fitter than some as were half his age,’ Jim Fergus said.
I pretended not to notice that I was being subtly needled. Let the two old boys poke their oblique Caledonian fun at the foreigner if it gave them pleasure. ‘Tell me about him,’ I said to nobody in particular. ‘You must all have known him well.’
