Death of a Charming Man (21 page)

Feeling happier than he had felt for some time, he then set out to arrange for his sheep to be looked after, his hens and ducks as well, and then decided to pay a visit to the seer to find out what had possessed the old sinner to wind Jessie up like that.

Angus Macdonald, the seer, a big, craggy man like one of the minor prophets, peered all around Hamish looking for a present before he let him in. The villagers usually brought him something, a bottle of whisky or a cake.

‘No, I didnae bring you anything,’ said Hamish, following him into his small living room. ‘I don’t want your services. I simply want to know what you were doing telling Jessie she was going tae marry a divorced fisherman.’

‘I seed it,’ said Angus huffily. ‘I dinnae make things up.’

‘Come on, man. Jessie!’

‘Well, that’s whit I seed.’

‘That sort o’ rubbish could start gossip.’

‘Maybe that’s whit you’re hoping fur, Hamish.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Stop them gossiping about you and your lassie.’

‘I think you’re an old fraud,’ said Hamish. ‘I’ve always thought you were an old faker.’

‘You’re jist bad-tempered because ye think nobody loves ye. Here’s Mrs Wellington coming.’

Hamish jumped up in alarm. He scampered off and ran down the hill, seemingly deaf to the booming hail of the minister’s wife.

‘That man,’ said the tweedy Mrs Wellington as she plumped herself down in an armchair.

‘I’ll be glad to see the back of him.’

‘Is he going somewhere?’ asked Angus.

‘I met Mrs Brodie just before I came up here. She said that Hamish was thinking of going over to Skag for a holiday.’

‘Oh, aye,’ said Angus. ‘Now whit can I dae for you, Mrs Wellington?’

‘This business about Jessie Currie. It can’t be true.’ Her eyes sharpened. ‘Unless you’ve heard something.’

‘I see things,’ said the Angus.

‘And you hear more gossip than anyone I know,’ said Mrs Wellington sharply. ‘I brought you one of my fruitcakes. It’s over on the counter. You see, Mr Patel at the stores told me that he had seen Archie Maclean talking to Jessie Currie and when he saw his wife at the other end of the waterfront coming towards him, he ran away.’

‘I’m saying nothing,’ said Angus mysteriously. ‘But we’ll jist have a wee cup o’ tea and try that cake.’

Early on Saturday morning, Hamish Macbeth hung a sign on the door of the police station, referring all inquiries to Sergeant Macgregor at Cnothan. He locked the police Land Rover up in the garage, put Towser on the leash, and picked up his suitcase. Then the phone in the police station began to ring. He decided to answer it in the hope that someone in the village might have phoned up to wish him a happy holiday.

The voice of the seer sounded down the line. ‘I wouldnae go tae Skag if I were you, Hamish.’

Hamish felt a superstitious feeling of dread.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘I see death. I see death and trouble fur you, Hamish Macbeth.’

‘I havenae time to listen to your rubbish,’ said Hamish sharply and put the receiver down.

At the other end of the line, Angus listened to that click and smiled. Called him a fraud, had he? Well, that should give Hamish Macbeth something to think about!

Hamish left the police station and walked along to the end of the harbour to get the bus to Bonar Bridge. From Bonar Bridge he would get another bus to Inverness and then buses from Inverness over to Skag.

The bus was, as usual, late, twenty minutes late, in fact. Hamish was the only passenger. He often thought the driver, Peter Dunwiddy, deliberately started off late so as to have an excuse to break the speed limit, even with a policeman on board. Hamish hung on tightly and Towser flattened himself on the floor of the bus as it hurtled up out of Lochdubh and then began to scream around the hairpin bends on its way to Bonar Bridge. He expected to feel a lightness of heart as Lochdubh and all its residents fell away behind him. But he felt an odd tugging sadness at his heart. To match his mood, the day was grey, all colour bleached out of the landscape, like a Japanese print. He hoped the good weather would return. Perhaps he should not have been so parochial as to holiday in Scotland. When did Scotland ever guarantee sunny weather and water warm enough to go for a swim?

By the time he reached the village of Skag, he felt as tired as if he had walked there. He asked directions to The Friendly House and then set out. It was about two miles outside the village, and not on the beach exactly but behind a row of sand dunes set a quarter of a mile back from the North Sea.

It was an old Victorian villa, vaguely Swiss-chalet design, with fretted-wood balconies and blue shutters. He glanced at his watch. Half past five. Tea was at six.

He entered a dim hallway furnished with a side-table holding an assortment of tourist brochures, a large brass bowl holding dusty pampas-grass, a carved chair, and an assortment of wellington boots. He pressed a bell on the wall and a door at the back of the wall opened and a thick, heavy-set man came towards him. He had blond hair and bright blue eyes and a skin which had a strange high glaze on it, like china. Hamish thought he was probably in his fifties.

‘You must be our Mr Macbeth,’ he said breezily. ‘The name’s Rogers, Harry Rogers. You’ll find us one happy family here. Come upstairs and I’ll show you and the doggie your room.’

The room boasted none of the modern luxuries like telephone or television. But the bed looked comfortable, and through the window Hamish could see the grey line of the North Sea. ‘The bathroom’s at the end of the corridor,’ said Mr Rogers. ‘As you see, there’s a wash-hand basin in the corner there. Tea’s at six. Yes, none of this dinner business. Good old-fashioned high tea.’

Hamish thanked him and Mr Rogers left. Towser, tired after the long walk, crawled on to the bed and closed his eyes. Hamish quickly unpacked, taking out a bowl which he filled with water for the dog, and a can of dog food, a can opener and another bowl. He filled the second bowl with the dog food and put it on the floor beside the water. Spoilt Towser did not like dog food, but, reflected Hamish, he would just need to put up with it for the duration of the holiday. Of course, maybe he could buy him some cold ham as a treat. Towser was partial to cold ham. He changed into a pair of jeans and a checked shirt, debated whether to wear a tie and decided against it, and then went downstairs and pushed open a door marked ‘Dining Room’. A small, birdlike woman who turned out to be Mrs Rogers, hailed him. ‘Mr Macbeth, your table’s here … with Miss Gunnery.’

Hamish nodded to Miss Gunnery and sat down. All the other diners were already seated. Mr Rogers appeared and introduced everyone to everyone else. Hamish’s quick policeman’s mind noted all the names and his sharp eyes took in the appearance of the other guests.

Miss Gunnery on the other side of the table had the sort of appearance which even in these modern days screamed spinster. She had a severe face, gold-rimmed glasses and a mouth like a trap. Her flat-chested figure was dressed, despite the humidity of the day, in a green tweed suit worn over a white shirt blouse.

At the next table was a man with his wife, a Mr and Mrs Harris. Both were middle-aged. She had neatly permed brown hair and neat, closed features, and was dressed in a woollen sweater and cardigan and a black skirt. Her husband was wearing an open-necked shirt and a trendy black leather jacket and jeans, the sort of outfit that tired businessmen in a search for fading youth have taken to wearing, almost like a uniform. He was grey-haired, had large staring eyes and a bulbous nose.

Beyond them were Mr and Mrs Brett and their three children, Heather, Callum and Fiona, aged seven, four and three, respectively. Mr Brett was a comfortable, chubby man with glasses and an air of benign stupidity. His wife was an artificial redhead with a petty face and pencilled eyebrows. Either they were plucked, a rare fashion these days, thought Hamish, or they had fallen off, or she had been born that way. She had pencilled in arches of eyebrows, which gave her a look of perpetual surprise.

At the window table were two girls called Tracey Fink and Cheryl Gamble, both from Glasgow. They both had hair sunstreaked by chemicals rather than sunlight and white pinched faces under a load of make-up, and both were wearing identical outfits, striped black-and-white sweaters and black ski pants with straps under the instep and dirty sneakers. And in a far corner was a solitary man who had the honour of having a table to himself. His name was Mr Andrew Biggar. He had a tanned face and thick brown hair streaked with grey, small clever brown eyes, and a long, humorous mouth.

High tea, that famous Scottish meal now hardly ever served, consists of one main dish, usually cold ham, and salad and chips, washed down with tea. In the middle of each table was a cake stand. On the bottom were thin slices of white bread scraped with butter. On the next layer were scones and teacakes, and on the top, cakes filled with ersatz cream and covered in violently coloured icing.

‘Grand day,’ said Hamish conversationally to Miss Gunnery, for every day in Scotland where it is not exactly freezing cold and pouring wet is designated a ‘grand day’.

Her eyes snapped at him through her glasses. ‘Is it? I find it damp and overcast.’

Hamish relapsed into a crushed silence. He wished he had not come. But Mr Harris’s voice rose above the conversation at the other tables, he of the trendy leather jacket, and caught Hamish’s attention.

‘Well, this holiday was your idea, Doris,’ he said.

‘I only said the tea was a trifle weak,’ protested his wife.

‘Always finding fault, that’s your problem,’ said Mr Harris. ‘If you exercised more and thought less about your stomach, you might be as fit as me.’

‘I only said –’

‘You said. You said,’ he jeered. He looked around the room. ‘That’s women for you. Always nit-picking.’

‘Bob,
please
,’ whispered his wife.

‘Please what?’

‘
You
know.’ She cast a scared look around the dining room. ‘Everyone’s listening.’

‘Let them listen. I’m not bound by your suburban little fears, my dear.’ His voice rose to a high falsetto. ‘What
will
the neighbours think.’

And so he went on and on.

The severe Miss Gunnery, who prided herself on ‘keeping herself to herself’, was driven to open her mouth and say to the tall, lanky, red-headed man opposite, ‘That fellow is a nag.’

‘Aye, the worst kind,’ agreed Hamish, and then smiled, and at that smile, Miss Gunnery thawed even more. ‘Mrs Harris is right,’ she said. ‘The tea is disgustingly weak, the ham is mostly fat, and those cakes look vile. I know this place is cheap …’

‘Maybe there’s a fish-and-chip shop in the village,’ said Hamish hopefully. ‘I might take a walk there later. My dog likes fish and chips.’

‘Oh, you have a dog? What breed?’

‘Towser’s a mixture of every kind of breed.’

Miss Gunnery looked amused. ‘Towser! I didn’t think anyone called a dog Towser these days – or Rover, for that matter.’

‘It started as a wee bit o’ a joke, that name,’ said Hamish, ‘and then the poor animal got stuck wi’ it.’

‘What do you do for a living, Mr Macbeth?’

The nag’s voice had temporarily ceased. There was silence in the dining room. ‘I’m a civil servant,’ said Hamish. He did not like telling people he was a policeman because they usually shrank away from him. And he had found that when he said he was a civil servant, it sounded so boring that no one ever asked him where he worked or in what branch of the organization.

‘I’m a schoolteacher,’ said Miss Gunnery. ‘I’ve never been to Skag before. It seemed a good chance to get a cheap holiday.’

‘When did you arrive?’

‘Today, like the rest. We’re all the new intake.’

Mr Rogers and his wife hovered about among the tables, snatching away plates as soon as any diner looked as if he or she was finished. ‘We have television in the lounge across the hall,’ announced Mr Rogers. His wife was carefully packing away uneaten cakes into a large plastic box. Hamish guessed, and as it turned out correctly, that they would make their appearance again during the following days until they had all either been eaten or gone stale.

The company moved through to the lounge. Bob Harris had temporarily given up baiting his wife, but Andrew Biggar made the mistake of asking Doris Harris what she would like to see.

‘“Coronation Street” is just about to come on,’ said Doris shyly. ‘I would like to see that if no one else minds.’

Her husband’s voice cut across the murmur of assent. ‘Trust you to inflict your penchant for soaps on everyone else. How you can watch that pap is beyond me.’

Hamish walked over to the television set, found ‘Coronation Street’, and turned up the volume. ‘I like “Coronation Street”,’ he lied to Doris. ‘Always watch it.’

He sat down next to Miss Gunnery. He was aware of the nag’s voice all through the programme, sneering and jeering at the characters. He sighed and looked about the room. The chairs were arranged in a half-circle in front of the television set. The fireplace was blocked up and a two-bar electric heater stood in front of it. There was a set of bookshelves containing battered paperbacks, no doubt left behind by previous guests. The Rogers’ were probably too mean to buy any. The chairs were upholstered in a scratchy fabric. The carpet was a worn-out green with faded yellow flowers. There were various dim pictures on the walls, Highland cattle in Highland mist, and a grim photograph of a Victorian lady who stared down on all. Probably the original owner, thought Hamish.

At the end of the programme, which he had only stayed to watch for Mrs Harris’s sake, he rose and said to Miss Gunnery, ‘I’m going to walk my dog along to the village and see if there’s a fish-and-chips shop. Want to come?’

‘I don’t eat fish and chips,’ she said primly, looking down her nose.

The tetchiness that had been in him for months rose to the surface again. ‘So you prefer that high-class muck we had for tea?’