In Loving Memory Read online

  IN LOVING MEMORY

  Gerald Hammond

  © Gerald Hammond 2007

  Gerald Hammond has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2007 by Severn House.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter One

  Mr Potterton-Phipps was on the phone to his daughter. ‘I’m thinking of changing the Range Rover,’ he said.

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Yes. I made a mistake accepting part-fabric seats instead of all leather and I hate the colour now that I see it full size and in daylight. There are one or two other things. So, if you’d like to let me have its predecessor back to trade in, Honeypot, you can have this one in exchange. It’s hardly even run in.’

  Detective Inspector Laird had been born Honoria Potterton-Phipps and she had grown from an attractive baby into an equally attractive woman, though she herself was rarely aware of it. During her salad days, men were drawn to her. It was therefore inevitable that she would be known as Honeypot and the nickname had stuck. She was still trying to live it down, preferring to be addressed by family and intimates as Honey, and it was a source of satisfaction to her that her father sometimes remembered that she disliked its use. ‘Thank you kindly, Dad,’ she said. The black Labrador by her feet emitted a loud snore and received a push from Honey’s slipper. ‘But I’ve just got everything in this one the way I want it and it’s not very much more than run in. You trade that one in and perhaps in another couple of years we’ll think about another swap.’

  ‘So be it. My regards to Sandy and love to the Mighty Midget. Bye, Honeypot.’ He hung up quickly before his daughter could find a suitable retort.

  Chief Inspector Alexander ‘Sandy’ Laird was nursing his month-old daughter and looking surprisingly at home in the act. Honey explained the burden of her conversation with her father and Sandy tried not to sigh aloud. It was an effort that he had had to make more than once in the past. Most men might consider themselves lucky to marry the attractive only daughter of a major landowner, one who was also a captain of industry. Sandy, however, usually resented his wife’s affluence and made a show of standing on his own feet. But now and again he felt that he just might abandon his Calvinist principles if his father-in-law were to make him such an offer. Mr Potterton-Phipps was in the habit of buying his cars at the very top of what was already an expensive range and then putting them into the hands of specialists for further improvement while Sandy, thanks to his own insistence on paying his share of a quite unnecessary mortgage out of a chief inspector’s salary, would have been quite happy with the lesser products of Messrs Ford or Vauxhall were it not for the larger and more opulent vehicle parked beside his. He made a show of being, if not quite the boss, at least the equal in his own home, but he did sometimes feel that his wife might make the effort, just once, to overrule him.

  At this point in his ruminations he glanced out into the gloomy Edinburgh street, where the yellow lights were reflecting on the wet surface, and he stiffened. ‘I think I’ll take Pippa for a walk,’ he said. At his words the black Labrador woke instantly and jumped to her feet.

  Honeypot recognized the signs. Sandy was not usually a devotee of walking for walking’s sake. ‘Who’s arriving?’ she asked.

  Sandy decided that honesty was the best policy. Honey could usually see through him. ‘It’s your friend, Kate Ingliston.’

  The elegant room was looking its best with the firelight flickering across the deep carpet and the subdued wall lights adding to the warm glow. It was the kind of cosy scene that one looks forward to in a winter’s daytime. It would have taken an effort to turn out into the cold and dusk but Honey muttered, ‘I’ve half a mind to come with you.’ She then said more loudly, ‘All right then. Hand me the Mighty Midget, let Kate in and then be off with you. Just don’t let Pippa roll in anything that you wouldn’t roll in yourself or you can shower her in the back garden. And don’t let her eat anything too awful or she’ll fart all evening.’

  ‘Hang a towel in a back window when she’s gone.’

  Honey accepted her daughter Minka into her arms, which gave her an excuse not to rise when Sandy showed Kate in and made his escape.

  Kate Ingliston should have been past her sexual peak but she managed to remain at or very close to it by a regime of diets, beauty treatments, hormone therapy and swinging weekends. She was well aware that Honey and her husband were strictly monogamous but she was equally aware that Honey was seldom if ever shocked. It was her habit to describe her ventures into wife-swapping (or being swapped) in pleasurable detail, thus prolonging the exquisite naughtiness and helping to fix the details in her own memory. This, Honey supposed, was the reason for the present visit late on a Sunday afternoon.

  But apparently not. Kate was not looking her cheerful self and she lacked the sparkle that usually came with her when she was preparing to gloat. After a quick peck on the cheek and a perfunctory enquiry after the baby’s progress, Kate said, ‘Honey, I need your help. Desperately.’

  There was only one emergency that Honey could envisage causing such a stir. ‘Blackmail?’ she enquired.

  Kate’s curls were usually tight and firmly positioned. But today they were flying loose, giving her rather the look of a distressed cockatoo, but at Honey’s question it looked as though they might stand on end. ‘Oh God no! I hope not. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘You’d better explain. But first, would you like a drink?’

  Kate paused. ‘God, could I use a drink!’ she said. She sounded surprised.

  ‘Help yourself. You could pour me a little one from the decanter.’

  ‘I thought you were still feeding Minka.’

  ‘I am. But it’s a very much diluted wine and I only sip until the last feed. It does make sure that she sleeps like a log.’ Honey accepted a small glass of diluted claret. ‘Now, tell me . . .’

  Kate was speaking before she had completed the act of seating herself. She had a loud voice with a metallic tone. Honey sometimes wondered how she had come to be friendly with anyone who made so much use of such a voice, and would then remember that the friendship was of Kate’s making. ‘Honey, it’s bad. I’ve had a boyfriend.’

  ‘I noticed the car. I thought your husband must have traded his Audi in.’

  ‘Phil’s abroad all this month, setting up something in Malaysia. He won’t be back until Wednesday. He’ll hit the ceiling if he finds out.’

  ‘This I do not understand,’ Honey said. ‘The two of you go away on swingers’ weekends . . .’

  Kate made a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s all very well, and quite acceptable if we’re both doing it. He’d be furious if I went off on my own. And I must say I can understand that, because I wouldn’t like it if I knew that h
e was having it off with some other woman behind my back. If we both go off at the same time with somebody we know, that’s just a giggle and something we can laugh over between ourselves. But for one of us to go off on our own, that’s different. You see, then it might be serious,’ she said earnestly. ‘But it isn’t, for me. It’s just a piece of fun and a reminder that the days of courtship and glamour and romance are not dead and gone. So he never slept here. We went to a hotel. That’s where I was most of the weekend, a week ago.

  ‘On that Sunday, I said a permanent farewell to him. Today, I went golfing with Sandra and Ivy – I don’t think you know them – and when I got home the house had been broken into. They cleaned us out of booze and loose cash – not very much, luckily – and some quite expensive odds and ends. My jewellery’s gone, but I never had very much and mostly it was small and rubbishy bits, the way it happens when it’s been collected over a long period. With a bit of luck,’ Kate said thoughtfully, ‘the insurance money may provide for fewer but better, which would be a big step up. But Phil’s camera was taken.’

  ‘Expensive?’ Honey asked. The baby in her arms roused, burped gently and then responded to a little friendly jogging and subsided into sleep again.

  ‘Very! But that isn’t the point. All our things are insured.’

  ‘And the camera isn’t?’ Honey was still groping for the reason behind Kate’s obvious agitation.

  ‘It’s insured all right. That isn’t the problem either. But . . . my friend and I used the camera, the way one does –’ she looked enquiringly at Honey but received no encouragement – ‘on timer delay to . . . to . . .’

  The penny dropped at last. ‘You mean,’ Honey said bluntly, ‘that you used your husband’s camera to take photographs of yourself and your lover in flagrante delicto?’ She tried to keep disapproval out of her voice, but Kate had always seemed to her to be an unattractive figure, having a pointed nose and a figure that was too skinny to be erotic and too angular to be a model. The idea of photographs of that body in raptures with a stranger was disturbing. Honey had been a bit of a girl in her day; she had enjoyed her youth and freedom. If she had been asked now how many lovers had figured in her past, she could only have given an approximate number. But since her marriage to Sandy she had stopped straying and then stopped looking, until now the idea of lingering in any arms but his was unthinkable.

  Just as unthinkable to Kate was the concept of so much fidelity. ‘Yes. It makes a good turn-on for next time. You must know that, surely?’

  Honey ignored the question. ‘And the camera has now been stolen?’

  ‘Yes. I looked for it to wipe off the amorous bits before Phil gets home. It’s so easy with a digital; it could have been made for that sort of thing. Anyway, it was gone.’

  ‘Have you told the police about your burglary?’

  ‘I’m telling you now. I was waiting for Phil to get home. He deals with all that sort of thing.’

  ‘For the love of Pete,’ Honey said impatiently, ‘you’ve got to make a formal report immediately. Otherwise the insurers won’t look at any of your claim. You may already be too late.’

  ‘Yes, but I came to you first because I thought you might be able to help.’ Kate said this earnestly, as if to a child.

  Honey found the idea that she might be able to conjure a stolen camera back from the thief showed a touching faith but she decided to make an effort. ‘Was the camera identifiable as yours and Phil’s?’

  Kate nodded sadly. ‘I’m afraid so, or else I’d just have let the burglar keep it and snigger over the pictures. But Phil’s very careful about possessions. He has our postcode in UV ink all over things, but he also put one of those stickers on it with our name and address, the ones you get free with charitable appeals.’

  ‘So what you want from me is to get the camera back without anyone seeing the pictures in the memory card?’

  Kate made a gesture of helplessness and knocked over her generous drink, which was still at least half full. Honey smelled gin and more gin. ‘I don’t give a tinker’s turd about the camera,’ Kate said. ‘If I could be sure that it will never surface, I’d be a happy bunny. I’m just hoping that if it does turn up you can get the memory card out of it before some coarse copper gets a look at it and decides to circulate the pictures around his friends – or sell them to a porno magazine.’

  Honey was not more than normally house-proud, but the table was a genuine antique and June, the housekeeper, would go berserk if the polish that she had lovingly burnished were to be spoiled. ‘If you want my help, go and fetch a damp cloth from the kitchen,’ she said. ‘My feet are tired, I’m weighed down by baby and you’re looking for a favour.’

  ‘Couldn’t June . . .?’

  ‘It’s June’s night off. And every minute wasted increases the chances of the polish being spoiled and the camera getting away from us.’

  In her own house, Kate would have scampered to prevent damage to the furniture, but her principles would have prevented her from doing manual work in somebody else’s house. However, she rose reluctantly and left the room, returning with two cloths, one damp and one dry.

  When the damage was halted to her satisfaction, Honey said, ‘That’ll do. June can give it a dab of wax tomorrow. Help yourself to a refill while I phone in. And as far as the police are concerned, you don’t know whether Phil had his camera away with him or not.’

  ‘But suppose it does turn up?’

  ‘Then you’ll be a liar as well as a trollop. Would that be so very much worse? No, don’t wave your arms around or you’ll spill more gin and I’ll have to have the table repolished and send you the bill. Would you rather have every copper in the Lothians hunting for a camera with your husband’s name on it and your pictures inside?’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Kate said. She poured more gin thoughtfully.

  Honey phoned the control room. There is a lassitude that comes over police buildings late on a Sunday when the few staff on duty resent the fact that the others are out on the town and can be pictured, sometimes wrongly, drinking or participating in orgies. Even for Detective Inspector Laird, no officers were likely to be available for several hours.

  ‘I believe that there were guns in the house,’ Honey said. That, apparently, was different.

  ‘There’s a car on the way.’

  ‘Tell them to come to my house, just across the street and a little way up the hill.’ She disconnected.

  Kate was looking at her as though she had lost her marbles. ‘There aren’t any guns in my house. There never were.’

  ‘If you think back, you’ll realize that I never said that there were. Are you prepared to offer a reward for the camera?’

  ‘I suppose so. A hundred?’

  ‘That might do it. It’s about the second-hand value of a miniature digital. But it does seem rather miserable when you set it against the risk . . . er . . . were you in the nude?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘Well, then. Imagine that image being passed around or exchanged on the Internet.’

  ‘Two hundred and fifty, then,’ Kate said. ‘And I’ll pay that just for the memory card if I have to.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  Two CID officers, a sergeant and a constable both known to Honey, arrived in an unmarked car and in a remarkably short time. Kate brought them into the sitting room.

  ‘Mrs Ingliston’s house was broken into,’ Honey said. ‘I’ve been telling her that she should have reported it as soon as she discovered it, so there’s no need to smack her wrist again. Please go with her and do the usual. I’d come with you except that, as you can see, my hands are rather full. Oh, and a word of apology,’ she said as an apparent afterthought. ‘I said that I thought there had been guns in the house, but it seems that my memory was at fault and I was acting on the recollection of a couple of toy guns that I had seen in her house some time ago.’

  The two officers said that they quite understood. Honey could see that they understood s
uch aberrations to be normal in their seniors in CID.

  Carrying her baby with care, Honey got up and set off up the stairs. She fetched a towel from the warm, clean-smelling airing cupboard to put in the window of the upstairs bathroom. Sandy would be walking by moonlight on the farmland that the house backed on to. He would probably be lurking, waiting for the signal, but in case he was out of sight for the moment she left the light on.

  Chapter Two

  ‘You didn’t eat more than a bittie of the dinner I left for you,’ June grumbled. ‘You need to build up while you’re eating for two.’

  Honey was also feeding for two at the kitchen table, suckling Minka while taking her own breakfast cereal at the kitchen table. Breakfast was the only time of day when she was allowed to undertake anything useful in the kitchen without provoking a hurricane of sighs and groans from June.

  ‘I’m only a middleman around here,’ Honey said. ‘Or is middleperson a word? Mr Sandy had eaten at the golf club before he came home and I’m trying to shake off the extra weight.’

  ‘You’re thin as a rake already,’ June retorted.

  ‘I wish. I’m supposed to be on maternity leave to get fit again. Anyway, my milk’s getting less and her appetite’s getting more. You’d better warm a bottle. Mrs Ingliston will be phoning or coming over soon. If she phones, bring me the cordless. If she comes, bring her into the sitting room and you can take over Minka for me.’

  June brightened. She had come to the Laird household as cook and housekeeper – the two functions that her mother carried out for Honey’s father – but her favourite duties by far were as nursemaid and nanny. June’s mother was beginning to find the work of running Mr Potterton-Phipp’s household to be hard work for one of her years and her employer had started dropping hints that perhaps it was time that she retired and that June came back to take over, a suggestion that was opposed by June’s present employers and no less by June herself, with many mentions of dead bodies and other obstacles that would first have to be overcome.