Sauce For the Pigeon

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘I was shooting rabbits up here during the summer,’ Keith said, ‘so I know the ground. Since the hard weather came in I’ve been fully occupied with the market garden. My permission there requires that I shoot it twice a day if asked, and by God I’ve been asked!’ He switched his attention to his right. ‘Very odd!’ he said. ‘Pigeon flight to and fro between their feeding ground and their roost. These trees here are the favourite roost, as you’ll have seen.’

  ‘Will we?’ Munro said.

  ‘Look at the droppings, for God’s sake! Now, as I remember it, Andrew Dumphy had his kale planted down there.’ Without looking round, Keith pointed to his left. ‘I’d expect anybody decoying to be over there or somewhere along that line, but I can’t see any sign of decoys and the pigeon aren’t showing any interest in anything on the ground. On the other hand, away up the valley I don’t see any pigeon flying at all, but I can see one sitting very still in a tree and there’s a crow down in the field. I think we should go up that way. Feel like a walk?’

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘About a mile. But there’s a farm road if you want to take the car up.’

  ‘We’ll take the car,’ Munro said.

  The Land Rover was still smoking as they passed it.

  In Munro’s car, the sergeant spoke over his shoulder. ‘Why would the man park there and walk all this way?’ he asked doubtfully.

  ‘Several reasons,’ Keith said, ‘depending on the man’s thinking. He might have parked to take a look around, and then walked rather than scutter with moving the Land Rover. Or maybe he doesn’t want to meet the farmer, doesn’t get on with him . . . Turn left here . . . More likely he didn’t want to block off the farm road, in case the farmer wanted to get a tractor out.’

  The car bumped on to the farm road. The line of trees turned with them, but the overgrown conifers gave way to a mixed woodland of deciduous trees and pines.

  ‘Stop here,’ Keith said when they were a hundred yards up the side-road.

  Munro was leaning over to peer out of the car. ‘There’s a pigeon up there in that tree,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the one I was looking at from where we were,’ Keith explained patiently. ‘It still hasn’t moved. I think it’s a decoy, a “lofter”, put in the tree to complete the realistic pattern. That’s what the catapult in the bag was for. You fire a weight over a branch, to take over the end of a fishing-line, and pull it up. I wonder why he chose that pine when the deciduous trees are bare.’

  ‘The fact remains that he did so,’ Munro pointed out.

  Keith nodded. ‘Perhaps he knew it for their favourite sitting tree. There’s no explaining the fancies of pigeons. You see those grey dots out in the field? Those are his decoys. And that crow further off, on the crest of the rise, that’s a decoy too. A flock of pigeon looks more natural and more reassuring with a crow nearby. Let’s take a closer look.’ Keith made to get out of the car.

  ‘Sit where you are, Mr Calder,’ Munro said sharply. ‘I can’t have you trampling over everything before we have searched in a proper manner. I brought you out here to suggest names to me, no more than that.’

  Keith sighed in exasperation. Munro often had that effect on him. ‘You’re tying my hands,’ he complained. ‘If I could look for the tracks of a dog, or see what make of decoys he was using or what kind of string or fishing-line or how he hid himself, I might be further forward. Are you treating this as a murder?’

  Munro hesitated. ‘It is an unexplained death,’ he said.

  Keith knew the signs. ‘But are you treating it as a murder?’

  ‘Until we know otherwise, yes.’

  ‘And you’re handling it yourself?’

  ‘For the moment.’ Munro tried not to scowl and succeeded instead in looking fretful. ‘There would have been a chief inspector from Edinburgh here by now, but that Soutra is still blocked with the snow. We seem to have got off lightly, down here. Now, that is enough of the blethering. What names can you suggest to me?’

  ‘Without taking a look around here, I can’t get very far,’ Keith said. ‘Just look at what we’ve got. A petrol Land Rover, which may have been borrowed. There was an ex-Government sale not long ago, and a number of petrol models were sold around here. A thousand saved on the price of a diesel vehicle buys a lot of petrol. He may have been alone or there may have been two of him. He may have been a good shot or you may find a hundred empty cartridges lying around. There may have been a dog, but maybe not. I could make a guess at most or all of those things if you let me look around.’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘All right. But if you even bring me one of his decoys, I might be able to tell something by its age and make.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Keith sighed in exasperation. ‘At least mind and photograph everything where it is,’ he said. ‘There could be a lot to be learned from the positions of things.’

  ‘That much I can do,’ Munro said. ‘Now tell me about those cartridge cases.’ When Keith hesitated, Munro went on with a sharpness underlying his soft, West Highland drawl. ‘I know there is something already in your mind, Mr Calder. I know you of old. If you hold it back it will only look all the worse when it comes out, which in the end it will.’

  ‘The only reason I’m shy of rushing in,’ Keith said, ‘is that I don’t know a damn thing. Take the cartridges. They may have been left over from a previous trip. Or he may have begged some of them off somebody else so that he could reload them – although I doubt it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, and then maybe you’ll see how you’re pushing me into the wildest guesswork. Around that Land Rover, even over all the reek, I thought I could distinguish two particular smells because they were familiar to me. They were black powder and modern smokeless powder, the two smells which I could make out in those cartridge cases. The smell round the Land Rover could have come from more cartridges, but it’d need one hell of a lot of them. And cartridges don’t go off with much of a bang unless they’re confined in the chamber of a gun. That Land Rover was just about shattered. Of course, you may find traces of some other explosive. But if not, if that damage was done by the two types of shotgun propellant, there must have been a lot of it, and confined in tighter containers than plastic cartridges. So I’m guessing that there were tins of each in the back of the Land Rover. So there’s a probability that somebody was going to do some reloading.’

  Having set Keith talking, Munro was reluctant to interrupt. But he had an objection. ‘Our man could have been carrying those powders for somebody else, could he not?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so. No stockist would be happy to hand over gunpowder to somebody using Form F made out in somebody else’s name. And you’d be twisting the long arm of coincidence, because some of those empty cartridges had already been reloaded at least once with black powder and fired in an old hammer-gun. You’ve a hell of a job to buy black-powder cartridges these days, so if you want them you load your own. And if you load your own you don’t give away your empties.’

  ‘Who—?’ Munro began. In his impatience he drew the word out like a fog-horn. He began again, more softly. ‘Who loads cartridges with gunpowder for an old hammer-gun?’

  ‘Give us a chance,’ Keith said. ‘Lots of men around here have old guns which have never been proved for nitro. If you want to shoot with a really good gun and can’t afford to pay thousands for it, you can get the same quality much cheaper in a gun which has only been proved for gunpowder. Of course, many of them just take a chance and use modern cartridges. But if you’re conscientious you use the propellant which the gun was designed for.’

  ‘When you get talking about guns,’ Munro said, ‘it is a hard job to stop you going on for ever. But if I want you to talk about people, you hardly say a word. I am asking you one last time. Who, around here, loads his own cartridges with gunpowder?’

  ‘I do, for one,’ Keith said. ‘My partner and I share a pair of vintage Lancasters, when we can get out toge
ther – which isn’t very often, the business being what it is. Sir Peter Hay has a grand old Purdey, but I supply him with cartridges.’

  ‘Who else?’

  Keith hesitated. But the thought which had been cowering at the back of his mind would have to be brought out some time. ‘Jake Paterson . . . for one,’ he said.

  ‘Paterson? The man who has the radio and TV shop? I don’t remember him having a shotgun certificate.’

  ‘He had one three or four years ago, because I sold him his gun. Knowing Jake, he won’t have let it lapse. He’s a pigeon-only man, plus occasional clays just as a relaxation. He’s a bit of a loner by nature.’

  ‘Sergeant,’ Munro said, ‘go for a walk. Don’t disturb anything.’

  Keith experienced a fresh prickle of interest. Munro was a strict officer who acted by the book and expected his subordinates to do the same. But, once in the bluest of blue moons, when his stern conscience told him that the book was in conflict with justice, Munro would throw the book over his shoulder and do what he thought was right, although never openly flying in the face of the law which he served.

  ‘The remains in the Land Rover were too small to have been Jake,’ Keith said when the driver’s door had closed with a petulant slam.

  ‘That is what I thought. But you can never be sure until you take measurements. A body loses a lot of bulk in a fire. Tell me what you know about Paterson.’

  Fair enough, Keith thought. ‘Jake’s the cleverest devil I know,’ he said. ‘At thirty, he was the top designer for one of the country’s top electronics manufacturers, and he dragged them out of the rut into a leading place in the world market. Jake ended up with a nervous breakdown. He’d been doing a three-ulcer job on a two-ulcer salary, and I think his ulcers were beginning to grow ulcers on their ulcers. So he chucked it up.

  ‘He thought he could settle down to life as a small-town shopkeeper, but he couldn’t.’

  ‘The world beat a path to his door?’ Munro asked, with unusual poetry.

  ‘He gets consulted a lot,’ Keith agreed. ‘But it isn’t so much that. You just can’t stop an active mind. Jake keeps getting ideas. He works them up and patents them, they get manufactured under licence and Jake makes another bomb. Christ, he could buy Newton Lauder if he wanted it. But his eyes are always on the next inspiration. From the signs, and from what I hear, he’s putting together something earthshaking just now.’

  ‘Does he have a Land Rover?’

  ‘Not that I know of. I’ve only seen him with a Lotus.’

  ‘Does all this—’ Munro nodded out of the car’s window ‘—look as if he was responsible?’

  ‘He shoots over decoys,’ Keith said. ‘And he uses a crow and a lofter, but so do most of us. His pattern of decoys usually looks more open than that one. But if you find that one of those decoys is a radio-operated flapper, then I’ll maybe believe that that’s Jake’s remains in the Land Rover.’

  ‘It takes two at least to make a murder just as it does to tango,’ Munro said with grim humour. He seemed to search around in his mind. The Gaelic language is not rich in rude words, but he found one which would do. ‘This is as awkward as the devil,’ he went on. ‘The man they are sending from Crime in Edinburgh is a Chief Inspector Russell. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘Should it?’

  ‘Perhaps not. No doubt you have seen our men walking about, or even driving, while tapping away at a thing which resembles a large pocket calculator. It is a device which was designed by Mr Paterson about two years ago. The patrolling constable need only press in the registration numbers of cars which he sees as he goes by. The device plugs into his radio, and another device in the station checks each number with the computer at Swansea. As soon as a number is found to belong to a stolen car, an untaxed vehicle or one regarding which an enquiry is out, the instrument buzzes and the vehicle’s number shows up on the little screen.’

  Keith made a mental note to check on the state of his car’s tax disc. ‘Very ingenious,’ he said. ‘But if some idiot’s ever undiscriminating enough to nick my car—’

  ‘No doubt,’ Munro said without listening. ‘Personally, I thought the thing excellent. But the point is that Mr Paterson offered his design to his former employers, who approached the Scottish Office who in turn consulted the Lothian and Borders police. The other forces, of course, were interested, but they left the testing to us. The job was given to Russell – he was with Traffic at that time – and he damned it as a useless and expensive piece of gimmickry. As far as the British police were concerned, it was dead. His old employers gave it up as a bad job. But Paterson persisted. He took it to the Japanese. Several overseas police forces became interested. One of them adopted it and praised it to the skies. Now it is on trial in two American states, Canada, Sweden and I-don’t-know-where. So now all the British forces have production models to test. But if it is now adopted in Britain we will have to buy it back from abroad.’

  ‘Which would make Chief Inspector Russell about as popular as a bleeding pile?’

  ‘Less,’ Munro said. ‘Much less. The Scottish Office is only one of the bodies to call for his head, preferably with Russell no longer attached to it. As a consequence, he missed what was surely his last chance of promotion, and was moved sideways instead.’

  ‘He won’t like Jake very much,’ Keith said.

  ‘That is like saying that Hitler had a mild dislike of the Jews. Russell has never been allowed to forget his error, by his superiors or by his colleagues. And I was hearing that his former subordinates in Traffic are very assiduous with their devices when they can be sure that he will see them.’

  Keith was nodding. ‘What you’re saying is that the chief inspector who’s on his way here is the one man who soothes himself to sleep with dreams of catching Jake Paterson in some illegal and preferably unnatural act and dragging him through the courts. Well, if the body is Jake’s it may not matter. If it’s not, then some other officer should be in charge.’

  ‘It is very difficult to suggest bias until it has been shown,’ Munro said, ‘by which time it may be too late. Of course, the death may prove to be an accident. Vehicles have been known to catch fire at the moment of starting. And sometimes a man will start his engine first thing, so that the vehicle will be warm when he is ready to drive off. He may have intended to load up his stuff and then to drive nearer to where he was shooting before picking up his other gear.’

  ‘It may be an accident,’ Keith said doubtfully. ‘But what if Russell refuses to recognize it as such? And what about the missing gun? That’s the one thing a man wouldn’t leave in his hide.’

  Munro decided to tackle the easier question first. ‘He could have put his gun down with the bag of pigeons, from where it was stolen by some vagrant who was drawn to the burning vehicle,’ he suggested without any great conviction.

  Keith had noticed the sergeant at the bonnet of the car. He was listening to his radio while scribbling clumsily in his notebook. Something told Keith that time was running out. ‘You’re suggesting that I see that Jake isn’t railroaded,’ he said, ‘but you won’t let me get a fair look at the evidence.’

  ‘I never said—’

  The sergeant was tapping on the window beside Munro. The chief inspector opened the door and shivered for a moment at the inrush of fresh air.

  ‘Sorry to break in on you, Mr Munro, sir,’ the sergeant said, ‘but I thought you’d want to know this. The searchers have found a place where murder might have been done. Traces of blood on and around a fence. About mid-way between there and here, near as I can make out.’

  Munro looked at Keith. ‘Would that not be where a man is most vulnerable?’ he asked.

  ‘Could be. When you come to a fence, you most likely hand your gun to your companion. If you have one. And if you trust him. On the other hand . . . Was the fence barbed?’

  ‘You’re thinking that somebody may have gashed himself on the fence?’ Munro suggested.

  The sergeant permi
tted himself a smile. ‘Hardly likely, sir. It was at a place where there was a split piece of plastic tubing slipped over the top strand of barbed wire.’

  ‘Tubing?’ Keith said. ‘With a clip attached to one end?’

  ‘They did say something about a clip, but I couldn’t make it out.’

  ‘Now I can point you towards an identity,’ Keith said. ‘There’s one man around here who carries – or carried – a split tube which clipped on to his belt for ease of carrying. The tube let him swing his leg over a fence without tearing his clothes. I thought it a good idea. In fact, I’ll copy it as soon as I get too stiff to vault a fence. It’d be safer for dogs, too – they can gut themselves on barbed wire. And if a dog decides to jump a fence while you’re astride it you can lose a ball if your luck’s out.’

  ‘Come to the point,’ Munro said. ‘Who is the man?’

  ‘If I ever knew his name, I’ve forgotten it. I’ve half-met him once in company, and then I met him again in the field and we chatted. He said he’d been a customer at the shop, although I didn’t remember him. A small man, shorter than me and thin as a trout-rod.’

  ‘Ah,’ Munro said with satisfaction. ‘That sounds more like the corpse in the Land Rover.’

  ‘I’m afraid it does. I think he lives in one of those ex-farmhouses further up the valley. You can track him down easily enough, because he holds a senior job with the concrete factory at Kalehead. I remember that he had a petrol Land Rover. I remarked that it wasn’t exactly light on fuel but he said that it saved him a fortune in petrol because he could get to work the short way over the moors, while with a car he’d have had to go a hell of a long way round by road.’

  ‘I am greatly obliged to you, Mr Calder,’ Munro said formally. ‘Sergeant Bannerman will take you home now.’