sandwiches. We’ll hae a wee bit o’ something while we’re waiting.”
Poor Maggie, thought Hamish. If Deacon isn’t careful she’ll be putting in a complaint about him.
When the tea and sandwiches arrived, Hamish ate without really tasting anything, his mind on the people back at the boarding-house. He was not looking forward to the arrival of Dermott and June. He had hated being present at the interviewing of Andrew and Doris. He liked them. Why couldn’t it be Cheryl or Tracey? he thought. But whoever this murderer was, it was someone cool and unemotional, or someone driven to the edge by fear. To walk into the boat-shed and kill Jamie MacPherson just like that did not seem like a premeditated crime any more than the death of Harris did. A murderer who planned things would have waited until a quieter time of the day, not marched in boldly in broad daylight, when anyone could have seen him or her. His thoughts began to wander. It could be a murderess rather than a murderer. Or was that not going to be used any more in these politically correct days? Would it soon become murderperson? Amazing that political correctness should start in a democratic society like America. One always thought of it as being the curse of a totalitarian society and coming from the top, not the bottom. Then there was therapyspeak or psychobabble to cover a multitude of emotions. People said, for example, “I am chemically dependent on so-and-so, I am obsessed, I am emotionally dependent, I have been taken hostage.” The old–fashioned words wouldn’t do any more. To go down to the basement of one’s emotions, switch on the light, stare the monster in the face and say ‘I am in love’ was not on, because that meant giving up control, that meant being vulnerable. Had he really been in love with Priscilla? His mind shied away from the thought with all the fright of the people he had been mentally damning and he was relieved when Dermott and June were ushered in.
“Who’s looking after the children?” asked Hamish and got a glare from Deacon for not knowing his place.
“Miss Gunnery,” said June.
The couple sat down uneasily and faced Deacon.
“Now,” said Deacon, “we’ll start with you, Mrs Brett. Do you mind if I call you June? I get confused with the real Mrs Brett.”
“Call me what you like,” said June wearily.
“Well, June, why didn’t you tell us you had written to Mrs Brett, telling her of your affair with Dermott here?”
Dermott’s face turned a muddy colour and he stared at June as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “You WHAT?” he shouted at her.
“Quietly now,” admonished Deacon. “I am speaking to June, not you, Dermott. June?”
“I meant to tell you,” she said, speaking to Dermott. “I couldn’t take it any longer. Eight years now we’ve been together. I’m sick of having you part-time. Heather was beginning to ask questions about why you had to be away so much, why you always missed Christmas, when you couldn’t be working, and things like that. I thought that one day she’d find out she was a bastard and I couldn’t bear that. You kept saying that Alice would never give you a divorce, but I thought she might if she knew about the children. Yes, I wrote to her. I’m not sorry. It worked out fine.”
“Except that Harris got killed and now MacPherson,” interposed Clay.
“That was nothing to do with me.”
“Wait a bit, wait a bit,” said Dermott, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Why didn’t you tell me about writing to Alice?”
“Because it would have been the same old thing,” said June. “Look at the way you buckled and were prepared to pay that rat Rogers to keep his mouth shut.”
“But you should never have done such a thing. You don’t know what you’ve done, woman!”
June’s face turned the same horrible colour as Dermott’s. “What have I done?” she screamed at him. And then, in a low voice, she repeated wretchedly, “Oh, what have I done?”
“Yes, what has she done?” Deacon’s voice was brutal. “Do you mean murdering Harris was a waste of time, Dermott Brett?”
“No,” said Dermott. “I never touched him. Never! I had that row with him. He was threatening to tell Alice. I was so upset, I didn’t stop to think that he couldn’t possibly have the address. They don’t have a visitors’ book at the boarding-house.”
“Did Rogers know your home address?” asked Hamish.
“No.” Dermott quietened. “No. June made the booking.”
“So why wass it that you told the police and us that you didn’t know the boarding-house wass under the new management?”
“I lied about a few little things,” said Dermott wearily. “I was terrified you would suspect me because I’d had that row with Harris.”
“So let’s begin at the beginning,” said Deacon.
Patiently he took them through everything all over again. When he had finished, Hamish said, “Heather says she saw Doris on the beach where Doris says she was. June, how was it you let a seven-year-old wander off on her own?”
June looked puzzled. “It’s not like Heather to leave the younger ones, but I fell asleep and Heather was collecting shells. And she was, you know. She carried them home in that pail she uses for making sand- castles.”
Maggie put her head around the door. “A word with you, sir.”
Deacon went out. He was back in a few minutes and sat down heavily. “More problems,” he said. “That will be all,” he added to Dermott and June. The couple got up and went out, but Hamish noticed that Dermott did not take June’s arm or hand the way he usually did.
“What’s up?” asked Clay. “Not another murder?”
Deacon shook his head. “Cheryl’s been arrested. She and Tracey were in the pub and got drunk. Some local lads started taking the piss out of them and Cheryl smashed her pint glass on the bar and then tried to take it across the face of one of the lads. Would have done it too if Tracey hadn’t held her back.”
Violence, thought Hamish. We’ve been looking for someone capable of a sudden attack of violence and forgetting Cheryl is the one with a proven record. We’ve been looking for a motive. What was it he had said to Miss Gunnery? Something about a motiveless murder being the most difficult to solve. These had not been intelligent murders. They had been the result of rage, rage and fear; fear in the case of MacPherson, if he had been blackmailing anybody.
Deacon was called out again. Again they waited. When he came back, he said, “One of the locals remembers that MacPherson always had a big pair of kitchen scissors on his desk. We haven’t found a trace of them. If the murderer used the scissors as a weapon and threw them in the river, they could be somewhere down there sunk in the sand. We’ve searched all around below the jetty, but they could have been tossed in further up. I’ll tell you another thing: anything that’s tossed in that river can sink down below the sand and be buried. I don’t know if we’ll ever find them.”
“Is Cheryl being brought in here?” asked Hamish.
“No, she’ll stay in the cells until she sobers up. Why don’t you get back to that boarding-house, Macbeth, and see what you can sniff out?”
That ‘sniff out’ was unfortunate because it gave Hamish a sudden and vivid picture of Towser. He got to his feet, nodded to Deacon and Clay, and went out. Instead of driving off, he left his Land Rover where it was and walked down to the harbour. The tide was in, sucking at the wooden piles of the jetty, making wet clumps of seaweed rise and fall like the hair on the dead Bob Harris’s head. There were long trails of rain out to sea, dragging across the stormy water as if pulled by an unseen hand. The air was full of wind and salt and motion. Behind him, a policeman he did not know stood on guard outside the boat-shed. A little knot of tourists stared hungrily at the boat-shed, as if a vicarious thrill were as much a legitimate part of the holiday as the rides at the fairground.
Hamish was reluctant to go back to the boarding-house, reluctant to face the others. He wished with all his heart that the case was solved and he could return to Lochdubh. How could he ever have taken such a dislike to his home village? He could always ask to leave Skag. He was officially on holiday. But the short happy time he had spent with the others at the boarding-house before the murders had given him a queer sort of loyalty towards them.
With a little sigh, he turned and walked back to the police station, climbed into the Land Rover and drove to the boarding-house.
