A Brace of Skeet

by Gerald Hammond

  The tall man – he topped even Mr Munro by at least an inch – looked almost relieved. ‘There was nothing like that. Have they finished in the house?’ he asked one of his subordinates. The man bustled away.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ I said. ‘It’s possible to shoot by yourself, holding the remote control in your left hand, but it’s difficult. The club has an acoustic release, which sends the bird when you call, by responding to the sound of your voice. If he’d planned to shoot Skeet on his own, he’d have plugged it in. Do you want me to look and see if it’s been plugged in somewhere else?’

  ‘Later, perhaps. We haven’t been able to make contact with any of the club officials,’ he said to Mr Munro. ‘Except the deceased, of course.’

  ‘The secretary is Mr Glencorse,’ I said. ‘He’s an engineer, but I don’t know where he works. Sir Peter Hay is the chairman.’

  Mr Munro tutted. ‘I wish you’d said that sooner. When Wallace James said that you had gone with your uncle, I telephoned Sir Peter to ask where you were likely to be found.’

  Superintendent McHarg wasted no words on what might have been. ‘Get on the radio,’ he told the other hanger-on. ‘Get a message to Sir Peter Hay. Ask him to meet you at wherever they’ve taken the body, to make formal identification. Then, if he can make himself available, he’d better come out here.’ He switched his eyes, which were grey and rather macho, to me. ‘Can you describe Mr Tullos?’

  ‘Easily,’ I said. ‘He is or was about three inches taller than me, middle-aged going on elderly, rather thin and totally bald. He had a pointed nose, rather rat-like but not in a nasty sort of way. And he walked with a limp.’

  He nodded. ‘That sounds very much like the dead man. What do you know about him?’

  When I came to think about it, Mr Tullos had been a background figure, somebody to be contended with rather than engaged in conversation. I gathered up the fragments that I knew. ‘He was in the police at one time,’ I said.

  Mr McHarg stared at me. ‘Not in this force, surely?’

  ‘No, not here. His accent was local but I think he served in Glasgow. From what he said, his limp was the result of an injury while on duty, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have been spinning a tale. He was pensioned and he worked abroad for a while before he took the job here. I don’t believe he was paid much of a salary – I’ve heard him grumble about it – but he lived rent-free in the house, earned fees for coaching, and I think there were a few perks. In return he looked after the place, took the money for cartridges and day memberships and so on, arranged competitions at weekends and did everything down to serving light meals, filling the coffee machines and putting new paper in the shunkies. Anything you wanted, you asked Mr Tullos for it, and, if he liked you, you got it. Not many people got what they wanted.’

  ‘He was unpopular?’

  I thought carefully before I answered. ‘I don’t want to exaggerate,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of anybody who liked him much but I don’t know of anybody who hated him – certainly not enough to kill him. He was a cantankerous old cuss and more interested in the place itself than in its members. For instance, he tried to get dogs banned although many of the members like to shoot with their dogs beside them. It’s the best way to teach a dog that a shot doesn’t necessarily mean a retrieve. He was a good shot but, frankly, he wasn’t a good teacher.’ The men were listening raptly. I paused and tried to think of some more goodies for them. ‘When he arranged competitions at the weekends, which were usually English Sporting—’

  ‘That is what you would call FITASC,’ Mr Munro put in. ‘Springing grouse and suchlike.’

  Evidently my words of wisdom had fallen short. FITASC resembles English Sporting and yet is quite different and much more difficult. ‘—he used to enter and win more than his fair share,’ I said firmly. ‘He waited until he saw who had turned up, and if there was nobody there who was good at . . .’ I paused. For the moment I could think of nothing but springing teal and driven grouse, either of which would have exposed Mr Munro’s total ignorance of the subject. ‘. . . any particular bird,’ I resumed, ‘that’s what we got. And, which was worse, when he won he got cocky about it.’

  ‘Were there any times when tempers flared?’

  ‘Off and on,’ I said. ‘He could be pleasant when he wanted to, but he had a rough edge to his tongue and some of the members . . . Well, it isn’t only the gentry who have the money these days. Some of the members and visitors work on the oil-rigs or in industry. I’ve heard some slanging-matches and a lot of language my mother didn’t appreciate.’

  ‘Your mother?’ The Superintendent’s more chauvinist preconceptions were being outraged.

  ‘We have a family membership and she sometimes comes along for the fun of it. She’s quite good at Sporting although she isn’t a serious competitor, like some. Clay shooters take it more seriously than game shots,’ I explained. ‘A sociable man who enjoys the country scene may go shooting game or pests and come clay-busting now and again to keep his eye in. Regular clay shooters are a different breed. They get into it because they enjoy shooting, but also because they’re competitive by nature. Some of them are only out for fun and practice, but there’s a percentage who’re fighting their way to the top or to stay there, or who pay for their shooting with what they can win at competitions. Those ones can have very short fuses.’

  ‘Punch-ups?’ the Superintendent asked eagerly.

  ‘Very, very rare,’ I said. ‘Raised voices are permissible, raised fists are not. Violence is dangerous when there are guns around, so a man can get himself banned that way. And remember that these aren’t street-corner rowdies. These are men who are getting rid of all their aggression in competitiveness and noise.’ I almost added that violence is the prerogative of men without any better outlet, but doubted whether he would accept such philosophising from me. The Superintendent was undoubtedly sexist. Besides, I knew that I was talking too much.

  The first minion came back then, to say that the search of the house had been finished. Superintendent McHarg began to move in that direction.

  ‘It is time that I was going back to my desk,’ Mr Munro said. ‘Don’t hesitate to call on me again, Gordon, if I can be of any help.’

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘what about me? How do I get home?’

  ‘I’m sure that Superintendent McHarg can arrange transport for you. Do you want to keep my expert for any longer, Gordon?’

  Mr McHarg, I was sure, would have liked to tell him to take his expert away and lose her, or worse, but I was the nearest that he had to a witness with local knowledge. ‘Leave Miss Calder with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll see that she gets home. And . . . thank you, Hamish.’

  The last words came out with all the eager spontaneity of somebody passing a lump of coke. Chief Superintendent Munro had been enjoying his moment of triumph with a little too much relish. But he was escorted to his car with great courtesy and the two men sketched salutes. I remembered to recover Sam from the floor at the back. Mr Munro winked at me and then his driver swept him away.

  Superintendent McHarg stood looking after the car for a few seconds through narrowed eyes. Mr Munro might be an old friend and hold a superior rank, but he belonged to the uniformed branch, always considered to be an inferior calling by those in plain clothes. The patronage had rankled.

  ‘Right, young woman,’ he said. ‘Come with me and don’t let that dog wander one inch off the path.’ He stalked towards the club buildings. With the departure of my patron, politeness had become superfluous.

  I could have matched his rudeness – Mum says that I have inherited Dad’s hair-trigger – but I was becoming interested and had no wish to be packed off home like a naughty child. I put Sam on his lead and followed, trotting to keep up.

  First Minion fell in beside me. ‘Sergeant Fellowes,’ he said helpfully.

  ‘Deborah Calder,’ I replied. I put out my hand. He hesitated and then shook it without slowing down. I thought that he seemed rather s
urprised, as though such courtesies were not the norm between officers and witnesses. Later, I realised that he had been checking to see that my hand was clean enough to shake. With my clothes still dusty from ratting, I could hardly blame him.

  The Superintendent led us to a door in the gable of the club buildings. I attached Sam to a substantial boot-scraper and we went inside.

  ‘Without touching anything,’ the Superintendent said, ‘point out whatever you wanted to show me.’

  Mr Tullos, or somebody else, had kept the small house in meticulous order, although there were now signs of a search and a dusting of grey fingerprint powder on doorhandles and window latches. The living-room was barely large enough for a suite and a television set. The three-quarter bed in the main bedroom had been remade since Mr Tullos last occupied it. There was a spare bedroom so tiny that it accommodated only a pair of bunk-beds, one above the other. The kitchen, with dining alcove, was well equipped and tidy. The whole place was as compact as a caravan. Everything was on show except what I was looking for.

  ‘We’d better try the office,’ I said.

  The Superintendent frowned. ‘Is there an office?’ he asked the Sergeant.

  An expression of concern flitted across the Sergeant’s face. ‘I don’t think we could have missed a whole office, sir,’ he said.

  Mr McHarg looked at him as though one of his turds had answered him back. ‘I know that you can’t help being funny,’ he said, ‘but don’t be funny on purpose.’

  Sergeant Fellowes waited impassively.

  I had only been into the office from the clubhouse side, but I was sure that I had seen a door to the house. There was a door at the end of a short leg off the corridor which served as a hallway in the house and this seemed to be aligned more or less with the one off the clubroom. ‘Do you have Mr Tullos’s keys?’ I asked the Superintendent.

  ‘I have them,’ said Sergeant Fellowes. He pulled out a ring of keys and, after some fumbling with the security lock, opened the door. It swung open heavily to reveal another short corridor with a door each side and the clubroom door beyond. The Superintendent made a sound of disgust.

  The Sergeant looked for a moment like a small boy caught stealing apples. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘I thought that this was the same door that you see from the clubroom.’

  ‘From outside, you wouldn’t know it was there,’ I said consolingly. ‘No windows.’

  The door on our right – to the front of the building – was the store. I showed them the racked cartons of cartridges, clay pigeons and miscellaneous gear. Opposite was the office, a narrow room lit only by a heavily barred rooflight and a fluorescent tube. There was a desk littered with papers, several four-drawer filing cabinets and a large gun-safe.

  ‘Fetch Jimmy Johnson,’ Mr McHarg said. ‘We don’t touch anything until he’s checked for prints.’

  The Sergeant hurried out.

  On a corner of the desk there was a plastic case with compartments for six choke-tubes and a key. The first two chokes from the left were missing.

  A stout man of around fifty in an unsuitable tweed suit came in carrying an attaché case and looked expectantly at the Superintendent.

  ‘Could he check these first?’ I asked. ‘I doubt if anybody’s managed to leave a print inside one of them, but it’s possible. You can tell the chokes apart by feel.’

  Mr McHarg nodded.

  The stout man blew some grey powder into each of the chokes, shook his head, wiped them clean and replaced them in the case in their proper order. Without waiting for further instructions he moved on to the handles of the gun-safe, the door and the various drawers.

  The Superintendent, meanwhile, had been studying the diary which lay open on the desk. ‘Nothing after midday on Monday – yesterday – when he seems to have had an appointment with a B. Torry at twelve noon. Nothing today. H. Noble seems to have an appointment on Friday for ES. What would that be?’

  ‘English Sporting, I should think. It’s the discipline that game shooters tend to go for. Harry Noble has a dud shoulder. He has to shoot one-handed and he isn’t very good at it. He needs coaching and he probably decided to pay for it.’

  ‘Ah. Against yesterday it also says GC. Any ideas?’

  I wasted some seconds in profitless thought. ‘Gun Club,’ I suggested. ‘But that doesn’t mean anything. Golf Course? There’s a Gertrude Cowan among the members. Or there may be a man with those initials.’

  The Superintendent flicked over the pages of the diary with a letter opener. ‘GC turns up every second Monday,’ he said.

  ‘Probably somebody with a regular appointment for coaching,’ I suggested. ‘The club’s supposed to be shut on Mondays, to give the steward some time off, but Mr Tullos never minded opening up if there was something in it for himself. Or Gun Cleaning – he may have liked a reminder to give his own and the club’s guns a going-over once a fortnight.’

  I tried the choke-tubes from the case with my twenty-bore cartridge and found that they varied between a tight fit round the cartridge’s metal base to a loose fit which was only stopped by the rim.

  ‘So?’ the Superintendent said impatiently.

  ‘As I thought,’ I said. Even to myself I sounded like Sherlock Holmes at his most pompous. ‘If these chokes belong to the gun outside, then, as near as I can tell by a rough check, the gun’s fitted with full and three-quarter chokes. If he was planning to shoot Skeet, he’d have used the two from the other end of the row. For Sporting, maybe the two middle ones of the four still in the case, unless he was tackling very high birds. The chokes in the gun are for the going-away disciplines. They’re a rather different game. People tend to specialise in them or avoid them. Mr Tullos was an all-rounder but he preferred Skeet and Sporting.’

  ‘Hm,’ said the Superintendent. It was impossible to tell whether he had understood a single word. He frowned at me for most of a minute. ‘Drawing conclusions is my responsibility,’ he said at last. ‘But if I asked you what you concluded . . .?’

  ‘The gun out there looks very much like Mr Tullos’s own gun,’ I said. ‘He was very careful with it, so he’d certainly have taken the chokes out and oiled the threads before putting it away. It’s just possible that somebody came up here wanting to be coached in one of the going-away disciplines, and that this was the only gun which fitted him. I doubt that, because Mr Tullos was of average build and there are several club guns in that safe. My best guesses would be either that somebody swatted him with something like the blunt edge of a kitchen cleaver, tried to make it look like an accident but made a bad guess about the chokes; or that somebody challenged him at Down the Line or Ball-trap, with money on it, and then there was a quarrel with a similar result; or else that he saw something threatening outside – vandals, perhaps, or an old enemy – and he took the gun out with him for his own protection.’

  ‘If he was hurrying outside to meet some threat, would he hang about putting chokes into his gun?’

  ‘Nobody who cared for his gun would use it with internal chokes missing,’ I said. ‘The threads would be ruined.’

  I probably sounded shocked. The Superintendent looked amused for a moment, but then his frown came back. ‘We’ll have to treat this as a murder inquiry,’ he said. ‘Sergeant, take Miss Calder somewhere quiet and get a full statement.’

  ‘Then can I go home?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘We’d be grateful if you waited a little longer. There will be more questions.’

  Sergeant Fellowes led me back the way we had come. Somebody had given Sam a plastic box filled with water.

  ‘You?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘It’s hot in the sun. And he can’t leave off his fur coat as you can.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, picking up the lead. ‘That was very considerate. But I don’t have a fur coat.’

  ‘I’m a considerate sort of person,’ he said, ‘but on police pay you won’t get one from me.’ I looked at him suddenly and caught the smile in his eyes.
Instantly, he stopped being one of a mass of faceless figures in an authoritarian team and became an individual. At the same moment I knew, in the intangible way that such knowledge comes, that despite my unflattering rig and probably rather pedantic manner something in him was responding to something in me.

  ‘Did I drop you in it?’ I asked.

  ‘You did. But I was doomed to be dropped in it anyway. Better sooner than later.’

  He proved his considerateness by finding us a seat on a bench in the shade of the building and then going to fetch us each a plastic cup of coffee from the machine in the clubroom. I watched the searchers scouring the ground without any of us having the faintest idea what they were looking for. The Sergeant took a seat beside me, put his coffee down carefully on his other side and produced a notebook.

  ‘Before we begin,’ I said, ‘tell me what we’re talking about. Was he killed last night or this morning?’

  The Sergeant shrugged and then made a face. ‘Either,’ he said. ‘The police surgeon suggested late yesterday evening, but rigor and body temperature are very variable and defence counsel always knows it, so the doctors are always careful to allow themselves a lot of margin. In this case it’s not as big a margin as it sounds, because the sun doesn’t go down for very long, this far north and at this time of year. I suppose you could shoot until about eleven p.m. and then resume around three in the morning?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said.

  ‘Both well within the bracket. The pathologist may be able to be more exact if we happen to find out—’ The Sergeant chopped his sentence off.

  ‘When he ate his last meal?’ I finished for him. ‘It’s all right. I’m quite tough and I’ve been involved in these things before.’

  ‘I’ll remember. Was Mr Tullos usually early to bed and early to rise? Or the reverse?’

  I was about to say that I wouldn’t know because I’d never gone to bed with him. But when I thought about it I realised how imperceptibly knowledge can accumulate. The late Mr Tullos had never discussed his sleeping arrangements with me, but a hundred fragments of overheard conversations all came together to present me with a complete picture. ‘I don’t think that he was a long sleeper,’ I said. ‘From what I’ve heard, a very few hours at night were enough for him and he sometimes made up by cat-napping during the day. But you’d better ask one of the members who knew him better.’