The Reward Game, page 8
part #2 of Keith Calder Series
‘My head’s as almost all right as it ever was or will be,’ Keith said.
‘Just as long as it’s still screwed on the right way. Why the panic message? Your lady wife wouldn’t say.’
‘His lady wife doesn’t know,’ said Molly.
‘She soon will, now,’ Keith said. ‘Peter, is your Land Rover secure?’ He helped himself to a drink and another sandwich while listening with one ear to Sir Peter’s assurance and with the other to the muttering of the radio as Panda Four was sent away towards Newcastle to intercept a small van which had driven off from the scene of an accident. When both had finished he asked Sir Peter if, among his directorships, he had any connection with the group of insurance companies represented by Andrew Gulliver.
Sir Peter shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t help you.’
‘Yes you can. I wanted to be sure, first of all, that you wouldn’t find yourself with a conflict of interests. Now have another dram and listen, in the strictest confidence, to my tale.’
So Sir Peter had another dram and listened, his protuberant eyes opening ever wider and his eyebrows climbing up his forehead. As he spoke, Keith strode about the room, crackling with nervous energy; but Sir Peter sat very still and only moved to stare at Keith when the story seemed to be accompanied by unnecessary or irrelevant detail.
When Keith had finished, Sir Peter stirred and took a small sip from his drink. ‘I still don’t know what you want me for,’ he said. ‘Never was much good at puzzles, and this seems to be about as Gordian a knot as anyone was ever asked to unloose.’
Keith laughed and threw himself down on the sofa beside Molly. He knew the baronet of old, and knew that he had caught his interest. ‘Don’t sell yourself short to me,’ he said. ‘You’re not as dim as you make out, you just like people to underrate you so that you can take wicked capitalistic advantage of them. Anyway, it’s not so much brainpower as manpower and useful connections that I want.’
‘Explain. I’ve sat and admired in the past, and no doubt shall do so again.’
‘As I said to Molly just now, it’s no skin off my nose who committed what crime. If there wasn’t a reward going begging, I’d leave it to the police to sort out. But Molly’s set her heart on Briesland House, so I want a good whack of the reward so that I can buy the place from you.’
‘So far, you ring true.’
‘Thank you. Today, I think I just about had my hands on the reward and it was snatched away again. If I go to the police, I’m dependent on getting a fair deal from them. And the officer in charge, at least until I can prove that there really has been a killing, is Munro, who has me breathalysed twice a week in the hope that I’ll slip up. I can still get to the reward, but now I have to share it in order to get to it at all. Shall I spell it out?’
‘Please do.’
Keith smiled lopsidedly. ‘I might never have got the connection,’ he admitted, ‘except that, between us, Andrew Gulliver and I had said all the magic words in the course of a few hours, and then I got to wondering what Superintendent Gilchrist might know that would make him suggest to Gulliver that he spoke to me. And I have a habit, from years in a business in which you count the other fellow’s teeth in case he’s a shark, of putting myself in the other shark’s place and thinking, “If I had that problem, what would I do?” It’s a small step from there to thinking, “If that’s what he’s doing, what was his problem?” You follow me?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Sir Peter.
‘Putting the pieces together the other way round, what do we have? Andrew Gulliver reminds us that a parcel of gems was pinched not long ago. And here we’ve got a man who has been accumulating illicit money. He feels the need to get out of the country in a hurry, taking as much as possible of it with him. If he was looking around for a readily portable form of assets, immediately available and at least as valuable abroad as it is here, wouldn’t those gems be his most likely bet?’
‘That,’ said Sir Peter, ‘seems logical. But have you any proof?’
‘Proof comes later. Next, a man tries to speak to me in Glasgow. He acts as runner and odd-job-man for a dealer who is also a fence in a big way of business. No need to speculate for the moment just what he wanted me to do – that becomes obvious later. Just remember that I’m a dealer and John Galloway was a collector. Then the same man turns up around here, dead. Significant?’
‘Potentially.’
‘Let’s look at it from John Galloway’s viewpoint. He knew that a visit from the police must be imminent. For all he knew he was being watched. He would have wanted to buy the gems as quickly as possible and get the hell out. He certainly wouldn’t want to trail across to Glasgow and visit with a dealer of dubious reputation; that would certainly have accelerated the activity of the police. Equally, the ultra-cautious Danny Bruce wouldn’t want to be within a mile of him. So they would probably arrange for the gems to come across here by the hand of a relatively expendable courier.’
‘Noddy Chalmers!’ said Molly.
‘Exactly. And whatever you may think about speaking ill of the dead, Noddy was not the person you’d hand a parcel of jewels to deliver. He’d’ve been round to some of his mates in two jumps, looking to substitute inferior stones for the good ones and to pocket the difference.
‘So what have we got so far? We’ve got a theft of jewels in the west of Scotland, a big-time embezzler looking for easily portable goodies, a Glasgow fence making overtures to me and being turned away, and then his runner turning up here dead at just about the time that the embezzler gets his head in a sling with the police. The runner’s been shot and the wound looks like a close-range shotgun job. Wouldn’t you say that it looked like all of a piece?’
Molly and Sir Peter nodded in unison.
‘To round it off,’ Keith said, ‘as soon as the runner’s defunct, suddenly everybody seems very interested in his body.’
‘Including you,’ said Molly.
‘And including two employees of a noted Glasgow gang-leader, and a second group who may represent the fence. So why has Noddy’s corpse become so much in demand?’
‘Do tell,’ said Molly.
‘All right. Assume that I’m right so far. Danny Bruce wants to send his parcel of gems through here by the hand of a lieutenant that he trusts about as far as he could spit. He’s sending it to a noted collector of antique guns. What might he use as a discreet container?’
‘Powder horn?’ suggested Molly. ‘Patch-box?’
‘I’d got about that far,’ Keith said, ‘when I remembered what I’d been saying to Inspector Munro the night before. I hope to hell Munro’s forgotten it. Peter, you remember the time I came up to your ancestral dump at Dawnapool, to overhaul and value the guns. How many of the muzzle-loaders did we find were still loaded?’
‘Three was it?’
‘Four, I think. I forget now.’
Sir Peter sat up straight. ‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘I’m with you now.’
‘I’m not,’ Molly said, frowning.
‘I’ll tell you what I think happened,’ Keith said. ‘Look at it this way. Danny Bruce is selling the gems to John Galloway. He loads them into the barrel of a not-too-valuable antique pistol, by arrangement. Not by arrangement, he chooses a pistol that still happens to contain powder and a ball. He finishes the second loading with a black wad, and sends Noddy Chalmers to deliver it. That way, Noddy thinks that he’s delivering a pistol and nothing else.
‘Noddy’s supposed to meet John Galloway near Briesland House, but not to come to the door in case the house is watched. The ride that runs through the woods would be the most likely place. Molly happens to be out with her camera, not far from the rendez-vous.
‘Now let’s consider Frank Hutch. Not many crimes are committed around Glasgow without Frank Hutch knowing and taking his cut somewhere along the line. It’s quite likely that the gems were originally stolen on behalf of Hutch and sold to Danny Bruce. It would be quite in keeping with what I’ve heard about Hutch that he should arrange to steal the stones back from Bruce and sell them again to another fence.’
‘Ah,’ said Molly. ‘Now I begin to see.’
‘I’m so glad,’ Keith said. ‘It’d also be in keeping for Hutch to have a spy in Bruce’s camp – they say he pays well for information. So let’s assume that Hutch was keeping track of the jewels, and when Noddy sets off to deliver them Hutch sends a tough after him to take them away. Quite probably, the tough wasn’t told about the stones, he was just told to bring back the pistol.
‘The tough catches up with Noddy in Bellcross Woods and tries to take the pistol away from him. They have a struggle. The pistol would be the only weapon to hand for Noddy. He wouldn’t know that it was loaded, but it would make a good club – as I have reason to know. In the struggle, the pistol goes off and Noddy is peppered with diamonds and whatever, plus one lead ball. I saw the wound when Big Hughie was carrying the body out of the wash-house, and it’s quite consistent with that explanation.
‘So the tough has Noddy’s corpse on his hands. He decides to remove it, either to hide the evidence or because he did know about the jewels. For some reason that we don’t know yet, he decides to pinch our car to move the body in. Perhaps he was using a car that was registered to himself or to Frank Hutch, and if there was going to be blood or corpses found around the place he’d rather that they were found in our car than his. He leaves our car for a minute, perhaps while he hides his own car, and when he comes back Molly’s driving off in our car complete with the late Mr Chalmers.
‘He gets his car out in a hurry and follows. When he gets to the square, there’s the car outside our shop with Noddy still in place. He would have had time to phone his boss for orders, which may have been the first time that he finds out about Noddy’s new value. He’s told to get hold of the corpse at all costs. So he drives our car away again.
‘But John Galloway had been hurrying to the meeting-place. He hears the shot, as Molly did, and sees enough to know or guess what’s going on. His Land Rover’s nearby, since he was intending to shoot straight off and catch his plane. He probably thinks that he’s quitted Briesland House for the last time.
‘Galloway knows or guesses that his entire portable assets are now . . . where they are. He becomes desperate. He follows the follower, sees him pinch our car for the second time and shoves it off the road. Frank Hutch’s boy is still hanging onto the pistol, intending to get rid of it as evidence, and he tries to bat Galloway with it. But he’s still shaken from the crash and Galloway gets the pistol away from him and cracks him on the head with it and lugs him into the trees. I go and turn up and he whacks me on the head too and chucks the pistol into the ditch. Then he dumps all my other guns into the ditch or onto the roadside near where his Land Rover came to rest, so that he can use the tin trunk as a coffin – just in case he meets up with the police but can still bluff it out.’
Molly put her hand up like a child in class. ‘But,’ she said, ‘but you expected the body to be in the wash-boiler. How was that?’
Keith looked at her for a second before he answered. ‘It’s not very nice,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you want to hear it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Well, I want to hear it,’ said Sir Peter. ‘Our little friend can put her fingers in her ears if she wants to.’
Molly snorted inelegantly.
‘I wondered what I’d do myself to recover the gems,’ Keith said. ‘You couldn’t just pull them out with a pair of tweezers.’
‘Why not?’ asked Sir Peter.
Molly put her hand up again. ‘They’d be all over the place,’ she said. ‘You remember, Keith, that roebuck that you brought in last year. It bolted right onto somebody, and he shot it with a shotgun at about six inches. You skinned it and I butchered and cooked it. Some of the shot was in one clump, but the rest was scattered all through it.’
‘I suppose that’s right,’ Sir Peter said. ‘So what would you do? Acid bath?’
Keith shook his head. ‘No time to go shopping for acid, and for a bath that the acid wouldn’t eat straight through. I think I’d put him into the wash-boiler, bring to the boil and simmer gently for a few hours – all night if necessary. Make soup of him, in fact.’
It was Sir Peter who looked unwell. Molly was only intrigued. ‘You mean, like game soup?’ she said. ‘All the pellets end up in the bottom of the pan.’
‘Just that. Run off the soup down the drain, bury the bones, wash out the sludge and you’ve got your gems back. Not a very pleasant job, but it’s what I’d do if it would make the difference between affluence and poverty in foreign parts. He could catch his plane a day later. And the ironic thing is that he just might have got away with it if he hadn’t been overcome by compunction and walked into the house to phone and tell the police where I was. And the other man.’
‘It may not have been compunction,’ Sir Peter said. ‘Galloway’s a very logical man. He may have realised that if you didn’t get attention and one of you died, he could be facing a much more serious charge than embezzlement.’
‘True,’ said Keith. ‘Anyway, next day, two different couples turn up playing “Who’s got the body?”’
Without knowing it, Sir Peter had allowed his other face to appear while he listened. No longer was he the affable, ineffectual aristocrat that Keith knew as a shooting companion and customer. He had become the man of the board-room, alert, thoughtful, decisive and with an authority that money alone never bestows. ‘What are the chances of a flintlock still firing after all that time?’ he asked.
‘It happened this morning in Newton Lauder,’ Keith pointed out. ‘Given that it’s still loaded, remember that most collectors like to see a well-knapped flint in the jaws. If it’s been kept in a dry place, the mechanism should still be perfect – with one exception. On lower and medium-quality guns, the half-cock position is nearly always faulty; that’s how “Going off at half-cock” came into the language. Oh yes, if the frizzen’s down over the flash-pan, it should fire all right.’
‘Would there be priming in the flash-pan?’
‘If the gun’s being carried about, some powder usually shakes through the touch-hole.’
Sir Peter nodded. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll buy it as a working hypothesis, although I think you have a couple of cars missing from the equation somewhere. But your evidence is very circumstantial. You’re saying “This is a possible explanation; try to think of a better one”. Well, I’m trying, and off the cuff I can’t. Perhaps I could have done if I hadn’t heard your theory first, but now that I’ve heard it I must admit that whenever I try to think of another it’s your explanation that comes into my mind. But have you any hard evidence? Because, if so, you haven’t been very forthcoming to the police about it.’
‘I’ve been honest with the police,’ Keith said. ‘The fact that they don’t believe my story is their fault, not mine. But I don’t think I’m obliged to offer them my theories, even if Munro was willing to listen to them.’
‘Probably not.’
‘They’ve seen or been told about such evidence as I have. One of them even had his hands on the pistol that I was nutted with, when it was found in the ditch. If he didn’t care to examine it, I did. And it wasn’t one of John Galloway’s pistols. He had several similar pistols with Tower locks, but his were late models with the lock held by two screws. This one was earlier, with three screws. And I took the trouble to look inside the barrel. It had been fired recently, and it had a number of deep scores along the inside of the bore, still bright and shiny. Scratches such as might be made by pellets being fired up the barrel that were as hard as diamond, not as soft as lead.’
*
There was a two-minute silence; not out of respect for the late Noddy Chalmers, so nearly siphoned down the Briesland House drains, but while Molly and Sir Peter digested and weighed Keith’s disclosure. While the silence lasted, Panda Five was sent to relieve Panda Two, and Panda Three reported a chimney on fire in Bloom Street. Keith waited.
Sir Peter drained his glass, set it down and pushed it away. He shook his head to Keith’s offer of a refill. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Your little Glaswegian friend is now richer than he ever was in his lifetime. What next?’
‘Next,’ Keith said, ‘I’ll tell you. Even with that evidence, I don’t know that I could convince Munro. If I go to Andrew Gulliver, he’d have to go to the police anyway. Until it’s accepted that there’s been a murder, Munro remains the officer-in-charge, and he hates my guts. So if I tell him all about it, and the police later find the body and the gems are recovered, Munro only has to say, “We found the body in the course of our normal enquiries and Mr Calder’s information didn’t help at all”, and I’ve been slugged on the head, lost two pistols from the collection and been dunked arse-first in freezing water all for nothing. And I’ve no reason to believe that they have any better chance of recovering the . . . the jewels than we have.’
‘They have resources, manpower, radios.’
‘They’re hide-bound, unarmed and under-manned,’ Keith said. ‘They might lose it altogether, or miss it for a fortnight, by which time fifty other people might have qualified for a share in the reward. I think I’m on a better bet if I split the chance of the reward with a limited number of people.’
‘I don’t much like the idea of you going body-hunting,’ Molly said, ‘especially while that man Curran’s running around with a gun.’
‘It’s time that I asked you something,’ Keith said. ‘Do you still want Briesland House, or did this morning’s stishie put you off it for life?’
