by M C Beaton
‘I’d like to, Mr Pomfret,’ said Hamish. ‘But it’s like this. Unless the colonel invites me, I chust cannot put my nose into this. And the colonel is not going to invite me. In fact, he sent word to stop me coming here tonight, but the message got lost on the way. Besides, any suggestion of a referee would mean the colonel would be made to look as if he thought one of his guests was about to cheat, and he wouldn’t stand for that.’
‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ said Jeremy, pouting like a disappointed baby. ‘Sorry to have troubled you.’
Hamish continued on his way out.
He picked up the parcel containing the waiter’s clothes from a chair in the hall and made his way out on to the drive.
Peter Bartlett, smoking a cigar, was pacing up and down.
‘Sobering up for the big day,’ he said when he saw Hamish.
‘Good luck,’ said Hamish politely, fishing for his car keys.
‘You’ve heard about the bet?’ asked Bartlett.
Hamish nodded. ‘I hear it’s for quite a bit of money,’ he said.
‘Yes, quite a stroke of luck that, finding old Pomfret here.’ Bartlett’s white teeth gleamed in a broad smile. ‘And I thought I was going to have to be content with that Arab’s miserly two thousand pounds.’
Hamish, who had been about to open his car door, stopped and turned around. ‘And what Arab would that be, Captain?’ he asked slowly.
‘Just some old oil sheikh in London. He’s heard stories about the honour of dining on Scottish grouse on the day of the Glorious Twelfth itself, so I offered to get a brace for him – at a price, you understand.’
‘And how will you get them to London in time for the sheikh’s dinner, Captain?’
‘He’s paying for that. He’ll have a helicopter here before nine in the morning. That’ll take the birds to Inverness airport. The helicopter pilot will put them on the shuttle plane to London, and one of the sheikh’s flunkeys will pick them up at London airport.’
Hamish studied the captain thoughtfully. ‘And the sheikh will send you a cheque, I suppose?’
‘Not likely. When I hand over the grouse, the helicopter pilot will hand me a packet – two thousand pounds in cash. I drive a hard bargain.’
‘So,’ said Hamish, ‘if you bag a brace by noon or so, you’re sure to get the two thousand?’
‘Exactly,’ said Peter Bartlett with a wolfish grin. ‘Just can’t lose.’
‘So if you don’t get the first brace, you’ll only have to pay Mr Pomfret three thousand pounds. And, of course, those side bets you’ve been making.’
Peter Bartlett thrust his head forward, peering into Hamish’s face in the gathering gloom. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
‘Don’t worry, my dear constable-chappie. I won’t lose.’
‘In that case,’ said Hamish, opening his car door, ‘I’ll say goodnight.’
‘Look here,’ said the captain, putting a hand on Hamish’s shoulder, ‘do you believe in that thing, you know, where you can tell what’s about to happen? The second sight – that’s it.’
Hamish patiently turned around. He was accustomed to weeping drunks, fighting drunks, and psychic drunks.
‘And just what do you think is going to happen?’ he asked politely.
‘I’ve got this feeling someone’s out to get me,’ said the captain. ‘I feel a lot of menace about . . . oh, it’s hard to explain.’
‘I think it iss very easy to explain, Captain Bartlett,’ said Hamish. ‘If a man puts as many backs up as you have, then it iss almost a form of suicide. I haff met people before who could not bring themselves to put an end to their lives, and so they went around goading other people into doing it for them. Goodnight. Captain Bartlett.’
He drove off and left Peter Bartlett staring after him.
Chapter Four
I once read the last words of a suicide, in which he stated he hoped the jury would not return a verdict of ‘accidental death’ or ‘death by misadventure’, because he thoroughly understood what he was doing when he shot himself, and did not wish it handed down to posterity that he belonged to the class of idiots who inadvertently would handle a weapon in such a way as to cause risk to themselves or others.
– Charles Lancaster
Police Constable Hamish Macbeth did not sleep well. Towser lay at the end of his bed, across his feet, snoring dreadfully. The sleepless sea-gulls wheeled and screamed over the loch outside, an owl hooted mournfully, and then there came the sharp bark of a fox.
‘And to think the tourists come here for the peace and quiet,’ mumbled Hamish. After another futile hour of trying to fall asleep, he struggled out of bed. Although it was only five in the morning, the sky was already light. He looked out of his bedroom window, which faced over the loch.
It had been a bad summer to date, but this morning had all the signs of heralding a perfect day. A thin mist was rising from the glassy loch. The humped hills on the other side with their stands of larch and birch floated in the mist like a Chinese painting. He opened the window. The morning air was sweet with the smell of roses.
Hamish had succeeded in growing a splendid rambling rose over the door of the police station, and flowers rioted around the blue police sign and trailed over the steps.
The one cell in the police station had stood empty for a long time. The village drunk had joined Alcoholics Anonymous in Inverness and no more enlivened the little police station with nightly renderings of ‘The Road to the Isles’ and ‘The Star o’ Rabbie Burns’.
It was not a job for an ambitious man, but Hamish took his responsibilities seriously. He could make enough to send money home to his father and mother. His job meant he did not have to pay rent or pay for the use of the police car. It was the duty of every Celt to stay unmarried until the next in line was old enough to go out to work. But there had been a long gap between the birth of Hamish, now in his thirties, and the next Macbeth child, Murdo. And Murdo was proving to be a genius at school and would probably win a scholarship to university and so Hamish’s responsibilities must go on a bit longer.
He decided to stay awake and scrambled into an old army sweater and his shiny regulation trousers. Uncle Harry’s dinner jacket and trousers were hung carefully over a chair, the expensive cloth and tailoring looking out of place in Hamish’s tiny shabby bedroom, like an aristocrat who has lost his way home from his club.
Towser rolled over on one side and spread himself comfortably out over the bed. Hamish looked down on the dog and sighed. There had been a time not so long ago when he had banished the dog from his bedroom – for what would, well, some girl think should she decide to share his bed?
But hope had gone. Now Hamish wondered gloomily if he was destined to share his bed with the mongrel for years to come.
He went out to the shed in the back garden to get the feed ready for the chickens and geese.
Henry had put his hand on Priscilla’s knee. If only he could get that nasty little picture out of his mind.
He went about his morning chores and then went back inside and made himself a large breakfast, more for something to keep himself occupied than because he was hungry. Towser, smelling the frying bacon, slouched out of the bedroom, looking dazed and rumpled like a dissipated drunk, and placed a large yellowish paw on Hamish’s knee, which was his lazy way of begging.
Hamish picked at his breakfast and then gave up and put his plate on the floor for Towser.
He decided to go down to the harbour and look at the catch brought in by the fishing boats.
As he walked along, he kept remembering snatches of overheard conversation from the party. That Vera had been insulted by Captain Bartlett had been all too evident. So was the fact that, up until a few moments before she had thrown her drink in his face, she had been madly in love with him. Perhaps Priscilla was better off with that neat little playwright of hers, thought Hamish gloomily. She might have become engaged to someone like Peter Bartlett. How old was Henry? wondered Hamish. Certainly
a lot older than Priscilla. Even older than he was himself. Probably pushing forty. It would have somehow been more understandable if Priscilla had fallen for a man as young as herself.
Lochdubh was a sea loch. The little stone harbour smelled of fish and tar and salt. He was just debating whether to mooch some herring for his dinner when his sharp ears caught the sound of heavy snoring, rather like Towser’s, coming from behind a pile of barrels stacked next to the sea-wall. He ambled around the barrels and stood looking down at the unlovely sight of Angus MacGregor, local layabout and poacher, lying on the ground between the barrels and the sea-wall. He smelled strongly of whisky. He was lying on his back, a shotgun cradled on his chest, and smiling beatifically.
Hamish bent down and gently removed the gun. Then he heaved the still-sleeping Angus over on his face and with experienced hands searched in the deep ‘poacher’s pocket’ in the tail of Angus’s coat. He lifted out a brace of dead grouse.
Angus had been warned off the Halburton-Smythe’s estate many times. The last time a gamekeeper had given him a beating, but all that had done was to make Angus swear he would continue to take every bird and beast he felt like taking off the estate. When he was crazy with whisky, he often claimed to be Colonel Halburton-Smythe’s bastard son. As Angus was about the same age as the colonel, no one even troubled to listen to the story – except Colonel Halburton-Smythe, who had been heard raging that one day he would shoot Angus and stop his lying mouth.
Hamish walked off with the brace dangling from his hand. He could not be bothered waking Angus up and charging him with theft. It was too fine a day. And taking a statement from Angus was always a wearisome business involving hours and hours of highly inventive Highland lies.
Then he remembered how Jeremy Pomfret had pressed him to ‘referee’ the contest for the first brace. Returning the grouse Angus had poached would give him an excuse to go to the castle and see what was happening. He might also see Priscilla.
Towser was panting for an outing when he returned to the police station, so he drove off with the large mongrel sitting up beside him on the passenger seat and the dead birds slung in the back.
The narrow road that led out of Lochdubh towards Tommel Castle wound through a chaos of tormented rocks, relics of the days when great glaciers had covered this part of the north-west of Scotland. In among the rocks, tarns filled high with water from the recent rains shone blue in the sun. These hundreds of tarns, or small pools, never failed to fascinate Hamish. On bright days, they scintillated sapphire-blue, and when the sky was heavy and grey mists twisted among the mountains, they glinted whitely or lay black and fathomless. The skies dictated the beauty of the scene, so that it was always changing, brilliant one day, weird and ghostly another.
Ahead reared up the fantastic pillared mountains of Sutherland, with quartzite sparkling on the upper slopes and the deep purple of heather on the foothills.
As he approached the castle, he caught a glimpse of red-and-white behind a stand of larch. He stopped the car and got out. A helicopter stood on a flat piece of ground behind the trees, the pilot leaning against its side, smoking a cigarette. Hamish looked at his watch. It was eight-thirty.
‘Fancy anyone wanting to eat birds that hasnae been hung,’ marvelled Hamish. ‘Some of thae Arabs have more money than sense.’
A few minutes later, Hamish drove up to the front door of the castle. Jenkins, the butler, had observed his approach and was standing waiting inside the open door.
‘The kitchen entrance is around the back,’ he said.
‘I ken that fine,’ said Hamish. ‘Aye, it’s a grand day. I just want a wee word with Miss Halburton-Smythe.’
‘That will not be possible,’ said Jenkins stiffly. ‘Miss Halburton-Smythe and the guests are at breakfast.’
Hamish looked over Jenkins’s shoulder and the butler turned round.
Red-eyed and haggard, Jeremy Pomfret was marching up to them.
‘That bastard Bartlett!’ he shouted.
‘I assume Captain Bartlett has gone out shooting,’ said Jenkins.
‘I thought so,’ said Jeremy bitterly. ‘He’s not at breakfast and he’s not in his room. And his gun’s gone.’ He noticed Hamish for the first time. ‘You see, I told you he was up to something. Sneaked out early. Well, he’s been found out and the bet’s off. Came to my room last night with a bottle of champers. “Have a drink, old boy,” says he. Made me drink the whole bottle. Said we’d meet up at breakfast and go out together, and all the time the bastard was planning to get up early an’ beat me to it. God, I feel awful.’
‘Aye, it’s a terrible thing when they force the stuff down your throat,’ said Hamish amiably.
‘He didn’t force it,’ muttered Jeremy. ‘But when a chap offers another chap champagne, a chap can’t refuse.’
‘True, true,’ said Hamish, leaning lazily against the castle door. ‘It’s awf’y hard to say no to the champagne.’
‘I have already told you, Mr Macbeth,’ said Jenkins, ‘that Miss Halburton-Smythe is not to be disturbed.’
Hamish recognized one of the maids who was crossing the hall with a tray. ‘Jessie,’ he said, ‘be a good girl and tell Miss Halburton-Smythe I want a wee word with her.’
‘Sure thing,’ said Jessie, who was an American movie addict.
‘Jessie,’ said Jenkins sharply. ‘I have informed this constable that Miss Halburton-Smythe is at breakfast.’
But Jessie either didn’t hear, or pretended not to hear. Jenkins clucked with irritation and went after her.
‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Hamish, turning his attention back to Jeremy.
‘Nothing, not with this hangover. I’ve a mouth on me like a Turkish wrestler’s jock strap. I’m going back to bed.’
He trailed wearily back up the stairs.
Priscilla came out of the dining room into the hall. She was wearing biscuit-coloured linen trousers, thin sandals, and a frilly Laura Ashley blouse. Her blonde hair was pinned up on top of her head. She looked as fresh as the morning.
‘What did you want to see me about?’ she asked Hamish.
Hamish, who had been staring at her, pulled himself together. ‘I wondered if you would like me to bring over Uncle Harry’s clothes or whether you would like to collect them from the police station.’
Priscilla looked amused. ‘Instead of coming all the way up here to ask me what to do,’ she said, ‘you could have brought the clothes along with you and solved the problem.’
‘Och, so I could’ve,’ said Hamish stupidly. ‘There’s another thing. Angus, the poacher, was down by the harbour and –’
He broke off and cocked his head to one side. Someone was running hard up the gravel of the drive.
He went out to the front steps, with Priscilla after him.
John Sinclair, the estate’s head gamekeeper, came running towards them. ‘He’s shot hisself,’ he cried. ‘Oh, what a mess!’
‘Who is it?’ demanded Priscilla, pushing in front of Hamish.
‘It’s Captain Bartlett, and he’s got a great hole blown clean through him.’
Priscilla turned and clutched at Hamish’s sweater in a dazed way. Sinclair ran on into the castle, shouting the news.
‘It’s awful,’ whispered Priscilla, beginning to shake. ‘Oh, Hamish, we’d better go and look. He might still be alive.’
He put his arms around her and held her close. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said in a flat voice.
The guests, headed by Colonel Halburton-Smythe, came tumbling out of the castle. Henry Withering stopped short at the sight of Priscilla enfolded in Hamish’s arms.
‘Lead the way, Sinclair,’ barked the colonel. ‘And you, Jenkins, call the ambulance. The ladies had better stay behind. Macbeth, what are you doing here? Oh, never mind, you’d better come with me.’
Hamish released Priscilla and set out with the colonel and the gamekeeper. Henry, Freddy Forbes-Grant, and Lord Helmsdale followed. Sir Humphrey Throgmorton returned to the
castle with the ladies.
The day was becoming hot. The air was heavy with the thrum of insects and the honey-laden smell of the heather.
As they left the castle gardens, Colonel Halburton-Smythe spotted the helicopter. ‘What the hell is that thing doing on my property?’ he demanded. Hamish explained about the Arabs in London and the promised payoff of £2,000.
‘Bartlett had no right to order helicopters to descend on my land without asking me,’ said the colonel. ‘Oh, well, the man’s dead and he won’t be needing that two thousand now.’
‘Aye, that’s right,’ said Hamish, looking thoughtfully at the helicopter.
‘Don’t stand there as if you’d never seen a helicopter before,’ said Colonel Halburton-Smythe impatiently.
Hamish fell into step with the others and they set out over the moors at a steady pace.
It should have been raining, thought Hamish, steady, weeping rain like they had had during the previous weeks. A tragedy in bright sunshine seemed much more frightful than one on a day when the skies were grey.
‘Here we are,’ said the gamekeeper, pointing ahead.
The ground sloped down. At the bottom of the slope was a wire fence. Hanging over the fence was a body, still and grotesque and unreal in the clear air.
‘What a mess!’ whispered Lord Helmsdale in awe as they reached the scene.
Captain Bartlett hung almost upside-down, suspended by his right leg from the top strand of the fence. The gun was on the other side of the fence, its butt in a gorse bush, the side-by-side barrels resting on the top strand of the fence, glaring wickedly like two black fathomless eyes at the group. There was no doubt the captain had been straddling the fence when he was shot.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ said Hamish. ‘The forensic boys from Strathbane will need to see everything.’
They stood around Hamish in white-faced silence.
The sun was hot. A buzzard sailed high in the clear air.
Then Lord Helmsdale cleared his throat noisily. ‘You can see what happened, Macbeth,’ he said, his voice once more loud and robust. ‘The silly ass was using his gun as a support to balance himself as he climbed over. Everyone does it. Do it myself. Then the gun got caught in that damned bush, and when he tried to pull it clear, the triggers snagged and went off. Must have been both barrels. Look! He’s blown a hole clear through his chest.’
