Death of a Charming Man (22 page)

There was an edge of contempt to his light Highland voice and Miss Gunnery flushed. ‘I’m being silly,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘I’d enjoy the walk.’

Hamish went up to get Towser, but when he descended to the hall again it was to find not only Miss Gunnery waiting for him but the rest of the party, with the exception of the Harrises.

They did not say anything like ‘We’ve decided to come too,’ but merely fell into line behind the policeman like obedient children being taken for a walk.

Mr Brett was the first to break the silence. ‘A stone’s throw from the sea,’ he exclaimed. ‘You would need to have a strong arm to throw a stone that distance.’

‘Are ye sure there’s a chip shop, Jimmy?’ asked Cheryl. She hailed from Glasgow, where everyone was called Jimmy, or so it seemed, if you listened to the inhabitants.

‘I don’t know,’ said Hamish. ‘May be something in the pub.’

‘I’m starving,’ confided Tracey, stooping to pat Towser. ‘I could eat a horse between two bread vans.’

Cheryl slapped her playfully on the back and both girls giggled.

‘It’s a pity little Mrs Harris couldn’t come as well,’ said Andrew Biggar. ‘Don’t suppose she gets much fun. Are you in the army, by any chance, Mr Macbeth?’

‘Hamish. I’m called Hamish. No, Andrew. Civil servant. What makes ye say that?’

‘When I first saw you, I thought you were probably usually in uniform. Got it wrong. I’m an army man myself. Forcibly retired.’

‘Oh, those dreadful redundancies,’ said Miss Gunnery sympathetically. ‘And us so soon to be at war with Russia again.’

‘Don’t say that,’ said Mrs Brett, whose name turned out to be June, and her husband’s, Dermott. ‘It’s been a grim enough start. That man Harris should be shot.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Dermott Brett, so June predictably did and the couple roared with laughter at their own killing wit.

‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to bear this holiday,’ murmured Miss Gunnery to Hamish.

‘Och,’ said Hamish, who was beginning to feel better, ‘I think they’re a nice enough bunch of people and there’s nothing like a common resentment for banding people together.’ He winced remembering how common resentment had turned the villagers of Lochdubh against him.

‘Harris, you mean,’ said Miss Gunnery. ‘But his voice does go on and on and it’s not a very big place.’

They arrived at the village of Skag. It consisted of rows of stone houses, some of them thatched, built on a point. The river Skag ran on one side of the point and on the other side was the broad expanse of the North Sea. The main street was cobbled but the little side streets were not surfaced and the prevalent white sand blew everywhere, dancing in little eddies on a rising breeze. ‘Getting fresher,’ said Hamish. ‘Look there. A bit of blue sky.’

They walked down to the harbour and stood at the edge. The tide was coming in and the water sucked greedily at the wooden piles underneath them. Great bunches of seaweed rose and fell. Above them, the grey canopy rolled back until bright sunlight blazed down.

Hamish sniffed the air. ‘I smell fish and chips,’ he said, ‘coming from over there.’

They set out after him and found a small fish-and-chips shop. Hamish suggested they walk to the beach and eat their fish and chips there.

They made their way with their packets past the other side of the harbour, where yachts were moored in a small basin, the rising wind humming and thrumming in the shrouds. There was a sleazy café overlooking the yacht basin, still open but empty of customers, the lights of a fruit machine winking in the gloom inside.

A path led round the back of the café, past rusting abandoned cars and fridges, old sofas and broken tables, to a rise of shingle and then down to where the shingle ended and the long white beach began.

‘You spoil that dog,’ said Miss Gunnery as Hamish placed a fish supper on its cardboard tray down in front of Towser

Hamish did not reply. He knew he spoilt Towser but did not like anyone to comment on the fact.

‘Why does a woman like Doris marry a pillock like that?’ asked Andrew Biggar.

June Brett nudged her chubby husband playfully in the ribs. ‘They’re all saints before you marry them and then the beast comes out.’

Dermott Brett snarled at her and his wife shrieked with delight. Faces could be misleading, thought Hamish. June looked rather petty and mean when she was not speaking, but when she did, she became transformed into a good-natured woman. The Brett children were making sandcastles down by the water. They were remarkably well behaved. Heather, the seven-year-old, was looking after her young brother and toddling sister, making sure that little Fiona did not wander into the water. Long ribbons of white sand snaked along the harder damp surface of the sand underneath and then there came a haunting humming sound, ‘Whit’s that?’ cried Cheryl, clutching Tracey.

‘Singing sands,’ said Hamish. ‘I remember hearing there were singing sands here but I forgot about it.’

‘It’s eerie,’ said Miss Gunnery. ‘In fact, the whole place is a bit odd. It never gets dark this time of year, does it, Hamish?’

He shook his head, thinking that the place was indeed eerie. Because of the bank of shingle behind the beach and the flatness of the land behind, there was a feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world. He remembered the seer’s prediction with a shudder and then his common sense took over. Angus had heard the gossip about his holiday and had invented death and trouble to pay Hamish back for having called him a fraud.

Miss Gunnery was carefully collecting everyone’s fish-and-chip papers when Hamish heard Dermott Brett say, ‘He’s got worse.’

‘Who?’ asked Andrew, lazily scraping in the sand for shells.

‘Bob Harris.’

‘You know him?’ asked Hamish.

‘Yes, he was here last year.’

Miss Gunnery paused in her paper-gathering. ‘You mean you stayed here and
came back
!’

‘New management,’ said Dermott Brett. ‘It was owned by a couple of old biddies. They did a good tea, but their prices were quite high for a boarding-house. We weren’t going to come back, because with the three kids it was coming to quite a bit. Then June saw the ad with the new cheap prices, but it said nothing about new management.’

‘What happened to the old women who owned it?’ asked Hamish, ever curious.

‘They were the Blane sisters, the Misses Blane. Rogers said they took a small house for themselves in Skag. Might call on them, if I can find them.’

‘So Harris is worse now?’ pursued Hamish.

‘He was bad enough last year, but in fits and starts. Didn’t go on like he does now the whole time. Maybe he’ll have settled down by tomorrow. Doris Harris wanted to come with us, but he ranted on at her when you were upstairs getting your dog about wasting good money on fish and chips when she had already eaten.’

There was a scream of delight from the Brett children. Heather had placed the three-year-old Fiona on Towser’s back. Towser was standing patiently, looking puzzled, his eyes rolling in Hamish’s direction for help.

‘Leave him be,’ shouted Hamish. Heather obediently lifted Fiona off Towser’s back and Towser lolloped up the beach and lay panting at Hamish’s feet.

‘Time I got those kids in bed,’ said June. ‘They’ve been on the train all day.’

‘Come far?’ asked Hamish.

‘From London.’

Dermott got to his feet and brushed sand from his trousers. He walked up to the children and swung the toddler on to his shoulders. June joined him, and the family set off together in the direction of the boardinghouse.

‘That’s a nice family,’ said Miss Gunnery, returning from a rubbish bin on the other side of the shingle, where she had put the papers. ‘Perhaps we should be getting back as well.’

‘Whit aboot the night-life o’ Skag?’ sniggered Cheryl. ‘Me and Tracey’d like a drink.’

‘How old are you?’ demanded Miss Gunnery severely.

Cheryl tossed her long blonde hair. ‘Old enough,’ she said. Her heavily made-up eyes flirted at Hamish. ‘Aye, old enough fur anything, isn’t that right, Tracey?’

‘Sure is,’ said Tracey in a dreadful imitation American accent. ‘So let’s just mosey along to the pub.’

‘Bound to be bottled beer up here,’ said Andrew, ‘but I’m willing to try it. What about you, Hamish?’

‘As long as they’ll let Towser in.’

‘He’s married tae his dug!’ shrieked Cheryl.

Hamish’s thin, sensitive face flushed angrily. He was ashamed of his affection for his dog, ashamed sometimes of Towser’s yellowish mongrel appearance.

‘I think a drink’s just what we all need,’ said Andrew quickly. ‘Come along, Hamish.’

Hamish had a sudden desire to sulk. But Miss Gunnery said, ‘I saw the pub near the harbour. It looked quite pretty. I think I’ll go after all.’ She linked a bony arm in Hamish’s as he stood up and the small party set off.

It was a pretty thatched pub with tubs of flowers at the door, more like an English inn than a Scottish one. But inside it was as plastic and dreary as the worst of Scottish pubs. A jukebox blared in the corner and a spotty moron was operating the fruit machine with monotonous regularity, his mouth hanging open as he fed in the coins. Hamish had noticed a table and chairs outside and suggested they take their drinks there. Cheryl and Tracey had rums and Coke, Miss Gunnery, a gin and tonic, Andrew, a bottle of beer, and Hamish, a whisky and a bag of potato crisps for Towser.

‘There’s a carnival here tomorrow,’ said Hamish. ‘Sideshows and everything. I saw a poster about it on the pub wall.’

‘I didn’t see a fairground,’ said Andrew.

‘It’ll be here tomorrow all right,’ said Hamish, wise in the ways of Highland gypsies. ‘They come in the night like a medieval army and the next day, there they all are.’

They finished their drinks and walked slowly back to the boarding-house. Cheryl and Tracey had decided to compete for the attention of Hamish Macbeth and so they walked arm in arm with him while Miss Gunnery and Andrew followed behind.

When they went into the boarding-house, Hamish collected a couple of paperbacks from the bookshelves in the lounge and went up the stairs to his room.

It was then that he found out that the Harrises had the room next door. Bob Harris’s voice rose and fell, going on and on and on, punctuated by an occasional whimper from his wife.

Hamish wondered whether to go next door and tell the man to shut up, but as a policeman he had found out the folly of interfering in marital problems. Doris would probably round on him and tell him to leave her husband alone.

Or rather, that’s what the lazy Hamish Macbeth told himself.

A busman’s holiday for Hamish …

After losing both his chances of promotion and the lovely Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, Hamish Macbeth decides the best cure for a broken heart is a week’s break at the charming coastal village of Skag. When he arrives at the ‘Friendly House’ B&B, however, he finds the ambience chilling, the food inedible and his fellow guests less then neighbourly. They include the annoying Miss Gunnery, a family from London, and Bob Harris, who so nags his wife that everyone wants to kill him. And then somebody does.

Now it is up to Hamish to act; to dig deep into the past and deliver something more daunting than merely the culprit: justice.

‘The detective novels of M. C. Beaton, a master of outrageous black comedy, have reached cult status.’

Anne Robinson,
The Times

March 2009

Paperback £6.99

978–1–84529–732–9

www.constablerobinson.com

The twelfth book in the Hamish Macbeth murder mystery series

Everybody in the Scottish Highlands village of Lochdubh knows Randy Duggan as the Macho Man. Duggan brags about everything he has done, and even claims to have been a professional wrestler. His insults at the pub have caused brawls while his furtive sneaking around has aroused suspicion that he has been romancing a number of the Lochdubh wives.

When Hamish tries to break up a brawl, Duggan challenges him to a public fist-fight. The villagers are taking bets on the winner when, on the day of the scheduled fight, Duggan is found shot to death.

Amid all the excitement it’s up to level-headed Hamish to track down the heartless killer of the brutal Macho Man …

‘Looking for an escape? Tired of waiting for Brigadoon to materialize? Time for a trip to Lochdubh … where M. C. Beaton sets her beguiling whodunits featuring Constable Hamish Macbeth.’

New York Times Book Review

May 2009

Paperback £6.99

978–1–84529–907–1

www.constablerobinson.com

To order your copies
of other books in the Hamish Macbeth series simply contact The Book Service (TBS) by phone, email or by post. Alternatively visit our website at www.constablerobinson.com.

And the following titles available from spring 2009 …