The Game

by Gerald Hammond

  THE GAME

  Gerald Hammond

  © Gerald Hammond 1982

  Gerald Hammond has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1982 by MACMILLAN LONDON LIMITED.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  All the characters in this book are intended to be wholly fictitious.

  As to where the real Millmont House might be, the reader, if he can afford it, can no doubt find it for himself; or have a lot of fun searching.

  Chapter One

  Pressure for space, allied to certain tax advantages, had long since persuaded Keith Calder to remove the gunsmithing part of the business from the small shop in the square of Newton Lauder to his home a few miles outside the town. Thus it was from the open window of what had once been a master-bedroom in Briesland House that Keith was able to look across his garden towards the town and to enjoy the Scottish lowland scene under its July blanket of crops and wild flowers; but he was more pleased to look down and admire his infant daughter, kicking and crowing on her blanket in the shade of a huge beech tree, guarded by an elderly spaniel against the overtures of a younger dog

  The room and its neighbour were given over entirely to firearms. Case after case displayed the antique guns which officially were stock-in-trade but of which Keith regarded the choicer pieces as being his personal collection. The desk and filing cabinets overflowed with catalogues and correspondence relating to original weapons, modern reproductions, kits and accessories. Beside the window was Keith’s work-bench, the origin and pivot of the business.

  On the bench was a superb North African jezail. Keith had finished patching in the missing scraps of ivory and mother-of-pearl in the inlaid stock and was touching up the engraving of the sliding flashpan-cover, when on one of his admiring glances he spotted the lanky form of his partner walking up the drive from a car parked outside the gates. By the time Wallace James arrived in the room the jezail was back in its case and Keith was concentrating on the innards of an English shotgun.

  ‘If that’s Mr C-carson’s sixteen-bore,’ Wallace said, ‘the L-lancaster, he wants it back not later than yesterday.’

  Keith refused to feel guilty. ‘He can have it not sooner than tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Tell him he’s knackered it.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘Nothing that a good clean-up and a new main-spring won’t fix, but tell him anyway. He’ll be all the more grateful when he gets it back next week. Is Janet alone in the shop?’

  Wallace nodded. ‘Do you think Molly could g-go and give her a hand?’

  When their two wives got together, conversation tended to take precedence over business. ‘Better not,’ Keith said. ‘The customers wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgeways. What brings you out here at this unlikely hour?’

  Wallace fiddled aimlessly with a set of taps and dies and then slumped into a hard chair. His bony, intellectual face took on something of the look of a harassed horse. ‘I’ll t-tell you,’ he said, and fell silent. He made a nervous gesture with his right hand, trying to run the missing fingers through his limp, brown hair.

  Keith began to feel anxious. Wallace’s slight natural stammer usually disappeared after the first few words unless he were very much disturbed. ‘There’s nothing wrong between you and Janet?’ he asked.

  Wallace shook his head. ‘N-nothing like that.’

  ‘The shop? Money?’

  ‘I’m going to t-tell you, dammit,’ Wallace said peevishly.

  The door bumped softly open and Molly backed in with a tray holding coffee and three cups. ‘I saw you arriving, Wal,’ she said.

  Wallace was usually at ease with his partner’s wife – more so, sometimes, than with his own, whom he regarded as one of the miracles of nature. But on this occasion Molly’s presence seemed to reduce him to a state of agonised incoherence and he only began to relax again when Molly, raising her eyebrows at Keith, finished her coffee and excused herself.

  ‘All right,’ Keith said. ‘I get the message. There’s something bloody far wrong, and it’s confidential. You’d better spit it out.’

  ‘Yes.’ With a visible effort, Wallace pulled himself together. ‘I’ll have to think where to b-begin. You remember when we first met? I was between jobs and doing people’s tax returns for pocket-money.’

  ‘You still do,’ Keith pointed out.

  ‘It doesn’t take up much time. N-not as much as you spend on your antiques.’

  ‘That’s part of the business!’

  ‘Is it hell!’ Wallace gestured around the cluttered room. ‘You may kid the tax-man that this is all business stock, Keith, but you know and I know that the best pieces stick to your fingers. You jack the prices up above market value so that they won’t get sold, and you make this side of the business wash its feet from the few that do fetch your asking-price and by spending a lot of time bodging up the damaged guns and flogging them again. Not that I’m c-complaining,’ Wallace said hastily. ‘Not as long as I make a living looking after the retail side. I just wanted to make you feel suitably guilty so that you’ll help me out.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ Keith said. ‘I’d help you out anyway.’

  ‘N-not as a friend and a partner. I want to tap your expertise on behalf of somebody else. One of my clients dug this out of a chair-back.’ Wallace took a matchbox out of his pocket and tipped out a small, lead ball. ‘What could you tell me about it?’

  Keith looked, and his eyebrows went up. ‘It had been there a long time?’

  Wallace hesitated and then decided in favour of frankness. ‘The hole was new,’ he admitted. ‘And the chair isn’t an antique.’

  Keith smelled the ball and touched it with his tongue. ‘You’ve washed it but there’s no mistaking blood. Was that fresh too?’

  ‘Do me a favour, just g-give me your opinion.’

  ‘I’ll do better than that, I’ll give you my advice. Go to the police.’

  Wallace made a face. ‘It may c-come to that,’ he said. ‘I hope not, but it may. T-trust me, Keith, without asking any more questions. It’s very, very important that we make sure it’s necessary before we contact the police.’

  ‘Blood and a bullet-hole, and you still aren’t sure?’

  ‘Somebody could have shot a . . . a cat,’ Wallace said.

  Keith shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘For the moment, I don’t know any different.’ He got up and went to the window. Molly was with the baby on the lawn. He waved and then drew the curtains until only a thin slice of sunshine crossed the gloom, dancing with motes of dust. With this side-light to throw up the details, and with the aid of the powerful magnifier which was an important item in his tool-kit, he studied the ball minutely and then turned back to his bench. ‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘Let there be light.’

  Wallace pulled back the curtains, sat down again and watched patiently while Keith measured the ball, weighed it both in and out of a beaker of water and then repeated the process with a ball from his drawer.

  ‘Got your calculator on you?’ Keith asked. ‘Do these sums for me.’

  Wallace, who had started his working life as an accountant, carried a slimline calculator next to his
heart. He pressed the buttons and read back a series of incomprehensible answers.

  Keith perched up on the bench and studied his notes. ‘Three hundred and seventy grains,’ he said, ‘which is near as dammit three-quarters of an ounce. It’s slightly distorted, but the average diameter seems to have been point six of an inch. The specific gravity’s the same as that of a modern, factory-made ball, so I can’t tell you anything about the lead off-hand. Chemical analysis might be more helpful, whether it was mercury-hardened or whatever.’

  ‘That would only home us in on a manufacturer,’ Wallace suggested.

  ‘No. This was home-made. Probably one of the cheaper Italian-made bullet-moulds – the two halves were very slightly out of register. The source of lead could be informative.’

  ‘M-more to the point, what could it have been shot out of?’

  ‘You don’t want a lot, do you? See if this helps. There’s very faint marks of rifling part of the way round one circumference. Probably six grooves, but there isn’t enough to be sure. Not sharp enough to suggest that the ball was in contact with the rifling. I’d guess that the ball was enclosed in a cloth patch. Was the chair set on fire?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then the patch probably remained inside the . . . the cat or whatever. Now, for the rifling marks to have been impressed through the patch, the ball plus patch must have been a pretty tight fit. There’s a mark which suggests that it may have been rammed home with the blade of a screwdriver. That, in turn, suggests a pistol. After all, you don’t use a screwdriver as a ramrod for something like a Tower musket, not unless you’ve got a screwdriver about four feet long. So you’re looking for a pistol with a rifled barrel and no ramrod. Antique or reproduction. Possibly a Queen Anne screw-barrel and he’d lost the key, although the bore’s a bit on the large side.’

  ‘Definitely not a modern weapon?’ Wallace asked gloomily.

  ‘Why the hell should anyone load a modern weapon down the muzzle? Anyway, it’s too big for anything smaller than an elephant-rifle.’

  Wallace, who never swore, uttered three very rude words in startling conjunction. ‘Can I borrow your barrel-gauge?’ he asked.

  ‘No you bloody well can’t,’ Keith said. ‘It’s stamped with my name, and I’m not having it found at the scene of a crime. I’m a respectable businessman, and I mean to stay that way in spite of you. I want my wild past forgotten. What’s more,’ he added, ‘you’re my partner now, and I want you to stay clean too.’

  ‘I’d bring it straight back to you.’

  ‘So you say. But suppose you were found on the scene? You know damn well you think there’s been a serious crime. Go to the cops, Wallace. You don’t have any choice.’

  Wallace stared at him miserably. ‘This is one of those impossible decisions to make,’ he said. ‘It’s like being asked whether you’d rather be boiled or fried. I wish to God I knew what to do!’

  Keith recognised the words as a cry for help. ‘If you don’t tell me what it’s about,’ he said, ‘I can’t give you any of that invaluable advice that you often ask for and never take.’

  Wallace came to a reluctant decision. ‘Will you come and look at something with me? And keep it totally and permanently confidential?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Less than an hour by car.’

  ‘All right,’ Keith said. ‘But it’s in confidence only as long as I don’t get my head in a sling.’

  Wallace brightened, just a little. ‘That sounds safe enough,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  When Keith told Molly that he was going with Wallace, she only nodded. Keith had been known to get into bad company. Indeed, there were those who said that Keith himself was the worst of company. But he would be all right with Wallace.

  *

  They took Keith’s car and Wallace directed him on to a by-road that ran, generally westward, from Newton Lauder towards the hills. Keith watched Wallace out of the corner of his eye. At first, Wallace seemed to have relaxed; then Keith saw signs of tension returning.

  ‘Pull in and p-park,’ Wallace said suddenly when Keith had been driving for half an hour.

  They had just crested a hill. Keith found a layby to park. They sat for a moment looking over the valley ahead – woodland below, then fields and bare hills above. There was silence, broken only by the ticking as the exhaust contracted. Keith wound down his window, and tiny country noises crept into the car.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Wallace said. ‘Wondering how I c-could show you what you need to s-see and no more. But there’s no way. So I’m going to spill the beans, in the strictest confidence, and if you ever utter a word without my express permission I swear I’ll do something awful to you with a rusty razor-blade.’ Wallace sounded as if he meant it.

  ‘Cough it up,’ Keith said. He prepared himself for a tale of some minor indiscretion which, to one of Wallace’s retiring nature, would seem cataclysmic.

  ‘You see that house there?’ Wallace pointed to the slate roof of a large and rambling house, just visible among a froth of treetops. ‘Do you know what that place is?’

  ‘No,’ Keith said.

  ‘Then I’ll have to go back a few years, to those days when I was in no sort of job and doing tax returns. Remember?’

  Keith remembered. The loss of three fingers from his right hand had cut short Wallace’s career in accountancy. When Keith met him, Wallace had been filling in time running an old barge.

  ‘About eight or nine years ago,’ Wallace went on, ‘one of my first clients was a girl. I’d got some small shopkeeper out of trouble with the Inland Revenue and he’d been mentioning my name around, so she sought me out. And believe me, Keith, she was a stunner. She still is as a matter of fact. Genuine red-gold hair, a face that saw innocent and yet full of promise . . . and if her figure was unequalled, that was because God had decided that He’d never do better.’

  ‘If this is a love story,’ Keith said, ‘You’d better confess it to Janet, not to me.’

  Wallace gave a short bark of laughter. ‘It might be a love story in your book but not in mine. She tried not to let on, but I soon guessed. She was a tart.’

  ‘If you’d rather have my help than a thick ear,’ Keith said, ‘you’d better cut out that sort of crack. What was her problem?’

  ‘The usual one – too much money which she hadn’t told the tax-man about. She’d tucked away some savings in a deposit account, apparently on the advice of her bank manager. She was most indignant when he reported the interest to the tax centre as he’s obliged to do. He hadn’t mentioned that obligation to her. Snitching, she called it, when I explained. So, of course, the tax-men wanted to know where the money came from.’

  ‘You told them?’ Keith asked, fascinated.

  ‘I decided not to. The legal position’s a bit confused. There’s a precedent for the proceeds of a crime being non-taxable, but prostitution isn’t a crime in itself and anyway I wouldn’t like to fight a case on it. Also, if you use the word “tart” in a tax return the inspector’s beady eyes light up – not with lust but with an assessment of about a hundred grand a year. This girl had been making big money, but a pimp had had some of it off her and she’d spent a lot of the rest. If we’d made any sort of a truthful declaration, she’d have had the tax-inspector sitting at her bedside and counting the money for about the next ten years.

  ‘So I spun a tale about her old job in hairdressing. It cost her some tax, which infuriated her, but she was off the hook – for that year.

  ‘But the real trouble was that she’d been joined by a friend, another spectacular looker, and the two of them had been pouring money into their deposit accounts. I switched them to a building society, which is a different ball game, but the interest was already enough to curl the tax-man’s hair, and come the following April the shit was going to hit the fan.

  ‘So I took them to the races at Portobello with a wad of currency. I told them to turn the money over as often as they could. Losing a bit would be cheap
at the price, what we wanted was a hell of a lot of cancelled winning tickets. Beginner’s luck being what it is, they were about breaking even before the last race, backing a mixture of favourites and hunches. Then, in the last race, they had a flier on a horse called Ginger Tart and picked up a packet.

  ‘We’d had a few drinks along the way, but when they realised that they could spend their winnings and make rude gestures at the tax-man, they started calling for champagne. But for that, I’d probably have kept my stupid trap shut. As it was, I couldn’t remember half of what I’d said in the morning, and I couldn’t have thought of it sober, but they had it all off by heart.

  ‘Earlier, I’d been lecturing them on the dangers of sharing a flat, because that counts as keeping a brothel and is illegal. What they told me I’d said they should do, and even in the cold light of the following afternoon I couldn’t find fault with it, was to buy an old house with a big garden, form themselves into a company, run a legitimate business in the house even if it lost money, put a couple of chalets in the garden and rent them from the company for the fun and games, pay themselves modest salaries, set up a pension fund and salt the rest away in short-term endowment policies.

  ‘So that’s what they did, in an old manse in Edinburgh. The other girl, Moira, had been masseuse and osteopath, so they ran the house as a health-and-beauty clinic and whored away in the chalets.

  ‘They had neighbour troubles, of course, and other girls wanted to join them, so after the first year they moved out here. The only thing that didn’t happen the way I’d spelled it out was the endowment policies. Before we’d got beyond the first one, the local laundry went on the rocks. Well, those girls go through one hell of a lot of laundry. So they bought it and put in a good manager and it started making money again. And rescuing moribund businesses became part of the pattern.’

  Keith was none too interested in the financial machinations. ‘Wallace,’ he said, ‘were you – uh –?’

  ‘None of your damn business,’ Wallace said.