Hook or Crook

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘I slung Imad outside and told him not to come back until he’d learned to behave as if he was a gentleman. Then, when he was well clear, I said much the same to Mr Hollister and put him outside and I suppose he went off home to his caravan. I never saw either of them again.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Sam Bruce said. ‘You did well. That’s why I employ you.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered why,’ Alec said. He picked up his cloth and another glass.

  ‘That was Sunday,’ Eric said thoughtfully. ‘And Hollister was dead about twenty-four hours later. Have you told the police about this? They were making inquiries around the village.’

  Alec looked blank. ‘I must have been at my digs about ten miles away, studying, while they were doing the rounds here. This is the first I’ve heard of it. You don’t suppose . . .?’

  ‘You’ll have to tell them,’ Sam Bruce said.

  ‘I suppose I will.’ The young barman was looking unhappy. ‘I don’t want to. I like old Imad. He may’ve lost his head once but I can’t see him killing anyone. He comes across as having about as much aggression in him as a woolly toy rabbit.’

  ‘You don’t know what the provocation was,’ Eric said. ‘Maybe Hollister refused the head of the family an overdraft while he was managing a branch bank out there. These Arabs remember an insult to the family honour for ever and they count life fairly cheap.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell them,’ Sam Bruce repeated.

  ‘All right. When I get around to it.’

  ‘You just want to give him time to scarper,’ said Eric. ‘But if you haven’t seen him since Sunday he’s probably back in the family oasis by now, tucking into the sheeps’ eyeballs and bragging about how he smote the infidel. Set ’em up again.’

  ‘Dinner won’t be long now,’ Mr Bruce said warningly.

  ‘Set ’em up all the same. And let’s have a look at the wine list.’

  The wine list was short but proved satisfactory.

  Other drinkers had begun to trickle into the bar and the subject of mysterious death was allowed to lapse for the moment. We became involved with a trio who had been fishing Seamuir Two all day with only modest success — they had one mediocre fish to show for it plus an unlikely tale about a salmon as big as a submarine which had taken the fly, dragged the struggling angler up the Dee and back again and then broken his tackle just when the battle was almost won.

  We were all having a little quiet fun, provoking the loser of the contest into ever wilder exaggerations, when Mrs Bruce made one of her rare appearances from the back premises. ‘We’re ready to serve dinner now,’ she said. ‘And is Mr Bell here? There’s a lady asking for him.’

  Eric was silent. I glanced at him in surprise. He seemed to have shrunk. He recovered his voice with an effort. ‘Coming,’ he said hoarsely. I would have hung back and let him greet his visitor alone but he grabbed me by the elbow, as he had the unfortunate reporter, and steered me ahead of him into the entrance hall. His grip was firm but I could feel a tremor in his hand. By the time we entered the hall I was expecting almost anyone, a gorgon, a policewoman or a young girl with a very large baby.

  But the lady who turned from hanging up a fawn raincoat in the hallway was none of these. She was plump in the pretty way that some women have, as though the plumpness of near middle age were puppy-fat. Her hair, which was chestnut with a natural wave, was tidy but its forward shape, reminding me of a spaniel’s ears, put me in mind of one or two ladies who mistrusted the local hairdresser in Newton Lauder and let it grow until they could visit the city. She was neatly but plainly dressed, and for the country rather than the town, Eric, no doubt, could have explained the difference but I, no expert in women’s clothes, could only have said that when Janet dressed that way she was going visiting but not straying far from home, and certainly not to Edinburgh. The plain but polished walking shoes were the only clue I could be sure of. The overall image was ladylike, countrified and somehow just right.

  Her eyes passed over me, unseeing, and settled on Eric. She hesitated. Her smile, when it came, was unforced. I felt Eric’s hand relax and then let go of my arm.

  ‘It is Eric, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t seen you since your wedding.’

  Eric took her hand and produced his own flashing smile. ‘And you must be Beatrice Kirk. It’s rude of me to admit it, but I was stunned by so many names and faces at the wedding that I had no recollection of you at all. I’ve put on weight since then. That’s two black marks.’

  Her smile widened. Two such smiles in the confined space were infectious. I found myself joining in.

  ‘And full marks for honesty,’ she said. ‘You were afraid that I was going to turn out to be a reincarnation of Amy, weren’t you? When you came through the door, you looked ready to turn and run. But I do understand.’

  ‘Your voice is so like hers,’ Eric said. ‘It brought her back. I half expected to see her double standing here.’

  ‘No such luck. Amy was the beauty of the family.’

  ‘I couldn’t have borne it if you’d had the same looks. They were special to your cousin,’ Eric said in a rush. I guessed that he wanted to get the subject out of the way before his voice betrayed him. He remembered my presence. ‘This is Wallace James, my companion and mentor.’ He let go of her hand at last so that she could shake mine and he went on, ‘We were just about to go through for dinner. Would you join us? Or have you eaten?’

  She glanced uncertainly at me, wondering whether she would be intruding. ‘Please do,’ I said. ‘We’re beginning to run out of conversation.’

  ‘Then I’d love to. I have a lot of friends around here and we exchange invitations now and again, but I still get very bored with cooking for one.’

  We went through into a dining-room which looked out onto a large garden, slightly overgrown and in full flower. The Bruces’ daughter, who doubled or trebled as waitress, receptionist and upstairs maid, laid an extra place for Beatrice Kirk. I glanced at the girl and thought that her parents were working her too hard. Eric ordered wine.

  To be honest, I was dreading a mealtime conversation devoted to reminiscences of the late Amy Bell, whom I had never met, but that subject was skirted around. Beatrice drew Eric out on the subject of existence as a widower. Eric tried for a light touch, but the lonely aimlessness came over loud and clear. In her turn she told us something of her own life. She had taken an arts degree but had given up a career in teaching to nurse her mother through a long terminal illness. There had been a fiancé somewhere along the way, I gathered, but he had died in an air crash and she had never married. Now alone in the world, she still lived in what had been her parents’ retirement home on money that her father had left her.

  ‘You never felt like going back to teaching?’ I asked her.

  ‘I’ve felt like it,’ she said. ‘But education has moved on and I haven’t moved with it. I’m just beyond the age for thinking metric — I was born imperial and I shall be buried in an imperial coffin. I know the wrong languages and I’m past becoming a student all over again. What’s worse, I’d be taking a job away from somebody who needs it more than I do. But I can’t bear to be altogether idle. I shall just have to make do with charitable works.’

  She made the words sound like a joke but I discovered later that, in addition to serving with great energy on the Community Council she did indeed do a prodigious amount of work for various charities.

  Our meal arrived. Eric’s fears proved unjustified. The cooking might be plain but it was very good indeed. The Aberdeen Angus steaks were tender and juicy and the vegetables were fresh out of the hotel garden. Beatrice enjoyed the meal but I saw her give Eric a succession of thoughtful looks as he worked his way through an excellent soup, the main course with extra vegetables and two helpings of apple tart with cream, followed by biscuits and three different cheeses.

  Bea, as she asked us both to call her, ate more sparingly and she and I were both finished and were toying with the coffee while Eric was
still working on his apple tart. The conversation had moved on.

  ‘The Spey wasn’t fishing well?’ Bea said to me. ‘So Eric told me on the phone.’

  ‘Abysmal,’ I told her.

  ‘And so you’ve moved to here. Which beat are you fishing?’

  ‘Strathdee One.’

  ‘That’s been doing well this year. Or so I’ve been told.’

  ‘We heard that it had been poached,’ Eric said.

  ‘On Monday night,’ Bea confirmed. (Eric caught my eye and waggled his eyebrows. The presence of salmon poachers could shed a new light on Mr Hollister’s death.) ‘But I believe that they were interrupted before they could get the net out. I heard a van go by and then the uproar and shouting followed only a few minutes later. You’ll have to ask the ghillie about it and get him to show you the best lies.’

  ‘I tried to hire him,’ Eric said. ‘He’s tied up with a couple of visiting Americans this week.’

  Something wistful in Bea’s voice had given me a hint. ‘Do you fish?’ I asked her.

  ‘When I get the chance. Toby Seamuir sometimes gives me a day when a beat’s unlet. I still have my father’s rods.’ She sighed for the days gone by and then chuckled. ‘You’ll have to watch out for His Excellency.’

  ‘Who?’ Eric and I asked in unison.

  ‘Don’t you know about the ambassador?’ She named one of the small Arab states which gain an importance quite out of proportion to size or population by being oil rich. ‘He rents the big house by the chain bridge and has a lease of Seamuir Number Three for the whole summer.’

  Eric had finished choosing his cheeses. He offered the last of the bottle and then emptied it into his own glass. ‘They must pay their diplomatic staff well,’ he said.

  ‘Probably they do,’ said Bea. ‘But I believe his family has money and to spare. Selling camels to the oil industry or something. He comes up here some weekends and stays on whenever things have gone quiet in London. In fact, I think he’s in residence just now. I heard the helicopter arrive on Monday and I see it’s still parked on the lawn. So watch out. His beat overlaps yours, on the opposite bank, but he thinks the whole river belongs to him. He strays over the boundaries when he feels like it, but he hits the roof if anyone encroaches on his water. He has a couple of tough-looking bodyguards who stand around glaring at the dog-walkers and intimidating other anglers into fishing those parts of their beats furthest from his.’

  ‘They won’t intimidate me.’ Eric frowned at a comparatively inoffensive piece of cheese. ‘Do people walk dogs along the river bank?’

  ‘Where else? It’s the prettiest walk for miles around, and safer than the road verges.’

  Eric looked at me. ‘I thought the sound of dogs’ footsteps put the fish off. They sound like an otter or something.’

  ‘That’s true, if the dog’s running loose near the water,’ I said. ‘But if they hear it come, they hear it go again. I’ve never found the effect very lasting. You’ll have to come and show us the lies,’ I told Bea. ‘Bring a rod.’

  ‘We’re only allowed two rods,’ Eric said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a two-rod beat. And when the factor asked me I told him there were only two of us.’

  ‘I’ll speak to George McPhee, the factor, and see whether he has any objection,’ Bea said.

  ‘If he does, I won’t mind sitting out for a while,’ I told her. She patted my hand.

  There was a contemplative silence for a few seconds.

  ‘The police have been all over the place today,’ Bea said, ‘and it wasn’t about poaching. There was a rumour about a drowning, but nobody’s seen a body being taken away.’

  Eric and I exchanged a glance. ‘And nobody local has gone missing?’ I said. Eric’s eyebrows went up again, as well they might, but I felt a reluctance to spread our inside knowledge around for fear either of hampering the police or of dropping Tony McIver into the mire for talking freely to us.

  To my surprise, Bea took the question seriously. ‘Nobody except one or two oil industry men who get sent offshore sometimes. I don’t know much about it — I live across the bridge and the police don’t seem to know that I exist — but I’m told that they’ve been asking about a man who was fishing Seamuir Number Four last week. That’s also partly opposite your beat,’ she added helpfully.

  This was too much for Eric, who had absorbed three gin and tonics and most of a bottle of a respectable wine. ‘We can tell you a little more than that,’ he said. Three of the other five tables in the small dining-room were occupied by now. He lowered his voice, although the chatter of three shrill women at the corner table would have drowned a pipe band, and embarked on the story of our week. In the telling, he gave me more credit than was due to me for the little help I had given the police.

  Bea was a good listener. Most women, and some men I know, would have interrupted the story with questions or exclamations of amazement, but she sat in silence, attentive and still, during the telling and for a minute after Eric had run down. Then she looked around. ‘They’ll be wanting this table in a minute,’ she said. ‘There’s a quiet coffee room behind the bar. Shall we move in there?’

  Miss Bruce arrived to clear the table before we were out of the door.

  Chapter Six

  Eric paused on the way through the bar. Bea was persuaded to accept a Grand Marnier. I went back to beer. Eric brought the drinks to us in the coffee room, with a large brandy and a cigar for himself. We had the small room to ourselves for the moment. Bea was still thoughtful.

  ‘You seem to be in pensive mood,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve given me a lot to be pensive about,’ she said slowly. ‘I think I’ll have to go and make a statement —’

  Somebody knocked on the door. I called, ‘Come in,’ although it was hardly for us to invite anyone in to one of the hotel’s public rooms.

  PC Tony McIver, very neat in a grey suit, slipped halfway through the door and nodded to us.

  ‘You heard the man,’ Eric said jovially. ‘Come and join us. Drink?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Before you decide to be off duty,’ I said hastily, ‘if you’re still concerned with the death of Mr Hollister you’d better identify yourself to Alec the barman. He has something to tell you.’

  ‘Then I shall do that.’

  He closed the door behind him. ‘It seems,’ Eric said to Bea, ‘that you’ll get your chance to make a statement sooner than you thought. That young man is a police officer, though what he’s doing this side of the Lecht I can’t imagine.’

  ‘I could make a guess,’ I said. ‘What are you going to tell him?’

  ‘Let me sit and think it out,’ Bea said.

  We sat quietly. Eric concentrated on lighting his cigar. When I made a visit to the toilet, Mr Bruce was tending the bar and I could hear voices from the small office behind the reception desk.

  Tony McIver rejoined us about twenty minutes later, notebook in hand, bringing a modest half-pint with him and interrupting me in the middle of a fishing reminiscence.

  ‘This is my cousin, Bea Kirk,’ Eric said. ‘She lives just across the river. We’ve been telling her all about it and she has some news for you. You’re a little off your usual beat, aren’t you?’

  ‘More than a little,’ said McIver. ‘I am by way of being piggy in the middle. I doubt if my superiors would wish me to be chatting so freely — or you either — but the way things are I need somebody to talk with. Here’s the way of it. You’ll remember that I stuck my neck out and said that the man’s death was no ordinary accident. And you, Mr James, said that like as not he’d been on Deeside. And then we found the cheque counterfoil to Seamuir Estate.

  ‘DCI Fergusson is in charge of the case back in Granton but he believes that, if it wasn’t indeed an accident after all, the man was killed here and dumped in the Spey. The procurator fiscal, on the other hand, would be quite happy to take it before the sheriff and press for a verdict of accidental death. B
ut Mr Fergusson asked Grampian Police to assist and they put a team to searching the river banks here, without turning up anything of use. They’ve come to the conclusion that the mannie drove himself over to the Spey and had an accident or was killed over there.’

  ‘With the result that it’s fallen through the crack and nobody’s doing very much,’ Eric said.

  McIver nodded. ‘Except for me,’ he said. ‘I’m sent over here, with the acting rank of detective constable, to liaise with Grampian Police. I’m reporting to a sergeant who is taking his line from his superiors, and he reports to an inspector who doesn’t want to know. I think the intention is to keep me busy but out of everybody’s hair . . . except that of the long-suffering public.’

  ‘So here you are,’ I said, ‘a beardless youth in what amounts to sole charge of a one-man murder inquiry.’

  McIver scratched his chin, producing a rasping noise. ‘Not quite beardless,’ he said, ‘but nearly so. I have spent half the day inquiring about the salmon poachers. And now we hear about a fight with one of the locals, and an Arab at that.’

  ‘I meant to ask,’ Eric said suddenly. ‘Any connection between Imad Vahhaji and the gentlemen from the embassy?’ he asked Bea.

  ‘Definitely not,’ she said. ‘Daggers drawn, my dear. Their respective countries aren’t on speaking terms, except at the end of a gun.’ She turned to Tony McIver. ‘What I was going to tell you, or the police in general, was this. Two things. Firstly, I’m told that the dead man’s name was Hollister. He was one of those men who move around quietly, speaking when spoken to and never giving a name unless asked, but when I asked him, if we’re talking about the same man, he said that it was Robinson. And, secondly, on Monday evening I saw him heading east towards the end of the village where Imad Vahhaji lives.’

  ‘Do you tell me that, now?’ McIver said, scribbling busily. ‘I shall likely be along to take a formal statement from you another day. For the moment, I think that I should go and visit this Mr Vahhaji.’