“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.