Death of a Scriptwriter (6 page)

‘It’s not me that’s stupid,’ yelled Jamie. ‘It’s all the fault of that stupid bitch, who doesn’t know how to drive. When does it get light
here?’

‘About ten in the morning in winter. And we’ll never live that long.’

But the sky was pearly grey at nine o’clock when Hamish Macbeth set out again into the bleak white world. The snow had stopped and everything was uncannily quiet, as if
the whole of the Highlands had died and now lay wrapped in a white shroud.

He marched ahead on his snowshoes, out of Lochdubh and up to the moors, keeping to where he guessed the road was but looking always to right and left in case they had skidded off it.

Hamish suddenly thought of Patricia and her holiday in Greece. Somewhere in the world outside this bleak wilderness the sun was shining and people were lying on the beach. He wanted to get as
far away as possible from Sutherland. His mind drew back from the sunshine of faraway places and settled on the thought of the film company. I’d like to get away before it happens, he
thought.
What happens
? screamed his mind, but then his sharp eyes saw a little piece of pipe sticking up above a snowbank.

He tunnelled with his gloved hands into the snowbank, and then he saw the gleam of green metal. Found them, he thought with relief. Now let’s hope they’re alive. He heard the clatter
of a helicopter in the distance.

He scraped away at the snow until he had the back window of the van clear. He peered in. Fiona, Sheila and Jamie all seemed to be huddled together for warmth on the backseat. He knocked on the
glass, but the still figures did not stir.

He stood back and waved frantically to the approaching helicopter and then crouched down beside the snowbank made by the covered van to protect himself from the flying snow as the helicopter
landed.

Sheila struggled awake as she heard the roar of the landing helicopter. ‘Fiona!’ she cried, shaking her companion. ‘We’re being rescued.’

They both tried to rouse Jamie, but he appeared to be unconscious.

Sheila was never to forget that moment after daylight appeared around the van and the door was wrenched open. She tumbled out into Hamish Macbeth’s arms and burst into tears. ‘I
thought that bastard had killed us,’ she sobbed. ‘I’ll never forgive him.’

‘Aye, well, into the helicopter with you,’ said Hamish. ‘They’ll take you all to hospital.’

The head of the mountain rescue team supervised the lifting of Jamie’s unconscious body into the helicopter. ‘This lot should be made to pay for all this expense,’ he grumbled.
‘What sort of fools drive in the Highlands in this weather?’

Hamish stood with his hands on his hips until the helicopter was only a little dot against the brightening sky.

A light breeze sprang up and caressed his cheek, a breeze coming from the west. Wind’s shifted, he thought. Thaw coming. Floods and mud. What a country!

He made his way slowly back to Lochdubh. Smoke was rising from cottage chimneys.

The Currie sisters, Nessie and Jessie, middle-aged village spinsters, were outside their cottage, the pale sunlight flashing off their glasses.

‘Just the man!’ cried Jessie. ‘Come and shovel this snow.’

‘Away wi’ you,’ said Hamish. ‘I’ve been up since dawn.’

He trudged past.

‘Call yourself a public servant!’ Jessie shouted after him.

‘I call myself one verra tired policeman,’ Hamish shouted back.

And an uneasy one, he thought. I hope this film company stays away. I’ve got a bad feeling about the whole damn thing.

Often one cannot look back on the best time in one’s life with any pleasure if it ends badly. So it was with Patricia Martyn-Broyd in the months leading up to the first
day of filming.

During the long winter months, a glow of fame had kept her exhilarated. Local papers had interviewed her and one national. She had given a talk to the Mothers’ Union at the church in
Cnothan on writing. And although she had not been able to start on a new book, there was always that little word ‘yet’ to comfort her. When all the excitement died down, she knew she
could get to work again and the words would flow.

She arose early on the first day of filming and dressed carefully. The weather was fine, unusually fine for the Highlands of Scotland, with the moors and tarns of Sutherland stretched out
benignly under a cloudless sky. She put on a Liberty print dress – good clothes lasted forever and did not date – and a black straw hat. Had the postman not decided to change his
schedule and deliver the mail to Patricia’s end of the village first, then her feeling of euphoria might have lasted longer, but a square buff envelope with her publishers’ logo slid
through the letter box.

She picked it up, sat down at the table and slit it open with an old silver paper knife which had belonged to her father.

She pulled out six glossy book jackets.

She stared down at them in shock. Certainly the old title was there –
The Case of the Rising Tides
– and her name in curly white letters, Patricia Martyn-Broyd. But on the
front of the jacket was a photograph of Penelope Gates, a nude Penelope Gates. Her back was to the camera, but she was holding a magnifying glass and looking over one bare shoulder with a
voluptuous smile. Larger than Patricia’s byline was the legend ‘Now a Major TV Series, Starring Penelope Gates as Lady Harriet’.

On the back of the jacket was more advertising for the TV series, along with Jamie Gallagher’s name as scriptwriter, Fiona King as producer, then a list of the cast.

Her hands trembled. What had gone wrong? She had seen such detective stories on the bookshop shelves but had never bought them, assuming that the writer was some hack who had written the books
from television scripts rather than being an original writer.

Angry colour flooded her normally white face. A naked woman portrayed as her Lady Harriet – elegant, cool, clever Lady Harriet!

She went to the sideboard and took out a bottle of whisky which she had won in a church raffle the previous year, poured herself a glass and drank it down.

Then she phoned Pheasant Books in London and demanded to speak to her editor, Sue Percival, whom she considered much too young for the job.

‘Hi, Patricia!’ said Sue in that awful nasal accent of hers which always made Patricia shudder.

‘I have just received the book jackets,’ began Patricia.

‘Great, aren’t they?’

Patricia took a deep breath. ‘They are
disgusting.
I am shocked. They must be changed immediately.’

‘What’s up with them? I think they’re ace.’

‘What has a naked actress to do with the character I created? And who is going to buy this? The covers make me look like some hack who has written up the book from the TV
series.’

‘Look here,’ said Sue sharply, ‘you want to sell your book, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, the bookshops will take a good number if it’s going to be on TV. Without that book jacket, we may get very low sales indeed. I am sorry you feel this way. We’ll see what
we can do when your next book is reprinted.’

The angry flush slowly died out of Patricia’s cheeks.

‘Are you there?’ asked Sue.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Patricia in a mollified voice. ‘You must understand I know little about marketing.’

‘Leave it to us, Pat,’ said Sue. ‘You’ll be a star.’

Patricia said goodbye and slowly replaced the receiver.
Another
book to be published. And what did it matter what they put on the cover? It was
her
work the public would be
reading.

Josh Gates awoke around his usual time, eleven in the morning. He remembered that Penelope was due to start filming that day. He smiled. He felt unusually well. Penelope had
begged him to slow down on his drinking, and he’d only had a couple of pints the evening before. He was pleased with Penelope. The money was good, and this detective series would make her
name. No more would people think of her as some sort of trollop.

Josh had strangely old-fashioned ideas. Films on Sky and cable television channels were full of writhing, naked bodies, but he ignored all that. Penelope taking off her clothes for anyone but
him reflected badly, he thought, on his masculinity.

He had given his promise that he would not appear on the location. Penelope had hugged him and said that it would spoil her acting.

He wondered idly how to spend his day. He decided to go down to John Smith’s bookshop in St Vincent Street and find something to read.

He crawled out of bed and picked up the clothes he had discarded the night before and put them on.

The bookshop, as usual, was crowded. He thumbed his way through several paperbacks and then, on impulse, asked an assistant whether he could look at the catalogue of forthcoming books.

She handed him an autumn catalogue, and he thumbed down the index until he found Patricia Martyn-Broyd’s name. He turned to the page indicated and found himself staring down at a full-page
spread advertising
The Case of the Rising Tides
. The book jacket was there in all its glory. He glared at the naked photograph of his wife and let out a roar of ‘Slut!’ The
bookshop assistants went calmly about their work. Any bookshop had its daily quota of nuts as far as they were concerned.

Sweating with fury, he went to the map section and jerked out a road atlas, blinking to clear his fury-filmed eyes until he located the village of Drim. Then he bought an ordnance survey map for
the Sutherland area and strode out of the shop, taking great gulps of air.

‘I’ll kill her!’ he yelled to an astonished passerby.

Two policemen strolling along St Vincent Street stopped for a moment and looked at the retreating figure of Josh.

‘Nutter,’ said one policeman laconically.

‘I know that one,’ said the other. ‘Thon’s Josh Gates, married to that actress. Probably drunk.’

‘How do you know him?’

‘Booked him for drunk and disorderly last year.’

‘Who’s he going to kill?’

‘Only himself, the way that one goes on. Fancy a hot pie?’

Fiona sat in Drim Castle in her makeshift office, biting the end of a pencil. She was upset at the script for the first episode. But her protests had caused Jamie Gallagher to
throw the scene of all time and threaten to get her sacked. ‘Back off,’ Harry Frame had told her. ‘BBC Scotland want Jamie’s work, and that’s what they’ll
get.’

But Fiona felt her job was going to be little more than a gofer, as Jamie fretted about camera angles and lighting. He had quarrelled not only with her, but with the production manager, Hal
Forsyth, and with the director, Giles Brown.

Jamie had also tried to get Sheila Burford fired after he had tried to get into her room at the hotel. Sheila had phoned reception, and a couple of burly gamekeepers from the Tommel Castle Hotel
estate had forcibly removed Jamie from outside her door.

But Harry Frame refused to be moved on the subject of Sheila. ‘That lassie has potential,’ he said, meaning, thought Fiona bleakly, that he wanted to get into Sheila’s knickers
as well.

Despite the blazing sunshine outside, the inside of the castle was cold and dark.

She sighed and ran over the budget again. If only Jamie would get well and truly drunk and fall into a peat bog and disappear forever.

Hamish Macbeth, entering Drim Castle half an hour later, looked like a pointing gun dog, thought Sheila as she met him in the hall. His nose was in the air, and one leg was
raised as he halted in midstride.

‘What’s that smell?’ he asked.

‘I can’t smell anything,’ said Sheila, blue eyes limpid with innocence. ‘Oh, maybe it’s the joss sticks. They’re starting with the commune scene in the first
shot.’

‘That’s pot,’ said Hamish.

‘Cannabis? Oh, I’m sure you are mistaken. We’re all drunks here.’

Nose sniffing busily, Hamish moved forward.

‘You’re imagining things,’ said Sheila as Hamish headed inexorably for Fiona’s office. She raised her voice and shouted, ‘You cannot possibly believe that any of us
would smoke pot!’

Hamish opened the door of Fiona’s office and went inside. The window was wide open.

‘Why, it’s Mr Macbeth from Lochdubh,’ said Fiona. Hamish went to the window, which was on the ground floor. He leaned out and picked up a roach from the flower bed and then
held it up before Fiona. ‘Yours?’

‘Look here, Constable,’ said Fiona, ‘I’m under a lot of stress. It’s not cocaine. If you ask me, pot should be legalized. It’s a harmless, recreational
drug.’

‘I picked the pieces o’ a driver out from his car after it had gone over a cliff last year. He’d been smoking your recreational drug. I’m a policeman and it’s not
legal, Miss King.’

‘Call me Fiona.’

‘Whether it’s Fiona or Miss King, you are breaking the law.’

Fiona saw her career falling in ruins before her eyes, and all because of one measly joint.

She reached for her handbag. ‘Perhaps this matter can be sorted out amicably, Officer.’

‘Don’t even think of bribing me,’ said Hamish. ‘You’re in bad enough trouble as it is.’

‘I wasn’t going to bribe you,’ said Fiona, near to tears, although that had been her intention. ‘I was just going to show you how little of the stuff I have.’

‘Then show me.’

Fiona took out a packet and handed it over.

Hamish turned round and said to Sheila, ‘Close the door.’

Sheila closed the door and came to stand behind Fiona.

‘It’s the people up here that could do with your money,’ said Hamish. ‘I have no wish to disrupt the film. I’m giving you a warning. Don’t let me catch you or
anyone else with this stuff again.’ He put the packet in his pocket and threw the roach back out of the window.