Hamish Macbeth 14 (1999) - Death of a Scriptwriter

by M C Beaton

  He frowned. Angus Macdonald, the seer, was once a famous climber.

  Angus claimed to be able to foretell the future. Hamish did not believe in his powers, judging that any successful predictions were the result of shrewdness and listening to gossip. But there was the very superstitious Highland side of Hamish which made him uneasy around the old man.

  Angus expected everyone who visited to bring him some sort of present. Hamish scowled. He already had to buy a bottle of good malt for Jimmy. He went into Patel’s. There was a display of Dundee cake, “great reduction.” Hamish bought one and set out for the seer’s cottage.

  “There’s aye a cheap streak in you, Hamish Macbeth,” said Angus sourly as he accepted the cake. Hamish realised the seer probably knew it had been on sale at a reduced price.

  He followed Angus into his old·fashioned cottage, where a peat fire smouldered in the hearth.

  Angus, looking more like one of the minor prophets than ever with his grey beard and thick, long grey hair, said, “I suppose ye’ve come to find out who murdered the lassie.”

  “And I suppose you know?”

  “Oh, aye, I ken fine.” Angus half closed his eyes. “I see a wumman wi’ short hair and big boots.”

  “A young woman?” asked Hamish, thinking of Sheila. “Blond hair?”

  “No, she is about forty, dark hair, takes drugs.”

  Fiona, thought Hamish.

  “How d’you know she takes drugs?”

  “I see it here,” said Angus, tapping his forehead and reminding Hamish of a Tenniel illustration of the eagle in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  Hamish was wise to the ways of the seer. When he had been sniffing for pot, one of the Drim gamekeepers had been hanging around the castle hall. Everyone told Angus everything.

  “And why should she kill the lassie?” asked Hamish, humouring him.

  “Because she iss ambitious and thon Penelope was out to ruin her career.”

  “Come on, Angus,” said Hamish. “Why are you so definite? I mean, it’s not like you to name names. You usually hint…‘I see a dark woman,’ that kind of thing.”

  “Och, no, Hamish, you haff always doubted the power.”

  “Forget about your powers for the moment, Angus. What I really came about was to find if you knew of another path up that mountain, maybe from the back. You know we usually use that path which runs up between thon two cliffs.”

  Angus looked huffy. “I think you will need to be doing better than a piece of old Dundee cake if you want mair information.”

  “Now, look here, Angus,” said Hamish sharply. “I could have you up for obstructing the police in their enquiries.”

  The seer sat in stubborn silence. Hamish sighed.

  “Look, Angus, I’ve got some fine trout in the freezer, six of them. You can have them if you come off it and tell me about any path up that mountain.”

  Angus rose to his feet and ferreted in a box in the corner. He came back with some sheets of paper and then placed them on the table and took out a pen.

  “Come here, Hamish,” he said. He started to make a rough sketch. “There’s a wee path here. Not many people know about it. It starts here on the lower slopes and twists and turns like a rabbit track, but it gives you even easier access than the other one.”

  Hamish watched the quickly moving pen. “If it’s that easy, why don’t more people use it?”

  Angus said, “You know how it is. Climbers like a difficult climb, and the locals neffer go up there. Why should they? I mean, local people don’t go mountain climbing. It’s only the oddball like me and the tourists. And talking of the tourists, they get sillier every year. Down in Glencoe in the winter, you haff to keep ducking, for they are falling off the mountain like dead flies. No respect for the Scottish weather. Up they go, down comes the blizzard, out comes the mountain rescue and the taxpayer foots the bill. Then some silly bugger who’s cost the nation a fortune sells his story of ‘How I Survived’ to the tabloids and keeps the money. If I had my way—”

  “All right, all right,” said Hamish, cutting short the lecture. “I’ll take this map and I’ll let you have thae trout by tonight.”

  He made his way to the door.

  “Hamish!” called Angus.

  Hamish turned round. “Aye?”

  “It iss no use you getting your hopes up about that pretty little blond lassie. Ambition will get her chust the way it got the Fiona woman. Be careful there, Hamish.”

  “Oh, aye,” said Hamish cynically. “I’ll be leaving you to look at your crystal balls.”

  As he strode off, he wondered if the police had found that other path.

  Eileen Jessop sat at her dressing table in the manse in Drim and looked dismally at her reflection in the mirror. She felt she had not really looked at herself properly in years. Her eyes blinked back at her through her thick glasses. She studied her iron grey hair and her dumpy figure.

  She had been a pretty girl when she had got married all those years ago…well, she had thought she was pretty. But somehow, right after they were married, Colin Jessop had begun to frown on anything he thought of as frivolous in the way of clothes and hairstyles. Makeup was definitely out, not at all the thing for a minister’s wife.

  At first she had stood up to him, but he had gradually become more bullying, more aggressive, until slowly her personality had become submerged under his. It was so much easier to give in, to bend to his will, than face another of those angry scenes she had come to dread.

  When he had been preaching at a church in Edinburgh, life had been easier. She had friends in the parish, she could go to theatres and cinemas. But he had resented her having any sort of independent life. When he had accepted the position of minister in Drim, Eileen had felt her very last little bit of freedom had been taken from her.

  She had felt isolated and shy. There was an odd sort of pecking order in a Highland village, and the minister’s wife was expected to keep a kind of distance between herself and the ordinary village woman. Until the idea of the film, she had not known any of the women very well. Normally Colin Jessop might have objected, but he had recently been spending a great deal of time during the week in either Strathbane or Inverness on what he described as ‘religious business.’

  For the first time in years, Eileen was free of his demanding and bullying company for long periods and felt that something inside her spirit was beginning to grow, giving her a restless springlike feeling.

  And yet, she thought, looking at herself, her appearance only reflected the old Eileen. It would be grand to go down to Alice and get her awful, awful dull grey hair dyed. But then he would notice and there would be a scene; he might even stop her film, and she could not bear that. She had a great deal of tape. Eileen wanted to ask someone on the television company for advice about cutting and editing. Colin had forbidden her to go near them, and so far she had obeyed him. But she could approach one of them when he was away.

  There was a ring at the doorbell and she went to answer it. It was Ailsa Kennedy. She and Eileen had quickly formed an odd sort of friendship.

  “Come in,” said Eileen. “What brings you? I thought you would be watching all the detectives and police.”

  “It’s half day at the shop,” said Ailsa. “I was thinking of taking the car for a drive into Inverness. Jock doesn’t need it today. Fancy coming along?”

  Eileen brightened, and then her face fell. “Colin likes me to be here when he gets back, and I never know when that’s going to be. And he always likes dinner to be ready for him. But I’ve actually cooked a stew for tonight. It would only need to be heated up.”

  “Then leave him a note to tell him to heat it,” said Ailsa.

  “Oh, I c-couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?” demanded Ailsa, tossing her red hair.

  “He’d be so very angry.”

  “Husbands are always angry. That’s their nature, and the nature of us women is not to pay a blind bit o’ notice.”

&nb
sp; A little spark of rebellion ignited somewhere in Eileen’s brain. Ailsa was always talking about ‘us women,’ making the lonely minister’s wife feel she now belonged to a freemasonry of women who were not afraid of their husbands.

  “I’ll go,” she said. “Wait till I leave a note.”

  Ailsa glanced in amusement at the minister’s wife as she drove competently along the one-track roads, for Eileen was singing ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking.’

  Then Eileen broke off singing and asked suddenly, “What do you think of my hair?”

  “Very nice,” said Ailsa with true Highland politeness.

  “I hate it, hate it,” said Eileen passionately. “I hate being dumpy, and I hate having grey hair.”

  “Then that is easily solved,” said Ailsa. “We’ll drop in at a hairdresser’s in Inverness and you can get it done. You don’t want to go to Alice. I don’t know what dyes she uses, but she still turns out bottle blondes or dead, lifeless black. Your figure’s probably not that bad. You just need new clothes. Does he keep you on a tight budget?”

  “No, I’ve a bit of money of my own.”

  “There you are, then.”

  “He’ll be so angry.”

  “Of course he will. They always are. It’s their way,” said Ailsa sententiously, as if explaining the strange ways of some native tribe up the Amazon. “Take it from me, you do what you want, they rave, and after a few days, they forget what you looked like afore. Now, seeing as how you’re getting your hair done, we may as well have the top down.”

  Ailsa was driving an old Morris Minor with a soft top. She pulled to the side of the road and folded back the roof.

  Then they sped off in the sunlight again.

  Eileen was to remember that journey for the rest of her life, the wind tearing through her hair and sending hairpins flying back on the road. Ailsa had put noisy pop music in the tape deck, and they sailed over the bridge from the Black Isle into Inverness, all racing wind and vulgar music and Eileen feeling young for the first time in her life.

  Ailsa parked in the multistory car park at the bus station. “Hairdresser first,” said Ailsa, “and then we’ll have a late lunch.”

  The hairdresser Ailsa led Eileen to was a new one, quite terrifying to one timid minister’s wife. But the girls were Highland and so had that gentle friendliness and entered into the interesting business of choosing colour and a hairstyle for Eileen.

  Two hours later, Eileen emerged blinking into the sunlight. Her hair was black and shining and cut in a smooth style. She clung to Ailsa’s arm and kept glancing at her new appearance in shop windows. Ailsa came to a sudden stop. “Thon’s a grand dress for you.”

  Eileen looked at it. It was a conventional shirtwaister but of soft silk, with a swirling pattern of peacock greens, golds and blue. She took a deep breath. “I’ll buy it.”

  Ailsa insisted she wear it, and then they walked to a restaurant which Ailsa said was open all afternoon because all the normal lunchtime places had closed.

  The restaurant was all brass and mahogany and palm trees and an exotic menu of foreign dishes. They ordered a Mexican dish and washed it down with lager, Ailsa protesting that she would ‘walk off the drink’ after lunch.

  Most of the tables were screened from the others by greenery and brass poles. Eileen said she had to go to the ladies’ room. She actually wanted to study her new appearance in the mirror.

  It was as she was walking to the ladies’ room that she suddenly saw her husband. He was sitting at a table by the window. Opposite him was a plump middle-aged woman with improbably blond hair and a predatory rouged mouth. Colin was holding this woman’s hand across the table and, noticed Eileen in amazement, he had a soppy smile on his face.

  She scurried on into the ladies’ room and leaned against the handbasin. Colin, of all people! This probably explained all his trips to Inverness. What should she do? Nothing. Ailsa would know.

  Her black hair and new dress gave her a strange courage. She took out a lipstick that she had bought in Boots and applied it carefully. She had also bought eye shadow, mascara, foundation cream and powder but decided she was too shaken to put on anything else.

  A few weeks before, a time in her life which Eileen privately designated as Before the Film, she would have kept secret the news of her husband’s presence in the restaurant and possible infidelity.

  But she was enjoying this new friendship, this new feeling of not being alone, so as soon as she was back at the table, she blurted out, “Ailsa! Ailsa, you’ll never believe what has happened, what I’ve just seen. Colin! My husband! He’s in this very restaurant, and he’s holding hands with a trollopy woman.”

  “Whit!” Ailsa shrieked.

  “Keep your voice down,” whispered Eileen urgently. “Colin is over there near the bar, holding hands with a blond woman.”

  “It could be some parishioner that he is consoling.”

  “You didn’t see the look on his face.”

  “Crivens!” said Ailsa. “That wee man. I’d never have believed it. Did he see your hair?”

  Eileen shook her head. “He was too wrapped up in that woman.”

  “Are you going over there to confront him?”

  There was a silence while Eileen looked down at her hands. Then she said, “No, I’m not.”

  “But you’ll speak to him this evening?”

  “Maybe not.”

  Ailsa looked at her curiously. “You look a bit shocked, but not furious or distressed.”

  Eileen gave a small smile. “Maybe I’m in shock.”

  Ailsa took a meditative sip of a blue cocktail called Highland Wind, tilting her head so that the little tartan umbrella sticking out of the top of the concoction did not get in her eye.

  “It’s a rare piece of gossip.”

  “You’re not to talk about it,” said Eileen fiercely, “not to Jock, not to anyone.”

  “All right.”

  “Promise?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “We’d best take our time until Colin leaves,” said Eileen. “Do you know what amazes me?”

  “What? I thought the whole business of Colin being maybe unfaithful to you would be enough puzzlement.”

  “That woman is wearing a ton of makeup and dyed hair, yet if I put on so much as lipstick, he shouts at me that it is not fitting for the wife of a minister.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t puzzle me at all,” said Ailsa. “Men were aye the same. The minute they’ve got you, they start to try to get rid of all the things about you that attracted them to you in the first place.”

  And despite her bewilderment at her husband’s behavior, Eileen felt once more enfolded in the world of women, a world banded together against the peculiar alien world of men.

  It took Hamish Macbeth some time to find Angus’s path. At last he located it and found his way up the mountain, searching all the while for clues. But by the time he had nearly reached the top, an easier climb than the other path, he found to his surprise, he had found nothing at all. The path looked as if no one had used it for years but rabbits and deer.

  Still, anyone using the path could have easily reached the bit under that outcrop of rock. But how would anyone know Penelope was to stand there? Was it in the script?

  He thought after some reflection that the murder had not been premeditated. Either Fiona or Gervase or Harry had seen the opportunity to get rid of her and had taken it. Right under the outcrop was a flat, sheltered bit where someone could have stood. Harry could have easily slid down there, reached up and pulled Penelope’s ankle to overbalance her. Fiona could have run off in the mist and done the same, or Gervase. And where had Patricia really been that day, and was her plea to him for help merely a blind?

  Could the seer really think that Fiona had done it? If so, who had supplied him with that information? Angus rarely went out these days, but picked up gossip from his visitors. From time to time there were articles in the newspapers on ‘the seer of the Highlands,’ and he h
ad been on television several times.

  He noticed how clearly he could hear all the voices of the men still searching the heathery plateau above.

  Anyone lurking down here could have heard the instructions to Penelope.

  He made his way back down the mountain and headed for Drim Castle to learn that Patricia had been taken off to Strath-bane for further questioning. The information was supplied by Fiona.

  “So what happens now?” asked Hamish.

  “To Patricia?”

  “No, to the TV show.”

  “We go on. Mary Hoyle is flying up today. She’s a competent actress.”

  “I’ve seen her in some things. Hardly a blond bombshell.”

  “It’ll take a few alterations to the script, but we’ll manage.”

  Hamish studied her for a few moments and then asked, “Do you think Patricia did it?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Fiona, puffing on a cigarette which Hamish was pleased to note was ordinary tobacco.

  “Why?”

  Fiona put down her cigarette and ran her hands through her short-cropped hair. “None of us could have done it. I’ve worked with all these people before. It’s not in them. But writers! Take it from me, they’re all mad with vanity. They don’t understand how television works, and they expect us to dramatise every dreary word they’ve written.”

  “It could be argued that murder is not in Patricia, either. She is very conscious of being a lady.”

  “‘God bless the squire and his relations, and keep them in their proper stations,”’quoted Fiona.

  “Aye, something like that. Is Sheila around?”

  “She’s been taken to Strathbane for questioning as well. She was heard shouting to Penelope, “I hope you break your neck.””

  “Have they taken in Gervase Hart?”

  “No, not him.”

  “I wonder why. He was overheard telling Penelope he’d kill her.”

  “Who told you that?” demanded Fiona sharply.

  “Meaning you’ve told them all to shut up, except when it comes to Sheila.”

  “That’s not the case at all.”