Death of a Perfect Wife (15 page)

Police Constable Hamish Macbeth sadly left the kennels where his dog, Towser, was housed. It was his evening off. He was bored and lonely and he hated Strathbane and he hated Detective Chief Inspector Blair with a passion for moving him out of Lochdubh.

He was sick and tired of the youth of Strath-bane with their white pinched faces, their drunkenness, and their obscenities. He was tired of raiding discos for drugs, and bars for drunks, and football matches for hooligans.

He walked along the dirty streets. A thin drizzle was falling. Even the seagulls wheeling under the harsh orange light of the sodium street lamps looked dirty. He leaned on the wall and stared down on the beach. The tide was up; oil glittered on the water and an old sofa with burst springs was slowly being gathered in by the rising tide.

A man reeled past him, then leaned against the sea wall and vomited on to the beach. Hamish shuddered and moved away. He wondered how much longer he could endure this existence. His home in Lochdubh had been the police station, so he did not even have a house to go back to. The neighbours were looking after his hens and his sheep, but he could not expect them to do so indefinitely. Some real estate agent would probably sell the police station. He had left most of his possessions there, refusing to believe his life in Lochdubh was over.

Then there was Mary Graham. PC Graham was Hamish’s usual partner on the beat in Strathbane. She was a thin, spare woman with a hard face and dyed blonde hair and a thirst for making as many arrests as possible. She was from the south of Scotland and considered Hamish some sort of half-witted peasant.

Hamish’s mind went back and forth and round and round the problem, seeking escape. He could always go back to Lochdubh and take lodgings with someone. He could move his hen houses on to the bit of croft land assigned to him. But, like all crofters, he knew it was impossible to live on small farming alone, trying to wrest a living out of a few stony fields. He could work on the fishing boats, of course.

What hurt most of all was that the people of Lochdubh appeared to have taken his banishment without comment. He felt very friendless.

On Saturday night, the village hall in Lochdubh was crammed to capacity. On the platform facing the audience was the committee made up of Maggie, Alison, Priscilla, and the minister, Mr Wellington, and his large, tweedy wife – who for the first time in her life was outdone in largeness and tweediness. Maggie Baird was encased in new tweeds and had a suede hat with a pheasant’s feather on it on her head. Alison had washed and set her hair for the occasion, perhaps in the hope that the handsome policeman would walk in the door while the meeting was on.

Maggie Baird, much to the annoyance of Mrs Wellington, rose to speak.

‘Our local policeman has been sent away because of a lack of crime in the area. I suggest we organize enough crime to make it necessary to send him back.’

There was a roar of approval. Shocked, Mrs Wellington struggled to her feet and held up her hands for silence.

‘That is a most dreadful and, if you will forgive me, Mrs Baird,
immoral
suggestion.’

‘What would you suggest?’ asked Maggie with dangerous sweetness.

‘Well, I think we should get up a petition.’

‘We’ll put it to a vote,’ said Maggie. ‘All in favour of organizing some crime, raise their hands.’

A forest of hands went up.

‘All in favour of a petition?’

Only a few hands went up.

Mr Wellington took the floor. ‘You cannot, Mrs Baird, expect us all to break the law.’

‘No one said anything about breaking the law,’ replied Maggie cheerfully. ‘We make it look as if we’ve got a crime and insist on having the police in. I am going to pass round sheets of paper and you will all write down suggestions. I will report that something of mine, something valuable, has been stolen, and then after a bit I’ll say, “Sorry to have wasted your time, it has been found.” That sort of thing.’

There was a silence in the hall. Maggie realized furiously that everyone was obviously waiting for Priscilla to say something.

Feudal lot of peasants, thought Maggie angrily.

Priscilla got to her feet. She was wearing a smart grey tailored pin-striped suit with a white blouse, sheer stockings, and patent leather high heels. ‘Yes, I think a bit of organized crime is the sensible answer,’ said Priscilla. ‘My father is having trouble again with poachers. I shall start off with that complaint.’

There was a cheer and a man shouted, ‘Good for you. We knew you would think of something.’

In that moment, Alison felt quite warm toward her aunt. It did seem unfair that Maggie should have thought up the scheme only to have everyone give Priscilla all the credit.

Papers were passed around, a few half bottles of whisky were produced, the villagers scribbled busily. The air was soon heavy with the raw smell of alcohol and a fog of cigarette smoke.

When the meeting was over, everyone was happy with the results – with the exception of Mr and Mrs Wellington, Maggie, and Alison.

‘Why did I bother?’ fumed Maggie on the road home. ‘Did you see that Halburton-Smythe bitch calmly taking the credit for everything? Anyway, my crime is the best and so I shall show them.’

Sergeant MacGregor drove angrily over the twisting Highland roads that led from Cnothan to Lochdubh. Some female had lost her diamond earrings and what should have been handled by that Macbeth fellow was now having to be handled by him, MacGregor.

What made it worse was that this female, this Mrs Baird, had phoned the high-ups in Strathbane and accused them of deliberately encouraging crime in Lochdubh by taking away the village policeman and had threatened to write to
The Times
.

He drove through Lochdubh, remarking sourly to himself that it looked as sleepy as ever, and took the coast road to Maggie’s bungalow.

The door was opened by a grim-looking housekeeper wearing a blue cotton dress with a white collar. MacGregor’s heart sank. Anyone who could afford to employ a Scottish housekeeper these days and get her to wear a sort of uniform must be stinking rich, and stinking rich meant power, and power meant trouble.

Mrs Baird was all he had feared and anticipated. She was a great, fat woman wearing a tweed suit and heavy brogues. Her thick hair was scraped back in an old-fashioned bun and she had the glacial accents of the upper class. With her on the chintz-covered sofa sat a dab of a woman, peering at him through thick-lensed glasses, whom Mrs Baird introduced as ‘my niece, Miss Kerr.’

‘You took your time about getting here,’ said Maggie.

‘Well, I have to come from Cnothan, which is a good wee bit away,’ said MacGregor with what he hoped was a placating smile.

‘Stop grinning like a monkey and get your notebook out,’ ordered Maggie. The housekeeper brought in a tray with a coffee pot, cream, sugar, and only two cups. MacGregor was obviously not going to be offered any.

‘When did you first notice the earrings were missing?’ asked MacGregor.

‘Last night. I’ve searched the house. Mrs Todd, the housekeeper, is a local woman and above suspicion. But two suspicious-looking hikers were seen hanging about yesterday. They could have got in somehow and taken them.’

‘Description?’ asked MacGregor, licking his pencil.

‘Man and a girl, early twenties. The man had a straggly beard and the girl looked like one of those dreary intellectual types, rather like Miss Kerr here.’ Maggie laughed and Alison winced. ‘The man was wearing a camouflage jacket and jeans, and the girl, a red anorak and brown slacks. The man had on a ski cap and the girl was hatless. Her hair was mousy brown.’

MacGregor eventually drove off in a more cheerful frame of mind. He had something concrete to go on. He telephoned from his Land Rover to Strathbane and put out an alert for the hikers. That strange creature, Macbeth, who had had the temerity to solve a murder case in his, MacGregor’s, absence, would soon find out his presence was not missed in Lochdubh.

He had only just reached home when a call came through from the chief constable. Colonel Halburton-Smythe demanded the presence of a policeman immediately. Poachers were netting salmon on his river. With a groan, MacGregor set out for Lochdubh again. The colonel insisted on taking the sergeant on a long walk across country to the river and haranguing him on the ineptitude of the police. MacGregor was tired and weary by the time he got back to Cnothan.

But fury gave him energy, fury generated by a call from Strathbane to say that Mrs Baird had telephoned. She had found her lost earrings down the back of the sofa and what was MacGregor doing wasting the force’s time by having them look for villainous hikers who did not exist?

Then a phone call came from the Lochdubh Hotel to say that a group of young people were creating a riot in the public bar. Mac-Gregor appealed for back-up and took the road back to Lochdubh to find the public bar empty apart from a few shattered glasses and the owner of the hotel, who was unable to give a clear description of the young people.

By the time he finally got home to bed, he was nearly in tears of rage. Morning found him in a calmer frame of mind. Lochdubh would sink back into its usual peace and quiet.

And then the phone started to ring. A crofter in Lochdubh complained that five of his sheep had been stolen during the night, and a farmer reported that two of his prize cows were missing. The schoolteacher, Miss Monson, called to say that drugs had been found in a classroom.

Again MacGregor telephoned for help, only to be asked wearily why he couldn’t handle things himself – that is, until he got to the tale of the drugs in the classroom. Detective Chief Inspector Blair and a team of detectives and forensic men were despatched from Strath-bane only to find that the drugs in the classroom were packets of baking soda. ‘Silly me,’ said the giggling schoolteacher, and Blair took his anger out on MacGregor, who had no one to take it out on except his wife, and he was afraid of her.

The amazing thing about British policewomen is that a surprising proportion of them are attractive. And so PC Hamish Macbeth could not help wondering why he had the ill luck to be saddled with such a creature as Mary Graham on his beat. PC Graham, he reflected, looked like one of those women you see in German war films. Not only was there the dyed blonde hair, but she had staring ice-blue eyes, a mouth like a trap, and an impeccable uniform with a short tailored skirt which showed strong muscular legs encased in black tights – not fine sheer tights worn by some of the younger policewomen, but thick wool ones, and her shoes were like black polished glass.

It was a sunny day as they walked side by side along the waterfront, past closed bars smelling of last night’s drunks; past shuttered warehouses falling into ruin, relics of the days when Strathbane was a small busy port; past blocks of houses thrown up in the fifties during that period when all architects seem to have sold their souls to Stalin, and had erected towers of concrete very like their counterparts in Moscow. The balconies had once been painted jolly primary colours, but now long trails of rust ran down the cracked concrete of the buildings in which elevators had long since died, and rubbish lay in heaps on the sour earth of what was originally intended to be a communal garden.

‘I always keep ma eyes and ears open,’ Mary was saying. She had a whining singsong voice. ‘I hae noticed, Macbeth, you’re apt to turn a blind eye tae too many things.’

‘Such as?’ asked Hamish while in his mind he picked her up and threw her over the sea wall and then watched her sink slowly beneath the oily surface of the rising tide.

‘Two days ago there were these two drunks fighting outside The Glen bar. All you did was separate them and send them off home. I wanted to arrest them and would hae done had I not seen that wee boy acting suspiciously over at the supermarket.’

Hamish sighed. There was no point replying. Mary saw villains everywhere. But her next words nearly roused him to a fury, and it took a great deal to rouse Hamish Macbeth. ‘I felt it was ma duty to put in a report about you,’ she said. ‘It is cramping my style to have to walk the beat wi’ a Highland layabout. The trouble wi’ you Highlanders is you just want to lie on your backs all day long. You know whit they say,
mañana
is too
urgent
a word for you.’ Mary laughed merrily at her own wit. ‘So I said I would never rise in the force, having to patrol wi’ a deadbeat like you, and asked for a change.’

‘That would be nice,’ said Hamish.

Mary threw him a startled look. ‘I’m surprised you’re taking it so well.’

‘Of course I am taking it well. Ye dinnae think I enjoy walking along on a fine day wi’ a sour-faced bitch like you,’ said Hamish in a light pleasant voice, although Priscilla, for example, would have recognized, by the sudden sibilancy of it, that Hamish was furious. ‘Wass I not saying chust the other day,’ said Hamish dreamily, ‘that it was sore luck getting landed wi’ you instead of someone like Pat Macleod.’ Pat Macleod was a curvaceous brunette of a policewoman who wore sheer stockings instead of tights. Every policeman who had seen her flashing her thighs in the canteen as she deliberately hitched up her short skirt to sit down could bear witness to that.

Mary could hardly believe her ears. She would never for a moment have dreamt that PC Macbeth would even think of insulting her. She did not know that her contempt for him was largely based on jealousy. Macbeth, in a short time, had made himself popular on the beat and householders preferred to bring their troubles to him rather than to Mary.

‘I have never been so insulted in all my life,’ she said.

‘Oh, come now, wi’ a face and manner like yours, you must have been,’ said Hamish who, like all normally polite and kind people, was relishing the rarity of being truly and thoroughly rude.

‘You’re jist mad because Blair winkled ye oot o’ your cosy number in Lochdubh,’ sneered Mary. ‘And you claim to have solved them murders! You! You’re no’ a man. I could beat the living daylights oot o’ you any day.’

‘Try it,’ said Hamish.

She squared up to him. ‘I warn ye. I’m a black belt in karate.’