When Harriet came to his hotel room at three in the afternoon, Hamish began to speak immediately, as if he had been discussing the case with her all through lunch. “Look, what about this? Heather actually succeeds in writing a blockbuster. Jessie types it and sends it off…but she puts her own name on it.”
Harriet looked doubtful. “Would such as Jessie recognise a block-buster? Then we’re back to means and opportunity. Jessie was not on the island when Heather was killed.”
“But Diarmuid was,” said Hamish. “That brief fling with Jane could have been a blind.”
“He’d need to have been awfully fast to follow Heather all the way over to the other side of the island, run all the way back, and then hop into bed with Jane,” pointed out Harriet, “Then striking her down in the dark when he was supposed to be searching for her – well, that’s hardly premeditated, and if there’s money for a book involved, her death would have to be worked out carefully beforehand.”
“There’s something there,” muttered Hamish. “I can feel it.”
He picked up the phone and dialed the editor in New York. “I’m sorry to keep bothering you, but it’s terribly important that I find out who wrote that book I was asking you about.”
“Look, all right, all right,” said the editor, “I’ll give you the author’s name. It’s Fiona Stuart.”
“Her address?”
The editor’s voice was terse. “Sorry, can’t do that.”
Hamish sadly replaced the receiver. “It’s no go. The book was written by someone called Fiona Stuart. Of course it could be a pseudonym.”
“Give up, Hamish,” said Harriet. “I’m beginning to think it way an accident.”
“lust one more try,” begged Hamish. “Let me speak to that agent of yours.”
Harriet sighed but phoned her agent in New York and told the surprised man that a Highland constable called Hamish Macbeth wished to speak to him about that block-buster.
“Well, you’re in luck,” said the agent as soon as Hamish was on the phone. “The advance publicity is out. It’s a saga of vice and crime and passion in the Highlands of Scotland, purple prose, I gather, at its worst. It’s a story about a sensitive heroine who is raped by some Highland lord in Chapter One, gang-raped by yuppies in Chapter Two, mugged in Chapter Three. Falls in love with the villain in Chapter Four, and eventually, after bags of sex and mayhem, meets her true love in tune for a steamy clinch in the last chapter, her true love being the one who raped her in Chapter One. It’s called Rising Passion and is reputed to out-Jackie Collins. Fiona Stuart is the name of the author.”
Hamish put down the phone and told Harriet what her agent had said. “Hardly a romance,” he commented.
“That’s romance these days,” said Harriet drily. “I bet it all bears no relation to the Highlands whatsoever, and what woman in her right mind would fall in love with a man who’d raped her?”
Hamish put his head in his hands. “There must be some connection.” He phoned the editor again. “I told you and told you,” snapped the editor, “I can’t tell you anything about her. Why don’t you phone her agent, for Chrissakes?”
“Can you give me the name of her agent?” asked Hamish. He waited. He was not hopeful at all. He expected the editor to read him out the name of a New York agent. Her American voice twanged over the line. “Here it is. Jessie Maclean, 1256b Billhead Road, Glasgow.”
“Thank you,” said Hamish faintly. He put down the phone and turned to Harriet. “Jessie’s the agent. How does that work?”
“Easy!” cried Harriet, looking excited. “All my money goes to my agent. He takes his percentage and then sends the rest to me. If he decided to cash the money and disappear abroad, there’s nothing I could do about it. Jessie takes Heather’s book and acts as agent. She tells Heather she’s sent it off to a New York publisher. Maybe, if she was shrewd enough, she’d send several copies round the New York publishers and then play one off against the other. Then she gets the stupendous offer of half a million. She doesn’t tell Heather, but she knows the minute the book is published, Heather would know about it.”
“But Heather might never have known about it,” said Hamish. “She – Jessie, I mean – could just sit back and not offer it to any publisher in Britain. That way there would be a good chance that Heather would never find out about it being published in America.”
“But don’t you see, Hamish, for half a million she probably sold the world rights.”
“Aye, but wait a minute, for that sort of money, wouldn’t any editor want to talk to the author?”
“Doesn’t need to. All the agent has to say is that the author is very retiring, so retiring she’s written under a pseudonym. Jessie can cope with the copy-edited manuscript and the galleys and all that.”
“So we’ve done it,” said Hamish, clutching his red hair.
“But how do we prove it? There’s no Fiona Stuart. It must be Heather’s book and Jessie pinched it. But proof? All Jessie has to say is that she wrote the book herself under an assumed name and acted as her own agent. There’s no law against that. And even if we could prove it was Heather’s book, how could we tie Jessie in with the murder? She wasn’t on the island. She didn’t know about Heather’s death until Diarmuid phoned her.”
“Wait a bit,” said Harriet. “I’ve just had an idea. Listen to this. Diarmuid’s the sort of weak man who has always had his life run for him by two women, Heather at home and Jessie in the office. Such a man likes to pretend he’s the one who makes all the decisions. What if Jessie phoned him?”
Hamish looked at her silently for a long moment and then phoned The Happy Wanderer. It was a bad line and Jane’s voice sounded tinny and very far away. Hamish clutched the phone hard as he asked, “Did Diarmuid receive any phone calls on the night Heather’s death was discovered?”
“He received one from some woman,” came Jane’s voice. “He took it in my office.”
“So far so good,” said Harriet when Hamish told her. “But she wasn’t on the island.”
They argued on about the pros and cons of the case until Harriet suggested they should see a movie and take their minds off it and return to the problem afresh. But nothing new occurred to either of them. Again, outside her door that night, Hamish wondered whether to try to kiss her, but again she had closed the door on him before he could summon up the courage.
Hamish lay in his bed, tossing and turning, thinking about Eileencraig. He fell into an uneasy sleep about two in the morning, and in his dreams he was being forced off the jetty by Geordie’s truck while the maid from The Highland Comfort stood and laughed. He awoke abruptly and switched on the bedside light. That maid, glimpsed briefly, in the shadowy darkness of the stair. Fat with red hair. Wait a bit. What of a Jessie minus horn-rimmed glasses, with pads in her cheeks to fatten them and a red wig on her head? He could hardly wait for breakfast to expound this latest theory to his Watson. “Won’t work,” said Harriet. “The hotel would ask for her employment card.”
“Not necessarily,” said Hamish. “Goodness, if all the employees in hotels in Britain had to have employment cards, well, there’d be self-service. And The Highland Comfort must find it nearly impossible to get staff.”
“I can’t buy that,” retorted Harriet. “There’s little enough work on these islands as it is. Look at all the women eager to work for Jane.”
“That’s different. I bet Jane pays high wages. It’s no use phoning up the owner of The Highland Comfort because he’s not going to admit to a copper that he hires staff without employment cards. The owner’s also the barman and he was complaining about having to do everything himself. Come on, Harriet, we’re going to search Jessie’s desk.”
Diarmuid was at home. He looked surprised at being asked for his office keys but surrendered them without too much of a fuss, which Hamish thought was highly suspicious, because surely a man would expostulate over a continuing investigation by a Highland bobby when his superiors had said the case was closed.
The estate office was in St. Vincent Street in the centre of Glasgow. Already it had a depressed air of failure about it. Outside, above the street, Christmas decorations winked on and off, intensifying the shadowy gloom of the deserted office.
Harriet switched oh the lights and looked about. “Well, this is easy. Her desk has her name on it. It’s probably locked.”
But the desk drawers slid open easily. Typing paper and carbons in the top drawer, headed stationery in the second, files in the third containing correspondence to do with the sale of houses.
“Nothing,” said Hamish, disgusted. “Absolutely nothing. We’d better take the keys back to Diarmuid.”
A grey drizzle was falling. Christmas was past and people were getting ready for the New Year’s Eve celebrations still to come, but the city wore a tired, tawdry air, as if the Calvinistic ghosts of Glasgow were frowning
