Death of Yesterday (2 page)

The single and widowed ladies of the village began to regard him as prime husband material, but Dick showed no interest, preferring to dream in a deck chair in the front garden by day and watch television in the evenings.

He was roused from his lethargy on Saturday by Hamish. “We’d better go and pick up yon Morag female,” said Hamish. “Get your uniform on.”

Morag rented a flat in a Victorian villa on the edge of Cnothan. When Hamish rang her doorbell, there was no reply. Morag’s flat was on the top floor. He stood back and looked up. The curtains were open, but there was no sign of anyone moving about.

“Silly cow,” he muttered. “I’m sure she wouldnae have forgotten.” He rang the landlady’s bell.

Mrs. Douglas, the landlady, opened the door. She was a small round woman with thick glasses and an untidy thatch of grey hair.

“Whit now?” she demanded.

“We’ve come to collect Miss Merrilea,” said Hamish patiently. “Is herself at home?”

“Dinnae ken.”

“Would you please go and look?”

Grumbling, she shuffled off up the stairs. They waited in the warm sunlight.

At last she reappeared and handed Hamish a postcard. “This was stuck on her door,” she said.

Typed neatly on a postcard was: “Gone to London. Will be in touch.” It was not signed.

“I don’t like this,” said Hamish. “Would you mind showing us her flat?”

“Have ye a warrant?”

“No, I haff not!” said Hamish. “But if you don’t let me in and show me her flat, I’ll come back here with a warrant and I will turn this whole damn place upside down, including your premises.”

“Here, now, no need for that,” she said, thinking of the cash undeclared to the taxman hidden under her mattress. “I’ll get the key.”

They followed her into a shadowy hall lit with coloured harlequin diamonds of light from the sun shining through the stained-glass panel on the front door.

Dick eyed the steep stairs. “I’ll be waiting for ye outside, sir,” he said to Hamish.

“Oh, all right,” said Hamish crossly.

He followed Mrs. Douglas as she panted up the stairs. She inserted a key into a door on the top landing. “There’s no need for you to wait,” said Hamish. “I’ll bring you down the key when I’ve finished.”

The flat consisted of a small living room, a cell of a bedroom, a kitchen unit behind a curtain, and a shower. The living room contained a small card table laden with artist’s materials and two hard-backed chairs by the window. There was a dingy print of
The Stag at Bay
over the empty fireplace. One battered armchair was beside the fireplace facing a small television set. Planks on bricks along one wall supplied bookshelves.

Hamish went into the bedroom. He opened the wardrobe. A few skirts and blouses hung there and a winter coat. On top of the wardrobe was a large suitcase. He hauled it down and opened it up. It was empty. He put it back and then opened a chest of drawers. There were various surprisingly saucy items of lingerie: thongs and stockings with lace tops.

He sat down on the bed and looked round. She might have had a backpack of some kind to take a few clothes with her. There was no sign of a handbag, passport, or wallet.

He locked up and went downstairs to where Mrs. Douglas was waiting in the hall. “Did she have a car?” he asked, handing over the keys.

“No, she had a bike.”

“And where does she keep it?”

“Just outside. But it’s no’ there.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Cannae bring tae mind.”

“Think!”

“Oh, I mind now. It was yesterday morning. Herself was just off tae work.”

“Was she carrying a suitcase or any sort of luggage?”

“No. She just got on her bike and went off, same as ever.”

Hamish felt uneasy. He put the postcard in a forensic bag and went out to join Dick.

“We’d better check where she works,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

At Shopmark Fashions, they found that Morag worked as secretary to the boss, Harry Gilchrist. Mr. Gilchrist kept them waiting ten minutes, which Hamish put down to the usual pompous Scottish boss’s way of trying to seem important.

Mr. Gilchrist was a tall, thin man in his forties. He had thick black hair in a widow’s peak above a sallow face and wet brown eyes.

“Working on Saturday?” asked Hamish.

“Work never stops,” said Gilchrist. “What do the police want with me?”

“Did Morag Merrilea turn up for work yesterday?”

“As a matter of fact, she didn’t. I meant to send someone to check on her on Monday if she was still absent.”

“She left a postcard on the door of her flat saying she had gone to London.”

“Isn’t that just typical of staff these days!” raged Gilchrist. “Well, if you come across her, tell her she’s fired.”

“Did she say anything about going to see a hypnotist?”

“No. A hypnotist? Why?”

Hamish explained about the suspected drugged drink and the missing sketchbook.

“Oh, that? She was complaining about that all over the place. She did drink a fair bit. She was in the habit of making things up.”

“Is there anyone she was close to?”

“She kept herself to herself.”

Like the whole of bloody Cnothan, thought Hamish.

Dick and Hamish next went to the Highlander pub. Pubs all over Britain had been smartened up with restaurants and pleasant decor, but the Highlander had been unmoved by time. There was one dim room with scarred tables and rickety chairs. The walls were still brown with nicotine from the days before the smoking ban. The only food on offer was in a glass case on the counter: tired-looking sandwiches and a solitary mutton pie.

Hamish recognised the barman and owner, Stolly Maguire. Stolly was polishing a glass with a dirty rag when they approached him. He was a thickset man with a bald head wearing a tank top strained over a beer belly.

Hamish explained they were trying to find out the whereabouts of Morag Merrilea.

“Thon artist?” said Stolly. “Havenae seen her. Usually comes in Saturday evening.”

“Two Saturdays ago,” said Hamish patiently, “did you notice anyone approaching her table when she went to the toilet?”

“Naw. It was fair busy.”

Hamish turned round and surveyed the customers, a mixture of crofters, shepherds, builders, and the unemployed.

“Which one of them was here two Saturdays ago?”

“I cannae mind,” said Stolly. “Ask them? I saw her collapsing outside the door and phoned for an ambulance.”

So Hamish and Dick went from table to table to receive surly answers to the effect that they had seen her on that Saturday but hadn’t noticed anyone taking her sketchbook or putting something in her drink.

But a youth with greasy hair said he had noticed a stranger. “Can you describe him?” asked Hamish. “What is your name?”

“Fergus McQueen.”

“Well, Fergus, what did he look like?”

“Hard tae tell. He had wan o’ thae baseball caps pulled right down. Small and skinny.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Black T-shirt, black jeans.”

“The cap. Did it have a logo on it?”

“Naw. It was dark green with an orange stripe.”

“Give me your address. We may want you to come to Strathbane and help a police artist make a sketch.”

Back at Lochdubh, Hamish sat down at the computer in the police station office and sent over a report. He felt uneasy. It was too much of a coincidence that she should disappear when she had an appointment with the hypnotist.

To his amazement, he got a call from Detective Sergeant Jimmy Anderson later that day. “Blair’s decided to look into it,” he said.

“Why? I thought he’d delight in shooting the whole thing down,” said Hamish.

“I think he feels if there is a crime, then he wants to be the one to solve it. You’ve stolen his glory too many times.”

“I’d better get back to Cnothan and join him.”

“He says you’re to sit tight and look after your sheep and leave it to the experts.”

Hamish groaned. He knew that Blair’s blustering, bullying tactics would make the locals clam up even more.

* * *

Hamish waited gloomily for the inevitable. Sure enough it came later with an e-mail from Blair telling him it was a wild goose chase and to stop wasting police time and, furthermore, never again try to employ the hypnotist without first getting clearance.

But undeterred, Hamish went back to Cnothan, knocking on doors, questioning one after the other without success.

He was furious when he returned to Lochdubh to receive a phone call from Superintendent Daviot. The locals in Cnothan had complained of police harassment. Blair had found nothing. Hamish was to leave it all alone.

The weather continued to be unusually hot. Three weeks after the disappearance of Morag Merrilea, two men were loading bales of T-shirts onto a lorry outside Shopmark Fashions when they suddenly stopped their work.

“Thon’s an awfy smell from that bale,” said one, “and it’s heavy, too.”

“Better cut it open,” said his companion. “There’s maybe a dead animal inside.”

They sliced the twine that held the bale and unrolled it.

The dead and decomposing body of Morag Merrilea rolled out and lay lifeless under the eye of the glaring sun.

Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.

—Christina Rossetti

“You would think,” said Hamish Macbeth angrily, “that such a horror would get folks’ tongues wagging, but they’re all more closemouthed than ever.”

Blair had given Dick and Hamish the task of knocking at doors in Cnothan to interrogate the villagers. Tired of looking into blank secretive faces and getting curt nonhelpful replies, they retreated to the café in the main street to console themselves with cups of bad coffee.

“See, it’s like this,” said Dick. “There was a village here that was supposed to be right friendly but along came the Hydro Electric Board, built the dam and made the loch, and the old village was drowned. So folks say there’s a curse on the place.”

“Havers!” said Hamish. “They were all rehoused. No one was drowned to come back and haunt the place.”

“Aye, but the church was buried in the water. They say when doom is coming, you can hear the old bells.”

“My mother remembers the old village,” said Hamish, “and she said they were a right lot of bastards. I hate being sidelined.”

“Jimmy Anderson will fill you in. I just this minute saw him heading up the main street to the pub.”

“Right! Let’s go and see if he’s got anything.”

Jimmy was seated in a corner of the Highlander pub, drinking a double whisky.

“Any luck, Hamish?” he asked.

“What do you think,” said Hamish crossly. “I feel like arresting the whole village and charging them with obstructing the police in their enquiries.”

“While you’re at it, you can charge the whole factory as well,” said Jimmy. “Sit down and have a drink.”

“I’ll get the drinks,” said Dick. “Fancy another, sir?”

“That’d be grand.”

“What will you be having, Hamish, er . . . sir?”

“Tomato juice.”

“Blair’s furious,” said Jimmy, his foxy face and bloodshot blue eyes alight with amusement. “ ‘I wouldnae put it past Hamish to murder the lassie himself just tae upset me’ is one of his choicest remarks.”

“I’ve got to find a young man called Fergus McQueen,” said Hamish. “He saw a youth in the pub the evening Morag’s sketchbook was stolen. He lives in a room up on the brae. I called there but got no reply.”

“Try his work?”

“He’s unemployed.”

Dick came back with the drinks. “I think I should go back up there,” said Hamish, “and get a look at his room.”

“You’ll need a search warrant.”

“The landlord might let us in. We could aye say that someone told us there was a smell o’ gas.”

“Wait till I finish this drink,” said Jimmy, “and then we may as well go. We’ve got nothing else.”

Up above the village, near where Morag had lived, stood a tall Scottish Georgian building with some of the windows still bricked up, dating from the days when house owners wanted to avoid the window tax.

As they entered the gloomy entrance hall, Jimmy remarked that he bet not much had been done to renovate the old building except to split the large rooms with thin partitions into smaller ones.

Although the day was warm outside, the inside was cold. The landlord was English, a small, wiry man called Jason Clement, who, to their surprise, seemed delighted to show them Fergus’s room. “He’s a good lad,” he said, leading the way upstairs. “Always pays his rent on the nail.”

“You can’t charge that much,” said Hamish, “unless he’s working off the books somewhere.”

“Don’t ask as long as I get paid,” said Jason. “Here we are.” He unlocked a door on the second landing and flung it open.

It was a very small room with half a window, the other half presumably belonging to the room next door. It was simply furnished with a small table, three chairs, a narrow bed, and a desk. A curtained alcove served as a wardrobe.