Free Death of a Charming Man by MC Beaton Page B

through the mist. Heather Baxter. Her eyes were blank but tears were streaming down her cheeks. He swore under his breath and jerked the brake on again and climbed down. The girl saw him coming and swerved away off the road and began to run across the peatbog beside the loch, off into the mist. ‘Heather!’ called Hamish sharply. ‘Heather!’ But only silence came back to him.
    ‘Something must be wrong at the Baxters’,’ he said when he rejoined Priscilla. ‘I’m going over there.’
    But when they got to the Baxters’ cottage, it was closed and silent. No smoke rose from the chimney. Hamish wondered whether to go back into the village and look for Betty Baxter. As he was standing there, irresolute, Heather Baxter came round the side of the cottage. She looked calm and composed. ‘Oh, Mr Macbeth,’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’
    ‘I saw you crying,’ said Hamish.
    ‘Me? Och, no, it must haff been a trick o’ the mist.’
    ‘Where’s your ma?’
    ‘Edie Aubrey is running the bingo. She’s there.’
    ‘Not the exercise class?’
    ‘After it, she sometimes has the bingo.’
    ‘And your faither?’
    ‘Up in bed.’
    ‘Look, Heather, if there is anything you ever want to talk to me about, phone me up.’ Hamish scribbled the Lochdubh police-station telephone number on a piece of paper and handed it over.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Heather, taking the paper, but Hamish noticed she crumpled it up in her hand.
    He returned to Priscilla and drove off. Up the twisting road they went, crawling through the now-thick mist until, at the top, they moved out into brilliant sunshine and blue sky. Hamish stopped and looked back. Below them, shrouded somewhere in the mist and at the foot of those black mountains, lay Drim. He shivered.
    ‘I’ve done my best,’ he said to Priscilla. ‘That place gives me weird fancies. Best leave it alone.’
    And indeed, among the bright heather and with the warmth of the sun striking through the glass, he could feel all his fears melting away. There were a lot of strange places in the Highlands of Scotland where the very earth gave out a bleak atmosphere of misery, as if years of hardship had been recorded in the ancient rock and thin poor soil. They made things seem exaggerated. With a feeling of relief, he drove home to Lochdubh.
       
    That night at two in the morning Peter Hynd was awakened by a sound of breaking glass. He struggled out of bed and climbed down the ladder from his bedroom under the roof. He went into the kitchen and switched on the light. A brick with a piece of paper wrapped round it was lying below the shattered kitchen window. He unwrapped the paper and smoothed it out on the table. In capital letters was the message: GET OUT OF DRIM OR WE’LL KILL YOU. Betty Baxter descended the ladder from the bedroom with Peter’s dressing-gown wrapped around her. ‘Whit’s happened?’ she asked.
    He showed her the message. ‘Maybe you’d best go home,’ he said.
    ‘Harry’s out with the fishing and won’t be back until the morn,’ she said. ‘It’s probably Jock and the others. You’d better put something on,’ she added, looking at Peter’s naked body.
    ‘Why? I’m going back to bed. You don’t think I’m going to let any of that lot spoil my sleep.’
    ‘I’m frightened,’ whispered Betty.
    He pulled her against him and kissed her lips, and neither saw the blur of a face which peered for a moment in from the mist and then disappeared.
       
    Life picked up for Hamish Macbeth in the following weeks, so that he almost forgot about Drim. There had been a series of burglaries over in Carrask, a small village forty miles away but still on his beat. To his distress, his suspicions began to focus on a newcomer, even though Hamish thought most newcomers suffered from undeserved bad reputations. But in this case he believed the culprit was one Sammy Dolan, an itinerant Irish worker who was, at that moment in time, out of work and drawing the dole. He was