Death of an Outsider by M.C. Beaton Page A

dark hillside. She knew that potato hadn’t been in long enough, and she had been hoping to slide it away to the side.
    ‘Hard as hell,’ cried Mainwaring triumphantly. ‘Look, if you want to know about microwave cookery, it’s all very simple.’ He moved round the table and began a lecture. Woman eyed each other uneasily, and then, with that peculiar Highland talent for disappearing from an awkward situation, the audience gradually melted away.
    Mrs Struthers fought back tears as she looked at her cooking. There were some splendid dishes there. ‘I’d better be off, then,’ said Mainwaring, abruptly cutting short his lecture when he realized he was addressing an empty room.
    When the door had closed behind him, Mrs Struthers sat down and began to cry. She picked up a bottle of British sherry she had used for cooking and took a gulp from it. For the first time in her blameless life, she knew what it was to want to kill someone.
    *    *    *
    Mainwaring returned to The Clachan. When he had finished tormenting someone, he immediately had to find another victim. His eyes fell on Harry Mackay, sitting over in a corner. He went to join him.
    ‘Business must be bad these days,’ said Mainwaring cheerfully.
    ‘What makes you say that?’ asked Harry Mackay sourly.
    ‘Just that no one seems to want property these days and you spend most of your time in here.’
    ‘Like yourself,’ said the estate agent nastily.
    ‘I wonder what your employers in Edinburgh would think if they knew exactly how little work you do,’ said Mainwaring.
    ‘You wouldn’t …’ gasped Harry Mackay.
    ‘I just might,’ laughed Mainwaring. ‘You know me.’
    ‘Oh, I know you, all right,’ said the estate agent bitterly. ‘We all know you.’
       
    William Mainwaring at last returned home to see if he could rile his wife to round off the evening. She always claimed she never drank. He searched and searched for the empty bottle but could not find it because Agatha had buried it in the garden. It had been a whole bottle of the cheapest wine possible, called Dream of the Highlands, made by a local winery. She could not risk anything more expensive out of the housekeeping money. She had claimed Hamish had drunk a lot of whisky to explain the low level in the decanter earlier in the day, but there had been no further callers she could use as an excuse and so she had been driven to buy the bottle of cheap wine.
    For once, she was armoured against her hus-band’s gibes. Full of Dream of the Highlands, and lost in a rosy fantasy, she barely heard him. She had read an article in the newspapers about the poisoning of an Iraqi businessman in London using a slow-acting rat poison containing thallium, banned in Britain, but available on the Continent. It had a delayed effect and only started to work a week after it was administered. She imagined manufacturing an excuse to visit her sister in Kent. Instead, she would go to Paris and buy the rat poison. Then she would return to Cnothan and poison her husband and promptly set off again, so that when he died, she would be far away from the scene of the crime. A local bobby would not suspect anything. She would start to tell everyone that William had a bad heart.
    And so Agatha Mainwaring, with a half-smile on her face, dreamt on, while her hus-band’s voice buzzed and hammered like a wasp against the glass protection of her fantasy.
    *    *    *
    ‘Now, promise me you won’t take a dram,’ said Jamie Ross, after showing Sandy Carmichael round the premises.
    Sandy shuddered. ‘I’ll neffer touch the stuff again.’
    Jamie looked at him uneasily. It would just be like Sandy to go and get drunk and prove Mainwaring right. But Jamie was soft-hearted and knew Sandy needed some money badly, and more than money, he needed the self-respect of being trusted with a job.
    Sandy was a tall, thin man in his forties. His face had an unhealthy, bleached look about it, but the hands now holding one of