The Reward Game Read online

  THE REWARD GAME

  Gerald Hammond

  © Gerald Hammond 1980

  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 1980 by St. Martin’s Press.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Press 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

  Newton Lauder is a fictitious town in the general vicinity of Lauder and Newton St Boswells, or possibly Newton, Roxburgh. The story is even more fictitious. Most fictitious of all are the characters who, as far as I am aware, have no counterparts in real life.

  G.H.

  Chapter One

  The shop had been shut for an hour or more but Keith Calder was still pottering among the guns and fishing-tackle. Outside, a golden spring sun shone low across the square of Newton Lauder, trying to chase away the memory of a bitter winter. Even in the middle of the small town there was bird-song. The birds were thinking of mating. Keith was thinking along similar lines.

  But when Molly came into the shop, her husband put down the Franchi gun that he had been polishing, so quickly that he dented the barrel. And that was very unlike him; but Molly’s usual happy grin was noticeably absent. She was white as paper and the whole of her small, plump self was shaken by regular tremors. Carefully controlling her hands, she unslung a camera with a large telephoto lens and set it gently on the counter. Then she fell into the customers’ chair and put her head in her hands.

  Keith had been relaxing over his labours with a glass of whisky at his elbow. He took the glass to Molly and raised her chin with one hand. Obediently, she sipped, while he held the glass.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ll be fine in a minute. I’ve had a bit of a shock.’

  ‘Is the car all right too?’

  She lifted a hand and pushed the glass away. ‘Keith Calder! Is that all you can find to ask –?’

  ‘I did ask first after you,’ he said mildly.

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’ Molly took a few deep breaths. ‘Bit of a shock,’ she said again. ‘Car’s all right. Except for a little blood.’

  ‘Yours? You’ve got blood on your front.’

  She looked down vaguely, and then shook her head so that her black hair swung across her cheeks. Her eyes looked large and unnaturally bright. ‘Not mine, no. I think I’m all right now.’

  Keith looked at her closely. ‘You’re not, but you’ll have to do for the moment. Take your time and tell me what, for God’s sake, happened. You went out to Bellcross Woods after that owl? Start from there and tell me all about it.’

  ‘Well . . . I went out to the woods and settled down in my hide. Really, it’s not so much a hide as a sort of nest scooped out in a gorse bush, and a bit of camouflage netting over it, and I settled down to wait.’

  ‘He came?’

  ‘Yes. I waited ages. I thought he’d come too late again after the light was gone. But then he came hunting down the ride, earlier than usual.’ Molly lit up for a moment. ‘I think I got a great picture of him stooping on a vole, but I won’t know until I develop it. Then I heard a shot not very far off and I wondered if it was you. You sometimes go out that way.’

  ‘Not me,’ Keith said. ‘You had the car, remember?’

  ‘I’ve never known you be stuck. Anyway, I called but you didn’t answer. The owl went off when he heard the shot, of course. I looked at my watch and it was getting late. I’d told you to put the potatoes on, but I knew you’d forget, so I decided not to wait.’

  Keith’s patience, never very great, was wearing away. ‘But what was this shocking thing that happened? Come to the point before I burst.’

  Molly looked at him with the hurt pathos of a whipped puppy. ‘I’m coming to that. I must tell it my own way. You said to start from the beginning and to take my own time. If you try to –’

  ‘All right,’ Keith said. ‘All right.’

  ‘But first I must go and have a pee.’ She got up and scurried through to the small loo tucked away at the back of the shop.

  Keith was left drumming his fingers on the counter. Then he laughed shortly, picked up the glass and drained it. The malt whisky was excellent, but it had never received the blessing of H.M. Customs and Excise.

  ‘If you try to hurry me, you’ll just make me flustered,’ said Molly’s voice, muffled by the door.

  She came back presently and sat down. ‘And then I’ll forget something,’ she said. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Reciting all your reasons for coming home.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Well, I packed up my gear and set off back to the car along the ride. I could hear noises in the woods. I thought that old Donald’s sheep had got in there again, but it sounded more like people.

  ‘And when I got back to the car, somebody’d moved it. They’d turned it round and driven it about a hundred yards back towards the road, and the engine was running and there was a man sitting in it.’

  ‘Hadn’t you locked it?’ Keith asked sharply.

  ‘Yes, of course I had. But somebody’s forced one of the quarter-lights. At least, the catch is broken now. But, Keith, how could they start the car without a key?’

  Keith smiled at her innocence. ‘That doesn’t matter. Get me into almost any car and give me an ordinary penknife and I’ll guarantee to start it within about fifteen seconds. What did the man have to say about it?’

  ‘The man in the car?’

  ‘Yes, the man in the car.’

  ‘Nothing, Keith. He was dead.’

  For a moment Keith felt reality slipping away from him. In his mind he sorted through several possible blasphemies that might have done justice to the situation, but in the end he decided that none of them would contribute much to the elucidation of the problem. ‘And Tanya?’ he said. ‘What was she doing while all this was going on?’

  ‘She was with me. She sits under the net as good as gold while I’m photographing.’

  Keith paused. ‘I suppose,’ he said at last, ‘that it’s too much to hope that the gentleman was no more than a car-thief who’d popped off from a dicky heart in mid-theft?’

  Molly shook her head again. ‘He’d been shot. And he was sitting in the back seat.’

  A lorry ground its way through the square, but it was very quiet in the shop.

  ‘Bullet or shotgun?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Shotgun, it looked like.’

  ‘All right. Let’s go on from there. What did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ Molly said plaintively.

  ‘I’m not sure that I’d’ve known either.’

  ‘You’d have known, all right. You always do. What made it worse was that I’d seen him before. Do you remember the last time you went to Glasgow on business and I came along and we had lunch at that place in Nile Street?’

  Keith stiffened. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you remember a wee chap, bald on top and a bit sweaty, who came and spoke to you, and you weren’t pleased and you wouldn’t tell me why?’

  ‘Is that who it was?’

  ‘Yes. And I didn’t know what you’d want me to do. If you’d been up to something. . .’

  ‘You didn’t –?’ Keith found that his voice had gone up to a squeak, and he dragged it down by brute force and began again. ‘You didn’t think I’d shot him, did you? And put the body in our own car?’

  ‘No,’ Molly said doubtfully. ‘But –’

  ‘No buts. I don’t get “up to” things. I never did, except maybe a little poaching.’

  ‘And off-certificate guns,’ Molly said.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘And ammunition.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘And you did –’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Keith said, exasperated, ‘stop cataloguing my past sins. I’m a strictly respectable shopkeeper and gunsmith now. I don’t even poach any more. Not to call poaching.’

  Molly looked away. ‘I couldn’t help wondering,’ she said in a very small voice, ‘whether he hadn’t been wanting to talk to you about his wife or his daughter or something.’

  ‘Good God!’ Keith looked down at her, incredulously. ‘You mean you thought I’d got into a quarrel with an angry husband or something?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Keith pulled her to her feet and put his arms around her, but instead of melting she remained rigid. ‘When we got married,’ Keith said, ‘I promised that those days were over.’

  Molly sniffed. ‘You didn’t,’ she said. ‘Not quite. What you said was that you didn’t make promises that you didn’t mean to keep. And, Keith, I believe you. I believe you did mean to keep it at the time.’

  ‘And I always have,’ Keith stated. Certain trifling lapses, he felt, could well be ignored.

  ‘Really?’ Molly softened in his clasp. She sighed deeply. In earlier days, Keith had been a rake with mistresses all over Scotland. Molly had known this and had still been happy to accept him in marriage because, loving him as she did, she could see that every other woman must l
ove him too . . . ‘Well, I couldn’t be sure,’ she said. ‘It could even have been about some girl you knew before we were married. And there wasn’t anywhere nearby that I could go to for help or to use a phone.’

  Keith frowned. ‘You must have been quite close to John Galloway’s house,’ he said.

  ‘Was I? I didn’t know.’

  ‘No, you probably wouldn’t. His drive comes off the side-road up to Donald’s farm, and it bends round. His house is just beyond the crest at the end of the ride. But never mind that. What did you do?’

  ‘What would I do? I pushed him down on the floor at the back, put your old mac on top of him and drove back here.’

  ‘And told the police?’

  ‘I thought I’d tell you first.’

  Keith took several long, deep breaths and then said, ‘Let’s go and take a look.’

  *

  Outside, dusk was falling quickly. The street-lamps were alight, a mixture of comfortable old gas-lights and self-conscious new fluorescents so that the passer-by seemed to change in age and health in a few paces. The lamps hardly relieved the half-light, but Keith could see that apart from a motor-cycle leaning tiredly against the telephone-box in the corner of the square there was no vehicle to be seen.

  Keith’s capacity for rapid thought had kept him out of trouble throughout most of a mis-spent youth. ‘Which way was the car facing?’

  ‘Back towards the north. I swung round the square so –’

  ‘That’s the way he’s gone, then. I was facing the door all the time and he didn’t go by. You’re sure he was dead?’

  ‘Positive. I’ve helped you gralloch enough deer to –’

  ‘Was Tanya in the car?’

  ‘Yes, I forgot to –’

  ‘He’s got a nerve, whoever he is,’ Keith said. ‘Crooks usually avoid cars with dogs in them.’

  ‘Tanya wouldn’t hurt a –’

  ‘He wasn’t to know that. Now, you run over to the police-station. Tell them, but give them the salient facts first. Tell them you found a body in our car but the car’s gone, probably north. And tell them I’ve gone after it. And once they’ve got going on that, tell them the rest of the story.’

  ‘But how are you –?’

  ‘I’ll think of something. Go on. Scoot!

  Molly nodded briefly and scooted across the square to where the lights of the police-station shone beside the dark Town Hall. Keith watched her, torn between satisfaction that she could keep her head when lesser girls would have suffered hysteria, and irritation that her strict adherence to chronological order had wasted crucial time. When he was sure that she was out of vision, or at least too far away to argue, he sprinted over to the telephone-box.

  *

  The motor-bike was of an elderly model not unfamiliar to Keith, and the engine was still mildly warm. With a mental apology to its absent owner, Keith kicked it into life, dropped it off its stand and set off with a swerve and a wobble.

  The road northward out of Newton Lauder is an accelerated lesson in Scottish architectural history. Keith left behind the square where the baronial Town Hall and police-station face the Adam shop-fronts. Passing the early nineteenth-century shops and flats, Keith thought that he might live to regret his impulsive expedition. Where the late-Victorian villas gave way to early George V ribbon-development he was sure of it. And, as he left behind the last contemporary cedar bungalow and the last street-light, regret was already his dominant emotion. The night air was cold and he was not dressed for it. He was almost sure that he had left the shop unlocked. And he was on a fool’s errand. In a very few miles the old road which had once carried the traffic between Edinburgh and the north of England would join the newer main road that bypassed Newton Lauder by the lip of the valley in which the old town lay. Probably his car, if it had ever left the town, had passed that junction by now, and it could have turned to any point of the compass, for in addition to the main road several lesser roads set off across the moors.

  Darkness was closing fast and the motor-cycle’s light was dim. Keith found his own car by nearly running into it. Another majestic wobble took him clear, and he dropped the motor-bike beside the road.

  Keith ran to his car, heart in mouth.

  His first concern was for his dog, and he called, ‘Tanya!’ To his infinite relief he heard a quick snort and saw the white patches of a liver-and-white spaniel appear and take up station beside his knee. He stopped for a moment and the bitch, just as relieved, pranced in front of him like some heraldic beast, rampant on a field sable.

  The car seemed to lie canted with two wheels in the ditch. Keith’s eyes were still only half-adjusted to the dark, but there was just enough light left in the sky to reflect in the car’s panels, and the distorted reflections told of bodywork damage. Keith, whose insurance was as far from comprehensive as the law allowed, cursed silently.

  The rear door resisted and then came open with a noise that combined a groan and a twang.

  Keith was accustomed to handling birds and animals that had been shot or trapped so that a state of death held no dread for him, but he had to overcome a certain revulsion before he could bring himself to grope in the dark for a human corpse that might or might not be there.

  It was there. Keith found it by putting his fingers into its mouth, and he nearly screamed. Pulling himself together, he brought himself to examine it by touch. The corpse was still warm and flaccid but the blood which had soaked its chest was crusting now. It had certainly been a ‘wee chap, bald on top’ once, but now it was, Keith told himself firmly, just a piece of meat. There seemed to be nothing in the pockets but the meanest and most easily recognised of trivia.

  Tanya, who never barked, barked once, and Keith was aware of movement on the road behind him. He pulled back. As he straightened up, his world was shattered and filled with pain.

  *

  The climb back to consciousness was up a slippery ladder made of broken teeth that smelled of blood. Keith made it in a series of lurches, up the ladder and down the snake. Going up, his head hurt. Going down, his stomach heaved. Being conscious was the worst of all.

  A flower-like pattern in the dark resolved itself into a ring of pale faces surmounting another ring of torches. The wet slapping at his face was Tanya’s tongue. The softness under his head was Molly.

  Keith spoke. The effort deserved to be rewarded by more than a feeble croak and a flash of pain. ‘I don’t think we closed the shop,’ he said.

  ‘I remembered,’ said Molly’s voice. ‘I’ve been back.’

  ‘Help me up.’

  Her hands pressed his shoulders down. ‘Stay where you are,’ she said. ‘There’s an ambulance coming. You’re going to the cottage hospital.’

  Keith was going to protest, but he was sick instead all over a policeman’s boots that smelled of polish. ‘Come with me,’ he said when the spasm was over. ‘I want you with me.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Keith looked up at the faces. ‘And will somebody get that poor sod’s bike back to him?’ he asked. ‘It was by the phone-box.’

  Then the world faded away again.

  Chapter Two

  Keith slept that night in a hard little bed in the cottage hospital. At first, between shock and drugs, he was deep in some secret limbo to which his consciousness could never return. Later, his sleep alternated between brief nightmares and periods of half-wakening to find that Molly was still beside him.

  At dawn he woke fully at last. He tried to crawl back under the covers of sleep, away from the headache and the nausea, but the waking world refused to let him go. Molly was tipped forward across his legs, deeply asleep.

  Keith lay quiet, trying to think of anything but how he felt.

  At last the rhythm of Molly’s breathing changed. She snorted once or twice, stirred and then sat up and blinked at him. Her hair, Keith thought, looked like unpruned clematis, but Molly looked better in the mornings than most girls did over dinner.

  ‘Are you better?’ she asked anxiously.

  Keith could have discussed the subject at some length, but he had more urgent matters on his mind. ‘Have you been here all night?’ he asked.

  She yawned, hugely. ‘Most of it,’ she said at last. ‘It’s all right, I won’t leave you alone.’ She patted his hand.