“Are you travelling on your own?” he asked.
“Naw, I’m with them,” said the boy, jerking his thumb across the aisle where four men were drinking beer and playing poker.
“Which of them’s your dad?”
“None of them,” said the boy.
“Uncle, then?”
“Don’t know ‘em from Adam.”
Hamish surveyed the white little face and the knowing eyes of the child.
“What’s your name?”
“Wee Alec. Alec MacQueen.”
“Well, Alec, what are you doing travelling on this train with four men you don’t know?”
“It’s my maw’s idea,” said Alec. “Man, I’m fair sick of the trains.”
“Oh, they’re friends of your mother?”
“Naw.” Alec put his pointed elbows on the table between them and leaned forward. “It’s like this. If you’ve got a Family Rail card and you take a child along, you get a third knocked off the price o’ the fare. Disnae need to be your own child. Anyone’s child’ll do. So my maw tells one who tells the other that if anyone wants to borrow me, they can. She charges five pounds a head for my services,” said Alec proudly. “Then when we get to London, they turn me over to some other blokes who are coming back up. Then I pick up another lot at Inverness and come back down, so’s I can go back up with them ones what I came down with.”
“Are you on your school holidays?”
“Aye, but it disnae matter one way or the other. If she’s got a good fare, my maw takes me off the school.”
“And do you like it?”
“Naw, I hate it,” said Alec. “I want to be in the school with my friends.”
Hamish looked wildly round the compartment. There were a lot of children on the train. Were they all for hire?
“Would you like me to do something to stop it?” he asked.
“I would like that fine,” said Alec. “But I don’t want my maw to get in trouble with the police.”
Hamish opened his mouth to say he was a policeman, and then thought the better of it.
Nobody seemed to care about education these days. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a truant officer. He could call on Alec’s mother or report her to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, but they were surely overloaded with more dramatic cases of child cruelty.
He chatted idly to Alec until the child fell asleep his narrow head and greasy, lank hair rolling with the motion of the train.
When they arrived in Edinburgh, Hamish left the train and went in search of a phone. He put through a reverse-charge call to Rory Grant on the Daily Chronicle, forgetting it was the middle of the night. But he was in luck. Rory was on night shift.
“What do you want, you great Highland berk?” came Rory’s voice over the crackling of a bad line.
“I have often wondered how this word ‘berk’ came about,” said Hamish.
“It’s rhyming slang. Berkeley Hunt.”
“Tut, tut, that’s no’ very nice,” said Hamish, shocked.
“Did you put through this expensive longdistance call just to ask me the meaning of rude words?”
“No, I have a wee story for you.”
Hamish told him about Alec, and then finished by saying, “I would like to do something to help the boy. He is a kind of Scottish Flying Dutchman, if you take my meaning.”
“It’s a nice human-interest one. Whether they’ll send me to meet the train is another thing. I’m out of favour these days. Didn’t even get sent up on that murder of yours – or murders, I gather, from the stuff coming over on the tapes. But I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll phone the story round for you – there’s that big Scottish Sunday’s got an office in London – and in return I want you to fill me in on some background on the murders.”
“I will do my best,” said Hamish. “I have an appointment later in the morning. If you can meet the train, maybe we can have breakfast somewhere.”
“I’ll try. If not, phone me at home during the day.”
Hamish ran back to the train and found his seat had been taken by a hot and cross-looking woman. Alec was still asleep. Once more, Hamish collected his overnight bag and went in search of a free seat.
The only one to be found was back in the freezing compartment. With a sigh of resignation, he pulled another sweater out of his bag, put it on, and settled down and tried to sleep.
Somewhere after Carlisle, the air-conditioning went off and the heating came on. He arrived in London eyes gritty with sleep and sweating profusely.
As he got off the train, he looked along the platform and smiled in satisfaction. Rory had done his work well. There were five reporters and three photographers clustered around Wee Alec, who was proudly holding forth, although there was no sign of Rory.
Hamish went to the Gents and changed into a clean shirt, shaved with an electric razor, parked his bag in a station locker, and went in search of breakfast.
At ten o’clock, he took the District Line to Chelsea and walked along the Kings Road to Flood Street, where Captain Bartlett’s aunt, a Mrs Frobisher, had a house.
The air felt very warm, and a brassy sun was shining through a thin haze of cloud.
Chalmers had promised to phone and warn Mrs Frobisher of his arrival.
The door to Mrs Frobisher’s home was opened by a dumpy, suet-faced girl dressed in a black off-the-shoulder T–shirt, black ballet tights, and scuffed shoes.
“Good morning,” said Hamish politely. “I am Police Constable Hamish Macbeth of Lochdubh, and I am here to speak to Mrs Frobisher.”
“Get lost, pig,” said the girl. The door began to close.
Hamish put his foot in it. “Now, what is a beautiful creature like yourself doing using such ugly words?” he marvelled.
“She don’t want to see you.”
“Miranda!” interrupted a sharp voice. “Who is it?”
“It’s that copper you don’t want to see,” the girl roared over her shoulder.
A door in the hallway opened behind her and an elderly lady emerged, leaning on a cane. Her hair was white, and her face criss-crossed with wrinkles.
She peered around Miranda’s bulk. “You don’t look like a policeman,” she said doubtfully. “I received a call from Scotland, saying an officer would call on me and I told whoever it was that I had no wish to see the police again.”
“I can well understand that,” said Hamish. “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”
“You seem harmless enough,” said Mrs Frobisher. “Come in. Bring us some coffee, Miranda.”
The girl sulked off, crashing her fat shoulders off either wall of a narrow passage at the back of the hall.
“Your daughter?” asked Hamish politely.
“Good heavens, no,” said Mrs Frobisher, leading the way into a small sitting room on the ground floor. “I am much too old to have a daughter of Miranda’s age. Miranda is my maid. I got her from an agency. They send me very strange girls. But then, I don’t suppose anyone in their right mind wants to be a maid these days. Now, what on earth do you want? I’ve talked and talked to policemen about Peter. I don’t think I can add any more.”
“There’s been another development,” said Hamish, and told her about the murder of Vera.
“Gosh,” said Mrs Frobisher, sitting down abruptly. “What a frightful thing to happen. Are you sure it wasn’t suicide? I always thought that woman was unstable.”
“I think she was killed by someone baking cakes for her with roach powder,” said Hamish. “It’s too nasty and complicated a death for suicide.”
“I met her once,” said Mrs Frobisher. “Peter brought her here. A greedy woman. Greedy for sex, greedy for money. But I think I know who it is who has been committing these murders. It must be Diana Bryce.”