The Worried Widow

by Gerald Hammond

‘I sent the young pup off with a flea in his ear. I wasn’t going to aid and abet a crime, I told him, in my position, when Sam could perfectly well have used the twenty-bore. If anybody had good reason to help Sam to end it, I pointed out, it was that wife of his, poor soul. I’m sure that she didn’t, but she had the motive. She’d no life of her own, waiting on him hand and foot, but she never complained. Never. Just slaved away, trying to make life tolerable for him. You had to admire her, and to help when you could.’

  Keith nodded sympathetically. ‘Mrs Hendrickson thinks that somebody helped make life tolerable for him by smuggling joints to him from time to time.’

  ‘Joints?’ Albany looked genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Joints,’ Keith said. ‘Pot. What used to be called reefers. Cannabis cigarettes’.

  ‘I’ve never even seen one of those,’ Albany said. His voice rose. ‘If you’re suggesting—’

  ‘I’m not,’ Keith said.

  ‘—that I brought illegal drugs to Sam Hendrickson, I’ll have you in court for slander before you can turn round. You’d better ask somebody like Ben Strathling about that sort of thing.

  ‘And I’ll tell you something else.’ Ian Albany had taken time to work himself up into a temper, but his voice was beginning to shake. ‘The club’s been a good friend to you and your shop, but if you go around making insinuations there’ll soon be an end to that. I’m in Edinburgh almost every day and I could strike just as good a deal for clays and cartridges with one of the gunshops, yes, and take members’ guns in and out for overhaul. You’d soon feel the pinch, don’t you kid yourself.’

  Albany gathered up his purchases, turned and stalked out. He tried to slam the shop door but the spring closer spoiled his gesture.

  *

  Another familiar face came into the shop on Tuesday morning, although Keith could not have put a name to it. It was an elderly face, lined and hollowed by the passage of time, and its owner was a small man in clothes which had seen better days. He bought some very small fish-hooks and a large pike-lure.

  The unusual combination triggered an idea.

  ‘You fish the canal quite often, don’t you?’ Keith said.

  The other nodded gloomily. ‘It gets me out of the house in my time off,’ he said. ‘If I hang about, the wife has me at the decorating. If there’s one thing I can’t thole,’ he added peevishly, ‘it’s painting things. I haven’t the patience for it.’

  ‘You’re still working, then?’

  ‘Gateman at the tweed mill.’

  ‘You’ll need plenty of patience, to fish beside the footbridge,’ Keith suggested.

  ‘That’s different. That’s sport.’

  ‘But Wallace says that there can’t be anything there.’

  The old man looked slightly less glum. ‘Och, your Mr James is a nice lad but he doesn’t know it all. I just bide there until I’ve caught a few wee perch or bream to use as live bait. Then I’m away a mile along the canal, to Wilkie’s Pool, to try will I get a pike. There’s pike in there the size of your leg. I’ve hooked one afore now. Never landed one yet, though.’ He relapsed again into his habitual gloom.

  ‘You were by the footbridge on the Saturday Sam Hendrickson shot himself, weren’t you?’

  ‘Aye. That I was.’ The old man paused and scratched his chin. He gave Keith a sharp look. ‘It’s you that put the police up to speiring into it a’ o’er again. And I’ll save you asking the same damned questions. Not a soul came past me, except two wifies that crossed the footbridge. Nobody along the towpath. Nobody on the far bank. Not a boat going by nor a frogman coming out of the water or a hang-glider out of the sky. I’d have seen them.’

  ‘You’d have been watching your float,’ Keith said.

  ‘Not me. I don’t watch a float. I feel –’ he drew the word out while slowly raising his fingers in an unintentionally obscene gesture ‘– for the fish. If there’d been anybody, I’d have seen them. All morning I was there, and not even a wee fish to show for it. And so I told the police.’

  ‘They’ve been on to you already, have they?’

  ‘Aye, surely. That Inspector Gowrie,’ the old man added in tones of great dislike. ‘Trying to make out that I’m keeping something back, just because I was with Border Weavers before they went bust. But I’d rather be a gateman than a weaver, and so I told him. The money’s less and the wife thinks I’ve gone down in the world, but the hours suit me better for the fishing. And now, if you’ll kindly take my siller I’ll be getting along.’

  ‘I won’t charge you, this time,’ Keith said. ‘Good luck! And if you catch a pike the size of my leg I’ll get it stuffed for you.’

  ‘If I get a pike,’ the old man said, ‘I’ll eat it.’ He left Keith wondering whether to accept the statement literally or as a measure of improbability. The thought was driven out of Keith’s head by the realisation of something the old man had said. He went out into the Square, but the stooped figure had vanished.

  *

  A belt of rain swept over during the Wednesday night and Keith spent the Thursday, when the shop was closed for the day, working on guns which had been left for overhaul. The Friday morning dawned brighter and once again spring-like. If Keith had not been tied to the shop he would have made some excuse to drop out of sight and take to the countryside with a gun, in search of rabbit or pigeon among the young crops.

  He was standing in the shop doorway, wondering whether Wallace would ever hear about it if he closed up for a few hours, when a business-like estate-car pulled up in the Square and a gentleman, very dapper in a black jacket and striped trousers, got out and looked around the signboards. The shop was again half-obscured by a parked van but enough was on show to catch his attention and he walked across. Keith backed inside to clear the door and retire behind the counter.

  The newcomer glanced around the shop’s interior. He seemed unimpressed. He had a tiny moustache and a loose mouth which he used skilfully to express disdain. A shop which aims to serve a wide catchment area with a full range of shooting and fishing gear has to stock a huge volume of goods and a certain clutter becomes inevitable. Keith had always preferred to have the stock and the clutter rather than a tidy shop which failed to satisfy the customer’s needs. When he had first opened the shop he had envisaged an air of dignified calm, where gentlemanly pastimes could be discussed as between gentlemen; but the clutter, seen in daylight darkened by the presence of a van delivering to Kechnie’s shop, created the opposite impression.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘Mr Calder? Or Mr James?’

  ‘Calder,’ Keith said.

  ‘Salmont. Huddersfield Cartridge Company. I had a letter from you last week.’

  ‘About Mr Wilmington’s gun,’ Keith agreed. ‘You’ve come to settle?’

  ‘I think that’s very unlikely,’ Mr Salmont said ‘We get many such ill-advised claims. This seems to me to have been the usual case of obstructed barrels.’ His voice, which was North of England, sounded patronising. Keith rarely took kindly to patronage, especially from Sassenachs.

  ‘Then either you haven’t read my report,’ Keith said, ‘or you’ve read it but couldn’t understand it. Either way, there seems to be little point in wasting our time discussing it. We’ll see you in court.’

  Mr Salmont never blinked, ‘You will, if you’re determined to have your client throw good money after bad. But—’

  They were interrupted by a customer in search of a camouflage net and some pigeon decoys. Keith spun the transaction out. Mr Salmont took the shop’s only chair and looked at the ceiling. Before the first customer was out another entered, wanting fishing-line. When they were alone again, Keith turned back to Mr Salmont and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Perhaps you’d tell me why you’re so sure you can put the blame on to our cartridges,’ Salmont said.

  ‘Very well. It was all in my report but perhaps I’d better spell it out for you. First, I never saw a burst caused by an obstruction which didn’t show a clear r
ing-bulge around what was left of the barrel.’ For ten minutes, interrupted only by a customer in search of an impossible bargain, Keith led Mr Salmont through the pointers which indicated excessive cartridge pressure. ‘Finally,’ he said, ‘you recalled a batch of cartridges about a year ago.’

  ‘That was just precautionary,’ Mr Salmont protested. ‘We never had any complaints of burst barrels.’

  ‘Then you were bloody lucky. You’ve got one now. And if Mr Wilmington had had the burst in his left barrel instead of the right, you’d have had a claim for two or three fingers at a few thousand apiece. At the time of your withdrawal notice, I was interested enough to retain some of the batch you’d recalled and to examine them. Some were normal, but some were grossly overloaded. I checked the weights, and it seemed that two-and-a-half-inch cartridges had been going through one of your machines which was fitting a magnum primer and cramming in a three-inch magnum load.

  ‘Mr Wilmington had kept the rest of his cartridges and I found several among them which corresponded exactly with the overloaded ones in the batch you withdrew. I tested them with lead crushers in a pressure-barrel and I was finding pressure up to ten times the normal.’

  Keith allowed a patronising note to creep into his own voice and Mr Salmont recognised it. His lips tightened further. ‘And you think that that sort of evidence would stand up in court?’

  ‘Friend,’ Keith said sadly, ‘it always has done, so far. Two years ago, in Glasgow, I spent three hours under cross-examination by the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, after giving just this sort of evidence about the damage done by one of Salisbury’s Hyperclay cartridges. I find it hard to believe that you didn’t read about the case, it was widely reported in the technical press. He couldn’t shake me and we won hands down. What’s more, we got more in damages than we’d have been prepared to settle for, and they collected a whole lot of very bad publicity and all the costs on top.’

  Having dropped his hint with a shade of emphasis in his voice, Keith waited for a calculated interval. ‘It’s all in my report, for those who care to read and digest it,’ he finished. ‘Show it to your lawyer. Perhaps he could explain it to you.’

  They were silent. Keith could hear voices in the Square and the hum of a distant car.

  At last, Mr Salmont stirred and sighed. ‘Suppose I were prepared to give you an immediate cheque, what would you settle for it?’ he asked.

  Keith relaxed. The other had only been probing to see how he would be likely to show up in court. ‘The gun’s a total write-off,’ he said. ‘A new one the same would cost over a thousand pounds. But Mr Wilmington’s taken a fancy to a used gun I have in stock, a faster handler with regulated chokes. I could put it in at six-fifty plus VAT. You buy it for him and pay my fee and we’ll settle. He wanted to go after you for the loss of his shooting but I think I’ve talked him out of it.’

  Mr Salmont had brought with him a blank cheque already signed by Huddersfield’s financial director. Ten minutes later, Keith dropped it into the till. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you owe me a favour.’

  Mr Salmont’s eyebrows rose. ‘I strongly suspect that you’ve ripped me off, and I owe you a favour?’ But his mouth had relaxed at last.

  ‘That’s right. Over the years I’ve headed off three other clients who wanted to go after you for the cost of burst barrels. Each time, it turned out to be an evident obstruction burst – one mud, one snow and one twenty-bore cartridge up the spout in front of twelve-bore one – and I choked them off without even referring to you. I think that counts as a favour. Three favours, really, but who’s counting?’

  ‘I’ll decide whether I’m counting when I know what the favour is.’

  ‘Nothing large.’ Keith patted his pockets. He was almost sure. . . . Yes. The cartridge which had come out of Sam Hendrickson’s gun was still in his pocket, protected by a small polythene bag. ‘Can you tell me anything about this?’

  Mr Salmont accepted the case gingerly. ‘This wouldn’t be another complaint?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. It fulfilled its function perfectly. What can you tell me?’

  ‘Nothing whatever. It’s a standard case, we’ve made millions of them. By the printing, it was supplied to you. Number six shot.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Nothing. How can I possibly . . .? It’s been fired once, never reloaded.’ Mr Salmont studied the extractor-marks on the brass head. Obligingly, the van outside pulled away, releasing a flood of light into the shop. ‘It was fired in a conventional gun, a double gun, not an auto or a pump-gun.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘What d’you mean, go on?’ Mr Salmont retorted irritably. ‘There’s nothing to go on about.’ He turned the case and looked at the flat of the head. ‘Nice, central firing-pin impression.’ He looked closer. ‘By gum!’ he said. ‘You’re in luck. After we had to recall those cartridges, we overhauled our machines and brought in new safety procedures, and we changed the style of lettering so that we could be sure we could tell the new cartridges from the old. But it took some time to make new dies, and we were rushing to get out replacement orders to such as yourself, so in the meantime we knocked the dot off the I in Huddersfield, just as a stop-gap. This came out during that time.’

  ‘And how long were you putting these out for?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Not more than ten days. You’d have got one batch like this and your next order would have had the new lettering.’

  ‘What else can you tell me?’

  ‘That is absolutely the lot.’ Mr Salmont’s manner suddenly changed. He became ingratiating and even managed a smile. ‘While I’m here, perhaps I can take an order and save you the cost of a phone-call?’

  *

  After Mr Salmont had departed, Keith had peace for an hour. He used the time to look back through the firm’s records. Wallace was meticulous in his record-keeping, Janet only slightly less so, and Keith had little difficulty in building up at least part of the picture.

  The Huddersfield Cartridge Company had issued its recall notice early in April of the previous year. This had left the firm short of twelve-bore cartridges for its customers just when the season of clay pigeon competitions was getting under way, and Keith noted that Wallace had bridged the gap by placing small orders with two continental manufacturers. The next delivery from Huddersfield had been on 19th April and the invoice showed that the cartridges had carried the shop’s own brand-name. A larger delivery had followed after another fortnight.

  Keith scratched his head and muttered something rude. There was no way of knowing whether any of the first replacement batch had been left when the next batch arrived. Any remaining boxes might have been pushed to the back of the shelves and only have emerged for sale during the last few weeks. Nevertheless, he dug out the sales slips for the month following 19th April.

  Most cartridges are sold a few boxes at a time, at values insufficient to make it worth noting the name of the purchaser. There were a dozen sales to ‘Cash’, and several corresponded to a multiple of the price of a box. Keith embarked on an attempt to identify purchases which could have comprised cartridges plus some other specific item but several prices had changed during the period and he gave up when he realised that the permutations were almost infinite.

  The small purchaser would usually buy cartridges as he ran short, and could be expected to have used up those cartridges long ago; but Keith knew that some men always take cartridges from the end of the cartridge-belt which comes easiest to hand, refilling the empty pockets before the next sortie. With such a man, cartridges from a particular batch could linger at the unhandy end of the belt for years. Not long before, he had noticed a brown, wartime Utility cartridge in another man’s belt.

  The only purchasers of twelve-bore cartridges whose names were noted were Ian Albany (because his four boxes had been added on to an order for waxed cotton, waterproof shooting clothes), one local man who had since emigrated, and James Beecher – the last because Molly, who had served him, was excessi
vely meticulous.

  The total of cartridge sales during the period seemed to add up to much less than the delivery of 19th April, unless a remarkable number were buried among the sales slips, in Wallace’s neat script or Janet’s scrawl, which mentioned only ‘Cash’ or ‘Goods’.

  Which, Keith decided, went a long way towards proving nothing at all. He wrote a note to that effect for Inspector Gowrie. He then re-opened the envelope to add that a purchase of twelve-bore cartridges by a man who shot only sixteen-bore could be explained a dozen ways although, if the purchase had been made for himself, it left unanswered the question as to whether any had remained in his possession a year later. He left the note at the Police Station on his way home.

  Chapter Seven

  Keith Calder had often grumbled against the law which, in Scotland as well as in parts of England and Wales, forbade the shooting of most live quarries on a Sunday – a law which, as he never failed to point out, was hard on the shopkeeper of a sporting bent, preventing him from shooting with those companions who worked a more conventional week.

  On the other hand, since the addition of Wallace to the firm it had not usually been necessary for Keith to work shop hours; and while he would have preferred to get out with a gun and a dog on the day of leisure which others counted as the Lord’s Day, he would have had to admit that any such change in the law would have been to the detriment of the Briesland House garden which rarely felt his shadow on other days.

  On the Sunday morning just a week after the visit by Inspector Gowrie, he was weeding a bed of flowering heathers when Deborah joined him and stood silently watching. ‘Do you want some help?’ she asked abruptly.

  Keith beamed at her. ‘There’s nothing I want more,’ he said. ‘Help me get the couch grass out. These ericas have never really got away. This clay doesn’t suit them. I think I’ll interplant them with periwinkle, the big variety.’

  ‘You’ll end up with a bed of periwinkle,’ Deborah said. She went down on her knees.

  ‘If I do, it’ll be a damned sight easier kept.’