The Reckoning (9 page)

‘How so, Angus?' Madden was listening closely.

‘You're interested in who might have called on Drummond: or any visitors he might have had. Well, as I said, we drew a blank on that. But he did have patients who came to his rooms, and some of them were strangers. Ballater's a tourist centre. It's next door to the Cairngorms and, rather like Lewes, it's something of a magnet for ramblers and the like. During those two weeks, apart from his regulars, Drummond saw a total of six patients who Miss McRae said were previously unknown to him: four men and two women. They were all tourists of one
sort or another. Four were Scottish – two men from Edinburgh, and a couple from Inverness – and two English: a man from Manchester and a woman from Ipswich. They all left their names and addresses with Miss McRae, who also had notes on their various complaints in the doctor's handwriting in her files. Would you like to know what those were?'

‘Yes, I would.'

‘Two of the men had sprained ankles and one had fallen over and cut his hand. The Scottish couple were suffering from a stomach upset, and the doctor had made a note of the hotel they were staying at. Perhaps he planned to have a word with the management. The woman from Ipswich complained of menstrual cramps. She was given a prescription.' Sinclair frowned. ‘Needless to say, Miss McRae was present at her desk in the waiting room when these patients were admitted to the doctor's surgery. While she had no idea of what went on inside, none of them gave the sense of anything having gone amiss when they left and Drummond himself had nothing special to say about any of them. As for the description you passed on to me, Miss McRae said that to the best of her recollection two of the men were youngish, in their thirties at any rate. They hadn't struck her as being particularly slight in build, but she cautioned us that her memory of the occasions was hazy.'

The chief inspector shrugged.

‘Be that as it may, I made a note of all their names and addresses in case you might want them.' He removed a sheet of paper from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to Madden. ‘The CID in Aberdeen has the same list, of course, and may choose to send it on. But to be on the safe side you might as well give it to the Yard.'

He waited in silence while his companion scanned the list.

‘I can't thank you enough, Angus.' Madden looked up with a smile. ‘Billy will see that the Lewes police are informed. They might get a match to one of the men's names.'

‘Let us hope so.' The chief inspector stretched in his chair. ‘Well, so much for events leading up to the murder. Now let me tell you about the shooting itself. To start with, there was nothing unusual about that day, nothing out of the ordinary so far as Drummond was concerned. We have that from Miss McRae. He followed the same routine he always did. He spent the morning at his surgery seeing patients. This went on until one o'clock, when both he and his secretary went home for lunch. In the afternoon he made his rounds while Miss McRae went back to her office to attend to secretarial work. It was understood between them that she would leave at half-past four on the dot. This was because her mother liked to have her tea equally punctually at five. As a result, and depending on how long the doctor spent on his rounds, he would either see his secretary just before she left for home, or not until the following morning. He himself always returned to his surgery before going home in case there had been a call from a patient while he was out, or some other message left for him by Miss McRae.

‘In fact, that day he returned quite late. The shopkeeper who heard the shot and whose hardware shop was beneath the doctor's rooms saw Drummond walk past his window at ten past five. A few minutes later he heard the gun go off, though he didn't know what it was, and went upstairs to the doctor's rooms to investigate. The door from the street was always left open during the day – Drummond himself would lock it when he went home – and the shopkeeper was able to go up to the first floor and try the door to his suite. It was locked and, after he had knocked a few times without response, he assumed that when he'd seen the doctor go by earlier he must have been on other business. Shortly afterwards he shut up shop for the day and went home, and it wasn't until later that evening after Mrs Drummond had raised the alarm that the local police went round with her to her husband's surgery and found his body.'

He paused to take a breath.

‘I haven't described Drummond's surgery yet. Baillie showed it to me. It was still unoccupied and the furniture was left as it was. Miss McRae had lent us the key. Basically it consisted of two rooms: a waiting room where Miss McRae sat at her desk, and the doctor's surgery, which was reached by an inner door and which overlooked the street. This was furnished as you might expect with a desk, an examination table, a screen . . .' Sinclair gestured. ‘There was a carpet in front of the desk and Drummond's body was found lying on it, face-down. You know about the urine-stained trousers. It seems clear that he was made to kneel down facing the desk and was shot once through the back of the head from close range.'

The chief inspector frowned.

‘Normally one might wonder how the killer gained access, but in this case it would have presented no problem. Given that he had some prior knowledge of the doctor's routine, he need only have watched for Miss McRae's departure before going up to the first floor and waiting there for Drummond to return from his rounds. We don't know whether they had met before, but even if they hadn't, he could have posed as a patient in urgent need of medical help, in which case Drummond would have invited him in.'

Sinclair tugged at an earlobe; he looked reflective.

‘What struck me most about the whole business was the speed with which the killer acted. Only a few minutes elapsed between the moment the shopkeeper saw Drummond walk past and the second he was shot. There can't have been time for much talk between them. Yet Drummond knew he was going to be killed: the trousers tell us that. But was he told why?'

The chief inspector paused to allow his listener to comment if he wished. But Madden could only shrug. In the silence that ensued he got to his feet and began to pace up and down.

‘What are the Aberdeen police doing now?' he asked.

‘Not a great deal, I fancy.' Sinclair frowned. ‘The description
of the man seen by the shepherd had reached Murray through the normal channels, and he was having all hotels and boarding houses in Ballater checked, to see if anyone could recall having had a guest who matched it. Earlier the CID up there had given some thought to the possibility that the assassin might be a local man, but the murder of Gibson and the linking of the two cases have pretty well ruled that out.'

The chief inspector sighed.

‘Other than that, I dare say the Edinburgh and Inverness police will check up on those three men – the Scottish tourists who consulted Drummond – to make sure they are who they say they are. But beyond that there's not much they can do. I'm afraid my efforts were largely wasted.'

‘Not at all, Angus.' Madden paused in his pacing. He looked down at his old friend with affection. ‘You've done heroic work. They'll all be agog at the Yard when they hear you're back in harness.'

‘Will they . . . I wonder.' The chief inspector looked dubious. ‘Somehow I can't see Charlie Chubb rejoicing at the news. And not so much of the “back in harness”, if you don't mind. You see before you a man content to cultivate his garden.'

He stretched luxuriously and rose to his feet.

‘But I wish I could have been of more help, John. It's still not clear whether you're involved in this. All I can tell you is that the answer doesn't lie in Scotland.'

They descended the steps from the terrace together and, with Hamish trotting at their heels, walked down the lawn in step with their lengthening shadows. When they reached the gate Madden paused with his hand on the latch.

‘There was something you said earlier . . . about why you were giving me so much background on Drummond. You said you had a reason. What did you mean?'

Sinclair grunted. ‘I'd forgotten about that. I was trying to underline how unlikely Drummond's murder seemed to me: how
hard it was to imagine why anyone should have wanted to kill him. I believe you felt the same about Gibson.'

Madden nodded. ‘That's why they seem random victims.'

‘So you don't think they shared a guilty secret?'

‘A Scottish doctor and an English bank official who had never met? I'd be amazed if they did. What's more, neither of them was expecting trouble. While it's true Gibson began writing that letter, he never finished it; and nothing in his behaviour suggested he was worried or concerned for his own safety.'

‘What are you going to do now?' Sinclair asked.

‘Ring Billy this evening and tell him what you've told me. Murray's report may not have reached the Yard yet.'

‘So you think the matter's urgent?'

‘I don't know.' Madden shrugged. ‘But it may be. If this man's really bent on a killing spree, is there any reason to think he'll stop?'

8

‘C
OME ALONG
, S
ANDY
.'

Tom Singleton tugged impatiently at the lead, but the Sealyham resisted. It had found something interesting to investigate in a pile of autumn leaves that had gathered beneath the straggly bushes lining the towpath, and Tom knew that his efforts to shift it before it was willing to move would be useless, short of strangulation; and although Sandy was more Nell's pet than his, he was still fond of the little brute.

‘Do get a move on.'

He gave another sharp jerk, but to no effect. Their walk that day had taken them to Port Meadow, a flat, watery expanse little more than half a mile from the house in north Oxford that he and Nell had bought on his retirement. Although the weather had been fine all day, offering up the same cloudless sky and mild sunshine they had enjoyed for the past fortnight, the sun was sinking rapidly: in another hour darkness would fall, and with it the temperature. As if in tune with the thought, Tom began to cough, and then to wheeze as his lungs laboured to draw in enough air, while his face grew red and his eyes began to water. Cursed from boyhood with a weak chest, he had suffered the further handicap of being gassed in the First World War and the damage done then had lingered in the form of a
persistent cough and a rattle in his chest when he breathed too hard.

‘Damn and blast!'

The incident had occurred during the Battle of Loos in 1915 and Tom had been inclined to make light of it, particularly when it turned out that it was his own side that was to blame: the whiff of chlorine gas that he'd inhaled had come from shells fired at the German defences, when a change in the wind had blown some of the poisonous cloud back over the British lines.

‘There I was, sitting in a dugout on a nice sunny day, minding my own business . . .' was how he would begin his account of the episode, adding further piquant details as time went by, mainly for the benefit of the schoolboys he had taught for three decades, who had relished the tales of life in the trenches that Tom would introduce into his history lessons as an antidote to wearisome details of the feudal system and the tedium of the Corn Laws.

In fact he still had a clear memory of that autumn morning when he and the other members of his battalion had watched, from the seeming safety of their lines, as the shells exploded around the German redoubt they were soon to assault; how the white cloud, pale as mist, had hung over the ground for long minutes and then begun to drift slowly back towards them. He had been lucky: he'd barely taken a lungful before someone had slapped a wet towel over his face and told him to hold it there. But he had never forgotten the sight of the Tommies on either side of him choking and retching; of the bodies convulsing on the duckboards at the bottom of the trench.

It wouldn't have done to tell the boys that; or about the men cut down like wheat stalks in the deadly cross enfilading fire of the German machine-guns; or of the thousands – the tens of thousands – of bodies that still lay hidden in the rich soil of France, unburied, and recorded only as names carved on stone.

Better to amuse them with tales of the whizz-bangs the Jerries
sent over, hissing like firecrackers, which you could see coming and could dodge, if you were quick enough. Or, better still, with accounts of visits made to the battalion bathhouse for delousing.

‘Yes, you grubby lot, delousing – and I've half a mind to give you a taste of it.'

Above all, what he could never bring himself to tell them was the deeper truth: that what they thought of as the civilized world – the one he had taught them about, the world that had risen out of the darkness and superstition of the Middle Ages into the dawn of the Enlightenment – had engaged in a war more terrible than any other before or since, and for reasons that even now he could not satisfactorily explain, either to himself or to them, let alone justify.

As to why he and so many others had answered the call of their country when it was clear they were being used as little more than cannon-fodder, he had tried to be truthful.

‘It was a question of duty, you see. It had to be done. It's a hard thing to describe, duty. But you know it when you see it.'

At that point Tom had always paused, so that the new faces looking up at him, the ones who had not heard his answer before, could take in the importance of what he was about to tell them.

‘At least you think you do . . . But you can be wrong. So remember: don't always believe what everyone else believes, even when it seems obvious. Don't always listen to what people tell you. Make up your own minds. Decide for yourselves.'

These words had a purpose. He hoped they would leave at least the residue of doubt in the minds of his young listeners; and that perhaps one day when they were faced with a decision requiring moral courage in the face of overwhelming opposition, they would remember them. His own moment of truth, if he could put it that way, had come many years before and could never be redeemed. Although he'd survived the war unwounded,
apart from the damage to his lungs, his joy on his return home had been marred by a shadow, a stain on his character, on his very image of himself, which he had known, to his sorrow – even as it was incurred – would last a lifetime.