Death of a Nag hm-11

by M C Beaton

  “They’re awfy young,” said Hamish.

  “But very young children commit dreadful murders these days,” put in Maggie, who was beginning to feel she had been forgotten.

  “I’ll check up on them myself,” said Hamish. “I hae a lot o’ contacts in Glasgow.”

  “The way I see it,” said Angela dreamily, “is that it was a murder of savage impulse, no poisoning or shooting or stabbing, just a sudden blow to the head. Whoever it was may not even have contemplated murder. Just bashed the horrible Harris on the head in a fit of rage. Harris tips over into the river and the assailant rushes off without waiting to see the result of the blow. It was death by drowning, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Hamish slowly.

  “So we get back to the respectable section of the boarding-house party,” said Angela eagerly. “Instead of looking for a murderer, look for someone who might just be capable of a fit of rage. Oh, and there’s something else.”

  Maggie looked at the doctor’s wife in irritation. It should have been she, Maggie, who should have been enthralling Hamish Macbeth with her speculations.

  “What else?” asked Hamish.

  “Harris seemed to like having things on people, like tormenting Dermott. And what if Harris knew about the bad food from the old folks’ home? What of that? This Rogers. Now there’s a criminal for you.”

  “Aye, you’ve given me a lot to think about,” said Hamish. “That business about Rogers now, I think Deacon should get on to it.”

  Maggie got to her feet. “Don’t worry. I’ll phone him, Hamish.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to go back to the police station,” said Angela to Maggie’s fury. “Use the phone over there, Hamish.”

  So Maggie had to sit, feeling useless, as Hamish outlined his suspicions about Rogers to Deacon. The fact that she herself had not really had one good insight into the case did not occur to her. She felt she was being left out as usual.

  When Hamish returned, he looked shrewdly at Maggie’s sulky face and said, “Why don’t you run along and get changed for dinner and make your own way up to the hotel. I’ve a few calls to make.”

  Maggie did not want to go, but on the other hand could think of no reason for staying, but as she walked along to Mrs Maclean’s she was cheered by the fact that Hamish Macbeth thought enough of her to buy her an expensive dinner.

  She sat in her room and read, occasionally glancing with pleasure at her newly laundered clothes, which had been laid out on the bed. The cotton dress she planned to wear was white, with great splashes of red roses. She knew it flattered her figure. Finally she went to the Macleans’ minuscule bathroom and had a bath in one of those modern plastic baths which had about as much space as a coffin.

  It was when she started to put her clean clothes on that she realized the sheer folly of having agreed to Mrs Maclean’s laundering her clothes. Mrs Maclean must have boiled everything. The dress was cotton, the bra and panties of a cotton-and-acrylic mixture, as were the petticoat and tights. Everything had shrunk. The dress was up above her knees and strained painfully across her bosom. Her bra and panties felt tight and uncomfortable. She glanced at the clock. It would have to do. But she would give Mrs Maclean a piece of her mind on her way out.

  But when she went into the kitchen, Mrs Maclean turned round from the steaming copper. Her face was flushed and red and her eyes very hard. Maggie’s courage ran out. She simply walked past her and out of the door.

  There had been no mirror in either Maggie’s room or in the bathroom – how the husband shaved, she didn’t know – and she had made up her face using the hand mirror in her compact.

  As soon as she walked into the reception area of the hotel, she was faced by a reflection of herself in a long mirror on the opposite wall. She wanted to turn and run. Her large breasts, cut by the brassiere underneath and constrained by the shrunken dress, bulged over the low neckline like those of an eighteenth-century tart.

  And then Hamish approached her, Hamish in a dinner jacket, looking very smooth and relaxed. “I see you let Mrs Maclean wash your clothes,” he said sympathetically. “Mistake. You can’t eat in that dress. The food’ll stick in your neck. Go and sit in the bar and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Maggie went and took a seat in the corner of the bar. As she walked across it, a group of men with gin-and-sauna-flushed faces watched her with amusement. One said with disastrous clarity, “Must be the local tart.”

  She sat there feeling naked and very alone. Hamish reappeared with Mr Johnson in tow. “My, my,” said Mr Johnson, staring at Maggie in admiration. “When Mrs Maclean washes, she really washes.”

  “Come with me, Maggie,” said Hamish. “I’ve got something for ye.”

  He led her upstairs and along a corridor and took a key out of his pocket and opened the door. “This is Mrs Halburton-Smythe’s quarters. We’ll find you something here, but don’t spill anything on what you wear, or we’ll all be in trouble. Here, what about this thing?”

  He took out a caftan, a purple silk one embroidered with gold.

  “Oh, that’ll do,” said Maggie, looking at the gown’s generous folds.

  “The bathroom’s through there,” said Hamish, “I’ll wait for you.”

  Maggie, in the bathroom, removed the hellishly tight dress and underwear and slipped the loose caftan over her naked body. She left her discarded clothes in the bathroom so that she could change back into them when the evening was over.

  When she came out, she asked, “Is there a stole or a wrap or anything to put over this?”

  “Bound to be,” said Hamish, searching through female garments. “Oh, here’s the very thing,” He handed her a black cashmere shawl, which Maggie gratefully put around her shoulders.

  As they walked downstairs together to the dining room, Maggie stole sharp little glances at her companion. He seemed transformed by the dinner jacket. He looked as if he had been dining in expensive restaurants all his life. Maggie did not know that Hamish was blessed with the Highlander’s vanity of feeling that he belonged anywhere he happened to be and so always fitted in.

  Although Maggie enjoyed her dinner, she could not find any ideas to top those of the doctor’s wife. Hamish did not exactly discuss the case with her, he seemed to be thinking aloud, almost forgetting she was there. In fact, thought Maggie, he did not seem to be aware she was a woman at all. Fortunately for Hamish, her self-consciousness stopped her from noticing that the waiter did not present him with any bill at the end of the meal.

  When she had finally changed back into those dreadfully tight clothes, she felt quite demoralized. She knew she would not even have the courage to give Mrs Maclean a lecture. The rest of her small stock of clothes was probably just as tight. She would need to wash what she had taken off that day in the hand basin in her room and dry everything in front of the room’s two-bar electric heater.

  They were just leaving the hotel when Mr Johnson came running after them.

  “Call for you, Hamish,” he shouted. “The police at Skag.”

  Maggie waited in her car. Hamish seemed to be away a long time. As he came out, she wound down her window. “Trouble?” she asked.

  “Aye. You’d best get down to Mrs Maclean’s and pack up your things. We’re off to Skag.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Another murder.”

  “What! Who?”

  “Thon Jamie MacPherson, the boatman.”

  ∨ Death of a Nag ∧

  8

  We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.

  —George Henry Lewis

  Smells of fish and chips and salt sea, cold wind, blowing sand, bleakness; only the end of July, and yet a strong suggestion of a dying year. Skag.

  It was two in the morning. Hamish sat in the police station facing an unshaven Deacon.

  “Tell me again, sir,” said Hamish. “How did it happen?”

  “If I knew how, I would know who,” said Deacon crossly. “But as I said, it
was like this: Mrs Flaherty and her husband wanted to take a boat out. It was late afternoon. They go to the boat-shed, that shack, you know, at the back o’ the jetty. They go inside and look about. No one seems tae be there. Then, like a Hitchcock movie, missis sees a foot stickin’ out from the back o’ the door to that wee office he has at the back where he keeps his records. Well, they don’t think o’ murder, do they? Think some poor sod has passed out. Mr Flaherty says he’s probably drunk but they have a look anyway. Jamie MacPherson is very dead. Mr Flaherty prides himself on his cool nerve and promptly tries to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. To do so, he slides one hand under Jamie’s neck. That’s when he feels wet stickiness, pulls his hand away and finds it covered wi’ blood. Shows his hand tae his wife, who starts screaming like a banshee. So the first estimate by the pathologist and by the forensic boys is that Jamie was sitting at his desk when someone stabbed him in the back of the neck wi’ something like a dagger, but not all that sharp.”

  “So it would take some muscle to stab him?”

  “Aye, that’s the way it looks. He fell off the chair, backwards, knocking the chair over, rolled towards the door, and died on his back behind it. So either this is not related, or Jamie knew something and was blackmailing someone and that someone did for him.”

  “And we haff the blackmailer in the shape of Rogers.”

  “Aye, but at roughly the time o’ the murder, Rogers was here, being questioned again. In fact, he was here all afternoon.”

  “What about the rest of them?”

  “Dermott Brett was interviewed again at lunch-time and sent away, Doris Harris and Andrew Biggar were interviewed again in the morning, as was that Miss Gunnery. Cheryl and Tracey say they were on the beach, but nobody saw them.”

  “If Jamie MacPherson was trying to make money out of someone,” said Hamish, “then someone’s bank account is going to show a recent withdrawal that someone might not be able to explain.”

  “We’re working on that.” Deacon passed a weary hand over his face. “Do you know, I’ve got a gut feeling someone murdered Jamie MacPherson, if he was a blackmailer, before the first payment was made. I don’t know what the weapon was.”

  “Would it haff been something that wass just lying around?” suggested Hamish. “A paper-knife, boat-knife, something like that?”

  “Aye, it could well be.”

  “What about family? Was he married?”

  “Wife died a whiles back. One son in America. That’s all. He lived alone, the auld bugger, so there’s no one that we know of that he might hae confided in. Solitary bloke. No friends. Bit o’ a quiet drunk, from all reports, solitary drunk.”

  “I hate being stuck here,” said Hamish after a short silence.

  “Why? This is where it’s all happening, laddie.”

  “There’s something nagging at me. Doris Harris lives in Evesham and Andrew Biggar in Worcester. They weren’t far from each other. The horrible Bob was a traveller, so Doris must have had some time to herself. Now Andrew Biggar appears to be the country gent, large house with mother outside Worcester, judges dog shows, rides in local point-to-points. If he even keeps one horse, that’s an expense. Someone like that does not suddenly decide to holiday in a tatty cheap boarding-house on the Moray Firth.”

  “Okay,” said Deacon. “Let’s look at it. The gentlemanly Andrew is madly in love with Doris. So why the hell would he want to torture hisself by seeing her in company wi’ her dreadful husband, eh?”

  “Unless,” said Hamish quietly, “he planned to murder Harris afore he came. Now you can get the local police at Worcester to dig deep, if you like. But you know what police routine is like. One bored constable or detective constable sent to ask patient questions. But I hae the knack of finding out things,” said Hamish with simple Highland vanity. “I would like fine to get down there and see what I could come up with.”

  “And what could you do that any detective could not?”

  “Use my imagination,” said Hamish eagerly. “Figure out if I were Andrew and meeting Doris on the sly, a Doris who would be terrified of any neighbour seeing her. I could figure out where they would meet. They don’t look like a couple who’ve slept together, so I would be asking at the sort of restaurants or pubs they would go to, that sort of thing.”

  Deacon leaned back in his chair and surveyed Hamish’s tall figure. “How do I cover for ye? You’d need to do it at your own expense and without the local police knowing.”

  “I’ll take a gamble,” said Hamish. “If I solve this case, I’ll leave it to you to fiddle the books to coyer my costs. If not, I’ll pay for it. I brought the police Land Rover wi’ me. I could use that to get me south and then hire a car in Worcester or use public transport. I’ve done this sort o’ thing before.”

  “With results?”

  “Always with results,” said Hamish, firmly tucking away in the back of his mind several wasted trips south.

  “All right,” said Deacon suddenly. “I’ll do it. We’ll say some relative of yours in the south has died. This is just between you and me. But don’t be long. Two days at the most. I’ve photos of Doris and Andrew taken by the local man I can give you.”

  Hamish drove back to the boarding-house in the Land Rover, which still smelt disturbingly of dog. He entered the unlit hall and stiffened as a dark shape on the staircase rose in front of him.

  “Hamish?” came Miss Gunnery’s voice.

  “What are you doing there?” he demanded.

  “I couldn’t sleep. I heard from that policewoman that you’d returned. You’ve heard about this other murder?”

  “Come into the lounge,” said Hamish.

  He switched on the lights and they sat down facing each other. She was still dressed. Black shadows circled her eyes. She seemed all at once old.

  “I’m going away tomorrow,” said Hamish.

  “Oh, no. You mustn’t. I’m frightened.”

  “I’ll be gone two days at the most,” said Hamish soothingly. “I’m going to Evesham and Worcester. What are the others saying about this latest murder?”

  “Dermott and June are protecting the children as much as possible, so they’re very quiet. The noisiest was Cheryl, who went into hysterics, screaming she knew she would be next. Mrs Rogers has gone to stay with a relative in Dungarton, so we have to cook our own food, not that that’s a hardship. I was thinking of leaving and then this other murder happened, so we’re all trapped in this dreadful place.”

  “I won’t be away long,” Hamish explained again.

  “I don’t know why they are keeping us,” said Miss Gunnery, a nervous tic jumping on her left cheek. “What can the murder of that boatman have to do with Harris?”

  “Jamie could have been blackmailing the murderer,” said Hamish flatly.

  “But that’s ridiculous!”

  “Maybe. But it’s a strong possibility. He was an odd, solitary man and a drunk. Go to bed, Miss Gunnery. I need a few hours’ sleep. I’ve got an early start.”

  “Could you do something for me?”

  “Depends what it is,” said Hamish cautiously.

  “You won’t be far from Cheltenham. Could you possibly call on Ada, my friend Ada Agnew? Tell her I’m all right.”

  “You could phone her.”

  “I know. It’s silly of me. But Ada is looking after my cat and I’m sentimental about that animal. He’s called Joey. Just call and see if the cat looks all right. Dear me, I sound like an old maid.”

  “Give me her address and I’ll call if I can,” said Hamish.

  Miss Gunnery stood up and took an old magazine and tore off a strip of the margin and wrote ‘Mrs Agnew, 42, Andover Terrace, Cheltenham’ on it and passed it to Hamish.

  He suddenly felt exhausted. He gave her an abrupt ‘Goodnight’ and strode out without waiting to see whether she followed him or not.

  ♦

  Hamish had told Deacon that he would leave at seven in the morning but he actually left at six, frightened that he
might find Maggie Donald waiting for him on the doorstep at seven.

  It was with a feeling of relief that he drove off from Skag and took the long road south. The motorways farther south made it a relatively easy journey and it was late afternoon when he arrived in Worcester, finding a bed-and-breakfast place on the London road. Although he was tired after his long drive, he washed and changed and phoned around for the cheapest car-rental place he could find, eventually settling for a doubtful firm called Rent-A-Banger. The couple who ran the bed and breakfast were elderly and with a refreshing lack of curiosity as to why a Scottish policeman would wish to leave his Land Rover in the street at the back of their house while he rented a car. The house was dark and old–fashioned, but his room was comfortable.

  He picked up an old Ford Escort from the rental firm and headed out on the Wyre Piddle Road towards Andrew’s home. It was only when he was on his way there that he began to feel rather silly. All around Worcester there were pubs and restaurants, not to mention all those in the town itself. This was not the far north of Scotland. There were hundreds of places where a couple could meet. Andrew’s home was called High Farm. As he approached, he saw that it had indeed been at one time a farmhouse but was now a private dwelling, the outbuildings converted to stables and garages. He could see it all clearly from the road. He pulled into the side and wondered what to do. It was then he saw a tall, powerful-looking woman with white hair emerge and get into a Range Rover and drive off. There was something about her features that made him sure that this must be Andrew’s mother. After she had gone, he continued to study the house. He noticed a burglar alarm box on the wall of it and wondered whether the place was really wired up or if it was just an empty box to deceive burglars. It was in that moment that he realized that all the while he had subconsciously been planning to break in. Ignoring the warning voices in his head, which were screaming at him that it would mean the end of his lowly career as constable of Lochdubh if he were caught, he drove a little along the road until he came to a side road. He drove up it, parked the Ford close in under an overhanging hedge, and then strolled back. There was no one around. The house was large. They might have a servant who lived in. But the place had the deserted blind air of a house when no one is at home. To be on the safe side, he rang the bell and waited. There was no reply. Looking all about him to make sure no one was watching, he ambled around to the back of the house, which was two-storeyed and of red brick.