Hamish Macbeth 14 (1999) - Death of a Scriptwriter

by M C Beaton

  “Is there a car firm in Strathbane where you can rent a car, a place that would be open all night?”

  “In Strathbane? Man, everything closes down as tight as a drum at six o’clock in the evening.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Phone me later and I’ll let you know.”

  Hamish had to fret and wait until he had fed the tramp and given him a few pounds. Then he took a statement from him and told him there would be more food and money for him if he reported to the police station the following day.

  Then he set out for Cnothan.

  Sheila Burford’s mobile phone rang. The actors stopped acting, the camera stopped rolling and Harry Frame shouted, “I told everyone to switch their phones off.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sheila, taking the ringing mobile phone out of her bag. “I’m expecting an important call.”

  “You’re fired,” shouted Harry, but Sheila was already walking away, the phone to her ear.

  Fiona King, watching Sheila, saw the sudden look of radiant joy on the girl’s face as she tucked the phone back into her bag.

  Sheila hurried away from the filming and towards the manse.

  The minister answered the door and reluctantly let her in, damning her as another of those friends who had so altered his hitherto submissive wife’s personality for the worst.

  “What is it, Sheila?” asked Eileen, who was rolling pastry in the kitchen.

  The minister went into his study and slammed the door. “Come outside a moment,” whispered Sheila. “Great news.”

  Eileen went out to the garden with her.

  Sheila swung round to face her. “We’re a success! Scottish Television want us both in Glasgow as soon as possible. They’re buying your film!”

  “Oh, my,” said Eileen, dazed. “Do I have to tell Colin? He’ll start ranting and raging again. I thought I had something on him, I thought he was having an affair with a woman down in Inverness, but he says he was comforting a poor widow, and it’s all in my dirty mind, and he’s suddenly stopped going away on trips.”

  “Is he out today?”

  “Yes, he’s got to go to Lochdubh to see Mr. Wellington, the minister over there, about something.”

  “What time?”

  “About two o’clock.”

  “I’ve got to pack up, and so have you. I’ll call round for you. You can leave him a note.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Eileen. “I was going to leave him anyway.”

  Ailsa Kennedy came up the garden towards them. “Not a word,” hissed Sheila. “I don’t want anyone to know until the contract’s signed.”

  Sheila ran off. “What was all that about?” asked Ailsa.

  “Oh, nothing much,” said Eileen, feeling disloyal, but desperately improvising. “She just wanted to know if I would be in a crowd scene.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said Colin wouldn’t approve.”

  Ailsa snorted. “He can’t say anything about anything after the way he’s been going on.”

  “That’s just the trouble. He says nothing has been going on and I have no proof.”

  “That’s daft. Ignore him. Come and join us. We’re all on in a few moments.”

  “No…I’ll stay here.” Eileen held up her floury hands. “I’m baking.”

  “Your husband’s got you in a right state. I’ve a good mind to go in there and give him a piece of my mind, minister or no minister.”

  “I’ll see you later, Ailsa. I promise. I’ve got to get on.”

  Eileen served her husband lunch and then waited impatiently until at last he got in the car and drove off. She hurried to her bedroom—she and Colin had had separate bedrooms for some years now—and began to feverishly pack up her belongings.

  When she heard a car drive up, she nearly fainted with fright, but soon she heard Sheila’s voice calling her.

  She lugged two heavy suitcases down the stairs. The manse door had been open, and Sheila was standing in the hall.

  “I’d better leave a note for him,” said Eileen. She left the cases and went into Colin’s clinically neat study.

  She seized a piece of paper and wrote, “I’m fed up with you. I want a divorce. I’ve left you. Eileen.”

  Then she slammed the study door behind her and went out to where Sheila was loading her suitcases into the boot of the car.

  “Off we go,” said Sheila as the minister’s wife climbed in beside her. “Goodbye, Drim!”

  “Goodbye,” echoed Eileen with a happy smile. She thought briefly of her husband and then shrugged. She felt she had finally become unchained from a maniac.

  “I hate this place. God, how I hate this place,” muttered Hamish Macbeth as he started his investigations again in and around Cnothan.

  The standard and cold reply to his questions was, “We aye mind our own business around here, Macbeth”—from a village, reflected Hamish, as notorious as Salem during the witch-hunts for minding everyone else’s business but their own.

  By the time he stopped in at the Tudor Restaurant—fake beams, fake horse brasses, dried flowers, and what was a restaurant called Tudor doing in the Highlands?—he was feeling as sour as the residents. As the waitress slammed down a plate of ‘Henry the Eighth Chicken Salad—throw the bones over your shoulder to the dogs!’—in front of him, he had more or less decided to give the whole thing up.

  He ate his cold dry chicken flanked by limp lettuce and wished he were Henry VIII and could have whoever in the back prepared this muck put in the stocks. He finished his dreadful meal with a cup of coffee of a brand publicised by a well-known British transvestite, and the coffee was as much coffee as the publicist was a woman. He fished in his pocket for his wallet to pull out note, and as he did so a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. He picked it up. Priscilla Halburton-Smythe’s London number.

  He paid for his meal and went to the nearest phone box. The graffiti inside reflected the bitterness of the inhabitants.

  As he dialled Priscilla’s number, he saw that someone had scrawled across the board holding the phone instructions ‘She doesn’t love you. Go fuck yourself.’ Malice, thought Hamish, inserting a phone card and dialling the number, gives the graffiti writer a certain vicious insight into what might hurt most.

  He had become so used to rejection that day that he was almost amazed when Priscilla answered the phone after the first ring.

  After the preliminary pleasantries, Hamish explained why he was in Cnothan.

  “Doesn’t this woman have any friends?” asked Priscilla.

  “Not a one.”

  “Does she go to church?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then if she wanted to ask a favour like borrowing a car, she might go to the manse. Have you asked there?”

  “No, I didnae even think of it.”

  “You’re slipping,” said Priscilla cheerfully.

  “This damn place is enough to make anyone’s brain slip a few cogs. Are you coming up here soon?”

  “In about two weeks’ time.”

  Hamish said goodbye and rang off. Two weeks! She would be home again in only two weeks. He felt so excited that he had to calm down by forcibly reminding himself that he did not love her anymore.

  At the manse he was greeted by the minister’s wife, Mrs. Struthers. “What is it, Officer?” she demanded sharply. “I am busy.”

  He masked his irritation and said, “Did Miss Martyn-Broyd at any time ask you for the loan of a car?”

  “We don’t lend anyone our car,” she said sharply. “Our insurance doesn’t cover anyone else driving it.”

  He thanked her and touched his cap and was turning away when he swung back. “But did she ask you?”

  “Well, yes, and so late at night, too. I told her she could not have it.”

  “Did you suggest anyone who might lend her one?”

  “I said she could try old Mr. Ludlow.”

  “And where does Mr. Ludlow live?”
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  “He is not very well, and I would not like to think of him being troubled.”

  “I am a police officer, and you are obstructing me in my enquiries. Ludlow’s address, please!”

  “Mr. Ludlow to you, Officer. Oh, very well. He lives at Five, The Glebe, down at the loch.”

  Hamish walked down to where the grey waters of the loch lay sullen under a low grey sky. The great ugly dam soared above the loch. He stopped and stared at it, imagining it cracking, then bursting, then the deluge crashing through to drown the whole of Cnothan and everyone in it.

  He found Mr. Ludlow’s cottage. There was a garage next to the cottage.

  He knocked at the door and waited.

  There was a shuffling sound inside, like that of some hibernating animal turning in its sleep. The shuffling noises grew nearer, and the door was opened a crack and a rheumy eye stared at Hamish.

  “Mr Ludlow?”

  “I havenae done anything. Go away.”

  “Nobody said you had,” said Hamish patiently. “I just want a wee word with you.”

  The door opened wider. Mr. Ludlow was an old man on whose face a lifetime of bitterness and discontent was mapped out in the deep, dismal wrinkles on a face as grey as elephant’s skin.

  “Did you lend your car at any time to Patricia Martyn-Broyd?”

  There was a long silence. An omen of crows suddenly tumbled overhead, cawing and cackling, and then they were gone.

  “Aye, and if I did?”

  “May I see your car?”

  The old man grumbled out in a pair of battered carpet slippers. He led the way to the garage, took out a key and opened the padlock which secured the door. Inside was an old black Ford.

  “When did she ask you for a loan of it?”

  “It wass the night afore that tarty bit was murdered, her what bares her body. Miss Martyn-Broyd, I knew her from the church, she says her car had broken down. She had got me out o’ bed to answer the door. I didn’t want to let her have it.”

  “But she took out a handful of notes, so you let her have it,” guessed Hamish.

  “Aye, well, I’m a pensioner, and money’s tight.”

  “Chust about as tight as that hole in your arse that you talk through,” said Hamish.

  There was a stunned silence, neither of them able to believe what they had just heard.

  “What did you say?” demanded Mr. Ludlow at last.

  “I said, chust about as tight as that hole in the road over at Crask,” said Hamish, improvising wildly. “I’ll be on my way, Mr. Ludlow.”

  “I didnae do anything wrong?” he asked.

  “No, nothing,” said Hamish, and added maliciously, “provided your insurance covers another driver.”

  He had the satisfaction of seeing from the sudden fright in Mr. Ludlow’s eyes that it probably did not.

  As he walked back to his police Land Rover, he had a new respect for Sergeant MacGregor. If I lived here, thought Hamish, I would end up stark, staring mad.

  He opened the Land Rover door. Then he stopped, one foot raised, his mouth a little open. Those two threads of blue tweed he had found on the mountain, the day Jamie died. Could they have been from something Patricia had been wearing?

  He got in and drove to her cottage. She had been released from hospital but was obviously not home yet.

  He stared at the cottage in frustration. Then he felt in the guttering above the door where locals usually hid a door key, but there was nothing there. Perhaps Patricia had not even bothered to lock up. He tried the door handle, and to his relief the door opened.

  He went in and searched for the bedroom, finding it off the kitchen at the back.

  There was a wardrobe over on the far wall. He swung open the door. There were a few tailored suits and dresses and, on a shelf above, an assortment of hats.

  He slowly lifted out a blue tweed suit and laid it on the bed and began to go over it inch by inch. And then down at the hem of the skirt, he found where two threads had been tugged out.

  He sat down suddenly on the bed. He could hardly go back to Lochdubh and find these threads and present them as evidence, for he would be charged with suppressing evidence.

  He was sure now she had murdered both Jamie and Penelope.

  And then he heard cars driving up outside. He went to the window. In the first black official car was Patricia with Superintendent Peter Daviot; in the second were Lovelace, Mac-nab and Anderson.

  He went to the outside door and opened it. Peter Daviot was helping Patricia from the car. Lovelace and the two detectives had gathered around.

  “We must assure you again, Miss Martyn-Broyd, of our deepest apologies,” Mr. Daviot was saying, when Lovelace suddenly saw Hamish standing there.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted.

  They all turned to stare at him.

  “I think we had better all go inside,” said Hamish.

  “You’d better have a damned good reason to explain what you are doing in Miss Martyn-Broyd’s cottage,” said Lovelace.

  But Patricia, with an odd little smile on her face, had already walked forward. Hamish stood aside, and they all trooped into the parlour.

  Hamish was suddenly terrified. All Patricia had to do was deny his accusations. He had no real proof. She could admit to borrowing Ludlow’s car but say that she’d had to get away, that in her distress she had forgotten to explain she was not in her own car. But he had gone this far, so he had to take it to the end.

  “Perhaps if we all sit down,” said Hamish, “I’ll explain what I am doing here.”

  “Tea?” said Patricia, smiling all around.

  “Not now,” said Hamish. “I haff a story for you, Miss Martyn-Broyd, that is stranger than any fiction. Josh Gates did not kill Jamie Gallagher. You did. I think you waited until you saw them all leave. You had not thought of murder then. You noticed that Jamie had not come down. You were probably hidden somewhere beside the path. You went on up. You saw Jamie sitting there, and the impulse took you. You picked up a rock and brained him with it, and then just went away. You felt that the man who had sneered at your work, who had debased it, was finally dead and gone.

  “But then there was Penelope Gates. She, too, sneered at you and told you how you had been tricked. You had killed once, and you could kill again. Somehow you knew from the script that she would be up on the mountain. In your book The Case of the Rising Tides, the murderer borrows a car so that his own car will not be recognised, so you borrowed a black Ford from Mr. Ludlow in Cnothan, calling on him late at night and paying him a lot to lend you that car.

  “At around six in the morning on the day of the murder you were spotted by the tramp Scan Fitz, heading for Drim. I think you found by accident that other path up the mountain. You would want to avoid the main path, too many people coming and going.

  “Sound carries verra clearly up there. You heard the instruction to Penelope to stand on that outcrop of rock. You were hidden underneath. When you knew she was in position, you stood up and grasped her ankle and jerked her over your head, and she went flying down the mountain. You escaped in the thick mist, got in the car, drove around and finally went to the Sutherland Arms Hotel for lunch. Then you returned the car to Ludlow.”

  Lovelace opened his mouth to say something, but Daviot held up a warning finger. All looked at Patricia.

  “What a load of rubbish,” she fluted. “Yes, I did borrow a car, but I was so dazed and unhappy, I did not know what I was doing that day. Yes, I may have gone near Drim, but I did not go up on that mountain.” She spread her hands in an appealing gesture and looked at Lovelace. “Have I not endured enough?”

  She might get away with it, thought Hamish, and even if it cost him his job, she would not get away with it. He would need to confess about those two threads of cloth.

  He said instead, “You were seen going up the mountain on the day Jamie Gallagher was murdered. I chust found that out today. A crofter saw you and didn’t think anything of it at the time, think
ing you were part of the TV crew.”

  “You’re lying,” said Patricia flatly.

  Too right, thought Hamish dismally. But he looked straight at her and said evenly, “I am only glad you will not profit from your crimes because after you are charged with these murders, the sales of your books will be immense, and all over the world, too. You will be a truly famous writer, and that is a distinction you do not deserve.”

  Patricia stared at him.

  Lovelace stood up. “This is enough,” he said. “1 have heard about you, Macbeth, and your behaviour has been disgraceful. Breaking into this poor woman’s cottage—”

  “I did it,” said Patricia.

  Everyone froze except Hamish, who felt himself go almost limp with relief.

  She gave a shrug and said in an almost merry voice, “It was justice, don’t you see? They were killing Lady Harriet, so they both had to go. I do not regret it. You are right. I did not mean to kill that Gallagher man. But I did not lurk around waiting until they all had left. I was late. I thought they were all still up there and that perhaps I could get them to change their minds. But there was no one there. I wandered about. And then I saw Jamie, sitting on the edge of the heather in front of the scree. After that I do not know what happened until he was dead at my feet and I was standing with a bloody rock in my hand. I hurled it away as hard as I could. I do not regret it.

  “Penelope Gates was everything I hated, crude and vulgar and vicious. She had to go. I do not regret her death, either.”

  “But two murders!” exclaimed Daviot.

  “But they were guilty of infanticide,” said Patricia with a sort of dreadful patience. “They killed my child. They were killing Lady Harriet.”

  Lovelace charged her with the murders. She kept looking at Hamish. When Lovelace had finished, she said, “Hamish, will I be really famous?”

  “Yes,” he said sadly. “Very famous indeed.”

  “Then that’s all right,” she said briskly, getting to her feet. “Shall we go?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Hamish as she was being led out. “Patricia, why did you ask for my help to clear your name?”

  “Oh, I thought you were the only person I had to fear,” said Patricia with a little smile. “These other gentlemen are so stupid. It worked for a bit, didn’t it?”