Stray Shot Read online

  STRAY SHOT

  Gerald Hammond

  © Gerald Hammond 1988

  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 1988 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

  I am deeply grateful to my friend and shooting companion, Earl H. Bell, who showed me Texas, gave inestimable help with the dialogue and then was pleased to be used as one of the characters in this book.

  *

  All other characters are as fictitious as I could make them.

  G.H.

  Chapter One

  Hunger, added to a stiffness about the neck and shoulders, brought me back into the here and now. My watch said 2.35. It was daylight, so it must be early afternoon and I had missed lunch again. Absently, I transferred the contents of the word processor to disc, started the printer and wandered through into the kitchen.

  Alice was there, looking, as always, fresh and feminine and irresistible. Sometimes I wondered how it was that the cottage was not eternally besieged by the entire male population of the world, all baying like hounds and trying to fight their way inside. She was doing something with food.

  ‘I heard the printer start up,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ I focussed on her. ‘Did I hear the doorbell? Or was it part of what I was writing?’

  ‘Keith was here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Keith Calder,’ Alice said patiently. She was used by now to my disorientation after an intense bout of writing. ‘Your friend. The man you’ve probably been writing about all morning.’

  I nodded. I knew who Keith was now. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He said he’ll come back. I said that I expected you to surface before much longer. Four hours is usually your limit. He took Boss for a walk.’

  ‘Not before you made him spill the beans,’ I said. ‘I know you. Tell me all.’

  Alice is too well balanced to be upset by allusions to her feminine curiosity. She put a snack on the table and almost pushed me into a chair. She had bought a small freezer and a microwave with her own money so that she could pander to my irregular eating habits. ‘He wants you to go and help him on Friday. That’s the day after tomorrow,’ she added helpfully.

  ‘Can I spare the time?’

  ‘Only you know whether you’re at a point where you can break off. But you’ve earned a holiday. I don’t know much about writers, but Sir Peter says you’ve become amazingly prolific.’

  That was probably true. Since moving in with me, Alice had relieved me of the need for almost any thought outside of my writing. Whole days which, back in London, would have been eaten up by the niggling trivia of living could now be given over to the enchanting, demanding, brain-wrenching compulsion to play with words.

  ‘I could have the first draft finished in another day,’ I said. I pushed my plate away and took an apple from the bowl. ‘A break might do me good. I’ll go and meet Keith.’ It only dawned on me later that she had avoided telling me what help Keith was asking.

  The printer had stopped. I checked that the disc contained a faithful reproduction of my morning’s work and switched everything off before heading for the back door. Alice popped out of the kitchen to make sure that I had remembered to put on a jacket, but my wits were returning and I was wearing a coat and cap. She nodded approvingly. Very occasionally her guise as a self-appointed nanny irritates me, but in the main I accept, even welcome it. Usually, I need nannying.

  The day was cold and shadowed. Beyond the back garden lay a wood where Sir Peter’s pheasants scattered at my approach. I had come to terms with the knowledge that they were destined for the pot, but any which cared to take refuge in my garden when the sound of the beaters approached could count on a safe haven, even if they were sometimes hard on the vegetables. A sharp wind was taking the last few golden leaves off the trees and whisking them aimlessly around.

  When I had first transplanted myself from London, it had been strange and humbling to have a dog at my side, attentive to my orders and wholly dependent on my whims for its food and even life. Now, so soon after, with Boss only a minute away, I felt a pang of solitude and hurried my pace. The ground rose beyond the wood. Soon I could see back through the branches to the roof of Tansy House and the fields beyond. Only a month before, I had had to climb higher to see over the wood to the view which stretched across the Border country almost into England. My path climbed between gorse bushes until I crested a rise and walked onto a field of stubble. A figure in the distance was accompanied by two dots, but one of them broke away and came racing towards me.

  Boss arrived at a gallop, nearly bowling me over, and fussed around me, panting and sniffing, wanting to know where I’d been and whether I’d betrayed him by fondling some other dog. I had inherited Tansy House from an uncle whose sister had married a southerner and brought me up to believe that civilisation ended somewhere in Hertfordshire. Before putting the house on the market, I had decided to look at it. My uncle’s Labrador had been ownerless and would have been put down if I had not taken him in. Alice, who had been my uncle’s housekeeper ever since she left school, had also been homeless. It made me shudder now to think how nearly I had turned them both away. But Alice had brought me under her spell, lending a roseate glow to the area where my mother had once had her roots. And now I had put down new roots of my own.

  Boss accepted my apple-core as a peace-offering and clung possessively to my heel as I walked to meet Keith. Keith’s spaniel came halfway to meet me.

  Keith Calder was about ten years older than I, but he had undeniably worn better. For one thing, he still had all his hair although it was touched with grey, and there was an athletic spring to his step which was lacking from mine. He had kept most of his good looks, and what time had stolen away it had replaced with an air of distinction at variance with a streak of boyishness which he had never quite outgrown. Ostensibly, he was no more than the local gunsmith and proprietor of the shop catering to those who shot and fished, but in practice he managed to leave most of the retail side to his partner and to deal with the gun repairs in the minimum of time, concentrating his own efforts on matters which he found more interesting and therefore more rewarding.

  But Keith was a man of many talents. His expertise, and an easy manner on the witness stand, had led to his frequent engagement as an expert witness, and his quick mind coupled with a penetrating curiosity had often led him to the truth in advance of the police. The consequent trickle of work which this brought him did not wholly explain his regular involvement in criminal investigation. The truth, I think, was that because he was observant, analytical and, having sailed very near the wind in his younger days, well versed in the workings of the criminal mind, he was often the first to realise that a crime had occurred at all. Which made me wonder how often a crime slips by undetected where there is no Keith Calder to poke his nose in.

  When Keith had invited me to write up his cases, I had jumped at the chance of a fund of cosy, real-life crime stories which might never sell a million but which would do well in the libraries. I might, I thought, have several years of reasonably remunerative work ahead. In fact, allowing for the need to keep my own pot boiling, it seemed that he was still gaining on me. His adoption of me
as a heaven-sent errand boy and leg-man had not helped me to catch up with him.

  Keith was carrying a couple of green, canvas dummies. He threw one out and then walked to meet me with his spaniel at heel.

  I responded to his friendly greeting with some reserve. I had no objection to being his biographer but I had no wish also to function as his Watson and general gopher.

  ‘What’s this help you’re looking for on Friday?’ I asked.

  He smiled at me. ‘You couldn’t get it out of Alice, then? Get on,’ he added. The spaniel, which had been nosing at his leg and gazing, liquid-eyed, into his face to remind him of the dropped dummy, raced away.

  ‘I got side-tracked,’ I said. ‘She has a talent for it. Tell me.’

  We started walking back. ‘Nothing much,’ he said. He stooped to take the dummy from the panting spaniel with a word of praise. ‘Just a pleasant day out in the country, free lunch and a small fee. Picking-up.’

  ‘Picking-up’ was an expression which I had heard somewhere but it took me a few seconds to put it into context. When the penny dropped, I protested immediately. ‘But you know I don’t approve of shooting,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody’s asking you to shoot,’ he returned blandly.

  ‘It’s the same thing.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing at all. The shooting will happen whether you’re there or not. The picker-up’s job is to use his dog to gather up shot birds. Especially runners which might otherwise escape and die miserably. Looking at it that way, it’s an errand of mercy.’

  The argument seemed specious but I let it go. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know the first thing about it.’

  The two dogs had gone ahead. Keith dropped one of his dummies under the gorse and walked on. ‘You’ve got a damned good dog,’ he said. ‘And an amazingly good relationship with him, considering that you took him over as an adult. You’ve kept up his basic training.’

  ‘Only because he seemed to enjoy it,’ I said.

  ‘Right. He enjoys retrieving dummies as a substitute for the real thing for which he was bred and trained. You’ve never seen a truly happy and fulfilled dog until you’ve seen a dog doing the work it was meant for. Let’s see you send Boss back. Handle him onto that dummy.’

  Showing off Boss’s paces hardly counted as capitulation. So I called him back and sent him out. We were a long way from the dummy by now but he trusted my signals. It took him a few seconds to recognise Keith’s scent on the dummy instead of mine. Then he picked it without difficulty. He came back at the gallop, sat and pushed the dummy into my hand, grinning all over his silly face.

  ‘There you are,’ Keith said. ‘No problem. He’ll perform even better on the real thing. And I’ll be around to keep you straight.’

  I was being pushed into a corner. Keith always could be persuasive. ‘But why?’ I asked plaintively. ‘Why do you need me?’

  ‘Because the keeper’s been let down. It’s damned near impossible to find anyone with a good dog who’s free on a Friday at short notice and one picker-up can’t serve a line of eight guns which may stretch a quarter-mile. I can see you don’t want to do it,’ he added.

  I thought that I had, for once, won. ‘You’re right, I don’t.’

  ‘But you’re out-voted. I want you to do it. Boss wants to get back to work. And I think you’ll find that Alice would like you to go.’

  The last was a clincher. After years spent, in London, avoiding the matrimonial intentions of a succession of lady-friends, I had fallen for Alice. And Alice, with the convoluted thinking peculiar to women and despite her Presbyterian fixation on respectability, had moved in and shared my life but had so far refused eleven offers of marriage. She would never expect me to pass for a Scot, she said, but when I could pass among them without causing offence or amusement with my alien ways, then she would marry me.

  ‘Oh, I suppose I’ll have to,’ I said ungraciously. ‘If you promise to prevent me making too much of an ass of myself.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up at eight,’ Keith said. As we descended the hill, with the wind in our faces and the dogs chasing the scent of rabbits, he began to explain the rules, customs and traditions. It all seemed quite simple.

  *

  Not even the prospect of wakening with Alice’s copper hair spread across the neighbouring pillow had turned me into an eager greeter of the dawn. There was a time when the most alluring commercial on the television showed a girl who came straight from sleep to joyful wakefulness, to the accompaniment of a fanfare. (This was supposed to popularise a certain breakfast cereal but I suspect that it only popularised girls.) If I had been in that role, a long, low grinding sound would have been more apt.

  Alice, however, could have played that girl to perfection. She had me up and even breakfasted in good time on the Friday morning. She had trimmed my beard the night before and laid out one of my late uncle’s suitable tweed suits and a pair of stout boots, and even found me a shooting stick to sit on. ‘You’ll find,’ she said, ‘that for every few minutes of hectic activity you’ll have a gey long wait for the beaters to get round.’

  So I had time to take Boss for a turn through the wood, and when Keith arrived in his hatchback I was sitting on the stick at the roadside with the dog at my side.

  ‘You look like the Laird of Inversnecky,’ he said – approvingly, I think. I learned later that he was quoting from the great Harry Lauder.

  ‘I feel like a prat,’ I retorted. I had adapted to life in the Scottish Borders on my own terms, an urbanite who happened to live in the country. Wearing tweeds and with a shooting stick, I felt that somebody else must have taken over my body.

  Keith opened the hatchback to admit Boss, who leaped lightly in and curled down with the spaniel. The two were old friends. I saw for the first time that Keith’s daughter Deborah was occupying the back seat. Usually very neat and trim, she was wearing jeans and a tattered anorak.

  ‘She’s a beater,’ Keith said.

  ‘No school today?’ I asked.

  ‘My leprosy’s broken out again,’ Deborah said. ‘It always does on shooting days. I think it’s psychogenic. If it goes to form, I’ll have a miraculous remission on Monday.’

  Keith slammed down the door. ‘I don’t approve,’ he said. ‘But she has all her Highers. She’s only marking time. And beaters are also in short supply on weekdays. They’ll probably be equal parts young, old and unemployed. Also, the fresh air does her good.’

  ‘The ten quid does me even better,’ Deborah said as we got into the car.

  Keith drove back through the local town of Newton Lauder and turned south towards the English border. But he turned again off the main road and headed in a generally south-westerly direction.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘Aikhowe.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘but that’s the Earl of Jedburgh’s place.’

  Keith decided to take me literally. ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘Have you got something against earls?’ Deborah asked from the back.

  I thought about that. I am not particularly leftish, except now and again when I feel that the Establishment has somehow done me down. ‘I don’t think I know any,’ I said at last. ‘As far as I’m concerned, he can be an earl if he wants to, but I think the whole concept’s a bit dated. I’m damned if I’m tugging my forelock.’

  They both laughed. ‘You couldn’t,’ Keith pointed out. And, indeed, I am getting a bit short of forelock for tugging purposes.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could bring myself to call another man My Lord.’

  ‘You’d probably embarrass the hell out of him if you did,’ Keith said. ‘He never wanted to be a lord.’

  ‘I call him Your Noble Lordship,’ Deborah said, ‘but he knows I’m pulling his leg and he turns pink and falls over his feet.’

  ‘What do you call him?’ I asked Keith.

  ‘Me? I call him Charlie. I’ve known him since way back when. Cut down his
first gun for him and taught him to shoot it.’ Keith glanced round and saw my face. ‘Look, don’t get uptight about it. This is one of those shoots where you’ll probably find that the beaters are better dressed than the Guns. The old Earl, now, in his day fifteen thousand pheasants were turned out and it was all done by the book. Pairs of guns and a loader apiece and lunch off a white tablecloth.

  ‘He was a character, the old Earl, and a grand old man in his way, but he was a bastard to the boy. Charlie was all brains and nerves and not very well coordinated and his dad used to call him all the names in the book in front of guests, or send him insulting messages by the keepers. I was heart-sorry for the boy and I used to take him out as often as I could.’

  ‘Poaching,’ Deborah said from the back. Her parents had tried to keep the details of Keith’s gaudy past from her, without any great success. Too many people still remembered.

  ‘That’s as may be and it’s all water under the bridge now,’ her father said. ‘At least I taught him to shoot to his father’s satisfaction. Rather better, in fact. Relationships weren’t improved when the boy started wiping his father’s eye.

  ‘The old Earl was a canny man but he wasn’t as fly as he thought he was. He got caught by one of the first reinsurance scams. Somebody set up a new syndicate at Lloyd’s, handed on a lot of policies at reduced premiums and bolted for the Caribbean with a few million in his pocket, leaving the members to cough up huge sums every time some old rust-bucket plunged to her inevitable fate.

  ‘So when the old man finally popped off, Charlie inherited a large and beautiful house, a huge estate, no money and some farm rents which didn’t begin to cover the debts.

  ‘Nobody could have blamed him if he’d sold up. But he was determined to hang onto the place where his early years had been made a misery. Folk are funny that way.

  ‘He’d taken a very good science degree at Cambridge and then, probably to stay as far away from the old man as he could, he’d gone on for a business degree at Harvard. When he came back, the one thing the old man didn’t grudge him was money to pursue his scientific interests. Earlier, two small farms had been rolled together into a more economic unit and the Home Farm buildings were empty, so he’d fitted up a pretty good laboratory.