by A. D. Scott
McAllister said nothing.
“Do you want to share?” Sandy Marshall could smell a story. But if it was going to bring some shady arm of government down on himself, he wasn’t certain he needed the bother.
“Considering I have no idea what’s going on, no. Besides, I’ve been warned off.”
“Since when did that stop you?” When his friend said nothing to the teasing, Sandy changed the subject. “I’m hearing our Mr. Forsythe is up to something.”
“Him of the velvet jackets.”
“Aye, and purple at that. No one knows what bother he’s up to now, but . . .”
“I don’t want to think about him.” Talk of the man irked McAllister. “In resurrecting the witch accusations in his article, some might say he harried a woman to her death.”
“That was my fault,” Sandy said. That the final responsibility for every word printed in a newspaper legally rested with the editor they were both aware.
“Done now,” McAllister told him. “Thanks, Sandy.”
“Not so fast. I want to know more about this numberplate.”
“If I find out more, I’ll call.”
“Maybe we need some secret system—you call me, give me ten minutes, and I’ll call you back from a phone box. Maybe you do the same.”
Silence.
“Just kidding.” The concern in the editor’s voice was soft and clear.
“Aye. I know. Thanks again.” McAllister hung up, reached for another cigarette, and was practicing blowing smoke rings when there was a knock. Without waiting for an answer, Don came in. He sat, lit up, and waited.
McAllister couldn’t remember what, and how much, he had shared with his deputy, so he began at the beginning.
“It was at the auction in Sutherland.”
Don knew immediately but said, “Refresh ma memory, starting wi’ the court case.”
McAllister summarized rapidly and succinctly.
Don digested it all—or at least all he could take in. “So all those involved in the trial were at the auction?”
“So Calum says.”
“Then we publish thon photo, then DI Dunne warns you, then Calum starts asking questions . . .”
“About the car and the numberplate.”
“The bit that intrigues me,” Don said, “is the rushing through of the fatal accident inquiry. That there is no information from whoever found her or why they were up at her place, no results of the postmortem made public, you have to have some major influence to keep that quiet.” He sighed. “Doesn’t feel right.”
“No, it doesn’t.” And Joanne, in asking all those questions, put herself in the thick of it.
McAllister didn’t need to explain this to Don; the deputy editor was sharp, and he was protective of Joanne. Rolling his shoulders, which were hurting from too much bending over proof sheets, Don continued, “Another thing: Calum tells me Alice Ramsay was cremated here in town.”
“Really? Why down here and not nearer her home? And why wasn’t anyone informed? There’s a good few would have liked to say farewell.” Joanne included.
“Why here? Don’t know. With no relatives coming forward, I’m told the sheriff decided it was the best option.” Like most of his generation, and many of the younger generation, Don was not in favor of cremation.
“Maybe the sheriff was ordered to dispose of the body discretely.”
“By whom? And why?”
“No idea. But it’s done.”
That evening, when the girls were in bed, in that time when the streets were empty, the house quiet, the sitting room smelling of wood smoke and whisky, when Joanne had her knitting, he his novel, and music, a piano concerto Joanne had requested, was swelling and fading, matching the dancing blue-red flames from the pine logs, McAllister told Joanne.
He spoke softly, stating the facts, telling her that Don knew and neither of them had an explanation as to why it was done so secretively.
“Cremated?” she asked. “With no one at the service?”
“That we don’t know.”
“Poor Alice.” She turned away to face the painting of the clergyman skating. It was not her favorite—perhaps because she was not too keen on clergymen. She wouldn’t tell McAllister—not yet—but she would find and claim Alice’s ashes. Somehow. And she would scatter them in the glen. In the wind. And the sun. And a lark would rise; of that she was certain.
Next afternoon it was still raining heavily and McAllister arrived home to a deserted house and a kitchen smelling of damp wool. Leaning over a drying rack laden with wet washing, he checked the wall calendar. Piano lessons. Joanne and the girls would be home in an hour. He put the kettle on. He took the mug of tea into the sitting room, drew the curtains, and then, catching sight of the picture on the floor behind his armchair, he paused. It was the painting of the clergyman skating.
When it hit him, he went up close, examining the paintings one by one.
He knew that painting. He looked again. It had to be a copy. He looked at the others. Maybe they were all copies.
Joanne’s favorite, the still life with red onions, he thought might be from the Bloomsbury school. Why hadn’t he noticed? The Skating Clergyman, a picture beloved by many a Scotsman, admired by many an art lover, reproduced in magazines, in newspapers, in schoolbooks. Why hadn’t he seen it?
His thoughts at fast gallop, he felt his hand shake. Cigarette smoke swirled above him in a cloud worthy of an Atlantic cold front. He was annoyed with himself. And disappointed.
He opened the folder Joanne had left on the bureau and leafed through the manuscript. No, these looked original; the writing, the drawings, they were fresh. Then again, he knew nothing about art. He examined pages of script, paragraphs written in different styles. He admired how Alice was trying out different styles, matching handwriting to subject. The penmanship was exquisite; even the spaces between lines seemed planned, exact, with a sense of an assured artist at work. An artist who loved her subject, who took joy and pride in her talent.
Seeing the pile of books he had yet to sort—art history books, books in English, a few in French, more in Italian—he began to speculate. Was she a teacher? A lecturer? An art historian? Didn’t someone say she spoke German? Whatever Alice Ramsay’s past, she knew her subject. It all added another layer to the mystery.
He knew he would have to tell Joanne that some, possibly all, of the pictures were fakes. How she would react he couldn’t guess.
“Well,” she said when he told her, “it all seemed too good to be true in the first place.” She looked around at the paintings. “I still enjoy them. And they brighten up this gloomy old house.”
“That they do.” He enjoyed yet another discovery about his new wife; she constantly surprised him. “Then it’s definitely time to move to a new place.”
She said nothing. The idea of a new house she loved. The idea of packing up and moving she hated.
Even though the rain had lessened, clouds were still hovering over the town, scowling, threatening, and Joanne refused to miss the ritual Sunday walk.
They headed for the Islands. To their surprise, Annie accompanied them with no objections or moans of Do I have to? The girl had on her Timex wristwatch, a present from her grandparents for passing her eleven-plus and becoming a Royal Academy pupil. She noted the time they left. Noted the time they reached what she thought of as their new house. Only seven minutes extra to get to school. She was delighted.
Joanne asked as they passed the high walls and gate, “When will we get news if your bid has been accepted?” She was trying not to look interested in the property, not wanting to alert the girls.
“Soon.”
“Did you do as I suggested?”
He laughed. “I did. And why not? When I went to write it in full, I couldn’t decide how much over a round figure to add to the offer. So I used the house number—eighty-nine—and hopefully your intuition will make the difference.”
“The solicitor is duty bound to accept the hig
hest bid, and as people always put round numbers, why not?”
He put his arm around her shoulders. “Why not?”
“I wonder what will happen to Alice’s house? Maybe . . .”
“Not today. Sunday is a day of rest, and that includes a rest from talking about work.”
I wish it included a rest from thinking, she didn’t say.
“Maybe Angus MacLean knows who put in a claim on Alice’s estate.”
He didn’t reply.
“Sorry. We should have the equivalent of a swear box—any talk of work on a Sunday, and we fine ourselves a sixpence,” Joanne said.
“Are you certain you want to continue working on Alice Ramsay’s manuscript?”
After the first flash of doubt, and fear that he might tell her to stop, followed by an understanding that he was not a man who would forbid his wife to follow her dreams, she answered, “Yes, I am.”
They were now at the War Memorial. The girls had run on ahead to the Infirmary Bridge, where they would enjoy jumping along the length of the suspension bridge’s span, trying to make it buckle but seldom succeeding, as they were too light.
“I know the other pictures are copies . . .” Joanne began.
“I’m told ‘studies’ is the correct word—exercises in painting and drawing technique.”
“I glimpsed a half-completed landscape painting on her easel. It was a wee watercolor of a wren. She did small sketchbook-sized paintings of birds or flowers or buildings and gave them away as presents. Even Mrs. Mackenzie has one in her shop. No, the manuscript is original, so I’ll finish it as best I can. The other paintings? I like them; that’s enough.”
She didn’t say, as it hurt too much, that she knew the manuscript was original because the signature and writing were the same as those on the envelope and the angry letter Alice had written her. The hand, the ink, and the signature were identical to those in the manuscript.
The experiments in writing styles she assumed were just that, experiments to determine what worked best with each illustration. It was clear also that Alice intended to publish her work in book form. That drove Joanne on. Guilt and regret had been the initial motivations. Now it was a sense of duty. And, increasingly, pleasure.
They reached the center of the long, narrow suspension bridge. The rain had paused. The wind was barely perceptible, the temperature mild for November. Yet Joanne shivered. “To do what she did—it makes no sense. Her work is so full of life. Love, even. The flowers, the light in the birch trees, on the hillsides, on the rocks, it makes me feel—I don’t know—connected?” She was shaking her head; “beautiful” was too vague a word to describe the paintings. So simple, so clean, there seemed less than a dozen brushstrokes in the more dramatic paintings, especially the ones with heavy hurrying clouds.
McAllister supplied the word. “There is a reverence in those works of the hills above her home.” Having seen many religious paintings in churches in Spain, in art galleries in France, and the Salvador Dalí in Glasgow, he understood what Joanne responded to in Alice Ramsay’s original work.
“Maybe that’s why I want to complete her project. It’s a need to understand.”
“There is sometimes no reason we can understand,” McAllister said. “In my brother’s case, it was his shame at being abused that made him drown himself.”
Sixteen, Joanne was thinking. What must it be like to be so desperate at only sixteen years of age?
“And in Alice Ramsay’s case, we may never know her reasons. After years of reporting or, rather, hushing up suicides, it is always the same question: why? It can obsess people, consume them. I know that was my reaction.”
Another suspension bridge crossing the river to the first of the islands was satisfyingly shaky. The whoops and yells from the girls made Joanne laugh. “As you said, it’s Sunday. No more thinking.” She hurried off to join the girls, calling out, “Race you to the next bridge!”
He watched her coat fly open, her hair escape the headscarf; he saw her skip off to join her children. Under the tunnel of barren trees, with the hushed roar of the river falling over the shallow weir filling his ears like a constant comforting tinnitus, he caught a distant glimpse of Annie’s red jacket. As he watched Joanne and Jean shuffle through the dank carpet of leaves, he was engulfed by a happiness he had never previously known. This is my family.
The week passed quickly for Joanne—an hour or so each day on Alice’s manuscript, around two hours on her linked short stories in the not-totally-imagined world of a remote glen still stuck in a prewar time warp. How to use the subject of witches she could not fathom, so she wrote about what she called the Celtic Twilight, adjusting to the loss of the old ways, bracing itself for the coming decade of electricity and, maybe one day, television. It was a world she wanted to document before it disappeared entirely. Much as Alice had done in her paintings.
Do not lapse into Brigadoon, she repeated to herself as she typed. Often. Much as she loved Gene Kelly, the Hollywood depiction of Scotland, with the fake accents and the terrible tartans, had her squirming in her cinema seat in embarrassment—unfortunately in the company of Rob MacLean, who’d laughed out loud at the more mawkish sequences, causing the woman in front to turn and shoosh him so often Joanne thought they’d be thrown out. Not a good look for representatives of the Highland Gazette.
In between organizing the chapter layout, which was clearly scripted in Alice’s notes, Joanne saw to the shepherd’s pie or perhaps mince and tatties, or a pot roast, or bramble and apple crumble, or jam roly-poly. Cooking, washing, cleaning, ironing, mending and darning, checking the girls’ homework—writing had to be fitted around the more important role of mother and housewife.
She joked with McAllister, “Unlike Mr. Wordsworth, I do not have a household of a devoted sister, wife, and helpers to allow me all the time in the world for art.”
He offered to pay for a housekeeper. She refused. “A weekly cleaner is all I need.”
She went over to her desk bureau, a lovely piece she had bought in the auction rooms in Church Street and restored with many sheets of medium, or fine sandpaper, and liberal applications of elbow grease. She took out her reporter’s notebook. But her pencil remained in the pot. The notepad unopened.
“Alice,” she said aloud, “I know I wronged you. But I know you didn’t kill yourself, and I can’t let your death go. Please help me find who did it.”
The clock ticked. A car passed. A flicker out the corner of her eye startled her. Someone behind that cypress tree? The wind rattled windowpanes, shook the trees. If we don’t move house, that kirkyard tree comes down. The girls came home. Then McAllister. And nighttime. And still no answer from Alice.
CHAPTER 11
Alice remembers Mrs. Mackenzie as an annoying child always on the edge of everything. In games in the woods and castle grounds, in the sand dunes, running and leaping, arms outstretched pretending to fly, she was the one who would complain about the sand down the back of her dress. On excursions up the glen to the waterfall, she was the one to complain the paths were too muddy, or too steep.
Father encouraged me to be friendly with the locals—as long as I didn’t learn to talk like them. Or forget my manners. The summers were long, and boring, for an only child like me, so even though it was a long time ago and I hardly knew her, I remember her—Mackenzie was her maiden name as well as her married name—as someone to be pitied. Though why I couldn’t exactly say.
At the end of the summer holidays, when we packed up to go back to London, Nanny McNeil would parcel up my old dresses and coats and give them to the Mackenzie family. “Always help those less fortunate than you,” she’d say.
Mrs. Mackenzie’s grandmother was one of our housemaids, and her father worked on the estate. There was some scandal about him, but I never knew what, just some overheard remarks that meant little to me as a child, phrases hinting that he was “soft in the heid.” Father had explained, “He was never the same since he came back from the Somme.”
Now, knowing her present family circumstances, I pity her. But I’ve discovered, much to my detriment, just how dangerous she can be.
Frankie Urquhart, the Gazette advertising manager, found accommodation for Calum. It was off Island Bank Road, the route to the south side of Loch Ness. The short street ended at the rock face of the ridge above the river. With the castle to the left and the prison not far above, the small enclave of terraced and semidetached houses was within walking distance to the Gazette office and the town center.
A war widow ran the three-room boarding house, and Frankie knew she’d recently renewed her classified advertisement in the Rooms to Let section. “Respectable gentlemen only.”
Calum was delighted. Then terrified. He had only ever spent four nights away from home, at a Boy Scouts camp near Aviemore. Even then, his mother was one of the volunteers, helping with the cooking and general minding of seventy twelve- to fifteen-year-olds from all over the county.
Elaine had tried every which way to prevent her future mother-in-law from coming on the trip.
Calum agreed. “I’ll tell her no,” he’d said.
“That’ll be right,” she’d replied. To herself.
She’d also appealed to Mr. Mackenzie. Such a nice man, she always thought, but the way she treats him, no one blames him for straying. “I won’t see Calum for weeks,” she’d told him. “It’d be really nice to have the day to ourselves.”
“Leave it with me,” he’d replied.
When Calum came to collect Elaine, Mrs. Mackenzie was in the front seat.
“Hello, Mrs. Mackenzie,” Elaine said through the front passenger door. “Are we dropping you off somewhere?”
“I’m coming to see ma boy settled in.”
“Really? And how will you get back?”
“The train.”
“Elaine is driving Dad’s car back home. I told you, you can go with her,” Calum pointed out.
“It’s no I don’t trust you, dear, it’s just I’m no keen on women drivers.”