Death of a Macho Man by M. C Beaton

Author:M. C Beaton [Beaton, M. C]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Humour
ISBN: 9780446403405
Google: v9hpCOZWkOUC
Amazon: 0446403407
Barnesnoble: 0446403407
Goodreads: 272137
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 1996-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eight

When love grows diseas’d, the best thing we can do is put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingring and consumptive passion.

—Sir George Etherege

As a sign that Superintendent Peter Daviot knew who had uncovered Beck as the murderer of Rosie, Hamish Macbeth was invited to the interview in Strathbane when Beck was brought north. Blair was in a sour mood. Hamish, in the comer as usual, looked at Bob Beck with a sort of wonder. He was a grey-haired man with a slight stoop, thick spectacles through which pale eyes looked out at the world with a childlike innocence, a rather large nose and a small mouth. He was wearing a well-pressed grey suit and black lacing shoes. He was hardly the picture of a man who, driven mad with passion, had plunged a knife into the naked I back of Rosie Draly. Had it not been for the evidence of the tape, Hamish would have been tempted to think that he had merely been unlucky, that he had travelled to Sutherland to see Rosie on the very day of her murder.

Blair began the questioning, mildly enough for him. Beside Beck sat his solicitor, a thin, rabbity man who looked even more bewildered than the murderer.

“How long had you known the writer, Rosie Draly?”

“Years,” said Beck, and then said firmly, “to save time I would like to make a full confession.”

Blair smiled expansively. “That’s the ticket, laddie. Go ahead.”

“I fell in love with Rosie just after Beryl and I were married,” he said in a rusty voice, as if he had not spoken for some time. “That was in nineteen sixty-four. I wanted to leave Beryl, get a divorce, but then Beryl told me she was pregnant and Rosie told me I must do the decent thing and stay with her. I’ve hated Beryl for a long time.” He blinked round the room myopically. “But I coped, particularly after I got the job in Birmingham. Beryl did not want to move to Birmingham and that suited me. Rosie and I met…often. I wanted her, I wanted to have her, and she always held out that hope and I believed her because I was in the grip of an obsession. When I wasn’t with her, I thought of her all day long. Some days I thought I would take time off from this madness, but then the day would be so black and empty, I would need to return to my dreams. In my dreams, I always made love to her as no man has made love to a woman. She wrote to me regularly and I saved all her letters. And then she moved to Sutherland, and the letters became less and finally stopped. When I phoned her, she always seemed to cut me off. May I have a glass of water, please?”

They waited while a policewoman fetched him a glass of water, which he drank in one long thirsty gulp.

“At last I couldn’t bear it any longer,” he went on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.