Hamish Macbeth 13 (1997) - Death of a Dentist (19 page)

A long silence followed. Blair gave an impatient grunt For one moment, he thought Hamish had discovered something, but this was sidetracking. He wanted a murderer.

“Better to be damned as a thief than a murderer,” said Hamish.

But she had regained her composure. She shrugged. “Search my room all you want,” she said. “You won’t find anything.”

Hamish stared at her. “No,” he said, “perhaps not in your room. Your daughter’s room?” No reaction. “So somewhere in the hotel.” She stared at him boldly. “Och, well, now let’s chust say not in the hotel, but outside…buried.”

Her eyes flickered. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“Buried,” said Hamish flatly. “In the hotel grounds. Should be easy to find this winter weather. We’ll look for a sign of recent digging. Shouldn’t take long.”

Silence.

“Well, you’ve had your say, Hamish…” Blair was just beginning when Mrs. Macbean, who had not taken her eyes off Hamish, said, “You bastard. You knew all the time. Who was it told you? Darleen?”

“So it was you what stole the money,” said Blair, suddenly wishing Hamish miles away so that he could take all the credit for this.

She gave a little sigh. “I loved him,” she said. She looked at Hamish and for a moment her eyes blazed with something, for one split second the ghost of the pretty girl she had once been shone out at him, and then she began to sob in a helpless dreary way. “I couldn’t even mourn him,” she said at last. “I couldnae even shed a tear or folks might have guessed. He said if I got the money we could go away together and start a new life. It wisnae really stealing, that’s what he said. The insurance company would pay up and the insurance company could afford it. We would go to Spain. I would get away from Macbean. Funny thing, marriage. I think I hated that man a week after we were wed but the years dragged on and on and on. I stayed for Darleen, but she’s become a hard little bitch. She wouldnae hae missed me. Oh God, I didnae kill him.”

But Blair gave her a wolfish smile and hitched his chair closer to the table. As far as he was concerned, Mrs. Macbean had killed Gilchrist and he was going to stay up all night to make her confess.

Hamish arrived back at the police station in Lochdubh at dawn, feeling bone weary. Despite Blair’s insistent and truculent questioning, Mrs. Macbean had not cracked. She had told them where the money was hidden and it had been recovered but she insisted she had not murdered the dentist. The barman was pulled in and confirmed that she had phoned down at the time the murder was taking place. And then he remembered a maid had taken clean sheets up to Mrs. Macbean’s room. Mrs. Macbean did not share a room with her husband. Both lived separately in respective hotel rooms. A long wait while the maid was located, a local woman with an impeccable reputation, a Mrs. Tandy, who confirmed that at ten-thirty on the morning of the murder, she had taken clean sheets in to Mrs. Macbean. So that had been that. Mrs. Macbean had been charged with the theft. The fact that Hamish Macbeth had solved the robbery did not earn him any kudos with Blair, who had grown quite savage when he had realised the murder was still unsolved.

Hamish went wearily to bed. Before he fell asleep, he wondered again if there had been any connection between the Smiley brothers and the dentist. Greed for money had been at the back of the Smileys’ operation and Gilchrist had been greedy for money.

The phone rang several times from the police office, dragging him up out of the depths of sleep, but each time he remembered he had left the answering machine switched on and the murderer was hardly likely to phone him up and confess.

He slept for six hours and rose, still feeling tired and gritty. He washed and shaved and put on his uniform. Then he went into the police office and played back the messages on the answering machine. First Sergeant Macgregor from Cnothan’s cross voice, wondering whether Hamish was back on duty, then Mrs. Wellington asking whether she should go back and instruct Kylie and her friends farther in the paths of righteousness, and then a lilting voice, saying cautiously, “This is Fred Sutherland. I think I’ve found out something about Kylie. I should’ve told you afore, but I didnae think of it. Can ye come as soon as possible?”

Alice was puzzled. “In our country,” she remarked, “there’s only one day at a time.”

 

—
Lewis Carrol

As he drove to Braikie, Hamish wondered what Fred Sutherland had to tell him. Whatever Fred had to tell him about Kylie was probably something he knew already.

There is very little daylight in the north of Scotland in whiter and Hamish, still tired, still with sore ribs, felt he had been living in a long dark tunnel for some time.

He parked outside the dress shop. Slowly he mounted the stairs, past the dentist’s surgery. He then realised he had been making his way up the stone staircase by the light of the street lamp outside. There was no light on the staircase. He went down to the surgery door and looked up. The light-bulb on the socket on the first landing was not there.

He went back to the Land Rover and got his torch and began to climb the stairs again. His senses were alert now, listening for any movement, any sound, as wary of danger as an animal in the woods.

He knocked at Fred Sutherland’s door. Then he flashed the torch upwards. No bulb in the light socket here either.

He tried the handle. The door swung slowly open. “Fred,” called Hamish. “Fred Sutherland?”

Was this another trick by Kylie and her friends? But then old Fred would never be a party to it.

He found the light switch and pressed it down. The little entrance hall was bleak and bare.

He then went into the living room. Fred Sutherland lay dead on the floor, his head bashed in. Someone had struck him a cruel and savage blow on the forehead.

Hamish knelt down by the old man and felt for the pulse which he knew already he would not find. His first guilty and miserable thought was that this was what became of involving the public in a murder enquiry. He saw the phone on a little table by the fireplace and went and lifted the receiver. The phone was dead. He looked down at the cord and saw that it had been cut near the wall.

He darted down the stairs to the Land Rover and contacted Strathbane on the radio and then, that done, went back up the stairs to wait. Without touching anything, he studied the scene. There was no sign of forced entry. The television set was still there. No drawers had been ransacked. It looked as if Fred had not kept the outside door locked. Someone had walked in and bludgeoned him to death in the doorway of his living room. Hamish then looked sadly at the old framed photographs dotted about the room: Fred, handsome and gallant in army uniform, Fred with a pretty girl on his arm, then a wedding photograph.

The contingent from Strathbane finally arrived, headed by Detective Chief Inspector Blair, red-eyed and truculent, with pyjama bottoms peeking out from below his trousers, showing he had been roused from bed.

Hamish told Blair about the message from the old man. “Right,” snapped Blair, “let’s get this girl in for questioning. Why didn’t you tell us about her before, Macbeth?”

“I had only just found out,” lied Hamish. “I have a report typed up I was going to send over to you tomorrow.”

Blair looked at him suspiciously. “Your trouble, Macbeth, is that you like to keep everything to yourself. If I find you caused this old boy’s death by not reporting what you know about this girl to us in due time, I’ll have ye off the force.”

Hamish gave him Kylie’s address. He was sure she would not tell about the entrapment—unless of course she panicked when the police arrived and assumed that was why they were there.

When two detectives and a policewoman had been dispatched to Kylie’s address, Blair turned again to Hamish. “So what was in this mysterious report o’ yours about mis girl?”

“There was nothing much,” said Hamish. “She’d been out on a date with Gilchrist and he made a pass at her. She threatened to tell everyone about it and he promised to buy her a car. A month passed. No car. When she approached him, he told her no one would believe her.”

“You should have phoned all that in right away,” howled Blair. “God protect me from daft, stupid Highland policemen!” Blair hailed from Glasgow. But guilt-ridden Hamish was not going to tell his superior officer that he had requested Fred to ask about and find out what he could about Kylie.

He asked if he should be at Strathbane for the questioning of Kylie Fraser, and Blair grunted, “We’ll see. Where does she work.”

“In the chemists along the street.”

“We’d best be having a word with her boss. What’s his name?”

Hamish remembered going into the shop, remembered the small fussy man. What had Kylie called him? “Cody,” he said suddenly. “Mr. Cody.”

“Well, to save you hanging around here, find out where Cody lives and get yourself over there.”

“But Kylie Fraser…”

“Och, I think we’ll do just fine withoot the great brain o’ Hamish Macbeth. And how many times do I have tae tell ye tae address me as ‘sir’?”

Hamish looked up Mr. Cody’s home address in the telephone book and took himself off. He was tortured with pictures of poor dead Fred Sutherland who would still be alive if one daft policeman had not asked him to investigate a murder.

Mr. Cody lived in a trim bungalow called Our House on the edge of the town. Hamish glanced at his watch. It was only ten at night. It seemed as if a lifetime had passed since he had left Lochdubh that evening.

He rang the doorbell and waited. It was answered by a rigidly corseted woman. He wondered vaguely why women in the north of Scotland still squeezed themselves into old-fashioned corsets while their fat sisters of the south let it all hang out.

“What’s happened?” she cried when she saw Hamish’s uniformed figure.

“I am just here to have a word with Mr. Cody.”

“What about? Is it his sister? Is it bad news?”

“No, no,” said Hamish soothingly. “Just part of our investigations.”

“You’d better come in. Charles! It’s the police for you.”

The small, fussy-looking man Hamish had seen first in the chemists came down the stairs. He had grey hair neatly combed back, round glasses and a small mouth. He was wearing a fawn cardigan over a shirt collar and tie and grey trousers and highly polished black shoes.

“How can I be of help to you, officer?” he asked. “We’ll go into the lounge. I hope the shop has not been broken into.”

“No,” said Hamish. He followed him into an overfurnished room and took off his cap.

“Mr. Fred Sutherland has been found dead, murdered.”

Mr. Cody looked startled. “Who is he?”

Hamish thought suddenly of the little table in the living room on which the phone rested in Fred’s flat. There had been a small array of medicine bottles beside the phone.

“He lived above the dentist, Gilchrist.”

“But this is terrible…terrible. Who would do such a thing? And why ask me?”

“It concerns your assistant, Kylie Fraser. Mr. Sutherland left a message on my answering machine this evening, saying he had found something out about her and asking me to call. Detectives are questioning Kylie. Can you think what it might have been that he found out?”

Mrs. Cody was sitting across from them. “I told you and told, you to get rid of that flighty piece,” she said. “She hangs about with some of the worst elements in the town.”

The pharmacist ignored his wife. “I had no trouble with her in the shop. I know she has a bit of a reputation, but during working hours, she’s pleasant and hard-working and the customers like her. She sells quite a lot of cosmetics for me.”

“And wears most of them all at once on her stupid face,”’ said his wife waspishly.

“Say Mr. Sutherland had really found out something about her, someone didn’t want us to know about,” said Hamish, “have you any idea who that someone would be?”

He shook his head. “I really don’t know.” A little wire-haired dachshund appeared from behind the sofa, went to Hamish and pressed its small shivering body against his legs. He leaned down to pat it.

“Just in the line of enquiry, can you tell me where you were this evening?”

“What time?”

“Say between eight o’clock and half past nine.”

“I had a coffee with my wife and we watched a quiz programme on television and then I took Suky out for his usual evening walk.”

“Where did you go?”

“Just up to Brady’s field at the end of the houses. Suky likes to run about the field looking for rabbits. He disappeared for quite a time and I had the devil of a job getting him back.”

“I thought Suky was a girl’s name,” said Hamish.

“Oh, well, we call him that,” said the pharmacist, pressing his hands together. “This has been a great shock. I did not know the man…what was his name?”

“Sutherland. Fred Sutherland. There is no other pharmacist in Braikie, surely.”

“No, I’m the only one.”

“I noticed Mr. Sutherland had several medicine bottles in his flat. I am sure if I go back and look at the labels, I will find the name of your shop on them.”

Mr. Cody coloured up. “You are making me feel guilty when I have no reason to feel guilty. Kylie hands me prescriptions and I make up the bottles and pills and paste labels on them. I cannot remember every name.”

“But a resident of Braikie who had probably been going to you for years!”

“I am afraid my memory is not what it was.”

“So there is nothing more you can tell us about Kylie? She did not confide in you?”

“No, of course not. We were employer and employee. She would hardly giggle to me about her boyfriends.”

“Did you know she had gone out with Gilchrist? That she claims he came on to her and that he slapped her face? She threatened to tell everyone and he said if she kept quiet he would buy her a car. But he subsequently told her that since it was her word against his, everyone would believe him.”

“This is what comes of employing a girl like that,” said Mrs. Cody. “She’s not our sort. This is what comes, Charles, from associating with a low-life creature like that.”

“It is very hard to get staff,” said Mr. Cody furiously. “Kylie has stayed longer than anyone else. The young people here prefer to stay on the dole and do a bit of moonlighting. I am sorry I cannot help you further, officer, but I know very little about Kylie.”