M.C. Beaton - Death of a Charming Man

—Rudyard Kipling

Hamish arrived in Inverness in a sour mood. Priscilla had failed to turn up the previous evening and he had been too proud to phone her. “A fine friend she is,” he muttered to himself, forgetting that friends are one thing and people with whom one is emotionally involved quite something else. He would simply have phoned a friend and said, “Where the hell are you?”

An autumn chill was making the smoky Inverness air feel raw. He parked at the station and walked round to the Castle Wynd. Inverness as usual was packed with shoppers. Britain might be lurching along the bottom of a deep recession, but there was little evidence of it in Inverness. Seagulls wheeled overhead as shoppers crammed the pavements. He found the lawyers’ brass plate and went up an old staircase of shallow stone stairs flanked by an iron-and-wood banister with brass spikes on the top, no doubt to stop happy clients from sliding down them. He went into the hush of a Victorian office. Gloomy light filtered through the grimy windows. A tired-looking girl sat at a large wooden desk doing something with her nails.

“Police,” said Hamish. “I want to see one of the lawyers.”

She rose and went to an oak door, rapped on it, and put her head around it. “Polis to see you, Mr. Brand.” There was a mumbled answer and she jerked her head at Hamish. “You’re to go in.”

Hamish reflected that it was the lawyers, not the police, who were getting younger these days. Mr. Brand was a slight young man with thick wavy hair and an ingenuous face. He was holding a collie pup on his lap when Hamish entered. He rose and put the dog in a basket in the corner of the room. “Great little fellow,” he said. “Very good for the battered wives. Puts them at ease. Now how can I help you, Sergeant?”

Hamish explained about Peter Hynd and asked if he had signed the papers. “Yes, a delightful man. I gather from the estate agents that they might have a buyer already. Odd, that, with castles and mansions going for a song these days, and then a run-down croft house with unfinished drains comes on the market and it’s snapped up.”

“What did he look like?” asked Hamish.

“Good-looking fellow. Fair. English. Upper class. Why all the questions?”

“I just wondered if it might have been someone impersonating him,” said Hamish, although, from the description he wondered who on earth it could be. Neither Jock Kennedy nor Harry Baxter, say, could have been labelled either fair, English, or upper class by any stretch of the imagination. “I shouldn’t think so. I mean, when the money comes through, it’s to be paid into his bank in London. The City and London Bank in New Bond Street. What makes you think someone might have been impersonating him?”

“He had caused a lot of ill feeling in the village of Prim and then he disappeared, and no one seems to have seen him go. He left a note with Jock Kennedy at the general store and he had been involved in a fight with Kennedy. The minister would have been a more believable choice. But if, as you say, he signed the papers…”

“Well, we can easily check that. I’ll fax his signature to his bank and ask for confirmation.”

Hamish, looking around the dusty, gloomy old–fashioned office, was amazed that it contained such a modern item as a fax machine, but Mr. Brand went to a file and brought out the papers. “There’s his signature…there and there. I’ll take this sheet and get Jenny out there to send it with a wee note. Care for a dram while we’re waiting? I’ve got to walk the dog.”

Jenny having been given her instructions, they went to a bar in the Castle Wynd and drank whisky and chatted amiably about various cases. “Drink up,” said Mr. Brand at last, “Should be a reply by now.”

They went back to the office, where the laconic Jenny produced a fax from the bank confirming the fact that the signature was genuine. Hamish felt he should have been pleased and relieved that Peter Hynd was obviously alive and kicking, but he felt strangely let down. He went back out into the street and stood irresolute.

“Hullo there!” He found Sophy Bisset smiling up at him.

“What brings you to Inverness?” asked Hamish.

“I had to go to the dentist. Had the most awful toothache,” said Sophy. “What about you?”

Hamish remembered walking into the hotel reception with Priscilla and telling her where he was going while Sophy had leaned on the reception desk, listening to every word, but he said briefly be had been investigating something.

“I was thinking of making a day of it and having lunch and going to a movie,” said Sophy. “Care to join me?”

Hamish hesitated. He had not told Strathbane he was going to Inverness, but he was hardly ever called on the car radio and he had left the answering machine switched on at the police station.

He was suddenly weary of the awkward situation with Priscilla. “All right,” he said.

They had lunch in a self-service restaurant and then went round to the small cinema. The film, Blood and Lust, was violent and pornographic. There was nothing, reflected Hamish, like a really pornographic film for making a man feel that celibacy was a good idea. Who liked watching other people making love, apart from perverts? He voiced this thought aloud to Sophy, who burst out laughing and told him he belonged in the Dark Ages. But Hamish felt jaded and grimy. It transpired that Sophy had arrived by bus and train, so he politely offered her a lift home although he longed to be by himself.

As he drove out of Inverness, he switched on the police radio. The crackling voices reminded him of his professional status and he was aware that he should not have been carrying a passenger. Then he heard his own name. A peremptory voice told him to get over to Drim, where a death had been reported.

Cursing, he switched on the siren and headed for the Struie Pass and hurtled over the hairpin bends and down into Sutherland. At Bonar Bridge he saw the local bus, which would eventually call at Lochdubh, and skidded to a halt. “You’ll need to take the bus, Sophy,” he said. “I’m going to be in trouble as it is.”

Again she kissed him on the cheek and Hamish was aware of watching eyes from the bus as he recognized the startled faces of the Currie sisters.

He swung off on the road that would take him over the hills to Drim.

O Village of Death, was his nought as he drove down and saw the huddle of villagers by the black loch, the forensic men in their boiler suits, the flashing blue lights of the police cars.

“Where the fuck were you, laddie?” demanded Blair when Hamish walked up. Hamish briefly explained about Peter Hynd.

“You had no right to go off yer patch an no’ give us a report,” howled Blair. “Start by asking some of these yokels if they know anything.”

Hamish turned his back on him and said to Blair’s sidekick, Jimmy Anderson, “Who’s dead?”

“Betty Baxter.”

“Where’s the child, Heather?”

“Being looked after at the manse. Mrs. Baxter was found face-down beside the loch, behind that clump of rock. It could be an accident. It looks as if she might have tripped and fallen so hard that she broke her neck.”

Hamish walked forward. The tent which had shielded the body had been taken away. The pathologist was stripping off his gloves and packing his bag. A police photographer was taking shots of the body.

Betty Baxter lay in an ungainly pose, diminished by death. Hamish noticed that her hair had been recently blonded, no dark roots, and that she was wearing those silly high heels.

“Accident?” he asked the pathologist.

He shook his head slowly. “I’ll have a better idea when I get the body back to the mortuary.” He bent over the body. “See here, she’s got a huge bruise on her forehead. Looks at first as if she tripped on those silly heels and fell heavily. She’s a big woman. But here at the back of the neck there’s a big bruise under the hair. Someone came up behind her and struck her hard, a powerful blow with something like a blackjack or lead pipe.”