Death of a Chimney Sweep - M. C. Beaton [23]
“I’ve heard you see things,” said Betty gamely. “I think maybe we’re looking in the wrong place and the murders might have been committed by someone local.”
Angus studied her for a long moment. She wondered uneasily what he was thinking. Angus was not thinking about Betty. He was thinking maliciously about Hamish Macbeth.
He had overheard a tourist last summer asking about the “famous seer” and heard Hamish say with a laugh, “I think he relies more on local gossip than second sight.”
Angus was vain and had the highland habit of plotting revenge long after the event.
“Now, Elspeth got a lot of her information up here before,” he said, “from Hamish Macbeth. Very keen on Hamish is our Elspeth. We all thought at one time that they’d get married, but, och, he kept backing off. Don’t interfere there, my girl, or you’ll really hurt Elspeth and she would not like you getting information that would put her in the shade.”
“I would do nothing to hurt Elspeth,” said Betty. “I must be on my way.”
Aye, and straight from here to the police station, thought Angus cynically.
He watched from the window as she hurried down the brae, and then he clutched at the sill. It seemed as if a dark shadow was creeping across the heather to engulf her. He shook his head and the vision disappeared.
But Hamish Macbeth was not at his police station. He was on his road to Inverness. He thought not enough had been done to investigate the woman who had helped to abduct Philomena.
He drove into the car park of the Dancing Scotsman, went into the bar, and asked to speak to the waitress who had previously been interviewed by the police. A plump waitress came forward wearing her uniform of frilly white blouse and Buchanan tartan pinafore dress.
“I’m sure I cannae tell ye more than I’ve already told the police afore,” she said.
“Maybe we could just sit down and have a wee chat,” suggested Hamish. The waitress, whose name was Rose Cameron, looked around the near-empty bar.
“Won’t do any harm. It’s fair quiet.”
“I know you’ve been through all this before and I’ve read the reports. But if you could just be describing her to me again.”
Hamish was in plainclothes and was driving an old car borrowed from the garage in Lochdubh, not wanting to alert Inverness police that he was poaching on their patch.
Rose was quite old for the job. Her face was wrinkled, and her sagging mouth showed that she had lost all her teeth some time ago. “Let’s see,” she said. “She was a bit on the fat side, dressed in a suede jacket and trousers. Her hair was hidden under one of those tweed fishing hats.”
“Face?”
“Roundish. Maybe she’d been to the dentist because she had a wee bittie difficulty speaking, as if her mouth was still frozen.”
“What kind of accent?”
“Posh. Lowlands. She came up to the bar for her first drink afore she joined that dead woman and I heard her telling the barman she was from Edinburgh.”
Hamish brightened. He now had one fact that the police had missed.
“And she didn’t pay by credit card?”
“No, cash. We were busy at the time so I didn’t take much notice.”
“Did the Inverness police examine the tape from the security cameras?”
“They tried. But the boss is a bit mean ower small things and there wasn’t any tape in there.”
“She surely wasn’t wearing gloves. There must have been some fingerprints.”
“By the time they got around to asking, her glass had been washed and the table she sat at wiped clean.”
Hamish asked a few more questions and then returned to his hired car, deep in thought. Would a ruthless murderer want a woman around who could identify him? Maybe blackmail him?
The wives of his four suspects were all in Guildford at the time of Philomena’s abduction and murder with plenty of witnesses. He frowned as he remembered the police reports.
The four men had pretty much alibied one another. But it would take only one of them to be the murderer with his mates covering up for him.
He drove back to Lochdubh as fast as