Hamish Macbeth 13 (1997) - Death of a Dentist (18 page)

“Do you think she could be violent?”

“I do not know. I would not have credited her with violence, but until the advent of Gilchrist, I would not have thought her capable of passion either.”

“I wish I’d known Gilchrist,” said Hamish. “I only saw him dead. He was nothing much to look at—white hair, white face—typical dentist, in fact. There must have been something in his character to attract women. He liked the high life and he left a lot of debt.”

Mr. Packer gave an odd little nod of his head as if Hamish had just confirmed something he had already thought. “Have you noticed, Mr. Macbeth, those ugly little millionaires who usually have some gorgeous blonde hanging on their arm? Women find an ambience of power and money almost irresistible. And before you damn me as being a chauvinist and politically incorrect, I mean some women. This is not Palm Beach, this is the north of Scotland where things are scaled down. A man who drives a large car and offers trips to Paris just like that must have struck Maggie Bane as a rare exotic. I think she is much to be pitied. I think I shall write to her if you would be so good as to furnish me with her address. I think she could channel all that passion and energy into a successful career.”

Hamish took out his notebook, wrote down Maggie’s address, and passed it over.

“There’s something else I want to ask you—about nicotine poison.”

“It’s very easy to make.”

“You will see from the newspapers, an illegal still was raided. I thought that might have been used. I mean anyone with the machinery to manufacture illegal whisky would be able to make nicotine poison.”

“I should think any bright schoolchild might be able to do the same in a school lab.”

Hamish sighed. “Motive, that’s the thing.”

“It’s usually drunkenness, love or money.”

“There was this robbery at The Scotsman Hotel. I kept thinking that Gilchrist with his love of spending and being low on funds might have had something to do with it. I mean, Mrs. Macbean, that’s the manager’s wife, might have let something slip about the money, about the safe having a wooden back.”

“Or,” said Mr. Packer, crossing a neat pair of ankles in Argyll socks, “if he was such a charmer, he could have worked on her. Surely such an enormous sum of money for a bingo prize would be advertised by the hotel in the newspapers.”

“Yes, it was.”

“This is fun,” said the tutor happily. “I feel quite like Dr. Watson. Tell me about this Mrs. Macbean.”

“She isn’t a looker, middle-aged, waspish, hair in curlers from morning till night. Husband is said to beat her up, but she does not seem afraid of him. Told a friend of mine”—oh, Sarah, what happened to us?—“that a woman with a breadknife in her hand didn’t need to be afraid of any man. Said she put laxative in his morning coffee after he had beaten her and threatened it would be poison the next time.”

“Mrs. Macbean sounds a likely candidate.”

“But she would need help. Someone with strength and coldness murdered Gilchrist and hoisted him into the dentist’s chair and drilled all his teeth.”

“You came here,” said Mr. Packer, “to find out more about Maggie Bane. I assume this is because there is often something in the person’s past which will highlight some murderous side of their character?”

“That is often the case.”

“Then perhaps you should try to find out a bit more about what Mrs. Macbean is like?”

“You’re right. I might just call down to Leith and see what I can find.”

Blessing the motorways which made travel so easy, Hamish drove down to Edinburgh and so to Leith. He had fortunately a note of Mrs. Macbean’s original address in his notebook. There might be someone living there or living close by who might remember her.

The early Scottish night had fallen when he finally entered a Georgian tenement in Leith. The woman who answered the door to him said that, yes, the police had already been round asking questions but she had never known the woman. Try Mrs. Morton on the ground floor.

Mrs. Morton turned out to be God’s gift to a policeman—a lonely grey-haired widow anxious for company and anxious to talk.

“Yes, yes, I remember Agnes Macwhirter. Beautiful girl and knew it. Full of herself. All the boys were mad for her. Said she was going to be someone someday. Went to business college and said she would be secretary to someone famous, like a film star.”

“And did she become secretary to someone famous?”

“No, she ended up as a pretty ordinary secretary working for the manager of a children’s wear factory in Dumfries.”

Hamish looked at her sharply. “Did you say Dumfries?”

“Yes, indeed. Now what was the place called. I’ll remember in a moment. It’s funny at my age how one remembers things clearly from the old days but nothing much about yesterday. I remember her mother coming down to tell me. Poor Mrs. Macwhirter, the cancer took her off. I know, it was Tot Modes, that’s it, Tot Modes in Dumfries.”

“Can you remember the name of the manager?”

She shook her head regretfully.

Dumfries, thought Hamish. That’s where Gilchrist had come from.

“I’d best find somewhere to stay the night and then I might drive over to Dumfries in the morning.”

“I have a spare room here,” said Mrs. Morton, loneliness peering out of her old eyes. “I would be glad of the company.”

Hamish hesitated. He would have liked to rack up in some anonymous hotel room and sort out his thoughts. But he knew what it was like to feel lonely and one day he would be old himself, and to hell with it…

“That is most kind of you,” he said. He retired early however, feeling if he looked through another album of ancient photographs he would scream.

He awoke early but Mrs. Morton was up before him and had prepared a massive breakfast. Hamish longed to offer to pay for food and accommodation but was afraid of offending her. But when he left, he put two twenty-pound notes in an envelope and left it on the bedside table with a note: “This is for your favourite charity,” hoping that Mrs. Motion’s favourite charity was herself, for he knew she sorely needed money. The little flat was spotless, but everything was shabby and worn.

He set out for Dumfries, grateful that although the weather was cold, it was still dry. Skeletal winter trees held their black tracery of branches up in supplication to an unforgiving sky. He took all seasons as they came, finding some beauty in all, but beginning to have an intimation of how much he would learn to hate the winter when he was older. Mrs. Morton had said she hailed each spring as a gift from God, knowing she would be alive for another year, because old people died in winter.

He had not phoned, and wondering if the children’s clothing factory would be still in operation, he stopped at the main post office in Dumfries and looked up the phone book. To his relief Tot Modes was listed. He drove out to an industrial estate and found the factory, which consisted of two long low buildings and asked for the manager.

The manager, a Mr. Goodman, was, Hamish saw with disappointment, a relatively young man. But he explained why he had called.

“That would be in my father’s time,” said Mr. Goodman.

“Is he still alive?”

“Yes, I’ll just phone him and say you will be calling, and then I’ll give you directions.”

Another twenty minutes and Hamish found himself confronting Mr. Goodman, senior, a portly old gentleman with a round face covered in so many broken veins it looked like a relief map. His eyes had the watery sheen of the perpetual drinker, but he was sober that morning and seemed delighted to have company.

“Agnes Macwhirter,” he said. “Aye, I remember her well. Bonnie lassie.”

“Can you tell me what she was like?”

“Very good secretary. Miss Perfect. Tailored white blouses, pencil skirts, that sort of thing. Walking out with a respectable young doctor.”

“Doctor?” Hamish looked disappointed. “I was hoping to find some connection between her and that dentist who’s just been murdered, Frederick Gilchrist.”

“Oh, him.” Then the old man stared at Hamish. “Of course, Gilchrist, that was the fellow. He was only a student when he was here. That’s right. Someone said he was a dental student, studying to be a dentist.”

“And he knew Miss Macwhirter?”

“Knew her? He ruined that lassie’s life.”

“How?”

“At first it seemed the Romeo and Juliet romance o’ all time. He would wait outside the factory for her in his car every evening. She was besotted with him. I got a wee bit worried because her work began to fall off, and then she began to turn up late in the mornings, hungover and—what’s the word?—looking shagged.”

Hamish suppressed a grin. “You mean they were having an affair?”

“Aye, talk went around. I couldn’t understand why the time passed on his holidays with no sign of a ring on her finger. I mean, things were stricter in those days. Her work got worse. I sat her down and had a wee talk to her. I said unless she pulled her socks up, I would need to fire her. She had grown insolent and she tossed her hair and said she’d soon be married so I had better start looking for a replacement, and then the next day she didn’t turn up, and a week later, she sent a note saying she had resigned. I got another secretary and forgot about it, until, oh, it must have been three months later, I was walking along with the wife, and she said, “Let’s cross the road. There’s these awful bikers.” I looked and there was this gang of blokes on motorcycles outside this pub, all sideburns and black leather and metal studs, and hanging around the neck of one of the bikers was Agnes Macwhirter. What a change! Her hair was a brassy blonde and she looked like a tart. I thought, that one will be on the streets before long, but she married one of those hoodlums, called Macbean, I think. He subsequently ran a pub and then a hotel, and then I never heard any more of her, Macbean or Gilchrist. The odd thing was that I read all about the murder in the newspapers and I didn’t connect the Gilchrist who was murdered with the dental student. I don’t get out much and no one comes to see me. Will you be having a dram?”

“I’m driving,” said Hamish.

“Well, a cup of tea?”

He wanted to escape from the loneliness of the old, but he said, “Thank you,” and virtue had its reward, for after making tea, Mr. Goodman produced some old staff photos. “There’s Agnes, at the Christmas party.”

She had indeed been beautiful then, and with a voluptuous figure.

Here was a motive for murder at last, thought Hamish. He forced himself to spend an hour with Mr. Goodman and then made his escape, putting on the police siren this time and breaking all speed limits on the road north.

When he finally reached Lochdubh at seven in the evening, he went straight to the police station and reluctantly picked up the phone. He knew if he tried to question Mrs. Macbean himself, he would probably be thrown out of the hotel, and this was news he could not, should not keep to himself.

He told Jimmy Anderson what he had found out. “You’re a miracle, Hamish,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell Blair and we’ll pull her in now.”

“You can tell him, I want to be in on the questioning,” said Hamish. “He would never have found this out without me.”

“Aye, I’ll tell him. Give us a bit to get her back here.”

Hamish then phoned Sarah but was told she had gone out for dinner. He went along to the Italian restaurant, but she was not there, so he ate a solitary meal and then set out for Strathbane.

Mrs. Macbean had red plastic hair rollers in mis time. Hamish sat in a corner of the interrogation room with a policewoman while Blair began the examination.

“Why did you not tell us you knew Gilchrist afore you were married?”

“It was a long time ago,” she said angrily.

“You had an affair with him. Did you murder him?”

“No, I did not,” she said, folding her arms. “The only reason I went to him was because he pulled my teeth and didnae charge a thing.”

Hamish looking at her thin mouth, rollered hair, bad-tempered face, thick body and rounded shoulders could not find a trace left of that happy, laughing beautiful girl of the staff photograph.

“Where were you on the morning of the murder?”

“I was at the hotel.”

“Witnesses?”

“I was in my room. My daughter’ll tell ye.”

“We need an independent witness. One of the guests, someone like that.”

“Whit time was the murder?”

“Between ten and eleven as you very well know,” said Blair.

“Aye, I was at the hotel. I know. I phoned down to Johnny at the bar sometime about then and asked if the insurance men had been yet.”

“We’ll check with him. But I think you killed him,” Blair shouted right in her face.

She leaned back in her chair and looked at him with contempt. “Prove it.”

The questioning went on while Hamish studied her, his mind working furiously. He was suddenly sure she had not done it. But she had known Gilchrist, had loved him passionately. Jeannie Gilchrist had thought her husband had been married before because she sensed there was someone in his past he had not got over. Yet Gilchrist with his penchant for attractive young women would find nothing left in her to love, in what had become an ugly, bad-tempered woman. She could not even pay him to…He sat up. It was a long shot.

Hamish interrupted Blair. “Sir?”

Blair swung round furiously. “Whit?”

“I chust wanted to ask Mrs. Macbean where the money is, the money she promised to Gilchrist.”

There was a dead silence. One red roller fell from Mrs. Macbean’s head and came to rest in front of Blair.

Mrs. Macbean was now staring at Hamish, all truculence gone.

“The way I see it is this.” Hamish’s gentle Highland voice sounded in the stillness of the room. “You had loved Gilchrist more than you had ever loved any man. You are unhappy in your marriage. You could no longer attract him. He was having an affair with a pretty young girl. But he liked money, he was worried sick about money. I think for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds he would have gone off with you. What happened? Did he take the money and then refuse?” Hamish watched her face closely. “No, that’s not it. You’ve still got the money. You’d best tell us where for we’ll take your room apart, take the hotel apart. I know you’ve got it and we’ll keep you here for as long as it takes to get you to confess.”