by M C Beaton
“Would you say you were unpopular in the community?” asked Hamish.
“I’m not. He is,” said Mrs. Mainwaring roundly. “In fact, I like this place. Nice people.”
“I would not say that they are very friendly to incomers, even someone like myself from the west coast,” Hamish pointed out.
“Well, they’re not hypocrites like the English,” boomed Mrs. Mainwaring, as if speaking of a nationality other than her own. “They’re all right when you get to know them. William got soured, that’s all. He ran about at the beginning being charming to everyone and they rebuffed him, and so now he wants his revenge on the lot of them.”
Hamish sighed and took out his notebook. “Now, Mrs. Mainwaring, if we can just get down to the facts.”
“Put your book away. I can’t be bothered. I am not really interested in who it is. I can’t take something like that personally when it was all directed at William.”
“What shall I tell your husband?”
For the first time a little crack appeared in Mrs. Mainwaring’s self-assured manner. “Have a whisky,” she said, and lumbered out of the room without waiting for an answer. “The coffee will do just fine,” Hamish called after her. “I am driving.”
There was no reply. She was gone a long time. At last she returned with a whisky decanter, a siphon of soda, and a cup of coffee and a plate of scones. She put the coffee in front of Hamish and then poured herself an enormous glass of whisky and soda and lit a cigarette. She poured the drink down her throat and let out a long sigh. There came the sound of a car approaching. Mrs. Mainwaring moved like lightning. She stubbed out her cigarette and opened the window, letting the gale howl through the room. She seized the whisky decanter, the ashtray, and her glass and ran out.
In what seemed like two seconds she was back, breathing heavily and smelling strongly of peppermint. She closed the window and sat down primly on the edge of a chair. Mainwaring came into the room. “So you’ve actually turned up,” he said to Hamish. “Who did it?”
“I don’t know,” said Hamish mildly. “I was just interviewing your wife.”
“You won’t get much sense out of Agatha,” said Mainwaring. His small blue eyes turned on his wife. “What are you wearing that old tweed skirt and jumper for? Didn’t that dress I ordered from the mail order arrive yesterday?”
“Yes, dear,” said Mrs. Mainwaring meekly. “I was saving it for best.”
“And what is a better occasion than your husband’s company? Go and put it on.”
Mrs. Mainwaring’s colour was high as she left the room. A moment later there came the sound of a car starting up.
“Gone off in a huff, as usual,” said Mainwaring. “Now, I assume you have already dusted the churchyard wall for fingerprints.”
“No, I haven’t,” said Hamish crossly. “I suggest the best thing to do is to phone Strathbane and ask them to send a team from Forensic. They won’t budge for me but they might do it for you. Not that there’ll be any fingerprints worth having from that wall, and since it was probably not done by hardened criminals, even if you got fingerprints, it wouldn’t do much good.”
“What you are trying to say is that you’re damned lazy and don’t want to be bothered,” said Mainwaring.
Hamish got to his feet. “I will investigate the case for you as I would for anyone, but I would get further and faster without the hindrance of your insulting and spiteful remarks. You’ve got a nasty tongue. I want a quiet time here and I don’t want another murder investigation. So if you want my advice, stop putting people’s backs up or you’ll end up at the bottom of Loch Cnothan one of these days!”
∨ Death of an Outsider ∧
3
How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species –
—D.H. Lawrence
Bewildered and unhappy, Hamish drove off. He had lost his temper two times that morning when he normally lost it only about two times a year. Far away, at the foot of the long, twisting road, he could see the houses of Cnothan. From this distance, the town had a temporary look, as if this ancient land of rock and thin earth were one day going to give a massive shrug and send all these petty humans and their squabbles to eternity. It was as if the land itself did not like incomers, or, as they were often jeeringly called in the Highlands, white settlers. An ancient hostility emanated from the fields, from the humped Neolithic ruins that dotted the landscape.
Across the fields came the dreary om-pom of the diesel train’s klaxon, tugging at something in Hamish’s memory. The sound of a diesel train, he thought, was never so haunting as the whistle of the old steam trains, which could conjure up visions of bleak distances with one solitary wail.
He slowed as he came to the Cnothan Game and Fish Company. There was something so cheerful and friendly and prosperous about the place that Hamish drove in and sauntered toward the office.
A very small, gypsy-looking man came out to meet him. “Jamie Ross,” he said, holding out his hand. “You’re just in time for coffee.”
“I’m Hamish Macbeth.”
“I know,” said Jamie. “Who doesn’t? Sit yourself down.”
There was a jug of steaming coffee standing ready, made by one of those American coffee machines that first pioneered good coffee in the Highlands of Scotland, replacing the bitter sludge which had masqueraded as coffee before.
The office was bright and warm. “Do a lot of business?” asked Hamish.
“Aye, but mostly with London. Lobsters, smoked salmon, and venison. I’ve just bought three new refriger trucks to take the goods down to the market at Billingsgate. Finish your coffee and I’ll give you a tour.”
While Hamish drank his coffee, Jamie continued to talk proudly of his business, how he had four fishing boats over on the west coast and was well on the way to making himself a fortune.
Then he took Hamish round the long, low buildings, housed deer carcasses, giant beasts pathetic in death, row upon row of them. The next building was a shop that sold commercial frozen packaged meals as well as smoked salmon, pheasant, grouse, and partridge. The last building they came to had three enormous lobster tanks, each surrounded by a low concrete wall, the water alive with crawling black lobsters. “See this one,” said Jamie, lifting black monster out of the water. “Eight pounds in weight.”
“And how much will that fetch in London?” asked Hamish.
“Oh, about twenty-five pounds. In fact, you could say about a pound sterling for every year of its life. That lobster’s about twenty-five years old.”
“So how much is in the three tanks – I mean, how much is all this worth?”
Jamie grinned. “There’s about six thousand pounds’ worth in each tank. The water’s salt, of course, and the filters you hear bubbling away there keep the water clean.”
“Man, you must be kept busy,” marvelled Hamish. “Ever get a day off?”
“Haven’t had one in years,” said Jamie. “But I’ll be going down to Inverness at the weekend for my son’s wedding. All the family’ll be there, so I’ll need someone to mind the store for the first time.”
“Would you like me to drop in at the weekend and see if everything’s all right?” volunteered Hamish.
“No, nothing can go wrong. I’m not worried about burglars. Never had a break-in in Cnothan. I’m more worried about the filters packing up. I’ve got a local man, Sandy Carmichael, who’s going to act as watchman.”
Hamish raised his eyebrows. “Not the town drunk, him with the horrors.”
“The same. But he’s going straight and there’s no harm in him at all. Of course, Mainwaring got to hear of it and dropped by to warn me and yak on about how dangerous it was to employ a drunk. I hate that man; I’d feed him to the fish if I thought I’d get away with it. Interfering, pontificating nuisance. I liked him at first. Funny, that. He was a breath of fresh air. Charming, friendly. Then he buys a book on scientific fish-farming and tries to involve me in it. No business head whatsoever. Or I assume the man has
no business head, for I was to put up the money for the venture, which he would run. I fended him off as politely as I could. He became more insistent. Then he started to get rude and make some patronizing remarks about how ill-run my business was. I wanted to buy one of those croft houses out beyond his for my uncle. I told him about it when we were friends. Next thing I know, he’s bought the place himself, and now it stands empty. I know he did it to spite me. I was not interested in the land, only in the house for my uncle. Mainwaring uses the croft land, of course, or the Crofters Commission would step in.”
“Why?” asked Hamish. “I mean, why does he put people’s backs up?”
“I think he likes power,” said Jamie, “and irritating people is a sort of twisted way of getting it. See here, I can’t believe my luck. I’ve worked hard, but I was a road worker’s boy and came up from nothing. At the back of my mind, there’s always the fear that all this will melt away like the fairy gold. Mainwaring senses that and does his best to make me feel insecure. He’d make a good blackmailer.”
“Would you say his wife is frightened of him?” asked Hamish, enjoying all this gossip immensely.
“Aye, and I wonder why. She’s a big, strong woman, and though he’s a big, strong man, you’d think she could still make mincemeat of him if she liked. You know that business o’ the witches?”
Hamish nodded.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it past him to have stage-managed the whole thing himself. Mrs. Mainwaring likes a dram, and she was a bit squiffy yesterday morning and told Mrs. Grant in the town that she thought he was jealous of her popularity. Mrs. Grant told Mrs. MacNeill, who told Mrs. Struthers, who told my wife, who told me.”
“Some marriages are awf’y sad,” said Hamish.
“They are that,” agreed Jamie, “and none so sad as the Mainwarings’.”
Hamish thought deeply for a few moments, and then said, “I am still surprised he got the extra croft land just like that. There’s a lot of land greed in the Highlands.”
“Like I said, he was popular in the beginning,” said Jamie, “although I don’t believe the man knew it. He took shyness and diffidence among the locals for rebuff. Then his aunt had been very well liked in the community. They didn’t like to put up objections. When they did, it was too late. You know crofters, Hamish. They don’t know their own laws. They learn distorted facts from each other by word of mouth. It was just after he acquired the crofts that he started throwing his weight about.”
“So his aunt wasn’t English?”
“Oh, no. But as far as I can gather, Mainwaring was born and brought up in England. His aunt, Mrs. Drummond, had been here since the day of her marriage about fifty years ago. Brian Drummond, her husband, died about ten years before she did. I think the Mainwarings are quite rich and Mrs. Drummond belonged to the mother’s side, which hadn’t much of the ready. Mainwaring came up on a lot of flying visits before she died.”
“And who was it objected to him getting the crofts?”
“Two of them. Alec Birrell over at Dunain, that’s on the other side of Cnothan, and Davey Macdonald, also from Dunain. How Mainwaring got to learn who had written in to object to him, I’m not sure, except at that time he was friendly with that wee weasel who works at the Crofters Commission, Peter Watson, so he could’ve told him. Anyway, a few months after they objected, both lost a couple of dozen sheep each one night. They accused Mainwaring of having taken them away out of spite, but since there was no proof and the sheep were never found, there was nothing Sergeant MacGregor could do.”
Heartened by the friendly visit, Hamish returned to the police station. He saw, as he drove past, that Jenny was working in her gallery. Once inside the station, he brushed his hair and his uniform. The snow was still blowing past the window, but it was getting thinner and tinged with pale yellow as the sun fought to get through. He picked a bottle of aftershave out of the bathroom cabinet. MacGregor’s. It was called Muscle, and the advertising on the packet said it was for truly masculine men. Hamish opened it and sniffed. It smelled pleasantly of sandalwood. He splashed some on his chin, and feeling quite strange and exotic, for he had never used aftershave before, he decided to go across the road and visit Jenny Lovelace.
And then the phone in the office began to ring. Cursing, he went through to answer it.
The voice at the other end was husky and Highland. “Murder,” it said. “A body on the top o’ Clachan Mohr. Come quick.” And then the receiver at the other end was replaced.
Heart beating hard, Hamish studied the ordnance survey map on the wall. Clachan Mohr was a craggy cliff outside the village, a relic of the ancient days when the long arms of the sea reached into the heart of Sutherland.
He drove at breakneck speed down the main street with the police siren blaring. A mile to the east, dimly visible through the snow, rose the steep sides of Clachan Mohr. He hurtled round the hairpin bends towards it, tyres screeching through the snow, until he parked the Rover in its shadows. There was a thin rabbit track of a path winding upwards. He set off, wishing he had worn his climbing boots, for the grass was slippery with snow and he kept sliding back. He was agile and athletic, but it took him nearly half an hour to reach the top. The snow thinned again, and there, at the very edge of the cliff, lay the body of a man, his red pullover clearly distinguishable against the blinding white of the snow. Someone’s got Mainwaring, thought Hamish, his mind working out times. How on earth could someone have had time to murder the man on the top of Clachan Mohr when Hamish had seen him only a short time ago?
And then he stiffened when he was still a few yards from the body. All at once, he knew he was being watched. He felt it. Then he thought…the body is just now getting covered with snow and yet that phone call was almost an hour ago.
He stood still, listening with his sixth sense, feeling for where those watchers might be. He sniffed the air like a dog. There was a faint tang of human sweat and stale tobacco. He saw a patch of gorse bushes to his left and suddenly dived towards it. Alistair Gunn and Dougie Macdonald rose sheepishly to their feet. “I’ll deal with you in a minute,” snapped Hamish. He ran to the body. It was, as he had already suspected, a dummy made out of old clothes stuffed with newspapers.
He came back and looked coldly at the two shuffling and grinning ghillies. “Jist our joke,” said Alistair Gunn.
He had a broad leering grin on his turnip face. Hamish took out his handcuffs and handcuffed the two men together.
“Start walking,” he snapped.
“Cannae ye take a joke?” whined Dougie.
“Shut up!” said Hamish.
The ghillies led the way down, not, to Hamish’s high irritation, by the difficult path he had scaled, but by a broad, easy, winding path down the back. He shoved both men into the police Land Rover and drove off, staring angrily trough the windscreen. On the edge of Loch Cnothan was a small jetty. Hamish removed the handcuffs from the two men after he had stopped by the jetty. “Now walk to the end,” he said, “and keep your backs to me. I don’t want to see your stupid faces when I talk to ye.”
“Whit’ll happen to us?” moaned Dougie to Alistair.
“Naethin’,” said Alistair with a shrug. “The man’s a poofter. Cannae ye smell him?”
This was said in a low voice, but Hamish heard it. It was all he needed. He waited until they were standing facing the water and then he kicked out with all his might, straight at Alistair’s broad backside. Alistair went flying into the water. “Dinnae touch me,” screeched Dougie, turning around. “It wasnae me. It wass him!” Hamish contemptuously pushed him in the chest and he went flying as well.
Hamish stood with his hands on his hips until he was sure both were able to make it to the shore. Then he climbed in to the Land Rover and drove back to the police station. The snow was turning to rain and his wheels skidded on great piles of slush.
When he reached the station, he changed out of his uniform and put on trousers and a flannel checked shirt. He pulled on his spare navy-b
lue police sweater over it, and then went over to Jenny’s cottage and knocked on the door. There was no reply.
“Damn and blast!” yelled Hamish.
The door suddenly opened and Jenny Lovelace stood there, her hair dripping wet and with a large bath towel wrapped round her. “I was in the bath,” she said. “What’s the matter? You look desperate.”
Hamish shuffled his boots and a slow blush crept up his thin cheeks. His long lashes dropped quickly to veil his eyes.
“Come in then,” said Jenny when he did not speak. “I’ll put some clothes on.”
♦
While she was getting ready, Hamish took a look at the pictures in the gallery. They were of the Sutherland countryside, but they were pretty-pretty, like the kind of pictures you used to see on old–fashioned calendars. They had not captured the wild, stark, highly individual beauty of Sutherland, and were strangely lifeless and dead. They were competently drawn and the draughtsmanship was excellent. He was examining a view of a path winding through graceful birch trees into a romantic sunset when Jenny came in.
She was wearing faded jeans and a man’s checked shirt, much like his own. Her curls were damp and tousled and her feet bare. When she came to stand beside him, she barely reached his shoulder. “What do you think?” she asked.
“Very good,” said Hamish politely.
“I do quite well with the tourists in the summer. Of course, I charge very low prices. I don’t need much. Come through to the kitchen and have some coffee.”
Hamish loped after her. The kitchen was warm and cluttered. A primrose-yellow Raeburn cooker stood against the wall and the table was covered with paints and brushes.
She poured him a cup of coffee and sat opposite him, clearing a space on the table in front of her by sweeping an assortment of stuff to the side with one small dimpled hand, like a child’s.
She gave him a gamine grin. “You’re looking better now,” she said. “I thought the Hound of Heaven was after you.”
