Hamish Macbeth 12 (1996) - Death of a Macho Man (14 page)

“Cleanest in Lochdubh,” agreed Hamish.

“Wait!” she screeched as her husband got to his feet. She picked up a newspaper and, separating the pages, spread them I out across the floor in front of him like stepping stones. Archie took down a crackling black oilskin from a peg and shrugged himself into it, and together both men escaped into the howling night. Conversation on the road to the Lochdubh bar was impossible because of the vicious screaming of the wind.

The bar was quiet that evening, to Hamish’s relief. Archie asked for a whisky and went to prop up the bar in his usual way but Hamish led him to a small table in the corner.

“Did you mourn Rosie?” asked Hamish.

Archie smoothed the sparse hairs over his head with a gnarled hand. “I’m right sorry she’s dead,” he mumbled.

“But you did not cry?”

“Och, come on, Hamish. Greetin’s for bairns.”

“Try to think clearly, Archie. This is important. Were you fond of her?”

There was a long silence while the fisherman struggled for words. At last he said: “The fact is, I was a wee bit flattered. Her being a writer and all. She told me I wass a highly intelligent man. But with her gone, it iss as if she neffer existed. Do you know what I mean?”

“But while she was flattering you and making you cups of tea, did you ever think of having an affair with her?”

Archie blushed deeply. “Och, Hamish, the thought neffer crossed my mind and that’s the truth. I’ve only got to look in the mirror.”

“You’re a modest man, Archie, but you must have wondered why she flattered you and cultivated your company.”

The little fisherman’s eyes were suddenly shrewd. “I think she wanted me to fall in love with her,” he said.

“And why would that be?”

“The ladies like the men to fall in love with them even when they’re not interested. It’s the way they are. Makes them feel good.”

“She was right about the one thing, Archie. You are an intelligent man. I’ll buy you another and then I’ve got to go. I’ve got a phone call to make.”

§

Back in the police station, Hamish got through to Birmingham CID. He was lucky in that he got a clever and bored detective who was anxious for action. He was Detective Sergeant Hugh Perrin.

Hamish outlined the details of the murder of Rosie Draly and then said, “I was just wondering whether it would be possible to get a search warrant for Bob Beck’s apartment. You see, when he made that phone call to his wife, she said he must have been down in Birmingham because she heard the nine-o’clock. Now all he had to do was make a tape recording of that train, take it up to Sutherland and play it.”

“You’ve got a point there. But you say there was evidence that papers and computer discs had been burnt in the fireplace? Doesn’t that point to the murderer of Duggan?”

“Beck could ha’ been burning evidence of letters from him and letters back to him.”

“Bit far-fetched. If that was the case, why didn’t he just chuck this tape of the train going past in the fire as well?”

“I think when he murdered her, he might have got rid of any evidence of letters. Then he would sit down and phone his wife. Wait a bit. He wouldn’t phone her from Rosie’s because we checked the calls for that evening. Damn, we should have been checking back through the past few months. Think o’ this. He needs a phone. He can hardly stand in a phone box and operate the tape recorder properly. He might be pressed for time. So he would go to some hotel or motel, on the road south and phone from there, not too far from Lochdubh.”

“There’s your answer then,” said Perrin. “You get evidence he was anywhere near the scene and we can haul him in…easy. I’m going to be here all night.”

With a fast-beating heart, Hamish said goodbye and reached for the battered phone book. He began to phone hotels and boarding-houses in the immediate area, asking if any stranger had checked in on the evening of the murder for one night and if there had been a London phone call on the bill. He gave Mrs. Beck’s number. And then, just when he was about to give up, he remembered the new Cluny Motor Inn on the A9 and phoned there. He could not believe his luck. Not only was there a clear record of Bob Beck’s having phoned home but he had even used his own name.

He phoned Detective Sergeant Perrin with the news. “We’ll get him in,” said the detective triumphantly. “But surely he hasn’t still got that tape? Surely he chucked it out the car window or something.”

“If you pull him in,” said Hamish, “I’ll go out to the Cluny Motor Inn and go through the trash. With any luck it hasn’t been collected.”

He stopped only to pick up his radio, which had a tape deck, from the kitchen table before driving off into the wild night. Sheets of rain battered against the windscreen and he thought bleakly of sitting in the Land Rover with Priscilla waiting for Blair and the others to arrive and experienced a stabbing pain of hurt and loss in his gut. He marvelled that the pain could still be so intense. He didn’t feel like a drink or a pill to ease it, but rather thought of taking a shotgun and blasting a big hole in his stomach, not to kill himself, but, like a cartoon animal, to leave a nice clean round hole where the hurt had been.

At last he reached the motor inn and eagerly asked the manager if he could search through the hotel rubbish, “Suit yourself,” said the manager. “It gets collected tomorrow. It’s all round the back.”

He led Hamish out to the back of the hotel, where two giant metal rubbish bins gleamed wetly in the lights from the inn. “You’d best leave me to it,” said Hamish gloomily. “I’ll need to take everything out.”

“I’ll make it easy for you,” said the manager. “The bin on the left is the kitchen waste. The one on the right is mostly other stuff from the rooms, old newspapers, that sort of stuff.”

The bin was so large that, tall as he was, Hamish had to stand on a box to reach down into the contents. The hours went past as he patiently sifted through cartons, newspapers, magazines, cigarette butts, condoms, sandwich wrappings and empty bottles. He threw everything out over his shoulder and then climbed into the bin as the contents grew lower and by the light of his torch ferreted around in the bottom. His hands closed on a cassette and he gave a whoop of triumph. He shouted for the manager, who came running out. “I want you to witness that I am taking this out o’ the bin,” said Hamish. “We’ll take it into reception and play it.”

Together they went back into the warmth of the reception, where Hamish had left his radio. He put the tape in the deck and pressed PLAY. After a few seconds, the throaty voice of Cher blasted around the room.

Hamish did not normally swear, but when he switched off the tape deck, his oaths resounded round the room. “Here! Enough o’ that,” said the manager. “If you’re finished, take yourself off.”

“I’m going for another look,” said Hamish stubbornly.

He went back out into the wind and rain and climbed back into the large green metal bin, concentrating on the refuse from the hotel rooms which was in the small plastic garbage bags used to line the waste-baskets. He opened one at the bottom and shone his torch. An empty half-bottle of whisky, a crushed, empty cigarette packet, several butts, soiled tissues…and a tape.

Once more, he called the manager. “What is it this time?” demanded the manager with heavy sarcasm. “Dolly Parton?”

“I want you to witness I’m taking this out of the bin.”

“Oh, sure.”

Hamish climbed out. Together they went back into the hotel again. Hamish slotted in the tape and switched on the machine. At first there was silence, broken only by the hiss of the tape, and then suddenly the room was filled with the sound of an approaching train. A slow smile broke on Hamish’s thin features.

He listened until the sound of the train had finished. “Is that what you wanted?” asked the manager.

“It’s the very thing.”

“Well, I’m short-staffed at the moment, so get out there and put that rubbish back.”

But Hamish had had enough of ferreting through rubbish.

“It’s all police evidence,” he said. “You’ll need to leave it as it is until the forensic boys get here.”

As he drove back to Lochdubh, Hamish’s feeling of triumph began to ebb. He should have told Blair what he was going to do. Blair would be furious. And sure enough, when he drove towards the police station, he saw the cars parked outside, and in the light of the blue lamp over the front door, swinging wildly in the wind, he made out the truculent features of Blair.

“What have ye been up to, pillock?” shouted Blair. “I got a call frae Birmingham telling me they were pulling in Beck for questioning and I didnae know a thing about it. Daviot’ll get to hear o’this.” .

“I’ve got the tape Beck made of the train going past,” said Hamish.

“How? What…?”

While Hamish talked, Blair only half listened to him, his mind working busily. Somehow he had to claim this bit of detective work as his own. He became suddenly conciliatory and smiled horribly. “Aye, well done, lad. You’ll be needing your bed. Just let’s be having that tape.”

Hamish meekly passed it over. He knew what Blair was going to do. Blair would tell Daviot that he, Blair, had instructed Hamish to phone Birmingham and had sent him out to look for the tape.

Which was what Blair subsequently did and was met with heavy suspicion. “What were you about,” demanded Peter Daviot nastily, “to send one lone constable out on the search? And phoning the CID in Birmingham and giving them instructions is your job, not Macbeth’s.”

“I phoned them myself,” howled Blair.

“That’s not what I heard. I heard that Hamish Macbeth phoned.”

“I mean,” said Blair quickly, “like I just said, I told him to phone.”

“Next time, do the job yourself.”

“Yes, sir,” said Blair meekly, and he hated Hamish Macbeth from the bottom of his heart.

When love grows diseas’d, the best thing we can do is put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingring and consumptive passion.

—
Sir George Etherege

A
s a sign that Superintendent Peter Daviot knew who had uncovered Beck as the murderer of Rosie, Hamish Macbeth was invited to the interview in Strathbane when Beck was brought north. Blair was in a sour mood. Hamish, in the comer as usual, looked at Bob Beck with a sort of wonder. He was a grey-haired man with a slight stoop, thick spectacles through which pale eyes looked out at the world with a childlike innocence, a rather large nose and a small mouth. He was wearing a well-pressed grey suit and black lacing shoes. He was hardly the picture of a man who, driven mad with passion, had plunged a knife into the naked I back of Rosie Draly. Had it not been for the evidence of the tape, Hamish would have been tempted to think that he had merely been unlucky, that he had travelled to Sutherland to see Rosie on the very day of her murder.

Blair began the questioning, mildly enough for him. Beside Beck sat his solicitor, a thin, rabbity man who looked even more bewildered than the murderer.

“How long had you known the writer, Rosie Draly?”

“Years,” said Beck, and then said firmly, “to save time I would like to make a full confession.”

Blair smiled expansively. “That’s the ticket, laddie. Go ahead.”

“I fell in love with Rosie just after Beryl and I were married,” he said in a rusty voice, as if he had not spoken for some time. “That was in nineteen sixty-four. I wanted to leave Beryl, get a divorce, but then Beryl told me she was pregnant and Rosie told me I must do the decent thing and stay with her. I’ve hated Beryl for a long time.” He blinked round the room myopically. “But I coped, particularly after I got the job in Birmingham. Beryl did not want to move to Birmingham and that suited me. Rosie and I met…often. I wanted her, I wanted to have her, and she always held out that hope and I believed her because I was in the grip of an obsession. When I wasn’t with her, I thought of her all day long. Some days I thought I would take time off from this madness, but then the day would be so black and empty, I would need to return to my dreams. In my dreams, I always made love to her as no man has made love to a woman. She wrote to me regularly and I saved all her letters. And then she moved to Sutherland, and the letters became less and finally stopped. When I phoned her, she always seemed to cut me off. May I have a glass of water, please?”

They waited while a policewoman fetched him a glass of water, which he drank in one long thirsty gulp.

“At last I couldn’t bear it any longer,” he went on. “She had told me that Lochdubh was a gossipy place and I was never to come up and see her. But I drove up. I took a tape recording of the train going past because I knew I had to phone Beryl.

“When I set out, I had no thought of murder in my head. I did not need to ask directions to her cottage. When she first moved up to the Highlands, she had described it in every detail and where it was. I was stunned when she answered the door. She was harsh with me, abrupt. She said she had big things ahead of her, a good future. She was going to London to see her agent and couldn’t waste any time on me.” His eyes filled with tears and he blinked them away. “She said she was going to have a bath and I could take myself off. She walked into the bedroom and she stripped off, insolent in all he nakedness I had dreamt so long about. I haven’t much memory of what happened next. I hurt so dreadfully. All I could think of was hurting her as much as she had hurt me. I must have taken the knife out of the kitchen drawer. I went back to the bedroom. She was bending over the bed, still naked. I plunged the knife into her back. I’m no surgeon. I didn’t know where to strike, didn’t even think of it. But she died instantly. One minute she was alive and the next she was as cold as mutton. And then all the hurt and rage left me and I was looking back on a life ruined by obsession. All I could think was to save myself, not make myself a sacrifice for such a woman. I found letters from me and some of her letters to me still on a computer disc. She never handwrote letters, and I burnt them. The rest you’ve found out—how I went to the Cluny Motor Inn, phoned Beryl with the tape of the train playing in the background, and how I threw it in the rubbish.” His voice died away. Blair leaned forward, his beefy shoulders hunched, suppressed excitement quivering in every part of his unlovely body. “But you were up here afore,” he said. “Tell us how you killed Randy.”