The Curse of the Cockers (Three Oaks Book 5)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘So that’s first, second, and a certificate for our stock,’ Isobel said, pointing out the obvious. ‘And we’ve made damn sure that the journalists realized it. That should be worth ten per cent on the price of a pup.’

  ‘Well done!’ I said. ‘Well done indeed!’ The girls were gesturing at me. ‘Daffy and Beth send their congratulations too. There will be champagne when you get back. Are you staying over another night?’

  ‘The hotel’s bloody awful,’ Isobel said. ‘And Rex seems to be missing his oats. We’re thinking of starting back and seeing how far we get.’

  ‘There’s a hell of a gale here,’ I said. ‘Do you have it?’

  ‘Not yet, but it’s forecast. If we run into high winds, we’ll maybe find another hotel and wait it out. Your car swings about a bit in a crosswind.’

  ‘Try to get back,’ I said incautiously. ‘I need the car.’

  ‘Use Henry’s.’

  I had no wish to try to explain over the phone that the mishap to Henry’s car had not been my fault. ‘It’s almost out of petrol,’ I said.

  Chapter Eight

  The gale kept us awake during the night, soughing under the eaves and rattling flying twigs on the slates. It peaked in the early morning and then began, very slowly, to abate.

  Following the sabotage to Henry’s car, we had expected, at the very least, a visit from DCI Kipple and an interrogation on such subjects as where the car had stood overnight and what we could have said or done to invite such attention. In this we were disappointed. But for the arrival of a uniformed constable from Cupar, who paced around the gravel in the apparent hope that the saboteur had left behind a hacksaw or a few spanners, we could have supposed that the police were sublimely uninterested in any attempts on our lives or wellbeing.

  The travellers, we learned by phone, had slept near Carlisle and were now meeting the worst of the wind. It seemed unlikely that they would be back in time for me to keep my appointment at Foleyknowe. So I phoned Angus Todd, explained my predicament, and arranged to borrow his Land-Rover. He drove it over to Three Oaks after lunch. I saw him coming and was waiting on the gravel.

  ‘Move over,’ I told him. ‘I’ll run you home and get the feel of this thing at the same time.’

  He clambered over the gear levers into the passenger seat and I settled myself behind the wheel. The wind pushed the unstreamlined vehicle around less than I expected.

  ‘I could come with you,’ Angus said. ‘I’d like to hear what you say to Mr de Forgan.’

  ‘Better not. I want to clear up the loose ends about the shoot,’ I said. ‘Nothing you don’t know about. After that, I’d rather you weren’t there while I ask him what he’ll say if you have to call him as a witness.’

  ‘You still think it’ll come to that?’

  ‘It may,’ I said carefully. ‘Not about murder; but if they don’t catch their murderer or can’t connect him more closely with Dinnet’s death, the big danger is that they might settle for the hit-and-run charge. I don’t think Mr de Forgan’s evidence will be useful, but we won’t know that for sure if we don’t ask him. That’s all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so. I said I wouldn’t name him to the police, but I told him you’d be asking questions.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘He didn’t seem too fashed about it. Why don’t you want me around?’

  ‘You blow your top too damned easily. I don’t want you putting his back up just because he doesn’t say what you think he should say.’

  Angus swallowed that without blowing his top but when I drew up at his house he sat for a moment before returning to the subject. ‘Well, don’t you go angering him either,’ he said. ‘If he takes a scunner to you, we could lose that lease. He’s generally easy-going, but he can flare up.’

  ‘I’ll be the soul of tact,’ I told him.

  ‘You do that.’

  Traffic on the Road Bridge and along the north side of the Tay was slowed by the wind. Large vans were crawling and a caravan had blown onto its side. By the time I turned through the gates of Foleyknowe the short afternoon of midwinter in Scotland was almost over and the sun, invisible behind dark clouds, was low in the sky.

  As Mr de Forgan had suggested, I wanted another look at the ground in daylight. I bypassed the house and bumped up the track to the fork. Several of the tall pines had been uprooted by the wind and lay at forlorn angles; others were listing precariously and one, I noticed, had split near the base. I parked near the shed where I thought that Angus’s Land-Rover would be safe from further casualties.

  My objective was the hump of hill that rose between the two valleys, but I had to make a lengthy detour rather than walk beneath the moving trunks. Pheasants moved away in front of me, but in nothing like the number that the ground could have held. Once I was clear of the trees I climbed a fence and set off up the hill, staggering sideways on the grass whenever a gust of wind hit me.

  At the top, I clung to a fence post and used my watering eyes. Angus had been right. The thick hedges that separated the fields had not been replaced by wire for the sake of a few extra yards of cultivable land. It would be easy to feed the birds upward to the clumps of gorse and bracken on the hilltops where a few strips of kale would hold them for the beaters. I could see at least six good drives and a couple of alternatives. When the birds passed over the guns they would be high and travelling like bullets, worthy quarry for the most skilled and demanding of visitors. Further along one of the valleys I could see a wide patch of bogland which could be worked up for woodcock or snipe.

  I made my way down again in failing light, glad to get out of the worst of the wind. The saplings on the low ground were reaching up out of their guards and due for a burst of growth. One more year would see a transformation.

  Back at the Land-Rover, I looked at my watch. I was still rather early for my appointment with Mr de Forgan. I decided to take another and longer look at the shed, check it again for dampness and try to envisage it holding the feed, traps, tools, pen sections, and all the paraphernalia of keepering, with room to spare for Angus’s little All-Terrain Vehicle.

  When I pushed the shed door it opened again, rather more easily than before. Something drew my attention downwards and I noticed that the doorpost had been repaired but that the door had been left unlocked. I was wondering whether this was the owner’s way of inviting me to take a look inside when a voice spoke behind me.

  ‘Yes,’ it said. ‘I thought you wouldn’t be able to resist poking your long nose in here again.’

  I began to turn with an apology already on my lips, but something heavy whacked me on the back of the head. The world turned into a whirlpool of pain and I went down hard on my face.

  I was stunned but I never quite lost consciousness. Through an enveloping cloud of pain I was aware, as if from a great distance, that somebody had lifted my underweight frame without any great difficulty. I was carried a few yards and dropped ungently onto damp ground which heaved like a ship at sea. There followed a squeaking sound which I was too dazed to identify.

  My head was so filled with pain that I was in the dream state in which the mind becomes disembodied. The limp and nauseous form on the ground could have belonged to anybody but me. When a pair of hands gripped my wrists and dragged me along on my face, I would have been unable to resist – but in a remote corner of my mind some part of me was crawling back towards reality and insisted that I had been hit by a flying branch and that some friend was dragging me to safety.

  I was grateful to be left alone for a few seconds. All that I wanted in the world was to be left to sleep off what was either concussion or the most monstrous hangover the world had ever seen. I tried to snuggle down into a bed of earth and stone and dead pine needles.

  There was a groan which was not all mine as a monstrous weight descended on my back. The breath was crushed out of me. The few functioning cells of my brain nudged their neighbours into sluggish activity but I could not understand, except that
I knew now how a stranded fish must feel. If I did not breathe soon I would die.

  With a great effort, I opened my eyes. Somebody was kneeling down and looking into my face. He put his hand over my nose and mouth for a second and then backed away.

  I turned my head, more in a desperate search for air than to try to make sense of a world gone mad, and I saw that I was lying under one of the fallen trees. The tree was across my back and it was this that was crushing me to death. The light and my consciousness were ebbing fast but some feet away I could see the figure of the man, still kneeling. He was fiddling with something under the trunk. He pumped a handle twice and a little of the weight came off me. I could just begin to breathe again, almost but not quite enough for life.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. He got up, brushed his knees and I felt a fractional increase in the load on my back as he took a seat on the fallen tree.

  A little more of my mind came back to life, pushing aside the pain. A hydraulic car jack, that’s what it was. And although the man was now out of my sight I remembered the face looking into mine. I had seen him before, somewhere, and his voice was not unfamiliar. I had heard it, and not on the phone.

  He was speaking – to me, I realized suddenly. ‘Whatever the media call me,’ he said, ‘I’m not a sadist. But nor do I believe in turning the other cheek. Only weaklings do that. When somebody has managed to make me bloody angry, I hit back. And I give them time to wish that they’d stayed a long way out of my way. That’s all.’ He was speaking calmly and quietly so that it was difficult to hear his words over the wind in the trees.

  My mind was functioning again at about half throttle. I wanted to ask him what I’d ever done to incur his anger, but I needed all my breath and more. I could only expand my chest a few millimetres, but I had discovered that I could use my stomach muscles to force up my diaphragm and keep the life-giving air going in and out. For the moment, that was the summit of my ambition.

  ‘That Wentworth bitch,’ he said. ‘I was sick to death of her and there was somebody else by then. We’d enjoyed each other for a year but I found her wanting. Always wanting. Wanting money. Wanting presents. Wanting sex. And then wanting me to divorce my wife and marry her. I’d told her from the beginning that that was out of the question. I’d been honest with her but she’d been stringing me along. When I told her that we were through, she threatened to go to my wife. I couldn’t have that. I love my family.’

  The light was almost gone. Out of the corner of my eye I could barely distinguish the silhouette of his legs among the shapes of the trees. It was a reasonable bet that if I could not see him he could not make out my shape against the dark ground. My elbows were hampered by the tree trunk but without abandoning my fight for breath I managed to feel around me.

  The dispassionate voice droned on. ‘Todd told me that you were helping him but I never thought that you’d be a danger to me, not even although we’d met. When Todd told me that you were to be his partner, I decided to break off negotiations about the lease. But before I could find a good reason for that, I saw you from the house. You were nosing around. And you had those cocker spaniel bitches in the back of your car. I couldn’t recognize them, but they had to be the same ones. Why else would a breeder of springers have three black cockers with him? When you forced your way into the shed I knew that you were real trouble. That’s when I remembered what I’d said. I had been careless.’

  Between my concussion, the struggle for breath, and the total unreality of what was happening to me, my mind was in a nightmare of confusion; yet parts of my consciousness were working independently. I could recognize the mentality of the psychopath, apparently rational and sometimes brilliant but quite unable to see any obligations of morality beyond his own desires. They turn up regularly in the Forces and, for as long as the disciplines of the service hold, they can be valuable. Some earn decorations, often posthumously. And, as I had suggested to Beth, many of them have a soft spot for kittens, children, or grandmothers. Somewhere, the circuits are incomplete.

  To my right, the gap between the tree trunk and the ground narrowed, made smaller by a bulge of immovable rock. To my left was almost as bad, except that another slight hump in the ground, also of rock, was smaller and something in its shape suggested that it might be loose. Still breathing frantically from the diaphragm, I began scrabbling with my left hand, heedless of broken nails but careful to work in silence and to send no telltale vibrations through the timber. It was cold but at least I was down out of the worst of the wind.

  ‘That’s a good little pup you sold me,’ he said. ‘I owe you something for that. I’m not superstitious as a rule, but there was a curse on those bloody cockers. If only I’d known . . .

  ‘I was on my way home with the first one when I called to see Vi Wentworth. Well, I know what pups are. Rather than leave him to panic and chew up the inside of a bloody expensive car I slipped him into my pocket where he quickly went to sleep. She doesn’t – didn’t – have anywhere to hang a coat in the hall so I laid my coat carefully over a chair. How was I to know that the little bugger would wake up and wriggle out? When I came downstairs after – you know? – I wasn’t thinking about the pup, I was thinking about her, up there with the cold water rising and wishing that she’d never tried to threaten me. I stepped right on him in the dark. If I’d had the stomach for it, I’d have taken the body away, although the mess would still have been there to tell the tale. But I’d fallen for the pup and I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.’ He was speaking very quietly, in a conversational voice, as much to himself as to me. That alone was shocking, as if my doctor had slipped in the revelation of an incurable cancer between discussions of the weather. De Forgan’s tone was petulant and distant in turn but, when he spoke of his victim waiting to drown in the rising water, there was a note of relish which made my flesh creep.

  My scrabbling in the loose compost of pine needles unearthed a sliver of slate and I began to use that as a small trowel. The embedded stone was larger than I had thought.

  ‘When I make up my mind to do something I go ahead with it and God help anybody who gets in my way! I told my family that the pup had trodden on some broken glass and I’d had to leave it with the vet. I knew that there was another pup available and I went back for it at Hogmanay. I always carry a First Aid box in the car. I made a nick in his foot and put in a couple of stitches. I don’t think that he even felt it.

  ‘I’d promised to meet Angus Todd in the bar. My wife had the Jag so I was using the Land-Rover. I’d got hold of a pet carrier by then. The pup couldn’t have done much damage in that, but when I tried to leave him on his own he began to squeal. I didn’t want some well-meaning idiot coming into the bar and shouting that there was a pup in distress in a Land-Rover outside. And I’m soft about animals. He sounded so miserable that I couldn’t bring myself to leave him. So once again I put him in my pocket. Lightning, I thought, never strikes twice in the same place, and anyway I was only going to be there for a few minutes and I intended to keep my coat on. But it was warm in the bar, the pup had fallen asleep, and even if he woke up I couldn’t see him escaping from the pocket of a hanging coat. Also, the coat would be where I could keep an eye on it.

  ‘Who would have expected that senile delinquent to take a fancy to my coat while I was looking the other way?’ he asked indignantly of the empty air.

  ‘I followed him up in the Land-Rover. I did what I did on the spur of the moment and it’s too late to change anything now. I was going to stop and walk back for my coat, and collect the pup if it was still in one piece, but in my mirror I saw more people against the street lights of the village so I drove on.

  ‘Later, I phoned the breeder but there were no more pups to be had. I didn’t give her my name but she let me know that she recognized my voice and she was curious. The purchase of one cocker pup would have meant nothing. Two plus an enquiry for a third would have been remembered. She was the type to talk and sooner or later somebody would have conn
ected it up. She had to go.

  ‘I told my family that the pup had an infection and would probably have to be put down. But I’d promised them a spaniel and a spaniel they were going to have. I came to see you. If the police were accepting the thief’s death as a hit-and-run accident, I might still have got my hands on the second pup, one way or the other. I got you to show me around, hoping to find out where he was being kept. Instead, I fell for the springer you showed me. It all made sense. As the owner of a springer pup it was less likely that anyone would associate me with cockers.’

  The light was gone now. The stone came loose under my hand. I pushed it aside and scraped away more dirt from around the hole. The cold of the ground tried to bite into me but the work was keeping me warmed and I found my thick clothing more of a nuisance than a comfort. Inch by inch I slid and wriggled and worked my way sideways and found that I could breathe almost with ease although I was caught by the waist and neither my hips nor my chest would pass through the gap. I grasped the stone and tried to pass its unwieldy weight across my back from one hand to the other. Between the effort and the sound as a gust of stronger wind swayed the trees above us, I lost a few words.

  ‘. . . can’t stay here talking all day,’ he said, for all the world as though breaking off a casual chat in the street. ‘I’ll make it easy for you and let it down suddenly. You were having a look around, just as we’d agreed, weighing up the shooting prospects, and the last tree to fall caught you across your back. Too bad, but these things happen.’

  I would have spoken, tried to reason with him, but I had the wits to see that I must not let him know that I had any breath to spare.

  He got up and stooped to let down the jack. I had no need to fake the sudden grunt of pain and expelled air. He treated me to a quick flash of a torch – more than anything, I think, to make sure that I had not written anything in the dirt. Then he walked away.