So you see, my friends, that I have not been idle.
I have also decided during the course of this year to change the subject of my novel. It was originally to be about a bank clerk, but I have noticed on television a resurgence of the detective story. Thus I have created a private eye called Sam Spaid who walks, as I write, the mean streets of Portree. He wears a bowler hat, and when he is in his office listens to tapes of Free Church sermons. He doesn’t drink or smoke and his only vice is sniffing. In his first case he opened his door to find a stunning Free Church woman there. He immediately knew that she spelt trouble. The elastic which she kept round her Bible had been stolen. This investigation, which of course ended in success, took Sam Spaid to a cache of black elastic in Inverness. Sam Spaid’s fee, which never varies, is £20 per day plus expenses! He will never be rich but he will be an interesting moral phenomenon. His next case will involve the serial murders of Free Church ministers by a crazed sniper who was made to spend his early years in the Sunday School.
I hope you are not bored at hearing about my projects at great length but at this season of the year such ramblings may be forgiven, as Christmas carols are.
My final project has to do with a taxi service that I run for drunks at the New Year. For this purpose I have a number of advertisements run off, which read, “Drink as much as you like. Murdo will run you home.” In small print it reads, “Ditches, lavatories, cemeteries, scoured for those who have INDULGED too much.” The taxi is of course my own car and I am happy for it to be used for such a Christian purpose. In the course of this work I have become very humble, as I have been beaten up and vomited on many times. Hence I have developed a servile stance which has served me well. I call my customers “Sir” or “My Lord” and am especially friendly to large people, and to those whose jackets are flecked with a mixture of lager and sickness. It seems to me reasonable that I should charge extra for taking people to their doors or to their lavatories or even to their bedrooms. I wear protective clothing and sometimes a gas-mask. I charge also for burns from cigarettes on the seat of my car. I consider what I am doing to be a Christian duty which money in itself cannot pay. I could tell you of some little contretemps I have had, as for example a drug-crazed addict from Shawbost who attacked me with a graip, but I shall refrain. Nor will I mention that time I took one of my customers to the wrong bedroom. This arose from the fact that there are many Norman MacLeods on the island.
As you can see therefore I have had a busy and eventful year. Blessings on you wherever you are and may we exchange literature such as this often in the future.
Yours as ever
Murdo
Home
The black polished car drew up outside the brown tenement and he rested for a moment, his hands still on the wheel. He was a big man with a weatherbeaten red-veined face and a strong jaw. On one finger of his right hand was a square red ring. He looked both competent and hard.
After a while he got out, gazing round him and up at the sky with a hungry look as if he were scanning the veldt. His wife in furs got out more slowly. Her face had a haggard brownness like that of a desiccated gipsy and seemed to be held together, like a lacy bag, by the wrinkles.
He glanced up at the tenement with the cheerful animation of one who had left it, and yet with a certain curiosity.
‘Lock the car, dear,’ said his wife.
He stared at her for a moment in surprise and then said as if he had been listening to a witticism, ‘But they don’t steal things here.’
She smiled disdainfully.
They walked into the close whose walls were brown above and a dirty blue below, pitted with scars. Somebody had written in chalk the words Ya Bass. It looked for a moment African, and he stared at it as if it had recalled some memory. On the other side of the road the flat-faced shops looked back at them blankly.
He pointed upwards to a window.
‘Mind the Jamiesons?’ he said.
She remembered them but took no pleasure in the memory. The Jamiesons had lived above them and were, of course, Protestant. Not that at that level you could distinguish Catholic from Protestant except that the former went to chapel and the latter didn’t. The O’Rahilly’s house – for instance – had been full of wee ornaments, and once she had seen a complete ornamental house showing, outside it, like Europeans outside a verandah, Christ and the twelve disciples, the whole thing painted a distasteful green.
She remembered Jamieson all right. Every Friday night he would dress up in his best blue suit, neat as a ray or razor, and would wave to his wife who was following his progress to the road from an open window, her scarf tight round her head. He would go off to the pub and pick a fight with a Catholic, or
