∨ Death of a Witch ∧
6
Still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!
– Robert Louis Stevenson
“Now we’re in trouble!” howled Jimmy when Hamish phoned him the following morning. “Inverness police are to interview McBride today and they’ll find out you’ve been there before them. Couldn’t you just have left it to them? I’d have let you know what they found out. I’ll try to make excuses for you and keep this from Blair but don’t you dare go near that Perth address. I’ll let you know what the Perth police find out.”
Hamish went out on his rounds. He called to question Timmy Teviot again but the forestry worker stuck doggedly to his story about poachers.
In the evening Jimmy phoned. Catriona Burrell’s mother, Morag, had been a Gypsy who had abandoned Catriona shortly after the baby was born. She had been brought up by her father, a strict lay minister in the Methodist Church. He had died when their home had gone up in flames one night when Catriona was seventeen. Arson was suspected but nothing was ever proved. Catriona was moved into the care of her father’s sister, Agnes, a few streets away from the burnt home. When Catriona was eighteen, Agnes had died after a fall down the stairs. She had inherited her brother’s money on his death, and that money then went to Catriona.
“How much?” asked Hamish.
“Altogether with the insurance from the fire and then the sale of Agnes’s house plus the money old Burrell left, about three hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”
“Worth killing for,” said Hamish. “Didn’t the police think Agnes’s death suspicious?”
“She was older than her brother, in her late sixties, and crippled with arthritis. The death wasn’t considered suspicious.”
“And where was Catriona at the time of the fire?”
“In the house. She was rescued from an upstairs bedroom window by a fireman. Burrell didn’t get out.”
“And when the aunt died, where was she?”
“She was out in the centre of Perth with friends. Of course, they couldn’t pinpoint the exact time of death.”
“I’d be willing to bet she bumped off both of them,” said Hamish. “Now, was there any other relative who might have felt cheated out of the inheritance?”
“No, but there was one furious wee woman, a widow, a Mrs. Ruby Connachie. She had been stepping out with Burrell and had hopes of marrying him. She hated Catriona with a passion. At the time, she told the police that Catriona had set the fire.”
“What was the source of the fire?”
“A chip pan.”
“Who cooks chips in the middle of the night?”
“Catriona said that her father cooked all the meals. This seems to have been true. He fancied himself a nutritionist. Catriona said they had fish-and-chips for tea and her father must have left the gas on low under the chip pan. From the remains of the cooker, they estimated that seemed to be the case. Sister Agnes said she was surprised because Horace Burrell, her brother, only cooked healthy food and never fried anything. So perhaps our witch left the pan on deliberately until it hotted up and burst into flames. There’s another curious thing. Ruby Connachie had had a tour of the house with the view to becoming the next Mrs. Burrell. She swore Burrell had a lock on his bedroom door, but no remains of a lock were found although the door was burnt to cinders. I wonder if Catriona locked him in and threw away the key.”
“They would look for the lock, surely.”
“Ruby only came out with all of this after the death of Agnes. The fire was quickly put down as an accident. The bedroom floor had collapsed in flames before the firemen could save it. All Catriona had to do was wait, go into the ruin when the investigation was over, and find the thing.”
“So what’s this Ruby like?”
“Churchgoing, God-fearing wee body. She said Catriona was the ‘devil’s spawn.’”
“Looks as if she might be right,” said Hamish gloomily. “Whoever killed Catriona hated her. And that fire could have been retribution rather than to cover up any forensic evidence. What’s this Ruby’s alibi?”
“She lives alone. She was certainly seen out and about in Perth, shopping, visiting the church, that sort of thing. She could have driven up during the night. She’s got a car.”
“What’s her alibi for the time the fire was lit at the witch’s cottage?”
There was a rustling of papers. Then Jimmy said, “Nobody asked her. I’ll phone Perth and tell them to get on it right away.”
“The way Catriona went on,” said Hamish, “the whole of Scotland’s probably littered wi’ folks who wanted to murder her.”
“You sound quite cheerful about it. Glad suspicion’s moving away from the local teuchters?”
“Not at all,” said Hamish. Although he knew Jimmy was right.
But Timmy Teviot knew something and he wasn’t talking. Hamish decided to order him to come to the police station and make a full statement about the poachers.
Timmy turned up that evening. Try as he would to trip him up, Hamish found that Timmy stuck unwaveringly to his original story.
♦
Hamish was to say later that not only did the case go cold, it went into deep freeze. On the day that there was a march in Strathbane against global warming, blizzards hurled down from the north, blanketing the countryside. Most of the protesters had come in from other parts of the country and soon found themselves stranded.
The snow piled up, blocking the highland roads despite the diligence of the snow ploughs. At Christmas, Lochdubh looked like an old-fashioned Christmas card with candlelight shining at the cottage windows because there had been a massive power cut. At a break in the storms, Hamish used snowshoes to visit the outlying crofts. Two weeks into the new year, and the snow was still falling.
In his kitchen, Lesley’s stew pot and cake plate lay as a mute reminder that she had never come back to collect them and that, before the snow, he had not even tried to contact her.
He suddenly remembered the brothel idea. He got out an ordnance survey map and began to map off locations in easy reach of Lochdubh where someone could run a brothel without alerting the neighbours. The spirit of John Knox still gripped parts of the north, and he was sure if it had been a large business, he would have heard of it. Someone would have reported it.
It would not, he thought, be an isolated croft house up on the moors because crofting neighbours would have reported something to him. When they were out with their sheep, they saw everything in the landscape that moved.
Then if men from Lochdubh had been visiting it, it would need to be somewhere quite close.
Perhaps Angus Macdonald, the seer, knew something. Hamish was very cynical about the seer’s psychic powers but knew that Angus collected a good deal of useful gossip.
Also, he realised, he should call on Angus anyway. The man must be in his seventies and might be in the need of food.
Hamish went to Patel’s and filled up a haversack with powdered milk – there had been no deliveries of fresh milk – locally baked bread, butter, cheese, tea, and coffee. Putting on his snowshoes and hoisting the haversack on his back, he set off to climb up the hill at the back to Angus’s cottage.
To his alarm, there was no answer to his knock at the door. He tried the handle and found the door unlocked. He walked in, calling, “Angus!”