by A. D. Scott
“I can’t do that, Joanne.” His voice was quiet, but the underlying hurt was clear. “We work with Betsy.”
“Betsy wants this too. She will tell you when and where to take the pictures.”
“What?” Now he was completely confused.
“But my husband mustn’t know. Or anyone else.”
“If my granny hears of it, she’ll throw me out.” Hector was jiggling from foot to foot, completely confused by the request. “Ma granny, she said no smutty pictures, and she’ll find out, ’cos I’ll have to go to court and tell how I got the pictures.”
“Really?” Rob was standing in the doorway. “What have you done this time?”
“Mind your own business, Rob McLean,” Joanne snapped.
“Sorry I spoke.”
He looked at her. She looked away. She ran down the stairs, out into the wind. It was nearly November, and the chill was getting to her bones. But her face was hot. She pulled her cardigan tight, crossing her arms, tucking her chin in, but the wind still penetrated the layers of cardigan and jumper and cotton vest.
“Damn and blast,” she was muttering when McAllister appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, saying, “I agree.”
“McAllister, don’t sneak up like that! You gave me a fright.”
“I’d ask you to have coffee with me but I don’t think I can walk across town. Maybe later?”
“Maybe. I have to get back, I’m freezing out here.”
He watched her run into the Gazette office and once more agreed. It is freezing, he was thinking, and it’s more than the weather.
* * *
McAllister’s only positive news came at the end of the day from Angus McLean.
“I’m phoning to let you know Sergeant Major Smart has dropped the charge against you.”
McAllister thanked him.
“I have a meeting on Thursday with the advocate from Edinburgh. He and his assistant will be here to prepare the defense. Would you care to join us?”
McAllister agreed. He started to make notes for the meeting, then called out across the landing for Rob.
“Shut the door.”
Rob did and took a chair.
“Have you spoken to your nurse friend?”
“Tonight. She has a day off and is sleeping for most of it, she said.”
“Ask her about the knife—who would know where it was kept. And anything that might be useful.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sorry, Rob. I know you know what you’re doing. I only wish I did.” He lit another cigarette, the first of his third packet of the day. “I have no idea what’s wrong with me. I can’t sleep, I can’t make decisions, my judgment is haywire, I feel powerless, I can’t find anything to free Don.”
“This advocate from Edinburgh has a good reputation,” Rob told him. “Let’s put together all the information we have, and hope he can make more sense of it than us.”
“Let’s hope so.” McAllister did not sound optimistic but at least it was a plan.
* * *
That evening, as Rob drove over the Black Bridge to see Eilidh, he remembered McAllister’s instructions: ask about the knife. Of course, Rob had thought, that’s obvious, but what else might Eilidh know?
He had been shocked by the editor’s lack of clarity; he was used to McAllister’s insight, he couldn’t believe how his hero was floundering. He knew the situation with Don was dire, so why was McAllister so indecisive? Neither Rob nor McAllister himself was aware that Joanne’s abandonment might be contributing to the editor’s overwhelming sense of loss. All Rob could see was how slowly the man thought and moved, as though wading through emotional and spiritual tar.
He arrived at the end of Church Street and switched off the bike engine. As instructed, he parked on the opposite side and further down from the passageway leading to Eilidh’s terrace.
The gate was closed but unlocked, just as she said it would be. He hesitated before pushing it open and turned to look again at the path leading to the steps down to the footbridge—the steps between the church and abbey wall, the steps where Mrs. Smart had been murdered. It was raining slightly. Just as it had been on that night. A damp misty rain, which, if you looked out a window you couldn’t be certain was rain except for the shine on the slate roofs, the paving stones, the cobbled street, weather that made driving a motorbike horribly dangerous, and made murder or a haunting no surprise.
He went down the passageway between and under the first floor of the buildings, where the roof was not high. Wide enough to get a coffin through; that was the saying about these old buildings. In the courtyard—the size of the sitting room in a grand house like that of Countess Sokolov—Rob stood looking at the empty windows in Don’s house. Less than two months empty, and the one-down, one-up terrace felt as desolate as a cottage from the Highland Clearances.
He knocked on Eilidh’s door, needing warmth and light and hopefully some cuddling.
“Hiya.” She opened the door and pulled Rob in. “It’s freezing out there.” She had a quick look around, saw no one, and shut the door. “I don’t want anyone to see you. My parents would make me live at home if they knew I had a man visiting.”
“Do you want me to lock the gate?” Rob asked.
“Please.” She pulled open the cutlery drawer and handed him a brass key that looked as though it would open a pirate’s treasure chest. “With the house next door empty and Mr. McLeod’s house . . . I’m alone here, so I keep the gate locked.”
“When did the house next door become empty?”
“Oh, two years or so ago.”
Damn, Rob thought, no witnesses there.
When he came back in, Eilidh had put the kettle on. “Coffee?” She shook the tin of the co-op’s own brand of instant coffee.
Rob’s heart sank. “Love some.”
“This wee place belonged to my mother’s mother,” she explained, “and when she died, my parents let me have it for as long as I’m at the hospital.” Then they expect me to train as a district nurse, and return home or at least marry someone respectable, preferably a doctor who will settle somewhere in my father’s parish and we can all go to his church together and listen to his endless sermons about hell and damnation and . . . “Sorry?”
“And here was me thinking you’d be hanging on to my words of wit and wisdom.” Rob laughed. “Listen, before we go out—or stay in—I want to ask about Don’s fish knife.”
“I know nothing about his stupid knife.” She was fed up with questions from everyone—from the police, from her parents, from colleagues, from the woman in the co-op where she did her shopping, and now Rob. “I keep saying, I’ve never seen the knife.”
“Aye, but do you know anyone who might know?”
“I suppose the people who lived next door might. They were friends o’ Mr. McLeod, so he said. Then there’s the usual—the coalman, the binmen, the meter reader, I don’t know . . . I suppose Mrs. Hoity Toity must have known, but then again, she didn’t stab herself.”
Rob was disconcerted by Eilidh’s description of Mrs. Smart until he remembered how correct she could be, how proper and prim she might have seemed to outsiders.
And when Eilidh put the record on the Dansette, he could understand that perhaps there might have been a problem with neighbors over the volume. When Eilidh started to dance or, rather, thump about, he well understood that Mrs. Smart or Don might have said something. When she joined in the chorus—she knew all the lyrics and could manage a fair American accent—Eilidh was loud, and completely tone-deaf.
“Wow,” Rob said when the record had finished, “that was incredible.” He meant it. She went to play it again.
“I’d love a Dansette but it’s too expensive for me.” He was lying. He had one. They cost three hundred guineas, and his mother had paid for it to keep the peace, or at least her husband’s health; Angus McLean went into the garden whenever Rob played his music on their big record player, and as winters were nine months long, she was happy to indulge
her only child if only to prevent her husband from catching pneumonia.
“I haven’t paid for it yet.” Eilidh was stroking the case as though it was a pet. “I got it on hire purchase.”
She saw he didn’t believe her; hire purchase if you were under twenty-one was impossible.
“I forged my mother’s signature as guarantor, else they wouldn’t give me the credit.” She took Bill Haley off and put Elvis on. “Mr. McLeod’s lady friend once told me she thought the music was too loud, especially on a Sunday, but I told her to mind her own business. You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time . . . ”
Rob endured it for the three minutes and something seconds it took to finish, then grabbed her in a clinch and started to nuzzle her neck.
“Hey, you’re not backwards in coming forwards.” She giggled, did not resist, and after a minute or so, joined in with a passion to match her dancing. It was Rob who was overwhelmed by Nurse Eilidh Davidson of Kiltarlity, not the other way around, so he didn’t get to ask her any more about the night Mrs. Smart was murdered. And he completely forgot to ask about the knife.
CHAPTER 14
Jimmy McPhee was a man whom many knew of, but few knew. He was an outsider. An observer. A man who thought human frailty a weakness. He would take note of people and their conversations, of objects, of places, and squirrel them away in the recesses of his memory. And like most people born into an oral culture, he had a prodigious memory. When the time was ripe, he would retrieve stored memories and impressions, the taste of the place and the weather, and his timing was very good indeed. That is what made Jimmy McPhee a man never to be underestimated.
His mother’s withdrawal into silences longer than usual, her wanting to be on the road even though she well knew that rain or sudden snow was likely, concerned him. The anniversary of the theft of the boys was in November. And that anniversary was soon. And that was why his mother was not herself, or so he kept assuring himself.
Then there was Neil Stewart. Here he was, noseying around, asking his mother to help with the book he was writing, on the same subject as his older brother Keith—why should his ma help a stranger? The cheek o’ the man, Jimmy thought.
Then there was the notion that Neil might be a relative. Nah, Jimmy told himself at first, I’m sure I’d know. As the weeks went on, he was less certain.
He believed he had inherited some of his mother’s sixth sense, and would know if this man was of his flesh and blood. But, he remembered, he had been a child, nearly five, when the young ones, babies really, were snatched, and he retained only an impression of them. Neither of them had his red red hair, but hadn’t the older boy been golden-headed? He couldn’t remember the boy’s face—he mixed it up with the younger brothers who came along later when his mother remarried.
What he could remember was the crying, the screaming, the gut-wrenching keening from his mother for days after.
He was not yet five. He could only stand and stare as a woman reached into the big coach-built pram that someone had given them. He remembered that when he was wee, he thought that’s how babies arrived: in a pram.
The baby was wailing a high-pitched squeal—like the seagulls when you went stealing their eggs. His mother came running up from the lochan. She started screaming at the two men and the woman, who was now in the back of the car doing nothing to comfort the baby, who cried as though he knew what was happening, filling the car with his anguish.
He remembered the grim face of the woman, who he later recalled looked like a prison warden, and the wailing, drowned out by screeches, from his mother, who was held back by one man, a constable, as the other grabbed his next brother, three he was, and his mother was shouting, “Run, Jimmy! Run! Hide! Run, Jimmy!”
He ran, but when he looked back he could see that the men had their hands full of one kicking struggling child and one kicking struggling biting screaming woman, until the constable holding her gave her an almighty shove, and his mother tumbled into the heather while the policeman ran to the car, where the others were locked in the backseat holding onto the howling bairns.
The constable, not a local man, started the engine, and by the time his mother recovered, Jimmy still watching from his hiding place behind a big boulder, the car had disappeared down the track, away from their encampment, away for forever, and never forgotten.
And he saw, as though he was back there in that place and time, the papers the man from the welfare had given his mother, the papers she had thrown back at him, blowing in the wind, down the track, trying to catch the departing children, white papers like tiny ghosts trying to catch the wee souls they had formally inhabited.
“They gave me a receipt for them as though they were parcels,” Jenny had told Joyce Mackenzie. Jimmy had overheard the conversation and it had puzzled him, and whenever the postman came with a parcel for them, which was rarely, he wondered if it might be one or other of his brothers coming home in a box. What made him the hard man he was, was his mother; there was nothing he could say to her, or do for her, except to be close to her, waiting, enduring, being her shadow son. And that was the day, even though he was only four and three-quarters years old, that Jimmy McPhee vowed, No one will ever capture me, never capture my body nor my soul.
* * *
On Tuesday, at half past eleven on a morning that was weeping at the loss of autumn, Jimmy walked into the bar on Baron Taylor’s Lane.
“Thon McAllister fellow was asking after you,” the barman told him.
Jimmy left without stopping for a drink, crossed to the Station Square, went into the telephone box, inserted the pennies, and dialed the Gazette.
“Your place at seven the night,” he told McAllister. Without waiting for a reply, he walked back to the bar. This time he ordered.
* * *
“Rob,” McAllister yelled without getting out of his chair. The yell carried across the landing into the reporters’ room, then spiraled down the staircase, so that the new junior, Fiona, heard only the roar. A nervous girl with black hair and a fresh crop of pimples, she considered phoning her mother, who worked as an assistant at the bakery and provided her daughter with a constant supply of day-old doughnuts. Fiona wanted to say she couldn’t take another day at the Highland Gazette, but she didn’t, only because it was a toss-up as to whom she feared most—McAllister or her father.
“Yes, master,” Rob said as he shut the door behind him.
“The advocate from Edinburgh will be here on Thursday.”
“Not you, too,” Rob complained. “My father’s so jittery you’d think he was practicing tap-dancing.”
McAllister rubbed his eyes with one hand and said, “Thank you, Rob, I needed that.” He smiled, but the smile did not lift the sadness from his eyes.
Rob knew that all he could do was to be practical. “What are you and my dad going to tell the Grand Panjandrum from the Faculty of Advocates?”
“That’s why we need to talk.”
“The advocate has asked if he and his assistant can walk through the crime scene before they interview Don.”
“Who is now back in prison.” McAllister felt his skin crawl at the thought of the dank cell with little light and far less comfort than a hospital bed. “Jimmy McPhee is coming to my house tonight. I’m hoping he has more than ‘look in the past’ stuff to tell me. Because I’ve looked till I’m blind and I’ve seen nothing.”
“Maybe you should ask Neil if he came across anything when he was searching the parish records in Inchnadamph . . . ” He saw he had lost McAllister. “That’s Mrs. Smart’s—the Mackenzie—parish church. Joanne said they saw her grave. Apparently there’s no headstone, but people have been laying flowers and . . . ”
McAllister had turned his head away, but Rob saw it. McAllister looked as though he too had been stabbed in the heart.
It took Rob half a second to realize what he had said. They. Neil. Joanne.
And he had enough sense not to dwell on the subject. “Firstly, the gate to the cl
ose where Don lives . . . ”
He watched McAllister take up a pencil, making an effort to concentrate.
“Was the gate locked that night?” Rob continued. “It seems Mrs. Smart made a point of making sure it was locked on the nights she visited, probably to keep her husband from confronting them. Apparently she had her own key.”
“So, point one, did she lock the gate, did she have the key on her? If she locked the gate, did the killer take the key so he could return the knife to the hiding place?” McAllister was doing all he could to forget what Rob had said, but, like an attack of tinnitus, the words echoed in the periphery of his hearing—Joanne, Neil, they. “You said the railwayman thought he saw something in the churchyard?”
“He might deny it, but I’m certain it wasn’t a ghost that he saw.”
“So, in the time it took the man to run to the police station, the killer could have gone to the courtyard and put the knife back in the wall.”
“Aye,” Rob agreed, “we’re back to the knife. Eilidh, Don’s neighbor, says any number of people might have known where it was kept.”
“Who also had a reason to kill Mrs. Smart?”
“Which brings us back to her husband. Two motives—jealousy and greed.”
“The same motive could apply to Don.” McAllister tipped his chair back into his thinking position. “I still keep thinking, why now? This situation had been going on for years.”
“I have one more thought. The Gurkha. Everyone says he was devoted to the Mackenzie family, that’s why he’s not a suspect. But what if he’d had enough of the sergeant major? What if something ordinary became too much and he snapped? What if he knew about the legacy—it’s a fortune in his terms, enough to last him the rest of his life. He has no alibi. He knows how to use a knife. I’ve looked them up in the library—Gurkha soldiers are fiercesome killers.”
“I’ll talk to Beech again, but they say he was devoted to Joyce.”
“Maybe I could join you and Jimmy tonight.”
“Fine, but if he tells you to go . . . ”