Death of a Bore

by Beaton, M. C.

  Freda was beginning to regret having asked him. What would her friends make of him?

  Elspeth and Matthew made good time and reached Inverness much earlier than they had expected to.

  But the prospect of dinner beckoned, and so they decided to stick to the original plan of setting out for Lochdubh in the morning.

  When dinner was over, Matthew said, ‘It’s early yet. What’s Inverness got in the way of amusement?’

  ‘There are a couple of clubs.’

  ‘What about dropping into one for a drink? I’d like to see what the local talent looks like.’

  ‘All right. But not for long. We can walk. It’s round the corner from this hotel.’

  ‘Good,’ said Matthew cheerfully. ‘Now I can have a really big drink.’

  Hamish Macbeth was not enjoying himself. Although still in his early thirties, he felt old and crotchety. Where was the fun of being jammed on a small dance floor where the music hurt his ears and the air was thick with smoke, cheap perfume and sweat?

  Freda had cast off her long winter coat to reveal that she was wearing nothing more than a cropped top and a tiny red leather skirt. Hamish had left his jacket in the cloakroom along with his tie. The dancing came as no problem to him: it seemed to consist of jumping around and waving his arms in the air.

  I wish I hadn’t brought him, thought Freda. Her friends, the ones she had made since first visiting the club, were sitting over in the small bar area staring at them.

  When the dance number finished, she said, ‘I would like a drink.’

  ‘I’ve got to go to the men’s room,’ said Hamish. ‘I’ll join you in a minute.’

  ‘What are you drinking?’

  ‘Give me a minute and I’ll get them when I come back.’

  Freda’s friends, Cheryl, Sharon and Mary, moved along the banquette they were sitting on to make room for her.

  ‘Who’s the boyfriend?’ asked Cheryl.

  ‘He isn’t my boyfriend. He’s the local bobby.’

  ‘He’s got gorgeous red hair,’ sighed Sharon. ‘I was dancing up next to him. I’d give anything for eyelashes like that.’

  Freda looked round at them in amazement. ‘You fancy him?’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ sighed Mary.

  At that moment Hamish appeared. ‘What are you all having to drink?’ he asked. They all ordered Bacardi Breezers. Gloomily Hamish went to the bar. It was going to be an expensive night. He ordered the drinks and then a tonic water for himself. ‘Where are the glasses?’ he asked the barman.

  ‘They all drink from the bottle here,’ said the barman.

  Hamish made his way back to the table and sat in a chair facing Freda and the girls.

  The disco music started again just as they were beginning to speak. Conversation was nearly impossible.

  Elspeth came on to the dance floor, and as she gyrated with Matthew, she glanced across at the bar and stumbled. ‘Sorry,’ she shouted in Matthew’s ear. ‘I’ve just seen Hamish Macbeth.’

  ‘The bobby?’

  ‘That’s the one. He’s at the bar.’

  ‘Let’s join him.’

  Hamish slowly rose to his feet as he saw Elspeth approaching. She looked more sophisticated than the last time he had seen her. Her thick hair had been defrizzed, and she was wearing it in a French plait. She was dressed in a tailored blouse and skirt and high heels. Gone were the charity shop clothes and clumpy boots.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he shouted.

  ‘On that murder story. Can we have a word with you outside?’

  He nodded.

  Freda got up and followed him. Her interest in Hamish was awakened anew by her friends’ admiration of him. Besides, who was this woman?

  Hamish turned round in the doorway and saw Freda following. ‘This is business, Freda. If you like to wait inside, I’ll come back for you.’

  ‘And dance by myself? A date’s a date, Hamish.’

  ‘All right. We’d best get our coats. It’s freezing outside and you haven’t got much on.’

  Matthew and Elspeth were already outside. ‘Let’s find a pub,’ said Matthew. ‘I was only in there a few minutes and I’m deaf already.’

  ‘You haven’t introduced us, Hamish,’ said Elspeth, looking at Freda.

  ‘Oh, sorry. Freda, this is Elspeth Grant, who used to work for the Highland Times. Elspeth, our new schoolteacher, Freda Garrety.’

  ‘And I’m Matthew Campbell,’ said Matthew. ‘There’s a pub on the other side of the street.’

  ‘More noise, probably,’ said Elspeth. ‘Let’s use the hotel bar.’

  In the hotel, after they had sat down in the bar, Elspeth covertly studied Hamish. Did he remember making love to her? As if picking up her thought, Hamish blushed and stared at the table.

  Freda’s eyes darted suspiciously from one to the other.

  The waiter came up and they all ordered drinks. Hamish stuck to tonic water, although he suddenly felt that a whisky would be nice. Then he thought a cigarette would be even better. He had given up smoking but was still occasionally haunted by a yearning for nicotine.

  ‘Now, Hamish,’ began Elspeth, ‘we’re going up to Lochdubh in the morning to do a background piece on this murder. Any other press around?’

  ‘No, they’ve given up apart from checking every day with headquarters in Strathbane. There isn’t much I can tell you aside from what’s been in the papers.’

  ‘Tell us from the beginning,’ said Matthew. He looked curiously at Hamish. He sensed Elspeth’s tension and had seen Hamish blush. Surely she hadn’t. Had she? Some of the already rebuffed reporters were going around saying she was a lesbian. But then, they said that about every girl who turned them down.

  Hamish began to talk about the writing class and the bruised egos of the would-be writers. He described the murder and the false arrest of Alistair Taggart.

  ‘It’s bound to be one of those people in the writing class,’ said Matthew

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Hamish stiffly. ‘I know them all.’

  ‘I don’t think you know the violence of the humiliated writing ego,’ said Matthew. ‘Elspeth, do you remember that new reporter who got struck with a fit of the Hemingways? He wrote this news story which went something like this: Constable Peter Hammond was patrolling his beat on a foggy night in the mean streets of Glasgow. The fog muffled noise apart from the shrill sound of a child crying. He remembered his youth . . . and on and on and on until in the last paragraph he gets to the point and says someone shot him.

  ‘The news editor went ballistic and tore it up in front of him and told him to write a proper news story. The reporter screamed that he had written a literary work of art and tried to strangle the editor, and it took three of us to haul him off.’

  ‘No one in the village,’ said Hamish firmly.

  ‘Then if not in the village, where?’ asked Matthew.

  Elspeth studied Hamish with those odd silver eyes of hers, Gypsy eyes. ‘What about Strathbane Television?’ she asked.

  ‘Why there?’ asked Hamish cautiously.

  ‘He was writing a script for Down in the Glen. If he was as nasty as he appears to have been, he could have riled someone there. Wait a bit. You asked me about the Trotskyites. Harry Tarrant was there at the time. Has he got an alibi for the time of the murder?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone asked him,’ said Hamish. ‘It’s Strathbane’s job, but they always walk on eggshells when it comes to television.’

  ‘We’ll ask him,’ said Matthew cheerfully.

  ‘Let me know what he says.’ Hamish turned to Freda. ‘I’ve got to start work early tomorrow. Would you mind if we went home?’

  Freda pouted. She had intended to dance until the small hours. But returning with Hamish meant she could get this policeman whom her friends found so attractive all to herself.

  On the long road back to Lochdubh, Freda chattered about this and that, but Hamish replied in monosyllables. He was engulfed with an odd longing f
or Elspeth, and yet he had not thought about her all that much since she had left for Glasgow.

  Was Matthew Campbell just another reporter? They seemed very much at ease in each other’s company.

  He got out of the car at Freda’s home. She put her face up to be kissed, but he didn’t notice, his thoughts being still focussed on Elspeth.

  What a waste of an evening, thought Freda, watching his long figure make its way along the waterfront to the police station.

  One of the many faults of Detective Chief Inspector Blair was that as soon as the press lost interest in a case, he was apt to lose interest in it as well. He had put the murder of John Heppel to the back of his mind and the investigation to the back of his workload. He was in a bad mood because although the raid on Dimity Dan’s had been successful – drugs found along with teenage drinkers – his moment of glory had been all too brief.

  Hamish Macbeth had sent over a computerized report on how he had asked Callum to deliver the box of rubbish to the police station; it contained a statement from Callum and witness statements from Freda and Callum as well. Somehow the report had found its way to his boss’s desk. Daviot had sent for him the morning after the raid. Fortunately Blair remembered in the nick of time that it was Peter Daviot’s daughter’s birthday and rushed out and bought a huge box of chocolates and a card.

  ‘That is so kind of you. Sheila will be delighted,’ said Daviot, who adored his eldest daughter. ‘I must say, you’re quite like one of the family.’

  And the blistering lecture he had meant to give Blair was modified to a mild reprimand. ‘I’m surprised you did not mention Macbeth in your report.’

  ‘I’m right sorry, sir,’ grovelled Blair. ‘It must ha’ slipped my mind. I should ha’ given Macbeth the credit. But I think there’s a reason for that. Macbeth insists on being a village bobby, and somehow you don’t think of the village bobby when it comes to a major raid.’

  ‘You have a point there,’ said Daviot with a sigh. ‘How is the investigation into the murder of John Heppel going?’

  ‘We’re still working on it.’ Blair was suddenly struck with what he thought of as a brilliant idea. ‘I was thinking of pulling my men out of Lochdubh,’ he said, omitting to say that he already had, ‘and letting Hamish Macbeth get on with it. Softly, softly approach, sir. He knows the locals.’

  ‘Are the press still interested?’

  ‘No, they’ve given up.’

  ‘Let’s try Macbeth for, say, a week, and see how he gets on.’

  The following day Matthew and Elspeth booked in at the Tommel Castle Hotel. Matthew had talked on the road up as the landscape grew wilder about how he loathed the countryside and how he would always be a city boy at heart. But as he walked outside the hotel after a very good lunch, the day was crisp and clear and the sun was shining. He breathed in the pure air and stared up at the soaring mountains. He would never have believed that a part of the overcrowded British Isles could be so deserted.

  Elspeth appeared behind him. ‘Admiring the view?’

  ‘It’s pretty breathtaking.’

  ‘Nowhere else like it. There are Atlantic seals in the harbour, golden eagles on the mountains, and red deer on the moorland. You can find places where you can walk miles and see nothing made by man.’

  ‘You love it here, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m ambitious, too. There’s not much up here for the ambitious. We’d better get started. Strathbane Television first.’

  ‘I must say the food at this hotel is cordon bleu standard.’

  ‘That’s Clarry, the chef. When Hamish was a sergeant, Clarry was his sidekick. But he spent all the time cooking until he discovered that was all he really wanted to do.’

  ‘Why did Macbeth get demoted back to constable?’

  ‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime.’

  They got in Matthew’s car and drove off. ‘How come Sutherland is so empty?’ asked Matthew.

  ‘It’s because of the old Duke of Sutherland. At the start of the nineteenth century he owned the biggest private estate in Europe. It amounted to some one and a half million acres and covered a huge part of northern Scotland. He discovered he could get more money from grazing sheep than from the crofters. This caused the brutal removal of up to fifteen thousand people from the Duke of Sutherland’s estates to make way for the sheep. Some were resettled in coastal communities like Lochdubh to take advantage of the herring boom. More were shipped abroad: many to North America. The clearances fundamentally changed the landscape of much of northern Scotland. The tiny settlements were swept away, leaving the occasional ruins you can see dotted about. There’s a row going on still about the duke’s statue in Golspie.’

  ‘What row?’

  ‘There’s a hundred-foot-high statue on the top of Beinn a’ Bhragaidh. It was erected a year after his death by, to quote, “a mourning and grateful tenantry to a judicious kind and liberal landlord.” An awful lot of people want it pulled down.’

  ‘See their point. Do we go straight to Strathbane Television, or do we call at police headquarters first?’

  ‘The television station, I think.’

  ‘I’ve often wondered,’ said Matthew, ‘why you settled for working for the Daily Bugle’s Scottish edition. You could have gone to London. I only heard the other day that the main office had made you an offer.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to be too far away from the Highlands.’

  ‘Glasgow’s far enough away for me. I’ve never been further north than Inverness. It’s a whole different world up here. You know how it is these days. The Scots don’t want to holiday in Scotland any more. They want the sun. It’s cheaper to take a holiday in Spain than book into some of these hotels in Scotland.’

  They drove on in silence as the road wound through rocky clefts where tumbling waterfalls cascaded down, across heathery moorland, the single-track road winding in front of them until they crested a hill and Matthew exclaimed, ‘What’s that doing there?’

  ‘That is Strathbane. Our very own area of pollution.’

  The town lay in a valley below them, dark and ugly. The sun was disappearing behind the clouds, and a last ray shone on the oily waters of the deserted docks.

  ‘What do they do for a living?’

  ‘Collect their dole money, spend it on drink or drugs, and then go out and mug people for more money. That’s the tower block lot. There’s a respectable section of the population: small factory owners, lawyers, dentists, doctors, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, people like that.’

  ‘And television people?’

  ‘Apart from the odd secretary or two, I don’t think you’ll find any local people. Make two right turns on Ferry Street and then a left.’

  ‘Was there a ferry?’

  ‘There was at one time. It went out to Standing Stones Island, that lump you can see away out on the water. No one lives there now. They say it’s haunted.’

  ‘That would be a good feature. A night on the haunted island.’

  ‘You’re on your own on that one.’

  ‘I might give it a try,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Left!’ ordered Elspeth. ‘Here we are.’

  Miss Patty was being interrogated at police headquarters, so it was a bouncing blonde with bouncing cleavage who escorted Elspeth and Matthew to Harry Tarrant’s office.

  Harry greeted them warily, told them to sit down, and asked them what they wanted.

  ‘We gather that you knew John Heppel quite a time ago when you were both members of the Trotskyites,’ said Matthew, plunging right in.

  Harry stiffened and then gave a jolly laugh. ‘Ah, the follies of youth.’

  ‘Can you tell us what sort of person he was?’ asked Elspeth.

  ‘Fine man,’ said Harry. ‘A really good writer.’

  ‘How did he come to be writing a script for you?’ asked Matthew.

  ‘He e-mailed me and said it was difficult to write in the city. I suggested he come up to th
e Highlands for a bit of peace and quiet. I asked him if he would like to try his hand at writing something for television.’

  ‘Why Down in the Glen? Hardly demands a literary script,’ Elspeth pointed out.

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Harry. ‘Soaps can be educational – should be educational. I thought we needed to go upmarket with some serious writing.’

  ‘I’m sure the police have asked you this.’ Elspeth studied Harry’s eyes. ‘Where were you on the evening John Heppel was murdered?’

  ‘Minding my own business,’ snapped Harry, ‘and I suggest you do the same.’

  Matthew took out his notebook and began to write. ‘Harry Tarrant said yesterday that he refused to state where he was on the evening of the murder,’ he said out loud.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Again that forced jolly laugh. ‘Scrub that out. I’ve nothing to hide. I went for a drive. It had been a tough day and I find driving soothes me.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Ullapool. I dropped in at the Fisherman’s Arms for a drink and then drove back. It’s a long drive. I must have left around six o’clock and got back at eleven o’clock and went straight to bed.’

  ‘Had John made any enemies in the television company?’

  ‘No, everybody was very impressed by him. Now, if there’s nothing more, I have work to do.’ He buzzed for the secretary to show them out.

  As they were walking along one of the long corridors, Elspeth said to the secretary, ‘I forgot to ask Mr Tarrant for a publicity photograph for our files. Can you get me one?’

  ‘Sure. Just wait in reception and I’ll bring you one.’

  ‘Now what?’ said Matthew outside.

  ‘Ullapool,’ said Elspeth. ‘It’s about an hour’s drive. We’ve got the photo of him. Let’s ask in the Fisherman’s Arms if he was there.’

  ‘What’s Ullapool like?’

  ‘Very pretty. Lots of tourists in the summer. They like to take the ferries out to the Summer Isles, uninhabited isles, to look at the seabirds and dolphins. Won’t be very busy now.’

  As they drove off, Matthew grumbled, ‘The sun’s gone down already. Does it never stay light up here?’