Death of a Scriptwriter

hurried to her bedroom – she and Colin had had separate bedrooms for some years now – and began to feverishly pack up her belongings.

When she heard a car drive up, she nearly fainted with fright, but soon she heard Sheila’s voice calling her.

She lugged two heavy suitcases down the stairs. The manse door had been open, and Sheila was standing in the hall.

“I’d better leave a note for him,” said Eileen. She left the cases and went into Colin’s clinically neat study.

She seized a piece of paper and wrote, “I’m fed up with you. I want a divorce. I’ve left you. Eileen.”

Then she slammed the study door behind her and went out to where Sheila was loading her suitcases into the boot of the car.

“Off we go,” said Sheila as the minister’s wife climbed in beside her. “Goodbye, Drim!”

“Goodbye,” echoed Eileen with a happy smile. She thought briefly of her husband and then shrugged. She felt she had finally become unchained from a maniac.

¦

“I hate this place. God, how I hate this place,” muttered Hamish Macbeth as he started his investigations again in and around Cnothan.

The standard and cold reply to his questions was, “We aye mind our own business around here, Macbeth” – from a village, reflected Hamish, as notorious as Salem during the witch-hunts for minding everyone else’s business but their own.

By the time he stopped in at the Tudor Restaurant – fake beams, fake horse brasses, dried flowers, and what was a restaurant called Tudor doing in the Highlands? – he was feeling as sour as the residents. As the waitress slammed down a plate of ‘Henry the Eighth Chicken Salad – throw the bones over your shoulder to the dogs!’ – in front of him, he had more or less decided to give the whole thing up.

He ate his cold dry chicken flanked by limp lettuce and wished he were Henry VIII and could have whoever in the back prepared this muck put in the stocks. He finished his dreadful meal with a cup of coffee of a brand publicised by a well-known British transvestite, and the coffee was as much coffee as the publicist was a woman. He fished in his pocket for his wallet to pull out note, and as he did so a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. He picked it up. Priscilla Halburton-Smythe’s London number.

He paid for his meal and went to the nearest phone box. The graffiti inside reflected the bitterness of the inhabitants.

As he dialled Priscilla’s number, he saw that someone had scrawled across the board holding the phone instructions ‘She doesn’t love you. Go fuck yourself.’ Malice, thought Hamish, inserting a phone card and dialling the number, gives the graffiti writer a certain vicious insight into what might hurt most.

He had become so used to rejection that day that he was almost amazed when Priscilla answered the phone after the first ring.

After the preliminary pleasantries, Hamish explained why he was in Cnothan.

“Doesn’t this woman have any friends?” asked Priscilla.

“Not a one.”

“Does she go to church?”

“Yes.”

“Then if she wanted to ask a favour like borrowing a car, she might go to the manse. Have you asked there?”

“No, I didnae even think of it.”

“You’re slipping,” said Priscilla cheerfully.

“This damn place is enough to make anyone’s brain slip a few cogs. Are you coming up here soon?”

“In about two weeks’ time.”

Hamish said goodbye and rang off. Two weeks! She would be home again in only two weeks. He felt so excited that he had to calm down by forcibly reminding himself that he did not love her anymore.

At the manse he was greeted by the minister’s wife, Mrs. Struthers. “What is it, Officer?” she demanded sharply. “I am busy.”

He masked his irritation and said, “Did Miss Martyn-Broyd at any time ask you for the loan of a car?”

“We don’t lend anyone our car,” she said sharply. “Our insurance doesn’t cover anyone else driving it.”

He thanked her and touched his cap and was turning away when he swung back. “But did she ask you?”

“Well, yes, and so late at night, too. I told her she could not have it.”

“Did you suggest anyone who might lend her one?”

“I said she could try old Mr. Ludlow.”

“And where does Mr. Ludlow live?”

“He is not very well, and I would not like to think of him being troubled.”

“I am a police officer, and you are obstructing me in my enquiries. Ludlow’s address, please!”

“Mr. Ludlow to you, Officer. Oh, very well. He lives at Five, The Glebe, down at the loch.”

Hamish walked down to where the grey waters of the loch lay sullen under a low grey sky. The great ugly dam soared above the loch. He stopped and stared at it, imagining it cracking, then bursting, then the deluge crashing through to drown the whole of Cnothan and everyone in it.

He found Mr. Ludlow’s cottage. There was a garage next to the cottage.

He knocked at the door and waited.

There was a shuffling sound inside, like that of some hibernating animal turning in its sleep. The shuffling noises grew nearer, and the door was opened a crack and a rheumy eye stared at Hamish.

“Mr Ludlow?”

“I havenae done anything. Go away.”

“Nobody said you had,” said Hamish patiently. “I just want a wee word with you.”

The door opened wider. Mr. Ludlow was an old man on whose face a lifetime of bitterness and discontent was mapped out in the deep, dismal wrinkles on a face as grey as elephant’s skin.

“Did you lend your car at any time to Patricia Martyn-Broyd?”

There was a long silence. An omen of crows suddenly tumbled overhead, cawing and cackling, and then they were gone.

“Aye, and if I did?”

“May I see your car?”

The old man grumbled out in a pair of battered carpet slippers. He led the way to the garage, took out a key and opened the padlock which secured the door. Inside was an old black Ford.

“When did she ask you for a loan of it?”

“It wass the night afore that tarty bit was murdered, her what bares her body. Miss Martyn-Broyd, I knew her from the church, she says her car had broken down. She had got me out o’ bed to answer the door. I didn’t want to let her have it.”

“But she took out a handful of notes, so you let her have it,” guessed Hamish.

“Aye, well, I’m a pensioner, and money’s tight.”

“Chust about as tight as that hole in your arse that you talk through,” said Hamish.

There was a stunned silence, neither of them able to believe what they had just heard.

“What did you say?” demanded Mr. Ludlow at last.

“I said, chust about as tight as that hole in the road over at Crask,” said Hamish, improvising wildly. “I’ll be on my way, Mr. Ludlow.”

“I didnae do anything wrong?” he asked.

“No, nothing,” said Hamish, and added maliciously, “provided your insurance covers another driver.”

He had the satisfaction of seeing from the sudden fright in Mr. Ludlow’s eyes that it probably did not.

As he walked back to his police Land Rover, he had a new respect for Sergeant MacGregor. If I lived here, thought Hamish, I would end up stark, staring mad.

He opened the Land Rover door. Then he stopped, one foot raised, his mouth a little open. Those two threads of blue tweed he had found on the mountain, the day Jamie died. Could they have been from something Patricia had been wearing?