“Who can tell? The potting shed is behind the garage. All you need to do is look.”
Mrs. Minto was still Mrs. Minto. She swayed as she looked at Richard King and the two constables who had accompanied him to her house. A woman well fallen from grace, thought King, two-bottle-a-day merchant at least. It was, by then, three P.M. and she was already “well on.” She looked at King with bleary eyes and then leered as if fancying him as her new young lover. Her home seemed to King to be a rambling mess, the pile of unwashed dishes in the sink, the smell of stale tobacco, the garden overgrown.
“Can’t keep staff,” she slurred.
“We have found your husband’s body, Mrs. Minto.”
She seemed momentarily sobered, then seemed to look ill, and then she recovered.
“He did it, then?”
“Who...?”
“Durham, Mr. David Durham... bold boy David, the boy-wonder lover. He did it.”
“Mr. Durham?”
“Head of physics at Partick Academy, last I heard. No time for old Sheila now. Left old Sheila to the bottle. He was my boy... my young man.”
“I’ll have to ask you to accompany us to the police station, Mrs. Minto.”
“To where?”
“To the police station.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Yes. Yes, you are. After a night in the cells and plenty of nonalcoholic liquid, we’ll have a chat with you and tell you why you’ve been arrested, and perhaps you could throw a bit of light on the circumstances surrounding your husband’s disappearance. If not his murder.”
“Murder...” Mrs. Minto croaked the word as she was led gently towards the waiting police vehicle. She walked calmly, as if in a dream. Richard King closed the door of the house, knowing that it would later be searched, though he doubted anything of value to the police would be found after twelve years. He walked into the garden and opened the door of the potting shed. The lock opened stiffly, and the door opened and let out a draught of musty air. There, leaning against the wall, was the pickaxe handle, thin end on the ground, just as Ian Dollar had described. Now dusty again, it had last been used to cave in the skull of Douglas Minto. King closed the door of the shed, leaving the pickaxe handle where it stood. He would draw the attention of the Scene of Crimes officer to the handle, but for now it was better left untouched. He glanced at his watch. The city’s schools would be coming out. He drove to Partick Academy.
“Sense of relief.” David Durham was a man in his early thirties. He laid the pile of exercise books on the bonnet of a Landrover in the school car park.
King had waited in the school car park. He noticed a Landrover amid the other cars. He watched as men and women carrying briefcases or piles of books got into their respective cars. When a male teacher approached the Landrover, King walked up to him and said, “Mr. Durham?”
“I’ve ruined my life,” Durham said.
King nodded.
“Yet I feel a sense of relief.”
“People often say that.”
“Do they?”
“Oh yes...” King nodded.
“I want a favour of you.”
“I doubt...”
“Hear me out.”
“All right.”
“I want to go home. I want to tell my wife. I want to hold my son.”
“I can understand that.”
“You’re a family man?”
“Yes.”
“I was stupid to get involved with her. She was a bad woman. I was young. I thrilled to it. It was fun to have an affair with an older, married woman who lived in a lavish home. I suppose you’ve seen her home?”
“Yes. Doubt that you’d recognise it now.”
“I know what you mean. I happened to drive past it the other week.”
“So, what happened twelve years ago?”
“She killed him. Evil little woman. She told me she’d murdered him. Crept up behind him and whacked him over the head with a pickaxe handle, right there in her living room. The woman who cleaned for her had walked out and she took the opportunity to kill her husband. Nobody else in the house, you see, except me. The guy who tended the garden never entered the house. He was lying there when I called round, still in his dressing gown... She was pushy... insistent... Just assumed that I’d go along with her. Before I knew what I was doing, I was loading the body into the Landrover... I just love these vehicles... This is not the one, I had an earlier model at the time.”
“That’s how you got the body up to the tops?”
“Yes. It’s the only way. A Landrover could handle that slope... A Landrover can go up a one in two... The route we took up the tops was about one in six. We did it at night. We took it to a part of the moor she knew to be in private hands. She said no one would find it. She was right for ten...”
“Twelve years. She was right for twelve years.”
“So what’s that, conspiracy to murder?”
“Probably not as serious as that. Conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. The unwritten rule is that the more you help us, the lesser the charge will be... But I think you’re right, you won’t enter a school again.”
“Just put these exercise books back on my shelves. I doubt I’ll be marking the third-years’ homework tonight. I mean, if you’ll let me?”
King nodded. “And it’s ‘yes’ to your other request. You know where P Division Police Station is? Bottom of Sauchiehall Street? Be there by seven P.M. Otherwise we’ll be obliged to arrest you in front of your wife and neighbours.”
“I’ll be there.”
Hank’s Tale
by Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Although Dorothy Salisbury Davis is the creator o£ series detective Juke Hayes, a New York City amateur sleuth, she has mainly produced, in her fifty-year career as a crime writer, nonseries hooks that have less to do with detection than with the understanding of character. Ms. Davis is a grandmaster of the MWA, and as this new story shows, she can write as convincingly of rural life as she does, in the Hayes hooks, of New York City.
It was a grey raw day when we buried Billy Baldwin. The wind turned the women around on the church steps, tugged at their skirts, and tossed their hair. The Reverend Barnes, who’d begun to show his years, didn’t seem sure of who he was talking about or when he’d died, and he was usually at his best at funerals, knowing everybody in Webbtown. But he hadn’t been called to the Baldwin house till Billy was cold and some time dead. Of a heart attack, according to the coroner, who had a Doctor of Medicine degree, which I guess entitles you to work on dead people if that’s your preference. He’d come from Ragapoo City, the county seat, routed out of his bed at four in the morning. Even at that he’d got there ahead of Reverend Barnes.
But everything got worked out by the time of the funeral. The sheriff examined Billy’s trap at Lookout Point, where he always stopped on his way home from work to pick up whatever small animal was waiting for him to put it out of its misery. There was a fair amount of trapping done in the Hills that time of year. Still is. Nancy Baldwin is famous up and down the valley for her hasen-pfeffer. Never had much stomach for it myself. The sheriff brought the trap down with him. Had to spring it and break the lock. Billy was working on it, it looked like, when he slipped and tumbled halfway down the hill. It was scrambling up again and getting himself home safe, the coroner reported, that brought on the heart attack. I sure thought about those words, home safe. Dead. I asked Prouty what he thought happened. Prouty’s the undertaker and my friend. It was in his cold room they did the autopsy. But Prouty didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, nobody in the whole town did, including me.
I did pay attention to who was at the funeral and who was not. Mostly women were there. They take to funerals better than men, certainly to this one they did. Mary Toomey was sitting next to Nancy in the front pew. Big Mary sat in the front pew of most things, especially since she’d been made president of Webbtown State Bank. First woman to hold the job. Nancy looked mighty frail and kind of scared. Every once in a while she’d let out a big, wet sob that started the little one in her arms wailing. Big Mary — we’d called her that since she was a bulging-out teenager — would clamp her hand on Nancy’s and you’d have thought it was a tourniquet, the way it stopped the tears for a while. If the baby didn’t let up, Mary took hold of her and gave her a shake that must’ve cured her of everything but breathing. I’d heard it was Mary who’d called Prouty from the Baldwin place. Said she’d been with Nancy when Billy died. I guess you could call that the truth if you wanted to, and I didn’t know of anyone who didn’t. Across the aisle, next to the plain coffin he’d steered into the church, was Prouty, as pale as any corpse he ever got ready for a last viewing. In the next pew back were the four pallbearers Mary Toomey recruited on Nancy’s behalf. I was one of them. During silent prayer I heard Mrs. Prouty clear her throat. Prouty gave a little flex to his shoulders when it happened so I assume it was Mrs. Prouty sending some kind of message he picked up. Alongside her was the pastor’s wife, Faith Barnes. She sat straight and solid as a farm silo. She’d always stood for what the pastor preached, even ecumenism when it came along. It was a word most of us found hard to say, but we swallowed it. Didn’t mean much except to Pastor, who tried to keep up with what was going on in the world. We’re a one-church town unless you count the itinerant alleluia-sayers who show up regular and get us hollering. I mention them now because one of them was going to show up before long, though we didn’t know it then.