Death of a Scriptwriter

by Beaton, M. C.

  As she approached the grim bulk of the manse, her heart sank. And then for the first time she wondered why she stayed married to Colin. She could just get in the car and drive away into the sunshine as she had driven down to Inverness with Ailsa, with the wind in her hair and the tape deck blasting.

  The next day Hamish put on his uniform and went out on his rounds. He had a feeling that Lovelace might call at the police station to make sure he was not slacking off. He drove over to Cnothan and started again to ask questions. The trouble was that Patricia’s cottage was outside the village and she did not need to drive through Cnothan to get anywhere.

  He started at one end of the village and began knocking on doors, patiently questioning without success.

  Cnothan stood on the edge of an artificial loch caused by an ugly hydro electric dam. It consisted of one bleak main street which led down to the loch. The council houses were segregated on the other side of the loch from the main village, but the privately owned houses in the village were so drab and grey that they looked like the council ones. The people of Cnothan seemed to have been soured by their surroundings. All he got were curt, rude answers. The villagers had a capacity for making work. They were always rushing about doing nothing. ‘I’m too busy to speak to you,’ seemed to be the standard reply.

  In his zeal to find out where Patricia had been, he had quite forgotten he was poaching on Sergeant MacGregor’s territory until, on leaving one house at the top of the main street, he found the sergeant standing by the garden gate, glaring at him.

  ‘Whit are you doing here?’ demanded the sergeant.

  ‘Can we go somewhere and talk?’

  ‘Aye, come up to the house until we sort this thing out.’

  Hamish thought Sergeant MacGregor’s house reflected everything that was worst about Cnothan. Even on this summer’s day, it felt cold.

  The living room was still the same as the last time he had seen it, with its dreadful ornaments and overstuffed salmon-coloured three-piece suite.

  ‘Now what’s this all about?’ demanded Sergeant MacGregor.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Hamish. ‘I have a quiet day today and I thought I might find out if anyone had seen Patricia Martyn-Broyd on the day of the murder. I should have called you first, but I did not think you would be wanting to waste your time with this sort of inquiry. In fact, I have to beg you not to report my visit here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Blair has been suspended and Lovelace is in charge of the case, and he told me to butt out.’

  ‘Lovelace!’ MacGregor’s face darkened. ‘Thon bastard.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Know him? I was off duty in Inverness five years ago and I nipped into a pub for a drink before I got home. I didn’t know Lovelace, so I didn’t recognize him. I got talking to a crony, had a few more. When I left the pub and got in the car, Lovelace and two coppers were waiting to breathalyze me. He insisted on putting in a report, and I nearly lost my job. If that’s all you’re doing in Cnothan, you can go ahead. He won’t be hearing anything from me.’

  ‘That’s good of you,’ said Hamish with relief. Lovelace could certainly have handled that affair better. He could have strolled over to MacGregor in the bar and introduced himself, and MacGregor would have been out of there like a shot. Of course, it could be argued that MacGregor should not have been taking one nip over the limit, but still, it seemed an unnecessarily harsh way of doing things.

  ‘Have you any idea where I might find out something about where our writer went that day, the day Penelope Gates was murdered?’ asked Hamish.

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Wait a minute. There might be the one person.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sean Fitz is back on the road.’

  Sean Fitzpatrick, known all over the Highlands as simply Sean Fitz, was an itinerant tramp, calling at doors to do small jobs in return for a cup of tea and a bite of food.

  No one had seen him for the past two years.

  ‘Where has he been?’ asked Hamish.

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe down south. But he’s your man.’

  Hamish thanked him and set out to try to find Sean. Sean Fitz noticed everything and everybody on the road.

  Chapter Eight

  They flee from me, that sometime did me seek.

  – Sir Thomas Wyatt

  Two days later, a good number of the village women who had acted in Eileen’s film were gathered in the manse.

  For the first time, Eileen became aware that there was a sour atmosphere. Nonetheless she was determined that nothing was going to take the glow out of her achievement, even though she could not talk about it.

  She stood up before them and cleared her throat. ‘There are a few mistakes in act one that need to be fixed. I thought we could film it again.’

  There was an impatient, restless shuffling. Then Nancy Macleod stood up. ‘We cannae really be wasting any more time on your fillum, Mrs Jessop. We’ve got other things to do.’

  Eileen looked at her in surprise.

  ‘You see,’ said Holly Andrews, Ailsa’s friend, whose nose had been put out of joint because of the friendship which had grown up between Ailsa and the minister’s wife, ‘we all feel we’re wasting our time with an amateur film when we’re in the real thing.’

  ‘But you are only in several of the crowd scenes in The Case of the Rising Tides,’ protested Eileen.

  ‘But Edie Aubrey got a speaking part,’ said Nancy. ‘There’s a chance for us all tae be discovered.’

  ‘Where is Edie?’ asked Eileen. ‘And shouldn’t Alice be here as well?’

  A hostile silence greeted her.

  ‘So we’d best all be going,’ said Nancy.

  Eileen watched them all, with the exception of Ailsa, depart in silence.

  As soon as she was alone with Ailsa, she asked, ‘What has gone wrong? Up till now they’ve all enjoyed acting for me. They said they’d never had so much fun.’

  ‘They’ve been discontented for some time,’ said Ailsa.

  ‘I didn’t know that!’

  ‘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 terrorizing 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 Sean 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 recognizing 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 way 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 The Witch of Drim. I would have liked to do some more work on it, but the village women have decided they do not want to be involved in amateur dramatics any more.’

  ‘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 civilized 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 recognized as being called blush pink. Pink scatter cushions cascaded on to 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.’

  ‘You are a bunch of silly hens,’ said Hamish. ‘And what about this film the minister’s wife is doing?’

  ‘Oh, that was fun for a while,’ said Edie, lying back against the sofa in a jaded, sophisticated way. ‘But we can’t be caught up in the wee woman’s amateur dramatics every day of the week.’

  ‘You’re making a big mistake there,’ said Hamish. ‘Oh, me and my big mouth!’

  Edie sat up straight. ‘What do you know?’

  Hamish smiled at her ruefully and then shrugged. ‘Oh, well, then I’ll tell ye, Edie, but it’s to be a secret, chust between the two of us. Promise you won’t breathe a word!’

  ‘I promise. Would you like a dram?’

  ‘No, it’s too early and I’m driving.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘As part of this murder case, I haff been checking up on the backgrounds of everyone.’

  ‘I heard you were off it,’ said Edie.

  ‘This was afore,’ said Hamish huffily. ‘Do you want to hear this or not?’

  ‘Yes, yes, go on.’

  Hamish took a slow sip of tea while Edie waited eagerly.

  ‘In the background of the minister’s wife …’

  ‘I knew it! I knew it!’ said Edie, her pale eyes shining behind her glasses. ‘Scandal!’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ said Hamish sternly, ‘and I won’t be telling you, Edie, if you keep interrupting.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘That play of hers, when she was a lassie, was performed at the university and got rave reviews. She was approached by a major film company. They wanted to buy the rights.’

  ‘Oh, my. What did she do?’

  ‘Her parents were Calvinists and against the movies. They made her turn it down. But I happen to know – if you tell anyone this, I’ll kill ye!’

  ‘No, no. Go on. Have a biscuit.’

  Hamish selected a foil-wrapped Penguin chocolate biscuit and began to peel off the wrapping with maddening
slowness. Then he took a bite and looked at Edie solemnly.

  ‘I happen to know that Eileen Jessop is sending her film off tae Hollywood to some big producer. It’s a deadly secret. She hasnae even told her husband.’

  He smiled sweetly at Edie’s astonished face. He finished his biscuit and drained his cup and stood up.

  ‘But if you get any more attacks from the locals, Edie, you should tell me.’

  ‘Oh, I will, Hamish. And I won’t breathe a word.’

  Hamish turned in the doorway. ‘See that you don’t.’

  Edie’s next visitor was Holly Andrews.

  ‘We put Eileen Jessop in her place,’ said Holly. ‘It’s a bit vain, don’t you think, Edie, her wanting us to take time off from our homes to act in her wee bittie film when we could all be stars.’

  ‘We’re all thinking this television thing is going to be shown,’ said Edie. ‘But there’s a jinx on it already. One of the camera crew said they were getting worried on BBC Scotland that it might be tasteless to show it at all in view of the deaths. I think we were all a bit hard on Eileen. Come to think of it, I think my part could do with more work. I’m going up to Eileen’s to say I’ll be available for more filming.’

  Holly was jealous of Eileen’s friendship with Ailsa. ‘She puts on airs because she’s the minister’s wife, but I tell you this, Edie, if she shows that tosh she’s filmed outside of Drim, we’ll be a laughing stock.’

  Edie leaned forward, her face intense in the gloom of her living room. ‘If I tell you something, Holly, something about Eileen, will you promise not to breathe a word?’

  ‘I’m a clam. You know me. I wouldn’t say a word to a soul.’

  Holly’s eyes grew rounder and rounder as Edie repeated what she had heard from Hamish Macbeth.