Hamish MacBeth 01 (1985) - Death of a Gossip Read online

  “I understand she specialized in taking holidays where there were going to be small groups of British people. She would find out something nasty about each one, since she liked to prove that everyone has a skeleton in the closet. There have been complaints to the press council, but her column’s been too popular. Folks chust lap it up and think it will never happen to them. Maybe someone in this group knew about her column, although the fact that she was Jane Maxwell was kept a closely guarded secret.”

  “And how did you find out if it’s that much of a secret?” asked Blair, his eyes raking over the lanky length of the village constable.

  “I naff my methods, Watson,” grinned Hamish.

  “I am not putting up with any cheek from a Highlander,” snarled Blair. “How did you find out?”

  “I have a relative that works in Fleet Street.”

  “And which of these fishing lot knew about her being Jane Maxwell?”

  “I do not know,” said Hamish patiently. “I was just beginning to find out when you arrived. I have talked with John Cartwright and you interrupted me when I was in the process of talking to Mrs Heather Cartwright.”

  “Before I start with the rest, I’d better fix up accommodation for me and my men. I’ll stay here myself, but it’s a bit pricey for the lot of us. We’ve got five officers combing the bushes along with the forensic team at the moment. I saw that police station of yours. You do yourself very well. Any chance of a spare bed or two?”

  “I have not the room. I have the one bed for myself and the other bedroom has not the bed but the gardening stuff and the poultry feed and the bags of fertilizer…”

  “Okay, okay, spare me the rural details.” Blair looked piercingly at Hamish, who gave him a sweet smile.

  Simple, thought Blair. Would have to be to live here all year round.

  He placed his beefy hands on the desk and looked at Hamish in a kindly way. “I’m thinking you’re a wee bit too inexperienced for this sort of high-class crime,” he said. “We’ll use your office at the station because I’m damned if I’ll pay hotel phone prices. I have to fight hard enough to get my expenses as it is. Just you attend to your usual rounds and leave the detective work to us. We’re all experienced men.”

  Hamish looked at the detective chief inspector blankly. Only a few minutes before he had been wondering how to keep out of the case. He had taken a dislike to the chief detective and his sidekicks and did not want to tag around after them. But now he had been told to keep clear, well, all that did was give him a burning desire to find out who had killed Lady Jane.

  “I’ll be off then,” said Hamish. Blair watched him go and shook his head sadly. “Poor fellow,” he said. “Never had to do any real work in his life before, and, like all these Highlanders, fights shy of it as much as possible. Send in that American couple, MacNab. Typical pair of tourists. May as well get rid of them first.”

  ♦

  Hamish ambled along the front, gazing dreamily out over the loch. The early evening sun was flooding the bay with gold. A pair of seals were rolling and turning lazily, sending golden ripples washing about the white hulls of the yachts and the green and black hulls of the fishing boats.

  He saw the slim, elegant figure of Priscilla Halburton-Smythe walking towards him, and, suddenly overcome with a mixture of shyness and longing, he stopped and leaned his elbows on the mossy stone wall above the beach.

  She stopped and stood beside him. “What’s all this I hear?” said Priscilla. “The hillside’s crawling with bobbies, putting things in plastic bags.”

  “Lady Jane Winters has been murdered.”

  “I heard something to that effect. Big, fat, nasty woman, wasn’t she?”

  “Aye, you could say that.”

  “And who did it, Holmes?”

  “I chust don’t know, and I’ve been more or less told to go home and feed my chickens by the detectives from Strathbane.”

  “Well, you must be pleased about that. I mean, you never were exactly one of the world’s greatest workers.”

  “How would you know that, Miss Halburton-Smythe? It is not as if I have the murder on my hands every day of the week.”

  “You must admit when Daddy wants to talk to you about poaching or something, you’re never where you should be. I told Daddy not to worry you about, poachers since you’re one yourself.”

  “That is not a very nice thing to say.”

  “I was only joking. Do you really want to find the murderer? Do you need a Watson? I shall follow you about saying, ‘By Jove, you’re a wonder. How on earth did you think of that?’”

  “Oh, I suppose I’ll do as I’m told and keep out of the way,” said Hamish equably.

  “Funny, I thought you’d have been dying to find out for yourself. All that Highland curiosity.” Priscilla sounded disappointed.

  “Aye, well…” began Hamish, and then his gaze suddenly sharpened. Mrs Baxter and Charlie could be seen leaving the hotel.

  “Are you going to ask them questions?” asked Priscilla, following his gaze. “Can I listen?”

  “Och, no. The wee lad has a very interesting stamp and I wanted to have another look at it.”

  “Hamish Macbeth, I give you up!”

  He gave her a crooked grin. “I did not know you had ever taken me on, Miss Halburton-Smythe.”

  He pushed his hat up on his forehead, thrust his hands in his pockets, and strolled off to meet the Baxters.

  Highly irritated, Priscilla watched him go.

  Day Five

  A counsel of perfection is very easy advice to give, but is usually quite impracticable.

  —Maxwell Knight, Bird Gardening

  Alice started to dress hurriedly, although it was only seven in the morning. She wanted to escape from the hotel before they were besieged by the press again. They had started to filter in gradually, and by late evening they had grown to an army: an army of questioning faces. Alice’s juvenile crime loomed large in her mind. If Lady Jane could have found out about that, then they could too. Normally Alice would have been thrilled to bits at the idea of getting her photograph in the papers. But her murky past tortured her. Jeremy had been particularly warm and friendly to her the evening before. She felt sure he would not even look at her again if he found out. The major had howled at the hotel manager over the problem of the press, and the manager had at last reluctantly banned them. He was thoroughly fed up with the notoriety the murder had brought to his hotel and had hoped to ease the pain with the large amount of money the gentlemen of the press were spending in the bar. But guests other than the major had complained, guests who came every year. And so the reporters and the photographers were now billeted out in the village, most of them at a boarding house at the other end of the bay.

  Alice was just on the point of leaving the room when the telephone began to ring. She stared at it and then suddenly rushed and picked it up. Her mother’s voice, sharp with agitation, sounded over the line. “What’s all this, luv? Your name’s in the morning papers. You didn’t even tell us you was going to such a place. We’re that worried.”

  “It’s all right, Mum,” said Alice. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “I know that, luv, but that woman that was murdered, her photo’s in the papers and she was around here last week, asking questions. Said she was writing a piece on young girls who had made the move to London and their reasons for doing it.”

  She must have got all our addresses from Heather, thought Alice with a sudden sickening lurch of the heart. Heather even sent me the names of the other guests, sort of to make it sound social.

  Her voice shrill with anxiety, Alice asked, “Did she find out anything about me being in court?”

  “You was never in court, luv.”

  “Yes. ‘Member? It was when I broke Mr Jenkins’ window and he took me to the juvenile court.”

  “Oh, that. She didn’t ask me and I don’t suppose anyone around here remembers a silly little thing like that. She talked to Maggie Harris
on, mind.”

  Alice held tightly on to the phone. Maggie Harrison had been her rival for years. If Maggie could have remembered anything nasty about her, Alice, then Maggie would have undoubtedly told everything.

  “Are you there?” Her mother’s voice sounded like a squawk. “I’m in a call box and the money’s running out. Can you call me back?”

  “No, Mum, I’ve got to go. I’ll be all right.”

  “Take care of yourself, will you? I don’t like you getting mixed up with those sort of people.”

  The line went dead.

  Alice slowly replaced the receiver and wiped her damp palm on her sweater. Well, Lady Jane couldn’t write anything now.

  She turned quickly and ran from the room. Outside the hotel a thin, greasy drizzle was falling.

  She looked quickly along the waterfront, dreading to see a reporter waiting to pounce on her, but everything was deserted as far as she could see. She hesitated. Perhaps it would have been better to stay in the hotel. It was now banned to the press, so why bother to venture out? But the fear of anyone—Jeremy in particular—finding out about her past drove her on.

  There was a pleasant smell of woodsmoke, tar, kippers, bacon and strong tea drifting from the cottages. Alice approached Constable Macbeth’s house and saw him standing in his garden, feeding the chickens. He turned at the sound of her footsteps, and she smiled weakly.

  “Is your third degree over?” asked the policeman.

  “It wasn’t so bad,” said Alice. “I really didn’t know that awful woman was a newspaper columnist, and I think they believed me.”

  “I was just about to make a cup of tea. Would you like one?”

  “Yes,” said Alice gratefully, thinking how very unlike a policeman Constable Macbeth looked. He was hatless and wearing an old army sweater and a faded pair of jeans. That chief detective had made it plain that the village constable would not be having anything to do with the investigation. Mr Macbeth must have riled him in some way because he had been quite unpleasant about it, Alice remembered. Blair had asked her if she had noticed or heard anything unusual that might point to the murderer, and Alice had shaken her head, but had said if she did remember anything she would tell Constable Macbeth, and that was when Blair had sourly pointed out that the village policeman was not part of the murder investigation.

  Alice followed Hamish into his kitchen, which was long and narrow with a table against the window.

  She looked around the kitchen curiously. It was messy in a clean sort of way. There were piles of magazines, china, bits of old farm implements, Victorian dolls, and stacks of jam jars.

  “I’m a hoarder,” said Mr Macbeth. “If aye think a thing’ll fetch a good price if I just hang on to it. I have a terrible time throwing things away. Milk and sugar?”

  “Yes, please,” said Alice. He gave her a cup, sat down next to her at the table, and heaped five spoonfuls of sugar into his own tea.

  “Do I look like a murderer?” asked Alice intently.

  “I think a murderer could look like anyone,” said the policeman placidly. “Now this Lady Jane, it strikes me she went to a lot of work to find out about the people who were going to be at the fishing school. How did she know who was going?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. Heather sent us all a list of names and addresses. The idea is that we can get in touch with anyone in our area and maybe travel up with them. That’s how Jeremy came to travel up with Daphne. He didn’t know her before,” Alice blushed furiously and buried her nose in her cup.

  “Yes, and she must have found out about me and my family after she came,” said Hamish. “She had only to ask a few people in the village. You can’t keep anything secret in the Highlands.”

  “I wish she had never come,” said Alice passionately. “She’s ruined my life.”

  “Indeed! And how is that?”

  The rain was falling more steadily and the cluttered kitchen was peaceful and warm. Alice had a longing to unburden herself.

  “If a young man was interested in a girl,” she said, not looking at him, “would you think that young man might go off that girl if he found out she had done something…well, against the law, when she was a kid?”

  “It depends on the young man. Now if you’re talking about Mr Jeremy Blythe…”

  “You noticed. He is rather sweet on me.” Alice removed her hat and tossed back her fluffy hair in what she fondly thought was a femme-fataleish sort of way.

  “It depends on the crime,” said Hamish. “Now if you’d poisoned your mother or…”

  “No, nothing like that,” said Alice. “Look, when I was about Charlie’s age, I threw a brick through Mr Jenkins’ window for a dare. Mr Jenkins was a nasty old man who lived in our street. The other girls egged me on. Well, he got me charged and taken to court. All I got was a warning and Mum had to pay for the window and the local paper put a couple of lines about it at the bottom of one of their pages. I mean, it was a silly little thing, really, but would a man like Jeremy mind? You see, he’s awfully ambitious and…and…well, he plans to stand for Parliament, and…and…oh, do you know now I’ve told you, I realize I’ve been worrying about nothing. I should have told him. In fact, I’d better before anyone else does. How he’ll laugh!”

  “If it’s that unimportant,” said Hamish, pouring himself more tea, “then I am thinking that there is no need whateffer to tell anyone at all. In my opinion, Miss Wilson, Mr Blythe is something of a snob and would not normally be interested in you were he not on holiday…”

  Alice leapt to her feet. “You’re the snob,” she said. “And rude, too. I’ll show you. I’ll tell Jeremy right now and when I’m Mrs Blythe, you can eat your words.”

  “As you please.” Hamish shrugged. Alice rushed out of the house and slammed the kitchen door with a bang. Hamish cursed himself for being clumsy. Alice reminded him of Ann Grant, a young girl brought up in Lochdubh, only passably pretty. She had been seen around one of the flashier holiday guests two summers ago, driving with him everywhere in his car, and gossiping about the grand wedding she would have. But the holidaymaker had left and Ann had gone about ill and red-eyed. She had been packed off suddenly to a relative in Glasgow. The village gossips said she had gone to have an abortion and was now walking the streets. But Hamish had heard through his relatives that she was working as a typist in a Glasgow office and had said she never wanted to see Lochdubh or her family again. If her family hadn’t been so common, she said, then her beau would have married her.

  Snobbery is a terrible thing, thought Hamish dismally. It can almost kill young girls. Would they kill because of it? That was a question well worth turning over.

  ♦

  Alice ran all the way back to the hotel and straight up to Jeremy’s room. She pounded on the door until a muffled voice shouted, “The door’s open. I’m in the bathroom.”

  She pushed open the door. Perhaps the murder had made her a little crazy or perhaps Alice had lived in a fantasy world for too long, but she justified her next action by persuading herself that they were going to be married, or would be married if she established a basis of intimacy. She strolled casually into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath.

  “Hello, darling,” she said.

  Jeremy hastily floated a large sponge over himself to act as a fig leaf and asked carefully, without looking at her, “Have you been drinking? I know we’re all shattered by this murder business but…”

  Alice came down to reality with a bump. “I’ll wait for you in the bedroom,” she gasped. “I’ve got something I must tell you.”

  She sat nervously on the bed by the window, fidgeting with the curtain cord and wishing she hadn’t been so bold.

  Jeremy came out with a white towel knotted around his waist and drying his hair with another.

  Alice turned her face away and twisted a handkerchief nervously in her hands.

  “Now you look like your usual self,” said Jeremy. “For a moment there I thought you were going to rape me.”<
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  “Don’t make fun of me,” said Alice, wishing he wouldn’t look so amused, so detached. What if Macbeth should prove to be right?

  But if they were married, it might come out. Better tell him now. And so Alice did, simply plunging into her story at the beginning and charging on until the end.

  As she talked, she was back there in that dusty court on that hot summer’s day with the tar melting on the roads outside. She could still remember her mother, crying with shame. She could remember her own sick feeling of disgrace.

  When she finished, she looked at Jeremy awkwardly. He was studying her face in an intent, serious way. Jeremy was actually wondering whether to share his own guilty secret and at the same time noticing how Alice’s schoolgirlish blouse was strained against her small, high breasts. God, it had been ages since…Then there was all this fear and worry about the murder. Yes, he knew why Alice had dreaded Lady Jane printing that bit of childhood nonsense. Hadn’t he himself gone through hell to try to shut her mouth? He glanced at the clock. Eight-thirty. Too early for a drink but not too early for that other tranquillizer.

  He sat down beside Alice on the bed and drew her against his still-damp body. “You don’t mind?” whispered Alice.

  “Of course not,” he said, stroking her hair. She smelled of nervous sweat, sharp and acrid, mixed with lavender talcum powder. He put a hand on one little breast and began to stroke it.

  Alice shivered against him. She was not a virgin, having lost that through curiosity and drink two years ago in the back of a car after a party with a man whose name she could not remember. It had been a painful and degrading experience, but he had been a heavy, vulgar sort of man.

  Women’s Lib has a long way to go before it gets inside girls like Alice. As his lips began to move against her own, her one thought was, “If I sleep with him, he’ll have to marry me.”

  As they lay stretched out on the bed, pressed together, as Alice’s clothes were removed, she had an idiotic wish that Jeremy might have been wearing some sort of status symbol, his gold wrist watch, say. For when the all-too-brief fore-play was over and she was rammed into the bed by the panting, struggling weight of this man, it all seemed as painful and degrading as that time in the back of the car. She wished he’d hurry up and get it over with. There was that terrible tyranny of the orgasm. What was it? He was obviously waiting for something to happen to her. She had read about women shrieking in ecstasy, but if she shrieked, she might bring people rushing in, thinking there had been another murder.