Bareback

by John Burke

  ‘Could you ask her to ring the police station when she gets in?’

  ‘The police station? What’s going on? What is it?’

  ‘We’d rather talk to your mother first.’

  It was getting dark when a call came to the police station. Mrs Ferguson wanted to know what on earth the fuss was about, and why had the police been round to her house frightening her daughter? When she opened the front door she was seething with hostility even before knowing the purpose of this visit.

  ‘What’s going on? Don’t tell me my husband’s been run over?’

  ‘May we come in, Mrs Ferguson?’ Lesley and the WPC followed Hannah into the sitting-room. ‘I’m afraid we do have bad news.’

  ‘He has been run over?’

  Hannah lowered herself on to the couch below an imitation Lalique wall lamp and put on a suitably brave face. The young WPC also assumed the appropriate expression, professionally grave and sympathetic.

  Lesley said: ‘Mr Ferguson was found dead this afternoon.’

  ‘Dead? So there has been an accident? Or he’s had a stroke, or something?’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s been attacked,’ said Lesley. ‘Murdered.’

  Hannah looked as if she might burst out laughing. ‘No, I’ll no be believing that. Who’d ever think of killing Archie? Who’d want to?’

  ‘That’s what we intend to find out.’

  Hannah reached for a box of tissues on the table by the couch and began mopping her eyes. It seemed the appropriately dramatic thing to do. ‘Look, where’s this supposed to have happened?’

  ‘He was discovered inside the cairn near Black Knowe.’

  ‘What on earth would he have been doing there?’

  Dying, thought Lesley; but did not say it aloud.

  ‘Mrs Ferguson, can you think of anybody who –’

  ‘I cannae think straight.’

  That seemed reasonable enough in the circumstances. Lesley gave her a couple of minutes and then saw she was waiting for more questions, like an actress impatient with a colleague forgetting her lines.

  ‘Mrs Ferguson, do you think you’re up to coming and making a formal identificaton?’

  ‘You mean you don’t really know if it’s Archie, after all?’

  ‘We’re pretty certain. Sir Nicholas, who found him –’

  ‘He found him?’

  ‘Sir Nicholas tells us he had been out checking the route he has to follow on the final Riding Day, and on his way back –’

  ‘He says it’s my husband.’

  ‘Yes. But we do need a close member of the family to . . . confirm the identity of the deceased.’

  There was no hesitation. ‘I’ll come.’

  Hannah sat regally upright in the car taking them to the mortuary. If there had been crowds lining the streets, Lesley felt, she might have brought herself to wave in gracious sorrow to them.

  Archie’s cranium had been lightly bandaged, for cosmetic rather than medical reasons. His face was a ghastly pallor, and his mouth was slightly open as if to frame a niggly protest.

  ‘Mrs Ferguson?’

  ‘Yes. That’s Archie.’

  Lesley stood ready to support the widow if she felt faint. But Hannah showed no sign of collapsing or needing any prop. She simply stared at Archie’s dead, drained face with the concentrated air of one adding things up in her head and seeking a solution.

  ‘Is your daughter at home?’ Lesley asked at last.

  ‘I suppose so. After she’d told me about your call, she went off upstairs. You’re not thinking of questioning her?’

  ‘Not right now, no. I just wanted to make sure there’d be someone in the house with you. I wouldn’t want you to be left alone at a time like this.’

  ‘Might as well be, so far as that selfish . . .’ Hannah checked herself, and dabbed her dry eyes. ‘Who could have done it? I mean, he wasn’t important enough for anyone to kill him.’

  ‘We’ll find out. Now, let me have someone run you home. We’ll have to come and ask you some further questions, of course. But do take it easy, Mrs Ferguson. You may find yourself getting a bit shaky with delayed shock. If you or Kirsty want to get in touch with us, or if you’d like me to have a word with your doctor –’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  Hannah did not waste even the sketch of a kiss on her dead husband’s brow before walking out at a measured pace, already intensifying the solemnity which her part demanded she should play.

  *

  Detective Chief Inspector Rutherford arrived first thing Monday morning. He was grumpy about the intrusion on whatever else he might have been working on, but once here he was determined to wrap the whole thing up fast and get back to his own patch.

  He was in his middle thirties, with a thin Edinburgh accent and a face that was naturally lopsided, not crushed that way by the attentions of sadistic villains. His right shoulder and right eyebrow appeared to have lifted in an ironic shrug of disbelief and failed to settle back again. When he half saluted Lesley there was a suggestion of a jibe rather than a friendly gesture.

  ‘I’ve heard about you, Les. And I’m Jack Rutherford. Jack, not Jock, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘It’s all the same to me.’

  ‘Right. What have we got?’

  Formal identification having been recorded, the autopsy had confirmed the cause of death as two or three blows to the head with one of the loose stones from the cairn. A trace of blood and a few hairs on the lintel might suggest that he had blundered into it; but blows to the occipital region had been deliberate and savage, the last one leaving the stone embedded in splintered bone and leaking tissue. Time of death probably between nineteen and twenty-two hours on the Friday evening. It was not easy on purely medical grounds to say whether the murder could have been carried out before the body was dumped in the cairn, but SOCO reported that the amount of blood on the earth and the direction of blood droplets spattered up the nearest inner wall suggested it had been carried out just within the doorway. Traces on the lintel tied in with that. Evidence for anything happening outside would be hard to come by, since the heavy rain had washed marks of any footprints away, and such blood as remained in the doorway could have trickled from the head wound where it lay, rather than dripping from the corpse as it was carried or dragged in.

  A cadaveric spasm had tightened Ferguson’s fingers round the quaich, so that for a time it would have been difficult for the killer to prise it loose, if that had been his intention.

  The pathologist added that Ferguson’s stomach contents indicated he had eaten nothing since a meagre breakfast the day before he was found. It might be relevant, depending on the man’s usual routine and why, if at all, it had been broken.

  ‘Right,’ said Rutherford. ‘Let’s go see this place. On the way you can fill me in on who’s who and what they’re up to.’

  They parked below Black Knowe tower. Rutherford ducked under a stretch of tape, rippling in the breeze, and trod gingerly towards the cairn and a patch of ground being photographed from several angles by a young man with a ring in one ear and a ponytail at the back of an otherwise bald head. Rutherford’s nose wrinkled. But the photographer was crisp and competent enough when he stood up and indicated the marks of a tyre imprint.

  It was blurred but still deep in the muddy verge of the lane. The assumption was that the car had braked and veered slightly off the lane, stopping close to the cairn, and then swung back again. Although so close to Black Knowe, the marks were not those of the owner’s Saab. It ought not to be too difficult to identify the treads and the owner of the vehicle if he was local.

  As they drove away from the scene of the crime, Lesley went on running through the findings so far. Rutherford listened in silence for five minutes, then said: ‘When and where was this Ferguson last seen? And who by? That’s where we start.’

  ‘Assuming Ferguson was in his office Friday afternoon – and it’d be unusual if he wasn’t – his secretary might have something to tell
us. She’ll know more about his commitments than anyone.’

  ‘Will she be in the office, or at home?’

  ‘If I know anything about her, she’ll be at work just as usual. Maybe didn’t hear the news till she came out this morning.’

  ‘Don’t they have telephones in this dump? Or do they have to wait for the town crier?’

  Miss Elliot had in fact heard, but could not come to grips with the situation. Her reaction was more genuinely miserable than Hannah Ferguson’s. She stared pitifully ahead as Rutherford opened up with brutal directness; then let out a dreadful wail and began to weep tears which refused to stop. Lesley put an arm round her shoulders. Jack Rutherford leaned against a filing cabinet, waiting without any obvious compassion.

  At last Miss Elliot spluttered out a few words. They were not unlike some of Hannah’s words, but more heartfelt. ‘But who could have murdered Mr Ferguson? Who’d want to?’

  Lesley propped herself uncomfortably against the arm of Miss Elliot’s chair. ‘Do you feel up to answering a few questions?’

  Miss Elliot blew her nose resoundingly. ‘Anything to help. Anything to find out . . . get whoever . . .’ She was in danger of bursting into tears again.

  Briskly Rutherford said: ‘Mr Ferguson was in his office as usual on Friday afternoon?’

  ‘As usual, yes.’

  ‘Did anybody come to see him, or did he leave with anybody?’

  ‘This lady was here in the morning.’ Miss Elliot bobbed her head towards Lesley. ‘But nobody in the afternoon until after he’d gone.’ She had been a meticulous secretary, and now was determined to go on being meticulous. Or fussy, if you chose to see it that way. ‘He’d done without lunch, which was most unusual. He seemed very busy with some papers. And he left much earlier than usual.’

  ‘Do you know where he was going?’

  ‘I knew he had a meeting that evening. About the Common Riding, and the loss of the quaich, and all that.’

  ‘And you say somebody did come after he had left?’

  ‘There was Mrs Telfer about some family question.’

  ‘What sort of question?’

  ‘Confidential,’ said Miss Elliot frigidly.

  ‘Miss Elliot, this is a murder enquiry.’

  ‘I can’t see what Mrs Telfer’s maintenance money would have to do with it.’

  Rutherford decided not to pursue this one. ‘Any other callers?’

  ‘Mr Brown. That Jamie Brown.’

  ‘And how confidential was Mr Brown’s business?’

  ‘It was probably something to do with the Cameron estate, but I couldn’t be saying.’

  ‘Couldn’t,’ said Rutherford, ‘or wouldn’t?’

  ‘All I know is Mr Brown said it could wait. Said he’d have a word with Mr Ferguson at the meeting that evening.’

  Rutherford glanced at the DI. ‘We’ve got this Brown’s address?’

  ‘We have.’ Lesley was still close by Miss Elliot’s side. ‘You did say,’ she prompted, ‘that Mr Ferguson left unusually early. Was there anything else unusual about him going off like that?’

  Miss Elliot frowned at an iritating memory. ‘Only that he did take a lot of those papers with him in his briefcase.’

  ‘Papers? Connected with the meeting?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ She tightened her thin lips reproachfully. Clearly she had expected to be in her employer’s confidence at all times. ‘I don’t know why he didn’t bother to tell me. Most unlike him.’ She softened. ‘Maybe it was because he was in such a hurry.’

  Lesley leaned towards Jack Rutherford. ‘There were no papers with the body.’

  ‘Could be he dropped them off somewhere first. Though if they were meant for the meeting . . . Do we know if he ever got to that meeting? And if so, what time it broke up?’

  ‘We’ll have to see the Convenor.’ Lesley steeled herself to ask a question which she knew would provoke indignation from Miss Elliot. ‘You never saw any sign in the office – when you were filing, or clearing out drawers – of the missing quaich?’

  Her prediction had been right. Colour flamed back into Miss Elliot’s cheeks. ‘Certainly not. Mr Ferguson? It’s unthinkable.’

  ‘And of course you wouldn’t know if he had kept it at home.’

  ‘Unthinkable,’ Miss Elliot repeated.

  Nevertheless, Archie Ferguson had been found with it in the crook of his arm when he died.

  *

  ‘I’d like to see this weird widow,’ said Rutherford. ‘Think she’ll be up to questioning by now?’

  In DI Gunn’s professional view, Hannah Ferguson would at all times be ready to be questioned and ready with aggressive answers. She would have got her breath back by now and be developing the juiciest aspects of the role she must play.

  It was no surprise to find her already dressed in a black blouse and black skirt. When she led them in and sat down, it was with a dignity which the mourning Queen Victoria would have envied.

  Rutherford wasted no time on commiserations. ‘Miss Elliot says that your husband left the office early, with some papers. Presumably he came here before going to his meeting?’

  She hesitated for the briefest of moments. ‘Yes, he had a snack and went off to his meeting.’

  Lesley tensed. ‘What sort of snack? Something light – a quick sandwich, or a round of toast? Cup of tea?’

  ‘Oh, how on earth should I . . . well, no, he’d have had a meat pie and pickle and a piece of cheese and a cup of tea. Always the same, before he went out to one of those useless meetings.’

  ‘Why do you say he’d have had it, Mrs Ferguson?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. He always did. Never had an original idea in his head.’

  ‘You were here, weren’t you? I mean, you can remember seeing what he actually did have?’

  ‘Of course. I was telling you, that’s what he always had.’

  ‘But did you actually see him eating it?’

  ‘I wasn’t in the habit of standing over him, no.’

  ‘Can you remember the exact time?’

  ‘Must have been . . . well, he usually gets in just after six.’

  ‘But Miss Elliot said he left much earlier than usual.’

  ‘I can’t be expected to check on the clock every minute of the day.’ Hannah was ready to flare up; but checked herself and resumed her regal remoteness. ‘But it could have been half past five, now I come to think of it. Or a bit earlier.’

  ‘You can’t be more definite?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t check every little move he makes . . . made.’

  ‘Was he carrying the quaich when he got in, or when he left?’

  ‘The quaich?’ She looked shaken. ‘Why should he have been?’

  ‘It was found on the body. Did he have it with him when he left this house?’

  A bead of sweat glistened on Hannah’s forehead. ‘Not that I saw.’

  ‘It would be rather hard to conceal it from you, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.’

  Lesley felt that this was out of character for Hannah Ferguson.

  She ventured: ‘Weren’t you worried when he didn’t come back Friday night?’

  Hannah was beginning to sound flustered. ‘I thought he must have gone on after the meeting to tidy up some loose ends with one of the committee. They could have had a late sitting over something. Oh, I don’t know. I still can’t believe it.’

  She decided this was a good moment to bow her face into her handkerchief. Lesley caught a sceptical glance from Jack Rutherford. He was beginning to get the drift of the local characters, starting with the most outrageous of them.

  Footsteps came down the stairs, and Kirsty came into the room. Oddly, thought Lesley, Hannah looked apprehensive at the mere sight of her daughter.

  Rutherford was introduced to Kirsty. They studied each other in a prickly silence. The two detectives were in mute agreement that the silence should be allowed to continue as long as possible.<
br />
  There was something tingling in the atmosphere.

  Rutherford reluctantly broke the silence. ‘Miss Ferguson, were you here on Friday evening when your father got home?’

  ‘I’m not Miss Ferguson, and he’s not my father.’

  ‘Sorry, I –’

  ‘Her stepfather,’ Hannah supplied, and could not resist adding: ‘One of them. Kirsty is a Torrance.’

  ‘Ah. Well. What time did you get in that night, Kirsty?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I’d been out, I . . . no, I can’t be sure.’

  ‘Mr Ferguson wasn’t here?’

  ‘Well, you’ve already told us he’d been murdered, so he couldn’t have been, could he?’

  ‘And before you went out –’

  ‘Leave the child alone.’ Hannah was getting snappish. ‘You’ll never get any sense out of her.’

  ‘Nor a word of truth out of you.’ Kirsty left the room as abruptly as she had entered. She must have been taking lessons in histrionic gestures from her mother.

  Faint vibrations of unease, near panic, lingered after her exit.

  Lesley eased her way into the echoes. ‘Now could we get back to that business of Mr Ferguson not coming home? Didn’t it occur to you by Saturday morning to report him as missing?’

  ‘No. Make us look such fools if . . . well, when he showed up.’

  ‘You’ve said you weren’t worried when he didn’t get back from the meeting he was supposed to have gone to, but surely –’

  ‘I must have gone to bed earlier than usual. And when I got up, I . . . well, I went out shopping early.’

  ‘Without noticing he wasn’t there for breakfast?’

  ‘He often made his own breakfast and went out early.’

  ‘On a Saturday?’

  ‘Oh, all he ever thought about was work. Plod, plod, plod.’ She spoke as vindictively as if Archie were still alive and there were still old scores to be settled.

  ‘You have – you had – separate bedrooms?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s any business of yours.’

  ‘It would help to explain why you weren’t aware of his absence.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I see.’ Hannah grabbed at this. ‘Yes, if you must know. We do. We did.’

  It seemed a good dramatic moment for memories to come flowing back, forcing her to take refuge in the handkerchief again.