A Brace of Skeet

by Gerald Hammond

  The police seemed to have left the place reasonably tidy. I let myself into the clubroom, gave it a sweep and then studied the notice-board. Mr Tullos seemed to have brought it up to date before meeting his end. There was a charity shoot with large prizes to be held near Glasgow on Saturday and a qualifying shoot for the National DTL Championship at Cumbernauld, so it would be a comparatively quiet weekend back at the club. As usual, the charity shoot would accept ladies for a slightly reduced entrance fee but would preclude them from the major prizes. One of the last surviving bastions of sex discrimination. I decided to write to my MP, whoever he was.

  With a jump, I realised that somebody was watching me from the doorway. He was a stocky man, slightly overweight, with thinning, sandy hair and a disgruntled expression spread like rancid butter over an already peevish face. He was carefully dressed and groomed, but the effect was spoiled by the sweat which trickled down his face and stained his lightweight suit under the arms.

  ‘Just who might you be?’ he asked. His tone suggested that he might neither believe nor approve of whatever answer I made, so I decided to side-step.

  ‘Are you a member?’ I asked. I tried to insinuate that even if he wasn’t black-balled he couldn’t afford to join.

  ‘No, I am not. I’m the manager of the Leisure Complex. McGruer’s the name.’ His tone shifted from angry to plaintive. ‘Look, what the hell’s going on around here?’

  ‘I’m Deborah Calder. I’m standing in for the steward and I don’t know any more than was in yesterday’s papers,’ I said – not quite truthfully, because the death had been covered by about three lines in most papers and a dozen words at the end of the television news, and the wording had suggested that while the death had been an accident the police were looking into it, just to determine whether there had been negligence. The press release by the police must have been evasive to the point of being deliberately misleading.

  He came further into the room. ‘You are, are you?’ He paused and blinked pale eyelids at me. ‘Will you have a seat on the committee?’

  His sudden interest was so blatant that I almost laughed at him. ‘I shouldn’t think so. Anyway, selling out wouldn’t be a matter for the committee. It would go to a Special General Meeting. And I’d be against selling.’

  ‘There could be a lot of money to share out. And it isn’t as if we’d close the place down. It’s just that we’d like all the facilities under the one management, so that we can control the times of noise-making and prevent clashes of dates.’

  ‘Balls,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to offer me the managership?’

  He was silent for some seconds. He was a very transparent man and I could see his little mind ticking over, finding my name in a card-index and working out that I knew more than he would have liked but that I was only the daughter of a member and that Dad was already opposed to a sell-out. ‘There’s more to it than was in the papers,’ he said suddenly, ‘or why are the police coming round, over and over again, harassing our residents? Who’s been putting in the poison?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said. ‘Don’t ask me, ask the police. Anyway, why are you getting so uptight about it?’

  His face darkened again and he took a step towards me. ‘Don’t be pert,’ he said. ‘You can do without making enemies around here. A girl on her own—’

  ‘But it was a good question,’ said Sergeant Fellowes. He followed Mr McGruer in through the open door. I hoped that the quick look he gave me contained a trace of unpolicemanlike warmth. ‘Good morning again, Mr McGruer. Why don’t you want us speaking to your residents?’

  Mr McGruer flushed red. ‘When the residents get upset, who do you think they complain to?’

  The Sergeant shrugged. ‘I can’t see why they would complain to you, when there’s a perfectly satisfactory official Complaints Procedure. It’s not as though you could do a damn thing about it – except by helping us to clear up the mess quickly instead of obstructing us.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Mr McGruer said.

  ‘You know exactly what I mean. I’ve just come back from the timeshare flats. You knew that we wanted to speak to whichever residents were out and about on Monday evening late. You knew that we were having difficulty catching some of them at home.’

  ‘They come here on holiday,’ Mr McGruer protested, ‘not to sit indoors in this sort of weather. Some of them go touring and stay away for a night or two.’

  ‘You begged us, on bended knee, not to make any more door-to-door enquiries. You promised me that you would find out for me who had been out late that evening. Your manner, Mr McGruer, was not convincing. I have just come back from knocking on a few doors. You have spoken to absolutely nobody on the subject. Why not? Mr McGruer, what are you trying to hide?’

  Mr McGruer tried to bluff and he tried to bluster but the Sergeant was not to be put off. In the end, McGruer could only fall back on the argument that his guests were entitled to their privacy.

  ‘If by that you mean what I think you mean,’ the Sergeant said grimly, ‘I may as well tell you that we are not the least bit interested in the morals of your timeshare residents. If any of them were committing fornication, adultery, sodomy or even bestiality up on that embankment on Monday night, I am only interested in what they saw over the fence. But that I mean to have by hook or by crook.

  ‘This is Thursday. On Saturday, some of your timeshare residents will be handing over their units and scattering. I can’t wait that long. So if whoever was up there on Monday evening doesn’t contact me here by five p.m. tonight, your development will be flooded with officers tomorrow. And it won’t bother me one damn bit if your residents are queueing right round the golf course for a turn at crying on your shoulder.’

  ‘If there was anybody,’ Mr McGruer said miserably, ‘they may not have seen anything. They may have been up there at the wrong time.’

  ‘Or they may have had eyes only for each other. If that’s the case, I want to know it. I want to see anybody who was up there between noon and midnight. And if anybody was out for an evening sail at this end of the reservoir, I want to meet them too. You haven’t got long so you’d better get going.’ He looked at me again and this time I was sure that we were still exchanging little signals. I warmed still more to a man who could let my peevishness of the Tuesday evening pass over his head. ‘I left my car at the Country Club. Would you lift me along to collect it? Perhaps we’d have room for Mr McGruer as well? He seems to have walked.’

  ‘There’s only a dog-bed in the back of the jeep,’ I said, ‘and there’s one dog in it already.’

  *

  Mr McGruer walked. We overtook him outside the gates, stamping furiously along the roadside and slashing at the taller weeds with his stick. When he heard us coming, he made an effort to seem unconcerned.

  ‘As you’ll have gathered,’ Sergeant Fellowes said, ‘I drew the double duty of keeping observation here and seeing that no villain jumps on you. I volunteered for it.’

  I would have liked to see his face, but we were approaching a blind hump and I dared not take my eyes off the road. ‘I’m flattered,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be too flattered. It was that, or becoming swallowed up in endless – and usually profitless – inquiries into the backgrounds and movements of the members and of such recent visitors as we’ve so far been able to trace.’

  ‘But why were you lurking out of sight?’ I asked him.

  ‘I might have learned something.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘I’ve confirmed that you’re very innocent and that our Mr McGruer isn’t to be trusted. And I knew both of those already.’

  Whether that was a compliment or not depended on which shade of meaning you attached to the word ‘innocent’. ‘You seem to be trusting him rather a lot,’ I said.

  He laughed shortly. ‘We’d already been round such residents as were at home in the units, to ask whose cars travelled this road on Monday evening. When we started to go round a
gain in search of anybody who took a stroll in the direction of the embankment, that’s when they started to complain and Mr McGruer did his proverbial nut. Putting together the gossip we’ve picked up so far, the answers to the who-was-where and doing-what-to-whom enquiry and the questions people refused to answer, we’re pretty sure we know who was up there for a picnic and a cuddle on Monday night. He’s elsewhere just now, visiting, but he’ll be back today. What you just heard was more a test of his honesty, and Mr McGruer’s.’

  ‘Just him?’ I said. ‘Not her?’

  ‘She’s usually in the company of her husband. We’re not in the business of wrecking marriages. We’ll choose our moment.’

  I let that go by. ‘Did anybody see a car?’ I asked. ‘Or any dinghies sailing down that way?’

  ‘Several people, several cars. One car turned out to belong to the farmer. I’m told that it was a bit too breezy for the inland mariners.’

  ‘The wind dropped later . . . at home,’ I said. ‘It may still have been blowing here.’

  We turned off what could loosely be described as the main road onto a driveway. Sam woke up and snuffled in my ear. He knew that there were guns in the car.

  For the first time I could see the golf course and the Country Club. Golfers were out and riders were mounting. Dinghies were jilling around in the light airs. Around the timeshare units some plushy cars, and several of quite remarkable scruffiness, were parked. (The truly rich do not need status symbols.) The landscaping still had to mature, but already the buildings gave an impression of relaxed jollity.

  I dropped the Sergeant at his own car and followed him back to the Gun Club. He shook a warning finger as we passed Mr McGruer and I shook two. I parked facing east, so that the sun would be off the seats by the time I was ready to leave. He pulled up beside me. The sun was warm, prickling the skin and heating up the head. I put on my lucky cap – a red, baseball-type cap emblazoned ‘Dallas Gun Club’, which my friend Simon had brought back from Texas for me and which I always believed put me one up on those with the club’s similar but blue cap.

  ‘I have the club’s guns in my boot,’ the Sergeant said. ‘The cartridges in the bin were fired in the dead man’s own gun. And it was his own gun, by the way. Sensibly, he’d kept a record of its serial number in his desk. What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I must take a walk round and see that all’s in order,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  He leaned back against his car. ‘I’m going to follow you around like Sam,’ he said. ‘I’m not convinced that we’ve learned all there is to learn from this place. You never know what scraps of information may come in useful. I want to be shown how it all works. And you may very well spot something wrong which looked normal to us. I wonder . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you shoot a few of the – what did you call them? – the stands? You might even give me a lesson. I could never pass for one of the boys, but I might get by as a pupil under instruction. Visitors may not talk freely if they’re pounced on by a copper as soon as they roll up.’

  ‘Sneaky,’ I said. ‘All right. Let’s take the guns inside first. You’re not telling me very much, are you?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Aren’t I? Professional habit, I suppose. We never tell the public more than we have to.’

  ‘I’m not the public, I’m a consultant. What time did he die?’

  ‘The pathologist thinks late evening. About two hours after he ate a chocolate bar, if we knew when that was.’

  ‘Had his gun been fired?’

  ‘Yes. What else have I been keeping from you?’

  I couldn’t think of any more questions. We carried the guns into the office. They had been cleaned, not well but adequately. The Winchester was the best fit for him. We stowed the others in the safe and I locked it again. ‘You have one set of keys,’ I said.

  He held up the ring. ‘I’ll keep them for the moment,’ he said.

  I supposed that he was within his rights. ‘Don’t leave them lying around,’ I said. ‘Now, I’ll let you off with your tuition fee and the cost of your clays, but if you’re going to shoot you can pay for a day-membership and a box of cartridges.’

  He paid up without a murmur although he seemed surprised at how little change he got back out of a tenner. Clay pigeon shooting, as I had told Mr Munro, is not a cheap hobby. I wondered how it would look on his expenses sheet. He hung his jacket in the office and I fitted him with somebody’s Skeet vest. ‘These are cooler,’ I said, ‘but you still need two layers of clothing to allow for the friction of recoil. And on the club’s behalf I’ll present you with a complimentary cap.’

  ‘I never wear a cap,’ he smiled.

  ‘You do now. Bits of clay pigeon can come down from a height.’ I lent him ear-muffs and protective shooting glasses. He was beginning to look highly professional.

  I got my twenty-bore and a belt of cartridges out of the jeep. ‘First lesson,’ I said. ‘You carry the gun open, empty and pointing at the ground or the sky at all times except when ready to shoot. Got that?’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ he said humbly. ‘Where do we start? The Skeet?’

  ‘Something easier, for a beginner. But first,’ I said, ‘let’s take a look in here.’ I stopped at the big bin which stood at a corner of the clubhouse.

  ‘We looked in there. Nothing but cartridges.’

  ‘Did you stir them up?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think any of the others did. We just looked inside and saw exactly what you’d expect to see at a clay pigeon club.’

  ‘But which are on top?’ I lifted the lid. The bin was half filled with fired cartridges. In the States, where I had once visited as a member of a women’s Skeet team, these would have been a precious asset, saved and re-sold to members – so much so that any spent shell which reaches the ground belongs to the club. In Britain, where reloading is less common, shooters could help themselves or the spent shells would go to the tip.

  ‘They look much of a muchness to me,’ the Sergeant said.

  ‘For a start,’ I told him, ‘Harry Noble kept his appointment on Monday. Those yellow ones on top are twenty-bore.’

  ‘But you were here on Sunday,’ he said. He looked down at my cartridges. ‘You shoot twenty-bore. Don’t you?’

  ‘Not always. And I use Winchesters,’ I said, ‘not Eley. Most of the rest are club cartridges, but I see some Express. The black ones are Fiocci Trap.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Damned if I know. You said yourself that you never know what scraps of information may come in useful. If you saved the top few layers, you just might be able to match them up with a gun later. Come on.’

  I had to wait while he fetched a plastic bag from his car and skimmed off the top layer of cartridges. Then I led him down the steps and turned away from the Leisure Complex towards where the Gun Club territory petered out among a rocky outcrop and small trees. Here, in a convenient depression, the Bolting Rabbit had been set up – a trap which bowled a special clay pigeon along a grassy strip about twenty yards from the stand. As I walked, I was turning over in my mind the traces which clay shooters leave behind. I had missed something. On more mature thought . . . No, it evaded me.

  The Sergeant submitted patiently to a lesson in basic gun-mounting. I unlocked the trap-house and switched on both traps. The magazine was full. As Wal had predicted, a neat stack of slightly warped clays was tucked away in the dark corner. I took out the coiled lead, plugged it into the waterproof socket beside the cage and gave the end to Sergeant Fellowes.

  ‘When I call “Pull,” press this tit,’ I told him.

  I stepped over the bar into the cage, which was shaped like an enlarged telephone booth constructed of tubes and wire mesh and with the door removed.

  I scattered the first clay. The sight of the wad skipping over the grass started me thinking again and I missed the next; but then I hit three in a row, unloaded and stepped out of the cage. ‘Your turn,
’ I said, taking the control from him. ‘And take your time. You have longer than you think. Swing through from behind and pull as you go past.’

  Something seemed to be worrying him. ‘You’re sure that this is legal?’ he asked.

  ‘The club has an Exemption Certificate. I told you.’

  He looked at the cage without favour. ‘Do I have to go in there?’ he asked. ‘It looks cramped. There’s only the two of us.’

  ‘Club rule,’ I told him. ‘It prevents an eager shooter swinging too far. You may as well learn to do it right. Now, no more cold feet. You won’t dent the gun.’ The tubes around the open side were encased in rubber hose. ‘And it won’t dent you,’ I added.

  There were rough, wooden seats to either side, but I took up a position behind the cage so that I could watch both the clay and his action. Again I was sure that I was missing something. I hauled my mind back and paid attention. He missed the first one behind, then caught up and missed the next in front. I made him move his feet for better balance and reminded him to point and swing even as he was mounting the gun. He broke two and missed the next over.

  ‘You didn’t have your cheek down on the comb,’ I said. ‘Is it giving you a kick in the face?’

  He rubbed his cheek thoughtfully. ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Then forget it and keep your head down. But never mind. You’re getting it. Unload and come out of there. We’ll change targets.’

  The same house had a second trap which threw the clay up and away. I changed plugs and showed him the button to press for pairs. I have always found Springing Teal comparatively easy. I broke two pairs and then put him back in the cage.

  ‘Pull up through them and, again, fire as you go past,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you singles at first.’

  He was a quick learner with good co-ordination, but he blew some holes in the empty air before he learned how to judge the climb of them. When he was hitting two out of three, I called a halt and coiled down the electric lead. ‘Gather up the empties,’ I said, ‘and we’ll skip to the tower.’