Death of a Valentine - M. C. Beaton [56]
He bent his head to kiss her but the phone rang. Elspeth swore under her breath. She picked it up and then slammed it down again. Then she phoned reception and ordered that no calls were to be put through to her room.
Hamish hesitated in the doorway. “I’d better pack,” said Elspeth, heaving her suitcase on the bed.
He felt he did not have the courage now to try to kiss her.
“You can’t want a wee lassie like Josie to go out in this freezing cold,” protested Mrs. Wellington when he arrived at the manse.
“It’s her duty,” said Hamish. “Go and get her.”
Grumbling under her breath, Mrs. Wellington climbed the stairs to Josie’s room and opened the door. The room was in darkness and there was a powerful reek of whisky. She switched on the light. Josie lay on the bed, fully dressed. She was snoring loudly. An empty whisky bottle lay on the floor beside the bed.
It’s that Hamish Macbeth, thought Mrs. Wellington. He’s driven the poor lassie to the bottle. I’ll sort her out in the morning.
She went back downstairs. “Josie is very unwell,” she said. “She has a bad cold and should rest.”
“I’ll see her tomorrow,” said Hamish, thinking bitterly that Josie was absolutely useless.
Mrs. Wellington picked up the phone book and scanned the pages. Then she dialled a number. “Alcoholics Anonymous?” she asked. “When and where is your next meeting?”
The roads had been salted and gritted, and the Sutherland landscape lay dreaming whitely under a thick canopy of snow.
Hamish wondered where to start. He stopped in the main street in Braikie and checked his notebook for a list of phone numbers and addresses. He found the name Jessie Cormack. She lived with her parents in a flat above a greengrocer in a lane just off the main street.
He got out and walked there. He mounted the worn stone steps leading up from the street and rang the bell.
Jessie herself answered the door. “I was just about to go to bed,” she said. “What’s the matter? Is it Percy? Folks are saying he’s disappeared.”
“Can I come in?” Hamish removed his hat.
“You’d best come through to the kitchen,” said Jessie. “My parents are watching television.”
Hamish sat down and took out his notebook. “If Percy was worried about something, where would he go?”
She frowned in thought. “He might go to the minister.”
“What about friends?”
“All his friends were from the kirk but he’d stopped seeing them and he barely spoke to me.”
“Did Percy need money? If he thought he knew the killer, would he try to blackmail him?”
“Not Percy. He’d be more likely to do something stupid, like say to the murderer, ‘I know it was you and I’m going to the police.’ ”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Hamish drove to the minister’s home. Martha Tallent opened the door. “What do you want?” she whispered. “Everyone’s in bed.”
“You’ll do,” said Hamish. “Just a wee word.”
He followed her into the living room. “What’s it about?” asked Martha.
“Have you seen anything of Percy Stane?”
“No. Why?”
“He phoned me to say he had some information and now he’s missing.”
Her eyes widened with shock. “Will this fright never end? He hasn’t been here.”
“Any phone calls?”
“Not for me. A few for Father. Nothing sinister. Just the usual parish business, people wanted to know about wedding and funeral arrangements and things like that.”
“You heard them all?”
“Yes, we were all in the living room when they came in. I heard them all.”
“Did you know Percy?”
“Only slightly. He was obsessed with Annie. Oh, I remember now. It was last week. Father went over to the Flemings’ house to check the repairs to the kitchen and he found Percy loitering in the garden. When he asked what he was doing there, Percy said he wanted to be near the place she had died. Father told us he thought Percy was sick in the head and he wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Percy was the murderer.”
Hamish thanked her and went out again into the cold, frosty night. He went to the Flemings’ home. The police tape had been removed. There was something pitiless about the biting cold and the white snow which blanketed