The Unkindest Cut

by Gerald Hammond

  The other three couples at their dinner table proved compatible. Conversation was wide ranging but after the first week was beginning to slow. The subject of mugging was mentioned. One of the couples was an Irish professor and his wife. He said that he had been mugged in the street at Naples. ‘And by my own wife,’ he added.

  His wife, who had a truly Irish temper that her husband enjoyed triggering, seemed to be on the point of explosion so Jane decided on a quick change of topic before the tranquillity of the trip should be endangered. She mentioned the activities of Knifeman including the insertion of the microchip. The story of the wedding seemed largely irrele-vant and she limited herself to a mention of the credit card slips that had found their way there.

  There was an immediate stirring of interest. ‘Has anyone been arrested?’ the professor’s wife asked.

  ‘They hadn’t up to when we left home, a week ago yesterday,’ Jane said.

  ‘And you haven’t phoned up to ask?’ said the husband of the youngest couple in tones of amazement. Jane suspected that they also were honeymooners. ‘But you must. Why not ring up now?’

  ‘Knowing wouldn’t change anything,’ Roland said. ’We’ll hear all about it when we get home.’

  ‘But we won’t,’ the young man’s even younger wife pointed out. ‘Go on, phone.’

  ‘My phone’s locked in the safe in our cabin,’ Jane said. ‘I check it once a day for voicemail and that’s quite enough. In my job the phone only brings bad news so I can do without it on … on holiday.’

  The young wife reached into her husband’s pocket. ‘Use this one.’

  There was a murmur of agreement around the table. Jane bowed to the will of the majority, only too well aware that the cost of mobile phone calls to Britain from abroad approached the cost of brain surgery without NHS support. She keyed in a well-remembered number and found Ian at home. The phone was loud and the others could hear him say that, no, there had been no arrest yet. They were looking into the possibility of getting more sensitive microwave detectors. ‘I’m glad you called,’ he carried on. ‘I was hesitating whether to call you. There was an attempt to break into your house but the intruder was chased away by the combination of your dog and your locum.’ And how was Jane enjoying her honeymoon?

  Damn and blast! She terminated the call as quickly as she could without downright rudeness.

  ‘So you’re newly-weds!’ said the professor’s wife. ‘How sweet!’

  ‘Not as sweet as all that,’ said Jane. ‘We had been partners for a year or more.’ She hurried on, hoping to put that admission behind them, and told the story of the wedding, the puppy and the wedding gown. Hilarity reduced most of the table to tears of mirth. The professor’s wife’s vision became so blurred that she blew her nose on her napkin. The transparency of the nightdress Jane did not dwell on.

  The company remained more interested in Knifeman. The professor turned out to have some knowledge of microchip technology. ‘Your friend the detective inspector needn’t waste his time looking for more sensitive detectors. The fault isn’t in the detectors. Those little microchips for implanting have to be small enough to spare the animal discomfort. They don’t have to be powerful enough to register at any distance, not like the transponders they put on a wild animal to track its movements.’

  The other young husband was similarly knowledgeable but disagreed. ‘I don’t think the microchip could have a power source of its own. It would receive an incoming signal and use that to power the reply. A boosted signal would be all you’d need.’

  ‘I’ll tell Ian.’

  It would have been a pity to be in touch with so much, if discordant, expertise without exploiting it. When she asked the question the two men were agreed that lead foil under the shirt would be enough to negate the signal.

  ‘But just fancy being on those sort of terms with a police inspector!’ said the professor’s wife. She had shown signs of IRA sympathies. ‘What would a burglar be looking for in your house? Do you think it’s connected to the burglary at your surgery?’

  Jane and Roland had already agreed to avoid mentioning the supposed Raeburn painting. ‘I don’t suppose that there’s a connection with Knifeman,’ Roland said. ‘Probably an opportunist thief who thought the house would be empty.’ It had been a leading question. Surely, he thought, the professor’s wife could not be in league with a team of burglars and looking for information about valuables; but you never knew. The IRA was reputed to have links with organized crime. ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘the inspector may have spread the word of our absence as a trap.’ You can spread that around and welcome, he thought.

  With the agreement of the telephone’s owner he called Ian again. ‘I suppose the house is in turmoil?’ he said. ‘Everything upside down and fingerprint powder everywhere?’ There was an embarrassed silence from the other end. ‘Do us a favour,’ Roland said. ‘Ask Helen Maple to clean the house for us – at our expense,’ he added quickly before Ian could rush to the defence of his budget. Further inspiration hit him. ‘And would you mind asking Helen whether she’d like to take on light housekeeping duties for us, say three mornings a week at the going rate.’

  ‘What brought that on?’ Jane asked when the call had finished and the other couples were engaged in a new conversation of their own.

  Roland shrugged. ‘We’re both working now. You’re becoming stressed and that’s not good for the baby, or for you, and I’m not clever at domestic things. We can afford some help, so let’s have it.’

  Jane felt her heart swell with love. At last he was thinking of her. It was unlikely to last but the most difficult part of any process is to begin it.

  TWELVE

  Jane and Roland returned home tanned, relaxed and with renewed energy. Roland’s laptop was loaded with ideas, snatches and whole chapters of works that he was determined to plunge ahead with. Jane’s locum had earned her one or two bad marks by mistaken diagnoses but at least he had walked Sheba and, with Helen’s help, had left the house and the surgery almost clean and fairly tidy. Sheba, the young Labrador, was suspicious of these newcomers for a few minutes and then, when recognition surfaced, went half mad with joy at their return.

  It took only a day to restore the familiar muddle. Soon, Roland was engrossed in printouts. Jane, for her part, found that some clients had put off consulting the locum about lumps and limps until they could get Jane’s personal attention, even if they had to wait for an appointment some days ahead. Jane was in the middle of breaking the worst possible news to a devoted cat owner when Ian telephoned.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Jane told him, sounding more stressed than sorry. The relaxing effect of a holiday seldom lasts much longer than the journey home. ‘If you want to jump the queue and take priority over all my other customers, you’ll have to arrest me. I am a busy professional and my first responsibilities are to my clients. I quite understand that the victim of a crime is only a bloody nuisance with few if any rights, but if you want to treat me as a witness you can make an appointment and send somebody to see me at home.’

  Ian sighed audibly. ‘I’ll come myself this evening, eightish. See you then at Whinmount.’

  Jane disconnected grumpily. She had rather been enjoying bossing a fairly senior policeman around.

  Promptly at eight, Ian Fellowes arrived at the door of Whinmount. The day was cold and damp, a shock to the system after the Greek islands. One of the few alterations that Jane had made since inheriting the house had been to have the garage added with a covered way to a side door. The covered way also acted as a porte cochère. Ian was therefore able to reach the house dry. Jane took him into the sitting room where Roland was already seated with a pad on his knee, drafting more ideas for his novel, a murder mystery in which the victim was pushed into a volcano on Santorini. Upon Ian’s entrance into the room, the future blockbuster was laid aside.

  Ian was always willing to extend his hours of duty but he was just as flexible about other rules. He accepted a small Scotch. ‘You m
ust be busy after skiving off for a fortnight or more,’ he said to them both, ‘but we’ve struggled along without you. Now comes the time for catching up. Have you remembered any more facts, presences, descriptions, anything that might help us?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ Jane said.

  Roland grunted agreement but added the words of advice from their table companions on the cruise.

  ‘I had already gleaned those fragments of information elsewhere,’ Ian said. ‘Have you thought of anything that somebody, Knifeman in particular, might have wanted to get from this house?’

  ‘Same answer,’ Roland said.

  ‘Then I may as well start updating you. There was another attack while you were away disporting yourselves. That’s why I didn’t come down to see you at your surgery, Jane. We’ve been passing it off as an accident. We don’t want the news to leak out for fear of copycat crime – which as far as we know we haven’t got yet.’

  Roland and Jane sat dumbly for a few seconds. Then Jane said, ‘Had this already happened when I spoke to you from the ship? And was anybody hurt?’

  ‘And if so, who?’ Roland asked.

  Ian sighed. ‘Yes, it had happened the previous day but I wasn’t going to broadcast the story and I’ll be grateful if you talk about it as little as possible. Do you know Minnie Pilrig?’

  ‘Plumpish lady?’ Jane said. ‘Late middle age? Acts as stand-in shop assistant for several shopkeepers?’

  Ian raised his eyebrows. Jane had erred on the charitable side. Minnie was elderly and had passed beyond plumpish to definitely fat, but no doubt Jane was doing as she would be done by. ‘That’s the one,’ he confirmed. ‘She was looking after my father-in-law’s shop. The strict orders laid down by his partner, the money man, are that all cash bar the one-hundred-pound float goes into the night safe at the bank when closing up each evening. It was dusk and Knifeman was waiting on the doorstep when she stepped out to go across to the bank. She tried to hang on to the bag and got a cut face as a reward.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Jane said. ‘Such a cheery person, with a smile and a kind word for everybody.’

  ‘She’s a chatterbox,’ Ian said, frowning. Clearly the age-old dichotomy between the sexes was at work. ‘Anyway, she isn’t dead yet, nor likely to be. She’s in the cottage hospital here, rather sorry for herself and very vocal about what she’ll get her nephew to do to Knifeman if they catch him.’

  ‘She’d better not hold her breath,’ Jane said. ‘Her nephew delivers our milk and he jumps at shadows.’

  ‘Good!’ Ian said. ‘We can do without a lot of vigilantes around here. The worry is that it seems our attacker is trying his – or her – hand at different methods of extracting money any way they can. A doorstep mugging – with violence this time – is a phase beyond what they’ve done so far, thank goodness, but it either shows the need for money is getting more acute, or they’re getting a taste for it. Both reasons are worrying for us considering we have no ideas as to the identity yet. And Mrs Pilrig wasn’t much help in that area. Her description of her attacker was beyond belief.’

  ‘Your father-in-law won’t be pleased,’ Roland said.

  ‘That he is not. Luckily there was only about three hundred in cash in the bag – sometimes it may be several times that – but his insurers are being sticky because he let Mrs Pilrig carry so much money without any protection. He wants me to speak to them for him because, after all, it is we police who discourage armed bodyguards. That’s the gospel according to my revered father-in-law.’

  ‘And to think,’ said Jane, ‘that I was on the point of asking him to guard me whenever I go to the night safe.’

  ‘But you’re not a criminal,’ Roland said. ‘Only the criminal is allowed to defend himself.’

  Ian looked indignant but refused to rise to the bait. It was an old argument and Jane made little use of the night safe anyway.

  Jane was uncertain whether, in not reporting her knowledge about dogfighting, she was committing a crime, so Roland’s comment put an end to her part in the discussion.

  ‘How badly marked is Mrs Pilrig?’ Roland asked. ‘Is her beauty spoiled for ever?’

  Jane contented herself with a ‘Humpf!’ but Ian said, ‘She’ll have a scar, no doubt about it. She says that if she was a man she’d pass it off as a duelling scar.’

  ‘Is she getting visitors?’ Roland asked.

  ‘One or two. Keith had arrived back from delivering a very expensive rifle just seconds after it happened and he lifted her into the shop and called the ambulance. The Square was empty at the time with everybody having their tea in front of the telly, so the drama passed unobserved. We’ve been calling it an accidental fall against a boot-scraper. We asked her to keep it that way and she’s been having fun phoning her friends and relations and passing on the same tale, gradually elaborating the story until it’s getting near the borderline of credibility. But we’ll have to let the truth out soon so that people will know to be even more careful.’ Ian made a face. ‘We just don’t know what comes next. Does he take fright and stop or, now that he’s drawn blood, will he get a taste for it and look for another victim? We can’t guess. Psychologists employed by the police have gone beyond reality so often that nobody believes them any more.

  ‘Peeling away the exaggerations occasioned by a dramatic attack on an imaginative old lady, Mrs Pilrig gave us pretty much the same description as you did, Jane, and the Dodd boy. She gave us one extra piece of information, a rather uncertain piece. She thinks that she smelled aftershave on him, the commonest one around here. The chemist says it’s the one that all the women give their menfolk at Christmas if they can’t think of anything else, so it doesn’t carry us much further forward except to suggest that Knifeman is probably male.’

  ‘That’s not exactly conclusive,’ Jane said. ‘When I get a spot – it doesn’t happen often, thank God, just now and again – I give it a dab with Roland’s aftershave. The alcohol in it seems to be the best there is for drying up a pimple.’

  ‘I’ll pass that tip on to my nephew,’ Ian said. ‘His life’s being made miserable by teenage acne at the moment.’

  ‘Tell him that it only lasts about five years, ten at the most,’ Roland said. ‘That should cheer him up.’

  ‘You’re evil,’ said his wife. ‘Evil.’

  ‘Does that bother you?’

  ‘Not a lot. Not when you’re only evil with me.’ Roland and Jane smirked at each other, being rather amused by the direction of the conversation. Ian, on the other hand, thought it was probably time to take his leave and departed Whinmount promptly.

  THIRTEEN

  The successor to the jeweller for whom the surgery had originally been built was now only a few doors further along the Square. Central to that window and outshining a display of cheap watches and chromium plated cutlery, for the previous few weeks a necklace of three strands of pearls had glowed discreetly on a base of black velvet sculpted after the manner of a female neck. It was rumoured that a certain lady, wife of a prominent politician and chatelaine of a castle tucked away in a glen many kilometres away from Newton Lauder, had sold this wedding present to the jeweller in order to raise funds to settle a gambling debt. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the rumour, the necklace had been written up in a glossy magazine so there could be no doubt about the genuineness of its components.

  Jane would not have been lured from the path of virtue by any diamond on earth, a girl’s best friend or not, but she admitted to herself that she did have a thing for pearls. Even the sale of the Raeburn painting would not have enabled the purchase of these perfectly matched and graded jewels, but she did yearn secretly for the lovely thing on the rare occasions when she dropped her takings into the night safe at the bank. This she might do on one evening a week when there was enough cash to merit the precaution. Jane never held a clinic on a Saturday, reserving it, along with occasional weekdays, as her day for making calls at farms, so on some Friday evenings she made that pilgrimage.

&n
bsp; On a Friday ten days after her return from honeymoon, Jane walked past the jeweller’s window, keeping her eyes stonily averted rather than pause where Knifeman might fancy a second attack on her. At the bank a certain dexterity amounting to sleight of hand was called for because it was her custom to carry a decoy package openly while the real cash was hidden in a less bulky but much more valuable envelope in her underwear. Fumbling inside her coat and the waistband of her skirt she retrieved it, posting it through the night safe slot and replacing it with the decoy package.

  On the return trip, walking carefully for fear of displacing the thick envelope, she felt free to pause for a lustful glance in the jeweller’s window; and she was immediately uneasy. Black clouds, which had seemed to be a feature of that so-called summer, had covered the sky; dusk seemed to have arrived hours early but it was too soon for street lights and the jeweller’s shop was generally the brightest thing in the Square. The necklace had vanished from the window.

  Jane had met the jeweller, Mr Golspie – a shrewd old man with a beaming smile and several gold teeth – on the doorstep of the bank only the previous day and he had said that he planned to send the necklace to a jewellery fair in London in a month’s time. Until then, it would continue to be a draw for customers who called to admire but often lingered to purchase something closer to their means.