Crackshot
A final group of men emerged from the bar of the cricket club pavilion in time to take their seats in the stand before the afternoon session began. Just after the second ball of the first over, the large, ginger-haired man in the middle of the second row bent forward to speak to the person in front. At the moment he did so, a rifle bullet, fired from amongst the gorse and hawthorn bushes that fringed the far side of the ground, went through the heart of the man seated directly behind the ginger-haired one. When the police arrived twelve minutes later, there was no sign of the shooter.
The dead man was Rodney Turnbull, a middle-aged local estate agent and stalwart of the cricket club. His wife, Miriam – only fifty years old, but diagnosed with early stage dementia – was too shocked by the news of his death, or too uncomprehending, for the police to talk to her that evening. When they returned the following morning, she had been joined by her daughter and her husband’s sister.
The Detective Inspector apologised for having, as a matter of ‘routine’, to ask the women if there was anyone who might have reason to have killed Rodney. Only the daughter spoke, to the effect that everybody had liked and admired her father. Rodney’s sister nodded her agreement, while Miriam remained staring at the coffee table in front of her. Anyway, the Inspector then said, the question was purely academic, since the police were sure that Mr Turnbull hadn’t been the intended victim. The real target had been the large man in front of him who had suddenly leant forward when the bullet was shot. Had he not done so, the bullet would have hit him between the eyes.
The man in question, the Inspector continued, was Charlie Stiles, someone well-known to the police – a man, in fact, who had done two lengthy spells in prison, once for GBH, the other time for smuggling drugs. He was still, the police were confident, active in a range of criminal activities – extortion, gambling, money laundering and even dog-fighting. Naturally, he was a man with many enemies happy to see him dead – friends of people he’d had killed, rival crime bosses, relatives of prisoners he’d shopped, and so on.
The police, the Inspector concluded, were working on the assumption that the killer was a professional hit-man, for he was certainly a crack shot. It would hard, of course, to track him down: probably he was already out of the country. Rodney’s daughter had the impression that the police would not make any undue effort to find him.
The funeral was well attended, for Rodney had many friends, work associates, and fellow members of the cricket club. An enormous wreath was sent by Charlie Stiles, with a note telling the family that, since Rodney ‘had taken a bullet for him’, he – Charlie – would do anything that he could for them. They had only to ask.
At the house afterwards, Miriam, her daughter and son, Rodney’s sister and brother, were joined by four of the family’s close neighbours. The conversation, as they sat around the coffee table, was muted and intermittent. It was Miriam who eventually stood up and said she would fetch some wine and nibbles from the kitchen.
When she was inside the kitchen, Miriam gave a little hop of delight. In a few weeks, she would inherit the house and Rodney’s sizeable portfolio of investments. And how could she not congratulate herself on acting skills that had persuaded people, doctors included, that she was suffering from dementia? It was a pleasure, too, to discover that she was, thirty years on, still the crack shot she’d been as a young and enthusiastic deer stalker.
