“Aye, it is that. When you look around, it’s hard to think that anything violent ever happened here. I thought Kirsty would have been selling her story to the newspapers. Her lawyer’s fees must have taken most of what she got.”
A sudden shadow swept over them. Angela looked up at the sky. “Look at that cloud covering the sun. Where did it come from? The sky was as clear as anything a minute ago.”
Lugs suddenly let out a long, wild howl.
Hamish crouched down by his dog. “What’s the matter, Lugs?”
Lugs threw back his shaggy head with the big peculiar ears and let out an even louder howl. Villagers began to gather around. “Take the beast tae the vet,” said Archie Maclean. “He’s probably eaten something that’s hurt him.”
“It’s a death, that’s what it is.” Jessie Currie’s voice.
Hamish scooped the still howling dog into his arms. “I’ll take him home first and see if I can calm him down.”
The dog was shaking and howling as Hamish carried him into the police station. And then suddenly he went quiet and licked Hamish’s nose, almost apologetically.
Hamish set him down. Lugs wagged his tail and went to his water bowl.
He stood for a long moment, looking down at his dog, and then suddenly he was off and running to the Land Rover.
I’m being daft, he told himself. But he put on the siren and accelerated out of the village, not stopping until he skidded to a halt in front of Kirsty Ettrik’s cottage.
The door was standing open. He ran up to it and inside the house, shouting, “Kirsty!”
Then he stopped short. Dangling from a hook on a beam in the kitchen was the lifeless body of Kirsty Ettrik. A kitchen chair lay on the floor where she had kicked it over.
He took another chair and stood up on it and forced himself to feel for a pulse. The body was still warm, but there was no life there. He took out a pocket knife and cut the body down and laid it on the floor. He went into the bedroom and got a sheet and covered those awful, bulging, staring eyes. There was an envelope on the table addressed to Elspeth MacRae, and an open sheet of A4 paper on which Kirsty had written, “I can’t live with myself any more.”
Hamish backed away to the door and took out his phone and called Strathbane.
Then he sat down in the sunshine outside to wait. He could not bear to go back inside the house.
♦
By evening, Kirsty’s body had been removed, Hamish had typed up his statement in the police station and sent it to Strathbane. In the letter to Elspeth, Kirsty had left the croft house to her.
Lugs came in and put a paw on Hamish’s knee.
“Who are you?” asked Hamish, looking down at the dog. Then he shook his head as if to clear the nonsense out of it. Some of the locals still believed that the dead came back as seals. He was getting as nutty as they were.
But he sat there a long time, thinking of the hell that had been Kirsty’s life.
“What a waste,” he muttered. “What a waste.”
A voice called from the kitchen. “Anybody home?”
Priscilla!
He leapt to his feet and went through to find her standing there, smiling at him.
She was wearing an impeccably tailored trouser suit, and not one hair on her blonde head was out of place.
“I thought you were in Milton Keynes.”
“That job’s finished. Care for that dinner we never got around to?”
Only for a moment did he hesitate. Only for a moment did his mind warn him against opening up old wounds. Who was it who had said, ‘There are no new wounds. Only old wounds reopened’?
But every minute of life was surely for living, for any enjoyment one could get. Seize the moment.
“Be with you in a minute,” said Hamish Macbeth. “I’ll just change out of my uniform.”