He crumpled up his fish-supper paper and threw it in a rubbish bin and strolled to the edge of the jetty and looked down into the receding waters. The harbour jetty thrust out into the river Skag just below a point where it flowed into the North Sea. The tide was ebbing fast. At low tide, the foot of the jetty was left dry, with the river running between sandbanks to the sea.
He stared idly down into the receding water. It was a lovely, calm late afternoon, with a sky like pearl. Children’s voices sounded on the still air and seagulls cruised lazily overhead.
Bob Harris came suddenly back into Hamish’s mind and he felt all his old dread returning.
And then, as he looked over the edge of the jetty, a distorted face stared back up at Hamish. He had been thinking about Bob Harris, cursing Bob Harris, so that at first he thought that the dreadful man had stamped his image on his mind. Then, as the water sank lower, he saw lank hair rising and falling like seaweed, he saw the way pale bulbous eyes stared up at him with an expression of outrage.
He climbed down the ladder attached to the wooden jetty and dragged the body clear of the water. Although he desperately tried every means of artificial respiration, he knew as he worked that it was hopeless. Bob Harris was very dead and had probably been dead for some hours.
A man peered over the jetty and shouted to him. Hamish told him to fetch the police.
Hamish turned the body gently over and parted the damp hair. Someone had struck Bob a savage blow on the back of the head. He sat down on the wet sand and stared bleakly out at the receding water. There was surely no hope that Bob had got drunk and fallen into the water. This was murder. But still, he thought suddenly, he could be wrong. Perhaps Bob had fallen over and struck his head on something. But there were no rocks and no sign of blood on the piers of the jetty. Of course, it depended on the time he had fallen in. If the tide was high and he had struck his head on some part of the jetty structure, then any blood and hair would have been washed away.
He heard the approaching wail of a police siren. There would be no hope now of concealing his profession.
Soon he was surrounded by policemen and then forensic men and then arrived Detective Inspector Sandy Deacon, a small, ferrety man with suspicious eyes. Hamish patiently answered questions about the finding of the body, of what he knew about Bob Harris, which was very little. Yes, he was the man who had punched Harris in self-defence.
“Odd behaviour for a police constable,” said Deacon sourly. Hamish requested that he be allowed to return to the boarding-house, as his dog needed a walk.
“No, you don’t, laddie,” said Deacon. “Policeman or not, you’re our prime suspect!”
♦
Deacon, who came from the nearest town, Dungarton, had found out after one phone call to Superintendent Daviot that Hamish Macbeth had recently been demoted from sergeant, had also recently broken off his engagement to a fine and beautiful lady, and was rather weird.
So Hamish sat and fretted. An office in the village police station had been turned over to the murder inquiry as his ‘prison’. He had to sit there, patiently answering questions fired at him by Deacon and a detective sergeant called Johnny Clay. He repeated over and over again that he had spent a solitary day, and no, he did not have any witnesses.
It transpired from a pathologist’s preliminary report that Bob Harris had been struck on the head, possibly with a piece of driftwood, for scraps of sea-washed wood had been found embedded in the wound in his scalp. He had been last seen by the boatman who had hired the fishing tackle to the boarding-house party. Bob Harris had been standing on the edge of the jetty, looking out over the water. Before that, he had been seen drinking heavily in the local pub. The boatman, Jamie MacPherson, had also provided the police with the interesting news that all the residents of The Friendly House had been plotting Bob’s murder.
Hamish tried to keep his temper. It was an odd and frustrating feeling to experience what it was like to be on the wrong side of the law. He was also worried about Towser, locked up in the boarding-house bedroom. Towser, for all his mongrel faults, was a clean animal and must be suffering agonies rather than foul the room.
Hamish had given up smoking some time ago but now he passionately longed for a cigarette. He was just beginning to think that they meant to keep him in the police station all night when Crick put his head round the door and summoned Deacon from the room.
Deacon switched off the tape recorder and went outside. Clay, the detective sergeant, stared stolidly at Hamish. Then the door opened and Deacon said nastily, “Get out o’ here, Macbeth, and next time ye try to protect a lady’s name, don’t waste police time doing it!”
Hamish left the interview room, wondering about his remarkable release. At first he did not recognize Miss Gunnery, who was waiting for him with Towser.
She was wearing a smart dress and her hair was down on her shoulders as it had been on the evening of the dance. She was very heavily made up and wearing high heels.
“What happened? What are you doing here?” asked Hamish.
“Oh, do come along, darling,” she said in a simpering voice, quite unlike her usual forthright tones. “Towser wants his walkies.”
Hamish headed for the front door of the police station but she whispered, “No, through the back. The press are outside. My car’s there.”
A policeman held a door open for them and they went down a short corridor and out into a small yard. “In the car,” urged Miss Gunnery. “I’ll tell you about it as we drive home.”
She drove out at speed. Flashlights from press cameras nearly blinded her, reporters hammered at the car windows, but soon they were out on the road. “They’re outside the boarding-house as well,” said Miss Gunnery.
“So why was I released so soon?” asked Hamish.
“I knew you didn’t do it, and I found out when they questioned me that the murder was supposed to have taken place in the middle of the afternoon, so I…don’t get mad…I told them you had spent the afternoon in bed with me.”
“Oh, my God,” wailed Hamish. “There wass no need for that, no need at all. They would have gone on giving me a hard time, but then they would haff had to let me go.”
“I thought you would be pleased,” she said in a small voice. “You…you won’t tell them I lied?”
“No, I won’t do that. But don’t effer do such a thing again. How did you get Towser?”
“I borrowed the spare key from Rogers.”
“But the others will know that you weren’t with me!”
“No, they were all out somewhere, all of them, even the Rogerses. They all turned up at tea-time to find the police waiting. While I was waiting my turn to be questioned, I got the key and took poor Towser out for a walk.”
“And they let you do it?”
“I didn’t ask permission. I returned just when they were questioning Andrew. When it was my turn, I said I would tell them where I had been if they would tell me where you were, for Doris had been interviewed first and told me you had found the body. They said you were ‘helping the police with their inquiries’ and I panicked, thinking that because Bob had called in the police only this morning, that they would arrest you. So I quickly thought up the lie. I hope none of it gets in the papers, or you might lose your job in the Civil Service.”
“I’m not in the Civil Service. I’m a policeman from Lochdubh in Sutherland, where I’m the local bobby.”