Death of a Nag

by M C Beaton

  When they went into the boarding-house, Hamish collected a couple of paperbacks from the bookshelves in the lounge and went up the stairs to his room.

  It was then that he found out that the Harrises had the room next door. Bob Harris's voice rose and fell, going on and on and on, punctuated by an occasional whimper from his wife.

  Hamish wondered whether to go next door and tell the man to shut up, but as a policeman he had found out the folly of interfering in marital problems. Doris would probably round on him and tell him to leave her husband alone.

  Or rather, that's what the lazy Hamish Macbeth told himself.

  2

  A tart temper never mellows with age,

  and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool

  that grows keener with constant use.

  —Washington Irving

  Hamish rose early and took Towser for a walk along the deserted dunes outside the hotel. The day was grey and warm and misty. Somewhere a foghorn sounded like some lost sea creature. The midges, those pestilent Scottish mosquitoes which he had naively thought he had left behind him on the west coast, were out in force. He automatically felt in his shirt pocket for a stick of repellent and found he had none and remembered there was one in his suitcase.

  He returned to his room and pulled his suitcase out from under the bed and flipped back the lid. It was then that he realized it had been searched. It was not precisely that things had been disturbed; there was more a smell, a feeling, that things had been gone through. Not that there was much left in the suitcase. He had unpacked nearly everything. He found a stick of repellent in one of the pockets lining the back of the case. There were a few books and sweaters he had not yet put away in the drawers, and oh, God, his police identification card, his notebook, and a pair of handcuffs. He sat back on his heels, his mind ranging busily over the guests. He had not bothered to lock his bedroom door when he had gone out with Towser. Rogers? Was it plain nosiness? He could complain, and complain loudly, but he had no real proof. He fished out the suitcase keys from a back pocket and locked the case and pushed it back under the bed. Pointless thing to bother about doing now. Someone in this hotel now knew he was a policeman. He would study their reactions to him today.

  The only good thing about breakfast was the surly silence of Bob Harris. The food was awful: fried haggis and watery eggs; hard, dry rolls with margarine; and marmalade so thin it could have been watered.

  "I'm going to the carnival," said Hamish to Miss Gunnery. "Would you like to come?"

  Before she could reply, Dermott Brett called over. "Going to the carnival? We'll come too, Hamish, and take the kids."

  And so, to Miss Gunnery's disappointment, for she had murmured to Hamish, "I hate crowds," the others came along as well, minus the Harrises. They had gone a little way towards Skag when the sound of running footsteps made them turn around. Doris Harris was running to catch up with them, her face flushed.

  "Bob doesn't want to come," she said breathlessly.

  As they walked on, they all found they were searching for new topics of conversation, the main one having hitherto been what a pig Bob Harris was. Hamish's stick of repellent was gradually getting worn down as everyone kept borrowing it. Hands flapped at the stinging, biting midges. "Let's hope they leave us when we get to the carnival," said Hamish. A thin drizzle had started to fall.

  An air of gloom was descending on the party. Hamish had a desire to lighten it for Doris's sake. Her life with Bob was surely misery enough. She should enjoy this bit of freedom. He stared up at the sky, willing the weather to change. There was a whisper of a breeze against his check. "Anyone heard the weather forecast?" he asked.

  "Said it might get sunny later," said Andrew.

  The children began to chatter with excitement, for the fair was now in view in a field outside Skag.

  Hamish looked at his watch. "There're floats and some sort of procession through the village first. Let's go and watch that."

  The rain was falling heavier as they huddled in a group and watched a series of tacky floats move past. A Scottish bank had a traditional jazz band on the back of a truck which momentarily brightened things as it slowly cruised by them, but the rest of the floats were mostly tableaux by the children, wet children with grease-paint running down their faces in the rain. Then there was the crowning of the carnival queen, a singularly ill-favoured little girl; but as Hamish learned, she was the daughter of the publican, who had contributed a large sum of money to the carnival, so that explained the choice.

  They all walked with Hamish to the fairground, all occasionally looking hopefully at him like tourists at their guide.

  "I know," said Hamish, "let's go on the dodgem cars. What about it, Miss Gunnery?"

  "It's a mither complex, that's whit it is," said Cheryl sourly to Tracey, but Hamish decided to ignore the gibe. And then, as they crashed their way about in the dodgem cars, Doris with Andrew, Hamish with Miss Gunnery, Cheryl and Tracey screaming together and eyeing the local talent, Dermott and June with their toddler on their knee while the other two children took up another car, the weather made one of its lightning changes. Again the grey rolled back out to sea, like a curtain being swept back on the transformation scene in a pantomime.

  After the dodgems, Hamish bought candy floss for the children and then looked about for more amusement. He was determined to keep "his" little party happy. He was beginning to catch a glimpse of his own easygoing happiness coming back again and he did not want to lose it. So they obediently followed him to the ghost train and he had the delight and pleasure of hearing the prim Miss Gunnery beside him in the car shrieking her head off. She gave him a rueful look afterwards. "I don't often let my hair down like that."

  Hamish looked at her glossy brown hair, which was scraped into a severe knot on top of her head. "You should," he said. "You've got pretty hair."

  Miss Gunnery gave him such a warm glowing look that he moved away from her uneasily. But he found that leaving her side was to get the undivided attention of Cheryl and Tracey, so he returned to her and continued to lead his party on and off roundabouts all over the fairground until Dermott Brett said the children were weary and it was nearly time for tea. They had made a lunch of hot dogs, candy floss, and chocolate bars, and as they all headed back to the hotel, the thought of the tea that was probably awaiting them damped their appetites further.

  The Brett children began to invent awful menus from fried snails to roast baby until they were helpless with giggles. Doris was laughing. She looked a changed woman. Hamish thought she had probably been quite pretty when she was younger. Andrew Biggar was walking beside her, looking delighted with her company.

  Hamish, covertly watching them, began to feel uneasy. He felt he was looking at the ingredients for a disaster: crushed wife, nasty husband, gentle and decent man—mix all together and what do you get? Murder, said a voice in his brain.

  He shook himself to get rid of the thought. Husbands and wives nagged each other up and down the length of the British Isles, but they didn't murder each other—or not all of them did.

  The main dish of high tea was a mixed grill: one small sausage, one kidney, one tomato, and the inevitable chips. Bob Harris was there, and drunk. He was so drunk that his voice was lowered to an almost incomprehensible whining mumble. Hamish was just able to make out that the burden of his complaint was that Doris had actually defied him by going off to the fair.

  After tea, Doris got to her feet and said quietly that she was tired and was going to have an early night. They all expected Bob Harris to join her but he followed them through to the lounge, just sober enough after the dreadful tea to turn his viciousness on the group. His first target was Andrew Biggar. "You army men are all the same," he jeered. "The only reason you go into the army is because you can't adapt to civilian life. Have to be told what to do."

  Andrew, who had picked up a book, put it down and said evenly, "Just shut up."

  Heather, the seven-year-old, gave a nervous laugh
. Bob's bulbous eyes focused on the child. "Your trouble is, you're spoilt," he said.

  "Here, that's enough," protested Dermott. "Why don't you go upstairs and sleep it off."

  "I can hold my drink," said Bob truculently. "And don't you come the high and mighty with me. I could tell this lot a thing or two about you and—"

  "I'm taking the children up to bed and out of this," shouted June. She gathered up the toddler and left, with the other two children following close behind.

  "You are one of the nastiest men I have ever come across," said Miss Gunnery.

  "Well, there can't be many men who've come across you, or got their leg over you, if any," sneered Bob. "You remind me of an old dried-up stick of a French teacher I used to have. You—"

  He let out a yelp of pain. Hamish Macbeth had twisted his arm up his back. "Off to bed," said Hamish pleasantly. He marched him to the door, released him and shoved him outside and slammed the door in his face.

  "That's that," said Hamish as Dermott, Andrew, and Miss Gunnery, Cheryl and Tracey stared at him in awe. He looked out the window. "The sun's still blazing down. Anyone brave enough for a swim?"

  "I think I would like that," said Miss Gunnery, surprising them all.

  "Wait till you see what we've got to wear," cried Cheryl.

  Andrew said quietly, "I wonder if Doris would like to come."

  "I wouldn't bother," said Hamish quickly.

  But when they all had gathered in the hall, that is Miss Gunnery, Hamish, Cheryl and Tracey, and Andrew Biggar, Doris came down the stairs to join them, carrying a large beach towel over one arm.

  "Bob's asleep," she said. "Andrew heard the snores through the door, so he knocked and told me you were going."

  Hamish looked at Andrew and Doris uneasily. They made such a suitable couple. He fought down a nagging feeling of apprehension.

  The party walked across the sand dunes in front of the hotel and then over the shingle rise which ran all the way from the harbour along the back of the beach and so down to the blowing sand. The sun was very warm for Scotland.

  They were all wearing their bathing-suits under their clothes. Tracey and Cheryl stripped down to string bikinis, exposing skinny acres of shark's-belly-white skin. Miss Gunnery was wearing a modest one-piece. She had a surprisingly trim, muscled, if flat-chested body, and long legs. Doris, also in a one-piece, ran down to the water with Andrew, plunged in and then let out a scream. "It's freezing!" she called back.

  Hamish, used to swimming in cold Highland streams and lochs, found the waters of the North Sea quite bearable. But the others gave up quite quickly and huddled in their beach towels, and when Hamish came running up the beach, they turned to him like hopeful children.

  "There's still the fair," he said, "unless you're all tired of it."

  This was hailed with enthusiasm, so they went back to the boarding-house to change. Doris was carrying a beach bag, and with a little guilty flush, she asked Miss Gunnery if she could use her room to change, "... so as not to disturb Bob."

  Hamish again felt that uneasiness as Miss Gunnery agreed. He felt they were all becoming conspirators in encouraging a highly dangerous romance between Doris and Andrew Biggar.

  The Bretts were seated in the lounge. They looked wistful when they heard the others were going to the fair, but they had better stay and look after the children.

  Hamish found himself cursing Bob Harris again as they all set out. Normally, they would have remained a typical group of British holiday-makers, restrained and separate and wary of each other. But the common resentment against the nag had drawn them all together so quickly, which might have been a good thing had it not been for the shy glow on Doris's face when she looked at Andrew.

  He had a sudden sharp longing for Priscilla Halburton-Smythe's cool assessment of the situation. But Priscilla, his ex-fiancée, was down in England. She had seemed very comfortable and at ease in his company before she had left. Whatever she had once felt for him—and he often wondered now what that something had been—had gone. And what am I doing, Hamish Macbeth, he wondered, holidaying with this odd bunch? He automatically stooped to pat Towser for comfort and then remembered he had left the dog behind at the boarding-house.

  As they approached Skag, the wind rose, making the sands sing, blowing white sand about them so that they were glad to get in amongst the comparative shelter of the fair booths and roundabouts. Hamish waited until they all had piled onto a roundabout and then slid off quietly to see a bit of Skag and have some time to himself. He wandered away from the fairground, hearing the harsh carousel music fading behind him, reaching him only now and then in snatches borne by the ever-increasing wind. He walked through the narrow streets, noticing, here and there, the larger window in front of a cottage denoting that it was once a shop, before the days of cars and cheap supermarkets at the nearest town. Some of the cottages were thatched, odd in Scotland, when the only cottages that were once thatched had been the black houses covered in heather, the ones without chimneys, now only maintained as museum pieces. And yet the buildings were surely not that old, late Victorian, perhaps. He saw a building with a sign "Museum" outside and went in for a look around.

  There had evidently been a village on the point between the river Skag and the North Sea for as long as anyone could remember, but in the 1880s, weeks of torrential rain and high winds and high tides had caused river and sea to meet in one roaring flood which had covered the whole village. The village had remained drowned for weeks before the waters had receded. Ten years later, when the village had been rebuilt and was thriving again, great gales had come tearing over the North Sea from Scandinavia, whipping up the white sand and eventually burying the whole village. After the houses had been excavated, trees and razor-grass had been planted on the other side of the river, where a Scottish Sahara of white sand dunes stretched for miles to stop the sand from shifting.

  He bought a small book on the history of the village and went back out without stopping to look at any of the exhibits in glass cases. The narrow, unsurfaced streets were deserted. Ribbons of sand snaked along them like feelers put out by some alien creature. The trouble with Scottish villages like this, thought Hamish, was that all the community life had been bled out of them. Cars took the villagers out at night to the bright lights of the town. The villagers would often blame the incomers for having destroyed village life, but it was the automobile which had done that, making nomads of even the elderly. There was no putting the clock back now.

  And then Hamish thought he was falling into the messy ways of thinking of so many—that the good old days had been better. Not so long ago, Skag would have been a closed-in fishing community, repressed and dark and secretive, everything kept under wraps—incest, drunkenness, violence, child abuse, pregnant girls forced to marry men who did not want them, all the miseries coloured by the overriding horror of living in poverty or the fear of having to.

  So now the young people left the quiet Scottish villages and were replaced by incomers from the south, who claimed they had come in search of "the quality of life" which meant they got regularly drunk with all the other incomers fleeing from reality. But the village did have an odd eerie charm, filled as it was with the sound of rushing water from the river and the susurration of the gritty white sand blowing in the streets. There was one shop still open, manned by the inevitable Asian. A Scottish shopkeeper closed up at tea-time, no matter how bad trade was. It sold newspapers, sweets, postcards, and toys, and an odd assortment of household goods. Next to it was a dress-shop, Paris Fashions, with two dresses drooping in the window and with price-tags marking the gowns down from £120 to £85. Hamish wondered if they would ever sell. But where tea-shops used to be the last refuge of the genteel, now it was dress-shops, which opened their doors for a few months before facing up to the fact that with cheap clothes so near at hand in the local town, it was folly to try to sell Bond Street fashions at Bond Street prices.

  There were two churches, one Free Church of Scotland
and one Church of Scotland. A poster outside the Church of Scotland was half torn and fluttering in the wind. It said, "Life is Fragile. Handle with Prayer."

  Turning away from it, Hamish saw Bob Harris. He was coming out of a house at the end of the main street, his walk denoting that he was still drunk. His face was flushed and he had a triumphant smile on his face. He's just made someone's life a misery, thought Hamish. I wonder who lives there. Then he suddenly did not want to know anything more about Bob Harris and about whom he had been possibly persecuting. He walked instead to the harbour and sat on a bollard and looked down into the water.

  The wind suddenly dropped and all was very quiet and still. He reflected that it must be the turn of the tide. It was a phenomenon he had noticed before. Just at the turn of the tide, nature held its breath—no bird sang, everything seemed to be waiting and waiting. And then, sure enough, as if someone had flicked a switch, everything started in motion again.

  He got up and decided to go straight back to the hotel, collect a couple of paperbacks, and walk Towser along the beach. He occasionally wondered who it was who had searched his case but decided it had probably been Rogers, whose motive had been nothing more sinister than vulgar curiosity.

  He felt a pang of guilt at not rejoining the others, but then reminded himself severely that he was not related to them, barely knew them, neither was he on police duty. If Bob Harris murdered his wife, then that was his business. And so, comforting himself with these callous thoughts, he loped home, collected Towser and the paperbacks, and set out along the beach in the opposite direction from Skag. He found a comfortable hollow and settled down to read with Towser at his feet. It would not get really dark. A pearly twilight would settle down about one in the morning for about two hours.