Hamish MacBeth 06 (1991) - Death of a Snob Read Online Free PDF Page A

the middle distance. Despite the heat of the lounge, he was wearing a chunky Aran sweater with blue cords and boat shoes without socks.
    His wife, Heather, looked older. She had blackish-brown hair and was wearing a pink jump suit with high heels. But her figure was lumpy and she looked like a parody of Jane, whom she obviously admired immensely. She had a doughy face set in lines of discontent.
    “And Tweedledum and Tweedledee, that’s Ian and Sheila Carpenter.”
    Ian and Sheila Carpenter were both roly-poly people with fat jolly faces and fat jolly smiles. They were flirting with each other in a kittenish, affectionate way.
    “The small, bad-tempered man is Jane’s ex, John Wetherby.”
    John was well-groomed, slightly plump, looking as if he had been reluctantly dragged from his office. He was wearing an immaculately tailored pin-striped suit, a shirt with a white separate collar and striped front, and an old school tie.
    “He’s a barrister,” said Harriet. “So what do you do?”
    Hamish hesitated. It was obvious that Jane did not want anyone to know he was a policeman. “I work for the forestry,” he said.
    Heather Todd, who had come up to them, caught Hamish’s last remark. Her eyes bored insolently into his. “Good heavens,” she said, “where did Jane pick you up?”
    “In Lochdubh, on the mainland,” said Hamish amiably.
    Heather’s voice was Glaswegian, although it would take a practised ear to register the tact. Among the middle classes of Glasgow it had become unfashionable to try to affect an English accent, the painful result of that effort usually coming out as what was damned not so long ago as Kelvinside, the name of one of the posher areas, where glass came out as ‘gless’ and path as ‘peth’. The new generation of middle-aged, middle-class snobs affected a transatlantic drawl (“I godda go’) but occasionally throwing in a few chosen words of Scottish dialect to show they were of the people, there being nothing more snobbish than a left-wing Glaswegian who longed for the days when that city was a dump of slums and despair instead of having its present successful image. These same snobs talked about ‘the workers’ and their rights frequently, but made sure they never knew one, short of indulgently telling some barman when they were slumming to “buy that wee fellow in the cap a drink.”
    “Do you realise what you and your like are doing?” demanded Heather.
    “No, tell me.” Hamish looked around, wondering whether he could ask Jane to relent and fetch him a cup of tea. There did not seem to be any staff.
    “Covering the Highlands with those ghastly conifers, and all so that rich yuppies in England can get a tax shelter.”
    “Forestry is no longer a tax shelter,” pointed out Hamish.
    “There arnae that many jobs in the Highlands, and forestry’s a blessing.”
    “Well, that’s not the way I see it,” said Heather, casting her eyes about her to draw an audience from the rest. “The massacre of the flow country in Sutherland, the damage to the environment…” Her hectoring voice went on and on.
    Hamish did not like the dreary new pine forests that covered the north of Scotland, but someone like Heather always made him feel like defending them.
    “I’ll find you a cup of tea,” said Harriet’s voice at his ear, and she tugged at his sleeve. They slipped quietly away while Heather continued her lecture, her eyes half-closed so that she could better enjoy the sound of her own voice, which went on and on.
    Harriet led kim into a sterile-looking kitchen where everything gleamed white under strips of fluorescent light.
    “I bet it’s herb tea,” said Hamish, looking gloomily about.
    “No, real tea. I’ve been in charge of the kitchen while Jane’s been away.” Harriet opened a cupboard and took down a canister of tea and then plugged in an electric kettle.
    “Never tell me Jane does all her own cooking,” Hamish said more in hope of being contradicted than