Hamish Macbeth 13 (1997) - Death of a Dentist (10 page)

“Good. I’d like to do that.”

Hamish gripped the receiver hard. “And maybe we could meet up later? I could pick you up.”

“Seven o’clock will be fine, if you’re through by then.”

“That’s chust grand…grand. I’ll see you then. Bye.”

Hamish put down the receiver and stood for a moment smiling idiotically at the phone. Then he pulled himself together and decided it was time he visited the Smiley brothers.

Small fine pellets of snow were beginning to be whipped down the loch on an icy wind. He gave a little sigh. Then he thought of Sarah. He hoped the snow would not get worse. He did not want to think of her skidding into a ditch on the Lairg road. But ahead of him loomed a large yellow truck. The Sutherland road glitters were already on the job. He passed the truck and headed off into the thickening snow. By the time he reached the Smiley brothers’ croft, the snow had suddenly stopped and pale yellow sunlight was flooding the whitened fields and the low croft house.

He noticed there was a new extension at the back of the croft house: a long low building with a corrugated iron roof and with steel shutters over all the windows.

He was just getting out of the Land Rover when the door of the cottage opened and Stourie Smiley came out to meet him, followed by his brother, Pete. Hamish knew both of them slightly, but he was taken aback again by their appearance. They looked living proof that trolls still walked the earth. Both were squat and barrel-chested and hairy. Thick mats of hair covered both their heads, and hair sprouted on their cheekbones, and tufts of hair poked out of their ears. Both had small, gleaming wet eyes and red faces. Both had very long arms.

“It’s yoursel’, Macbeth,” said Stourie. “What brings ye? Ye’ve got the sheep dip papers.” A visit by the police to a croft in the Highlands did not usually mean a report of death or accident, but merely a demand for sheep dip papers.

“Can we go inside and sit down for a minute?” asked Hamish. “I need your help.”

“Okay,” said Pete, “but don’t take too lang ower it. We’ve got work to do.”

He led the way into the croft house kitchen, a bleak stone-flagged room with a plastic-covered table in the centre and a few hard upright chairs.

Hamish sat down, took off his cap and put it on the table. “It is my belief you are running an illegal still.”

“Whit?” demanded Stourie. “Who tellt you that?”

The two trolls bristled at Hamish and the cold air of the kitchen was suddenly full of menace.

“Before you get your lies ready,” said Hamish, “listen to me. Thon dentist, Gilchrist, was poisoned with nicotine. Anyone who had a still could have extracted the nicotine by means of a still. Now, either you cooperate or I’ll get a team over from Strathbane with a search warrant and right behind them will come the Customs and Excise. If you give me a dram of your stuff and I consider it safe and not liable to kill anyone, I’ll not be booking you. But I need to know if either of you had a grudge against Gilchrist, and then since I’m pretty sure you know your competitors, I’ll need some names.”

They looked at him in truculent silence and then Pete’s small wet eyes travelled past Hamish to the fireplace. Hamish swung round. A shotgun was hanging on the wall.

“Don’t even think of it, man,” he said. “That’s another breach of the law. That gun should be locked in a gun cabinet. You have one. Sergeant Macgregor over at Cnothan reported you had one.”

“Aye, well, we’d rather deal wi’ Macgregor than you.” Stourie looked surly.

Had Macgregor really checked, wondered Hamish.

“So let’s not take all day about this,” he said. “Did either of you go to Gilchrist?”

Pete suddenly grinned and so did Stourie. Hamish blinked. Both men were toothless. Pete jerked his head in the direction of the sink. Hamish looked across. There were two tumblers of water by the sink and in each tumbler resided a pair of false teeth, the dentures grotesquely imitating the grins across the table from him.

“We both had all our teeth out in our twenties,” said Stourie. “We don’t need no dentists.”

“So you didn’t know Gilchrist?”

“Didnae even know what the man looked like.”

“That’s strange, you pair being so near Braikie. It’s a small town. Surely someone pointed the man out to you.”

Stourie spat contemptuously on the floor. “We don’t talk to them in Braikie.”

“So who else has a still?”

“We arenae saying we hae one,” said Stourie, “but I guess you could say if we had, we wouldnae want any competition.”

“Meaning you’re the only ones you know about?”

They looked at him in sullen silence.

“All right, I’ll leave it there at the moment. Give me a dram.”

They looked at each other and then Stourie gave a little nod. Pete went over and opened a kitchen cupboard and took down a bottle of whisky, tipped one set of false teeth out into the sink and poured the whisky into the glass.

Oh, well, thought Hamish, the alcohol will probably act as a disinfectant.

He sampled the whisky and then raised his eyebrows. It was pretty good, quite smooth, not as good as a regular legal blend, but certainly not likely to poison anyone. Hamish had a good palate for whisky and knew that they had not given him Johnnie Walker or something like that to pass off as their own.

“I’ll be on my way.” He got to his feet. “That’s a big extension ye’ve built onto the cottage.”

“Lambing shed,” said Stourie laconically.

“Well, now, the poor wee things must grow up fair blind in the dark,” said Hamish sarcastically. “The windows are all shuttered.”

“We aye take the shutters off when we’re lambing,” jeered Pete. “As a crofter yourself, you should hae guessed that.”

“Now, listen here.” Hamish Macbeth turned in the doorway. “I’m turning a blind eye to your practises but only for the moment. I’ll give you a couple of months to pack up. If I hear by then that you’re still making whisky, I’ll report you.”

“It iss no wunner you became a policeman, Macbeth,” said Stourie viciously, “because without that uniform, you’d chust be a lang drip o’ nothing.”

Hamish put his cap firmly on his flaming red hair. “Behave yourselves,” he snapped and went out into the cold day.

It was clouding over again and a few snowflakes were beginning to drift down. Against the black clouds massing to the west curved a glorious rainbow. He stood looking at it, a half smile on his lips, and then he clutched his head and let out a groan as pain stabbed over his left temple. Hamish could not remember when he last had a headache. Could it have been that whisky?

But he belonged to the school of thought which firmly believes that if you pay no attention to physical ailments, they go away. He drove into Braikie and parked in the main street. The pain was now nagging and persistent. He found he was outside a chemist’s shop. He went in and walked through the racks of cosmetics and vitamin pills to the pharmacy counter.

Behind the counter was a plump little girl in her early twenties. Her buxom figure was covered in a tight white coat. She had a piggy little face and a turned-up nose. Hamish had often read that a turned-up nose was supposed to be saucy and attractive. He had never found it so. But he had to admit that despite his headache, he was well aware that this buxom piggy little blonde was exuding a strong air of sexuality, so strong it hung in the air like musk.

“I’ve got a bad headache,” he said. “Can you give me something?”

“The best thing is aspirin,” she said.

“What about one of those extra-strength painkillers?”

“Just a rip-off,” she said cheerfully. “Aspirin’s cheaper and does the job the same. You smell of whisky. Maybe you shouldn’t drink so early in the day.”

“I was out at the Smiley brothers on a case,” said Hamish stiffly, not liking the implication that he was a drunk.

“Oh, another one of those headaches. It’ll go away all by itself the minute you have another dram.”

Hamish looked at her curiously and she gave him a cheeky wink. Apart from himself the shop was empty of customers. He leaned forward on the counter. “So you know that the Smiley brothers operate a still?”

“I don’t want to get them into trouble, but, yes, everyone knows it.”

“I’m slipping,” thought Hamish. And I forgot Angus’s salmon.

“The pharmacist, Mr. Cody, says there’s migraine and there’s tension headaches and there’s the headache from the Smileys’ hooch. You don’t need aspirin. You need another drink. Works a treat.”

Despite the pain in his head, Hamish smiled. The shop door opened and a small, fussy man came in. “Everything all right, Kylie?” he asked. When she nodded, he said, “You can take a break.”

He went through into the back.

“Come and have a drink with me,” said Hamish.

“Righty-ho. Just get my coat.”

She emerged a few moments later wearing a scarlet wool coat over a thin yellow blouse, tight short jersey skirt and heels so high that Hamish thought she must be very tiny indeed when she took them off, for as they walked in the direction of the pub, she hardly came up to his shoulder.

“What are you having?” he asked when they entered the smoky, dreary barroom of The Drouthy Crofter.

“Same as you. Straight whisky. And make it a couple of doubles.”

He went to the bar, collected their order and carried the glasses over to a corner table where Kylie was already seated. She shrugged off her coat. The yellow blouse had a deep V revealing that Kylie had the sort of cleavage only usually seen in the magazines on the top shelf of the newsagents. He dragged his gaze from it and raised his glass. “Let’s hope mis works.”

And it did, almost immediately. He blinked at her in relief. “Do you always join customers for a drink?”

She giggled. “Only the sexy ones.”

He was not surprised that despite the fact that the Smileys’ still was obviously pretty well known that no one had come forward to report it. There are some things in the Highlands which would be regarded as crimes anywhere else in Britain that people here regarded as quite respectable. Poaching, provided it was the occasional salmon or deer, was not regarded as illegal. It was every Highlander’s birthright to take a deer from the hill and a fish from the river, no matter who owned the land. And a whisky still was regarded as about as innocent as making homemade cakes.

But as he surveyed sexy little Kylie, he began to wonder if Gilchrist had ever made a play for her. How Gilchrist had been able to attract such a beautiful young girl as Maggie Bane was beyond him. But he had, and so it followed that other women might have found him attractive—young women.

“I’m investigating the murder of the dentist,” he said.

“Oh, him.” She shrugged. “I don’t understand anyone going to that man. I went there once. I knew all I needed was a simple little filling, but he says it had to come out. No thank you, I said, and got the hell out of there.”

“So that was the only time you saw him?”

“You’re looking a me as if I’m the first murderer. Why on earth suspect me?”

“I don’t suspect you. You’re a very pretty girl and Gilchrist liked the ladies.”

“I had nothing to do with him.” But that sexy aura had disappeared. It had been turned off somewhere deep inside her. Her eyes roved restlessly around the bar. “Headache better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I see some of my friends over there.”

And without waiting for his reply, she got to her feet and went over to join a group of men at the bar.

I’d better ask around about that one, thought Hamish. She was all right until I started asking about Gilchrist.

He left the pub and walked back towards where he had parked the Land Rover. He saw he was passing a fishmongers and stopped. “Special Offer. Fresh Salmon.” The sign in the window caught his eye. Salmon was selling for £1.80 a pound. He decided it would be worth buying one for the seer. He was sure the salmon was farmed rather than wild, but he was equally sure that old Angus would not be able to tell the difference.

He went in and bought a ten-pound salmon, big enough for that old leech, he thought crossly.

He took the salmon back to the police station and threw away the fishmonger’s bag, wrapped it in kitchen foil, and drove this time up to the seer’s.

He laid the salmon on the table in front of the seer. Angus studied it curiously after he had taken it out of its foil wrapper. Then he went off without a word into the nether regions and came back carrying a small stone on the end of a cord.

“What’s that?” asked Hamish. “Your pet rock?”

“Aye jeering at things you do not understand, Hamish. This iss my crystal.”

He waved it over the salmon. The ‘crystal’ swung round over the fish like a pendulum.

“This iss the farm salmon, Hamish.”

“It is not!”

“Aye, the pendulum sees it all. You forgot last night and it’s cauld the day and so you thought you could pass a shop-bought fish on poor Angus.”

“Havers.” Hamish wrapped up the salmon. “I’ll have it myself.”

“If I were you, Hamish Macbeth, I waud be thinking of getting Angus the real thing tonight or something bad will happen to ye.”

“You mean you’ll put a curse on me?”

“Don’t sneer. There are mair things in heaven and earth…”

“Horatio.”

“Who’s he?”

“Never mind. I’m out of here.”

Hamish drove off. What could the old phony do to him? He was damned if he was going to take his rod out on the river in this weather.

The wind had dropped and large Christmas card flakes of snow were spiralling down from a leaden sky. He went home and made himself a scrap lunch, that is he ate tuna out of the can with a fork while leaning against the kitchen counter. Then he set out for Braikie again. He nodded to the policeman who stood on guard outside the dentist’s building and then went on up the stairs to the top landing and knocked on Fred Sutherland’s door.

The old man answered his knock promptly and said, “You better come in.”

Hamish followed him in and sat down. “I want to ask you about the murder.”

“My, my. That was a thing. Poisoned him and drilled all his teeth. My, my.”

“How did you hear all that? The method of killing was not in the papers.”