Death of a Macho Man

? Death of a Macho Man ?

8

When love grows diseas’d, the best thing we can do is put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingring and consumptive passion.

—Sir George Etherege

As a sign that Superintendent Peter Daviot knew who had uncovered Beck as the murderer of Rosie, Hamish Macbeth was invited to the interview in Strathbane when Beck was brought north. Blair was in a sour mood. Hamish, in the comer as usual, looked at Bob Beck with a sort of wonder. He was a grey-haired man with a slight stoop, thick spectacles through which pale eyes looked out at the world with a childlike innocence, a rather large nose and a small mouth. He was wearing a well-pressed grey suit and black lacing shoes. He was hardly the picture of a man who, driven mad with passion, had plunged a knife into the naked I back of Rosie Draly. Had it not been for the evidence of the tape, Hamish would have been tempted to think that he had merely been unlucky, that he had travelled to Sutherland to see Rosie on the very day of her murder.

Blair began the questioning, mildly enough for him. Beside Beck sat his solicitor, a thin, rabbity man who looked even more bewildered than the murderer.

“How long had you known the writer, Rosie Draly?”

“Years,” said Beck, and then said firmly, “to save time I would like to make a full confession.”

Blair smiled expansively. “That’s the ticket, laddie. Go ahead.”

“I fell in love with Rosie just after Beryl and I were married,” he said in a rusty voice, as if he had not spoken for some time. “That was in nineteen sixty-four. I wanted to leave Beryl, get a divorce, but then Beryl told me she was pregnant and Rosie told me I must do the decent thing and stay with her. I’ve hated Beryl for a long time.” He blinked round the room myopically. “But I coped, particularly after I got the job in Birmingham. Beryl did not want to move to Birmingham and that suited me. Rosie and I met…often. I wanted her, I wanted to have her, and she always held out that hope and I believed her because I was in the grip of an obsession. When I wasn’t with her, I thought of her all day long. Some days I thought I would take time off from this madness, but then the day would be so black and empty, I would need to return to my dreams. In my dreams, I always made love to her as no man has made love to a woman. She wrote to me regularly and I saved all her letters. And then she moved to Sutherland, and the letters became less and finally stopped. When I phoned her, she always seemed to cut me off. May I have a glass of water, please?”

They waited while a policewoman fetched him a glass of water, which he drank in one long thirsty gulp.

“At last I couldn’t bear it any longer,” he went on. “She had told me that Lochdubh was a gossipy place and I was never to come up and see her. But I drove up. I took a tape recording of the train going past because I knew I had to phone Beryl.

“When I set out, I had no thought of murder in my head. I did not need to ask directions to her cottage. When she first moved up to the Highlands, she had described it in every detail and where it was. I was stunned when she answered the door. She was harsh with me, abrupt. She said she had big things ahead of her, a good future. She was going to London to see her agent and couldn’t waste any time on me.” His eyes filled with tears and he blinked them away. “She said she was going to have a bath and I could take myself off. She walked into the bedroom and she stripped off, insolent in all he nakedness I had dreamt so long about. I haven’t much memory of what happened next. I hurt so dreadfully. All I could think of was hurting her as much as she had hurt me. I must have taken the knife out of the kitchen drawer. I went back to the bedroom. She was bending over the bed, still naked. I plunged the knife into her back. I’m no surgeon. I didn’t know where to strike, didn’t even think of it. But she died instantly. One minute she was alive and the next she was as cold as mutton. And then all the hurt and rage left me and I was looking back on a life ruined by obsession. All I could think was to save myself, not make myself a sacrifice for such a woman. I found letters from me and some of her letters to me still on a computer disc. She never handwrote letters, and I burnt them. The rest you’ve found out – how I went to the Cluny Motor Inn, phoned Beryl with the tape of the train playing in the background, and how I threw it in the rubbish.” His voice died away. Blair leaned forward, his beefy shoulders hunched, suppressed excitement quivering in every part of his unlovely body. “But you were up here afore,” he said. “Tell us how you killed Randy.”

Hamish leaned back in his chair and sighed and waited for the inevitable denial. To his honor he heard Beck say, “So you know about that too?”

“Aye,” said Blair triumphantly. “So tell us about it.”

Hesitantly Beck said, “She said she had met this most interesting man. It was in one of her rare letters, but I read between the lines and I went mad with jealousy. I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast place on the road to Lochdubh; don’t ask me what it was called, I was in such a passion, I can’t remember. I bought a shotgun in Birmingham. They’re easy to get if you know which pub to go to. I bought myself a wig and put on a pair of sunglasses and scouted around until I had identified him and then I followed him home. I had some chloral hydrate. It was my mother’s. I called on him and said I was a friend of Rosie’s and had dropped by for a chat. He offered me a drink. When he was out of the room, I poured the chloral hydrate into his glass and then, after he had drunk it, I waited for it to take effect. I bound up his hands because I was frightened he would wake up. I shot him, turned up the heating to conceal the time of death, just in case I had been seen, and then I drove south again, stopping only to throw the shotgun into a peat bog.”

“You’re lying,” said Hamish Macbeth.

Blair’s face turned purple with rage. Here he was on the edge of winding up the whole business and this rat, Macbeth, was trying to spoil it. Like every other human being, Blair: judged other people’s motives by his own. Hamish Macbeth was trying to take his success away from him.

“You!” he roared at Hamish. “Get oot o’here!”

And so Hamish left Beck signed a written statement and the next day the newspapers were full of the solving of the two murders.

¦

The press left Lochdubh, satellite dishes, cables, cameras and all. The rain continued to fall steadily and Hamish Macbeth was left alone with an unsolved murder on his hands. He believed that Beck had murdered Rosie – all that passion, all that obsession had been genuine. But why on earth had the man confessed to murdering Randy? All the details of the case had been published in the newspapers, so he would have known of every detail, from the tying of the wrists to the chloral hydrate in the drink. Blair, so anxious to believe the confession, would not check it thoroughly, would not find out who Beck’s mother’s doctor had been and whether he had ever prescribed chloral hydrate. Could it be that Beck might have been as burnt up with hatred for his wife as he had been with passion for Rosie? Was this his way of getting even, so that Beryl would find out she was married to a double murderer.

He sat down in his office and began to write out a short list of suspects. There was Geordie Mackenzie, who had been sorely humiliated by Randy; there was Annie Ferguson; there was Andy MacTavish, the forestry worker; and even Archie Maclean was suspect. And then there was Willie Lamont and Lucia. Beck had shown what a mild man in the grip of passion could do. He now could not interview any of them officially. But he could talk to them as friends. He could say that he did not believe Beck had murdered Randy and he knew that piece of gossip would go around the village like wildfire. He had not seen anything of Betty and felt he ought to phone her but did not like to find that Priscilla was answering the hotel phones. He shivered. Not only was it still raining but the weather was turning colder. He lit the wood-burning stove in the kitchen so that he would have a warm room to return to, pulled on his raincoat, settled his peaked cap down about his ears and went wearily out into the deluge. He headed in the direction of Geordie’s cottage, reflecting that he had never been there before. It was a trim, low-storeyed, whitewashed building. The garden was neat and orderly, with small flowerbeds edged with scallop-shells. He rang the bell and waited.

After a few moments Geordie answered the door and smiled a welcome. Hamish thought that none of his suspects would feel they had anything to fear from the police any more. Geordie led the way into a small living- room. It was as soulless and characterless as Rosie’s and just as cold.

“Coffee?” asked Geordie. “I just put the kettle on.”

“No, thank you,” said the normally mooching Hamish and Geordie looked at the tall policeman with a flicker of unease at the back of his eyes. “Well, well,” he said, rubbing his hands, “sit down, sit down. It was kind of you to call. What a business, eh? Here we all are thinking of international crime and gangsters and it was that man, Beck, all along.”