Pursuit of Arms Page 5

  “You have a responsibility to Eddie also,” York said sharply.

  “I don’t see it,” Keith said. “Eddie was supposed to deliver his guns to me and he didn’t do it. I don’t mind being helpful.”

  “You’d better be as helpful as you can. Eddie can be trouble.”

  “Eddie’s always trouble,” Keith said. He hoped that, like Munro, Eddie was listening. “Eddie’s as nice to have around as a feral ferret. What do you want from me?”

  “I want in with you. Eddie means to have those guns back.”

  And, Keith thought, without the police or his insurers knowing it. “What had you in mind?” he asked.

  “Exchange information. Pool resources. Act in concert. Will you be in this evening, nineish?”

  “I expect —”

  “See you then.” Paul York disconnected.

  Keith hung up and switched off his amplifier. “It looks as if I may be playing for two different teams,” he said.

  “Just as long as you remember which team you want to win,” Munro said.

  “I’ll remember,” Keith said. He picked up the phone again. There was no answer on Ronnie’s number, which was not surprising in the middle of a working day. “He’ll be stalking,” Keith said. “It’s the roe season, and farmers have been complaining again. We’ll leave Molly to get a message to him through his boss. Molly can twist Sir Peter round her little finger.”

  “Is that wise?” Munro asked.

  “It’s necessary. He’s Ronnie’s employer. He also employs all the foresters and a lot of estate workers. You don’t suspect Sir Peter Hay?”

  Munro shook his head emphatically. “I do not. But he’s a romantic old fool. Give him just one hint that you are embarked on one of your escapades and he will be after you like a shot, wanting to join in what he thinks to be the fun.”

  “Probably,” Keith said. “And a damn good thing too. How much good do you think Doig’s house-to-house enquiries will do him?”

  Munro sighed and shrugged at the same time. “About half as much as they should. That’s the best we ever do.”

  “Exactly. And why? Because half the men you’re talking to have memories of being breathalysed or prosecuted for a chimney fire or some other footling thing, or they’re wondering whether they’ve let some licence lapse, or they’re reluctant to say anything in case they drop a neighbour in the clay and make bad relations. The very men who might have seen the lorry heading into the hills are the foresters and farm workers who’re working all hours at this time of year, and they’re just the men to be thoroughly scunnered with you after being buggered about with their firearms and shotgun certificates. But ask them the same questions through Sir Peter, who’s very popular with his men, and you may get some answers.”

  “Swings and roundabouts,” Munro said. “But be careful what you say. My name must not come into it. Now, shall I give you a lift into the town? I must go in and arrange for a day or two off.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more help if you stayed on duty? You’d know all that’s going on,” Keith pointed out, “and have access to all the facilities.”

  “If I stay in the office,” Munro said, “I shall be snowed under with all the trivia of day-to-day police routine; and it would certainly be noticed if I took an interest in the investigation. No, Keith, I can find out all that I need to know through my own men.”

  “That sounds reasonable. All right, I’ll be glad to have you with me. You call in at your office, arrange for some time off and find out as much as you can about the progress Doig may have made. Then go home and change into plain clothes. You can pick me up near the shop after I’ve made sure that we’re tapped into the other lines of local gossip. And we’ll call the team together for a meal this evening. We’ll keep you out of sight when Paul York turns up.”

  “That would be necessary,” Munro said. “If he is the man I’m remembering, he’s ex-police.”

  “I guessed that. And, from the way he moves, a karate man. I think he’s got something to tell us. Why isn’t he getting all the help he wants from Chief Superintendent Doig? Did York leave the police under a cloud? Tampering with evidence, maybe?”

  “Suspicion of that,” Munro said. “And intimidating witnesses. A rough character altogether. I would not be trusting him.”

  “I will not be trusting him either,” Keith said, in conscious imitation.

  *

  Superintendent Munro was waiting in his car in the back lane behind the shop when Keith arrived at their rendezvous with a bag slung over his shoulder. He sniffed disapprovingly as Keith got into the car. “You have been drinking,” he announced.

  “If a half-pint of lager counts as drinking,” Keith said, “I have. I was in the hotel, asking Mrs Enterkin to keep note of any bar gossip. Let’s go out by the south junction.”

  “If you say so.” Munro coaxed the car along the narrow lane and out into the main street. “I will be off sick for a few days,” he said. “For the record, I have a slipped disc; but my men think that it is only my nose that is out of joint. Who else have you spoken to?”

  “Sir Peter’s going to ask his men what they saw. My brother-in-law is studying tracks at the places we picked on the map. And my partner and his wife are going to chat up the customers in the shop, just in case some angler or bunny-hunter saw a vehicle go by.”

  Almost opposite the south junction, a little-used track slanted up the hill. The car climbed until they had an open view of the countryside, the town, and the further hills with their patchwork of plantations and older woodland. Munro parked. The two men quitted the car. Out of his bag, Keith produced two pairs of binoculars from the shop. While they spoke, they rested their elbows on the car roof and picked over the scenery.

  “Sandy Doig would tell me nothing about his progress,” Munro said grumpily. “He said that he was in a hurry. It may even have been true. But my inspector looks to me for his next step up, so he gave me what you would call the ‘gen’.”

  Keith had never used the word but he let it go by. “What did he say?”

  “My lad would not know all that the chief superintendent knows,” Munro said, “but they do not seem to have got very far. After all, it is barely twenty-four hours since the event. There is no sign of the trailer, but the cab which pulled it has been found. It had been parked during the night, bold as you please, among others in the carrier’s yard. It was a Leyland, like the others, and the same colour, and was only noticed when the others went out. Whoever drove it through the town had the devil’s own nerve.”

  “Who’d be looking for a trailerless cab if he went quickly?” Keith asked rhetorically. “On the other hand, maybe he waited for dark. Most likely of all, he dropped the trailer off at its hiding-place somewhere towards or inside the forestry and then headed north — there’s a rough sort of a road — and only came down to the carrier’s yard after dark.”

  “There have been no tyre tracks found,” Munro objected.

  “There wouldn’t be, with the ground baked hard and so much felling going on. We’ll have to hope that Ronnie can do better. Does the trailer have a solid body, or is it a flat bed with one of those canvas affairs over it?”

  “It was all metal,” Munro said. “It seems to me, in spite of all that you say, that it would be the very devil to hide. If it wasn’t that we had cars at the junctions, thanks to yourself, I’d be sure that they’d got it out already.”

  “Well,” Keith said, “unless they’ve chopped it up, they haven’t. You know as well as I do that, apart from those two junctions, every road out of Newton Lauder peters out in the hills. There are one or two ways you can get over the moors with a Land Rover, but not heavily laden enough to get that load out in less than about twenty trips. No, it’s in front of us, somewhere.”

  Through their binoculars, they scanned the hills which climbed beyond the valley from farmland through the patterned forestry to the moors above. The heather was bright on the high ground. It was going to be a good year for gr
ouse.

  “I just can not believe it,” Munro said suddenly. “How, for a start, would they get it up there, and nobody see them?”

  “You see that tree-strip to the right of the factories?” Keith asked. They both turned their binoculars in that direction. “There’s an old road runs through the middle of it. There’s a link from the back of the factories, which used to serve Oldbury Farm. The newest factories are built on the site of the old farm. The contractors were using those roads, but nobody else ever goes along there.”

  “Even so, they’d be exposed when they came out above the trees.”

  “From up here,” Keith said, “yes. Down there, they’d be over the crest.”

  “A man walking might be over the crest. I think that the top of the vehicle would be in sight for half a mile. And once up there,” Munro added, “I don’t believe that you could hide such a thing. How would you set about it?”

  Keith felt that he had already covered the point, and he did not feel inclined to give Munro the benefit of the lecture on disruptive patterning which he usually gave to pigeon-shooting courses. “They probably painted it to look like a brick shit-house,” he said, “and hung an ‘out-of-order’ notice on the door. I expect your coppers are peeing against the corner of it whenever all the tea catches up with them.”

  Munro had learned to ignore Keith’s attempts at humour. “I find it hard to accept,” he said. “I suppose that the trailer could not be hidden in the town? Some empty building . . .?”

  “Not a chance,” Keith said. “When it first seemed possible that the workshop I usually take over mightn’t be available, it didn’t look as if the new factory would be ready in time. There was a delay on materials or something. So I went looking for premises which I could rent. Believe me, apart from that group of factories, there isn’t any vacant space at all.” While he spoke, they had turned their glasses left, to where Newton Lauder straggled up the valley, a spread of low buildings, a few spires and the tower of the Police Building standing guard above the bulk of the old Town Hall. Trees lifted above the slated roofs. It was all cosily familiar, and inconceivable as a scene for murder or a cache for stolen arms.

  “There’s a helicopter over there,” Keith said suddenly.

  Munro turned his binoculars and searched to find the speck above the hills. “It has R.A.F. markings,” he said at last. “It will be at work for Sandy Doig.”

  “It seems to be working a search pattern,” Keith added.

  “Doig has already had cars visiting the farms to take a look in the barns and outbuildings.”

  “Waste of time,” Keith said. “Look at Lairy Farm down there, on a line with the factories. That’s a fairly typical layout. We’re looking at the back of the farmhouse. You can see Mrs McLelland at her kitchen window. To the right of it, those buildings are cattle-courts. From lower down, you can see right through them. Anyway, the space is mostly taken up with concrete stalls. Left of the farmhouse, beyond the stack of straw bales, there’s a Dutch barn, almost empty at this time of year. You can see into one side of it. One silo and a drying-shed and that’s the lot. They used to have a lot of closed-in outbuildings, but they’ve been replaced with what you see. Farmers don’t store a lot of stuff under cover any more. What else has Doig got?”

  Munro put down the binoculars on the car roof and stretched. “Very, very little,” he said, “and most of that from the survivors. They have been unusually lucid, all things considered. It seems that six men arrived in a big car, on the heels of the lorry. They were masked and they acted as a well-drilled team. They carried sawn-off shotguns. They always do,” Munro said bitterly. “I would happily see small-bore rifles removed from the Firearms Act if I could see shotguns put on it.”

  “When you get your hands on those guns,” Keith retorted, “if you ever do, you’ll find that most of them had never been legitimately held, and maybe the odd one had been stolen from a cabinet which would have satisfied the Act anyway. What else did he say?”

  “It was all over in seconds. Four men herded the eight into the yard and made them sit down. They heard the car and the lorry driving off. Then each of the murderers produced what the victims thought was a piece of lead pipe and clubbed two men. That, of course, was the end of it as far as they were concerned.”

  Keith tried to keep his mind away from the revulsion, but he failed. “How can men get like that?” he asked.

  “Professionals,” Munro said unemotionally. “Men with records and who have killed before. They knew that the killings might make the difference between being caught and getting away, or between conviction and acquittal, and would add little or nothing to their sentences. Looked at in that way and without compassion, it has a black logic. There will be a leader who makes up in organising ability for a total lack of human feelings. It is not a new pattern.”

  Keith shook his head to dispel the pictures in his mind. “Something must have been said. Could they detect any accents?”

  “Only one man spoke. One witness said that he sounded Scots, probably Glasgow, but that the accent did not sound right.”

  “Same as I heard on the phone,” Keith said. “Is that the lot?”

  “That’s all that the injured men could tell us. They may know more, but the doctors are not letting them be questioned again today. One man did say that he thought that the car might have been red, but that is not to be relied on. Accident victims, for instance, often remember colours as having been brighter than they really were. As to the rest . . . The cab was smothered in prints, but it is unlikely that any of them will belong to our customers. They took the guns and the pipes away with them, so that Forensic do not have much to work with. They are doing their best with a little dust which may have come from afar on somebody’s feet. It could help if they could find the car or a witness.”

  “You could suggest that they look for a car on the stolen list, neatly parked in the square or in one of the supermarket carparks.”

  “They will not have missed that,” Munro said sadly.

  “Also,” Keith said, “you may be overlooking one valuable witness. Don’t forget my travels before the hijack.”

  “If you saw anything of significance —”

  “All that I saw I’ve told you. But I was driving, and a driver doesn’t usually see much but road. My daughter wasn’t so hampered.”

  “How old is she now? Five?”

  “Nearly seven. And she’s not your run-of-the-mill Baby Doll witness. She’s very observant. She notices cars. And she’s noticing men already, the little madam.”

  “That would be expected of any daughter of yours,” Munro said. “If the raid had been carried out by a team of Amazons, you would be able to give me descriptions down to their bust measurements.”

  “True, I hope,” Keith said. “Now, as I see it, the gang had information about the load of arms consigned to me. But . . . Just a minute.” His binoculars had found a target. He blinked to clear his eyes and touched the focusing wheel. But the box-like shape which had shown through a thin screen of trees was the Portakabin which Sir Peter Hay used as an on-site facility for his foresters. “But at the last minute they heard that I had been squeezed out of the workshop where I’d usually taken such contracts in the past. What would they do?”

  “What would you do?”

  “Good question.” Keith lowered the binoculars and frowned in thought. “I wouldn’t want to shadow the vehicle, not with Paul York supposed to be on its tail. And I wouldn’t want to go around asking questions, in case my face was remembered. The wrong question on the telephone might cause alarm. Better to ring Mr Calder and impersonate the driver. Well, that didn’t quite work, but the idiot Calder drove straight to the factory and told them what they wanted to find out.”

  “You weren’t to know,” Munro said.

  “If I’d had a grain of sense, I’d have led them somewhere else. Anyway, they only had to shift their operation a couple of hundred yards, because I usually got space in one of those ol
der factories at the mouth of the estate. I wonder whether their plan would still have worked if I’d found a place at the other end of the town. Well, no sense in speculating until we’ve gathered what facts we can. I’ve asked Mrs Enterkin to keep tabs on the bar gossip; and my partner and his wife are letting it be known, through the shop’s customers, that I’m desperate for any titbits I can pick up, implying that I’m hoping for news of strangers asking around so that I needn’t blame myself for the word getting out. Something useful may get back to us.”

  “Aye, it just might,” Munro said. “Folk will say in gossip what they won’t tell the police.”

  “Not everybody has my enlightened attitude,” Keith said. “I keep reminding myself that every policeman is my friend, despite all evidence to the contrary. For the moment, I suggest that we’ve said all that’s worth saying and stared at damn-all quite enough for one day. Let’s make a loop through the countryside, just to get the geography and the present stage of the felling into our heads. Then we’ll go and interrogate Deborah.”

  They got back into the car, but Munro sat quietly for a moment. “One thing,” he said. “Will you be hoping for a reward from Mr Adoni’s insurers?”

  “If we’re successful, maybe.”

  Munro attempted an engaging smile. “With your car off the road, I shall be doing a lot of mileage. Would you share the cost of my petrol?”

  “Did you come to me or did I come to you?”

  “I came to you,” Munro admitted.

  “The chances of us finding out enough to get you off the hook would be about even money,” Keith said. “The odds against our getting enough to screw a reward out of an insurance company must be in the hundreds to one. Pay your own damn petrol.”

  Chapter Six

  A quick tour of the countryside to the east of Newton Lauder served to convince the superintendent that only a detailed search by many men over a long period could be sure of finding a camouflaged lorry, if it were there at all. When Munro was depressed he looked, to Keith’s eye, even more like an ailing camel than usual.