Hendry?”
She shook her head.
Hamish and Priscilla went silently outside. As they drove off, Hamish cleared his throat and said, “Nothing can be done unless she wishes it done.”
“Exactly,” agreed Priscilla. “Turn off here to the left, Hamish. The house we want to see is called Haven. A few hundred yards along on the right. The owners are Mr. and Mrs. Peterman.”
Hamish parked outside. The house was low and square, built, he guessed, sometime in the thirties. The garden was neat with regimented flowers and plants, evenly spaced, as if the distances between them had been measured by a ruler.
It was a one-storey house, the roof slate, the walls pebble-dashed, and the door had a top pane of stained glass. Priscilla rang the imitation ship’s bell outside the door. A thin, nervous woman answered it. Her shoulders were hunched and her arms were hanging straight down and her head was jutting forward, as if someone had thrust a coat-hanger into her sweater. She had a long fringe down to her eyebrows and slate-coloured eyes stared out from under it. She was wearing skin-tight jeans and baseball boots.
“Good morning,” said Priscilla. “We have come to see the house. Mrs. Peterman?”
“Yes.” The woman held out a hand in welcome. The skin was red and glazed and the knuckles swollen.
“I am Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, and this is Hamish Macbeth, my fiance.”
“Pleased to meet you.” She had a slight Yorkshire accent. “I’ll take you around,” she said. “There’s one thing I will say, this house is always clean. You could eat off the floor. We’ll start with the lounge.”
The lounge, of which she was obviously very proud, contained a mushroom-coloured, three–piece suite which looked as if it had never been sat on. Despite the days of hair oil being long gone, both chairs and sofa were decorated with antimacassars. An electric fire of fake logs decorated the hearth in front of a pink-tiled fireplace. There was a low coffee-table in front of the sofa set about with coasters decorated with flamenco dancers. Against one wall was a hi-fi unit, and over the fireplace, a picture of a mountain scene painted by an amateur, all eye- hurting colours and peculiar perspective. The air was cold and stale. “And now the dining-room,” said Mrs. Peterman, charging out, her shoulders hunched and her arms straight out like a character in a cheap cartoon where the animator had been trying to save on animation.
Priscilla and Hamish stood together, looking at a long dining-table surrounded by ladder-back chairs with petit-point cushions in such vile colours that Hamish suspected Mrs. Peterman had been responsible for them. There was a sideboard of the kind called Swedish, a depressingly geometric thing. Outside, the wind of Sutherland rose in its usual violent, unheralded way, making this box of a place appear to Hamish a temporary excrescence on the Highland landscape of moorland and mountain which lay beyond the ‘picture windows.’
“Don’t you have the central heating?” he said, looking around.
“We have electric-storage heaters,” said Mrs. Peterman, “but we only use the heaters in winter. Too much heat makes you soft. The kitchen’s through here behind the dining-room.”
The kitchen was full of those gleaming white units bought from a Do-It-Yourself shop. The floor of black- and-white linoleum tiles shone brightly enough to hurt the eyes. A square plastic-topped table and four metal kitchen chairs with plastic seats dominated the centre. “We’ll be taking the fridge and the cooker,” said Mrs. Peterman. Priscilla was for once at a loss for anything to say. She wanted to escape. But there were still the bedrooms to see, two of them, one single and one double. The double bedroom had twin beds, narrow and rigid, separated by a bedside table which held a large Bible. On the wall above the beds was a text: THOU GOD SEEST ME!
“The guest bedroom,” said Mrs. Peterman, throwing open another door. They both looked bleakly at a cell of a room.
“Well, that’s all very nice,” said Priscilla brightly. “We’ll let you know. We have several other places to see.”
“You’ll not see one better than this,” she said. “We’ve just put it on the market. Not like them at Craigallen. They’ve had that place up for sale for a year.”
Hamish hesitated on the doorstep. “Charming woman, Mrs. Hendry.”
“Oh, her? The things that woman puts up with.”
“What things?”
Her mouth closed like a trap. “I do not discuss my neighbours.”
“Well, that’s that,” said Hamish with a sigh of relief as he drove off. “Don’t tell me you want to live in a place like that, Priscilla.”
“No, it was pretty dire,” she said. “But Craigallen is all right, Hamish.”
“A bad house,” said Hamish firmly. “Let’s go to Brim.”
“Do you know,” said Priscilla, “mat in all the time I’ve lived up here, I’ve never been to Drim. I’ve heard it’s a dead-alive sort of place.”
“Aye, it’s all of that.”
They drove down towards Drim. Below them they could see the black sheen of water on the loch, that thin sea loch which lay between the towering walls of the mountains where nothing grew in the scree on the flanks except an occasional stunted tree. As they climbed down from the car, the air was heavy and still. Either the wind had suddenly dropped, thought Priscilla, or Drim was so protected from the elements that hardly a breath of air stirred the black waters of the loch.
“Why would anyone want to live here?” asked Priscilla, looking around.
Hamish shrugged. “Why would anyone want to live in a place like Strathbane either, Priscilla? You’d best wait here. I’ll see Jock on my own.”
After Hamish had disappeared into the shop, the women began to emerge from the community hall after their exercise class. They stopped short at the sight of Priscilla standing beside the police Land Rover. She was wearing a short blue skirt of soft wool and a short-sleeved wool sweater. A white cashmere cardigan was draped about her shoulders. Her long legs in sheer stockings ended in low-heeled, tan leather court shoes. The women huddled together and stared at her from the top of her smooth blonde head to the tips of her shoes.
“What’s someone like that doing here?” asked Betty Baxter harshly.
“Maybe she’s come tae see Peter,” said Nancy Macleod, voicing all their worries.
“In a polis car?” demanded the hairdresser, Alice MacQueen.
Priscilla saw them watching her and smiled tentatively. There were no answering smiles, only eyes as hard as Scottish pebbles.
Inside the shop, Hamish was confronting Jock Kennedy, who had been summoned from the back premises by his wife, Ailsa. “Look, Jock,” said Hamish, “I know you are running a sort of pub in the back there after hours, and it will chust not do.”
Jock scowled ferociously. “Who telt ye?”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to stop it.”
“You cannae stop me from having a few friends round.”
“No, and I suggest you make it that. If Strathbane heard about it and crashed in here one night, how would things look for me? I am not booking you, Jock, nor am I asking to have a look-see. Chust make sure you’re doing nothing illegal in future.”
“You should not be bothering an honest man like me,” said Jock. “It’s that Sassenach you should be after.”
“What’s he done?”
“He’s a dirty fighter. He kicked me in the balls.”
Ailsa gave a shrill laugh. “It wass self-defence. Hear this, Macbeth. It wass at the ceilidh. Himself here gets them to call Peter out fur a dram and as soon as Peter appears, Jock challenges him to a fight. Going to beat him to a pulp, he wass.” Ailsa laughed again. “Well, you got your comeuppance, so leave Peter Hynd alone.”
“Hiss days here are numbered, wumman.”
“I’ll leave you both,” said Hamish hurriedly. “Don’t forget what I said, Jock.”
He went outside. He paused for a moment, studying the scene in front of him. Priscilla had turned to face the loch, trying to look unconcerned. The women of Drim had edged closer to her, as if inspecting some rare wild beast.
“Shoo!” said Hamish, running up to them and waving his hands.
