by A. D. Scott
She watched as Hec, his head cocked to one side like a blackbird listening for a worm, considered the question. Remembering the solid beams and the height of the barn roof, he could visualize the how all too clearly. The why was beyond him.
“Sorry, I’m not one for thinking. Images is how I figure out the world. But whatever caused her to do it must have been serious—hanging is pretty final.”
Thanks for the reminder, Hec, she wanted to say. But didn’t. His cutting to the quick of an argument or an idea was what she valued most in the photographer. She knew how scatty he could be. And that he suffered from foot-in-mouth disease. But in this, the manuscript, the drawings, the secret, she knew she could rely on him. Absolutely.
The doorbell rang, startling her out of her dwam.
“Mrs. McAllister?” a man with a suitcase asked when she opened the door.
“Sorry, I’m not interested.”
“I have some great household gadgets you might want to take a look at.” Ignoring her, he opened a suitcase in which brushes and mop heads and all manner of cleaning products in bright plastic bottles were neatly arranged. An Aladdin’s case of chemical delights. “Let me demonstrate how good this is, best furniture polish ever, and a lovely fragrance.” He began to insinuate his way into the porch, intent on gaining entrance to the hallway. “That mirror, I have just the solution to make it sparkle.”
Joanne said, “Sorry, I have to go. I have guests.”
He stepped back. “Another time. Let’s fix an appointment.”
“No, sorry. I’ve everything I need.”
When he’d gone, she looked at the mirror. It was dusty. In the reflection, Alice’s painting seemed to fade to the color of another country. Another century.
“Who was that?” Hec asked.
“A brush salesman.”
“My granny buys from them. Says they’re good.”
McAllister came home. They talked about Hector helping Joanne with the manuscript. McAllister said he was delighted. And he was.
Nothing was said about the drawings.
Hector said he had to get going.
McAllister offered him a lift.
He said he’d rather walk.
They trouped out to the hall to say good-bye. The stained-glass door panels were aglow in the last of the sun, a sun that disappeared in late afternoon in the Highland autumn, and the world seemed brighter, washed clean by all the rain.
Hector Bain walked down Stephens Brae, along Eastgate, down the High Street and Bridge Street, across the river. He walked almost the length of Tomnahurich Street—in a complete dwam.
Joanne was much the same. Mostly studies, she was thinking. Mostly. So does that mean one might be genuine? She told McAllister. Yet she kept back the real secret.
He didn’t notice; hands clasped behind his back, he stared at the paintings, as though in Kelvingrove Art Gallery, attempting to guess which might be authentic.
“I give up,” he declared—to an empty room. He hadn’t noticed that Joanne had gone to bed ten minutes earlier.
CHAPTER 13
Alice steps into the farmyard and sniffs the wind. “Maybe it’s time to move on,” she tells the dog, “but not yet.” She inspects the new roof on the barn. Nods at the excellent result of hard work, much money, and Ballahulish slate.
I’ve always known I might have to leave. But not yet—I won’t give Mrs. Mackenzie the satisfaction of driving me out.
Somewhere warm next time. She smiles to herself, somewhere with a better climate to grow tomatoes and herbs. Basil, I’ve never been able to grow basil this far north—let alone find the seeds. Up here, basil is a man’s name. As for olive oil—you can only buy that in tiny bottles in the chemist’s shop.
Maybe I should move to a place where I barely speak the language, then, when the gossiping starts I won’t understand what’s being said. Or care. I can be an eccentric old woman, lost in her memories. Heaven only knows how many of us there are—widows, mothers, sisters, daughters, bereaved and bereft by two world wars, and the century only a decade past the halfway mark.
She tries to shake the thought. Soon, she tells herself, a new decade will arrive, bringing a new civilization. It should be time to put an end to wars. But she doubts that will ever happen. Like the wind, this new war is cold, invisible, and insidious, penetrating the cracks in our civilized exterior, revealing us for the warmongering creatures we still are.
A blast of freezing air, blowing straight across the ocean from the wastes of Labrador, rattles a loose tile above the porch. She makes a mental note to fetch the ladder and fix it.
“It is indeed a cold, Cold War.” She says this aloud. The dog looks up, head cocked to the side. No “walk” in the sentence, so he drops down on his haunches. And sighs. She mistakes his sigh for a sign of understanding.
“Don’t worry, boy,” she tells him. “If I ever leave, I’ll find a good home for you.”
She shivers, whether from cold or a premonition, she can’t tell. She crosses her arms, hugging herself, before turning back to the warmth of the kitchen and a cup of tea.
The following Tuesday morning, Calum’s second day in his new job, in a new town, and after another terrifying night in his new lodgings, McAllister asked, “Settled in, have you, Calum?”
How could he explain that the strange bed, strange sounds, strange smells all terrified him? “Thanks, Mr. McAllister, it’s great.” Calum looked around at his colleagues, saw everyone busy with notebooks, photographs, copy, the layout spread on the table awaiting decisions, and felt better. This was what he knew.
The morning discussion of the front page had barely finished when the new receptionist, Lorna, marched into the reporters’ room. She distributed one telephone message to McAllister, two to Frankie Urquhart, and a pile to Calum Mackenzie.
As she handed them over, she said to Calum, “Please tell your mother I do not lie. When I say you are in a meeting, you are in a meeting.”
Calum blushed. Rob looked at his boots, Frankie at the ceiling. Hector didn’t notice. Don, who initially thought Lorna might not last long at the Gazette, especially as her eye makeup made her look like a terrified panda bear, changed his mind. With an attitude like that, she stays.
“Rob, give the new lad here an hour or so of your time,” Don said. “Frankie, two o’clock for that update on the layout. McAllister, the editorial.”
“Calum, let’s get a coffee. Bring your notebook, and we’ll go over stuff you need to know.” Rob put on his motorbike jacket and grabbed his tattered leather fighter pilot helmet, saying, “We’ll take my bike.”
Halfway down the stone staircase, Calum whispered, “Is it OK to leave the office without permission?”
Rob could think of no answer except we’re not at school anymore, and was too kind to say so.
On Thursday, publication day, Lorna put a call through to the editor. He was busy on the Herald crossword and hated being interrupted. “What?”
“It’s important. A policeman from Sutherland.”
There was a pause, a change to a vacant whisper down the line. As he waited, he thought about Lorna—eighteen years old; an A pass in English, history, and French in her Highers exams; sharp, efficient, and unafraid to speak her mind to anyone, even him. He valued that in an employee. Plus, she didn’t gossip. Listened to it, yes; repeated it, no.
“Hello. Hello?”
“John McAllister, Highland Gazette.”
“Sergeant Black, Sutherland Constabulary.” The policeman cleared his throat. “I gather Calum, eh-hem, Mr. Calum Mackenzie, is working with you.”
McAllister instantly knew this was not good news. “He is.”
“I’d appreciate if you ask him to call us. No, what I mean is . . . och, maybe you should tell him first, better than hearing on the telephone. It’s his mother, she’s in hospital, in a bad way.”
McAllister knew this meant possibly fatal. “What happened?”
“She was knocked down by a car. Hit-and-ru
n. But maybe no say anything about that just yet.” There was a hint of a command in this request; the sergeant realized he should not have given out the information to a journalist. On good terms with the local newspaper, he’d forgotten the outside world was not always as biddable.
“I’ll let Calum know immediately.”
That Thursday was a special day for Calum; his first story for the Gazette was running, a minor report on the Forestry Commission plans to plant a particularly beautiful glen with a vast plantation of conifers, much to the disgust of wildlife lovers.
Calum had looked at the article numerous times, and although there was no byline, he knew his mother would cut it out and add it to the scrapbooks of his articles in the Sutherland newspaper, his essays from high school, even his homework from primary school she had saved and put into the book of her boy’s achievements.
Hector was also in the reporters’ room, looking at the photographs in rival newspapers. “Rubbish,” he’d mutter. “A joke,” he’d say, chortling. “Would you look at yon?” he’d ask of no one in particular. As Calum was not yet accustomed to Hector’s constant havering, he dutifully looked at each offending photograph—and saw nothing remarkable.
The phone had been ringing a full minute. Again, Calum wasn’t to know Hector never answered the phone.
Lorna yelled up the stairs, “Calum, it’s not your mother, so pick up the phone.”
“Hello.”
The caller sounded as though she were laughing. “Sorry, Calum, I have a wee bit of a cough. It’s Joanne Ross.”
“Uh-huh?” He had no idea what to say. Yesterday morning, he’d been feeling lost. The phone call to his mother had been three minutes of her sobbing and wailing, when all he’d wanted was to know if he could send his washing on a Thursday and have it back by the following Monday. It took three minutes of him saying “I have to go now” before he could hang up. Shopping, cooking, washing, sleeping in a strange room, all the unconsidered disadvantages of living away from home, had hit him after the call. Now, with an edition printed, with a sense that he was part of the team, he felt better. But no closer to finding a solution to his domestic problems.
“Would you like to join us for supper, a small celebration as it’s your first edition of the Gazette?” Joanne asked.
“Supper?” In Calum’s parlance, lunch was called dinner and supper was tea. But breakfast was always breakfast.
“Tea.”
“That would be great.” A home-cooked tea, he was thinking. Can’t wait.
“Come back with McAllister,” Joanne said.
Thirty seconds later, McAllister walked in from his office. “Calum, I need to talk to you.”
“It’s OK,” Calum said. “Joanne—sorry, Mrs. McAllister—she’s just asked me.”
“How does she know?”
“Mrs. McAllister invited me for tea, and I said—”
“Come into my office.”
When McAllister broke the news, Calum’s first thought was that he’d miss being fed properly for the first time in almost a week. Then it hit him. Paralyzed him. So used to his mother organizing his life, he had no one to ask, What do I do now?
McAllister told Calum to phone Sergeant Black in Sutherland. Seeing that Calum could barely dial the number, he also offered him a lift to the station.
On the way there, Calum repeated what he’d been told, talking as though reading aloud from a book that made little sense.
“The sergeant said that last night, after my mother closed up the shop and petrol pumps, she was walking home.” He was visualizing every step she would take. “It’s not far, only five minutes to our house, so all she had to do was cross the main road.” He shivered. “It was dark, it was raining, must be the driver didn’t see her.” He closed his eyes. “But I don’t see how, cos there’s a big streetlight right out front o’ the petrol pumps.” He stared at the rain and the streets ahead, seeing nothing.
McAllister was driving cautiously over the cobbles in the lane beside the Station Hotel, looking for a free parking spot.
Calum was seeing, in slow motion, his mother, her wee scurrying walk, her handbag with the day’s takings clutched tightly to her, seeing her sprawling, her crying. And although the sergeant hadn’t mentioned it, he was seeing blood. “Maybe they skidded when they braked.” He was trying to find a reason, avoiding the thought of a hit-and-run. Or worse. “Probably they stopped to check she was all right and panicked and . . .” To not stop was beyond him. “She’s got broken bones and . . .” He was not distraught; he was bewildered. “It’s the hypothermia the doctor’s most worried about. All that time and no one found her. She’ll be fine eventually, he said, even though it was a right bad accident.”
If it was an accident, McAllister thought, recalling his brief conversation with the policeman. “Wait, last night?” He somehow had assumed it was this morning.
“Aye, she wasn’t found until the back o’ seven this morning. The petrol station wasn’t open, so someone phoned Dad.”
McAllister wanted to ask, Didn’t your father notice she didn’t come home? But he didn’t. “I hear it’s a good hospital,” he said. Why come up with such an inane statement, he asked himself; he had no idea if it was a good or an indifferent hospital.
After buying a ticket for Calum, he waited until the train left. He could find little to say beyond remarks on the weather and good wishes for Mrs. Mackenzie’s recovery. He felt he should have said more, should have given the young man some advice, some comfort. Knowing he was inadequate in emotional situations, knowing Joanne would have been better, yet not wanting to involve her in anything to do with accidents, hospitals, grief, he told himself, Elaine will be there; she’ll comfort Calum.
Back in the office, his newspaperman’s antennae on alert, he wondered—hit-and-run—and decided to telephone his counterpart in Sutherland. Then changed his mind. This was a task for Don McLeod; Highlander to Highlander, his deputy would find out more than a southern interloper.
He guessed that when the news about Mrs. Mackenzie came out, few would feel sorry. Titillated, yes. Satisfied?—perhaps. Shocked that such an event could happen in their small community more likely.
In a small community, two unfortunate events could be seen as just that, unfortunate. Unconnected. In McAllister’s brief acquaintance with a town he formerly knew only as a place with an ancient history and a golf course, there were too many riddles: the life, the trial, and death of Alice Ramsay; mysterious strangers; bizarre events; now this.
Next day, Joanne was shopping in the town’s only department store for new slippers. All the styles reminded her of Mrs. McAllister senior. Her own mother thought it vulgar to wear slippers in the house. Even at thirty-two, the learned-by-osmosis rules of her upbringing still cast a shadow.
She tried the chain-store shoe shop in the High Street. Better but still not right; pink faux-fur trim was not for her. Leaving the shop, she squeezed past a woman in a navy-blue trench coat buttoned high against the weather, who was struggling with an umbrella.
“Sorry,” they said in unison.
“Joanne!”
“Elaine!”
“You’re in town for long?” Joanne asked.
“Just for the day. I had an interview at the hospital. Now I’m going to treat myself to those shoes in the window.”
“If you’ve time, we could go for a coffee afterwards.”
“Love to.”
Joanne enjoyed shopping with Elaine, enjoyed the pleasure the young nurse conveyed as she stood in front of the mirror three inches taller. She noted how Elaine counted out the money, mostly in small notes and change, telling Joanne how she had been saving for months, how the shoes were entirely unsuitable for work, but gorgeous for dancing, but that Calum didn’t dance, so maybe spending so much money was silly.
Joanne reassured her. “Gorgeous shoes are always a good idea, although—” She bit back the thought that wearing them, Elaine would be a foot taller than her fiancé.
&nb
sp; “I agree.”
Elaine laughed, and Joanne smiled, and the seriousness of the days and weeks past vanished. Temporarily.
Shoes purchased, umbrellas open, they walked quickly through the back lanes, through the covered market, running the last yards across Queensgate, holding on to their hats, nervous the umbrellas might turn inside out in a gusting wind blowing from the Atlantic straight up the Great Glen, ripping through the town before joining its little brother, the North Sea squall.
“Whew!” Elaine laughed. “And I thought it rained up our way.”
The conversation started on Elaine’s plan to move south to the town. Inevitably the subject turned to Mrs. Mackenzie.
Elaine said, “Mrs. Mackenzie being injured, Miss Ramsay being . . .” She was mopping a small smear of spilt coffee with a paper napkin. To say the word “murdered” would make true her fears. Like Joanne, Elaine could not believe Alice Ramsay had killed herself. She had no explanation for the death, only a firm belief in the impossibility of a bright, alert, caring woman, with a passion for her art, ending her own life.
“The old people miss her. Nurse Ogilvie does her best. Me too. Mrs. Galloway has a word with most of them when she comes to see her mum. But Miss Ramsay had that special touch.”
Joanne told her about working on the manuscript and asked her not to share this with anyone.
“I won’t tell Calum, then.” Elaine smiled. “I swear his mother can read minds.”
“How is she?”
“Bones take time to heal. The bruising and swelling have gone down. But her mind is as full of the same old nonstop nosiness as ever.” Elaine looked up at Joanne. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be so uncharitable. Mrs. Mackenzie has a hard life, so I can’t condemn her. But Calum needs to get back here soon as possible, or else she’ll never let go.” She smiled. “The interview for a transfer—I think I did well. Fingers crossed. Eyes too.”
Her face and crossed eyes were funny and guileless, as was her laughter. Joanne was glad she’d bumped into Elaine. “Don McLeod, the deputy editor, will love you for life if you persuade Calum to come back to work.”