“Fifteen years!” exclaimed Priscilla. “Then that means you weren’t a criminal until this.”
Betty stared at her mulishly.
“Why?” pursued Priscilla. “Why now? You may as well tell me because he’s going to kill me.”
“No, he’s not,” said Betty contemptuously. “He’ll set you free as soon as we decide to move.”
“He’ll kill me, just the way he killed the real John Glover.”
“Jim didn’t kill Glover.”
“Oh, and how did you get his credit cards and bank-book? Ask him to hand them over?”
“Jim got one of his friends to keep a guard on him while we came up here. He’ll be released as soon as we get back to Glasgow.”
“Do you know this for a fact? He killed Duggan. You can’t be naive enough to think he let Glover live, or that he’s going to let me live…or even you!”
Betty laughed. “Don’t try and pull that one on me. Jim and me are an item.”
“But you were engaged to John Glover, the late John Glover,” said Priscilla, hoping to frighten her, hoping to get her angry.
“Stop saying that! Duggan deserved to die. He was nothing more than a common criminal.”
“And your Jim is an uncommon criminal?”
There was a long silence. The wind of Sutherland howled around the deserted farmhouse like a banshee. The police would have reached the hotel, thought Priscilla. Surely they would search the surrounding countryside. But Blair would be in charge and Blair would think only of road-blocks. But surely they would bring dogs.
Betty gave an involuntary shiver. “I don’t know how anyone can live up here,” she complained. “Nothing for miles and miles, and the weather’s dreadful.”
“It can be just as dreadful in Glasgow,” said Priscilla. “Look, we may as well pass the time until he gets back. Tell me how you got into all this.”
Betty gave a shrug and walked to the window and looked out. The moorland fell away in front of her. Thin curtains of rain were trailing over the mountains in the distance although the sun shone where they were.
She turned back. “As I said, I’d been working in that bank for years. I got engaged to John Glover because I decided I’d better start making provision for my old age. I used to go to a bar near the bank after work. One evening, Jim came up to me and asked if he could buy me a drink. We got talking. He seemed rich and sophisticated, everything John was not. We began to see each other. Then we started an affair. I told him I would tell John the engagement was off. He asked me why I’d got involved with such a dry stick of a man in the first place and I told him, security. He said he’d a proposition to put to me. He said for a start I had to stay engaged to John. He said he loved me and was going to marry me.”
“And you believed him!” exclaimed Priscilla.
“He does love me and he wants to marry me and I love him,” said Betty passionately.
“In fact you love him so much, you end up in bed with Hamish Macbeth!”
“Oh, that! That was Jim’s idea. Tie that copper up, he said, and he’ll look elsewhere for suspects.”
In all her misery and dread Priscilla suddenly wished she could stay alive if only to tell Hamish Macbeth what Betty had said.
“Let me get this straight,” said Priscilla. “You’re a respectable bank clerk for years. This Jim comes on the scene and you agree to his taking the identity of your fiancé and conspire to murder Duggan.”
“His name wasn’t Duggan. He was some rat of a low life called Charlie Stoddart.”
“And that makes it all right?”
“Look, you snotty bitch, you don’t know what it was like working in that bank, year in and year out, handling all that money that didn’t belong to me. Jim said we could have everything I’d ever dreamt of – fancy homes, fancy holidays, visit all the places I’d only seen in the movies.” She turned back to the window. “What’s keeping him?”
♦
Jim checked to make sure the three-wheeler was still there and ready to drive. Then he walked away across the moorland, the wind tugging at his thick hair. He did not feel afraid, only felt a rush of adrenaline. He knew in his bones he was going to get away with it. He felt the gods were on his side. Beck confessing to the murder of Duggan had been an amazing bit of luck.
The jealousy that fat pig Blair had for the local Lochdubh copper had been another. There had been no need to try to kill Hamish, but he had felt it would have been a way of tying up loose ends. It had been amazingly simple to leave the crowd at the Cnothan games and climb up that mountain and be ready and waiting when Hamish came into view, finding the rifle he had buried in the heather the night before. So he had missed – so what? No one had believed Hamish’s story, his rifle had not been found, and he had been able to get it back in the middle of the night after the games. It was a pity he’d had to go off and leave the rifle and shotgun in the hotel room, but it was a small price to pay for freedom. He had no intention of heading off during daylight. They would have helicopters up there soon, searching the surrounding countryside. He took a last look around. As he had previously found, the moorland was surprisingly dry and heathery despite all the rain: no sinister peat bogs. He had a man waiting for him in a cottage near Bonar Bridge, complete with a ready disguise for him and a set of fake identity papers. Now to clear up the remaining loose ends.
♦
Blair was in a bigger fury than he had ever been before. It was he who had poured scorn on Hamish Macbeth’s belief that Beck had not killed Duggan. But he could have saved the day with the arrest of this man masquerading as John Glover, believed to be the famous Gentleman Jim. But Jim was gone, together with that Betty John. And, worse than that, the staff had been told to keep clear, but a maid watching from one of the upstairs windows had seen the pair forcing Priscilla Halburton-Smythe into a car and driving off. The normally urbane Superintendent Peter Daviot was on the scene, and his language was worse than Blair’s. Radios crackled as orders went out to block every road leading out of Lochdubh.
Colonel Halburton-Smythe, supporting his weeping wife, was shouting that they were all a bunch of dangerous incompetents.
Press cars were beginning to drive up and Blair was howling at his men to ‘get the buggers away.’
Adding to the confusion were the villagers of Lochdubh, who had heard about the trouble at the castle before the police arrived and were huddled in groups in the hotel car park.
“So it wasn’t you, Willie,” said Lucia.
Willie looked at her in amazement. “You mean you thought I might have murdered Duggan! Why, for God’s sake?”
“You’re such a tiger when you’re angry.”
And Willie promptly forgave her everything.
Mrs. Wellington, the minister’s wife, was addressing some of her husband’s parishioners, her booming voice reaching Blair’s infuriated ears. “We should have listened to Hamish Macbeth. Did he not say that. Beck had not done the murder?”
“Yes, but how do we know this armed man here did it, tell me that?” cried Geordie Mackenzie.
Mrs. Wellington gave him a withering look. “Use your brains. We may be getting a reputation here, but it’s hard to believe we have two murderers in Lochdubh.”
“If you’re right, then we have,” said Geordie triumphantly. “Beck murdered Rosie and this fellow murdered Duggan.”
Mrs. Wellington ignored him and went on, “It’s all the fault of this hotel, letting rooms to murderers. Money greed, that’s what it is. I shall tell my husband on Sunday to preach a sermon on the subject. They would let rooms to apes here provided the apes had enough money.”
“Shut up, you old bag,” screamed the colonel, beside himself with worry and fright. “What are all these policemen doing here, for God’s sake? Why aren’t they out looking for my daughter?”