Mad Dogs and Scotsmen (Three Oaks Book 7)

by Gerald Hammond

  The door bell chimed. I stopped the tape, killing the sight and sound of a programme which I would have judged to be aimed at the mentally retarded. But there was nothing wrong with Beth’s intelligence. I could only put down the divergence of taste to a difference in hormones.

  Hannah hopped up quickly. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. She was soon back, gently closing the door behind her. ‘There’s a lady,’ she said. ‘Wants to see you.’

  She was looking at me.

  ‘A client?’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t say what about, but she’s not a doggy sort of person, not by a mile.’

  ‘What sort of person, then?’

  Hannah’s detailed observation of the car thief had not been a fluke. ‘A business person,’ she said. ‘Business dress, anyway. Early thirties, I think. The Amazon type. No rings. Sometimes wears glasses. Blonde hair, dressed very severely. But her car looks quite sporty so I think she must have come straight from work. Her nail varnish is opalescent scarlet. She can probably tart herself up to the nines in minutes when she gets away from the office.’

  I felt myself blanch. ‘She’s not from Ag and Fish, is she?’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘Some other ministry, perhaps, but not that. Too urban altogether. I doubt if she’d know a welly boot if it trod on her.’

  ‘Or the fuzz?’

  ‘Doesn’t have the strut. Business-like but without the arrogance.’

  I considered. I was tired and in no mood to be imposed on. But officialdom can have some atypical representatives and client money can take surprising forms. ‘I’d better see her,’ I said. ‘I can take her into the office if you two want to watch telly.’

  ‘I’m going out for a walk,’ Hannah said.

  ‘And I can watch the end of the film any time,’ said Beth. ‘Some time that you’re not at home to hate it. If I bother. It’s very predictable. I could script the rest of it myself and not be more than a few dozen words adrift. Bring her in here, please, Hannah. And be careful while you’re walking,’ she added in the direction of Hannah’s departing back. ‘Take Jason with you. He won’t let anyone bother you.’ Jason was Beth’s personal Labrador. ‘And he needs the walk,’ she added to me.

  ‘You’re afraid to let me be alone with a blonde Amazon?’ I asked.

  Beth chuckled at me. ‘When I let you go off with blonde Amazons,’ she said, ‘you’ll know that I think you’ve got back enough of your strength to be able to fight them off.’

  I thought it over and decided that I had been paid a compliment.

  Hannah returned. ‘Miss Johnson,’ she said formally. The door closed between them.

  Miss Johnson was much as Hannah had described her. Her hair, dress and make-up were all skilfully subdued. Under it all, her bone structure was good and sturdy so that her figure just missed being slender and was athletic instead. I could imagine her being the terror of the hockey field. Her features, her jaw in particular, suggested a certain strength of character but she was visibly too tense, almost nervous, to have been from either the police or the Scottish Office. I got up and led her to a seat on the settee. I saw Beth noticing the small courtesy and drawing her own conclusion, but in fact I found Miss Johnson not so much sexless as unsexy. I could not have pointed to anything wrong with her and yet I could no more have imagined myself making love to her than to one of my aunts.

  She arranged herself neatly with her handbag in her lap. We waited patiently to be told what she wanted.

  ‘I’ve had a terrible job finding you,’ she said at last, ‘and now that I’m here I’m not sure how to approach you.’ Her accent came from somewhere in Greater Glasgow, but it was from one of the better neighbourhoods and not obtrusive. ‘Would you mind telling me . . . will you be seeing Noel Cochrane again soon?’

  Her guess would have been at least as good as mine and I was on the point of saying so when Beth forestalled me. ‘Do you have a message for him?’ she asked gently.

  When Beth answers a question with a question I know that she’s up to something. I sat back to await developments. This was more interesting than Girl Loses Boy.

  Miss Johnson, now that this much was out, seemed to relax. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do. Can you put me in touch with him?’

  Beth looked doubtful. ‘He’s never very easy to contact,’ she said, which had certainly been true in the past and was even truer now. ‘He phones sometimes but we never know when we’re going to see him. We could certainly pass a message when he does get in touch. But what brings you to us?’

  ‘Everybody knows that Noel keeps a dog somewhere around here, Mrs Cunningham, a dog that he certainly wouldn’t abandon. It was just a matter of finding out which kennels. When I saw in the evening paper that your car had been stolen and a dog was missing, I put two and two together.’

  ‘Very clever,’ Beth said approvingly. ‘Miss Johnson – or can we use your first name?’

  The innocent question seemed to disturb Miss Johnson for a fraction of a second. ‘Catherine,’ she said. ‘They call me Kate.’

  ‘Thank you, Kate. Call me Beth, please. Would you like a drink?’

  ‘No. No, thank you.’

  ‘What’s the message?’ I asked. A faint cloud of annoyance drifted across Beth’s face and was gone. For some reason of her own she was pumping Miss Johnson for information which would probably have come of its own accord, I thought, except that Miss Johnson was showing clear signs of preferring to control the twists and turns of discussion.

  ‘I’d rather speak to him myself.’

  I decided to play along with Beth. ‘I don’t see why,’ I said.

  Miss Johnson’s previously smooth brow creased in thought. ‘It sounds so secretive and mysterious. But it really is confidential. Tell him,’ she said slowly, ‘that he must do as he thinks best, but Jake and Simeon have changed sides and Nigel H is going to call on some Glasgow heavies. Noel must get hold of Donald and tell him to give it up and go home at once, and to stay away from the Bothy at all costs. Will you tell him all that? And keep it to yourselves? Please? It really is very important.’ She looked at me. I thought that for two pins she would have batted her eyelashes.

  Hiding inside her, I was sure, was too powerful and self-assured a lady for her to be convincing in her role of helpless little girl in need of help from the big strong man. Again, I nearly put my foot in it. I was about to say that at least one Donald was already hospitalized, but I caught a glare from Beth, limited to Miss Johnson’s blind side, that would have stopped a charging bull.

  ‘I can see that it’s important,’ Beth said. ‘Would you say it again, just to be sure that we’ve got it right?’

  Miss Johnson began to repeat the message, but refused to be drawn by such questions as ‘Jake who?’. ‘Please pass the message,’ she said again. ‘Please. Donald doesn’t mean any harm and he doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into.’

  ‘You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?’ Beth said.

  Miss Johnson looked coy although under the clever make-up I could see no sign of a blush. ‘I don’t want to be rude while I’m asking a favour of you,’ she said, ‘but that really is no concern of anybody but Donald and myself. We have to be discreet,’ she added, so that there should be no doubt about it.

  ‘He isn’t married, is he?’ Beth asked in a tone of great concern.

  Miss Johnson smiled at last. Her smile sat lopsidedly on her symmetrical mouth. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s not married. And now, I must go. Remember the message, please, please, please.’

  I got up to see her out. To my surprise, Beth came with us. With the minimum of farewells Miss Johnson slid into a two-year-old Mazda and drove very carefully away.

  We turned back into the house. Beth paused in the hall to note down the number of Miss Johnson’s car. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that I’ll give Henry a ring. He may have an idea.’

  ‘I suppose he might. Shouldn’t we tell the police?’

  ‘Tell them what?’

>   ‘They could trace her car number.’

  ‘They could. But why should they? There are other ways.’

  She had stopped making sense. I yawned. ‘We ought to have told the poor woman that her boyfriend’s in hospital.’

  ‘If he is her boyfriend. But then she wouldn’t have given us the message,’ Beth pointed out.

  ‘For all the good it did us.’

  ‘Exactly. Anyway, she’ll find out in the morning.’

  I wanted to ask how she could be so sure, but the usual night-time waves of tiredness were coming over me. I went through to the kitchen to make myself a milky drink.

  While I waited for the pan to boil, the phone rang. I delayed in the hope that Beth would take it in the sitting room, but evidently she was again deep in her weepie. I picked it up.

  ‘Are you holding it for him?’

  ‘Am I holding what for who and why do you want to know?’ I asked irritably.

  ‘That’s all I wanted.’ The connection was broken.

  I thought that the man had had an accent from somewhere in the Borders, but the conversation had been so brief that I could not be sure.

  As I took myself to bed, the taped film must have finished. I could hear Beth talking to Henry on the phone. My mind was too sluggish to take in the words. I flopped into bed. Miss Johnson and the voice on the phone were blurring together in my mind. I zonked out in mid-thought.

  Chapter Five

  My first concern was still for Jove. He was a biddable dog with a soft mouth and a good nose, well on the way to being a stalwart worker. But outside his job in life he had a puppyish, bumbling charm which I found irresistible. Whatever the law might say, I was determined not to stand by and see him shot by some nervous volunteer. At the same time, his continued absence posed a real threat to our livelihood and, if by some terrible mischance he should really be carrying rabies, to human life.

  When I managed to relegate Jove to the back of my mind, I found that I was also in a fever of impatience to get my hands on the new car. But Henry had taken his own car home and for once he failed to turn up with Isobel in the morning. ‘I’ve no idea where he’s gone,’ Isobel said peevishly. ‘He got up early, which is unusual for him, and I could hear him making phone-calls. Then he made his own breakfast, which is just as unusual and I hope he hasn’t poisoned himself. And then, as I finished getting dressed, he just drove off with a smug expression on his face.’

  As it happened, Hugh Morris was equally impatient to obtain delivery of Beech. He was on the phone by ten. I explained that whenever practicable I always insisted on introducing the client and the dog to each other properly and in as near to working conditions as possible. Twenty minutes later Hugh and the new car were on the doorstep.

  Together, we spent a happy hour or more at the Moss. None of the quarry on offer was in season, but we managed to simulate some real work using a shotgun and the dummy launcher. Man and dog soon developed an understanding. I could tell that a close relationship would follow in its own time.

  Henry was waiting beside his car as we walked up the drive and he signalled that he wanted to confer. I let Daffy drive Hugh and Beech home. It was agony, letting Daffy have first drive of the new car although I knew that she was a far more careful driver than her bizarre appearance would have suggested. The car would return undamaged.

  We went into the kitchen. This was where almost every scrap of indoor life was lived during working hours. It was warm and spacious and discussion could involve anyone who was cooking a meal, preparing dog-food or attending to Sam at the time. Also, there was a percolator with coffee always available. We found Beth, as usual trying to cope with Sam’s voracious appetite, Isobel dealing with accounts at the scrubbed table, and Hannah preparing puppy mash. Henry and I helped ourselves to coffee and took the two basket chairs.

  ‘You’ve been busy,’ I said to Henry. ‘According to Isobel you jumped into your car and drove off furiously in all directions.’

  ‘I didn’t say furiously,’ Isobel murmured without looking up from her papers. ‘Those days are long gone.’

  ‘Irritably, perhaps. And in only one direction,’ Henry said. ‘So I have been busy. You don’t have to make it sound like some ghastly aberration. And now, to save you asking, I’m about to tell you what I’ve been busy at. Beth,’ Henry said, leap-frogging clear over his whole story and beginning at the end, ‘you turned out to be absolutely right.’ He smiled broadly, so that the lines that time had etched in his face dug more deeply.

  ‘That’s good,’ Beth murmured.

  ‘What was she right about?’ I asked patiently.

  Henry turned his attention to me. ‘Ah. I remember now. When Beth phoned me last night, she said that you’d gone off to bed. She told me about your visitor and passed on several guesses, frankly admitting that they were no more than just that. Guesses. She suggested that your Miss Johnson was not in fact a Miss Johnson at all but was trying to hide her identity. On the other hand, when asked for a Christian name the lady seemed to be caught flat-footed. She produced Kate or Catherine reluctantly and after a hesitation too brief for selecting another alias. Beth also suggested that she probably worked for Cook and Simpson.’

  ‘What on earth gave you that idea?’ I asked Beth.

  Beth tried to shrug but was hampered by a double armful of guzzling toddler. ‘She said that “everybody” knew that Noel Cochrane kept a dog around here. When someone says “everybody” in that sort of context they don’t really mean everybody in the world, they mean everybody in some closed circle. She could have meant the local dog club or some such body, but the workplace seemed more likely.’

  ‘Spot on,’ Henry said. ‘Beth also suggested that she was probably a secretary, and to somebody senior.’

  I nearly asked how Beth could possibly know such a thing but then realized that, compared to Beth’s, my eye for a woman’s dress hardly began to start to commence.

  ‘That was an office dress she had on,’ Beth explained. ‘She was smart but severe, just what a senior executive would want. She would only have to change her dress and let her hair down and she’d be ready to go out on the town. She was a long way above the typing pool.’

  ‘She could have been an executive,’ I said.

  Beth shook her head at me, pityingly. ‘No, if she herself had been at management level she would have splashed out rather more and in a less disciplined way; and if she’d been a biochemist or something like that she wouldn’t have bothered to be so smart for work, where she’d have worn a lab coat. From her clothes and her car, she wasn’t short of a bob or two, which again suggested seniority – or a rich father or boyfriend.’

  ‘Or maybe all three,’ said Hannah. ‘Lucky bitch!’ She sniffed and went back to her feeding bowls.

  ‘Be that as it may,’ Henry said firmly, ‘it was easy to follow her up. I phoned a friendly policeman who checked out the car’s number for me. It’s registered to a Miss Catherine Otterburn at an address not too far from Cook and Simpson’s Glasgow plant.

  ‘So I phoned the plant and asked for Kate Otterburn. A voice which didn’t realize just how much it was telling me said that she wasn’t available this morning but that I could be connected with the temp who was looking after the managing director for the moment.’

  ‘Being interviewed by the fuzz,’ Beth said wisely. ‘I phoned for Inspector Tirrell after I spoke to you last night, Henry. He’d gone home but I left a message with his sergeant suggesting more or less what I’d suggested to you.’

  ‘You may well be right,’ Henry said. ‘Or she may be unavailable for any one of a number of other reasons.’ (As Henry spoke, I realized that he was avoiding saying aloud that Miss Otterburn might by now be another corpse in the countryside.) ‘Rather than stir anything up, I said that I’d call back later. But before I rang off, I asked for the MD’s name and was told that it was Heatherington. Nigel Heatherington.’

  ‘Nigel H,’ said Beth, ‘who was hiring some heavies.’ She had managed
to satisfy Sam’s appetite for the moment and was nursing his somnolent body.

  ‘So,’ Henry said, ‘I phoned an old friend who had at one time been a director of Cook and Simpson. He called me back a little later. He had been in touch with Miss Otterburn’s predecessor, one Madge Laidlaw now living in retirement near Perth, and she was willing to grant me an interview. So that’s the direction in which I drove sanely off.

  ‘The lady was valuable, not only for her intimate knowledge of the company but because she had a considerable chip on her shoulder. Being no chicken, she had been pushed into retirement, she assured me, so that somebody younger, prettier and probably more liberal with her favours could be appointed in her place. Whether that was the truth or just a slighted lady’s imagination working overtime I know not. But she gave me the lowdown on the company structure and personnel.

  ‘The company specializes in veterinary products and carries out a great deal of research, but I already knew that. They confine their research and manufacturing activities to Scotland because we are less troubled by the activities of the animal rights activists up here; and they divide their work between Glasgow and Aberdeen to make industrial espionage more difficult. Broadly, basic materials are produced in a plant between Aberdeen and Fraserburgh. Then, using code numbers only, they’re blended, finished and packaged in Glasgow, where most of the management and some of the research is based. They sell worldwide.

  ‘As I’d already discovered for myself, Nigel H is Nigel Heatherington, the managing director and, according to his former secretary, a forceful, ruthless man – although few men in their own lifetimes could live down to her image of him. He’s a member of the original Simpson family and himself a major shareholder, so he carries a good deal of clout. Jake must be Jake Spurway, who is nominally one of the security men but is widely rumoured to be Mr Heatherington’s personal fixer and general tough. According to Miss Laidlaw, Spurway and his assistant, by name Spragg, are or were occasional drinking companions of Noel Cochrane – for whatever that’s worth.