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damned fool taking a boat like the Harvest Lass out on his own. Did Dave say what started the fight?’
    A sudden caution in her grey eyes, Sheila Francis shook her head. The white hair-ribbon brushed tantalizingly along her neck.
    ‘And now Dave has fired him.’ Carrick waited, saw no response, and tried a different tack. ‘Meeting Dave tonight?’
    ‘Not a chance,’ she said wryly. ‘Having a day off doesn’t mean too much in a place like this. I’ve some patients to look in on tonight.’
    ‘And afterwards?’
    She shrugged. ‘Not the White Cockade. I’ve landed in enough hot water since I came here without looking for more. Portcoig’s view of a district nurse is that she should be above wanting a drink.’
    ‘And what does the nurse feel about it?’
    Her laugh was a soft chuckle. ‘I’ll tell you some other time. Goodbye, Chief Officer.’
    ‘If Rother is Dave, then I’m Webb,’ he told her. ‘Otherwise I call you Nurse.’
    ‘I’ll remember.’ She smiled at him again, then left, strolling confidently along the pier.
    Watching, Carrick gave a silent whistle of appreciation, then turned and made his way down the ferry steps towards the launch. All he could see of its owner was her trousered bottom and legs. The rest of Maggie MacKenzie was hidden under a raised engine hatch.
    ‘Hello, Maggie,’ he said mildly.
    ‘Go away,’ came her muffled voice. ‘Come back in an hour, whoever you are. I won’t be ready till then – there’s a fuel line needs clearing.’
    ‘I wouldn’t go out on your old tub if you paid me,’ said Carrick with a grin. ‘Come on out of there, Maggie.’
    ‘Eh?’ She did, wriggling out smartly, an adjustable wrench clutched in one hand. ‘And just what’s wrong with …?’ As she saw him, she stopped and sighed. ‘So it’s you, is it?’ Using her free hand she wiped her forehead and left a smudge of oil in the process. ‘Come to work or watch?’
    ‘To talk.’
    ‘I know what that usually means,’ sniffed Maggie MacKenzie. A small, neat woman, still with a reasonable figure, she was probably in her late fifties. Skin tanned dark by the weather, she considered him with a trace of annoyance. ‘Could that captain of yours not have sent Mr Pettigrew? I like my men mature.’
    ‘I’ll tell him,’ promised Carrick with a twinkle. ‘But coming here was my own idea.’
    ‘That’s even worse.’ She still looked interested. ‘All right, sit down somewhere. You’re too big to have standing around.’
    Carrick settled in the stern thwarts. Maggie MacKenzie joined him, took the cigarette he offered, and cupped her hands round the flame of his lighter.
    ‘When you say “talk” you mean you want to hear the local gossip,’ she declared after a first puff of smoke. ‘Well, what do you want to know?’
    Carrick lit his own cigarette first. ‘How much trouble John MacBean’s death could cause.’
    ‘A lot.’ Her mouth tightened at the thought. ‘No one here needs a crystal ball for that. Things have been heading from bad to worse as it is, ever since …’
    ‘Ever since Helen Grant drowned?’
    Her eyes narrowed. ‘If you know that, why ask?’
    ‘I’d like more of the story, Maggie. More than I could get out of Sergeant Fraser, though he practically admitted he covered up a suicide in his report.’
    ‘For the girl’s family.’ The woman nodded and considered the lapping water pensively. ‘Aye, as police go that man Fraser’s decent enough. And what’s your interest in it all? I’d have thought pregnant fish were more in your line.’
    He ignored the thrust. ‘Who do people say the man was, Maggie?’
    She frowned and flicked ash from her cigarette. ‘You never waste time, do you? Well, some say it was Dave Rother. Others say that lad I just brought over, the one that looked like he’d been hit by a truck.’
    ‘Young Benson?’
    ‘Him,’ she agreed dryly. ‘Maybe she liked mixing her men. I’d say Dave Rother was the one she really was