by A. D. Scott
“I can’t remember where I heard it.” Joanne was fibbing; she had heard it from Mrs. Galloway, the landlady at the hotel, who’d been furious at the gossipmongering from Mrs. Mackenzie and her clique.
Elaine came back. “Sorry I took so long. More tea, Joanne? Nurse Ogilvie?”
“Is that the time?” Nurse Ogilvie was consulting the upside-down brooch-watch she habitually wore even when not in uniform. “Thank you, Mrs. Ross, you’ve reminded me I need to be back for the residents’ afternoon tea. We’re short-staffed with Elaine on her day off and Miss Ramsay now gone.” At the door she paused, looking around the kitchen, perhaps sensing, as Joanne had, that the house was only walls and a roof without the presence of Alice Ramsay.
More people cared than you will ever realize, Alice, Joanne thought.
“Ready?” McAllister appeared.
“I’m coming with you to show you the way,” Elaine said.
“Good,” McAllister replied. He was also thinking she could protect him from Hector.
Joanne asked her husband when they reached the car, “Do you have the paintings?”
“In the boot. Mind you, one of the antique dealers was keen to buy them off me. Offered me double what we’d paid.”
“You didn’t?”
“Too scared of my wife to sell, I told him.”
Joanne poked him in the ribs. “Quite right.”
They drove to the golf clubhouse, where Calum Mackenzie—miraculously without his mother—was waiting in the foyer to sign them in.
McAllister went with Calum to the bar to order. At the opposite end of the long curved counter, he spotted Dougald Forsythe. The editor knew it was not advisable for him to go anywhere near the man and had to turn away before he did something he knew he should regret but wouldn’t—like punch the man’s lights out.
Apart from being trounced by the art critic at the auction, the pain the newspaper article had caused Alice and Joanne were still sore subjects in the McAllister household. That revealing the life and locality of Miss Ramsay might have contributed to her death McAllister was uncertain, though his wife was not. But he had no doubts about Forsythe’s unprofessional, self-serving attitude.
“Keep me away from that man,” he muttered to himself.
Calum overheard. “Aye, I will.” Who signed him in? Calum was thinking.
Ten minutes or so later, Calum watched an obviously inebriated Forsythe weave his way through the tables.
“Sorry, really sorry,” he said when he bumped a table, rattling the drinks.
McAllister had his back to the room and was contemplating the vista of a sea more white than grey, gorse bushes bent landwards by ceaseless weather, and huddled competitors waiting their turn to tee off only to have the balls return in their direction in the fierce wind.
Calum contemplated waylaying the art critic, but as the man was six feet tall and drunk, he hesitated.
Too late. Forsythe was standing there, swaying slightly from his heels to the balls of his feet. Calum longed to check if the southerner was wearing the infamous patent-leather shoes, but he daren’t duck beneath the table.
“Mrs. Ross, isn’t it? Joanne—you don’t mind if I call you Joanne?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Mad at me for outbidding your husband for the drawing?” He had turned the straight-backed chair around and sat. Joanne thought the pose ridiculous. In other circumstances, she would have laughed, but she was aware of her husband’s anger and afraid of a scene in a crowded room in a distant county in an incident that might attract the police. And be reported in the local newspaper.
“Who invited you?” McAllister snapped.
“Wheesht.” Joanne put a hand on McAllister’s sleeve. “Mr. Forsythe, I wanted that drawing as a reminder of a lovely lady and a true artist,” she said. “You betrayed her. You don’t deserve to have her work.” She straightened her neck and glared at him, waiting for him to deny the accusation.
“I never meant to harm her.”
“But you did. As my husband indicated, you are not welcome.”
“All I wanted was a reminder of a talented but sadly unacknowledged Scottish female artist,” he countered.
Joanne waved her hand, swatting him away as though he were a fly on a sandwich. “We bought some of her other works, so no problem.” She was angry, yes. And upset. But seeing him now, she thought him ridiculous. His sitting on a reversed chair, his ruby-red cravat, his overlong hair, brought to mind one of McAllister’s words, said in a strong Glasgow accent: “poser.”
Caricature of an artist was Joanne’s kinder assessment.
Different, Elaine was thinking.
He’s a right character. Dougald Forsythe dumbfounded Calum.
Now is not the time or place to give him a good hiding, McAllister was telling himself. But his hands were shaking in the effort to keep them under the table.
Hector had no opinion of the man but had taken plenty of pictures, as requested. All Hec could think about were the canvas and leather bag—a poacher’s bag, he thought—and the camera and equipment, still marveling that such a precious camera and lenses were now his.
“Well, nice meeting you,” Forsythe said. His long face and his downward-turning eyes showed a weariness that almost made Joanne relent. His red-veined nose indicated years of drinking. In Joanne’s opinion and experience, drink was never an excuse for bad behavior.
“I can’t say the same, Mr. Forsythe,” she told him. “You betrayed me. Most of all, you betrayed Alice. I hope you can live with that.”
He took a step backwards, her words landing as squarely and as painfully as any punch.
No one at their table or the neighboring tables saw him leave—they were too busy admiring Joanne.
“Jings!” Hector’s eyes were round and bright, his grin almost reaching his ears. “You terrified me as much as him.”
McAllister’s shoulders were shaking in his attempt not to laugh long and loud. “That’s him told.”
Elaine and Calum were looking at each other, smiling. “Good for you,” Elaine said.
“Ever since the trial, I’ve wanted to pay back that man,” Calum added. “He made us out to be an ignorant bunch of teuchters.”
Joanne said, “If I wasn’t driving, I’d have a port to celebrate. Instead, I’ll have a shandy.”
Hector went to talk to the tournament organizers and take pictures of the returning golfers; no way would he risk his cameras in the salt-laden air. The talk returned to a discussion of the auction and the ridiculous amount Forsythe had paid for the picture. McAllister joked it might be an unknown masterpiece.
“I was sure it was Alice’s work,” Joanne said. “At least, that was the impression I got when I saw it in her kitchen.”
As they waited for Hec to return, the conversation slowed into more personal exchanges between the couples. In the far corner, next to the picture windows overlooking the first tee, McAllister noticed the man with whom he’d had an encounter in Alice Ramsay’s farmyard. He was sitting with two gentlemen. Locals, McAllister decided, though he wouldn’t have been able to say why.
McAllister had been carrying a box of books he’d purchased as a job lot after hearing they were to be thrown out. Reaching the car, keys in hand, he had been fumbling to open the boot quickly to avoid the rain.
The driver of the car next to him started the engine and began to move out, almost running over his boxes—and his feet.
“Hey, watch it!” he’d called out to the driver. But there was no slowing down, no acknowledgment, and the car continued on into the yard and down the track to town. McAllister had seen that the driver was in a chauffeur’s uniform, with a cap placed on the passenger seat. The passenger, sitting in the backseat, was as unmoved and uninterested as a shop-window dummy. This was the man now seated at the far corner of the bar. Even though he was in the company of two men who, from the way other customers addressed them, were frequent visitors of the club, the man from the car remained still and silent. Watchful.
“My round.” McAllister stood. “Calum, will you help me carry them over?” As they waited on the order, he asked, “Do you know those gentlemen over there?” He nodded towards a corner.
“Oh, aye, the big man is the chief constable, the old man is the sheriff, and the other man, I’ve never seen him before.” Calum looked carefully in the mirror to avoid turning around. “But he looks English.”
McAllister had to smile at that; any person with pale skin, a perfect suit, and a perfect haircut, perhaps even a manicure, had to be English to a young man who’d never been anywhere.
To McAllister, the man looked official. What sort of official he could only speculate, but from a branch of some government office was his supposition. Or perhaps a relative of Miss Ramsay’s? He remembered Joanne saying she thought Alice was wellborn.
Three rounds of drinks and sandwiches later, Hector returned. “Calum, I need your help wi’ names o’ the competitors. Everyone’s a Mackay or a Mackenzie up here.” He wanted to rope Calum into writing down the players’ names, the scores, and a brief commentary that Hector would pass off as his own work, as he had no time for golf.
“Oh. Right. Aye.” Calum wanted to stay; to be in the company of Mr. John McAllister, famous journalist, was an honor. And an opportunity—or so Elaine had told him.
“Hec, take a couple of interior shots,” McAllister instructed. “And”—he dropped his voice so Hector had to stand closer to hear—“get me a shot of the trophy board at the end of the room and those men sitting under it. But discreetly.”
“Hector” and “discreet” only belonged in the same sentence when applied to his photography. His art, as Hec preferred to call it.
It was midafternoon before they were ready to leave, and McAllister was not looking forward to the long drive ahead. As they walked towards the car, the clouds parted. A rainbow appeared. And in the near distance, the beach and the dunes lightened up to golden and green moving strips of color, stretching southwards to the mudflats of the mile-wide firth.
Standing atop the dune bordering the car park, surveying the empty seascape, Joanne took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the chill, ozone-laden air. Letting it out in a long, slow, deliberate stream, she exhaled the melancholy of the auction. She tried to banish thoughts of a desolate Alice Ramsay. And to dismiss the encounter with the preening peacock that was Dougald Forsythe.
In the cocoon of the car, lulled by the sound of tires on tarmac and wind rushing by, Joanne dozed, and Hector slept deeply, stretched out on the backseat with his head resting on a camera bag. She knew only the apocalypse would wake him.
She jerked to full consciousness as McAllister braked. Then cursed.
“Watch out, you bloody idiot!”
A black saloon car, driving fast, surged around them on a blind bend, before disappearing towards Dingwall. McAllister was certain it was the car he’d had the encounter with in the farmyard. But he said nothing. I took your plate number, he thought, and I will find you and report you for dangerous driving.
Joanne said, “The train south runs about now. Let’s hope he’s held up at the level crossing.”
McAllister smiled. “That’s another thing I love about you—you know all these wee bits of information.”
“Aye,” she agreed. “I don’t know a lot about anything, but I know an awful lot about nothing.”
“You’re too unkind to yourself.” He said it lightly, but it hurt him nonetheless to hear her talk like this.
“What gets me is what on earth made Alice do it?”
The swift shift in subject he was used to from his wife, but he wished it wasn’t this particular subject. And he knew she was not asking him for an answer, just thinking aloud.
“She had everything she wanted,” she continued, picturing the house, the kitchen, the garden, as it was before the auction. “A home. A beautiful garden. From what Nurse Ogilvie told me, she had friends. So why?”
“I think everyone wonders that when a person takes their own life.” McAllister spoke quietly. “And we know nothing of Miss Ramsay’s past.”
“You’re right. Why would you come back here when you could be living somewhere in southern Europe in sunshine?”
“With wine and song and art galleries,” he added.
“There is something about these mountains, these glens,” Joanne began, “this empty landscape. It gets into your heart, your veins. It mesmerizes you. Perhaps Alice was seduced by the landscape.”
“She either forgot or had never spent a nine-month winter up here,” he joked. Then, more somberly he added, “When it comes to the dead, there are always questions and seldom answers.”
Knowing that this was an eternal struggle for her husband, with his younger brother having taken his own life, she said no more. She was about to say, I’m so sorry, but knew he was trying to heal her of her constant need to apologize. Sorry is such an inadequate and overused word, he’d told her. Instead, she reached over and squeezed his hand. She was right. The touch of her skin expressed more than could ever be said.
CHAPTER 8
Alice has on walking boots and a waterproof jacket—the disreputable one with the many pockets for camera and film, sketchpad, pencils, pen, magnifying glass, penknife, big red-spotted hankie, and chocolate. Her smaller camera, on a strap fashioned from a torn strip of silk scarf, is around her neck.
She watches her visitor glance at the pictures on the wall,. Then pause before a slight painting of wildflowers in a blue-and-white-striped milk jug. Done as an exercise in mixing color, Alice knows it is appealing—if you like pretty.
She knows her visitor has little interest in art. Just as well, Alice is thinking, because the treasure is hidden in plain sight.
“The frames are nice,” the visitor says.
“Made most of them myself,” Alice replies.
She sees the visitor glance at the Herald article pinned to the edge of the easel.
“Absolute rubbish,” Alice says.
“I haven’t read it,” her guest says.
She knows this isn’t true. How else did they find me? she is thinking. Then wonders if this person right here is the one who is spying on her; that she has a watcher she no longer doubts.
No, he’s a friend, she tells herself. Though how anyone can have true friends in our business is always the question.
Over the next few days, singly and together, Joanne and McAllister would ponder their trip to the glen. It was only Hector’s photographs that brought all the loose thoughts, ideas, and speculation together.
Tuesday morning, the day before deadline, McAllister, Rob, and Don were working together at the High Table, Don’s name for the long narrow high bench in the long narrow high-ceilinged reporters’ room where they worked side by side.
“These are the best I could do in thon rain,” Hec said, laying out the photographs of the golf tournament. “Ma notebook got soaked through, so I’m no sure who anybody is.”
“Looks like you took the pictures through a cloud,” Don said, examining them. “There’s nothing usable here.”
“I didnay want to get ma cameras wet,” Hec complained. “It was bucketing down.”
“How about the pictures of the auction?” McAllister asked.
“Now, there the light an’ shadows wiz great. Got some brilliant shots.” Hec’s grin would win a gurning competition. “Here’s a great photo of thon Forsythe mannie.”
McAllister agreed it was a brilliant photograph, but he could not think how to use it. Hec had captured the art critic in full flow, hands sweeping out in a Shakespearean gesture. Richard in want of a horse, the editor thought, although he was certain Richard III would not wear a paisley cravat.
Other pictures were of locals: the auctioneer, local farmers in a huddle over some garden implements, women poking around in the detritus of another woman’s life—her hair combs, her jewelry, a silver hairbrush, a bundle of lace-edged hankies. He put the photographs facedown on the pile. Knowing that the woman w
ho had once handled these objects was dead by her own hand made it all feel so poignant, so wretched.
There was one photograph of the person McAllister had encountered in the farmyard. “Have you a better one of this man?” he asked, pointing to the shot of the surly driver of the black car, a car he now thought might be the same one that had overtaken them, at speed, on the Dingwall road.
“Naw,” Hec replied. “He caught me lifting the camera and turned away.”
The editor turned over more shots from the sale, most taken outdoors, and most featuring stone walls and cobbled surfaces and other creative compositions. He liked the pictures of the caged cockerel but knew they were of no interest to readers of a local newspaper.
“These three pictures, I like them.”
“Aye, that’s those gadgies in the golf clubhouse. Not much good, really—unbalanced, too much light coming in from the window and not enough on the right-hand side.”
It was the men that interested McAllister. Calum had identified the sheriff and the senior policeman but didn’t recognize the other man. Their guest, perhaps? They were certainly comfortable in each other’s presence. Then again, he thought, men of their class always had something to connect them, mostly their former schools or a passion for grouse shooting.
One August, he had seen a party of men such as these alight from the London train. As resplendent as the birds in their tweed plus-four suits, with matching grouse-shooting hats and waistcoats, they had voices, used to commanding soldiers or the lower orders, that made him want to join the revolution—any revolution that would rid Scotland of the braying asses of privilege. And you can relocate those bloody grouse to Hyde Park or Wimbledon Common.
The visitor was interesting in his ordinariness. A cultivated ordinariness, McAllister decided. Compared with the lined or unlined, the animated, or quiescent faces of the locals, his expression was blank, more mask than face. His suit, plain, unremarkable, had an air of money. McAllister was more intrigued than ever, but he would not share his fascination with his wife.