by M C Beaton
Hamish did not know that Charlie was sick of being a policeman and escaped into his mind back to his home in South Uist in the Outer Hebrides.
Charlie blinked and then said, “Where was I? Oh, yes. So, I told her it was dangerous to make up stories like that but she said she often played in the church and one day she was in the kitchen—they have one because tea is sometimes served after the service—when the minister and Mr. English came in and she said they dropped their bottom clothes and began to grunt and heave. She told her big brother who hopes one day to be a minister and he told her that she couldn’t have seen anything like that because it would mean Mr. English was having carnival knowledge of Mrs. Walters and that couldn’t be the case because they weren’t married.”
“You know, Charlie, there’s an awful ring of truth about all this. Let’s go and have a chat to Mrs. Walters.”
Mrs. Walters lived in a drab pebble-dashed bungalow which served as a manse. A brick path led up to the front door between regimented flower beds where the plants were so evenly placed and so upright, it was as if they had been ordered to stand to attention.
Hamish knocked on the door. It was abruptly opened by Mrs. Walters herself, who was much as Hamish remembered her to be: hair scraped back, thick glasses, thin mouth, dumpy figure, and no bra because her breasts were lumped over her belted waist. Her clothes were a depressing sludge brown and her skirt was droopy. But she was wearing patent-leather high-heeled sandals.
“May we come in?” asked Hamish as he and Charlie tucked their caps under their arms.
She suddenly looked ready to faint. “Is it Paul? Has anything happened?”
“No, no. Steady now,” said Hamish. “We just cannae find him. We’ll all go inside and Charlie here will make you a cup of tea.”
She guided them into what she called “the lounge.” It was a cold room. The fireplace had been blocked up and the hearth was filled with orange crepe paper. A set of bookshelves full of old leather-bound books took up one wall. The mantelpiece was covered in framed photographs of Mrs. Walters at various stages of her life. Hamish noticed there were no photos of Paul. He explained about the last time Paul had been seen.
“Why are you asking me?” she demanded. “I barely knew the man.”
“Well, barely seems to be the word for it. To put it crudely, you and Mr. English were seen shagging in the vestry.”
Charlie came in and handed her a cup of hot sweet tea. She blindly took it from him and the cup rattled in the saucer as her hand shook.
She put the cup down on a small bamboo side table, folded her hands in her lap, and said, “We are engaged to be married. Paul swore me to secrecy. He said he couldn’t bear gossip. But we never, ever did anything like that! I am a minister. Also, the vestry is locked. Where is he?”
“That is what we and the rest of the police force are trying to find out. When did you last see him? And why did you just say you barely knew the man in one breath and then say you were engaged in almost the next? When did you last hear from him?”
“That would be yesterday afternoon. He was furious about something but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. And I said I barely knew him because I didn’t really know what I was saying.”
Hamish promised to let her know as soon as Paul English was found but he was beginning to wonder if they would ever find him. He and Charlie called on daughter Holly who swore her mother was a saint and never, ever would blackmail anyone and how could they speak ill of the dead and began to cry so hard that a neighbour who had been looking after her phoned Strathbane and complained so Hamish was told to submit a full report in triplicate explaining his behaviour.
* * *
But the opportunity didn’t arise to question her any more, for Holly suddenly left for Norway without informing the Scottish police. The Norwegian police said that her mother’s body had been found and the daughter had identified it. A Mrs. Merriweather who had been on the cruise with Maggie had offered to pay for the funeral. Hamish’s friend at headquarters, Jimmy Anderson, turned up at the police station just after Hamish had heard the news.
“I tried to get permission to go out there but it was no go.”
“Why?”
“Pour me a whisky and I’ll tell you.”
“It is only ten in the morning.”
“So what?”
“Oh, well, it’s your liver.”
“I got to thinking. What if this Mrs. Merriweather is actually Maggie?”
“What did the Norwegian police say?”
“They e-mailed a photo of Mrs. Merriweather. She’s a bit wrinkly and droopy but there’s no way she looks like Maggie. The captain made a statement saying he often couldn’t tell them apart—one old woman looked much the same as another to him. Cheeky sod. Wait a bit. The evening afore Maggie went overboard, he said the pair were pretending to be each other. He said that was when he had a good look at them and burst out laughing. He said Maggie was trying to sound American and Mrs. Merriweather was trying to sound Scottish and they were making a pig’s ear of it. Oh, well, here goes. Rummel, rummel roond the gums. Look out stomach, here it comes!”
“How did they know she had committed suicide?” asked Hamish. “I mean, what if she was pushed overboard?”
“Member of the crew saw her. She fell from the upper deck. Alarm called. Ship stopped, alarm bells rung, search and search until the rich passengers began to bitch that this wasnae what they paid for.”
“I wish I could get a real search of that house of hers. But the daughter will…wait a bit. The daughter’s over in Norway.”
“Holly will scream police harassment even if I could get a search warrant. Gosh. This weather fair gives a man a thirst.”
Jimmy held out his glass and beamed as Hamish absentmindedly poured a large measure of whisky into it.
“Of course,” said Hamish slowly, “if me and Charlie happened to be passing and heard what we thought was a cry for help, well, as good policemen, we’d break in, wouldn’t we?”
“I never heard that,” said Jimmy. “Man, this is the grand whisky. I can aye tell the good ones.”
“It’s Japanese,” said Hamish. “An American tourist was over in Japan and brought it back and gave it to me.”
Jimmy glared into the contents of his glass. Pride told him to pretend it was awful and pour it down the sink. Honesty prevailed. It was alcohol. So what?
* * *
After Jimmy had left, Hamish drove up to the Tommel Castle Hotel, taking Lugs with him. Sally, the poodle, was almost permanently with Charlie. He was about to descend the stairs to Charlie’s apartment when he heard the voice of Colonel Halburton-Smythe, owner of the hotel, talking to Charlie, and backed away. It was an odd friendship, that of the usually snobbish colonel and Charlie Carter. But the colonel also fancied himself as a detective and Hamish knew that if he told Charlie about going to Holly Bates’s home, then the colonel would insist on following.
“Looking for me?” asked a voice behind him. He swung round. His former fiancée, Priscilla Halburton-Smythe stood there, blonde and beautiful as ever, and as cold as ice, Hamish reminded himself. Her lack of any sexual warmth was what had made him terminate their engagement, and yet part of him still yearned for her.
“Do you think you can get your father out of there?” asked Hamish. “I need Charlie for police business and you know your father will try to come as well.”
“Well, hullo, Priscilla, how are you, up here for long?” mocked Priscilla. “Don’t worry. Go and have a coffee with Mr. Johnson.”
* * *
Mr. Johnson, the hotel manager, looked up as Hamish and Lugs walked into his office. “Avoiding Hercule Poirot again?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
“Help yourself to coffee and tell me all about Granny Dinwiddy committing suicide.”
Hamish collected a mug of coffee from the coffee machine along with a packet of biscuits. “Why are these damned things always hermetically sealed?” he complained, teari
ng open the packet with his teeth. Two biscuits shot out and landed on the floor where Lugs gulped them down. “What’s with the airline-type biscuits?”
“They were going cheap and we put a packet in each room with their free coffee and tea. Try another, and here’s a pair of scissors.”
When Hamish had successfully opened the packet, he said, “I think she was a blackmailer. I think maybe Paul English who I know was being blackmailed by her got fed up and said he was going to the police—something like that. I mean, she must have had a stronger hold on him than merely getting under the minimum wage for him to pay for a cruise and a set of new clothes. But then she was floating around some fjord while he was being murdered. Of course, he might be alive and just have cleared off.”
“No sign of him yet?”
“The trouble is no one wants him found and if someone murdered him, well, there are suspects like the old Highland and Islands phone book. He must have insulted hundreds of people. I’m beginning to think we’ll never find him.”
* * *
Penny and Abby Worhy were sisters and not very much alike. Both were in their early teens. Penny, a black-haired beauty, was thirteen and her sister, Abby, small and thin with pointed features like an elf, was twelve. They had a metal detector which belonged to their elder brother, Callum, who was at Edinburgh University. They had seen a documentary on television about people who had found treasure with their metal detectors. Penny had suggested they try the peat bog up on the moors outside Lochdubh.
It was half term; the day was sunny and warm and Abby said she was sure they would find something really good like a Viking sword. But Penny laughed at her and said she was only interested in gold and silver.
They settled down on the tussocky grass and heather at the edge of the bog to eat a picnic lunch. But Abby couldn’t wait. “Let me go first, Penny,” she begged.
“Okay,” said Penny. “But make sure you’re on safe ground.”
But Abby knew the bog well and was soon moving from one safe little island to another as she swung the metal detector over the bog. She nearly fell in with excitement when the detector issued its shrill alarm. “I’ve got something!” Abby yelled.
Penny hurried to join her. “I never thought what we would do if the thing was down in the bog,” she said gloomily. “How do we search without being dragged down?”
“I think it’s safe,” said Abby. “It’s been dry for ever so long. Look!”
She put her hand down into the bog and showed a small handful of dry peat to her sister. “I brought the brass coal shovel,” said Penny. “I’ll lie on my stomach and you hold my feet just in case.”
“I should be the one to look,” muttered Abby. But she held her sister’s ankles as Penny began to dig. The small brass shovel flashed in the sunlight and Penny was soon covered in clouds of peat dust. “I’ve found something.” The shovel clinked against metal.
Overcome with excitement, Abby released her grip on her sister’s ankles and crawled forward. “We’ll both use our hands to scrape around it,” said Penny. “Look, Abby. Those look like handcuffs. Let’s…”
“No!” screamed Abby. “Get your phone. Call Hamish.”
“What?”
“Don’t you see? Thon missing man was wearing handcuffs!”
* * *
Hamish got the call on his phone and sent Mr. Johnson to fetch Charlie. “Did you have to bring that poodle?” complained Hamish.
“You’ve got Lugs.”
“Lugs is a dog. That’s a thing.”
“No superior rank is going to stop me from punching your head, sir.”
“Sorry, Charlie. But we’ll drop the beasts at the police station first. Blair will be on the scene.”
* * *
When they arrived at the peat bog, Blair was there along with Jimmy Anderson, Superintendent Daviot, various detectives, and a squad of policemen already combing the moorland for clues.
Blair lumbered up to them, his eyes gleaming with malice as he surveyed them. “You useless pair. Join the squad out on the moor and bag anything ye find.”
“I think we would be more use talking to the suspects,” said Hamish. “I was the one who stopped them from throwing him in the loch the night he disappeared.”
“Aye, that’s right,” said Charlie.
“My, my!” jeered Blair. “It’s alive! My God, the teuchters are thick enough on the mainland but when they’re frae the isles, they’re brain-dead.”
Charlie took an enraged step forward but Hamish put a restraining hand on his arm and said, “Do be careful, Charlie, we both know the detective to be capable of murder.”
Blair was clenching his fists in rage when the colonel’s high precise voice could be heard saying, “Peter, a word with you, if you please.”
“A’right,” snarled Blair. “Do whit ye have tae do!”
Hamish and Charlie went off but it was too late for Blair. Peter was Daviot’s first name and Daviot and his wife had been invited to dinner at the castle by the colonel and all because of, as Daviot knew very well, the colonel’s close friendship with Charlie.
“I did not know in these politically correct days,” said the colonel, “that policemen were allowed to indulge in ethnic slurs.”
* * *
“So,” said Charlie, “where do we start?”
“We’ll go over to the forestry. The ones who were trying to throw him in the loch were all forestry workers. The trouble is they’re all from Glasgow and it would take someone with local knowledge to know about the peat bog.”
“Who were they?”
“Two brothers, John and Harry Noble. The others? Tim Rankin and Sam Meachin.”
* * *
The forestry workers were at first sullen until they realised they were not going to be arrested for assault. They said Paul had mocked their accents and sneered at their city and so they had decided to teach him a lesson. As Glaswegians, they did not possess the highlander’s talent for lying and so Hamish was forced to believe them when they all swore that after Hamish had appeared on the scene, they had all gone home. The only thing they got of use from them was that just before Paul had started sneering at them, he had made a phone call.
As they strolled back to where they had left the police Land Rover with the dogs at their heels, Hamish said, “Usually it’s sex or money. What was the name of that wee girl who claimed Maisie had carnival knowledge?”
“Fairy McSporran.”
“Do you know where she lives?”
“Aye, I wrote it down.” Charlie fished in his pocket and drew out a small notebook. As he searched the pages, Hamish leaned against the sun-warmed side of the Land Rover and watched the sun slanting through the pines and suddenly wished it were all over.
“Here we are,” said Charlie. “It’s number five, Dunmore Road, that’s up the brae a bit behind the kirk. What did this Paul do afore he came up here?”
“I checked it up. He was a bank manager in Stirling and retired last year. Stirling police say he was very unpopular as he delighted in refusing loans. He was all right for a time because Scottish people of a certain age don’t like change but the new generation said, ‘The hell wi’ this,’ and changed banks. The bank was the Scottish Independent. They were alarmed at the loss of customers. They gave him a golden goodbye and so he came up here to torment us all.”
“So it could ha’ been someone from Stirling.”
“I doubt it,” said Hamish. “It was chance that someone who hated him found him wandering along the road with his hands handcuffed behind his back.”
* * *
It showed all the signs of being a Christian household, thought Hamish gloomily as he and Charlie sat side by side on a slippery chintz-covered sofa. In front of them was a coffee table with various religious magazines arranged neatly on it. The wallpaper was cream with brown Regency stripes which somehow seemed to turn the room into a cage.
Mrs. McSporran came in carrying a tray with two steaming mugs of coffee and
a plate of shortbread. “I put the sugar and milk in for you,” she said. Hamish liked his coffee black but there was something intimidating about Mrs. McSporran’s glittering eyes and jerky movements. She sat down on a chair opposite them. She was wearing very thick glasses which caught the sun shining in the window so that it was hard to read her expression.
Charlie was reaching for a piece of shortbread when Mrs. McSporran said in a severe voice, “We will now say grace.”
She began to recite Robert Burns’s Selkirk Grace:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
Some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.
“You may have your coffee now. Why do you want to see Fairy?”
What on earth made this grim matron give her daughter a name like Fairy, thought Hamish. Aloud he said, “Your daughter claims to have seen Mrs. Maisie Walters and Mr. Paul English in a compromising position. And I assume Mrs. Walters is a widow?”
“Aye, her first husband died a while back, so I heard. But to get to Fairy. The puir wee thing. When the reverend came around and told me, I skelpt that wee lassie’s backside and told her never to lie again.”
Said Charlie, “Her description of the event did not sound like lying to me.”
She had a weather-beaten red face but it almost turned white. “This has got to stop,” she shouted. “Mrs. Walters says she will take us to court for slander.”
Had Mrs. Walters been a poor woman, then the gossip would have festered and burnt, but she was a reverend and Cnothan was still old-fashioned in its pecking order and ministers were the top of the tree.
“We’ll leave that for the moment,” said Hamish soothingly. “Now, the late Mr. English…”
“He’s deid!”
“Yes, his body was found in a peat bog.”
Mrs. McSporran fell to her knees on the haircord carpet and raised her hands to the ceiling. “You have heard my prayer, O Lord, and you smote the wicked.”
