Sauce For the Pigeon

by Gerald Hammond

  Mr Enterkin nodded slowly. ‘If we are ever going to panic,’ he said, ‘now might be a very good time.’

  Keith understood that it would not be proper for Mr Enterkin to say any more.

  ‘I told that fat, female slob in Jake’s shop,’ Keith said, ‘that she was to get a message to Gatwick for him, telling him to phone me before getting on his flight. And,’ he added defiantly, ‘I said that I’d wait at home this afternoon for his call.’

  Wallace dropped his fork with a clatter. ‘Why couldn’t you have waited for the call at the shop?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I didn’t think of it in time.’

  Mr Enterkin protruded his lips in his habitual expression of deep thought and then nodded. ‘I don’t see anything more that can be done for the moment,’ he said.

  ‘No more do I,’ Keith said. ‘I was going to ask you to force Munro’s hand to let me examine the ground. But the rain’s on now, so it’s too late.’

  Molly looked up from monitoring Deborah’s progress in transferring minced beef from her plate to various parts of herself. ‘Too late for what?’

  ‘Hang on a moment.’ Keith bolted a mouthful of his cooling meal, swallowed and went on. ‘I wanted to look at the ground, before the rain started to pee down, because there’s something wrong. Not just a deader, although that’s serious enough. The thing isn’t what it appears to be. It’s like one of those paintings of sailing ships which don’t look right and you can’t think why until you see that the wind’s blowing the sails one way and the sea another and the pennants yet another way again. Whichever way I look at it, nothing adds up right. Take the decoy pattern. I didn’t get the chance of a close look, which might have told me a hell of a lot more than it’ll tell Munro or his pal from Edinburgh. At the time, there was a light sprinkling of snow over frozen ground. Now there’ll just be mud.’

  ‘The p-police will have taken photographs,’ Wallace said.

  ‘I hope so. But will they have taken the right ones? That pattern of decoys didn’t look right for Jake or for Muir either. And if there’s a copper on the way who hates Jake’s guts . . .’

  ‘Unless it was Jake in the Land Rover,’ Molly said. Her brown eyes started to fill with tears.

  ‘I think not. If he’d borrowed a Land Rover, his car would have been parked up the close beneath his flat; which it wasn’t. So I think he left for his holiday.’

  Mr Enterkin pushed his mouthful into one plump cheek. ‘You always complain if I use Latin,’ he said, ‘but now you speak to me in Greek. What do you mean about a pattern of decoys?’

  Keith raised his eyebrows. He seemed surprised that anyone in his close circle of acquaintances should be unfamiliar with the techniques of pigeon shooting. He glanced around the table. Wallace had finished his meat. ‘You explain, Wal, while I catch up.’

  ‘As told to children,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘Remember that I am a child in these matters.’

  Wallace pushed back a lock of lank, brown hair. His bony, intellectual face was solemn, for they were speaking of important rituals. ‘The cushat – woodpigeon – is a wily beggar,’ he said. ‘M-maybe not quite as wily as a crow, but damn near. A slippery customer altogether. Also very difficult to shoot. They say that if you can shoot pigeon you can shoot anything.’

  ‘If,’ said Janet. As a farmer’s daughter and Wallace’s wife she knew about pigeon shooting and was herself more than a passable performer.

  ‘The shotgun’s essentially a short-range weapon,’ Wallace went on. ‘If you think of the limit as being forty yards, you won’t be far out. So you’ve got to get within that s-sort of range. Their Achilles’ heel is that they’re gregarious birds. So the b-best and most favoured method is to find where they’re feeding or guess where they’re most likely to feed, and put out a pattern of decoys which looks as like as possible to a feeding flock. Then there’s a good chance that any passing birds will see them and drop in to join them.’

  ‘You shoot them on the ground?’ Mr Enterkin asked.

  ‘That’s not c-considered sporting. Now, your decoys will usually be plastic mouldings, shaped and coloured to resemble the real thing. Most people use half-shells, which are nice and compact to carry nested together.’

  ‘Real birds are better,’ said Janet. ‘Fresh or stuffed or yesterday’s birds out of the freezer.’

  ‘True,’ said her husband. ‘But the plastic ones are usually on a stick with a rubber t-tip so that they bob in the wind like feeding pigeon.’

  ‘Lending verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative?’ Mr Enterkin suggested.

  ‘Exactly. And most men have their own favourite t-touches to add that touch of verisimilitude. Like a decoy which flaps its wings when you pull a string, or a wire frame to hold a shot bird with the same end in view. And crows often hang around near a flock of pigeon, so a crow decoy nearby helps. And what’s called a lofter – a pigeon decoy up in the branches of a tree, because there often is a bird up a tree, having a look round before dropping down, and other pigeon can see it for miles, sitting there and looking calm.’

  ‘Very sneaky,’ said Mr Enterkin.

  ‘You have to be sneaky to get near pigeon,’ Keith said. He pushed his empty plate aside. ‘Thanks, Wal. The point is, we all have our favourite ways and tricks. Jake tends to scatter his decoys over a wide area, leaving a hole in the middle where he wants the live birds to come in and the shot ones to fall. This was a tighter pattern.’

  ‘And Mr Muir?’ Enterkin asked.

  ‘I only met him the once that I remember. He used all those techniques. But what I remember most is the quality of his layout. I was short-cutting through a wood to where I knew there was some laid barley. Sure enough, when I came out of the trees there was a flock of pigeon only about thirty yards away. I expected them to go up with a roar, and I got ready. But they just stayed there, bobbing gently, and now and again one of them would give a couple of flaps. It took me . . . well, not a whole minute, but definitely some seconds to realize that it was a very well laid out pattern of decoys. The man was well hidden, too. This morning’s pattern looked somehow stilted and mechanical, not the way that real pigeon congregate.’

  ‘And the hide?’ Molly asked.

  ‘That’s another odd thing. I don’t remember a hide. In summer,’ Keith explained to Mr Enterkin, ‘you may get away with sitting down with your feet in a ditch and the weeds all round you, if your clothing’s well camouflaged. But in winter, after the leaves are fallen and the frost’s cut the weeds down, you’d be about as inconspicuous as the coalman’s handprint on a white silk bum. No pigeon would come within a mile of you unless it was tired of life. So you build a hide with straw bales or camouflage netting, or whatever comes to hand naturally.

  ‘And another thing,’ Keith said, remembering. ‘Neill Muir, when I met him, was using a flapper. It was a real bird in a wire cradle. Jake had a plastic flapper he bought from me. Jake being Jake, it was radio-operated by the time it was in use. But the point is, I let him have it cheap because it’s not a design that would fool me if I were a pigeon. It was larger than life-size and the wings only went up and down, they didn’t fold away. At best, it looked like a bloody great vulture coming across the field. I’d have noticed that all right. Jake said it worked quite well,’ Keith added.

  ‘Not Jake’s decoys, then?’

  ‘I’d say not. Doesn’t help a lot, though, does it?’

  Janet, for all her blonde prettiness, had a sharp mind which was often one leap ahead. ‘I’ve seen Mr Muir in the shop,’ she said. ‘He buys a lot of cartridges. Eley usually, although I think he took a box of Maionchi once when Eley had a strike or something. So I don’t think he’s a reloader.’

  ‘Clever girl,’ Keith said. ‘No, come to think of it, when we introduced ourselves he said that he bought his ammunition from us.’

  Mr Enterkin crumbled bread petulantly. ‘I thought I was beginning to understand what you four were talking about – five, really, because that
little bizzum is getting as bad as the rest of you—’

  ‘She can name every gun in my rack,’ Keith said proudly.

  Mr Enterkin refused to be diverted. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘you relapse into Greek again. Kindly expound.’

  ‘What Keith’s afraid of,’ Janet explained patiently, ‘is that this Edinburgh fuzz will jump to the obvious conclusion, or perhaps delusion would be the better word, that Jake and Mr Muir were shooting together, or maybe separately and they met at the fence, and that there was a quarrel, and that Jake killed Mr Muir and bunged him into the Land Rover and set it on fire in the hope of its being passed off as an accident. All that links Jake with it, apart from whatever it is that you’re being so cagey about, is the presence of what seem to be his spent cases in Mr Muir’s bag.’

  Mr Enterkin was straining to keep up in this strange and sticky going. ‘How do you know that it was Mr Muir’s bag and not – God forbid! – Jacob Paterson’s?’

  ‘Jake carries a hessian sack for his decoys and birds.’

  ‘And he’s the only man around who shoots black powder cartridges?’

  ‘He’s the only one who uses them in a gun with that shape of firing-pin,’ Keith said. ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘You’d know,’ Molly said.

  ‘It seems to be a lot of trouble to go to,’ Mr Enterkin said, ‘saving up empty cartridges, and buying gunpowder – which I believe is harder to come by than the modern stuff – and loading up and so on. What’s the point?’

  Keith repeated, almost word for word, the explanation which he had given to Munro. ‘That’s why, just for the fun of it, Wal and I sometimes share a pair of old Lancasters. Wal shoots off the left shoulder, so I had to alter the cast of one of them for him.’

  ‘Cast?’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘No, don’t tell me. I can’t absorb many more technicalities at the moment, and this one seems to be irrelevant. You were hoping that Mr Muir was also a reloader, using gunpowder?’

  ‘I’m damn sure that he wasn’t,’ Keith said. ‘I’d have known, as Molly said. We sell most of the black powder around these parts. But if Muir reloaded at all, even with modern powders, he might well have been saving up other people’s spent cartridges. Has any one of you ever sold him powder or wads or shot or primers? Small, thin man, nearing fifty, with baggy eyes.’

  ‘Straight, gingery hair,’ Janet added, ‘going grey at the sides and thin on top.’

  Molly and Wallace shook their heads.

  ‘I never saw him without his hat,’ Keith said. ‘Well, that’s it, then. I can’t think of a single innocent explanation for Jake’s empties being in Muir’s bag, except, just conceivably, that Muir was conscientious about tidiness – I noticed him picking up his own cases – and if he’d come across some of Jake’s he might have tidied them up. But I doubt it, because Jake’s a fanatical hoarder of empty cases, especially the yellow Maionchi ones, which he swears are the best for re-crimping. And there were several of those in the bag.’

  Keith paused and looked hard at Mr Enterkin. ‘That’s all we know so far,’ Keith said. ‘And if there was no connection between Jake and Mr Muir you could tell me that I’m making a mountain out of a molehill and we could get on with enjoying our lunch. But you’re not going to tell me that, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Mr Enterkin said sadly. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  The waiter served biscuits and cheese and coffee. Keith waited impatiently until they were private again. ‘You may as well tell us what the connection is,’ he said.

  ‘And I may as well not,’ the solicitor retorted. ‘My client’s affairs are private and may as well remain so. You have no need to know.’

  Wallace James pointed a long finger at the solicitor. ‘Perhaps you’ve n-no n-need to tell us,’ he said. ‘Jake has been raising money for some gadget of his own design, something in the radio line. I know b-because he asked me and I put him in touch with an investor. You t-tell us that Muir was a “man of finance”. He was taking early retirement. Keith’s guess is that he wasn’t fifty yet. From what I hear on the accountants’ grape-vine, the managing director of Kalehead wanted that job for some relative who’s coming home from a post abroad. P-put that together and what does it smell of?’

  ‘A bloody great golden handshake,’ Keith said, ‘and a man looking to invest in a new career.’

  ‘And,’ Janet put in, ‘if he’d changed his mind, another man with a great big motive for losing his temper.’

  Mr Enterkin was glowering. The expression sat badly on his cherubic and usually benign visage. ‘I never made any such suggestions, and if you have any sense you’ll forget that those words were ever spoken. Just accept that there is a connection, sufficient for me to share, to some extent, your unease. I trust that Mr Paterson’s holiday was booked some time ago.’

  ‘So did I,’ Keith said. ‘But no. Jake knows perfectly well that the price of a package holiday nose-dives during the last few days if there are unbooked places. If you go to a travel agent and say, “I can leave any day from now on, so send me somewhere sunny”, you’ll pay a fraction of the usual price.’

  Mr Enterkin again protruded his lips in the thoughtful pout which, although familiar, was always startling. ‘A pity,’ he said at last. ‘But even a booking made yesterday or the day before would suggest his innocence. Or premeditation, which in the circumstances would be unlikely.’

  ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘None of your business.’ Mr Enterkin paused again for fresh thought. ‘You, Keith, had best spend the afternoon hovering like a vulture over your phone. If and when Mr Paterson telephones, tell him that he must, without fail, speak to me before boarding that plane. If I’m satisfied that nobody is waiting for him, then it might be best if he were to proceed with his holiday. His total absence from sight, and from mind but for the arrival of the occasional vulgar postcard, might, for the next week or two, be the happiest solution. And, of course, his subsequent voluntary return would have just the opposite effect to the present symptoms of intended flight.’

  He might have continued thinking aloud but for the arrival of his wife, carrying her own chicken-and-salad lunch. She took the chair beside her husband. Seen together they were an obvious match, two plump and jovial figures modelled by a maker in playful mood.

  ‘Sorry I’ve been so long,’ Penny Enterkin said, ‘but the bars are busy, what with them all wanting to talk about Mr Muir being killed like that. Was that what you wanted to speak about?’ Her Devonshire voice always sent little shivers of pleasure up her husband’s spine.

  ‘It is Mr Muir, then?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Seems so, my dear. At least, one of Mr Led better’s garage hands was called out to identify the Land Rover. He’d put on a new tow bar and replaced the windscreen last summer. He’d made the tow bar, so he could identify that. Terrible, he said it was. And the dentist was fetched away from his bar lunch a few minutes ago, so I dare say we’ll know for sure before long.’

  ‘Is the policeman from Edinburgh here yet?’ Keith asked. ‘I heard that he couldn’t get through because Soutra was blocked again.’

  ‘He’ll be here by now, then,’ Penny said. ‘Soutra was cleared by eleven, because a rep from the brewers came in. He said that he followed the snow-plough as far as Carfraemill.’

  They seemed to have said it all. There was a silence, broken by Molly. ‘It’s his widow I’m sorry for,’ she said. ‘Being dead can’t be all that bad, but being left must be terrible. He did leave a widow?’

  Penny had just filled her mouth. She nodded.

  ‘If indeed it is Mr Muir,’ said Mr Enterkin, ‘he leaves a widow some years younger than himself. And larger. A positive Amazon. I believe that she was something of a sportswoman a few years back, representing Britain in some cup or other. Tennis or squash, or possibly badminton. You’ve probably seen a large, Nordic-looking blonde striding about the town.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s often in the town,’ Penny said. ‘She gets her supplies in Edinburgh
. But Mr Muir used to come in here from time to time, for a lager or a g. and t., and his wife came in with him once, earlier this year. A big, strapping blonde, my dear, just as you said.’

  ‘I think I saw her once,’ Janet said. ‘In the chemist’s. I can’t believe there’s two such Valkyries about the place. If I’m thinking about the right two people, they didn’t look as if a man like him would be enough husband for a woman like her. Did they get on?’

  Penny glanced at her husband before speaking. He raised his eyebrows. ‘They seemed very lovey-dovey, the time they came in here,’ she said. ‘That’s why I was so surprised when she came in alone about a fortnight ago, dressed up to the nines, or undressed down to them, whichever way you want to look at it, and look at it you certainly could. She was out for a pick-up, making eyes at all the men.’ She looked at Keith. ‘Went off with a friend of yours in the end. That Mr Paterson who has the telly shop. He’s a widower, of course, and you could expect it of him, but . . .’ She stopped dead, warned by some tremor in the atmosphere, and turned to her husband. ‘Have I said something I shouldn’t?’

  Mr Enterkin patted her hand. ‘Nothing that wouldn’t have come out sooner or later,’ he said. ‘It’s just as well that I know now rather than have it sprung on me. No point going over it all again, I’ll explain when we have time. It looks, Keith, as though your fears were well founded. You had better go and man your telephone, and all that I said before now goes ten times over.’

  Keith nodded. ‘And if there’s anything else that we can do to help . . .’ His companions made acquiescent noises.

  ‘Bless you!’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘Run along as soon as you’re ready, and leave the bill to me. I’m deeply appreciative. Although just why you should want to help my rash and foolish client out of the mire which he seems to have created for himself I can’t imagine.’