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-blue 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.”
“It’s this place,” said Hamish ruefully. “It’s getting me down.” He told her about the witchcraft investigation, and then about the fake murder.
“They do have a rather childish sense of fun,” said Jenny defensively.
“Now me myself,” said Hamish, “I would call it pure and simple malice.”
“Maybe it’s because you don’t understand the Highlander.”
“I’m one myself.”
“Of course you are,” giggled Jenny. “Silly of me. You mustn’t listen to all this rubbish about poor Agatha Mainwaring. She’s one of those women who deliberately goads her husband into being nasty so that she can play the martyr.”
“That’s one way o’ looking at it,” said Hamish slowly.
“Never mind the Mainwarings,” said Jenny. “Tell me about yourself. Married?”
“No. Are you?”
“I was. In Canada. It didn’t work out. He was jealous of my painting. He was an artist himself. At my first exhibition in Montreal, he waited until one minute before the show opened and then told me he had always thought my work was too chocolate-box and I wasn’t to be disappointed if the critics panned it. I never forgave him.”
Hamish looked at her curiously. “I would never have guessed ye to be one of those Never-Forgive sort of people. Every husband or wife usually says something crashingly tactless they wouldn’t dream of saying to a friend.”
“But not about my painting,” said Jenny fiercely. “I put my whole personality into my work. He was insulting
