Hamish took out his notebook, wrote down Maggie’s address, and passed it over.
“There’s something else I want to ask you – about nicotine poison.”
“It’s very easy to make.”
“You will see from the newspapers, an illegal still was raided. I thought that might have been used. I mean anyone with the machinery to manufacture illegal whisky would be able to make nicotine poison.”
“I should think any bright schoolchild might be able to do the same in a school lab.”
Hamish sighed. “Motive, that’s the thing.”
“It’s usually drunkenness, love or money.”
“There was this robbery at The Scotsman Hotel. I kept thinking that Gilchrist with his love of spending and being low on funds might have had something to do with it. I mean, Mrs. Macbean, that’s the manager’s wife, might have let something slip about the money, about the safe having a wooden back.”
“Or,” said Mr. Packer, crossing a neat pair of ankles in Argyll socks, “if he was such a charmer, he could have worked on her. Surely such an enormous sum of money for a bingo prize would be advertised by the hotel in the newspapers.”
“Yes, it was.”
“This is fun,” said the tutor happily. “I feel quite like Dr. Watson. Tell me about this Mrs. Macbean.”
“She isn’t a looker, middle-aged, waspish, hair in curlers from morning till night. Husband is said to beat her up, but she does not seem afraid of him. Told a friend of mine” – oh, Sarah, what happened to us? – “that a woman with a breadknife in her hand didn’t need to be afraid of any man. Said she put laxative in his morning coffee after he had beaten her and threatened it would be poison the next time.”
“Mrs. Macbean sounds a likely candidate.”
“But she would need help. Someone with strength and coldness murdered Gilchrist and hoisted him into the dentist’s chair and drilled all his teeth.”
“You came here,” said Mr. Packer, “to find out more about Maggie Bane. I assume this is because there is often something in the person’s past which will highlight some murderous side of their character?”
“That is often the case.”
“Then perhaps you should try to find out a bit more about what Mrs. Macbean is like?”
“You’re right. I might just call down to Leith and see what I can find.”
♦
Blessing the motorways which made travel so easy, Hamish drove down to Edinburgh and so to Leith. He had fortunately a note of Mrs. Macbean’s original address in his notebook. There might be someone living there or living close by who might remember her.
The early Scottish night had fallen when he finally entered a Georgian tenement in Leith. The woman who answered the door to him said that, yes, the police had already been round asking questions but she had never known the woman. Try Mrs. Morton on the ground floor.
Mrs. Morton turned out to be God’s gift to a policeman – a lonely grey-haired widow anxious for company and anxious to talk.
“Yes, yes, I remember Agnes Macwhirter. Beautiful girl and knew it. Full of herself. All the boys were mad for her. Said she was going to be someone someday. Went to business college and said she would be secretary to someone famous, like a film star.”
“And did she become secretary to someone famous?”
“No, she ended up as a pretty ordinary secretary working for the manager of a children’s wear factory in Dumfries.”
Hamish looked at her sharply. “Did you say Dumfries?”
“Yes, indeed. Now what was the place called. I’ll remember in a moment. It’s funny at my age how one remembers things clearly from the old days but nothing much about yesterday. I remember her mother coming down to tell me. Poor Mrs. Macwhirter, the cancer took her off. I know, it was Tot Modes, that’s it, Tot Modes in Dumfries.”
“Can you remember the name of the manager?”
She shook her head regretfully.
Dumfries, thought Hamish. That’s where Gilchrist had come from.
“I’d best find somewhere to stay the night and then I might drive over to Dumfries in the morning.”
“I have a spare room here,” said Mrs. Morton, loneliness peering out of her old eyes. “I would be glad of the company.”
Hamish hesitated. He would have liked to rack up in some anonymous hotel room and sort out his thoughts. But he knew what it was like to feel lonely and one day he would be old himself, and to hell with it…
“That is most kind of you,” he said. He retired early however, feeling if he looked through another album of ancient photographs he would scream.
♦
He awoke early but Mrs. Morton was up before him and had prepared a massive breakfast. Hamish longed to offer to pay for food and accommodation but was afraid of offending her. But when he left, he put two twenty-pound notes in an envelope and left it on the bedside table with a note: “This is for your favourite charity,” hoping that Mrs. Motion’s favourite charity was herself, for he knew she sorely needed money. The little flat was spotless, but everything was shabby and worn.
He set out for Dumfries, grateful that although the weather was cold, it was still dry. Skeletal winter trees held their black tracery of branches up in supplication to an unforgiving sky. He took all seasons as they came, finding some beauty in all, but beginning to have an intimation of how much he would learn to hate the winter when he was older. Mrs. Morton had said she hailed each spring as a gift from God, knowing she would be alive for another year, because old people died in winter.
He had not phoned, and wondering if the children’s clothing factory would be still in operation, he stopped at the main post office in Dumfries and looked up the phone book. To his relief Tot Modes was listed. He drove out to an industrial estate and found the factory, which consisted of two long low buildings and asked for the manager.
The manager, a Mr. Goodman, was, Hamish saw with disappointment, a relatively young man. But he explained why he had called.
“That would be in my father’s time,” said Mr. Goodman.
“Is he still alive?”
“Yes, I’ll just phone him and say you will be calling, and then I’ll give you directions.”
Another twenty minutes and Hamish found himself confronting Mr. Goodman, senior, a portly old gentleman with a round face covered in so many broken veins it looked like a relief map. His eyes had the watery sheen of the perpetual drinker, but he was sober that morning and seemed delighted to have company.
“Agnes Macwhirter,” he said. “Aye, I remember her well. Bonnie lassie.”
“Can you tell me what she was like?”
“Very good secretary. Miss Perfect. Tailored white blouses, pencil skirts, that sort of thing. Walking out with a respectable young doctor.”
“Doctor?” Hamish looked disappointed. “I was hoping to find some connection between her and that dentist who’s just been murdered, Frederick Gilchrist.”
“Oh, him.” Then the old man stared at Hamish. “Of course, Gilchrist, that was the fellow. He was only a student when he was here. That’s right. Someone said he was a dental student, studying to be a dentist.”
“And he knew Miss Macwhirter?”
“Knew her? He ruined that lassie’s life.”
“How?”