Death of a Sweep

by Beaton, M. C.

  Milly sat in the kitchen waiting for them to arrive, her face white with shock. Tam went up to his room and collected the diamond engagement ring. He returned to the kitchen and knelt down in front of Milly and took her cold hands in his. He mutely held up the ring box and looked at her with pleading eyes.

  Milly opened the box. ‘Will you marry me?’ asked Tam in a hoarse voice.

  A faint pink suffused her pale cheeks and she said shyly, ‘Oh, yes.’

  He stood up and leaned forward to kiss her when there came a hammering at the door.

  ‘Damn,’ he muttered and went to answer it.

  At first Hamish thought it was his alarm and then realized it was his mobile phone. Jimmy was at the other end. ‘Where the hell are you? Someone tried to set the captain’s house on fire.’

  ‘Is Milly all right?’

  ‘Yes, fortunately Tamworth was staying there and got the fire out in time. Why aren’t you at the station?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I get back. Cover for me. Tell them one of my family’s been taken ill.’

  ‘You’re in Edinburgh, you daft loon!’

  ‘Help me, Jimmy. I’ll come back with the murderer.’

  ‘This once. Just this once.’

  Hamish made his way through the quiet streets. When he got to Prosser’s office, he looked carefully to left and right but did not see anyone. He took out a bunch of skeleton keys and got to work. It took him half an hour to unlock the door. A burglar alarm let out a shrill noise. He wrenched open the control box and cut the wires. He had noticed earlier that fortunately there were no CCTV cameras covering the entrance. He sat and waited in case he heard the police arrive and had to make a quick getaway.

  After a quarter of an hour, he entered Prosser’s office. With a pencil torch between his teeth, he searched the desk but did not find anything incriminating. He went to the safe, took out his tape recorder, and listened to the clicks. It took him half an hour to get the right combination. The safe swung open. He found a file of letters, two thick ledgers, and piles of banknotes. He took out the ledgers and laid them on the desk. Here were lists of all the companies. He risked switching on an Anglepoise lamp. Taking out a camera, he photographed page after page. Then he opened the file of letters. There was one from the late Captain Davenport saying that he could make them all a fortune. He had employed a geologist, and rich seams of gold had been found in Perthshire. But he needed funding for mining equipment. He would put up most of the money himself but would need an extra five hundred thousand pounds and in return he would make Prosser a majority shareholder. Hamish photographed that as well.

  When he had finished, he returned everything to the safe. Before he closed the door, he stared at all that money. He took two plastic bags out of his pocket and stuffed both bags full. May as well make it look like a robbery, he thought, because Prosser would discover the wires on his burglar alarm had been cut.

  He let himself out and walked back to the flat. What do I do now, he wondered. If I just disappear, they’ll get hold of David Harrison and sweat my real identity out of him.

  He phoned David Harrison. A sleepy David answered the phone. Hamish rapidly explained the situation. ‘Could you and your family disappear for a week?’ he asked.

  ‘I was about to take a holiday. But why?’

  ‘Because if I clear off, these villains will be after you to find out my real identity.’

  ‘What an exciting life you do lead,’ said David. ‘But keep in touch. I’ll want to know when it’s safe to come back.’

  ‘They’re all in it,’ said Hamish. ‘I was with Bromley and Prosser but one of the others must have gone to Drim and tried to set the captain’s house on fire.’

  Hamish snatched two hours’ sleep and then packed up everything. He took the pads out of his cheeks and ripped off his fake moustache. He found a pair of sharp scissors and hacked off all his hair, then shaved his scalp. He pulled his cap over his bald head and quietly let himself out. He hailed a passing taxi and asked to be driven to the airport, not relaxing until he saw Edinburgh disappearing under the plane’s wings.

  He took a taxi all the way from Inverness airport to Lochdubh, guiltily paying the fare with notes he had stolen from the safe, hoping they would not turn out to be forged.

  Once more, he printed off his photographs on the machine in Patel’s. Wearing gloves, he put the pile of photographs in a plain envelope. Then he drove to Strathbane.

  Jimmy was sitting sleepily at his desk. ‘I want you to say this lot landed on your desk and you don’t know who gave them to you,’ whispered Hamish. ‘There’s enough in there for you to pull Prosser in. Now go on as if you’ve summoned me and demand to know where the hell I was.’

  ‘But I told them about a member of your family being ill!’

  ‘Shout that you phoned my mother and that they were all well and call me a skiving bastard or something like that.’

  Prosser strode up and down his office in a rage. ‘Before I call the police,’ he shouted at Bromley, ‘take the ledgers and correspondence and lock them in your safe.’

  ‘You can’t phone the police,’ said Bromley miserably.

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘That money was never declared to the tax man. They’ll ask questions about it.’

  Prosser clutched his hair. ‘Phone Sanders and Castle and get them here.’

  ‘What about Diarmuid Jenkins?’

  ‘He’s due here soon. May as well see how much we can get out of him.’

  By one o’clock when Bromley had returned after putting the ledgers and correspondence in his safe, Prosser was beside himself with rage. ‘He hasn’t shown and David Harrison is nowhere to be found.’

  Prosser went suddenly quiet. He sat down behind his desk. He said slowly, ‘I think this Diarmuid is behind all this. Look, he chats us up, he says he’s going to invest, and yet he doesn’t turn up. I’m going to phone round all the hotels and see if I can trace him.’

  But no hotel in Edinburgh had heard of Diarmuid Jenkins or had any guest answering his description.

  By evening, Castle and Sanders arrived and learned about the robbery. ‘Thank your stars it was just the money he was after,’ said Sanders. ‘Those ledgers are dynamite. Why the hell didn’t you keep them in a safe-deposit box?’

  ‘Why the hell don’t you shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you permanently,’ said Prosser.

  They all started as a loud knocking came at the street door and a stentorian voice shouted, ‘Police! Open up!’

  ‘We’re blown,’ said Prosser. ‘Follow me.’

  He pressed a button in the wood panelling, and a door slid open. They followed him down a narrow staircase which led into a weedy garden at the back. He opened a gate in the garden wall. Outside in the lane was parked a four-wheel drive. They all piled in and sped off.

  ‘All gone,’ said Jimmy wearily the next day when he called on Hamish. ‘But we had search warrants for their offices. Prosser owned Scots Entertainment, not to mention other suspicious companies, and Bromley owns Timothy’s in Guildford. But as to the murders, it’s all too circumstantial. They hadn’t time to clear out any of their bank accounts in this country, but they’ve probably got money stashed abroad. We hoped if we’d got them all that one of them would crack and turn Queen’s evidence to get off.’

  ‘I hate this Queen’s evidence,’ said Hamish. ‘I remember a case where two boys murdered an old granny for the few coins in her purse. One held down her head while the other sawed it off. The one who’d held down her head turned Queen’s evidence and walked free.’

  ‘We’ve frozen their bank accounts,’ said Jimmy.

  Hamish sighed. ‘They’ve probably got money all over the world. I wonder if we’ll ever catch them. It was vanity on Prosser’s part, keeping those accounts in his safe. I bet he liked to gloat over them. Then along comes Davenport and cons him out of a large chunk of money. There’s no record of how much. I bet it was in cash, too.’

  C
hapter Ten

  A direful death indeed they had

  That would put any parent mad

  But she was more than usual calm

  She did not give a single damn

  – MARJORY FLEMING

  Angela Brodie sat miserably in front of a table of her books in a Glasgow bookshop. As she was damned as a literary writer, interest in her had flared and died even though her book reviews were excellent. In the past hour, she had only signed three books. To make matters worse, she had to share her signing with a well-known detective writer of the slash ’em, torture ’em, and sodomize ’em genre whose queue stretched out across the shop.

  I’ve been nominated for the Haggart, thought Angela. My sales are respectable. I’ve got a contract to write two more. I think ambition is some sort of pernicious infection.

  She looked up. A woman with a familiar face was smiling down at her. ‘Would you sign, please? Just your signature.’

  Angela signed her name. ‘Don’t I know you?’

  The woman leaned forward and whispered: ‘I’m one of the booksellers. It’s a shame there aren’t more people.’

  Oh, Hamish Macbeth, thought Angela. Lack of ambition is a truly good thing to have.

  She suddenly gathered up her belongings and walked straight out of the bookshop, blinking in the sunshine of Buchanan Street. ‘I’m going home,’ she muttered. ‘I’m going back to my old life.’ A man eyed her nervously and gave her a wide berth.

  Milly Davenport was working in the garden, humming a tune as she dug the spade into what was once a flower bed, determined to make it bloom again.

  The phone in the house rang shrilly. Milly hesitated only a moment. Tam usually answered all calls for her. She ran to answer it. An angry voice shouted down the line before she could even say, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Harcourt here,’ said the voice. ‘Look, Tam, we know you’ve been romancing thon widow woman for the background stuff but you’re spending too much time in Drim and there’s work to be done here. There was no need to actually get engaged to the woman. She could sue you for breach o’ promise when she finds out you were just using her. Also, you missed the story about those four men fleeing the country. Get your sorry arse in gear now!’

  The phone was slammed down at the other end.

  Milly slowly replaced the receiver. She should have known, she thought. Never trust a reporter. She didn’t know where Tam was. He had said he wouldn’t be back until the following day.

  She wearily walked back into the garden and picked up the spade. She would dig and dig, hoping the physical exercise would keep the tears at bay. She seized the spade and rammed it down into the soft earth. The spade struck something. She knelt down and, picking up a trowel, cleared away the earth, exposing the corner of an attaché case. She dug around it until she could pull it up. It was locked.

  She took it into the kitchen and attacked the hasps with a hammer until she had broken them and opened the case. It was stuffed full of banknotes. With trembling fingers, she lifted them all out on to the kitchen table and began to count them. The notes amounted to nearly 780,000 pounds.

  Milly stared at the money. She thought of her late bullying husband who had made her life a misery and then she thought of Tam’s perfidy. Suddenly as cold as ice, she packed up the money. Then she went upstairs and packed two suitcases with her clothes. She went outside and covered up the hole where the attaché case had reposed and covered the raw earth with clods of grass and weeds. She returned to the house, took off her engagement ring, and left it on the kitchen table.

  She then went out, locking the door behind her. She drove to Inverness airport where she bought herself a ticket to London.

  Once in London, she booked into the Waldorf Hotel in Aldwych, then went to a travel agent and reserved a cabin on a cruise of the Caribbean on a liner due to leave Southampton on the following day. She had not used the money in the suitcase … yet. That would do for spending money on board.

  Tam was lying in his bed in his flat in Strathbane, nursing one of the worst hangovers he could ever remember having. He had been careful not to drink too much in Milly’s company but he had run into some colleagues the night before and set out on a drinking spree.

  His doorbell rang. With a groan, he struggled out of bed and went to open the door. A fellow reporter stood there.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he demanded. ‘Harcourt’s going apeshit. I heard him phone you at that widow woman’s and give you a rocket.’

  ‘But I wasnae there,’ exclaimed Tam, who suddenly felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his stomach. ‘Did you hear what he said?’

  ‘Oh, jist ranted on about he knew you were romancing the Davenport woman for a story and getting engaged to her was maybe going a bit far because she could sue you for breach o’ promise. Something like that.’

  Tam swore and clutched his aching head. ‘It’s nothing like that,’ he howled. ‘I’ve got to see her.’

  ‘You’d better see Harcourt first if you want to keep your job.’

  It was evening before Tam got to Drim. He found the door locked and let himself in with the key Milly had given him. He went into the kitchen. Milly’s engagement ring sparkled up at him from the table. He sat down heavily. Harcourt had told him he had thought he was talking to Tam because Tam had always answered the phone.

  It’ll be all right, thought Tam desperately. I’ll wait until she comes home and explain everything.

  He waited and waited all the long night but Milly did not return.

  In a villa outside Rio de Janeiro a week later, the four wanted men sat on the terrace of a rented villa just outside the city with their four wives. They had not wanted to bring their wives but Prosser said it would be dangerous to leave them behind in case one of them opened her big, silly mouth.

  ‘The new passports should be ready today,’ said Prosser.

  ‘But we’ve already got good forgeries,’ protested Ferdinand Castle.

  ‘Better be on the safe side,’ said Prosser.

  Bromley shifted uneasily in his rattan chair. He wished he had given himself over to the police. The whole thing was a nightmare. Why had he let Prosser talk him into something so idiotic as trying to set Davenport’s house on fire? Milly left the door open during the day, and he had hidden in one of the attics until nightfall. Why had he let Prosser dominate him and frighten him? If he turned Queen’s evidence, then he might get a considerably reduced sentence. Maybe in one of those open prisons. He was tired of his nagging wife and frightened of Prosser.

  It was Prosser’s psychopathic vanity that had led them to exile in Brazil. He had tried to tell Prosser at one time to forget Davenport, but Prosser had said he wanted revenge.

  Bromley miserably counted up the murders: Captain Davenport, the sweep, Philomena Davenport, Betty Close, and that prostitute. How had he ever become drawn into this web of murder and deceit? What if the SAS were sent to Brazil to seize them? They had bribed a fishing boat to take them to France and then journeyed overland by rented car to Lisbon, where they had booked flights to Rio. They had used cloned credit cards to pay for the rented car and their fares.

  The thought of escape grew in his mind. At one point, he felt Prosser’s bottle-green eyes fixed on him and threw the man a weak smile. Prosser held the cloned credit cards. If he escaped, he daren’t pay the airfare with cash because that would ring alarm bells. But, he suddenly thought, a travel agent would be glad of the cash.

  How to get away?

  Charles Prosser said suddenly, ‘Have you got that photo of Diarmuid whatsisname? I told the waiter to snap it and you kept a print.’

  ‘I think it’s in my case,’ said Bromley.

  ‘Go and get it.’

  Bromley returned after some time and handed Prosser the photograph. He studied it, then brought out a magnifying glass and peered at it again.

  He sat back in his chair, his face turning white with anger. ‘I think that bastard was that highland constable, Macbeth.’

&
nbsp; Sanders let out a nervous laugh. ‘Come on. That great idiot?’

  ‘He was on television. He’s solved a lot of murders. He was sniffing around Scots Entertainment and then John Dean reported he had called at the Canongate flat asking about Betty Close. I’ll have that bastard.’

  ‘You can’t,’ said Sanders gloomily. ‘We daren’t go back.’

  ‘You can stay here. I’m getting even with that policeman if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘You’ll get caught,’ said Bromley.

  ‘I won’t. As soon as the new passports arrive, I’m off.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do?’ asked Sandra petulantly.

  ‘Take up knitting. I don’t care.’

  I have to get there before him, fretted Bromley. I know Prosser. If he gets caught, he’ll take us all down with him. He may even try to pin the murders on one of us!

  ‘I’m off to get the passports,’ said Prosser, getting to his feet.

  Now’s my chance, thought Bromley desperately. He waited until Prosser had driven off. Sandra said she was going for a dip in the pool and the others said they would join her. ‘Coming, Tom?’ she asked.

  ‘Not me. I think I’ll have a bit of a siesta.’

  Sandra Prosser turned on her road to the pool and watched Bromley walk into the house. Suddenly suspicious, she told the others to go ahead and then waited in the garden behind a stand of palm trees.

  Soon she saw Bromley get into the old car he had bought and drive off. She took out the mobile phone her husband had bought her when they had arrived in Rio and spoke to him urgently.

  Prosser, who had just collected the new passports, swore under his breath and headed for the airport.

  There was a flight for London via Sao Paulo due to leave at seven o’clock that evening. He sat and waited.