Sting in the Tail

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘We didn’t agree anything of the sort. If you remember, I suggested that your friend might have killed Mr Ricketts and that he or somebody else could have given in to sudden temptation and removed the do-it-yourself cash-card kit.’

  I thought hard. ‘I don’t see why that should call for a search of his house, and as a matter of such urgency. It could have waited until Charlie comes back.’

  ‘If he comes back.’

  ‘You may be right,’ I said. ‘When he hears that his house has been searched he may well head for the hills, if only because he’s afraid of what may have been planted on him.’

  I was beginning to get hot under the collar and I could feel DS Waller’s glare scorching my left ear. ‘And just how might he come to hear about it?’ he asked me.

  ‘He’s bound to phone up again, to ask how Clarence is getting over his injury.’

  ‘I could keep you incommunicado.’

  ‘Not legally,’ I pointed out. ‘Not at all, for more than an hour or two, without having lawyers coming at you from every direction. Do you think that I would have come here without bothering to mention where I was going, and why, to my two partners and,’ I said, beginning to embroider on the truth, ‘Mr Kitts, and Angus Todd who I was supposed to be meeting—’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right!’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘you tell me what and why and I’ll promise not to let any cats out of bags. And I’ll promise the same for anybody who I’ve already told. You’ll have to deal with Charlie’s neighbours yourselves. He could very well phone up to ask if his house is still standing. If he was guilty of anything, which I don’t believe for a moment, he might do that anyway just to find out whether there had been any unusual activity.’

  DS Waller grunted unhappily. ‘Somehow, your promise isn’t worth a lot just now,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the best I’ve got to offer,’ I pointed out.

  ‘That isn’t a hell of a comfort, but I suppose it’ll have to do. All right, I’ll explain a little more. But,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘if you allow anybody to warn Mr Hopewell against coming home, I’ll make a clean breast of it and have you charged with threatening an officer, interfering with the course of justice and anything else the Procurator-fiscal can dream up. On the other hand, if you breathe a word about my disclosures I’ll get my Fife colleagues to fit you up for something so ridiculous and humiliating that you’ll never dare to show your face at a field trial again.’

  I was in no position to argue. ‘Get on with it,’ I said.

  ‘On your head be it. Detective Chief Inspector McStraun had it figured that, whether your friend Mr Hopewell was a secret lover or an accomplice in the forging of bank cards, he was the one person who could have had a motive for cutting off his own dog’s tail.’

  Beth might have followed, but I was left behind. ‘What motive?’ I asked blankly.

  ‘Once Clarence got that peculiar colour of paint on his tail, whether or not he had gone there with his master or made his own way on a food-seeking foray, he was a breathing, walking implication – if not proof positive – that Mr Hopewell was a visitor to Nearn House. And Clarence lived almost next door to a senior police officer.’

  ‘That’s slim grounds for breaking into a man’s home during his absence,’ I said.

  ‘And the DCI was prepared to wait for Mr Hopewell’s return. But then we had a tip-off that there was something significant to be found. It was decided to seek a warrant immediately, before he had time to vanish or –’ he looked at me with meaning ‘– have a friend clear the place out. The friend who is getting so peevish because we beat him to it. And,’ the Sergeant added indignantly, ‘we didn’t break in; we got the key from his neighbour.’

  I decided to ignore the slur on myself. ‘Tip-off from whom?’

  ‘No,’ said the DS firmly. ‘At that point I must draw the line.’

  ‘Tell me or the deal’s off.’

  ‘Remember what we’ve both got to lose. I’ve certainly got it in mind. My job’s on the line here.’

  ‘In other words, it was anonymous.’ I was guessing, but he did not contradict me. ‘So what did you find?’ There was a long pause. ‘Buy my silence,’ I said.

  He sighed. ‘This is the absolute end,’ he said. ‘After this, nothing.’ His cutting-off gesture was so violent that it made my car rattle.

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Remember, it’s against my better judgement that I’m trusting you at all. We found another blank plastic card, identical to the first, in a dark corner of the hallway.’

  ‘Was it—?’

  ‘No. I told you. Nothing more.’ His voice was deafening in the small space.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘I’m not asking for a state secret. All I wanted to know is whether it was in a position where it could have been flicked through the letter-box.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t. We thought of that. And, anyway, there’s a wire cage over the letter-box. And that is quite definitely your lot,’ he said briskly. ‘Go and drive yourself back across the Tay. Take the short route, don’t bother to use the bridge.’

  He got out of my car and slammed the door so hard that, when I reversed away from the police car in front, there was a rectangle of red dust beneath where the car had been.

  The dashboard clock said that it was almost lunchtime. I could see Mrs Bell peeping out of her friend’s front window. I made signs indicative of eating and drinking and she nodded violently. I drove round to the hotel.

  *

  The public phone was under a Perspex hood in the vestibule of the hotel, where the hungry and thirsty were trickling by. I found a Phonecard with some credit left on it. Isobel answered the phone at Three Oaks. Every word that I said had a high chance of being heard by not less than three people, so I kept it brief and left a message for Beth. If by any chance Charlie phoned, no mention was to be made of my reason for coming to Foleyburn. In fact, it would be better if nothing whatever was said about the events of the past few days, just reassure him about Hannah and Clarence and ask what the weather was like in France. Isobel was intrigued but she gave me her word and promised to pass the message on.

  I looked for Mrs Bell outside and then in the bar, but I had not seen her car in the car park and she would have had to sprint to arrive there so soon on foot.

  The first familiar face that I saw belonged to Bob Roberts. He was nursing the remains of a pint at the bar counter and glowering at himself in the mirror behind the ranked bottles. I took the adjacent stool and invited him to have another pint. His beard seemed to register qualified approval. When our beers were poured and paid for, he moved to a table, jerking his head for me to follow.

  ‘The police are searching your friend Hopewell’s house, I’m told,’ he said.

  ‘Told by whom?’

  ‘It’s all over the village. Is that what brought you over?’

  ‘I came to see if there was anything I could do.’

  ‘And is there?’

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  He hummed tunelessly for a moment. ‘From the questions the police was asking, they think Mr Hopewell was a brown-hatter. Queer. Know what I mean?’

  ‘I know what you mean. What did you tell them?’

  ‘Same as a’body else. He’s no more queer than I am. And that’s not at all,’ he added fiercely. ‘Losh, I hope I’m as vigorous when I’m his age.’

  ‘He could just be putting on an act,’ I suggested, more to test the water than because I had any doubts about Charlie’s heterosexuality.

  Roberts shook his head violently and his beard took on a sneer of its own. ‘If it’s an act, it’s a bloody good one. It’s got the women fooled.’ He lowered his voice. ‘He’s not one to crow, I’ll say that for him, but my wife does hairdressing in folk’s own homes and she hears things. Since his wife died, your friend Charlie Hopewell hasn’t gone out looking for his nooky, not quite, but he hasn’t turned away from what’s been on offer, not if it w
as clean and had most of its own teeth. And there’s more than one unmarried lady, and the occasional widow, pleased enough to take up wi’ an eligible widower wi’ a nice house and not short of a bob or two, even if it’d mean taking on a lassie who’s—’ He met my eye and broke off. ‘All right. I’ll not say it aloud, but you ken fine what’s adae there.’

  ‘You can say it aloud,’ I said. ‘She’s her own girl and she doesn’t care who knows it.’

  ‘Aye. That’s one way of putting it. Another would be that she’s wild. She’s an angel the most of the time, but when that temper lets go . . . Whatever, I know for a fact that her dad’s had that woman behind the bar. And she’s not one to be free wi’t.’

  From what he was saying, Charlie had retained rather more vigour than I had been left with after my illness. I fought back a feeling of envy. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘What else were the police asking?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. Who had been seen around Nearn House or the cottages on the Friday and Saturday nearly three weeks back? When were your pal Hopewell or his lassie last seen out our way? When was Clarence seen, with or without his tail? And who was the regular visitor at Nearn House?’

  So the pathologist had placed the death around the date when Clarence lost his tail. After such a delay and in weather which would not have encouraged the growth of insects, they would have had difficulty narrowing it down to even two days. If, however, they had discovered when and where he ate his last meal, they would have their answer to within an hour or two. More probably, they had found traces of drink or a bar meal in his stomach and his last visit to the hotel was remembered.

  ‘Are they getting answers?’ I asked.

  ‘Not to the last one. There’s not a soul will admit having been near the place, except yon van-driver and the postie. Not even the milkman.’

  ‘He took UHT milk,’ I said. ‘Bought it in bulk.’

  ‘So. If anybody’s told them anything about anything worth a damn, nobody’s told me.’ Roberts looked slightly cheered by the thought.

  Mrs Bell had arrived in the bar. She had settled at the corner table where we had sat more than a week earlier and she was wiggling her eyebrows at me. I asked Bob Roberts a few more questions without learning anything of use.

  With an abrupt change of mood and subject he said, ‘You was right.’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘Aye. I’m going offshore wi’ the rest of them. Young Strachan fixed it for me. I’m not one to suck the public tit.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said. I declined a hesitant offer to buy me a drink in return and made my escape.

  Mrs Bell had already ordered the tagliatelle, but she allowed me to fetch her her usual shandy. ‘How did you get on?’ she asked as I sat down.

  ‘I couldn’t do much. Nor could the solicitor,’ I said. Remembering my promise I chose my words carefully. ‘My guess is that they’ve had a tip, probably anonymous. Tell me, is there any likelihood that Charlie might phone you or your friend Mildred to ask whether everything was all right at home?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. But the police have already been round to utter terrible warnings about what we mustn’t say if he should happen to phone. We had to give our solemn promises. That young Detective Sergeant was threatening to have our phones disconnected if we didn’t.’ Mrs Bell spoke as though having her phone cut off would be the end of civilization as she knew it, which might well have been the case.

  She had been sworn to secrecy, so there was no point in trying to keep her in the dark. If she broke her word, it would make little difference how much more she knew. I told her the rest of what I had been able to squeeze out of the Sergeant.

  ‘But that’s a whole load of nonsense,’ she said when I had finished. ‘For one thing, those houses were all built at the same time and they have the same baskets inside the letter-boxes. One day, I had a long thin box to put through Mildred’s letter-box – she’d lent me her electric carving-knife and I knew that she was needing it back but she was out when I called. Well, to cut a long story slightly shorter, it was too long for the wire basket but I found that I could push the flap of the wire box up with a piece of stick and pop the other box through. Anybody could do the same and flick a plastic card inside.

  ‘And I’ll tell you something else. Charlie Hopewell wasn’t the mysterious visitor. It’s true that he goes out for walks with Clarence every day, but I’ve seen him when I’ve been at the shops. Sometimes he goes out past the cottages, but I’ve seen him just as often on the other road.’

  ‘That isn’t exactly conclusive,’ I said, and I explained about the van.

  ‘Well, there’s another—’ Mrs Bell bit off her words. ‘Look who’s here,’ she said, without any sign of pleasure.

  I looked round. Carol Haven – Mrs Postman Pat – was slipping between the tables. Her make-up was again perfect, but this time, instead of windblown hair and an inspired casualness of garb suitable for the garden, she wore an inexpensive dress which must have been chosen more for its flattering sheerness rather than for the warmth demanded by the weather. To my inexpert eye it looked very slightly dated. Her hair might have only just emerged from one of the great salons. Male eyes were covertly following her and she knew it; but outwardly as she reached our table she was only showing pleased recognition.

  ‘Janet Bell!’ she said brightly. ‘And Mr Cunningham! I didn’t know that you two knew each other. You don’t mind if I come and play gooseberry?’ Without giving Mrs Bell time to express her evident abhorrence of the idea, she took the chair opposite to mine and studied the menu. ‘Isn’t it awful about poor Charlie?’

  ‘Isn’t what in particular awful about Charlie?’ Mrs Bell demanded.

  Mrs Haven looked at her vaguely. ‘Well, whatever it is, it can’t be very good, can it? His house being searched and all that. There are rumours going around that he’s been mixed up in something really bad. Worse, I mean, than just being queer.’

  That was going too far. ‘You really ought to watch what you’re saying,’ I said. ‘Charlie only lost his wife a few years ago. And you told me yourself that he’d made passes at you and that he’d told you that it was your fault rather than his that you were born thirty years too late for him. I think that those were the words you quoted.’

  ‘Thirty?’ Mrs Bell’s strong face registered amazement and we were left in no doubt that what had bedazed her was the size of the estimated gap between the ages of Charlie and Mrs Haven.

  The latter looked hastily out of the window. ‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘But he’d have run a mile if I’d taken him up on it.’ I met Mrs Bell’s eye and she winked. Carol Haven, she was saying, was a scandalmonger who couldn’t bear the thought of any man not being after her long-lost virtue, not even one whom she was at the same moment denouncing as homosexual. Mrs Haven was quick to see a second way out. ‘And I didn’t say for sure that he was that way inclined, I said that whatever trouble he was in was supposed to be worse.’ So there! said her tone of voice.

  The waitress brought my filled, baked potato. Mrs Haven snapped the menu shut. ‘I’ll have the chicken paella,’ she said.

  There was a pause. I gathered that I was expected to offer her a drink. I asked the question and ordered a glass of the house white. The waitress went away.

  ‘What I was about to say before . . . what did you say your name was, dear?’ Mrs Bell enquired pleasantly.

  Mrs Haven flushed. ‘I’m Carol Haven, as I think you know very well.’

  ‘Put it down to my awful memory,’ Mrs Bell said. She then went on to demonstrate that she had a perfectly sound memory for names. ‘What I was going to tell Mr Cunningham was that there’s another reason why Charlie Hopewell couldn’t have been the regular visitor at Nearn House. It was late one afternoon, after dark, and I bumped into you outside the village shop talking to Jenny Laing. You have always been the one person who was most curious about whether Mr Ricketts was bent and the identity of his visitor—’

  Carol Haven poute
d her luscious, dark lips. ‘Well, you must admit that it was intriguing, to wonder if it was one of the local husbands and whether his wife knew that he’d have preferred her to be a man. If he did,’ she added.

  Mrs Bell paused to wonder whether there were any points to score off that remark and decided against it. ‘You said that you’d just been for a walk up the Foley Burn and you’d met a figure shrouded in a hat with a turned-down brim and a mac with a turned-up collar, who switched his torch off and hurried by. And I was just about to say that if you were so desperate to know all the answers you’d only have to note which of the local men didn’t respond to your overtures, when Charlie Hopewell came out of the baker’s next door, wearing an anorak and a flat cap, and you started telling him all about it. You never even noticed me slipping away.’

  Carol Haven shrugged. ‘I could have been wrong. That one time it could have been some other man walking along the burn.’

  ‘Was he tall or short?’ I asked. ‘Fat or thin?’

  ‘It was dark. He seemed about average.’

  I was about to ask whether he walked with a limp, smelled of aftershave, sounded asthmatic or had any other features recognizable in the near-darkness when we were interrupted. Beth came stalking through the bar and halted at our table. ‘So this is where I find you!’ she declaimed. ‘Lunching with not one but two other women.’

  Beth was serious, but not about my apparent infidelity. I sensed that she was rather enjoying playing a part. ‘Mrs Bell,’ I said without rising, ‘and Mrs Haven. The lady talking through her hat is my wife, Beth.’

  ‘How do you do, my dear?’ Mrs Bell said cheerfully.

  Jealous wives were no novelty to Carol Haven. ‘We’ll have to stop meeting like this,’ she said in a husky voice, pitched just loudly enough to attract the attention of the nearby tables. She kissed the air a foot from my cheek, snorted with amusement, then got up and moved to another table, beckoning to the waitress who was approaching with her lunch.

  ‘Simple but effective,’ Mrs Bell said approvingly, modestly aware that no suspicion could possibly attach to herself.