“At the top of the main street?” asked Hamish. He knew the woman knew perfectly well where the police station was, but Hamish was an incomer, and in Cnothan, you never told incomers anything if you could help it.
“It could be, but why don’t you ask someone else?” said the face at the door.
Hamish leaned against the door jamb and studied the sky. “Aye, it iss blowing up,” he said in his soft Highland voice, which became more sibilant when he was angry or upset. “Now, Mr. MacGregor, he will be going to Florida to visit his brother, Roy. It will be hot there this time of year.”
“Aye, it will,” said the woman.
“And I call to mind he has the sister in Canada.”
The chain dropped and the door opened another few inches. “That’s Bessie,” said the woman. “Her that is in Alberta.”
“True, true,” agreed Hamish. “And you are Mrs. MacNeill?”
“Now, how did you ken that?” asked Mrs. MacNeill, opening the door wide.
“Oh, hass not everyone heard of Mrs. MacNeill,” said Hamish. “That’s why I called. People are not often anxious to give directions, but I said to myself, that Mrs. MacNeill, being a cosmopolitan sort of lady, would help if she could.”
Mrs. MacNeill simpered awfully. “You was asking about the police station. Yes, as I was saying, it is right at the top of the main street on the left. They are packed and ready to leave.”
“Thank you.” Hamish touched his cap and strolled off.
“Cantankerous auld bitch,” he muttered to Towser, “but there was no point in asking anyone else, for I suppose they’ll all be the same.”
At the top of the main street was a long, low, grey bungalow with the blue police lamp over an extension to the side. A small angry police sergeant was striding up and down outside.
“What kept ye?” he snapped. And then, before Hamish could open his mouth, he went on, “Come in. Come in. But leave that dog outside. There’s an old kennel at the back. It can sleep there. No dogs in the house.”
Hamish told Towser to stay and followed the sergeant into the house. The sergeant led the way through to the extension. “Here’s the desk, and don’t you mess up my filing system. And there’s the keys to the cell. You’ll have trouble wi’ Sandy Carmichael of a Saturday. Gets the horrors something dreadful.”
“If a man has the DTs, isn’t it better to get him to the hospital?” asked Hamish mildly.
“Waste o’ public money. Just strap him down on the bunk and let him rave away until morning. Come ben and meet the wife.”
Hamish loped behind the bustling policeman. “She’s in the lounge,” said Sergeant MacGregor. Mrs. MacGregor rose to meet them. She was a thin, wispy woman with pale eyes and enormous red hands. Hamish’s pleasantries were cut short.
“I like to keep the place nice,” said Mrs. MacGregor. “I don’t want to come back from Florida and find the place like a tip.”
Hamish stood with his cap under his arm, his hazel eyes growing blanker by the minute. The living-room in which he stood, which had been exalted to a lounge by the MacGregors, was a long, low room with pink niched curtains at the windows. A salmon-coloured three–piece suite, which looked as if it had been delivered that day, stared back at him in all its nylon velveteen overstuffedness. The walls were embellished with highly coloured religious pictures. A blonde and blue-eyed Jesus suffered the little children to come unto him, all of them dressed in thirties school clothes and all of them remarkably Anglo-Saxon-looking. A carpet of one of the more violent Scottish tartans screamed from the floor. There was a glass coffee-table on wrought-iron legs in front of the sofa, and a glass-and-wrought-iron bar stood in one corner, with glass shelves behind it lit with pink flourescent strip lighting and containing, it seemed, every funny-looking bottle ever invented. An electric heater with fake logs stood in the fireplace. In the recesses of the room were glass shelves containing a startling variety of china ornaments: acid-green jugs in the shape of fish, little girls in pastel dresses holding up their skirts, bowls of china fruit, dogs and cats with Disney smiles on their highly glazed faces, and rows of miniature spun-glass objects, of the type of spun glass you see at fairgrounds. On a side table lay a large Victorian Bible, open at a page where there was a steel engraving of an epicene angel with scaly wings throwing very small anguished people in loincloths down into a fiery pit.
Mrs. MacGregor then led him from one frilly overfurnished bedroom to another. The bungalow boasted five.
“Where’s the kitchen?” asked Hamish, finding his voice.
She trotted on her high heels in front of him, head down, as if charging. “In here,” she said. Hamish stifled a sigh of relief. The kitchen was functional and had every labour-saving device imaginable. The floor was tiled, and there was a good-sized table. He decided to shut off that terrible lounge for the duration of his stay.
“Have you got television?” he asked.
Mrs. MacGregor looked up at the tall, gangling policeman with the fiery-red hair and hazel eyes. “No, we don’t believe in it,” she said sharply, as if debating the existence of little green men on Mars.
“I see you have the central heating,” remarked Hamish.
“Yes, but we have double glazing on the windows, so you’ll find you hardly need it. It’s on a timer. Two hours in the morning and two in the evening, and that’s enough for anyone.”
“Well, if I could chust haff a word with your good man…” began Hamish, looking around for the police sergeant, who had disappeared during the tour of the house.
“There’s no time, no time,” she said, seizing a bulging handbag from the kitchen counter. “Geordie’s waiting with the taxi.”
Hamish looked at her in amazement. He wanted to ask MacGregor about duties, about where the keys to the car were kept, about how far his beat extended, about the villains of the parish. But he was sure the MacGregors were cursed with what he had rapidly come to think of as Cnothanitis: Don’t tell anyone anything.
He followed her out to the taxi. “So you’ll be away three months, then?” said Hamish, leaning on MacGregor’s side of the taxi. The sergeant stared straight ahead. “If you’d get out of the road, Constable,” he said, “we might be able to get to the train on time.”
“Wait a bit,” said Hamish. “Where are the keys to your car?”
“In it,” snapped MacGregor. He nodded to the taxi-driver and the cab moved off.
“Good riddance,” grumbled Hamish. He jerked his head to Towser, who followed him into the kitchen. Hamish took the central heating off the timing regulator and turned up the thermostat as high as it would go and started to examine the contents of the kitchen cupboards to see if there was any coffee. But the cupboards were bare; not even a packet of salt.
“You know, Towser,” said Hamish Macbeth, “I hope they get hijacked to Cuba.”
He went through to the office and examined the files in a tall filing cabinet in the corner. It was full of sheep-dip papers and little else. Not dipping one’s sheep seemed to be considered the major criminal offence in Cnothan. There came a crashing and rattling from the kitchen. He ran through. Towser had his large head in one of the bottom cupboards, which Hamish had left open, and was rummaging through the pots and pans.
“Get out of it, you daft animal,” said Hamish. “I’ll just away to the shops and see if I can get us some food.” He searched until he found a bowl and filled it with water for the dog. Then he ambled out of the house and down the main street. The lunch-hour was over and the shops were open again. People were standing in little knots, gossiping, and as he passed, they stopped talking and stared at him with curious and unfriendly eyes.
He bought two bags of groceries and then made his way down to the garage, which also sold household goods. He asked if he could rent a television set and was curtly told by a small man whose face was set in lines of perpetual outrage that no, he could not. To the shopkeeper’s irritation, Hamish did not go away, but kept repeating his question in a half-witted sort of manner, looking around the other customers as he did so.