“And what do you do yourself, Mr. Macbeth?”
“Hamish, I’m a civil servant.” Hamish was not in uniform.
“On the council?”
“Something like that.”
“Do you work for Miss Halburton-Smythe?”
Hamish winced slightly at the innocent assumption that he could not be on any social level with Priscilla. But he did not want Tracey to think he had taken her for coffee merely to get information from her, so he said vaguely, “We both live in Lochdubh.”
“I’m glad I don’t live in a place like that,” said Tracey. “I mean, what is there to do?”
“We have fun,” said Hamish defensively. “We have the ceilidhs.”
“Oh, them,” Tracey snorted dismissively. “Big fat woman thumping around in the eightsome reel and wee men outside passing half-bottles o’ whisky to each other. We have discos in Strathbane.”
“How can you bear all that thumping music and those strobe lights giving folks epileptic fits?” demanded Hamish.
“Oh, well, someone of your age wouldn’t understand,” said Tracey with all the tolerance of eighteen looking at thirty-something.
Feeling a hundred-year-old peasant, Hamish left Tracey and made his way on foot to Strathbane High School. It was a huge barracks of a place, built of red brick in the thirties, set among rain-washed playing fields where seagulls squatted on the grass. Children were returning to their classes after lunch. He stopped one boy and asked for the headmaster’s office, was corrected and told it was the head teacher and pointed in the right direction. The head teacher was a woman who introduced herself as Beth Dublin. She was a small, mousy creature who looked about the same age as Tracey but must have been a good bit older. To Hamish’s request to see the chemistry teacher, Mr. Hendry, she said that he had a free period and could be found in the staff common-room and she would take him there. On the way along a gloomy corridor smelling of stale cigarette smoke and disinfectant, Beth said, “His kids aren’t in trouble again, are they?”
Startled, Hamish wondered at first if she had guessed he was a policeman and then decided she probably thought he might be an irate parent. “Not that I know of,” he said cautiously. “Are they often in trouble?”
She primmed her lips and then said, “That’s not for me to say.”
She opened the door of the staff common-room and a fog of cigarette smoke rolled out. They may dash the weed from your lips in New York and frown on you in London, but the north of Scotland is the last hope of the tobacco companies outside the Third World. “Mr. Hendry?” called Beth. A small man with a large head and a scrubbing-brush hair-style appeared in the gloom. “Visitor,” said Beth and left Hamish to it.
“I am Hamish Macbeth, Mr. Hendry,” said Hamish. “My fiancée and I have just been to see your house, the one for sale.”
“Come over to the window where we can talk,” said Mr. Hendry eagerly. “It’s a grand house and you’re getting a good offer. It would have been snapped up long ago if it weren’t for this damn recession.”
They sat down in chairs by the window. The other teachers were leaving for their classes and soon Mr. Hendry and Hamish were alone.
“My fiancée,” lied Hamish, “is a verra superstitious lady and she would not like to be staying anywhere there’s been a violent death or murder.”
“Nothing like that,” he said quickly. “We bought it fifteen years ago from a couple who emigrated to Australia, and what happened to the people before that I don’t know, but if there had been a murder or anything like that, I would have heard of it.”
“My fiancée said she felt bad vibes in the house.”
“Och, you Highlanders,” said Mr. Hendry, who was a Lowland Scot, “you’re always thinking you’ve got the second sight and you’re psychic. All havers.”
“I wouldna’ say it’s all havers,” said Hamish crossly. “We haven’t made up our minds.”
“If you want my wife to take you around and show your lady where everything is in the kitchen,” he said, “she’d be glad to do it.”
“Well, my fiancée’s gone back home. But if Mrs. Hendry could spare the time…”
“Wait there. Got your car with you?”
“No, I’m on foot.”
“I’ll get her to pick you up.”
Mrs. Hendry turned out to be a sedate middle-aged woman with pepper-and-salt hair, a tweed suit, a thick energetic body, and tiny plump feet encased in brogues. Hamish was beginning to feel very silly indeed as she drove him competently back out to the house. He noticed this time that it was called Craigallen. He listened patiently as she opened cupboards and pointed to electric points. She then took him round the garden. “It was a happy house for us,” she said, “and I hope you’ll be happy as well. Oh, would you look at those weeds!”
She crouched down over a flower-bed and stretched out a plump, beringed hand to pluck a weed. As she did so, her sleeve fell back. Hamish stared down at a vicious purple bruise on her wrist As if aware of his gaze, she tugged down her sleeve.
He promised to return and asked her to drop him in the centre of Strathbane. He ambled into the police headquarters and made his way to the records room, where he asked if the police had ever been called out to a house called Craigallen on the Lochdubh Road. After the dragon in charge had made him sign multiple bureaucratic forms, she produced a slim file.
The police had been called out two years ago. Craigallen was pretty isolated, but a man walking his dog had reported screams and shouts. The police had called but the Hendrys said they had been watching a noisy video.
Hamish scowled down at it. What if Hendry was a wife-beater? And why had the head teacher assumed that something had been wrong with his children? He gave a little sigh. It was really none of his business. Probably Priscilla was right and he had only done it to get out of moving to Strathbane. And it was a long road home without transport and he had missed the one daily bus to Lochdubh.
He left the police headquarters and saw a familiar figure across the road…Edie Aubrey. He walked over to her and introduced himself. “I was hoping to get a lift back or part of the way,” said Hamish.
“I can take you as far as Drim,” said Edie, blinking up at him through her thick spectacles. “Maybe one of the locals will be going to Lochdubh. Harry Baxter should be setting out for the night’s fishing.”
“Grand,” said Hamish. “Finished your messages?”
She nodded. She was carrying a plastic shopping bag labelled “Naughties,” which Hamish knew was Strathbane’s newest lingerie shop, having previously studied the delicate items in the window and wondered who bought them, as the washing-lines from Strathbane to Lochdubh were hung with sturdier and more serviceable items.
When they were driving out of Strathbane, Hamish said, “Peter Hynd seems to have caused quite a flutter.”
“Such a charming boy,” enthused Edie. “Before he came, I kept telling them they ought to exercise, but nothing would get them started. Now they’re all at my classes every day.”
“Good for you,” said Hamish. He added maliciously, “It’s a pity there are no young lassies in Drim for him to marry.”
There was a startled silence and then Edie said, “Och, well, he says to me the other day, he says, ‘I can’t be doing with these young women, Edie,’ he says. ‘Give me a mature woman every time.’”
“And has he any particular mature woman in mind?”
Edie giggled and batted her sparse eyelashes. “That would be telling.”
Hamish guessed that the perfidious Peter had somehow led every woman in Drim to think she was the favoured one. He shivered. It was all an amusing game to Peter, but a dangerous one to play in a shut-off village in the Highlands of Scotland.
Edie chattered on about the improvements that Peter was making to the croft house all the long road to Drim until Hamish was glad to be dropped outside Harry Baxter’s cottage and escape from her.