Hamish MacBeth 01 (1985) - Death of a Gossip

by M C Beaton

  His silence was punctuated by grunts, not words of love. At last, just when she thought she could not bear it any longer, he collapsed on top of her. She let out a long sigh of relief, and Jeremy kissed her ear and said, “It was good for you too,” mistaking her sigh for one of satisfaction.

  “I love you, Jeremy,” whispered Alice, winding her arms around him and hugging that vision of sports car, expensive clothes, good accent, and Member of Parliament.

  “Do you?” He propped himself up on one elbow. “That’s nice.” He kissed her nose and then smacked her on the bottom. “Better get dressed. Gosh, I’m hungry.”

  Alice scooped up her clothes and scuttled into the bathroom. After she had showered and dressed, she felt better. Love in the morning. How sophisticated. How deliciously decadent.

  She was just putting on lipstick when Jeremy shouted through the door, “I’ll see you in the dining room. Don’t be long.”

  Alice’s hand jerked nervously, and she smeared lipstick over her cheek. She scrubbed it off with a tissue and then ran out, hoping to catch him, but he had already left.

  When she went out into the corridor, two maids were stuffing dirty sheets into a hamper and they looked at her curiously. “Good morning,” said Alice, staring at both of them hard as if challenging them to voice their evil thoughts.

  The fishing party was grouped around one large table in the far corner as if the management had decided to put them in quarantine. The Roths were there and Daphne, the major and Jeremy. Charlie would be having breakfast with his aunt, but where were the Cartwrights?

  “Don’t know,” shrugged Daphne. “ I think they jolly well ought to be here handing out refunds. Pass the marmalade, Jeremy darling.”

  Alice frowned. It was time to stake her claim. She slid into a chair beside Jeremy and took his hand under the table, gave it a squeeze, and smiled at him in an intimate way.

  “I need both hands to eat, Alice,” said Jeremy crossly. Alice snatched her hand away and Daphne giggled.

  ♦

  Heather and John Cartwright were sitting in Hamish’s cluttered kitchen, eating bacon baps and drinking tea. They had explained they were ‘just passing’.

  It was Heather who had had the impulse to talk to Hamish. Hamish was a good sounding board because he was the law, and although he could hardly be described as a strong arm of it, he was in a position to overhear how the investigation was proceeding.

  “I just hope this won’t break the fishing school,” said John gloomily.

  “I should not think so,” said Hamish, turning bacon deftly in the pan. “Provided, of course, the murderer is found. It will be in the way of being an added attraction.”

  “I was shocked when Blair told me she was really that awful columnist woman.”

  Hamish stood very still, his back to them as he worked at the stove. “And you did not know this before?” he asked.

  There was a little silence, and then John said, “Of course not. Had we known then we should not have allowed her to come.”

  “Aye, but did you not know after she had arrived?” asked Hamish.

  Again that silence. Hamish turned round, the bacon slice in one hand.

  “No, we did not,” said Heather emphatically.

  Hamish carefully and slowly lifted the bacon from the pan and put it on a plate. He turned off the gas. He lifted his cup of tea from beside the stove and came and joined Heather and John at the table.

  “I happen to know that you had a letter from Austria. You see, you threw it out of the window, hoping it would land in the loch. The tide was out and the boy Charlie picked it up because the stamp attracted his attention. I would not normally read anyone else’s mail, but when it comes to murder, well, I don’t have that many fine scruples. It was from a couple of friends of yours in Austria who ran a ski resort until Lady Jane came on holiday.”

  “You have no right to read private mail,” shouted John.

  Hamish looked at him stolidly.

  Heather put a hand on John’s arm. “It’s no use,” she said wearily. “We did know. We were frightened. This school is our life. Years of hard work have gone into building it up. We thought she was going to take it away from us.”

  “But the couple at the ski resort turned out to be married to other people, not each other,” pointed out Hamish. “They said the publicity by Lady Jane ruined them only because Mr Bergen, the ski resort owner, had not been paying alimony for years. You are surely both not in that sort of position. When you found out, would it not have been better to try to tell the school, openly and in front of her, what she did for a living?”

  “I didn’t think of that,” said John wretchedly. “You may as well know that I saw Jane on the night she was murdered. I went up to her room after dinner.”

  “And…?”

  “And she just laughed at me. She said this sort of fly fishing in these waters was like grouse shooting or deer stalking—a sport for the rich. She said she was about to prove that the sort of people who went on these holidays were social climbers who deserved to be cut down to size.”

  “Deary me,” said Hamish, stirring his tea, “was she a Communist?”

  “I don’t think she was a member of the Communist Party, if that’s what you mean,” said John. “She seemed to want to make people writhe. She was like a blackmailer who enjoys power. In Scotland they would say she was just agin everything.”

  “Did she say she was out to ruin the fishing school?”

  “Not in so many words. But that’s what she was setting out to do.”

  “What exactly did you say?”

  “I said that I had worked hard to build up this school and I begged her not to harm it. She laughed at me and told me to get out. I said…I said…”

  “Yes?” prompted Hamish gently.

  “You’d better tell him,” said Heather.

  “I told her I would kill her,” whispered John. “I shouted it. I’ll have to tell Blair—I think Jeremy heard me.”

  “Mr Blythe? Why would he hear you? Is his room next to hers?”

  “No, he was out in the corridor when I left.”

  “What will we do, Mr Macbeth?” pleaded Heather.

  “I think you should tell Mr Blair. If there’s one thing that makes a detective like Blair suspicious, or any detective for that matter, it’s finding out someone’s been hiding something. The pair of you have got nothing awful in your past that Lady Jane was about to expose?”

  Both shook their heads.

  “And apart from the short time that Mr Cartwright was with Lady Jane, you were together all night?”

  “Why do you ask?” Heather had turned white.

  “I ask,” said Hamish patiently, “because any copper with a nasty mind might think that one of you might have sneaked off and bumped her off, if not the pair of you.”

  “We had better go,” said Heather. “Tell Mr Blair we’re taking the class up to the Marag to fish. It’s near enough. We must go on as if nothing had happened.”

  After they left, Hamish, who had already heard the sound of voices from his office at the front, ambled through with a cup of tea in one hand.

  “Shouldn’t you be in uniform?” growled Blair, who was seated behind Hamish’s desk flanked by his two detectives.

  “In a minute,” said Hamish easily.

  “And I told you to keep out of this. That was the Cartwrights I saw leaving.”

  “Aye.”

  “Well, what did they have to say for themselves?”

  “Only that they knew something they hadn’t told you and now thought they should. Also that they were taking the class up to the Marag which is quite close so that you can go and see any of the members quite easily.”

  “For Jesus buggering Christ’s sake, don’t they know this is a murder investigation?”

  “Find any clues?” asked Hamish.

  “Just one thing. If it had been like today, we might have found more traces. But most of the ground was baked hard. The procurator
fiscal’s report says she was strangled somewhere else and dragged along through the bushes and then thrown in the pool.”

  “And what is this clue?”

  “It’s just a bit of a photograph,” said MacNab, before Blair could stop him. “Just a bit torn off the top corner. See.”

  He held out the bit of black and white photograph on a pair of tweezers. Hamish took it gingerly.

  It showed the very top of a woman’s head, or what he could only guess to be a woman’s head because it had some sort of sparkly ornament on top like the edge of a tiara. Behind was a poster with the part legend BUY BRIT—.

  “That might have been Buy British,” said Hamish, “which means it would have been taken in the sixties when Wilson was running that Buy British campaign and that would therefore eliminate the younger members of the fish…”

  “Listen to the great detective,” jeered Blair. “We all reached that conclusion in two seconds flat. Why don’t you trot off and find out if anyone’s been raiding the poor box in one of those churches. Damn ridiculous having so many churches in a wee place like this.”

  Hamish turned to amble out. “And get your uniform on,” shouted Blair.

  “Now,” said Blair, rustling through sheafs of statements. “According to these, they’re all innocent. But one of them was so afraid that Lady Jane would print something about them that they killed her. So chase up all these people we phoned yesterday and hurry them up. And that includes background on the Roths. See if there’s been a telex from the FBI. Find out if any of them have been in trouble with the police, although I think you’ll have to dig deeper than that.”

  Hamish changed into his uniform, admitting to his reflection in the glass that he, Hamish Macbeth, was a very angry man. In fact, he could not quite remember being so angry in all his easygoing life. He was determined to go on talking to the members of the fishing school until someone said something that gave himself away. He was not going to be frightened because it was a murder investigation. All criminals were the same whether it was a theft in the school or poaching deer on the hills. You talked, asked questions, and listened and watched and waited. The hell with Blair. He would go up to the Marag and find out what Jeremy had been doing outside Lady Jane’s room. As he left by the back door, the press were entering the police station by the front. At least Lochdubh would be spared their headlines until the following morning. The newspapers were always a day late.

  In any common-or-garden murder, the press would not hang about longer than a day or two. But this murderee had a title and the location was well away from their office with out-of-town expenses, so they would all try to spin it out as long as they could. Of course, Lady Jane had been one of their own, so to speak, and Hamish had learned from his relative in Fleet Street some time ago that the press were not like the police: they were notoriously uninterested in anything that happened to one of their ranks except as a subject for gossip.

  The day was warm and sweaty, and although the rain had stopped, there was a thick mist everywhere and the midges were out in clouds. Hamish took a stick of repellent out of his tunic pocket and rubbed his face and neck with it.

  When he reached the Marag, it was to find the fishing school diligently at work, looking like some old army-jungle movie, as each one had a mosquito net shrouding the face.

  Hamish scanned the anonymous figures, picked out Heather and John by virtue of their expert casting rather than their appearance, and Charlie because of his size and because his mother was sitting on a rock nearby, flapping away the mosquitoes and watching her son as if expecting him to be dragged off to prison at any moment. Hamish went to join her.

  “I think this is ridiculous,” she burst out as soon as she saw him. “It’s horrible weather and the whole school should be broken up and sent home.”

  “They seem quite happy,” said Hamish.

  “I don’t understand it,” wailed Mrs Baxter. “Those Cartwrights suggested the school should try to go on as if nothing has happened, and they all leapt at it when just a moment before they had been threatening to ask for their money back. I told my Charlie he was coming straight home with me, and he defied me. Just like his father.” Two large tears of self-pity formed in Mrs Baxter’s eyes and she dabbed at them furiously with a tissue. “I knew I should never have let Charlie come all the way up here. The minute I got his letter, I was on the train.”

  “Aye, and when did you arrive?”

  “I told the police. I got to Lochdubh just after the terrible murder.”

  “Then how is it that Mrs MacPherson down at the bakery saw you the night before?”

  “It wasn’t me. It must have been someone else.”

  “Blair will check the buses and so on, you know,” said Hamish. “It’s always better to tell the truth. If you don’t, it looks as if you might have something to hide. Did you know Lady Jane was a newspaperwoman?”

  Mrs Baxter sat in silence, twisting the damp tissue in her fingers. Rain dripped from her soutwester. “She’s been around the neighbourhood asking questions,” said Mrs Baxter at last in a low voice. “I’ve never got on with my neighbours and I know they told her all about the divorce. But what’s divorce? Half the population of Britain get divorced every year. I’ve nothing to be ashamed of and that I told her.”

  “You told Lady Jane?”

  “Well, I phoned her before I got on the train,” said Mrs Baxter miserably, “and I said if she wrote anything about my Charlie I would…”

  “Kill her?”

  “People say all sorts of things they don’t mean when they’re angry,” said Mrs Baxter defiantly. “This is a wretched business. Do you know that detective, MacNab, was round at the house last night asking for Charlie’s leader?”

  “No, I did not. I’m shocked.”

  “So you should be. Suspecting a mere child.”

  “It is not that that shocks me but the fact that they did not immediately check all the leaders earlier in the day. Was anyone’s leader missing?”

  “I don’t know. You should know. They fingerprinted everyone as well.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Hamish saw a white police car moving slowly round the edge of the loch.

  He moved quickly out of sight behind a stand of trees and made his way silently along a rabbit track that led back down to the village. Jeremy would have to wait. Hamish went straight to the hotel and asked the manager, Mr Johnson, where the press had disappeared to, since he would have expected them to be up at the loch, photographing the school.

  “There’s a big Jack the Ripper sort of murder broken in London,” said Mr Johnson, “and that’s sent most of them scampering back home. The nationals anyway. This is small beer by comparison. Also, Blair got the water bailiffs to block the private road to the Marag. He hates the press. Going to solve the murder for us, Mr Macbeth?”

  “Aye, maybe.” Hamish grinned. “Any hope of a wee shufty at Lady Jane’s room?”

  “Blair had it locked, of course. No one’s to go in. Police commandment.”

  “I’m the police, so there’ll be no harm in letting me in.”

  “I suppose. Come along then. But I think you’d better try to leave things as they are. I’ve a feeling that Blair doesn’t like you.”

  Hamish followed the manager upstairs and along the corridors of the hotel. “They took a plan of all the hotel rooms,” said Mr Johnson over his shoulder. “I don’t know what they expect to learn from that because it’s said she was strangled up on the hillside in the middle of the night, not far from where she was shoved in the pool. They’ve found a bittie of a photograph, and Blair got everybody down to the last chambermaid fingerprinted. No fingerprints on the photo of course, and none on those chains that were around her legs, as if there would be anything worthwhile after that time of churning and bashing about that pool. But Mr Blair likes to throw his weight around. Here we are.”

  He put the key in the lock and opened the door. Lady Jane had occupied a suite with a good view of the loch. �
��I’ll leave you to it,” said Mr Johnson cheerfully. “I can’t feel sad about this murder. It’s turned out good for business. Every lunch and dinner is booked up solid for the next few weeks. They’re coming from as far as Aberdeen, but then these oil people have more money than sense.”

  Left alone, Hamish stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked around. Surely it must have dawned on Blair before anything else that Lady Jane would have brought notes of some kind. Yes, of course it had. Fingerprint dust lay like grey snow on every surface. Well, they would hardly come back for more fingerprints. Hamish began his search. The suite consisted of a small entrance hall with a side table and one chair, a tiny sitting room with a writing desk, television set and two easy chairs, and a bedroom with a bathroom leading off it.

  There was a typewriter open on the writing desk with a pile of hotel writing paper beside it. He diligently searched the top of the desk and drawers. There was not a single piece of paper with any writing on it whatsoever. Perhaps Blair had taken away what there was.

  He turned his attention to the bedroom. He slid open drawers of frivolous underwear—Lady Jane’s taste in that direction was rather startling—and rummaged underneath. Nothing. If she had had a handbag, then Blair must have taken it away. Two suitcases lay on a luggage rack at the foot of the bed. Locked.

  He took a large ring of keys out of his tunic pocket and got to work, listening all the while in case Blair should choose that moment to return for another search. At last the first case sprang open. There was a lavender sachet, two detective stories, a box of heated rollers, and a hair dryer. No paper of any kind. The next suitcase was completely empty.

  He looked under the bed, under the mattress, down the sides of the chairs, even in the toilet tank and the bathroom cupboard, but not one scrap of paper did he find.