Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

Fifth Time Dead by John Paxton Sheriff

They brought the sheriff and the procurator-fiscal over from mainland Scotland for the Serious Accident Enquiry, but it was midwinter and blowing a gale and they stumbled over the step into that hastily prepared room in Tobermory still looking green and shaken from the ferry trip. And that just about set the pattern. There were a lot of disgruntled faces, and I drew some black looks, but I’d heard enough gossip to know why. It was unnecessary, they argued; legal procedure should be adhered to, right enough, but it had been an accident, so what the hell.

So in that bare, cold room on the Isle of Mull, with its crude wooden benches and iron-legged tables, I listened with the sour taste of fury in my mouth as big, bearded Dougail Gaunt told them what they wanted to hear with soft words and a twisted tongue. And long, long before he’d finished I was outside, leaning into the wind as I stumped disgustedly towards my car through the salt spray whipping in from the harbor.

It was twenty miles of single-track, twisting coastal road to Craignure. In the deepening gloom of that winter evening I drove blind with rage, and poor, dead Jamie was with me all the way. Jamie, and the hypocrisy of Dougail Gaunt’s words.

He’d been on his way back to his motel, he’d told them, fighting the wheel of his old truck as it bucked and slewed in the wind swirling across that icy, pitted road. He must have nudged Jamie’s Land Rover as the lad tried to go past at Wilson’s Gap, he said, and his heavy brows lowered over black eyes narrowing at painful memories. Aye, he said, he’d have stopped, had he known. But in that shrieking, westerly gale he’d heard nothing...

I’d turned away then, gazing in mute fury towards the high white windows, because back there in the night Jamie had bitten through his lower lip in agony and, pinned beneath tom and twisted metal, had bled his life away into the purple heather of Glen More.

That last bit was mine, and true, and all the rest was lies. Jamie had died, whisky-swilling Doug Gaunt had killed him, and it had been no accident. But the verdict was there in all their faces, and I’d left before the end because I didn’t think I could listen to it without the anger spilling over.

I drove home like a madman, with a dead boy’s ghost at my shoulder and the echoes of a murderer’s voice all around. At Craignure I roared up the hill and onto the forecourt of the filling station and repair shop I owned, and I sat for a while, gripping the wheel to still the trembling. When I got out and limped towards the office, Frank was in the workshop doorway, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

“How’d it go?” he called.

“Accident,” I mumbled, the word lost in the wind. I went inside and slumped behind the desk, and in a surge of fury I swept vehicle parts, books and old invoices, and chewed pens to the floor and reached for the telephone.

She’d been with him three weeks. This was the first time I’d called her.

“He got off,” I said when she answered. Her voice was husky, her breath so close to my ear my skin tingled all the way down to my hip. “They called it an accident, so now he’s taken my girl and killed my brother and got away with it both times.”

There was a silence while she thought that over. Her heady perfume was there, in my nostrils, and I could picture her, blonde hair brushing the shoulders of the flame housecoat I’d given her, hip thrusting and a half smile on her full lips as she closed her eyes and waited for him to come through the door.

“I’m glad for him, Will, and sorry for you, truly I am. But word got around, there were rumors you and Jamie were about to do something because of me, and if you put Jamie up to some trickery on that wicked night...”

“If we were going to put the fear of God into Dougail, that’s one thing; knocking the lad clear off the side of a mountain is something else again,” I gritted, almost choking with fury and grief. “He must have seen him, it had to be deliberate, coldblooded...”

“It was an accident,” she cut in, and for a moment there was nothing but the whisper of her breathing. “You know that truck, Will. It’s like riding inside a tin can full of rocks, and on a dark night with that wing mirror flopping around...”

“Then get it fixed,” I said stupidly.

“Coming from you, Will McGair, that’s priceless, you pushing grease into the truck and fixing all the broken bits on Fridays when he’s playing cards. The mirror’s your concern, not his.”

I sat gripping the phone and watching my knuckles whiten, because cards had been the beginning and before he’d taken my girl he’d taken my money. Yet as I listened to the breathless way she used words, and remembered the whiteness of her body in the warm darkness, I knew I had to have her.

“When are you coming back to me, Chrissie?”

“Give me one good reason, Will, I’ll come running.”

“I’m reason enough,” I said hoarsely. “You can’t be enjoying life at that fleabitten motel he runs. And besides,” I added desperately, “what good is a man who’s drunk most of the week and a hungover wreck the rest?”

She chuckled, a wicked gurgle that made my throat ache. “Look around you, Will. What’s so cosy about a poky room over a filthy garage? Doug Gaunt’s got an acre and a half down here at Pennyghael, and this time of the year, guests all gone, there’s a different bedroom for every night of the week. And he’s all man, Will, so if you want me, come and get me...”

I cut her off, putting the phone down with a gentle click to avoid smashing it in my rage.

Because that last, vicious taunt was a cruel reference to the twisted left leg I drag around, a legacy of one afternoon’s lobstering when frantic haste to haul in the pots had seen me caught astride the gunwale of the crazily rocking boat and dragged bloodily across the jagged rocks. Dougail Gaunt’s pots, I remembered. We’d been hauling them up, Jamie and I, because in his habitual alcoholic haze Gaunt had dropped them into deep water and they’d drifted across ours, tangling lines and dragging buoys — but all I’d got for my pains had been half a dozen of his derelict pots, three months in hospital, and a leg so shortened it needed a wooden block to depress the clutch pedal of a truck and could do precious little else.

My money, my girl, a crippled leg, and now a dead brother.

Were those four strikes reason enough for cold, calculated murder?

Outside again in the darkness I stood for a moment, shivering. The drone of an approaching car swelled above the moaning wind. Headlights flashed back from the workshop windows, blinding me so that in my grief and anger for a moment I was disoriented, not knowing from which direction it was coming.

And in that instant, as the car went past, it all clicked, came neatly together; that loose wing mirror that needed fixing, the flash of reflected headlights, big Dougail Gaunt and his liking for cards and drink. I grinned bleakly, tossed the workshop keys to Frank, and, ignoring his direct gaze, thumped up the narrow wooden staircase to that cramped room Chrissie Stewart had once been happy to share.

But that was before Dougail Gaunt had set lecherous eyes on her and stayed half sober for the seven days it took him to lure her away with smooth talk and a fat wallet. I brooded over that, and a bottle of Glenfiddich, while overhead the loose asbestos sheet slapped in the wind and every corner of that mean room was dark and empty.

By the time I crawled into my lonely bed I knew how I was going to kill him. I had it all worked out.

Next day was raw, the wind moaning in from the snowcapped peaks of Ben Nevis far away to the northeast. Roads everywhere were treacherous, and over on the Fionnphort road as it snaked down towards Pennyghael, the wind funnelling through the mountain passes of Glen More made safe driving ten percent skill and ninety percent luck. And that was for a sober man. For the man heading home with a dozen whiskies under his belt and his mind on the hot blonde keeping his supper warm, the skill went out the window and landed smack in the lap of the gods. It was midwinter, dark by four thirty. And if certain factors beyond the poor sucker’s control presented him with a situation that was utterly without precedent, his reactions were likely to be too slow altogether, or fast enough, but wrong. Either way, he was dead.

And this was Friday.

The old truck came clattering past as I was dipping the underground fuel tanks, backfiring as it lurched on down the hill into Craignure. Right then, knowing what I was about to do, the tenseness set in. I’d caught a glimpse of Chrissie’s blonde head on the passenger side. She’d spend the morning shopping and gossiping in the village, then catch the Fionnphort bus back at lunchtime. Dougail would stay behind for his afternoon of poker and hard drinking. Before that, though, he’d rattle back up the hill and leave the truck with us the way he did every Friday. Frank would hose it down and pump grease into the nipples, and tack-weld any bits that happened to have worked loose during the week.

I put the long brass dipsticks back on their hooks and went into the office, feeling a tightness in my chest. Frank was warming his hands over the paraffin heater. The coffee cups were steaming on the desk.

He was short and chunky, iron grey hair over a craggy face. He dragged a pipe out of the top pocket of his dirty overalls and cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Over it?”

I grunted, jotting the petrol readings in the book. When I slammed the drawer and reached for the coffee, he had his pipe going, and the air in the office was as thick as Highland mist.

I eased a haunch onto a corner of the desk.

“Doug Gaunt’ll be in around ten,” I said, fiddling with the spoon. “There’s a couple of things I want done on his truck.”

“You want done, or he wants done?” He was puffing thoughtfully when I looked up, his eyes searching my face. “And Doug Gaunt comes in every Friday and he always gets here at ten, so what’s new?”

“Frank...”

“Okay, Will, I’ll hacksaw through his steering tie-rod and disconnect a brake hose...”

“You’re talking nonsense, Frank.”

“Then what goes on?”

I rubbed my left leg and sipped the hot coffee. All I could think of was Dougail Gaunt, crouched in the cab of the truck with his black eyes on that wing mirror as Jamie roared up behind him with the heel of his hand setting the Land Rover’s air-horns wailing. I saw the fiendish glint in those eyes, the calculated drift forcing the Land Rover’s wheels off the gravel shoulder. And I saw Jamie’s broken body as they winched the vehicle off his chest and stretched him out on the crisp, springy heather.

“I want you to give it the usual greasing,” I said tightly. “Then fix a mirror in the cab and weld the bracket on that wing mirror. This time Dougail Gaunt is going to see exactly what’s happening.”

“And what’s that, Will?”

He’s going to see two bright headlights, I thought grimly; and I tossed back the remains of the coffee, dropped the cup in the sink, and went to the door.

“That’s all,” I said gruffly.

But I kept my face turned away because Frank was all right and I hated to deceive him.

After that the day dragged. I wandered about the workshop, picking things up and putting them down and generally mooning around. All the time, one half of my mind was shearing away from the terrible thing I’d worked myself up to do, trying to wriggle out of it. The other half kept throwing up Jamie’s dead, twisted body and boosting up the hate.

And somehow I kept an eye on Frank, making sure he did the things I’d told him to do. I wasn’t too concerned about the welding on the wing mirror because that was just a blind. But when he started on it, I had to be there.

The lunchtime Fionnphort bus gave a toot as it labored up the hill. When I straightened from the tube I was vulcanizing I caught only the steamed up rear windows and dirty number plate, so I missed Chrissie and that blackened my mood.

About four the darkening skies cleared and the temperature really plummeted. I heated more coffee, and went into the workshop where Frank was just about finishing Gaunt’s truck.

It was an old Ford fifteen-hundredweight flattop, and he’d bolted a brand new mirror in the cab and was about to weld the bracket holding the wing mirror. I took the oxyacetylene torch from him and watched him wander away for his coffee, and once I was sure he’d gone, I set to and finished the job.

That was the easy bit. The next move was dangerous. Listening uneasily for his returning footsteps, I shut down the oxygen and opened the acetylene valve until the flickering torch flame turned smoky yellow. Black smuts drifted as I played that flame over the wing mirror. I watched the bright, reflective surface disappear beneath a film of greasy soot.

I cut the flame, turned the gas off at the bottles, and hung the torch on the hook. Then I poked around in the cluttered cab of the truck and found Gaunt’s old leather holdall, lifted that out, and dropped it on the floor well back by the side of the bench.

Frank strolled in and handed me my almost cold coffee and I steered him away from Gaunt’s truck because I didn’t want him inspecting that mirror. We chatted for a while, and then it was just a matter of waiting.

About six I saw Gaunt weaving his way up the hill, hunched up inside a parka, hands deep in his pockets. My heart began to thump. I’d backed his truck out by that time. Frank was tinkering with the Lister diesel from the lobster boat. I watched Gaunt puffing up the hill, his breath white in the still air. From the shadows outside the office I kept one eye on him and one on Frank. The timing had to be just right. If Frank found the holdall before Gaunt pulled off the forecourt, the whole plot crumbled.

Gaunt crossed the pool of light spilling from the workshop, reached the truck, wrenched the door open, and heaved his bulk inside. I heard him muttering as he fumbled in his pockets for the keys, then a low chuckle as he saw them dangling in the ignition.

I glanced over towards the workshop. Frank was still bent over the diesel. Casually, I began to wander across that way as the truck’s starter whirred and the engine coughed to life. I went into the workshop, grabbed the bass broom, and made a few half-hearted passes across the floor. Then something about the sound of that truck jerked my head around. Headlights swept across skeletal trees as Gaunt pulled out onto the road and turned, not left, but right towards Craignure.

He wasn’t heading home. He was going back to the village.

“Jesus!”

A spanner clanged on the stone floor as Frank stood up.

“Trouble?”

Shaking, I squinted at the palm of my hand, feigning a splinter. Frank stared across, frowning, then went outside, wiping his hands. I chewed my lip and clung to the broom, thinking about the new inside mirror and the outside one I’d doctored. If he was drunk enough, he wouldn’t notice either in the dark, and if he did it wouldn’t matter; outside my own devious mind, those two things added up to precisely nothing.

But he’d still be alive.

Frank came back in, his face wooden.

“He’s coming back again. He forgot his bottle, that’s all.” His bright blue eyes were puzzled. “Happy?”

I grunted as if I couldn’t care less. My legs were suddenly weak. As the Ford roared back up the hill, drew level, then rattled past, I dropped the broom with a clatter and reached down by the bench.

“Hey!” I held up the holdall, frowning across at Frank. “Did you take this out of the Ford?”

I ran awkwardly to the door, peering after the departing truck. Frank, back at the Lister, glanced up and grunted. “Forget it. Let him wait. He’ll pick it up next week.”

I winked broadly. “Better still, I’ll take it.” And as he shrugged and turned away, I knew he’d remember the lunchtime bus with its steamed up windows and guess I was using this as an excuse to see Chrissie. I limped outside and threw the holdall into the breakdown truck and climbed in after it.

The engine caught the first time, and I slammed it into gear and pulled round in a tight turn onto the road and hammered after the Ford.

The night sky was intensely black, the road strangely luminous. Deliberately, I left all lights off. I leaned forward, scrubbing condensation from the windscreen with my sleeve, watching the Ford’s headlights dancing across the heather amid the red glow as Gaunt braked for the bends. The gap closed rapidly. I throttled back and tucked in some fifty yards behind.

Suddenly I was calm, and in no hurry. I’d picked my spot last night with the Glenfiddich warm in my belly and cold hatred in my heart.

The road ran through Lochdonhead, brushed the eastern end of Loch Spelve, and began the long climb into the mountains. As it snaked down again through Glen More there was a section where it dropped steeply, and at the bottom of that stretch the camber was all wrong. Maybe it had been okay when they built the road, I don’t know, but with the surface sloping fiercely away to the right, drivers had to negotiate a tight left-hand turn leading into a steep, narrow climb.

It was a single lane road, with no room for vehicles to pass.

On the outside of the bend, and on the wrong side of that adverse camber, the ground fell away for about two hundred yards, a lumpy, boulder-strewn slope of heather and coarse grass that finished up in a dense clump of pines.

Dougail Gaunt knew that road. Drunk or sober, he had a built-in automatic pilot that could handle high winds and driving rain or nights when the temperature was through the floor and the Ford was taking most bends in a wicked, sideways slide. But even the best automatic pilot can blow a fuse. At the bottom of the dip I was going to hit Doug Gaunt with a shock situation. He’d have no time to think, and no room for error.

Ahead of me, the Ford began the long climb. The roar of the breakdown truck drowned all other sounds. I hung on, fifty yards back, seeing Gaunt’s hunched silhouette in the reflected glare from his headlights. He would hear nothing over the roar of his own engine. I was confident that with my own lights off there was no chance of his seeing me. If he was looking at all, it would be at that familiar outside mirror. He’d be wasting his time.

And then we were over the hump and dropping down and as the breakdown truck yawed on a patch of ice I saw, ahead of Gaunt, the road swinging left and up. Far down to the right the pines were dark against the glitter of water.

I closed up, one hand on the wheel, one fumbling for the dashboard switches. There was a sudden flash of blue flame from Gaunt’s exhaust, indicating a backfire, and I knew he’d dropped down a gear. As the bend approached I caught myself watching his taillights. I held my breath. Don’t slow too much, don’t brake, don’t...

Now!

I flicked the switch.

Headlights blazed.

Ahead, the whole scene was suddenly bathed in light; the sloping moorland, the tall pines, the Ford heeled over on the tight bend, the unmistakable figure crouched over the wheel.

And then, suddenly, I was screaming — “No! oh, Christ, no!” — and I scrambled for the switches, desperately trying to cut the lights. My flailing hand hit the right one, and they went out. I heard the Ford’s tires bite, saw the flash of brake lights, the sickening slide as the brakes locked. On that icy road with its wicked, wrong-way camber there was no second chance. The truck went spinning backwards over the right hand verge, headlights sweeping across my own wildly staring eyes.

And as I braked, fiercely, not caring, I saw those headlights swing almost lazily across the night sky. The Ford rolled once, slowly, bounced high. It landed on its wheels and careened down the slope, plowing into the pines with a distant tinkle of glass and the crackle of splintering timber.

Silence.

I sat, gripping the wheel, staring numbly into the blackness.

It had worked perfectly. Yet I felt physically sick, because I couldn’t blot out what I had seen before I slapped the switches the second time, finally extinguishing those deadly lights. And I knew I had to do something. Down there in the stillness, a life could be seeping away into the soft pine needles.

So I pulled the hand brake on and climbed out of the truck and the cold hit me and I shivered, tightening up, and for a moment my whole body locked and I couldn’t move at all. Then I unfastened the padlock and took a torch from the toolbox and slithered off the road and followed the scarred earth, down through the tussocks, across the grass towards the trees.

Streaks of white, splintered wood showed where the Ford had hit the smaller pines and gone through. I picked my way through broken, twisted branches to where the little truck had crumpled its front end against a monster tree trunk, reared high in the air, and dropped back, canted over to one side. There was the crackle of cooling metal. The air reeked of petrol.

I took a deep breath, and opened the door.

She flopped down like a rag doll and I held her dead weight with my shoulder. Her hair brushed my cheek as I stared across at the empty passenger seat. Glass was everywhere. The steering wheel was buckled and she’d gone into the windscreen and her blonde hair was dark and wet. I reached up and touched the soft white skin of her neck, but life had gone. Just once I pressed my face against her still-warm breast, eyes squeezed tight against the tears, breathing deeply of that oh so familiar perfume. Then I pushed her away, head lolling, and gently closed the door.

As soon as I hit the headlights, I knew Frank had been wrong. When Dougail Gaunt left the garage, he hadn’t gone back for his bottle, he’d gone to hand the Ford over to Chrissie. If I’d had a clear view into that lunchtime bus, I’d have realized that she wasn’t on it. He’d kept her with him, all day. Then, for some reason — cards, booze, another woman — he’d decided to stay the night in Craignure.

She was a good driver. I’d had no intimation that they’d changed places until, closing up on the Ford as it prepared to negotiate that treacherous bend, I’d flicked the lights on as planned. Instantly, I’d seen her blonde head bent over the wheel and screamed my horror and despair into the dark night.

When I finally hit those switches again, it was too late.

When the lights went on, Chrissie was suddenly blinded by the glare from two powerful headlights blazing into her face. Where from? There was no mirror in the cab, there never had been. And the instinctive glance at the wing mirror I’d doctored would have convinced her there was nothing coming up from behind. So the instant, unequivocal message from her brain was not that she was being blinded by two headlights seen through a newly-fitted mirror, but that a heavy vehicle was hurtling head on towards her down that narrow hill. Instinctively, her foot jabbed the brake, her hands and strong young wrists jerked the wheel hard over.

The ice and the camber had done the rest.

Just as I’d planned it for murderous Dougail Gaunt.

I took out a handkerchief and went over to the wing mirror. It was shattered, and I knew that somewhere down in those pine needles lay shards of carbon-covered glass. I flashed the torch a couple of times, but there was no reflection — how could there be? — and I kicked at the pine needles with my stiff left leg and then gave it up and started back up the hill.

I felt bleak, and I felt empty. And all the way up that hill from blonde, dead Chrissie, my leg ached and I thought ahead to Craignure, and the job that was still to be done.