Hamish Macbeth 17 (2001) - Death of a Dustman

by M C Beaton

  “Look here, Callum. You should ha’ told me this afore.”

  “I didn’t want to,” Callum mumbled. “It might look bad for me, me having had words with the man and then him getting murdered. That Fleming woman might have sacked me. Do you need to put in a report, Hamish?”

  Hamish buried his head in his hands. He had kept secrets from headquarters before, but never so many. He raised his head. “I’ll let you know, Callum. I’ll let you know.”

  §

  Hamish then drove to the Tommel Castle Hotel. Priscilla met him at the entrance. “He’s up in my apartment,” she said. “Follow me.”

  Priscilla had an apartment at the top of the hotel. The one concession to modernity the colonel would not make was installing a lift, and so they trudged up the stairs. “Has he said anything?” asked Hamish.

  Priscilla shook her blonde head. “Not to me. He’s waiting for you.”

  In her small sitting room, the colonel was waiting, tweedy and defiant. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” he growled. “I thought the man was poaching and gave him a bawling out.” But his eyes shifted away from Hamish’s face.

  Hamish took a gamble. “I have to hear it all from you in your own words. You were overheard.”

  The colonel turned red and stared at the floor.

  “So you’d better tell me,” said Hamish gently.

  The colonel raised his head and became all man-to-man bluff geniality. “You’re a friend of the family, Hamish. There’s no need for this to go any further.”

  “Tell me.”

  “That new hotel,” said the colonel. “Fergus told me he had proof that they were going to poison my river, take my staff, things like that.”

  “What proof?”

  “He said he had a fax from someone in London to Ionides.”

  “So why did you not come straight to me?”

  There was a silence. The colonel stared at his highly polished shoes.

  “Come on,” urged Hamish. “Out with it!”

  “He offered to sell me the fax. I told him to get lost. I told him he could rot in hell.”

  “But why didn’t you come to me with this? And if Fergus had such proof, why didn’t he demand money from Ionides to keep quiet?”

  “I’m coming to that,” said the colonel sulkily. “I went straight to see Ionides. Seems a charming chap. He said that Fergus had already been to see him. He said there was no such fax and that Fergus was a fantasist, his brain addled by the drink. He took me on a tour of the hotel and pointed out mine was more a country house place, and, besides, he didn’t have the fishing or shooting that I had. He said he was going in for tourists, conventions, coach parties, stuff like that. We got on very well. I mean, who was I going to believe? A reputable hotel owner or a drunken dustman?”

  Hamish stared at him, amazed. “But didn’t you think, when Fergus was murdered, that he might be onto something?”

  “But I couldn’t say anything then,” said the colonel. “The police would have wondered why I didn’t come forward. Also, I didn’t think for a minute it could be anything to do with Ionides. Men of his substance don’t need to go round bumping off people. I thought it was probably Fergus’s wife. Anyway, I decided to sit tight.”

  “By sitting tight,” said Hamish wrathfully, “you may have caused the death of Angus Ettrik.”

  “That’s a bit far-fetched.”

  Hamish clutched his head.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m going to have to put in a full report. I wanted a search warrant for Ionides’s office, and you have given me reason to get one.”

  “Couldn’t you keep it quiet?” pleaded the colonel. “You’ll make me look like an awful fool. I mean, do you think Fergus really had such a fax?”

  “Yes, I do, and I wonder what became of it. I’m sorry. I have a whole lot of stuff to tell headquarters in the morning, and a lot of people are going to get hurt.”

  The colonel got to his feet and marched to the door. “Your trouble, Hamish Macbeth,” he said, “is you have no loyalty.”

  When her father had gone out, slamming the door behind him, Priscilla sank down wearily into an armchair and groaned. “What a mess. Do you really have to report him, Hamish?”

  “There’s a lot more than your father I have to report, Priscilla.”

  “The thing is,” said Priscilla, “why did Fergus go to Father?”

  “That’s easy. He tries to blackmail Ionides and is told to get lost. Maybe he finds Ionides a bit frightening. So he tries to get money out of the colonel. He may have taken a copy of the fax. He may have thought he’d hit the jackpot and that he could get money out of both. The thing that worries me is that I’m pretty damn sure there’s not an incriminating piece of paper in that office of his. It’s no use getting Callum to search through all the hotel rubbish for papers. After Fergus’s approach, they probably learned to burn anything incriminating. Och, what a mess!”

  “Who else are you covering up for?”

  “Priscilla, I’m that hungry. I’ll tell you if you get me some food.”

  “Wait there.”

  Hamish lay back in the chair and closed his eyes. He was depressed and weary. I’m losing my touch, he thought. Dammit, I’m losing my brains. Where have I got for covering up for people? What if it isn’t Ionides? But it’s bound to be.

  He fell into a light sleep and jerked himself awake when Priscilla came in bearing a tray of sandwiches and a pot of coffee.

  “Your policeman is doing wonders in the kitchen. He’s a natural. He must be earning a bit as well. Three of the diners have sent him their compliments along with a tip. I’ve never known that to happen before.”

  She sat down and waited until Hamish had wolfed down all the sandwiches.

  “So what’s been going on?” she asked.

  Hamish began at the beginning, telling her all about the letters, all about the blackmail, about how the new schoolteacher had lied.

  Priscilla waited until he had finished. He had expected her to call him a fool, forgetting that his lingering resentment at Priscilla often put words into her mouth that she never used.

  Then she said calmly, “I don’t really see what else you could do.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “I mean, think about it, Hamish, you’ve always managed to succeed by using your intuition rather than your brain.”

  Hamish winced.

  “You know what I mean. You must have had a gut feeling that no one in this village would kill one of their own. I’m thinking of Angus. But I see your dilemma. You really can’t hold out any longer. But when you get permission for this police search, a whole team will come from Strathbane, and we can leak it to the press. A stink like that will hurt Ionides’s trade and might make any of the staff who’ve decided to leave us think again.”

  Hamish’s face brightened and then fell. “But I can’t help thinking of poor Mrs. McClellan and Mrs. Docherty, dragged off to Strathbane to be grilled by Blair.”

  “Someone told me he was ill.”

  “I’ll bet he’s back on duty and nastier than ever. That man’s got the most resilient kidneys and liver in the world. If he dies and there’s ever an autopsy and they take those organs out, they’ll be able to bounce them along the floor like rubber balls.”

  “We must try to think of something,” said Priscilla.

  Despite his worry, Hamish was warmed by that ‘we.’

  “Somehow,” Priscilla went on, “we’ve got to think of a way of finding a bit of proof within the next few hours.”

  “It is a self-imposed deadline, Priscilla. I could always put it off for another day.”

  “I don’t think you can put off Father’s bit of proof. I know he’ll be in trouble, but Ionides mustn’t be allowed to get away with it.”

  They sat in silence. If only this case were solved, thought Hamish. If only we could sit here like in the old days.

  Priscilla sat up straight. “The bottle bank,” she said. �
��The one with the paper.”

  “What about it?”

  “I went to Patel’s last Sunday to buy the papers, and you know what the Sunday papers are like, full of stuff nobody wants to read, supplement after supplement. They’ve got as big as American papers. I remember reading once that there was a newspaper strike in New York, and they sold the British papers on the street, and one man lifted a whole pile thinking it must be like The New York Times, and the bundle he took must be all the one paper. Anyway, I put the papers in the car and took out all the bits I didn’t want to read to put in the bottle bank. There was even an article in one about saving the forests, and yet I had a whole tree’s worth to throw away.”

  “Where’s this leading, Priscilla?”

  “The bottle bank was full. It hadn’t been emptied.”

  “You mean, any stuff from the hotel might have been shoved in there?”

  “It’s a long shot.” Priscilla sank back in her chair. “But the bottle bank weighs a ton. How could we ever get the stuff out?”

  “Tarn Gillespie over at Braikie’s got a crane.”

  “The phone’s over there, Hamish. Let’s get started.”

  “Won’t Ionides smell a rat when he sees all the activity?”

  “Someone said he took off in his helicopter. With any luck, he won’t be back until morning at the latest.”

  “Right!” Hamish sat down at Priscilla’s desk and pulled the phone towards him. He phoned Tarn Gillespie. “Tarn, it’s Hamish here. It’s an emergency. I need you to bring your crane down to Lochdubh to lift up the bottle bank. There’s evidence in there that might save some people in the village from a lot of trouble.”

  A voice quacked at the other end. Hamish turned to Priscilla. “He says he can lift it up, but we’ll need something to open it at the bottom.”

  “A crowbar,” said Priscilla calmly. Hamish turned back to the phone. “Chust bring the crane along, Tarn. We’ll do the rest.” He replaced the receiver and then said, “Now we need searchers.”

  “Let’s go for broke and get out the whole village,” said Priscilla. “Move over. I’m going to phone Mrs. Wellington.”

  “She’ll never go for anything illegal like this!”

  “She will if I ask her.”

  Priscilla changed places with Hamish and dialled the number of the minister’s wife. “Mrs Wellington,” began Priscilla. “We—that is, Hamish Macbeth and myself—are having the bottle bank with the papers opened up. We need to collect any correspondence to the new hotel for evidence.”

  Hamish heard Mrs. Wellington’s booming voice asking questions. “If we don’t,” said Priscilla when the voice at the other end of the line had finally fallen silent, “then some of our own could be under suspicion. I feel we all have a God-given duty to help the righteous.” Priscilla winked at Hamish.

  Then Hamish heard her say: “That’s very good of you. The fishermen? But they’re out at the fishing. Oh, I’ll tell Hamish.”

  When she rang off, she said, “We’ll need to be quick. The fishermen haven’t gone out because there’s a storm forecast.”

  “Good, let me have the phone, and I’ll call Archie and get the men rounded up.”

  After Hamish had given Archie instructions, he said, “I’d better get going.”

  “I’m coming with you. Wait till I find a sweater.”

  When Priscilla and Hamish drove down into Lochdubh, figures were appearing at doors of cottages. Other figures were making their way along the waterfront towards the bottle bank. It looked as if the whole village was on the move.

  They gathered around the bottle bank. Hamish stood up on the seawall beside the bottle bank and said, “I am looking for any correspondence to do with the new hotel. I need your help to go through everything and give me anything you can find.”

  In the faces looking up at him in the starlight, he saw Mrs. McClellan, Mrs. Docherty and Josie Darling. He had a momentary pang of doubt. But then he steeled himself. It must be Ionides.

  They waited in silence. Hamish began to fret. “Where is that crane?” he asked Priscilla.

  “It’ll be here soon,” said Priscilla in a comforting voice. “Remember, his top speed is probably ten miles an hour.”

  Archie Maclean looked up at the starry sky. “I think that forecast got it wrong,” he grumbled. “Not even a breath of wind.”

  Still they waited. The crowd began to murmur and shift restlessly.

  Then they could hear the drone of an engine coming over the hills and soon the small crane driven by Tarn came into view, its long neck nodding like some prehistoric creature.

  Tarn jumped down and surveyed the bottle bank. “It’s a big beastie,” he said. “You break my crane, Hamish, and you’ll have to pay for a new one.”

  They all waited while Tarn started to operate the crane. “You’ll need to reach up and fix the ring o’ the bank to the crane.”

  Hamish leapt up on the harbour wall again and fixed the hook of the crane on to the ring on the top of the bottle bank. The bell-shaped bank swung up and over. Tarn switched off his engine. “Now what?” he called.

  Hamish stood on tiptoe and studied the underside of the bank. “We need a crowbar.”

  “Here,” said Priscilla, handing one up to him. “I put it in the car before we left.”

  Hamish was always amazed at Priscilla’s efficiency. “I’ll need something to stand on,” he called, almost as if he expected Priscilla to produce a ladder from her handbag.

  “I’ll get a ladder,” shouted Archie. They waited until he came back with a metal stepladder. Hamish climbed up. Callum didn’t have the necessary tools to release the bottom of the bottle bank. The bank was to be cleared separately by men from Strathbane. He sweated and strained until Geordie Liddell, champion caber tosser, shouted, “Gie me a try, Hamish.”

  Hamish relinquished his place to Geordie.

  Geordie climbed up the stepladder, which creaked under his great weight. He gave a gigantic thrust at the crowbar. There was a crack. The bottom of the bank opened and papers hurtled down to the ground.

  “Don’t rush!” shouted Mrs. Wellington, coming forward. “We’ll put all this stuff into bundles, and then we’ll all start searching.”

  “A bottle of whisky to anyone who finds hotel correspondence,” said Hamish.

  They all crowded forward, paying no heed to Mrs. Wellington, and began searching. “Can’t see a thing,” someone said. People left for their cottages and returned carrying torches and hurricane lamps. Some women carried a trestle table out from the church hall and other women started laying out cups and cutting sandwiches.

  “It’s getting like a party,” mourned Hamish to Priscilla.

  “Just keep searching,” said Priscilla.

  Time passed. After an hour, Hamish looked up at the sky. Black clouds were beginning to stream across the stars, although there was still no wind at ground level.

  The papers that had been searched were being laid aside, newspapers, letters, comics, but nothing from the hotel.

  “It was a good idea, Priscilla,” groaned Hamish. “But there’s practically nothing left, and now I’m in bad trouble for having wrecked a bottle bank.”

  “That bottle bank swung out in an arc,” said Priscilla. “Maybe some of the stuff went over the harbour wall.”

  Hamish thrust his torch in his pocket and vaulted over the harbour wall and down onto the stony shore of the sea loch. He took out his torch and swung it in a wide arc.

  Then he saw a large manila envelope lying near the water. He walked to it and picked it up. Holding his torch under his armpit, he opened the envelope. It was stuffed with letters and faxes, headed IONIDES PLC. He sat down on the shingle and began to go through them.

  Then he found one from Ionides’s London office. “Dear George,” he read. “How’s the work on the hotel going? I mean, your rival. I know you’re mad about fishing, but it’s an expensive gamble, and what if them up at the Tommel Castle carry on regardless, even after you’
ve pinched their staff and poisoned their water? Besides, you’ll be stuck with two hotels in the back of beyond. Then what about that other business? Are you sure the police aren’t sniffing around? To risk so much just for fishing! Anyway, let me know if I can help. Your loving brother, Harry.”

  He tucked it carefully into his pocket and read the others. There was a fax. “Dear Harry. Everything is OK. Don’t worry. The police here are morons and the one in this village is subnormal. Come up, soon. Once I get the Tommel Castle, I can restock the river. Love, George.”

  “Gotcha!” said Hamish.

  He ran to the wall and heaved himself up over the top. “It’s all right, folks,” he called. “I’ve got what I wanted.”

  “What did you find?” asked Priscilla.

  “One incriminating letter. One incriminating fax. I’ll have Jimmy and the boys up here in the morning.”

  People were yawning and drifting away.

  “What about all this paper?” demanded Mrs. Wellington.

  “We’ll see to it in the morning,” said Hamish.

  Tarn released his crane from the bell bank and then backed off, shouting a warning. The great bell bank fell to the ground with a hollow clang and rolled on its side and then lay there, mouth gaping.

  “I’ll be down in the morning,” said Priscilla. “Don’t worry about running me home, Hamish. Mrs. Wellington says if you want to phone, she’ll take me back.”

  Hamish nodded and then sprinted for the police station. He phoned Jimmy at home and rapidly described what he had found. “Grand!” said Jimmy. “Got the bastard. I’ll be along with the men in the morning, and I’ll hae a search warrant.”

  “I don’t think Ionides is back yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ll get that secretary of his to open up everything.”

  “What time will you be here?”

  “The earliest I can manage.”

  “I’m beat. I’ll set the alarm.”

  Hamish stretched and yawned. There was a pile of fax paper lying by the machine. He could see it was headed STRATHBANE COUNCIL. That damn woman again. She could wait.