by A. D. Scott
“And what proof do you have for this preposterous story?”
“I’ll just have a wee word with your wife, point her in the right direction, let her find out the truth. If she asks, I’m sure she will be told.”
“I’ve done nothing to you,” Grieg protested.
“Yes you have. You set out to destroy my husband and his company so you could get work and materials on the cheap for your Rowan Lodge scheme.”
“Why would you want to save your drunk of a husband? He has nothing good to say about you.” This felt like an ice dagger to the heart, but she would never give him the satisfaction of a reaction. She sat, immobile.
“You can’t prove anything.” His agitation, desperation Joanne thought, deflated him and he floundered down to reality like a huge collapsing dirigible.
“You’re right. I can’t. Not without compromising a lovely young lass who doesn’t deserve any more trouble. But I am prepared to tell Mr. McAllister and Don McLeod and your wife, Mrs. Grieg, and my mother-in-law, and all my women friends and”—she’d run out of names, then inspiration struck—“and the whole of the Kyle Women’s Institute.”
“Fine, fine. You’ve made your point.” He stared at her, reappraising her. “I can hardly credit that a minister’s daughter would scheme like this.”
“I can and I will, Mr. Grieg. Just like you.”
“Tell me what you want.” He was attempting to be all business and took out his fountain pen, unscrewing the top, but he could not disguise the shake as he went to write.
Joanne knew it; he had folded. Always stand up to a bully, she reminded herself.
“I’ve told you. It’s simple. Bill will put in an application for an extension to finish the contract, citing delays due to weather.” He wrote. “All work already done will be paid for by the end of December. That has to be put in writing to Bill. You can keep your own wee scheme going; nothing will change. The local firm can finish Bill’s contract along with yours, but you must use your own materials, paid for by yourself, not Bill’s supplies.”
He nodded agreement and sat back, deflated but relieved.
Joanne, realizing she was winning, continued. May as well grab the chance, she thought.
“Secondly, I want a council house. In my name only.”
That made him stare. “And may I ask why?”
“No, you may not.”
“It’s not so easy. The council waiting list is very long, and you’ve already got a house, a good one.”
“I’ll have one of those prefabs you’ve been going to pull down the last five years. No one wants them.”
Joanne knew it would take them at least another five years to demolish those houses. If ever.
“I’ll see to it. But it’ll have to be a swap, your bigger house for a prefab.”
“Agreed. Finally, I want you to acknowledge your daughter, even if it’s in secret.”
“Now hold on. That’s none of your business.”
“Mr. McLean is a fair and discreet solicitor. Mhairi doesn’t want a fuss either. Just do it.”
This is too easy, thought Joanne. “One final thing.”
“What now?” Grieg was exhausted. No one had ever turned the tables on him before.
“I want an absolute promise that you will never mention this conversation to anyone. Ever. Otherwise you know the consequences.”
“I promise.” The look of relief on his face made Joanne want to laugh. “You have my word of honor on that.”
“That’s not worth much, is it, Mr. Grieg?”
And with that Joanne left the room, shut the door behind her and stood shaking in the corridor outside.
“Oh my goodness me!” She grinned, amazed at herself. She ran down the stairs, skipped along the corridors, fairly dancing along the riverbank, full of glee and desperate to catch Don McLeod, to recount the whole interview, in every tiny detail.
Then she stopped. “What on earth possessed me?” She grabbed the railing on the riverbank, her heart racing. She had asked for a house, had made the decision—she was leaving Bill. That hadn’t been her intention. She turned back. Then stopped. It didn’t have to be a final, final step. She would not put her children through the disgrace. But it could be a bargaining chip when she spoke to Bill. She tried to laugh; I’ve been spending too much time with Don McLeod. The river went out of focus. She shook her head, blinking rapidly. A voice, a well-modulated, bitter voice, came down through the years, her mother’s voice, You’ve made your choice, Joanne, it said, and forever more you will have to live with it. “No, Mother.” This she spoke aloud, then quickly looked round to see if anyone overheard. But the wet, cold pavements were empty.
Scared but terminally optimistic, she went over the possibility of a new beginning, of living up to her own expectations of a single life with two children. There would be the condemnation from town and kirk, the challenge of working on the Gazette and keeping house, her mother-in-law’s reaction, and her sister and brother-in-law and how hurt they would be. And how would she tell the girls? And tell Bill and get away safe? And a new house, her very own, how would that be?
“Well, at least it will be exciting,” she told the cherry tree beside her.
SEVENTEEN
Eight-thirty-November-morning light was only one or two notches up from dark. Four-thirty in the afternoon and dark would return, leaving the counties of the north shut in under an immense blackout curtain. The MacLean household was lit up like the Titanic. Rob felt the need for brightness before tackling his morning. Digging with gusto into the full Scottish breakfast of eggs, bacon, black pudding, white pudding, tattie scones and toast with homemade whisky marmalade, Rob greeted his father with a full mouth, a grunt and a gesture toward the frying pan.
“If you’re offering, then yes.”
His father had just come back from his morning constitutional. His face glowed in the heat of the kitchen.
“So, to what do we owe this banquet? A promotion? An engagement? Last request before the scaffold?”
“I felt like cooking,” Rob explained. “I’ll be going into work later but first I’ve an interview next door with Father Morrison. He’s off to a new job down south.”
“Mr. McAllister put you up to this?”
“No, it was my idea.” Rob was pleased with himself.
His father looked over his spectacles at his son. He was confident in his boy but uneasy just the same. Rob caught his father’s frown and was grateful.
“Don’t worry, if he turns obstreperous, I’ll yell for Mum. That’ll put the fear of God in him.”
“A fear of God appears to be distinctly lacking in this case.”
“Dad, you surely don’t agree with McAllister’s wild theories?”
“No, I don’t. It is an impossible thought.” He hesitated. “All the same, call me when you’re finished.”
The doorstep of the Big House took up more space than most people’s kitchens, Rob reflected, and the house was as welcoming as a vault. Hand poised on the bell, the realization that this was the last place wee Jamie had been seen alive chilled him. Ridiculous. McAllister had two and two making thirty-nine. Rubber footsteps came squelching down the linoleum in the hallway.
“Here we go.” Rob prepared a Cheshire cat smile.
Father Morrison filled the doorway, cheeerful as ever. “Come in, come in. A dreich day. At least you didn’t have far to walk.”
Rob followed him into the sitting room, where a freshly lit fire was struggling to stay alight against the frequent blowbacks. A dim overhead light, with a parchment-colored shade, sent out a watery custard light.
The house and the room were far different from Rob’s childhood memories of when his grandparents lived here. Ornate sideboards, bookcases and a desk were still in situ—too large to move. Some of the original carpets and runners had also been left behind—too old to matter. What was different was the general air of shabbiness and the faint institutional smell of boiled cabbage and disinfectant. Close up, the
priest too had an institutional tinge; boiled-tattie complexion, musty soutane and a home haircut. He was big, granted, but frightening? No. Up until now, Rob had always thought of Father Morrison as a nice man—if he thought of him at all. Now, in his newfound role of investigative journalist, he furtively examined the man. He searched for the right word. Gone to seed, like a former sportsman down on his luck; that was it. That is how he would describe him—if Don didn’t cut it out.
Exactly one hour later Rob scurried down the driveway, turned left to his own house, walked through to the kitchen and dropped into a chair.
“That didn’t take long.” Margaret was ironing. Rob sat silent. She made tea. She let him be. Waited. Elbows on the well-scrubbed, well-worn table, he cradled the cup, taking slow sips.
“Mum, you know I love you.”
Margaret was shocked. A normal Highlander did not say such things beyond the age of six.
“My dear Robbie. Tell me about it.”
Shaken, embarrassed, a wee boy again, he told her.
“I don’t know what to say.” She started. But she did. “Rob, we have always taught you to believe in goodness and in kindness and honesty. So we must suppose that the reverse exists. Look at what’s happened and is happening in Europe. Your father and I went through two wars. We know evil exists. I try not to see it, but it is there, in big and small ways. And always balanced by good.”
Rob nodded.
“This morning, in Grandma McLean’s old house, for me a happy house, I felt something that made me feel sick.” He looked up at her. “The trouble is, well, it was nothing really. It just gave me the creeps, that’s all.” He shook himself like a dog after a dip in a swamp. “I feel such a fool for overreacting.”
She listened, didn’t say much, just murmured reassurances. But Margaret was seething inside, feeling that her only child, her sunny boy, was losing his innocence.
Rob left for work, having told her a simple version of what had happened. Yes, Rob assured her, he was fine. And no, Margaret assured him, she wouldn’t say anything to his father about Rob being upset; she would just give him the facts. Then, after waving him and his motorbike out the gate, she called her husband. She didn’t know what to think. Rob assured her again that it was nothing. It was only some photos, he said. But her first reaction was the same as Rob’s; there was something unsavory about the obsession with young boys. Dozens of photos, Rob said, and sheets and sheets of negatives, all of boys.
She phoned her husband. She told him. Quickly, quietly, no drama in her voice, she related the bare facts. No need to worry, she said; it’s probably harmless, she said. She put down the phone, leaving Angus McLean to draw his own conclusions, to exercise his eminent sense of right and reason. She then went round the house locking every door, every window, closing curtains as though death had visited. She switched on every lamp in the house, banked up the fire and even then, she still felt chilled. She remembered. She could now see for herself how the idea had come about; a hoodie crow indeed. But the step between a distasteful hobby and the killing of a child, that was a step she could not contemplate.
Don walked into McAllister’s room, a cup of tea in one hand and the layout in the other.
“Am I interrupting?” He nodded to Jimmy McPhee.
“Yes,” McAllister told him.
Don was not in the least offended—he knew he would find out what was going on eventually.
“When you’re done here, a word?” he asked Jimmy.
“Aye, I’ll see you after,” Jimmy agreed.
McAllister closed his office door.
Jimmy McPhee went straight to the point.
“I didn’t tell you everything when you came to our place. But ma mother thinks you should know.” He left McAllister in no doubt that if he had had his way, this conversation would not be taking place.
He told his story straight, in his harsh, crackling voice, speaking in the local dialect with the local speech pattern of glottal stops and swallowed words and sentences spoken on an ingoing breath. He dropped in the occasional Glasgow swear word, picked up from his time on the boxing circuit.
McAllister kept his head down through most of the monologue, allowing Jimmy McPhee a private space to remember.
“We were at the berries one summer, in Blair, I was eleven, but small, still am, and runnin’ round, driving everyone daft. And I was always in fights.
“Ma, she had this notion to get at least one more of us educated and she had heard of a place in Glasgow where you could go to a good school for free if you were any good at sport an’ if you were poor. We definitely made it in on the poor bit, an’ I wasnae a bad boxer neither.”
Speaking with the ease of a natural storyteller, he told it as a tale from a distant past, a story that had happened to someone else.
“So there I was, a tough skinny wee tyke, boxing and training and trying to put on a bit of weight. We had some good instructors, fathers or brothers, mostly Irish, mostly fine fellows, tough but fair. And school, a boarding school it is, it wasn’t so bad. I could read and write a wee bit, but I was a dab hand at the numbers. Helps me work out the odds.” He grinned.
“But you know how, as bairns, you just know some things. Not much is said, you certainly don’t discuss it, and it’s just a word here, a curse there, a warning or two. So, it wasn’t long before I heard the talk about one of the fathers. Watch out for him, dirty old B, and they all laughed. But not as bad as that other manny, the one that was supposed to be a teacher, the one that left, said one of the boys. Aye, him, said another. I was right confused. The warnings, I had no idea what it was about, I thought it meant that some of them were a bit too rough in the ring, nothing I couldn’t deal with, me being tough an all. It was not like some of the stuff the boys from the orphanage had to put up with. That was a ferocious awful place.”
They simultaneously lit a cigarette.
“So not long after, I met this father they had warned me about. He was a big man a’ right. Cheerful, smiling, Glasgow through and through. I ended up on his dormitory wing. The boys were no scared o’ him, but they didn’t like him. Me, I couldn’t see the problem. He loved all his “innocent wee souls” as he put it. There were the photos, right enough, that was his hobby and he was a dab hand at it. He liked doing the private portraits as well as the usual group shots. You were in your boxing drawers and gloves and you did the poses. It all seemed harmless enough. He did harp on a bit about nasty wee boys with dirty habits. I’d no idea what he was on about.
“So all was fine, until you started changing—you know. Then, when we had the weekly bath night, it was—all scrubbed clean are we? I’d better check. That was the inspection to see if you were clean, everywhere. He’d peer in yer lugs, inspect yer fingernails and yer hair for nits, then, making a game of it, he would check your willie. Touch it. And he’d go on about keeping yerself clean in mind and body, about how filthy thoughts and filthy habits was how the devil got into you.
“Now, I’m a tinker an’ I was that wee bit tougher than those boys, but the real difference was this; I knew my brother would listen. Keith, fifteen and strong, wi’ a good heid on him, he’d help. So one day I told ma brother. It took me a while. The man was doing nothing wrong, not really. He was a decent fellow, mostly. We all liked him, sort of, but I knew it wasn’t right.”
Jimmy looked straight at McAllister and grinned. “Us tinkers are brought up with the stallions an’ mares, we know all about nature. This wasn’t natural. So, next thing I know, Ma comes down tae Glasgow to take me back to the Highlands. We’re off on the road for the summer, she said, needs my help with the horses, she said.”
He stopped, remembering. “Aye. And that’s no all she said. She said I was a grand lad.” He grinned again. A picture of his mother as she marched off to the office of the school’s headmaster came into his head. He never knew what was said. He had no need. He never doubted his mother’s capacity to put the fear of God or of the devil into anyone. And if that failed, Jen
ny McPhee would blast the culprit with a string of tinker curses—in Gaelic.
Jimmy wasn’t finished.
“What he did, see, Father Bain, was built you up when you were young, ’specially the ones who were good boxers, made you feel so proud, someone special, he was like a real father to the boys, and many of them had no one. Then as soon as you started to become a man, he made you feel like shite. So it was nothing really, he didn’t hurt you or harm you. There were others who were right sadists, and worse. No, he was one of the good ones. But he made you feel so dirty.”
Jimmy stopped. “That’s it. If it helps.”
It took some moments for McAllister to recover.
“Jimmy, this Father Bain, was he the man who took the photos of my brother?”
“Aye, the same.”
“And have you seen this man since then? Maybe up here, in the Highlands?”
“No, I haven’t. But that doesn’t mean anything. I don’t recall bumping into any priest since I came back up north.”
“Jimmy, would you do something for me?”
Half an hour later, McAllister was still off in some distant void, but returned to the here and now by the clatter of Rob running up the stairs, banging around the reporters’ room, asking for the whereabouts of the editor. He roused himself and yelled out the door.
“In here!”
Rob blew in, still in his motorbike gear.
“So?”
“Well …” Spiral notebook in one hand, drawing pictures in the air with the other, Rob started to describe the interview with the priest.
“It was all very civilized, chummy really.”
McAllister took a second look at his junior reporter. For all his brave, look-at-me-I’m-grown-up air, the lad was shaken.
“Sit.”
Rob did as he was told, then started again.
“I asked about his past assignments. He told me; very proud of his boxing club and community work in Glasgow. But the war put an end to the boys’ club.”
McAllister stared. Then even before he heard what Rob had to tell him, he began to feel better; These shadows of coincidence, he thought, I’ve not imagined them.