Hamish Macbeth 12 (1996) - Death of a Macho Man (7 page)

“The mind boggles. What was it?”

“That she willnae say. She just sobs and cries and says she cannae utter the dirty words.”

Hamish’s Highland curiosity was rampant. He suddenly:’ wanted shot of Jimmy so that he could go and question Annie.

“You know Blair,” Jimmy was saying. “It’s a wonder he didn’t arrest her on the spot, he’s that keen to wrap up this case.”

“Hamish Macbeth!” called an imperious voice from the kitchen.

“That’s Mrs. Wellington, the minister’s wife,” said Hamish. “You’d best be off.”

“Can I take the bottle with me?”

“No, you can’t,” said Hamish, seizing it and putting it firmly back in the bottom drawer. If Jimmy wanted more free whisky, then Jimmy would be back again and hopefully with more interesting information.

Having got rid of the detective, he went through to his kitchen and faced the tweedy bulk of the minister’s wife.

“What I want to know,” said Mrs. Wellington pugnaciously, “is what you’re doing about it.”

“The murder? There’s not much I can do, Mrs. Wellington. I’ve been told to keep off the case.”

“It hasn’t stopped you before I can’t stand that man Blair. You must go and see Annie Ferguson. He has reduced that poor woman to a shaking wreck. That beast, Duggan, seduced her and took her good name away.”

Hamish blinked. “I didn’t think in these free and easy days that women had any good name to take away at all.”

“I’ll have none of your cynical remarks. She sent me to get you. She feels if she does not get help soon, then Blair will arrest her.”

“I’m on my way,” said Hamish, delighted to have an invitation to see the very woman he was interested in interviewing.

“And if that pig Blair says anything to you,” said Mrs. Wellington, “tell him I sent you to see her.”

“Right,” said Hamish. He ushered her out and then set off along the waterfront towards Annie’s little cottage, which was situated just before the humpbacked bridge which led out of Locbdubh.

It was amazing, he marvelled, as he surveyed Annie when she opened the door to him, that you could think you knew someone quite well and then discover that you must hardly have known them at all. But who would think that Annie of all people, with her corseted figure and rigidly permed grey hair, would indulge in passion with a bit of rough like Duggan? “Come in,” said Annie. “I don’t know what to do.” Her voice trembled.

She led Hamish into a neat living-room filled with bits of highly polished furniture and bedecked with photographs in steel frames. There was an old-fashioned upright piano against one wall, with a quilted front and brackets for candles.

Lace curtains fluttered at the open cottage windows, and from outside came all the little snatches of sound of the normal everyday life of Lochdubh—people talking, children playing, bursts of music from radios, and cars driving past along the sunny road.

“So what’s been going on, Annie?” asked Hamish.

“Sit down,” she urged, “and I’ll make us a nice cup of tea and I have baked scones. You aye liked my scones, Hamish.”

Hamish was so anxious to hear what she had to say that despite his mooching ways, he would, for once, have gladly dispensed with the tea and scones, but one could not refuse hospitality in a Highland home. He waited impatiently as she fussed about, bringing in the tea-tray with the fat, rose-decorated china teapot, matching cups, cream jug and lump sugar. Then the golden scones, warm and oozing butter.

Hamish dutifully drank one cup of tea and ate two scones and then said, “So tell me about it.”

“I think God is punishing me,” she said. Her eyes began to water in the way of someone who has cried and cried for days.

“Now, now,” said Hamish, wondering not for the first time why when things went wrong entirely through people’s own making that they should wonder what God had against them. “Just tell me slowly and carefully. And remember. Nothing shocks me.”

“You’re a good man, Hamish. Randy and I fell into conversation in Patel’s store. I was buying flour and he said he thought I was probably a good cook. I said, in the way we have in the village, “Oh, drop by one day and I’ll give you some of my scones.” So a day later, he did that and we got talking. I’ve never travelled further man Glasgow, Hamish, and his stories fascinated me. Also…he looked at me as if I were a woman, you know, and my ain husband didn’t even do that in the later years afore he died, if you take my meaning.

“I wouldn’t have let things get far, but he said he fancied me. I said I was a respectable body and a village was a hotbed of gossip and I had no desire to ruin my reputation. He pointed out that he came in the back way. No one had seen him. No one would know. So…I let him.”

“You had an affair with him?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you kept it quiet, I’ll say that for you. So what went wrong?”

“He asked me to do a nasty and evil thing.”

“You can tell me,” said Hamish soothingly. “Now what was it?”

Her voice broke as she said, “I cannae tell anyone. Dirty, evil beast!”

“Now, Annie, it’s a wicked world out there and we lead the sheltered life in Lochdubh. It may be nothing that horrible. Just spit it out and you’ll feel better. I won’t say a word to Blair.”

“Do you mind not looking at me when I tell you?”

“I’ll go and look out of the window.”

He rose and went and stared through the lace curtains.

The Currie sisters, Jessie and Nessie, were walking slowly past, arguing about something, shopping baskets over their arms.

“He came to me one night about three days afore the murder,” said Annie in a choked voice. “He said he had bought me a wee present and he wanted me to put it on afore we went to bed.”

“What was it?”

“It was a suspender belt, black stockings wi seams and…and…purple silk crotchless knickers. He wanted me to wear them in bed.”

Hamish felt a sudden desire to giggle.

“I told him, I told him straight to his face, I was not a whore. I told him that my Hector, God rest his soul, had never even put the lights on once in the bedroom in all our marriage day s, and the dirty animal had the nerve to tell me I was becoming boring and he felt like spicing things up a bit. I threw the filthy garments of Satan on the fire and told him to get out. He stood there laughing at me, like the demon he was. I said I would kill him. We were through ben the kitchen and I started to throw things at him. He left by the front and I threw a pot at his head, and now Blair will be hearing about it.”

Hamish turned round. Annie’s plain face was scarlet with shame.

“Now look here, Annie, you must not distress yourself. No one needs to know, although it is not very shocking at all. You just tell the police that he made a pass at you and you threw him out. Simple. I mean, you didn’t exactly tell Blair that you had been sleeping with Randy.”

“Oh, Hamish, I never thought of that.”

“Did you tell anyone other than Mrs. Wellington?”

She shook her head.

“So don’t. Just stick to the story I gave you. No need to say anything else. Tell me, what did Mrs. Wellington think of Randy’s…er…behaviour?”

“She told me that men were like that, because she had read about it, and I wasn’t to worry. She said they sold underwear like that in the city shops and Lochdubh must be the last place in the world where they sold knickers with elastic at the knee. But I found that hard to believe. What self-respecting woman would wear stuff like that?”

“Don’t distress yourself further, Annie. I have to ask you this. What were you doing on the evening of the murder?”

“I was at home until the fight I went to watch, for I hoped you’d beat the living daylights out of him.”

“Might have at that,” said Hamish, who didn’t believe a word of what he was saying. “Do you know that Randy was drugged wi’ chloral hydrate before he was shot?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s an old-fashioned sleeping draught. You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who might still have some?”

“No, but Dr. Brodie would know. He’s been the doctor here for some time.”

Hamish silently cursed himself for not having thought of such an obvious thing himself. “I’ll go and have a wee word with the doctor. So are you feeling better, Annie?” He stood up to leave and she rose as well. She kissed him on the cheek and looked up at him from under her sparse eyelashes. “Thanks, Hamish. Call on me anytime. Has anyone ever told you, you are a very attractive man?” Hamish disengaged himself hurriedly and made for the door. “‘Bye,” he said and escaped outside and took a gulp of fresh air.

Annie went to the window and watched him go. “The big softy,” she said, half to herself. “I hope I didn’t lay it on too thick.”

§

Hamish knew there was no surgery that morning and so went to the doctor’s house. Dr. Brodie’s wife, Angela, opened the door to him. “Come in, Hamish,” she said, her thin face lighting up with pleasure.

“Is the doctor home?”

“In the kitchen.”

Hamish went through to the cluttered kitchen, where Dr. Brodie was eating toast and drinking coffee.

“What brings you here, Hamish?” asked the doctor. “Apart from the free coffee, that is.”

“Chloral hydrate,” said Hamish.

“One of Blair’s sidekicks has been round asking me that very question. I never prescribed it. In fact, I don’t believe in sleeping pills either. I just tell them that lack of steep never killed anyone.”

“I thought lack of dreaming could do that,” said Hamish. “I read this article…”

“It wouldn’t kill anyone in Lochdubh. They dream with their eyes open.”

“I want to talk to Angela about sexy underwear.”

“Do you want me to leave the room?”

“No. Listen, Angela,” said Hamish, “can you imagine a middle-aged woman in this day and age being horrified at the idea of wearing a suspender belt and crotchless panties?”

“If she’s middle-aged, she probably wore a suspender belt in her youth, but the crotchless panties might come as a bit of a shock. What middle-aged woman have you been horrifying, Hamish?”

“Oh, nothing. Now about this chloral hydrate…?”

“They could,” said Dr. Brodie, “in this village, find it in someone’s medicine cabinet left over from the old days. A lot of them have relatives out on the isles with medicine cabinets full of junk handed down from generation to generation. Do you know when I was last on Barra, I found someone with a cabinet full of old-fashioned drugs. What about the shotgun, Hamish? I suppose they’re sifting through the records.”

“I suppose they are. I mean, standard routine,” said Hamish absent-mindedly. He glanced at Angela, who was putting fresh coffee in the percolator. She seemed such a contrast to Annie. Why? Hamish suddenly remembered a woman in Glasgow at the bus station pleading with him to lend her some money for her fare home to Inverness. She said she had been mugged. Hamish had generously given her the money for her bus fare home. She had seemed such a decent woman.

Later that evening he had seen her lurching along Sauchiehall Street, dead drunk, and realized he had been conned. There had been something about that talk with Annie that hadn’t rung true.

He wondered what Annie’s underwear was really like. Turning the problem over in his mind while he talked of other things, he drank a cup of coffee and took his leave. The next call he made was on Archie Maclean. How the fisherman appeared to fish all night and stay awake all day was a mystery, but there was Archie sitting outside his cottage in the sunshine, smoking a pipe. Hamish sat down on the wall beside him. “I’ve been to see Rosie,” he said. Archie’s gnarled little brown face brightened, but he cast a nervous look over his shoulder at his cottage, where his wife could be heard scrubbing the floors. “How wass she?”

“Herself was just fine,” said Hamish, “or as far as I could I judge. She didn’t seem all that friendly. A buttoned-down, closed-up sort of woman.”

“Oh, now that iss the mystery aboot her,” said Archie eagerly. “She’s all wumman.”

“It’s an odd sort of friendship for a man like you to strike up,” said Hamish. “Weren’t you scared to death your wife would find out you had been going there?”

“She knew. I gave her Rosie’s book, mind? She got it into her head that Rosie was an auld wumman and I didnae tell her otherwise.”

“She’ll find out.”

“ ‘Don’t care,” said Archie bravely, but he cast another frightened look behind him.

“Did she talk about herself?” asked Hamish curiously. “Why she came here, that sort of thing.rdquo;

“Aye, she said she wanted the Highland background, but also she said it was cheaper to live up here. She said…she said I wass a verra interesting man.” And Archie gave a dreadful smirk.

To a wee henpecked man like Archie, thought Hamish, such flattery must have been like a drug. And yet, what had Rosie’s purpose been in getting the little fisherman all steamed up?

He left Archie and went up to Tommel Castle Hotel. He drove past Blair on the waterfront, gave him a cheery wave and got a suspicious scowl in return.

“Now what?” said Priscilla as Hamish walked into the gift shop.

“Do you never think I might just want to see you?”, demanded Hamish plaintively. “But yes, there is something.”

“What now?”

“Could you invite Annie Ferguson up to the castle for tea this afternoon—say three o’clock?”

“I barely know the woman, Hamish. Why should I invite her?”

“Because I want a look inside her house. Because I think she’s hiding something from me.”

“You want me to assist you in breaking and entering?”

“There won’t be any breaking and entering. She disnae lock her door. Come on, Priscilla.”

“Oh, very well. What excuse do I give?”

“You won’t need one. You’re the lady of this manor. She’ll be that flattered, she’ll come like a shot.”

“Give me her number and I’ll ring now so you’ll know if the coast is going to be clear.”

Priscilla rang Annie and invited her. Hamish listened to the enthusiastic squawks of acceptance from the other end of the line. “Remember,” cautioned Priscilla when she had replaced the receiver, “if you get caught it’s got nothing to do with me.”

After he had left her, Hamish walked across the hotel carpark to the police Land Rover. A small energetic-looking woman hailed him. “Where do you go in this burg for some fun?” she asked.