Death of a Witch

by M C Beaton

  When Hamish put the bottle and a glass on the table, Jimmy filled the glass up to the brim and took a swig. “That’s better. Blair’s been worse than ever. Mike Haggerty, thon foreman who gave Fergus Braid an alibi, well, Blair’s decided they’re in cahoots and Mike is lying. Mike’s in the cells at the moment.”

  “Why?”

  “He shouted, ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ Blair said yes, so Mike socked him on the nose. But I think Mike will be out by now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mike’s sister, Shona, is an advocate who lives in Dingwall, and she’s demanding to hear a tape of the interview and screaming police harassment. Daviot told Blair to let her hear the tape and wouldn’t you know it, Blair hadn’t got the interview recorded so he’s in deep poo.”

  “Let’s hope that keeps him quiet for a time,” said Hamish. “He was always awful about badgering and arresting the innocent, but I swear he’s getting worse.”

  “Aye, that’s the drink for you,” said Jimmy, taking another hearty swig from his glass.

  Hamish drove down to Oban the following morning, taking the cat and dog with him. He sometimes thought the pair were worse than children, having to be regularly watered and fed. At least Sonsie’s company meant that Lugs would roam far and wide with the cat up on the moors and manage to consume quite a large amount of food without getting fat.

  The day grew darker as Hamish drove south into Ross & Cromarty. Oban was a pretty place in the summer but as he drove down to the waterfront, a gale was whipping across the harbour. He asked about Rory McBride in various shops, pubs, and restaurants along the waterfront but without meeting any success.

  He then went up to the offices of the local newspaper, the Oban Journal, and asked to see the editor.

  The editor listened to his request and then asked a reporter, Isla Damper, to go with Hamish and search the files. Isla was a tall thin girl with thick glasses and a spotty face. Her unfortunate appearance was redeemed by a soft highland voice, a charming smile, and beautiful large brown eyes flecked with gold.

  “I’ll try the weddings first,” she said, going to a large filing cabinet. “We’re putting everything on computer disks but it’s a long slow job and Wee Geordie who’s supposed to be doing the job went off to Thailand two months ago and hasn’t come back. The best thing is to look in the photo file. If this Rory McBride wasn’t local then there might just be a photo and caption.”

  She searched diligently, puffing on a cigarette. “I thought smoking was banned in offices in Scotland,” said Hamish.

  “Aye, well, there’s offices and offices.”

  After an hour of searching, she sighed. “You know, I should just put the mannie’s name up on the computer.”

  She sat down at a computer and switched it on. Hamish could see the early northern night coming down outside the window, where a seagull looked in at him with contempt before flying off.

  “Got something!” she cried. Hamish unwound himself from the typing chair he had been sitting on and looked over her shoulder. “There was a photo,” she said, “but not under marriages.”

  The photograph showed Catriona and Rory McBride on the waterfront. “On their honeymoon in Oban, happy couple Rory McBride and his wife, Catriona.”

  “Can you give me a copy of that photograph?” asked Hamish.

  “If I can find it.”

  “Try under Catriona McBride.”

  “Okay.”

  She tapped away busily. Then she said, “Our cross referencing leaves a lot to be desired. Here we are. But it’s about him. That photo was taken four years ago in July. Now here we are, still in the same July, and Rory McBride is appealing for any sighting of his missing wife.” There was the same photograph of the couple to illustrate the news item. Rory McBride was described as a crofter from Torgormack outside Beauly in Inverness-shire. He and Catriona had come to Oban to spend their honeymoon. In the middle of the second week, she had disappeared, but as she had taken her belongings with her, Hamish gathered the police were not really looking very hard for her.

  He looked at his watch, trying to calculate how long it would take him to get to Torgormack and see if he could find Rory McBride.

  He thanked Isla and left, stopping on the waterfront to buy a fresh fish for Sonsie, haggis-and-chips for himself, and a hamburger for Lugs. They all sat in the Land Rover, eating in companionable silence. Hamish wondered whether to leave going to try to find the crofter until the next day or he could phone Jimmy and get the Inverness police on to it. But he decided he wanted to see the man for himself. He also wondered if Strathbane had found out anything about Catriona Burrell’s background.

  The little crofting community at Torgormack seemed quite prosperous—a few trim bungalows instead of old croft houses. By knocking at the nearest door he got directions to Rory McBride’s address.

  It was further up the hill from the other houses and had a run-down appearance.

  Hamish rang the bell. He could hear no sound of ringing inside and so he knocked on the door. A man he barely recognised from the photograph as Rory McBride answered the door. He looked much older and careworn.

  Hamish introduced himself and said he was looking into the death of Catriona.

  “Oh, her,” said Rory wearily. “You’d best come in.”

  The living room was bleak with only a few bits of old furniture. A peat fire smouldered on the hearth, sending out very little heat.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t contact the police when you learned of her murder,” said Hamish.

  “Sit down. A dram?”

  “I’m driving,” said Hamish. “Your marriage didn’t seem to last long.”

  “No.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “I met her at the game fair down in Perth. I was fair bowled over. She was staying in Perth at the time.”

  “I’ll need that address.”

  “I’ve got it somewhere,” he said wearily. “I’ll look for it in a minute.”

  “Go on.”

  “It was a whirlwind romance. I proposed right away. I stayed at her place and then we got married in Perth and went to Oban on our honeymoon. I suppose it was my fault. I told her I was a farmer. I wanted to impress her. She started asking questions about the farm when we were in Oban. That’s when I told her I was a crofter. She stared at me and she exclaimed, ‘A croft? One of those tiny smallholdings?’ I said I had eighteen acres and kept sheep. She went a bit quiet after that. She started going off for long walks on her own.

  “Then one day I came back and she’d packed up and gone. I reported her disappearance to the police. They weren’t inclined to bother because she had taken her luggage with her. Also, she had cleaned out my wallet but somehow I couldn’t tell them that. Then someone said they had seen her getting into a fish lorry, which headed off out of the town in the middle of the night.”

  “Did you never try to find her?”

  “I did for a bit. I went back to her place in Perth but there was a new tenant there. I just gave up. It was obvious she had married me because she had thought I was a rich farmer.”

  “I’m afraid you’re now going to have detectives calling on you,” said Hamish. “It’ll look to them as if you had a reason to murder. Where were you the day she was killed? That’s estimated to have been during the night on the tenth.”

  “Here.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  “On the evening of the tenth I was down at a dance in the Lovat Arms Hotel. I didn’t leave until one in the morning.”

  Still time to drive like hell to Lochdubh, thought Hamish, but as if reading his thoughts, Rory said, “And in case you’re thinking I drove up there afterwards, my Land Rover was off the road for repairs and I went down to Beauly in the tractor.”

  “When you were staying at her place in Perth, were there any photographs? Did she talk about her family?”

  “No, come to think of it. She gave the impression she’d been an only child. I told her all ab
out my family, about my brother in Dubai and my sister in Hong Kong. In fact, I did the most of the talking. I don’t remember seeing any photographs.”

  “How much money did she steal from you?”

  “A little under two thousand pounds.”

  “What?”

  “Aye, you see, just before the Perth game show, I’d won five thousand pounds on a lottery scratch card. I was so tired of scrimping and saving. I wanted to have some fun. I got myself new clothes, I flashed money around at that game show. No wonder she thought I was rich.”

  “But you didn’t tell her about the scratch card, did you?”

  He hung his head. “I wanted to impress her. I was frightened if she knew the real truth then she wouldn’t marry me. Well, that’s hindsight. I think I only suspected that deep down.”

  “See if you can find that address in Perth for me.”

  “I remember it was Petry Road, the bottom half of a Victorian villa, but I’ll find the street number for you.”

  Hamish felt sorry for him and was glad the man seemed to have a good alibi.

  Rory came back. “It was number twenty-four A.”

  Hamish thanked him and left. It was too late now to go to Perth and he wondered if he dare take any time off the next day.

  Chapter Six

  Still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!

  —Robert Louis Stevenson

  “Now we’re in trouble!” howled Jimmy when Hamish phoned him the following morning. “Inverness police are to interview McBride today and they’ll find out you’ve been there before them. Couldn’t you just have left it to them? I’d have let you know what they found out. I’ll try to make excuses for you and keep this from Blair but don’t you dare go near that Perth address. I’ll let you know what the Perth police find out.”

  Hamish went out on his rounds. He called to question Timmy Teviot again but the forestry worker stuck doggedly to his story about poachers.

  In the evening Jimmy phoned. Catriona Burrell’s mother, Morag, had been a Gypsy who had abandoned Catriona shortly after the baby was born. She had been brought up by her father, a strict lay minister in the Methodist Church. He had died when their home had gone up in flames one night when Catriona was seventeen. Arson was suspected but nothing was ever proved. Catriona was moved into the care of her father’s sister, Agnes, a few streets away from the burnt home. When Catriona was eighteen, Agnes had died after a fall down the stairs. She had inherited her brother’s money on his death, and that money then went to Catriona.

  “How much?” asked Hamish.

  “Altogether with the insurance from the fire and then the sale of Agnes’s house plus the money old Burrell left, about three hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”

  “Worth killing for,” said Hamish. “Didn’t the police think Agnes’s death suspicious?”

  “She was older than her brother, in her late sixties, and crippled with arthritis. The death wasn’t considered suspicious.”

  “And where was Catriona at the time of the fire?”

  “In the house. She was rescued from an upstairs bedroom window by a fireman. Burrell didn’t get out.”

  “And when the aunt died, where was she?”

  “She was out in the centre of Perth with friends. Of course, they couldn’t pinpoint the exact time of death.”

  “I’d be willing to bet she bumped off both of them,” said Hamish. “Now, was there any other relative who might have felt cheated out of the inheritance?”

  “No, but there was one furious wee woman, a widow, a Mrs. Ruby Connachie. She had been stepping out with Burrell and had hopes of marrying him. She hated Catriona with a passion. At the time, she told the police that Catriona had set the fire.”

  “What was the source of the fire?”

  “A chip pan.”

  “Who cooks chips in the middle of the night?”

  “Catriona said that her father cooked all the meals. This seems to have been true. He fancied himself a nutritionist. Catriona said they had fish-and-chips for tea and her father must have left the gas on low under the chip pan. From the remains of the cooker, they estimated that seemed to be the case. Sister Agnes said she was surprised because Horace Burrell, her brother, only cooked healthy food and never fried anything. So perhaps our witch left the pan on deliberately until it hotted up and burst into flames. There’s another curious thing. Ruby Connachie had had a tour of the house with the view to becoming the next Mrs. Burrell. She swore Burrell had a lock on his bedroom door, but no remains of a lock were found although the door was burnt to cinders. I wonder if Catriona locked him in and threw away the key.”

  “They would look for the lock, surely.”

  “Ruby only came out with all of this after the death of Agnes. The fire was quickly put down as an accident. The bedroom floor had collapsed in flames before the firemen could save it. All Catriona had to do was wait, go into the ruin when the investigation was over, and find the thing.”

  “So what’s this Ruby like?”

  “Churchgoing, God-fearing wee body. She said Catriona was the ‘devil’s spawn.’”

  “Looks as if she might be right,” said Hamish gloomily. “Whoever killed Catriona hated her. And that fire could have been retribution rather than to cover up any forensic evidence. What’s this Ruby’s alibi?”

  “She lives alone. She was certainly seen out and about in Perth, shopping, visiting the church, that sort of thing. She could have driven up during the night. She’s got a car.”

  “What’s her alibi for the time the fire was lit at the witch’s cottage?”

  There was a rustling of papers. Then Jimmy said, “Nobody asked her. I’ll phone Perth and tell them to get on it right away.”

  “The way Catriona went on,” said Hamish, “the whole of Scotland’s probably littered wi’ folks who wanted to murder her.”

  “You sound quite cheerful about it. Glad suspicion’s moving away from the local teuchters?”

  “Not at all,” said Hamish. Although he knew Jimmy was right.

  But Timmy Teviot knew something and he wasn’t talking. Hamish decided to order him to come to the police station and make a full statement about the poachers.

  Timmy turned up that evening. Try as he would to trip him up, Hamish found that Timmy stuck unwaveringly to his original story.

  Hamish was to say later that not only did the case go cold, it went into deep freeze. On the day that there was a march in Strathbane against global warming, blizzards hurled down from the north, blanketing the countryside. Most of the protesters had come in from other parts of the country and soon found themselves stranded.

  The snow piled up, blocking the highland roads despite the diligence of the snow ploughs. At Christmas, Lochdubh looked like an old-fashioned Christmas card with candlelight shining at the cottage windows because there had been a massive power cut. At a break in the storms, Hamish used snowshoes to visit the outlying crofts. Two weeks into the new year, and the snow was still falling.

  In his kitchen, Lesley’s stew pot and cake plate lay as a mute reminder that she had never come back to collect them and that, before the snow, he had not even tried to contact her.

  He suddenly remembered the brothel idea. He got out an ordnance survey map and began to map off locations in easy reach of Lochdubh where someone could run a brothel without alerting the neighbours. The spirit of John Knox still gripped parts of the north, and he was sure if it had been a large business, he would have heard of it. Someone would have reported it.

  It would not, he thought, be an isolated croft house up on the moors because crofting neighbours would have reported something to him. When they were out with their sheep, they saw everything in the landscape that moved.

  Then if men from Lochdubh had been visiting it, it would need to be somewhere quite close.

  Perhaps Angus Macdonald, the seer, knew something. Hamish was
very cynical about the seer’s psychic powers but knew that Angus collected a good deal of useful gossip.

  Also, he realised, he should call on Angus anyway. The man must be in his seventies and might be in the need of food.

  Hamish went to Patel’s and filled up a haversack with powdered milk—there had been no deliveries of fresh milk—locally baked bread, butter, cheese, tea, and coffee. Putting on his snowshoes and hoisting the haversack on his back, he set off to climb up the hill at the back to Angus’s cottage.

  To his alarm, there was no answer to his knock at the door. He tried the handle and found the door unlocked. He walked in, calling, “Angus!”

  He heard a faint croak from the bedroom and opened the door. Angus was huddled in bed. The room was freezing.

  “What’s up, Angus?” asked Hamish, bending over him.

  “I think it’s the flu, Hamish. Dr. Brodie came up. He said it was a bad cold and left me some pills to take my temperature down.”

  “I’ll get a fire going in this bedroom for a start,” said Hamish.

  He worked busily, lighting a fire and then, in the kitchen, preparing a bowl of soup and some toast and carrying the lot in on a tray to Angus. He propped the seer up on his pillows and placed the tray in front of him. “Try to get that down you,” said Hamish, “and I’ll make you some tea afterwards. You shouldnae be alone like this.”

  Hamish retreated into the kitchen and phoned Mrs. Wellington. After he had made Angus tea and persuaded him to take some aspirin, Hamish heard approaching voices and went to the front door.

  There was nothing in the world, he thought, more indomitable than the ladies of Lochdubh. Fighting their way up the hill came Mrs. Wellington, the Currie sisters, and Angela. Angela was pulling a laden sledge.

  Soon the little cottage was a hive of activity. Angus was persuaded to move through to his living room wrapped in blankets and sit by the fire until the sheets on his bed were changed.