by M C Beaton
“It could be. On the other hand, I got the impression that Mrs. Macbean was a bitter and unbalanced woman. I think her shrinking away from me when I mentioned Gilchrist was caused by nothing more sinister than a sort of paranoid secrecy. Women will tell you about their private lives and then suddenly resent you bitterly for having been the recipient.”
“It could be. I didn’t order any wine and that sour-faced Jenkins didn’t even offer us the wine menu.”
“I don’t feel like drinking wine. Do you?” asked Sarah.
“Not really. After that headache-inducing hooch, I don’t feel like any more alcohol. Now one thing did come up today. The CID will have gone through the contents of Gilchrist’s house, his papers, photographs, bankbooks, things like that. I would dearly like to know what they found out.” He looked at her quizzically.
Sarah laughed. “You want me to have another go at hacking. But how on earth are we both to get to the police station in this weather?”
“Priscilla has a computer in her apartment at the top of the castle.”
“Wouldn’t Mr. Johnson think it odd if we asked for the key? I assume it’s locked up when she is away.”
“You could say she had asked you to collect something for her. I know, an address logged in her computer.”
“I’ll try.” She stood up. “You wait here. I’ll ask the manager myself.”
After only a few minutes she came back and placed a key on the table. “Very trusting of him,” said Sarah, sitting down. “I mean, I could be some con pretending to be a friend of Priscilla’s.”
“Priscilla often phones up the hotel to make sure everything is still running smoothly. That’s a point. What if she phones up tonight?”
“You are friends, or so I gather. I will just tell her the truth.”
“Aye, that would do.” Hamish leaned back in his chair and looked at her thoughtfully. He was grateful to her, for her help, but more for her beauty and charm, which banished any wistful thoughts about the absent Priscilla. “How can you be sure you will be able to hack into the police computer this time?” he asked. “Blair will have changed his password.”
“I can only try,” said Sarah. She hesitated and then said, “Let me put this dinner on my bill. It’s very pricey and you can’t earn that much as a village policeman.”
“That’s kind of you, but – ” He broke off as Mr. Johnson came up to them.
“Priscilla’s on the phone,” he said, “and you going up to her apartment to look for an address seems to be the first she’s heard of it.”
Hamish stood up. “Is she still on the phone?”
“Yes.”
Hamish smiled at Sarah. “I’ll chust be having a wee word with her.”
“You can talk to her on the phone at reception,” said Mr. Johnson, following him out and then standing next to him when he picked up the phone.
“Priscilla?”
“Yes, Hamish, what’s all this about you and Sarah wanting the key to my apartment?”
Hamish hunched over the phone, his back to the manager.
“You’ve forgotten,” he said. “You know you asked her to look up thon address for you.”
There was a silence and then Priscilla said, “As you very well know I did nothing of the kind. You want to use my computer for something.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got a computer at that police station.”
“Aye, the weather’s that bad, I don’t think I’ll make it back to the police station tonight.”
Another silence. Somewhere behind Priscilla, a man’s voice, lazy and amused, said, “Are you going to be on that phone all night, darling?”
Hamish’s heart lurched.
“Oh, go ahead,” said Priscilla. “I trust Sarah even if I don’t trust you, Hamish Macbeth. You obviously can’t tell me about it. Phone me sometime when you can. Bye. You’d best put Johnson back on the phone and I’ll tell him it’s all right.”
Hamish silently handed the phone back to the manager and trailed back to the dining room.
“What’s the matter, Hamish?” demanded Sarah sharply. “Was she furious?”
Hamish forced a smile although his hazel eyes were bleak. “No, no, she said it wass all right. But we’ve got to phone her when Johnson isn’t listening and tell her all about it.”
“Did Priscilla help you with any of your investigations?”
“Yes, quite a few, some of them verra dangerous, too.”
“You must have been very close.”
“Aye, you could say that.” There was an awkward silence. The shutters were down over Hamish’s eyes.
“So,” said Sarah brightly, “do you want coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
Mr. Johnson approached them again. “Priscilla says dinner is on the house.”
“That’s very good of her,” said Hamish, while all the time he was wondering furiously – who was that man?
After the manager had left again, Hamish wrenched his mind back to the case. “The thing about all mis that bothers me is that I get mis mad feeling that the burglary and the murder are connected in some way.”
“I don’t see how they could possibly be,” remarked Sarah.
“Nor me. Chust an intuition.”
Sarah privately noticed the sibilance of Hamish’s Highland accent. It always seemed to become more marked when he was upset. Speaking to Priscilla had upset him. Of course it could be simply because she had ticked him off for trying to lie his way into her apartment, but that would hardly allow for the bleakness of his eyes.
“So tell me again about this still,” she said aloud. “When will they appear in court?”
“They won’t,” said Hamish. “I’ve given them a warning and time to close it down.”
“But what they are doing is illegal! Why didn’t you arrest them?”
“There iss something in the Highlander that does not regard the illegal making of whisky as a crime,” said Hamish. “Out in the Hebrides, there was a new policeman, new to the area, and he arrested two of the locals and charged them with running an illegal still. He had to take refuge on the roof of the police station as the locals tried to burn it down. There are chust some things a Highland policeman has to turn a blind eye to. Even farther south, they can get a bit vindictive.”
“You’ve heard of the RSPB – the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds?”
“Of course. In fact, I used to be a member but I cancelled my subscription.”
“Why?”
“They wrote to me appealing for funds and pointing out that they had the means to be a political force. I did not want to be associated with anything that wanted to be a political force.”
“Aye, well, down in Perthshire, the gamekeepers get really tired of birds of prey and that includes golden eagles. You see, these protected birds of prey wreak havoc on stocks of young grouse and pheasant. A gamekeeper was fined £2,500 at Perth Sheriff Court after he admitted placing six hen’s eggs laced with poison in an area that is home to golden eagles and other birds of prey. After that, an estate belonging to a former employee of the RSPB was vandalised. The estate has the British national collection of thousands of rare and valuable plants imported from the Himalayas. They were doused in weedkiller and ‘RSPB’ etched in nine-foot letters on the lawn with herbicide. Although nothing could be proved, it was believed to be a revenge attack connected to the sentencing of the gamekeeper.”
“Now, I am not condoning it, for it was a wicked and nasty piece of vandalism. On the other hand, there is a great deal of frustration felt among gamekeepers at the attitude of what they privately damn as a lot of moronic townees. Many in the Highlands owe their livelihood to the great shooting estates, and there’s not much work anywhere else.”
“It certainly feels like another part of the world up here,” said Sarah, “and not like part of the British Isles at all. Sutherland. Someone told me that was the southland of the Vikings.”
“I believe so,” said Ha
mish, who in fact did not know much of Sutherland’s history.
“So,” said Sarah, beginning to rise, “if you’ve finished, let’s start on a life of crime.”
Hamish led the way upstairs to Priscilla’s apartment With an odd feeling, a mixture of guilt and loss, he turned the key in the lock, swung the door open and switched on the light. Everything in the living room was as cool and ordered as Priscilla herself. Sarah went straight to the computer, which sat on a desk at the window. She sat down in front of it.
“I suggest you read something, or think about something,” she said over her shoulder. “This might take some time.”
Hamish wandered over to the bookshelves, and suddenly conscious again of his lack of knowledge of his home county, he took down The Sutherland Book, edited by Donald Omand, and settled down to study it.
Sutherland, is an immense District lashed by the waves of the Minch in the west, where the legendary blue men ride the Atlantic waves ready to lure unwary sailors to their doom, by the cold North Sea where the Vikings of old landed their longships, in the north-east by the fertile lands of Caithness, in the south-east by the waters of the Moray Firth, while in the south Sutherland melts into the beauty of Ross. They are a mixed bag of Celts, Scots, Rets, Vikings, and since the Clearances, with not an inconsiderable leavening of Lowlanders brought in to look after the sheep. Wherever they came from, the low-lying mists, the dark lochs and tarns, the dreary moors and the towering mountains were bound to have added to the superstitions they already held and accentuated their fear of the unknown.
The landscape still works on the imagination, thought Hamish, raising his eyes from the printed page. People come up here from the cities and begin to believe in ghosts and fairies before they’ve settled for very long.
Sarah gave a little sigh. “Nothing yet?” asked Hamish.
“Not yet. Need more time.”
Hamish began to read about water horses.
Of all the supernatural creatures flitting through the pages of folklore, none was so feared as the water horse, in Gaelic, Each Uisge. In my own childhood, we were forbidden to go near certain lochs which were dark and dangerous because they were said to be the haunts of water horses. In the Highlands with stormy seas, wave-lashed islands, short and rushing rivers and deep dark lochs, water power was feared and looked on as malignant. This malignancy often took the form of a horse that could change shape into a handsome young man or even an old woman. Indeed the water horse or kelpie as it was sometimes called could change form at will to lure its victims to their deaths.
“Got it! We’re in!” cried Sarah.
He went over to join her. “Blair’s new password?”
She nodded.
“What is it?”
“Shite. I thought it might be shit, but in Scotland people use the old form and say shite.”
“Nasty bugger.”
“Bring a chair over and we’ll see if we can get a report on Gilchrist’s belongings.”
Hamish obediently carried a hardback chair and placed it next to her and sat down. She flicked busily through various reports and then said, “Here we go.”
They eagerly read the contents of the dentist’s home. He had not left a will and police were still searching for any living relative. There was no evidence of a wife before Jeannie in Inverness. There had been no photographs at all. Odd that, thought Hamish. There was a bar in the living room stocked with the finest malt whiskies. Clothes were listed as tailored and expensive, silk shirts, handmade shoes. His car was a BMW only a few months old.
“Obviously earned a mint and spent it,” murmured Hamish. “But no photographs! Passport, birth certificate, school certificates, university and dental college, but no personal records of the holiday snapshot kind. Not even a wedding photograph. Damn, this iss not helping. I wish I could see the place.”
“There’ll be a policeman on duty outside the place. Couldn’t you just go over and chat to him and ask him if you could have a look around?”
“I could try. That’s if the roads are passable in the morning.”
“Will you be able to get home tonight?”
Hamish went to the window and looked out. In the hotel’s floodlights, he could see white sheets of snow savagely tearing across the courtyard below.
“Might have to stay the night,” he said slowly.
She looked at him. Their eyes locked. The air was suddenly charged with sexual tension. He took a half step towards her and then the door swung open and Mr. Johnson came in. “Weather’s terrible, Hamish,” he said. “I’ve arranged a wee room for you down by the office so you can stay the night. In fact, if you’ve finished here, I’ll take you down.”
“I don’t know,” said Hamish reluctantly. He looked hopefully at Sarah, but she was already switching off the computer. That air of sexual excitement had gone, not even a frisson.
“As a matter of fact, I am pretty tired,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning, Hamish.”
“Story of my life,” muttered Hamish as he followed the manager downstairs.
“What?” asked Mr. Johnson.
“Nothing,” said Hamish crossly. “Nothing at all.”
♦
He awoke in the morning to white stillness. The room allocated to him was one of the ones given to hotel servants. It contained the narrow bed on which he was lying, a wardrobe, chair and nothing else, not even a handbasin.
He got up and went to the window. The room was on the ground floor. He looked out at a wall of white. That was all he could see. A huge drift was blocking the view.
He took his underwear off the radiator – he had washed it and put it there to dry – and then wrapped the bedcover around his nakedness, went along to the narrow bathroom used by the staff, and took a shower. By the time he was fully dressed, he could hear the scrape of shovels outside the hotel in the courtyard and the roar of tractors as the outdoor staff began to dig paths around the hotel to free the snowbound cars.
There was a smell of frying bacon. He went through to the dining room where he found Sarah eating toast and marmalade. He felt suddenly shy of her, but she smiled at him in a friendly way and said, “How are we to get anywhere today?”
“We, Sherlock?” he asked, sitting down opposite her.
“I thought that if perhaps we went to Gilchrist’s house, two of us could charm our way past the policeman on duty, but I don’t see how we are going to be able to move.”
He looked out the long dining room windows. “It’s stopped snowing, and they’re better up here than they are in the cities at getting the roads cleared. As long as the snow stays off, we might be able to move. After breakfast, I’ll get my snowshoes on and go back to the police station and collect the Land Rover.”
“And you’ll take me with you?”
“Against police regulations, but I could always explain that I found you stranded and gave you a lift. I wonder if I could ask you a favour?”
“Go on.”
“Could you get back into that computer and see if there’s any reference to Gilchrist’s bank accounts?”
“I could, but I can tell you now, there was no reference to his finances.”
Hamish banged the table in frustration. “It’s aye the same,” he complained. “I cannae get the full picture because I’m nothing more than the village bobby.”
“You could change that.”
“Och, it would mean living in Strathbane and I couldnae bear that.”
Hamish relapsed into a moody silence.
The waitress came up to them. “More coffee?”
They both refused. Then she said, “Oh, Mr. Macbeth, Mr. Angus Macdonald was on the phone. He says not to forget the salmon.”
“How did he know I was here?”
“Mr. Macdonald always knows.”
“Who’s Mr. Macdonald?” asked Sarah.
“He’s the local seer. He claims to have the second sight.”
“And does he?”
“I think he’s a verra
clever old gossip.”
“So what’s this about a salmon?”
“He wanted a river salmon, but chust look at the weather. I bought him one in the fishmongers in Braikie and the auld beast sussed out it wass a farm salmon and threatens me with all sorts of bad luck unless I get him the right one.”
Sarah looked at him curiously. “How did he know it was a farm salmon?”
“He waved his damn crystal ower it, but I think one o’ his gossips phoned him from Braikie.”
Sarah looked out at the white wilderness outside. “You certainly won’t be able to catch anything in this weather.”
“Well, let me get my snowshoes and see if I can make it back to the police station.”
When Hamish emerged from the hotel, a couple of tractors with snowploughs attached had cleared the hotel forecourt and even the narrow road outside had already been ploughed and salted. The sky above was steel grey but no snow fell. He trudged down into Lochdubh through the frozen landscape. Everything was still, everything was quiet. No bird sang. Not even a buzzard sailed up to the cold sky. The tops of the twin mountains above Lochdubh were hidden in mist. Fortunately, there was no wind to whip up the snow into another land-blown blizzard.
He checked his sheep and put out their winter fodder. Then he got out a snow shovel and cleared the short drive at the side of the police station so that he could get the Land Rover out.
He then made a thermos of coffee with plenty of milk and sugar, placed it in the Land Rover and drove up to the Tommel Castle Hotel.
He was glad to have Sarah’s company.
“I hope the road’s clear all the way to Braikie,” he said. They were driving along beside the sea as the one-track road twisted and curved. Sarah looked out in amazement at the fury of the green-grey Atlantic. Waves as huge as houses pounded the rocky beach.
“Stop for a moment,” she urged.
She looked out of the window in awe at the stormy sea.
“It’s all so still on land,” she marvelled, “and yet the sea is so…furious.”
“All the way from America,” said Hamish.
“Is it always so rough?”
“No, sometimes in the summer it’s like glass. But it’s a treacherous climate up here.”
