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Lochdubh and suggested they stay at the Tommel Castle Hotel for the night.
    Jamie was roused from his slumbers. He was in a foul temper all the way back to Lochdubh, and once checked into the hotel, he headed straight for the bar.
    Fiona phoned Harry Frame in Glasgow. ‘It’s Drim,’ she said wearily.
    ‘Where the hell’s that?’ asked Harry.
    ‘It’s at the ends of the earth,’ said Fiona, ‘but Jamie’s happy and it’s right in every way.’ She began to enthuse over the castle, deliberately not
mentioning the awkward business of getting there.
    Major Neal said to his head gamekeeper, ‘You’ll find a good haunch of venison in the freezer and a side of smoked salmon. Take them over to Macbeth at Lochdubh
tomorrow with my thanks. No, forget it. I haven’t seen Hamish in ages. I’ll take them over myself.’
    ‘That’s very good of you,’ beamed Hamish when the major arrived on his doorstep half an hour later, bearing gifts.
    ‘Least I could do, Hamish,’ said the major, following him into the kitchen. ‘But, oh my, what’s Miss Martyn-Broyd going to do when she hears how they’re planning to
change her book?’
    ‘What are they going to do with it? A dram?’
    ‘Just the one, Hamish.’ They both sat down at the kitchen table. ‘It’s like this. . . . Have you read The Case of the Rising Tides ?’
    Hamish shook his head.
    ‘It’s not bad. Complicated plot. But it’s a lady’s book, if you know what I mean. The main character is a Scottish aristocrat called Lady Harriet Vere.’
    ‘So her father was an earl or something like that?’
    ‘The author doesn’t mention any parents at all. Just this Lady Harriet who lives in a castle in the Highlands with devoted servants. In the TV series, she’s going to drop a few
years – in the book she’s around forty, with a stern, handsome face and so on – and be played by Penelope Gates, who is a voluptuous blonde whose recent performances on the box
have left nothing to the imagination. Unless she dyes her pubic hair as well, she’s a real blonde.’
    ‘You’d make a good detective,’ said Hamish dryly.
    ‘Anyway, in the TV series, she’s going to be a hippie aristocrat who runs a commune in her castle, pot and free love.’
    ‘Bit sixties.’
    ‘It’s set in the sixties.’
    ‘I wonder if Miss Martyn-Broyd knows this,’ said Hamish.
    ‘Probably does. Her books have been out of print. Bound to go along with anything. I’ll be glad when the light nights come back again, Hamish. These long northern winters get me
down. But thanks to you, once they start filming and I get paid, I’ll be able to take a holiday somewhere far away from Scotland.’
    ‘Nonetheless, I wouldn’t tell Miss Martyn-Broyd about what they’re going to do to her book, in case she doesn’t know. Better to upset her later than sooner. How are
things in Drim?’
    ‘Same as ever. A living grave with resident ghouls.’
    ‘This TV thing should spice them up. Did you tell them they’d better cosy up to the minister and the village headmen?’
    ‘Yes, that Fiona woman knew how to go about it.’
    ‘I should think those silly village women will all be seeing themselves as film stars the minute they hear about it.’
    ‘You know how they are up here, Hamish. They’ll be split into two camps. There’ll be those who are trying like mad to get their faces on the telly and the sour ones who stand
around the location hoping to register their disapproval on camera.’
    Hamish laughed. ‘And no filming on the Sabbath.’
    ‘I didn’t tell them, and I’m not telling them until I’ve got the contract.’
    * * *
    Fiona lay on her bed in a room in the Tommel Castle Hotel and listened to the moaning of the wind outside. Thank God a location had been found! This series could make her name
at last. If only she hadn’t got to deal with Jamie. She felt uneasy about his work. She had read his ‘bible’, where he had set out plot, storyline, characters and