“Sometime or another when the insurance company finishes its investigations and gets around to paying.”
“I should think,” said Hamish, “that they might consider a safe with a wooden backing an invitation to crime. Are you sure you’ll get your money?”
Macbean’s eyes blazed with anger. “I’d bloody well better get it. How will the insurance company know the safe had a wood back anyway?”
Was he really this stupid, wondered Hamish.
“They’ll get all the police reports and then they’ll send their own investigators. Then the company who owns this hotel will want to know why you had such an unsafe safe.”
The anger left Macbean’s eyes and he groaned. Then he said, “Look, if you want to talk to the wife, run along and do it, and stop worrying me with these questions. Ask Johnny to find them.”
Hamish rose and picked up his cap and put it under his aim and went out of the office to where Johnny was still unloading bottles of beer.
“I want to talk to Mrs. Macbean and her daughter,” he said.
“I’ll get them.”
The barman picked up a phone on the bar and dialled an extension number. “Police tae see you, Mrs. Macbean, and Darleen,” he said. The voice quacked on the other end of the line.
The barman replaced the receiver. “Give her a few minutes.”
“Any ideas about who might have stolen the money?” asked Hamish.
“Naw. Why shoulda?”
“You surely must have discussed it with the other members o’ the staff.”
“Let me tell you somethin’,” said Johnny, lifting a crate with strong tattooed arms, “I keep masel’ tae masel. You can ask the others if you want any gossip.”
He turned his back on Hamish and walked off to the nether regions, carrying the crate.
It was an odd place for a bar, thought Hamish, placed as it was along one wall of the reception area like a theatre bar.
There was a clack of heels and Mrs. Macbean and her daughter, Darleen, came in. Mrs. Macbean was wearing yellow plastic rollers in her hair this time. Hamish wondered wildly if she ever took them out and if they were colour coordinated to match her clothes, for she was wearing a sulphur yellow blouse. Darleen was in jeans with frayed slits at each knee, a satin pyjama jacket, but no makeup, which made her look much younger.
“I’m sick o’ the police,” began Mrs. Macbean. “Questions, questions, questions.”
“This will not take long,” said Hamish soothingly. “Is there somewhere we can sit down and talk?”
She led the way through a pair of double doors leading off the main reception area. He found himself in a rather sleazy dining room with the residue of breakfast still lying about on three tables. “I see you have guests,” said Hamish. “I assume the police have questioned them?”
“They’ve questioned everyone in the whole bloody place.”
She sat down at a table. Darleen sat down next to her, crossed her long legs and winked at Hamish. Hamish took out his notebook and sat down as well.
“Now the morning of the burglary, you and Darleen had been over at the dentists in Braikie. You know the dentist has been found murdered. So I am trying to get a picture of what sort of man Gilchrist was. Had you been to him before?”
“Ma got her dentures from him,” said Darleen and Mrs. Macbean glared at her daughter.
“A dentist is just a dentist,” she complained. “You don’t wonder about anything but getting your teeth out.”
So much for progress, so much for cleaning and flossing, so much for dental technology, thought Hamish. This was still Scotland. Out with all of them and get yourself a nice set of false teeth.
“What about you, Darleen?” he asked.
Darleen giggled. “He was dead sexy.”
“In what way?”
“He used tae stroke my hair and tell me I was a good girl. Cool.”
“Pay no heed to her,” snapped Mrs. Macbean. “She thinks everything in trousers is after her.”
“And they usually are,” commented Darleen, smug in the security of long legs and youth.
“Did either of you ever meet him socially?”
“What d’ye mean?” Mrs. Macbean lost a roller.
“I mean, did he ever ask either of you out on a date?”
“Here!” screeched Mrs. Macbean. “What are you getting at? You cannae solve a burglary and now you’re trying to pin a murder on me.”
“Och, no,” said Hamish soothingly, wondering if her husband beat her out of a mixture of exasperation and hate – if he beat her. “Did you see anyone while you were at the surgery who looked as if they might loathe the man enough to murder him?”
“Everyone loathes the dentist.”
“And you Darleen?”
“There was that awful old Harrison woman always hanging around. She gave me the creeps.”
“Anyone else?”
“Naw.”
“Look, we’ve got a hotel to run, copper.” Mrs. Macbean got to her feet. She shook her head angrily and rollers fell from her head and rattled across the carpet, thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa. Hamish wondered whether to pick them up for her, but she was already walking away, leaving the rollers spinning across the carpet.
She turned in the doorway. “Come on, Darleen!”
Darleen winked at Hamish again and walked out after her mother, her hips swaying.
Hamish, who had stood up when they had left, sat down again and looked bleakly at the tablecloth, which had a large coffee stain in the middle of it although it was supposed to be clean. His mind wandered off to speculate on the various claims of washing powders, beaming women holding up stained items and then pulling them out of the machine an hour later with cries of joy. This cloth had come back from the laundry, starched and ironed but with the coffee stain still on it.
He jerked his mind back to the problem in hand. It was his own fault for doggedly avoiding promotion that he was kept in the dark as to what everyone had said in their statements. Had the dentist been sexy or had Darleen just been winding him up? What would a girl that young see in a middle-aged dentist? It was hard to tell what Gilchrist had really looked like. Had the pathplogist’s report come through?
Perhaps the day had come when he should alter his attitude to his job, apply for a job in the CID. But being a detective would mean moving to the hell that was Strathbane and working closely with Blair. Gone would be lazy days in Lochdubh. Was there something missing in his character, for he knew himself to be that rare thing, a truly unambitious man.
If this burglary had been an inside job, who was there on the inside? The staff of the hotel and the Macbeans. Was Macbean in debt? So many questions. He could go to Strathbane and try to get hold of Jimmy Andersen. But Blair would hear he had been at police headquarters go through another of his lightning changes of mood banish him from both cases.
Rain began to patter against the windows and the wind howled in increasing ferocity. The wind of Sutherland started with a regular gale and then increased to a booming sound finally ending in a great screech that rent the heavens from end to end. No wonder the locals were superstitious.
Was there any point in plodding on, finding out a bit here and a bit there? Why not go back to the police station, light the fire and settle down in front of it with a detective story, preferably an American one of the more violent kind where the hero could act out Hamish’s frustrations for him, slamming people up against walls and beating confessions out of them.
But Duty, stem daughter of the voice of God, niggled at his conscience. He would go back to Braikie and see what he could find out there.
Starting with Maggie Bane.
♦
Maggie Bane lived in a trim bungalow on the outskirts of Braikie called My Highland Home.
Hamish, as he rang the doorbell, wondered whether he should have called at the surgery first. But surely she would not be there. The police would have the whole place sealed off.