Sauce For the Pigeon Read online

  SAUCE FOR THE PIGEON

  Gerald Hammond

  © Gerald Hammond 1984

  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 1984 by MACMILLAN LONDON LIMITED.

  This edition published in 2018 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 One

  Keith Calder came whistling down the farm road and turned in through the gates of Briesland House. On the face of it he did not seem to have much to be whistling about. He had been up well before dawn on a freezing winter’s morning, and instead of spending the day among his beloved guns, ancient and modern but preferably the former, he was due to spend it at the shop, stock-taking. Keith, who had once been itinerant in body and spirit, had come to terms with life as a settled businessman, but the humdrum chores of business bored him out of his mind. Those, in his opinion, were what partners were for.

  However, the woodpigeon were here in great flocks, and to the dedicated shooter that fact was enough to mark the day in the reddest of letters even if most of it were to be spent in the dentist’s chair – another engagement for which Keith had little enthusiasm. A couple of hours’ shooting over decoys at the market garden had been rewarding. The bag of decoys on his left hip was balanced by a heavier bag of real pigeon on his right.

  Keith was not a religious man but he had been known to thank his maker for the evolution of that perfect quarry, the pigeon. Requiring no assistance from man to proliferate in the wild, an enemy to the farmer who could be counted on to welcome its pursuer, a cunning and observant quarry demanding skill in fieldcraft and a high standard of shooting to bring to bag, the woodpigeon is the standby of the majority of shooting men.

  And Molly was a great hand with the tough and earthy little bird. Her pigeon pilaf was a particular delight; but jugged or curried, jellied or in cranberry sauce, and especially in a pie with mushrooms and cider and flavoured with bay leaves, the pigeon was enjoyed by the Calders. Keith began to salivate at the thought.

  Brutus, the black labrador, caught Keith’s mood and frisked at heel.

  They entered the house from the rear. Keith’s mood might have spoiled if he had seen the car which waited at the front door. Instead, it rose higher. Molly, from the kitchen window, must have seen him coming. He could smell bacon frying. There would be eggs and coffee and toast and marmalade. With such a breakfast to round out such sport, he might even be able to face a day with Wallace without snarling more than once or twice.

  The warmth of the house was stifling after the freezing air outside. Keith dropped his steamed-up sunglasses, his scarf, gloves and balaclava on the hall table. He leaned his bagged gun in a corner over his bags of birds and decoys. On to the hall chair went his cartridge belt and layer upon layer of warm clothing; for decoying is static, chilly work. Slippered, comfortable and half his former bulk, he went through to the kitchen.

  Molly was putting his breakfast on the table. His daughter, Deborah, was in her chair. Brutus had already settled happily in the warmest corner, safe out of the way of feet.

  And Chief Inspector Munro was dawdling over a cup of coffee.

  Keith’s euphoric mood began to waver at the edges. He ran a quick mental check over his various permits and licences. Everything from the car’s MOT to the dog licence was up to date. True, he lacked a Game Licence, in company with almost everybody of his acquaintance, but after all, he had not been shooting game. Stolen goods turning up at the shop, then.

  ‘Come to take me away, have you?’ he asked.

  Chief Inspector Munro did not smile. He was a lean Hebridean with a Calvinistic view of life and a supreme contempt for the habits and morals of all Lowlanders. Over the years, he and Keith had bickered into a relationship which somehow managed to blend antipathy with mutual respect, verging occasionally on qualified affection.

  ‘I have come to ask for your help,’ Munro said in his careful West Highland lilt. ‘Real help, not “helping us with our enquiries”.’

  ‘A stolen gun?’ Keith asked. He dropped into his chair and filled his mouth.

  Munro shook his head impatiently, enhancing his slight resemblance to a peevish horse. ‘A dead man,’ he said. ‘Found in a burning Land Rover, and a bag of pigeons nearby.’

  That made sense. Reluctant as the police were to consult lay experts, there were certain matters of ballistics as applied to shooting in the field on which his opinion was sought from time to time. He was becoming experienced in the arts of the expert witness.

  This could be anywhere in southern Scotland. He emptied his mouth. ‘How long will I be away?’

  ‘Not long. This one is just a few miles up the road. The body is too burnt to identify, without we know which dentist to ask. I was hoping that you might be able to put a name to him from other evidence.’

  ‘The Land Rover’s registration no good to you?’ Keith asked between delicious mouthfuls.

  ‘There is a fault on the line to Swansea. All this snow, doubtless.’

  ‘Likely. Shall I take my car or will you bring me back?’

  ‘I’ll bring you back.’

  ‘Hang on a minute, then.’ Keith finished his bacon and eggs. While he buttered his toast, he spoke to Molly. ‘Would you call the shop? Tell Wal to carry on without me.’

  Molly’s attractive and usually amiable face managed to work up quite a creditable frown. ‘But you’ll be back soon?’ she protested.

  ‘Tell him you don’t know when I’ll be back.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s despicable. Just because you don’t like stock-taking. He can’t do it on his own and watch the shop, and you won’t let him close up during the season.’

  ‘Tell him to call in Minnie Pilrig to help out. Oh, and Molly, there’s a few pigeon in the hall. They’ll go off if they’re left in the bag. Will you deal with them?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Molly said with a sigh.

  Keith reached over and ruffled his daughter’s hair. ‘A pity you can’t help yet, Half-pint,’ he said.

  When the two men were gone, Molly fetched Keith’s bag from the hall and laid out the pigeon on the kitchen table. ‘Let this be a lesson to you about men,’ she told Deborah. ‘When your dad says a few, it all depends what he’s talking about. If it’s pounds on the housekeeping, it means two or three. But if it’s drinks, or birds for me to pluck, few means anything from twenty up.’

  Plucking would take all morning and result in a kitchen full of feathers. Freezing them in the feather only postponed the evil day and there was already a bag of feathered pigeon in the freezer. Instead, Molly set to and sliced out the breast meat. The now shrunken carcasses she dropped whole into a bin-bag and deposited it in the freezer until the day the dustbin-men called. By the time they started to thaw, they would be somebody else’s problem.

  A uniformed sergeant was at the wheel of Munro’s police Jaguar. Keith and the chief inspector shared the back seat. The car turned north, away from the town of Newton Lauder, and soon took to a small road which continued northwards, climbing along the bottom of the valley and running roughly parallel to the main Edinburgh road higher up. Their road went nowhere, Keith knew, except to serve a straggle of farms up to the valley’s head among the moorland.

 
; ‘From what I hear,’ Munro said, ‘you shooting men are all after the pigeon just now. I thought we were at the height of your season for the pheasant and grouse and so on.’

  ‘Grouse are just about over,’ Keith said patiently. ‘With this hard weather there’s a statutory ban on wildfowling, and the shoots are more concerned about keeping their birds alive than killing them. But we’ve had two mild winters for the pigeon population to build up, and now that the high ground’s under deep snow, which we’ve more or less escaped, the pigeon are down here in hordes.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Munro said doubtfully. ‘I have not seen them myself.’

  ‘For God’s sake, look at them,’ Keith said. He pointed out a flock of more than a thousand pigeon, all heading south above the trees which lined the left side of the road.

  ‘I see them now,’ Munro said. It was almost an apology.

  Higher up the valley, the car pulled in to the roadside behind two small panda cars and an ambulance. They got out. Keith was glad that he had resumed most of his warm clothing. Munro seemed to be impervious to the cold.

  ‘I’ll tell you this for a start,’ Keith said. ‘You needn’t hope to get the dead man’s name from the farmer. This is Andrew Dumphy’s land. His kale’s being hit hard by the pigeon. When the snow comes, it often happens that only the cattle-crops are left showing. The pigeon can clean them right off, leaving the farmer to buy feed for the rest of the winter. Mr Dumphy put the word around that anyone was welcome to shoot pigeon on his ground for as long as the snow lasted.’

  ‘He told us just that on the phone,’ Munro said.

  They walked up a rough track, slithering where the light snow had penetrated the canopy of trees. The track took a twist between two sudden outcrops of rock.

  ‘Just ahead,’ said Munro.

  ‘I can smell it.’ Keith paused and sniffed, then walked on. They rounded a bend and came in sight of the still smouldering wreck. Keith had expected to see damage, but he was shocked to see that the Land Rover was almost wrenched apart. It stood on a circle of incinerated ground, the pine needles still smoking. Two ambulance men and a uniformed sergeant were standing by, but Keith could see other figures between the trees, scouring the ground.

  ‘Forensic work can’t begin until this mess cools down,’ Munro said, ‘but if you come this way . . .’

  ‘Hang on a moment,’ Keith said. ‘Let me get the picture first.’ He walked slowly around the Land Rover, using his eyes a little and his nose a lot. The smell of petrol was in the air, but he would have known it for a petrol model without that – the carburettor showed under the gaping bonnet. There were other smells. Burnt rubber and plastic and paint. Hot metal. Scorched bushes and the branches overhead – some of the trees, he thought, would have to be lopped or die-back would kill them.

  Threaded among the other smells was one that was more awful because of its acceptable familiarity – the smell of burnt meat. The body crumpled across the front seats was far from recognizable. It was no longer a person but a thing, inanimate but shocking.

  There were still more scents, but around the Land Rover they were drowned. Keith did a tour of the surrounding bushes. The heat had brought out the smell of the evergreens, but on a dead limb he thought that he could make out faint traces which were familiar.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What else have you got?’

  ‘This way.’ Munro led the way, Keith and the sergeant following, to where an empty bag lay beside a group of boulders. The bag’s contents had been laid out on a sheet.

  ‘Your groundsheet?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I handle these things?’

  ‘Not the cartridges,’ Munro said. ‘They have still to be tested for prints. As to the rest, go ahead.’

  Keith squatted down. ‘Twenty-two woodpigeon,’ he said, weighing one of them in his hand. ‘They seem to be in good condition despite the weather. Two collared doves. One feral racer, at least I suppose it was feral, there’s no ring on its leg. Eleven of the rubber-tipped sticks that decoys sit on, so wherever his decoys are or were the ground’s too hard to push in a stick. Which, just now, is about everywhere. And twenty-eight cartridges, all of them fired. Twenty-five birds for twenty-eight cartridges is damn good shooting, unless he was shooting his birds on the ground. And always assuming that he gathered up all his spent cases.’

  ‘Those cartridges,’ said the sergeant. ‘They aren’t all the same.’

  ‘This is Sergeant Bannerman,’ Munro said, without suggesting that the information was of more than passing importance. In Munro’s private version of the Police Manual, sergeants were to be seen and not heard.

  ‘Hullo,’ Keith said. ‘That’s very quick of you, Sergeant. You’re right. The firing-pin marks are different.’

  The sergeant debated with himself whether to take the credit for such advanced observation but decided in favour of frankness. ‘It was the cartridges themselves I was looking at. They aren’t the same make.’

  ‘Ah. Don’t pay attention to the printing. Shops often get their own names printed on the cartridges they sell. The bases are all Eley, and they’re all twelve-bore, two-and-three-quarter-inch. There wouldn’t have been a ha’p’orth of difference between them.’

  ‘Except for the imprints of the firing-pins?’ Munro said.

  ‘Don’t rush me,’ Keith said. He went down on his knees and with a pen from his pocket he pushed the empty cases around. He bent right down to sniff at each cartridge. ‘Of course,’ he said at last, ‘some of these could be left over from a previous trip. Otherwise I’d say that we’re looking for two men. These—’ with his pen he isolated twelve cartridges ‘—have all been reloaded, you can see from the shape of the base. Five different printings. They’ve been fired from a gun with a flat instead of a round firing-pin, so that the imprint is a slot instead of a round hole. What’s more, although the smells are very faint – because of the cold, I suppose – they smell of black powder rather than of modern smokeless. Which suggests to me that we have a man with a beloved old hammer-gun which has never been proved for anything stronger than gunpowder, so he loads his own cartridges with that, rather than risk damage to the gun or himself.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘The others are all Eley Grand Prix factory loads, number six shot. They’ve been fired in a modern gun. Not a repeater, you can see the ejector marks.’

  ‘Two men, then?’

  Keith shrugged. ‘You’ll need to look at them under a microscope to be sure that there’s only two guns involved. And, remember, people do collect each other’s empties to pass on to a friend who loads his own. We may have two men here or we may not. Was any gun found?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘I see.’ Keith got to his feet and straightened his back. ‘I suggest that your forensic boys recover the shot from those birds and see how many makes and sizes there are. Have you found his decoying position?’

  The two policemen looked blank.

  ‘We’d better start from the beginning.’ Keith took a seat on a rock which was slightly warmed from the fire. Munro hesitated and then chose himself a seat. The sergeant stood. ‘The pigeon’s a canny beggar,’ Keith said. ‘You can’t drive it or walk it up like a game-bird. You’ve got to be as crafty as the bird itself to get near it. Sometimes you can wait on their favourite flight-line, or in their roosting wood of an evening. But the only way you’d get a bag this size at this time of day would be by shooting over decoys from a hide. The pigeon’s a gregarious bird, and if it sees what it thinks is a flock on the ground it’s likely to join it.’

  The sergeant sniffed. ‘Doesn’t sound very sporting,’ he said.

  ‘It’s sporting all right,’ Keith said. ‘It needs fieldcraft, and it takes a good shot to shoot pigeon in the air.’

  Munro waved aside these irrelevancies. ‘There are no decoys here,’ he said. ‘Would they have burned up in the fire?’

  ‘They might, if he had two bags and he put
the other one into the Land Rover first. But this was his decoy bag. If he had two bags, one of them would be the standard game-bag of heavy canvas, and he’d have put his birds in that.

  ‘On the other hand, he might do what I sometimes do; take a bag with his decoys and gear, a beltful of twenty-five cartridges plus a few in his pocket, and his gun. That’s quite enough weight to carry until you know whether you’re going to get lucky.

  ‘He seems to have found a good spot. When he had some birds and was getting short of cartridges, he’d have to decide whether he was knocking off or going on. Either way, he’d go back to his vehicle.

  ‘On the whole, I’d guess that he was ready to quit, because if you’re going on you usually leave your shot birds out to add to the pattern of decoys. You may find that his decoys are still out in the fields somewhere, perhaps even complete with more birds and more empty cases. In which event, I’d say that he was going to go on and only came back to the Land Rover for more cartridges, and brought his surplus birds to save another trip later.’

  ‘There are no signs of footprints in the snow,’ Munro said. He seemed to be thinking aloud. ‘Under these trees there is no snow to speak of, just pine-needles, which take no prints. I suppose it will do no harm to have the men tramping about and searching. Just what would they be looking for, though?’

  Keith got to his feet. ‘Let me have a peer around,’ he said. ‘I may be able to save you some time.’ He set off towards the splash of grey-white sky which marked the gap in the trees where the track reached the fields.

  The other two followed behind. Munro spoke softly to his sergeant. ‘If he gets his teeth into this thing, we may have to hold him back.’

  The sergeant nodded. ‘Let him help while we need him, sir,’ he said. ‘I can just see some of our stupid beggars tracking each other through the snow for the rest of the week. We could use a short cut.’

  ‘Just as long as we know what’s being cut,’ Munro said.

  From the edge of the fields Keith looked around, but the contours left large areas of dead ground out of his view. He climbed on to a fallen tree and looked over the fields, concentrating on the area to his left, back down the valley. The two policemen waited patiently, their heads level with his knees.