The Revenge Game

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Too late,’ Ronnie said. ‘Here they come.’ And indeed the klaxon of a police car was coming close.

  Keith raised his arms in fury. ‘Satan’s testicles!’ he said. ‘If we’d been being killed, they’d have taken half an hour.’

  Tweedledee groaned and tried to sit up. Ronnie pushed him down ungently with his foot. ‘Aye,’ he said.

  A frantic Janet came dashing along the shed, brandishing a pinch-bar like some Valkyrie with her sword. ‘I called the fuzz,’ she shouted. ‘I called everybody. Is Wallace all right?’

  ‘Somebody blew his brains out,’ Keith said, ‘but he seems to be managing all right without them.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Did you do as I suggested?’ Keith asked.

  Munro nodded impatiently. ‘We followed Mrs Donald. She went straight home. Then we picked her up again.’

  ‘A pity,’ Keith said. ‘I was hoping she’d go looking for whoever left her there, to scratch his eyes out or to put the screws on again. Who-all have you got in the bag?’

  They were clustered in the big shed; Keith and Ronnie sitting on the bucket of the J.C.B., Wallace on an old oil-drum with Janet leaning protectively against his shoulder. The four were confronted by the chief inspector, Sergeant Ritchie and a constable. Their voices echoed in the large space. The three policemen were palpably anxious.

  ‘We’ve collected Smiler Snelgrove,’ Munro said, ‘the two lads that you . . . that were in here with you, and the two women from the end cottage. Mrs Snelgrove’s looking after all the kids. And what I want to know is whether I can hold them all.’

  ‘Not the three youngsters?’ Keith asked. ‘The black leather boys?’

  ‘Did you not know? They’ve been in the jug down in Newcastle the last few days. Apparently, they went down to contact one of the local motorcycle gangs, wanting them to pay a visit up here. They were turned down flat. So they went on the rampage. “Blew their stacks” is what the local man said.’

  ‘I wondered why they’d left me alone,’ Keith said. ‘What about McSween?’

  ‘Out, gone to Edinburgh for the day. If he’s implicated, we’ll grab him tonight. Now.’ Munro drew himself up and glared. ‘Tell me who I can hold, and on what charges. And if you’ve raised all this stramash for nothing, you’ll not be in business this time next week.’

  Keith nodded to Wallace, who stopped fingering his burn and became businesslike. ‘Hold them all,’ Wallace said. ‘Except Mrs Snelgrove. There’s no evidence against her for the moment, but time will tell.’

  ‘Even the women?’ Ritchie asked. ‘Even little Mrs Franks?’

  ‘This lot,’ Wallace said, ‘have pulled every fiddle in the book. What am I saying? They’ve written a new book. You remember, three or four years ago, there was some leakage from the canal where the new breach is? They dropped the water-level for a month while repairs were carried out. The Canal Authority paid for new masonry, but they got sandbags and puddle-clay. The construction company was J. Donald Construction Limited. Does that sound familiar?’

  ‘Jessie Donald?’ Keith said.

  ‘I’m betting on it. All properly registered, but she was the only director of the firm. The work was almost certainly done by canal employees on canal time. J. Donald’s done a lot of work for the canal over the years. Then the owner of the land was paid to give support to the repaired canal-bank by raising the level of the lower land. I’ve checked with the Records Office. That field was bought by Mrs Franks at the time, and sold again six months later. She was paid for more than two hundred loads of excavated material, levelling, topsoiling and reseeding, and a rent for loss of use during the work. About nine thousand quid. None of the work was done, of course.’

  Munro was frowning but it was a frown of concentration, and the rest of his face, from the eyebrows down, contrived to look almost happy. ‘How do you know about the sandbags?’ he asked.

  ‘When I walked along the canal-bank the other day the canal staff were tidying up. What they were doing seemed odd at the time, but I understand now. They were taking sandbags to the top and masonry to the bottom, to make it look as if a masonry wall had given way and attempts had been made to seal the breach with sandbags, instead of the other way around. If you want more than that on Mrs Franks,’ Wallace added, ‘she’s on the books as having worked eight hundred hours for the canal in the past twelve months, operating the dredger.’

  ‘And if you look at the dredger,’ Keith said, ‘it can’t have been in the water since Brechin City won the cup.’

  ‘And the three with the motorbikes?’ Munro asked.

  ‘I’ve known for years that they were the ones to see about fishing permits,’ Wallace said. ‘But they were printing their own. Not a penny went to the Canal Authority; as far as that body was concerned, fishing was free on the canal because of some ancient riparian agreement. As far as I can make out so far, every one of them had some personal fiddle. But mainly it’s been a syndicate operation, going back many years and masterminded by the late Mr Frazer.’

  ‘Let’s have your reasoning,’ Munro said. ‘Not evidence yet, but reasoning.’

  ‘Up until a year ago,’ Wallace said, ‘it was canny, careful, well structured and well integrated. They even paid extra money to the Canal Authority.’

  ‘Extra?’

  ‘A sprat to catch a mackerel. You know what a backwater this canal is. My barge, a few rowing-boats, a handful of cruisers coming up for the summer, and that’s about all. Not a scene that the Authority would want to lash out a lot of money on. So our clever lads were paying the dues on about fifty extra boats. It cost them a few hundred a year, but it painted the picture of a busy canal. So the Authority was prepared to meet the bills. From that point on, everything I’ve checked was fraudulent. Padded bills, padded timesheets, non-existent workers, false accounts to a dummy company, materials bought and then sold again for cash, canal tools and premises used for all kinds of private work. And all carefully camouflaged. You’d need to bring the accounts through and compare them with the work on the canal to spot the discrepancies. It could only have worked with a set-up like this, with head office many miles away and totally uninterested. And you’ll probably find that somebody at that end was getting a cut.

  ‘But after Frazer’s death, the pattern changes. Maybe they lacked a clever leader. Discrepancies become more obvious. They might have got by the next audit, but they might very well not.’

  ‘And you can prove all this?’

  ‘I could prove most of it now,’ Wallace said. ‘Give me a week on the books and I’ll give you enough evidence to send them all away for ever.’

  ‘All right,’ Munro said. ‘I can hold them on charges of fraud and embezzlement. But in the light of all this, killing Frazer would be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.’

  ‘Let’s talk about Frazer,’ Keith said. ‘We probably know all the bits between us. Let’s put it together. I’ll make a start.

  ‘According to one of Frazer’s lady-friends, he visited her after Mrs Weatherby dropped him off. He was angry. He was saying, “I’ll shake them”. And he was saying “J.C.B.”. He got well and truly stotting, and he took a bottle away with him. He was off on one of his binges.’

  Munro walked over and slapped the big machine. ‘This is a J.C.B.?’ he asked.

  Keith nodded. ‘I checked the chassis number. You were right, Wal. This is the old one that was written-off after the rock-face fell on it.’

  ‘I’d have betted on it,’ Wallace said. ‘According to the Canal Authority records, the insurance company stumped up for a new machine. Well, I’d seen two machines working around here, both in nice new-looking paint, but the canal machine sounded clapped out. So I asked Keith to check.’

  ‘The machine couldn’t have been too badly damaged,’ Keith said. ‘I’d guess that Tweedledee – he’s the engineer around here – with one or two of the others repaired it and painted it up and put it back into service. Ten thousand quidsworth of machine
went to work, McSween’s cousin driving it and the Canal Authority providing the fuel, earning a fat hire-charge for no outlay whatever.

  ‘Frazer must have been left out of that particular fiddle. The first he knew of it was when he called at head office on his last day. If he had a pal there, maybe the pal tipped him off. Or maybe somebody made a perfectly innocent remark – “How’s your new J.C.B. running?” or something like that.’

  Munro had been examining the J.C.B., but he had not missed a word. ‘Just a wee minute,’ he said. ‘Our information was that Frazer had not been seen at the head office for a fortnight before that.’

  ‘There’s a new clerk there now,’ Wallace said, ‘but from what I picked up in Glasgow in the last couple of days Frazer was very chummy with his predecessor, an Australian named Mulcahy. Always lunched with him when he was in Glasgow. If Frazer only saw Mulcahy, and they only talked about a fiddle that Frazer was being left out of, Mulcahy would keep quiet about it. Could be that Mulcahy went back to Australia because he suspected that Frazer was dead and that cats were going to get out of bags.’

  ‘Well, whatever,’ Keith said impatiently, ‘Frazer was livid. He came heading back to Newton Lauder with blood in his eye. He was on the booze again. His certificate for the new pistol had come through, so he got Mrs Weatherby to stop in the square while he collected it.

  ‘Now we’ll switch to what Jock Sparrow says. He was rabbiting in the field at the back here. He says that all the doors were open and that two men were target-shooting in the shed. He says that when the last shots were fired, just after he’d heard some drunk approaching along the towpath, three shots sounded together, too quickly to have been anything but three different guns. This must have been a couple of hours after Frazer left the lady.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Munro. He thought for a second, and then smiled grimly. ‘We begin to see the picture. Frazer finished off the bottle, and then walked along the towpath, working himself up into a fury. He comes suddenly in through the doors at the canal end of the shed. Let’s suppose that he confronts the two men whom he suspects of pulling the fraud with these machines.’

  ‘I don’t see why he was so angry,’ Janet said. ‘Was it just that he’d been left out of the money?’

  ‘That’s not how I see it,’ Wallace said. ‘Frazer was careful. But this swapping of J.C.B.s was dangerous. When the annual check’s made and the machines and tools are counted, nobody pays much attention to condition but they should certainly verify chassis numbers.’

  ‘That would likely be it,’ Munro said. ‘But the two men were there, with pistols in their hands, already shooting at targets not a dozen feet from the doors. Suddenly there is Frazer, armed, drunk and angry. So they all pull their triggers,’ he finished simply.

  ‘One of those occasions,’ Janet suggested, ‘on which nobody wants to but everybody must.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ Munro said. ‘But who would the two men have been?’

  ‘Jack Sparrow said that he smelled black powder smoke,’ Keith said. ‘Nitro powders were in general use by about 1890, but there are still a number of older guns around that are only proofed for black powder. The wise man doesn’t shoot them with anything stronger, not if he values his fingers, and especially if the gun’s a valuable antique. There’s been an antique-pistol theme popping up now and again, which I thought was an interesting red herring; but now I think different. I knew that there was still an enthusiast for old firearms around, because I picked up a cartridge last Sunday, in a remote spot where people sometimes do a bit of poaching. It was a nine-millimetre cartridge which somebody had adapted, rather cleverly, to work in a pin-fire gun.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Janet asked.

  Keith blinked. He seemed surprised that somebody present was not familiar with the pin-fire system. ‘The first cartridges, before they solved the problems of the centre-fire cap, were pin-fire. They had a pin sticking out of the side of the cartridge. That was about 1835. There was also a needle-gun, but–’

  ‘You mean there are still those things around and people shooting them?’ Munro broke in.

  ‘You probably think of the name Lefaucheux in connection with breech-loading shotguns,’ Keith said – Munro nodded wisely – ‘but the Lefaucheux revolver was used throughout European armies and by both sides in the American Civil War. Giulio Fiocci was still making pin-fire cartridges until recently. You can probably still find them on the shelves in Italian gunsmiths’ shops.

  ‘It doesn’t much matter where the gun came from, but I told Superintendent Blackhouse that I suspected Frazer had a number of off-certificate pistols. He certainly had a Lefaucheux revolver, because he showed it to me once, and I don’t remember seeing it on his certificate. The guns dumped in the canal correspond almost exactly with Frazer’s certificate, Blackhouse said, so we can assume that they were dumped as being traceable to Frazer. Any untraceable modern ones were probably sold and the antiques kept by the local enthusiast. Frazer was the more knowledgeable, but Tweedledee was the expert mechanic and loader. He was licensed to buy gunpowder, and he got some from me not long ago.

  ‘Finally,’ Keith said, ‘I found dozens of these among the spent bullets which Dougie Cruikshank sifted out of the sand-bed along at the end there. It’s a nine-millimetre ball.’ Keith sorted a small object out of a collection of odds-and-ends in his pocket.

  ‘Snap!’ Munro said jovially, producing a small envelope. ‘This was found under the skeleton. I browbeat one of my young officers to abstract it from Blackhouse’s murder room.’

  Keith took the ball from the envelope. A thin crust of dried mud flaked away and he was left with a lead ball identical to the other. The rifling-marks around one circumference were clear and sharp. ‘There we are,’ he said. ‘The man with the older revolver was firing ball. It lodged in Frazer’s ribcage.’

  ‘Is that why Dougie was killed?’ Janet asked. ‘Because he knew about the – er – balls?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’d sent me a note on the back of a Canal Authority indent form, on which somebody’s drafted a requisition for umpty thousand gallons of diesel for the dredger. I suppose Dougie was seen pinching it. Like me, he wondered why they wanted diesel for a dredger that hasn’t moved its own length in years. They wanted it for the other J.C.B. of course. Never buy anything if you can indent for it. And then, suddenly, it was potentially dangerous evidence.’

  Janet bit off a yawn. ‘So we’ve got two men,’ she said, ‘and one of them firing ball. Who would that be? Tweedledee?’

  ‘He’s the vintage weapons enthusiast,’ Keith said. ‘Chief Inspector, did he also make the false statements about Derek Weatherby?’

  Munro hesitated and then nodded. Sergeant Ritchie was more forthcoming. ‘He was the one who brought us all the gossip about who’d said what to Frazer.’

  ‘Ah,’ Keith said. He had wondered how Munro had gathered so much hearsay so quickly.

  Wallace put his oar in with diffidence. ‘N-nobody’s asked yet,’ he said, ‘where Frazer’s bullet went. He was a crack shot, remember. Well, when I was looking over time-sheets, the date August 24th jumped out and hit me in the eye. Tweedledee started three weeks sick-leave that day. His medical certificate should have ended up in Glasgow, so–’

  ‘He was part-time with the canal,’ Keith broke in. ‘He wouldn’t have needed a certificate. Just a friend to patch him up. Three weeks doesn’t sound like more than a flesh-wound.’

  ‘Very well,’ Munro said. ‘If you are right, he will have a scar to explain. Now, who had the other gun?’

  ‘That’s more difficult,’ Keith said. He sorted through his oddments again and produced a battered bullet. ‘Let’s start with this. Wallace gave it to me. It was lodged in the woodwork of his barge, beside the hatch. I’m guessing that that’s the bullet that went in through Frazer’s mouth and came out the back of his neck.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ Janet said. ‘If Mr Frazer was standing in the shed doors, no way could it have been shot through hi
m and fetched up in the barge where we found it.’

  Wallace laughed indulgently. ‘The barge was moored across from the shed that night,’ he said.

  ‘But it was on the wrong side.’

  ‘I was headed the other way, that trip.’

  ‘Of course,’ Janet said. ‘Sorry. I’m half-asleep.’

  ‘Can I go on, now?’ Keith asked. They fell silent for him. ‘This bullet, then. We’re assuming that it’s the one that went through Frazer’s neck. It seems to have been of thirty-eight calibre, or possibly nine-millimetre, which is only about two thou’ smaller. But it weighs a hundred and thirty-odd grains, which is too heavy for nine-mil. pistol ammunition. And it’s not metal-jacketed, which rules out the Colt automatic.

  ‘But let’s go back a step. We’re also assuming that the attacks on Molly and me and on the shop were made because somebody’d had a pistol out on sale or return and wanted to destroy the evidence. I don’t like the idea, but I can’t think of another one so I’ll go along with it. Which means that the murder gun must have been in my stock. Of course, providing that the cartridge case is appropriate – which we don’t know about – and provided that the recoil’s enough to work the action of an automatic, if that’s what you’re shooting, you can fire a lot of unlikely ammunition out of firearms that were never intended for it. I haven’t had time to examine the rifling-marks –’

  An ominous suspicion had been creeping over Munro. He lost patience. ‘Get on with it, man,’ he said. ‘You know damn fine what pistol you think it was fired out of.’

  Keith nodded. ‘To me, it spells Webley and Scott, or Smith and Wesson. And I’ve only had the one thirty-eight in stock in the last couple of years.’

  Munro uttered a yelp which was so unlike his usual pedantic West Highland speech that they all stared at him. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that I obtained a permit for you to carry the murder weapon?’