Death of Yesterday by M. C. Beaton

a face at the window, but there’s nothing here.
     I’ll need to question everyone in this sketchbook. Damn!”
    “Damn, what?” asked Elspeth.
    “This could have been drawn on any evening. Anyway, I’ll phone Jimmy and we’ll start with Pete.”
    “Wait a minute,” said Elspeth. “Don’t forget. This is my news story. Before you take that book away, I want film of it.”
    “Hurry up,” urged Hamish. “But film it away from the police station and I’ll say you did the commentary before you came to
     me.”
      
    Fortunately for Hamish, Blair was away “sick,” which usually meant another crashing hangover, and so he was allowed to be
     at the interview of Pete Eskdale.
    “I can’t remember when that was,” said Pete. “I hardly ever go there and it certainly wasn’t on the evening Morag said she
     was drugged.”
    “We’ll be asking everyone whose sketch is on this book,” said Jimmy.
    Pete grinned cockily. “Ask away.”
    Hamish and Jimmy questioned him for two hours but always got the same replies. He seemed supremely confident.
      
    Wayne Box arrived back at the caravan that evening to find it cold and empty. Usually his little sister had a meal ready for
     him.
    “I’ll give that brat a right thrashing when she gets back,” he muttered. Then he saw a note lying on top of the cooker. It
     read: “Gone to Gran in Glasgow. Try and get me back and I’ll pit the social onto ye. Abbie.”
    Wayne clenched his big fists in a fury. He had become used to using little Abbie as a sort of house slave.
    On the following day, while a squad of police along with Jimmy, Hamish, and Dick descended on Cnothan to question all who
     had been sketched by Morag, Abbie sat in her grandmother’s tenement flat in Glasgow, eating currant buns and drinking tea.
    Her grandmother, Mrs. Sheena Box, was a widow in her fifties. She was a thickset woman with dyed blonde hair and a pugnacious
     face. She worked shifts in a supermarket.
    “It’s a fair wonder I was at home, this being my day off. How come they let a wee lassie like you travel alone on the bus?”
    “I asked a wumman in Inverness to buy a ticket for me, saying it was for my mither. Then I got on the bus wi’ another wumman
     and sat next to her and began to talk as if I was with her. You won’t send me back?”
    “No, petal. You’re wi’ me now. I’ll get you fixed up wi’ the local school. Will Wayne try to get you back?”
    “Telt him if he tried I’d get the social onto him.”
    “Grand. Have another bun.”
      
    By the end of another day, Hamish felt he could weep with frustration. Three of the more sober locals, frightened for once
     into being cooperative, said that the sketches must have been done the Saturday before Morag claimed she was drugged, one
     saying he was wearing his new jacket for the first time as shown in the sketch, and he hadn’t worn it to the pub after that,
     his wife complaining it was too good to go boozing in. The other two confirmed the date.
    Stolly Maguire, the bartender, also said it couldn’t have been on the fatal Saturday because he hadn’t been wearing that T-shirt.
    Hamish found it hard to believe he was back to square one. He wondered whether Elspeth had lied about finding the sketchbook
     on her car. But when he called at the Tommel Castle Hotel, it was to find she had checked out.
      
    Elspeth had earlier received a frantic phone call from Barry Dalrymple. “You better get back here. We’ve got to let Hannah
     go.
    “She’s making mistakes all over the place. She was talking about a riot in Syria and describing that many had been killed
     and the silly bitch smiled at the camera. And there’s worse. She did a report about a wee lassie in Irvine who was swept to her death by a freak wave.
     It was the last item, so she grins into the lens and says, ‘And the moral of that is, be careful where you walk.’”
      
    Hannah was gloomily clearing out her desk when Elspeth arrived back at the