A Kind of Grief

by A. D. Scott

  McAllister suspected Stuart seldom apologized. He also knew he had little choice but to let the man, or his minions, inspect the pictures. So he relented. “You can do that, but in my home.”

  “I will need to request expert help.”

  “Fine. Let me know when you’ll be coming round. In the meantime, I have a newspaper to put to bed.”

  They all shook hands. McAllister left first.

  Dunne remarked to the visitor, “You and your colleagues would do well to remember that we Scots don’t take kindly to threats.”

  “I promise to remember.”

  The inspector did not believe him. They left the room, both glad of fresh air. The London man invited the inspector to lunch. Dunne refused. Holding the man’s umbrella, watching him as he put on an overcoat the inspector knew would cost a month’s salary, he asked, “So does the attack on Mrs. Mackenzie have any connection with your inquiries?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You don’t know?” Dunne saw confusion, the first and only sign of emotion, in the blank canvas of a face. Doesn’t want to admit he’s missed something else. The policeman sighed. “You’d better sit down again.”

  McAllister was usually late home on Wednesday evenings. There was no need for him to stay in the office, but when the presses started to roll, he and Don had a little ritual. The first proof pages would be printed off and checked. Barring last-minute adjustments to be corrected on the stone, Don would give the Father of the Chapel the nod. Then the presses would roll.

  Against all union regulations, McAllister was allowed onto the print-room floor. He was wise enough to keep out of the men’s way as they went about the controlled panic of the countdown to the printing run. The hammering and clattering of the printing press, the race of the machine that layered and folded, shooting out the warm, ink-damp newspapers onto the conveyer, always entranced him.

  Watching the men and apprentices parceling, labeling, and loading the awaiting delivery vans gave him a satisfaction that could never be bettered. His words, his newspapers, were now on the journey to the people of the towns, the islands, the villages, to be sold in large news agents’ or wee general stores where everything necessary for the rural communities was available, except on Sundays, when even the petrol pumps were locked.

  Then the two men, a Highland Stan and Ollie, would trudge up the stairs into the editor’s office and share a dram of a good whisky, a single-malt from whatever small distillery in the area they were of a mind to sample.

  This time, McAllister brought out a favorite, a twenty-five-year-old Talisker. He felt he deserved it after the morning’s interview with the “Man from the Ministry,” as the deputy editor had baptized him.

  Don lifted his glass. “Slàinte.” He took a sip. “A fine drop from the shores of my homeland,” he pronounced, then settled back to listen to what he expected to be a fascinating account of the morning’s interview. He was not disappointed. “The Cambridge spies?” He whistled. “Not what I expected to hear of in the Highlands of Scotland.”

  “Me neither,” McAllister agreed.

  “Aye. Fits, though. Some o’ them lords and lairds that come up here for the fishing and shooting, they were, and are, the regimental chiefs who used our young men as cannon fodder.”

  McAllister knew the truth of Don’s statement. “Aye, but the spy scandals center around London, Berlin, Moscow, Washington, even Istanbul. It’s quite a leap from there to a glen in Sutherland.”

  “Not for the aristocracy or royalty, it’s not. They own more than eighty percent of our country.” McAllister knew he meant Scotland, not Great Britain. “As for the traitors in their ranks turning up here, stranger things have happened an’ a’ that.”

  “So?”

  “So let’s wait an’ see.”

  Don’s pronouncement made sense to McAllister. Since arriving in the north from the city of his birth, Glasgow, he’d learned the Highland ways. He didn’t always follow them, but he appreciated the lesson of sit back, do nothing, and wait for what unfolds.

  Next morning, McAllister waited for the girls to leave for school and a second pot of coffee to brew before he told Joanne. He skimmed over the details of the interview, although “interrogation” would be a truer description of the meeting. There had been no overt threats. He understood the directive: This is none of your business; if you try to publish anything, we will issue a D notice—a legally binding edict that stated “publish and you will be prosecuted”—perhaps in secret.

  When he’d finished, he saw that we have to do something gleam in her eyes. He said, “Joanne, we cannot continue to be involved in this. Making ourselves of interest to whoever—”

  “Whoever killed Alice.”

  “If I thought for one second—”

  “It’s fine. I don’t believe government people would leave us exposed to danger.”

  He didn’t contradict her. He didn’t express his opinion that that was exactly what they might do. In his darker thoughts, he had considered that perhaps he—they—were being used to draw out traitors. Why else allow a journalist the freedom to keep asking questions? Why else share highly confidential information?

  But protecting Joanne was all he cared about. “I don’t want strangers in our home, so I’ve asked for the paintings to be taken to the town art gallery and examined there. They’ve agreed.”

  That the discussion had become heated and that he’d asked DI Dunne to back him up, he didn’t share. He also omitted to mention that at Don’s suggestion, he’d typed up a statement of the events, leaving it with Angus MacLean, their solicitor, and made sure Stuart was aware of those actions.

  Joanne looked once more at the paintings she had grown to regard as theirs forever. “We don’t have a choice, do we?”

  “Not really. They’ll be collected later this morning, so I’ll stay home until then.”

  He was firm, decision made. She didn’t object. He was her husband. He had the right to decide what happened in their household. “Alice’s manuscript, can I keep that?”

  “Nothing was mentioned about the manuscript or her books.” He grinned at her. His eyes, deep dark blue, crinkled with mischief, and she saw the little boy, the one his mother said was impossible to say no to, and she grinned back.

  “What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over?”

  “Something like that.” He was certain the manuscript was nothing more than what it appeared to be. And he enjoyed how much pleasure it gave his wife.

  “Right, we’d better get started.” But she didn’t move. She was gazing around the room, taking in each painting, every splash of color. She tried to imprint the images in her imagination, in case—in case of what, she didn’t want to think about. Every thought of Alice Ramsay was tinged with regret, shadowed by the what ifs. “I uncovered a newspaper article wrapped around a cabbage. I followed it up because I was appalled that a woman could be openly called a witch in this day and age.”

  McAllister was listening without comment, watching Joanne as she stared at nothing in particular, recounting what had led them to an encounter with an unknown government organization.

  “I met Alice Ramsay. I liked her. I think she liked me. Then I betrayed her trust—or at least, I allowed myself to be duped into betraying her—and her name was splattered across a national newspaper. She died. We bought her pictures. And now you say the secret service thinks that classified information could be hidden within these pictures?” She was shaking her head slowly, slightly. “It’s hard to believe.”

  “I was thinking the same.”

  Joanne didn’t want this happening. That she was hiding two potentially valuable drawings, so mesmerized by them, so covetous of them, that she was possibly committing a crime—that was something she was not ready to admit, even to her husband. “Right. Let’s get started. You lift the paintings off the wall. I’ll stack the others in the hall. I’m not having strangers tramping through my house.”

  “Your house
?”

  “Our house.”

  “Does that mean you don’t want the other house?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  “When the pictures are returned, this affair will be over. We can return to normal.”

  “Never thought I’d hear my husband say that.” She grinned. She knew what he meant yet gave no indication she agreed.

  “I’m serious. No investigating, no poking around, no asking questions.”

  The flash of defiance in her eyes did not escape him.

  “Joanne, I’m not ordering you to drop it. I would never do that. But after all you went through the last time you investigated a crime . . .” He stubbed out his cigarette, not wanting to look at her. “I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you again.”

  “Me neither.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “If it’s that brush salesman, tell him no thanks.”

  The bell rang again. It was two men with a van to fetch the pictures.

  Joanne called out, “Tell them to take their boots off.” Perhaps she needed that carpet sweeper after all.

  That night, in bed alone, McAllister downstairs with a book and his music, Joanne tried to sleep. Couldn’t. The images of the drawings came to her. A desire to creep down and open the box, open the folder, stare at them, perhaps touch them, was overwhelming her. That and a guilty conscience.

  The key was in the small snuffbox on the mantelpiece. She’d told Hector she didn’t have the head for heights anymore, and climbing up every time to fetch a key from on top of the picture frame was silly. Hector offered to take the drawing to his studio-cum-washhouse at his granny’s place.

  “They stay with me,” she’d snapped.

  She remembered him staring at her, then shrugging, saying, “I know. Gets to you, a really fine work of art does.”

  Possessiveness was new to her; acquisitiveness had never been her nature.

  Wrapped in McAllister’s dressing gown—she loved the smell of him that clung to the wool—she went downstairs. The sitting-room door was shut; he didn’t want the music to disturb her. She went in, saw the top of his head above the armchair, and she melted. I love this man, she thought, and now I have to disappoint him.

  “Can’t sleep?” he asked when she took the chair opposite his. “I’ll make some cocoa.”

  “No. Sorry. I know I should have told you before.”

  She explained about the drawings.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” she finished.

  “Maybe just as well. I would have had to inform that man.” He looked at her sitting, waiting, like a small girl in front of the headmistress or her father, awaiting punishment. “I’d love to see them,” he said, and smiled.

  She smiled back. What flashed between them were the small steps, the vital, crucial, accumulative steps in a new marriage, a friendship, a relationship that held people, families, together. She watched him as he examined the pages, the small sketches that might, just might, she told herself, have been created centuries ago.

  “Interesting.” He sat back, the closed folder on his lap. “I’d like to check the legal position first. We bought them fair and square—not that that is a defense in a court of law. How Miss Ramsay acquired them is another matter. If she obtained them illegally, we might be guilty of receiving stolen goods.”

  “So shouldn’t we tell the official from London about them?”

  “The way it was put to me was that they wanted to examine the paintings we bought as a job lot.” He smiled. “It could be said I’m being obtuse, but I’ll risk it.”

  She sighed. “It might be better if we handed them over.” She meant safer.

  “We will. But not yet.”

  From his smile, from the way he was nodding his head slightly, she guessed he was plotting something. And she knew not to ask. Her husband’s phrase “not yet” delivered when her eldest, Annie, would ask, “When are we going . . . ? When are we getting . . . ? When . . . ?” drove the girl crazy. Joanne now knew how she felt.

  She stood and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Night night.”

  He covered it with his. “I’ll close up the house.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Alice looks up from her handwriting exercises. The cloud cover is lifting, the light softening to pearlescent greys. She puts down her pen, chooses another nib.

  What would my teacher, Mr. Smith—formerly Mr. Schmitt—say now?

  The training had lasted only two weeks, but in that time she’d learned the basic principles of the psychology of handwriting.

  She remembers how he had surprised her when, after asking her for a brief handwritten curriculum vitae, he’d guessed that although she was a native English speaker, she was not entirely English. Irish perhaps? Or Scottish? With a French education?

  Swiss boarding school, she’d told him.

  He even guessed I was estranged from a parent, or parents.

  Mummy was too busy to look after me I told him. Daddy was a career soldier and died in the war. “My father also,” Mr. Smith had said. From the number tattooed on his wrist, she suspected more than one parent had perished.

  Mr. Schmitt was the one who started me on a new passion, the study of graphology. His ability to discern, through handwriting, the sex, age, physical type, native or nonnative speaker, even a person’s weight, was astonishing.

  After a further two weeks of training, I began to grasp the tricks of replicating a person’s handwriting.

  We practiced with private correspondence obtained from who-knew-where. “Intimate letters are best,” he said. “See here, in the first paragraph, the letters are upright, evenly spaced, the handwriting clearly stating the writer’s intention. Then in the middle section, the writing is looser.”

  See this—he was using a letter with sections blacked out by the censors.“See how in the first paragraph the man is in control. The second, he is in a hurry to describe his situation. In the third, he slows down, the writing is sprawling, lingering, intense with longing for the person, the place, from which he is parted.”

  “Perhaps written by a man who isn’t certain he will return,” I commented.

  “Just so,” my teacher said.

  At the end of the training, I was deemed competent enough to work unsupervised. Star operative, Mr. Smith called me. I never heard from or of him again.

  The paintings were returned.

  “The still life painting of the onions, it’s not here,” Joanne told the delivery man.

  “Nothing to do wi’ us,” he said.

  She read the document that accompanied the inventory. “Says here they have shipped it down to London for ‘further examination.’ ”

  “At least it’s not off to Glasgow and the esteemed Dougald Forsythe to pontificate over it,” McAllister commented.

  “Meow.” Joanne laughed.

  “Why that one?”

  “It had such a beautiful frame,” she answered. “Maybe it’s genuine.”

  “Hope so. It would go well over the mantelpiece of our new house.”

  “Have we got it?” It wasn’t that she’d forgotten. More that she didn’t want to think about moving. She dreaded packing up, clearing out. She had married a man who could afford professional help, not hire a man with a van and a boy and a dog. But the thought of strangers poking through her possessions, except for the lifting and carrying, she hated.

  “I haven’t heard,” he said. “I was expecting to know by now. I’ll call Angus MacLean tomorrow.”

  She could see he was distracted. The rehanging of the pictures had motivated him to unpack the last two boxes of books. That most of the volumes had gone to the attic—another place that needed a clearing out were they to move—McAllister thought logical.

  Joanne didn’t. After her father had died, after her mother had had to move out of the manse, her sister was left with the job of dealing with the detritus of thirty-two years in the same house. Joanne h
adn’t been allowed to help, but her sister’s stories of the woodworm in the furniture, broken crockery, moldy books, and moth-infested rugs and blankets and curtains being carted off to the town dump were a warning to both sisters.

  “If you don’t use it, look at it, care for it for more than a year, then give it away, or put it in the church jumble sale,” her sister had said.

  “That will be my motto,” Joanne agreed.

  But how to enforce that with a husband who’d had so little in his childhood he was now the proverbial jackdaw? As for her younger daughter, Jean kept everything—broken crayons, almost-finished coloring books, and a toy tea set with only one cup remaining. When she and the girls had moved from their wee Council prefab to McAllister’s house, she’d found under Jean’s bed an ancient knitted bear that a mouse had attempted to make a nest from and was well beyond repair. After a prolonged crying fit, her daughter had agreed to keep all her old treasures in a tin trunk, not scattered on the alternative cupboard, the bedroom floor.

  “This is interesting,” McAllister said. He was leafing through a leather-bound book. It was translated from German. “It’s a system, graphology, and seems to be a method of deducing personality traits from handwriting.”

  “Alice was experimenting with different handwriting for her illustrations.”

  “Hmmm. Stuart said she was an expert in falsifying documents.”

  “The book is a remnant from her colorful past, then.”

  “I wonder if . . .”

  “McAllister! Now you are doing what you told me not to.”

  He looked up at her.

  “You are speculating. Come on, admit it. You’re as fascinated by Alice Ramsay as I am.”

  “I am.” He stood. Taking the book to the table, he laid it on a sheet of paper. “Everything about Miss Ramsay is intriguing. But the more we know, the more dangerous it seems.”

  “I listened to you. I had no intention of becoming involved.” She gestured around to the books, the paintings, the manuscript snug in the writing box. “But now that we know a little of her past, these papers are very interesting to a nosy journalist and a budding author.”