Mrs. Frank Urquhart was dead set against the Sabbatarians. What right did religious folk have to tell others they couldn’t do anything other than pray on a Sunday? How could they dictate no hanging out washing on a fine day—which Sunday often was?
Here I am with the whole of the shinty team’s shorts an’ shirts, and I’m expected to leave the washing until Monday? No chance. God must be a man, she always complained. No woman would ignore grass stains and mud stains, to say nothing of the blood, for two whole days.
It was Saturday night; she was waiting for the water to boil in the washhouse attached to their council house on one of the new schemes of homes built for decent working families.
They’ll need a good long soak this week, she thought as she sorted through the big wicker hamper, the one with the leather handles that was delivered to her house a couple of hours after the match ended if it was a home game, Monday if it was away.
The smell didn’t bother her—she was a nurse. This job she accepted as her duty, her husband being the manager of the town shinty team.
“Would you look at yon?” she muttered when she reached in for the socks, “one of those eejits has left his boot in with the dirty washing.”
When she pulled the boot from the pile and found a foot in the sock inside, she screamed loud enough and shrill enough to set the dog barking, her daughter running, and wake her husband up from his chair in front of the fire, where he was dreaming of the team winning the competition and drinking whisky from the silver Camanachd Cup itself.
Her daughter, Morag, who was sixteen and a replica of her mother, ran in to see what the noise was about. She almost threw up at the sight, but had the sense to relieve her mother of the boot—and the foot—and lock it in the pantry out of reach of the dog. But not before her father, the feared coach, had seen the end stump of the leg and passed out on the washhouse floor, where Nurse Urquhart used an already bloody pair of shorts to stem the flow from the cut on his forehead. Then Morag called the police.
The confusion in the ensuing forensic investigation came about because no one dared mention that Coach Frank Urquhart always fainted at the sight of blood.