by M C Beaton
Mrs. Morton turned out to be God’s gift to a policeman – a lonely grey-haired widow anxious for company and anxious to talk.
“Yes, yes, I remember Agnes Macwhirter. Beautiful girl and knew it. Full of herself. All the boys were mad for her. Said she was going to be someone someday. Went to business college and said she would be secretary to someone famous, like a film star.”
“And did she become secretary to someone famous?”
“No, she ended up as a pretty ordinary secretary working for the manager of a children’s wear factory in Dumfries.”
Hamish looked at her sharply. “Did you say Dumfries?”
“Yes, indeed. Now what was the place called. I’ll remember in a moment. It’s funny at my age how one remembers things clearly from the old days but nothing much about yesterday. I remember her mother coming down to tell me. Poor Mrs. Macwhirter, the cancer took her off. I know, it was Tot Modes, that’s it, Tot Modes in Dumfries.”
“Can you remember the name of the manager?”
She shook her head regretfully.
Dumfries, thought Hamish. That’s where Gilchrist had come from.
“I’d best find somewhere to stay the night and then I might drive over to Dumfries in the morning.”
“I have a spare room here,” said Mrs. Morton, loneliness peering out of her old eyes. “I would be glad of the company.”
Hamish hesitated. He would have liked to rack up in some anonymous hotel room and sort out his thoughts. But he knew what it was like to feel lonely and one day he would be old himself, and to hell with it…
“That is most kind of you,” he said. He retired early however, feeling if he looked through another album of ancient photographs he would scream.
♦
He awoke early but Mrs. Morton was up before him and had prepared a massive breakfast. Hamish longed to offer to pay for food and accommodation but was afraid of offending her. But when he left, he put two twenty-pound notes in an envelope and left it on the bedside table with a note: “This is for your favourite charity,” hoping that Mrs. Motion’s favourite charity was herself, for he knew she sorely needed money. The little flat was spotless, but everything was shabby and worn.
He set out for Dumfries, grateful that although the weather was cold, it was still dry. Skeletal winter trees held their black tracery of branches up in supplication to an unforgiving sky. He took all seasons as they came, finding some beauty in all, but beginning to have an intimation of how much he would learn to hate the winter when he was older. Mrs. Morton had said she hailed each spring as a gift from God, knowing she would be alive for another year, because old people died in winter.
He had not phoned, and wondering if the children’s clothing factory would be still in operation, he stopped at the main post office in Dumfries and looked up the phone book. To his relief Tot Modes was listed. He drove out to an industrial estate and found the factory, which consisted of two long low buildings and asked for the manager.
The manager, a Mr. Goodman, was, Hamish saw with disappointment, a relatively young man. But he explained why he had called.
“That would be in my father’s time,” said Mr. Goodman.
“Is he still alive?”
“Yes, I’ll just phone him and say you will be calling, and then I’ll give you directions.”
Another twenty minutes and Hamish found himself confronting Mr. Goodman, senior, a portly old gentleman with a round face covered in so many broken veins it looked like a relief map. His eyes had the watery sheen of the perpetual drinker, but he was sober that morning and seemed delighted to have company.
“Agnes Macwhirter,” he said. “Aye, I remember her well. Bonnie lassie.”
“Can you tell me what she was like?”
“Very good secretary. Miss Perfect. Tailored white blouses, pencil skirts, that sort of thing. Walking out with a respectable young doctor.”
“Doctor?” Hamish looked disappointed. “I was hoping to find some connection between her and that dentist who’s just been murdered, Frederick Gilchrist.”
“Oh, him.” Then the old man stared at Hamish. “Of course, Gilchrist, that was the fellow. He was only a student when he was here. That’s right. Someone said he was a dental student, studying to be a dentist.”
“And he knew Miss Macwhirter?”
“Knew her? He ruined that lassie’s life.”
“How?”
“At first it seemed the Romeo and Juliet romance o’ all time. He would wait outside the factory for her in his car every evening. She was besotted with him. I got a wee bit worried because her work began to fall off, and then she began to turn up late in the mornings, hungover and – what’s the word? – looking shagged.”
Hamish suppressed a grin. “You mean they were having an affair?”
“Aye, talk went around. I couldn’t understand why the time passed on his holidays with no sign of a ring on her finger. I mean, things were stricter in those days. Her work got worse. I sat her down and had a wee talk to her. I said unless she pulled her socks up, I would need to fire her. She had grown insolent and she tossed her hair and said she’d soon be married so I had better start looking for a replacement, and then the next day she didn’t turn up, and a week later, she sent a note saying she had resigned. I got another secretary and forgot about it, until, oh, it must have been three months later, I was walking along with the wife, and she said, “Let’s cross the road. There’s these awful bikers.” I looked and there was this gang of blokes on motorcycles outside this pub, all sideburns and black leather and metal studs, and hanging around the neck of one of the bikers was Agnes Macwhirter. What a change! Her hair was a brassy blonde and she looked like a tart. I thought, that one will be on the streets before long, but she married one of those hoodlums, called Macbean, I think. He subsequently ran a pub and then a hotel, and then I never heard any more of her, Macbean or Gilchrist. The odd thing was that I read all about the murder in the newspapers and I didn’t connect the Gilchrist who was murdered with the dental student. I don’t get out much and no one comes to see me. Will you be having a dram?”
“I’m driving,” said Hamish.
“Well, a cup of tea?”
He wanted to escape from the loneliness of the old, but he said, “Thank you,” and virtue had its reward, for after making tea, Mr. Goodman produced some old staff photos. “There’s Agnes, at the Christmas party.”
She had indeed been beautiful then, and with a voluptuous figure.
Here was a motive for murder at last, thought Hamish. He forced himself to spend an hour with Mr. Goodman and then made his escape, putting on the police siren this time and breaking all speed limits on the road north.
When he finally reached Lochdubh at seven in the evening, he went straight to the police station and reluctantly picked up the phone. He knew if he tried to question Mrs. Macbean himself, he would probably be thrown out of the hotel, and this was news he could not, should not keep to himself.
He told Jimmy Anderson what he had found out. “You’re a miracle, Hamish,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell Blair and we’ll pull her in now.”
“You can tell him, I want to be in on the questioning,” said Hamish. “He would never have found this out without me.”
“Aye, I’ll tell him. Give us a bit to get her back here.”
Hamish then phoned Sarah but was told she had gone out for dinner. He went along to the Italian restaurant, but she was not there, so he ate a solitary meal and then set out for Strathbane.
♦
Mrs. Macbean had red plastic hair rollers in mis time. Hamish sat in a corner of the interrogation room with a policewoman while Blair began the examination.
“Why did you not tell us you knew Gilchrist afore you were married?”
“It was a long time ago,” she said angrily.
“You had an affair with him. Did you murder him?”
“No, I did not,” she said, folding her arms. “The only reason I went to him was because he pu
lled my teeth and didnae charge a thing.”
Hamish looking at her thin mouth, rollered hair, bad-tempered face, thick body and rounded shoulders could not find a trace left of that happy, laughing beautiful girl of the staff photograph.
“Where were you on the morning of the murder?”
“I was at the hotel.”
“Witnesses?”
“I was in my room. My daughter’ll tell ye.”
“We need an independent witness. One of the guests, someone like that.”
“Whit time was the murder?”
“Between ten and eleven as you very well know,” said Blair.
“Aye, I was at the hotel. I know. I phoned down to Johnny at the bar sometime about then and asked if the insurance men had been yet.”
“We’ll check with him. But I think you killed him,” Blair shouted right in her face.
She leaned back in her chair and looked at him with contempt. “Prove it.”
The questioning went on while Hamish studied her, his mind working furiously. He was suddenly sure she had not done it. But she had known Gilchrist, had loved him passionately. Jeannie Gilchrist had thought her husband had been married before because she sensed there was someone in his past he had not got over. Yet Gilchrist with his penchant for attractive young women would find nothing left in her to love, in what had become an ugly, bad-tempered woman. She could not even pay him to…He sat up. It was a long shot.
Hamish interrupted Blair. “Sir?”
Blair swung round furiously. “Whit?”
“I chust wanted to ask Mrs. Macbean where the money is, the money she promised to Gilchrist.”
There was a dead silence. One red roller fell from Mrs. Macbean’s head and came to rest in front of Blair.
Mrs. Macbean was now staring at Hamish, all truculence gone.
“The way I see it is this.” Hamish’s gentle Highland voice sounded in the stillness of the room. “You had loved Gilchrist more than you had ever loved any man. You are unhappy in your marriage. You could no longer attract him. He was having an affair with a pretty young girl. But he liked money, he was worried sick about money. I think for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds he would have gone off with you. What happened? Did he take the money and then refuse?” Hamish watched her face closely. “No, that’s not it. You’ve still got the money. You’d best tell us where for we’ll take your room apart, take the hotel apart. I know you’ve got it and we’ll keep you here for as long as it takes to get you to confess.”
A long silence followed. Blair gave an impatient grunt For one moment, he thought Hamish had discovered something, but this was sidetracking. He wanted a murderer.
“Better to be damned as a thief than a murderer,” said Hamish.
But she had regained her composure. She shrugged. “Search my room all you want,” she said. “You won’t find anything.”
Hamish stared at her. “No,” he said, “perhaps not in your room. Your daughter’s room?” No reaction. “So somewhere in the hotel.” She stared at him boldly. “Och, well, now let’s chust say not in the hotel, but outside…buried.”
Her eyes flickered. “Can I have a cigarette?”
“Buried,” said Hamish flatly. “In the hotel grounds. Should be easy to find this winter weather. We’ll look for a sign of recent digging. Shouldn’t take long.”
Silence.
“Well, you’ve had your say, Hamish…” Blair was just beginning when Mrs. Macbean, who had not taken her eyes off Hamish, said, “You bastard. You knew all the time. Who was it told you? Darleen?”
“So it was you what stole the money,” said Blair, suddenly wishing Hamish miles away so that he could take all the credit for this.
She gave a little sigh. “I loved him,” she said. She looked at Hamish and for a moment her eyes blazed with something, for one split second the ghost of the pretty girl she had once been shone out at him, and then she began to sob in a helpless dreary way. “I couldn’t even mourn him,” she said at last. “I couldnae even shed a tear or folks might have guessed. He said if I got the money we could go away together and start a new life. It wisnae really stealing, that’s what he said. The insurance company would pay up and the insurance company could afford it. We would go to Spain. I would get away from Macbean. Funny thing, marriage. I think I hated that man a week after we were wed but the years dragged on and on and on. I stayed for Darleen, but she’s become a hard little bitch. She wouldnae hae missed me. Oh God, I didnae kill him.”
But Blair gave her a wolfish smile and hitched his chair closer to the table. As far as he was concerned, Mrs. Macbean had killed Gilchrist and he was going to stay up all night to make her confess.
Hamish arrived back at the police station in Lochdubh at dawn, feeling bone weary. Despite Blair’s insistent and truculent questioning, Mrs. Macbean had not cracked. She had told them where the money was hidden and it had been recovered but she insisted she had not murdered the dentist. The barman was pulled in and confirmed that she had phoned down at the time the murder was taking place. And then he remembered a maid had taken clean sheets up to Mrs. Macbean’s room. Mrs. Macbean did not share a room with her husband. Both lived separately in respective hotel rooms. A long wait while the maid was located, a local woman with an impeccable reputation, a Mrs. Tandy, who confirmed that at ten-thirty on the morning of the murder, she had taken clean sheets in to Mrs. Macbean. So that had been that. Mrs. Macbean had been charged with the theft. The fact that Hamish Macbeth had solved the robbery did not earn him any kudos with Blair, who had grown quite savage when he had realised the murder was still unsolved.
Hamish went wearily to bed. Before he fell asleep, he wondered again if there had been any connection between the Smiley brothers and the dentist. Greed for money had been at the back of the Smileys’ operation and Gilchrist had been greedy for money.
The phone rang several times from the police office, dragging him up out of the depths of sleep, but each time he remembered he had left the answering machine switched on and the murderer was hardly likely to phone him up and confess.
He slept for six hours and rose, still feeling tired and gritty. He washed and shaved and put on his uniform. Then he went into the police office and played back the messages on the answering machine. First Sergeant Macgregor from Cnothan’s cross voice, wondering whether Hamish was back on duty, then Mrs. Wellington asking whether she should go back and instruct Kylie and her friends farther in the paths of righteousness, and then a lilting voice, saying cautiously, “This is Fred Sutherland. I think I’ve found out something about Kylie. I should’ve told you afore, but I didnae think of it. Can ye come as soon as possible?”
∨ Death of a Dentist ∧
9
Alice was puzzled. “In our country,” she remarked, “there’s only one day at a time.”
—Lewis Carrol
As he drove to Braikie, Hamish wondered what Fred Sutherland had to tell him. Whatever Fred had to tell him about Kylie was probably something he knew already.
There is very little daylight in the north of Scotland in whiter and Hamish, still tired, still with sore ribs, felt he had been living in a long dark tunnel for some time.
He parked outside the dress shop. Slowly he mounted the stairs, past the dentist’s surgery. He then realised he had been making his way up the stone staircase by the light of the street lamp outside. There was no light on the staircase. He went down to the surgery door and looked up. The light-bulb on the socket on the first landing was not there.
He went back to the Land Rover and got his torch and began to climb the stairs again. His senses were alert now, listening for any movement, any sound, as wary of danger as an animal in the woods.
He knocked at Fred Sutherland’s door. Then he flashed the torch upwards. No bulb in the light socket here either.
He tried the handle. The door swung slowly open. “Fred,” called Hamish. “Fred Sutherland?”
Was this another trick by Kylie and her friends? But
then old Fred would never be a party to it.
He found the light switch and pressed it down. The little entrance hall was bleak and bare.
He then went into the living room. Fred Sutherland lay dead on the floor, his head bashed in. Someone had struck him a cruel and savage blow on the forehead.
Hamish knelt down by the old man and felt for the pulse which he knew already he would not find. His first guilty and miserable thought was that this was what became of involving the public in a murder enquiry. He saw the phone on a little table by the fireplace and went and lifted the receiver. The phone was dead. He looked down at the cord and saw that it had been cut near the wall.
He darted down the stairs to the Land Rover and contacted Strathbane on the radio and then, that done, went back up the stairs to wait. Without touching anything, he studied the scene. There was no sign of forced entry. The television set was still there. No drawers had been ransacked. It looked as if Fred had not kept the outside door locked. Someone had walked in and bludgeoned him to death in the doorway of his living room. Hamish then looked sadly at the old framed photographs dotted about the room: Fred, handsome and gallant in army uniform, Fred with a pretty girl on his arm, then a wedding photograph.
The contingent from Strathbane finally arrived, headed by Detective Chief Inspector Blair, red-eyed and truculent, with pyjama bottoms peeking out from below his trousers, showing he had been roused from bed.
Hamish told Blair about the message from the old man. “Right,” snapped Blair, “let’s get this girl in for questioning. Why didn’t you tell us about her before, Macbeth?”
“I had only just found out,” lied Hamish. “I have a report typed up I was going to send over to you tomorrow.”
Blair looked at him suspiciously. “Your trouble, Macbeth, is that you like to keep everything to yourself. If I find you caused this old boy’s death by not reporting what you know about this girl to us in due time, I’ll have ye off the force.”
Hamish gave him Kylie’s address. He was sure she would not tell about the entrapment – unless of course she panicked when the police arrived and assumed that was why they were there.
