Death of a Charming Man by MC Beaton Page A

pretty Sophy with her sparkling eyes appearing delighted with his company. And a friendly bird in Carrask was worth two chilly ones in Lochdubh any day. He was hurt and angry with Priscilla and it was with a feeling of revenge that he set out to be especially charming to Sophy in the pepper-scented back room of the craft shop.
    At last he looked at his watch. ‘I must be on my way,’ he said with genuine regret. They walked out together. ‘See you back in Lochdubh, then,’ said Sophy. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.
    Across the street Mrs Fair, who owned the small hotel called Carrask Arms, watched curiously and then she picked up the phone. ‘Is that the Tommel Castle Hotel?’ she asked. ‘Good. May I speak to Miss Halburton-Smythe?’
       
    Hamish was glad of the tea and cakes he had shared with Sophy in the afternoon as the long evening wore on. He would have liked to watch television to pass the time but Miss Tabbet had recovered from the glow that smile of his had given her and said she ‘didn’t hold with it,’ and Hamish wondered crossly why she had the thing in the first place. She sat and knitted fiercely while listening to a concert on the radio, a modern piece by a Hungarian composer full of crashing minor chords. At last, to Hamish’s relief, she went up to bed. He was amused to hear loud snores reverberating through the ceiling a short time later. Miss Tabbet slept like a pig, he thought. A whole gang of burglars could crash in without her hearing anything.
    He looked at the clock. It was only ten. He switched on the television set and watched the news and then a programme in Gaelic, inevitably about the history of the Highland Clearances, when the crofters were driven off their land. Then a very fat Glaswegian woman sang a dirge about the clearances she had written herself, and apart from being briefly fascinated to hear Gaelic sung with all the glottal stops of a Glaswegian accent, Hamish became bored and switched it off.
    The minutes dragged on. At midnight, he switched off the downstairs lights and sat in the darkness. The nights were getting darker and he knew that by two o’clock there would be about one hour of guaranteed darkness and that, he guessed, would be when Dolan struck, if it was Dolan who had been guilty of the other break-ins.
    Two o’clock came and went and he yawned and stretched. Nothing was going to happen, he decided. Miss Tabbet was an old battleaxe and even Dolan must have decided to give her house a miss. The wind had risen and was howling outside. But suddenly he heard it. The tinkle of breaking glass coming from the kitchen.
    He went quietly to the back of the house. A hand crept through a hole in the glass of the kitchen window and released the catch. Then the burly figure of a man climbed in over the draining-board and jumped lightly on to the floor.
    Hamish switched on the kitchen light.
    Sammy Dolan stood there, blinking at him. But before Hamish could charge him, Dolan whipped a wicked hunting-knife out of his boot.
    ‘Stand back,’ he said, ‘and no one will get hurt.’
    Hamish reached behind him, picked up a frying pan from the cooker and then, darting forward like lightning and ducking to avoid a vicious stab of the knife, brought it down with all his force on Dolan’s forehead.
    The Irishman groaned and fell to the kitchen floor. He was down but not out, so Hamish dragged him across the floor and handcuffed him to the iron leg of the cooker, read out the charge and then went through and called Strathbane and asked them to send help to pick Dolan up.
    He returned to the kitchen. Dolan looked up at him balefully and let out a stream of oaths. ‘Shut up,’ said Hamish. He went upstairs in the direction of the snores. Miss Tabbet was lying on her back, her face glistening with cold cream. He put a hand on her shoulder and shook her awake.
    ‘Get out of my bedroom, you … you rapist ,’ she screamed.
    ‘The day I even think about raping