In comparison with Portree, Inverness was a metropolis. He counted ten churches before giving up: the Woolworths too was larger. Feeling tired, he sat down on a bench for a while. He took a blue tablet from his pocket and swallowed it; it should keep his thrombosis at bay.
A man who appeared to be a beggar came and asked him for money for a cup of tea.
‘No, thank you,’ said Sam. The beggar looked at him for a moment and then scuttled away.
Sam gazed straight ahead of him at what appeared to be a cinema, and whose lights flashed intermittently. A moment’s thought however told him that it was not a cinema. It was in fact some kind of a club as he deduced from the large green letters which said ‘THE MESS OF POTTAGE’. It suddenly seemed to him certain that he would find Donnie Macleod in there. He had no logical means of knowing this, only the mystical intuition of the great detective that he was.
He walked over to the building. Behind a glass screen sat a large woman who was wearing black lipstick.
‘One ticket,’ he said crisply. ‘That will be enough.’
‘Adult?’ said the woman in a husky voice.
He disdained answering her; he had taken an instant dislike to her from the moment he saw her. But, more than that, he was suddenly struck by an intuition as he looked at her naked neck and almost naked breasts. He couldn’t quite focus on what it was but it told him he had come to the right place.
He left the lobby and going through a door ahead he found himself in a large smoky room, in fact Sodom and Gomorrah. The noise was frightening. Dancers clung closely to each other. Some people were drinking at tables. On a stage a large, almost naked, woman was prancing. So this was what the Highlands had come to after the Clearances. So this was what the ’45 had done to the people. So this was the result of the sheep runs and the deer forests.
If it hadn’t been for his instinctive desire to pursue his investigations, he would have left at once. He touched his bowler hat as if for comfort.
As he stood there hesitating, a large woman wearing red lipstick and tottering on the sharp heels of her shoes (Armstrong and Brothers, Inverness) came up to him and said in a deep attractive voice, ‘Are you not dancing, darling?’ And before he could say anything he was dragged into the maelstrom of light and noise.
‘Where do you come from?’ asked his partner, against whose naked breast Sam’s bowler hat bobbed like a cork in a stormy sea. He couldn’t account for his hatred of her, but said sharply, ‘Portree.’
‘Portree, darling. Over the sea to Skye and so on.’ (Her cliché immediately offended him. Why, wherever one went nowadays, could one never get a really satisfactory religious discussion?) Her mouth yawned, surrounded by a red infernal line.
‘Do you always wear a bowler hat when you are dancing?’ she asked.
‘Always,’ said Sam.
‘How flip, what an ironic comment you are making on our contemporary society,’ said the large woman. ‘You must be a satirist, rather like Juvenal.’
Not another pagan writer, thought Sam savagely. Why not one of the prophets such as Micah? But no one ever mentioned Micah or Jeremiah.
The large woman made as if to kiss Sam. He turned his head away from a breath that stank like garlic.
‘Has “THE MESS OF POTTAGE” been here long? he forced himself to say, trying to wriggle away from her hand which rested on his rump. A thrill of horror pervaded him.
‘Who knows, darling?’ So many questions, so few answers.
Her shadowy chin bent over him and suddenly the solution to the case was as clear to him as a psalm book on a pew on a summer day. He withdrew rapidly from the woman’s embrace and made his way to the exit, the sign for which hung green above his head.
‘I knew it,’ he said to the receptionist, ‘I knew I had seen you before. The hair on your chest registered subconsciously.’
‘It is true,’ said Donnie. ‘You have run me to ground. I suppose it was Annie who hired you . . . ’
‘It was indeed,’ said Sam. (You ungrateful pervert, he muttered under his breath.) He wanted to crush Donnie into a pulp. So he had been right after all. That red spot beside the word ‘enuff’ had been lipstick, not blood.
‘I couldn’t stand it any longer,’ the vicious serpent was saying. ‘I was tired of hearing Leviticus and especially Numbers. You have no idea what it was like. If I had stayed I would have gone mad.’ (You horrible atheist!) ‘I couldn’t distinguish between the Amalekites and the Philistines.’ (You pathetic heretic!) ‘When sitting at the table I would have an impulse to stab Annie with a knife. I knew there was no future for us. I saw this job in the paper and applied for it.’ (You belly-crawling snake!)
So this was why Donnie had said to that ineffable boring ferryman, ‘A change is good for a man.’ So this was why he had looked devilish.
‘I won’t go back,’ said Donnie simply, ‘I’m happy here. I love my new dresses. Pink was always my favourite colour.’
‘You used to dress up in your bedroom,’ said Sam.
‘How did you know that?’
Sam ignored the question. After a while, Donnie said, ‘You are a marvellous detective, the best in Portree. But you can tell Annie I will not go back. I have made a new life for myself here, and Jim and I have fallen in love. Tell her that if it hadn’t been Leviticus it would have been someone else.’
Sam Spaid looked into Donnie’s blue eyes, thinking many thoughts. His gaze rested on the rose in his corsage. Then he sighed deeply. ‘I think you are
