The Path of the Bullet

by M C Jacques

  32

  Tuesday evening in the White Hart, Tuxford

  “So, just run through it one more time will you, old man?” Mountfitchet was struggling to come to terms with the precise chronology and format of Jill Prestons’ shooting. McKay nodded his understanding at the Wing Commander’s befuddlement.

  “It seems that Jill Prestons was lured down to the far corner of the Warfare on Land Hall…”

  “Close by that old ruin, you say, with the German Panzer tank parked inside, near to the T34 and the SU100 tank destroyer?” The interruption was polite and not entirely unanticipated by McKay. His dad’s old colleague and pal was on the edge of his leather seat in the lounge, close by reception at the White Hart, his craggy face secreting a grim determination to achieve a complete comprehension of events.

  “That’s the place. Now, what we know so far is that Jill Prestons was shot twice by two very different guns. The first shooting must have occurred relatively soon after she arrived for her meeting with Sarah Millar. Well, that’s how it looks at the moment, let’s say. We’re waiting for the complete lab report from Foulds and his team.”

  “The note found at the scene having been sent from Millar to Prestons in order to arrange their meeting…”

  “Ostensibly so, but by no means definitely so,” insisted McKay. “The note was certainly found in Prestons’ hand and there had been some paltry attempt to remove it or – and I consider this to be more probably the truth of the matter – the person who fired the original shot wants us to believe that he or she tried to tear the note from Prestons’ right hand. That note may well have been contrived to direct us to precisely the wrong person!” McKay refrained, tempting Mountfitchet – who by this time had allowed his chin to harbour in his large cupped hands – to comment.

  “Sarah Millar. Always thought her a bit on the strange side. Damn good at her job, mind, from all accounts! Disciplined, so she seems to me. Can’t imagine her gunning anyone down in cold blood, especially a colleague! I’d always thought those two rubbed along pretty well, you know, complementary opposites, that type of thing! She, Jill Prestons – always thought she was a bit, you know, a bit on the rum side, too.” He paused to take a mollifying gulp of his Glengoyne. “I know Fothergill thinks the world of her, always praising her to high heaven. Credits her with increasing the museum’s turnover by such a large amount. But who would hate her enough to try to incriminate her with murdering Jill Prestons? Such a brassy, spirited lass. Such a downright shame. Anyway, sorry, old man, going around the houses!”

  McKay perceived a measure of regret to have trickled into his old friend’s tremor as he spoke. The downcast and darkened eyes reinforced his view that the noble Wing Commander might well have been a light-bearer for the late Jill Prestons.

  “Sure. No problems, sir. And who would want to murder Jill Prestons, anyway? We’ll know more about the note in a day or two, as I mentioned; it’s with Dr Foulds and his colleagues in the labs out at Huntingdon. Paul Burrows had sent Matt Fothergill away, by the time I arrived. Fothergill was, to quote Paul, ‘doing his nut!’ ‘The museum could be forced to close at this rate’ and all that kind of stuff.”

  “And, at the moment, at least, it would seem that anybody who may have had a convincing motive to murder Jill Prestons has an even more convincing alibi. It may have been that she simply stumbled across something she shouldn’t have.”

  “Wrong place, wrong time, perhaps,” surmised Mountfitchet; lachrymose and even a tad woebegone, thought McKay.

  At first, McKay failed to recognise the back of the hefty gent in a cream, short-sleeved shirt, finely striped, leaning over the bar and clearly eliciting information from Gavin, a young, alacritous – and, Alex would add, metrosexual – barman working during his summer vacation from the University of East Anglia, desperate to offset a portion of his student loan, as McKay had discovered whilst awaiting Mountfitchet’s arrival at the bar.

  Gavin pointed across in the direction of the momentarily quiet pair and the somewhat anxious face of Detective Inspector Paul Burrows span around to locate his quarry.

  “What is it, Paul?” McKay was already on his feet with his glass firmly planted on the table. Mountfitchet remained seated, his cranium once more furrowed with foreboding.

  “Well, gentlemen, it seems that things are going from bad to worse around here! Andrew Fordham has been found hanged just off the A505 on the way to Royston – in a small spinney.” The policeman scanned the other two for some response, a visible reaction, but none was forthcoming from either man. Following the emission of a long breath he went on. “And that’s not all… not all by a long way. It seems that in his pocket we found a CD, you know, an audio disc or something like. On it, in a very shaky voice, Fordham would seem to confess outright to the murdering of Sergeant Smith.” The burly, seasoned cop broke off again to survey the facial expressions and body language of his two associates. Again, bereft of any feedback, audible or visible, he continued. “I must say, it’s the worst recording I’ve heard for years – sounds like it was taped on a dishwasher or something!. Anyway, he goes on about a lot of technical stuff about how exactly he contrived the device with which to shoot Sergeant Smith – I think ballistics may have to comment on that – but then, and this is the crux of the next matter, he lays the shooting of Jill Prestons squarely upon the broad shoulders of our elusive friend, Sarah Millar. And she’s gone to ground. Can’t find her anywhere; I’ve got half a station full of men and women whom we think Millar knows, yet they can’t, or claim they can’t, even speak a sentence in English!”

  “Not to you, at least. The police, I mean.” Neither the calmness of McKay’s pitch nor his ossified expression could possibly have concealed the fact that Burrows’ news had perturbed him profoundly. “How can we best help?” Mountfitchet grunted his concord with McKay’s words towards Burrows, his head rocking with approval while his interlaced fingers ground against each other as if trying to scrape each other clean of some clingy, toxic gel.

  Appreciating at least something of the gravity of his customers’ conference, Gavin edged towards the threesome’s table very gingerly. McKay resumed his seat. Burrows sat down. “A double single malt for you, sir, and for you Wing Commander. An Orvieto for you, Dr McKay.” After receiving subdued thanks and brief nods of gratitude from his guests, Gavin strode back to the bar, the small steel tray stashed away promptly and neatly under his left arm.

  “Don’t worry, gents, I’m not driving! Just as if! No, Sutton’s waiting in the car outside, she’s on Diet Coke – she always is… on Diet Coke, or a diet something or other, that is, even at staff shindigs!”

  With each successive drink being imbibed at an immoderate pace, the three men conferred long into the night, being joined eventually, after bouts of canvassing by McKay and Mountfitchet on her behalf, by a rather ghostly, pallid WPC Sutton.

  In time, a plan was hatched which involved McKay being dispatched on the Sarah Millar trail, whilst DI Burrows pledged to sniff out and to pass on all he could ascertain regarding Jill Prestons’ murder and the apparent suicide of Andy Fordham. Sutton’s attractive and relatively youthful presence served the company well, moderating and adjudicating impassively, amidst a gushing torrent of creative, yet frequently unrealisable, schemes. And the colour returned to her cheeks after a matter of minutes, too, no doubt inspired by the verbal banter, sometimes combative, she readily engaged herself in. The feminine perspective was a boon, as well; the relationships between Prestons and Millar, with each other and with Matt Fothergill, should be scrutinised more thoroughly than they had been hitherto. Burrows agreed and promptly tasked her to do precisely that.

  McKay was impressed by the young WPC’s verve and shrewdness, even though he noticed, despite his mild inebriation, that she was – as a rule of thumb – deferential towards his own suggested machinations and ruses. Conversely, she was decidedly dismissive and censorious towards the other
two, especially towards her boss, Burrows, who muttered ‘Bloomin’ graduate know-it-alls!’, or comparable phrases, with increasing frequency as the night drew on into the early hours. Yet he rarely, if at all, countermanded anything his young colleague suggested or stated.

  It was nearly two a.m. when a languid McKay quietly eased the door shut on re-entering his room and nearly three-thirty a.m. when he emerged from a scorching hot shower, much of the intervening time having been spent composing a lengthy email to John Foote which had, McKay had rued, comprised mainly requests, if not demands. It really must not appear to John as simply a list of demands! reasoned McKay, with only faint satisfaction as he clambered, in a slightly ungainly manner, into his pristine, freshly dressed, caressing, single bed in Room 12 of the White Hart Inn & Hotel.

  Whatever his conscious misgivings about life, death and even his perhaps over-burdening email to his old mate, John Foote, McKay’s subconscious did nothing to trouble him that night as he slept soundly through his alarm. He had, in fact, only been awakened by the second round of knocking by Agnieszka from reception who had, most thoughtfully, saved him some breakfast (she had recalled his preferences, too!), which he devoured savagely, but gratefully, at a table in the bar, before dashing back upstairs, with half of his third cup of coffee still in hand, to check out any reply there may have been from Manhattan. There was a reply, rich in detail and heavy in depth. Some of what John had discovered rocked McKay. He knew that he had to speak with DI Burrows at once and return to Cambridge briefly, almost at once.

  33

  A tree in a field

  Even though it didn’t make sense, something about the scene resounded with familiarity in McKay’s mind. But it was not a case of déjà vu; not by any means. It was the situation, the circumstances, which struck an atonal, unwelcome chord in McKay’s memory.

  The original event, now jousting for his attention, had occurred in the early 1960s. It had involved what would then have been called aggression and intimidation, but probably was not referred to as bullying. Although the names of the main players were hazy, the grizzly sequence of events was affixed to the recesses of McKay’s little grey cells.

  The story, assuredly verifiable, had been related to McKay whilst still in his nativity by three mischievous cousins in a concerted attempt to shock and spook him about the school he would one day, in all likelihood, have to attend.

  Peter Doherty, let’s call the unfortunate lad thus, and his parents, had moved to a particular town because Peter had been awarded a scholarship at that town’s prestigious school. Quite a step. Unfortunately, Peter, being Irish, patently and proudly, and, more notably, not being local, that is to say, not of the same cut as some of the self-appointed nobler elements of his new community, was, almost from the outset, earmarked for maltreatment. And maltreatment he received by the bucket-load and by the fist-load.

  An assembly was called and a search organised by the teachers and school staff on the day that Peter did not turn up for class registration. Later on that fateful morning, Peter was found hanging from a tree, along a little used farm lane, about a quarter of a mile from his beloved school; the one he and his parents had striven to gain access to – their dreamy Emerald City had been mercilessly wrought into a dreadfully real Aceldama.

  As he stood looking at the overhanging branch, simple, sturdy but sufficient, the friction marks from a coarse cord or rope still evident, McKay was only all too well aware that, just as had been the case with young Peter, Andy Fordham, too, would have cherished his own fair share of fragile dreams, which now lay shattered interminably; a fragmented heap of unrealised aspirations. He’d heard enough about Andy to know that he, too, had many good points: people liked him, people trusted him, some people respected him. Some good people respected him. Yet he had concluded that to enter in to the Great Sleep was, all things considered, the better route for him to take.

  McKay’s wending cogitations then led him along another mnemonic lane. This time, the reminiscence was more recent and related to a teaching colleague, later a friend, called Crispin. Occasionally, usually at a derisory hour on a Saturday morning, the then bachelor McKay used to be invited to accompany this friend, who preferred to be known simply as Chris, on a trek around a range of appointed lakes and rivers of Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire – Chris being an avid and inexhaustible twitcher.

  Little by little, Chris had unfolded to McKay the drama of his dilapidated marriage, by instalments, giving each early morning rendezvous an episodic quality, McKay recalled – the final venue for most of the walks being an excellent little coffee house in Quorn. But the climax of the plot was attained one morning aside Ulverscroft reservoir, at a secluded point, covered by shrubs, where a bustling contributory stream effused its vodka-clear contents into a swelling plunge pool, presided over by a hypnotising vortex. ‘It was here,’ Chris had announced without preface. ‘Here. This very spot. About three months ago. This is where I had decided to throw in a few concrete breezeblocks… bound securely to my ankles, of course. I’d thought it all through. Janice and the kids would’ve got by okay, you know.’ He recollected perfectly calmly.

  The water was dark and eddying. No, not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door. But ‘tis enough. ‘Twill serve, thought McKay who was in no doubt that this opaque backwater would indeed have sufficed to relieve Chris from his Night of the Soul and to shepherd a watery access in to the Great Sleep.

  By the time they had last met up, some six or seven months before, at a small Italian café near the Carillon and alongside the park in Loughborough, Chris was newly divorced and, not unlike Philip Neville in Anita Brooker’s novella, Hotel du Lac, confidently extolled that he had succeeded in discovering the ‘secret of contentment’. This had impressed McKay no little amount. And it had, to his mind, certainly borne the test of time; mild, moderate contentment had shown itself to be a realisable, graspable goal for McKay, too, quite unlike the Bluebird of Happiness.

  34

  ‘Handy’ Andy Fordham, Mechanic

  It was only a field but – as he stood there contemplating Andy Fordham’s rather marginal legacy – McKay felt as if he had visited Aceldama. Besides, what of the late Andy Fordham? His immediate legacy was a low-quality recording, stating that it was he who had shot and killed Sergeant Smith in cold blood and that he knew Jill Prestons to have been murdered by Sarah Millar over some feud, cause unspecified, involving Matt Fothergill. With that thought, McKay’s wanton consciousness began to reactivate.

  He had quite forgotten that Burrows, standing askance his right shoulder, had accompanied him from his office, in the bowels of Cambridgeshire CID’s Headquarters, to this soulless, desolate spot of bucolic sterility, straddling the county’s border with Hertfordshire. In Burrows’ office, every visible surface polka-dotted by stained coffee mugs, they had both listened together intently, McKay for the first time, to the last will and testament of a deranged, crazed Andy Fordham, explaining why he had gunned down Smith, as best he could.

  McKay refocused his eyes on the scene before him. The oblong score on the ground where Fordham had placed a pedal operated device which, when depressed, released sufficient force to simultaneously cut the rope, elevate the throttled body clear of the ground, and propel the small wooden crate, which had served as a plinth, about a metre away, securing an irreversibility of fate.

  Burrows sighed like a horse. “Damned clever. Ingenious enough to make sure that he really did kill himself! It’s just like Graham Locke said: anything Andy Fordham really wanted to do, he would. He’d find a way to pull it off, no matter how long it took.” They both looked at the contraption of death, now shrouded in hermetically sealed polythene and queued, ready to be ‘white-vanned’ away.

  “He liked putting his foot down,” recalled McKay, thinking aloud, at once trying to deduce whether the observation had been cruelly ironic or not. “It’s one of my clearest recollections about him; actually,
one of the very few.” The sombre detective glanced across, a mite puzzled.

  “Well, there won’t be any more, Mark, that’s for sure!” he announced brusquely, turning and scanning the unembellished, carpet-like surface of the meadow. Usually the serenest of grazing habitats for its regular quadruped occupants – a stud of small, pedigree horses with some ponies, destined for the world’s polo circuits. The early morning clamour of forensic teams and a sweeping, manual search of the immediate environs had seen the unwitting residents cooped in to a fenced, adjoining field, wherefrom they stood and stared incomprehensibly at the bipedal impostors who had perpetrated this act of deportation and incarceration.

  35

  Not even a glance

  As McKay was dolefully striding across a marshy patch of the meadow, towards the squelchy gateway, the icy dew softly squirming into his old brogues – he’d been meaning to get them seen to for weeks now – WPC Sutton bounded up behind him, panting like a terrier.

  “The transcript, Dr McKay!” McKay looked at her rosy apple-like cheeks, non-plussed, vacant. “The transcript of Fordham’s recording!” She swallowed hard, marshalling her composure. “I thought you’d like a copy…” Her words tailed off at a gradient, but her breaths were now longer and less audible. Her last sentence had an aura of incompletion about it and this was spotted by McKay.

  He rallied. “Super. Thanks. Please call me Mark, by the way.” He tried to appear simply sad, rather than downright sullen. Sutton proffered a faint smile back and nodded, looking up at and directly into McKay’s hazel eyes; watery and weary.

  “Well, okay, sir; I’m Amy… or Amantha. Like Mum, like gran, too, come to mention it! Ha!” McKay’s eyebrows were lifted a little by her words and by her breezy tone.

  “An interesting and a pleasant name,” said McKay, nodding his approval. “Probably Aramaic. Possibly a variant on Samantha, and certainly not anything to do with the ancient Greek word for ‘tower’ or ‘look-out post’, as some might have you believe! Which do you prefer? Amy or Amantha, that is!” At last, he noticed a measure of levity had returned to his voice. Sutton had discerned it, too.