Death of a Gentle Lady

by Beaton, M. C.

  ‘No, I’ll drive over.’ She gave him a saucy look. ‘If I drink too much I can stay the night.’

  And why not? thought Hamish as he settled into a pew. The hell with romanticism. What I need is some healthy sex.

  The organ in the loft struck up, and Hamish twisted his head to get a look at the bride. Mary – he must forget that she was once Ruby – came sailing up the aisle in all the splendour of a white wedding dress and veil. Daviot was to give her away. Mrs Daviot was maid of honour, and Jimmy was best man.

  Blair, as he turned to watch his bride approach, looked white and strained.

  The service was long. The address to the couple by the minister seemed to go on forever. The hymns were of the dirge variety.

  Then it was over. The couple went into the vestry to sign the register.

  The organ struck up Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ and down the aisle came a triumphant Mary. She had lost weight, and her face shone with happiness.

  I’ve done a good thing for once in my life, thought Hamish. And after her experience on the streets, she should be able to handle Blair.

  As Blair walked past Hamish, he looked at him, his eyes glittering with suspicion.

  The reception at a hotel in Strathbane was a merry affair. The cake was cut, speeches were made, dinner was served, and then the dancing began, Blair and Mary taking the floor. Blair felt he had been sober for a hundred years. The Blair-God up in the sky who had sustained his sobriety was fading fast.

  He had asked Mary time after time if Hamish Macbeth ever knew who was behind his kidnapping, but each time she had vehemently replied that he knew nothing.

  He returned to his table after the dance. A large fresh bottle of mineral water was sitting beside his plate. He rose and went over to the bar. A bottle of malt whisky glittered in the lights. What was it the highlanders called it? Usquebaugh – the water of life. That was it.

  ‘May I help you?’ asked the barman.

  ‘I’ll help myself,’ said Blair. He opened the bottle, filled up a glass, and took a great swallow, feeling the blessed liquor course through his body right down to his toes.

  People said later they had never seen Blair in such fine form. He danced the Eightsome Reel, the Gay Gordons, and the Dashing White Sergeant as if his feet had wings.

  When he finally retired to the honeymoon suite in the hotel with his bride, Blair stumbled across to the bed, fell across it, and lay there snoring. Mary carefully hung away her wedding dress, had a bath, and put on not the honeymoon nightgown, but a serviceable flannelette one.

  She undressed her snoring husband down to his underwear. With a contented little smile, she took her knitting out of her suitcase, turned on the television, and proceeded to knit.

  Marriage was good.

  The following evening, Aileen arrived exactly at seven o’clock. Unfortunately, Aileen was one of those women who look more attractive in uniform than out of it. When she shrugged off her coat in the restaurant, she showed she was wearing a pink boob tube decorated with sequins. Her navel was decorated with a fake ruby, very much in prominence as a roll of fat bulged over her tight Lycra trousers when she sat down. She had put pink streaks in her hair, and her eyelashes were so heavily mascaraed, it looked as if two large spiders had found a home in her face.

  Oh, God, I wish something would happen to get me out of this, prayed Hamish, hiding his face behind a menu.

  Willie’s face when he took the order was a tight mask of disapproval.

  Aileen chipped in and said they’d have a bottle of Valpolicello to start. ‘Hear you’re quite a lad with the ladies,’ she said when Willie had left.

  ‘All lies,’ said Hamish. ‘I’m quite shy really.’

  ‘Come on, laddie. Shy men don’t get engaged to hookers.’

  Her voice rang round the restaurant. The other diners listened avidly.

  Hamish was just wondering if he could fake illness when to his amazement, Anna Krokovsky walked into the restaurant. He did not like her but in that moment he looked on her as his saviour.

  She was out of uniform. ‘May I join you?’ Ignoring Aileen’s scowl, she pulled up a chair and sat down.

  ‘Aileen, do you know Inspector Krokovsky?’ asked Hamish.

  ‘I’ve seen you around,’ muttered Aileen.

  ‘I thought you had gone back to Russia,’ said Hamish.

  ‘I had, but I am here with a special invitation. You are invited to Moscow. We would like to study your methods.’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘A few months. Mr Daviot says officers from Strathbane can cover your beat.’

  This was worse than the prospect of a night with Aileen, thought Hamish miserably. Blair would work furiously during those months to prove that the station in Lochdubh was not needed.

  ‘It’s verra kind of you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘But I’m afraid I must refuse.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I would like to talk to you in private. Maybe afterwards.’

  ‘No, now.’ She turned to Aileen. ‘Would you mind leaving us?’

  ‘Whit!’ screeched Aileen. ‘I’m on a date.’

  ‘Do you want me to phone Superintendent Daviot?’

  Aileen glared at Hamish, who was studying the tablecloth. Then she threw down her napkin.

  ‘Never, ever speak to me again, Hamish Macbeth.’

  Hamish got to his feet to help her on with her coat, but she pushed him away. Under the fascinated eyes of the diners, she rushed to the door and slammed it so hard behind her that the whole room seemed to vibrate.

  Anna sat unmoved.

  Hamish began to speak, but Willie arrived with the starters. ‘I may as well eat what she has ordered,’ said Anna. ‘Your taste in women is not what I would have expected.’

  ‘Let’s get down to this,’ said Hamish. ‘I cannot go. I am begging you not to press the matter. I have fought and fought until I am weary to keep the police station open here. You like my methods or you would not have got this invitation for me. If I go away for several months, they will find a reason to close the station. I will be put on the beat in Strathbane. There will be no one to deal with this vast area, no one to look after the old people in the outlying crofts. They talk about community policing in Strathbane but they really don’t have the first idea how to go about it.

  ‘Did you come all this way just to invite me?’

  Anna suddenly smiled. ‘Not exactly. Scotland Yard need Moscow’s advice on the mysterious death of a Russian in London. You look wretched. Eat your food and we will forget about the matter.’

  ‘But what will Daviot say?’

  ‘I will say I have been called back to London and will approach you about the visit some other time.’

  Hamish let out a slow breath of relief.

  She began to question him about the death of Cyril and listened carefully while he described how he had discovered that Cyril had stolen Harold Jury’s identity.

  ‘Amazing,’ she said when he had finished. ‘But did you not notice his small feet before?’

  ‘I had no reason to be looking at men’s feet,’ said Hamish. ‘It was seeing him dressed as a woman to play the part of Lady Macbeth that gave me the idea. Also, it was not just that he was good in the part of Lady Macbeth, he almost was Lady Macbeth, if you know what I mean. There was something cold and murderous about him. He was mad, of course. It wasn’t just because of his rotten upbringing. Lots of kids have rotten upbringings and go on to be decent citizens. I think he really was a dangerous psychopath. He’d need to have been to go around killing all those people. But he was clever. He played the part of that author so well.’

  ‘But why, when he had finished what he came to do, murder his mother, did he hang around?’

  ‘I think he fell in love – or as much as a character like that could fall in love – with Priscilla Halburton-Smythe.’

  ‘Ah, the blonde beauty.’

  ‘Then he loved acting, and the production of the play got him close to Pri
scilla and kept him in the limelight, even though it was only the limelight of a small village. Also he hated me for playing a trick on him.’ Hamish told her about the ‘highland welcome’.

  Anna laughed. ‘If he was that clever, why did he fall for a stupid prank like that?’

  ‘Because he was acting the part of Harold Jury. God rest his soul, but I think Harold Jury must have been pretty pretentious.’

  At the end of the meal, Hamish asked, ‘Where are you staying? Can I drive you somewhere?’

  ‘I am staying in Inverness. I have a car and driver waiting.’

  Hamish waved her goodbye with relief and started to walk towards the police station. Then he froze. Aileen’s car was still parked outside, and the engine was running. She must be inside her car, running the heater, and waiting for me, thought Hamish. No doubt, she really wants to tell me what she thinks of me.

  Huddled in his coat, he set off on the long walk up to the Tommel Castle Hotel to beg once more for a room for the night.

  The next morning when he walked back to the police station, snow was beginning to fall. Winter was moving back into Sutherland. It looked as if the spring would never come.

  Aileen’s car was gone. He set about doing his chores. The snow became a blinding blizzard.

  It raged all day and then by evening, it roared away to the east. Hamish dug a path outside the police station, leaned on his shovel, and looked along the waterfront. Everything was white and glittering under the moon. He felt the village and landscape had been in some way sanitized by the snow, swept clean of murder and strangers and blood.

  With a comfortable feeling of being safe at home at last, he went in and locked the door.

  If you enjoyed Death of a Gentle Lady, read on for the first chapter of the next book in the Hamish Macbeth series …

  Chapter One

  By the pricking of my thumbs,

  Something wicked this way comes.

  – William Shakespeare

  Police Constable Hamish Macbeth, heading home to his police station in the village of Lochdubh in Sutherland, heaved a sigh of relief. He stopped for a moment by the side of the road and rolled down the car window. He was driving a battered old Rover, manufactured before the days of power steering and electronic windows.

  Hamish breathed in all the familiar scents of the Scottish Highlands: peat smoke, wild thyme, pine and salt air blown in on the Atlantic gales from the coast.

  Urged by his friend Angela Brodie to go abroad on holiday for once in his life, Hamish had opted for a cheap off-season package trip to the south of Spain.

  His hopes of a holiday romance had been dashed as soon as he arrived. The hotel, ambitiously named The Royal Britannia, catered for British old-age pensioners who wanted to escape the winter back home and the heating bills that came with it. He was in great demand at tea dances, as the other guests were mostly sprightly ladies in their sixties and seventies. When he tried to escape from the hotel food, which was designed for the British palate – chips with everything – and went to some little Spanish restaurant, he would find that several of the ladies had followed him only to become amorous over jugs of sangria. Cursed with innate highland courtesy, he could not find it in him to be rude enough to get rid of them.

  But now he was heading home. He had bought the old banger of a car to leave at Inverness airport when he started his journey, not wanting to use the police Land Rover and so incur the wrath of his bosses.

  Hamish started off again as the car coughed and spluttered, threatening to collapse at each steep hill like a weary horse.

  At last he drove over the humpbacked bridge and into the village of Lochdubh.

  He uncoiled his long length from the little car and stood up and stretched. Fingers of rain were blowing down the sea loch, but there was a patch of blue over to the west heralding better weather to come. Although it was November, the proximity of the Gulf Stream meant there were often mild days.

  Then for some reason he could not explain, he began to fell uneasy. It seemed that the very air was full of some vague threat.

  He shook himself impatiently, unlocked the police station door, and went in.

  There was a note from Angela lying on the kitchen table. It read: ‘Hamish, this is the very last time I look after your pets for you. Come and collect them as soon as you can, Angela.’

  Hamish owned a mongrel called Lugs and a domesticated wild cat called Sonsie. Angela Brodie was the doctor’s wife. He went out again and walked to Angela’s cottage. The cat and dog looked at him sullenly as if he were not to be forgiven for having left them.

  ‘About time, too,’ said Angela crossly.

  ‘They weren’t too much trouble, surely?’ said Hamish.

  ‘They kept escaping and going to look for you and I had the gamekeeper, Willie, and several of the others up on the braes to hunt them down and bring them back. Oh, well, sit down and have a coffee and tell me about your trip. Lots of sunshine, pretty girls?’

  ‘I’m glad to be home, and I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Hamish.

  The wild cat put a large paw on Hamish’s leg and gave a low hiss. Lugs, a shaggy dog with floppy ears and odd blue eyes, stared up at Hamish accusingly.

  Hamish sat down at the cluttered kitchen table where Angela’s cats roamed among the unwashed breakfast dishes. Looking at Angela, with her wispy hair and gentle face, Hamish wondered, not for the first time, how a doctor’s wife could be so unhygienic.

  ‘I had an offer for your cat while you were away,’ said Angela, putting a mug of coffee down in front of him. ‘Most insistent, she was. Last offer was a hundred pounds.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Of course, you don’t know. We’ve got a newcomer. She bought Sandy Ross’s cottage.’

  ‘Must have got it for a song,’ said Hamish. ‘That place has only a corrugated iron roof and an outside toilet. Who is she?’

  ‘Catriona Beldame.’

  ‘What sort of a name is that? Is she foreign?’

  ‘No, she has a bit of a highland accent.’

  ‘And where’s she from?’

  ‘Nobody knows. She just arrived. She’s …well, odd.’

  ‘How odd?’

  ‘She gives me the shivers. She’s very tall, as tall as you, and she has a queer sort of medieval face, very white, and yellowish brown eyes with heavy white lids. She has a long thin nose and a small mouth. She saw your cat and decided she must have it. There’s something else.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Some of the local men have been seen visiting her late at night.’

  ‘Dinnae tell me Lochdubh’s got its own brothel at last!’

  ‘That’s not it. I think she supplies herbal medicines.’

  ‘So why men, why late at night? Why no women?’

  ‘That’s the odd thing. No one talks about it. The Currie sisters said something to me about the men visiting her and then they clammed up.’

  ‘Not like that precious pair,’ commented Hamish. The Currie sisters were spinster twins and usually a great fund of gossip, some of it at Hamish’s expense. ‘I’d better go and visit this newcomer.’

  ‘If you can find the time. Detective Chief Inspector Blair has been demanding to know when you’re getting back. He said that you’re to report to police headquarters in Strathbane as soon as you arrive.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It might be because some gang has been robbing all the little local post offices in the north. Lochinver was attacked last week and then Altnabuie. You know how it is. They think we’re easy pickings this far north and with only one policeman to cover hundreds and hundreds of square miles.’

  * * *

  Hamish returned to the station, changed into his uniform, helped his pets into the police Land Rover, and set off over the hills.

  As he drove down the long slope that led to Strathbane, he thought the town really was a blot on the beauty of the highland landscape with its decaying docks, crumbling tower bloc
ks, vice and crime.

  Steady rain was beginning to fall as he walked up the steps of headquarters and made his way up to the detectives’ room.

  Detective Sergeant Jimmy Anderson cried, ‘Well, if it isn’t señor back from Spain! Bring me a present?’

  ‘Some duty-free whisky.’

  ‘Got it with you?’

  ‘Back at the station.’

  Hamish noticed that Jimmy’s usually sharp foxy face was getting blurred round the edges and his blue eyes were watery. The amount the detective drank was at last beginning to show.

  ‘What’s all this about burglaries?’ asked Hamish.

  ‘Lot of them at wee post offices.’

  ‘What’s been done about it?’

  ‘Nothing much. The territory’s huge and we never know where they’ll hit next. Blair wants to see you.’

  The man himself lumbered out of his office. He was a thickset Glaswegian who loathed Hamish.

  ‘There you are, you teuchter,’ he snarled. ‘Anderson, gie him what we’ve got on thae burglaries. I want a quick result.’

  Blair went back into his office and slammed the door.

  ‘I’ve printed off all the reports for you,’ said Jimmy. ‘It’s always the same. Three men, masked wi’ balaclavas. One wi’ a sawn-off shotgun. Nobody’s been hurt so far.’

  ‘Any undercover cops been sent out to hide in the post offices?’ asked Hamish.

  ‘Aye, for a bit. But the villains always chose the one there wasn’t a cop in.’

  Hamish pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Now, there’s a thing. Could it be possible that some cheil here was giving them information?’

  ‘Aw, come on, Hamish. It’s hardly the Great Train Robbery we’re talking about.’

  ‘Who’s the newest policeman on the force?’

  ‘Policewoman. Wee Alice Donaldson.’

  ‘Where is she right now?’

  ‘Off duty today. Och, Hamish. You just can’t think …’

  ‘Of anything else,’ said Hamish. ‘Let me have her address.’

  Jimmy applied himself to the computer and then said, ‘Here it is. Write it down. Eight Bannoch Brae. That’s down near the docks. Not a tower block. There’s a row of wee houses just before you get to the tower blocks on the Inverness Road.’