There was a restless stirring among the small audience. I didn’t know Hamish could look so cold and hard, thought Priscilla illogically. She glanced round at the others. All were staring fixedly at Blair, as if willing the detective to prove Hamish wrong.
“How did you come to this ridiculous conclusion?” scoffed Colonel Halburton-Smythe. “Murder, indeed! Those grouse and cartridges don’t mean a thing.”
“Well,” said Hamish, “you remember when we found the captain, he had been climbing over the fence when he was shot.”
“Yes, yes,” said the colonel testily.
Hamish glanced quickly at the others who had come with them to the scene of the shooting – Henry, Freddy, and Lord Helmsdale. They all nodded.
“Good,” said Hamish. “We’re all agreed. Now, it is obvious Bartlett was coming in this direction, away from the moor. So, that could only mean, as his game bag was empty and his gun was still loaded, that he had been unable to bag his brace and was giving up and heading back here. He should have unloaded the gun, but people are careless sometimes, and that’s how they shoot themselves accidentally.”
“Just like Bartlett did,” said Blair, looking triumphantly around the room, but Hamish continued as if he had not heard him.
“But I stepped easily over that fence, and the captain’s legs are – were – as long as mine, so there was no need for him to use the gun to help himself over. That’s what made me suspicious in the first place. So I checked the game bag again and it wasn’t empty.” There was a sharp intake of breath from someone in the room. Hamish turned and dipped again into the plastic bag. From it, he produced a small box for carrying fishing hooks. He took something out and held it up. They craned forward to see. It was a tiny feather, a greyish feather with a brown tip. “A breast feather from a grouse,” said Hamish. “And there was another one.” He held it up. “It was lying on the ground near the body.
“It looked to me as if the captain
“Look, laddie,” said Blair heavily, “say Bartlett was going to cheat and get his grouse before the agreed time, then why wouldn’t he have been the one who hid them in the heather, ready to be picked up quickly and get them first to the castle to win the bet, and then to the helicopter to ship them to London?” Everyone knew by this time what the helicopter had been doing there.
Hamish’s soft voice went inexorably on. “The captain was too experienced on the moors. He would know there would be a great likelihood of a fox picking them up. And if not, the crows would have found them. There was already a crow picking at this pair when we got to them. They wouldn’t have been in any fit state to go to London.”
“This is all very well,” said Diana in a strained voice. “But I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at. How did the murderer go about it?”
“This is how I think it happened,” said Hamish. “I believe that the murderer intended to kill the captain sometime during their stay here. If the captain had gone out at nine o’clock as agreed, he couldn’t have managed it, what with people up and awake. He would have waited for another opportunity.
“But the captain decided to cheat and left at dawn. The murderer must have seen him, realized what he was up to, and saw his opportunity to kill him without a witness. He followed him out to the moor, taking a gun and cartridges with him.
“It wouldn’t have been easy to find him in the poor light, but when the captain got his brace, the murderer followed the sound of the shots. He met the captain on his way back here to the castle and they came face to face as the captain stepped over that fence.
“The murderer fired both barrels at point-blank range. What he did next shows he is a very clever man indeed. He opened the captain’s gun and found it unloaded. He checked the game bag and found the grouse, so he knew the gun had been fired. He took the spent cartridges from his own gun, the ones that had killed the captain, and put them in the captain’s gun, closed it again, then carefully tangled it in the gorse bush. Now it looked like an accident.
“But our murderer was more than just clever. He examined the captain’s pockets and came across a handful of unused cartridges. They were number seven shot, and the captain was killed with number six shot. So the murderer took the number sevens and replaced them with the number sixes he had brought with him.
“Then he had to get rid of the grouse, otherwise the police would wonder why his gun was still loaded
“What the police found was a dead man full of number six shot, two spent number six cartridges in his gun, and more number sixes in his pocket. The murderer was sure everyone would think it was accidental death. It should have been the perfect murder.” He glanced sharply at the faces turned towards him, faces that were no longer looking to Blair for help. They all looked shocked and strained.
“But the fence and the feather in the game bag made me suspicious, so I arranged with Angus and our dogs to do a bit of tracking this morning. We backtracked over the captain’s trail, in the direction away from the castle and, sure enough, we found the freshly used cartridges, number sevens. It took us a couple of hours, tracking in increasing circles away from the spot where the body was found, to find the grouse.
“I think that when the birds are examined, it’ll be found they were shot around the morning of the twelfth and that they were killed with number seven shot.”
“It’s still all speculation,” said Blair furiously.
“I should suppose,” said Hamish, “that his gear is still in his room and his car is still out front. I suggest we search both and see if he had any more cartridges with him.”
“Go and have a look, Jenkins,” barked the colonel.
“This is all a muddle, you village idiot,” said Blair, turning a dangerous colour of puce. “You keep calling the murderer a ‘he.’ How do you know it was a man?”
“I don’t,” said Hamish. “It could just as easily have been a woman.”
Voices rose in a furious buzz. “He’s a better fiction writer than I am,” came Henry’s sharp tones. And Mrs Halburton-Smythe’s voice, shaky with tears: “This is a nightmare. You must stop Macbeth making up these lies, Priscilla.”
Jenkins came back into the room, carrying a small box. He handed it to Colonel Halburton-Smythe. The colonel opened it and looked gloomily down at the contents. “Number seven,” he said in a hollow voice.
Everyone looked at Blair again as if he were their last hope. Hamish studied their faces. They were all, even Priscilla, willing Blair to say that Hamish Macbeth had made a mistake.
But Blair’s heavy head was down on his chest. “I’ll need to call the boys in,” he mumbled.
“Speak up!” demanded Lord Helmsdale.
“I’ll need tae get statements from ye,” roared Blair suddenly, making them all jump. “This is a bad business. And you’ll all need tae stay here until your rooms are searched. Come wi’ me, sir,” he said to the colonel.
The colonel followed him out. The rest stayed where they were, stricken, looking accusingly at Hamish, and listening to the mumble of voices from the hall.
Blair was in a quandary. He sweated to think what his superiors would say if they learned he had been made to look a fool by the local bobby. But if he could get Hamish out of the investigation before anyone from Strathbane arrived, then he could make it look as if he, as a diligent officer, had been unsatisfied with the accident verdict and had returned to the scene of the crime.
“Look here, sir,” he said in oily, wheedling tones. “This is going to take a wee bit of time. Now I am sure you don’t want the television and press to harass your wife, daughter, or guests. If you would let me set up headquarters here with MacNab and Anderson, we’ll soon get to the bottom of this.”
“You’ll find this dreadful murder had nothing to do with me or my guests,” said Colonel Halburton- Smythe.
“Exactly,” cried Blair. “And you won’t want your family or guests troubled with a lot of haranguing, which they would get if they allowed that Macbeth to stay around.”
