Thin Air

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Women don’t give up their dreams easily,’ I said, speaking from long and sometimes bitter experience. ‘She’ll make it up sooner or later. Or, if not . . . Somewhere, there’s a girl walking around with your name on an invisible label around her neck. She’ll pop up just when you least expect her.’ It was the best I could do. It was not enough, but I have asked myself since whether anything would have been enough.

  He started to say something that came out as only an inarticulate sound of pain, then grabbed up his bicycle, swung a leg over and pedalled furiously off towards Easter Coullie. As I crossed the pasture I could see him on the farm road, still racing as fast as his old-fashioned machine would let him, until he vanished among the farm buildings.

  Did Young Murdo have a rival, I wondered? In its usual haphazard manner, my mind turned aside into reverie. The scenario that had looked so promising the previous day would not work. The book would be one of the many that I had conceived but lost, stillborn. It was a pity. I had the perfect title. Eternal Quadrangle. But duality is the very essence of love and sex. There can only be a pair of opposites. Large and small. Hard and soft. The ball and the ring. Innocent and guilty.

  I came back to reality. As nearly as I could judge, I was where I had been when I last saw Old Murdo alive. Walking normally, I timed myself to the corner of the barn. My best estimate was that he had been out of my sight for a minute and a quarter. Not very long; but many of the world’s greatest crimes have been committed in less time. A minute is a long time in the dentist’s chair.

  The farmyard was both more orderly and less busy than when I had last seen it. The place where the body had been was still fenced off and a taped outline showed where it had lain after Mrs Heminson and I – with Duggie’s help – had finished moving it around. But it seemed that work in that area had finished. At the barn, Duggie’s scaffold and tools were still in place but there was no sign of the builder, who, I guessed, had been banished rather than arrested.

  The large caravan was emplaced where the police cars had parked the day before. Temporary wires and cables trailed to it. Two police cars were squeezed into the remainder of that side of the yard and Ian was closing the door of one of them on Ronnie, who was seated like royalty, alone in the rear. The car pulled out. Ronnie bowed and waved graciously as he went by.

  ‘If I’d known that you were chauffeuring your expert witnesses around,’ I said, ‘I’d have phoned for a car.’

  Ian frowned. ‘His alcohol count of milligrams per millilitre of blood won’t get down into double figures before about Wednesday,’ he said. ‘I’m not having him drive around in that state while I might be coming the other way. Nor you, either,’ he added severely. ‘I have no objection to breathalyzing my friends, so don’t take any silly chances. Come on in.’

  I said nothing, not wanting to start him wondering who had collected the jeep from my door. I settled Boss in the shade of the caravan and followed Ian up the steps.

  The caravan had evidently been permanently converted for use as a mobile incident room. The one desk, the filing cabinets and the L-shaped table seemed to be fixtures and the walls were finished with pinboard already spattered with maps, charts and duty rosters. The table space was allocated to six workspaces but only one was occupied, by a very young constable who was listening to a telephone and making notes in longhand. The windows seemed to be sealed closed, presumably to prevent delicate discussions being overheard, and a small fan in the roof failed to cope with the stuffiness of the atmosphere.

  The chairs were metal, swivel, typists for the use of. Ian took a seat behind the desk and nodded to the chair that was placed opposite for interviewees. I handed over my printouts.

  ‘Your young lady’s hard at work on my word processor,’ I said.

  ‘As long as she doesn’t start gossiping with Alice.’

  ‘She thinks I’m a slob.’

  ‘She could be right.’ Ian skimmed rapidly through the pages. He took longer over my summary of our discussion in his absence. ‘Of course, I got most of this from Ronnie this morning,’ he said, ‘only not quite so methodically expressed. You can take your break now, Hodges.’

  The young constable left the caravan. Evidently the minions were not going to hear the boss being indiscreet.

  ‘Was Ronnie any help?’ I asked.

  ‘As helpful as he could be, which means not a damn bit. If the rain had come before the murder we could probably have solved the case by studying the traces. But people had been moving around, mostly quite legitimately, on baked ground – and the rain followed afterwards. Hopeless. Mrs Heminson could have gone round the house on a pogo-stick before the rain fell and the signs would be lost by now. I’m not even expecting much from Forensic Science. After all, everyone who was around the farm that day had been around a hundred times before.

  ‘When we went to look at the place where he’d found Young Murdo’s bits and pieces, Ronnie did manage to point out that the far corner of the rape had been disturbed during the night, but whether it means anything or not we can’t tell. He’s sure that it wasn’t like that when we passed it at the finish of shooting, and I think he’s right.’

  ‘A fox going after a rabbit?’ I suggested.

  ‘Ronnie thought not.’ Ian tapped my notes with a finger and half smiled. ‘At the moment, I’m gathering information rather than theorizing, but I think that we can exonerate you and discount several of the more fanciful ideas. A preliminary report from the pathologist came through by hand. The full autopsy will have to wait, probably until tonight, but he managed to get a scan which showed up the track of the bullet. No abnormal signs, as of the projectile being pushed around in the brain matter. So he went ahead with the first steps.’ Ian picked up a thin sheaf of papers. ‘“No traces of soot on hair or scalp . . . no muzzle imprint . . . incision through scalp . . . no soot or propellant residues on undersurface of scalp or outer surface of skull . . .” In fact, all he’s saying is that the shot wasn’t fired from less than three or four feet—’

  ‘Or that it was fired from an air weapon,’ I said.

  ‘He makes that point. Not that there was much likelihood of the shot having been fired from close to. Where was I? Yes. “. . . hole in skull examined and measured . . . skull cap sawn, removed and examined . . . hole in outer surface smaller than hole in inner surface, typical of entry wound . . . dura mater removed to expose brain proper . . . brain removed and placed in solution of formaldehyde to harden by fixation . . .” The interesting bits come at the end. “Measurement of the metal projectile from X-ray photographs suggested that it was still expanding by flattening as it progressed through the skull and that its present diameter would not pass through the entry hole in the outer surface of the skull. This was later confirmed experimentally.”’

  ‘He was shot, then,’ I said.

  ‘There’s more. “At the point of entry, the skull was of at least average thickness and would not have been penetrated by a pellet of conventional eight to ten foot-pounds energy.” Which seems to take us right back to square one.’

  ‘A souped-up airgun or a two-two rifle with a blank as propellant,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. That seemed to make the track of the projectile less critical, so the pathologist went ahead and recovered the pellet. A conventional waisted two-two airgun slug. Some signs of rifling marks, he thinks, but probably too damaged for the rifling and other marks to be matched to a weapon. I wish my revered father-in-law was here,’ Ian said peevishly. ‘Deborah phoned last night, but Keith’s involved in some damned gundog competition. He’ll get away as soon as he can.’

  ‘Or as soon as he wants to,’ I said.

  ‘How true. It may come to a delicate balance between how much he’s enjoying himself at the Game Fair against how much fun he expects to get out of stirring things up around here.

  ‘There was one other snippet in the pathologist’s report. The scan showed a serious brain tumour, possibly malignant.’

  The implications took a f
ew seconds to sort themselves out. I went for the easy one first. ‘That probably explains Old Murdo’s behaviour for the past year. He was a sour sort of devil when I first met him, but he was getting rapidly worse.’

  Ian nodded. ‘Very probably it does. He’d been complaining to his doctor of headaches but he refused to go for a scan, let alone a biopsy. Probably afraid of what he might find out.’

  ‘From what I heard, he firmly believed that people only went into hospital to die. If he was going to pop his clogs anyway . . .?’

  ‘That doesn’t make a damn bit of difference in law. We’re all going to die, the only open question being when. If somebody falls off a cliff and you shoot him while he’s on the way down, it’s still murder.’

  Ian paused and scowled around the contents of the caravan. ‘I wanted to clear this one up quickly. I reported that an accidental death seemed very unlikely indeed. A chief inspector’s been assigned to take over. He’ll be here on Monday. For the moment, I’m reporting to him by phone. He’s said to be clearing his desk, but if I know him he’s getting ready for a golfing weekend.’

  I could see the cause of Ian’s concern. ‘So it’s a race. If he’s here by the time you solve the case, he gets the credit,’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s the way it goes. I’ve got men out scouring the countryside for possible witnesses, but I’m not very hopeful. Mrs Heminson’s out of sedation now but doesn’t seem able to add anything to the bones of what she said yesterday.’ Ian frowned. ‘All right,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ll break my own rule, but this is in confidence, mind. I know I can count on that. You never waste words in gossip if you can save them up for use in print. If it wasn’t for one factor, Mrs Heminson would be my best suspect.’

  ‘If you think she’d have the technical ability,’ I said.

  Ian leaned back as far as the chair would let him and looked at the ceiling of the caravan. I guessed that he was helped by being able to think aloud with somebody who would not be deterred by his seniority from arguing with him. ‘One thing you can never assume is a lack of knowledge. She might easily have seen her sons trying out the combination of a humane-killer cartridge and an airgun pellet. The sons deny that they’ve ever done any such thing, but that’s only to be expected.

  ‘All right, let’s theorize for a minute or two. The timing is critical. We found the two-two rifle standing behind the back door. It had been recently fired and then cleaned, but Old Murdo had been shooting rabbits near the farm buildings that morning.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’ I asked.

  ‘Duggie Bracken confirms it. The question is, could his wife have shot him from a window of the house and had time to clean the gun before running outside? She certainly never had a chance later.’

  I tried to imagine an inexperienced woman – my guess was that Mrs Heminson was inexperienced with firearms – carrying out a minimal clean of a small-bore rifle. ‘My guess would be no,’ I said. ‘I timed myself this morning. From the time I saw Old Murdo disappear until Mrs Heminson appeared would have been about one minute, give or take. And he wasn’t even shot where I saw him. Allow time for him to walk another twenty yards and, no, I don’t think that even a practised rifleman could have cleaned the gun, washed – because there was no oil on her hands – and run outside in the time. And her faint seemed absolutely genuine.’

  Ian’s face registered doubt. ‘A faint is the easiest thing in the world to fake,’ he said. ‘You’d be amazed how many shoplifters try it on. None of us thought to stick a pin in her. The doctors claimed to recognize the classic symptoms of shock, but they often see what they expect to see.’ Ian scratched his neck, his usual mannerism when deep in thought. ‘Brett could have cleaned the rifle after his mother used it.’

  ‘That assumes that not less than two thirds of his family was conspiring to murder him,’ I pointed out. ‘And presumably his wife at least had some idea that he was a dying man. His doctor must have warned him that he might have a tumour.’

  Ian ignored my remarks. ‘If Brett shot his father and she ran outside and fainted over the body, would she, when she came round, still be quick-witted enough to cover up for him?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘But as well as the kitchen window there’s a staircase window looking out onto the yard. She might not have seen Brett at all.’

  Ian was nodding. ‘He came in by the back door, went halfway up the stairs and shot his dad from the window. His mother, at the kitchen window, took the sound of the shot for Duggie Bracken’s nail-gun but she saw her husband fall and ran outside. Brett cleaned the rifle, replaced it behind the door and hurried out through the garden and back to the tractor. I suppose it’s possible. The cleaning gear’s kept in a small room off the back passage. Brett’s fingerprints are on it, of course, but he says that he cleaned the rifle after his father used it.

  ‘So Brett is a definite possibility. Your other prime choice was Ken McKee.’ Ian paused, took another look at my notes and scratched his neck again.

  ‘What sticks in my craw,’ I said, ‘despite what I said in my notes, is the idea of either of the McKees wandering around on open land or heading for the house without being seen.’

  ‘If one of them was there, we’ll probably find that he or she was seen,’ Ian told me. ‘In my experience, you’ve only got to stop for a pee or leave a gate open on farmland and a dozen pairs of eyes are on you, but if you break your ankle or get treed by the bull there’s nobody for miles.’

  That much was true. ‘It’s a pity,’ I said, ‘that I was with you instead of at home. When I’m at work I’m looking over this area every time I raise my eyes.’

  Ian registered mild amusement. ‘The way you go into a trance when you’re working, I don’t suppose you’d have noticed a herd of hairy elephants stampeding across the landscape, let alone remembered a solitary figure hoofing it between the fields.’

  That mild stricture, I had to admit, was true. ‘I have one fresh scrap of information for you,’ I said. I told him about the emotional scene between Young Murdo and Sheila McKee. ‘It occurred to me that her distress might have been because she saw her father kill Old Murdo. She spends a lot of time on that knoll on the boundary.’

  Ian sat up straight. ‘Or it could have been because Young Murdo saw Ken McKee do the deed.’

  ‘That would square with your theory that somebody always sees the rural miscreant,’ I said.

  He waved my comment aside as frivolous. ‘I’m beginning to fancy Ken McKee for this,’ he said. ‘Assuming that he turns out to have an air cane of the right calibre he had the means, plus a possible opportunity and the father and mother of a motive. His daughter may have the key. I’ll see that young lady before the day’s much older, but I doubt if she’ll incriminate her dad.’

  His mention of the passing time reminded me. ‘Alice says to come for a meal this evening,’ I said. ‘You won’t have time to cook for yourself.’

  ‘Thank her for me, but I have to go in to Edinburgh this evening to report in person. Tomorrow, if Deborah isn’t back by then?’

  ‘Tomorrow, then,’ I said. ‘Have the press been onto it yet?’

  ‘We had a few phone-calls, but by good luck they came while there still seemed to be a probability of the death being accidental. We told them that it was being treated as such, which was more or less true, and I haven’t felt obliged to issue a correction. There may be a line or two in tomorrow’s papers.’

  ‘They’ll give you a hammering when they find out you’ve been holding back a hot story.’

  Ian produced a semblance of his usual cheerful grin. ‘By that time, my superior will be here to answer for it. Or if not, I’ll blame him anyway.’

  We were interrupted by two officers who came into the caravan and sat down at the table. Ian immediately became the formal police inspector. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Parbitter,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. We’ll get in touch with you again if there are any more questions.’ A wink behind his subordinates’
backs softened the words.

  I was glad to escape from the heat that was building up in the caravan and into the welcome breeze outside. Boss got up to join me as I descended the steps, relieved to see me again but in no hurry to get moving. He was still stiff after his labours of the day before. While I waited for him to finish a cautious stretch of each limb in turn, I looked around me. Duggie’s tools seemed to be much more neatly arranged than when he had left them.

  From where I was standing, I could see the smaller yard that ran along to the back door and the tap and hose with which Miss Mather had been trying to cleanse the Augean car. There was a bush of dark red roses beyond, which would have clashed horribly with the car’s colour. But there was no sign of the small DAF. Surely she couldn’t be driving around in it? Or had it been removed for examination of its contents back at the police garage?

  Standing there with all the crucial places in sight, I found that I was unconvinced. The theories I had been discussing were credible as theories and yet I could not give credence to any one of them. My opinions were subjective and yet I knew that I was right. It was as though the tiny missile had come out of thin air – which, of course, it had. But there was something else, something that we were missing. A dim memory from long, long ago was moving like a fish below the water, refusing to rise to my lure.

  Ian and one of the constables came out of the caravan. Ian nodded to me. They got into one of the cars and drove off. The McKees, I decided, were about to receive visitors.

  There was nothing to do but go home. My curiosity was still a-tingle and as the finder of the two inert bodies I felt an almost proprietary interest. If I thought about something else, perhaps the memory would surface. When WDC White had finished, I could retrieve her work from the memory of my word processor and have a look at any fresh reports, including Jean Mather’s statement.

  Brett Heminson was crossing the yard towards the house and I remembered that I had not had a chance to offer the few obligatory words of condolence. He was in working clothes, but he struck me as unusually neat and clean until I realized that the police would have taken away all his clothing of the previous day.