A Small Death in the Great Glen

by A. D. Scott

  “One Russian helped me after my wife died,” the story continued. “The war was over, we were free—ha! Free! It took three years of my pitiful salary to bribe my way back to a mine job in Poland.

  “I didn’t want any of the Russians to know my background. I am from the bourgeoisie. I am just a miner, I told them. When I arrived back in Silesia, it is very hard, but in the country people eat better. In winter they hunt wild birds, that is if you know your way through the minefields. In summer the forests are full of people searching for fruit, nuts, mushrooms. It is like the Middle Ages.

  “Then I get permission to visit my family village. I find that my mother is dead also. Then I meet my mother’s friend Madame Kowalski, Peter’s mother.”

  Peter leapt from his chair, his long strong arms grabbing Karl by the lapels, shaking him, shouting, swearing at him in Polish, yelling, “She’s alive? What do you know? Why didn’t you tell me?” followed by unrepeatable curses and finally tears.

  Angus’s secretary came bursting in to see what the commotion was. Gino reached up, patting his future son-in-law on the back, trying to soothe him as one would soothe a heartbroken child; Karl slunk lower in his chair, doing nothing to ward off the attack.

  Angus waved his secretary out with “It’s fine, it’s fine” and when the commotion had subsided, he topped up the glasses with a healthy dram of whisky.

  “I must tell you,” Karl said simply. “I must go on.” He took a gulp of the spirits and took up the story again. “My mother’s family is Jarosz, they have been trusted servants on the Kowalski estates for centuries.”

  Slowly, recognition dawned on Peter. He nodded.

  “Madame Kowalski knows Peter went to Scotland. She had news from a priest who works with the Red Cross. She learned of the town where you are. She wants me to escape, to find her son, and she says to me to have a new life. She gave me gold. This is how I am here.”

  Tiring visibly, he looked down at the floor.

  “First, I had to find a ship. Gdansk, anywhere in Poland, is too dangerous, many guards, traitors reporting anyone looking for escape. So I take many months, through the marshes and forests, to make it to Tallinn, then weeks to find a captain who would take me. I give him all the money I have left.

  “When we arrive here I want to go to the police. But the son of a Russian bear, he said no. He knows there will be big trouble for losing a crewman when he gets back home. He asks for more money, but I have none. He asks me what I hide in my coat, I don’t tell him. He hits me, I hit him, but he is big, big man and he throws me into the river. I nearly die. But the fishermen catch me and take me to their Gypsy camp. That is my story.”

  The rough kindness of strangers who had helped him out on many, many parts of his journey was a story for another, later time. And the final cruelty, the irony that broke his carefully constructed carapace of courage, what he was unable to tell his listeners just yet, was that he had failed in his mission. On the cusp of freedom, the precious, carefully guarded package, carried on the long march across the occupied Baltic states, across the North Sea, the package entrusted to him by Peter’s mother, carefully hidden deep in the pockets of his greatcoat, was lost, stolen by the scoundrel of a sea captain.

  It was Gino who broke the long silence.

  “We have the necklace.”

  “The necklace?” Karl stared in shock. “Madame Kowalski’s necklace?”

  Angus McLean looked completely lost.

  “Why did you not tell Peter about his mother and the necklace?” Gino continued, “I do not believe you tell us all your story.”

  The reply was a short sharp bark of a laugh, perhaps a cough.

  “How to explain my idiocy, my cowardice, my failure …” He stopped, momentarily lost in thought, then stood, drew himself up and, in a quaintly old-fashioned gesture, bowed from the waist.

  “Mr. Corelli, I promise you, as a Polish compatriot and a gentleman, I did not steal Madame Kowalski’s necklace. Please believe me it is my deep regret I lost it. I came back to the town to get it from that lying Russian thief. But then I am told that the ship has sailed.”

  Gino did believe him. He knew the times threw up strange tales. He knew you could never judge a man for what he did in the darkness of war. His innate kindness overtook his doubt. “Hold up, my friend. We will explain all later. First we must feed you.” Gino smiled up at Karl. “My sister and daughter are waiting.”

  FIVE

  The next day there was a distinct late-autumn briskness to the air. The hurry-hurry-it-will-soon-be-winter wind, intent on clearing the last of the leaves, sent them scurrying along the riverbank. They tumbled this way and that, tiny disembodied hands attempting to escape the cruel blast. The wide shallow river, sprinting the short journey from loch to sea, had an icy hue, reflecting the pale blue of the high sky. The snow line on the distant mountains crept lower with each passing day.

  Rob, Joanne, Don and McAllister came into the office over the space of two minutes. Discarding coats, scarves, hats, mittens and, in Rob’s case, extravagant motorbike gear, they gathered round the table.

  “Right, a quick review of what we’ve got for tomorrow’s paper. Firstly, Rob”—McAllister poked the pages of the article before him—“I like this, necessarily brief for the moment, but nicely put. I know all the shenanigans with the Polish man and the tinkers can’t be written up, and I can’t say as I blame them for wanting to keep out of it, but still, this is good. So, fill me in on the status quo of the lost-but-now-found Polish gentleman.”

  “Peter Kowalski is out; the other man, Karl, or Karel I-can’t-pronounce-it, was in, all hokey-cokey like, one Pole in, one Pole out, but now he’s out on bail too,” Rob informed McAllister. “But my dad, sorry, Mr. McLean the solicitor, believes it will all be fine. He’s now working on sorting out the legalities of the Polish not-sailor’s status.”

  “I still don’t get why the tinkers will say nothing,” Joanne started.

  “Don’t want trouble,” Rob told her.

  “But they’re the ones who rescued him from the river and can back up his story of his being beaten up.”

  “They helped a wanted man. End of story as far as Inspector Tompson is concerned.”

  McAllister felt sorry for Rob. “When it’s all sorted you can write this, make it a big story, human interest stuff.”

  “Aye … when!”

  “Patience, laddie, you’re only a cub reporter. You’ll get there one day. Joanne next. I love the bit you did on the Highland Ball.”

  “Don helped a lot.” She was pink with pleasure.

  “Right, next. Anyone got anything more on the wee boy in the canal?” The editor raised the one subject they had all unconsciously been avoiding.

  “I’ve got my spies,” Don said, “but nothing so far.”

  “I’ve nothing either,” said Rob. “My contact, she said not much is happening. The fatal-accident inquiry convenes again tomorrow. Of course it would be a day after deadline.”

  “We’ll make a newspaperman out of you yet. Right, anything else?”

  “I like your piece about the boy.” Don looked uncomfortable even slightly admitting he may have got it wrong. “You’re right, boss, telling a wee bit about him coming from the Islands to start a new life, his school and his train set, well, it made it all the more real, his death. And leaving out the parents, that was smart.” He noticed Joanne’s puzzled look. “In case they did him in or something.”

  “Don!”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time, lass.”

  “Thanks, Don.” McAllister perused the layout spread across the table. “It’s not big changes I want, or at least not yet, just a wee bit of the color of life. And yes, death.” He ticked off the pages and passed them over to Don. “Right.” He stood. “Let’s get to it, we’ve a paper to put to bed.”

  The sound and smell of a newspaper were quite different on press day. The clatter of the presses, although in a sub-sub-basement, made its way up the three flights of
spiral stone staircase. The newsroom smelt of ink on paper, acid on metal, and the many cigarettes needed to produce a newspaper. The office staff had left and the printers were engaged, deep in the dungeons of the building, in their dark secret art of picking up the type, setting it with meticulous precision and very small tweezers, with, courtesy of union rules, only Don McLean allowed to stand in the hallowed area of the stone to check the proof pages as they were printed up. Toward midnight the presses would roll and another Highland Gazette, the most recent in ninety-odd years of the Highland Gazette would be printed.

  But at eight o’clock on this Wednesday night, it was well dark, October black starlight dark. The lights from the eyrie in the heart of the town were a lone beacon; everything except the pubs and the chip shop had closed long since.

  Don was working steadily checking pages. The old newspaperman's trick of reading the typeset pages upside down and back to front never ceased to amaze Joanne. Thinking to stir up mischief, Don had thrown out a tidbit of gossip on an outgoing ring of smoke, as he and McAllister finished up their night’s work, leaving the printers to get on with their job. “By the way, a friend of yours said to say he was asking for you.”

  “A friend?”

  “Mr. Grieg.”

  “The town clerk? He’s no friend—barely an acquaintance.”

  “Not what he says,” Don informed him. “Bosom pals you are. So he tells everyone and—”

  Before Don could continue, McAllister stopped him.

  “Hold on.” Eight o’clock had just finished striking on the church clock. “My stomach thinks ma throat’s been cut. What do you say to a fish supper and a dram back at my place?”

  “Make that fish, black pudding, a double portion of chips, two pickled onions and a pickled egg.” He counted the order off on his fingers. “All them pickles go well with ma pickled liver.”

  On the climb up the brae to McAllister’s house, like big boys without their mother to stop them, they tore open the newspaper and tore into the finger-burning fish and chips. The biting North Sea wind made them glad of the hot package keeping at least the hands warm. Once home and with a beer each, they settled down, feet on the fender by the kitchen fire, content.

  “He’s a fly one, thon Grieg, no doubt about it,” Don started. McAllister waited expectantly. “Look, John, there’s a story there. I can smell it. But pinning it down? The man seems to be everywhere when it comes to getting hold of land. At the right price naturally. The land where the tinkers camp every winter—which is now to be industrial land—that place has always been traditional common land where the drovers from the west left their beasts before the auctions. Now the town council is taking it over. Fair enough, times change, there’s few drovers left and it is some of the only flat land left in town. But a wee bird, well, two young blokes from the planning office, told me they were uneasy at some of the deals being done. They’ll talk. Off the record, naturally.”

  “Naturally.” McAllister thought about it. “You have a good nose. If you say there’s a story there, well and good. Goodness knows there are enough people in local government everywhere with their fingers in the pie. There’s a lot of money in this postwar building boom and it’s not only the cities that have avaricious local governments.” He gazed into the fire, giving it some thought.

  “From what I know, I think this is only one man with ideas above his station. Fancies himself as a laird, I hear. He’s started by building a great big house, an abomination of a baronial-style mansion, on rezoned land west of town.”

  “The Gazette can’t have a go at the town council, nor its officials, without a cast-iron case.”

  “Jenny McPhee, as well as the lads from Planning, know a thing or two.”

  “Does she now? And what else?”

  He waited, watched, as Don started winding himself up—to tell or not to tell.

  “I’ve come across Bill Ross’s name from time to time—in connection with his building contract out west. His was also one of the building firms on Grieg’s new mansion, then he gets a contract way out of his territory, across in the west. And although that should be a county council decision, not the town council’s, there is talk that Grieg put in a word—at the very least.”

  “Joanne’s husband seems quite a character.” McAllister sighed. “Right, tell me again, in detail. No, wait. Let’s settle in.”

  McAllister went out, came back with a coal scuttle, banked up the fire, then fetched two more bottles of beer from the scullery, poured them. He offered Don a cigarette, lit up, then proclaimed, “I’m all ears.”

  The next morning, with the new newspaper fresh and crisp in front of them, Joanne, Rob, Don and McAllister sat reviewing that day’s edition. Friday was traditionally a quiet, tidying-up sort of day and Joanne was officially not supposed to be at work but she loved the Friday-morning peruse-the-paper get-together.

  McAllister finished reading, shook his copy of the Gazette back into shape. “Everybody, well done. We’re a long way off the newspaper I know we can be, but we’re getting there. Thanks.” He rose.

  “You’ll fill the lass in on the other stuff?” Don wanted out of that particular task.

  “Oh. Aye. Joanne, in my office in five minutes.”

  He and Don left. Rob shrugged a “no idea” and he too left.

  Joanne hated that. Why did she have to wait five minutes, why not tell her immediately? It was like being at school waiting for the interview with the headmistress, knowing you were in for it. Mystified, she sighed, suspicious it would not be good news, fearing it would be one more burden she didn’t need.

  McAllister had a propensity to sit back and view events with an amused detachment; nothing to do with him, he wasn’t a character in the events, just the instigator. In other words, as someone had once said, he was a born editor.

  The goings-on with Joanne—her lapses into unhappiness, the way her husband so obviously saw her as a possession, the bruises she tried to but couldn’t always hide—he tried not to judge. It appalled him but he had to admit it was not uncommon. A man had a right to do what he did within his family.

  And somewhere below the surface of this and other small towns and villages everywhere, he knew there were other visceral tides—dislike of change, anything new, anything, anyone different. Those with a university education, those who were deemed to live above their station, those who spoke or dressed differently, those who didn’t go to church, didn’t look after their gardens, women who wore trousers or makeup, who hung out the washing on a Sunday, all were victims of the susurration of gossip that permeated the town.

  The distrust, even dislike, of outsiders, the Italians, the Poles, the English, all that was spoken of openly. No one saw anything wrong in calling foreigners by belittling slang names. God help anyone with a Germanic-sounding name, even if their family had been in Scotland since the Hanseatic treaties. All this, McAllister knew, would reflect on whether the charge against Peter Kowalski would be dropped and whether the other Polish man, newly escaped from the Russian occupiers, would get a fair hearing.

  The interview with the drowned boy’s parents also cast a shadow on McAllister’s soul. It brought to the surface the bright pain of another boy, another drowning. He shook himself, hearing his mother’s voice telling him, often, that too much thinking never did anyone any good. As he aged, he was inclined to agree.

  But the previous night’s conversation with Don was sharp in his mind.

  Right, he thought, Joanne, he had to talk to her. It was only fair to warn her of the gossip. He walked into the reporters’ room.

  “Joanne?”

  The telephone in her hand, she held up a finger in a “one minute” gesture.

  “Yes, who? Mr. McLeod? Hold on.” She had detected Don’s laborious shuffle coming up the stairs. “Who shall I say is calling? Righty-oh.” She held out the receiver. “Don, a Mr. Burke for you.”

  McAllister was decidedly uncomfortable telling Joanne of the rumors about her husband. Bill�
��s name has been mentioned in the gossip about dodgy dealings with the town council, he informed her. She was not at all pleased.

  “Typical,” she fumed. “All the goings-on over council contracts being awarded to favorites, relatives, those that went to the right school, those with families of influence, ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ kind of thing, and there’s Bill, with none of the right connections, trying to make a go of it, fairly and honestly …”

  She had no idea if this was really so. She just presumed it must be so because that is what Bill had told her.

  “Then, when they, those jumped-up, too-big-for-their-boots, favor-for-a-favor, doing-deals-on-the-side councilors think that maybe they’ve been found out, who gets the blame? My husband and hardworking people like him.”

  Joanne had to stop to breathe.

  “Honestly I could—I don’t know—I could wring their necks.”

  She made a fierce twisting gesture, demonstrating the time-honored way of dispatching a feathered fowl. Certainly not squeamish, was Joanne Ross.

  “Finished?” McAllister inquired with a slight smile. He, like many a chicken before him, had been quite intimidated by the gesture.

  “It makes me so mad.”

  “I know. Can’t say as I blame you. Don and I thought you should know the rumors and—”

  “McAllister.” Don walked in. A grim-faced Rob followed close behind, as yet unseen by Joanne.

  “What’s the matter?” She quipped, “Your friend Mr. Burke, or was it Mr. Hare, from the mortuary got a wee tip for you?” One look at his face and Joanne felt her heart leap. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It’s about the boy.” He looked straight at McAllister as though this was somehow his fault, as though the new editor’s wishes for something, anything, newsworthy to happen had brought this upon them.

  “He was dead before he went into the water. It was no accident.”

  There was nothing Joanne or Rob or McAllister or Don McLean could say. The news stunned them.