by M C Beaton
He stood grimly while, with a terrible sucking sound, the bog gave up its prey. The blackened body was put on a door and a little procession of men carried it into the community hall. Hamish ordered them to place it on a table below the stage and stood beside it with his arms folded while the whole of the village filed in.
The minister strode to the front of the crowd. “This is disgraceful,” he said. “There are children here. What do you think you are playing at?”
Hamish raised his voice. “This is the body of Peter Hynd,” he said. “And the murderer of Peter Hynd is in this hall. This body may be covered in peatbog, but forensic science can do marvels these days to find out how, when, and why the man was killed. But I know who did it.”
His eyes ranged over the startled faces. He sent up a prayer. He was acting on a wild hunch. But he had wanted pressure, and pressure was here in this still, dead body.
“Step forward, Annie Duncan,” he said in a loud voice, “and look at what you have done.”
Her face was white and drawn and she moved towards him like a sleep-walker. “Why is he so black?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I thought he would be clean with all that water. Why is he so black?”
“You did it,” said Hamish. “I know you did it and I can prove it. Peter Hynd did not sign the final papers for the house sale. You did. A handwriting expert will soon prove it.”
The minister found his voice. “You madman,” he howled. “How dare you? Come along, Annie.”
He tugged at her arm but she went on staring at Hamish as if hypnotized. “Leave me, Callum,” she said quietly. “Don’t you see he knows?”
“Knows what?”
“That I killed Peter Hynd.”
There was an indrawn hiss of amazement from the hall. “Phone Strathbane,” said Hamish to Mr. Apple, who was standing beside him. “Come with me, Mrs. Duncan.”
As he led her to a side-room, he could hear a voice saying, “Thank goodness it wass not one of us. It wass an outsider.”
Annie Duncan had lived many years in the village but she was still regarded as an outsider.
They faced each other over a table in a side-room of the community hall. “While we’re waiting for the team from Strathbane,” said Hamish, “you’d better tell me how you did it and why you did it.”
She gave a dry sob and then seemed to compose herself. “How did you know it was me?” she asked.
“I knew it was you when I saw you dressed as a principal boy. You had deepened your voice for the part. You are English. I realized you could have impersonated Peter. I remembered the way your face became transformed when I first called at the manse when Peter Hynd’s name was mentioned. I remembered Peter’s sister. She looked very like him but vaguely like you. How did you do it? Men’s clothes and a blonde wig?” She nodded.
“Why?”
She stared off into space, a blind look on her face. Then she said, “He was the most marvellous thing that had ever happened to me. He said he loved me, that we would go away together. He told me he planned to sell the house. We were above these peasants in this village, Peter and I. He was the sort of man I should have married. I had never known love like it. And then I heard the men were going to throw a brick through his window and I went to warn him, but as I crept up to the cottage I could hear the tinkling of glass. I waited until they had gone away and I crept forward to look in the broken window. When he came down, I would call to him. He did come down. He was naked and he looked so beautiful, I stood and stared, enjoying looking at him, about to call to him. And then she came down from the bedroom. Silly, fat Betty Baxter, with her coarse face and her great coarse thighs. I saw them together, I saw them going up to the bedroom together, and I thought I would die of loss and shame. I think it drove me mad. Then I saw my moment. There was a film to be shown at the community hall and I knew all the village would be there. I had overheard him saying he had already seen the film in London.
“I went up to the cottage. I wanted it all to be the same. I wanted him back again. I did not think anymore of killing him. He smiled when he saw me, that blinding smile of his and I wanted to think I had imagined him with Betty. But I told him I had seen him. He looked a bit taken aback and then he began to laugh. He tugged my hair and said, ‘You don’t think you’re the only woman in this dead-alive place that I’ve laid to pass the time.’
“I pleaded with him. I reminded him that he wanted to marry me. He said, with an awful sort of indifference, ‘Oh, get back to your worthy husband. It’s only vanity that makes you think you’re any different from the women in this village, although I suppose you are. You’re more the suburban-housewife type. Now, I’m going to have a drink. You can join me or you can go.’ He went into the other room, I suppose to get the bottle of whisky. I saw a hammer lying on the floor of the extension. I went and picked it up and hefted it in my hand. He came back and went over to the counter and took down a glass. My hand seemed to take on a life of its own. I struck him as hard as I could. He fell to the floor, stone dead. And I was glad. I worked like the devil. He had only a few sticks of furniture, so I knew nobody would think it odd that he might include them in the house sale. I took everything else and loaded it up in his car except the papers and title deeds and bank-books and cards, which I took back to the manse later. I backed the car up to the door, his car, and put his body in the boot. I loaded up his car, like I said. I got into the driving seat and free-wheeled slowly down past the community hall. I had the car windows open and could see the lights in the hall and hear the sound of laughter. When I was down past the hall, I started the engine and drove to the end of the loch, to the deep part, to that ledge which hangs over it. I switched off the engine. I got out and I pushed the car over and watched it sink down like a stone into the black water.
“I went back to his cottage and scrubbed the blood from the floor and scrubbed every surface I could see. I had kept his typewriter back, along with the papers. I took it home with me, typed the letter to Jock, and put it with the key through the letter-box at the shop. The next day I couldn’t believe I had done it.” Hamish looked at her in bewilderment. “But the body was found in the peatbog.”
“The what?”
“Thon body was found in the peatbog at the back of Apple’s cottage. Didn’t you know?”
She shook her head. “Someone came running up to tell us we were to come to the community hall. That was all.” She stared at him and then began to laugh harshly. ‘Wrong body,’ she said. Hamish rose and went outside and told one of the waiting men to phone Strathbane and order a team of frogmen.
Then he returned to Annie, determined to worry about the strange peatbog body when he had got her full confession. “And Betty Baxter?” he said when he had sat down again. She sighed heavily. “Betty had become over-familiar with me. I like the women to know their place and keep their distance, and it was borne in on me that Peter had told her about his affair with me, had probably laughed over it with her and God knows who else. I hated her. I thought I would play a trick on her. I phoned her and said I was Peter and I asked her to meet me on the beach the following morning, and then sat back and enjoyed the spectacle of Betty wild with excitement, getting her hair done, running about in a glow of triumph.
“I saw her standing by the rocks, her gross body supported I on those ridiculous heels, and I thought, Oh, Peter, how could you! I had meant to jeer at her, to see the look of disappointment on her face. But I gave her a great push in her great fat back. Why didn’t she put her hands out to save herself? I couldn’t believe it when I found she was dead. I ran away.”
“How could you live with yourself?” marvelled Hamish. “Betty’s death was an accident, not murder. I put it out of my mind. I was waiting until things all died down and then I planned to leave Callum and go back to London. But you had to turn up with your gawky amateur probing.” She began to laugh again. “And you got the wrong body.” She was still laughing and weeping when the team from Strathbane arrived.
∨ Death of a Charming Man ∧
11
When we were a soft amoeba, in ages past and gone,
Ere you were the Queen of Sheba, or King Solomon,
Alone and undivided, we lived a life of sloth,
Whatever you did, I did one dinner served for both.
Anon came separation, by fission and divorce,
A lonely pseudopodium I wandered on my course.
—Sir Arthur Shipley
“So,” said detective Jimmy Anderson gleefully, “you’ve been reduced to the ranks, Hamish. Stripped o’ yer stripes, and nae wonder. You dig up a fine example o’ Pictish man in a bog, accuse a minister’s wife o’ murdering it, and she confesses to murdering Peter Hynd. Och, we havena’ had such a laugh down at Strathbane for years and years.”
Anderson and Hamish were sitting in the police office at Lochdubh several days later, sharing a bottle of whisky.
“Man, man,” said Anderson, pouring another shot of Scotch, “I think the super must have had complaints from every prof, museum, and archaeological society from here to Australia. Such a valuable relic in the hands of a clod-hopping policeman.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Hamish moodily. “Do you know what got to all of you lazy fools in Strathbane? It wass that I knew there had been the murder, and proved it too.”
“Aye, you did that. Car in the loch, body in the boot, and Hynd’s typewriter up at the manse. What put you on to her?”
“It was when I saw her on the stage dressed up as a principal boy with her hair pushed up under one of those Tudor hats. I remembered thinking that she made a fine-looking man. I had been uneasy about her in the back of my mind, or I must have been. It wass her vanity, you see. Priscilla told me she seemed to think herself a good cut above the women of the village, and I could see that vanity in the way she strutted about the stage and the way she ordered the women about during that rehearsal. But she had seemed such a controlled and quiet woman that her vanity was not immediately evident. She was the only one in the village with the sophistication to keep cool and to plan, and to impersonate Peter. I don’t know how I knew it, but I somehow knew Peter had been killed and one o’ them had done it. I’m right glad it didn’t turn out to be Harry Baxter.”
“It’s a wonder it wasn’t that cold wee daughter o’ his.”
“Och, the lassie wasnae cold at all,” said Hamish. “She wass chust holding herself together because she loves her father and she thought he had done it. When she heard about Annie, she broke down and cried her eyes out wi’ relief that the nightmare wass over for her. It was her that put me on to it. She came here one night and said she had seen the murder of Peter in her head.”
“Well, it’s all over,” said Anderson, “although I could do without Blair being so happy about your demotion. Then the super got to hear from his wife that your engagement was at an end and that made you even more of a failure, Hamish. Aye, and there’s something else.”
“There can’t be,” said Hamish, reaching for the bottle.
“But there is. Do you ken a wee man called Hendry, schoolteacher?”
“The wife-beater? What’s happened?”
“He’s put in a complaint about you.”
“What did he say, not but what it’ll be all lies,” added Hamish quickly, thinking of how he had banged the school-teacher’s head into the wall.
“He says you got his missus into some sort o’ brainwashing cult.”
“Havers. I suggested she go to Al-Anon.”
“Aye, well, so she did, and she put the children into Ala-Teen. That house, Craigallen, was in her name. She’s got her ain money. Well, she sells the house, pockets the money, takes the kids and goes off tae Glasgow saying she’s finished wi’ being a martyr, and the wee drunk man she married can either come tae his senses or drink himself tae death. It looks as if he’s chosen the latter solution.”
“But surely Strathbane didn’t take the complaint seriously?”
“Relax, they didn’t, Blair was all for sobering Hendry up and presenting him to the super, but Hendry had a half bottle in his pocket and showed no signs of wanting to sober op. So what are you going to do with yourself now?”
“Same as I did before,” said Hamish. “Police Lochdubh and stay as far away from Strathbane as possible. Is Annie Duncan still talking?”
“Aye, and the more she talks, the weirder she gets. Now she’s over the shock o’ being caught, she seems almost proud of what she’s done.”
“It’s odd,” said Hamish. “When the estate agents reported that Peter Hynd had had a bad cold and was muffled up to the eyebrows, I thought that must be someone impersonating him. But that was him. It was her that signed the final papers. It’s come out that he did have a bad cold. And now they tell me happily about the night of the film show. If they had told me before and I had learned that Peter wasn’t there, then I would have known that was the ideal time to get rid of him. Did the minister know about his wife’s affair while it was going on?”
“Annie says he didn’t know a thing,” said Jimmy. “In fact, she says the one great thing about going to prison is that she’ll get away from him. Makes ye think hanging a good idea.”
Anderson drained the last Scotch from the bottle into his glass, tossed it off and got to his feet.
“I’d better be off, Hamish. Can’t be caught socializing wi’ the enemy. See you around at the next murder.”
Hamish sat with his feet up on the desk after Anderson had left. He had a sudden impulse to go to Drim and see how they were all settling down. He could not drive because he had drunk well over the limit, and so he got up and went out to the shed at the back and wheeled out a rusty bike and set off up the hill on it.
It was a steel-grey day and the air was heavy with the metallic smell of approaching snow. He almost wished he had not decided on this trip as he weaved his way down the winding road which led into Drim and saw the black waters of the loch and the stark bleakness of the surrounding mountains. He went straight to Harry Baxter’s. It was a Sunday, and so he knew the fisherman would be at home. Harry was watching television.
“Where’s Heather?” asked Hamish.
“She’s out playing wi’ her friends.”
“That’s grand,” said Hamish.
“Aye, she doesnae need to worry about me anymore. Can you imagine,” said Harry in awe, “that she thocht I’d done it?”
“Well, it’s over now. No more rows, I hope?”
Hairy grinned. “I don’t know about that. We’re getting the new minister and he’s a young man and no’ married, so Alice’s shop is busy again and Edie’s started the exercise classes.”
“Oh, dear. What about the pantomime?”
They stopped that and sent the costumes back. “I thocht Heather would be disappointed not to play the cat but she didnae seem to mind.”
Hamish dug into his pockets and took out a handful of paperbacks. “I brought some books for Heather. Though she won’t be needing them so much now.” He put them on the table.
“Thanks,” said Harry, his eyes straying back to the television set, where one furry puppet was savagely hitting another.
Hamish went down towards the community hall. The old familiar sound of music reached his ears. He had a pang of dread that rivalry over this minister would start the old feuds. He looked towards the manse and saw there was a furniture-delivery van outside.
He cycled up. He called to one of the workmen, “Is the minister in?”
The man jerked his head towards the kitchen door.
Hamish walked in. The new minister turned to meet him.
He was a small fat man with thinning hair. He had very thick pebble glasses. He looked like a toad.
Hamish stepped forward with a smile of pure relief and gladness on his face and wrung the minister’s hand. “Welcome to Drim,” he said.
♦
When he returned to Lochdubh, he saw Phil Jameson, a young man who did odd jobs about the village, and called
to him. “Got a job for you, Phil.”
“Whit’s that?” asked Phil, padding over and wiping his hands on his overalls.
“Come with me,” said Hamish. He led Phil to the shed at the back and pointed to the wood-burning stove. “I want that put back in the kitchen and the new electric taken out.”
“Can do,” said Phil laconically. “Selling the electric?”
“No, put that on your truck and take it to Tommel Castle Hotel and give it to Miss Halburton-Smythe with my compliments.”
“That’s finished, I hear,” said Phil.
“Aye, well, mind your own business. I’m off to Rogart to get my dog.”
The phone from the police station rang shrilly. He went in to answer it. It was Edie Aubrey. “Hamish,” she said, “I’ve found out who tripped Nancy on the stairs.”
“Who was it?”
“It was Ailsa. She told Nancy and asked her to forgive her.”
“And does Nancy forgive her?”
“Oh, yes, they’re as thick as thieves, but I don’t see why Ailsa should get away with it. You should – ”
“Edie,” interrupted Hamish, “have you seen the new minister?”
“Not yet.”
“He’s at the manse. Go and have a look and then ask yourself whether you want Ailsa charged with anything.”
And one look at that ugly minister, thought Hamish, as he put the phone down, will be enough to cool their fevered dreams. They were probably expecting another Adonis.
The next phone call was from his cousin Rory in London, very angry because Hamish had not given him an advance story on the murder. “If you’d got me up there,” said Rory, “I could have stopped you making such a fool of yourself by accusing someone of murdering a man out of a peatbog who’d been dead for centuries.”
“Leave’it be,” said Hamish. “I found the murderer and the real body. I’ve had enough criticism and been demoted, and I don’t want any more complaints.”
But there was more to come. For when he went to his parents in Rogart, he had to listen to his mother’s gentle complaints about ‘losing’ Priscilla.
