The Unkindest Cut (12 page)

Ian was always willing to extend his hours of duty but he was just as flexible about other rules. He accepted a small Scotch. ‘You must be busy after skiving off for a fortnight or more,' he said to them both, ‘but we've struggled along without you. Now comes the time for catching up. Have you remembered any more facts, presences, descriptions, anything that might help us?'

‘Not a thing,' Jane said.

Roland grunted agreement but added the words of advice from their table companions on the cruise.

‘I had already gleaned those fragments of information elsewhere,' Ian said. ‘Have you thought of anything that somebody, Knifeman in particular, might have wanted to get from this house?'

‘Same answer,' Roland said.

‘Then I may as well start updating you. There was another attack while you were away disporting yourselves. That's why I didn't come down to see you at your surgery, Jane. We've been passing it off as an accident. We don't want the news to leak out for fear of copycat crime – which as far as we know we haven't got yet.'

Roland and Jane sat dumbly for a few seconds. Then Jane said, ‘Had this already happened when I spoke to you from the ship? And was anybody hurt?'

‘And if so, who?' Roland asked.

Ian sighed. ‘Yes, it had happened the previous day but I wasn't going to broadcast the story and I'll be grateful if you talk about it as little as possible. Do you know Minnie Pilrig?'

‘Plumpish lady?' Jane said. ‘Late middle age? Acts as stand-in shop assistant for several shopkeepers?'

Ian raised his eyebrows. Jane had erred on the charitable side. Minnie was elderly and had passed beyond plumpish to definitely fat, but no doubt Jane was doing as she would be done by. ‘That's the one,' he confirmed. ‘She was looking after my father-in-law's shop. The strict orders laid down by his partner, the money man, are that all cash bar the one-hundred-pound float goes into the night safe at the bank when closing up each evening. It was dusk and Knifeman was waiting on the doorstep when she stepped out to go across to the bank. She tried to hang on to the bag and got a cut face as a reward.'

‘That's a shame,' Jane said. ‘Such a cheery person, with a smile and a kind word for everybody.'

‘She's a chatterbox,' Ian said, frowning. Clearly the age-old dichotomy between the sexes was at work. ‘Anyway, she isn't dead yet, nor likely to be. She's in the cottage hospital here, rather sorry for herself and very vocal about what she'll get her nephew to do to Knifeman if they catch him.'

‘She'd better not hold her breath,' Jane said. ‘Her nephew delivers our milk and he jumps at shadows.'

‘Good!' Ian said. ‘We can do without a lot of vigilantes around here. The worry is that it seems our attacker is trying his – or her – hand at different methods of extracting money any way they can. A doorstep mugging – with violence this time – is a phase beyond what they've done so far, thank goodness, but it either shows the need for money is getting more acute, or they're getting a taste for it. Both reasons are worrying for us considering we have no ideas as to the identity yet. And Mrs Pilrig wasn't much help in that area. Her description of her attacker was beyond belief.'

‘Your father-in-law won't be pleased,' Roland said.

‘That he is not. Luckily there was only about three hundred in cash in the bag – sometimes it may be several times that – but his insurers are being sticky because he let Mrs Pilrig carry so much money without any protection. He wants me to speak to them for him because, after all, it is we police who discourage armed bodyguards. That's the gospel according to my revered father-in-law.'

‘And to think,' said Jane, ‘that I was on the point of asking him to guard me whenever I go to the night safe.'

‘But you're not a criminal,' Roland said. ‘Only the criminal is allowed to defend himself.'

Ian looked indignant but refused to rise to the bait. It was an old argument and Jane made little use of the night safe anyway.

Jane was uncertain whether, in not reporting her knowledge about dogfighting, she was committing a crime, so Roland's comment put an end to her part in the discussion.

‘How badly marked is Mrs Pilrig?' Roland asked. ‘Is her beauty spoiled for ever?'

Jane contented herself with a ‘Humpf!' but Ian said, ‘She'll have a scar, no doubt about it. She says that if she was a man she'd pass it off as a duelling scar.'

‘Is she getting visitors?' Roland asked.

‘One or two. Keith had arrived back from delivering a very expensive rifle just seconds after it happened and he lifted her into the shop and called the ambulance. The Square was empty at the time with everybody having their tea in front of the telly, so the drama passed unobserved. We've been calling it an accidental fall against a boot-scraper. We asked her to keep it that way and she's been having fun phoning her friends and relations and passing on the same tale, gradually elaborating the story until it's getting near the borderline of credibility. But we'll have to let the truth out soon so that people will know to be even more careful.' Ian made a face. ‘We just don't know what comes next. Does he take fright and stop or, now that he's drawn blood, will he get a taste for it and look for another victim? We can't guess. Psychologists employed by the police have gone beyond reality so often that nobody believes them any more.

‘Peeling away the exaggerations occasioned by a dramatic attack on an imaginative old lady, Mrs Pilrig gave us pretty much the same description as you did, Jane, and the Dodd boy. She gave us one extra piece of information, a rather uncertain piece. She thinks that she smelled aftershave on him, the commonest one around here. The chemist says it's the one that all the women give their menfolk at Christmas if they can't think of anything else, so it doesn't carry us much further forward except to suggest that Knifeman is probably male.'

‘That's not exactly conclusive,' Jane said. ‘When I get a spot – it doesn't happen often, thank God, just now and again – I give it a dab with Roland's aftershave. The alcohol in it seems to be the best there is for drying up a pimple.'

‘I'll pass that tip on to my nephew,' Ian said. ‘His life's being made miserable by teenage acne at the moment.'

‘Tell him that it only lasts about five years, ten at the most,' Roland said. ‘That should cheer him up.'

‘You're evil,' said his wife. ‘Evil.'

‘Does that bother you?'

‘Not a lot. Not when you're only evil with me.' Roland and Jane smirked at each other, being rather amused by the direction of the conversation. Ian, on the other hand, thought it was probably time to take his leave and departed Whinmount promptly.

T
he successor to the jeweller for whom the surgery had originally been built was now only a few doors further along the Square. Central to that window and outshining a display of cheap watches and chromium plated cutlery, for the previous few weeks a necklace of three strands of pearls had glowed discreetly on a base of black velvet sculpted after the manner of a female neck. It was rumoured that a certain lady, wife of a prominent politician and chatelaine of a castle tucked away in a glen many kilometres away from Newton Lauder, had sold this wedding present to the jeweller in order to raise funds to settle a gambling debt. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the rumour, the necklace had been written up in a glossy magazine so there could be no doubt about the genuineness of its components.

Jane would not have been lured from the path of virtue by any diamond on earth, a girl's best friend or not, but she admitted to herself that she did have a thing for pearls. Even the sale of the Raeburn painting would not have enabled the purchase of these perfectly matched and graded jewels, but she did yearn secretly for the lovely thing on the rare occasions when she dropped her takings into the night safe at the bank. This she might do on one evening a week when there was enough cash to merit the precaution. Jane never held a clinic on a Saturday, reserving it, along with occasional weekdays, as her day for making calls at farms, so on some Friday evenings she made that pilgrimage.

On a Friday ten days after her return from honeymoon, Jane walked past the jeweller's window, keeping her eyes stonily averted rather than pause where Knifeman might fancy a second attack on her. At the bank a certain dexterity amounting to sleight of hand was called for because it was her custom to carry a decoy package openly while the real cash was hidden in a less bulky but much more valuable envelope in her underwear. Fumbling inside her coat and the waistband of her skirt she retrieved it, posting it through the night safe slot and replacing it with the decoy package.

On the return trip, walking carefully for fear of displacing the thick envelope, she felt free to pause for a lustful glance in the jeweller's window; and she was immediately uneasy. Black clouds, which had seemed to be a feature of that so-called summer, had covered the sky; dusk seemed to have arrived hours early but it was too soon for street lights and the jeweller's shop was generally the brightest thing in the Square. The necklace had vanished from the window.

Jane had met the jeweller, Mr Golspie – a shrewd old man with a beaming smile and several gold teeth – on the doorstep of the bank only the previous day and he had said that he planned to send the necklace to a jewellery fair in London in a month's time. Until then, it would continue to be a draw for customers who called to admire but often lingered to purchase something closer to their means.

So perhaps he had changed his mind in sudden fear of a robbery. Or perhaps the robbery had happened. She tried the shop door but the night latch was locked. Mr Golspie's habit when closing for the night was to turn down the shop's lights to the minimum required to intrigue potential customers and to expose any burglar to public view; and this was the routine when he left early. Of recent years he had taken to heading for his home whenever Helen Maple, his occasional assistant, was available in good time from her other and very varied commitments, but the same rule applied. Tonight the lights were at full strength although there was nobody to be seen behind the sparkling counter or at the little desk where watch batteries were changed.

Jane had her mobile phone in her pocket. She keyed for emergency services, was connected to the police station only a few hundred yards away and reported that something seemed to be wrong at the jeweller's shop. Back at her surgery, she got rid of her dummy package in a drawer, collected the knife that she used for opening envelopes and returned to Mr Golspie's shop.

There she waited and waited. The police, it seemed, did not attach much weight to her unease. The recessed doorway gave her some shelter from a cold breeze. After twenty minutes she took out her phone again and called Ian's office number. The DI knew Jane's character well and understood that she was not given to false alarms. Within three or four minutes she saw his sturdy form approaching.

‘Tell me what's wrong,' he said.

Jane explained. ‘What's more,' she added, ‘you can see that only the Yale-type night latch is locked. The proper lock, mortise I think it's called, hasn't been turned. Mr Golspie is never so careless and nor is Helen Maple. I think we should go in.' Ian nodded and began to feel in his pocket. Jane produced her letter knife. ‘This should do it,' she said.

Ian took the knife from her and with little difficulty slipped back the cylinder night latch. The door opened. There was no bell – the shop was a single room so no bell was necessary. A muffled sound fetched them both forward to look behind the counter. Helen Maple was lying there, hidden from the street. Jane's heart was in her mouth but after a single second it was clear that she was not seriously hurt. There were traces of blood from several small stab wounds, little more than scratches, to her face and neck, but she was mainly incapacitated by what appeared to be a common clothes line. Her wrists and ankles were tied and linked together. A yellow duster was folded, slipped between her teeth and tied there with several turns of the same clothes line, pulled tight.

Jane stooped. She was about to begin the process of untying Helen but Ian stopped her. ‘The knots can sometimes tell an expert a lot,' he said. Jane twitched the other's skirt down. It seemed to be the least that she could do. Ian produced his miniature camera from his pocket and took two or three shots. Then, with his own penknife, he cut the rope and removed the gag. He went to work on the other ropes.

Helen's first reaction on being freed was of furious anger. She sat up, rubbing her wrists where the skin was marked, and uttered several epithets which were evidently about her assailant. ‘He didn't care if I was left there all night,' she said. ‘And Mr Golspie opens late on a Saturday morning.'

Ian and Jane helped her up and into the customers' chair. ‘Tell me what happened,' Ian said.

Helen was bent forward to rub her ankles. Her voice seemed to be choked off by the cramped position. ‘The shops were shutting,' she said at last. ‘I was just going to close up. The Square was deserted. Then this man came in. He had a black hood on. And a knife. He made me lie down on the floor and when I was too slow for him he jabbed me with the knife. Och, look at the state of me. There's blood on the blouse my mam gave me for my birthday. She'll be fizzing.' There were tears on Helen's face but whether these were for her blouse or arose out of sheer aggravation Jane could only guess.

A uniformed constable arrived in the doorway. It was his bad luck that he was sent to respond to Jane's phone call and so drew down on himself the full wrath of a detective inspector who was on the lookout for someone to bite. Ian's expressions of contempt for the belated response were still at an early stage when Jane slipped out and collected some sticking plasters and lint from her surgery. Ian was still in good voice when she returned so she set about cleaning and patching Helen's small wounds.