Suddenly alarmed, Angela began to hammer at the door and shout.
Again she waited. Again that silence. The Kennedy family had fallen silent now. The fly buzzed against the glass and the rain drummed on the roof.
Angela decided to go for help. She would look a fool if they burst into that bedroom and found Trixie fast asleep. But she remembered stories in the papers of people who had not interfered for fear of looking foolish and because of that fear, someone had died.
She thought Hamish would laugh at her, but he put on his peaked cap and followed her to The Laurels. His face was set and grim. He tried to tell himself his feeling of foreboding was the weather. The midges danced through the raindrops, stinging his face and he automatically fished in his pocket for his stick of repellent.
He walked up the stairs past the Kennedy family who were gathered at the foot. The children were strangely silent, their jam-covered faces turned upwards.
He went up to Trixie’s room and hammered on the door. Then he tilted his head on one side and listened to the quality of the silence.
“Stand back,” he said curtly to Angela.
He kicked at the lock with all his might and there came a splintering sound and the door burst open.
Trixie Thomas lav half across the bed, her hair spilled over her face. He gently put back her hair and looked down at her contorted face and then he felt her pulse.
“Get your husband here,” he said over his shoulder.
“Is she…?” Angela put her hands up to her mouth.
“Yes. But get him anyway.”
Angela ran down the stairs and along the waterfront towards the surgery. Rain water poured down her face like the tears she could not yet shed.
The receptionist called something as she ran past and burst into the consulting room.
“Come quickly,” Angela called.
Dr Brodie was examining Mrs Wellington’s bared bosom with a stethoscope. Angela reflected wildly that she had never seen such enormous breasts before.
“Mrs Brodie!” screeched the outraged minister’s wife, seizing a brassiere the size of a hammock.
“It’s Trixie. She’s dead,” said Angela, and then the tears came and great suffocating sobs.
“Dear me. Dear me,” said Mrs Wellington, encasing her girth rapidly in underwear and Harris tweed.
Dr Brodie seized his bag and ran out of the surgery to his car. Hamish was waiting for him in Trixie’s bedroom. “Don’t move the body if you can,” he said when he saw the doctor. “I’ll have a look around outside.”
The doctor spent only a short time in the room. Hamish was coming along the corridor when Dr Brodie emerged outside.
“I’ll just write the death certificate,” said the doctor. “Heart attack. No doubt about it.”
Hamish’s eyes narrowed and he said quietly, “Go back in there and try again. It’s a case of poisoning, if ever I saw one. It’s murder, doctor. Pure and straightforward murder!”
∨ Death of a Perfect Wife ∧
4
The very pink of perfection.
—Oliver Goldsmith.
The day after Trixie’s death was perfect. The clouds rolled back and the sun blazed down on a glittering, wet landscape. Beds hummed among the roses tumbling over the police station door as Hamish Macbeth waited for news from the laboratory in Strathbane.
He had to ask a lot of questions – starting with Dr Brodie. Why had the doctor been so keen to diagnose a heart attack? But there was always the slim hope in Hamish’s mind that somehow it would turn out to be food poisoning.
He had reported his suspicions to Mr Daviot. That gentleman had finished his holiday and had been packing to leave when Hamish had arrived at the hotel. To Hamish’s surprise, he treated the news of Trixie’s death lightly. Hamish did not know that because of Hamish’s addled behaviour at the Halburton-Smythe’s dinner party, the superintendent had swung round to Blair’s view of the village constable, which was that Macbeth had a slate missing.
But Mr Daviot had called at The Laurels, been satisfied that the forensic boys had taken away everything possible from the kitchen for analysis, and then had driven off.
Hamish still shuddered when he remembered the ordeal of breaking the news to Paul Thomas. The big man had seemed to crumple up and shrivel inside his clothes. Dr Brodie had given him a sedative. Now all Trixie’s fan club were in attendance on the bereaved husband.
The arrival of Detective Chief Inspector Blair was imminent, but surely there would not be the hordes of press that had attended the last two murders in Lochdubh…if it should prove to be murder. The murder of a housewife in the Highlands would be of interest only to the local press.
He went out into the front garden carrying a battered old deck chair and stretched out in the sun. Why had Trixie had such a hold over the women of Lochdubh? he wondered. She had, of course, quite a powerful personality. Then the village women themselves were mostly of the old school, that is, they were housewives rather than wage earners. There was no cinema in Lochdubh, no theatre, no discos, or parties. The wonder of television had long worn off. Trixie, Hamish decided, had given them all a purpose. They were still housewives in an age that had been taught to despise housewives. The days of the enormous families had gone. Time, Hamish supposed, must lie heavily on a woman’s hands. It was all right for him to be lazy and stretch out in the sun when he had the chance. Apart from his police work, he had his garden, his sheep, and his hens to look after. The only thing which made a demand on his affections was Towser. He reached down and scratched the dog behind the ears. Even when their husbands died, he mused, the women of Lochdubh did not promptly travel to Inverness or Strathbane looking for work. Most of them had never gone out to work in their lives, having got married as soon as they left school. Of course a lot of them worked very hard, doing most of the gardening and, if the husband had a croft, an equal share of the work load. But there were the long winter months where everything ground to a halt and they were not paid for their labours. Anything they did was part of their wifely duties.
A lot of the local men, he knew, married not out of love but because their mothers had died or because they wanted a home of their own with someone to cook the meals and iron the shirts.
Priscilla had been right about Angela Brodie. She had the soul of an academic. Good intelligence there and absolutely no commonsense whatsoever. Incapable of judging character. Hamish fervently hoped for both the Brodies’ sakes that Angela would revert to her old self. But would she? She had become accustomed to interests outside her books.
Hamish rose and ambled into the office and searched through a file of phone numbers that he had jotted down from time to time in the hope that they would prove useful. At last he found what he wanted. He phoned the Open University in Milton Keynes and said he was phoning for a Mrs Brodie who was interested in taking a science degree and would they send her the necessary papers? When he put down the phone, he had a feeling of satisfaction. Studying for a degree at home would be just the thing for Angela Brodie and a science degree would give her something difficult and practical to work on. The Open University enabled men and women to work for University degrees at home.
He returned to his deck chair.
He lay back and closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the village, the chugging of a donkey engine on a boat out of the loch, snatches of song from a radio, the harsh scream of the wheeling seagulls, and the lazy drone of a car winding its way through the hills behind. It was a pity, he thought, that all the skylarks seemed to have gone. He could remember them in his youth, the very sound of summer, climbing to the heavens and sending down a cascade of glorious sound. No-one could remain an atheist with larks around, he thought dreamily.