Does Your Mother Know? by Maureen Jennings Read Free Book Online

with my opponent’s stick.” Gingerly, he touched his cheekbone. “At least I got a penalty shot out of it.”
    “Did you win the game?”
    “No.”
    He moved out to pass a slow car in front of us, and involuntarily I flinched as we seemed to come too close.
    “This driving on the left takes some getting used to.”
    We were soon out of the town and on a two-lane road that wound across what he told me was Barvas Moor. Houses became few and far between. I put down the window and stuck my face into the rushing air.
    “Oh, what is that wonderful tangy smell?”
    “I don’t know what you’re smelling. You never know with visitors. It could be sheep; the sea; the peat.”
    “Hey, I know sea and I doubt sheep smell this good. This is sort of smoky.”
    “Then it’s the peat. It’s still used for fuel by the crofters. It was an old tradition for the villagers to band together to ‘bring in the peat’ as they called it. You’ll see the stacks near the cottages.”
    “Did you do that?”
    He shook his head. “I’m an incomer. I grew up in the big city of Inverness. I married a girl from Stornoway and came to live here twenty odd years ago.” He paused a beat. “We’ve been separated four years now, but I saw no reason to move away. One of my daughters lives down in Barras.”
    I can read subtext as well as the next bacherlorette. I replied in kind.
    “I’ve never been married myself, and I’ve never put myself in the way of maternity.”
    He didn’t get the joke, so I assumed he hadn’t seen the show, Mamma Mia. “I suppose the major relationship in my life these days is with my job.”
    “I know how that can happen,” he said, a little grimly, I thought. “Jock said you were, quote, a ‘criminal investigative analyst.’”
    “I’ve only just started that. I was a regular generic detective until recently.”
    “Thought you’d like a change, did you?”
    “Something like that.”
    Detective Sergeant Morris is completely exonerated of using excessive force in this unfortunate tragedy. “You killed my sister, you racist pig. I spit on you.” And she did, right across my mouth.
    Gillies was saying something.
    “Needless to say, we no have any such thing as profilers here in Lewis, we’re a mite short on serial killers, but from what I’ve heard, it’s interesting work.”
    “I’m hoping that. When I was with the violent-crime squad, which is where you have to start, I might be stuck on the same casedragging on for two or even three years. With this work, so I’m told, there’s nothing if not variety. Just when you think nobody can come up with any new way to kill themselves or somebody else, they do.”
    He grimaced. “Nothing like that happens here, thank God. Even with the summer tourist population, Stornoway is a small place. I know most of the people who live here, who’s had a brush with the law, who’s into drugs, teenagers mostly. We get virtually no violent crimes if you discount the occasional drunken brawl on the docks. Russian sailors usually with too much vodka in them. The perpetrators are usually lying right beside their victims. I don’t get much chance to play Sherlock Holmes, and frankly I’m happy to keep it like that.”
    He didn’t say it in any smug way, just matter of fact. The difference between small town and megacity.
    “At least you get the satisfaction of seeing a case through to its conclusion. The downside of my job is I won’t own a case any more. We’re consultants. The local investigators still have to do the leg work, and the detectives aren’t obliged to tell us what happened. Most of them do so out of courtesy, but they don’t have to.”
    Neither of us asked why we’d gone into police work in the first place. Officers rarely talked about it seriously. But then neither do brain surgeons. “ By the way, Doctor Medley-Brown, why did you decide to make a career of slicing through bone and flesh?” As for gynecologists, I don’t want to go