by A. D. Scott
“I’ll be gone.” Rob stood. “And we’ve still to get out a newspaper, so have you done the op-ed yet?”
“Later.”
When Rob returned to the reporters’ room, he decided that later might be never, so he called Beech, asked him to write the editorial and two obituaries, and when asked why, said, “McAllister isn’t feeling too well.” When he put down the phone he saw Joanne and Neil had been listening.
“Is McAllister okay?” Joanne asked.
“No, not really—but I’m glad you’ve noticed.”
He saw her flush, then look away. Rob hadn’t meant it callously; he was just stating the world as he saw it. Plus, he was busy searching his pockets for a ten-shilling note, all he had to last him until payday at the end of the week, and couldn’t find it, so he did not notice he had hurt her.
The remark cut, making her shiver, making her, for a brief moment, grasp the fugue she was in, reality gone. Rob was her friend. McAllister was a friend, a man she more than liked, and although she had fantasized that he might one day look at her in more than friendship, she had scorned the idea.
McAllister thinks I’m not too bright, she told herself, forgetting the times when they had talked and laughed as though they had known each other their whole lives.
“Hello, is anyone there?” Rob was waving the ten-shilling note at her, found inside his spiral-bound reporter’s notebook.
Joanne’s eyes came back into focus.
“I’m off to interview a visiting Canadian evangelist. See you when I see you.” Rob left her to her doubts, and ran down the stairs two at a time.
Neil had been mostly ignoring their exchange, focused on the correct spelling of a Gaelic name. He looked at Joanne and said, “It must be hard for McAllister. Were he and Don McLeod close?”
She grabbed on to the question, dismissing thoughts of her own culpability in McAllister’s descent into melancholy, and answered, “Yes, I suppose they were, are—in an odd, bickering old couple, way.”
“The best we can do is get this paper out.” Neil smiled and went back to typing.
His smile worked—as always.
“Good idea.” She did the same.
It’s nothing to do with me, she tried telling herself as she sorted out the community notices for the next edition. But she knew this was not true—We were once more than colleagues. We came close to. . . . She tried not to think how close she had come to spending a night with McAllister—until common sense had come to her rescue. And she tried to push away the awareness that she was not being a good friend to him when he was obviously in distress.
Some months back, when her husband, Bill, had beat her so badly she ended up in hospital, she needed a friend. And McAllister had listened to her, helped her stick to her resolve to leave the marriage, had not once been judgmental. But not once had he indicated he cared for her—except as a good friend and colleague.
No, she chided herself; I know he is interested in me. But why does he never say anything? It didn’t occur to her that she was the one who had discouraged him; all her talk of freedom and friendship had made McAllister—an inarticulate man when it came to expressing feelings—even more reticent.
Now there was Neil; another man who had made no commitment but who made her forget everything and everyone—even McAllister, even her family, even her reason.
* * *
Jimmy arrived at McAllister’s house at twenty to eight, no apologies for being late, but a bottle in his hand.
“You.” Jimmy looked Rob up and down, mostly up, as he was a good six inches shorter. “I suppose you’re here to help Don McLeod—no’ being nosy for the sake o’ it.”
“I’m helping my father with the defense case.”
They sat around the kitchen table, the bottle and two glasses in the middle and a jug of water, which was ignored. Rob had made himself a pot of tea, and the discussion began.
“Does he know about ma brothers?” Jimmy jerked his head towards Rob.
“No. Is it relevant?” McAllister asked.
“No idea. Then again, I’ve no idea about much of this shambles. But Joyce Mackenzie left money to the orphanage.”
It took Rob a moment to connect Joyce Mackenzie to Mrs. Smart. “What has the orphanage got to do with anything, and why do you keep calling her Joyce Mackenzie?”
Jimmy looked at Rob, gave him the long stare for which he was notorious, and said on the outgoing breath of a lungful of cigarette smoke, “You want to use her legal name? The late Mrs. Donal Dewar McLeod?”
“They’re married?” One look at Jimmy’s shrug, and McAllister knew it had to be true. “Great God Almighty.” He said the words as though only the Almighty, in whom he didn’t believe, could make sense of the secret.
“I can’t believe it.” Rob stared at Jimmy, hopeful that reading the lines and scars on the tinker’s face might shed some light on the bombshell. But no. “Are you sure?” he asked. No reply. But Jimmy’s face said a lot. “Sorry, yes, of course you’re sure . . . ” Rob was sitting down, leaning back in his chair, shaking his head as he spoke, disbelief extending to his open, palms-up hands. “Who told you?” The look in Jimmy’s eyes told Rob he had stepped over the boundary of Traveler etiquette. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“All the times I’ve spent with Don and he never once let on that they were close, never mind married.” McAllister was talking to himself, rolling the information around his brain, his tongue. “Married. Don. Mrs. Smart was . . . Mrs. McLeod.”
“I’ll always think of her as Mrs. Smart,” Rob said. “It really suited her.”
Rob looked from Jimmy to McAllister and back again. He saw neither of them was going to say it, so he said, “They’re bigamists.”
“Maybe,” Jimmy answered. “Don’t know for sure.”
“No,” McAllister said. “Legally it would be Mrs. Joyce McLeod, as we now know she was, who was the bigamist, and only if she went through another marriage ceremony.” He knew he was being pedantic, but words were his refuge in times of distress. “But where does this get us?” McAllister was asking himself, not looking for an answer.
“With more questions,” Jimmy said. He didn’t tell them, and he would only have told McAllister if he could articulate the will-o’-the-wisp thought, but there was something more, something his mother couldn’t bring herself to say.
He thought it was about the brothers, but maybe not; he felt, rather than saw, her distress, the way his mother’s shoulders rounded, the way she held her cardigan or her coat tighter to her, the way she complained about the cold and the damp and the old ways vanishing; all this from a woman who never complained, who would give you a clip round the ear if you complained, even when there was only tatties with eyes and beards to eat until the next pennies or halfpennies or farthings came in. She would say, Be thankful for what you have, Jimmy McPhee. There’s a lot worse off than us.
Although happy to help anyone escape from the law, Jimmy also had a vested interest; Don McLeod was a valuable source of information, the keeper of the town’s secrets he had called himself more than once.
Knowing a person’s secrets gives you power, his mother had taught him. And Jimmy knew the reverse was true. The less anyone knows about you the better. His brother Keith, the clever one, had once thought that that would have made a good clan motto, in Gaelic of course.
“I’m off.” Jimmy downed the remains of his whisky. “I’ll be in touch.”
McAllister was not completely surprised at Jimmy’s abrupt departure—that was the way of the man—but he had wanted to talk more.
“I’ll see maself out.” Jimmy needed to leave, to avoid a conversation with McAllister. He needed to think about what he had previously dismissed as unthinkable. He needed to talk to his mother.
With the sound of the front door shutting, all Rob could think to do was to make another pot of tea.
“Have a drink, for goodness’ sakes.” McAllister caught Rob watching him pouring another dram.
R
ob ignored him. “I presume I can tell my father this . . . ” He was about to say “news” but “revelation” seemed more appropriate.
“Jimmy didn’t say not to.”
“It’s late. I’ll see you tomorrow.” What Rob meant was, he needed to talk to his father, immediately. Needed his father’s calm steady unshockable voice.
McAllister, his eyes glazed as though looking down into an invisible dark cavern and seeing nothing but blackness upon blackness, only nodded.
Rob left.
The fire shifted in the grate. The bottle steadily diminished. Still the blackness did not clear. But flickering forms appeared and disappeared; foremost Joanne. McAllister was unable to articulate the sense of loss; he who prided himself in being a wordsmith could not find the words for the visceral pain he experienced when he recollected her laughter when in Neil’s company, the way her body bent towards him when they were talking.
He had a vision of her hair; the way it fell half over her face when she was unsure of herself—which was less and less, he now realized. I wanted her to fly, he remembered, I encouraged her, but not to fly so far away from me.
He became aware of the chill creeping in from under doors and floorboards and through the invisible gaps in the hundred-year-old house. He reached for the bottle, found it empty. He reached for a cigarette but his mouth felt like the full ashtray sitting on the table. He went to the sink, drank water straight from the tap, a habit of his childhood when he could never stand still enough to find a cup and fill it.
He went to bed. This time he slept. But in the morning, he wished he hadn’t. The dreams were not the usual—not the ones where he was running to catch his brother before he, or sometimes another little boy, fell over and over into the river the canal the loch the water.
This time in his dream he was a Glasgow Professor Henry Higgins—teaching his Eliza, his Joanne, how to behave. And once more he was running, as the more she learned, the further he was left behind. He was running. She was laughing. She was running. He was desperate.
When he awoke, and even though the dream was only half remembered, he told himself he had no right to judge her, no right to tell Joanne whom she should love.
When he went to the kitchen to face the debris of the previous night, the sight of the ashtray he had forgotten to empty left him miserable. And no further in his quest to free Don McLeod.
* * *
Angus McLean went to the station to meet the advocate and his assistant off the Edinburgh train. As he watched the passengers disembarking from the first-class carriage he instantly knew which was Mr. William Brodie, QC. Angus examined the short stout man—“compact” was the advocate’s own description of his roly-poly shape. Although the QC was clad in a sharp midnight-blue suit cut by a most expensive tailor to minimize the client’s width, the local solicitor, much to his surprise, saw that the advocate’s tie was of such a virulent scarlet-verging-on-pink, it was a beacon on an otherwise drab day. Angus also fancied he had caught a glimpse of socks of the same color. He confirmed the sighting as he ushered the visitors into the Station Hotel, where the lawyers were staying for the night.
A table had been booked for luncheon. Mr. Brodie, QC, had communicated that business would not begin until after they had eaten. Angus McLean knew that no business could be conducted during meals, in spite of his son’s assertion that that was a business practice in the United States of America.
After a meal where the advocate had praised the fish and his deputy had said nothing, Angus McLean suggested they walk the length of Church Street to gain an idea of the geography of the crime scene.
“Good,” replied Mr. Brodie, QC. “I need to walk off the train journey. Mind you,” he added, “the kippers at breakfast were very good indeed.”
As they reached the intersection between Church and Union streets, Angus pointed eastward towards the scene of the crime and westward towards the police station. The assistant opened a sketchbook and started to draw a diagram.
“So,” said Mr. Brodie, “the man who discovered the body ran all the way up Church Street to the police station . . . ”
“Then up a steep brae . . . ”
“Then he ran all the way back with a constable in tow . . . ”
“A sergeant . . . ” Angus said. But the idea of Sergeant Patience running struck him as unlikely.
At the top of the stairs beneath the former abbey wall, they paused to allow the artist-lawyer time to catch up on his sketching. They examined the gate to the churchyard, then walked slowly down the steps to the back porch of the church that bordered the other side.
“This is where the victim was found?”
“Yes.”
As Angus watched, the advocate examined the door handles, the lock, the iron balustrades, the stone wall with the gravestones towering above them, oblivious of the curious looks from passersby. Angus also watched the deputy advocate hold up his pencil to judge the distance between objects, mutter approximate distances, and note them beside his sketch of the scene. The team of garrulous advocate and silent deputy advocate were working as professionally as a pair of music-hall artists who had been treading the boards, perfecting their routines, for decades.
Angus glanced at the sketchpad and saw the detailed plan with the river, the churches, and the steps, all in reassuring detail.
“I can help you fill in the names of the landmarks,” he offered. He received a nod in reply; not from impoliteness, but his was concentration so intense, soaking up every detail of the surroundings, the artist-advocate dared not look up to speak.
“Now.” Mr. Brodie, QC, was wiping his hands on a hankie, which, Angus was pleased to observe, was traditional white. “Let us now examine the location and home of Mr. Donal Dewar McLeod.”
They crossed the street. A man in black who looked like an usher from one of the many churches on Church Street stood and stared at the strangers. He did not look as though he approved of the trio of lawyers, especially one with a pink tie.
Angus produced the key to the gate, which his secretary had tied to the house key with a piece of twine, a brown cardboard label attached.
Mr. Brodie pounced. “Did the keys come like that?”
Angus was startled. “Like what?”
“Tied together, man.”
“No, my secretary . . . ”
“Please instruct her not to interfere with evidence.”
Angus put the key in the lock of the iron-barred gate, and tried not to show his discomfort. Of course, he is correct, he was thinking, but there’s no need to lecture me as though I was his junior.
They walked down the close, the deputy advocate measuring the length in strides. “Twenty-three feet,” the deputy announced, and noted it on his diagram of the scene of the crime.
“Is the gate normally locked?” Mr. Brodie asked Angus.
“At night, yes.”
“Did Mrs. Smart have a key?”
“I . . . Yes. I believe so.” But the mention of her name had made Angus hesitate.
“Spit it out, man.”
As the advocate said this, Angus heard the faint resonance of the accent of a man from Moray—a neighboring county of phlegmatic farmers not known for flights of fancy, and he immediately felt confident.
“She is, was, not Mrs. Smart. Not legally.” Now he had the attention of both advocates. “I only heard of this last night. My son, Rob, is a journalist. He occasionally helps me with research and he will bring us copies of the relevant documents. It seems that Joyce Mackenzie married Mr. Donal McLeod in 1920.”
“That information will support the prosecution.” Mr. Brodie saw Angus McLean nodding. “If McLeod is her legal husband, he inherits everything. Premeditation for monetary gain would be my argument if I were prosecuting.”
Angus was looking at his shoes; brown brogues, he saw they could do with a polish. What he was hearing from Mr. Brodie, QC, had been his own thoughts when Rob had told him of Don McLeod’s marriage.
“Miss Joyce Ma
ckenzie, who was perhaps Mrs. Donal McLeod, left for India, alone, in 1921?”
“Early 1922, so I have been informed,” Angus said.
“I see.” Early in his career William Brodie, as he then was, had adopted a policy to use the neutral phrase “I see” even when he had no idea what was happening. This had added to the reputation of omniscience that attached to the name Mr. William Brodie, QC.
Angus held up the keys and said, “Shall we go inside?”
“The courtyard first, if you don’t mind.” Angus was again surprised, this time by the man’s accent. Not Scottish, he was thinking, public school definitely, Eton perhaps. He was delighted when he later asked the deputy where he went to school and his guess was confirmed.
A tap came out of the wall above a drain in the far corner of the courtyard. To one side there was a block of granite, its upper surface polished smooth. Behind it, a crevice in the wall looked right for the storage of a knife and big enough to store a cleaver. The wall above was the only one not part of a building, but as it was at least one and a half stories high, and of a smooth construction, they thought it unlikely anyone would come into the courtyard over the top.
“This is where Mr. McLeod prepared fish,” Angus informed them.
“Sensible fellow.” Mr. Brodie was ferreting around the niche with his hand. Finding nothing except dried fish scales, he nodded and walked to the front door of the narrow terrace. Angus produced the key, opened the door, and stood aside to allow the Edinburgh lawyers first entry.
Facing the door rose a staircase where many policemen’s boots had left mud on the carpet. At the left of the staircase was a coatrack, to the right a door leading to the sitting room. At the back another door lead to a galley kitchen. There were the remains of a fire in the grate, the remains of a newspaper on the table and a bottle of whisky—empty. On top of a bookshelf, crammed with titles familiar to the advocate, sat a vase with the remains of what looked like roses.
Roses in September, Angus McLean thought, they must have been expensive. Then he remembered Mrs. Smart’s walled garden.
Angus could not bring himself to join the others upstairs in the bedroom. As he waited, he thought the house felt forsaken. But not as terrible as the cell where Don is now in residence.