But if none of these niggles were the innocent variables of real life, what were they? And back we were again. But the picture slipped away like Jell-O on a spoon as soon as I tried to bite into it.
I hadn’t mentioned to Gillies my interest in my sperm donor, but I was rapidly developing one possible story. This was a conservative religious community. Joan was only eighteen when I was born, and although from the beginning she called herself
Mrs.
Morris, I’d be very surprised if she’d had benefit of clergy. There was a good possibility that she got herself knocked up and fled to Canada. Was this a happy coupling or not? There was no way to know at the moment. She’d told me she wanted to lay some ghosts to rest. I just hoped she didn’t create one.
Gillies pushed back his chair and began to gather the tea cups.
“Come on, let’s get you to the hotel. I suggest you try to have a rest while I go to the station and see if there’s any news. How about if I come over about eight and take you to dinner? There’s a good wee restaurant near the hotel that specializes in Scotland’s national dish.”
“My God, not the famous haggis? I don’t know if I’m up to eating sheep’s intestines.”
“That used to be Scotland’s national dish. Now we’re talking fresh-caught salmon with delicate herb seasoning and buttered potatoes. Tourist traps.”
“Now you’re talking. I’ll just use the bathroom before we go... all that tea.”
While he went to the sink, I trotted upstairs. I did have to use the facilities, but I was really interested in checking the bathroom. Before I washed my hands, I scrutinized the sink. Both it and the toilet bowl were scrupulously clean. If MacAulay had bled in the bathroom, there was no sign of it.
There was a medicine cabinet, but there was nothing in it except a flattened tube of shaving cream, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. No floss. There was a full bottle of prescription sleeping pills and the usual pharmaceutical paraphernalia you’d expect with a man in such ill health. Just as I was about the switch off the light, I saw a wicker laundry hamper tucked in beside the toilet. I looked inside. There was the usual pile of used T-shirts and underwear, but on top of the heap was a tea towel that had been saturated in blood.
Gillies smiled at me when I rejoined him downstairs. He had an infectious smile that softened the rather hard lines of his face, not to mention the ferocity of his black eye.
“And? How was the bathroom?”
“Clean as a whistle.”
On the way to the car, I asked him for a favour.
“Could we stop and talk to the MacLeans?”
“I don’t see why not. You’re a visitor. We’re not doing anything in an official capacity.”
When we pulled into the driveway, both Mr. and Mrs. MacLean came out at once. They appeared to be in their seventies, and had matching soft white hair and tweed jackets. He was still chewing on his dinner.
“We saw the ambulance come. Puir Tormod. They’ve taken him away to Stornoway, I suppose.”
“They have.”
We were still in the car at this point, and Gillies leaned his head out of the window. “If it’s not spoiling your dinner, would you mind if Miss Morris and I had a wee chat with you both?”
They nodded almost simultaneously. “Come on in,” said Mr. MacLean. “We spoke to young Fraser, but I’m not sure how much he really understood. He was in shock, puir fellow.”
Gillies came around and opened the car door for me while I was gathering up my purse. As we went in, he made introductions, but kept it to the fact that I was a police officer from Canada. The MacLeans were quite flustered by the excitement. Mr. MacLean asked me if I had met his cousin who had emigrated years ago and
lived in Ontario — or was it Vancouver? No, I hadn’t, I said. The odds were about five-million-to-one that our paths had crossed. But then you never knew.
They took us straight into the kitchen, which, like MacAulay’s, hadn’t changed since the 1950s. More tea was offered, which I declined, but which Gillies accepted. Finally we were sitting down around the Formica table.
“Could you just go over again what you told Constable Fraser? You saw a car leaving Mr. MacAulay’s house on Friday night.”
“Well now, let’s see. Isobel and I had gone up to the community centre in Carloway. There’s always a little
ceilidh
on Friday nights, and we enjoy going, don’t we, Bel?”
“We do,” said Mrs. MacLean, who was the less talkative. “It breaks the monotony.”
“We must have left there about eleven o’clock, wouldn’t you say, Bel?”
“Five past at the most. And I must tell you now, Tom had only had two glasses of beer. Isn’t that so?”
“It is. I can’t take the drink these days. More than two glasses and my prostate acts up fierce. So where was I?... Oh aye, we were jest approaching on our house. Look, why dinna I draw you a map? Bel, can you bring some paper and pencil?”
Mrs. MacLean got up promptly, as no doubt she had done all her married life when requests came from her husband. While we waited, Mr. MacLean took what appeared to be a single cigarette from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth.
“I’m trying to stop smoking, and these things are supposed to help you. They’re menthol or some darned thing like that. Tastes like mothballs.” He sucked in air from the plastic tube, which made a little whistling sound.
Bel placed a lined notepad in front of him and a stubby pencil. He quickly sketched out a double line that curved down to the bottom of the page.
“Here’s Arnol, see? They’ve got a fine wee museum there of the old Blackhouses. Very worth seeing, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
“Indeed.”
“And here’s Shawbost.”
“We weren’t anywhere near there, Tom,” interjected his wife.
“I know that Bel, I’m just filling in some detail for the young lady so she can orientate herself.” He tapped the paper. “This is the way you’ve come from Stornoway, see. You passed through Arnol and Shawbost. If you continued on the main road, you’d come to Carloway village.” He drew an arrow off his double line. “Here’s the turnoff to our house and Tormod’s. We’re on the right and Tormod’s house is further down a wee way on the left.” He made crosses on his map.
“She’s already seen all that, Tom,” interrupted Bel. “You don’t need to go over it again. Just get on with what happened. If you don’t, I will.”
“Is it clear now?” he asked me.
“Quite clear, thank you.”
“Aye, good. Well then, as I was saying, we were coming from the direction of Carloway and were almost at the turnoff when a car came roaring out of the side road and turned north right in front of us. It’s a good thing I wasn’t driving too fast.”
“Tom’s a careful driver,” said Mrs. MacLean.
He grinned. “You have to be at my age. I had to brake sharp or I would have been up their boot.”
I only half-understood this reference, but I didn’t dare stop him now.
“That car just took off like a bat out of the Other Place.”
“But you had a chance to see it was a red Vauxhall?”
“Yes, we did. My previous car was a Vauxhall, so I’m very familiar with them.”
“Tom, could you tell who was in the car?” Gillies asked.
Mrs. MacLean couldn’t hold back any longer. “There were two women. One was Sarah MacDonald, may she rest in the Lord. She died in that tragic accident, as you know.”
“Did you actually see her when the car drove out in front of you?” I asked.
They both looked surprised, and Mrs. MacLean said, “We just told you we did.”
Mr. MacLean waved his fake cigarette. “No, Bel, what the lady means is did we see her face? That’s what you mean isn’t it, Miss?”
I said yes, that was what I meant, and wondered if they could describe the other woman as well. I didn’t add that it was dark and the only lights were car lights, which will make silhouettes of anybody who is driving in front of you. There was silence for a moment as they eyed each other and considered the question. Mr. MacLean sucked hard and made the whistling sound.
“My wife will have to speak for herself, but I would say that, no, I didn’t get a good look at either person. I just assumed it had been Sarah because of what happened.”
“We were right about the car though, weren’t we,” said Isobel quickly. They were starting to feel they’d failed as witnesses, which wasn’t what I wanted at all.
“The car that crashed was a red Vauxhall,” said Gillies. “Mr. MacLean, do you know what time it was when you reached the turnoff and saw the car?” I asked.
“Oh, if we left the hall at five past eleven, we’d have been at the turnoff at twenty past. Right, Gill? Wouldn’t you say it would take us fifteen minutes to get here from the
ceilidh
?”
“Yes, driving at normal speed, it’d take no more than that.” Mrs. MacLean regarded Gillies anxiously. “There’s no funny business about Tormod’s passing is there? He was not a well man.”
“According to Dr. MacBeth, he died of natural causes, Tom. But as you probably know, the second person has disappeared, and we’re just trying to pin down all the details.”
She nodded. “That’s what we said to Jamie Fraser. Deaths come in threes.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you, Mrs. MacLean.”
She glanced over at me, but continued to talk to Gillies. I could feel that, in the meantime, her husband was scrutinizing me.
“When we saw the police car go by this afternoon, we thought we’d better go and see what was happening, in case Jamie wanted help. Young Lisa Mackenzie had arrived earlier. We heard her motorcycle. Dreadful thing that it is.”
Her husband jumped in to finish the tale. “We walked down to the house, and Jamie said that Tormod had passed on. That’s when Isobel said death comes in threes. First Sarah, then the visitor woman, now Tormod.”
I felt Gillies’s discomfort, but I was hardened now to any stab. “How did you hear about the car accident?” I asked.
“Bel’s sister, Morag, rang us up this morning.” He looked worried. “We always motor down to Harris on Saturdays to visit our daughter, and we didn’t get back until after church. When we heard the news, we were actually talking about going to the police and telling them what we saw, weren’t we, Bel?”
His wife nodded. “We were. Then we saw the police car and, well, we told you the rest. We mentioned to young Fraser we’d seen the two women leaving the house, and he said as how the other lady’s body wasna found yet, so he’d better report what we said. He also asked us if we’d seen Tormod since Friday, but we hadn’t, had we, Isobel?”
“We had not, being as how we were away at Harris. Besides, we might not have clapped eyes on him even if we were here. Tormod sometimes didn’t come out for two, three days at a time if he wasn’t feeling well. His grandson looked in on him most every day, so we didn’t worry.”
“According to Andy’s fiancée, they didn’t come over on the weekends,” said Gillies.
“No, they didn’t. Lisa was here then, and she and Coral-Lyn didn’t get along.” Isobel frowned. “People talked about Lisa and Tormod, but I say let them who are without sin throw the first stone.”
I didn’t quite know how to respond to that, so once again I nodded encouragingly. They had said their piece, however, and to press them might make them adapt their story. I wanted the freshness of the first telling. They sat quietly and watched me. Tom sucked energetically on his menthol tube.
“Is that it then?”
“It is, and thank you very much for talking to me.”
We all shook hands. They asked if I was staying long and, if I
was, to please come to tea and they’d show me pictures of Tom’s cousin. I might have met him. You never know, stranger things have happened. Indeed, I said, and Gillies and I left.
“Well?” he asked. “What did you think?”
“It could have been any car and anybody in it.”
He was quiet for a few moments, then he glanced over at me.
“I know that in a court of law what you say is true. But let’s not abandon common sense. A red Vauxhall crashed not far down this same road late on Friday night. What other car would it be?”
He spoke nicely, but I felt reprimanded and that made me sharp. “Who knows?” I snapped. “We have no idea when the accident happened. Maybe there were other visitors. I’m just getting tired of all these ifs and maybes.”
He reached over and briefly touched my hand. “You know what, I think the right word is tired. And by the way, we do know what time the accident happened. Sarah MacDonald was killed at precisely seventeen minutes past ten.”
“What? Come on, how can you be that exact?”
“You may see us as a little backwater relying on primitive technology to solve our cases, but we have been able to determine the exact time of her death to the minute.”
“Yeah? How did you do that?”
He chuckled. “Her watch was smashed on the rock. It had stopped at ten-seventeen.”
“That proves nothing. She could have been wearing a broken watch all week. She hadn’t gotten around to getting it fixed.”
“You should have been a lawyer. They aren’t interested in common sense. Would you wear a broken watch?”
“I concede the point, but then we have a major time discrepancy. How could she be dead at ten-seventeen, and the MacLeans see her driving away at eleven-fifteen?”
“They’re dear folks, but would you consider them reliable witnesses?”
“I don’t know them,” I said. “It would be easy to confirm their statement though, if we talked to the other people at the
ceilidh
.”
“Yes, it would. If this were a homicide investigation, I’d go and
do just that. But it isn’t. I know these people. They could have as easily sworn they left at midnight. Nobody was watching the time.”
A rather thick silence dropped into the car and I said, “On the other hand, we don’t know if Sarah’s watch was accurate, do we? Unless it’s a habit of the Lewishans to keep their clocks an hour late.”
He laughed. “I’m sure some would do that, just to be perverse.”
Tension evaporated.
“How about if I give you more history lessons while we drive, and then we can discuss the other stuff over dinner when you’re rested?”
I stopped bristling and making a fool of myself. “That sounds like basic rule number three, or is it four? ‘Never draw conclusions if you are so sleep deprived your eyes are falling out of your head.’”