by A. D. Scott
By the time Rob recovered, McAllister was already halfway down the stairs. He ran after him but stopped when he saw Betsy holding the telephone receiver away from her, glaring at it as though the instrument was responsible for the shock.
“What is it?” Rob asked.
“I wasn’t listening in.” She dropped the receiver. It missed the cradle. She put it back. Not looking at Rob, she gave a most unladylike sniff. “I don’t listen in, not anymore.”
“Betsy, I don’t care if you did listen in, tell me why McAllister rushed off. It sounded really important.”
“I put the call through,” Betsy said, “that’s all.”
“Betsy, who was it?” Rob shouted, and as Rob never shouted at anyone, she burst into tears.
“It was Detective Inspector Dunne.”
“Get me the police.”
Betsy dialed, handed the phone to him, then backed away into the secretary’s cubbyhole of an office to hide.
Rob knew immediately the voice that answered. “Sergeant Patience, it’s Rob McLean. What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you.”
“I’ll be round the back lane in one minute.”
* * *
“Mind, you never heard the news from me,” Sergeant Patience said for the third time as Rob ran off to get his motorbike.
The hospital was on the outskirts of town, and Rob decided the quickest way was by the longer main road rather than through the winding back streets and suburbs of town, fighting his way through the Saturday-morning-shopping traffic.
He overtook lorries laboring up the hills and through the twisting bends. A dark road, enclosed by steep hills and thick trees on both sides, it was treacherous in winter black ice and treacherous in flickering summer light. He passed slow vehicles recklessly, sounded his horn futilely. He lost all sense of his own mortality. Don was “at death’s door,” as the sergeant had put it.
Leaving his bike parked illegally, Rob ran towards the emergency department doors. He spotted McAllister pacing, smoking, making tracks in the narrow strip of grass that bordered a bed of withered wallflowers. “Is he alive?”
“Aye,” McAllister told him, “just.”
“What happened?”
“Tried to hang himself.”
Rob could barely take in the notion. “Don? Hang himself?”
“The doctors are with him. He can’t speak. And they’re worried about brain damage. Technically he died, but the guard resuscitated him.” McAllister had a flash of the man, the Highlander, the gentle big man who spoke to Don in the Gaelic, and was grateful.
Rob sat on the grass, put his head in his hands.
McAllister threw his cigarette butt into a patch of weeds to join the dozens of others, discarded by those waiting for the good the bad and the tragic news that was the lot of hospital emergency departments. “No visitors allowed. The police have posted a guard outside his room. Anyhow, Don can’t talk, so there’s no point in going in.”
“Yes, there is.” Rob stood. “Just go in there.” He was shouting. “He’ll know somehow. He’ll sense a friend.”
“Aye.” But McAllister could never admit he was not up to the sight of his old friend so diminished he would try to take his own life. “Maybe you should go.”
Rob thought for all of one second. “I will.” He rubbed his hair, his head, as though the massage would set his brain cogs working. As he left through the swing doors into the Valhalla of the hospital accident and emergency department, he thought, Don really must believe there is no escaping a guilty verdict.
McAllister was asking himself a similar question. “What the hell would make you want to end it all, Don McLeod?” he muttered to the heavens. He refused to consider that Don might be guilty.
The woman behind the admissions counter looked as friendly as Cerberus at the entrance to the underworld, so Rob stood in the corridor searching for someone who might give him news of Don’s condition. He saw the nurse in the distance, and even though her back was turned, he was certain it was Eilidh.
He hurried down the corridor trying in vain to diminish the clatter from his motorbike boots.
“Eilidh.”
She turned. She looked around. The corridor was still empty.
“If I’m caught talking to you, the matron will have my guts for garters.” But she was smirking as she said it.
“Do you know anything about Don McLeod?”
“Aye, but you’ll not be able to see him. There’s a prison guard outside his room.”
“Blast.” Rob shook his head as though that would clear the darkness.
“He’ll be fine. The guard caught him in time.”
Her voice sounded oddly callous. No, Rob decided, she sounds like a nurse. They’re all pretty matter-of-fact about death and injury.
“I’m sorry, Rob, I really do have to go.”
“Can we meet later?”
“I’m on late shift, so not really. But I’m coming to the dance to hear you play.”
“Smashing. I’ll leave your name on the door.” He called this after her, as she was hurrying off, having caught sight of a sister bearing down on them, her nursing headdress making her look like a galleon in full sail.
“Can I help you?” her voice implied that she knew he was up to no good.
“Rob McLean, Highland Gazette. I’m wondering if I can visit our deputy editor, Mr. Donal McLeod.” He tried his signature grin without much hope, and he was not disappointed.
“He is not allowed visitors.” And she sailed on.
Off to intimidate other targets, Rob guessed.
When he went out to find McAllister, the editor had vanished. When he went home, his parents were out. He made himself some tea, warmed up the supper his mother had left in the oven, switched on the television, switched it off again; he couldn’t stand shows with big bands featuring big-haired singers.
He went out again. He drove to Joanne’s house. He found the place empty, no lights, no music, no shadows behind the curtains. He was on the edge of desolate when he remembered. Hector lives around the corner; he’ll be in his studio cum washing shed. He’ll be developing film. He’ll keep me company.
He went round the back of the house. Hector wasn’t in the studio. But there were light and noise coming from the kitchen. He knocked. Granny Bain took one look at him and said, “Best come in.”
She took his bike jacket. She handed him tea from the pot on the stove, then said, “Tell me what’s happened.” So he did. When he had finished, she said nothing, just sighed.
The kitchen clock, big and round like a single frame of a giant’s wire spectacles, was ticking away Saturday night, a night when a young man should be out enjoying himself, not sitting in despair with a Highland granny.
When she started speaking, her accent thick with soft Gaelic sibilants, it was as though the sea had decided to speak.
“I remember that time as though it was yesterday, because Donal was the only one who could give me the whole story. The ship went down, holed by a German battleship. But before she sank, she went on fire. Terrible. Only a few survived. And it was three years after it happened before Donal got back to tell me, him having to recover because he’d lost most of the skin off of his back.”
What is it about this century? Rob was thinking as Granny Bain went into another silence. All these deaths, all this war? He knew of his own family members lost in both world wars; he knew every village, every town had its war memorial, breaking your heart as you read the long columns of the names of the fallen, often several from the same family. He knew Armistice Day was almost upon them and how somber his family and their friends and the towns and villages became on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
He had been terrified he might be conscripted when Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden declared war on Egypt over the Suez Canal. He had listened to what little news there was from the invasion of Hungary, watching the newsreels in the cinema in horror. But instead of feeling sa
fe in his Highland hideaway, it made him determined to leave, as soon as possible he was now thinking. I need to get out into the world. Become a real journalist.
“. . . loved each other,” Granny Bain was saying. Rob was not sure who she meant, was it her and her husband; Don and Mrs. Smart?
“But it was impossible. One thing I do know is that he regretted it all his life.”
Rob did not feel he could interrupt the tide of memories with questions. Rather, he felt that by letting it go, the story would unfold. And it did.
“She was prepared to give up everything, her name, her reputation, her home, her inheritance, so Donal told me, but he said no, he told her he couldn’t ask that of her. It was like he was the snob, no’ her—even though she was from the gentry.” She shook her head at the folly of it all. “So, he sent her away.”
She reached for her tea. She would never tell anyone that after Joyce Mackenzie left town, Don had drunk himself stupid, that he only told her his miserable story because she had picked him up from the gutter outside his wee house in Church Street, that at that time, just as now, he was well on the way to killing himself.
“Later, after she came back from India, he never said, but I know he blamed himself for her ending up with thon Smart fellow. A jumped-up-too-big-for-his-boots manny thon—and his father no more than a beater on an estate in Perthshire—so I’ve been told.”
“So what’s all this to do with . . . ”
“Rob?” Hector stood in the doorway staring. They hadn’t heard him come in. “What’re you doing here?”
“Come to check on the story about the sword dancing competition,” Rob answered. “Your sister is a star.”
“And out too late for her age,” Granny Bain said. “Hector, off with you and fetch her from Mrs. Grigor’s house.”
“But it’s only half past eight.”
“Hector.”
Hector fled. Granny Bain handed Rob his jacket. He knew he would learn nothing more.
“Thank you. And if you should think of anything . . . ”
“I’ll let you know.”
And, Rob knew, she would if she could.
CHAPTER 12
I don’t want to pressure you . . . ”
“But the trial is only four weeks away.” McAllister completed Angus McLean’s sentence for him.
They were in the solicitor’s office. It was nine thirty on Thursday, publication day, and McAllister had not even bothered to glance through that day’s Gazette.
He looks terrible, Angus McLean was thinking.
He looks like he needs a good night’s sleep, McAllister was thinking.
“So Don’s still in the hospital?” It was more a rhetorical question, as Angus knew McAllister had been to visit Don late the previous night, after the Gazette had been put to bed.
“I was told I was not allowed to see him,” McAllister said, “but the sister relented. I think she felt sorry for Don.”
McAllister’s eyes glazed over as he remembered the visit to the hospital. Angus saw his anguish. He began to fill his pipe, knowing to wait until the editor returned to the here and now.
When McAllister had arrived—to find the lights dimmed, the ward silent except for the hush of feet moving behind the screened-off bed McAllister guessed was Don’s—he pulled the curtain to one side and looked in.
“Do you know the time?” the ward sister had asked.
“How is he?”
“He’ll survive.”
“Aye, but for how long?”
The woman, who at first glance appeared to be a caricature of a ward sister—all starch and no comfort—took McAllister by the arm and led him out into the corridor. The ward doors closed behind them with a sigh of compressed air.
“Mr. McAllister . . . ”
“How do you know my name?”
“Wheesht,” she shushed him. “Of course I know who you are, the same as I know Mr. McLeod. It’s a small town. And a big murder. Everyone’s talking, and not everyone credits Don McLeod with Mrs. Smart’s death.”
“You know, knew, her?”
“No, but my mother did.” She sighed. “She was a good woman. Everyone knew about them . . . ”
I didn’t, but McAllister was too ashamed to admit it.
“He couldn’t have killed her. He loved her.” But the way she said it, the way her voice took on a misty tone, annoyed him.
“Not everyone thinks that way.”
“You’re right. Many always want to believe the worst.” She shook her head. The white headdress crackled. “Come back tomorrow during visiting hours, you can see him then.”
“You’re keeping him here?”
“Aye. The doctor knows Mr. McLeod, and we’ll find reasons to keep him here as long as possible. But you didn’t hear that from me.” She smiled and patted him on the arm. The touch of her hand, through the layers of coat and jacket and jumper and shirt, made him realize how long it had been since someone had touched him with love.
“Can I not just peek in to see him?”
She thought for a moment. “The guard is in the canteen on a break. If he finds you, you never got any permission from me.” She turned away, disappeared through a door into some hospital netherland that could have been a cupboard or the secret entrance to Brigadoon.
McAllister tried to walk quietly, but that only made more noise, the leather of his shoes creaking in the unaccustomed position. Peering around the screens, he saw Don’s head, his thick grey and white and black hair lit by the night-light shining from the wall above. His eyes were closed. The neck was not bandaged, but even in this light McAllister could see the dark semicircle of bruising. He saw the hand hanging outside the sheets, caught the glint of the bracelet of steel where Don was handcuffed to the frame of the bed. The feeling that he needed a chair overcame him, but the chair was at the end of the bed, and all he wanted to do was to sit and hold his old friend’s hand.
“Did you bring a dram?” It came out as a garbled croak, but McAllister understood.
“You’re alive.” It was meant as a joke, came out as surprise.
“Aye.”
McAllister bent down, touched Don’s hand. “I can’t stay. I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Aye.” Don gripped McAllister’s hand. The grip was not strong. “Ask thon nurse, the young one, if she . . . ” Don started.
“I’ll have to ask you to leave, Mr. McAllister.” Although the guard, the same man McAllister had met in the prison, spoke softly, McAllister knew he would have to go. He squeezed Don’s hand again.
“He wants the nurse,” he told the guard as he left, unable to look at the shriveled old man who was once Don McLeod, cock o’ the North.
When McAllister eventually went home, he spent the rest of the night reading, sleeping, awakening, making tea, adding a dram to it, taking the mug to bed, trying to read but rereading the same paragraph or sometimes a whole page over and over, all the time the words of the nursing sister coursing around his brain. He loved her.
And he knew he was jealous. To truly love someone, for that love to survive on only one Sunday evening a week alone together for two decades . . . he was jealous.
“McAllister.” Angus McLean summoned McAllister back from his contemplations. He had smoked one pipe to McAllister’s two cigarettes, watched the editor staring out the window, had seen his face, particularly the minute shifts of the eyebrows, reflecting pain and loss and puzzlement. Now, Angus decided, they needed to plan.
“As I was saying,” the solicitor reminded McAllister, “the advocates for the defense are coming up from Edinburgh next week. I’d like to have something to tell them.”
“I have nothing. No ideas. Nothing.”
“Mrs. McPhee, has she information that might help the case?”
“I don’t think so.” McAllister shuddered. The proverbial ghost had walked over his grave. “I’ll talk to Jimmy McPhee again.” His voice had changed. There was a hardness to it that made the solicitor look up, see the
grim set of McAllister’s mouth, and he took comfort from it.
“Let me know if you hear anything, anything at all.”
They shook hands, and McAllister walked out to fetch his car. He would never tell Angus McLean, but he would find Jimmy, they would plan, scheme. If he had to lie and cheat and plant false evidence he would. And Jimmy will help me. This McAllister knew.
* * *
It took a day and a half to find Jimmy through the elaborate system of leaving messages in various drinking establishments.
Late Saturday afternoon, McAllister was at home, having visited Don again, only for Don to keep his eyes tight shut and growl, “Go away.” So he did. But he’d keep visiting whether Don wanted or not.
When Jimmy McPhee phoned him at home in the late afternoon saying, with no word of greeting, Jimmy McPhee here, McAllister told him, “I need to speak to you.”
“I’ll be round your place the night, but it might be late.”
Jimmy McPhee was late—half past ten at night late. He was sober, which surprised McAllister, and he was carrying a briefcase, which surprised McAllister even more. A second glance and McAllister decided it was not documents Jimmy was carrying, so he said nothing. He went to the shelf and selected a Dalmore single malt. Jimmy saw the bottle and grinned; it was a bottle produced not many miles from the McPhee encampment, and a bottle that Jimmy himself had once presented to McAllister.
“A fine taste in whisky you have,” he said.
“And a fine taste in friends,” McAllister replied. They raised their glasses. They drank. There was a comfortable silence as they savored the peat coursing through the veins.
“Your mother well?” McAllister broke the hush.
So it’s to be the Highland way, Jimmy thought. Must mean some big favor he’s wanting.
“She’s well, feeling the cold in her bones, though.”
“Aye, my mother’s the same.”
They contemplated the fire.
“The defense doesn’t have to prove who did it,” McAllister started, “just raise enough doubt . . . maybe only show an alternative . . . the Procurator Fiscal, he’ll have to show . . . ‘Beyond reasonable doubt’ . . . ”