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  Most of my questions answered themselves, but there were several points to be checked. Mrs Brindle, who had been lurking at my elbow – whether to prevent me tampering with the guns or for the sake of male companionship I had no way of knowing – shied away when I asked her a question.

  ‘I’d better see him,’ I said.

  ‘There’s only the one estate road makes a ring around the place,’ she said. ‘There are side-tracks, but you can see along them. Watch for a grey, long-chassis Land-Rover.’

  I bumped halfway around the frozen mud of the estate road. The woods were not the usual coniferous plantations, put in for the grants and then forgotten, but a mixture of deciduous forest trees and low conifers, split into wandering fingers of woodland around glades and clearings and broad rides. They would be beautiful in summer, but I decided that they had been planned for the shooting rather than for amenity value.

  I spotted the grey Land-Rover a hundred yards up a ride which led through a beech-wood towards a glow of open sky beyond. In a small pen containing a blue-painted pheasant feeder and a drinker, a man in a stiff tweed suit and gaiters, assisted by a youth in his late teens, was catching pheasants, examining each one critically before either releasing it outside the pen or stuffing it into a large, plastic crate. An old but well-kept side-by-side shotgun lay against the wire. A sleek black Labrador lay motionless beside the pen, watching me with suspicious eyes.

  The older of the two men looked at me with similar mistrust. He was in his thirties, strong-featured with a mop of black, curly hair only partially concealed by a fore-and-aft hat which matched the tweed of his suit. (The youth, I noticed, was wearing breeks of the same tweed which I guessed to be the estate uniform.)

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked abruptly.

  Keepers are rightly suspicious of anyone wandering on their territory. I took the question at face value, introduced myself and explained my errand.

  Mr Brindle was not mollified. ‘More bloody bureaucracy!’ he complained. ‘There was no need for you to come out here. I ken fine what you’re up to. Running up the costs of the new legislation to justify an increase in the fees, pricing gun-ownership out of the reach of the working man! If you’d do something about the bloody poachers you’d do more to earn your keep.’ He tossed a gaudy cock pheasant outside. It gobbled indignantly but strolled off, unperturbed. ‘That beggar’s in here every day, helping himself to feed instead of having to scratch for it in a strawed ride. He kens damned fine he’s safe now.’ Brindle smiled grimly. ‘If he hopes I’ll take him along to the hens, he’s got another think coming. I’ve more than enough cocks.’

  ‘If you have a problem with poachers,’ I said, ‘it’s the first I’ve heard of it. Let’s talk about it.’

  He looked at me hard, seeing me for the first time as a person rather than as an annoying figure of authority. ‘What do you want?’ he asked more mildly.

  ‘Your application for a renewal of your shotgun certificate,’ I said. ‘There were some unclear points. It seemed easier for both of us if I came out for a chat instead of trying to deal by phone or letter.’

  He nodded. ‘You carry on,’ he said to his young assistant. ‘I’ll be watching. Now, what are these points?’

  I looked down at my notes. ‘I’ve cleared most of them up,’ I said. ‘Your wife showed me the guns—’

  ‘She did what? You’d no business. The new law gives you no power to inspect.’

  So he was a barrack-room lawyer. I chose my words carefully. ‘The Firearms Act gives me the right, and you have rifles in the same room. Anyway, your wife invited me inside. I didn’t ask her.’

  ‘If you’re going to be technical . . .’

  ‘If I was going to be technical,’ I said, ‘I could point out that your wife had access to the guns and, not holding a certificate, she’s an unauthorised person. Under the Nineteen Sixty-eight Act, Section Fifty-two, I could confiscate your guns.’ He changed colour and gaped at me. ‘But I’m not unreasonable and I’m not going to be technical.’

  ‘But you were having a snoop at my security.’

  ‘I wasn’t. But I could hardly help noticing.’ I paused and he glared at me. ‘I noticed the oak door, the security lock and the bars on the window. I also noticed the dog’s basket just outside the door. As long as the house is occupied, I’ll accept that. Of course, if you leave it empty—’

  ‘We’re not ones for holidays,’ he said, ‘even if a keeper could spare the time or the money. If we go away it’s for a night or two and one of my under-keepers sleeps in.’

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ I said. I nodded at the shotgun. ‘I take it that that’s the McNaughton gun that was absent from your rack?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You’ve applied for certificates for your two under-keepers but no guns are specified. They’ll use guns out of your gunroom?’

  ‘When they need them.’

  ‘Fine, as long as they’re kept securely overnight.’

  We tidied up a couple of minor, technical questions. ‘That’s all that I needed,’ I said. ‘Do you want to tell me about your poachers?’

  He drew a deep breath and let it out again. ‘I thought you were going to ask for security cabinets and electronic alarms,’ he said more mildly. ‘And I don’t see my boss paying good money for such-like, not here. He’ll have all the latest at his own home, no doubt of it.’

  He stopped and, while he thought, he pulled out an old pipe and a pouch. When his pipe was drawing nicely he said through the smoke, ‘This time of year, we’re still catching up pheasants, hens mostly, for egg-laying.’

  ‘And release them again as soon as they’ve raised their chicks?’

  He shook his head. Evidently I had exposed my ignorance. ‘Sooner than that. Soon as they’ve finished laying,’ he said, ‘they’re out. Pheasants don’t make good mothers. The eggs go into electric incubators and the chicks into brooders. We’ve been poached, off and on, all winter, but while we’re catching up we’re specially vulnerable. We’ve four catching pens – d’you see? – and we can’t watch ’em all. Not the whole time. Some slippery sod who kens the ground well keeps helping himself.’

  I nodded sympathetically. From Deborah and her father I had learned something of the economics of poaching. This was a commercial shoot, where businessmen coming for a day’s driven shooting paid perhaps twice what each bird had cost to rear. The game dealer would pay the shoot operator or the poacher only a fraction of the rearing cost. The poacher was therefore removing from the ground an asset of considerably greater value than he would be paid for it. Whatever one’s views might be of that type of sport, the keeper, whose livelihood might depend on showing a good return, had every right to feel aggrieved at what was, after all was said and done, robbery – and often armed robbery.

  ‘Why haven’t I heard about this before?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged and turned away, picking up a thumbstick which lay beside his gun. Evidently I was expected to walk with him. The dog lay still until a flick of a finger called him tight to his master’s heel. It was good to move again, walking over the crunching leaves. The sun had come out and frost was melting and dripping from the branches overhead.

  ‘I reported the first occurrences to Newton Lauder,’ Brindle said. ‘Seems they still think of the poacher as a poor, starving old peasant feeding his family on nature’s bounty which the wicked laird wants to keep for hisself. They equip themselves with the latest technology but their thinking’s a hundred years out of date. I gave up after a bittie. You’ll do the same. They’ll not want you to take an interest.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I told him. ‘Especially about the latest technology. I come under Edinburgh, not Newton Lauder. If I report the matter to my chiefs in Edinburgh, I think they’ll let me follow it up. What can you tell me about your poacher?’

  He stopped and leaned on his stick. We had come to where the trees stopped at a hedge and the ground fell away steeply to a fence at the bottom. B
elow us, open Borders farmland was spread in a winter patchwork of plough and grass and stubble. I started picking out landmarks. Below me a digging machine – a JCB, I thought – was noisily cutting a scar across the countryside, through a field where some cereal crop had been left unharvested. Ahead of it, to my left, a line of large pipes laid on the ground marched away into the distance.

  ‘What’s happening down there?’ I asked.

  ‘Water main.’

  ‘What about your poacher?’

  ‘He kens the ground as well as I do myself,’ Brindle said. ‘During the winter, he was using a lamp and an air rifle, knocking the pheasants out of their roosts. He was coming about once a week, on average, but not regular. We kept watch and spotted the light of his lamp more’n once but we could never come up wi’ him. He has a dog wi’m to give warning – a wee dog, from the tracks, no’ a big bogger like Seamus here. This time of year he finds it easier to raid the catching pens – and any birds that he leaves behind are too unsettled to mate for a fortnight,’ Brindle added bitterly. ‘I’d be feared that he was at one of the other catchers this minute, except that he’s seldom here midweek in daylight. I jalouse that he has a daytime job or a business of his own.

  ‘And he has a freezer, or access to a cold store. A game dealer wouldn’t be buying pheasants just now, not without wanting to know where they came from after the season’s finished, so my mannie’ll be putting them by to take out at the beginning of next season when the price is above rock-bottom.’

  I was making notes – not that my memory was untrustworthy, but notes made at the time can lend support to evidence given later. ‘Anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye there’s more. I’ve followed his tracks often enough. He wears the common, black welly, size nine. There’s been times I’ve been so close ahint him that I could see where he’s brushed the dew off a fir-tree. From that, and the length of his stride, I’d say that he’s not more than average height and most likely less. I’ve found matches but never a tabbie, so he smokes on the job – there’s no’ many poachers do that – and if it’s the ciggies and no’ a pipe then he’s a damned carefu’ man. He comes and goes by a different road each time. Usually he’s on his ownsome and takes just as many birds as he can carry in a jute sack – I’ve seen the imprint of it where he set it down on a patch of mud. But twice there’s been another man wi’ him.’

  Mr Brindle paused, thought deeply and then gave a grunt to signify that he had no more to offer me.

  ‘Can you tell me anything about the other man?’ I asked him.

  ‘Smaller boot, a seven. Not so heavy. Could be a woman or a teenager. And it was daytime, both times he – or she – came along.’

  I remembered one of Deborah’s father’s anecdotes about poaching. ‘You didn’t notice a woman with a pram walking a baby through the estate, either time?’

  His full lips twisted into a sneer. ‘I’m not as green as I’m cabbage-looking,’ he said. Evidently he had heard the same story of poached pheasants carried off in a perambulator.

  ‘This damned pigeon-shoot,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s out of my hands, I’m just told to co-operate and find places for our beaters and whoever yon mannie Pollinder sends me. Every Tom, Dick and Harry with permission to bring their guns on to the estate.’ He straightened up and began to ram down his thumbstick to lend emphasis to his words. ‘Rag, tag and bobtail, all the scruffs from the beating line, shots going off all around, how the hell am I supposed to know it’s all pigeon that’s being shot?’

  His words reminded me. ‘I’m coming to the pigeon-shoot on Saturday. That’s Nuttleigh’s Farm below us, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. Damn’t, I wish I’d known. I could fine be doing with a policeman among the Guns. But all the corners are spoken for now. So you shoot, do you?’

  ‘Clay pigeons, mostly.’ I was damned if I was going to admit that Saturday would be my first attempt at a live target. ‘One of your neighbours is joining us on Nuttleigh’s on Saturday. Ian Kerr. Which is his farm?’

  Mr Brindle nodded to our left, towards what I thought was the north. ‘The open ground beyond the trees,’ he said shortly, and clamped his mouth shut. It seemed that Mr Kerr was not a favourite with him.

  ‘About your poacher,’ I said. I save a few slips of blank paper in the back of my notebook. I wrote my home phone number on one of them and handed it to him. ‘If you can’t reach me through the police, call me at home. Can you give me a map of the estate? Mark on it a few suitable rendezvous points and give them names or letters. And do you have walkie-talkies?’

  He nodded. ‘We use them on shoot days. They’re idle now.’

  ‘I suggest that you lend me one and carry another. Then if you have to call me out we can keep in touch.’

  He nodded again, looking a little less fierce. ‘Pick it up, and the map, on your way to Nuttleigh’s on Saturday,’ he said. ‘Now I’d better get back and see what’s going wrong. These MSC laddies . . .’

  As we walked back towards the vehicles he made conversation about the weather and the prospect for the pigeon-shoot. I felt that I had passed a test and I was oddly gratified.

  *

  There was nothing of any urgency to require my attention back at Headquarters. On the other hand, there was a good chance that Deborah would be at home. I drove round the town and turned off to Briesland House.

  It was as well that among Brindle’s guns I had found a reasonable excuse to visit Keith Calder. When Molly, Deborah’s mother, sent me into Keith’s study, I found Chief Superintendent Munro taking coffee with Keith, very much at his ease. He sat up and glared at me. Keith, with a glint of mildly malicious amusement in his eye, waved me to a chair and poured coffee into a spare cup.

  ‘Deborah’s out,’ he said.

  ‘I knew that,’ I said, thanking my luck. ‘I came to consult you, or your copy of the Firearms (Amendment) Act Nineteen Eighty-eight.’

  ‘And what is wrong with the office copy?’ Mr Munro demanded sternly.

  I thought swiftly. ‘You borrowed it, sir.’

  He waved an impatient hand but relaxed. ‘Ask my staff for it back.’ In fact, a WPC had returned it to me that morning.

  Keith, who knew all about the longstanding animosity between my chiefs which sometimes rubbed off on me, hid his smile. ‘How can I help?’ he asked.

  ‘Allan Brindle, the keeper at McKimber, has a Chassepot rifle, bored out for use as a four-ten shotgun.’

  ‘True,’ Keith said. ‘And a useless item it is. I sold it to his boss when the old man was still collecting. So?’

  ‘In the white paper, it was proposed that any such gun reverted to its original status as a firearm.’

  ‘And a damn stupid proposal it was,’ Keith said. ‘They dropped it before the Act was passed. Whoever proposed it in the first place needed his brains tested.’

  ‘It was proposed by the Committee of Chief Police Officers,’ Munro said indignantly.

  Keith’s smile came again at full strength. ‘There you are, then,’ he said.

  ‘The rifling could be re-cut.’

  ‘It wouldn’t fit any ammunition current today. For the matter of that, any competent mechanic could make an adaptor tube to turn a shotgun into a rifle. Or cut rifling in any piece of iron piping.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ the Chief Superintendent said sadly. ‘You can sell these . . . these killing machines, but I have to deal with the results. As long as the theft of firearms for use in crime is on the increase . . .’

  ‘But it isn’t,’ Keith said. ‘Take a look at the figures for yourself. The civil servants and the police make so much noise about the increase in crimes involving firearms that the media and the public have come to accept it as a fact. But if you look at the Government’s own figures you’ll see that, over a period during which the total of thefts and burglaries more than doubled, thefts of rifles and pistols dropped and thefts of shotguns remained remarkably constant. And if you try to find out how ma
ny of those were later used in a crime, nobody knows.’

  Mr Munro finished his coffee, sighed and unfolded his gangling body from the deep chair. ‘About the private ownership of firearms,’ he said sadly, ‘we shall never agree.’

  ‘Did you know that more people are killed by falling trees than by firearms? Wouldn’t it make more sense to cut down all the trees instead of trying to stamp out private ownership of guns? Without trees, guns would die out. There’d be nothing to shoot.’

  ‘Now you are being silly,’ Munro said.

  ‘Will you look at the figures for yourself and let me know what you conclude?’ Keith persisted.

  ‘It would make no difference.’ Munro looked at me sharply. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘I want to check Mr Calder’s security,’ I said.

  Keith looked at his watch. ‘A long job,’ he said. ‘You may as well stay to lunch, if Mr Munro permits. Molly will be expecting you.’

  Munro looked petulant. He knew that he was being manipulated. But he shrugged. In my reading, he would have liked to be ‘one of the boys’ but his position and his upbringing combined to set a barrier between him and the coterie which he secretly liked and admired. ‘Who the Sergeant cares to associate with in his own time does not concern me,’ he said. ‘I shall see myself out.’

  The door closed behind him.

  ‘He means well,’ Keith said. ‘Do you really want to look at my security? Again?’

  I shook my head. Keith kept a large stock of rare antique weapons in the house. I could only guess at the value and I knew that I was probably underestimating it wildly. His security was the best in the Region.

  ‘Come upstairs anyway,’ he said. He called to Molly that I would be staying to lunch and got a cheerful acquiescence in reply. He led the way upstairs and unlocked the steel-backed door to what had once been two large bedrooms, now thrown together to make his workshop and gunroom. Most of the large space was taken up by rack upon rack of guns, each one a collector’s piece, but Keith’s workbench, with a stool and a visitor’s chair, occupied a clear corner. While we talked, Keith settled to work on a handsome Horsley back-action hammer-gun – or so he referred to it. The place smelled of linseed oil.