beach bag, and with a little guilty flush, she asked Miss Gunnery if she could use her room to change, “…so as not to disturb Bob.”
Hamish again felt that uneasiness as Miss Gunnery agreed. He felt they were all becoming conspirators in encouraging a highly dangerous romance between Doris and Andrew Biggar.
The Bretts were seated in the lounge. They looked wistful when they heard the others were going to the fair, but they had better stay and look after the children.
Hamish found himself cursing Bob Harris again as they all set out. Normally, they would have remained a typical group of British holiday-makers, restrained and separate and wary of each other. But the common resentment against the nag had drawn them all together so quickly, which might have been a good thing had it not been for the shy glow on Doris’s face when she looked at Andrew.
He had a sudden sharp longing for Priscilla Halburton-Smythe’s cool assessment of the situation. But Priscilla, his ex-fiancee, was down in England. She had seemed very comfortable and at ease in his company before she had left. Whatever she had once felt for him – and he often wondered now what that something had been – had gone. And what am I doing, Hamish Macbeth, he wondered, holidaying with this odd bunch? He automatically stooped to pat Towser for comfort and then remembered he had left the dog behind at the boarding-house.
As they approached Skag, the wind rose, making the sands sing, blowing white sand about them so that they were glad to get in amongst the comparative shelter of the fair booths and roundabouts. Hamish waited until they all had piled on to a roundabout and then slid off quietly to see a bit of Skag and have some time to himself. He wandered away from the fairground, hearing the harsh carousel music fading behind him, reaching him only now and then in snatches borne by the ever-increasing wind. He walked through the narrow streets, noticing, here and there, the larger window in front of a cottage denoting that it was once a shop, before the days of cars and cheap supermarkets at the nearest town. Some of the cottages were thatched, odd in Scotland, when the only cottages that were once thatched had been the black houses covered in heather, the ones without chimneys, now only maintained as museum pieces. And yet the buildings were surely not that old, late Victorian, perhaps. He saw a building with a sign ‘Museum’ outside and went in for a look around.
There had evidently been a village on the point between the river Skag and the North Sea for as long as anyone could remember, but in the 1880s, weeks of torrential rain and high winds and high tides had caused river and sea to meet in one roaring flood which had covered the whole village. The village had remained drowned for weeks before the waters had receded. Ten years later, when the village had been rebuilt and was thriving again, great gales had come tearing over the North Sea from Scandinavia, whipping up the white sand and eventually burying the whole village. After the houses had been excavated, trees and razor-grass had been planted on the other side of the river, where a Scottish Sahara of white sand dunes stretched for miles to stop the sand from shifting.
He bought a small book on the history of the village and went back out without stopping to look at any of the exhibits in glass cases. The narrow, unsurfaced streets were deserted. Ribbons of sand snaked along them like feelers put out by some alien creature. The trouble with Scottish villages like this, thought Hamish, was that all the community life had been bled out of them. Cars took the villagers out at night to the bright lights of the town. The villagers would often blame the incomers for having destroyed village life, but it was the automobile which had done that, making nomads of even the elderly. There was no putting the clock back now.
And then Hamish thought he was falling into the messy ways of thinking of so many – that the good old days had been better. Not so long ago, Skag would have been a closed-in fishing community, repressed and dark and secretive, everything kept under wraps – incest, drunkenness, violence, child abuse, pregnant girls forced to marry men who did not want them, all the miseries coloured by the overriding horror of living in poverty or the fear of having to.
So now the young people left the quiet Scottish villages and were replaced by incomers from the south, who claimed they had come in search of ‘the quality of life’ which meant they got regularly drunk with all the other incomers fleeing from reality. But the village did have an odd eerie charm, filled as it was with the sound of rushing water from the river and the susurration of the gritty white sand blowing in the streets. There was one shop still open, manned by the inevitable Asian. A Scottish shopkeeper closed up at teatime, no matter how bad trade was. It sold newspapers, sweets, postcards and toys, and an odd assortment of household goods. Next to it was a dress- shop, Paris Fashions, with two dresses drooping in the window and with price-tags marking the gowns down from ?120 to ?85. Hamish wondered if they would ever sell. But where teashops used to be the last refuge of the genteel, now it was dress-shops, which opened their doors for a few months before facing up to the fact that with cheap clothes so near at hand in the local town, it was folly to try to sell Bond Street fashions at Bond Street prices.
There were two churches, one Free Church of Scotland and one Church of Scotland. A poster outside the Church of Scotland was half torn and fluttering in the wind. It said, “Life is Fragile. Handle with Prayer.”
Turning away from it, Hamish saw Bob Harris. He was coming out of a house at the end of the main street, his walk denoting that he was still drunk. His face was flushed and he had a triumphant smile on his face. He’s just made someone’s life a misery, thought Hamish. I wonder who lives there. Then he suddenly did not want to know anything more about Bob Harris and about whom he had been possibly persecuting. He walked instead to the harbour and sat on a bollard and looked down into the water.
The wind suddenly dropped and all was very quiet and still. He reflected that it must be the turn of the tide. It was a phenomenon he had noticed before. Just at the turn of the tide, nature held its breath – no bird sang, everything seemed to be waiting and waiting. And then, sure enough, as if someone had flicked a switch, everything started in motion again.
He got up and decided to go straight back to the hotel, collect a couple of paperbacks, and walk Towser along the beach. He occasionally wondered who it was who had searched his case but decided it had probably been Rogers, whose motive had been nothing more sinister than vulgar curiosity.
He felt a pang of guilt at not rejoining the others, but then reminded himself severely that he was not related to them, barely knew them, neither was he on police duty. If Bob Harris murdered his wife, then that was his business. And so, comforting himself with these callous thoughts, he loped home, collected Towser and the paperbacks, and set out along the beach in the opposite direction from Skag. He found a comfortable hollow and settled down to read with Towser at his feet. It would not get really dark. A pearly twilight would settle down about one in the morning for about two hours.
He read a tough-cop American detective story. The detective in it seemed to get results by punching confessions out of people, which gave Hamish a vicarious thrill as he thought of the scandal and miles of red tape that would descend on his head if he tried to do the same thing. The story ended satisfactorily with the detective incinerating the villains in a warehouse and getting a medal for bravery from the mayor in front of a cheering crowd on the steps of City Hall. America must be a marvellous country, thought Hamish wryly, if any of this was real. He imagined what would happen to him if he did the same thing. He would be hauled up before his superiors, who would want to know first of all why he had tackled the villians single-handed and not called for back-up, and why he had wrecked three police cars. Then he would be told that when he had finished writing all that out in triplicate, he would be interviewed by the gentlemen who owned the warehouse and their insurance company to explain why he had torched billions of dollars’ worth of stock.
With a sigh of satisfaction, he stood up and stretched and set off back along the beach for the boarding- house.
He had been looking forward to reading the other book, but Bob Harris was berating his wife next door and she was crying. Hamish ripped up pieces of tissue paper to form earplugs, buried his head under the pillow and fell asleep.
¦
Hamish had fully intended to keep the next day for himself, but when he entered the dining room for breakfast, all eyes turned to him hopefully. It was the sight of Doris’s sad face that made up his mind for him. He suddenly did not care whether Doris fell in love with Andrew or not. She might have a little happiness to remember in her otherwise miserable life.
“Whit are we daein’ the day, Hamish?” Cheryl called over to him.
“I thought you would all have had enough of bloody civil servants,” growled Bob Harris. “Petty little bureaucrats.”
Hamish ignored him. “I was down at the harbour yesterday evening,” he said, “and I noticed that you can hire
