Cousin Once Removed

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘He attended to several matters of business for me,’ Lady Batemore said.

  ‘I see. A similar car was parked, or rather hidden, near the old quarry just before I was shot at Foleyhill.’

  ‘Are you accusing my son of something?’ Lady Batemore demanded. The chill in her beautiful voice was even more bitter. ‘If so, what and why?’

  ‘Your son,’ Keith said, ‘has the reputation of being a wild and arrogant young man, but he never lays his own neck on the block. He’s a hunt saboteur, but I’ve never heard of him getting into punch-ups with the hunt followers. He’s antinuclear, but it’s his cousin and not himself that gets had up for bopping a policeman with a placard. He never has tuppence in his pocket, but he charges everything to his stepfather. The picture that came over to me is of a credulous young man, not one of the world’s strivers but one who waits for everything to fall into his lap and who prefers to avoid taking direct action but to persuade others to act for him.’

  ‘An unkind description, questionable as to fact and to relevance,’ Sir Henry said.

  ‘It’s relevant background, because it’s the picture of a lad who might very well be so concerned about money that he might offer Creepy Jesus a share of the profit if he could help him get his hands on the letter and on Chondo’s gun.’

  ‘He’d have the same difficulty,’ Sir Henry suggested, ‘in selling a stolen antique complete with its provenance.’

  His lady rounded on him angrily. ‘Henry,’ she said, ‘you seem to be endorsing this . . . this farrago of nonsense, by taking it seriously!’

  ‘Seriously enough to point out objections as they occur to me. My dear, please believe that this is best left to me.’

  ‘The answer,’ Keith said, ‘may be that he thought that a private sale to an American collector wouldn’t come to my ears. He’d probably have been wrong, if he thought so. On the other hand, I’m very much afraid that my wife may have had the right idea from the start.’

  ‘Me?’ Molly said. She was not usually given credit for original thinking.

  ‘Molly suggested that somebody tried to kill me with the crossbow because, if one of the guns we’d bought had been stolen or faked, I’d be the person most likely to spot it. Similarly, with me out of the way Molly wouldn’t have known the special significance of any of the guns. And I should point out that, when Creepy Jesus visited us the other night, he was carrying a sawn-off shotgun.’

  There was a moment of choking silence. Then Lady Batemore started to protest, but her husband touched her arm and shook his head at her. ‘This man Creepy Jesus,’ Sir Henry said, ‘seems sufficiently endowed with original sin to have acted on his own initiative. If my stepson was in pursuit of one or more guns for financial reasons – which I do not for a moment accept – you have still shown inadequate motive for him to go as far as incitement to murder.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Keith said. ‘You must realize that I’m still thinking aloud. And you only gave me the finishing touch just now when you said that you had explained to your family that, as far as the pistols were concerned, you were bomb-proof, only last week. This is how I see it. It was only during my visit to Register House that I realized that Lady Batemore must have been widowed and have remarried while her son was still an infant. He wouldn’t have known that the Batemore fortune was exhausted and that the coffers had only been replenished from his mother’s and his real father’s families. He speaks of you as his father and no doubt thinks of you that way. Male pride being what it is, I doubt if you’ve ever gone out of your way to enlighten him. He had been living in the pockets of the Duguidsons while Valerie was plotting the overthrow of the house of Batemore, formerly Rath. Valerie would hardly have told him about it, but Creepy Jesus would. And your credulous stepson would have seen the family fortune going up the spout.

  ‘His try at getting the pistols out of my car failed. Hugh Duguidson was in my shop while I was telling my partner that the guns were coming by water. The Duguidsons decided to get me into a compromising situation and to blackmail me. Hugh Duguidson took Creepy Jesus up to Foleyhill to kill the deer, and, I suppose, took him home again. Brian brought Creepy back to Foleyhill in your Jag., and waited round the back of the quarry while Creepy went up and hid until I arrived and he could nail me, leaving the Duguidsons stuck with the problem. The Duguidsons weren’t quite so ruthless. They tied up my wound and phoned for an ambulance or I wouldn’t be here now.

  ‘By the time the guns landed in this country, you’d pointed out that Valerie was living in a fantasy world and that the pistols wouldn’t mean a damn thing in court. Maybe that was a relief to him. But he’d had a taste of violence and of the prospect of money. He was getting up a head of steam. Anything went, as long as there was no apparent risk to himself. This was his chance to get off the short financial rein. If he could bring together Chondo’s gun, the letter and if possible a corroboration from Monsieur Detournville, he could be independent. With the help of Creepy Jesus, of course.’

  Lady Batemore was struggling to get out of her chair, despite Sir Henry’s grip on her arm. Her voice was no longer seductive, but high and venomous. ‘Can you prove any of this?’ she demanded. ‘If you can’t, and if you repeat a word of it outside this room, you can expect an action for slander.’

  ‘I’m not trying to prove anything at this stage,’ Keith said, ‘and I don’t have to. The police have the facilities, and its their job to protect me. If this is an unsolved mystery and there seems to be any likelihood of my still being in danger, then the sensible thing for me to do is to take what I now know and suspect to the police. You know young Brian’s character and his movements better than I do. Judge for yourselves. If I start the police on a further investigation, what do you think they’ll find out?’

  ‘That’s what you get, Adèle, for not taking my advice,’ Sir Henry said coldly. ‘I suggest that you go and wait in our very comfortable car while I finish my discussion with Mr Calder in private. Leave the letter with me.’

  Lady Batemore got up and stumped out of the room.

  ‘I think I hear Deborah crying,’ Molly said quickly. She hurried into the calm security of her kitchen.

  *

  By the time Keith had, at long last, seen Sir Henry to his car and waved the Batemores on their way, he was ravenous. Molly had laid the table in the kitchen. She put down a late and hasty lunch in front of him and sat down opposite with her own. ‘How did you make out with Sir Henry?’ she asked.

  ‘Not too bad,’ Keith said with his mouth full. ‘God, I’m hoarse. I haven’t spoken so much since we got married.’

  ‘Don’t be sarcastic. Just tell me all about it.’

  Keith decided that he would not want Molly to burst with curiosity, not in the newly-decorated kitchen. He took pity. ‘Sir Henry was after the pistols. Although the Rath story is well enough known, he didn’t want the full and dirty details coming to light with an election not too far off. He also wasn’t averse to capitalizing on the value of the Louisiana letter. I told him that no way was he getting the pistols at his sort of price, but that, with my part of the whole package, I’d throw in an undertaking to hold on to them and not publish anything while he’s still active in politics. By which time, with the whole story told, they should be worth a mint.’

  ‘That could be years,’ Molly said. ‘Wallace won’t be pleased. You’re just adding those pistols to your private collection.’

  ‘I don’t have a private collection. And politicians’ careers don’t last forever. He’ll be out on his ear soon enough. Anyway, we struck a deal in the end. He gives me his two guns and the letter and I keep the pistols a secret and cut him in for a share of the net profit on Chondo’s gun – after a deduction for part of all our travelling expenses and so on. And he’d better not hold his breath waiting for his share, because I mean to jack up its value by writing articles about it over the next year or two.’ Keith smiled to himself. He was secretly amused at the thought that Sir Henry’s share would be diminish
ed by a proportion of the value of the drink which he had brought back from France.

  ‘You’re a swick,’ Molly said, without even divining Keith’s secret thought. ‘So now we know the whole story?’

  ‘Do we hell! We have a tacit agreement not to probe any further.’

  They cleared their plates in silence. Molly passed the bowl of fruit. ‘But it can’t all be over,’ she said suddenly. ‘Not just like that. I mean, people have conspired to try to rob and blackmail. And if it was Creepy Jesus who tried to kill you, somebody else put him up to it.’

  ‘What really bugs me,’ Keith said, ‘is that I handled Creepy Jesus all wrong. I’d have got much more out of him if I’d realized that he was actually enjoying being roughed up in the presence of a moderately attractive old lady in her flannel nightie.’

  Molly ignored the insults. ‘What you’ve really been saying is that, while Sir Henry thought he was driving a hard bargain and you knew that you were robbing him blind, you were both happy enough that the police don’t know anything and there’s no legal proof of any of it and you don’t want the boat rocked.’

  Keith wished that Molly would develop enough savoir faire to avoid saying uncomfortable truths out aloud. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well, what about Lady Batemore’s son? He seems to have been the evil genius, the behind-the-scenes baddie.’

  ‘The rat in the arras,’ Keith agreed. ‘Sir Henry promised me that the lad wouldn’t come back to Britain, and I said that if I ever got wind of young Batemore being in this country, under that or any other name, I’d produce a witness who’d seen him going up Foleyhill with a crossbow.’

  ‘Keith, you didn’t!’ Molly did not sound displeased. ‘What was Sir Henry’s reaction to that?’

  ‘He seemed to think it perfectly reasonable. Which, from his point of view, it probably was. You’ve got to remember that, with an election to come at any time, a murderous great-great-grand-father might be mildly embarrassing but a stepson on a serious charge would be a disaster. And there’s another side to it. I gathered that he rather expected her ladyship to decide that, if her baby boy was to be exiled, it was her duty to join him. Which seems tough on young Batemore for all his misdeeds, but Sir Henry seemed to think of it as a good idea. I think he sees himself taking up residence in a Westminster flat, pending Number Ten falling vacant, and being kept warm by a dolly-bird secretary or a Turkish wrestler, whichever happens to turn him on. I wouldn’t know anything about that.’

  Molly was not interested in Sir Henry’s preferences. ‘Whatever anybody else thinks, Sir Henry was ready enough to believe that his stepson was behind you getting shot,’ she said. Then another thought hit her. She tried not to let her excitement show. ‘You think he’ll be giving up Wallengreen Castle?’

  ‘Probably,’ Keith said. ‘But if you’re beginning to imagine us taking it over, put the idea out of your tiny mind. Good God, I’ve not finished paying for this place yet.’

  ‘Of course.’ Molly filed the subject away for future reference. She had absolute faith in Keith’s ability to achieve any goal which she could motivate him to set for himself. ‘What about Creepy Jesus?’ she asked.

  ‘Abroad, by now, and out of reach. I’m sure of it. If the police had got him, we’d have heard.’

  ‘Everybody happy,’ Molly said, ‘except the Duguidsons. Do they get anything out of it?’

  ‘They get rid of Creepy Jesus, who can’t have been much fun to have around. I can’t think of anything else. Except that I think we might do them a favour.’

  ‘Favour?’ Molly tried not to sound suspicious.

  ‘If your brother and I went up to Foleyhill for a couple of days and nights, with sleeping bags, a pair of silenced two-twos, infra-red lamps and some Fenn traps, we could transform that place. These idealists mean well, but they’ve been brain-washed by Walt Disney. They think that you’ve only got to give the cuddly bunnies somewhere safe where nasty people can’t get at them and they’ll live happily ever after. What usually happens, just as it has at Foleyhill, is that the place gets taken over by vermin, especially by those that prey on other creatures’ eggs or young. When they’ve cleaned out their own patch they go raiding over the boundary. We could improve the place out of recognition and they’d never know they’d been visited.’

  Molly smiled sweetly. ‘Get down off your soapbox,’ she said. ‘What’s in it for you?’

  ‘Just a public-spirited concern for the wildlife of the district, and a selfless desire to help the Duguidsons and make life sweeter for the farmers and shoot-owners round about.’

  ‘All right,’ Molly said, sighing. ‘So when do I expect you to disappear, leaving me to placate Wallace, help out in the shop and be ready with an alibi?’

  ‘Oh, not for ages. I’ll want to take expert advice before I rock the ecological boat. We’d be safer from interruption when the December exams are on. And,’ Keith added, ‘by then the foxes should have their winter pelts.’

  ‘Ha!’ Molly pointed her finger into his face. ‘You old bastard! It’s just that you miss the old poaching days. Admit it!’

  Keith bit the tip of her finger, gently, and left the room without replying.

  He was back in five minutes. ‘Talking of poaching, have you seen my desk-lighter?’

  ‘The one you made out of the powder-testing flintlock thing?’

  ‘The eprouvette. Yes. It’s vanished.’

  ‘Oh, Keith. Don’t say that the Duguidsons have pinched it!’

  ‘That was my first thought,’ Keith said. ‘But, after they’d been and gone, don’t I remember Sir Henry using it?’

  Molly was horrified. ‘He just wouldn’t do a thing like that,’ she declared. ‘He’s a politician.’

  ‘I know you believe in Santa Claus,’ Keith said. ‘But is there no end to your simple faith? An honest man’s chance of getting elected to Parliament is about the same as of winning the pools. This is his way of getting back at me. I made out that there was another way I could authenticate Chondo’s gun. He knew I was bluffing, but he couldn’t call it. Then, when I promised that I’d hang on to the pistols during his political career, I added something about not doing anything to shorten that career. He smiled at that, and I thought it was because there wouldn’t have been anything I could do to shorten it anyway. But now I think that he was smiling because he knew that, after saying what I’d just said, I couldn’t run straight to the police and accuse him of theft.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s awful,’ Molly said. ‘That thing’s a valuable antique.’

  ‘In point of fact, it isn’t. It’s something I made during my apprenticeship, out of odds and ends.’

  ‘Oh. So what are you going to do?’

  ‘For the moment, just what he knew I’d do. Nowt.’

  *

  Wallace, when Keith saw him that evening, seemed uncharacteristically uninterested in the details of Keith’s deal with Sir Henry. Other things were pressing on his mind.

  ‘That goddam bloody awful McSwale & Angus gun,’ he said. ‘It’s been a lesson to me. Never, ever again will I try and do your job for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t all that bad,’ Keith said, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘You described it as knicker-pink, or some such words. But I saw what was left of it when the cop picked it up off the floor and it was a much nicer pink. About the colour of an angel’s tit.’ He spluttered with laughter.

  Wallace ground his teeth and made faces. ‘You think it’s bloody funny? Well, laugh this off. The finish was much admired at Lord Whatsit’s shoot. A retired admiral who was there has brought in a McSwale & Angus of his own. He wants it refinished in the authentic Jock McSwale colour.’

  Keith stopped laughing. ‘You didn’t really use that story, did you? You’ll get the firm a bad name if you take my little jokes seriously.’

  ‘I didn’t take it seriously. I just couldn’t think of another excuse. And Mr Threadgold’s been on the phone. When he gets his gun back he wants it rebarreled and fin
ished in the same colour.’

  ‘Well, you did it once and you can do it again.’

  ‘The trouble is that I can’t. I’ve been trying it out on bits of off-cut, and I c-come up with a different bloody colour every time.’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to tell them that our expert, the only man who knew how to do it, just died, and the secret with him.’

  ‘Ain’t it the truth?’ Wallace said unhappily.

  Chapter Eleven

  Time, in its usual way, rolled past almost unheeded.

  Keith forgot the Duguidsons and the Batemores except when isolated incidents reminded him.

  The first of his articles about Chondo and the miquelet brought in several substantial offers for the gun. With Wallace’s reluctant agreement, Keith refused them all. There was a lot more mileage to be gained.

  Creepy Jesus seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth, regretted by none.

  Keith was making a study of percussion guns prior to the invention of the centre-fire cartridge. He repaired and cleaned up Sir Henry’s Maynard tape-primer gun, and added it to his catalogue at a price at least double what he expected any collector to pay, thus demarking it as part of the personal collection which he always denied having. A sudden fluctuation in rates of exchange caught him out. A Belgian millionaire collector bought it at the catalogue figure. Keith was furious. Wallace did a little dance down the middle of the shop, accompanying himself with a creditable imitation of Woody Woodpecker, to the great alarm of an old lady who was buying waders for her grandson at the time.

  Keith was restored to general health at a speed which confounded the doctors. The tenderness of his shoulder was another matter. By December it was abating and he managed his excursion to Foley-hill with his brother-in-law. The recoil of anything heavier than a small-bore rifle bothered him for several more months. He contented himself with some outings to decoy pigeon within the range of a four-ten shotgun, and then graduated to rabbiting with his heavy magnum twelve-bore allied with lightly-loaded Impax cartridges – an unhandy combination but comfortably devoid of kick.