A Brace of Skeet

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘You noticed? I hope nobody else did.’

  ‘Did you take some of my cartridges? I can always count them.’

  ‘Yes, of course I did,’ he said. ‘Why should it bother you? You’re innocent, aren’t you?’

  I knew that I was innocent. I could hardly say that I would have hoped that he needed no proof of my innocence. The law does not work that way. ‘It doesn’t bother me,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know what time I’ll get out here again. Will you feel safe on your own?’

  ‘I’m not the nervous type.’

  ‘No, I don’t think you are. I’ve enjoyed my day,’ he said. But I saw a momentary look of reserve. (I was becoming adept at reading his expressions. I wondered what that new perceptiveness was a sign of.) ‘I can understand the fun you get,’ he said. ‘I can imagine what it’s like to win a cup. But you shoot real birds as well, don’t you? Pheasants and things?’

  ‘Now and again,’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t it bother you, killing something?’

  ‘Sometimes. If I wing a bird and don’t manage to gather it. Did you enjoy your chicken?’

  He blinked at me, puzzled. ‘It was good,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t it ever bother you that your chicken, and your eggs, are produced in battery conditions by birds which never know life in the wild? Have you ever wondered what life would be like for a battery hen? Most people don’t bother.’

  ‘I’ve bothered. Perhaps not as often as I should.’ From his tone, I knew that he really had bothered. He was an unusual policeman. Most police decide early that the letter of the law should take the place of conscience.

  ‘Have you ever wished that we could turn them loose to grow up and breed in the wild and only recover them when they were needed for the table?’

  He paused before answering. ‘Not in so many words,’ he said at last.

  ‘Because that’s what we do. And the birds which we recover are free range and absolutely without preservatives or colouring. What’s your excuse?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘You’re a hunter too,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I suppose I am, in a way. Have we known each other long enough to exchange the stories of our lives?’

  ‘Just bits,’ I said.

  ‘Then you may as well hear this bit.’ He had been speaking lightly but now he was very serious. ‘When I was young, I admired and respected my father very much. He was a god to me.

  ‘One day he was attacked in the street, beaten up by a gang of youths for no reason except devilment.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I was sorrier than could be expressed in two words. Or two thousand.

  ‘His injuries weren’t serious. But the damage to his self-regard never quite healed. It was months before he’d even leave the house on his own. He made excuses. And even when he seemed to have got over it, I knew that he was wondering what his family thought of him now.

  ‘I can’t honestly tell you that I joined the police only because of that incident, or because I loathe and detest the arrogance that makes one man assume the right to attack another. But, deep inside me, I think that that was a large part of it. I still see my father often. You must meet him some day. I’m very fond of him, but he isn’t a god any more. And whenever I meet up with violence, I remember.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

  ‘It’s water under the bridge now,’ he said. ‘Be careful tomorrow, until I come. And if anybody new turns up to shoot—’

  ‘I’ll keep a few cartridges and note who it was and what the gun was.’

  ‘I was going to repeat, be careful. We’ve no more men to spare or I’d send somebody out—’

  ‘To baby-sit?’

  He smiled at me again from about six inches. Something seemed to be drawing our faces together. ‘If the cap fits. But be as careful with your tongue as you would be with a shotgun. It could be just as dangerous.’

  ‘Keep my mouth open and empty? I’ll remember.’

  He chuckled. ‘Couldn’t I help you to defrost that fridge?’

  His mention of my tongue had made me very conscious of it, so that it seemed to fill my mouth. ‘Janet said to bring you for a meal on Sunday evening. If you’d like.’ Surely, I thought, this was how it should be, not a quick romp in the bushes with somebody else’s spouse.

  ‘I’d like that very much,’ he said.

  A door slammed. Our lips had just touched, very lightly. The Sergeant let go of my hand in a hurry and got to his feet. I heard the jeep’s door open and Sam came rushing to greet both of us as long-lost friends. Ronnie was taking his sleeping-bag out of his Land-rover.

  I drove home. My mind was not on the road as it should have been and I nearly hit the back of an artic before I pulled myself together. Janet had supper waiting for me. She took one look and then asked whether the Sergeant was coming on Sunday evening. I said that he was.

  ‘About time I got a look at him,’ she said.

  Chapter Nine

  A flying visit to Wallace delayed me in the morning. Ronnie had already left for work when I arrived at the club.

  The unguarded interval had been no more than an hour, but there had been time enough for the place to seem overrun with children from the timeshare flats. On closer study there were only five, but those five had between them the energy and malice of a whole swarm of tenement kids. No serious damage had been done as yet, but two of the eldest were ready to defy my attempts to get rid of them. And they could run faster than I could.

  The usually mild Sam sensed my anger and his hackles rose. If he bit a child, for however valid a reason, he might be put down. I left him shut in the jeep.

  Dad keeps a catapult in the jeep, for lofting decoy pigeons and knocking off the occasional rabbit which has scraped a secure little bunker under the gorse and dares the dog to come and get it. I fetched it out, filled my pockets with pebbles and set to work. I had never before been cursed so foully nor in such posh accents, but they scooted away towards the water, took off in three canoes which had been pulled in to a tree-lined inlet in the bank of the reservoir and paddled back towards the Country Club.

  After that, I had little to do but to wait for Harry Noble to keep his appointment – if word had reached him that the club was still functioning. I loafed in the shade and decided that enough sunshine was enough. I would hate to live in California. A day of good, Scottish drizzle would be a welcome change when it came, which would be soon enough.

  Harry had been something senior and technical in the oil industry until a falling derrick mashed his left shoulder. Invalided out with a pension and a lump sum, he had gone into business for himself as a consultant and by all accounts was doing well. He seemed to have all that a man could wish for – money and the freedom to choose his own working hours. That he chose to spend his money and much of his leisure at the one sport which his accident had made difficult for him was his own affair. Men climb mountains, not because they’re there but because they’re difficult.

  He arrived in the early afternoon in a light blue Audi; a tall man and broad almost to the point of being stout, with a cheerful face, cropped fair hair and smiling blue eyes. He was light on his feet and always gave the impression of being as fit as a fiddle – except that he could not lift his left elbow more than a few inches from his waist, a disability which he had learned a thousand tricks to conceal.

  He greeted me as if I were his long-lost daughter, putting his right arm round my waist and swinging me off my feet. I accepted the familiarity as being from one consultant to another. ‘Did Keith get away all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I presume so,’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard from them yet, but if they’d missed the ship they’d have been home again by now.’

  ‘That figures. Peter Hay phoned to say that Herbie Tullos was dead but that you’d be carrying the ball until they found somebody else. He also said that you’d be continuing to give coaching.’

  ‘I am. But I don’t know much about coaching a
man who shoots one-handed.’

  ‘Nobody does. At least you can tell me where I’m missing. That’s all that Herb Tullos ever did for me.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘If I can’t do more than that, I won’t charge you a fee for the lesson.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure doing business with you.’

  ‘The pleasure’s mutual. Show me your membership card.’

  He laughed and showed me his card. ‘The season will be on us soon,’ he said as we descended to the Sporting layout, ‘and I’ve joined a small pheasant syndicate. It’s probably money down the drain, but I’m damned if I’m going to give up my pleasures just because some damn fool can’t keep his ironmongery upright. I look to you to see that I get my money’s-worth and don’t let the others down. I get by all right on most low birds, but high crossers tend to keep on going.’

  Sam came along with us. I opened up the tower and switched on the trap. Harry’s gun was a nice little twenty-bore with a full pistol grip. He handled it well but when I started sending the clays over he hit only one of the first four. He missed once in front and twice underneath.

  ‘Let’s get your feet right for a start,’ I said. ‘Point your left foot where you intend to take the bird and take your weight on the right foot . . . That looks better. Try again.’

  He hit two of the next four. ‘You’re trying to swing through,’ I said, ‘but your right hand’s trying to do too many jobs; it doesn’t have anything to spare for timing a trigger-pull. And sometimes you let your hand sag slightly with effort.’ I stopped and thought about it. ‘This isn’t the advice I’d give any other shooter,’ I said, ‘but your problems aren’t their problems. Well, at least you can’t use your left hand to check your swing. Do you find the gun heavy?’

  He had to think about it. ‘Not heavy. Unwieldy, perhaps.’

  ‘Then it might help if I add a little weight to the butt to improve the balance. Meanwhile, try using a maintained lead. Imagine another clay about two feet in front of the real one, aim at it, swing with it and fire without checking.’

  He broke three in a row and then missed again. ‘You were under,’ I told him. ‘Is your wrist getting tired?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘It won’t, in the field. Don’t let your hand drop. Swing a straight line, not a rainbow.’

  He was powdering four out of five by the time his cartridges ran short. ‘You’ve earned a fee,’ he said. ‘That’s the first time I’ve had coaching which went beyond “Next time hit the damned thing.” You’ll make some cripple a wonderful wife.’

  I tried to look demure, modelling my expression on that of Mrs Hickson. ‘Are you by any chance paying me the highest compliment a man can pay to any woman?’ I asked.

  He grinned at me. ‘No, I’m bloody well not,’ he said. ‘When I take a wife, she’ll be a rotten shot. I still have my pride. I’ll square up with you before I go.’

  ‘Let me try the weight of your gun.’ I took it from him and tried mounting and swinging it one-handed. I lacked his muscles, but that lack helped me to sense the stresses on his right hand. ‘Do you trust me?’ I asked him. ‘If you leave the gun with me for a couple of days, I think I could help you.’

  ‘You’ve been right so far,’ he said.

  I noticed that he was using Eleys. I was standing over the place where I had found the mark of the shooting-stick.

  ‘You were up here on Monday evening, weren’t you?’ I said. As soon as the words were out, I remembered the Sergeant’s admonition to be careful.

  But he only nodded. By common consent we moved to one of the seats. I took off my Skeet vest and spread it to keep my skirt clean.

  ‘What did happen to Herb Tullos?’ he asked. ‘Some sort of accident with a trap, I gathered. Easily done, I suppose.’

  ‘Haven’t the police spoken to you?’

  ‘I’ve been on an oil-rig since Tuesday morning, arguing about safety standards. What’s more, I’m due to fly out to another rig in . . .’ he glanced down at a large wrist-watch which was almost obscured by sub-dials and adjustable rings ‘. . . in three hours’ time. It’s only a quickie. If I can approve the work I’ll be back in time for tomorrow’s competition. So don’t start any work on my gun that you can’t finish by tomorrow.’

  ‘And if you can’t approve the work on the rig?’

  ‘Days. Or indefinitely. Who knows?’

  What would my Sergeant want me to do? ‘They may be trying to reach you.’ I said. ‘But they don’t know that you were here on Monday. Perhaps you’d better tell me about it and I’ll pass it on. And they’re eliminating cartridges. I’ll keep a few of yours for them.’

  ‘Herb wasn’t shot, was he?’

  ‘No. It looked as if he’d been caught across the head by a trap-arm, but they want to be sure. They’re identifying the last few visitors by the cartridges they left behind them.’

  Harry thought it over. ‘That seems reasonable,’ he said at last. ‘You can tell them that I only have the one gun and I was using the same batch of cartridges.

  ‘I had an hour or two to spare, so I took a chance and came up on Monday evening, rather late. Eightish, perhaps. The club’s closed on Mondays in theory, but if Herb was free he never minded you getting a bit of practice, provided that you slipped him the occasional fiver or a bottle at Christmas. I think that he was glad to have company. It must be lonely up here, outside of working hours.

  ‘He was his usual cheerless and unhelpful self. I had another go at the same birds we’ve been working on today and he sat behind me and told me that I was missing them, which I could see for myself.’

  ‘Was anybody else here?’ I asked.

  ‘Not a soul while I was here. If it’s any help, I passed another car as I was leaving. That was around ten o’clock. It was slowing down, so I think the driver intended to turn in here.’

  ‘Light-coloured, was it?’

  ‘I think so. Grey or maybe blue. The sun was almost down and I’d been dazzled coming out of the gates. And, anyway, I’d no reason to notice it particularly.’

  There would be a hundred things that the Sergeant would want to know, but I could think of only one or two more questions. ‘Was Mr Tullos sitting on that folding stool of his?’

  ‘You ask the damnedest questions,’ Harry said, ‘but I’ll pay you the compliment of assuming that you have a reason for them. As a matter of fact, no. Herb had been doing a bit of gardening in that bed on the clubhouse side of the Skeet layouts when I showed up. I had cartridges and the right money to pay for my clays and his time, so there was no reason for either of us to go into the clubhouse. While I was getting my gun out of the car he asked if he could borrow my shooting-stick, and he used that.’

  So much for the shooting-stick! ‘He didn’t shoot with you?’ I asked.

  ‘No. He said that he could only dig for a few minutes at a time before his back played him up. He was going to give himself some practice at Ball-trap, later. His gun was out on the grass beside him while he was gardening, laid out on his Skeet vest with a box of cartridges.’

  The background to Mr Tullos’s death was becoming clearer. My Sergeant would be pleased with me. I decided to see if I couldn’t make his day. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know whether he ate a chocolate bar?’

  Harry blinked at me. ‘You must be psychic,’ he said. ‘I was hungry when I arrived, so I took out a bar of chocolate. I offered him a piece. He enjoyed it so much that he was almost dribbling, so I took another bar out of my stock for him. I always carry a few in the car.’

  ‘And that would have been what time?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘Best guess, eight-twenty.’

  *

  Harry departed, en route for his oil-rig. I locked his gun away and then took a walk round, assuring myself that all was ready for the weekend’s rush of activity.

  There was a light breeze now to mitigate the heat of the day and sails were out on the water. I decided that sunshine was tolerable after all. Even if we had the Gree
nhouse Effect and all those little aerosols to thank for it, an occasional warm summer would make it almost worthwhile.

  The central fact of Herbert Tullos’s death was surrounded, I told myself, by bits and pieces of discombobulated fragmentism. Possibly the police, by patient teamwork, were fitting piece to piece and making a whole. Or possibly not. Unless they had found something illuminating in the way of contact traces or other mute evidence, it seemed to me that they were working from insufficient data. The only witnesses on land had been too engrossed in adultery to spare a glance for anything so unromantic as a murder. But had the cops asked whoever had charge of the dinghies whether anyone had been out sailing, late on Monday evening?

  I would ask my Sergeant. He wouldn’t tell me, but I would ask him anyway. If he ever showed his face again. Perhaps I had frightened him off and some female officer, built like a Russian weightlifter, would take his place.

  Keeping an occasional eye cocked in the direction of the clubhouse I had wandered towards the bright water, leaving the orderly paths and lawns of the club for an uneven terrain of weeds, wild flowers, stands of birch and alder and sudden patches of marshy land. A mallard left her nest in a hurry, circling until I turned away. A weasel abandoned the carcass of a carrion crow and undulated into cover.

  My wandering had brought me closer to the trees sheltering the small inlet. A movement caught my eye. If my mind had not still been toying with the idea of water-borne witnesses, I would probably have ignored it. I walked casually in that direction, pretending great interest in the further hills. If one of those kids had returned, a clip round the ear would be followed by some stern questions.

  There was another canoe in the inlet. The boy who was lying comfortably in a well-used nest, between two trees and sheltered by the underbrush, was unembarrassed. A pair of binoculars lay by his hand. He was older than the kids I had chased away, but rather young for an assassin – I put him at fifteen, give or take a year – and anyway I recognised the rifle at his side as a moderately expensive airgun. He was tall, built on the lines of a pipe-cleaner although I thought that once he had filled out he would be sturdy. He had a likeable, sensible face and his brown hair, in need of a trim, had a natural curl which I envied.