“What now?” he asked.
“The handwriting expert. Did you see him?”
“Yes. Oh, come in. I’m trying to get off on the road to Braikie, but maybe it would be a good idea for you to hear what the man said.”
Elspeth followed him into the kitchen. “What was she doing here?”
“Who?”
“The newcomer, Jenny Ogilvie.”
“Wanted some advice, that’s all. Now, here’s what the handwriting expert said.” He told her of Glass’s findings.
“So,” he said, “what is there in Braikie for an over-achiever? Maybe it is some woman who left and went to London, say, and made a success of whatever she did, then retired and returned to Braikie.”
“I don’t think so. She’s obviously had a lifetime of studying the locals.”
“Okay, Sherlock, come up with a better idea.”
“I think it would be someone with some sort of local power. The minister isn’t a woman. The bank manager’s a man and a newcomer at that. I have it!”
“Have what?”
“What about a schoolteacher? Braikie School is small and the headmistress has a lot of power.”
“They don’t call them headmistresses any more,” said Hamish. “It’s ‘head teacher’ in this politically correct world.”
“Bugger political correctness,” said Elspeth. “Who do we know?”
Hamish thought about it. “Miss McAndrew retired last year. I never really knew her.”
“Try her,” urged Elspeth.
“All right. But from the little I know of her, she seems a highly respectable lady.”
“I’d better get off.” Elspeth walked to the door and then hesitated. She turned round. “We haven’t had dinner together for a while. What about this evening?”
“I have a date.”
“Oh, Hamish. There’s something odd there. She’s stalking you.” And with that she was gone, leaving Hamish staring at the empty space where she had been standing only a second before.
♦
Hamish fed Lugs but decided not to take his dog with him. It was going to be a tricky call. He could hardly walk into Miss McAndrew’s home and accuse her of being a poison-pen writer. Maybe he should pretend he wanted her advice.
He drove off to Braikie, enjoying the splendid day, wondering how long it would last before the weather broke again. He drove along the shore road, noticing that for once the sea was calm, smooth glassy waves tumbling onto the rocky beach.
He called at the school and asked a teacher if he might have Miss McAndrew’s address. He was told she lived in a bungalow called Braikie Manor on the shore road.
Interested to meet this woman who wanted to give the impression that she lived in a manor house, Hamish drove back out again on the shore road. He had been told that the bungalow was situated on a rise, just beyond the edge of Braikie.
It was a small square box of a house with one large bay window. The views out over the sea must be magnificent, he thought as he parked the Land Rover at the side of the road and got out.
There was a short tarmac drive up to the front door. The garden was scrubby grass and a few trees permanently bent into a crouch by the Atlantic gales. The front door was slightly ajar.
He rang the doorbell in the wall on the side and listened as Westminster chimes sounded inside the house. No one came to the door. There was a garage at the side of the house. He walked up to it. There was a window at the side of the garage. It was grimy. He rubbed it with his sleeve and peered in. A small Ford Escort was inside. So she hadn’t driven off anywhere.
He returned to the door and rang the bell again. Behind him, waves crashed on the beach and a seagull screamed overhead. He pushed the door wider and called, “Miss McAndrew!”
Silence.
He took off his cap and tucked it under his arm. Perhaps she was asleep. He walked inside. There was a narrow hall. He looked down. The morning post was lying on the floor. He could feel his heartbeats quicken.
“Miss McAndrew!” he shouted again.
He opened a door on his left. The living room. No one there. A door on his right opened into the lounge, musty and slightly damp, obviously the ‘best’ room, used only on special occasions. There was an open door at the back of the hall leading into the kitchen. Before it, on the left and right, were two more doors. He opened the first.
It was a bedroom, the curtains tightly drawn. He fumbled for the light switch beside the door and switched it on. Light glared down on an awful figure on the bed soaked in blood. He walked forward. Dead eyes stared up at him. To make sure, he felt for her pulse and found none.
Miss McAndrew had been viciously and violently stabbed to death – a frenzy of stabbing. He took out his phone and called Strathbane. He pulled on a pair of thin gloves and went through to the living room. There was a desk by the window. On the top were a few bills and circulars. He slid open the desk drawers, one after the other. In the bottom drawer he found a packet of cheap stationery and a packet of envelopes. In one at the left top of the desk he found the beginning of a letter. “Dear Effie,” it began, “I have not heard from you for a while.” The handwriting looked like the writing on the anonymous letters.
He walked outside the bungalow and breathed in great gulps of fresh air. A car drove up and Jimmy Anderson got out, followed by his sidekick, MacNab, and two police officers. Hamish went to meet them. “How did you get here so quickly?”
“Blair’ll be along in a minute,” said Jimmy. “We were in Braikie when we got your message. We were investigating that other murder.”
“You mean Miss Beattie?”
“Aye, that’s the one. You were right. She’d been heavily drugged.”
“But I phoned this morning and was told the results weren’t through.”
“I don’t know who told you that, but it turns out you were right. So what’ve we got here?”
“A fatal stabbing.”
“Victim?”
“A Miss McAndrew, retired schoolteacher.”
“We’ve got the forensic team with us. They were going over the postmistress’s flat again. We’ll wait until they arrive. Any idea who murdered her or why?”
“I don’t know who,” said Hamish heavily. “But I know why.”
A car screeched to a halt at the foot of the garden and Detective Chief Inspector Blair heaved his bulk out of it.
“Why?” Jimmy asked Hamish.
“Miss McAndrew was the poison-pen writer and somebody found out.”
∨ Death of a Poison Pen ∧
3
Me thought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep!” the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the rovel’d sleeve of care.
—William Shakespeare
Blair was in a bad mood. He felt resentful that somehow Hamish’ Macbeth had turned what had appeared to be a simple suicide into a murder. And now that long drip of water, that glaikit Highland teuchter, had found another dead body.
He brushed past Hamish and said to Jimmy, “Let’s be having a look at the body.”
“Well, sir, the forensic team’s just coming. Might be as well to wait for them.”
Blair’s eyes bulged with fury, but he saw the wisdom of what Jimmy was saying and he rounded on Hamish. “What prompted ye to call on her?”
Hamish patiently went through what the handwriting expert had told him and how he had thought a retired schoolteacher might fit the profile. Blair listened to him, his great bull head on one side.
The police photographer arrived, then the forensic team, and then the pathologist, Mr. Sinclair. “As soon as you’re finished, I want a look inside the place,” growled Blair. “And as for you, laddie, you may as well get back to your sheep or whatever.”