The Executor (Keith Calder Book 10)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Know it?’ Fleet said. ‘I think I married its daughter. Sorry,’ he added, in response to a disapproving glare from Ovenstone. ‘Go on.’

  ‘At one time or another, she dominated her son and her stepson – the sort of domination which can be achieved through the purse-strings, backed by a battering with words. It becomes a habit in the end. She tried with partial success to dominate her second husband. I suspect that it was her foolish indulgence which turned her son into a raving homosexual, but when she found out his . . . tendency, according to the former maid, she transferred her affection and her favours entirely to her stepson.

  ‘Robin Winterton was concerned about this. He felt that Steven Clune was being unfairly treated and in the many family rows he sided with him. He might even have got around to mentioning him in his will, in the certain knowledge that he would get no benefit from his mother’s inheritance, but there’s no sign that he ever did anything about it.

  ‘Robin Winterton was a sensible old chap. His only act of folly seems to have been his second marriage. Through his first wife he inherited some property, including some antique guns of very great value, and, realising that these were very much an appreciating asset, he extended the collection during the rest of his working life, as his form of life-savings.

  ‘After I heard of his death, I took a look at the list I’d been keeping of his collection. I can’t be sure, because he didn’t buy everything through me, but I’d guess that he’d only spent around forty thousand.’

  ‘Only?’ Molly said.

  ‘Think of it as an average of twenty quid a week out of the earnings of a successful career and you may see it in perspective. Those guns alone will fetch nearly half a million quid now. But add to them the almost priceless guns which came through his first wife and he could have been a millionaire, at least once.’

  ‘Can’t you be more specific?’ Fleet asked. ‘A court will need to know.’

  ‘I have a rough figure in mind for what final disposal should realise,’ Keith said, ‘but I’m quite prepared to be astonished. You never know what collectors and museums will go to at auction when something unrepeatable turns up.

  ‘The tragedy is that his family could not appreciate the wealth which he was accumulating. I’m not sure that he fully understood it himself. His will may have been very much out-of-date, or perhaps he meant it that way, but the hundred thousand each which he willed to his son and his daughter were a couple of drops in a biggish bucket. The balance, after capital transfer tax on the whole, was willed to his wife.

  ‘As far as his family was concerned, he had been a salaried man with a pension which would die with him. He owned a fine house but lived modestly. He made no secret of the fact that his money was in a gun collection which his wife regarded as no more than an annoying hobby. She seems to have realised that it was valuable, but value is a relative term. The same applies to certain other antiques, mostly deriving from his first marriage.

  ‘That’s the background. Now we approach the facts.

  ‘After Mr Winterton was murdered, his widow confessed that she had sold his collection, for far less than its value, to a knocker who had called at the door and who, from her description, seemed to have been Duncan Laurie. Later, I was approached by Danny Bruce’s daughter Mary.

  ‘I knew the Bruces of old. I used to do business with them until I found that they were trying to unload stolen guns through me. Danny is an antique-dealer in Glasgow. Unless he’s changed, he’s also the premier fence for most of Scotland and northern England. And his intelligence system was always superlative – news from the worlds of crime or of antiques was part of his stock-in-trade. You probably know that as well as I do.

  ‘Mary’s approach to me was guarded. She was after information. Danny evidently had wind of the value of Mr Winterton’s guns. But I couldn’t make out whether Mary was sniffing after their whereabouts or their value to me as executor. Either Danny Bruce had staged the whole thing including the murder, or he had sent the knocker to buy them after he heard about Mr Winterton’s death, or else he had had nothing to do with either event but had got wind that the guns were missing and was trying to get his hands on them anyway.

  ‘I tried to cover all those possibilities.’ Keith looked at Ovenstone. ‘I told your sergeant about the guns. You didn’t take it seriously because you learned that Laurie had been in Glasgow when he was supposed to have been visiting Mrs Winterton. That didn’t matter a lot, because in fact Duncan Laurie never saw or, as far as I know, even heard of the guns. Yet he got drawn into the events.’

  Ovenstone had been sitting in silence, but his reserve broke. ‘I thought you said—’

  ‘Wait,’ Keith said. ‘Please wait. I asked a friend in the Strathclyde police to keep an eye on Danny Bruce’s movement of goods. And I set my brother-in-law to following Mary Bruce – I suppose I should call her Mary Anguillas – who was travelling with a bodyguard of two toughs.

  ‘Mary made a bee-line for Steven Clune. Her two goons tied him up and then they – with or without her assistance – beat hell out of him until he handed over . . . this.’ Keith picked up the plastic bag containing the handbag, from beside his chair. Four pairs of eyes followed it. ‘I pinched it out of her car yesterday. Its purpose seems to have been blackmail and our best guess is that it’s the handbag of the girl who was raped and murdered at Granton a few months ago, Jean Watson. I haven’t opened the wrappings,’ he added.

  Chief Detective Inspector Ovenstone assumed the privilege of seniority and received the package. Without opening the polythene bag he managed to unlatch the handbag and to take a clouded look at the contents. ‘Blue checked handkerchief and a green purse,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can make out. We’ll keep the whole parcel intact for the lab. But it’s enough. It fits. Our colleagues will be turning handsprings.’ Ovenstone himself was looking happier. The humiliating publicity of his capture by the Bruces and his rescue by a schoolgirl would be offset if he could bring in the solution to the Jean Watson case.

  ‘Assume that Michael Winterton’s fingerprints are on it, or that he thinks they are,’ Keith said. ‘After all, they could hardly be the widow’s. That would be the hold which Steven Clune had over his stepbrother. And, Danny Bruce having the grip that he’s got on the grape-vines of crime, he knew that some such incriminating evidence existed.

  ‘The fact that he wanted it at all suggested very strongly that Danny-boy was only trying to cut himself a piece of the cake . . . post hoc, as the lawyers would say. This is confirmed up to the hilt if the description which Mary Bruce brought me of Mr Winterton’s murderer was the truth – and, of course, if the murderer was still alive. Danny would never have pointed the finger at anyone who might have pointed it back.’ He looked at Fleet and awaited a comment.

  ‘A yes on both counts,’ Fleet said. ‘The description went to Records and fitted one man like a glove. A message reached me over the radio just before I came indoors. The police in Kirkcaldy picked him up. He still had the gold watch in his possession. The brass book-end was found in a dustbin two streets away. He’s in process of coughing the lot at this moment.’

  ‘You could have told me before now,’ Keith said. ‘It would have shortened the story. Anyway, it does confirm that Danny Bruce was a late arrival on the scene.

  ‘It also suggests that the widow did tell the truth at least once, when she stated that she arrived home to find her husband dead.

  ‘You thought that she might have killed him?’ Molly asked.

  ‘She didn’t,’ Inspector Fleet said. ‘We had to consider her, of course. But Mr Winterton made several phone-calls while she was out. And she didn’t have enough time between being dropped by her friend and the arrival of the police to clean herself up after – if the ladies will forgive me – so messy a killing.’

  ‘I wondered about that,’ Keith said. ‘There was the possibility that Robin Winterton might have intended to change his will. She could easily have done it before she went out. No r
eputable pathologist will ever pinpoint the time of a death, not unless he saw the murder committed. There are too many variables and his evidence is too easily upset by the thousands of cases in which precise estimates of the time of death have been proved to be hours or even days out. And I thought that Steven Clune might have killed his stepfather. But he picked up his mother after we conferred in the solicitor’s office – by royal command, I suppose.

  ‘If you arrive here by car, it’s difficult not to park opposite the front door. And, just at the moment, not only are rowan berries falling there but the birds are dropping purple plonks from the trees – I think they’ve been eating the berberis berries. It makes a hell of a mess.’

  ‘Doesn’t it just!’ Philip Stratton said.

  ‘Clune’s car had the dust of weeks on the roof,’ Keith said, ‘but no stains. When I saw Michael Winterton’s car in Edinburgh, however, I leaned on the roof. It was freshly washed, but there were still one or two rowan berries in the gutter. And Duncan Laurie’s van was all splattered with purple.’

  ‘You just said that he never saw or heard of the guns,’ Ovenstone said.

  ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘But Michael Winterton didn’t kill his father,’ Molly said despairingly. ‘We know that.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Keith said. He turned to Detective Inspector Fleet. ‘Mrs Winterton called the police, late on the Monday evening. How long were your team at the house?’

  ‘We finished on Wednesday morning, sealed the two relevant rooms and left,’ Fleet said.

  ‘Was the widow in the house, and alone, all that time?’

  ‘Several visitors came to offer help or condolences,’ Fleet said. ‘Her stepson among them. So much for berries on his car.’

  ‘Indeed, yes,’ Keith said. ‘Because she assured Mr Enterkin and myself that he hadn’t looked near her. And she summoned her own son to chauffeur her although she usually used the local taxi. She was trying to foster the impression that she was still friends with her son rather than her stepson. And I’ll tell you why. I’m speculating, but—’

  ‘Go ahead and speculate,’ Fleet said. ‘Finding the evidence is our job.’

  ‘Right. During those two days, Michael Winterton and his affectionate stepmother compared notes. Remember that he was very much under her thumb. As they saw it, in their inadequate understanding of his finances, Mr Winterton’s assets would hardly cover the legacies to Michael and his sister; and he would certainly be blackmailed out of his share by his stepbrother. They couldn’t bring themselves to believe that, after capital transfer tax on the whole was paid, there’d be anything much left for his widow. And this seemed very unfair to them.

  ‘So, they thought, why not keep the gun collection separate? The value of this house and its contents might realise enough to pay perhaps half of the legacies to Michael and his sister. The value of the guns could remain unknown to Steven and to the Inland Revenue.

  ‘As soon as the police left the house, Michael moved the guns out of their cellar and hid them under the coal in the boiler room. He must have been out of his mind.’

  ‘With anxiety, you mean?’ Molly asked. ‘Or do you mean that he was mad to think that he could get away with it?’

  ‘I was thinking of the damage he could have done to what are really national treasures,’ Keith said indignantly.

  ‘On Thursday morning,’ he went on, ‘I returned from my wanderings. Mr Enterkin called a meeting that afternoon and the widow coolly announced that she had sold the guns. Well, she got a shock but she covered it well. I gave her some idea of the probable value of the guns.

  ‘If she had had the sort of mind which could be changed, she could still have backed off. She could, for instance, have spun some tale about the guns still being nearby and awaiting collection and that she would cancel the deal. But no. The chance to cheat her stepdaughter, the tax man and her own son of even greater amounts still looked good.

  ‘But I was pressing her for details of the sale and in her confusion she made a bad mistake. She had to describe a knocker and she described one who had called at the door earlier in the week. Duncan Laurie’s visit must have been during Monday or it would have been noted by the officers in the house. I pressed her for more details. I asked whether there had been any packing-case in the van. She described the first case which came into her head, which happened to be an old and valuable dower chest. I’ve just been looking in the inventory. The dower chest is mentioned but I see no sign of it in the house.

  ‘She had arranged for her son to transport her. This may have been because she and her stepson had decided to play down their closeness or because she wanted an opportunity to try and persuade Steven Clune to give up the evidence he was holding over his stepbrother. Whatever the reason, she capitalised on it by stating that her stepson hadn’t been near her since his father’s death.

  ‘There must have been another conference, probably by telephone, between her and Michael Winterton. I call it a conference, but more likely she was dispensing tablets of stone. It was decided to go through with the theft or embezzlement, whichever you like to call it. From Michael’s viewpoint, the idea of getting access to a lot of money which neither his stepbrother nor anybody else knew about would have seemed attractive beyond his powers to resist. Remember, he would have been facing the possibility of becoming a fugitive if his other crime had surfaced.

  ‘So far, it’s almost a humdrum story of muddled thinking and bad intentions. Here’s where it becomes truly evil.’ He paused and wiped his face. The room seemed suddenly oppressive. ‘The snag they faced was that Mrs Winterton had described a real man who would almost certainly be able to prove that he had nothing to do with the guns.’

  Chief Detective Inspector Ovenstone had been recovering his humour. His flush had subsided and, no longer glaring out of the window, he had been listening attentively. ‘You’re suggesting that Duncan Laurie was killed for no better reason than to support a story which accounted for the disappearance of some valuable guns?’

  Keith shrugged. ‘Many men have been killed for less,’ he said. ‘May I ask why you decided that he hadn’t killed himself?’

  Ovenstone hesitated. ‘I suppose there’s no harm,’ he said reluctantly. ‘It seemed a clear case of suicide, but we had a pathologist look at him, just in case. The pathologist reported that the wounds had been made by a weapon much sharper than the razors – which seemed to have been used for sharpening pencils and the like – and with a shorter blade.’

  ‘Like a veterinary scalpel?’ Fleet asked.

  ‘Could be. And the tentative cuts had been made after death. A suicide by knife,’ Ovenstone explained kindly, ‘usually makes some preliminary cuts before he gets up the nerve to do the real job.’ (Keith avoided Molly’s eye.) ‘Do you really want your daughter listening to all this?’ Ovenstone asked suddenly.

  ‘I think it would do her more harm to sit outside and imagine things,’ Molly said.

  ‘And I was the one who caught the Bruce gang for you,’ Deborah said indignantly.

  Ovenstone coloured again.

  Keith hid a smile. ‘The press will be all over her,’ he said, ‘so she’d better know what not to say. You’ll feature as a beautiful blonde,’ he added to Deborah, ‘but don’t let it go to your head. They called Smelly Nelly a beautiful blonde when she had to be rescued from a fire in that hovel of hers.’

  Philip Stratton gave him a look of reproach. ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ he told Deborah.

  ‘Try this for size,’ Keith resumed. ‘Michael Winterton hurried over to Halleydane House as soon as he could. Remember, he already had one murder to his credit; the next would come easier.’

  ‘If you’re right,’ Ovenstone said, ‘– and it’s a big if – he may have had more than one.’ He glared at Philip. ‘This isn’t for publication until we release it. There have been three other rape-murders in the Lothians during the last five years which seem to show similar features.’

  ‘All the e
asier, then,’ Keith said. ‘And I suppose that, in his line of work, he’d come to think less and less about the sanctity of life.

  ‘In that big estate-car of his he collected the dower chest and an old set of razors. He returned to Edinburgh and found Duncan Laurie’s store. Probably he had on a boiler-suit and gloves. He offered to sell Laurie the set of razors and as Laurie sat at his table to look at them he took a scalpel out of his pocket and . . . did the deed. Then he carried in the dower chest.’

  ‘If fits very well,’ Ovenstone said slowly. ‘All we need is evidence. Are the razors mentioned in the inventory?’

  Keith had the inventory turned to the page. ‘Very tersely,’ he said. ‘It just mentions razors, set, one, without any description. It could refer to the Rolls razor which Robin Winterton habitually used. But the dower chest is described, so they needed a replacement before the widow dared cough up the inventory – of which she thought she had the only copy. She tried the antique-dealers without success. But I found out, quite by chance, that Dougall and Symington, the cabinetmakers in Craiglockhart, are knocking up a dower chest as an urgent job for a cash customer who left a deposit instead of his name.’

  ‘That could tie it up,’ Ovenstone said.

  ‘If he hasn’t used an intermediary. When you start questioning the locals,’ Keith said, ‘you’ll be looking for anyone who saw Michael Winterton or his car near Duncan Laurie’s store on the Thursday night. Ask about Friday morning as well.’

  ‘Why Friday morning?’

  ‘After I found Laurie’s body,’ Keith said, ‘I noticed the smell of his hair-oil on the fingers of my right hand. I had been careful not to touch the body at all. But I had shaken hands with Michael Winterton a few minutes earlier. I think that he’d realised that the lack of tentative cuts would make suicide less likely. So he went back in the morning – the murderer, true to form, revisiting the scene of the crime – and, seeing that the body hadn’t been found, he went in and added them.’