Death of a Gossip (2 page)

‘No, Mr Macbeth often joins us on the first day for coffee.’

‘Why?’ Lady Jane was standing with her hands on her hips between Hamish and the coffee table. The policeman craned his neck and looked over her fat shoulder at the coffee pot.

‘Well,’ said John crossly, wishing Hamish would speak for himself. ‘We all like a cup of coffee and . . .’

‘I do not pay taxes to entertain public servants,’ said Lady Jane. ‘Go about your business, Constable.’

The policeman gazed down at her with a look of amiable stupidity in his hazel eyes. He made a move to step around her. Lady Jane blocked his path.

‘Do you take your coffee regular, Officer?’ asked Marvin Roth. He was a tall, pear-shaped man with a domed bald head and thick horn-rimmed glasses. He looked rather like the wealthy
upper-eastside Americans portrayed in some
New Yorker
cartoons.

Hamish broke into speech for the first time. ‘I mostly take tea,’ he said in a soft Highland voice. ‘But I aye take the coffee when I get the chance.’

‘He means, do you take milk and sugar?’ interposed John Cartwright, who had become used to translating Americanisms.

‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ said Hamish. Lady Jane began to puff with outrage as Marvin poured a cup of coffee and handed it over her shoulder to the constable. Alice Wilson let out a
nervous giggle and put her hand over her mouth to stifle it. Lady Jane gave her shoulders a massive shrug and sent the cup of coffee flying.

There was an awkward silence. Hamish picked up the cup from the floor and looked at it thoughtfully. He looked slowly and steadily at Lady Jane, who glared back at him triumphantly.

‘Oh,
pullease
give the policeman his coffee,’ sighed Amy Roth. She was a well-preserved blonde with large, cow-like eyes, a heavy soft bosom, and surprisingly tough and wiry
tennis-playing wrists.

‘No,’ said Lady Jane stubbornly while John Cartwright flapped his notes and prayed for deliverance. Why wouldn’t Hamish just
go
?

Lady Jane turned her back on Hamish and stared at Marvin as if defying him to pour any more coffee. Alice Wilson watched miserably. Why had she come on this awful holiday? It was costing so
much, much more than she could afford.

But as she watched, she saw to her amazement the policeman had taken a sizeable chunk of Lady Jane’s tightly clad bottom between thumb and forefinger and was giving it a hearty pinch.

‘You pinched my bum!’ screamed Lady Jane.

‘Och, no,’ said the policeman equably, moving past the outraged lady and pouring himself another cup of coffee. ‘It will be them Hielan midges. Teeth on them like the
pterodactyls.’

He ambled back to his armchair by the window and sat down, nursing his coffee cup.

‘I shall write to that man’s superior officer,’ muttered Lady Jane. ‘Is anyone going to pour?’

‘I reckon we’ll just help ourselves, honey,’ said Amy Roth sweetly.

Seeing that there was going to be no pleasant chatter over the cups, John Cartwright decided to begin his lecture.

Warming to his subject as he always did, he told them of the waters they would fish, of the habits of the elusive salmon, of the dos and don’ts, and then he handed around small plastic
packets of thin transparent nylon cord.

He was about to call Heather down to tell her it was time to show the class how to tie a leader, when he suddenly felt he could not bear to see his wife humiliated by the terrible Lady Jane. She
had been remarkably quiet during his lecture, but he felt sure she was only getting her second wind. He decided to go ahead on his own.

‘I am now going to tell you how to tie a leader,’ he began.

‘What on earth’s a leader?’ snapped Lady Jane.

‘A leader,’ explained John, ‘is the thin, tapering piece of nylon which you attach to your line. A properly tapered leader, properly cast, deposits the fly lightly on the
surface. The butt section of the leader, which is attached to the line, is only a bit less in diameter than the line. The next section is a little lighter, and so on down to the tippet. Now you
must learn to tie these sections of leader together to form the tapering whole. The knot we use for this is called a blood knot. If you haven’t tied this thin nylon before, you’ll find
it very difficult. So I’ll pass around lengths of string for you to practice on.’

‘I saw some of these leader things already tapered in a fishing shop,’ said Lady Jane crossly. ‘So why do we have to waste a perfectly good morning sitting indoors tying knots
like a lot of Boy Scouts?’

Heather’s calm voice sounded from the doorway, and John heaved a sign of relief.

‘I am Heather Cartwright. Good morning, everybody. You were asking about leaders.

‘Commercially tied leaders are obtainable in knotless forms,’ said Heather, advancing into the room. ‘You can buy them in lengths of seven and a half to twelve feet. But you
will find the leader often gets broken above the tippet and so you will have to learn to tie it anyway. Now, watch closely and I’ll show you how to do it. You can go off and fish the Marag if
you want, Major,’ added Heather. ‘No need for you to sit through all this again.’

‘No experts in fly fishing,’ said the major heartily. ‘Always something to learn. I’ll stay for a bit.’

Alice Wilson wrestled with the knot. She would get one side of it right only to discover that the other side had miraculously unravelled itself.

The child, Charlie, was neatly tying knots as if he had fallen out of his cradle doing so. ‘Can you help me?’ she whispered. ‘You’re awfully good.’

‘No, I think that’s cheating,’ said the child severely. ‘If you don’t do it yourself, you’ll never learn.’

Alice blushed miserably. ‘I’ll show you,’ said a pleasant voice on her other side. Alice found Jeremy Blythe surveying her sympathetically. He took the string from her and
began to demonstrate.

After the class had been struggling for several minutes, Heather said, ‘Have your leaders knotted by the time we set out tomorrow. Now if you will all go to your rooms and change,
we’ll meet back here in half an hour. John will take you up to the Marag and show you how to cast.’

‘Well, see you in half an hour,’ said Jeremy cheerfully. ‘Your name’s Alice, isn’t it?’

Alice nodded shyly. ‘And mine’s Daphne,’ said a mocking voice at Jeremy’s elbow, ‘or had you forgotten?’

‘How could I?’ said Jeremy. ‘We travelled up together on the same awful train.’

They walked off arm in arm, and Alice felt even more miserable. For a moment she had hoped she would have a friend in Jeremy. But that fearfully sophisticated Daphne had quite obviously staked a
claim on his attentions.

Lady Jane surveyed Alice’s powder-blue Orlon trouser suit with pale, disapproving eyes. ‘I hope you’ve brought something suitable to wear,’ she said nastily.
‘You’ll frighten the fish in that outfit.’

Alice walked hurriedly away, not able to think of a suitable retort. Of course, she had thought of plenty by the time she reached the privacy of her bedroom, but then, that was always the
way.

She looked at her reflection in the long glass in her hotel bedroom. The trouser suit had looked so bright and smart in London. Now it looked tawdry and cheap.

The stupid things one did for love, thought Alice miserably as she pulled out an old pair of corduroy trousers, an army sweater and Wellington boots and prepared to change her clothes.

For Alice was secretary to Mr Thomas Patterson-James. Mr Patterson-James was chief accountant of Baxter and Berry, exporters and importers. He was forty-four, dark, and handsome – and
married. And Alice loved him passionately.

He would tease her and ruffle her hair and call her ‘a little suburban miss’, and Alice would smile adoringly back and wish she could become smart and fashionable.

Mr Patterson-James often let fall hints that his marriage was not a happy one. He had sighed over taking his annual vacation in Scotland but explained it was the done thing.

Everyone who was anyone, Alice gathered, went to Scotland in August to kill things. If you weren’t slaughtering grouse, you were gaffing salmon.

So Alice had read an article about the fishing school in
The Field
and had promptly decided to go. She imagined the startled admiration on her boss’s face when she casually
described landing a twenty-pounder after a brutal fight.

Alice was nineteen years of age. She had fluffy fine brown hair and wide-spaced brown eyes. Her slim, almost boyish figure was her private despair.

She had once seen Mr Patterson-James arm in arm with a busty blonde and wondered if the blonde were Mrs Patterson-James.

It was not like being in the British Isles at all, thought Alice, looking out at the sun sparkling on the loch. The village was so tiny and the tracts of heather-covered moorland and weird
twisted mountains so savage and primitive and vast.

Perhaps she would give it one more day and then go home. Would she get a refund? Alice’s timid soul quailed at the idea of asking for money back. Surely only very common people did
that.

Mr Patterson-James was always describing people as common.

Suddenly she heard raised voices from the terrace below. Then loud and clear she heard Mr Marvin Roth say savagely, ‘If she doesn’t shut that goddamn mouth of hers, I’ll shut
it for her.’

There was the sound of a door slamming and then silence.

Alice sat down on the bed, one leg in her trousers and one out. Her ideas of American men had been pretty much based on the works of P. G. Wodehouse. Men who looked like Marvin were supposed to
be sweet and deferential to their wives, although they might belong to the class of Sing-Sing ’45. Was everyone on this holiday going to be nasty? And whose mouth was going to be shut? Lady
Jane’s?

Jeremy Blythe seemed sweet. But the Daphnes of this world were always waiting around the corner to take away the nice men. Did Mrs Patterson-James look like Daphne?

Alice gloomily surveyed her appearance in the glass when she had finished dressing. The corduroys fitted her slim hips snugly, and the bulky army sweater hid the deficiency of her bosom. Her
Wellington boots were . . . well, just Wellington boots.

Carefully setting a brand-new fishing hat of brown wool on top of her fluffy brown hair, Alice stuck her tongue out at her reflection and went out of her room and down the stairs, muttering,
‘I won’t stay if I can’t stand it.’

To her surprise, everyone was dressed much the same as she was, with the exception of Lady Jane, who had simply changed her brogues for Wellingtons and was still wearing the breeches and blouse
she had worn at the morning lecture.

‘We’ll all walk up to the Marag,’ said John Cartwright. ‘Heather will go ahead in the estate car with the rods and packed lunches.’

Loch Marag, or the Marag as it was called by the locals, was John’s favorite training ground. It was a circular loch surrounded by pretty sylvan woodland. At one end it flowed out and down
to the sea loch of Lochdubh in a series of waterfalls. It was amply stocked with trout and a fair number of salmon.

The major took himself cheerfully off to fish in the pool above the waterfall while the rest of the class gathered with their newly acquired rods at the shallow side of the loch to await
instruction. Instead of a hook, a small piece of cotton wool was placed on the end of each leader.

It was then that the class discovered that Lady Jane was not only rude and aggressive, she was also incredibly clumsy.

Although the loch was only a short walk from the hotel, she had insisted on bringing her car and parking it at the edge of the loch. She backed it off the road on to the grass and right over the
pile of packed lunches.

She refused to listen to John’s careful instructions and whipped her line savagely back and forth, finally winding it around Marvin Roth’s neck and nearly strangling him. She then
strode into the water, failing to see small Charlie Baxter and sending him flying face down in the mud.

Charlie burst into tears and kicked Lady Jane in the shins before Heather could scoop him up and drag him off.

‘I’ll kill her,’ muttered John. ‘She’s ruining the holiday for everyone.’

‘Now, now,’ said Heather. ‘I’ll deal with her while you look after the others.’

Alice listened carefully as John Cartwright’s now slightly shaking voice repeated the instructions.

‘With the line in front of you, take a foot or so of the line from the reel with your left hand. Raise the rod, holding the wrist at a slight down slant. Bring the line off the water with
a smooth motion but with enough power to send it behind you, stopping the rod at the twelve o’clock position. Your left hand holding the line pulls downwards. When the line has straightened
out behind you, bring the rod forward smartly. As the line comes forward, follow through to the ten o’clock position, letting the line fall gently to the water. Oh,
very
good,
Alice.’

Alice flushed with pleasure. Heather had said something to Lady Jane, and Lady Jane had stalked off. Without her overbearing presence, the day seemed to take on light and colour. Heather shouted
she was returning to the hotel to bring back more packed lunches.

A buzzard sailed above in the light blue sky. Enormous clumps of purple heather studied their reflections in the mirror surface of the loch. The peaty water danced as Alice waded dreamily in the
red and gold shallows, which sparkled and glittered like marcasite. She cast, and cast, and cast again until her arms ached. Heather came back with new lunches, and they all gathered around the
estate car, with the exception of Lady Jane and the major.

Suddenly, it
was
a holiday. A damp and scrubbed Charlie had been brought back by Heather. He sat with his back against the estate car’s wheel contentedly munching a sandwich.

All at once he said in his clear treble, ‘That is quite a frightful woman, you know.’

No one said, ‘Who?’

Although no one added their criticism to Charlie’s, they were all bonded together in a common resentment against Lady Jane and an equally common determination that she was not going to
spoil things.