“Grand. Blair is furious. All the time we were going through the stuff on the guests, he paced up and down behind us until she complained.”
“Blair can be dangerous when crossed,” said Hamish. “He’s probably planning something nasty for her. Let’s get going. We’ll take the animals.”
They were driving along the waterfront when the tweedy figure of Mrs. Wellington, the minister’s wife, waved them down.
“What is it?” asked Hamish.
“Your constable has not been to church,” she boomed.
“There’s a murder enquiry going on,” said Hamish. “Charlie hasnae had time to go to the kirk.”
“If you do not ask the Good Lord for help, you will never solve it,” said Mrs. Wellington.
“I’ll get in touch right away,” said Hamish, letting in the clutch and speeding off.
Outside Kinlochbervie, he parked outside the café and he and Charlie made their way along to where the body had been found. “I’m hungry,” said Charlie.
“We’ll get a bite in a minute,” said Hamish. “Now, if Dick Fraser were here, he’d have the table and stove out and be cooking up a full meal. Maybe we had better get up to the top of the cliffs. If she was thrown over, there would be nothing down here. Oh, hell, let’s eat first.”
After bacon baps and strong tea and cans of animal food for Lugs and Sonsie, they climbed up to the top of the cliffs. “That storm might have wiped out anything useful,” said Charlie. “And the trouble with heather is that any vehicle wouldn’t leave tracks.”
“Let’s walk back towards the road,” said Hamish. “I would like to get my hands on her luggage. I don’t think those guests, or Harrison or Juris, would know about peat bogs, and there aren’t any around here. Say I’m the murderer. Unless I am some sort of serial killer, this is my first. I chuck the dead body over. I’ve got the cases in the back. What would I do with them?”
“Throw them in the sea,” said Charlie.
“Och, this is a waste of time,” grumbled Hamish. “It’s getting dark.”
They made their way back to the Land Rover. “The guisers are out,” commented Charlie. “Hallowe’en already.”
There were three small boys. “Penny for the guiser,” they chanted.
Hamish fished in his pocket. “Fifty pee, and that’s your lot. Hey, wait a minute. Where did you get those clothes?”
They were all wearing women’s dresses which trailed on the ground, expensive-looking dresses. One was carrying a tattie bogle, a lantern made out of a scooped-out turnip. For hundreds of years in Scotland, it was the tradition to dress up as spirits of the dead until it changed to children wearing disguises and going out guising.
“My mum found them,” said one of the boys. “Finders keepers.”
“Listen you, laddie,” said Hamish. “Those clothes are part o’ a murder enquiry. We’ve got to talk to your mother right away.”
Chapter Four
’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world
—Shakespeare
The mother who had found the clothes was at first defiant. Her name was Annie Eskdale. She was a very small woman wearing an old-fashioned wraparound pinafore over a faded T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. Although in her thirties, discontent had marred her face with early wrinkles. Her eyes were small and radiating suspicion. The council house she lived in was dingy and smelled of cabbage.
At first, she whined that the clothes were her own. Hamish twisted back the neckline of the dress her son was wearing and said, “How could you afford to pay for an Armani dress?”
“Thrift shop,” she screeched.
Charlie produced a pair of handcuffs and held them up. “I am charging you with defeating the ends of justice. A right shame it is, too. Social services will look after your boy.”
She broke down and, between sobs, said she had found two suitcases up on the moors. She hadn’t meant to do wrong, but times were hard. Her man had left her.
Hamish turned to the boys. “Take off those dresses and I’ll give you five pounds. Gentle now,” he cautioned as they scrambled out of them. “Now, Mrs. Eskdale, where are the cases?”
“Out the back.”
They followed her out through a kitchen piled with dirty dishes and through a weedy garden to a shed at the end. She opened the door. “I havenae touched anything else,” she said. “I only took out three gowns for the boys.”
“We cannae touch them until a forensic team gets here,” said Hamish. He phoned headquarters and got through to Fiona.
“Good work,” she said. “Stay there until I arrive.”
They retreated into the house. Hamish gave the boys five pounds and they scampered off. “Do you just have the one son?” asked Charlie.
“Aye, Sean.”
“Right, let’s sit down and take your statement, and then after the forensic team arrive, we’ll go up to the moors and you tell us where you found the cases. When did you find them?”
“The Sunday morning, afore they found that body.”