Small fine pellets of snow were beginning to be whipped down the loch on an icy wind. He gave a little sigh. Then he thought of Sarah. He hoped the snow would not get worse. He did not want to think of her skidding into a ditch on the Lairg road. But ahead of him loomed a large yellow truck. The Sutherland road glitters were already on the job. He passed the truck and headed off into the thickening snow. By the time he reached the Smiley brothers’ croft, the snow had suddenly stopped and pale yellow sunlight was flooding the whitened fields and the low croft house.
He noticed there was a new extension at the back of the croft house: a long low building with a corrugated iron roof and with steel shutters over all the windows.
He was just getting out of the Land Rover when the door of the cottage opened and Stourie Smiley came out to meet him, followed by his brother, Pete. Hamish knew both of them slightly, but he was taken aback again by their appearance. They looked living proof that trolls still walked the earth. Both were squat and barrel-chested and hairy. Thick mats of hair covered both their heads, and hair sprouted on their cheekbones, and tufts of hair poked out of their ears. Both had small, gleaming wet eyes and red faces. Both had very long arms.
“It’s yoursel’, Macbeth,” said Stourie. “What brings ye? Ye’ve got the sheep dip papers.” A visit by the police to a croft in the Highlands did not usually mean a report of death or accident, but merely a demand for sheep dip papers.
“Can we go inside and sit down for a minute?” asked Hamish. “I need your help.”
“Okay,” said Pete, “but don’t take too lang ower it. We’ve got work to do.”
He led the way into the croft house kitchen, a bleak stone-flagged room with a plastic-covered table in the centre and a few hard upright chairs.
Hamish sat down, took off his cap and put it on the table. “It is my belief you are running an illegal still.”
“Whit?” demanded Stourie. “Who tellt you that?”
The two trolls bristled at Hamish and the cold air of the kitchen was suddenly full of menace.
“Before you get your lies ready,” said Hamish, “listen to me. Thon dentist, Gilchrist, was poisoned with nicotine. Anyone who had a still could have extracted the nicotine by means of a still. Now, either you cooperate or I’ll get a team over from Strathbane with a search warrant and right behind them will come the Customs and Excise. If you give me a dram of your stuff and I consider it safe and not liable to kill anyone, I’ll not be booking you. But I need to know if either of you had a grudge against Gilchrist, and then since I’m pretty sure you know your competitors, I’ll need some names.”
They looked at him in truculent silence and then Pete’s small wet eyes travelled past Hamish to the fireplace. Hamish swung round. A shotgun was hanging on the wall.
“Don’t even think of it, man,” he said. “That’s another breach of the law. That gun should be locked in a gun cabinet. You have one. Sergeant Macgregor over at Cnothan reported you had one.”
“Aye, well, we’d rather deal wi’ Macgregor than you.” Stourie looked surly.
Had Macgregor really checked, wondered Hamish.
“So let’s not take all day about this,” he said. “Did either of you go to Gilchrist?”
Pete suddenly grinned and so did Stourie. Hamish blinked. Both men were toothless. Pete jerked his head in the direction of the sink. Hamish looked across. There were two tumblers of water by the sink and in each tumbler resided a pair of false teeth, the dentures grotesquely imitating the grins across the table from him.
“We both had all our teeth out in our twenties,” said Stourie. “We don’t need no dentists.”
“So you didn’t know Gilchrist?”
“Didnae even know what the man looked like.”
“That’s strange, you pair being so near Braikie. It’s a small town. Surely someone pointed the man out to you.”
Stourie spat contemptuously on the floor. “We don’t talk to them in Braikie.”
“So who else has a still?”
“We arenae saying we hae one,” said Stourie, “but I guess you could say if we had, we wouldnae want any competition.”
“Meaning you’re the only ones you know about?”
They looked at him in sullen silence.
“All right, I’ll leave it there at the moment. Give me a dram.”
They looked at each other and then Stourie gave a little nod. Pete went over and opened a kitchen cupboard and took down a bottle of whisky, tipped one set of false teeth out into the sink and poured the whisky into the glass.
Oh, well, thought Hamish, the alcohol will probably act as a disinfectant.
He sampled the whisky and then raised his eyebrows. It was pretty good, quite smooth, not as good as a regular legal blend, but certainly not likely to poison anyone. Hamish had a good palate for whisky and knew that they had not given him Johnnie Walker or something like that to pass off as their own.
“I’ll be on my way.” He got to his feet. “That’s a big extension ye’ve built onto the cottage.”
“Lambing shed,” said Stourie laconically.
“Well, now, the poor wee things must grow up fair blind in the dark,” said Hamish sarcastically. “The windows are all shuttered.”
“We aye take the shutters off when we’re lambing,” jeered Pete. “As a crofter yourself, you should hae guessed that.”
“Now, listen here.” Hamish Macbeth turned in the doorway. “I’m turning a blind eye to your practises but only for the moment. I’ll give you a couple of months to pack up. If I hear by then that you’re still making whisky, I’ll report you.”
“It iss no wunner you became a policeman, Macbeth,” said Stourie viciously, “because without that uniform, you’d chust be a lang drip o’ nothing.”
Hamish put his cap firmly on his flaming red hair. “Behave yourselves,” he snapped and went out into the cold day.
It was clouding over again and a few snowflakes were beginning to drift down. Against the black clouds massing to the west curved a glorious rainbow. He stood looking at it, a half smile on his lips, and then he clutched his head and let out a groan as pain stabbed over his left temple. Hamish could not remember when he last had a headache. Could it have been that whisky?
But he belonged to the school of thought which firmly believes that if you pay no attention to physical ailments, they go away. He drove into Braikie and parked in the main street. The pain was now nagging and persistent. He found he was outside a chemist’s shop. He went in and walked through the racks of cosmetics and vitamin pills to the pharmacy counter.
Behind the counter was a plump little girl in her early twenties. Her buxom figure was covered in a tight white coat. She had a piggy little face and a turned-up nose. Hamish had often read that a turned-up nose was supposed to be saucy and attractive. He had never found it so. But he had to admit that despite his headache, he was well aware that this buxom piggy little blonde was exuding a strong air of sexuality, so strong it hung in the air like musk.
“I’ve got a bad headache,” he said. “Can you give me something?”
“The best thing is aspirin,” she said.
“What about one of those extra-strength painkillers?”
“Just a rip-off,” she said cheerfully. “Aspirin’s cheaper and does the job the same. You smell of whisky. Maybe you shouldn’t drink so early in the day.”
“I was out at the Smiley brothers on a case,” said Hamish stiffly, not liking the implication that he was a drunk.
“Oh, another one of those headaches. It’ll go away all by itself the minute you have another dram.”
Hamish looked at her curiously and she gave him a cheeky wink. Apart from himself the shop was empty of customers. He leaned forward on the counter. “So you know that the Smiley brothers operate a still?”