by M C Beaton
Priscilla sadly watched him go. It was all such a mess. Why hadn’t she waited for him at the police station? But she did not want to answer her own question, so she turned her mind to Hamish’s story.
She went through to the office and phoned Susan Daviot.
“Hamish is in trouble and all because of this fool Dolan,” said Priscilla.
Mrs. Daviot’s voice lacked its usual ingratiating warmth. “It seems to me, Priscilla, as if Hamish went over the top. Now Dolan’s sister is making trouble and threatening to talk to the newspapers before the inquiry.”
“What’s her name?”
“Bridget Dolan.”
“And where does she live?”
“That’s clessified information.”
“Dear me, aren’t we being a trifle stupid, Susan?” Priscilla was at her haughtiest.
“But I cannot tell you secret information. Never mind. When are we meeting for a little chat?”
“I am going to be much too busy in the future, Susan.”
Susan Daviot saw her social ambitions biting the dust. “Come to think of it, I did hear that the Dolan woman was living at number forty, Winnie Mandela Court.”
“Thank you, Susan. I’ve just remembered, next Tuesday is a quiet day if you would care to come for tea.”
Mrs. Daviot sent up a heartfelt prayer of thanks to the god who looks after social climbers. “Thank you, Priscilla, dear.”
Priscilla grinned and put down the phone. She went out and drove off to Carrask and parked in front of the schoolteacher’s house and waited patiently while the afternoon wore on. At last she saw a figure who could only be the schoolteacher returning and climbed out of the car. “Miss Tabbet?”
Miss Tabbet swung round and looked favourably at the elegant creature in front of her. “What can I do for you, Miss…?”
“Miss Churchill. I represent the Daily Bugle.”
The smile faded on Miss Tabbet’s face. The Daily Bugle was one of Britain’s sleaziest tabloids.
“And what do you want with me?” asked Miss Tabbet.
“You made a report to Strathbane police which contained complaints against a certain police sergeant, Hamish Macbeth. In it, you said he had come into your bedroom.”
“Yes, but—”
“Good stuff, that,” said Priscilla cheerfully.
“Schoolmarm lures copper into her bedroom.”
“But he burst into my room when I was asleep.”
“‘The Sexy Copper’? Even better.”
“This is dreadful,” said Miss Tabbet. “I do not want my name in the papers. I have always been a respectable body. You ruin people. Look what you did to dear Prince Charles! I will have you stopped.”
“As long as you’ve made an official complaint. Come on. Let’s go indoors. My photographer will be along in a minute and I want to be ahead of the pack.”
“THE PACK!”
“Yes, they’ll all be along. Maybe you’d like to fix your hair and put on a shorter skirt.”
“I’m withdrawing any complaint,” screamed Miss Tabbet.
“But that means there’ll be no story!” cried Priscflla.
“That’s it men. I’m doing it now. Get out of my way.”
Priscilla watched with amusement as the terrified teacher scampered to a garage at the side of the bungalow. Moments later an old Rover was backed out, with Miss Tabbet crouched over the wheel. She turned and drove off down the road in the direction of Strathbane.
Waiting until she was out of sight, Priscilla followed along the Strathbane road at a leisurely speed.
When she arrived in Strathbane, she took out a folder of maps and selected a street map of Strathbane and located Winnie Mandela Court and drove there. It turned out to be one of those depressing Stalinist tower blocks boasting a broken urine-smelling elevator and acres of graffiti. Priscilla trudged up the stairs. A group of skinheads barred her way on the first landing. “I am from the Social Security Department,” said Priscilla frostily, “investigating dole claims.”
They shrank back and let her past. Priscilla reflected that if she had said she was a policewoman, they would probably have beaten her up.
Finally she reached number 40 along a rubbish-littered balcony which afforded a view of the grim harbour. The door was answered by a massive woman with dyed-blonde hair and a face so covered with broken veins that it looked like an ordnance-survey map. “What d’ye want?” she asked, the watery eyes of the habitual drinker raking Priscilla up and down.
“I am from the Daily Bugle,” said Priscilla. “We are interested in buying your brother’s story about police brutality.”
“Come in,” said Bridget eagerly. “I phoned youse lot up but you says you weren’t interested.”
“Some amateur took the call.” Priscilla was ushered into a living-room which was awful in its filth and dreariness. She sat down on a hard chair after looking suspiciously at the greasy stains on the upholstered ones.
“I’ll tell you all I know,” said Bridget.
“My newspaper is prepared to pay a large sum, but I need to see your brother in person. Do you by any chance have a visitor’s pass?”
Her eyes gleamed. “I have one for tomorrow morning—ten o’clock,”
Priscilla opened her handbag and took out her wallet. She extracted two twenties. “Just something on account.” Bridget snatched up the notes and tucked them down somewhere near her heavy bosom. She went over to a battered handbag on an equally battered sideboard and took put a pass. “How much will the Bugle pay?” she asked. “Thousands?”
“It’s up to the editor.”
Refusing all invitations of tea, stout, and gin, Priscilla took her leave. She-drove off and parked in the multi-storey in the centre and decided to call at the estate agent’s, Cummings and Bane, just to see if there were any more properties on the market. She would not nag Hamish into staying in Strathbane, but there might be something between Lochdubh and Strathbane.
The young man leaped up to greet her, as hopeful as ever. He produced folders of houses and Priscilla sat down and went through them. She came to Peter Hynd’s cottage and looked at it curiously. She tapped it with her fingernail. “I knew Mr. Hynd,” she said. “Any idea why he left?”
“Och, I don’t think I thought to ask,” said the young man. “You know how it is, the English come and go. Are you interested, Miss Halburton-Smythe?”
“Not in Drim, no. Exceptionally beautiful young man, Mr. Hynd.” Priscilla opened another folder.
“I couldn’t say,” said the estate agent.
Priscilla looked up quickly. “But you saw him!”
“Aye, but be had such a bad cold, poor man. His voice was rasping and he had a scarf up round his face. He said he was protecting us from his germs.”
“What colour of hair?”
“I can’t say as I can remember. Tracey, do you call to mind that young Mr. Hynd, the one with the property over in Drim?”
“The one with the cold?”
“Aye, him. What colour was his hair?”
“Fairish, I th.ink. Had one of those deerstalkers on, like Sherlock Holmes.”
Priscilla stored up this information to tell Hamish. She looked through some more folders but with the feeling that Hamish Macbeth would not like any of them. She thanked the young man and left. She was reluctant to return to Lochdubh. She decided to buy herself a tooth-brush, a change of clothes, and check into The Highlander, Strathbane’s main hotel, and stay the night. It would be pleasant to be in someone else’s hotel for a change.
§
Just before ten in the morning she joined the queue of depressed and depressing women waiting to get into the prison. Some of the women tried to engage her in conversation but she snubbed them, being tired of making up stories about herself and so, to a sort of Greek chorus of “Stuck-up bitch,” she finally-made her way into the prison.
Dolan appeared on the other side of the glass and stared at the vision that was Priscilla in amazement. “The
y said it was my sister,” he exclaimed.
“Listen very hard to me,” said Priscilla, leaning forward.
“I am Hamish Macbeth’s fiancée, and I am here to tell you that if you do not withdraw your complaint of police brutality, I will have a word with the sheriff, who is a personal friend, and make sure you are put away for a long stretch in Inverness prison, where Hamish has many friends among the warders. Not only that, I have many connections and I will hound you, both inside prison or out, even if it means sending one of the gamekeepers after you with a gun.”
“Wait till I tell the polis about you,” jeered Dolan. “More threats.”
“And who will they believe?” she mocked. “Me or you? Go ahead. I will prove you are a liar. I’m out for your blood, Dolan.”
Dolan looked at her beautiful and implacable face and cringed. He believed every word she said. Like quite a lot of criminals, he thought he was often in prison because society was unfair, because ‘They’ had had it in for him since the day of his birth, ‘They’ being the establishment.
He was sure this beautiful bitch would poison the sheriff’s mind.
“And if I withdraw the complaint, will ye have a word in my favour with the sheriff?” said Dolan.
“Of course.”
“Oh, well, I suppose,” he grumbled.
“Do it,” hissed Priscilla.
Later that day, a surprised Hamish Macbeth received a call from Jimmy Anderson to tell him that not only had Miss Tabbet withdrawn her complaint against him—not to mention her claim for a new frying-pan—but that Dolan had withdrawn his complaint as well.
“Thank heavens,” said Hamish. “I wonder what came over them.”
“Aye, it’s the grand day for you, Hamish, because when Dolan was pressed to say why he had made the complaint in the first place, he said Blair had talked him into it. So Blair’s on the carpet.”
Hamish decided to drive up to Tommel Castle and tell Priscilla about it and found her just arriving as he drove up.
After he had told her his news, he listened in amazement as she told him her part in it and then said in admiration, “Ye get more like me every day.”
“Yes, I’m turning out to be a good liar,” agreed Priscilla. “I’ll be poaching my father’s salmon next. But there’s something else.” She told him about the mysterious Peter Hynd who had appeared at the estate agent’s muffled up to the eyebrows.
His hazel eyes gleamed. “I’d better get down to Inverness and see those lawyers. What was the name again? Ah, Brand and MacDougal in Castle Wynd. I’ll drive down tomorrow.” They had walked into the hotel reception as they were speaking. “Would you care to come with me?”
“I’d love to, but there’s a new party of guests arriving tomorrow.”
“I’ll let you know how I get on. Free for dinner tonight?”
Her face took on a guarded look. “I’ve got to check the accounts with Mr. Johnston, but if I get through it quickly enough, I’ll drive down and see you.”
He masked his disappointment and irritation with an effort. She had done sterling work in getting him off the hook with those complaints, and he fought down a feeling that he would gladly have faced any inquiry board in return for a warmer and less efficient fiancée.
Sophy’s cheek swelled up alarmingly that day. By evening she was complaining loudly about the pain and Priscilla reluctantly agreed that Sophy should have the following day off to visit the dentist.
So a happy Sophy drove off in the direction of Inverness in the morning, only stopping to take the lump of candle wax out of her cheek and toss it into the heather.
SIX
He gave way to the queer, savage feeling that sometimes takes by the throat a husband twenty years’ married, when he sees, across the table, the same face of his wedded wife, and knows that, as he has sat facing it, so must he continue to sit until the day of its death or his I own.
—Rudyard Kipling
Hamish arrived in Inverness in a sour mood. Prisciila had failed to turn up the previous evening and he had been too proud to phone her. “A fine friend she is,” he muttered to himself, forgetting that friends are one thing and people with whom one is emotionally involved quite something else. He would simply have phoned a friend and said, “Where the hell are you?”
An autumn chill was making the smoky Inverness air feel raw. He parked at the station and walked round to the Castle Wynd. Inverness as usual was packed with shoppers. Britain might be lurching along the bottom of a deep recession, but there was little evidence of it in Inverness. Seagulls wheeled overhead as shoppers crammed the pavements. He found the lawyers’ brass plate and went up an old staircase of shallow stone stairs flanked by an iron-and-wood banister with brass spikes on the top, no doubt to stop happy clients from sliding down them. He went into the hush of a Victorian office. Gloomy light filtered through the grimy windows. A tired-looking girl sat at a large wooden desk doing something with her nails.
“Police,” said Hamish. “I want to see one of the lawyers.”
She rose and went to an oak door, rapped on it, and put her head around it. “Polis to see you, Mr. Brand.” There was a mumbled answer and she jerked her head at Hamish. “You’re to go in.”
Hamish reflected that it was the lawyers, not the police, who were getting younger these days. Mr. Brand was a slight young man with thick wavy hair and an ingenuous face. He was holding a collie pup on his lap when Hamish entered. He rose and put the dog in a basket in the corner of the room. “Great little fellow,” he said. “Very good for the battered wives. Puts them at ease. Now how can I help you, Sergeant?”
Hamish explained about Peter Hynd and asked if he had signed the papers. “Yes, a delightful man. I gather from the estate agents that they might have a buyer already. Odd, that, with castles and mansions going for a song these days, and then a run-down croft house with unfinished drains comes on the market and it’s snapped up.”
“What did he look like?” asked Hamish.
“Good-looking fellow. Fair. English. Upper class. Why all the questions?”
“I just wondered if it might have been someone impersonating him,” said Hamish, although, from the description he wondered who on earth it could be. Neither Jock Kennedy nor Harry Baxter, say, could have been labelled either fair, English, or upper class by any stretch of the imagination. “I shouldn’t think so. I mean, when the money comes through, it’s to be paid into his bank in London. The City and London Bank in New Bond Street. What makes you think someone might have been impersonating him?”
“He had caused a lot of ill feeling in the village of Prim and then he disappeared, and no one seems to have seen him go. He left a note with Jock Kennedy at the general store and he had been involved in a fight with Kennedy. The minister would have been a more believable choice. But if, as you say, he signed the papers…”
“Well, we can easily check that. I’ll fax his signature to his bank and ask for confirmation.”
Hamish, looking around the dusty, gloomy old-fashioned office, was amazed that it contained such a modern item as a fax machine, but Mr. Brand went to a file and brought out the papers. “There’s his signature…there and there. I’ll take this sheet and get Jenny out there to send it with a wee note. Care for a dram while we’re waiting? I’ve got to walk the dog.”
Jenny having been given her instructions, they went to a bar in the Castle Wynd and drank whisky and chatted amiably about various cases. “Drink up,” said Mr. Brand at last, “Should be a reply by now.”
They went back to the office, where the laconic Jenny produced a fax from the bank confirming the fact that the signature was genuine. Hamish felt he should have been pleased and relieved that Peter Hynd was obviously alive and kicking, but he felt strangely let down. He went back out into the street and stood irresolute.
“Hullo there!” He found Sophy Bisset smiling up at him.
“What brings you to Inverness?” asked Hamish.
“I had to go to the dentist. Had
the most awful toothache,” said Sophy. “What about you?”
Hamish remembered walking into the hotel reception with Priscilla and telling her where he was going while Sophy had leaned on the reception desk, listening to every word, but he said briefly be had been investigating something.
“I was thinking of making a day of it and having lunch and going to a movie,” said Sophy. “Care to join me?”
Hamish hesitated. He had not told Strathbane he was going to Inverness, but he was hardly ever called on the car radio and he had left the answering machine switched on at the police station.
He was suddenly weary of the awkward situation with Priscilla. “All right,” he said.
They had lunch in a self-service restaurant and then went round to the small cinema. The film, Blood and Lust, was violent and pornographic. There was nothing, reflected Hamish, like a really pornographic film for making a man feel that celibacy was a good idea. Who liked watching other people making love, apart from perverts? He voiced this thought aloud to Sophy, who burst out laughing and told him he belonged in the Dark Ages. But Hamish felt jaded and grimy. It transpired that Sophy had arrived by bus and train, so he politely offered her a lift home although he longed to be by himself.
As he drove out of Inverness, he switched on the police radio. The crackling voices reminded him of his professional status and he was aware that he should not have been carrying a passenger. Then he heard his own name. A peremptory voice told him to get over to Drim, where a death had been reported.
Cursing, he switched on the siren and headed for the Struie Pass and hurtled over the hairpin bends and down into Sutherland. At Bonar Bridge he saw the local bus, which would eventually call at Lochdubh, and skidded to a halt. “You’ll need to take the bus, Sophy,” he said. “I’m going to be in trouble as it is.”
Again she kissed him on the cheek and Hamish was aware of watching eyes from the bus as he recognized the startled faces of the Currie sisters.
He swung off on the road that would take him over the hills to Drim.
O Village of Death, was his nought as he drove down and saw the huddle of villagers by the black loch, the forensic men in their boiler suits, the flashing blue lights of the police cars.