A Double Death on the Black Isle Read online

  “The night Fraser died, what time did he come in?”

  “The back o’ six, maybe. I came in at half past and he was here at the bar.”

  “Did you hear him have words with anyone?”

  “No more than usual.” She saw by the constable’s face and his fierce scribbling that she had said something important. “I mean, we did have a wee bit o’ trouble wi’ him an’ his tongue. . . .”

  “And his fighting?”

  “Once or twice. But they were no really fights, drunken dancing with a few punches and kicks more like.” She stopped, looked across at the closed shutters of the bar, worried that her husband might be there listening. He’d told her to hold her tongue with the police . . . but this was Davey, one of their own.

  “Did you ever throw Fraser out of the bar?”

  “Well, we did bar him, but it was only the once . . . no, twice. It’s his father and his poor mother I feel sorry for. A right nice family they are. Allie Munro was born on that farm, and their Fraser was aye on about how he hated it, and hated the Ord Mackenzies.” Mrs. Duncan leaned forward and dropped her voice to that hush usually used to describe a serious medical condition. “He wasn’t the same since he came back from his regiment.”

  “So who was he having words with that night?”

  “All the usual, the farm boys, the tinkers, anyone in earshot.” She rattled off the names of two McPhee brothers and three of the lads from Achnafern Farm. “Aye, Fraser was going on about them all being mammy’s boys, no real men, but no one took much notice.” She shrugged, as though it was all nothing.

  But DC Grant knew it was a nothing that could have led to Fraser’s death.

  “Was there any more than words?”

  “It got a wee bit heated, so my husband threw them all out and after that I didn’t see much. I heard a bit o’ yelling from outside, but boys will be boys, nothing wrong in a wee bit o’ fisty-cuffs—as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.” She realized what she had said and suddenly put her hands to her mouth in a half-prayer. “But it must have got out of hand, mustn’t it?”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Duncan.” The policeman closed his notebook, satisfied. This was a good witness—respectable and indiscreet.

  Next came the questioning of the lads from the farm. Faced with three men ages seventeen to twenty-three—three locals all born to families who had worked Achnafern Estate for generations, who collectively saw nothing, knew nothing, and supplied the minimum of information in grunts and “ayes” and “Aa canny mind”—DS Wilkie should have known better and handed over the questioning to the local policeman.

  DC Grant had been at school with the oldest, knew the families of the other two, but no, the sergeant was in charge and he made sure everyone knew it. When it was time to head back to the police station, Grant was amazed to hear that the case had been solved.

  “There was a fight outside the hotel, right?” DS Wilkie asked. His constable knew this was a rhetorical question and stood almost at attention, saying nothing.

  “The tinker boys, Jimmy McPhee’s brothers, had a fight with Fraser Munro. Right?” The sergeant spat out the name Jimmy McPhee.

  Again the detective constable knew better than to speak.

  “So there’s the answer. One of the punches led to Munro’s death, so it’s manslaughter. Right?”

  The smug look on the sergeant’s face, the way he rubbed his hands congratulating himself on solving the case, made DC Davey Grant extremely uneasy, but he knew there was no questioning his boss once he had reached a decision. The investigation was closed.

  TEN

  After two years in the local solicitor’s office, Calum Sinclair had a deserved reputation as a bright young man—even a partnership was possible. One day. It would be a good opportunity, one of his tutors had advised when asked an opinion on the offer of a job in the small Highland town.

  “Calum, you’re one of my best students, but without family connections, you’d be lost in the city. Just another clerk in a law office,” his professor had said.

  From a small Caithness town, perched right on the northernmost coast of Scotland, to Edinburgh University to study law as a scholarship student, he was now a junior in a respectable solicitors’ office.

  Not a tall man, he gave the impression of reliability. Perhaps it was his strong jaw and his cheekbones, which looked as though they had been sculpted by the relentless wind of his home county.

  For the first year in the Highlands, Calum Sinclair questioned his decision almost weekly. To say that he was bored would be understating the tedium of a small-town solicitor’s life. Now there was the prospect of an intriguing case and even more intriguing clients.

  The visit from Jimmy McPhee was causing interest in the office. Mr. Cameron, the senior partner in the firm, had no problem having a Traveler for a client.

  “His money is as good as anyone else’s,” he replied when Calum had raised the matter.

  This was not the opinion of some of the office staff.

  “Whoever heard of a tinker getting a solicitor?” had been the reaction of the secretary.

  The police, and all too often the law, treated Travelers differently. Prejudice against them was as deep as the prejudice against the Romany, and everyone now knew what had happened to them during the Second World War.

  Calum Sinclair knew that if the McPhee brothers were charged with complicity in the death of Fraser Munro, he would have to allow for this in his defense strategy.

  “So what charges could the polis bring?” Jimmy McPhee asked as soon as he was comfortable in the visitor’s chair, only an arm’s length across a narrow desk from Calum. The smallness of the room was made bearable by the view to the hills and mountain beyond.

  “Mr. McPhee . . .”

  “Call me Jimmy, everyone does.” Jimmy’s grin was so cheeky Calum couldn’t help smiling back.

  “You said on the phone that the police are looking for your brothers to question them in relation to Fraser Munro’s death. Why do you think they will be charged?”

  Jimmy’s grin became a glower and Calum saw just why people were intimidated by him.

  “We’re tinkers. That’s cause enough for some people.”

  Calum waited.

  “And I have my sources.”

  “Mr. McPhee . . .” Calum Sinclair started.

  “Jimmy.”

  “Fine—Jimmy—so if they are charged, and you want me to represent your brothers, I’ll need some background on what happened.”

  Jimmy gave a brief account of the night Fraser Munro died.

  Calum wrote quickly on a legal pad in his personal shorthand. “Your brothers were drinking in the hotel bar. Do they go there often?”

  “No. They don’t have enough money to drink more than once a week.”

  Calum noted that. “Was it usual to be out on a weeknight?”

  “Not usual, but they’d had a hard day working at Achnafern and wanted a beer before going home, so they said. You know how it is on these long summer nights, no getting dark before ten, you feel like the day is never ending.”

  “And Fraser Munro?”

  “He was a regular. Four or five nights a week.”

  “I’ll confirm that.” Calum looked up. “Next, the fight.”

  “A bit o’ argy-bargy and some pushing and shoving. You couldn’t call it a fight.”

  “Do you know why they were fighting?”

  “It was all the usual stuff from Fraser—calling them names, trying to pick a fight, trying to prove he wis a big man.” Jimmy had know Fraser for years and didn’t think him much of a fighter—all show in his opinion.

  “Did either of your brothers hit Fraser Munro?”

  “They swore it was only a bit o’ shoving, a kick or two, maybe a slap, but no real punching.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “From what I heard, the landlord and his wife, some other o’ the drinkers, and the lads from Achnafern Farm.”

  “Now,” Calum reached fo
r a map and unrolled it on the desk, “show me where all this took place.”

  “This is the hotel,” Jimmy pointed, “this is the farm and the farm road.” Jimmy pointed to a sharp bend on an unsealed road with woodland on either side. “It’s no marked, but there’s a bridge over a wee burn. It’s called the Devil’s Den. That’s where Fraser Munro was found.”

  “Would your brothers walk home that way?”

  “No. They’d take this road over the hill to where the boys stay with our cousins.” Jimmy showed him. “The farm road would be well out of the way.”

  Unless they wanted a quieter place to finish the fight, Calum thought.

  “Do you know if anyone might have seen your brothers on the road that night?”

  “There were the other farm lads that left wi’ Fraser Munro.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Naw.” Jimmy paused to think. “Lambing is well over, there’d be no one out in the fields that late. One thing—the dogs at the schoolhouse on the road. The boys set them off barking just as a joke. They said they whistled and got a laugh when the old schoolteacher gadgie shouted at them to wheesht.”

  “That might come in useful . . . if they are charged.”

  Jimmy said nothing to that, but he knew that if Fraser Munro’s death really was suspicious and if the police needed a culprit and if a McPhee was in the vicinity, then the McPhee would be charged.

  “I know the polis will be coming for my brothers,” Jimmy said. “If they’re charged, I’ll let you know.” He stood to leave.

  They shook hands, but before he opened the door to show Jimmy out, Calum knew he had to ask one further question.

  “You’re not hiding your brothers from the police are you?”

  “Me? Would I do that?” Jimmy gave his signature, eyes-screwed-up-mouth-like-a-Halloween-lantern grin.

  When he had gone, Calum answered for him. “Oh, yes you would, Jimmy McPhee—if it suited you.”

  He sat down to read his notes, thought through the visit and his impressions. It had been more than interesting—it had been entertaining. He had taken an immediate liking to the feared, hard man of the McPhee family. He almost wanted the brothers to be charged just so he could have a challenging case and the enjoyment of McPhees as clients.

  It took two days for the police to call. Minutes after the results of the postmortem arrived, Detective Sergeant Wilkie took great pleasure in announcing the news to all in the station.

  “We’ll be needing extra men to go to thon tinker’s camp and arrest the McPhee boys.”

  Jenny McPhee was matriarch of her branch of the Travelers of Scotland—“tinkers,” “tinks,” and “dirty tinks” to many of the locals and to the police. Now in her fifties, Jenny McPhee was witnessing the passing of her way of life and the loss of her language—the Travelers dialect of Gaelic.

  She was still a handsome woman after seven children and a hard life on the road, living in horse-drawn wagons. Formidable some might say, scary was how others described her. Hard work at berry picking in early summer, lifting of the tatties in the autumn, selling lucky white heather and clothes-pegs door-to-door, often to insults and curses from the householder, had not left its mark on her. And amongst the Traveling people, her singing and her repertoire were legendary.

  Her second son, Jimmy, might be a former boxing champion, and a hard man, but his mother could still put the fear of God in him.

  Jimmy McPhee had brought the news of Fraser Munro’s death. Jenny had immediately sent him to fetch the boys involved and spread the word amongst the clan that they needed information. Now three of her seven sons were in the room, and a family conference was taking place in the largest of five benders—large shelters constructed from bent saplings and covered with canvas and turf.

  Erected on the banks of a swift river, in a pass between heather and birch-covered hills, the encampment was on a traditional resting spot for cattle-drovers and tinkers. There was a plentiful supply of young birch to construct the frames of the benders, river stones to make a fireplace, running water and narrow meadows for grazing the herd of horses and ponies—the campsite was as practical as it was beautiful.

  The boys were not like their brother Jimmy. Their inheritance was that black-haired, blue-eyed, clear-skinned Celtic gene common throughout Scotland and Ireland. Fine specimens both.

  Jimmy had twelve years on one brother and fourteen on the other. His wiry body was leaning over them as they sat sprawled in the velvet, brocade-covered sofa that sat plum in the middle of the bender. Jimmy’s slicked-back dark hair and gleaming white false teeth added to the resemblance of a growling guard dog. That was what Jimmy was doing—guarding the family.

  “You know the police’ll be here soon. They’ll no be wanting a cozy chat by the fireside.”

  “But we didney do anything,” protested Geordie, the older of the two.

  Jimmy looked at his wee brothers in amazement. “Do you no know the facts o’ life yet? We’re dirty tinkers to them. That’s enough.” He lit a cigarette, threw back another dram, not wanting to show his wee brothers his fears for them. “When they do come, and if they arrest you, you say nothing. Do you hear? Nothing at all.” But Jimmy knew it was as impossible for them to keep their mouths shut as it would be for a cockerel not to crow at dawn.

  Their mother was watching all this with a detached expression on her shrewd, dark face, leaving it all to Jimmy. She knew her boys were nervous, and it wasn’t because of the police.

  “Are you scared Jimmy might find out about the betting?”

  “What’s this?” Jimmy asked.

  The boys wouldn’t look at their mother. Jenny laughed. “There’s not much escapes me.”

  Jimmy sighed. “Let’s be having it. The whole story mind.”

  Geordie had the good sense to know they were caught. William too. They told the story, sentences bouncing back and forth between them. Both chimed in with the final statement in almost a shared breath.

  “It was nothing to do with us. Fraser was fine when we left him.”

  The story was simple. The brothers had been running a small business for a year or so—betting on darts matches, the plowing competition, the winners at the Black Isle Show. It was no great empire. The farmhands were occasionally in debt to them, but only for shillings, maximum a pound. Except for the elder Munro son. He was into them for eleven pounds. Expecting his army payout, he seemed good for it. Then that night, when asked to pay, he told them to get lost. He was never going to pay dirty tinkers.

  “We waited outside,” Geordie told Jimmy. “We were going to give him a kicking, but Fraser left the hotel bar with the boys from the farm.”

  William continued the story. “There was shouting and swearing, a bit of pushing and shoving, a few kicks, but that’s all. Honest.”

  “Aye,” Geordie said, “somebody shouted they was going to call the police, so we left.”

  In their version, the scuffle broke up, they all went home. Geordie and William left first. They could hear the others behind them, they said. They walked on, and were soon over the hill and saw and heard nothing more.

  “That’s it?” Jimmy asked.

  “Aye,” Geordie said. “Fraser Munro was well away, staggering and shouting and swearing, calling a’ the others from the farms a bunch o’ lassies, stay at home mammy’s boys. Telling them he was a real man, he could fight, knew how to kill—but it was nothing new, he was aye going on like that.”

  “He was having a right go at the laird’s daughter, Patricia,” William remembered. “Right crude about her he was.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” Jenny said, “you two fine wee laddies, you threatened Fraser Munro, you gave him a shove and a kick, all in front of witnesses?”

  “Only after he said he would never pay us the money,” William protested.

  Jimmy ignored him.

  “Then you walked over the hill, only a hundred yards or so separating you all until the turn-off to the farm, then on you two wal
ked, on your own, into the night, and nobody saw you. Right?” Asked Jimmy, wanting the story clear.

  “We saw each other.”

  Jimmy laughed with no hint of humor. Jenny looked worried.

  “Have you heard any more, Ma?” he asked.

  “Not much. The cousins are asking around. But no one can fathom how a kick or two at the hotel could kill Fraser.”

  “We didney kick him hard, we . . .” started up one of the boys.

  “Enough,” Jimmy bellowed. “Shut up the both of you and let me think. Go and see to thon two mares. I want them in perfect condition for the Black Isle Show. Get!” He stood, his five-foot-five body falling into a half-boxing stance, his fists in a half-clench, scaring the daylights out of his brothers. They were glad to escape to the comfort of the horses.

  “I’ve a bad feeling about this,” Jenny said when the boys were gone.

  After watering the animals, the young men brushed and combed the two prize horses. The ponies watched on as the fairest of the mares were groomed, given a treat of molasses and generally fussed over. The Black Isle Show was eleven weeks away. This mare and maybe her companion had a good chance of winning their class.

  A chill began to creep over the boys, and it was not from the gathering dark. Maybe it was not as simple as they had first thought. After all, they began to realize, what had the truth got to do with it, between a tinker and the law, between landowners and land dwellers, the landless Traveling people—the tinkers?

  It was no more than a passing worry—with a mother like theirs and Jimmy as a brother, nothing could go wrong, nothing that couldn’t be sorted.

  When the police arrived in the early evening, DS Wilkie barged into the bender with neither a greeting nor an explanation. Jenny McPhee sat calmly in her chair and offered them a cup of tea.

  “George McPhee, William McPhee, I’m here to arrest you on the charge of involuntary manslaughter.” Wilkie was looking at Jimmy as he said this, furious it was not Jimmy he was arresting. And he was more furious that the procurator fiscal had refused to charge the McPhees with manslaughter, the lesser charge carrying a much lesser sentence.