“It’s because you’re the minister’s wife. It’s like that in Highland villages with the minister’s wife. They’re usually respectful.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were enjoying yourself. No need to involve you in squabbles. But Edie Aubrey got a chance to say one line and so someone threw a brick through her front window.”
“Who did it? What did the police say?”
“Edie never reported it. We police ourselves here.”
“They cannot possibly think they are going to be film stars!”
“That’s exactly what the silly biddies do think. Cheer up. You’ve got masses of film already.”
“But I could still have done better,” wailed Eileen.
“Never mind. You’ve lost weight.”
“I’ve been on a diet,” said Eileen in an abstracted way. “I should do something about this. Why should some jealous woman get away with terrorising poor Edie?”
“It’ll all blow over, you’ll see,” said Ailsa. “Now I’d better get back and take over from Jock and mind the store. He’s got a shinty game over in Crask this afternoon.”
After she had gone, Eileen paced up and down. Then she came to a decision, got in her car and drove over to Lochdubh and parked outside the police station.
Hamish was feeling tired. In between his other duties, he had driven all over the place, searching for Scan Fitz. If only the morning of the murder hadn’t been thick with mist.
He opened the door to Eileen and looked at her in polite inquiry, not recognising the minister’s wife in the slimmer, dark-haired woman who stood blinking myopically up at him.
“We met before,” she said, holding out her hand. “I am Eileen Jessop, the minister’s wife…at Drim, that is. You called on myself and my husband shortly after we moved up here.”
“So I did. Come in. Tea? Coffee?”
“Coffee would be nice,” said Eileen.
“Then pull up a chair.”
Eileen sat down at the kitchen table. Then she said, “Perhaps I should be telling you this in the police office. It’s a police matter.”
“You can tell me just the same over a cup of coffee.” He plugged in the kettle and took down two mugs and a bowl of sugar and took a jug of milk out of the fridge. Eileen waited until he had handed her a mug of coffee and sat down.
“Now,” said Hamish, “what is this all about?”
He was really a very attractive man, thought Eileen, and her next thought was that it was a long time since she had really looked at any man to find him attractive or otherwise.
“It’s this TV film. It’s causing bad feeling among the village women. Now it’s turned criminal. Edie Aubrey got a line to say instead of just being in the crowd scene like the others and so someone threw a brick through her window.”
“Well, that’s Drim for you.”
“But they were not like this before!”
“They have been,” said Hamish, remembering that murder case a few years before. “If it is any comfort to you, tempers flare among them, but if you try to interfere, they close ranks against you.”
“But you must do something!”
Hamish was about to say if Edie had not reported it, there was little he could do; but suddenly he saw a great way of being officially back in Drim.
“Wait until you’ve finished your coffee and then I’ll follow you over and see if I can do something to frighten them into good behaviour. So how are you getting on? I heard something about you making a film.”
“Oh, it’s just a silly little thing,” said Eileen, who had become increasingly depressed about her play on the road over. She had even begun to worry that Sheila had just been humouring her. “But it was fun while it lasted.”
“What’s it about, your film?”
“I wrote a Scottish play when I was a student. It’s comedy with a dark side. It’s about an eccentric woman who arrives to live in a small Highland village and gets damned as being a witch. I changed the title to
“I suppose they think that Spielberg or someone will see their unlovely faces on the Strathclyde Television thing and say, “That’s the woman for me!””
“That is just what they are thinking.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll do something. Is Drim still full of the press?”
“They’ve mostly gone. I believe some of the nationals have left a few reporters up here, but they are down in Strathbane. There’s some scandal about poor Miss Martyn-Broyd being driven into a nervous breakdown.”
“Is that young lassie Sheila Burford around? She was supposed to meet me for dinner on Monday and she didn’t turn up or even bother to phone.”
Monday, thought Eileen. Monday was when she had seen Sheila. And Sheila had forgotten her date with this attractive policeman to look at her, Eileen’s, film. Her heart soared and she gave Hamish a radiant smile. Then she said, “I asked for her at the castle before I came here. She said she had to go down to Glasgow for a funeral.”
Hamish hoped against hope that bad news had made her forget their date. He did not like to think he had not been worth even a phone call.
Eileen finished her coffee, thanked Hamish and left. Hamish washed out the cups, put the milk back in the fridge, locked up the police station and got into the police Land Rover and took the winding road to Drim.
There was no filming that day, and Drim lay peacefully in the sunshine, as if murder had never taken place.
He parked the Land Rover outside the general store and then walked to Edie Aubrey’s cottage. The front window was boarded up. In a more civilised part of the country, a glazier would have replaced the broken window by now, but in the Highlands it was very hard to get anything repaired quickly. Glaziers, plumbers, electricians, men who repaired dry stone walls and builders all seemed to suffer from bad backs. The work always eventually got done, but it took a long time.
He knocked on the door, and after a few moments Edie answered it. She was a scrawny woman with thick glasses and dressed in a track suit of a violent shade of red.
“Hamish!” she said. “What brings you?”
“Can I come in?”
“Yes, of course. I was just about to put the kettle on. Take a seat in the lounge.”
Hamish went into an uncomfortable, overdecorated room. Although not a Highlander, Edie had adopted the Highland way of keeping one room for ‘best,’ so it had that clean, glittering look and stuffy, unused smell. It was all in shades of pink. Barbara Cartland would have loved it. There was a pink three·piece suite upholstered in some nasty slippery material. Pink curtains hung at the boarded-up window, and the walls were painted in a shade Hamish recognised as being called blush pink. Pink scatter cushions cascaded onto the floor as he sat down. The sofa was so overstuffed, he felt himself slipping forwards, so he retrieved the cushions and then sat down on the one hard upright chair in the room.
Edie came in carrying a glass tray with thin cups on it, cups embellished with gold rims and pink roses.
“Could we have some light in here, Edie?” asked Hamish, peering at her through the gloom.
“Of course.” She switched on a pink-shaded, pink-fringed standard lamp.
“Now, Edie, what happened to your window?”
“The silliest thing,” said Edie with awful brightness. “I was vacuuming the room and I slipped and the end of the vacuum went straight through the window.”
“So all this talk about someone throwing a brick through the window is lies? Come on, Edie, I’m not daft and I know what goes on in Drim. Someone was jealous of you getting a wee speaking part.”
Edie glared at him and then shrugged her thin shoulders. “Oh, well, you know how we are here. Someone pushed money in an envelope through the letter box the other day for the repairs. We settle our own disputes.”
