Another silence. Somewhere behind Priscilla, a man’s voice, lazy and amused, said, “Are you going to be on that phone all night, darling?”
Hamish’s heart lurched.
“Oh, go ahead,” said Priscilla. “I trust Sarah even if I don’t trust you, Hamish Macbeth. You obviously can’t tell me about it. Phone me sometime when you can. Bye. You’d best put Johnson back on the phone and I’ll tell him it’s all right.”
Hamish silently handed the phone back to the manager and trailed back to the dining room.
“What’s the matter, Hamish?” demanded Sarah sharply. “Was she furious?”
Hamish forced a smile although his hazel eyes were bleak. “No, no, she said it wass all right. But we’ve got to phone her when Johnson isn’t listening and tell her all about it.”
“Did Priscilla help you with any of your investigations?”
“Yes, quite a few, some of them verra dangerous, too.”
“You must have been very close.”
“Aye, you could say that.” There was an awkward silence. The shutters were down over Hamish’s eyes.
“So,” said Sarah brightly, “do you want coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
Mr. Johnson approached them again. “Priscilla says dinner is on the house.”
“That’s very good of her,” said Hamish, while all the time he was wondering furiously – who was that man?
After the manager had left again, Hamish wrenched his mind back to the case. “The thing about all mis that bothers me is that I get mis mad feeling that the burglary and the murder are connected in some way.”
“I don’t see how they could possibly be,” remarked Sarah.
“Nor me. Chust an intuition.”
Sarah privately noticed the sibilance of Hamish’s Highland accent. It always seemed to become more marked when he was upset. Speaking to Priscilla had upset him. Of course it could be simply because she had ticked him off for trying to lie his way into her apartment, but that would hardly allow for the bleakness of his eyes.
“So tell me again about this still,” she said aloud. “When will they appear in court?”
“They won’t,” said Hamish. “I’ve given them a warning and time to close it down.”
“But what they are doing is illegal! Why didn’t you arrest them?”
“There iss something in the Highlander that does not regard the illegal making of whisky as a crime,” said Hamish. “Out in the Hebrides, there was a new policeman, new to the area, and he arrested two of the locals and charged them with running an illegal still. He had to take refuge on the roof of the police station as the locals tried to burn it down. There are chust some things a Highland policeman has to turn a blind eye to. Even farther south, they can get a bit vindictive.”
“You’ve heard of the RSPB – the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds?”
“Of course. In fact, I used to be a member but I cancelled my subscription.”
“Why?”
“They wrote to me appealing for funds and pointing out that they had the means to be a political force. I did not want to be associated with anything that wanted to be a political force.”
“Aye, well, down in Perthshire, the gamekeepers get really tired of birds of prey and that includes golden eagles. You see, these protected birds of prey wreak havoc on stocks of young grouse and pheasant. A gamekeeper was fined ?2,500 at Perth Sheriff Court after he admitted placing six hen’s eggs laced with poison in an area that is home to golden eagles and other birds of prey. After that, an estate belonging to a former employee of the RSPB was vandalised. The estate has the British national collection of thousands of rare and valuable plants imported from the Himalayas. They were doused in weedkiller and ‘RSPB’ etched in nine-foot letters on the lawn with herbicide. Although nothing could be proved, it was believed to be a revenge attack connected to the sentencing of the gamekeeper.”
“Now, I am not condoning it, for it was a wicked and nasty piece of vandalism. On the other hand, there is a great deal of frustration felt among gamekeepers at the attitude of what they privately damn as a lot of moronic townees. Many in the Highlands owe their livelihood to the great shooting estates, and there’s not much work anywhere else.”
“It certainly feels like another part of the world up here,” said Sarah, “and not like part of the British Isles at all. Sutherland. Someone told me that was the southland of the Vikings.”
“I believe so,” said Hamish, who in fact did not know much of Sutherland’s history.
“So,” said Sarah, beginning to rise, “if you’ve finished, let’s start on a life of crime.”
Hamish led the way upstairs to Priscilla’s apartment With an odd feeling, a mixture of guilt and loss, he turned the key in the lock, swung the door open and switched on the light. Everything in the living room was as cool and ordered as Priscilla herself. Sarah went straight to the computer, which sat on a desk at the window. She sat down in front of it.
“I suggest you read something, or think about something,” she said over her shoulder. “This might take some time.”
Hamish wandered over to the bookshelves, and suddenly conscious again of his lack of knowledge of his home county, he took down
Sutherland, is an immense District lashed by the waves of the Minch in the west, where the legendary blue men ride the Atlantic waves ready to lure unwary sailors to their doom, by the cold North Sea where the Vikings of old landed their longships, in the north-east by the fertile lands of Caithness, in the south-east by the waters of the Moray Firth, while in the south Sutherland melts into the beauty of Ross. They are a mixed bag of Celts, Scots, Rets, Vikings, and since the Clearances, with not an inconsiderable leavening of Lowlanders brought in to look after the sheep. Wherever they came from, the low-lying mists, the dark lochs and tarns, the dreary moors and the towering mountains were bound to have added to the superstitions they already held and accentuated their fear of the unknown.
The landscape still works on the imagination, thought Hamish, raising his eyes from the printed page. People come up here from the cities and begin to believe in ghosts and fairies before they’ve settled for very long.
Sarah gave a little sigh. “Nothing yet?” asked Hamish.
“Not yet. Need more time.”
Hamish began to read about water horses.
Of all the supernatural creatures flitting through the pages of folklore, none was so feared as the water horse, in Gaelic, Each Uisge. In my own childhood, we were forbidden to go near certain lochs which were dark and dangerous because they were said to be the haunts of water horses. In the Highlands with stormy seas, wave- lashed islands, short and rushing rivers and deep dark lochs, water power was feared and looked on as malignant. This malignancy often took the form of a horse that could change shape into a handsome young man or even an old woman. Indeed the water horse or kelpie as it was sometimes called could change form at will to lure its victims to their deaths.
“Got it! We’re in!” cried Sarah.
He went over to join her. “Blair’s new password?”
She nodded.
“What is it?”
“Shite. I thought it might be shit, but in Scotland people use the old form and say shite.”
“Nasty bugger.”
“Bring a chair over and we’ll see if we can get a report on Gilchrist’s belongings.”
Hamish obediently carried a hardback chair and placed it next to her and sat down. She flicked busily through various reports and then said, “Here we go.”
They eagerly read the contents of the dentist’s home. He had not left a will and police were still searching for any living relative. There was no evidence of a wife before Jeannie in Inverness. There had been no photographs at all. Odd that, thought Hamish. There was a bar in the living room stocked with the finest malt whiskies. Clothes were listed as tailored and expensive, silk shirts, handmade shoes. His car was a BMW only a few months old.
“Obviously earned a mint and spent it,” murmured Hamish. “But no photographs! Passport, birth certificate, school certificates, university and dental college, but no personal records of the holiday snapshot kind. Not even a
