M.C. Beaton
Death of a Gossip
Hamish Macbeth #1
1985, EN
Lady Jane Winters, society widow and gossip, is found dead at an angling school in Scotland. Who wouldn't want her shrills silenced? Local policeman, Hamish Macbeth is suspicious. With the inspiring aid of Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, Hamish pursues the case.
∨ Death of a Gossip ∧
Day One
Angling: incessant expectation, and perpetual disappointment.
—Arthur Young
I hate the start of the week,” said John Cartwright fretfully. “Beginning with a new group. It’s rather like going on stage. Then I always feel I have to apologize for being English. People who travel up here to the wilds of Scotland expect to be instructed by some great hairy Rob Roy, making jokes about saxpence and saying it’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht and lang may your him reek and ghastly things like that.”
“Don’t chatter,” said his wife, Heather, placidly. “It always works out all right. We’ve been running this fishing school for three years and haven’t had a dissatisfied customer yet.”
She looked at her husband with affection. John Cartwright was small, thin, wiry, and nervous. He had sandy, wispy hair and rather prominent pale blue eyes. Heather had been one of his first pupils at the Lochdubh School of Casting: Salmon and Trout Fishing.
He had been seduced by the sight of her deft back cast and had only got around to discovering the other pleasures of her anatomy after they were married.
Heather was believed to be the better angler, although she tactfully hid her greater skill behind a pleasant motherly manner. Despite their vastly different temperaments, both Heather and John were dedicated, fanatical anglers.
Fishing was their hobby, their work, their obsession. Every week during the summer a new class would arrive at the Lochdubh Hotel. Rarely did they have a complete set of amateurs; experienced fishermen often joined the class, since they could fish excellent waters for reasonable rates. John would take care of the experts while Heather would mother the rank amateurs.
The class never consisted of more than ten. This week they had received two last–minute cancellations and so were expecting only eight.
“Now,” muttered John, picking up a piece of paper, “I gather they all checked in at the hotel last night. There’s an American couple from New York, Mr and Mrs Roth; a Lady Winters, widow of some Labour peer; Jeremy Blythe from London; Alice Wilson, also from London; Charlie Baxter, a twelve-year-old from Manchester – the kid’s not living at the hotel, he’s staying with an aunt in the village; Major Peter Frame. Oh dear, we had the galloping major before. These men who hang on to their army titles don’t seem able to adapt to civilian life. Then there’s Daphne Gore from Oxford. I’ll send the major off on his own as soon as possible. Perhaps you’d better look after the kid.”
John Cartwright glanced out of the hotel window and scowled. “Here comes our scrounging village constable. I told the hotel I needed coffee for eight people. But Hamish will just sit there like a dog until I give him some. Better phone down and tell them to set out an extra cup.”
“What that policeman needs is a good, juicy murder. Keep him off our hands. All he’s got to do all day is mooch around the village getting under everyone’s feet. Jimmy, the water bailiff, told me the other day he thinks Hamish Macbeth poaches.”
“I doubt it,” said Heather. “He’s too lazy. He ought to get married. He must be all of thirty-five at least. Most of the girls in the village have broken their hearts over him at one time or another. I can’t see the attraction.”
She joined her husband at the window, and he put an arm around her plump shoulders. Hamish, Lochdubh’s village constable, was strolling along the pier that lay outside the hotel, his hat pushed on the back of his head, and his hands in his pockets. He was very tall and thin and gawky. His uniform hung on his lanky frame, showing an expanse of bony wrist where the sleeves did not reach far enough and a length of woolly Argyll sock above large regulation boots. He removed his peaked hat and scratched his fiery red hair. Then he reached inside his tunic and thoughtfully scratched one armpit.
The smell of hot coffee wafted up from the hotel lounge below the Cartwrights’ bedroom window. It obviously reached the nostrils of the policeman, for Hamish suddenly sniffed the air like a dog and then started to lope eagerly towards the hotel.
The Lochdubh Hotel had been built in the last century by the Duke of Anstey as one of his many country residences. It was battlemented and turreted like a castle. It had formal gardens at the back and the clear, limpid waters of Lochdubh at the front. It had stags’ heads in the lounge, armoury in the hall, peat fires, and one of the best chefs in Scotland. Prices were astronomical, but the tourists came in droves, partly because the main road ended abruptly in front of the hotel, making it the only haven in a wilderness of barren moorland and towering mountains.
The village of Lochdubh nestled at the foot of two great peaks called the Two Sisters. It was a huddle of houses built in the eighteenth century to promote the fishing industry in the Highlands. The population had been declining steadily ever since.
There was a general store-cum-post office, a bakery, a craft shop and four churches, each with a congregation of about five.
The police station was one of the few modern buildings. The old police station had been a sort of damp hut. Constable Hamish Macbeth had arrived to take up his duties a year before the fishing school was established. No one knew quite how he had managed it, but, in no time at all, he had a trim new house built for himself with a modern office adjoining it with one cell. The former policeman had made his rounds on a bicycle. Constable Macbeth had prised a brand-new Morris out of the authorities. He kept chickens and geese and a large, slavering guard dog of indeterminate breed called Towser.
Lochdubh was situated in the far northwest of Scotland. In winter it went into a long hibernation. In summer, the tourists brought it alive. The tourists were mostly English and were treated by the locals with outward Highland courtesy and inner Highland hate.
John Cartwright had been struggling for a month to make the fishing school pay when he had met Heather. It was Heather who had taken over the bookkeeping and put advertisements in the glossy magazines. It was Heather who had trebled John’s low fees, pointing out shrewdly that people would pay up if they thought they were getting something exclusive and the rates were still reasonable considering the excellent salmon rivers they were allowed to fish. It was Heather who had made the whole thing work. She was plump, grey-haired, and motherly. Her marriage to John Cartwright was her second. John often thought he would never know what went on under his wife’s placid brow, but he loved her as much as he loved angling, and sometimes, even uneasily, thought that the school would not have survived without her, although most of the time he prided himself on his business acumen and his wife comfortably did all she could to foster this belief.
He tugged on his old fishing jacket with its many pockets, picked up his notes, and looked nervously at his wife.
“Don’t you think we should…well, meet them together?”
“You run along dear,” said Heather. “Give me a shout when you’re ready to show them the knots. Once you get started talking, you’ll forget to be nervous.”
John gave her a swift kiss on the cheek and made his way along to the main staircase. He prayed they would be a jolly crowd. At least he knew the major, although that was more a case of being comfortable with the evil he knew.