Fair Game

by Gerald Hammond

  Keith wondered whether some animal, perhaps a feral mink, was in there. But Brutus’ tail was sweeping the grass.

  And Keith remembered: Brutus would follow the man with the gun. ‘There’s someone inside the willow,’ he hissed.

  It was too late to retreat. While Keith was still wondering what the hell to do, the sergeant pulled hard on one oar, swinging the dinghy straight for the tree.

  Everything seemed to happen in the flick of an eye.

  The sergeant gave one more mighty pull on the oars.

  Keith let himself fall backwards into the bottom of the boat.

  The sergeant turned and sprang in one movement, launching himself in what should have been a flying tackle through the branches. It was a brave act and might have been suicidal. But the thrust of his leap shot the dinghy backwards from under him.

  The shot came, with the ringing blast that can only be heard in front of the muzzles.

  The sergeant landed in three feet of water and two of mud.

  Keith was looking past his own feet into a hole that had been blown in the foliage. He could see the muzzles of a shotgun and a pale blur behind that might have been a face and a pair of hands. He seemed to be looking right down the barrels and counting the pellets. The echoes of the first shot were not dead, and he could hear duck taking off, disturbed by the unseasonable sound.

  Fascinated, he watched the twin muzzles that looked so like the eye-sockets of a skull, and waited for them to sound his knell.

  There was a loud pop, and suddenly the air was filled with little coloured bubbles. And then he bumped the bank on the other side of the creek. He could hear the sound of someone crashing away through the bracken and brambles.

  *

  ‘Of course it was the bloody general,’ Keith said. He peered out of the boat-house door, gun in hand, like some settler waiting for the Indians. ‘Old Grass mixed some trick cartridges with his. I told you. They just went pop and blew out a lot of coloured bubbles.’

  ‘Is that what happened? I was underwater at the time. When I came up, I wondered why you were still alive.’

  ‘That’s exactly what happened. I was looking right down his barrels – it was a side-by-side – and suddenly we had bath-night in Technicolor. And as for you,’ Keith stirred the soaking wet Brutus with his foot, ‘I’m trying to believe you took to the water to help me. But in my heart I know that what you were after was to retrieve me. You don’t give a damn, do you?’

  ‘It needn’t have been the general. You said people swap cartridges, as if I didn’t know it. But you heard whoever-it-was run off?’ the sergeant asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes. That’s not to say that he isn’t going to wait for us somewhere else. We’d better stay as much in the open as we can. You coming?’

  ‘You think I’m staying here while you take the gun away? Of course I’m coming.’

  Outside the boathouse, the world looked abnormally normal. It was only when they stepped outside that Keith saw the blood on the other’s hand. ‘He hit you?’

  Sergeant Yarrow nodded. ‘He got my shoulder. At that range, I don’t know how he didn’t blow my arm off.’

  ‘Come on.’

  As soon as they were back in the fields and safe from immediate ambush Keith stopped and made the sergeant take his soaking jacket off. ‘About twenty pellets,’ he said, ‘not too deep. Shooting through leaves and twigs must have scattered his pattern and you just caught the fringe. You were bloody lucky.’

  ‘We both were,’ Yarrow said. ‘Where are we heading?’

  ‘The village.’

  They set off again, avoiding thick cover and ignoring crops and cattle. Keith thought of things that he would do to the general. He wondered whether shooting people while not wearing a white coat would contravene the terms of the will.

  ‘How’re the wounds holding up?’ he asked.

  ‘Not bad. It’s my feet that’re bothering me.’

  ‘He shot you in them?’

  ‘You’ve walked me off them.’

  Where their path plunged into the woods that backed the village, they paused. ‘Good place for an ambush,’ said the sergeant.

  Keith had opened his mouth to reply when a shot sounded, loud and near. He bit his tongue. The sergeant jumped several inches and uttered a word of startling vulgarity. Each looked at the other and was surprised to find him alive.

  Brutus’ reaction was quite different. He darted forward and pinned a still kicking rabbit.

  Miss Wyper stepped out of the trees, shotgun hanging negligently over her arm. ‘Sorry if I startled you. I didn’t see you coming.’ She took the rabbit from Brutus and dispatched it with a flick of her wrist. ‘That’s clobbered the bastard,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Three more for a hat and I’m ready.’

  Keith held his own gun two-handed. It was against his instincts to point it at a lady, but he kept it where he could bring it to bear instantly. ‘Has the general passed this way?’ he asked.

  ‘I haven’t seen a soul,’ she said. She looked at them curiously. The sergeant had taken up position behind Keith, who was backing slowly away from her.

  ‘My – er – friend fell in the loch and hurt himself,’ Keith said. ‘Got to get on. Need doctor. Good hunting!’

  ‘Just a minute,’ the sergeant said. ‘Have you been down by the loch?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve been in the village, posting yesterday’s letters. Cheerio!’ She strode off in the direction of Whinkirk House.

  The two men stood taking deep breaths. ‘I didn’t really suspect her anyway,’ Keith said shakily.

  ‘Nor did I,’ said the sergeant. He came out from behind Keith.

  Their way brought them into the village by a path that led between the gardens of a row of cottages. A plump figure was pulling vegetables in one of the gardens and Keith recognised the comely barmaid from the inn. She looked up, recognised him, started to smile and then saw the colour of the sergeant’s face and the blood on his hand.

  ‘Whatever’s happened?’ she asked, and, without waiting for an answer, ‘you’d better come inside quick.’

  ‘Do you have a phone?’

  ‘No. But the doctor’s visiting two doors away. I can fetch him.’

  ‘Fine,’ Keith said. ‘And I’ll go and borrow him some dry clothes.’

  Inside the cottage, a stout figure had been sleeping off a heavy lunch on Penny’s sofa. Mr Enterkin sat up, blinking.

  ‘So this is where you’ve been skiving off to,’ Keith said.

  ‘No it is not,’ Mr Enterkin said truculently. He rubbed the sleep out of his face. ‘And I haven’t been skiving off. And . . . and what the hell’s going on? Did you shoot this man?’

  ‘No I did not. The blasted general did it.’

  ‘That he didn’t,’ said Penny Laing. ‘The general was taken off to hospital this morning. Took ill in the night, poor soul.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Keith walked to the inn. Quite illegally, he carried his loaded gun at the ready. Nobody seemed to notice. It was most of an hour before he returned. The largest part of that time was spent on the phone to the police, relaying a series of messages from Sergeant Yarrow to several of his superiors, answering questions and receiving messages in return. A few minutes were enough for borrowing a change of clothing from Harvey Brown. The rest of the time was spent in trying to find reverse on the sergeant’s car, which was a model strange to him. He found it after much trial and many errors, and drove back to Penny’s cottage.

  He found the sergeant stripped to the waist in front of a comforting fire, heavily bandaged around the left shoulder and admiring a wine-glass which contained a number of shotgun pellets. ‘Home-poured,’ he said. ‘They look as if they may have come from Joe Merson.’

  There was a mixed grill waiting on the table for Keith, with a can of beer. ‘Sergeant Jim said you hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast,’ Penny told him. ‘He’s already had his.’

  ‘That’s no way to refer to an offic
er,’ Enterkin said from the couch. He had resumed his prone position. ‘If you must fraternise with the rival branch of the law, show a proper respect.’

  ‘He asked me to call him Jim,’ Penny explained.

  Keith found that he was hungrier than he could remember ever being. As he ate, he could hear the sergeant protesting his outraged modesty in the room next door as Penny helped him to change into Harvey Brown’s dry clothes. She came back and snatched Keith’s plate away as soon as it was empty. ‘That silly boy,’ she said. ‘He can’t move his arm, but he won’t be helped. Take a scone.’

  ‘You’ll make me fat,’ Keith said, helping himself.

  She considered him, her head on one side. ‘A little more weight would suit you,’ she said. ‘Your wife doesn’t feed you enough. I’m the one that needs to get some weight off.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Just pleasantly plump,’ Enterkin said sleepily.

  The sergeant rejoined them, dry-clad but ill-fitted. ‘We can talk in front of Mrs Laing,’ he said. ‘She wheedled the story out of me anyway. What did my chiefs have to say?’

  Keith thought back. ‘If you need to go to hospital –’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘– I’m to take you there. But if you’ve had adequate medical attention for the moment, you’re to wait at the inn while the body’s secured or a guard put on the loch. When that’s all in hand, somebody’ll come and drive you home. But would you radio in, if you have one with you, or phone if you don’t and confirm what I said to them just in case I’m a hoaxer.’

  ‘If I’d had a radio on me I’d still be out in the middle of the loch screaming for help. Did I seem to be unpopular?’

  ‘Glynder wasn’t too pleased,’ Keith said. ‘But your own chief seemed to be delighted. There doesn’t seem to be much love lost between him and Glynder.’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  ‘We’d better be getting round to the inn,’ Penny broke in. ‘You can talk there. Mrs Brown’s away, and if the bars open late there’ll be thirsty men battering on the doors.’

  ‘I’ll be one of them,’ said Sergeant Jim. ‘I’ve suddenly developed the most colossal thirst, and I can hardly be on duty and I can’t drive. The inn’s a good place to wait. And I seem to remember that they have a very pretty barmaid there with a lovely bosom.’

  Keith and Penny exchanged a wink. ‘Shame on you,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘She’s old enough to be your mother.’

  ‘I am not,’ Penny said.

  The sergeant began to blush furiously.

  *

  Like most men, the sergeant was a bad passenger in his own car. They were all glad when the inn was reached. In the cool of the empty private bar the three men took stools while Penny Laing busied herself with the routine of opening up. Brutus, still damp, flopped by the dead fireplace.

  ‘I could have sworn that it was the general,’ Keith said glumly.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t,’ Penny said.

  ‘Everything pointed to him. How old’s your Glen Grant?’ Keith asked. On being satisfied that the malt whisky was of a respectable age he decided to accept a dram. ‘Those cartridges alone . . .’

  ‘Export,’ said Sergeant Jim.

  ‘Pint?’

  ‘If you’ve nothing larger. You don’t know that those are the important cartridges.’

  ‘Colin Winter’s as fussy as an old wife about cartridges lying around, and those are the only two I’ve ever seen, and they were both fired from a repeater.’

  ‘I seem doomed,’ Mr Enterkin began, ‘to spend my evening listening to, and possibly participating in, forlorn speculation on a subject which holds for me no profit and therefore very little interest. I see no reason to remain more clear-headed than my company. I shall have a large brandy. With soda.’ He produced a five-pound note. ‘And you’ll oblige me by taking the round out of this.’

  Penny put a jug of water beside Keith’s whisky. ‘You didn’t say anything about a repeating shotgun,’ she said accusingly to the sergeant. ‘And the general doesn’t have one of those.’

  ‘How would you know that?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘She knows everything,’ said Enterkin proudly.

  ‘He was trying one out back in February,’ Keith said. ‘Colin Winter told me.’

  ‘Colin’s wrong, then.’ Penny said, topping up the pint glass. ‘The general was trying it out early in January, because I remember him saying that he was thinking of giving himself a late Christmas present. But he never bought it. You see, the inn’s a sort of market-place. Most private deals get settled in here. Colin bought the gun himself, later.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Keith said. ‘I wonder why he didn’t tell me that it was the same gun.’

  ‘Was there any reason that he should?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘I’d better phone in,’ said Sergeant Jim. ‘Can I have some change?’

  ‘Don’t bother with the phone-box,’ Penny said. She lifted a telephone from under the bar and put it on the counter.

  ‘Bless you! I don’t know that I’ll ever recover enough strength to get off this stool.’ The sergeant dialled his number.

  ‘All this walking’s very debilitating,’ Enterkin said sympathetically.

  Keith was determined to stick to one subject. ‘Unless there’s something we don’t know about,’ he said, ‘I can’t see any motive for Colin Winter to do such a thing.’

  ‘What thing?’ asked Penny.

  ‘Kill Mr Grass. He was the other person who was likely to see us hiking around the place and skilled enough to follow us without being spotted. And he had the repeater.’

  ‘Not when Mr Grass died, he didn’t. He only bought it about a month ago.’

  Keith was silenced. Vaguely aware of Sergeant Jim’s voice on the telephone, he was reviewing people and guns. If he were wrong in his interpretation of the faint marks on the cartridges . . .

  ‘I’ll hang on,’ the sergeant was saying. He covered the mouthpiece. ‘There’s another panic on,’ he told them. ‘A hit-and-run driver. It seems to have been deliberate, she was run over more than once by something fairly heavy. That’s all they can say, so far.’

  ‘Who?’ they asked in unison.

  ‘A Mrs Ambrose. Almost outside her own house. Quite dead.’

  Keith’s first reaction was regret, that an attractive, sensual woman had departed the world unenjoyed by himself. Then pity for the crippled husband whose wife, however faithless, had at least stayed by him. And then irritation. Mrs Ambrose had been his next choice – the woman of a certain age, saddled with an impotent husband, ridding herself of the old lover to spend his money on the new. He had wondered whether the Ambroses had been considering a repeater for their son. But if this last death were connected with the others . . .

  Penny had been staring into a glass that she was polishing, as if it had been a crystal ball. ‘But that’s awful,’ she said suddenly. She had turned very pale. ‘Wicked! She really is old enough to be his mother. Well, nearly.’ The three men gaped at her. ‘Don’t look at me like that. Get onto them quickly. Tell them to go to Wellhead Farm, real quick, and to watch the car-washes and places like that. Tell them they must look at Mrs Benton’s Land Rover before she has time to wash it off.’

  ‘Wash what off?’

  ‘I don’t know. Blood. Hair. Skin. Bits of clothes. Whatever it is that you find on a car that’s knocked somebody down.’

  The sergeant had caught up with her. ‘I have a tip from an informant,’ he said. Briskly, without a wasted word, he began to relay Penny’s advice.

  The influx was arriving in the public bar and Penny went through to serve. The sergeant, still speaking on the phone, was making signals to Keith who, hoping that he was interpreting them correctly, got up and put a chair under the handle of each door. The private bar was going to remain especially private that evening.

  Penny returned through the back-bar door just as the sergeant hung up the phone. ‘There’s a car on the wa
y to the farm,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a call as soon as they know anything.’

  ‘And the car-washes?’ asked Penny.

  ‘There’s only two within miles. They’re going to be out of order from now on. But,’ Sergeant Jim asked plaintively, ‘you mean that Mrs Benton killed Mrs Ambrose? On purpose?’

  Penny picked up another glass to polish. ‘Of course, my dear.’

  ‘And Mr Grass, and Joe Merson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s have your reasoning.’

  The brief flush of confidence had deserted Penny. ‘It’s not reasoning that I could give you in a logical order. It’s just a lot of things,’ she said shyly. ‘Things. Do you know what I mean? Things that I knew anyway. What you told me this afternoon set me wondering. When you said that about the repeating shotgun, it began to come together. But, before I spoke out, I stopped to wonder who else was in danger if it was Mrs Benton. And I’d just decided that there were two people, and Mrs Ambrose was one of them, when you said she’d been knocked down and killed.’

  There was an impatient knocking from the public bar. ‘If you think Mr Grass and old Joe were killed with a repeater,’ she said quickly, ‘I may as well tell you that Mrs Benton used to own the gun that the general tried out in January and Colin bought later. She was sitting where you are, Sergeant Jim, when the deal was done.’ She slipped away through the back-bar door.

  ‘Purple scented mouse-crap!’ Sergeant Jim exploded. ‘She can’t just tell us that somebody else’s neck’s on the chopping-block and then buzz off!’

  ‘She just did,’ Keith said.

  The sergeant ducked under the flap in the bar counter and went in pursuit. Craning his neck, Keith could see an excited conversation being pursued in whispers. The sergeant returned, ducked back and resumed his stool. ‘She says not to worry, there’s no danger now. She can’t really be that far ahead of us, can she? A woman?’ He was engaged to marry a feather-brained filing-clerkess and confidently expected to live happily ever after.

  ‘Her reasoning powers are better than she gives herself credit for,’ Enterkin said anxiously. He had never married, but had enjoyed a protracted affair with a lady possessed of acute reasoning powers, and had sometimes had cause to feel that where the female I.Q. was concerned enough was enough. ‘She’s nobody’s fool. And she had a flying start over any of us. Anything of importance that is said or done in this village is said or done in the bar here, or talked over in the bar afterwards.’