Free Death of a Prankster by MC Beaton Page A

stoop tae such a thing.’
    Mrs King looked wistful, all the same.
    ‘Tell me,’ said Hamish, ‘is there anyone in Arrat itself who hated the auld man? Is there anyone who had such a nasty joke played on him that he might kill?’
    She folded her deformed hands on top of the handle of her stick and rested her chins on them. ‘Aye,’ she said at last. ‘But it wass twa year gone.’
    ‘We have the long memories in the Highlands when it comes to insults,’ said Hamish. ‘Who was it? What happened?’
    She half-closed her reptilian eyes. ‘It wass the gamekeeper up at the big hoose, Jim Gaskell, what lives in the flat above the stables wi’ his family.’
    Hamish listened in horror as the story unfolded. Jim’s wife had had a baby two years ago in a hospital in Inverness. Jim had not been allowed to go to the hospital because Mr Trent was complaining about poachers on his land and did not want an absent gamekeeper but said he would send Enrico with the car to bring home wife and baby. Jim came in from the hill one day to be told that his wife and new baby were home and waiting for him. His wife, Mary, proudly led him into the little spare bedroom they had turned into a nursery. They approached the cradle and Mary gently pulled back the covers. They found themselves staring down at a small chimpanzee wearing a baby’s bonnet. Mary had fainted with shock and had struck her head on a chest of drawers as she went down and suffered a severe concussion. Jim found old Andrew Trent hiding in the next room, holding the shrieking baby, and laughing fit to burst. Jim had threatened to kill Andrew, but then it was rumoured that Andrew had paid over money for the baby’s upkeep and so it had all died down.
    Hamish sat turning this over in his mind. No Highlander would ever forgive a thing like that. But knifing in such a way? A bullet through Andrew Trent’s brain as the old man was walking through his estates would have been more the way Jim would have killed him.
    ‘Anyone else?’ Hamish asked and then listened to a catalogue of the old man’s jokes, from putting a cat in the school piano before the annual concert to nailing up the doors of Jean Macleod’s cottage on her wedding day and making the frantic girl and her family late for church. What a power money was, thought Hamish in amazement. Had Andrew Trent been poor, his family would probably have had him certified as dangerously mad long ago.
    He thanked the old woman and went up towards Arrat House with Towser. A group of shivering men and women, like refugees, were huddled outside the gates. The press had arrived.
    He politely told them all to put any questions to Blair and walked up the drive. As he was approaching the house, he saw a girl in front of him, a girl with pink hair. ‘Miss Clarke,’ he called.
    Melissa swung round, saw Hamish’s uniform, and turned pale.
    ‘It’s all right,’ he said easily. ‘I am not going to question you at the moment.’ She had beautiful eyes, he noticed, well spaced and dark grey. He thought her pink hair suited her. ‘Did Blair give you a hard time?’ he asked.
    Melissa looked up at him warily but the policeman’s hazel eyes were kind and his ridiculous-looking dog was slowly wagging its plume of a tail.
    ‘Yes, very,’ she said in a low voice.
    ‘It was because you went away,’ said Hamish. ‘He wasn’t really after you but Paul Sinclair. You see, Paul’s mother, Mrs Trent, paid the servants to take away the body and clean the room. So Blair figured that the mother knew the son had done it and was covering up the evidence.’
    ‘It was awful,’ said Melissa. ‘I didn’t know the police could be like that. You know, at university, I was in some left-wing groups and they called the police fascist pigs, but I never quite believed it until now. I was brought up in a family which always went to the police when in trouble.’
    ‘Blair’s in a class of his own,’ said Hamish. ‘Wait until the will is read and