“All right. Get in the chair.”
Half an hour later after draining the abscess, drilling the diseased tooth, and filling the hole, Mr. Murchison said, “Tell me all about it,” and Hamish did the best he could although by that time half his face was still frozen with the injection.
“I’m not surprised,” said Mr. Murchison at last. “I dealt with some of his ex-patients and I’d never seen such bad work. I’d just got together with some of my colleagues and I was going to report him to the Health Board.”
“But do you know anyone in particular who would hate him enough to murder him?”
“Not a one. You know how it is, people say, “I’ll murder that bastard,” but they never actually go and do it.”
“Someone did,” said Hamish.
He settled his bill with the receptionist, complained bitterly about the price, wondering if these days the National Health Service actually paid for anything. Then he went out and drove out to Anstruther Road on the Loch Ness side of Inverness. He was just turning into Anstruther Road when he saw a police car. He swiftly reversed back around the corner. He got out and walked into Anstruther Road and then walked slowly up and down it until he saw a policeman and policewoman emerge from Mrs. Gilchrist’s house, get into the car and drive off.
He walked towards the house, a trim Victorian villa, opened the gate and walked up to a front door with a stained-glass panel and rang the bell beside it.
The woman who opened the door came as a surprise to Hamish. She looked very young. She was wearing a blue T–shirt and blue jeans and her black hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her features were small and elfin.
“My name is Police Constable Macbeth,” said Hamish. “Is Mrs. Gilchrist at home?”
“I’m Mrs. Gilchrist.”
“Och, you look too young,” Hamish blurted out.
Her face lit up in a charming smile. “I have just been interviewed by the police.”
“I am from Lochdubh,” said Hamish, “and I have just come from Braikie.”
“You’d best come in, but…” She looked up at him doubtfully.
“But, what?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No! Why…? Oh, I’ve been to the dentist in Inverness, which is why my voice sounds slurred. My face is still frozen.”
“I thought you sounded drunk. Come in, then.”
Charming as Mrs. Gilchrist undoubtedly was, Hamish could not help noticing that the possible murder of her husband had left her unmoved.
The living room was designed in what he privately thought of as Scottish Modern: stripped pine furniture, lots of green plants, and prints by modern artists on the walls.
“Now Mrs. Gilchrist,” said Hamish, “the death of your husband must have come as a great shock to you.”
“Not really. I suppose the shock will hit me later.”
“Did you divorce him or did he divorce you?”
“I divorced him.”
“On what grounds?”
“I didn’t like him,” she said airily.
“Why?”
A look of irritation marred her pretty face. “It happens, you know. Little things begin to annoy and then they assume major proportions.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t see what this has to do with his possible murder.”
Hamish sighed. “I’m trying to get a picture of your husband.”
She echoed his sigh and then said, “I’ll do my best. I was working in the council offices when I met him. He came in with some question about council tax. He asked me out for dinner, just like that. He seemed a very strong, definite person who knew where he was going and what he was doing and I was tired of being single. He was a lot older than I, fifteen years older, but that was part of the attraction. We got married a few weeks later. It became gradually clear to me that he was a petulant, arrogant man. Things that annoyed me? Oh, reading the newspaper aloud at the breakfast table and tutting over it and explaining how he could have managed the world better, criticising my clothes – he liked short skirts, high heels, little blouses, things like that. I said I would wear what I liked and the verbal abuse started. I began to feel demoralised. I had kept my job, thank God, and so I moved out to this place, and then got a divorce after two years’ separation had passed.”
“How old was he?”
“Fifty.”
“Hadn’t he been married before?”
“Yes, I think he had. But he was secretive about things. I just got a feeling he had.”
“Where did he come from originally?”
“Dumfries.”
Hamish studied her for a moment. Then he asked, “But just suppose this should turn out to be murder and I think it’s bound to turn out that way, doesn’t the idea startle you and shock you?”
“You must realise,” she said gently, “that I came to hate him like poison. It stands to reason that some other woman would feel the same.”
“I don’t see that a woman would have the strength to watch him die, pick him up, put him in the dentist’s chair, drill all his teeth and – ”
“
“Oh, dear, I thought the police that were here might have told you. But that’s what seems to have happened.”
“There must be some maniac on the loose.”
“A very cold-blooded maniac. The surgery, I think, had been cleaned up.”
“Do you mind leaving?” she said suddenly. “I don’t think I can take any more at the moment.”
Hamish walked to the door. Then he turned around. “Where were you this morning? Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“I took the day off. Woman’s troubles. Nothing too bad but my job bores me. No, I have no witnesses but I’ve been here all day till now.”
As he drove off, the full enormity of the strange murder hit Hamish. There were so many questions he would like answers to. Why had Maggie Bane stayed away so long? What if someone like himself with an aching tooth had just decided to drop in? That CLOSED sign. He had handled it himself. Damn! What if the murderer had entered and just hung the sign outside the way he had done himself?
¦
He drove straight to Braikie and parked on the outskirts of the town and then began to make his way on foot towards the dentist’s surgery. A Strathbane policeman approached him. “Blair was going ballistic looking for you.”
“I have been making the enquiries all over the town,” said Hamish. “That man usually wants me off the case.”
“Well, he said if I found you, you were to go straight to Strathbane. And he said to get your uniform on.”
Hamish drove to Lochdubh, changed into his uniform, made a sandwich and cup of coffee and then set out at a sedate pace for Strathbane. He did not like Blair. He did not like his anger or his bluster or the way he had of accusing the easiest person as a murderer. But when it came to everyday Strathbane crime, Hamish knew Blair to be good at his job. He kept his ear to the ground and knew all the villains.
The Land Rover crested a heathery rise and there below him lay Strathbane like the City of Dreadful Night. Black ragged clouds were racing across a windy sky and a fitful gleam of watery sunlight lit up the windows of the dreary tower blocks on the outskirts of the town.
Why such an excrescence should pollute the landscape of Sutherland, Hamish did not know. There had once been a lot of industry back in the fifties, paper mills, brick works, electronics factories, and the tower blocks had
