08 - The Highland Fling Murders by Jessica Fletcher, Donald Bain

way.”
    “Can’t hardly do that,” Mort replied. “You can see this castle from everywhere.”
    With that, we were off.
    I ended up leading the pack, and decided to take a different route than I’d chosen during my first foray into Wick. It was a good choice; we were surrounded at every turn by natural beauty, walking at one point through a waist-high field of heather, looking down sheer black cliffs to the sea, waves crashing, hundreds of birds nesting in crevices or soaring into the sky that was, at once, menacing black and cobalt blue.
    “Look over there,” Roberta Walters, our resident bird-watching aficionado, said, training a small pair of binoculars at a small plateau atop a huge rock jutting up from the water. “A redthroated diver.” She handed the binoculars to her husband, who confirmed the sighting while Roberta made a note in a bird book in which she listed every bird she’d ever seen.
    We continued in the direction of town, looking back on occasion at Sutherland Castle, growing smaller as we distanced ourselves from it. But no matter how its visual dimensions decreased, its domination of the horizon continued to impress.
    A golf course sat unused. Golf originated in Scotland, and the Scots’s love of the game is legendary. But from the looks of this course, golf wasn’t a popular sport with the citizens of Wick, or its surrounding villages and towns.
    “Look at that,” Mort said, pointing to something in the distance. “Looks like an oil rig.”
    “ ‘Course it is,” Seth said. “Didn’t you read your guidebook, Mort? There’s oil all up and down Scotland’s coast, includin’ right there offshore from Wick.”
    Mort was offended at Seth’s tone; they often slipped into such minor arguments that never progressed very far because of their long and deep friendship. Usually, I find their spats to be humorous. But on this day, I didn’t want one to intrude into our pleasant excursion, and expressed my feelings.
    “Just pointing out the obvious,” Seth said.
    “No need to put me down,” said Mort, “just ‘cause I missed the part about oil in the book.”
    “How can you miss it?” Seth said. “Everybody knows Scotland got rich ‘cause a’ oil.”
    “Doesn’t look too rich to me around these parts,” Mort countered.
    “And it doesn’t matter,” I said, summoning steel into my tone. “Stop it!”
    Seth and Mort looked sheepishly at me. Mort grinned. Seth shrugged. And we continued walking until reaching the beginning of Bridge Street.
    “How about stopping in that shop,” suggested Susan Shevlin. Its sign said it specialized in kilts and bagpipes. She’d been making notes ever since we left the castle. One thing is certain—Susan Shevlin is a hard-working travel agent, and her clients benefit from her conscientious approach whenever she travels.
    The shop’s inside was musty and dimly lighted. Behind the counter stood an older man with unruly white hair, red cheeks, and eyes sunk deep into his face. He was doing something with a bagpipe when we entered, looked up, nodded, and went back to his chore. We browsed kilt outfits on manikins that looked to have been crafted in another era. The clothing draped on them was dusty, like the shop owner.
    “Why don’t you buy one, Seth?” Roberta Walters suggested, laughing. “You have great legs.”
    “That might be true,” he said, “but I’m not one to go around showin’ them off.”
    “I don’t think you have such great legs,” Mort said, still stung by Seth’s earlier comment about not knowing of Scotland’s oil industry.
    “How would you know?”
    “Boys,” I said.
    “Sorry,” they muttered.
    I went to the counter, where the owner continued to do his work. “Excuse me,” I said.
    Another glance up, his hands still working.
    “Fixing a bagpipe?” I asked.
    “Ay.”
    “Do they break often?”
    “No.”
    “What happened with the one you’re fixing?”
    “Tenor drone. Cracked. Hole in the