M. C. Beaton - Death of a Hussy

Title:

Death of a Hussy

Series:

The fifth book in the Hamish Macbeth series

Author:

by M.C. Beaton

Year:

1990

Synopsis:

Finding out who set a rich tarts car on fire while she was still in it requires all Scottish Police Constable Hamish Macbeths extraordinary common sense and insight into human nature. When it comes to solving a murder, Hamish lets no grass grow under his feetnot even when the killer appears to be the wrong person entirely.

In the Highlands in the country places

Where the old plain men have rosy faces,

And the young fair maidens

Quiet eyes. R. L. STEVENSON

Y ou might have known people really do dress up for dinner in the Highlands. Maggie Baird shifted her large bulk irritably in the driving seat and crashed the gears horribly.

Beside her in the passenger seat of the battered Renault 5, her niece, Alison Kerr, sat in miserable silence. Her Aunt. Maggie had already gone on and on and on about Alisons shabby appearance before they left the house. Alison had tried to protest that, had she been warned about this dinner invitation to Tommel Castle, she would have washed and set her hair and possibly bought a new dress. As it was, her black hair was lank and greasy and she wore a plain navy skirt and a white blouse.

As Maggie Baird mangled the car on its way to Tommel Castlethat is, she seemed to wrench the gears a lot and stamp down on the footbrake for no apparent reason at allAlison sat and brooded on her bad luck.

Life had seemed to take on new hope and meaning when her mothers sister, Maggie Baird, had descended on the hospital where Alison was recovering from lung cancer in Bristol. Alisons parents were both dead. She had, when they were alive, heard little about this Mrs. Maggie Baird, except, We dont talk about her, dear, and want to have nothing to do with her.

When she had thought she was about to die, Alison had written to Maggie. After all, Maggie appeared to be her only surviving relative and there should be at least one person to arrange the funeral. Maggie had swept into the patients lounge, exuding a strong air of maternal warmth. Alison would come with her to her new home in the Highlands and convalesce.

And so Alison had been borne off to Maggies large sprawling bungalow home on the hills overlooking the sea outside the village of Lochdubh in Sutherland in the very north of Scotland.

The first week had been pleasant. The bungalow was overcarpeted, overwarm, and overfurnished. But there was an efficient housekeeperwhat in the old days would have been called a maid of all workwho came up from the village every day to clean and cook. This treasure was called Mrs. Todd and although Alison was thirty-one, Mrs. Todd treated her like a little girl and made her special cakes for afternoon tea.

By the second week Alison longed to escape from the house. Maggie herself went down to the village to do the shopping but she would never take Alison. Eventually all that maternal warmth faded, to be replaced by a carping bitchiness. Alison, still feeling weak and dazed and gutless after her recent escape from death, could not stand up to her aunt and endured the increasing insults in a morose silence.

Then had come the invitation to dinner from the Halburton-Smythes, local landowners, who lived out on the far side of the village at Tommel Castle, and Maggie had not told her about their going until the very last minute, hence the lank hair and the blouse and skirt.

Maggie crashed the gears again as they went up a steep hill. Alison winced. What a way to treat a car! If she herself could only drive! Oh, to be able to go racing up and over the mountains and to be free and not immured in the centrally heated prison that was Maggies bungalow. Of course, Alison should just leave and get a job somewhere, but the doctors had told her to take it easy for at least six months and somehow she felt too drained of energy to even try to escape from Maggie. She was terrified of a recurrence of cancer. It was all very well for other people to point out that these days cancer need not be a terminal illness. Alison had had a small part of her lung removed. She was terribly aware of it, imagining a great hole lurking inside her chest. She longed daily for a cigarette and often refused to believe that a diet of forty cigarettes a day had contributed to her illness.

Maggie swung the little red car between two imposing gate posts and up a well-kept drive.

Alison braced herself. What would these people be like?

Priscilla Halburton-Smythe pushed the food around her plate and wished the evening would end. She did not like Maggie Baird, who, resplendent in a huge green and gold caftan, was eating with relish. Her voice was county as she talked to Colonel Halburton-Smythe about the iniquities of poachers, and only Alison knew that Maggie had a talent for sounding knowledgeable on all sorts of subjects she knew little about.

I cant quite make her out, thought Priscilla. Shes a great fat woman and quite nasty to that little niece of hers and yet Daddy is going on like an Edwardian gallant. He seems quite taken with her.

She looked again at Alison. Alison Kerr was a thin girlwell, possibly in her thirties, but such a waif that it was hard to think of her as a woman. She had thick horn-rimmed glasses, and her black hair fell in two wings shielding most of her face. She had very good skin, very pale, almost trans-luscent. Priscilla flashed a smile at Alison who scowled and looked at her plate.

Priscilla was everything Alison despised. She was beautiful in a cool poised way with shining pale gold hair worn in a simple style. Her scarlet silk dress with the ruffled Spanish sleeves must have cost a fortune. Her voice was charming and amused.

I would be charming and amused if I lived in a castle and had doting parents, thought Alison bitterly. I know what that smile meant. Shes sorry for me. Damn her.

You will find you have to do a lot of driving in the Highlands, Mrs. Baird, the colonel said.

Maggie sighed and then looked at him with a wicked twinkle in her eyes. How true, she said, Im up and down that road to the village like a tarts drawers.

There was a little silence. Mrs. Halburton-Smythe opened her mouth a little and then shut it again. Then the colonel gave an indulgent laugh. Its not London, he said. There isnt an Asian grocer at the corner of every field. You have to make lists, you know. Its quite possible to buy all the groceries for a week in one go. Doesnt that housekeeper of yours do the shopping?

I prefer to do it myself, said Maggie, once more falling into the role of country gentlewoman. I like to get the best of everything although Lochdubh is pretty limited. I think the inhabitants must live on a diet of fish fingers.

You should take a trip into Inverness and stock up, said Mrs. Halburton-Smythe. Theyve got everything there now. Quite a boom town and expanding every day. Why, I remember not so long ago when it was a sleepy place and they drove the Highland cattle to market through the main street. Now its all cars, cars, cars.

And crime on the increase, said the colonel. What those fools in Strathbane think theyre about to leave us without a policeman, I dont know.

Hamish! said Priscilla. You didnt tell me. She smiled at Alison. I only arrived last night and havent caught up with the local news. Hamish gone? Where?

Theyve closed down the police station and taken that lazy lout off to Strathbane, said her father. Its funny, I never thought Macbeth actually did anything. Now hes gone and someone has been netting salmon in the river. At least Macbeth would have found a way to stop it, although he never arrested anyone.

But this is dreadful, exclaimed Priscilla. Hamish is a terrible loss to the village.