‘And then,’ Norman said, leaning forward and speaking in a whisper, ‘his very words were, “A change is good for a man.” ’ Norman withdrew his head so quickly that he nearly butted Sam in the face, while at the same time his left eye winked rapidly at the great detective.
‘He looked devilish,’ said Norman, ‘and another thing. He came very close to me.’
‘Did he do that before?’
‘Not as close as that, not as close as that.’
‘I see,’ said Sam, who did not see at all. What had this to do with anything? (You winking parrot, he thought fiercely.)
‘How much will my ticket be?’ he asked.
‘Same as always,’ said Norman, and laughed uproariously. ‘Same as always.’
Sam threw a gaze of hatred after him as he made his way to the nonsmoking saloon where he sat very upright and watched a child making faces at him.
Devilish, he thought. Devilish. So Donnie was on the ferry after all. He hadn’t been killed by Annie, of whom Sam was suspicious from the very beginning because her hair was shorter than the church of St. Paul strictly allowed.
When the ferry docked he strode over to the bus and sat in the back seat. He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly that his blood pressure was rising. He made a mental note that he must take more exercise. His contempt for the easy-going Highland way of life was beginning, he knew, to affect his health.
When he opened his eyes he was horrified to see straight ahead of him above the driver’s head a screen on which there was a picture of a man and a woman in a naked embrace. For a moment he was worried that this was the content of his sinful mind, but when he looked about him he saw that the passengers were following the film with interest.
Without thinking, he strode down the aisle and said to the driver, ‘I want you to turn that filth off at once.’
The driver, manoeuvring equably between a foreign car and a truck, said, ‘I can’t do that sir. The passengers are watching it.’
‘And I am not a passenger, then?’
The driver considered this, chewing gum all the while – he was in fact quite young, and he wore a uniform and a pair of boots from Macdonald and Sons – and then said, ‘I suppose you are, in a manner of speaking.’
‘What do you mean, in a manner of speaking?’ said Sam loudly. He wanted to kill this young man, he wanted to wrench his bones apart, he wanted to spatter his blood all over the bus.
While he was standing there, a large man with a red face touched him lightly on the shoulder, ‘Had you not better sit down, Papa? The rest of us can’t see the screen.’
Sam turned round abruptly. He should really kick this man in the groin, but on the other hand reasoning might be better.
‘This is pornographic filth,’ he said. ‘This man should be ashamed of showing it.’
‘We like pornographic filth,’ said the large man simply. ‘Don’t we?’ and he turned to the other passengers. There was a chorus of ‘yes’.
‘You tell that bowler-hatted nyaff to sit down,’ said a woman with red hair, who was sitting in one of the middle seats.
‘You tell him to sit down or you will kick his balls in,’ said a fat woman with a fat chin, who was sitting in the front seat.
‘You sit there, Papa,’ he said, ‘We don’t want to put you out.’
I will report that driver, thought Sam, in incoherent rage. I will report him and hope that he will be dismissed from his job and turned out on to the street of whatever town he lives in. I wish to see him starving and indigent, begging for food, subservient, humble, asking for mercy as the whip lashes his back.
He maintained a resentful silence till the bus pulled into the bus station at Inverness, imagining only the large man’s flesh dripping from his bones in hell. He then got off the bus in the same silence, making a note, however, of its number. He should have slugged that bus driver, and that large man. He felt a familiar contempt: his toothache throbbed, his arthritis hurt, his blood pressure was rising, and now he felt a pain just above his heart.
When he was biting into the pie which he had bought at the café at the bus station, he belched. Thank God it wasn’t his heart, it was indigestion. He looked around him savagely. The usual crowd of nonentities, fodder of the Clearances, remnants of the ’45. He felt such unutterable contempt that he almost vomited on the spot. The good ones had gone to America and now he was left with illogical dross, who winked their eyes and seemed to have a secretive tradition which they would only tell after eons of time had elapsed. ‘You should do something about your salt,’ he said to the proprietor as he left, and felt the deep satisfaction which his parting shot had given.
The question however still remained. Had Donnie stayed in Inverness, or had he gone further afield? He felt a sudden pain in his kidneys and went into the lavatory at the side of the café. After he had finished he looked around him for a towel but there was none available.
‘You use that machine over there,’ said a young man with a grin.
Sam pushed the button on the machine but finding that no towel came out of it he left in the worst of humours.
What else could he do but parade the streets of Inverness.
If it hadn’t been for that film he could have questioned the bus driver about Donnie Macleod. But he could not ask a pervert for information and in any case he would have lied to him. I have to assume that he is still in Inverness, he thought, there is nothing else that I can
