He picked up her wool coat and walked back into the kitchen and placed it on a chair. He waited until the kettle had boiled and made a pot of tea. He put a mug of hot, sweet tea in front of Kirsty and handed her a clean handkerchief. ‘Drink that,’ he ordered. ‘You’ll need a good lawyer, Kirsty. You can afford it now.’
‘Won’t they freeze my money?’
‘The money’s yours. You didn’t get it as the result of a crime. Do you want me to get you a good lawyer?’
She nodded. He took out his phone and dialled a number in Inverness. He outlined the case rapidly and told the lawyer to make all haste to police headquarters in Strathbane.
Then he waited and waited. The snow started to fall gently, great white lacy flakes. At last, he heard the sound of the police siren.
When the police arrived, he turned and charged Kirsty Ettrik with the murder of her husband, Angus. He waited until she was led to the police car. He watched until the flashing blue light disappeared into the snow.
With a heavy heart, he got into the police Land Rover and drove back to Lochdubh.
Epilogue
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
– William Shakespeare
It was once more a sunny summer’s day in Lochdubh. Hamish Macbeth and Detective Jimmy Anderson sat out in deck chairs in the police station front garden. The sky above was as blue as the eyes that shone in Jimmy’s foxy face. Hamish often marvelled that a man who drank so much could remain looking so fit and healthy.
‘So she got off,’ marvelled Jimmy again. ‘I couldnae believe it. Kirsty Ettrik got off! Mind you, it was thanks to about every villager here going down to the High Court and swearing blind that she had been tormented and beaten near to death by that husband of hers. Took the shine out of your case, Hamish. Daviot wonders how you could have possibly not known what was going on when everyone else in the village did.’
‘I can be a bit stupid,’ said Hamish, preferring to forget that he had organized the lying himself. He felt a bit guilty. He had hoped that his work for Kirsty would have got her a lighter sentence. He had not expected her to walk free.
‘Still, that’s another case cleared up. Nothing else happening?’
‘Nothing, I’m glad to say. Been as quiet as the grave here.’
‘What happens to that hotel at the harbour?’
‘Still bound up in red tape, so it sits there, rotting again. Peter McLeigh, who used to own the bar, managed to buy it back, however he did it, so the locals have someplace to go again. Man, you should see it. I thought he would smarten it up. Ionides had all the dirty old tables and fruit machines and stuff cleared out. He was going to make it into a gift shop. But Peter’s put everything back the way it was, even the dirt. It looks as dreary as ever.’
‘It’s Calvinism,’ said Jimmy lazily. ‘They think drinking in dreary surroundings is appropriate. So where’s Kirsty now?’
‘Back at the croft house. She’ll probably sell out to her neighbour, Elspeth MacRae, and move on.’
‘I would have thought she would have wanted to stay, considering the way everyone stood up for her.’
Hamish did not reply. He knew the villagers felt she had deserved some kind of punishment. They would not be too friendly towards her, to say the least.
Jimmy reached down and picked a whisky bottle off the grass at his feet and poured himself another generous measure.
‘How’s that new schoolteacher getting on?’
‘She’s left. Funny thing. I thought she was a really sensible woman. She runs about the village, all excitement, and tells everyone she’s got a job at Eton. I thought, that’s funny, I thought they’d mostly be masters there. So after she left, I phoned Eton College.’
‘And they hadn’t heard of her?’
‘Exactly The woman’s a raving fantasist. She was friendly with the banker’s wife, who then tells me the woman was always a compulsive liar. I’m telling you, Jimmy, the things that people in this village knew that they didn’t bother to tell me!’
‘And what about your love life?’
‘What love life?’ said Hamish. With all the drama of the arrest of Kirsty, he had forgotten about that dinner date. And then Priscilla had received another contract job, in Milton Keynes this time, and had taken herself off.
‘And how’s your ex-copper?’
‘Clarry is the happiest man you’ve ever seen. He’s got famous chefs checking in at the Tommel Castle to try to find out his secrets.’
‘That’s grand. Oh, by the way, that Fleming woman lost her job as environment officer, and not only that, she didn’t get elected again at the last council elections. She was beaten by a wee lassie from the Green Party, would you believe it?’
‘Horrible woman. I’ve a funny feeling I haven’t heard the last of her.’
Jimmy drained his glass and stood up. ‘I’d best get going. I’ll give your love to Blair.’
‘Aye, you do that.’
Hamish went indoors and fed Lugs and then took the dog for a walk along the waterfront. Everything seemed placid and blue. Even the normally black waters of the sea loch reflected the blue sky. A yacht sailed lazily past, heading out to the open sea. The sound of a jazz tune being played on a radio drifted across the water. He leaned on the old stone wall and breathed in the fresh, sunny air.
Two tourists, a middle-aged couple, were standing a little way away from him. He judged them to be tourists and probably American because they wore sensible summer clothes and shoes, whereas the locals wore pretty much the same clothes as they wore all year round, being used to the very short summers and very, very long winters. He heard the woman say in a voice with a Midwest twang, ‘Isn’t it just perfect? I would love to live in a place like this.’ And the man answered with a smile, ‘Everything’s possible. I wonder what the house prices are like around here.’
Hamish sighed. People who came on the sunny days were often seduced by the sheer beauty of the place. They enthusiastically decided to move house, but, faced with the ferocious winds and the almost perpetual night of winter, they soon sold up and moved on.
‘Afternoon, Hamish. You smell of whisky.’
Hamish turned round and saw Angela Brodie, the doctor’s wife, standing next to him.
‘I just had the one. Jimmy came calling.’
‘What do you think about Kirsty?’
‘I’m a bit taken aback, to tell the truth. She did kill her husband. I expected some sort of sentence.’
‘Well, she’s back now. Some of us went up to see if she needed anything, but she said she was just fine and didn’t even invite us in. What a lovely day!’
‘Aye, it is that. When you look around, it’s hard to think that anything violent ever happened here. I thought Kirsty would have been selling her story to the newspapers. Her lawyer’s fees must have taken most of what she got.’
A sudden shadow swept over them. Angela looked up at the sky. ‘Look at that cloud covering the sun. Where did it come from? The sky was as clear as anything a minute ago.’
Lugs suddenly let out a long, wild howl.
Hamish crouched down by his dog. ‘What’s the matter, Lugs?’
Lugs threw back his shaggy head with the big peculiar ears and let out an even louder howl. Villagers began to gather around. ‘Take the beast tae the vet,’ said Archie Maclean. ‘He’s probably eaten something that’s hurt him.’
‘It’s a death, that’s what it is.’ Jessie Currie’s voice.
Hamish scooped the still howling dog into his arms. ‘I’ll take him home first and see if I can calm him down.’
The dog was shaking and howling as Hamish carried him into the police station. And then suddenly he went quiet and licked Hamish’s nose, almost apologetically.
Hamish set him down. Lugs wagged his tail and went to his water bowl.
He stood for a long moment, looking down at his dog, and then suddenly he was off and running to the Land Rover.
I’m being daft, he told hims
elf. But he put on the siren and accelerated out of the village, not stopping until he skidded to a halt in front of Kirsty Ettrik’s cottage.
The door was standing open. He ran up to it and inside the house, shouting, ‘Kirsty!’
Then he stopped short. Dangling from a hook on a beam in the kitchen was the lifeless body of Kirsty Ettrik. A kitchen chair lay on the floor where she had kicked it over.
He took another chair and stood up on it and forced himself to feel for a pulse. The body was still warm, but there was no life there. He took out a pocket knife and cut the body down and laid it on the floor. He went into the bedroom and got a sheet and covered those awful, bulging, staring eyes. There was an envelope on the table addressed to Elspeth MacRae, and an open sheet of A4 paper on which Kirsty had written, ‘I can’t live with myself any more.’
Hamish backed away to the door and took out his phone and called Strathbane.
Then he sat down in the sunshine outside to wait. He could not bear to go back inside the house.
By evening, Kirsty’s body had been removed, Hamish had typed up his statement in the police station and sent it to Strathbane. In the letter to Elspeth, Kirsty had left the croft house to her.
Lugs came in and put a paw on Hamish’s knee.
‘Who are you?’ asked Hamish, looking down at the dog. Then he shook his head as if to clear the nonsense out of it. Some of the locals still believed that the dead came back as seals. He was getting as nutty as they were.
But he sat there a long time, thinking of the hell that had been Kirsty’s life.
‘What a waste,’ he muttered. ‘What a waste.’
A voice called from the kitchen. ‘Anybody home?’
Priscilla!
He leapt to his feet and went through to find her standing there, smiling at him.
She was wearing an impeccably tailored trouser suit, and not one hair on her blonde head was out of place.
‘I thought you were in Milton Keynes.’
‘That job’s finished. Care for that dinner we never got around to?’
Only for a moment did he hesitate. Only for a moment did his mind warn him against opening up old wounds. Who was it who had said, ‘There are no new wounds. Only old wounds reopened’?
But every minute of life was surely for living, for any enjoyment one could get. Seize the moment.
‘Be with you in a minute,’ said Hamish Macbeth. ‘I’ll just change out of my uniform.’
If you enjoyed Death of a Dustman, read on for the first chapter of the next book in the Hamish Macbeth series . . .
DEATH of a
DUSTMAN
Chapter One
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
– William Shakespeare
Hamish Macbeth did not like change, although this was something he would not even admit to himself, preferring to think of himself as a go-ahead, modern man.
But the time-warp that was the village of Lochdubh in northwest Scotland suited him very well. As the village policeman, he knew everyone. He enjoyed strolling through the village or driving around the heathery hills, dropping in here and there for a chat and a cup of tea.
The access to Lochdubh was by a single, twisting, single-track road. It nestled at the foot of two huge mountains and faced a long sea loch down which Atlantic winds brought mercurial changes of weather. Apart from a few tourists in the summer months, strangers were few and far between. The days went on much as they had done for the past century, although sheep prices had dropped like a stone and the small farmers and crofters were feeling the pinch. From faraway Glasgow and Edinburgh, authoritative voices suggested the crofters diversify, but the land was hard and stony, and fit only for raising sheep.
So Hamish felt the intrusion into his world of a newspaper office was unsettling. The owner/editor, Sam Wills, had taken over an old Victorian boarding house on the waterfront and, with the help of a grant from the Highlands and Islands Commission, had started a weekly newspaper called Highland Times. It was an almost immediate success, rising to a circulation of nearly one thousand – and that was a success in the sparsely populated area of the Highlands – not because of its news coverage but because of its columns of gossip, its cookery recipes, and above all, its horoscope. The horoscope was written by Elspeth Grant and was amazingly detailed. Startled Highlanders read that, for example, they would suffer from back pains at precisely eight o’clock on a Monday morning, and as back pain was a favourite excuse for not going to work, people said it was amazing how accurate the predictions were.
But Hamish’s initial disapproval began to fade although he thought astrology a lot of hocus-pocus. There were only three on the editorial side: Sam, and Elspeth, and one old drunken reporter who somehow wrote the whole of the six-page tabloid-sized paper among them.
He did not know that the larger world of the media was about to burst in on his quiet world.
Over in Strathbane, the television station, Strathbane Television, was in trouble. It had been chugging along, showing mostly reruns of old American sitcoms and a few cheaply produced local shows. They had just been threatened with losing their licence unless they became more innovative.
The scene in the boardroom was fraught with tension and worry. Despite the No Smoking signs, the air was thick with cigarette smoke. ‘What we need,’ said the head of television features, Rory MacBain, ‘is a hardhitting programme.’ Over his head and slightly behind him, a television screen flickered showing a rerun of Mr. Ed. ‘People come to the Highlands but they do not stay. Why?’
‘That’s easy,’ said the managing director, Callum Bissett. ‘The weather’s foul and it’s damn hard to make a living.’
As a babble of voices broke out complaining and explaining, Rory leaned back in his chair and remembered an interesting evening he’d had in Edinburgh with a BBC researcher. He had met her at the annual television awards at the Edinburgh Festival. He had been amazed that someone so go-ahead and with such stunning, blonde good looks should be only a researcher. He had been even more amazed when she had taken him to bed. He had promised her that if there was ever any chance of giving her a break, he would remember her.
He hunched forward and cut through the voices. ‘I have an idea.’
They all looked at him hopefully.
‘Our biggest failure,’ he said in measured tones, ‘is the Countryside programme.’
Felicity Pearson, who produced it, let out a squawk of protest.
‘The ratings are lousy, Felicity,’ said Rory brutally. ‘For a start, it’s all in Gaelic. Secondly, you have a lot of old fogies sitting at a desk pontificating. We should start a new series, call it, say, Highland Life, and get someone hardhitting and glamorous to present it. Start off by exploding this myth of the poor crofter.’
‘They are poor now,’ protested Felicity. ‘Sheep prices are dreadful.’
Rory went on as if she had not spoken. He said that although people did not like to live in the Highlands, they liked to see programmes about the area. With a glamorous presenter, with a good, hard, punchy line, they could make people sit up and take notice, and the more Rory remembered the blonde charms of the researcher – what was her name? Crystal French, that was it – the more convincing he became. At last his idea was adopted. He retreated to his office and searched through his records until he found Crystal’s Edinburgh phone number.
After he had finished talking, Crystal put down the phone, her heart beating hard. This was the big break and she meant to make the most of it. She would be glad to get out of Edinburgh, glad to get away from being a mere researcher. Researchers worked incredibly long hours and had to kowtow to the whims of every presenter. Who would have thought that a one-night stand with that fat little man would have paid such dividends? And she had just been coming around to the idea that a woman can’t really sleep her way to the top! She did not realize that her past failure to move on had been because of her reputati
on for doing just that thing. There were a lot of women executives in broadcasting these days who had got to the top with hard work and brains and did not look kindly on any of their sisters who were still trying the old-fashioned methods, so when her name had come up for promotion there had always been some woman on the board who would make sure it was turned down flat.
Rory, when he met her at the Strathbane Station, was struck anew by her looks. Her long blonde hair floated about her shoulders, and her slim figure was clothed in a business suit, but with a short skirt to show off the beauty of her excellent legs. Her eyes were very large and green, almost hypnotic. Crystal kissed him warmly. She had no intention of going to bed with him again. He had done his bit. He was only head of features. If necessary, she would seduce one of his superiors.
Hamish Macbeth did not watch much television. But he did read newspapers. He was intrigued to read that a new show called Highland Life was to start off with an investigation into village shops in the Highlands. He decided to watch it. He expected it to be a series of cosy interviews.
The show was to go out at ten o’clock that evening. He was about to settle down to watch it when there was a knock at the kitchen door. He opened it to find with dismay that he was being subjected to a visit from the Currie sisters. It had started to rain, and the sisters, who were twins, stood there with raindrops glistening on their identical plastic rain hats, identical glasses, and identical raincoats. ‘Our telly’s on the blink,’ said Nessie, pushing past him. Jessie followed, taking off her plastic hat and shaking raindrops over the kitchen floor. ‘I was just going to bed,’ lied Hamish, but they hung up their coats and trotted off into his living room as if he had not spoken.
Hamish sighed and followed them. The Currie sisters were unmarried, middle-aged ladies who ruled the parish. Jessie had an irritating habit of repeating everything. ‘We’re here to see that new show, that new show,’ she said, switching on the television set. ‘Don’t you have the remote control, the remote control?’
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