Hamish rang the bell and waited. The door was answered by a tall woman. She was dressed in a well- tailored tweed suit. The tweed was not new – such as Mrs. Barret-Wilkinson, Hamish guessed, would be too sophisticated to be caught wearing brand-new tweed – and yet the clothes sat oddly on her as if her normal style might be something more towny.
“Mrs. Barret-Wilkinson?”
“Yes. It is I.”
He judged her to be somewhere in her middle forties. She had thick brown hair pulled back into a knot, a long nose, and small, intelligent eyes. She looked something like a collie.
Hamish removed his cap. “I am Police Constable Hamish Macbeth. May I come in? I have some bad news.”
Most people would have blurted out, Is it my son? My daughter? Or some close relative. But she merely nodded and turned away.
He followed her into a dark hall and then into a large sitting room on the ground floor. It was decorated like a scaled-down version of the drawing room of a stately home. The sofa and chairs were upholstered in striped silk. The curtains at the windows were of heavier silk. Over the fireplace was a portrait of Mrs. Barret-Wilkinson – apparently an oil portrait – but Hamish’s sharp eyes registered that it was a photograph, cleverly treated to look like an oil painting. A log fire crackled on the hearth of a marble fireplace.
She sat down and gestured to him to do the same. Her stockings were thick, and her feet were encased in sensible brogues.
“So tell me your bad news,” she said calmly. Her voice was English upper class.
“I’m afraid your cleaner, Mrs. Gillespie, has been found murdered.”
“Good heavens! That’s a blow. Now where am I going to get another maid?”
She surveyed him quietly. Why didn’t she ask how Mrs. Gillespie was murdered and where? wondered Hamish.
“Tell me about Mrs. Gillespie,” said Hamish. “Was she a threat to anyone? Did anyone dislike her enough to kill her?”
She gave a little laugh. “My dear man, I was not on familiar terms with the home help. I haven’t the faintest idea. Might be the husband. It usually is.”
“The husband has an alibi. Where were you this morning, between, say, the hours of ten and eleven?”
Her face hardened. “You surely have not the impertinence to think that I would have anything to do with it?”
“I must eliminate everyone from my enquiries.”
“Well, I was here.”
“Any witnesses?”
“I am a bit isolated from the village. I don’t know if anyone saw me.”
“Mrs. Gillespie had an unexpectedly large amount of money in her bank account. We feel she may have been indulging in blackmail.”
“That’s ridiculous. She probably won the lottery.”
“The lottery would have meant a cheque. All the money was paid in cash.”
“I am beginning to find your insinuations a little bit impertinent. Please leave. If you persist in bothering me, I shall complain about you to your superiors.”
Hamish stood up. “I must warn you, this is just a preliminary investigation. You can expect a further visit from a detective.”
“See yourself out,” she snapped.
¦
Before he left, Hamish peered through the windows of the garage at the side of the house. He saw a powerful BMW. She could have raced over the hills to Braikie in record time with a car like that, waited outside the professor’s, and struck the cleaner down as she walked to her car. Hamish asked around the few houses in the village, but no one had seen Mrs. Barret-Wilkinson that morning. He learned that she was often absent for months at a time, and it was assumed she went to London. He wondered about Mrs. Barret-Wilkinson. What was she doing living alone so far from anywhere? And there had been something of the pretend-lady about her.
As he drove back towards Lochdubh, Hamish realised that Mrs. Wellington might know something interesting. She was always refreshingly direct.
Mrs. Wellington was in the manse kitchen, a gloomy relic of Victorian days with the rows of shelves meant for vast dinner services. There were still the old stone sinks.
“I heard about the murder,” said Mrs. Wellington. “I’m not surprised.”
Hamish sat down at the kitchen table and removed his hat.
“Why not?”
“She was such a nosy, bullying woman.”
“So why did you keep employing her?”
“I tried to fire her. She went to my husband in tears with some sob story. He told me it was my Christian duty to rehire her.”
“How was she nosy?”
“I occasionally caught her looking through drawers. She swore she had simply been cleaning the ledges inside. She was a great church-goer. One time my husband had just recovered from a nasty cold. He didn’t feel up to writing a sermon, and so he delivered an old one. Mrs. Gillespie recognised it and slyly asked me what people would think if they knew. I told her to go ahead and tell everyone, but I would let them all know the source of the nasty gossip. My! I remember I was so furious with her, I asked her if she went in for blackmail. She muttered something and scurried off.”
“The kettle’s boiling,” said Hamish, looking hopefully at the stove.
“I’ve no time to waste making tea or coffee for you, Hamish.”
“Apart from Professor Sander, do you know the other two women she worked for in Braikie, Mrs. Fleming and Mrs. Styles?”
“No, I don’t. They probably attend the kirk in Braikie. But I’ll tell you who will know – the Currie sisters. They sometimes attend church in Braikie for a bit of amusement.”
¦
The fact that the Currie sisters, Nessie and Jessie, twin spinsters of the parish, should find entertainment in church services came as no surprise to Hamish Macbeth. He knew local people who flocked to hear a visiting preacher with all the enthusiasm of teenagers going to a Robbie Williams concert.
Of course, he was not supposed to refer to them as spinsters any more. The police had been issued with a handbook of politically correct phrases. “Spinster’ was not allowed, nor, he thought sourly, as he headed for the spinsters’ cottage on the waterfront, was ‘interfering auld busybodies,” which was how he frequently damned them.
They were remarkably alike, both having tightly permed grey hair and thick glasses. He could tell them apart because Nessie was the more forceful one and her sister, Jessie, repeated phrases and sentences over again.
Other highlanders may have been alarmed to find a policeman on the doorstep, but it was almost as if the sisters had been expecting him.
“Come in,” said Nessie eagerly. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Waiting for you,” chorused her sister.
“Poor woman. Hit on the head with a bucket like that,” said Nessie. Bad news travels fast, thought Hamish.
“Was there a lot of blood?” asked Nessie.
“Blood,” intoned Jessie.
“Get the constable a cup of tea,” Nessie ordered her sister. Jessie left for the kitchen, grumbling under her breath.
Both sisters were small in size, and their furniture looked to Hamish as if it had come from a large doll’s house. He sank down into a small armchair and found his knees were up to his chin.
“I was wondering,” began Hamish, “if you could tell me anything about two ladies over in Braikie. Mrs. Gillespie worked for both of them. Mrs. Fleming and Mrs. Styles.”
