Hamish Macbeth 13 (1997) - Death of a Dentist

For there was never yet a philosopher, That could endure the toothache patiently.

 

—
William Shakespeare

It was a chill autumn in the Highlands of Scotland when Police Constable Hamish Macbeth awoke in hell.

The whole side of his jaw was a burning mass of pain.

Toothache. The sort of toothache so bad you cannot tell which tooth is infected because the pain runs through them all.

His dentist was in Inverness and he felt he could not bear the long drive. Lochdubh, the village in which his police station was situated, did not boast a dentist The nearest one was at Braikie, a small town twenty miles away. The dentist there was Frederick Gilchrist.

The problem was that Hamish Macbeth still had all his teeth and meant to keep them all and Mr. Gilchrist had a reputation for pulling out teeth rather than saving them, which suited the locals, who still preferred to have their teeth drawn and a ‘nice’ set of dentures put in. Also Gilchrist, in these days of high dental charges, was cheap.

One summer visitor complained bitterly that Gilchrist had performed The Great Australian Trench on her. Australian dentists had gained the unfair reputation for casually letting the drill slide across as many teeth as possible, therefore getting themselves a lucrative and steady customer. And although Mr. Gilchrist was Scottish, he was reputed to have performed this piece of supposedly Australian malpractice. Mrs. Harrison, a local widow, alleged nastily that she had been sexually molested by Gilchrist while unconscious under gas, but Mrs. Harrison was a strange woman who always seemed to think every man was lusting after her and so her charge was not taken very seriously, and as she had not reported it to the police, but only to everyone else who would listen, there had been no excuse for Hamish Macbeth to take the matter further.

And yet the pain was so fierce that by the time he had dressed, he had argued himself into sacrificing one tooth.

He dialled Gilchrist’s number. Gilchrist’s receptionist, Maggie Bane, answered the telephone and to Hamish’s frantic appeal for help said sourly he would just need to come along and take his chances. Mr. Gilchrist was very busy. Come at three and maybe he’ll fit you in.

Hamish then went to the bathroom and scrabbled in the kitchen cabinet, looking for aspirin and found none. He petulantly slammed the cabinet door shut. It fell off the wall into the handbasin, and cracked the porcelain of the handbasin before sending large shards of glass from its shattered glass doors onto the bathroom floor.

He looked at his watch through a red mist of pain. Eight o’clock in the morning. Dear God, he wouldn’t live until the afternoon. A sorry, lanky figure in his worn police uniform, he left the police station and made his way rapidly along the waterfront to Dr. Brodie’s home.

Angela, the doctor’s wife, answered the door in her dressing gown. “Why, Hamish, you’re early,” she cried.

“I need help,” moaned Hamish. “I’m dying.”

“Come in. He’s in the kitchen.”

Dr. Brodie, wrapped in a camel hair dressing gown, looked up as Hamish entered, a piece of toast and marmalade halfway to his lips. “Hamish!” he said. “You look like death.”

“You’ve got to give me something quick,” gabbled Hamish, grabbing his arm. “I am in the mortal pain. I haff the toothache.”

“You look as if you’ve got mad cow disease,” said Dr. Brodie sourly, jerking his arm away. “Oh, very well, Hamish. Sit yourself down while I get my bag.”

Hamish sank down in a chair and clutched his jaw. One of Angela’s cats leapt lightly on the table, studied Hamish with curious eyes and then began to drink the milk out of the jug.

Dr. Brodie came back with his bag, opened it, and took out a small torch. “Now, open wide Hamish. Which one is it?”

“It feels like all of them,” said Hamish. He opened his mouth and pointed to the lower left of his jaw.

Dr. Brodie shone the torch in his mouth. “Ah, yes, nasty.”

“Nasty what?” demanded Hamish.

“You’ve got an abscess there. The bottom right-hand molar. Ugh! I don’t know that a dentist could treat you until it’s cleared up. I’ll give you a shot of antibiotic. I’ll need to go to the surgery. Stay here and Angela’ll get you a coffee. I’ll need to get dressed.”

“Where am I getting this injection?”

“In the backside.”

“Then I will be coming with you.”

“Why?”

Hamish blushed. “I do not want your wife seeing my bare bum.”

Dr. Brodie laughed. “I’m glad there’s one woman left in this village you don’t want to show your bum to.”

When he had gone upstairs to change, Hamish whimpered, “No coffee, Angela. I’m in such awfy pain, I couldnae get it past my lips.”

“You’re nothing but a big baby, Hamish Macbeth,” said Angela, her thin face lighting up with amusement.

“Women!” said Hamish sourly. “All that talk about maternal feelings and womanly sympathy is chust the myth.”

“If the abscess is that bad, why did you let it go so far?”

“I felt a few twinges,” muttered Hamish, “but, och, I thought I had the cold in the face.”

Angela smiled again at him, sat down at the coffee table, grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and dragged its face out of the milk jug, poured some in her coffee, and picked up a book, saying before she started to read, “I am sure you do not feel like talking.”

Hamish glared at her and nursed his jaw. Dr. Brodie eventually appeared. “Let’s get to the surgery, Hamish, and spare your blushes.”

They walked silently along the waterfront. The day was cold and still. Smoke from the cottage chimneys rose straight up into the clear air. A heron sailed lazily over the sea loch. The village of Lochdubh in Sutherland—that county which is as far north in mainland Britain as you can go—dreamed in the pale sunlight making one sad constable feel like a noisy riot of pain.

Once in the surgery, Dr. Brodie injected Hamish with a stiff shot of antibiotics, gave him a prescription for antibiotic pills and told him to go home and lie down. Hamish had told him about the appointment with Gilchrist. “You’d best cancel it,” said Dr. Brodie, “until that abscess has cleared up. You don’t want to go to Gilchrist anyway. He’ll pull the tooth and there’s no need for that these days. You’d be better off in Inverness. There’s been some awfully nasty stories about Gilchrist circling about.”

Hamish crept off back to the police station. He had bought a bottle of aspirin from Patel’s, the local supermarket on the road there. He took three aspirin, swallowing them down with a stiff glass of whisky. He undressed slowly and climbed back into bed, willing the pain to go away. To take his mind off the pain, he began to think of Gilchrist and all the rumours about the man, and then he suddenly fell asleep.

He awoke two hours later. The pain had almost gone, but he was frightened to get out of bed in case that dreadful pain came roaring back. He clasped his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. He missed his dog, Towser, who had died so suddenly. Towser would have lain on the end of the bed and wagged his tail and he, Hamish, would have felt that someone in the whole wide world cared about his suffering. Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, the once love of his life, had gone to London to stay with friends and no other woman had come along to fill the gap left by her going. They had once been unofficially engaged, but he had broken off the relationship because of Priscilla’s odd coldness when he had tried to make love to her. He missed her, but he tried to tell himself that missing Priscilla had simply become a habit.

His thoughts then turned to Gilchrist and his Highland curiosity about the dentist was fully roused. Hamish had never met the man. He would phone up and say he could not see him that day and then he would make another appointment. If Gilchrist showed any signs of removing the tooth, he would remove himself from that dentist’s chair and go to Inverness. But that way he would be able to see the dentist and form his own opinion. It was all so easy to lose one’s reputation in the Highlands of Scotland where one tall tale was embellished and passed, around and another added to it.

The phone rang shrilly from the police station office. He got gingerly out of bed and went to answer it. It was from the owner of a hotel fifteen miles away on the Lairg road, complaining he had been burgled the night before.

Hamish promised to be over as soon as he could, dressed again, got into the police Land Rover and drove out to The Scotsman Hotel where the burglary had taken place. He expected to find vandalism, broken windows, the bar a mess, but it transpired that the break-in had been a professional one. The safe in the office had been broken into and the week’s takings stolen.

The safe looked heavy and massive and the door undamaged.

“How did they get into that?” he asked, pushing back his peaked cap and scratching his fiery red hair.

The manager, Brian Macbean, nodded to two men, who swung the safe round.

“Oh, my,” said Hamish. For the back of the safe had been made of a panel of chipboard which the burglar had simply sawn through.

He took out his notebook. “Can we sit down, Mr. Macbean, and I’ll take some notes. Then I’ll phone Strathbane and get them to send a forensic team over. How much was in the safe?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”

“What on earth were you doing keeping that amount of money on the premises?”

“It’s the giant prize for this Saturday night’s bingo session. Man, we’ve got folk coming from every part of the Highlands.”

“So someone knew about it, and someone knew about the back of the safe.”

Macbean, a squat, burly man with thinning hair, looked morose. “The big bingo night’s been in all the local papers, so it has.”

“But why cash?” Hamish was puzzled. “A cheque would ha’ done.”

“That was the attraction. It was all in twenty pound notes. All the press photographers were coming. It would have made the grand picture, some winner with all those notes.”

Hamish licked the end of his pencil. “So why the wooden back on the safe?”

“I needed a safe and there was this one over at the auction rooms in Inverness. I thought that would do me fine.”

“And probably charged the owners for a real safe.”

Macbean looked mulishly at the floor and did not reply.

Hamish patiently took him through exactly when the theft had been discovered and then said, “Who knew the safe had a wooden back?”

“The barman, Johnny King, and one of the waiters, Peter Sampson. They helped me bring it back from Inverness.”

“What about your family?”

“Well, of course they knew. My wife, Agnes, and my girl, Darleen.”

Hamish racked through his mind for any gossip he might have heard about Macbean’s family, but could dunk of nothing in particular. “I’ll need to interview the barman and the waiter,” he said, “and then I’ll talk to your wife and daughter.”

“Whit! Leave my family out of it.”

“Don’t be daft, Mr. Macbean. They might have seen something or heard something. How old is Darleen?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s over at the dentist in Braikie with her mother.”

Gilchrist again, thought Hamish, and then realised with a sort of glad wonder that the hellish pain in his tooth had subsided.

“How come a Highland hotel can afford to offer such a huge money prize?”

“We run the bingo nights all year round with small prizes and the profits are put in the bank. I drew the big money out of the bank in the middle of the week.”

“I’ll just use the phone there,” he said, “and call Strathbane, and then I’ll take a look around.”

Detective Chief Inspector Blair when contacted said he was busy on a drugs job but would send his sidekick, Jimmy Anderson, over with a forensic team.

Hamish examined the hotel office. Apart from the gaping hole in the back of the safe, there was no other sign of a break-in that he could see. “You discovered this in the morning,” he said. “What was going on here last night?”

“There was a ceilidh.”

“How many people?”

“About a hundred or so. But the office was locked.”

Hamish examined the office door. It was wooden with a frosted-glass panel. The lock was a simple Yale one, easily picked.

The barman and the waiter were brought in. Hamish questioned them closely. They hadn’t finished their duties until one in the morning and then had gone straight to bed. The barman, Johnny King, was a sinister-looking man in his thirties with his hair worn in a ponytail and his thin face marred by a long scar. Peter Sampson, the waiter, was a small, smooth-faced youth of about twenty.

After he had finished interviewing them, Hamish walked around the public rooms of the hotel. It was typical of the more depressing type of Highland hotel, everything in pine and plastic and with the once gaudy carpets looking as if they badly needed shampooing. Tartan curtains hung at the windows and the walls were ornamented with plastic claymores and plastic shields along with bad murals of depressing historical events like the Battle of Culloden and the Massacre of Glencoe. The artist had not liked Bonnie Prince Charlie, for there he was with a cowardly look on his white face fleeing the Battle of Culloden.

And he hadn’t liked the Campbells either, witness their savage and gleeful faces as they massacred the Macdonalds of Glencoe.

“What’s the polis doing here?” demanded a shrill voice behind him.

He swung round. A small blonde middle-aged woman stood glaring at him. Her hair was wound around a forest of pink plastic rollers and a cigarette hung from thin lips, painted orange. Beside her stood a tall, sulky girl in micro skirt and black suede thigh boots, fringed suede jacket and purple blouse. Her makeup was dead-white, her lipstick purple and her black hair gelled into spikes.