Fair Game

by Gerald Hammond

  The phone rang and the sergeant picked it up and listened. Penny came through the back-bar door and raised her eyebrows. The sergeant ignored her, but on a signal from Keith she refilled the glasses.

  Sergeant Jim laid down the phone with a satisfied nod. ‘That does it,’ he said. ‘One of the cars en route for the loch was diverted to Wellhead Farm. They found the lady running out her hose. Blood and hair on her Land Rover. She’s now said to be helping us with our enquiries, but not, I understand, helping one hell of a lot.’

  ‘She didn’t strike me as the helpful type,’ Keith said. ‘Now, for God’s sake, Penny, tell us how you knew. But don’t tell us that gossip had her pegged for it all the time.’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Penny paused, and a mild frown disturbed her soft brow. ‘I think I fancy a brandy and ginger,’ she said. She looked at Keith. He pushed another pound note across the bar. She mixed her drink and gave him his change before she went on. ‘One thing was this. I wondered who could have noticed the two of you prowling around and finding Joe Merson’s remains. I know the lie of the land there. Before he died, my husband used to rent grazing off the Bentons, and from Wellhead Farm you get a view of the loch and all over. And I’ve seen her with binoculars. Would she know your face, Sergeant Jim?’

  ‘I was interviewing her when the news of Mr Grass’s death came in. She’d complained about sheep-stealing. It turned out to be holes in the fence.’

  ‘There you are, then. And I wondered who might have reason to wish Mr Grass away, and I thought of her again. A whole lot of people are better off for being left his money and things, but only one was on the edge of bankruptcy. She has debts the way a hedgehog has fleas. .’

  ‘Not easy to lose money at farming these days,’ Keith said.

  ‘Well, she and her husband, they had the knack of it. I’ve heard the seedsmen and suppliers talking, she’d no credit left at all. She married beneath her, of course, and her family gave her the farm to get rid of them both. Only four hundred acres it was then, and they borrowed a whole lot of money to buy the rest when it came on the market. And both of them living it up, hunters and point-to-points and gambling.

  ‘And then her husband died and left her his debts, and of course men aren’t so keen to give credit to a woman in farming.

  ‘She couldn’t make a go of it on her own. In a farming community, there’s always talk about what’s the best crops for next year and where the best prices’ll be and what the EEC’ll do to them next, and somehow between them they usually come to the right decisions. But she and her husband, they’d never mixed with the farming crowd, thought they were one better, so she never got the benefit. Always making wrong guesses, she was, so the farmers were saying in here. And now the land’s all let for grazing, and the men were adding it up in the bar and reckoning that she couldn’t be taking in more than’d pay the interest on her loans.’

  ‘She could have sold up,’ Keith said.

  ‘But she needed something behind her. Since her husband died, she’d been setting her cap at Bert Yates, over at North Farm. Young Mr Yates, I mean.’

  ‘I didn’t think you meant the old man,’ Keith said. He remembered Mrs Ambrose with Bert Yates. He felt his face glow.

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ Penny said. Absently, she mixed herself another drink and looked around for the money. ‘She seems to fancy the farmers,’ she said.

  ‘Whereas you go more for solicitors,’ said the sergeant, taking out his wallet. ‘Set them up again,’ he added.

  ‘That’s right.’ She winked. ‘There’s a lot of old nonsense talked about farmers. Solicitors have more spunk to them.’

  Mr Enterkin felt that if he were not turning pink then he should be. ‘Go on about Mrs Benton,’ he said.

  ‘It was to get a place of his own Bert Yates was after,’ she said. ‘That stuck out a mile. He wanted to get away from that father of his, and who could blame him? But when he realised that she’d got nothing of her own he seemed to decide that he’d be better off staying by his dad and waiting for the old man to pop off, and in the meantime he took up with Mrs Ambrose. And I don’t suppose it was money he was after . . .’

  ‘Is that why she was killed?’ asked the sergeant. ‘Jealousy?’

  ‘That maybe made it easier but it wasn’t the whole of it, not by any manner of means. I’ll come to that. Let me finish about Mrs Benton first. I heard her speaking to Mr Grass one day about six months ago, sitting in here. She was taking a sherry, same as himself, although she usually preferred gin. Trying to please him, I thought at the time. She didn’t let on as she was broke, too proud for that, and I don’t suppose he knew it for he was never one to listen to gossip. She tried to lease him her shooting rights or to sell him a bit of land. But he said that he’d got more than enough to be going on with. Then he said that he hoped that her land’d be added to his some day, and I saw her begin to light up, but he went on to say that he’d made provision in his will for her land to be bought in for a good sum of money. “More than it’d fetch on the open market,” he says, “but I shan’t feel like haggling by then”. So she knew she had enough coming to save her bacon when he was gone.

  ‘And while I was remembering about that,’ Penny went on, ‘I was wondering who could do such a thing. There’s a few around here that you’d think were ruthless. Most have a soft streak somewhere. But not her. She’s the first to shoot a dog that’s worrying sheep, even a pet poodle once that was only wanting to play. And it’s more than that sort of thing. It’s the feeling you get when you see and hear somebody. I don’t know what it is, but you can tell.

  ‘One more thing. You said about cartridges being passed from hand to hand, and it made me wonder who’d been shooting with the general. And I remembered the general saying that Mrs Benton was a pretty good shot, for a woman.’

  Thirsty voices were calling from the other bar and she went through to attend to them.

  ‘It’s not who you know, it’s what you know,’ said the sergeant. ‘If we’d had a tenth of her local knowledge between us . . . I think I’ll make friends with every barmaid for fifty miles around.’

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ Keith said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  The sergeant was scribbling frantically in a notebook. ‘I’d better get all this down,’ he said. ‘With a little editing, I can make myself out to be the greatest detective of all time.’

  ‘Well, make a note of this,’ Keith said. ‘It explains the noise of a tractor that I heard while we were down at the loch.’

  ‘I heard it too.’

  They sat in silence until Mr Enterkin said, ‘I’ve just realised that we’ve as much right as anyone else to bang on the bar,’ and he rapped with a large ashtray.

  Penny came back at last. ‘Same again, is it?’ she asked.

  ‘That is not why we called you back,’ said Mr Enterkin, ‘and very well you know it.’

  ‘We can’t afford your prices,’ said the sergeant.

  She smiled softly. ‘Have one with me,’ she said, and started pouring.

  ‘And now,’ said the sergeant, ‘dear Mrs Laing, please tell us why Mrs Ambrose was on the hate-list.’

  ‘All right.’ Penny finished serving, and carefully counted money from her purse into the till. ‘Mr Brown’s in next door now, so we needn’t be interrupted again. I’ll tell you. It was something that happened in here.’

  ‘It would be,’ said the sergeant. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was a Friday. That’s the day most of the ladies do their shopping for the weekend, and some of them pop in here for a drink and a chat before lunch. There were three of them in here that day, Mrs Ambrose, Mrs Benton and a Mrs Burns. It was about ten days after Mr Grass died, perhaps a week after Joe Merson went missing, and they’d been talking about whether the one thing had anything to do with the other. Mrs Ambrose said to Mrs Benton, in that snooty voice of hers, “I thought Joe had moved in with you, dear.” Mrs Benton turned scarlet and asked her what she meant. Well, I was called
through to the other bar and I didn’t hear all that Mrs Ambrose said. But I heard a bit of it. Mrs Ambrose said something about a crossed line. Then she said, “I heard you make a date . . .” That was all.’

  Sergeant Jim made a silent whistle. ‘It was enough,’ he said. ‘If Mrs Benton knew that Mrs Ambrose had heard her invite Joe Merson to meet her down by the loch, then the moment that his body was found Mrs Ambrose became a ticking bomb. I suppose the other one in danger was this Mrs Burns.’

  ‘No, dear. She was in the little girls’ room when that was said. I meant me,’ Penny said. ‘I heard it too.’

  Mr Enterkin dropped his glass. ‘Oh my God!’ he said, in a squeak that was far from his usual booming voice. ‘There was a Land Rover outside your cottage.’

  Penny patted his hand. ‘I know,’ she said gently. ‘I saw it as we were getting into Sergeant Jim’s car. But don’t take on about it.’ She leaned across the bar and kissed Mr Enterkin on the chubby cheek. ‘It’s all over now.’

  Silence fell while each of them thought of what might have been. Somebody rattled the door-knob, gave up and went away.

  The sergeant looked up from a fresh page of scribbles. ‘One more question,’ he said. ‘And if any of you can answer it I’ll buy the next round, and you can make it Champagne if you like.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll serve you three any more,’ Penny said. ‘I think you’ve had enough.’

  The sergeant ignored her. ‘The question’s this. We can prove that Mrs Benton’s Land Rover killed Mrs Ambrose. We can probably prove that she was driving it at the time. But a good Q.C. might easily get her off lightly, as a hit-and-run driver who’d panicked after the victim carelessly stepped off the kerb under her wheels. We can infer that she killed Mr Grass and Joe Merson, but these are inferences backed up by the most slender of circumstantial evidence. Can anybody provide me with the least bit of hard, physical proof?’

  Silence fell again. Mr Enterkin stirred at last. ‘I suppose it’s my turn to buy the drinks,’ he said.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Penny said. ‘Don’t you go giving up so easy.’ She planted her elbows on the bar in front of the sergeant. ‘If I give you the answer, will you give me a bottle of Champagne, to put by for my next wedding?’

  The sergeant dragged his eyes away from her cleavage. ‘Gladly. And I’ll come and help you drink it.’

  ‘I’ll be fair with you,’ she said. ‘What I’m going to tell you is going to come out anyway, because it’s not a thing can be hid.’

  The sergeant poised his pencil. ‘That doesn’t matter to me,’ he said. ‘I want to be able to take in a case with proof.’

  ‘All right. You know the bits of it between you anyway. It’s just that you don’t know the same bits. I’ll ask you some questions, just as if I was a real lawyer in court.’

  ‘Before you start,’ Enterkin said, ‘put up another round of drinks, so that we can listen in comfort. I need something, after that shock. You’re called to the other bar, in fact.’

  ‘All right.’ Penny turned to the bottles but spoke over her shoulder. ‘Sergeant Jim, you looked through Joe Merson’s cottage?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Did you see his gun there? It was an old single-barrel hammer-gun.’

  ‘No, M’Lud, I didn’t. It’s probably at the bottom of the loch. Maybe parts of it were used to help weight him down.’

  ‘Don’t go jumping ahead, now. If you were trying to blackmail somebody, and he or she said to come down to a lonely place at dusk to meet them, and you had a gun, would you take it along with you?’

  ‘I’d be a fool not to,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘And if you realised, all of a sudden, that the other person was going to try and kill you?’

  ‘I’d try to get my shot off first.’

  ‘Exactly! Now, Sergeant Jim, tell me this. When you were interviewing her about the missing sheep, did you notice her feet?’

  ‘Her feet?’

  ‘Now you’re getting it, my dear.’

  ‘Don’t call him your dear,’ Enterkin said. ‘You’ll spoil the judicial atmosphere. And make me jealous.’

  ‘Your turn in a minute,’ Penny said.

  ‘She certainly had feet,’ the sergeant said thoughtfully. ‘Two of them. Yes, I remember. Quite small, in brogues.’

  ‘She was walking about?’

  ‘Striding around like an Amazon.’

  ‘Now, my dear,’ Penny said to Enterkin. ‘You’ve been up to see her about the will?’

  ‘What a relief,’ Enterkin said, ‘to know that you can be wrong. Keith went to see her.’

  Penny switched her gaze to Keith.

  ‘She was wearing a large size in men’s Wellingtons,’ Keith said, ‘and she never got down off her tractor.’

  ‘That’s right, my dear. Until about the middle of February, as near as I can remember it, she was walking everywhere in her brogues. Very proud of her small feet, she is. But, ever since then, she’s been going around in her Land Rover or on her tractor, and wearing a pair of her husband’s old wellies.’

  ‘So,’ said the sergeant, ‘she’d made up her mind to kill Joe Merson, rather than pay him off. When he saw what she was going to do, he tried to bring his gun up, but he only got as far as her feet before she blasted him. His gun went off, and she got it in the feet and ankles. She didn’t dare to go to a doctor with gunshot wounds, just at that critical time, so she’s been trying to nurse herself better.’ He picked up the phone.

  ‘Wait until I’ve finished,’ Penny said reprovingly. ‘I’m sure I don’t know why you’re in such a hurry.’

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Just a bit. It must have been a terrible time for her. She looks ten years older, and no wonder. You could feel sorry for her, if it wasn’t for what she’s done. I am coming to the point, you don’t have to be impatient. The vet was in here the other evening, chatting with a couple of farmers about drugs and antibiotics for cattle. He said that every farmer ought to keep a stock handy, just in case of injury to his beasts. He said Mrs Benton was a sensible woman, she’d been stocking up with things like penicillin spray although she doesn’t have a single beast of her own these days.’

  ‘Right,’ said the sergeant. He grabbed up the phone and dialled a number.

  Penny and Mr Enterkin clinked glasses. ‘I’ll have to put you to work in Newton Lauder,’ Enterkin said. ‘With you behind the bar in the hotel I’d have every case won before it came to court.’

  ‘I’ll go through and see if Mr Brown needs a hand,’ she said, but she made it sound like a promise of eternal bliss.

  ‘I gather,’ Keith said, ‘that you two intend to make a go of it. Despite what you’ve always said about the state of holy bedlock. I wish you happy.’

  ‘Get those boots off her,’ the sergeant was saying. ‘If there’s a doctor available, get him to examine her feet. I’ll hang on.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mr Enterkin said to Keith. ‘I confidently expect it, but thank you for your good wishes anyway. Which reminds me.’ He blinked at Keith. ‘If you’ll forgive my saying so, your marital boat seems to be rocking a bit. I trust that you haven’t been getting up to any shenanigans again?’

  Penny came back. ‘They’re telling blue stories through there,’ she said. ‘They didn’t need me.’

  ‘I wondered,’ Keith said to Enterkin, ‘whether somebody had been putting the poison in. About me, I mean, with Molly. She’s been acting all week as if I’d been guilty of something.’

  ‘Why would anybody do that?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to think of a reason, and I can’t. Except . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s the person who’s been ripping-off Mr Grass with faked-up guns. If he didn’t want me poking around the collection, he might have got somebody to phone Molly with a made-up tale, linking me with some bird through here. That could be it,’ Keith said doubtfully.

  Mr Enterkin pointed his finger, not very accurately, at Keith. ‘T
hat is it! Somebody thought that if Molly was told that you were having an affair through here, she’d stop you coming back. They were, of course, living in a dream-world. Molly couldn’t and wouldn’t stop you doing anything, she’d just be hurt and say nothing.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ Penny said. ‘When Ralph and I started going together,’ she managed a small blush, ‘there was gossip went round of course. But for once they had it wrong. They thought it was you and me . . .’

  ‘And yet another thing,’ said Mr Enterkin. ‘This morning, I had an odd phone call from Molly. She asked whether I had really telephoned you to come here, to the inn. Which suggests very strongly that somebody had got hold of that erroneous rumour and tried to use it to their own ends.’

  ‘But that still doesn’t make sense,’ Keith said plaintively. ‘It’d have to be somebody local. But the only reason would be to keep me away from the guns. And there isn’t a gun-dealer around here.’

  ‘There’s Mrs Benton’s brother,’ Penny said. ‘Waterhouse, his name is.’

  Chapter Twenty

  The sergeant hung up the phone. ‘That does it,’ he said with grim satisfaction. ‘She’d managed to get most of the pellets out, but the punctures were still weeping.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Keith said. ‘We’re dealing with something else. Penny, did you say that Waterhouse is Mrs Benton’s brother. Jack Waterhouse?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But somebody told me she was a Cunningham.’

  ‘Her mother was, my dear.’

  Keith stared fixedly at the Glen Grant bottle for a few seconds. ‘Now it all comes together,’ he said. ‘Put up another round while we work it out. Jack Waterhouse is a mad beggar, always coming round scrounging for guns that he can bodge up and sell at a profit. And he’s a damn good engraver. In fact, if he’d made up his mind, he could have earned more as an engraver than he makes dealing dishonestly. But he’s just the man to have pulled off those fakes and flogged them to Ray Grass. Great! This gets me off the hook with Molly.’