A Double Death on the Black Isle

by A. D. Scott

  “I want an idea of this trial before it begins.”

  “In that case mine’s a double Glenfarclas.”

  I’ll never get this past Mrs. Smart, Rob thought, this time McAllister will have to sign the expenses chit.

  The drinks arrived. They settled down to talk. It was not so much an interview, more a think-aloud session.

  “Remember, for your ears only.”

  “I’m too scared of you to break my word,” Rob told him.

  “As it should be.”

  “If Fraser didn’t die until dawn, he must have lain by the roadside all night,” Rob started the discussion.

  “Maybe. He should have sobered up by the early hours, though. Lying on that road by the Devil’s Den all night doesn’t seem right. Maybe he had a carry-out.”

  Rob looked at him, waiting. Jimmy was picturing the geography of the farm.

  “If you cut over the field a wee bit farther on, there’s a great big shed where the tractors, the combine harvester, the Land Rover, all the farm equipment is kept. There’s also plenty o’ straw bales to make a good bed. So I was thinking, he might go there to sleep it off.”

  Rob made a note. “Has anyone checked it?”

  “Aye, the polis searched the farm buildings and found no sign o’ him.”

  “So?” Rob couldn’t follow Jimmy’s thinking.

  “If he could have, he’d’ve gone there, I hear he’d done that before. So maybe something else happened to stop him.”

  “Do you think he got into a fight with the farm lads?”

  “Maybe. Fraser had a right nasty way o’ getting under yer skin. He was always calling them a bunch o’ big lassies who’d never traveled far from the farm and never would. Maybe no a fight, maybe a wee set-to, same as my brothers had.”

  Jimmy paused to take a sip of the excellent whisky.

  “Another thing,” he continued after smacking his lips in loud appreciation, “Fraser’s wee brother. No one has said one word about him in all this. But he was around that night. He hated his big brother for the way Fraser disrespected their da.

  “Then there wis the dogs—they barely barked when the farm lads returned, just a wee welcome yelp or two. But I heard that just before dawn, something spooked them. They was barking enough to set the dogs in the big hoose off as well.”

  “How do you know all this?” Rob was fascinated. Jimmy McPhee was very well informed.

  “It’s been common knowledge this past year that Fraser had gone too far wi’ that tongue o’ his. His fists too. Don’t forget, we Traveling folk work on most o’ the farms hereabouts. More and more o’ our cousins have left life on the road and settled. You canny have a pish in the burn without us knowing.”

  Rob knew this to be true. The old way of life of the Traveling people was coming to an end, sometimes forcibly. He thought it a pity, but not many would agree with him.

  “Anything else? Anything more solid?” Rob was fascinated by the speculation, but he couldn’t see how any of it would help Jimmy’s brothers.

  “Sinclair has this idea that there was some injuries that didn’t come from a kicking from lads wearing wellies,” Jimmy told him.

  “He can prove this?”

  “Maybe, but no for sure. Whoever kicked him or hit him must have been in a right rage.”

  “The trouble is,” Rob pointed out, “the procurator fiscal doesn’t have to prove your brothers killed him, or that they had any intension of killing him. For involuntary manslaughter, all that needs to be proven is that the injuries received outside the hotel led to his death.”

  “I know. And the eejits have admitted the fight . . . no, no a fight, a scuffle, wi’ Fraser.”

  Jimmy was not happy with the brothers. “If the worst happens and the boys are found guilty, Calum Sinclair says that since the boys have never been in trouble afore, that will help. He’s also lined up the minister from Culbokie as a character reference, and Patricia Ord Mackenzie—she’ll say they are good workers, no trouble ever.”

  But as Jimmy said this, Rob could hear the doubt in his voice. Once a tinker, always a tinker would be the feeling in the court.

  Rob had a sudden thought. “Could a woman have done it? Hit Fraser? Women kick out when they’re furious. Isn’t a man more likely to punch?”

  “Aye. If they square up to their opponent, a man will punch. A woman is more likely to kick and pull hair and . . .” He stood abruptly, spilling some of Rob’s untouched shandy. “Thanks for the drink, lad. I have to be off.”

  “To see a man about a horse, I suppose.”

  “That as well. Say hello to yer mother. And mind, this conversation is between us.” Jimmy was gone before Rob could put in any witticisms about his mother and her bookie.

  Rob took a sip of his drink. He thought through the discussion and decided there were far too many permutations of possibilities in this case. He closed his notebook, pleased at the prospect of the next episode in the family drama. That was how he saw it, family—the Ord Mackenzies, the Munros, the farm workers, the tinkers, all with their allotted place in Achnafern Estate, all part of the tight-knit community of the Black Isle, and therefore family.

  I hope this isn’t another story where I can’t write up the juicy bits, he thought. But cheerfulness was in his bones. The trial will be a cracker of a story one way or another.

  In another bar in another town, Calum Sinclair was having similar thoughts. He was still smarting from the John Skinner fiasco. Apart from being lied to and made to look an idiot, Calum felt he had been cheated of a chance to show his abilities.

  He was hoping that the trial of the McPhee brothers would compensate, and establish his reputation.

  He sighed. This was a messy case—too much information, too much speculation, with a large dollop of innuendo. Added to this, there were many possible contributing factors in the death of Fraser Munro. And no alternative suspects.

  But as the police said, Calum reminded himself, it is possible the kicking did lead, however indirectly, to Fraser Munro’s death.

  He put down his pen and reached for his beer. He enjoyed his pint, enjoyed being solitary in the company of drinkers, had no wish to return early to his lonely lodging house. There was another reason; from here in the Station Hotel bar, he could gauge the atmosphere of the community. Here he could anticipate the thinking of a jury. And be prepared.

  He had heard the mutterings in the town.

  “Stands to reason, they hit him, he died, so they done it,” one farmer had started, before spotting Calum across the bar.

  “One of my friends at school was a tinker. . . .” the barroom barrister would begin.

  “My auld dad always gave them work,” the son of a two-acre croft would contribute. “When they could be bothered to work, that is.”

  “He’s done well for himself. For a tinker.” This came from a punter who had placed a bet with Jimmy McPhee on the two o’clock at Ayr and won a substantial amount.

  Calum was not without his fanciful side. A highly rational man, he had an endearing but valuable asset for a solicitor—a sense of the drama of a trial, a sense of the unsaid. Trials had undercurrents. This trial would have more than most.

  He set his pint on the table alongside his camouflage documents, donned a warning frown of concentration, and put himself into the role of the foreman of the jury.

  The court usher made the usual declamation. The sheriff settled in. The match began.

  Calum imagined the procurator fiscal presenting his case. He listened to himself for the defense. He heard witnesses for the case against his clients. He heard the testimony from their side. He could clearly picture them all, could hear the voices. He imagined the sheriff, saw the robes and the wig, but not the face. He tried to listen to the summing up, then snapped back into the here and now. His fervent imagination could only offer what he considered a fair, impartial summing up. Who knows what the sheriff would say?

  Being the son of an ardent, active socialist of the Keir Har
dy variety, Calum was brought up to be aware of prejudice and its rotting corrosive effects. The cause of wars even. He remembered the gypsies, the Continental equivalent of tinkers. Another race had suffered the larger evil, but the fate of the Romany should never be forgotten.

  The charge was clever. It wasn’t necessary to prove the McPhee brothers directly responsible, only that their actions set off a chain of events leading to Fraser Munro’s death. However lesser the charge, it could still mean time in prison.

  A fair summing up would make the case difficult to prove—the evidence was circumstantial. The sheriff could warn against taking into account who the young men are, who their clan was. He could warn the jury not to give undue weight to testimony from those from the farm, as they were almost family to the deceased. He could point out that postmortem findings were not an exact science . . . he could . . . he should . . . Calum knew enough to know never to speculate on the foibles of the Sheriff’s Court.

  Yes, he thought, this case will be quite the challenge. And he acknowleged the thrill of the challenge.

  A murder trial was rare in the Highlands. That the charges were manslaughter didn’t count; that it was murder was the general consensus of opinion.

  The trial was rushed. Everyone wanted it over before the summer recess, especially the two lads waiting in the gaol. It was not the adventure they thought it would be.

  The McPhee brothers, like all of their family, had seldom lived without the constant of sky, the blue or the grey or the black, star-pierced, ever-changing canopy of sky.

  The raspberries would be over. This year, for the first time since they were small boys, they would not pick the berries where, in the rigid rows of canes, in the company of friends, there was good money to be made. They talked about missing the short season of the sweet wild deep-purple-red rasps, and the dirty-gold yellow variety. In roadside hedges, on the fringe of woodland, along the banks of burns, in patches of bramble, in beds of nettles, the wild raspberries grew. Then it was quick quick, pick them, eat them, before the grubs got them, yes, there was no harm in swallowing the wee white wriggly creatures, maybe even made the berries that bit sweeter.

  The hay making too, that they had already missed. The smell of fresh-cut meadows, the itchy arms and legs, the aching backs from tossing, bending, tossing, working the pitchfork as an extended limb with hardly ever a spill, tossing the hay up above to the bogie and riding home at the end of the day, lying on the fragrant pile of work, tired, happy, the day never seeming like work.

  And after the long day in the still bright late evening light, they would miss the jumping into the pool under the short falls of the Goose Burn. And the fire, and the charcoal-flavored tea, and the tatties roasted in the embers, and whatever their ma had cooked in the cauldron that hung on a tripod over the fire, so old it could have been used by Macbeth’s witches.

  They remembered the laughing and pushing, wrestling games with a brother or cousin, teasing each other over a girl or the Stewart sisters from Muir of Ord, and being struck dumb if ever a girl spoke to them. The many falls-off-a-horse stories, or a story so long-standing it had grown with each telling, grown so not much of the truth remained except the beginning, which was, “Mind when . . .”

  And when it hurt to remember, they took turns in saying, “Jimmy’ll sort it out.”

  Rob was to cover the trial. Joanne would attend and add her thoughts to the reporting. Journalists from the Press and Journal and the Ross-shire Journal would be there. Rob was hoping he would have a short write-up accepted by a prestigious Scottish daily. If the coup of national publication came off, Rob would make sure the stringer from the Aberdeen paper knew. Modesty was not one of his virtues.

  Others from the Gazette would attend—deadline allowing. Mr. Beauchamp Carlyle would put in an appearance for the pomp and pageantry and as a resident of the Black Isle. McAllister wanted to watch Calum Sinclair in action to see if he was indeed a young man going places. Don would show his face occasionally to give support to Jimmy McPhee.

  Margaret McLean thought she might attend. Patricia Ord Mackenzie would be there to support Mr. and Mrs. Munro, as would Granny and Granddad Ross. That Patricia was a possible character reference for the defendants had not been mentioned.

  The Black Isle contingent—Mrs. Munro, Allie Munro, three farmhands, a neighbor, the landlady from the hotel, and the local postman, who witnessed the scuffle in the car park—all came over on the ferry for the trial, all in various degrees of anxiety and excitement. Such an event in their uneventful lives would become the stuff of barroom and sitting-room and out-in-the-fields and indoors-in-the-barn conversations for years to come.

  The jury of eleven men and four women was as neutral as could be hoped for. A railway clerk, a pharmacist, two schoolteachers, an architect, a senior civil servant who worked in the county buildings, an unknown but virtuous minister’s wife, a butcher, a nurse, a hill farmer, and five others Calum didn’t know. All fifteen jury members seemed safe enough—if you discounted the restless plumber who wanted it over quickly, as he had a big job on and didn’t trust his new apprentice.

  From Calum’s inquiries, it seemed the sheriff was impartial, at least no one said otherwise. Edinburgh establishment was the word on him, not a farming background as Calum had feared. Farmers and tinkers had a symbiotic relationship, which even the landed gentry acknowledged. The loss of so many Highlanders in the war meant the seasonal hiring of Traveling people was even more vital. But the collective memory of Hogmanay losses of various fowl, especially geese, kept the prejudices alive and fresh.

  So, Calum thought, no more than the usual prejudices against tinkers—and that is substantial enough.

  He shared his opinion of jury and sheriff with Jimmy and Jenny McPhee, “The jury is about as good as we could hope for.”

  “No one from Muir of Ord, that’s good,” said Jimmy.

  Quite what Jimmy had against the denizens of Muir of Ord, Calum didn’t know—or didn’t want to know.

  “But thon farmer, I don’t like the sound o’ him,” Jimmy added.

  “From his address,” Calum told him, “it seems he’s a hill farmer from the back of Daviot. They don’t employ Travelers on their land.”

  “Maybe so,” Jimmy was not reassured, “but they have prejudices a’ the same.”

  “So do you,” his mother reminded him. “I’ve heard you make many a joke that wouldn’t bear repeating about sheep farmers.”

  “The butcher from Kiltarlity should be on our side. If he wants his Christmas geese, that is.”

  Calum made a choking sound. “I didn’t hear that, Jimmy.”

  Calum left them. He wanted to, not that he needed to, review his papers before the start of the case against George and William McPhee.

  The Highland Gazette office was quiet—Joanne had gone home, Don disappeared. As McAllister was leaving, he noticed Rob alone in the reporters’ room.

  “How did it go in court today?” McAllister asked.

  “Interesting. I’m just finishing up my notes. Tomorrow should be better, though.” Rob was looking forward to it.

  “Fancy coming to my place for a drink?” McAllister asked. “I can’t be bothered with the public and the barroom journalists telling me how to do my job.”

  “Why not?”

  They walked downstairs.

  “Do you want a lift on my bike?” Rob asked.

  The look on McAllister’s face said it all. “I’ll walk, thanks. See you at my house in fifteen minutes.”

  Rob was waiting on the front doorstep when McAllister arrived.

  As he walked into the sitting room, the slight smell of damp offended McAllister. It might be summer, but high ceilings and Highland temperatures still warranted a fire. Plus he hated his books smelling fusty.

  He put a match to an already-set fire—back copies of the Gazette started a fine blaze. He found a bottle of wine. He poured himself and Rob a glass, and the color and the scent and the taste made him all the more g
lad of the warmth from the fire.

  My blood has thinned after all those years in Spain and in France, McAllister thought.

  “Slainthe,” Rob toasted.

  “Santé,” McAllister replied. “So,” he asked after a good swallow of a lovely Burgundy, “before you tell me about today’s trial, have you come up with any new information on Sandy Skinner’s accident at the Falls of Foyers?”

  “Ac-ci-dent?” Rob pronounced each syllable slowly, separately.

  “That was the verdict.”

  “It was. And no, I know nothing more. It probably was an accident, it’s just . . . well, you’re always telling me to trust my instinct, and . . . and nothing really. It’s all too pat. . . . Sorry, that sounds like a Don pun.”

  His grin made McAllister feel his age. This is the new generation, he thought.

  “I keep coming back to the same question,” Rob continued. “Panic. It’s a plausible explanation for driving all the way to Dores to report him missing, but panic is not Patricia.”

  “Hang on to your instincts, keep an open mind, and all the usual clichés that Don would delete.”

  McAllister knew, as Rob now knew also, that without Don, and subeditors the world over, there would be no decent newspapers.

  “So, today’s trial. What happened?”

  “It was a roll call of the witnesses to the fight outside the pub. In spite of all the fiscal’s efforts, it was clear it was nothing more than a drunken kerfuffle. The McPhee boys were sober; they only had a pint apiece, taken in halves—all they could afford. It was also agreed that Fraser Munro was completely pished.”

  Rob thought about the witnesses who had taken the stand.

  “The postie was straightforward, he described the incident, and nothing could shake him. The landlady was next. She enjoyed the drama and described the evening with much sighing and ‘it was terrible.’ So, so far so straightforward.”

  “How was the atmosphere in court?” McAllister was interested in the subtleties that could sway a jury into making mysterious decisions.