Hamish Macbeth 02; Death of a Cad

didn’t want to lose her. I loved her.” He began to cry in a helpless, dreary way.

“Your wife may have had a soft spot for the captain,” said Hamish, “but she loved money more than anything or anybody. She knew now what the captain had known. Henry was awake that night after the party, watching and waiting. Perhaps he planned to follow Bartlett when the captain went out as planned with Mr Pomfret, wait until they separated, shoot Bartlett, and throw the blame on Mr Pomfret. But he happened to see the captain going out long before the appointed time. Having rigged it to look like suicide, he returned and went to bed, confident he would never be found out. Luck had been on his side. No-one else had been awake when the captain went out.

“Then Vera told him she knew Bartlett was the author of the play. I think Henry agreed to pay her while waiting his chance. As in the first murder, he waited for the right opportunity and seized it. He took a can of roach powder from the cupboard under the sink in the school kitchen, poured it into a bowl of cake mix, and then baked that batch of cakes himself. It was easily done. Everyone was milling about, beating up cake mix and putting cakes in the oven.”

“But Vera couldn’t have suspected Henry,” cried Priscilla. “She believed Freddy had done it. She was proud of him.”

“She wanted to think Freddy had done it. It made her into the femme fatale she’d always wanted to be. It removed any fear of Henry. Henry must have denied he murdered Bartlett. He wouldn’t have wanted Vera to know that as well. She would have asked for double the money. Henry put the gloves into Freddy’s room, a clumsy trick, but it paid off. Freddy thought Vera had murdered Bartlett, and so he confessed.

“I took a lot of the baking to the fair myself. But other people were going up and carrying stuff as well. Henry and Priscilla arrived with Mr and Mrs Wellington. They had boxes of cakes in the car. All Henry had to do was extract his box and put it with all the things he’d bought at the fair.

“I don’t think he even needed to give Vera the cakes. He knew her passion for sweet stuff. All he had to do was put them in her room. He had nothing to do with that dummy strung up over her bed. The Chief Superintendent here already knows that was a particularly nasty trick played by Jessica Villiers and Diana Bryce.”

Jessica began to cry, but Diana looked defiantly round the room.

“You can’t arrest us for a trick,” she said. “We didn’t murder Peter.”

“But Henry Withering did,” said Hamish flatly.

Henry leaned his head against the back of his chair. He appeared very relaxed and amused.

“You’re guessing and you know it,” he said. “You haven’t a shred of proof.”

Hamish went out to the hall and came back in carrying a large box.

“After the supposed suicide of Bartlett had been discovered to be murder, you gave this parcel to Charles French of London Television News. You told him it was some clothes you didnae want and he was to leave it at their reception desk in London and you would pick it up when you went back south. French didn’t think anything about it. You are a famous playwright. Perhaps you gave him some exclusive background.”

Hamish opened the box. “In here,” he said, “we have cleaning equipment from the gun room, and a pair of thin plastic gloves like the kind women wear when they’re bleaching their hair. In the bathroom cabinet in your room, there was a clutter of stuff left by previous occupants, including a hairdressing product for bleaching the hair. There is also a raincoat stained with gun oil. It was clever of you. The post office would have told us if anyone from the castle had posted a parcel.” He nodded to Anderson and MacNab.

“Wait a bit,” said Colonel Halburton-Smythe. “You cannot arrest Mr Withering. He’s my daughter’s fiance!”

“All right,” said Henry. “Now you’ve got that parcel, there’s no point in me pretending any longer. But why couldn’t it have been anyone other than you, Macbeth? To be found out by the local yokel!” He gave a harsh laugh. “But it was the way you described it. Peter was sharing my flat. You’re right about him adopting other people’s enthusiasms. I was working on a play, Animal Firm, and he said he never went to the theatre because you couldn’t see jolly plays any more. Then he said he would write one. God, how I laughed. But he had tremendous energy and could do without sleep and he worked day and night. Before he could send it to anyone, he started pursuing some girl, I forget her name. He forgot all about the play. Anyway, he wasn’t paying any rent, and I told him to leave.

“I came across his stupid play one evening after Animal Firm, the best thing I’d ever written, had been rejected by the National Theatre. Peter’s play was so awful, it was priceless. I was about to throw it away when I thought suddenly that if I polished it up a bit and changed the title, it might appeal to all the Peter Bartletts of this world who wanted something that wouldn’t strain their brains. I gave it to an impresario who thought up the idea of having it expensively dressed and bringing back some of the famous lords and dames of the theatre.

When it took off, I thought I’d better square Peter, but I couldn’t find him. I didn’t know he’d gone back to the army. When all the publicity began to appear and Peter didn’t get in touch with me, I thought I was safe. The title was different and a good lot of the lines were mine – or rather, I’d polished up Peter’s lines.

“When I saw him here, I felt sick. But it dawned on me very quickly he hadn’t a clue I’d used his play. I didn’t think he’d be likely to see it. It was ages since he’d been to the theatre. Then Pruney started quoting from it. He came to my room that night. I told him he had no way of proving it was his play, but he said he could dig up some old friends he had told at the time about it, and that he would make enough of a stink to cast doubts on the authorship. Then he said I could have the fame if he could have the money – all of it. I agreed, but I knew I’d have to kill him. Sooner or later, he’d tell someone. He was proud it had been put on and thought it a famous joke. He wouldn’t have kept it secret long, not with the way he drank.” Henry fell silent. Anderson and MacNab moved towards him, but stopped as he began to speak again.

“I didn’t think of shooting him. Not at first. I stayed up all night, keeping a watch on his door. I saw Vera go in and Pruney listening, but I couldn’t get nearer to hear what was said. I thought if he came out to go on the prowl, I’d push him down the stairs or something like that. I nearly fell asleep, nearly was asleep when he came out with his shooting togs on. The rest was as you described. I put the cleaning stuff and a raincoat in that box and hid it in a bush behind one of those pillars at the gates. I knew I had to move the box because sooner or later the police would find it. Funny, if I’d just wiped my fingerprints off everything and dumped it…Still, I can’t think of everything,” said Henry with a ghastly social smile. “I gave the parcel to that journalist. He never thought anything odd about it. I was lucky all along. Yes, Vera blackmailed me. I had to make love to her to convince her I was a gentle, caring soul and not a murderer. I promised to pay her to keep quiet about the play. But I knew I’d have to get rid of her as well.” He turned in his chair towards Priscilla, who shrank away from him. “No publicity is bad publicity. Isn’t that right, darling?” As Anderson and MacNab came up on either side of him, he rose to his feet. “You should see your stupid faces,” he said. And then he began to laugh. He was still laughing as they led him from the room.

The trial of Henry Withering, with all its attendant publicity, was over at last. Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, who had vague thoughts of returning to her job, stayed on at Tommel Castle instead. Winter was settling down on the Sutherland mountains.

Colonel and Mrs Halburton-Smythe had been shocked and shaken over Henry Withering’s arrest. Their shock had not improved their attitude to their daughter. Fear of what might have happened to her made them treat her more like a fragile blossom than ever. They kept begging her not to return to London, to stay in Sutherland where it was ‘safe’ from doubtful suitors such as Henry.

It was when they said they had invited Jeremy Pomfret to dinner and made it obvious they had begun to look on him in the light of a possible son-in-law that Priscilla decided to make her escape back to London.

Jeremy, who had sworn not to stay at Tommel Castle again, had nonetheless accepted the invitation. He had enjoyed all the publicity surrounding the murder trial and seeing his picture iri the newspapers, and so the cold castle had become endowed with a certain glamour in his eyes. It was small comfort to Priscilla that that glamour obviously did not extend to herself. She had not seen Hamish since the day Henry had been accused of murder. Her parents were, irrationally, furious with Hamish, blaming him obscurely for all the notoriety that had descended on their home.

Priscilla thought Hamish might have gone to Strathbane, for surely the solving of two murders would be enough to give a village constable instant promotion. She was surprised one morning to hear Jenkins complaining that Hamish Macbeth was becoming lazier and ruder every day.

All at once Priscilla wanted to see Hamish, to talk about the murder, to talk as much of it out of her brain as possible. It was a forbidden subject at Tommel Castle.