“There’s another way you could go about it,” said the doctor slyly.
“Aye, what’s that?”
“Get married yourself.”
“There’s nobody I fancy.”
“Except Priscilla. Forget Priscilla. Do you know Priscilla? I’ve known her since she was a wee lassie and I don’t really know her. Very self-contained. She’ll eventually marry the right bloke, some landowner, and we’ll never know whether it was love or whether she was doing the right thing to please her parents. What about that new luscious lovely at the restaurant?”
“Lucia? Oh, everyone’s after her, including Willie, and Willie hasn’t a hope in hell. I gather his idea of courtship is telling her how to scrub the steps and clean the cooker.”
“There’s Maisie Gowan.”
“Maisie Gowan’s eighteen years old!”
“What’s up wi’ that? She fancies you. Then there’s that Doris Ward from the hotel.”
“No, not her,” said Hamish. “I don’t want anyone. I want my old life back. I want rid of Willie. Man, this power is the terrible thing. When I had no one to boss but myself, I was that easygoing. Now I breathe down Willie’s neck and snap if he doesn’t haff the paperwork chust the way it should be. Ach, the man’s a fair scunner, but I make things worse.”
“Never mind. Have another whisky,” said the doctor. “It’s this bitter weather. Very claustrophobic. The good weather’ll be along soon and everything will be more open and relaxed.”
“Is there anything on the telly?” asked Hamish, looking longingly at the set in the corner. “Willie had one but he got rid of it because he says he doesn’t believe in it, chust as if it wass a type of religion.”
“Wait and I’ll look up the paper and see what’s on,” said the doctor, judging by the hissing sibilancy of Hamish’s Highland accent that he was really upset. “Here we are, BBC 1: ‘Whither England? Mary Pipps of the former Communist Party discusses plans for a European future.’ Dear me. BBC 2: ‘The rape of the Brazilian rain forests.’ Not again. You know what’s caused the demise of the Brazilian rain forests, Hamish? Camera crews trudging all over the place. Grampian: ‘The Reverend Mackintosh of Strathbane Free Presbyterian Church gives his view on the spread of AIDS in Africa.’ Nothing left but Channel 4, let me see…ah, ‘Highlights of the Gulf War’, a repeat of last year’s showing. Well, Hamish?”
“None of that. Can I take a look through your paperbacks and borrow a hot-water bottle? Willie threw my hot-water bottle out. He said the rubber was perished.”
“You sound like a man with a nagging wife. The books are over there; help yourself.”
Hamish, after much deliberation, chose an American detective story of the tough-cop variety. He collected a hot-water bottle and then crunched his way out through the icy snow on the doctor’s unswept garden path. Great stars still burnt overhead but were beginning to be covered with thin high trails of cloud. He sniffed the air. A change was coming. The air smelt damp, rain-damp, not the metallic smell of snow.
He drove slowly to the police station. The furniture was gone from outside. Inside, the stove was blazing merrily in the kitchen. Everything smelt damply of ammonia and disinfectant. He took a look around the rest of the place. Willie’s bedroom door was tightly shut, a mute reproach to Hamish’s lack of understanding about housekeeping. Hamish went back to the kitchen and sat in front of the fire and opened the detective story. In it, the detective had a blonde girlfriend whom he treated abominably, something which seemed to make her even more adoring. Long and careful questioning of suspects was out of the question. He simply slapped them around until he got the answers. It was as remote a way of life to Hamish as an Arthurian legend. He read happily and finally went to bed with much of his old good-natured frame of mind restored. Let Willie clean and scrub and write reports in convoluted English. If he just ignored the man and went about his own ways, then life would be tolerable. As for Priscilla…?
Pompous hard-faced bitch, he thought, clutching the comforting hot-water bottle to his stomach. Who needs her anyway?
♦
The weather again went in for one of its abrupt changes and heralded in the morning light with a blast of wind which roared into the loch and departed at the other end with an eldritch screech. Following it came the rain, steady, drenching rain. Once more the River Anstey was in tumult and the bridge was being seriously damaged by the pressure of the roaring flood. The village council met to decide whether to opt for a completely new bridge by the side of the old one, a new one which could take two lanes of traffic. But the die-hards wanted the old bridge. It was picturesque and one of the much photographed sights of the village.
Willie, sensing there was some sort of a truce, kept his housekeeping to a minimum, but when Hamish made no protest, he was soon happily back, polishing everything in sight.
But his happiness was dimmed by the fact that Lucia was walking out with Jimmy Gordon, the forestry worker. Jimmy was tall and fairly good-looking. Everyone in the village said they made a handsome couple.
Hamish had elected to do the outer reaches of the beat by car, leaving Willie to cover the village beat on foot. Somehow, wherever Jimmy walked with Lucia, Willie was never far behind.
“Would ye no’ like tae come for a bit o’ a drive up in the hills wi’ me?” Jimmy was asking Lucia. “We cannae get away from the polis.”
Lucia shook her head. Mr Ferrari said she was allowed to go for walks with Jimmy in the village and always where they could be seen. She glanced back at Willie and then said in her soft voice and very slowly, for she was always translating what she said in her mind from Italian to English, “What is your idea of marriage, Jeemy?”
He took her hand in his. “I want a wee wife to work and clean fur me, someone pretty tae come home tae in the evenings.”
“Would you wish me to iron your shirts?”
“Aye, that would be grand. Look at this one. It’s a’ crumpled.”
“Why don’t you iron it yourself, Jeemy?”
He gave a great laugh and then flung an arm about her shoulders. “That’s women’s work.”
Lucia gently disengaged herself.
Jimmy never knew what he had said wrong. But after that when he called at the kitchen door for Lucia, it was always old Mr Ferrari who answered and who told him that Lucia was too busy to see him.
∨ Death of a Travelling Man ∧
4
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek.
—Sir Thomas Wyatt
The good weather did not come all at once. At first there was a lessening of the wind, then the rain decreased to a thin drizzle and soon the rain ceased altogether, letting fitful rays of watery sunlight through the clouds. The days grew perceptibly warmer until even Hamish Macbeth, who delighted in his new central heating, was forced to admit that the police station was becoming like a hothouse. And then one day all the clouds rolled back and pale-blue skies stretched above Lochdubh, and the River Anstey at long last settled back down into its familiar banks, leaving a path of torn trees and bleached grass on either side as a record of its recent fury.
But the coming of the idyllic weather made Hamish Macbeth realize that he was becoming oddly unpopular. Angela Brodie, the doctor’s wife, went out of her way to avoid him, as did Mrs Wellington. No more did Priscilla drop in on him for a chat. Even Nessie and Jessie Currie, the village spinster sisters, dived indoors and left their gardening tools scattered on the lawn when they saw him coming.
And for some reason, Hamish felt it all had something to do with Sean Gourlay. The bus was still there, looking to Hamish like a cancerous sore in the heart of the village. But he could not ask Sean to move on because of a feeling of evil, or rather a premonition of evil to come. He knew several of the villagers, the Misses Curries and Angela among them, had been visitors to the bus. Cheryl was occasionally to be seen about the village, much cleaned up and quiet, always on her own and talking to no one. Hamish was sure Sean had started some campaign to turn the villagers against him.