By the return of the shooting season, however, he was back on form, all disability forgotten.
And then, rather more than a year after the visits of the Duguidsons and the Batemores to Briesland House, a General Election was called. Government changed hands.
*
‘Look at this, will you?’ Keith asked. He and Wallace were relaxing in the study at Briesland House over a large dram apiece, following a protracted business discussion which had ranged also over women, football and, of course, shooting.
Wallace accepted the magazine and followed Keith’s finger. The glossy photograph showed Home Secretary Sir Henry Batemore, aglow with fresh pride, seated in his new office. A few personal effects, carefully chosen and artfully arranged, decorated the desk before him. Prominent among these was Keith’s éprouvette. It had the appearance of a truncated flintlock pocket pistol, the barrel being replaced by a powder container, spring and small quadrant.
‘He’s got a b-bloody nerve,’ Wallace said.
‘He has. And it raises some interesting implications. I told you that I promised I wouldn’t do anything to shorten his political career?’
‘Several times, in t-tones ranging from fury to disgust.’
‘When I made that gadget, I had a hell of a job hiding the gas container where it wouldn’t show. But it’s a good, big container and won’t need filling very often, so it didn’t seem to matter that it was held by lots of tiny grub-screws. Well, that old bugger only seems to smoke the occasional cigar, so the gas might have lasted for years. But on his desk in the Home Office it’s going to get used. And when the gas runs out he’s going to have to take it to somebody, probably a jeweller, to refill it for him.’
‘And so?’
‘So here’s where it gets interesting. Whoever takes it apart is going to find something like this.’ Keith took the ink-wells off his desk-set and handed the base to Wallace. Neatly impressed across the underside were the words Stolen from Keith Calder, and the phone number of Briesland House.
‘It’s my form of therapy,’ Keith said. ‘Any time I feel nervous or depressed, or when I stop for thought, I look around for something personal which I’m not going to want to sell again, and stamp my identity on it. There’s probably some deep, psychological reason which I’d rather not know about.’
‘The jeweller will only phone Sir Henry.’
‘I’m not so sure. Jewellers and gunsmiths have to keep their noses very clean when it comes to stolen goods. If I found a message like that inside a gun, say, I’d phone the number even if the gun had been brought to me by Her Majesty in person.’
‘All right,’ Wallace said. ‘Suppose the phone rings and a voice asks you whether you’ve lost a desk-lighter made out of a reproduction éprouvette. What then?’
‘If I’m asked,’ Keith said slowly, ‘I think I’m morally bound to pass it off.’
‘And if Molly takes the call.’
‘That,’ Keith said, ‘is the crunch question. She didn’t give any promises and I haven’t told her not to implicate Sir Henry. I reported the loss to the police at the time, letting them jump to the conclusion that Creepy Jesus had pinched it and that I’d only just discovered the loss. Molly’s still furious over it. If she was asked whether Sir Henry was here between Creepy Jesus’s visit and our discovery of the theft, she’d swear to it like a shot.’
‘You’d be breaking your word if you gave evidence. As if you cared.’
‘Molly didn’t give her word. And it’s her lighter. I made her a present of it, never mind when.’
Wallace thought over this sophistry. ‘He’d be forced to resign. They couldn’t have the Home Secretary prosecuted for theft. And he couldn’t be allowed to shelter behind his status as head of the police.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’ve fairly got it in for him.’
‘That photograph didn’t include my lighter by accident,’ Keith said. ‘He’s taunting me. Besides, I want to get on with publishing my material on the Rath pistols.’
Chapter Twelve
A fortnight or so later, Keith announced that the moon and tides were approaching perfection and that the weather forecast indicated ideal conditions for a morning’s recreation – stormy, with a probability of low cloud.
Molly went to look out his wildfowling gear, pausing only to remark that he just had to be out of his mind.
Keith could understand her comment, even if he could not agree with it, as he breakfasted next morning in the very small hours and set off on a long drive to the coast. The car lurched and shuddered in a blustery wind and the wipers had to cope with occasional sleet from clouds that were hiding the hill tops. Keith gripped the wheel and nodded to himself. The geese would not be in a hurry to climb in such weather.
He came at last to a broad estuary which had been one of his hunting grounds for twenty years and turned off on to a farm-track which led him, jolting, to a favourite parking place a hundred yards from the high water mark. An old van already occupied half the space, its bonnet still warm. So there was a chance of company out on the flats.
In the lee of the car, Keith dressed in his warmest clothes and put oilskins on top. He checked his gear carefully and set off. Even Brutus, his labrador, seemed daunted by the weather and stayed close as they slithered their way out over the mud. It was almost pitch dark, the last light of a setting moon coming faintly beneath the scudding clouds. Keith pressed on, guided by the wind behind his shoulder and urged on by the music of geese ahead, a thousand or more by the sound. He angled across to intercept their likeliest line of flight.
A dark shape came out of the darker night, half a tree and a tangle of branches all cast up by the tide. It was not perfect camouflage, but it would do. Keith and Brutus settled into concealment. Keith felt a breathless surge of excitement, a taste of the old magic. Wallace and he shot as often as the business would allow, perhaps oftener. But there was no quarry to match a goose on the foreshore.
Dawn, when it came, arrived without warning. At one moment Keith could only make out the difference between earth and sky, and then, it seemed only seconds later, he could see the gulleys and rivulets in the mud, the scatterings of weed and driftwood and the dark specks of a multitude of geese.
The note of the chorus changed as the birds became restless. The making tide was beginning to disturb them. Keith slipped his safety-catch off and breathed deeply.
A trio of mallard, always the first in flight, came over from behind. He was almost caught napping but he snapped off a shot and a duck turned over and dropped. At a nod from Keith, Brutus was away, bolting over the mud with his tail thrashing, to return in a few seconds, filthy but ecstatic.
The shot had disturbed the geese. The chattering changed its tone again and group after group took to the air. Keith felt his usual sense of wonder and frustration as the majority defied his best guess, either by turning more quickly and passing to his right, or by rising for longer in the teeth of the wind and coming over him high out of shot. Then at last one small skein of yelping pinkfeet came straight for him, rising steadily but still in range. At the last moment Keith stood up and took out the leader. The skein broke, swung and re-formed on a new leader. With his other barrel Keith took a second bird. He restrained Brutus. Both his geese were stone dead and there might be more to come.
The sound of a third shot came to him, attenuated by the wind, but not from far away. A third goose fell from the same skein. He could see nobody. The goose hit the ground but it was still struggling. He was on the point of sending Brutus to bring it for the coup-de-grâce when a black and white collie erupted from an invisible depression in the mud and raced forward to collect the wounded bird.
A few minutes later it was all over. The sands were bare and the geese had gone to their feeding grounds on the farmland. Keith might have stayed on for the chance of a late teal, but time was precious and Christmas dinner was already in the bag. Also, the tide was making fast. He sent Brutus after his geese and st
ood up.
Full daylight had arrived, unnoticed.
Away to his left another figure rose out of the mud.
Keith accepted one goose from Brutus and set off. The use of a collie for retrieving caught his curiosity. There are no rules, only tradition and breeding, to determine which dog does which job, and indeed Keith knew of the pair of Victorian gamekeepers who had trained a pig to retrieve. All the same, he fancied a chat about it. There was always more to learn. He angled across to intercept the other fowler.
The sleet, which had let up, was falling again. When their paths met, Keith rolled up his balaclava and the stranger unwound a heavy scarf, each showing his face. The other man was in his early twenties, short but sturdily built, with a round face and freckles which had not shown up in the photographs. Keith recognized him immediately but kept his face blank.
The young man took one look and stopped dead. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re Keith Calder.’
Keith stooped to take his second goose from a panting Brutus while he decided that circumspection would pay no dividends. ‘I know you too,’ he said.
‘You saw me coming down from Foleyhill with the Duguidsons. I’ve been thinking I owed you an explanation, but I kept putting it off until it seemed o’er late. My name’s Carluke, but I’d feel better about it all if you called me Andy.’
They shook hands, exchanging foreshore slime.
‘Would you fancy some breakfast?’ Andy asked. ‘I farm just over the hill there.’
Keith hesitated.
‘Bacon, egg, sausages, mushrooms. And I think there’s kidneys.’
The kidneys swung it. Keith accepted.
*
Keith followed the rusty van up a side road and over the brow of a hill chequered with the brown and green of mixed farming. The collie showed signs of territorial defensiveness so he left Brutus in the car.
‘Come through into the kitchen,’ Andy said. ‘Hang your things to dry. If you like to start the fry-up while I do the first chores we’ll have time for a crack.’
A start had been made to redecoration, but Keith noticed the signs that comfort and convenience over-rode appearances, which suggested that Andy was a bachelor and living alone.
Twenty minutes later they were digging into the sort of second breakfast which makes up for the rigours of wildfowling.
‘I think I feel survival creeping up on me,’ Keith said.
‘My dad has a bigger place a few miles off,’ Andy explained between mouthfuls. ‘There’s only a hundred acres here. Dad’s getting on now. If I make a success of this place on my own, he’ll think about retiring and leaving me to carry on. I’m getting wed in the New Year.’
‘To Valerie Duguidson?’
‘God, no! I’m back to my childhood sweetheart. You guessed that I was overboard for Valerie?’
‘I saw you frisking around her, coming down from Foleyhill. I put you down as a casual helper, a hanger-on looking for her favours. Was I wrong?’
Andy sighed and shook his head. ‘You weren’t wrong.’
‘Even so, how could you, a shooting man, join up with a bunch of antis and go in for sabotaging somebody else’s shoot? And you from a farming background!’ Even to himself, Keith sounded priggish.
‘I’m not proud of it,’ Andy admitted. ‘I was at the Agricultural College, and I was kicked out of my digs. My landlady fancied me, but I couldn’t stand the sight of her. I could have fancied her daughter, though. The only place I could find, just at the end of the academic year and the middle of the tourist season, was at the Duguidsons. I could hardly thole some of the weirdies who hung out there, but it was a roof. And Val was something else. Sophisticated. And legs up to here.’
‘I’ve seen them.’
‘Aye, so you have. All the way. Then you can guess the effect she’d have on a lad just off the farm. I thought she was the tops. For me, the sun shone out of her fud. Well, you’ve seen and it doesn’t,’ he added. ‘She was aye sounding off about the wrong that was done her great-great-granddad, or whoever it was, and how there was an old tale in the family that whoever got the pistols could prove it. So when they wanted an extra driver, I went along. I didn’t know they meant to steal the things, but if I had known I don’t suppose it’d’ve made any difference. It was a lark, a crusade, a holiday, and doing something for my bird. She was spitting feathers when she found you didn’t have them in the car with you.’
‘Birds –’ Keith began.
‘All right, birds don’t spit feathers. But she’s more like a cat. Sleek, demanding, determined to get her own way.
‘I knew nothing of their plan to fit you up, not at the time. Even in the state I was in, I don’t think I’d have stood still for that. You weren’t meant to be hurt, you know.’
‘So they kept telling me,’ Keith said.
‘Well, you weren’t. I was in the house all that day, doing some reading. I heard that somebody’d had an accident, and they asked Creepy whether he’d been out again. He said that he hadn’t, which was a bloody lie, but it didn’t seem to be any business of mine so I kept mum. I was going off their ideas by then anyway, so I wanted to stay loose.’
‘You didn’t seem to have gone off their ideas that day I saw you at Foleyhill,’ Keith said.
The boy flushed. ‘I still had the hots for Valerie. For a while, what they said about animal rights seemed to make a sort of sense. Then, when I came to think about it, I tried to imagine a world in which animals had rights of the kind they were talking about. It just didn’t make any sense at all, and a farmer was the person to see it. I just went along that day to please Valerie, and for the lark, and because they bet me I couldn’t work old Tessa from cover.’ The collie, recognizing her name, made a push at his leg.
‘I’d have bet you couldn’t get her to retrieve,’ Keith said. He thought back. ‘If you were in Bonnyrigg all that day when I got shot, you might be able to confirm something for me. The second time that Creepy Jesus went out, was it Brian Batemore who picked him up?’
‘No,’ Andy said, ‘it was not. I was just coming back from taking Tessa a walk and I saw Creepy getting into a blue Jag. Brian’s dad was driving. There was nobody else in the car.’
The kitchen was warm with the range burning. Keith had been near to dozing off, but this jerked him awake. ‘Sir Henry was driving?’
Andy let Keith sit in silence while he turned his ideas over. He could believe in Sir Henry as the mastermind behind any number of evils. But why?
‘Sir Henry was after the pistols,’ Keith said at last. ‘But he already knew that they had no legal importance, not the way Valerie imagined. They show that Sir Henry’s ancestor was a bad, bad bugger, a fratricide among other things. But that information would be no more than an embarrassment. I doubt whether any politician, or any other man, would come out well if every one of his nineteenth-century forebears was brought into the light of day. I just can’t see him going to such lengths to get his hands on the pistols.’
Andy poured two more mugs of tea that was now almost black and only lukewarm. ‘I’ll have to get to work soon,’ he said. ‘Meantime, I don’t know the answer. You likely know more about it than I do. But I’ll tell you this. Brian and Val and Hugh and Sir Henry, they’re all related, aren’t they?’
‘Not very closely.’
‘That doesn’t matter. I’ve been around the breeding of cattle all my life and I know that what matters is the way the genes come out. The three that I know all think the same way, and from what I hear Sir Henry’s no different. Once one of that lot sets their mind to a thing they don’t give up and they’ll go to any lengths to get what they want. And if they don’t get it, they’ll take some petty revenge.’
This was so consistent with what Keith already knew that he only nodded.
‘Sir Henry, now,’ Andy went on. ‘From what Brian says, he cares about nothing in the world except his political career and the power and glory that it brings him. If he thinks the way those others do, once
he made up his mind to get those things because they just might count against him, he’d soon forget their relative unimportance and go after them hell-bent. Just the same way, from what I read in the papers, as he’s got on in politics by going hell-bent after every political objective along the way.’
Keith decided that he very much disliked what he was hearing. ‘If he ever makes it to prime minister like his great-great-granddad. . . .’
‘He’ll be just the same sort of disaster. He’d declare war on China if it’d win him a by-election.’ Andy hesitated and scratched his ear. ‘Look, I’m going to tell you one more thing. I’ve been swithering over telling it, and I’m almost feared to say it aloud. And, mind, I’m never going to repeat it to another soul, let alone give it in evidence.
‘There was one night, just before I found new digs and moved. I’d been out late at a student party and when I got to my room Creepy came to talk to me. He was a man I’d no use for at all, but for some reason he’d taken to me. He was excited. Something had happened, and I think he’d been drugging. He’d come to say goodbye, and to get my help lugging some of his books and junk out of the house. He said he was in real trouble with the police, but he’d been on the phone to Brian’s dad, who was going to get him out of the country. He had friends in a hippy colony in Spain and he was going to go to them until he’d “got it together” again. I helped him to lug his stuff down the road to where he was going to be picked up. As I left, I saw Sir Henry arrive again in the blue Jag.’
‘I was always sure it was Sir Henry that got him out of the country,’ Keith said.
‘And I’m sure you’re wrong,’ Andy said grimly. ‘I don’t think Creepy ever left the country. Another lad who’d been with us in Bonnyrigg went out to Spain for a month last summer. He called in here just lately, to bum a bed and a few quid. He said that Creepy never arrived in Spain.’
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