Fair Game

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Well, you may have one now. In fact, the more I think about it the more it fits together. The general was certainly helping himself to Mr Grass’s pheasants. I think he still is.

  ‘And there’s another point. Most of the lessees who’re allowed by the will to renew at bargain prices have been nagging Enterkin to get new leases signed as soon as possible. The possibility, rumoured, that Mr Grass might suddenly pop up again may have had something to do with it. Only your own police authorities and the general have been waiting patiently. Wouldn’t that suggest that they’re the only ones who are quite certain that he’s really, truly and finally dead?’

  ‘Circumstantial,’ the sergeant said. ‘If you offered that as evidence you’d be laughed out of court.’

  ‘Most murder cases are built on circumstantial evidence. I’m only trying to point out where you might be looking for more. It’s bloody ironic really. The old soldier, bored by retirement, not exactly well-off on his pension. He gets his kicks and a lot of extra pocket-money by poaching. Like the men in John Macnab – have you read it? – he thinks he’s risking everything. But, according to Winter, Mr Grass knew all about it. He liked the general so he tolerated it. Grass had made up his mind to have it out with the general. But the general didn’t know that his secret was public knowledge. So when Mr Grass’s voice suddenly challenges him from the top of the bank his years as a soldier take over. They taught him that life is cheap, firearms are for using and decisions are for making quickly. So he shoots. That’s my best theory so far, and if you want to make it less circumstantial you can get your lab comparing firing-pins with that cartridge.’

  ‘Against the general’s guns? But we don’t even know that it’s the right cartridge.’

  ‘I think it’s an odds-on shot. But not against the general’s guns. Get your hands on the repeater that Winter says the general was trying-out about that time.’

  ‘Got you.’ The sergeant slowed to a halt and looked around. ‘Since you’re doing all the fantasising, try yourself out on this. If you’re right, if Jimmy went on to shoot the old poacher, where’s the second body?’

  ‘Good God, how should I know?’ Keith said. He waved a hand vaguely around at the fields, the woods and the lake. ‘I’ve done the difficult bit. All you’ve got to do is dig up a few square mile of farmland.’

  ‘Dig up . . .’ Sergeant Yarrow roused himself and walked on to the next gate. Keith joined him. The sergeant seemed to have dozed off, his elbows on the top bar of the gate and his chin in his hands. ‘No point digging,’ he said. ‘I was up there,’ he nodded across the lake, ‘when word came about Mr Grass’s death. My God, but it was cold, standing round arguing over some missing sheep when the ground was too hard to have taken any traces at all. And the same was true where Mr Grass died. The ground was too hard to take a mark. We’d had our worst frost of the winter, and it had lasted a fortnight. The ground was frozen to about two feet deep. You couldn’t have put a spade in it to bury a body.’

  ‘You could have put him back in his shed,’ Keith suggested. ‘He’d have kept all right until the thaw came, and then you could bury him in his own garden and wait for the weeds to cover him over.’

  ‘Somebody could come looking for him and find the body. And if you hid him in the undergrowth –’

  ‘The predators would have been starving. The first fox to come by would have found him. And then the carrion crows would have drawn Winter’s attention.’

  ‘That’s right. If I’d had a body to get rid of,’ the sergeant said, ‘I’d have put it in the loch.’

  ‘Carry it all that way?’

  ‘All what way? I’d have told old Merson, “Meet me down by the water and I’ll give you the money”.’

  ‘But the loch would have been frozen over too.’

  ‘Probably. But running water doesn’t freeze over so easily. The places where the burns run in and out were probably open. Well, it’d be no use dropping him in at the outflow. But where it runs in, you could push a weighted body under the ice and let the current take it away.’

  Keith thought about it. The more he thought, the more reasonable it seemed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and look.’

  The sergeant seemed to have taken root. ‘I think I’ve walked far enough for one day,’ he said.

  Keith had walked further. He remembered his debilitated state. ‘So’ve I,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to the inn, have a pint and you can phone for frogmen.’

  After a few seconds spent wrestling with temptation, the sergeant shook his head. ‘If I call out the frogmen and there’s nothing there, I’ll be back in uniform and lecturing the schools on road safety. I’d better take a look. If nothing else, I can get the scene clear in my mind.’

  Keith sighed. ‘Let’s get it over,’ he said. ‘This way.’

  Although they were walking round the lake they could hardly see the water for the trees and undergrowth, except at the small creek where the boathouse stood, until they came to a half-acre of open grass at the mouth of the feeder stream. As they approached the stream, Brutus sensed the interest which they were taking in the ground and intensified his own hunting, to and fro, until he pounced on a small object in the grass.

  ‘Here you are,’ Keith said. ‘Another cartridge.’

  ‘There must be thousands lying around.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see any. I’ve never seen but the two.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve stopped noticing them except when they’ve got a special meaning for you.’

  ‘No,’ Keith said, ‘it’s because Winter’s such a bloody tyrant about always taking your cartridges home with you that I think even the two poachers would rather have been caught poaching than dropping a cartridge.’

  Brutus was nudging Keith’s leg. He stooped, and the dog delivered another object into his hand. It was a lower dental plate.

  ‘Please,’ the sergeant said, ‘don’t ask me if I think there are thousands of these lying around. I couldn’t stand sarcasm just now. Let’s look around.’

  They searched around the mouth of the stream, casting both ways along the banks, but even with Brutus’ help they found nothing more of interest.

  ‘You wouldn’t expect to find many traces,’ Keith said. ‘Not all these weeks after a crime that was committed in a black frost anyway.’

  ‘Probably not. But there’ll have to be a search. I’m going to be popular with the rank-and-file. It’ll be pouring wet. It always is when that sort of miserable job has to be done.’

  ‘What a terrible shame,’ Keith said absently. ‘The poor laddies. My heart bleeds. This is just about where I’d drop a body in, if I had one I wanted rid of. You can see how the spate must come down in winter. Where we’re standing would be under water, but shallow enough to wade. I’d weight a body with stones, or whatever couldn’t be traced to me. The force of the water would take it under the ice and out into deeper water where it’d run slower.’ He threw a stick in and watched it float away. ‘That’s about the line it would follow, and if it didn’t get snagged up I’d expect it to settle down between twenty and fifty yards out, depending on the current and how heavily the body was weighted. Right. That’s solved your problem for you. Now can we go and get some lunch?’

  ‘You’re joking,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘No I’m not. Come back with a frogman or two, and I believe you’ve got a sixty-forty chance of finding a corpse where I said. And I’ll tell you something else. It won’t be Mr Grass, because his teeth were all his own.’

  ‘As a jumper to conclusions, you’re Grand National material. Anybody could have fumbled and dropped his lower choppers, or sneezed them out. And if the ground was flooded at the time he wouldn’t have a hope of finding them again. Especially if he didn’t have your highly trained denture-hound with him at the time,’ the sergeant said. ‘And I meant you were joking about giving up now. You can’t just stand there theorising about real people and real bodies and then walk away. Is there a boat in that boa
thouse?’

  Keith had been carried along by the momentum of his own reasoning and by the various discoveries which could be considered to support it. The sudden intrusion of reality chilled him. ‘Haven’t we gone far enough already?’ he suggested. ‘We seem to be tramping about all over any evidence there may be. Should you go dragging lakes on your own authority?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. There won’t be any footprints on the loch. I’m getting hungry myself, but I can’t row a boat and drag the bottom as well, so I’ll be obliged for your help.’

  ‘All right,’ Keith said against his better judgement.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The boathouse was locked, but they found the key under a slate beside the door and entered the tar-smelling gloom. The larger boat was out of the water but a robust plywood dinghy was afloat, complete with oars. Keith hid his gun under a thwart of the other boat rather than risk it on the water, and they were ready.

  The sergeant took the oars, with Keith in the stern nursing a grapnel which they had found hanging inside the boat-house door. Brutus ran to and fro on the bank and then settled down, whining but yet relieved at being excused from an outing which he regarded as alien and therefore probably doomed.

  Sergeant Yarrow soon mastered the knack of the oars, and a few minutes took them back to the head of the loch. The sergeant dipped his oars so that the boat would follow the deeper current, and Keith lowered the graphnel until he could feel its hooks brushing the muddy bottom.

  Families of mallard, which had scattered when they came out, became used to their intrusion and paddled almost under the oars.

  They had time to look around. From this low level, the panorama was of woods and hedges with hardly a field visible until the ground rose in the middle distance, but somewhere there was the sound of a tractor. Keith could see the upper half of Whinkirk House and the roofs of some of the houses beyond, and most of Wellhead Farm on its hill.

  From time to time the grapnel brought up debris from the bottom or clumps of a weed that Keith thought was stonewort, and once, on their third drift down, it snagged on something immoveable and it took ten minutes of prodding with an oar to free it. On their fifth drift, it caught in something that moved sluggishly.

  ‘Hold your horses,’ Keith said. ‘I’m into something.’

  The sergeant backed water gently, to hold the boat steady.

  Keith pulled in the line until the grapnel was only a few inches below the surface. It was caught in a grey nylon anorak of popular style, the pockets of which were dragged down by something loose and heavy. The remains of a face stared sightlessly through the water and over his shoulder.

  ‘Oh my God!’ he said. ‘I never really believed it.’

  ‘Can you hold on to it while I pull for the shore?’ Sergeant Yarrow asked.

  ‘Hang on a moment,’ Keith said shakily. ‘This needs a bit of thinking over.’ He made sure that the grapnel had a good hold on the corpse’s clothing and then let the line out gently until the bottom was reached again. The boat revolved slowly until it lay to the body as if to an anchor.

  ‘What’s the hangup now? I want to report this. And you were starving to death a few minutes ago.’

  Keith dipped his hands into the cold water and then put them to his face. ‘Can’t you wait to get back and tell your boss what a pig’s breakfast Glynder made of the first investigation?’

  The sergeant thought over the question. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘If you want to be sure of getting that pleasure, you’d better think about this. We’ve been a wee bit rash, but let’s not make it worse. Consider this. What I just brought up wasn’t Mr Grass. It had no teeth in the bottom jaw, and he had all his own. We now seem to have two murders, with strong local connections. Right?’

  The sergeant nodded.

  ‘This is a place where gossip travels faster than the jungle drums. I’ve been asking pointed questions. The murderer must know that. Do you not think Jimmy would keep an eye and an ear open, to know what I’m up to?’

  The sergeant nodded again.

  ‘So what does he see? He sees me pay a visit to the police. A few days later, a C.I.D. sergeant meets me at the inn. We walk to the place of the first murder. Then we go to the second victim’s house and probably behave like a couple of the stars of the silent screen who’ve been told to register excitement and horror. Well, if our Jimmy saw or heard of only a part of all this, by now he’s either watching us through binoculars or stalking us through the woods. And what do we do? Talking all the way, we walk in the direction of the second victim’s body. We examine the place where the body was dumped and pocket another two clues. Then we get in a boat, row out into the lake and can be presumed to find the second body.

  ‘Now, let’s go on looking at it from Jimmy’s viewpoint. If there’s nothing to connect him with Mr Grass’s murder, then none of us has anything to worry about. But if there’s any connection, so that the finding of the second body, with the very strong inference that Grass died by murder, is dangerous to Jimmy, then the non-discovery of the second body may be very important to him.’

  ‘I don’t think I like your reasoning as much as I did,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘Keep your voice down. You know how sound travels over water. In Jimmy’s shoes, I might decide that two more mysterious disappearances or accidents, or one of each, would be better than having Joe Merson found. The weather’s much more suitable for a little grave-digging than it was in February, and the evidence would soon be grown over. I’d think that I had nothing to lose and might have everything to gain.’

  Sergeant Yarrow bit his lower lip. ‘It’s all ifs and ands and buts again,’ he said.

  ‘True. But that’s what you said last time.’

  ‘And I don’t go for this domino effect in murders. Some faceless Jimmy wandering around knocking off half the countryside. The idea’s like something out of bad television.’

  Before staking his life, Keith preferred to calculate the odds. ‘Would you say that nobody ever killed again to cover up a first crime?’ he asked.

  ‘You know it happens,’ the sergeant said irritably. ‘Not often, but sometimes.’

  ‘Now put yourself in a murderer’s place. Be Jimmy for a moment. If you had killed once and then killed again to cover up the first killing, and then found that your secret was again in danger, would you find it more difficult to kill yet again? Or would it get a wee bit easier every time?’

  The sergeant’s only answer was a visible shiver.

  They looked around. The near countryside presented an uncaring, leafy face. The few visible fields were empty and even the tractor’s engine had stopped or died away. ‘A few years ago,’ Keith said, ‘these fields would’ve been fairly teeming with men. The face of farming’s changed, and not for the better.’

  ‘Never mind griping, go on being the murderer. I don’t like it, I don’t necessarily believe it, but you seem to have the knack.’

  ‘Do you ever get the feeling that you’re being watched?’ Keith asked.

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Nor do I. That’s what worries me. A man, or a dozen men, could be watching me through telescopic sights, and I wouldn’t know. If I was Jimmy, I’d be lurking somewhere in all that undergrowth. I might wait near the boathouse, to catch us on our way back. But watching us sitting here and arguing, I could make a damn good guess at what we’re saying. And I’d have to try and guess which side we’d come ashore, because, the loch being longer than it’s wide and with the banks overgrown beside, it’d be quicker to row across than to run round.’

  ‘And anything we think, he can think too and try to go one better,’ the sergeant said unhappily. ‘So it’s just a toss of the coin and a brief prayer that there’s only one of him. I wish we’d never had this conversation at all.’

  ‘Between you and me, my prayer is that there aren’t any of him just here and now.’

  ‘I’ll second that. Now, be the murderer again. What would you think if you
saw the boat being rowed very slowly towards one bank?’

  ‘I would guess,’ Keith said slowly, ‘that it was a bluff and that we were going to row back very quickly towards the opposite bank.’

  ‘Right. You can switch off now, I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to row very slowly towards the boat house, and hope that he’ll start for the other side. Then, when we get within fifty yards or so, I’m going to pull like hell and we’ll go straight inside and grab your gun.’ The sergeant bent to his oars and pulled slowly for the boat-house.

  ‘About that prayer of yours,’ Keith said. ‘Would you care to add a brief request that he doesn’t have a rifle and that my gun’s still there?’

  ‘No point repeating myself,’ the sergeant said, ‘I just did that one. Now I’m praying that I’m as good a guesser as you are, and better than he is.’

  ‘Amen.’

  Leaving the sunken body behind, they moved slowly towards the boat-house. Keith scanned the banks. There was no sign of movement in either direction, but an army could have moved unseen behind that cover. Keith thought that there probably wasn’t anybody there anyway. He thought that if some innocent bird-watcher appeared suddenly on the bank, somebody was going to need a clean pair of underpants.

  Fifty yards from the bank, the sergeant rested on his oars. ‘Any sign?’

  Keith tried to look into the silent foliage. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Here we go, then.’

  The sergeant pulled like an Olympic oarsman. The light dinghy rose in the water. It went faster than Keith could have believed. They were even overtaking a fleeing moorhen. Yet the boat-house seemed to be coming no nearer. Keith made up his mind that, at the first sign of danger, he was going to get underwater in one jump.

  At the very mouth of the creek, a short stone’s-throw from the boat-house, there wept a great willow-tree. It stood slightly back from the bank so that the circle of dangling fronds barely reached the water. The boat was entering the creek, almost abreast of the willow, when Keith’s eye was drawn to Brutus. He was sitting by the tree, patiently waiting, staring into its dark interior.