Death of a Traitor
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Marion Chesney
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First U.S. Edition: February 2023
Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Constable
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-4676-9 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-4674-5 (large type), 978-1-5387-46752 (ebook)
E3-20221212-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by R. W. Green
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Discover More
About the Authors
The Hamish Macbeth series
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Foreword by R. W. Green
Sergeant Hamish Macbeth knows far more than most about secrets and lies. If someone told you that they had no secrets and never told lies, Hamish would tell you that they were clearly lying to cover up their secrets. Everyone, after all, has a secret or two, and we’ve all told the odd fib at some time, haven’t we? What—not you? Hamish would have a hard time believing you…
No one, you see, knows more about how secrets and lies work than Lochdubh’s police sergeant. He deals with them on a day-to-day basis and, like the village’s twin paragons of virtue, the Currie sisters, who manage to waylay him and lambast him for his laziness or some perceived dereliction of duty whenever he leaves his police station, Hamish knows that the twin demons of secrets and lies forever walk shoulder to shoulder. If you see them coming, like the Currie twins, they’re best avoided.
For Hamish, of course, avoiding them really isn’t an option. His beat covers a vast swathe of rural Sutherland in the far north of Scotland. Here he deals with all sorts of problems, from rowdiness and burglaries to stolen bicycles and—on occasion—murder. Whatever crime or misdemeanour he’s investigating, the culprit will certainly tell desperate lies to avoid the wrath of the law—and hiding in the shadow of desperate lies lurk dark secrets. Fortunately, Hamish has a Highlander’s unerring instinct for recognising a lie when he hears one and the dogged determination to root out its twin secret.
When M. C. Beaton—Marion—first devised her Highland policeman character almost forty years ago, she endowed him with all of the talents, traits and foibles she believed she saw in the people of the Highlands. Having lived there, she loved Sutherland and its inhabitants, admiring the strength and fortitude it takes to live and work in one of the most remote areas of the United Kingdom. She also regarded them as intuitive and astute, well able to bend the truth themselves when it suited their needs. Hamish is certainly capable of bending not only the truth but also the law when he sees it as a means to an end. That’s not to say that Marion based Hamish on any one particular person. She cherry-picked ingredients for her Hamish recipe as she thought fit—a little from someone she’d met in a shop, a smidgen from someone she’d seen in the street, a pinch from someone she’d overheard talking in the post office, and a huge portion from her own imagination.
So did Marion regard Hamish as a typical Highlander? Is there even such a thing as a typical Highlander? Just like everywhere else, the Highlands are populated—albeit far more sparsely than most other places in the UK—by a wide variety of people, many of whom come from outside the region, just as Marion did. Outsiders can take a lifetime to be accepted into the fold by those born and bred in the far north, and Hamish was no exception. When he first moved to Lochdubh, he was treated as an outsider because he was from Ross and Cromarty, to the south of Sutherland. That’s not too far to the south, but far enough for him to be regarded as an interloper. You shouldn’t think, however, that those who live in the Highlands are inhospitable or unwelcoming—far from it. Many, after all, rely on the tourist trade for their livelihood, but newcomers who aim to stay longer, those who want to make a home in the Highlands, need to be patient to earn acceptance.
That’s not something unique to the Highlands or something that creates a “typical” Highlander. Caution in the acceptance of strangers is simply human nature and an attitude that prevails to a greater or lesser extent in communities everywhere, whether rural or urban, especially if the strangers come with secrets to keep—and Hamish arrived in Lochdubh with a clutch of secrets. No one could quite understand how Constable Macbeth, as he was when he first arrived in the village, managed to have the police authority build him a brand-new police station and provide him with a new car. Nobody knew, and it wasn’t something that Hamish felt inclined to explain.
Perhaps little mysteries like that provided enough intrigue to make the locals believe that their new police officer was something special, although at first he did nothing much to impress them. He seemed to want a quiet life and didn’t go out of his way to find work, leading some to brand him as lazy—but he was always there when people needed him most. They discovered that he was perfectly capable of discreetly turning a blind eye to someone poaching the odd salmon or trout, even indulging in a little illicit angling himself, but anyone threatening the peace and tranquillity of Lochdubh, or running amok in the Sutherland countryside, had a very different Macbeth to deal with. His temper was as fiery as his flaming red hair and, at well over six feet tall, he was an imposing figure.
Surely that hair makes Hamish a typical Highlander? Marion described his hair as “true Highland red that looks like it has purple lights” but, despite his hair and his height, she shunned the stereotype of a burly Highland strongman. Hulking great Highlanders were famously prized as fighting men, recruited into armies throughout Europe at one time. In the early fifteenth century, Scotsmen formed the Garde Écossaise, elite personal bodyguards to the French monarchs for more than three centuries. Such was the reputation of the Highlander, yet Hamish isn’t quite like that. He is tall and long-limbed but lanky rather than muscle-bound, a champion hill runner who won the top prize at the Strathbane Highland games five years in a row.
Unlike the residents of Lochdubh, who have had to spread their gossip nets far and wide to trawl for titbits about their policeman, I was fortunate enough to learn all about Hamish from Marion herself when I first began working with her. I was amazed that she didn’t keep any notes about the cast of characters who appear alongside Hamish, but she didn’t feel she needed any. She had created them all, from the salty old fisherman, Archie Maclean, to the sophisticated and beautiful Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, and knew all of their secrets and lies. She knew just what any of them would say or do in any given situation, allowing her to weave them into her stories whenever their presence was required to keep the plot moving forward.
Hamish, I learned, was the oldest of seven children, having three brothers and three sisters. Highland tradition has it that the oldest son works to help support the family until his siblings are able to lead their own lives, which is one of the reasons why Hamish has never married. Still a young man, although well beyond his twenties, he has now reached the age where, while continuing to contribute to the family coffers, he has been able to consider marriage, and he’s been engaged three times. For many reasons best discovered by reading previous books, none of his engagements resulted in marriage.
It was a great pleasure to listen to Marion talk about Hamish and the other Lochdubh residents and, following her death, an immense privilege to be able to take them forward, using some of the many plot ideas we discussed. Whenever I’m wondering how best to deal with the latest predicament into which Hamish has been dropped, all I have to do is think of how Marion would handle it. She usually points me in the right direction.
So Hamish soldiers on in Lochd
ubh, dealing with friendly, familiar faces, as well as a few old adversaries. In Death of a Traitor, as you would expect from a plot involving treachery, he also has to contend with a whole host of secrets and lies, mainly perpetrated by a clutch of new characters. He is issued with a new uniform, has a new constable assigned to him temporarily and, perhaps, finds a new love. Needless to say, he has more than his fair share of trauma to deal with along the way, including the sad demise of a faithful old friend.
I hope you enjoy being back in Lochdubh as much as I do.
Rod Green, 2022
CHAPTER ONE
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel
Gregor Mackenzie gazed out over the hillside above Lochdubh, leaning on his cromach walking staff and admiring his sheep grazing contentedly in the late morning sunshine. On a day like today, he mused, with a blue sky and a light breeze breathing the freshest of air across the mountains, gently ruffling the heather in soft purple waves, Sutherland was surely the most beautiful place on the planet. His mood was buoyed by the sound, healthy condition of his flock. He was immensely proud of his prize-winning animals and had a fine selection of lambs almost ready for the big auction at Lairg in September, sure to fetch a handsome price. As though they could read his thoughts, several of the North Country Cheviots turned their white faces towards him, their pensive expressions filled with false wisdom. When Gregor’s border collie, Bonnie, pricked up her ears and raised her head, they immediately returned to their grazing.
“Ha!” Mackenzie let out a soft laugh and reached down to pat his dog. “It’s like they don’t want you to know what it is they’re thinking, lass. Truth be told, I doubt they’re ever thinking anything much.”
It was then that he spotted a movement far below on the track leading to the main road. He immediately recognised the pink coat and hat of Kate Hibbert, the woman who had moved into the glen more than a year before. Her cottage was little more than a hundred yards from his. She was perfectly outlined against the distant view of Lochdubh and she appeared to be struggling with a large suitcase, dragging it down the rutted track.
“Where’s that sly besom off to, eh, Bonnie?” Mackenzie reached into a battered knapsack, quickly laying a hand on his old binoculars without ever taking his eyes off the figure in pink further down the hill. No sooner had he fixed the woman in focus than she disappeared where the track dipped behind a heather-clad mound. He tutted, setting off down the hill to find a spot where he could catch sight of her again when she reappeared, Bonnie trotting at his heels. He’d heard nothing about Hibbert taking a holiday and his day was suddenly cheered by the thought that he might be rid of her for a couple of weeks. Wait, though—what if she were going for good? Man, he’d sink a dram or two of his best whisky to that thought as soon as he got home, no matter what his wife might say about him drinking in the afternoon.
Mackenzie stopped abruptly, his dog almost slamming straight into the backs of his legs. He looked down at the white, petal-like bracts and delicate purple flowers of the avern plants and took a detour off to his left. The avern, some called them cloudberries, marked the edge of boggy ground where he could easily sink up to his knee if he wasn’t careful. Once he had a view of the track and the road running along the lochside, he raised his binoculars again. The glasses had been part of the trouble the Hibbert woman had created between him and his wife, Clara. He’d always kept the binoculars for spotting otters, or maybe an osprey, out on the water but Hibbert had told Clara she’d seen him spying on the women aboard the tourist yachts that came into the loch in the summer. Well, on warm days they were in bikinis—sometimes even topless. What was so wrong with taking a wee peek? That, of course, wasn’t how Clara saw it.
He scanned the track and the road, waiting for Hibbert to reappear, musing over the problems she had caused. She’d interfered when it came to the peat. Clara had a fine, strong back on her and was well able to carry a sackload of peat down the brae to their cottage from where they cut it further up the hill. Hibbert had insisted on helping, always cheerful, always smiling but always bleating about what heavy work it was and how “poor Clara shouldn’t have to lug all that peat around.” Clara never complained, but Hibbert kept on about it until, in the end, he’d been forced to agree that Clara shouldn’t be carrying the peat and that he needed to do something about it. He bought Clara a peat barrow.
Even then, Hibbert gave him no peace. She was constantly round at their cottage, happily helping Clara to bring in the washing or clean the windows. She was forever drinking coffee, having lunch with Clara or happening to drop by just as they were about to sit down at teatime, making them feel obliged to invite her to share their evening meal. All the time, she was watching him, always looking for another chance to point out how he was failing his wife. When none came, she would conjure one up, saying things like, “That sofa’s seen better days, has it not, Gregor? Surely Clara deserves a new one?” Gregor hated Hibbert but, while she never claimed they were the best of friends, Clara tolerated her at first. As time went on, however, Gregor could plainly see that Clara was starting to find Hibbert about as welcome as a midge in the bedroom on a warm night.
Things came to a head when Clara arrived home from doing some shopping at Patel’s little supermarket down in Lochdubh to find the woman in their house, going through their mail and the old ledger where they kept their accounts.
“Aye, that was a grand day, Bonnie,” Gregor said softly, the binoculars pressed tight against his eyes. “We were rebuilding the dyke all the way up in the top pasture, weren’t we? We could hear Clara going mental even from there—such language as I’ve never before heard from her. She was right ashamed of the blasphemy afterwards. Attended the kirk every Sunday morning for a month. The bloody Hibbert woman steered well clear of us after that. But where has she got to now, eh?”
Mackenzie had a clear view of the track and the road but there was no sign of the woman in pink. Making his way down the slope, he took a look behind the mound that had obscured his view only to find the track deserted. He ran a hand over the greying stubble on his chin, shrugged and turned to head for home, itching to tell Clara he had seen that damned woman leaving their glen. With any luck, they’d heard the last of her.
Kate Hibbert was the furthest thing from Sergeant Hamish Macbeth’s mind as he stood close to a small crowd gathered on the shore of The Corloch, enjoying the morning sunshine and listening to a story he hadn’t heard since he was a child.
Auld Mary’s Tale (part one)
“You’ll neffer catch them now, John Mackay! They’re free from your evil clutches at last!” The old woman stood on a small, rocky island ten yards from the shore of The Corloch. Silhouetted in the moonlight, her shadow cast long upon the water, the woman pointed a crooked finger towards the loch, the ragged folds of her black cloak hanging from her outstretched arm. “They’ll be in Sutherland territory afore an hour has passed. The Gordons will welcome them there, and you dare not follow.”
The three men on the shore stared out across the water to where a man and a woman were making their way steadily across the loch in a small boat. A ripple of water could be heard echoing over the surface each time the young man heaved on his paddle, yet they were still close enough for the three men to make out the pale, frightened face of the young woman staring back at them.
“Damn you, Mary! You gave them your boat!” raged the leader of the three. Each of them was barefoot, as they generally were come rain or shine, and dressed in a heavy plaid wrapped around the body, with a generous length draped over one shoulder, all held fast at the waist by a broad, leather belt. Each of them also carried a long, heavy sword, the steel blades glinting in the pale light.
“Just as you knew I would,” the old woman cackled. “Don’t try to pretend otherwise. It’s all part of your plan.”