“If we could go inside…” Mr. Hendry stood back and walked through to the living-room. Hamish followed him. “Do you want to look at it again?” asked Mr. Hendry. “No, I want a good look at you. You’ve been beating your wife again.”
“How dare – ”
“Again. Now she hasn’t laid a charge against you…yet…But I am convinced I can talk her into it.”
“Prove it,” sneered the schoolteacher.
“Oh, I could get her to a doctor to look at the bruises and weals on her body. You can either end up in court or we’ll do it this way. You will pick up that phone and phone Alcoholics Anonymous and tell them you want to go to a meeting. You will neffer drink again.”
Mr. Hendry’s fist shot out but Hamish caught him by the wrist and twisted his arm up his back. “Stop it,” shouted Mr. Hendry, “you’re hurting me.”
“Aye, just like you hurt your wife.” Hamish ran his head into the wall and gave it a good bang. “Every time from now on that you hit her, I’ll get to hear of it and come and hit you worse.”
“This is police brutality, you fascist pig, you bourgeois lackey.” Hamish listened in delight to these Stalinist phrases. Anyone of any other political persuasion would repent him to headquarters. Only a drunk pertaining to the far left would think he was up against an establishment conspiracy. He dragged the schoolteacher to the phone and stood over him. “Phone,” he ordered, “or I’ll kick your head in.” Mumbling and cursing, Mr. Hendry dialled the number. “When’s the next meeting?” he snapped when a voice answered.
The voice at the other end said something. “My drinking’s nothing to do with you,” howled the schoolteacher.
Hamish took the phone away from him. “What he is trying to ask is where and when is the next AA meeting?”
“It’s in the church in Market Square in half an hour,” said the voice. “My name is Ron. Ask for me. I’m just leaving to go there.”
“Right,” Hamish banged down the phone.
Fifteen minutes later he thrust the still-cursing Mr. Hendry into the church-room, which was hung with slogans like EASY DOES IT and LIVE AND LET LIVE, reminding Hamish he wasn’t doing much of either.
He did snatch up a pamphlet entitled ‘Help for the Family’ and took it with him back to the Hendrys’ house; He sat in the car and read it, parked outside. He noticed gloomily that it warned families that you could not force the drunk to get sober. All the family could do was to attend Al-Anon meetings for help for themselves. Mrs. Hendry arrived with the children and he handed her the pamphlet. “He’sat an AA-meeting,” said Hamish. “But you’d better read this and get some help yourself. And here is my phone number in Drim. If he lays a finger on you again, you’re to phone me.”
She thanked him but in a way that showed she was regretting the whole business already.
Feeling sad and slightly dirty, he wished he had taken the orthodox line and had got her to report her husband. He drove to a fish-and-chip shop and moodily ate fish and chips behind the driving wheel and then threw the remains to Strathbane’s grimy scavenging seagulls.
Tomorrow was another day. He would doggedly stay in Drim. He thought Heather was right. Even if a murder had not taken place, he was convinced something pretty bad had happened there.
¦
The next morning he went up to Jimmy Macleod’s. Nancy was in the kitchen, grey roots poking through the dead black of her hair. “Oh, it’s you,” she said ungraciously. “You’ll find Jimmy out back in the shed.”
“Did you see Peter Hynd leave the village?” asked Hamish.
She turned away from him and riddled with a pot handle on the stove. “No. Why ask me? He came, he went. Like most incomers, that’s all there is to it.”
“Who put a brick through his window?”
“What is this? Folks are saying you are here on holiday?”
“Aye, but I’m curious all the same. Who threw the brick through his window?”
“Och, weans.”
“What had children got against him?”
“Weans will be weans.”
Hamish left and went out to the shed, where Jimmy was sharpening an axe.
“Grand day,” said Hamish.
Jimmy scowled by way of reply.
Hamish leaned against the door-jamb. A pile of logs waited by a chopping block to be split. The air smelled pleasantly of pine. Outside, the day was still and clear, with white patches in the shade where the morning sun could not reach the frost. Up in the clear blue sky, two buzzards swirled and turned.
“Nice place, Drim,” Hamish went on. “Full o’ character. I haff often heard myself saying, ‘Yes, Drim is the nicest place in the Highlands. Good place for a holiday.’”
“Havers,” said Jimmy sourly.
“Always the outstretched hand of welcome,” said Hamish dreamily. “That’s when the locals aren’t heaving bricks through people’s windows.”
Jimmy stopped sharpening the axe. “I had nothing to do wi’ that,” he said.
“Who did?”
“Och, who knows or cares? We don’t need strangers here.”
“No? Aye, I suppose you all love each other that much. Neffer the hard word. Come off it, Jimmy. This place is a hotbed of spite.”
“That’s maybe the way an outsider sees it.”
“Well, you’ll be seeing a lot of me. Get used to it.”
Hamish walked off. The one person who would speak to him was Heather. But he would need to wait until she came home from school.
He headed down to the manse. Annie Duncan answered the door. “I was expecting you,” she said. “Come in.”
Hamish looked at her appreciatively. She wore no make-op but her skin had a good colour and her long brown hair shove with health.
“Do you know why I am in Drim?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said calmly. “It’s because of Betty Baxter’s death. You think it might be murder.”
“Yes, but I am also worried about the disappearance of Peter Hynd.”
“But surely there is no mystery about that? He took his car and all his things.”
“But no one saw him go. Did you?”
She shook her head and then said, “If he left in the middle of the night, no one would see him, would they? Everyone in this village sleeps like the dead.”
“What about the brick that was thrown through Peter’s window?”
“Oh, I can tell you about that. That was the men of the village led by that great big idiot, Jock Kennedy. They were trying to scare him out of the village and I suppose they succeeded, although it surprised me. Peter seemed to delight in getting people’s backs up.”
Hamish gave her a shrewd look. “You got wise to him?”
“Oh, yes. At first I was charmed like everyone else. But one had only to look at the way he tied these poor women up in knots. And yet he brought some life here. At least when everyone was at the exercise classes, there was a feeling off community. I have been speaking to Callum about that I want to put on a Christmas show in the community hall. Some of the women do have good singing voices. A pantomime would be a good idea. I have already written off for a script. One can buy one of the traditional scripts and then just add in a few local jokes. You are staving with Edie? Yes, I have sent her a note inviting her and some of the other women to the manse tonight to discuss the project. It will give them an interest.”
“I’ll tell her. Now what about Betty Baxter? What do you think?”
“I think it probably was an accident,” she said cautiously. “Betty was even heavier than she looked, I think. She slipped on the ice last winter and came down so heavily that she broke her hip.”
“But why do you think after receiving a phone call would she get so excited, get her high heels on, get her hair bleached, and go out to walk on the beach?”
