Hamish Macbeth 19 (2003) - Death of a Village

by M C Beaton

  Hamish’s eyes took on that limpid look they always got when he was about to lie. “She said you were the finest gentleman she ever met.”

  He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. “Thanks, Hamish. I was very fond of her.”

  “I believe you were,” said Hamish quietly. “I’ll see you at the funeral.” He stood up. He turned in the doorway. “By the way, have you made the catering arrangements?”

  “What?” Mr. Jefferson gazed at Hamish uncomprehendingly through a haze of cigarette smoke.

  “The wake, man. They’ll all be round here after the funeral. Oh, never mind. I’ll see to it. Just get some whisky in from Patel’s and some sweet sherry for the ladies.”

  Hamish left and called on Mrs. Wellington, Angela Brodie, and the Currie sisters to beg help with the catering. He hit a stumbling block with the Currie sisters.

  “She was living in sin, living in sin,” said Jessie.

  “At her age? She was doing nothing of the kind. Only someone with a truly dirty mind could think that,” said Hamish. “If neither of you are prepared to help, I’d better be on my way to find some proper Christians.”

  “There’s no need to take on so,” said Nessie. “We’ll start baking.”

  It was a calm day of hazy sunshine when Mrs. Annie Docherty was laid to rest. The whole village was at the churchyard. Mr. Patel had closed his shop and the fishing boats bobbed lazily at anchor in the loch below the church. Hamish knew the funeral parlour would have done their best to rearrange Mrs. Docherty’s features into an appearance of calm. But as the coffin was lowered, he felt he could see that anguished, frightened face staring up at him through the coffin lid, and, while the others bent their heads in prayer, he stood there and vowed vengeance. He had been told to leave Stoyre alone. He had been told that enough money and manpower had been wasted on the place. The fact that the major might well have blown up his own home had soured Strathbane. But somehow Hamish would carry on the investigations on his own.

  After the service was over, they all walked to the church hall. Mrs. Wellington had phoned Mr. Jefferson the night before to say that the cottage would be too small to hold all the people. The wake started quietly as the trays with glasses of whisky circulated and people told stories about Mrs. Docherty and how she had come to the village some thirty years before. Then the minister made a little speech about what a grand lady she had been, and to Hamish’s horror, Mrs. Wellington began to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ while the pianist desperately tried to follow her tuneless voice. After that, the party became noisy, and to Mr. Jefferson’s amazement, the village band consisting of drums, fiddle, and accordion arrived and began to play.

  “How long will this go on for?” he asked Hamish.

  “All night. It used to go on for weeks.” He saw Jimmy Anderson walking in and went to join him. “Didn’t expect to see you.”

  “Just thought I’d pay my respects.”

  “You can smell free whisky miles off,” said Hamish cynically. “Get yourself a glass and let’s step outside.”

  When they were standing outside the church hall, Hamish said, “So Stoyre is finished?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “Jimmy, that old woman died of fright.”

  “I’m with you there. But they combed that coast all around and found nothing. Cost a lot of money and Daviot is still growling about what it cost to replace the wiring in that holiday cottage and to install new locks and a burglar alarm. As usual, it’s a matter of money.”

  “If I do find anything, it’ll be terrible trying to get them interested again.”

  “Do you really think something bad is going on there?”

  “Of course. And Major Jennings may be in financial difficulties but I’m willing to bet he didn’t blow that cottage up himself or get anyone to do it for him.”

  Jimmy finished his whisky. “If I hear anything, you’ll be the first to know. Best get back inside.”

  Hamish made his way to where Archie Maclean was helping himself to food from the buffet. “Did you find out anything from Harry Bain?” he asked.

  “Nothing about Stoyre,” said Archie. “But, och, he is one frightened wee mannie. He jumps at shadows. He believes in the fairies.”

  “What! Wee glittery folk wi’ wings?”

  “No, the other kind. Dark wee men.”

  “Does he now? I wish he would speak to me.”

  “Bad business about Mrs. Docherty. She was a grand old lady. Always good for a crack.”

  “You mean, she didnae pull her senile act on you?”

  “No, she liked me. Are you sure that Jefferson creature didnae bump her off? He gets everything she owned.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Oh, word gets around.”

  “No, he had nothing to do with it, and if you hear anyone say so, try to scotch that rumour. This has been hard enough on the man.”

  “Here’s your girlfriend,” said Archie.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” said Hamish crossly, and turned round expecting to see Elspeth. But it was Mary Bisset who stood looking up at him.

  “You never did take me for that dinner, Hamish,” she said. She was slightly drunk.

  “Your ma practically called me a dirty old man.”

  “Oh, that’s Ma for you. I never listen to her. You and me should get it together.”

  She was pressing her bosom against him. Her eyelashes, heavily coated with mascara, batted at him. He backed away. “Och, you are one bonnie lassie,” he said desperately, “but you shouldnae go on like that or my girlfriend’ll get mad.”

  Mary pouted. “I didnae know you had a girlfriend.”

  “Hamish!”

  “Elspeth,” said Hamish with relief. “I wondered where you’d got to? Feel like a breath o’ fresh air?” He took her arm.

  “I’ve just arrived…” she started to say, but he hustled her towards the door.

  “What’s this all about?” asked Elspeth when they were outside.

  “It’s about Mary Bisset. She was coming on to me and I was feart that any moment her mother would be after me with the rolling pin.”

  Elspeth laughed. “We’ll walk a bit until she cools down.”

  Hamish looked down at her. In the light shining from the windows of the church hall, he could see she was wearing a grey floaty sort of dress decorated with a few tiny sequins which glittered as she moved like stars behind a veil of cloud. Her hair was piled on top of her head. She was wearing high-heeled sandals. He began to feel uncomfortable and wished she were wearing some of her outrageous clothes along with her usual clumpy boots.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  He cursed her sixth sense. “I am not used to seeing you look so attractive,” he blurted out.

  “Well, that’s a backhanded compliment if ever there was one. When’s your day off?”

  “Saturday. Here, I don’t want to mislead you…”

  “Relax, copper. I wasn’t going to suggest a day of sin. What about a trip to Stoyre?”

  “Why? The case is closed.”

  She stopped and looked up at him. “You know and I know there’s something badly wrong there. We’ll take a picnic. We’ll put on our hiking boots and look along the coast ourselves.”

  “What can we find that a whole squad of detectives and policemen couldn’t?”

  “I’ve got those admiralty charts for a start.”

  “And?”

  “There’s so many inlets and bays, they can’t have covered them all. I also got ordnance survey maps. That track north of the village, if you follow it along to where the land rises and the cliffs begin and the track peters out, there are caves down there. Done any rock climbing?”

  “Some.”

  “I’ve done a lot. It might be worth going down the cliffs and having a look at one of these caves.”

  “You’ve got ropes and things?”

  “Yes. You’ll need proper climbing boots. We could have our picnic in Stoyre and then walk along. It
would be a bit much to carry the picnic stuff and the climbing equipment.”

  “All right,” said Hamish.

  “We’ll need to leave Lugs behind. He might try to go down the cliff after us.”

  “He’s a sensible dog,” said Hamish. “He’ll pine if I leave him behind.”

  “I could cope with another woman,” said Elspeth half to herself. “But a dog!”

  “What?”

  “I said, leave Lugs with Angela. He likes her and he can chase her cats all day long.”

  “Then we’ll do it. Best get back to the party.”

  They turned round and began to walk to the church hall. Mary Bisset was standing outside. Elspeth put an arm around Hamish’s waist and leant her head on the side of his arm. “Darling,” she said loudly, “no one can kiss quite like you.”

  Mary flounced back into the hall.

  “Now, that’s torn it,” complained Hamish. “It’ll be all over the village tomorrow.”

  Sometime during the wake, Hamish had switched over to drinking mineral water. He wished that Jimmy Anderson had done the same. The detective was sleeping it off in the one cell in the police station. The following morning, Hamish had tried to wake him, but Jimmy had only groaned, muttered it was his day off, and gone back to sleep.

  It was Jimmy who had done the damage, thought Hamish. He had got very drunk and had told the Currie sisters in confidence that Mrs. Docherty had died of fright. Nessie had told Mrs. Wellington, and Mrs. Wellington had repeated what Nessie had said in her loud, booming voice at one point when the hall was quiet. Hamish had tried to stop the gossip but to no avail. He could only be thankful that Mr. Jefferson had left to go to bed. He only hoped he wouldn’t hear about it from someone, for, if he did, Hamish was sure he would decide to go to Stoyre to investigate for himself.

  He left a note for Jimmy telling him to make himself some breakfast and then he set off on his rounds. Although he could have legitimately gone to Stoyre because the village was on his beat, he decided to leave the place alone until Saturday. He cruised down into the village of Drim and called on Jock, who ran the general store. “Everything quiet?” he asked.

  “Dead quiet. We arenae getting the tourists this year.”

  “And does that surprise you? The way you folk treat strangers is a disgrace.”

  “We aye like keeping ourselves to ourselves.”

  “Meaning you never try to be friendly to tourists and then you wonder why they don’t come back.”

  “There were some strange folk in a boat.”

  “Really? What kind of a boat?”

  “A big powerful cruiser. They came in for supplies. Foreigners they were.”

  Hamish took out his notebook. “Description?”

  “Och, I was never the one for noticing people. Foreigners all look the same to me.”

  Anyone else might have wondered whether the shopkeeper was being racist and was referring to Japanese or Chinese, but Hamish knew that Jock even considered the English to look all alike.

  “Try,” he said patiently.

  Jock turned round. “Ailsa!” he shouted.

  His wife came out from the back shop. “Those foreign men,” said Jock, “Macbeth here wants to know what they looked like.”

  “Oh, them. Two of them came in but there were others on the boat. One was tall with blond hair and a thin face and the other was small and dark. They spoke together in some foreign tongue.”

  “Did you get the name of the boat?”

  “I did.”

  “So what was it?”

  “Blessed if I can remember.”

  “Jock?”

  “Don’t ask me. I cannae remember yesterday.”

  Hamish sighed and closed his notebook. He knocked on doors around the village. The best bit of information he got was from an elderly lady who said she liked watching the birds on the loch through her binoculars. She said that she remembered it at the time as odd. There were boards over the side hiding the name, and when they had cruised off down the loch, there was something hanging over the back which obscured the name as well and it hadn’t been flying a flag. So how had Ailsa managed to see the name? He went back to the shop but this time Ailsa said that maybe she had just imagined seeing the name.

  I wonder if there’s a connection with Stoyre, thought Hamish. Maybe it’s drugs, after all.

  He drove off and called at various other villages, checking on old people, stopping here and there for a chat, and returned to the police station in early evening. Jimmy had gone, leaving his dirty breakfast plate and cup on the kitchen table. Lugs, who had accompanied Hamish, started rattling his food bowl noisily.

  Hamish cooked food for the dog and then fried a trout for himself. He had just finished eating when Lugs put a paw on his knee and looked accusingly up into his face.

  “What is it?” asked Hamish. “You’re not getting any more food.” He bent down to pat the dog’s head. Lugs jerked away. Hamish looked down at him, puzzled.

  The kitchen door opened and Elspeth called, “All right if I come in? I’ve got the maps and things.”

  Lugs gave a low growl and slumped off into a corner and lay down, turning his back on them.

  If that dog were human, I would swear he was jealous, thought Hamish, looking at his dog in amazement. And yet Lugs had not been jealous of Priscilla. Maybe because the beast knew there was no hope there, thought Hamish cynically. So why should he think there’s anything going on between me and Elspeth?

  “If you’ve finished brooding over your dog, Hamish,” said Elspeth sharply, “we could take a look at these maps.”

  “Oh, sure. Wait until I clear the table.” Hamish collected his dirty plate and cutlery and threw them in the sink. “Right, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Together they pored over the maps. “There are some caves below the cliffs,” said Hamish.

  “But the cliffs are steep there. Wouldn’t the land swell make it tricky for a boat to get in there?”

  “Maybe not at low tide.”

  “Still, it would be tricky. The weather’s been fairly calm this summer. Think what it would be like at the foot of these cliffs in the middle of a storm.”

  “We can have a look. I’ll go into Strathbane tomorrow and buy climbing boots.”

  Hamish felt quite sulky when they set out on Saturday in Elspeth’s sports car. The climbing boots had cost what he considered an evil lot of money. Hamish did not like what he considered unnecessary expense and he usually wore his police regulation boots even when he was out of uniform. And Lugs had had to be carried to Angela because he had dug his paws in and refused to move.

  But the day was fine with that bracing chill in the air that always heralded the arrival of the early Highland autumn. “Isn’t it a glorious day?” said Elspeth.

  “We’d better stop before we get to Stoyre and have our picnic. Don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

  Elspeth pulled off the road outside Stoyre and they spread the picnic out on the blazing heather on a hill which overlooked the village.

  “No wine?” said Elspeth.

  “No wine,” snapped Hamish. “We’ll need all our wits about us for the climb. God knows this is costing me enough.”

  “I could have brought the picnic,” said Elspeth. “I didn’t know your bank balance was so perilous that a few sandwiches and coffee would be considered such an expense.”

  “It’s not the food, lassie. It’s the boots.”

  Elspeth looked, puzzled, at Hamish’s large black regulation boots. “I thought you got those free along with your uniform.”

  “Not these! The climbing boots.”

  “Oh, I didn’t think. You can’t earn much as a copper. Couldn’t you have borrowed a pair?”

  “I tried. No luck.”

  “I tell you what: if we do find out anything big and I sell a story to the nationals, I’ll pay for the boots.”

  Hamish suddenly smiled at her. “I’m being churlish,” he said. “If we do find
anything, it’ll be worth every penny.”

  They ate in companionable silence. Then Hamish said, “It might be an idea to leave the car here and circumvent the village. If we go by way of the foothills round the back of the village, they might see us at a fair distance and just put us down as hikers.”

  “Okay,” said Elspeth, beginning to put plates and cups back into the basket. “Let’s set out and find out what’s in these caves.”

  They walked in a large circle until they came down to where the grassy track leading north out of the village petered out.

  On they went until they reached the top of the cliffs. They could hear the waves pounding below and the screech of sea birds, diving and wheeling over their heads. Hamish took out the maps and spread them on a flat rock, a remnant of the Ice Age which jutted out of the purple heather.

  “About a mile on,” he said at last, rolling up the maps. “We’ll start our descent there. It’s low tide and there should be a bit of a beach. No point in ending up with nothing but the sea below us.”

  They walked on in single file, Elspeth’s small sturdy figure leading the way. Her legs were strong and tanned and she carried her rucksack with ease. She was wearing shorts and a red-and-white-checked gingham shirt. At last Hamish called a halt. “I think this is the spot.”

  Charlie Jefferson was walking along the waterfront when he met Mrs. Wellington. “You look well,” said the minister’s wife. “The rest of the village seems to have one monumental hangover. I hope you are bearing up.”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” he said sadly. “At least it wasn’t murder.”

  A look crossed her face, and his eyes sharpened, “That’s odd,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I said at least it wasn’t murder, and you got a funny look on your face.”

  “No one likes the subject of murder,” said Mrs. Wellington, and she hurried off.

  He stood watching her. Then Angela came towards him with Lugs on a leash.

  “Where’s Hamish?” asked Mr. Jefferson.

  “He’s gone out for the day somewhere,” said Angela. “I’m looking after Lugs.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  “I don’t know,” said Angela, and Mr. Jefferson guessed she was lying. She said goodbye to him and walked on.