by M C Beaton
For once, she was armoured against her husband’s gibes. Full of Dream of the Highlands, and lost in a rosy fantasy, she barely heard him. She had read an article in the newspapers about the poisoning of an Iraqi businessman in London using a slow-acting rat poison containing thallium, banned in Britain, but available on the Continent. It had a delayed effect and only started to work a week after it was administered. She imagined manufacturing an excuse to visit her sister in Kent. Instead, she would go to Paris and buy the rat poison. Then she would return to Cnothan and poison her husband and promptly set off again, so that when he died, she would be far away from the scene of the crime. A local bobby would not suspect anything. She would start to tell everyone that William had a bad heart.
And so Agatha Mainwaring, with a half-smile on her face, dreamt on, while her husband’s voice buzzed and hammered like a wasp against the glass protection of her fantasy.
‘Now, promise me you won’t take a dram,’ said Jamie Ross, after showing Sandy Carmichael round the premises.
Sandy shuddered. ‘I’ll neffer touch the stuff again.’
Jamie looked at him uneasily. It would just be like Sandy to go and get drunk and prove Mainwaring right. But Jamie was soft-hearted and knew Sandy needed some money badly, and more than money, he needed the self-respect of being trusted with a job.
Sandy was a tall, thin man in his forties. His face had an unhealthy, bleached look about it, but the hands now holding one of Jamie’s coffee-cups were steady. Jamie remembered having to hold Sandy’s hands so he could get the coffee down him.
Nothing could really go wrong, Jamie reassured himself. There had never been a burglary in Cnothan. No one even bothered to lock his car.
He wondered whether to ask that policeman to drop in over the weekend just to see that things were all right. But that would show a lack of trust in Sandy, and Sandy certainly did look on the road to recovery.
Hamish found himself surprisingly busy. A sharp phone call from police headquarters to Strathbane told him what MacGregor had not – that he had to patrol a much wider area of surrounding countryside than he had expected. He still found time to call on Diarmuid Sinclair and persuade the crofter to see his family. But to his disappointment, there were no more relaxed coffee sessions with Jenny, who was either painting furiously or not at home. She’d said she went walking to clear her brain. Hamish had offered to go with her, but she said she liked to be alone. Once more, his three months stay in Cnothan stretched out into an eternity of winter days.
Chapter Four
Ah! Who has seen the mailed lobster rise.
– John Hookham Frere
Sandy Carmichael arrived at the Cnothan Game and Fish Company late on Saturday afternoon. Rain had fallen earlier in the day and had now frozen, and the wheels of his old Land Rover crunched over the ice in the yard. Jamie had given him a spare key to the office, where the keys to the sheds hung on a board on the wall.
The office was warm and quiet. Sandy pulled a tattered romance, The Laird’s Passion, from his pocket, and began to read. Unfortunately, it turned out the laird was a bit of a rake, ripe for reform by the heroine, and in the initial pages, he drank large quantities. Sandy put down the book and stared into space. He hadn’t really thought about drinking this past week, the memory of his last bout of the horrors being still fresh in his mind. But now whisky seemed like a golden friend he had harshly misjudged. He could feel the taste of it on his tongue and the warmth of it coiling around his stomach.
He began to fidget, picking up pencils and putting them down. He thought about his last binge. How ill he had been! But he had bought that fish supper from the fish-and-chip shop and some said Murray’s fish and chips were cooked in old grease. Maybe it had been food poisoning. Maybe it had been something he had eaten. Or just maybe he was allergic to whisky and he should try drinking wine. Jamie had paid him his wages in advance and the money was there in his pocket, and in Sandy’s mind, money and whisky went together.
But he was proud of the fact that Jamie had trusted him and he would not let Jamie down. He would go and patrol the sheds, just like a real watchman.
How eerie the sheds were at night. The fluorescent light still left the corners in darkness. The deer carcasses hung motionless and sad. He moved on to the lobster shed. The water gurgled monotonously in the three tanks.
And then, there, right on the edge of the centre tank, he saw it. A full glass of whisky.
He stared at it, wondering if he were hallucinating. He advanced cautiously, picked it up, and sniffed it. Malt whisky! And, by the smell of it, one of the best malts.
Well, it was only one drink, he reasoned, and stuck out here, he couldn’t get any more. One drink never did anyone any harm.
He picked up the glass and took a sip. He took another, larger, sip and the tension of the past week began to leave his body. He’d soon finished the glassful. He felt happy and warm and confident. A few more wouldn’t matter. It was Saturday night. The Clachan would be warm and full of company and noise. And he had money.
He would lock up the office, but there was no need to lock the sheds. Jamie never locked them; he was more worried about his filters packing up than he was about crime. Half an hour at The Clachan and then he would come back and settle down and read that romance. A gust of wind howled around the buildings like a banshee. He thought briefly of the haunting of the Mainwarings. That new copper had been questioning an awful lot of people in that innocent-seeming, I-have-just-dropped-by-for-a-gossip way of his. But whoever had frightened Mrs Mainwaring, it hadn’t been criminals. The Mainwarings deserved to be driven out of Cnothan – well, him, anyway.
Feeling better than he had in a long time, Sandy drove carefully down into Cnothan. He decided that if Hamish Macbeth was in the bar, then he would buy a packet of cigarettes and take himself off. It was still early evening. There were only a few youths in the bar, all looking remarkably Dickensian in their skintight trousers and short jackets. They had pinched white faces and lank hair. Most of them were drunk already, and the giant of a barman, Hector Dunn, was wondering whether that new policeman knew it was part of his duties to turn up at The Clachan on Saturday nights and remove the car keys of anyone who had drunk over the limit.
He tried phoning the police station, but there was no reply. He phoned Jenny Lovelace in case Hamish was there, the gossip about Hamish’s visit and attempted visits having spread around the town like wildfire, but she said she hadn’t seen him. Her voice sounded funny, as if she were crying.
Hamish was, at that very moment, speeding fast out of Cnothan. A report of an assault on one of the customers at a fishing hotel some thirty miles out of town had just come in.
Sandy drank up a double whisky and ordered another. He immediately became sentimental. When Hector asked him why he wasn’t ‘minding the store’, Sandy said that Jamie Ross knew nothing would happen, and hadn’t Jamie in the kindness of his heart left a glass of good whisky on the edge of one of the tanks in the lobster shed for Sandy? It all went to show Jamie knew he, Sandy, could handle his liquor. He put some of his change in the jukebox and selected a Frank Sinatra record and sat down. ‘I did it my way,’ sang the famous voice. How wise, thought Sandy, nodding his head up and down. Story of my life, he thought. He began to sing along with the record. The youths jeered and catcalled and Hector threw them out.
The bar began to fill up with the locals, men at first, and then later their wives, come to curb the expense of a Saturday night’s drinking.
Faces swam in front of Sandy, and voices offered to buy him a drink. The locals were violently jealous of Jamie Ross. Not only did he make a great deal of money, but he did not hide the fact. His new white Mercedes had caused a great deal of heart-burning. To a number of the locals, it seemed like a good joke to get Sandy drunk. Nothing would happen to Jamie’s business, of course, but he would be furious when he got back to find his watchman away sleeping off another drinking bout.
Sandy became dimly aware that
Hector was demanding his car keys, and with the cunning of the drunk, he said he had walked and did not have his Land Rover with him.
Then Hector was calling ‘Time!’ and Sandy was aware of the sharp cold outside the pub, of people laughing and teasing him.
He climbed into his rusty Land Rover and then his mind went blank. He drove home in a total drunken blackout.
Sandy Carmichael awoke at noon the following day. His mouth felt like the bottom of a parrot’s cage. He drank great gulps of cold water and splashed his face. It was then he remembered his job.
He was still wearing the clothes he had worn the night before. He scrambled out and drove to the Cnothan Game and Fish Company.
His mind worked feverishly, Jamie and his family would be back on the last train. He must get the second half of his wages from Jamie, before Jamie learned, as he surely would, that he had been drinking in The Clachan on Saturday night.
He unlocked the office and then began to calm down. Of course, everything was just as he had left it. He went over to the lobster shed and looked around. The whisky glass was still there. He slipped it into his pocket. He sat down on the edge of the main tank and sighed with relief.
Then he blinked. The water seemed to have a strange pinkish tinge. He slowly scooped a handful of water into the palm of his hand.
Pink.
Then, as he stared at the tank, a piece of torn and shredded jacket slowly rose to the surface and turned over and over in the bubbling water.
He got to his feet and looked down into the lobster tank.
There, underneath the busy, crawling black lobsters, lay a white skeleton, grinning up at him.
Sandy fainted dead away with shock.
When he came round, he staggered up, gloomily deciding he had had a bout of the horrors. But another look into the depths of the pool showed him the skeleton was still there.
Sandy sat down on the edge of the pool. Now fear and shock were sharpening his wits. He thought about that glass of whisky. Jamie couldn’t have left it. Some friend of Jamie’s must have been sitting in the shed drinking, got drunk, and fallen into the pool and had his body picked clean by the voracious lobsters. But if he called Macbeth, Macbeth would call in a forensic team, and all the lobsters would be taken away along with the skeleton. The whole shed would be sealed off. Eighteen thousand pounds’ worth of lobsters! Sandy began to cry. You couldn’t insure lobsters, could you? No one would ever trust him again. Jamie wouldn’t pay him the second half of his wages and so he would not be able to get a drink to blot out this nightmare. He scrubbed his eyes with his dirty sleeve.
The self-pity of the habitual drunk gripped him. Life was always playing him dirty tricks. Well, he, Sandy, was going to fight back!
He saw a long pole with a net standing in the corner and carefully began to scoop out every bit of clothing. He found a garbage bag and put each shredded piece into it. With his whole body screaming for a drink, he began to search the water to make sure nothing was left. Gold glittered faintly in the light. With mad patience, he fished out the object. It was a gold watch with a few shreds of leather strap still attached to it. He took a deep breath and searched again, poking and moving the crawling black lobsters to see if there was anything left underneath. His search was rewarded. He brought up remains of a leather wallet and scraps of plastic credit cards and pound notes. After that, he found some silver and pennies, which he retrieved by donning a thick pair of work gloves. Shaking and exhausted, he had just decided that must be all when his eyes caught the shine of gold again. Swearing horribly, he resumed his macabre fishing and at last brought up a gold pen. He looked at it curiously, wondering where he had seen it before, and then slipped it into his pocket. A last frantic hunt revealed a pair of false teeth. Shivering and sick, Sandy put them in his pocket as well. Then he eased the net under the skeleton and raised it to the surface. He seized one arm bone and pulled it out. There was a black monster of a lobster clinging to the skeleton and he screamed and tore it off and threw it back in the pool.
His brain had become sharp and clear. The water filters would soon turn the water clear again. The work gloves were nearly in tatters from the claws of the lobsters, so instead of putting them back on the edge of the sink in the corner where he had found them, he added them to the wet and ragged clothes in the bag. He went out and got his Land Rover and backed it up to the shed. He put the bag of clothes and the skeleton in the back and threw an old travelling rug over them.
As he drove off, he could feel the weight of those terrible false teeth dragging at his pocket. He stopped at a bend in the road and hurled the things out of the window, as far away into the gorse and heather as he could manage.
Then he drove to his home, which was a tumbledown cottage outside Cnothan. He took the bag of clothes round the back of his cottage and dumped it down. He siphoned some petrol out of his Land Rover and poured it over the bag and set fire to it. He raked the blaze, turning it over and over, until he was sure all the clothes had been reduced to ash. Then he raked up the ashes and put them in a bag.
He went into his cottage and made himself a cup of hot sweet tea. He took out the watch and pen and laid them on the table. He remembered seeing that pen before.
He longed for a drink so much that his whole body ached and his hands trembled. But he had not finished yet. He remembered the haunting of the Mainwarings and the stories about witchcraft that had buzzed around the town. He drove off again, up out on to the moors. Up against the failing light of the winter sky stood a ring of standing stones, a miniature Stonehenge.
He drove off the road and over the moor towards it, the Land Rover lurching and bumping over the springy turf. He carried the skeleton in his arms into the middle of the standing stones. A ray of setting sun burst through the clouds and shone on to a raised piece of turf in the centre. Sandy gently laid the skeleton down.
It was then he realized that the skull was nearly coming away from the body of the skeleton. He examined it with delicate probing fingers and then let out his breath in a long hiss.
This had been no accident. This was murder.
‘If I report this now,’ said Sandy aloud, ‘they will probably be after me for the murder. If I keep my mouth shut, there’ll be money in it for me.’
The sun disappeared and the wind began to howl, tugging at his clothes, as if the spirits of the dead had risen from the moors and were trying to hold him back.
He gave a whimper of fright and began to run.
That evening, Hamish Macbeth saw the light in Jenny’s cottage. He was longing for a sympathetic ear. He had gone all the way to the Angler’s Rest to find the report of an assault on one of the customers had been false. ‘Probably some of the locals playing a joke on you,’ the manager had said.
Hamish had stayed to talk, and by the time he had returned to Cnothan, The Clachan was closed. The next day, he had put off trying to see Jenny, but a morning listening to Mr Struthers’ sermon and an afternoon interviewing secretive locals about the frightening of Mrs Mainwaring had irritated him immensely.
He saw Jenny moving about and went and knocked on the door. At last she opened it. ‘Come in,’ she said. Hamish followed her through to her kitchen. ‘Will you have a drink?’ she asked, turning around.
‘What on earth has happened to you, lassie!’ cried Hamish, for Jenny’s eyes were red with weeping and her face was bloated.
She averted her face. ‘I had news of my sister’s death,’ she said. ‘In Canada.’
‘I never heard a thing about it,’ said Hamish, his mind racing. Relatives, however far away, always phoned the local police station.
‘I had a letter,’ said Jenny drearily. ‘It came yesterday.’
‘I am verra sorry,’ said Hamish awkwardly. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Just talk to me.’
‘I think it’s yourself that needs to do the talking,’ said Hamish.
Jenny gave a weak smile. ‘I’m being silly,’ she said. ‘I never like
d my sister. We’re not very much alike. It was the shock, that’s all.’
‘And will you be going to Canada for the funeral?’
‘No point.’ Jenny shrugged. ‘We’re not a close family.’
‘What did she die of?’
‘Look, Hamish Macbeth, it’s over and done with. I don’t want to talk about it. Now, have a drink and tell me about your witch-hunt.’
She produced a bottle of Barsac, a sweet dessert wine, from the fridge, opened it, and poured it into two water glasses.
‘Do you often drink this stuff?’ asked Hamish, wrinkling his nose.
‘What’s up with it? It’s a drink, isn’t it? I forget when I bought it. Oh, I remember. It was last year. It was for some recipe. It’s been in the fridge ever since.’
A fat tear rolled down her cheek and splashed into her glass.
Hamish decided to do what he’d been told and chattered on nervously about the fake assault, about how Diarmuid Sinclair was slowly coming out of his shell, about the difficulty of getting any information at all out of the locals.
She drank and listened and seemed soothed. Hamish finally felt he could not talk any longer. He got to his feet. ‘I’ll be off to my bed, Jenny,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll drop by tomorrow, if it is all right with you.’
‘Sure. I’ll be here.’ She came round the kitchen table and stood in front of him, her head bent. ‘You don’t need to go,’ she said.
‘Whit?’
‘Stay the night . . . with me,’ said Jenny.
Hamish bent and kissed her cheek. ‘It wouldna’ work,’ he said softly. ‘Not when you’re this miserable. I’d be someone tae cling to the night, and someone to hate in the morning.’
