The Kill (19 page)

‘Yes, but that’s an illusion. We’ve no land. The previous owners had sold it off, bit by bit, to developers. There’s a housing estate that way,’ he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, ‘and a garden centre further down Tigg’s Lane. A big one, too. Then there’s a golf course on another few acres that used to belong to Callancote. Not that I mind. I can’t see ’em or hear ’em and I never saw myself as a gentleman farmer anyway. Not a gentleman, for starters.’ He twinkled at me and I found myself smiling at him.

Derwent’s next question put an end to the friendly demeanour. ‘So why the interest in guns?’

He shifted in his chair, at a loss. ‘I don’t know. Why is anyone interested in anything? It could have been football but I prefer to do things than sit and watch someone else do it. I was all right at it. I started off and I was no good but I got better. I worked hard at it. I got a buzz out of it.’

‘You like the guns, don’t you?’

‘As machines? Of course. The design that goes into them. The thought.’ He shook his head admiringly. ‘They’re effective and beautiful. What more could you want?’

‘They’re designed to kill,’ I said.

‘They’re designed to hit a target. What that target may be depends on the man shooting. People kill people, in lots of different ways. They just use guns to do it sometimes.’

‘And you don’t have a problem with that,’ I said.

‘I don’t approve of murder, miss. But I don’t make the mistake of blaming the instrument, any more than I’d blame the car manufacturers if my vehicle was hit by a drunk driver.’

‘Let’s talk about your involvement with the gun club,’ Derwent said. ‘You’re pretty hands-on, aren’t you?’

‘No. Not any more. Not in an official capacity.’

‘But you host a party for the members every year.’

‘Just a little get-together. The clubhouse isn’t what you’d call glamorous, and we have the space. There’s a drawing room on the other side of the hall that’s four times the size of the sitting room. We put a bar in the hall and give people a few canapés and mince pies. Simple, but it’s nice for the wives to get dressed up.’

‘The wives? Aren’t there any female members?’ I had to ask.

‘Oh, probably. I just assume they’re interested because their husbands or boyfriends shoot. Or because they want to meet men.’

Derwent’s expression was pure glee. He cleared his throat though, and I got the message:
play nice.

‘Maybe so,’ I said, through gritted teeth.

‘The party was supposed to be hosted by a different committee member each time, but I have this place and most people don’t have a home big enough to accommodate everyone who wants to come. It just became my responsibility after a while. Not that I minded. I love a party.’

‘And you love the gun club.’

‘Yes.’ He glared at me, daring me to find it strange. ‘I like the people. I like the guns. I like shooting and watching other people shoot.’

‘And you like to help the younger club members.’

‘When I can. Financially, you know.’

‘Do you ever invite them to the house?’

‘They’re invited to the party along with their parents. It wouldn’t be fair to exclude them. We make sure they don’t get any alcohol,’ he added quickly.

‘Don’t worry. We’re not going to nick you for facilitating underage drinking,’ Derwent drawled. ‘I’m more interested in knowing whether you ever spend any time with them alone.’

Gibney went bright red. ‘What are you implying?’

‘It’s just a question.’

‘No. Never. If they come here for any reason it’s in the company of their parents. I have little interest in getting to know them, you understand. I like to see the talented ones do well and I like them to tell me about the competitions they go to around the country and abroad. Sometimes I have them over for tea, if I’ve funded a trip. But there’s nothing strange about it and I resent the suggestion that I am trying to get access to them for a sinister purpose.’

Derwent smiled. ‘You know, I never said anything of the kind.’

‘I knew what you meant. Everyone has a filthy mind these days. Everyone expects the worst of people. Whatever happened to trust?’

‘It was abused and children suffered.’ Derwent’s voice was crisp. ‘Ever been in trouble with the police?’

‘No.’

‘Ever been run through the Criminal Records Bureau?’

‘No.’

‘Did you deliberately avoid being CRB checked?’

‘No, I did not.’ It was a shout, followed almost immediately by a gentle tap on the door. It opened a few inches and Gibney’s wife put her head into the room.

‘Is everything all right, dear?’

‘It’s fine. Go away, Evelyn.’

She shut the door again, softly, as if that would make up for having disturbed us. Gibney sat in his chair, his fingers digging into the arms, his chest rising and falling quickly. I hoped he wasn’t going to have a heart attack on us.

‘We have to ask these things, Mr Gibney,’ I said.

‘I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘I don’t know where this is going. Why are you attacking me?’ he asked Derwent, who shrugged.

‘Because there’s something strange about a grown man who likes playing with guns. I got talking to a few people at the club. Other members. People who said you had a stash of illegal weapons.’

People named Andrew Hardy, I thought, but I appreciated Derwent’s uncharacteristic subtlety.

‘That’s not true.’

‘A Dragunov and a Falcon, I heard.’

‘You are mistaken.’

‘Dangerous weapons, those.’

‘In the wrong hands,’ Gibney allowed.

‘Do you know what the minimum sentence is if you’re found to be in possession of a weapon such as either of those?’

Gibney went very still. Through stiff lips, he whispered, ‘No.’

‘Five years. That’s the minimum. Five years. Not in a country club kind of prison either. You’d be in with the scum. Cat A, Cat B. No one you’d want to know. Not the kind of people who have country houses, with or without land. Even in the suburbs.’ Derwent laughed, even though Gibney was a long way from amused.

‘I don’t see how this is relevant to me.’

‘It isn’t. Unless I get a search team in here and we take the place apart. Get some dogs in who can sniff out a gun a mile off. Check the attic. Under the bed. The garden shed.’

There was a flicker behind Gibney’s glasses at the mention of the garden. I saw it and Derwent saw it. His voice hardened.

‘You see, you’d hide them somewhere clever. I’m not underestimating you. You wouldn’t leave them lying around. But you’d want to look at them. You’d want to show them off to people who came to the house. Like-minded people, I mean. People who could be trusted not to talk.’ He leaned forward. ‘That’s the thing, though. People always talk in the end. It’s human nature. Like thinking the rules don’t apply to you just because you’re rich and irresponsible.’

‘I’m not irresponsible.’

‘You own illegal weapons. You’ve caused them to be brought into this country, from what I hear. You’re looking at a serious set of charges. Serious jail time. And you will be convicted, Rex. You needn’t think you can buy a good QC and get off. Juries hate millionaires and they hate guns. Judges hate them more. The sentences are mandatory and they are long and you will loathe every minute of being inside, if you make it to the end of your sentence, which I doubt. What are you, seventy? There’s not a lot of seventy-year-olds in jail. You don’t get the healthcare, you see. Basic stuff, yes, but not the kind of tests and medications you’d be used to.’

‘What do you want?’ Gibney ground out.

‘World peace and a cottage by the sea.’ Derwent sat back. ‘But I’ll settle for a trip to your gun stash.’

‘You must think I’m stupid, Inspector Derwent. If you saw that I had illegal guns you’d arrest me.’

‘Not if you told us someone had put them on your land unbeknownst to you. Not if I could recover them and hand them in to Surrey Police. Not if I got a personal, private assurance from you that you wouldn’t dream of buying anything similar again. Not if Scotland Yard got an anonymous tip-off about the person who acts as your dealer in the UK and the route they used to get the guns into the country. Shop them, give me the guns and save yourself a lot of trouble, Mr Gibney.’

He considered it for a full minute, his eyes locked on Derwent’s face. I knew he was weighing up the risks, looking for something else to offer us, trying to see his way to making a better deal. But there was no better deal on offer, as he obviously deduced.

‘I could promise you anything,’ he said at last. ‘Why would you believe me if I said I wouldn’t buy an illegal weapon in the future?’

‘Because once or twice a year the local coppers are going to call on you. They’re going to have a look around. And if they find so much as a bit of lead shot you shouldn’t own, you’re going to get done.’

Gibney nodded. ‘You’re a hard man, Inspector.’

‘Fair, Mr Gibney. I want the guns. I don’t care much about what happens to you. You’ve been stupid and self-indulgent and you’ve broken the law but I don’t believe you meant to do any harm with your weapons. You just thought the laws didn’t apply to you. Not my favourite attitude, but I’ll give you a chance to change it.’

Luck is a funny thing. We had been lucky in finding Rex Gibney, and Derwent had been lucky to break him so quickly. It was bad luck that the rain had settled down to a steady drizzle by the time Gibney took us out to the vegetable garden and pointed out a patch of ground near the marrows. It was worse luck that Gibney had buried the weapons there only a couple of months earlier, having decided their previous hiding place in a nice dry outbuilding was too risky. Even more unfortunate was that the weapons were buried deeper than Gibney had remembered, and that the soil was a particularly heavy, clinging clay that was a bugger to dig. Gibney had an umbrella but I didn’t, and I couldn’t exactly ask to borrow one. To give him his due, Derwent didn’t complain about the miserable conditions. He handed me his coat and jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves and dug until the spade hit something solid, by which time his hair was drenched and his shirt was so wet it was translucent. He worked around the package carefully, loosening the earth from the edges so he could lever it up. I helped him to pull it out of the soil and we laid it on the ground beside the hole. What he had uncovered was long and wrapped in plastic.

‘That’s the ZVI.’ Gibney pulled a penknife from his pocket and slit the plastic, revealing a hard plastic casing with the manufacturer’s name stencilled on it. He opened it briefly, shielding the case with his umbrella so the rain didn’t get on the parts of the gun as they nestled in the protective foam. ‘All there. The other one should be underneath it.’

Derwent peered into the hole. ‘Beside it?’

‘Underneath.’ Gibney sniffed. ‘I thought this was the first one in, actually, but it must have been second. Easy to get the two confused.’

Derwent had jumped down into the hole again and was poking around with the tip of the spade. ‘Nothing here, mate.’

‘There must be.’

‘No.’ He stuck the spade into the sides and bottom of the hole, pushing down with his foot to go as far as he could. ‘Nothing.’

‘That’s impossible.’

Derwent leaned on the spade. ‘Who knew the guns were here? Specifically in this place rather than the original hiding place?’

‘Four or five people,’ Gibney admitted. ‘But reliable people.’

‘Four or five people who might have told a couple of people each.’ I looked at Derwent. ‘It’s somewhere to start, though.’

‘Go back into the house and write a list,’ Derwent said to Gibney. ‘Names and addresses. I want to know who helped you put the weapons in the ground. I want to know who knew you owned them. I want to know the name of anyone who asked you about the weapons and their location, specifically. And I want to know how someone could have come and dug this gun up without you noticing.’

‘I can answer that one now,’ Gibney said. ‘We’ve just been away. A Scandinavian cruise. We were out of the house for three weeks.’

‘Who knew that?’

‘Everyone at the club, I should think.’

‘Was it a last-minute holiday?’

‘Booked since last April.’

‘And you talked about it.’

‘We were excited. I was looking forward to it.’

So there had been plenty of time for someone to plan to use one of Gibney’s weapons, if it was the gun that had killed Terence Hammond. And it needn’t have been someone at the club, I thought. It could have been someone in the criminal underworld. Someone who was looking for a weapon and fetched up with Gibney’s armourer. These guns weren’t common. No one had one lying around to sell. But if you wanted it badly enough, and quickly, there was always a way.
There’s this rich geezer out near Guildford has what you want, mate, but you’ll have to get past his security gates. Course I can ask him where he keeps them, casual-like. No problem.

As if he was reading my mind, Gibney said, ‘But you don’t know if this gun was used on your policeman.’

‘Not until we find it,’ I said.

‘What if you had bullets fired by that weapon? Could you compare them?’

‘Yes,’ Derwent said. ‘Obviously.’

‘Then you’ll need to go down to my range. Or send your ballistics man, anyway. I collect the casings in a plastic bin and the projectiles should be still embedded in the earth behind the targets. Easy enough to recover. I’ve only shot five or six weapons there so they’ll be able to work out which ones relate to the missing gun by a process of elimination. I’ll hand over all the guns, of course. I’m cooperating fully with you.’

Derwent was stuck on the first part. ‘You have your own range.’

‘It’s just a makeshift affair. It’s on the other side of the house, backing onto the garden centre. I only use it when the garden centre is closed,’ he said quickly, seeing our expressions. ‘But what’s the point in having guns if you can’t fire them now and then? And I couldn’t take them to the club, could I?’

‘Because they’re illegal,’ I said.

‘Exactly.’ Gibney looked at us from under the dripping brim of the umbrella, his expression a mixture of mischief and concern. I could see how Hardy could describe him as childish. This wasn’t the millionaire businessman and property owner. This was a small boy trying to explain away bad behaviour. ‘I’m not going to get in trouble for that too, am I? Because it’s lucky for you I’ve got my own range, in the circumstances. It should help you rule the Dragunov out.’