Hook or Crook

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Do you think that that motor-caravan could have made it over this road?’ he asked, changing into a low gear for a long, steep descent.

  ‘If this chap can,’ I said, ‘it certainly could.’ A Ford Escort trailing a conventional caravan was climbing towards us, puffing steam.

  ‘But can he?’ said Eric. The road bent sharply at the bottom of the hill and we looked back. The Escort was still going, climbing into the cloud that draped the mountain tops.

  We came down at last into the valley of the Dee, emerged onto the North Deeside Road and turned towards Bantullich. The Dee, when we began to get glimpses of it, seemed to be in a much better state than the Spey, well up and slightly coloured. Coming through the mountains we had left the sunshine behind. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and there was a thin drizzle. Our spirits remained high. The angler is the one sportsman to whom sunshine is a mixed blessing.

  An hour and three-quarters on the road from Granton, we pulled up in the yard behind the Seamuir Arms Hotel. The hotel was just as I remembered it, of granite and slate, old but well kept and with the woodwork brightly painted, set back from the village street which paralleled the main road. It was warm with memories of old friends, good fishing and tall stories so that there was a welcoming feel to the place as if I were coming home.

  To my surprise Sam Bruce, the landlord, set the seal on my pleasure by greeting me by name — no mean feat after an absence of several years. The bar, he said, was nominally closed during the afternoons but it could be open to residents whenever we were ready.

  I can drink beer at any hour. Eric was similar, except that his taste was more catholic and his thirst also extended to wines and spirits. We took our luggage up and unpacked. My room was next to Eric’s but the old walls seemed solid enough to exclude the sound of snoring.

  A long parcel had awaited me at the hotel. I showered, shaved and changed and then, before we went down again, I had a small presentation to perform. Eric had been a generous host and in addition was paying a stiff fee and I wanted to make up for some of the disappointments. Also, I rather fancied treating myself to a new rod. Keith was not averse to helping himself out of stock and as his partner I felt entitled to do the same. Keith took so little interest in such humdrum tasks as stocktaking that I knew he would never notice, nor be in a position to complain if he did.

  When I presented him with the rod that he had coveted, Eric blinked at me. ‘How did you manage to get another rod up here?’ he asked me.

  ‘When I phoned home last night, I asked Janet to put it on the bus.’

  ‘I didn’t know that one could do that. Well, I must say that I’m deeply grateful. Do you want my old rod in return?’

  ‘Keep it,’ I said. Frankly, I wouldn’t have had it as a gift; and Eric’s style of casting tended to be so violent that he would certainly need a spare sooner or later.

  We found the bar already open for business. A gloomy-looking man in a thin summer suit was occupying one of the stools and apparently enjoying just the kind of bar snack Eric had foretold, while an untouched drink waited at his elbow.

  I asked Sam Bruce, who was behind the bar, for a pint of Special. Eric glanced at his watch before ordering a gin and tonic — a superfluous gesture but one which he always made, although I never detected that it made any difference to his choice of beverage.

  Mr Bruce poured our drinks and made a note for the bill. ‘Nothing to eat?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll wait for dinner,’ Eric said. ‘We stopped for something at Tomintoul.’

  Mr Bruce nodded, indicated the bell and withdrew into the back premises.

  The white-painted walls of the bar were hung with sporting trophies. Keith had examined the few guns years before and pronounced them of only minor interest, but Eric seemed fascinated by a collection of ancient fishing rods, some of them so heavy that a strong man must have been exhausted after an hour of casting.

  A meticulously hand-drawn and coloured map of the river and its immediate environs hung on the wall beside the outer door and I looked at it to refresh my memory. The map was framed and glazed but it must have been removable from its frame because pencilled information had been added in many hands over the years as to the best salmon lies and the places where notable fish had been hooked.

  According to the map, a path began almost opposite the hotel and ran down between a wood and the garden wall of a large house in spreading grounds, to the river, which it crossed by way of a chain bridge. I remembered the house, which was a baronial monstrosity of pink granite, all turrets and crow-steps, and also the bridge, a Victorian suspension affair of iron rods, with pillars on concrete bases and a footpath of timber sleepers. On the far bank, the path became a track which continued through woods and broken farmland towards the South Deeside Road and Strathdee Castle. Our beat, Number One, stretched upstream from the bridge for two long pools, finishing at a sharp bend in the river, and downstream for three pools to where a small burn entered. (In this context, a ‘pool’ is any stretch of slower water between areas of rapid descent.) I fixed the boundaries in my mind rather than risk being found committing the ultimate sin of fishing in somebody else’s water.

  The glum-looking stranger had finished his snack. ‘You’re here for the fishing?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘That’s right,’ Eric said. ‘We’ve got Strathdee Castle Number One tomorrow and all next week.’

  ‘Then I’m your next-door neighbour. I’m on Number Two Beat, this week and next. Harry Codlington. Call me Harry.’

  Eric gave our names and we all shook hands. ‘You’re here alone?’ Eric asked.

  Harry nodded sadly. ‘For the moment. My pal has a business crisis and had to fly out to the States. He’ll be back next week, God and the weather permitting.’

  ‘Is the fishing any good?’

  ‘My beat’s not been too bad. I’ve had four good fish in three days.’

  I had turned back to the map. Strathdee Castle Number Two was downstream of our beat, beginning at the mouth of the burn.

  ‘Only three days?’ Eric said idly. ‘I thought you said you’d been here all week. This is Friday, isn’t it? Or have I slipped in an extra day somewhere?’

  ‘Friday it is. But I went over to the Spey on Monday for a casting lesson and to visit some old friends. And I don’t count today. Something’s been going on here. There were police crawling all over the river banks. They tried to send me away. I told them to go and get stuffed,’ Harry added with satisfaction.

  ‘And did they?’ Eric asked.

  ‘Not exactly. Not while I was trying to fish. I don’t know what they got up to in their own time,’ Harry added, without the least trace of a smile. ‘But at least they stopped trying to browbeat me. I went on fishing, but between the disturbance and the feeling that I was being watched and eager-beavers asking me if I’d caught anything yet I got pretty fed up, I can tell you.

  ‘It’s not the easiest place to cast a line — there are trees overhead or just behind you at most of the best lies, which I suppose is one reason why they’re the best lies — and every time I got caught up I could hear some bastard give a quiet cheer. So I packed it in. They tell me they’ll be finished by tomorrow. If they aren’t, I’ll be demanding a refund from the estate.’

  ‘Golly!’ Eric said respectfully. ‘I wish I’d had your strength of mind. Much the same happened to us on the Spey on Tuesday and Wednesday, but we were soft. I did threaten to take the senior copper to court, but we let them push us off and I never thought of asking for a refund. Are you ready for the other half?’

  ‘My treat,’ Harry Codlington said, pressing the bell. He sounded more cheerful now that he had found a fellow sufferer. ‘Gin and tonic, was it? And a pint?’

  I was still studying the map but Eric accepted on my behalf. On the near side of the river Seamuir Number Four Beat, which had been booked by the now defunct Mr Hollister, ran downstream from the chain bridge. Above the bridge, Number Three Beat began.

&nb
sp; ‘What the hell is going on around here?’ Harry demanded of the room. ‘Policemen combing river banks and harassing honest fishermen. They wouldn’t tell me a thing. Salmon poachers? I hear that your beat was poached a week ago.’

  Eric’s jaw dropped and his eyebrows went up. ‘Poached? The girl in the office never said anything about that.’

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t, would she?’ Harry said reasonably. ‘It isn’t the sort of thing they boast about.’

  ‘If it was only netted once, the best lies will have been taken over again by now,’ I said.

  ‘He speaks at last!’ Codlington said.

  Sam Bruce chuckled. ‘If you get Mr James onto the subject of fishing, he’ll talk all night.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ Eric said.

  Their comments, of course, left me more tongue-tied than ever.

  ‘I was wondering myself what the fuss was about,’ Sam Bruce said from behind the bar. ‘It didn’t sound like poachers. They showed me a photograph of a man and asked if I’d ever seen him.’

  ‘And had you?’ Eric asked him.

  ‘Certainly I had. It was a man who came in here most evenings last week. I never asked his name. Mind you, he was alive then. From the photograph, although they’d tried to pretty him up a bit, I’d say that he’d popped his clogs, but when I asked what was up they told me, more or less, to mind my own business. So I made them pay for their drinks. That was minding my own business, as I pointed out to them, but they weren’t amused.’

  Eric was too full of inside information to hold on to it any longer. ‘His name was Hollister,’ he said with a carefully assumed air of omniscience, ‘and you’d be right about his clogs. We found his body in the Spey on Tuesday morning. It put us off our fishing, I can tell you, quite apart from there hardly being a fish in the river. I did land one good one,’ he added quickly, ‘but that seemed to be the only salmon there. That’s why we decided to move over to the Dee.’

  ‘What had happened to him?’ Harry Codlington asked. He seemed to have been further cheered by the news of another misfortune to somebody else. He was almost smiling.

  I shot Eric a warning glance. Despite the interest of the reporters, the press coverage of the death had been minimal. If the police wanted to play it down, it seemed to me that it was not for us to broadcast our inside knowledge.

  Eric caught my glance and seemed to interpret it correctly. He choked off what promised to be a lengthy exposition of the subject. ‘That’s what the police want to know,’ he said. ‘He could have fallen and hit his head.’

  ‘Or somebody could have dotted him one,’ said Sam Bruce. He leaned his elbows on the bar with the ease of comfortable familiarity.

  ‘But why are they searching the river bank here?’ Codlington asked.

  Eric hesitated. ‘Between ourselves, there seems to be a possibility that he died here and was moved,’ he said at last.

  Silence fell while Harry Codlington and the landlord digested the implications of what Eric had said.

  The hour for evening trade was approaching. I saw a pale yellow sports car pass the front windows and heard it draw up in the car-park with a slither on the gravel. Almost immediately, a man in a waiter’s grey jacket entered the back bar. He seemed very young but he looked like a rugby-player, self-confident and physically strong. One side of his mouth was badly swollen, which seemed to support my guess. I further guessed that he was a student doing a vacation job.

  ‘I only saw him a few times,’ Sam Bruce was saying. ‘Alec serves in here during the evenings. He’ll remember him. Alec, the gentleman who was fishing Seamuir Number Four — his name was Hollister — turned up dead in the Spey.’

  Alec started polishing glasses. ‘Is that so?’ he said.

  ‘You remember him?’

  ‘I certainly do.’ Alec put a glass down carefully on top of his cloth and leaned his elbows on the bar in unconscious imitation of Sam Bruce. ‘Frankly, if he’d been found in the Dee I could have understood it.’

  ‘What was wrong with him?’ Eric asked.

  ‘Nothing, really,’ Alec said hastily. He straightened up and resumed his polishing. ‘Very quiet man. I thought that he was shy, but there was more to him than that. I gathered that he was staying in a caravan, somewhere across the river. He’d walk over the bridge most evenings, have a single pint while he listened to the general chit-chat without saying more than a word or two, and then he’d say good-night politely and off he’d go again.’

  ‘Then why wouldn’t you have been surprised if he’d been found here?’ Sam Bruce demanded.

  Alec shrugged. ‘I don’t usually gossip about the customers. You know that, Mr Bruce. But if the mannie’s dead . . . One evening last week he came in early. The bar was empty — it’s like that sometimes in the early evenings before the Aberdeen commuters get home — and he took a little longer than usual and had a couple of nips of whisky. So I chatted to him, drew him out a bit. Well, people come into a pub for human contact and a little conversation as well as the grub and booze, and I look on it as part of the job, if somebody’s on his own, to be a pair of ears or whatever else he seems to want.

  ‘He loosened up after a while and chatted away quite pleasantly. Told me that he’d been an overseas branch manager for one of the big banks. Israel, Lebanon, Iran, you name it, he’d been all over. Had several passports, he told me, so that he never needed to let one lot of immigration officials see the stamp of a country they weren’t on speaking terms with.

  ‘He retired back to Britain a few years ago, he told me. Apparently, overseas service entitles them to an early pension. He wasn’t going to say any more but I went and put my foot in it. Just to break the silence, I asked him whether he was married and what his wife thought of his going off on fishing trips on his own. I think that he nearly broke down at that point but he pulled himself together after no more than a sort of hiccup and told me that he and his wife used to go on fishing trips together but that she’d been knocked down and killed in a London street soon after their retirement.’

  I saw Eric’s face drop. ‘Poor devil!’ he said softly. It came to me that he would know better than any of us how Hollister had felt.

  ‘That’s what I thought myself,’ Alec said. ‘I’ve never known that sort of a loss myself. I hope I never do. I’d have thought that I could imagine what it would be like, but looking at his face . . . no, I couldn’t.

  ‘Then on Sunday evening — you know the lull we get between the before-dinner drinkers and the evening boozers on a Sunday?’

  ‘Regular as clockwork,’ Sam Bruce confirmed.

  ‘That’s when he came in again, bought his pint and went to sit in the corner.

  ‘The only other drinker left in the bar was Imad Vahhaji. He’s an Arab, Iranian or some such, who rents a house on the edge of the village. He’s over here studying the oil industry and not short of a bob or two by all accounts. His clothes look expensive, and I’d kill to get my hands on that car of his.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with the car you’ve got,’ Sam Bruce said gruffly. ‘It’s not every student can run a car like that off his grant.’

  Alec’s eyes narrowed for a moment but he resisted the temptation to point out that he was working to supplement his grant. ‘It gets me here and takes me home,’ Alec admitted. ‘But if Imad offered to make me a present of his car, I wouldn’t exactly be insulted. Not by a mile. You don’t wash a car like that, you lick it clean.’

  ‘He might even do that. Friendly sort of bloke,’ Sam Bruce explained. ‘Very anxious for everybody to like him. Always standing his hand.’

  ‘That’s the chap,’ Alec agreed. ‘Usually. He was in his expansive mood that evening. Of course, he’d had a few. Not drunk, just seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses. Amazing how these Arabs take to it as soon as they get away from their strict Moslem backgrounds. He offered the other man a drink but only got a head-shake out of it for his pains. So, when Mr — Hollister, did you say? — went to the Gents, Mr Vahh
aji asked me what was up with him. I didn’t have any other explanation to offer and I didn’t want to leave him thinking that Mr Hollister, who I liked and felt sorry for, was prejudiced against Arabs. So I told Imad about Mr Hollister’s wife being dead.

  ‘That seemed to upset Imad. He’s one of those skinny Arabs with soft eyes like a spaniel and I’ll swear that they were ready to fill with tears. But he was just as interested in Mr Hollister’s time in the Middle East and wondered whether he knew his — Imad’s — home territory.

  ‘Mr Hollister came back, and on the way by he asked me if there was anywhere he could buy petrol on a Sunday evening. I said that there was only one place between here and Banchory, open twenty-four hours including weekends. Mr Vahhaji said that he’d give him the directions and went over and sat down with him. I didn’t even try to hear what was being said for the next few minutes. They seemed to be getting along all right. I don’t like friction among the customers. But, next thing I knew, Gulf War Two had broken out. Chairs went flying and, within a couple of seconds, Imad Vahhaji had Mr Hollister by the throat and the two of them were thrashing around on the floor.’

  ‘Aha!’ Sam Bruce exclaimed. ‘That’s what the row was, then. I was out at the back. When I came in, my wife said that there’d been some trouble but you had it under control, so I kept my nose out of it.’

  Alec nodded. ‘Just as well. The proper drill would have been to stay out of it and call the cops, but they could have done some serious damage to each other by then and anyway they were both well behaved as a general rule, so I got Imad Vahhaji by the scruff of the neck and pulled him off. Then Mr Hollister, who’d completely lost his rag, tried to have a go at Imad while I was holding him, which was a bit over the odds. I fended him off and he took a swipe at me, the innocent bystander —’ Alec touched his swollen mouth ‘— so I kneed Hollister where it did most good. Imad tried to get in a swift kick or two, so I picked him up by the middle and squeezed the breath out of him. Neither of them seemed to have much appetite for a scrap after that.