get me charged with rape.”
“It was just a joke, that’s all,” said Kylie.
“It’s a joke I don’t like, so I am about to drive you to police headquarters where you will be charged with wasting police time, attempting to coerce an officer of the law and God knows what else.”
Kylie began to cry, her vamp makeup running down her cheeks.
“Och, I’ll tell you,” said Tootsie, “if you promise not to charge her.”
“I can’t promise anything,” said Hamish. “But if you are open and honest with me, I’ll think about it.”
Mrs. Wellington snapped open her capacious handbag and produced a packet of tissues which she handed to Kylie.
“Go on, Kylie,” urged Tootsie. “Tell him, or I will.”
Kylie blew her nose and then scrubbed at her face. Clean of makeup, her face looked much younger and almost vulnerable.
“Mr. Gilchrist took me out to Inverness a few times, posh restaurants. It was a bit o’ a laugh. Then the last time – ”
“When was that?” asked Hamish sharply.
“A month ago. He stopped the car on the road back from Inverness and he was all over me. He said I had cost him enough and it was time to pay back. I told him to get stuffed and he slapped me across the face – hard. I said I would tell everyone in Braikie and he seemed to get frightened. He says to me, he says, that if I kept my mouth shut, he would buy me a car.”
And where did he plan to get the money for that, wondered Hamish.
“So I kept quiet, but when I called on him and I says, ‘Well, where’s the car?’ he told me, ‘What car,’ so I said I would tell everyone and he said I was the town tart and no one would believe me.”
“So why didn’t you just tell me this?” demanded Hamish. “Why go in for this stupid trick?”
Kylie and her friends, stared at him in mulish silence.
“You should charge them,” said Mrs. Wellington.
“I don’t think there’s any need for that, Mrs. Wellington,” said Hamish. “But these young people are in need of spiritual guidance, so I’ll just be waiting outside while you give them some.”
Mrs. Wellington snapped open her huge handbag again and drew out a Bible. As Hamish left, he could hear her voice booming away.
He stood outside the gate and looked up at the burning, bright Sutherland stars.
Gilchrist had been a philanderer. Therefore it followed, it could have been a crime of passion, perhaps committed by some furious husband or lover. Could Kylie have got some of the local youth to do it for her? Hardly. They would have beat him up and spray-painted the walls of his surgery, that was more their style.
He thought again about the Smiley brothers. Whether their still had been used to make nicotine poison was something to be considered. After he escorted Mrs. Wellington home, he would drive back to the Smileys’ croft and see if there was any sign of activity.
After some time, Mrs. Wellington emerged. “I think I have talked some sense into their immoral heads. But how did you guess, Hamish, what she had planned for you?”
“Just a feeling,” said Hamish.
After he had followed her to the manse and seen her safely indoors, he went back to the police station and changed into a black sweater and black trousers and then set out on the Braikie road again.
He parked the Land Rover some way away from the Smileys’ property and continued on foot.
The night was very quiet. He went along the side of the new extension and stopped at the door. He flicked his pencil torch at the padlock. It was open. He quietly opened the door and let himself into the darkness of the shed. He flashed the torch around. It looked just as it had been before, but mis time he began to search the place inch by inch, pausing every so often to cock his head and listen in case he heard some movement from outside. He had almost given up when he impatiently kicked aside the straw in a pen in the comer. A large new-looking trapdoor was revealed underneath.
With a smile of triumph, he lifted the heavy hasp and swung the trapdoor open. A flight of wooden steps led downwards. He went quietly down the stairs, stood at the bottom and flashed the light around.
A huge still occupied one corner, pipes and vats and barrels and a whole bottling plant.
Got you, thought Hamish.
His torch flicked over the size of the still. It seemed too huge an apparatus to make a little nicotine poison.
Satisfied, he backed towards the trapdoor. This could not wait until the morning. He would return to the police station and get a squad over from Strathbane.
And then just as he had nearly reached the stairs, there was an almighty crash as the trapdoor was slammed down.
He darted up the stairs. “Stourie! Pete!” he yelled. “Open this door at once!”
But the only answer was the sound of retreating footsteps.
He went up the stairs and pushed at the trapdoor above his head but he could not even budge it an inch. He shouted and yelled and banged. There was nothing now but silence.
Hamish was suddenly frightened. Did the Smileys plan to leave him down here to rot? There was the police Land Rover parked down the road, but what if they knew how to hot-wire it to get it started. And no one knew where he was.
¦
Sarah Hudson banged on the door of the police station and then went round and knocked on Hamish’s bedroom window. She had been unable to sleep. She had felt that she had treated Hamish Macbeth very badly and had decided that as the night was cold but fine that she would go down and wake him up and take matters from there. But there was no reply and the police station had that empty atmosphere any building has when the resident is away from home.
Feeling dejected, she turned and began to walk along the waterfront, keeping to the shadow of the cottages, for she suddenly wondered what any local might think of her, if she was seen.
She heard the sound of a vehicle approaching and pressed back into the Currie sisters’ privet hedge.
The police Land Rover passed her followed by a truck. So Hamish wasn’t alone.
She waited in the darkness of the hedge. Then the truck, this time with two men in it, came past her.
She watched it disappear and then headed back to the police station. The Land Rover stood at the side of the building. But there were no lights on in the police station. Surely Hamish wasn’t creeping off to bed in the dark.
She went to the kitchen door and knocked. Silence.
She stood mere, her hand to her mouth. What was going on? Was Hamish off on some secret assignment? Had two fellow officers driven the Land Rover back for him?
She tried the handle of the kitchen door. Locked.
But someone as easygoing as Hamish was the type of man who probably usually forgot his keys. Had he left one around under a flower pot or in the gutter the way country people often still did?
She stood on tiptoe and ran her hand along the guttering on the low roof but found nothing. She dropped to her knees and peered around in the darkness and then lifted away the doormat and felt the ground underneath with her fingers.
Those fingers closed on a key. “Now let’s see if I can find out what’s going on,” she muttered.
She unlocked the door, went in and shouted, “Hamish!” at the top of her voice. No answer. She searched through the small station, ending up in the office and looking through the papers and notes on the desk for some clue.
And then all at once she remembered Hamish saying he wanted to find out about the Smiley brothers and saying they could be dangerous.
She then stared at the phone. “I hope I’m doing the right thing,” she said aloud, “or Hamish will never forgive me.” She looked up the phone number of police headquarters at Strathbane and began to dial.
She was put through to a tired Jimmy Anderson, who was on night duty. He listened carefully to her story about the suspected still, the Smiley brothers, and then how two men had driven the Land Rover, parked outside the police station and left.
“I’ll see to it,” said Jimmy. “Why didn’t the silly fool tell us about this?”
