“Priscilla often phones up the hotel to make sure everything is still running smoothly. That’s a point. What if she phones up tonight?”
“You are friends, or so I gather. I will just tell her the truth.”
“Aye, that would do.” Hamish leaned back in his chair and looked at her thoughtfully. He was grateful to her, for her help, but more for her beauty and charm, which banished any wistful thoughts about the absent Priscilla. “How can you be sure you will be able to hack into the police computer this time?” he asked. “Blair will have changed his password.”
“I can only try,” said Sarah. She hesitated and then said, “Let me put this dinner on my bill. It’s very pricey and you can’t earn that much as a village policeman.”
“That’s kind of you, but – ” He broke off as Mr. Johnson came up to them.
“Priscilla’s on the phone,” he said, “and you going up to her apartment to look for an address seems to be the first she’s heard of it.”
Hamish stood up. “Is she still on the phone?”
“Yes.”
Hamish smiled at Sarah. “I’ll chust be having a wee word with her.”
“You can talk to her on the phone at reception,” said Mr. Johnson, following him out and then standing next to him when he picked up the phone.
“Priscilla?”
“Yes, Hamish, what’s all this about you and Sarah wanting the key to my apartment?”
Hamish hunched over the phone, his back to the manager.
“You’ve forgotten,” he said. “You know you asked her to look up thon address for you.”
There was a silence and then Priscilla said, “As you very well know I did nothing of the kind. You want to use my computer for something.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got a computer at that police station.”
“Aye, the weather’s that bad, I don’t think I’ll make it back to the police station tonight.”
Another silence. Somewhere behind Priscilla, a man’s voice, lazy and amused, said, “Are you going to be on that phone all night, darling?”
Hamish’s heart lurched.
“Oh, go ahead,” said Priscilla. “I trust Sarah even if I don’t trust you, Hamish Macbeth. You obviously can’t tell me about it. Phone me sometime when you can. Bye. You’d best put Johnson back on the phone and I’ll tell him it’s all right.”
Hamish silently handed the phone back to the manager and trailed back to the dining room.
“What’s the matter, Hamish?” demanded Sarah sharply. “Was she furious?”
Hamish forced a smile although his hazel eyes were bleak. “No, no, she said it wass all right. But we’ve got to phone her when Johnson isn’t listening and tell her all about it.”
“Did Priscilla help you with any of your investigations?”
“Yes, quite a few, some of them verra dangerous, too.”
“You must have been very close.”
“Aye, you could say that.” There was an awkward silence. The shutters were down over Hamish’s eyes.
“So,” said Sarah brightly, “do you want coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
Mr. Johnson approached them again. “Priscilla says dinner is on the house.”
“That’s very good of her,” said Hamish, while all the time he was wondering furiously – who was that man?
After the manager had left again, Hamish wrenched his mind back to the case. “The thing about all mis that bothers me is that I get mis mad feeling that the burglary and the murder are connected in some way.”
“I don’t see how they could possibly be,” remarked Sarah.
“Nor me. Chust an intuition.”
Sarah privately noticed the sibilance of Hamish’s Highland accent. It always seemed to become more marked when he was upset. Speaking to Priscilla had upset him. Of course it could be simply because she had ticked him off for trying to lie his way into her apartment, but that would hardly allow for the bleakness of his eyes.
“So tell me again about this still,” she said aloud. “When will they appear in court?”
“They won’t,” said Hamish. “I’ve given them a warning and time to close it down.”
“But what they are doing is illegal! Why didn’t you arrest them?”
“There iss something in the Highlander that does not regard the illegal making of whisky as a crime,” said Hamish. “Out in the Hebrides, there was a new policeman, new to the area, and he arrested two of the locals and charged them with running an illegal still. He had to take refuge on the roof of the police station as the locals tried to burn it down. There are chust some things a Highland policeman has to turn a blind eye to. Even farther south, they can get a bit vindictive.”
“You’ve heard of the RSPB – the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds?”
“Of course. In fact, I used to be a member but I cancelled my subscription.”
“Why?”
“They wrote to me appealing for funds and pointing out that they had the means to be a political force. I did not want to be associated with anything that wanted to be a political force.”
“Aye, well, down in Perthshire, the gamekeepers get really tired of birds of prey and that includes golden eagles. You see, these protected birds of prey wreak havoc on stocks of young grouse and pheasant. A gamekeeper was fined £2,500 at Perth Sheriff Court after he admitted placing six hen’s eggs laced with poison in an area that is home to golden eagles and other birds of prey. After that, an estate belonging to a former employee of the RSPB was vandalised. The estate has the British national collection of thousands of rare and valuable plants imported from the Himalayas. They were doused in weedkiller and ‘RSPB’ etched in nine-foot letters on the lawn with herbicide. Although nothing could be proved, it was believed to be a revenge attack connected to the sentencing of the gamekeeper.”
“Now, I am not condoning it, for it was a wicked and nasty piece of vandalism. On the other hand, there is a great deal of frustration felt among gamekeepers at the attitude of what they privately damn as a lot of moronic townees. Many in the Highlands owe their livelihood to the great shooting estates, and there’s not much work anywhere else.”
“It certainly feels like another part of the world up here,” said Sarah, “and not like part of the British Isles at all. Sutherland. Someone told me that was the southland of the Vikings.”
“I believe so,” said Hamish, who in fact did not know much of Sutherland’s history.
“So,” said Sarah, beginning to rise, “if you’ve finished, let’s start on a life of crime.”
Hamish led the way upstairs to Priscilla’s apartment With an odd feeling, a mixture of guilt and loss, he turned the key in the lock, swung the door open and switched on the light. Everything in the living room was as cool and ordered as Priscilla herself. Sarah went straight to the computer, which sat on a desk at the window. She sat down in front of it.
“I suggest you read something, or think about something,” she said over her shoulder. “This might take some time.”
Hamish wandered over to the bookshelves, and suddenly conscious again of his lack of knowledge of his home county, he took down The Sutherland Book, edited by Donald Omand, and settled down to study it.
Sutherland, is an immense District lashed by the waves of the Minch in the west, where the legendary blue men ride the Atlantic waves ready to lure unwary sailors to their doom, by the cold North Sea where the Vikings of old landed their longships, in the north-east by the fertile lands of Caithness, in the south-east by the waters of the Moray Firth, while in the south Sutherland melts into the beauty of Ross. They are a mixed bag of Celts, Scots, Rets, Vikings, and since the Clearances, with not an inconsiderable leavening of Lowlanders brought in to look after the sheep. Wherever they came from, the low-lying mists, the dark lochs and tarns, the dreary moors and the towering mountains were bound to have added to the superstitions they already held and accentuated their fear of the unknown.