—
As he drove to Braikie, Hamish wondered what Fred Sutherland had to tell him. Whatever Fred had to tell him about Kylie was probably something he knew already.
There is very little daylight in the north of Scotland in whiter and Hamish, still tired, still with sore ribs, felt he had been living in a long dark tunnel for some time.
He parked outside the dress shop. Slowly he mounted the stairs, past the dentist’s surgery. He then realised he had been making his way up the stone staircase by the light of the street lamp outside. There was no light on the staircase. He went down to the surgery door and looked up. The light-bulb on the socket on the first landing was not there.
He went back to the Land Rover and got his torch and began to climb the stairs again. His senses were alert now, listening for any movement, any sound, as wary of danger as an animal in the woods.
He knocked at Fred Sutherland’s door. Then he flashed the torch upwards. No bulb in the light socket here either.
He tried the handle. The door swung slowly open. “Fred,” called Hamish. “Fred Sutherland?”
Was this another trick by Kylie and her friends? But then old Fred would never be a party to it.
He found the light switch and pressed it down. The little entrance hall was bleak and bare.
He then went into the living room. Fred Sutherland lay dead on the floor, his head bashed in. Someone had struck him a cruel and savage blow on the forehead.
Hamish knelt down by the old man and felt for the pulse which he knew already he would not find. His first guilty and miserable thought was that this was what became of involving the public in a murder enquiry. He saw the phone on a little table by the fireplace and went and lifted the receiver. The phone was dead. He looked down at the cord and saw that it had been cut near the wall.
He darted down the stairs to the Land Rover and contacted Strathbane on the radio and then, that done, went back up the stairs to wait. Without touching anything, he studied the scene. There was no sign of forced entry. The television set was still there. No drawers had been ransacked. It looked as if Fred had not kept the outside door locked. Someone had walked in and bludgeoned him to death in the doorway of his living room. Hamish then looked sadly at the old framed photographs dotted about the room: Fred, handsome and gallant in army uniform, Fred with a pretty girl on his arm, then a wedding photograph.
The contingent from Strathbane finally arrived, headed by Detective Chief Inspector Blair, red-eyed and truculent, with pyjama bottoms peeking out from below his trousers, showing he had been roused from bed.
Hamish told Blair about the message from the old man. “Right,” snapped Blair, “let’s get this girl in for questioning. Why didn’t you tell us about her before, Macbeth?”
“I had only just found out,” lied Hamish. “I have a report typed up I was going to send over to you tomorrow.”
Blair looked at him suspiciously. “Your trouble, Macbeth, is that you like to keep everything to yourself. If I find you caused this old boy’s death by not reporting what you know about this girl to us in due time, I’ll have ye off the force.”
Hamish gave him Kylie’s address. He was sure she would not tell about the entrapment – unless of course she panicked when the police arrived and assumed that was why they were there.
When two detectives and a policewoman had been dispatched to Kylie’s address, Blair turned again to Hamish. “So what was in this mysterious report o’ yours about mis girl?”
“There was nothing much,” said Hamish. “She’d been out on a date with Gilchrist and he made a pass at her. She threatened to tell everyone about it and he promised to buy her a car. A month passed. No car. When she approached him, he told her no one would believe her.”
“You should have phoned all that in right away,” howled Blair. “God protect me from daft, stupid Highland policemen!” Blair hailed from Glasgow. But guilt-ridden Hamish was not going to tell his superior officer that he had requested Fred to ask about and find out what he could about Kylie.
He asked if he should be at Strathbane for the questioning of Kylie Fraser, and Blair grunted, “We’ll see. Where does she work.”
“In the chemists along the street.”
“We’d best be having a word with her boss. What’s his name?”
Hamish remembered going into the shop, remembered the small fussy man. What had Kylie called him? “Cody,” he said suddenly. “Mr. Cody.”
“Well, to save you hanging around here, find out where Cody lives and get yourself over there.”
“But Kylie Fraser…”
“Och, I think we’ll do just fine withoot the great brain o’ Hamish Macbeth. And how many times do I have tae tell ye tae address me as ‘sir’?”
Hamish looked up Mr. Cody’s home address in the telephone book and took himself off. He was tortured with pictures of poor dead Fred Sutherland who would still be alive if one daft policeman had not asked him to investigate a murder.
Mr. Cody lived in a trim bungalow called Our House on the edge of the town. Hamish glanced at his watch. It was only ten at night. It seemed as if a lifetime had passed since he had left Lochdubh that evening.
He rang the doorbell and waited. It was answered by a rigidly corseted woman. He wondered vaguely why women in the north of Scotland still squeezed themselves into old–fashioned corsets while their fat sisters of the south let it all hang out.
“What’s happened?” she cried when she saw Hamish’s uniformed figure.
“I am just here to have a word with Mr. Cody.”
“What about? Is it his sister? Is it bad news?”
“No, no,” said Hamish soothingly. “Just part of our investigations.”
“You’d better come in. Charles! It’s the police for you.”
The small, fussy-looking man Hamish had seen first in the chemists came down the stairs. He had grey hair neatly combed back, round glasses and a small mouth. He was wearing a fawn cardigan over a shirt collar and tie and grey trousers and highly polished black shoes.
“How can I be of help to you, officer?” he asked. “We’ll go into the lounge. I hope the shop has not been broken into.”
“No,” said Hamish. He followed him into an overfurnished room and took off his cap.
“Mr. Fred Sutherland has been found dead, murdered.”
Mr. Cody looked startled. “Who is he?”
Hamish thought suddenly of the little table in the living room on which the phone rested in Fred’s flat. There had been a small array of medicine bottles beside the phone.
“He lived above the dentist, Gilchrist.”
“But this is terrible…terrible. Who would do such a thing? And why ask me?”
“It concerns your assistant, Kylie Fraser. Mr. Sutherland left a message on my answering machine this evening, saying he had found something out about her and asking me to call. Detectives are questioning Kylie. Can you think what it might have been that he found out?”
Mrs. Cody was sitting across from them. “I told you and told, you to get rid of that flighty piece,” she said. “She hangs about with some of the worst elements in the town.”
The pharmacist ignored his wife. “I had no trouble with her in the shop. I know she has a bit of a reputation, but during working hours, she’s pleasant and hard-working and the customers like her. She sells quite a lot of cosmetics for me.”
“And wears most of them all at once on her stupid face,”’ said his wife waspishly.
“Say Mr. Sutherland had really found out something about her, someone didn’t want us to know about,” said Hamish, “have you any idea who that someone would be?”
He shook his head. “I really don’t know.” A little wire-haired dachshund appeared from behind the sofa, went to Hamish and pressed its small shivering body against his legs. He leaned down to pat it.
“Just in the line of enquiry, can you tell me where you were this evening?”
“What time?”
“Say between eight o’clock and half past nine.”
