“The way I see it,” said Angela dreamily, “is that it was a murder of savage impulse, no poisoning or shooting or stabbing, just a sudden blow to the head. Whoever it was may not even have contemplated murder. Just bashed the horrible Harris on the head in a fit of rage. Harris tips over into the river and the assailant rushes off without waiting to see the result of the blow. It was death by drowning, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Hamish slowly.
“So we get back to the respectable section of the boarding-house party,” said Angela eagerly. “Instead of looking for a murderer, look for someone who might just be capable of a fit of rage. Oh, and there’s something else.”
Maggie looked at the doctor’s wife in irritation. It should have been she, Maggie, who should have been enthralling Hamish Macbeth with her speculations.
“What else?” asked Hamish.
“Harris seemed to like having things on people, like tormenting Dermott. And what if Harris knew about the bad food from the old folks’ home? What of that? This Rogers. Now there’s a criminal for you.”
“Aye, you’ve given me a lot to think about,” said Hamish. “That business about Rogers now, I think Deacon should get on to it.”
Maggie got to her feet. “Don’t worry. I’ll phone him, Hamish.”
“Oh, there’s no need to go back to the police station,” said Angela to Maggie’s fury. “Use the phone over there, Hamish.”
So Maggie had to sit, feeling useless, as Hamish outlined his suspicions about Rogers to Deacon. The fact that she herself had not really had one good insight into the case did not occur to her. She felt she was being left out as usual.
When Hamish returned, he looked shrewdly at Maggie’s sulky face and said, “Why don’t you run along and get changed for dinner and make your own way up to the hotel. I’ve a few calls to make.”
Maggie did not want to go, but on the other hand could think of no reason for staying, but as she walked along to Mrs Maclean’s she was cheered by the fact that Hamish Macbeth thought enough of her to buy her an expensive dinner.
She sat in her room and read, occasionally glancing with pleasure at her newly laundered clothes, which had been laid out on the bed. The cotton dress she planned to wear was white, with great splashes of red roses. She knew it flattered her figure. Finally she went to the Macleans’ minuscule bathroom and had a bath in one of those modern plastic baths which had about as much space as a coffin.
It was when she started to put her clean clothes on that she realized the sheer folly of having agreed to Mrs Maclean’s laundering her clothes. Mrs Maclean must have boiled everything. The dress was cotton, the bra and panties of a cotton-and-acrylic mixture, as were the petticoat and tights. Everything had shrunk. The dress was up above her knees and strained painfully across her bosom. Her bra and panties felt tight and uncomfortable. She glanced at the clock. It would have to do. But she would give Mrs Maclean a piece of her mind on her way out.
But when she went into the kitchen, Mrs Maclean turned round from the steaming copper. Her face was flushed and red and her eyes very hard. Maggie’s courage ran out. She simply walked past her and out of the door.
There had been no mirror in either Maggie’s room or in the bathroom – how the husband shaved, she didn’t know – and she had made up her face using the hand mirror in her compact.
As soon as she walked into the reception area of the hotel, she was faced by a reflection of herself in a long mirror on the opposite wall. She wanted to turn and run. Her large breasts, cut by the brassiere underneath and constrained by the shrunken dress, bulged over the low neckline like those of an eighteenth-century tart.
And then Hamish approached her, Hamish in a dinner jacket, looking very smooth and relaxed. “I see you let Mrs Maclean wash your clothes,” he said sympathetically. “Mistake. You can’t eat in that dress. The food’ll stick in your neck. Go and sit in the bar and I’ll see what I can do.”
Maggie went and took a seat in the corner of the bar. As she walked across it, a group of men with gin-and-sauna-flushed faces watched her with amusement. One said with disastrous clarity, “Must be the local tart.”
She sat there feeling naked and very alone. Hamish reappeared with Mr Johnson in tow. “My, my,” said Mr Johnson, staring at Maggie in admiration. “When Mrs Maclean washes, she really washes.”
“Come with me, Maggie,” said Hamish. “I’ve got something for ye.”
He led her upstairs and along a corridor and took a key out of his pocket and opened the door. “This is Mrs Halburton-Smythe’s quarters. We’ll find you something here, but don’t spill anything on what you wear, or we’ll all be in trouble. Here, what about this thing?”
He took out a caftan, a purple silk one embroidered with gold.
“Oh, that’ll do,” said Maggie, looking at the gown’s generous folds.
“The bathroom’s through there,” said Hamish, “I’ll wait for you.”
Maggie, in the bathroom, removed the hellishly tight dress and underwear and slipped the loose caftan over her naked body. She left her discarded clothes in the bathroom so that she could change back into them when the evening was over.
When she came out, she asked, “Is there a stole or a wrap or anything to put over this?”
“Bound to be,” said Hamish, searching through female garments. “Oh, here’s the very thing,” He handed her a black cashmere shawl, which Maggie gratefully put around her shoulders.
As they walked downstairs together to the dining room, Maggie stole sharp little glances at her companion. He seemed transformed by the dinner jacket. He looked as if he had been dining in expensive restaurants all his life. Maggie did not know that Hamish was blessed with the Highlander’s vanity of feeling that he belonged anywhere he happened to be and so always fitted in.
Although Maggie enjoyed her dinner, she could not find any ideas to top those of the doctor’s wife. Hamish did not exactly discuss the case with her, he seemed to be thinking aloud, almost forgetting she was there. In fact, thought Maggie, he did not seem to be aware she was a woman at all. Fortunately for Hamish, her self-consciousness stopped her from noticing that the waiter did not present him with any bill at the end of the meal.
When she had finally changed back into those dreadfully tight clothes, she felt quite demoralized. She knew she would not even have the courage to give Mrs Maclean a lecture. The rest of her small stock of clothes was probably just as tight. She would need to wash what she had taken off that day in the hand basin in her room and dry everything in front of the room’s two-bar electric heater.
They were just leaving the hotel when Mr Johnson came running after them.
“Call for you, Hamish,” he shouted. “The police at Skag.”
Maggie waited in her car. Hamish seemed to be away a long time. As he came out, she wound down her window. “Trouble?” she asked.
“Aye. You’d best get down to Mrs Maclean’s and pack up your things. We’re off to Skag.”
“What’s happened?”
“Another murder.”
“What! Who?”
“Thon Jamie MacPherson, the boatman.”
∨ Death of a Nag ∧
8
We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.
—George Henry Lewis
Smells of fish and chips and salt sea, cold wind, blowing sand, bleakness; only the end of July, and yet a strong suggestion of a dying year. Skag.
It was two in the morning. Hamish sat in the police station facing an unshaven Deacon.
“Tell me again, sir,” said Hamish. “How did it happen?”
“If I knew how, I would know who,” said Deacon crossly. “But as I said, it was like this: Mrs Flaherty and her husband wanted to take a boat out. It was late afternoon. They go to the boat-shed, that shack, you know, at the back o’ the jetty. They go inside and look about. No one seems tae be there. Then, like a Hitchcock movie, missis sees a foot stickin’ out from the back o’ the door to that wee office he has at the back where he keeps his records. Well, they don’t think o’ murder, do they? Think some poor sod has passed out. Mr Flaherty says he’s probably drunk but they have a look anyway. Jamie MacPherson is very dead. Mr Flaherty prides himself on his cool nerve and promptly tries to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. To do so, he slides one hand under Jamie’s neck. That’s when he feels wet stickiness, pulls his hand away and finds it covered wi’ blood. Shows his hand tae his wife, who starts screaming like a banshee. So the first estimate by the pathologist and by the forensic boys is that Jamie was sitting at his desk when someone stabbed him in the back of the neck wi’ something like a dagger, but not all that sharp.”