M.C. Beaton - Death of a Dustman

Hamish buried his head in his hands. He had kept secrets from headquarters before, but never so many. He raised his head. “I’ll let you know, Callum. I’ll let you know.”

♦

Hamish then drove to the Tommel Castle Hotel. Priscilla met him at the entrance. “He’s up in my apartment,” she said. “Follow me.”

Priscilla had an apartment at the top of the hotel. The one concession to modernity the colonel would not make was installing a lift, and so they trudged up the stairs. “Has he said anything?” asked Hamish.

Priscilla shook her blonde head. “Not to me. He’s waiting for you.”

In her small sitting room, the colonel was waiting, tweedy and defiant. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” he growled. “I thought the man was poaching and gave him a bawling out.” But his eyes shifted away from Hamish’s face.

Hamish took a gamble. “I have to hear it all from you in your own words. You were overheard.”

The colonel turned red and stared at the floor.

“So you’d better tell me,” said Hamish gently.

The colonel raised his head and became all man–to–man bluff geniality. “You’re a friend of the family, Hamish. There’s no need for this to go any further.”

“Tell me.”

“That new hotel,” said the colonel. “Fergus told me he had proof that they were going to poison my river, take my staff, things like that.”

“What proof?”

“He said he had a fax from someone in London to Ionides.”

“So why did you not come straight to me?”

There was a silence. The colonel stared at his highly polished shoes.

“Come on,” urged Hamish. “Out with it!”

“He offered to sell me the fax. I told him to get lost. I told him he could rot in hell.”

“But why didn’t you come to me with this? And if Fergus had such proof, why didn’t he demand money from Ionides to keep quiet?”

“I’m coming to that,” said the colonel sulkily. “I went straight to see Ionides. Seems a charming chap. He said that Fergus had already been to see him. He said there was no such fax and that Fergus was a fantasist, his brain addled by the drink. He took me on a tour of the hotel and pointed out mine was more a country house place, and, besides, he didn’t have the fishing or shooting that I had. He said he was going in for tourists, conventions, coach parties, stuff like that. We got on very well. I mean, who was I going to believe? A reputable hotel owner or a drunken dustman?”

Hamish stared at him, amazed. “But didn’t you think, when Fergus was murdered, that he might be onto something?”

“But I couldn’t say anything then,” said the colonel. “The police would have wondered why I didn’t come forward. Also, I didn’t think for a minute it could be anything to do with Ionides. Men of his substance don’t need to go round bumping off people. I thought it was probably Fergus’s wife. Anyway, I decided to sit tight.”

“By sitting tight,” said Hamish wrathfully, “you may have caused the death of Angus Ettrik.”

“That’s a bit far-fetched.”

Hamish clutched his head.

“Look,” he said, “I’m going to have to put in a full report. I wanted a search warrant for Ionides’s office, and you have given me reason to get one.”

“Couldn’t you keep it quiet?” pleaded the colonel. “You’ll make me look like an awful fool. I mean, do you think Fergus really had such a fax?”

“Yes, I do, and I wonder what became of it. I’m sorry. I have a whole lot of stuff to tell headquarters in the morning, and a lot of people are going to get hurt.”

The colonel got to his feet and marched to the door. “Your trouble, Hamish Macbeth,” he said, “is you have no loyalty.”

When her father had gone out, slamming the door behind him, Priscilla sank down wearily into an armchair and groaned. “What a mess. Do you really have to report him, Hamish?”

“There’s a lot more than your father I have to report, Priscilla.”

“The thing is,” said Priscilla, “why did Fergus go to Father?”

“That’s easy. He tries to blackmail Ionides and is told to get lost. Maybe he finds Ionides a bit frightening. So he tries to get money out of the colonel. He may have taken a copy of the fax. He may have thought he’d hit the jackpot and that he could get money out of both. The thing that worries me is that I’m pretty damn sure there’s not an incriminating piece of paper in that office of his. It’s no use getting Callum to search through all the hotel rubbish for papers. After Fergus’s approach, they probably learned to burn anything incriminating. Och, what a mess!”

“Who else are you covering up for?”

“Priscilla, I’m that hungry. I’ll tell you if you get me some food.”

“Wait there.”

Hamish lay back in the chair and closed his eyes. He was depressed and weary. I’m losing my touch, he thought. Dammit, I’m losing my brains. Where have I got for covering up for people? What if it isn’t Ionides? But it’s bound to be.

He fell into a light sleep and jerked himself awake when Priscilla came in bearing a tray of sandwiches and a pot of coffee.

“Your policeman is doing wonders in the kitchen. He’s a natural. He must be earning a bit as well. Three of the diners have sent him their compliments along with a tip. I’ve never known that to happen before.”

She sat down and waited until Hamish had wolfed down all the sandwiches.

“So what’s been going on?” she asked.

Hamish began at the beginning, telling her all about the letters, all about the blackmail, about how the new schoolteacher had lied.

Priscilla waited until he had finished. He had expected her to call him a fool, forgetting that his lingering resentment at Priscilla often put words into her mouth that she never used.

Then she said calmly, “I don’t really see what else you could do.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“I mean, think about it, Hamish, you’ve always managed to succeed by using your intuition rather than your brain.”

Hamish winced.

“You know what I mean. You must have had a gut feeling that no one in this village would kill one of their own. I’m thinking of Angus. But I see your dilemma. You really can’t hold out any longer. But when you get permission for this police search, a whole team will come from Strathbane, and we can leak it to the press. A stink like that will hurt Ionides’s trade and might make any of the staff who’ve decided to leave us think again.”

Hamish’s face brightened and then fell. “But I can’t help thinking of poor Mrs. McClellan and Mrs. Docherty, dragged off to Strathbane to be grilled by Blair.”

“Someone told me he was ill.”

“I’ll bet he’s back on duty and nastier than ever. That man’s got the most resilient kidneys and liver in the world. If he dies and there’s ever an autopsy and they take those organs out, they’ll be able to bounce them along the floor like rubber balls.”

“We must try to think of something,” said Priscilla.

Despite his worry, Hamish was warmed by that ‘we.’

“Somehow,” Priscilla went on, “we’ve got to think of a way of finding a bit of proof within the next few hours.”

“It is a self-imposed deadline, Priscilla. I could always put it off for another day.”

“I don’t think you can put off Father’s bit of proof. I know he’ll be in trouble, but Ionides mustn’t be allowed to get away with it.”

They sat in silence. If only this case were solved, thought Hamish. If only we could sit here like in the old days.

Priscilla sat up straight. “The bottle bank,” she said. “The one with the paper.”

“What about it?”

“I went to Patel’s last Sunday to buy the papers, and you know what the Sunday papers are like, full of stuff nobody wants to read, supplement after supplement. They’ve got as big as American papers. I remember reading once that there was a newspaper strike in New York, and they sold the British papers on the street, and one man lifted a whole pile thinking it must be like The New York Times , and the bundle he took must be all the one paper. Anyway, I put the papers in the car and took out all the bits I didn’t want to read to put in the bottle bank. There was even an article in one about saving the forests, and yet I had a whole tree’s worth to throw away.”