Stray Shot, page 7
part #13 of Keith Calder Series
‘We daren’t go to the police,’ Keith said. ‘They might get results, but the media would have the news before we did. We know who we’re after. But we don’t know where he’s going. He could market what he’s got almost anywhere in the world although our first guesses would be the USA, Italy, Germany and after that you name it. Possibly the Orient. We need a quick way to ask the maximum number of people for news of him.
‘So I asked Jake for the name of somebody with time to spare, if possible a bit of a linguist, and a keen radio ham.’
There was a silence while Haddo thought it over. I looked down at my feet, but in reality I was bowing my head once again at Keith’s ingenuity. But I could see snags ahead.
Haddo put my doubts into words. ‘By the wording of the licence,’ he said, ‘a ham is supposed to confine himself to “Remarks about matters of a personal nature in which the licensee or the person with whom he had been in communication has been directly connected.” In other words, just chat. Nothing commercial or political. Seeking news of a wanderer could just slip through within the definition, provided that nobody asks about my direct connection. But how do I broadcast for help and still preserve your secrecy?’
‘I chewed on that all the way here,’ Keith said, frowning. ‘And it isn’t easy. We need a message that wouldn’t excite the interest of any law officer.’
‘And yet,’ said Alice, ‘you’ve got to make him sound unsympathetic.’ We looked at her and she blushed. ‘What I mean is, you can’t broadcast a request for news of him on the grounds that, say, his old mother’s dying, or the first person to see him would say, “Here, they’re trying to reach you.”’
‘And then the jig would be up,’ Haddo said.
‘Wouldn’t it!’ Keith said. ‘Suppose we made him a homosexual who’d deserted his boyfriend?’
‘There are still some who’d be on his side,’ Haddo said carefully. ‘Especially in the States. If he’s gone to San Francisco . . .’
‘Well, even a fairy has a mother,’ Keith said. He found an envelope in his pocket, borrowed a pen from me and started to scribble. ‘He’s deserted his poor old mother, cleaning out their joint account and leaving her penniless. We want news of him without his being warned, so that a process-server can catch up with him. How’s that?’
‘We can polish it,’ Haddo said. ‘It stretches “Remarks about matters of a personal nature”, but not quite to breaking point.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Evening and through into the small hours, local time, is when you get most of them listening.’ He wheeled himself across the room and opened a cupboard, revealing a compact transceiver with its ancillary equipment. He lowered a flap to form a small desk on which he opened a copy of a magazine. ‘I’ll put this onto tape and get it around Europe straight away. America will have to wait until the middle of our night, and then the Orient when it’s early morning here. That depends on conditions being suitable, of course.’ He ran his finger down a page in the magazine. It was headed, ‘F-layer Propagation Prediction.’
‘You’ll have to sleep some time,’ Keith said. ‘If they can’t raise you on the radio they can phone me at home, collect.’
‘But what about all the different languages?’ I asked.
‘No problem,’ Haddo said, leaning back in his wheelchair. ‘English is the preferred language. When I make an English-speaking contact, I can ask him to pass it around his own territory. Or I read the message to him. He repeats it back to me in his own language. I tape it. I’m not allowed to replay the tape over the air, so I repeat his translation in my own voice onto another tape and broadcast it as a CQ call. That’s a general call to anybody who wants to listen. Simple as that. It’s been done before.’
‘Simple as that!’ I echoed.
He chuckled. ‘Well, it is,’ he said. ‘By the time I’ve spoken to a hundred people and each of those has spoken to fifty and asked them to pass it on . . .’
‘By then, it should have reached somebody who’s seen him,’ Keith said. ‘But whether he bothers to call back is something else again.’
‘If he’s a ham, he’ll call back,’ Haddo said. ‘They’re always dying for an excuse to blether.’
*
The Calders lived in the country to the north of Newton Lauder in an attractive Victorian house – far more attractive, in my opinion, than Aikhowe although less grandiose. We were, of course, obliged to run Keith back. I offered him drinks at Tansy House, which would have brought me home where I could then have relaxed at leisure while Alice went on with Keith but, uncharacteristically, he declined. He also jibbed at being dropped at the gates when we arrived at Briesland House but persuaded Alice to take him right to the door.
The Calder family always gave such an impression of solidarity, and of a hierarchy with Keith firmly at its head, that I would never have guessed that he felt the need of moral support. He must have sensed Molly’s disquiet during his phone call of the morning. We were left in no doubt that she had spent the day imagining Keith’s accident but with a variety of less happy outcomes.
Alice made a circle on the gravel and parked outside the front door. Before she had time to pull up the handbrake, Molly’s head had arrived at the open window beside me. ‘Where have you been all day?’ she demanded of Keith. We might not have been there at all.
‘I told you we were going to—’ he began.
‘Wal’s been trying to find you. And what happened to the car?’
‘Somebody—’
‘It’s too bad of you!’ she snorted. She was very white about the face. ‘And it’s not the first time. I suppose you were tearing around as usual, too busy talking to pay attention?’
‘I was already stopped,’ Keith said loudly. ‘Wasn’t I?’ he added in my direction.
With Molly established in the window, I was unable to move and let Keith out. ‘That’s quite true,’ I said. ‘Alice phoned Keith because there was somebody hanging around the house. When he arrived, I’d been attacked. The man drove off and collided with your stationary car.’
‘I saw it all,’ Alice said quickly. ‘That’s exactly what happened.’
Molly looked hard at me, saw the graze on my ear and tutted.
‘Let me get out and I’ll tell you all about it,’ Keith said. ‘You’ll be interested.’
Bending down to a Mini’s window is a long stoop. She straightened up while she thought it over, which gave me a chance to open the door and get out of the car. Keith followed me out like an animal escaping from a trap.
‘Well, all I can say is that it happens too often,’ Molly said hotly. ‘If I bust as many plates as you do cars, I’d soon hear about it. You get involved in these violent things and one of these days you’re going to get yourself killed and then what about Deborah and me?’ Her voice, as she finished, was almost a wail.
Keith put his arms round her. ‘This time,’ he said, ‘I can’t keep out of it. Our whole future’s at stake.’
I got back into the car and made driving-off signals to Alice, but she was spellbound.
‘That doesn’t justify taking stupid risks,’ Molly was saying. ‘Maybe you weren’t at fault this time, but you do get yourself into the most awful scrapes. We’ve been broke before and we were happy. Can’t you see that we’d rather be broke again than risk being without you? Charlie phoned,’ she added without any change of tone. ‘He said to call him back but it isn’t urgent. Well, you needn’t think that you’re running all over the place at his beck and call. The jeep’s mine until you get the car fixed.’
‘But I’ve got to get in to the shop,’ Keith said.
‘When did you even care about going to the shop? I’ll run you there and fetch you back and that’s all.’
She turned back to the house and Keith went with her. I nudged Alice again and we drove off.
‘And that goes for you too,’ Alice said firmly. I could have asked whether she was referring to transport or to not being ramstam, but the moment seemed inopportune.
Molly phoned an hour later. Alice had gone out, so I took the call. Molly wanted to apologise, she said. She was her old, calm self; indeed, her voice held the warm gentleness of a woman who has been reassured of her partner’s love. Keith, it seemed, had expressed himself in the way which came most naturally to him. His example is not one which I would always care to follow, but in this instance he seemed to have hit on the right treatment.
Chapter Six
In the same way that sleep is impossible while you wait for the other shoe to hit the floor, and one cannot absorb heavy reading in the company of someone in the habit of demanding sudden and urgent attention, so I can never settle to work when interruption is in the wind.
Quite sure that I had not heard the last of Keith and his stolen secrets, I found that I was waiting next day for the phone to ring when I should have been concentrating. So when Alice asked whether I wanted to join her in a trip to Newton Lauder, I went along. Anything, even shopping, would be better than sitting at home staring at a blank screen.
Newton Lauder is a small town, pleasantly old-fashioned. Most of it was built during periods when standards of both design and construction were high and it has since been graced with more than its share of trees and gardens. But it does not have much to entertain the casual stroller when a thin drizzle is drifting on the wind, darkening the pavements and driving the girls indoors. Licensing hours had not yet arrived. Having jibbed at accompanying Alice into the one supermarket and after studying the displays in the other shop windows, I was at a loose end.
Sight of the Calders’ jeep parked in the Square suggested that Keith might well be in town. If not, at least I could pass the time of day in the warm, dry shop with Wallace James, his partner.
Keith and Wallace were in the otherwise empty shop, arguing without heat over the condition of a gun, well worn but bearing a famous name, which Wallace had taken as a trade-in.
‘Send the barrels away for blueing,’ Keith said at last. ‘I’ll sort the rest of it.’
Wallace was nursing a clipboard heavy with lists but Keith turned to me with evident relief. He had an intense loathing of the mundane routines of business life although Wallace, who had begun his professional life as an accountant, seemed to thrive on them.
‘I was wondering what Charlie called up about,’ I said.
Wallace threw up his eyes and turned away to continue checking stock.
‘Nothing earth-shaking,’ Keith said. ‘His secretary had offered to feed Donald Lucas’s dogs once before when Lucas went off. It seems that he phoned up on Friday night to ask her to do it again. Her mother took the message and forgot about it.’
‘Mystery resolved,’ I said.
‘Maybe. The mother had never heard Lucas’s voice,’ Keith said. ‘But Bill Haddo phoned up this morning. He wants to report progress.’
‘And I want to g-get these orders away,’ Wallace put in.
‘You carry on. Whatever you order will be all right with me.’
‘And won’t you half complain when the time comes to sign the cheques,’ Wallace said. His slight, natural stammer is inclined to disappear when something annoys him. ‘You’ve got time to initial the orders.’
‘Gimme.’ Keith grabbed the clipboard and began to jot his initials without reading anything. ‘I’m sorry I got us into this mess, Wal,’ he added humbly. ‘You were always agin it.’
I realised for the first time what I should have guessed, that the development of the new cartridge was the concern of the business and not Keith’s private venture.
Wallace shrugged. ‘I was acting as d-devil’s advocate. It was a reasonable bet. It still may be. At worst, we’re back where we were ten years ago.’
‘And Charlie takes a hell of a knock.’
‘Lord Jedburgh deserves whatever’s coming to him,’ Wallace said with some heat. ‘He undertook to send the samples out to Italy and he buggered about, if you’ll excuse me, Simon, with tenth-rate James Bond gimmicks, hiding the stuff in dogs’ bones for God’s sake! I’m only surprised he didn’t throw in an explosive booby-trap or a poisoned needle.’ He paused and smiled reluctantly. ‘I’d have g-given an arm and a leg to have been hiding behind a tree when Boss came out of the wood and grabbed it.’
‘It has its funny side,’ Keith admitted. ‘We owe Boss a genuine bone. If he hadn’t let greed take over from his training we wouldn’t have a starting-point at all.’
Wallace raised one eyebrow at him. ‘Looking at it the other way up, if you don’t catch up with this man Reece – and I don’t rate your chances very highly – B-boss’s interference has had us throwing good time and money after bad, so d-don’t lash out on any jumbo hambones just yet. You must have been out of your skulls, the lot of you! If you needed a courier, I’d have gone to Italy.’
‘But would you have come back?’ I asked.
Wallace glanced out of the window at the chill drizzle. ‘Not if I could bloody well help it,’ he said, flourishing his clipboard. ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Run along, Keith, and see what Haddo’s got. I can hold the fort.’
*
Keith made his escape and I followed him outside. ‘Do you want to come and see Bill Haddo with me?’ he asked me.
After a moment’s thought, I decided that I was curious. ‘Do we have transport?’ I asked.
‘I have the jeep,’ he said. He seemed surprised that I should doubt it.
‘I’ll join you in a minute,’ I told him.
Newton Lauder is not of a size to support a very large supermarket. Alice was easily found, browsing through the frozen food cabinets. I told her where I was going. She hesitated and then nodded.
Keith drove us southward with the radio playing the Bruch Violin Concerto above the buzz and rattle of the small vehicle and the thwack of the wipers. It finished as we climbed towards Bill Haddo’s house and Keith turned the radio down. ‘I’m not expecting results this early,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t feel up to doing anything else.’
‘That’s how I feel,’ I said.
The tall aerial, I noticed, was rotating under its own power as Haddo homed in on radio traffic. It froze when we rang the bell. The remote gadgetry admitted us. There was a coffee-pot and cups on a low table. Haddo was at his radio desk and he spoke to us from behind a coffee-mug the size of a chamber-pot.
‘I’ve had a dozen possible sightings,’ Haddo said. ‘It’s up to you whether you follow any of them up, but I’d suggest not – the next day or two should sort the wheat from the chaff. This one’ – he pushed aside a slip of paper – ‘was from an Irishman who is always a close friend of anybody you care to mention.’
Keith looked up from pouring coffee. ‘One of those,’ he said.
‘One of those. Another sounded probable, but the sighting was last Tuesday, mid-morning, in Oslo.’
I shook my head. ‘We know where he was then,’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought. And you can’t follow up every man with a bruised face, colour of hair not known because he was wearing a hat.’
‘How many of those?’ Keith asked.
Haddo counted slips. ‘Eight,’ he said. ‘Aberdeen, Toronto, Channel Islands, Dallas, Minorca, Paris and two in Cornwall – both the same chap, from the sound of it, but the descriptions don’t sound much like your man.’
‘Most of the places sound unlikely,’ Keith said. ‘I can’t see him rushing to Minorca with industrial secrets.’
‘That’s what I thought. We’re left with one good sighting, but it may be too early to be helpful. Perth, after lunch on Tuesday. My contact was collecting his car from one of those riverside parking places when a blue Peugeot came into the slot beside him. He took notice because the car had been in a front-end accident and he didn’t want to be the victim of the next one. The man who got out was wearing a hat, but he had a swollen mouth and the rest of the description tallies. Does that help?’
‘It could,’ Keith said, frowning. ‘Just what the hell he’d be doing in Perth beats me. But it could certainly help.’
The radio receiver began to speak and a second later the phone rang beside me. Haddo turned to the radio and Keith was listening intently, so I picked up the phone. ‘Bill Haddo’s house,’ I said.
‘Is that you, Simon?’ said Wallace’s voice. ‘Tell Keith that Lord Jedburgh’s been on the phone again. Strathclyde Police rang him. His car’s been found, with a body in it. They want him to go over there, straight away, and he wants Keith to go with him and hold his hand. What does he need Keith for?’ Wallace demanded indignantly.
‘I think that he looks on Keith as his big brother,’ I suggested.
‘If Keith was his big brother he’d be the Earl,’ Wallace pointed out. ‘Anyway, I told Lord Jedburgh where to find Keith and I think he’s on the way to you now.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ I said.
The radio call had been from some ham wanting to chat about the weather. I relayed Wallace’s message to Keith.
‘Was there no indication as to whose body?’ Keith asked sharply.
‘That’s probably what the police want Charlie to tell them,’ I said.
‘Of course.’ Keith scratched his head. ‘If it’s Reece’s body it could change everything, not necessarily for the better.’
‘Shall I suspend my side of it?’ Haddo asked.
‘Not yet. If it’s Reece I’ll phone you.’
Haddo nodded. ‘You’ve a long journey ahead of you,’ he said. ‘If you want the bathroom, it’s the last door on the right.’
*
Bill Haddo’s house was no more than fifteen miles from Aikhowe. We soon heard a car slowing at the gate and Keith and I went out to join the Earl.
He was driving Donald Lucas’s small Ford and readily agreed to pick Keith up at Briesland House so that the jeep could be returned to Molly. There seemed to be a general assumption that I was going to go with them. I got in beside Charlie rather than ride in the less comfortable jeep.
‘This is the best I could borrow at short notice,’ Charlie said, following the jeep down the hill. ‘The Range Rover’s fetching supplies from Edinburgh and my car seems to be stuck on a hilltop near the west coast with a corpse inside. This was still outside Donald’s door. If the corpse is Donald’s he won’t mind and, if it isn’t, he owes me the loan of a car. But I shouldn’t be making jokes,’ he said quickly.
