Death of a Valentine

by M C Beaton

  Hamish put out the lamp and lit a torch. “Hamish!” exclaimed Elspeth. “You don’t have to let Sonsie and Lugs come with you. Leave them here for once. The kitchen’s nice and warm.

  “You can’t go on with those beasts chained to you,” she continued. “What woman would put up with rivals such as these?”

  “You were aye jeering at them!”

  “Don’t let’s quarrel,” said Elspeth. “Let’s get to the hotel.”

  They were about to drive off when the Currie sisters appeared, standing in the glare of the headlights and waving their arms. Hamish lowered the window. “What’s up?”

  “Tell Miss Grant the press are all at the hotel waiting for her,” called Nessie.

  “Waiting for her,” chorused Jessie.

  “Thanks,” said Hamish.

  He turned to Elspeth. “They’ll all be in the bar. We’ll park at the side and go in through the kitchen door.”

  The chef, Clarry, was sitting reading a newspaper when they entered the hotel kitchen.

  “Evening, Hamish,” he said. “I thought you pair might come in this way. Take the back stairs and the press won’t see you. I’ll send the boy up with some sandwiches. I’ve got some bones for Lugs and a bit o’ fish for Sonsie. You can leave them here in the kitchen.”

  “She wouldnae let me bring them,” said Hamish.

  “Well, call in on your road out and I’ll pack them up for ye.”

  Elspeth and Hamish made their way up the back stairs to Elspeth’s room.

  “Right,” said Hamish. “Let’s see what’s on this video.”

  He switched on the television set and slid in the video.

  It was a film of Annie being crowned Lammas queen. How faraway that sunny day appeared now! There he was, standing just below the platform. The provost raised the crown and placed it on Annie’s head. She smiled triumphantly. Her two attendants were Jessie Cormack and Iona Sinclair. Jessie was glaring at Annie.

  The film ran on. Percy had followed the procession through the town.

  “Do you notice anything?” he asked Elspeth as he went to answer the door and receive a tray of food and coffee.

  “It all looks ordinary,” said Elspeth.

  “Wait a bit,” said Hamish. “Run it back a little. Stop! There! That’s Jake from the disco. He’s passing up a little package to her. Bastard! Dealing drugs right in the middle of what should ha’ been an innocent day.”

  “Yes, but he’s dead,” said Elspeth. “I’m starving. Let’s have something to eat and look through the tape again.”

  “I hope Percy’s all right,” Hamish fretted. He picked up the phone by the bed and called Percy’s mother.

  “He hasn’t come home,” she wailed. “Where’s my boy?”

  “We’ll have a search party out in the morning,” said Hamish. “I’ll call as soon as I hear anything.”

  He then phoned Jimmy and explained the situation. “It’s urgent, Jimmy,” said Hamish. “Percy said he’d remembered something. Now he’s missing.”

  “Can’t do anything tonight, Hamish.”

  “I don’t think I should wait until the morning, Jimmy. Maybe I’ll get over to Braikie and begin to look. I’ll take McSween with me.”

  When he rang off, he said to Elspeth, “It’s a right pity. I would ha’ preferred your company, but the press’ll be hounding you from now on.”

  “I know,” said Elspeth sadly. “I’d better stop running away. I’ll get back to Glasgow tomorrow where I’ve got a press agent to cope with the lot of them. I shouldn’t have run away.”

  Hamish ejected the video. “When will you be back, Elspeth?”

  “I don’t know, Hamish. Maybe I’ll spend my next holidays up here.”

  He bent his head to kiss her but the phone rang. Elspeth swore under her breath. She picked it up and then slammed it down again. Then she phoned reception and ordered that no calls were to be put through to her room.

  Hamish hesitated in the doorway. “I’d better pack,” said Elspeth, heaving her suitcase on the bed.

  He felt he did not have the courage now to try to kiss her.

  “You can’t want a wee lassie like Josie to go out in this freezing cold,” protested Mrs. Wellington when he arrived at the manse.

  “It’s her duty,” said Hamish. “Go and get her.”

  Grumbling under her breath, Mrs. Wellington climbed the stairs to Josie’s room and opened the door. The room was in darkness and there was a powerful reek of whisky. She switched on the light. Josie lay on the bed, fully dressed. She was snoring loudly. An empty whisky bottle lay on the floor beside the bed.

  It’s that Hamish Macbeth, thought Mrs. Wellington. He’s driven the poor lassie to the bottle. I’ll sort her out in the morning.

  She went back downstairs. “Josie is very unwell,” she said. “She has a bad cold and should rest.”

  “I’ll see her tomorrow,” said Hamish, thinking bitterly that Josie was absolutely useless.

  Mrs. Wellington picked up the phone book and scanned the pages. Then she dialled a number. “Alcoholics Anonymous?” she asked. “When and where is your next meeting?”

  The roads had been salted and gritted, and the Sutherland landscape lay dreaming whitely under a thick canopy of snow.

  Hamish wondered where to start. He stopped in the main street in Braikie and checked his notebook for a list of phone numbers and addresses. He found the name Jessie Cormack. She lived with her parents in a flat above a greengrocer in a lane just off the main street.

  He got out and walked there. He mounted the worn stone steps leading up from the street and rang the bell.

  Jessie herself answered the door. “I was just about to go to bed,” she said. “What’s the matter? Is it Percy? Folks are saying he’s disappeared.”

  “Can I come in?” Hamish removed his hat.

  “You’d best come through to the kitchen,” said Jessie. “My parents are watching television.”

  Hamish sat down and took out his notebook. “If Percy was worried about something, where would he go?”

  She frowned in thought. “He might go to the minister.”

  “What about friends?”

  “All his friends were from the kirk but he’d stopped seeing them and he barely spoke to me.”

  “Did Percy need money? If he thought he knew the killer, would he try to blackmail him?”

  “Not Percy. He’d be more likely to do something stupid, like say to the murderer, ‘I know it was you and I’m going to the police.’ ”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Hamish drove to the minister’s home. Martha Tallent opened the door. “What do you want?” she whispered. “Everyone’s in bed.”

  “You’ll do,” said Hamish. “Just a wee word.”

  He followed her into the living room. “What’s it about?” asked Martha.

  “Have you seen anything of Percy Stane?”

  “No. Why?”

  “He phoned me to say he had some information and now he’s missing.”

  Her eyes widened with shock. “Will this fright never end? He hasn’t been here.”

  “Any phone calls?”

  “Not for me. A few for Father. Nothing sinister. Just the usual parish business, people wanted to know about wedding and funeral arrangements and things like that.”

  “You heard them all?”

  “Yes, we were all in the living room when they came in. I heard them all.”

  “Did you know Percy?”

  “Only slightly. He was obsessed with Annie. Oh, I remember now. It was last week. Father went over to the Flemings’ house to check the repairs to the kitchen and he found Percy loitering in the garden. When he asked what he was doing there, Percy said he wanted to be near the place she had died. Father told us he thought Percy was sick in the head and he wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Percy was the murderer.”

  Hamish thanked her and went out again into the cold, frosty night. He went to the Flemings’ ho
me. The police tape had been removed. There was something pitiless about the biting cold and the white snow which blanketed everything. He cursed the “lambing blizzard” that often struck the Highlands in April.

  The garden gate screeched when he opened it. He looked in the front windows of the house and then studied the front door. There was no sign of a break-in.

  He made his way around the side of the house to the kitchen door. There was a new door and new windows; the kitchen door was locked and padlocked.

  He turned and surveyed the garden, glittering under a small cold moon. His eyes narrowed as he saw a black lump of something in the far corner.

  He switched on his torch and walked over, his boots crunching in the frozen snow.

  Percy lay there, his dead eyes staring up at the uncaring moon. Blood from slashes in his wrists stained the snow. An old-fashioned cutthroat razor lay half buried in the snow beside him.

  Hamish cursed under his breath. Poor Percy. What a waste of a young life. And all over some manipulative bitch! He had attended Annie’s funeral but few people apart from the press had turned up. The locals, having learned of Annie’s reputation, had shunned the funeral, which had taken place two whole months after her murder. None of the town’s dignitaries who had smiled on her so fondly when she was the Lammas queen had bothered to put in an appearance. He retreated to his Land Rover, switched on the heater, took out his phone, and called Strathbane.

  Then he waited. And as he waited, he began to wonder about Percy’s death. Surely if Percy had planned suicide, he would not have bothered to phone the station in Lochdubh.

  After a while, he heard the sound of approaching sirens. He was suddenly weary of the whole business. Percy’s death had depressed him so much that his emotions felt as numb and as cold as the weather outside.

  Jimmy Anderson was the first on the scene, followed by Andy MacNab. “Bad business,” he said. “God, it’s cold. Suicide?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Well, get your suit on and show me.” They all struggled into their plastic suits. Hamish led the way to the garden. “We’ll just stand here at the edge,” said Jimmy. “Don’t want to muck up the crime scene. I’ve called in a local doctor. Dr. Forsythe’s retired and the nearest pathologist is in Aberdeen, would you believe it?”

  Soon the garden was a hive of activity. A tent was erected over the body and halogen lights glared over the scene.

  A local doctor, Dr. Friend, finished his examination. “Seems a clear case o’ suicide,” he said. “Poor young man.”

  “When you examined the cuts on his wrists,” said Hamish, “did it look as if he’d really done it himself?”

  “What are you getting at?” demanded Jimmy.

  “Only that it seems odd to me,” said Hamish. “The laddie phoned me earlier and said he had information for me. Now he’s dead. Could someone have drugged him and then slashed his wrists for him?”

  “I suppose it’s possible. The pathologist will do a better estimation than me.”

  “There were no footprints near the body other than your own, Hamish,” said Jimmy.

  “So it happened earlier in the day. The falling snow would cover up any other footprints. Maybe we could have scraped off the top snow and seen if there was anything underneath but now everyone’s trodden everything. Cutthroat razors aren’t that common. I wonder if it could be traced.”

  “Hamish, you’ll find it was suicide, plain and simple. You can go home now. There’s nothing more we can do till we get a full postmortem. Do you want to tell his mother? Or shall I send a policewoman?”

  “Send a policewoman,” said Hamish gloomily.

  “Where’s McSween?”

  “ Ill in bed.”

  “I’ll send Police Sergeant Sutherland. She’s good at that sort of thing.”

  * * *

  Hamish got home, feeling tired, cold, and miserable. Tomorrow the press who were waiting to see if they could interview Elspeth would be delighted to find they were all in the area of a murder. Press coverage meant pressure and pressure meant Blair.

  Josie sat mutinously in Mrs. Wellington’s car the following morning. She had been appalled to learn that the minister’s wife was taking her to an AA meeting in Strathbane. Deaf to her protests, Mrs. Wellington had said that if Josie did not go, she would tell Hamish that Josie had been drunk. Mrs. Wellington had also found two precious half bottles of whisky in Josie’s underwear drawer and confiscated them.

  As the car neared Strathbane, Josie protested, “I’ll be stuck in a room with smelly old drunks in dirty raincoats.”

  “It’s where you belong,” said the minister’s wife. “But I happen to know respectable people go to these meetings.”

  She parked outside a church in the town centre. “There’s a lunchtime meeting here. It’s only an hour long. I’ll see you inside and come back and pick you up when it’s over.”

  A tall man in a business suit was standing at the door, acting as a greeter. “This is Josie,” boomed Mrs. Wellington. “First meeting. Look after her.”

  “Will do. Come along, Josie. I’ll introduce you. My name’s Charlie.”

  There were twelve people in the room, all smartly dressed and clear-eyed. Josie would have felt better if they had been dirty old men. There was no one to feel superior to. They pressed literature on her and gave her a cup of tea. Then they all sat around a long table. A woman was the speaker. Josie mutinously did not listen to a word. What had it to do with her? What a stupid place and what stupid slogans pinned up on the walls-LIVE AND LET LIVE, EASY DOES IT, things like that. Stuff for morons, thought Josie.

  But she pinned an interested look on her face, wondering all the time what Hamish was doing. Was he really interested in Elspeth? What chance had she compared with a television star? The newspapers said that Elspeth’s engagement had broken off.

  She realised with a start that the chairman was addressing her. “As it’s your first meeting, Josie, you don’t have to say anything.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I think you are all so brave.”

  It went round the room. People talked about free-floating anxiety, about loneliness of spirit, about selfishness. What has all this bollocks got to do with drink? thought Josie.

  At last the dreadful meeting was over. People gave her phone numbers and wished her luck, along with a meeting list. Josie thanked them all and hurried out to where Mrs. Wellington was waiting for her.

  “How did you get on, Josie?” she asked.

  “Fine. Nice people. I’ve got a meeting list.”

  “Good girl. You’ll be all right now.”

  Vodka, thought Josie. I’d best try vodka. It doesn’t smell.

  If she had been listening at the meeting she would have heard a woman say that she had started drinking vodka because she thought it would not smell and everyone had burst out laughing.

  On the way back, her mobile rang. It was Hamish. “You’re probably still in bed,” he said. “I’m over in Braikie. Percy’s dead.”

  “I need to get over to Braikie,” said Josie. “There’s been another death.”

  “This is horrible,” said Mrs. Wellington. “Braikie is becoming like Chicago!”

  When Josie arrived in Braikie, it was to find the small town full of policemen going door to door, but there was no sign of Hamish. She asked one if he had seen him and was told that Hamish was back in his police station.

  Josie hurried back to Lochdubh. She went straight into the police station without knocking, a fact that Hamish, crouched over sheets of notes, noticed with annoyance.

  “Next time, knock at the door,” he snapped.

  “I wondered what you wanted me to do today. I thought you would be in Braikie.”

  “I was,” he said curtly. “But after chapping at a few doors as instructed by Blair and being told that the police had already been around, I thought I’d be better back here trying to figure out who killed Annie. Everything leads from the first murder.”

 
“I’ll help you,” said Josie, starting to take off her coat.

  “Good,” said Hamish. “Get yourself over to Cnothan. There is a Mrs. Thomson, number nine, Waterway-that’s down at the loch. She says she’s been burgled but she has phoned before complaining about one thing or the other and it always turns out to be a figment of her imagination. Still, she sounded genuinely upset this time.”

  Josie trailed miserably off. Hamish had a sudden qualm of conscience. “Are you feeling better?” he called.

  Josie came hurrying back. “I still feel a little weak.”

  “Help yourself to a coffee before you go. There’s some on the stove.”

  “Can I bring you one?”

  “What? Okay.”

  Josie happily busied herself in the kitchen, looking about herself with possessive eyes. The kitchen was too small. It could be extended. Copper pans, hanging on hooks, she thought dreamily.

  She took Hamish a mug of coffee. He leaned back in his chair and wrinkled his nose. “Have you been drinking vodka?”

  “No!” exclaimed Josie, feigning outrage.

  Hamish shrugged. “Smells like it to me. Drink your coffee and get over to Cnothan.”

  Josie put her own mug down on the desk next to his and pulled up a chair.

  “Take your coffee into the kitchen,” ordered Hamish.

  Josie trailed off. He just didn’t know what was good for him, she thought. The cat suddenly looked up at her with yellow eyes and gave a low hiss. I’d better make friends with those animals, thought Josie. I’ll start to bring them food. If I drug Hamish, I’ll need to drug them as well.

  * * *

  The days for Hamish crawled past as he waited for the autopsy report. Finally Jimmy called. “This is a right mess,” he said. “There was a quantity of sleeping drug in the boy’s stomach along with a lot of whisky. The pathologist says that from the angles of the cuts, it looks as if someone did it for him. Have you worked out anything at all, Hamish? We’re getting desperate.”

  “I found a video in his desk.”

  “Have you been withholding evidence?”

  “There was nothing on it but mair evidence of Percy’s obsession with Annie. It was a video of her as the Lammas queen last summer.”