M.C. Beaton: Death of a Nag

Maggie put her head around the door. “A word with you, sir.”

Deacon went out. He was back in a few minutes and sat down heavily. “More problems,” he said. “That will be all,” he added to Dermott and June. The couple got up and went out, but Hamish noticed that Dermott did not take June’s arm or hand the way he usually did.

“What’s up?” asked Clay. “Not another murder?”

Deacon shook his head. “Cheryl’s been arrested. She and Tracey were in the pub and got drunk. Some local lads started taking the piss out of them and Cheryl smashed her pint glass on the bar and then tried to take it across the face of one of the lads. Would have done it too if Tracey hadn’t held her back.”

Violence, thought Hamish. We’ve been looking for someone capable of a sudden attack of violence and forgetting Cheryl is the one with a proven record. We’ve been looking for a motive. What was it he had said to Miss Gunnery? Something about a motiveless murder being the most difficult to solve. These had not been intelligent murders. They had been the result of rage, rage and fear; fear in the case of MacPherson, if he had been blackmailing anybody.

Deacon was called out again. Again they waited. When he came back, he said, “One of the locals remembers that MacPherson always had a big pair of kitchen scissors on his desk. We haven’t found a trace of them. If the murderer used the scissors as a weapon and threw them in the river, they could be somewhere down there sunk in the sand. We’ve searched all around below the jetty, but they could have been tossed in further up. I’ll tell you another thing: anything that’s tossed in that river can sink down below the sand and be buried. I don’t know if we’ll ever find them.”

“Is Cheryl being brought in here?” asked Hamish.

“No, she’ll stay in the cells until she sobers up. Why don’t you get back to that boarding-house, Macbeth, and see what you can sniff out?”

That ‘sniff out’ was unfortunate because it gave Hamish a sudden and vivid picture of Towser. He got to his feet, nodded to Deacon and Clay, and went out. Instead of driving off, he left his Land Rover where it was and walked down to the harbour. The tide was in, sucking at the wooden piles of the jetty, making wet clumps of seaweed rise and fall like the hair on the dead Bob Harris’s head. There were long trails of rain out to sea, dragging across the stormy water as if pulled by an unseen hand. The air was full of wind and salt and motion. Behind him, a policeman he did not know stood on guard outside the boat-shed. A little knot of tourists stared hungrily at the boat-shed, as if a vicarious thrill were as much a legitimate part of the holiday as the rides at the fairground.

Hamish was reluctant to go back to the boarding-house, reluctant to face the others. He wished with all his heart that the case was solved and he could return to Lochdubh. How could he ever have taken such a dislike to his home village? He could always ask to leave Skag. He was officially on holiday. But the short happy time he had spent with the others at the boarding-house before the murders had given him a queer sort of loyalty towards them.

With a little sigh, he turned and walked back to the police station, climbed into the Land Rover and drove to the boarding-house.

He was met in the hall by a stout middle-aged lady who said, “I am Mrs Rogers’s sister, Mrs Aston. Poor Liz has gone to lie down. She can’t cope here. You must be Mr Macbeth. Tea is just about to be served, if you will step into the dining room.”

Wondering, Hamish went in and joined Miss Gunnery. “I had thought of asking you out for dinner tonight,” he said. “But do you think this Mrs Aston is going to be any better?”

“Let’s see,” said Miss Gunnery. “She seems a very civil and polite woman.”

“She seemed to have heard a description of me,” said Hamish. “I could have been any other policeman.”

The door opened and the Bretts came in. They avoided looking at Hamish and sat down at their table in silence. Then Andrew and Doris came in, followed by a tearful Tracey. They, too, avoided looking at Hamish.

Mrs Aston wheeled in a trolley with three-tiered cake stands on it and proceeded to put one on each table. “Goodness, this is more like it,” exclaimed Miss Gunnery. On the bottom plate were wafer-thin slices of bread and butter, white and brown; on the next plate up, teacakes and scones, golden and fresh-baked, and on the top a selection of scrumptious-looking cakes.

“I wonder what the dish is?” said Hamish. “I smell fish and chips, but to tell the truth, I think I’ve had enough fish and chips to last me a lifetime.”

The trolley creaked in again. But it was fish and chips made surely by the hand of an angel: haddock fillets in crisp golden batter and real chips, rather than those frozen ones.

“This is grand!” exclaimed Hamish.

“And really good tea,” said Miss Gunnery. She looked across to where the three small Brett children sat in old–fashioned, well-behaved silence. “There’s a showing of The Jungle Book on in the cinema at Dungarton. It’s at seven-thirty this evening. We could all just make it after tea, and it might take your children’s minds off the troubles we are going through, Mrs Brett.”

“I tell you what,” said Hamish directly to the children, “if your parents’ll let you stay up late, I’ll give you a ride in the police Land Rover.”

Heather’s eyes widened. “With the siren on?”

“I don’t think I can manage that,” said Hamish, “but we could flash the blue light.”

“Och, let’s go,” said Tracey. “It’s started tae pour wi’ rain an’ if we sit in this hellish place, we’ll all go daft.”

There was a definite thawing of the air in the dining room. “Might be the very thing,” said Dermott. “But what if they send for any of us to interrogate us again this evening?”

“They didn’t say anything about it,” said Hamish. “Let’s forget our troubles and eat up and just go.”

“You’ll get into trouble with your superiors for fraternizing with the enemy,” said Andrew dryly.

“Maybe Hamish hopes that if he stays close to us, we’ll reveal something useful,” put in Doris in a flat little voice. There was an uneasy silence.

“No, no,” said Hamish. “I need to get my mind off the case as much as the lot of you. Come on. Let’s give the kids a bit o’ fun.”

And so Maggie Donald, arriving just after tea at the boarding-house to see if she could entice Hamish out to dinner, found him lifting the Brett children into the Land Rover. He told her rather curtly where they were going but did not issue any invitation. Maggie stood and watched as the cars drove off, feeling strangely abandoned and yet wondering crossly at the same time why Hamish Macbeth, a policeman, should want to spend the evening with a group of people among whom was probably a murderer.

The film was a great success. Hamish, who hadn’t seen it before, said to Miss Gunnery that it was just about his intellectual level. Hamish drove the Brett children home and on an empty stretch of road switched on the flashing blue light and the police siren.

Miss Gunnery, following behind, driving Tracey, said, “He is a very unusual policeman, our Hamish.”

Tracey shivered. “They’re all pigs.”

“There is nothing to fear from the police if you keep on the right side of the law,” said Miss Gunnery. “Why don’t you break free of company like Cheryl, Tracey, and make a new life for yourself?”

Tracey, instead of protesting, sat in silence. Then she said, “She belongs to ma sort o’ life. My faither’s in prison.”

“There comes a time, Tracey,” said Miss Gunnery, “when you must break free of your family if you have had an unfortunate upbringing, which I believe you have experienced.”