Sauce For the Pigeon

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Give it to me,’ Watty said. ‘Keith’s been there before.’

  ‘So he has. Bear in mind,’ Mr Enterkin said, ‘that opposing counsel only wants the truth. He is not your enemy – or, if he is, then it is for the counsel who called you to jump to your defence. Tell the truth. If you’re sure you’re right, stick to your guns; but don’t be afraid to admit it if he’s shown you that you’ve made a mistake. If the going gets rough and you are being savaged, it sometimes helps to picture the other man sitting on a chamber-pot, or in some other equally ridiculous situation. . . .’

  Keith missed the rest of Mr Enterkin’s valuable advice. Exhaustion took over. The solicitor’s voice became hollow and distant, and Keith dozed off. He awoke, still groggy, as Mr Enterkin pulled up at the door of Briesland House. He sat up and rubbed his face.

  ‘I’ll pick you up in the morning,’ Watty said. ‘Mr Enterkin has to go back at some unChristly hour for a lawyers’ confab. And my car’ll need exercise after being idle since November.’

  ‘That seems sensible,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘Now we’ll just come in for Mr Dunbar’s cases.’

  Molly met them in the hall. ‘How did it go?’ she asked.

  ‘You should have stayed,’ Keith said. ‘I was magnificent.’

  ‘I bet.’ She looked at Mr Enterkin.

  ‘He was, as a matter of fact,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘But he can’t discuss it.’

  ‘A quick dram,’ Keith said. ‘Something to eat. And then sleep. Good night, you two.’

  He tried to follow that sensible programme, but sleep was slow to come. Through his mind ran a number of questions which he would prefer not to be asked on cross-examination.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Keith never had to face the ordeal by cross-examination. He was hurrying to finish his breakfast at eight the next morning when visitors arrived. Mr Enterkin and Chief Inspector Munro arrived together. They seemed to be on better terms than usual.

  Keith joined them in the hall. ‘This had better be quick,’ he said. ‘I can’t hang about. And if you’re driving yourself, Ralph, you’re going to be late. At the speed you drive, you won’t be there before they break for lunch.’

  ‘None of us need hurry,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘It’s virtually over.’

  ‘Then come into the dining-room,’ Keith said. ‘I can finish my toast and you can share the coffee. Do I need to phone Watty?’

  ‘He knows.’

  Keith fetched more cups and emptied the percolator into the coffee pot. They sat down at Molly’s polished table. It occurred to Keith that Munro was looking tired and hungry. ‘Molly always makes far too much toast,’ he said. ‘Would you like to help me finish it?’

  ‘That would be kind,’ Munro said. ‘I have been up all night, and with no time for eating. I will use your plate.’

  ‘Penny gave me a cooked breakfast an hour ago,’ Mr Enterkin said comfortably.

  Keith spread himself one final piece of toast. He took it in his fingers and passed his plate to the chief inspector. ‘I saw you follow Mrs Muir out of the courtroom,’ he said.

  Munro nodded. ‘It was already obvious, the direction your evidence was taking.’

  ‘You thought that she might skip out?’

  But Chief Inspector Munro had already filled his mouth. His long and usually moody face bore an expression of sublime pleasure. ‘Taitneach! Delicious!’ he said at last. The Hebridean lilt in his voice was so strong that Keith half expected him to break into song. ‘I did not realize how hungry I was.’

  ‘We can wait.’

  ‘Just let me eat this and wash, and I shall be ready to talk.’

  A few minutes later Munro, with six pieces of toast and much coffee inside him and his face freshly scrubbed, was as good as his word. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I did not expect her to skip out. I thought that she might burn the house down. You had reached the point of telling the court that there was evidence in the house, but you had not said what it was. And I knew that the buyer she thought she had for the house had not been able to get his mortgage, because he was one of my men. It might have suited her fine to destroy the evidence and to gain the insurance money, all for the price of a match.

  ‘I followed her, and she went straight to the Grassmarket where her car was parked, and I caught up with her just as she was getting into it.’

  ‘What did you do,’ Keith asked. ‘Make her produce her driver’s licence?’

  ‘I did exactly that, while I thought about it. I wanted to keep her away from her house until it had been searched properly and in my presence. So I asked her to hurry home so that she could let our men in.’

  ‘You crafty old devil,’ Keith said.

  ‘Thank you. One thing I have learned about you Lowlanders is that if you want them to do one thing you must ask them to do another. She told me to go to hell and walked off. I thought of following her but decided, wrongly perhaps, that that would do no good. Instead, I found a telephone and called my office. I told the duty officer to get a car out to the house. Under no circumstances was Mrs Muir, or anybody else, to enter that house until it had been searched in my presence.

  ‘I came back to Parliament House just in time to hear the last of your evidence and the Judge’s directions. I waited to get hold of Chief Inspector Russell, who went straight away to get a search warrant. When I got to him, he was on the point of leaving for Newton Lauder. By that time I was becoming anxious about the woman. I knew that I should not have let her away on her own. So I told Russell that he would not be wise to leave before seeing whether she was at her Edinburgh flat, because if she was not at Newton Lauder and he had made no attempt to contact her then he would be out of order to break in. He did not like it, but I told him of a similar case in which an officer was ordered to pay for a new door out of his own pocket.’

  ‘Was that true?’ Mr Enterkin asked quickly.

  ‘We will not go into that. It took us some time to find out the address of the flat, the purchase being so recent, and when we arrived at last we could get no answer. Russell was for leaving immediately for Newton Lauder, but by that time I was seriously worried. A neighbour said that Mrs Muir had arrived some time ago and had not left again. So I went to the janitor for a master-key and we went inside.’

  Munro paused to refill his cup. Keith waited, his scalp prickling.

  ‘It is a nice flat,’ Munro said, ‘and she had decorated it well although not to my taste. Many of her personal things were there already; she was prepared to move at once if she sold the house.

  ‘It was clear that she had gone there straight from the Grassmarket. She had spent a little time dusting and polishing and she had lit a fire. There is great comfort in a fire. She had sat down with a large brandy, and had used it to help her down with a whole lot of sleeping tablets. She was breathing when we got to her but she died on the way to hospital.

  ‘There was a letter beside her. In it, she admitted everything.’

  In the silence which followed, Keith tried to hold his mind back from the thought that a woman, one of the many who had loved him in the back of his van in the wild old days, had gone through a cleansing ritual, in the longed-for home which she knew she would never occupy, and had then taken her own life because of his interference. He preferred to remember that because of that interference Jake would walk free.

  ‘What happens now?’ he asked.

  Munro choked off a yawn. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I must away to my bed soon. I am getting too old for these all-night affairs. Mrs Muir’s letter bore out your reasoning in a way that was hardly canny. We managed to find the Crown Office solicitor, and he caught the advocate-depute on his way to a dinner. I doubt that he got to his dinner before the pudding, poor man. There will have to be an investigation, of course, but the upshot was that the advocate-depute will go into court this morning and put the letter into evidence. He will then move for an adjournment and will not oppose the granting of bail. Your friend will be free in an hour or two. Mr Enterkin ha
s ordered a car, to fetch him home.’

  ‘So it really is all over,’ Keith said.

  ‘Not quite,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘There is one piece of evidence, Chief Inspector, which Keith’s theory doesn’t explain.’

  ‘That is true,’ said Munro. ‘But there are always loose ends.’

  ‘At the very beginning of this case, you took the trouble to warn Keith that Chief Inspector Russell would not be unbiased. That seemed extraordinary. After all, an innocent man should not fear even a biased investigation. Just now you said, twice, that the Muir house was to be searched in your presence. After you had taken that decision, you seem to have stuck to Chief Inspector Russell as if to the proverbial blanket.’

  Munro looked out of the window and said nothing. His long face, tired as it was, seemed to have been drained of expression by some effort of will.

  ‘There are some police officers,’ Mr Enterkin said, ‘who, when they believe their prisoner to be guilty but their case is incomplete, are not above fabricating such pieces as are missing. Was it in your mind that Russell is one of them?’

  ‘I never said so,’ Munro said. He was speaking with great care, in the pedantic style of the Gaelic-speaker afraid of tripping over the English language. ‘That is not a trait of which I would lightly accuse a brother officer. I will only say that Mr Russell is known to hold a grudge. And he is now a very angry man. It could be said that he wants blood. Mr Paterson, whom he looked on as his persecutor, seems to be slipping out of his grasp – thanks solely to you, Mr Calder. On whom do you suppose his rage is turning?’

  ‘Can’t think,’ Keith said huskily.

  ‘You mean that you prefer not to think. But it would be better if you gave these things some thought. For my own reasons, about which you may think what you like, I stayed with Russell while a search was made, first of the flat and then of the house. We have not long finished. In the flat, I will only mention a large, chest freezer, and there was an empty space in the larder of the house where it seems to have stood. The marks of the feet correspond. At the house, we also found the missing piece of Mr Muir’s gun together with a ring from the leg of a racing pigeon. And there were indeed traces of candle wax.

  ‘My own view is that the fore-end and the ring may have been moved, but only so that they could be photographed from the window. Mr Russell takes a different view. As I have said, he is a very angry man. In his mind, he has convinced himself that those things were planted in order to support a trumped-up story for the defence. He refuses to see that Mrs Muir’s confession invalidates at least a part of that supposition. He insisted on a fresh search for fingerprints, which is not yet finished, and he himself lifted the fingerprint which had been found and photographed inside the controls of the Muirs’ alarms. When last I saw him, he was on his way to the room which he has been using in our building here, to fetch the photographs of that print and of the fingerprints which my sergeant obtained from you. In this,’ Munro said with satisfaction, ‘he will not succeed. Both have, unfortunately, been mislaid. He will undoubtedly come here next.’

  Keith had had several weeks to worry about what story to tell if the worst should come to the worst. His best effort might be worth testing. ‘When I was thinking of getting my own installation,’ he said, ‘Jake showed me the insides of a control box in the shop and told me how to reset the code. I tried it out for myself. I expect that’s the box which ended up in the Muir house. That could explain my fingerprint, if it should happen to turn up.’

  ‘That might stand up in court,’ Munro said judicially, ‘but I can think of many arguments against it. Could you explain how that print survived when the code was reset, several times, by others?’

  ‘I’ll have a bloody good shot at it,’ Keith said. He humped his chair back to change his view through the window. ‘Did you come in a jam sandwich?’

  ‘I brought Mr Enterkin in my Jaguar.’

  ‘Then Russell’s here now.’

  A ring on the doorbell lasted long beyond polite bounds. They heard Molly’s footsteps tapping towards the front door.

  ‘Shall I give him an earful?’ Keith asked.

  ‘You hold your wheesht,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘When the time comes, I shall give him an earful. That is what lawyers are for.’

  Munro stirred in his chair. ‘Do you wish me to go or to stay?’

  ‘That,’ Mr Enterkin said, ‘would depend on your attitude. Do whichever you think I would want you to do.’

  Chief Inspector Munro settled back in his chair.

  *

  Keith, Munro and Mr Enterkin were grouped at one end of the dining table. None of them rose when Chief Inspector Russell stamped in and thumped down, uninvited, into a chair at the far end of the table. In his anger, he had pulled himself up into a better posture than his usual almost hunchbacked stoop, and again Keith could see him as he must have been in his uniformed days, a formidable figure. His solid bulk and the vitality of his fury made his end of the table the head of it.

  The glare which the big man directed at Keith could, Keith thought, have defrosted the late Mr Muir in a few seconds. ‘I suppose you think you’re damn clever,’ he said.

  Keith opened his mouth to say that, yes, he did think so. Mr Enterkin was quick to forestall him. ‘Irrelevant,’ the solicitor snapped. ‘You’ve already wasted far more than enough of my time and that of my clients Messers Calder and Paterson, without entering into discussions of their opinions of themselves.’

  Russell ignored him and looked at Munro. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Visiting.’

  ‘Stay. I may want a witness.’

  ‘You should have brought Ritchie.’

  Russell gave a snort of contempt. ‘That man’s an incompetent. Well up to scratch for the cowboy outfit you run out here, but he wouldn’t last ten seconds in a city force. He’s lost the records of those fingerprints, the ones which could prove the house had been entered. As the officer in charge, I’ve been told to do a further investigation; and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And if I can prove unauthorized entry to that house, I’ll have the advocate’s office go before Lord Bickenholme and show that that evidence was planted.’

  ‘Could have been planted,’ said Mr Enterkin.

  ‘Was,’ said Russell. ‘Was. Why else would Calder’s fingerprint be inside the box?’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘It was. It’s safe now between a piece of Sellotape and a card signed by four officers and on its way to Edinburgh. I came here to get a fresh set of Calder’s prints.’

  ‘You can’t have them,’ Mr Enterkin said.

  ‘I can and I will.’ Russell placed a wrapped object on the table. ‘This is your glass back. I don’t believe, Mr Calder, that the prints on it were yours. I believe that, accidentally or a-purpose, Ritchie made a guddle and took a wrong glass. I demand that you furnish me with a fresh set.’

  Mr Enterkin managed a laugh, although Keith could see a very slight tremor in his hands. ‘If the police have been careless enough to lose the first set, I do not see any obligation on my client to submit to being pestered for more prints until the cows come home. Your request is refused.’

  ‘Then I shall take Mr Calder into custody on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice.’

  ‘That would be unwise,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘It would force me to brief counsel to argue, first, that anything done in support of a case which Mrs Muir’s confession now proves to be true must have been supporting rather than perverting the course of justice; and, secondly, that, almost in Lord Bickenholme’s own words, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Or, in this case, perhaps I should say sauce for the pigeon. I deny, of course, that my client introduced any evidence into the house, but counsel will argue that he might well have been justified had he done so, in view of your own fabrication of evidence concerning the microswitch.’

  Russell did not even blink. ‘I’d like to see you proving such a thing,’ he said.


  ‘You will see it, but you won’t like it. We will start with an independent forensic examination of that switch, which turned up so unexpectedly and is now seen to run counter to all the true evidence. Was it, in fact, damaged in an explosion, or will our expert decide that you gave it a smack with a hammer? Will chemical analysis of the scorching upon it verify the presence of gunpowder, Nobel 80 and petrol? Or did you merely give it a few minutes in the fireplace?

  ‘Next, was that component found in the first search, or did it turn up later, after your own expert had suggested the necessity of such a switch because the current generated in a radio-telephone would be inadequate to fire the explosion on its own? Will we discover that you were the happy searcher? Or will the officer who made the find withstand rigorous examination under threat of prosecution for perjury?’

  Mr Enterkin paused. The others waited. Keith was aware of a new Ralph Enterkin. The mild, sometimes ineffectual solicitor, without raising his voice, had taken command. To interrupt would have been unthinkable.

  ‘Finally,’ he resumed, ‘we would call on Miss Gurney, the assistant in Mr Paterson’s shop. You were, of course, too careful to buy the component. But she saw you abstract such a switch from one of the display stands and is prepared to swear to it.’

  Russell found his voice. ‘She didn’t,’ he said. ‘You were the one who mentioned perjury. It would be perjury for her to swear such a thing. She never saw it. It never happened.’

  ‘She would be safe from a charge of perjury, because you could only prove that it was perjury by proving where you really obtained that component. Are you prepared to try that? Really, I am surprised at you for falling into such an elementary trap.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What trap?’