There was a roar of approval. Shocked, Mrs. Wellington struggled to her feet and held up her hands for silence.
“That is a most dreadful and, if you will forgive me, Mrs. Baird,
“What would you suggest?” asked Maggie with dangerous sweetness.
“Well, I think we should get up a petition.”
“We’ll put it to a vote,” said Maggie. “All in favour of organising some crime, raise their hands.”
A forest of hands went up.
“All in favour of a petition?”
Only a few hands went up.
Mr. Wellington took the floor. “You cannot, Mrs. Baird, expect us all to break the law.”
“No one said anything about breaking the law,” replied Maggie cheerfully. “We make it look as if we’ve got a crime and insist on having the police in. I am going to pass round sheets of paper and you will all write down suggestions. I will report that something of mine, something valuable, has been stolen, and then after a bit I’ll say, ’Sorry to have wasted your time, it has been found.’ That sort of thing.”
There was a silence in the hall. Maggie realised furiously that everyone was obviously waiting for Priscilla to say something.
Feudal lot of peasants, thought Maggie angrily.
Priscilla got to her feet. She was wearing a smart grey tailored pin-striped suit with a white blouse, sheer stockings, and patent leather high heels. “Yes, I think a bit of organised crime is the sensible answer,” said Priscilla. “My father is having trouble again with poachers. I shall start off with that complaint.”
There was a cheer and a man shouted, “Good for you. We knew you would think of something.”
In that moment, Alison felt quite warm toward her aunt. It did seem unfair that Maggie should have thought up the scheme only to have everyone give Priscilla all the credit.
Papers were passed around, a few half bottles of whisky were produced, the villagers scribbled busily. The air was soon heavy with the raw smell of alcohol and a fog of cigarette smoke.
When the meeting was over, everyone was happy with the results – with the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Wellington, Maggie, and Alison.
“Why did I bother?” fumed Maggie on the road home.
“Did you see that Halburton-Smythe bitch calmly taking the credit for everything? Anyway, my crime is the best and so I shall show them.”
Sergeant MacGregor drove angrily over the twisting Highland roads that led from Cnothan to Lochdubh. Some female had lost her diamond earrings and what should have been handled by that Macbeth fellow was now having to be handled by him, MacGregor.
What made it worse was that this female, this Mrs. Baird, had phoned the high-ups in Strathbane and accused them of deliberately encouraging crime in Lochdubh by taking away the village policeman and had threatened to write to
He drove through Lochdubh, remarking sourly to himself that it looked as sleepy as ever, and took the coast road to Maggie’s bungalow.
The door was opened by a grim-looking housekeeper wearing a blue cotton dress with a white collar. MacGregor’s heart sank. Anyone who could afford to employ a Scottish housekeeper these days and get her to wear a sort of uniform must be stinking rich, and stinking rich meant power, and power meant trouble.
Mrs. Baird was all he had feared and anticipated. She was a great, fat woman wearing a tweed suit and heavy brogues. Her thick hair was scraped back in an old–fashioned bun and she had the glacial accents of the upper class. With her on the chintz-covered sofa sat a dab of a woman, peering at him through thick-lensed glasses, whom Mrs. Baird introduced as “my niece, Miss Kerr.”
“You took your time about getting here,” said Maggie.
“Well, I have to come from Cnothan, which is a good wee bit away,” said MacGregor with what he hoped was a placating smile.
“Stop grinning like a monkey and get your notebook out,” ordered Maggie. The housekeeper brought in a tray with a coffee pot, cream, sugar, and only two cups. MacGregor was obviously not going to be offered any.
“When did you first notice the earrings were missing?” asked MacGregor.
“Last night. I’ve searched the house. Mrs. Todd, the housekeeper, is a local woman and above suspicion. But two suspicious-looking hikers were seen hanging about yesterday. They could have got in somehow and taken them.”
“Description?” asked MacGregor, licking his pencil.
“Man and a girl, early twenties. The man had a straggly beard and the girl looked like one of those dreary intellectual types, rather like Miss Kerr here.” Maggie laughed and Alison winced. “The man was wearing a camouflage jacket and jeans, and the girl, a red anorak and brown slacks. The man had on a ski cap and the girl was hatless. Her hair was mousy brown.”
MacGregor eventually drove off in a more cheerful frame of mind. He had something concrete to go on. He telephoned from his Land Rover to Strathbane and put out an alert for the hikers. That strange creature, Macbeth, who had had the temerity to solve a murder case in his, MacGregor’s, absence, would soon find out his presence was not missed in Lochdubh.
He had only just reached home when a call came through from the chief constable. Colonel Halburton-Smythe demanded the presence of a policeman immediately. Poachers were netting salmon on his river. With a groan, MacGregor set out for Lochdubh again. The colonel insisted on taking the sergeant on a long walk across country to the river and haranguing him on the ineptitude of the police. MacGregor was tired and weary by the time he got back to Cnothan.
But fury gave him energy, fury generated by a call from Strathbane to say that Mrs. Baird had telephoned. She had found her lost earrings down the back of the sofa and what was MacGregor doing wasting the force’s time by having them look for villainous hikers who did not exist?
Then a phone call came from the Lochdubh Hotel to say that a group of young people were creating a riot in the public bar. MacGregor appealed for back-up and took the road back to Lochdubh to find the public bar empty apart from a few shattered glasses and the owner of the hotel, who was unable to give a clear description of the young people.
By the time he finally got home to bed, he was nearly in tears of rage. Morning found him in a calmer frame of mind. Lochdubh would sink back into its usual peace and quiet.
And then the phone started to ring. A crofter in Lochdubh complained that five of his sheep had been stolen during the night, and a farmer reported that two of his prize cows were missing. The schoolteacher, Miss Monson, called to say that drugs had been found in a classroom.
Again MacGregor telephoned for help, only to be asked wearily why he couldn’t handle things himself – that is, until he got to the tale of the drugs in the classroom. Detective Chief Inspector Blair and a team of detectives and forensic men were despatched from Strathbane only to find that the drugs in the classroom were packets of baking soda. “Silly me,” said the giggling schoolteacher, and Blair took his anger out on MacGregor, who had no one to take it out on except his wife, and he was afraid of her.
The amazing thing about British policewomen is that a surprising proportion of them are attractive. And so P.C. Hamish Macbeth could not help wondering why he had the ill luck to be saddled with such a creature as Mary Graham on his beat. P.C. Graham, he reflected, looked like one of those women you see in German war films. Not only was there the dyed blond hair, but she had staring ice-blue eyes, a mouth like a trap, and an impeccable uniform with a short tailored skirt which showed strong muscular legs encased in black tights – not fine sheer tights worn by some of the younger policewomen, but thick wool ones, and her shoes were like black polished glass.
It was a sunny day as they walked side by side along the waterfront, past closed bars smelling of last night’s drunks; past shuttered warehouses falling into ruin, relics of the days when Strathbane was a small busy port; past blocks of houses thrown up in the fifties during that period when all architects seem to have sold their souls to Stalin, and had erected towers of concrete very like their counterparts in Moscow. The balconies had once been painted jolly primary colours, but now long trails of rust ran down the cracked concrete of the buildings in which elevators had long since died, and rubbish lay in heaps on the sour earth of what was originally intended to be a communal garden.
