A Kind of Grief

by A. D. Scott

In his grim don’t worry, I have this under control tight-lipped smile—or was it a grimace?—Joanne saw pain. No, she corrected herself, humiliation.

  Mr. Mackenzie must have felt her gaze on him, for he turned, caught Joanne’s eye, and shrugged. Then smiled. Then, taking half a step sideways to close the gap between him and Mrs. Galloway, he linked arms with her.

  Mrs. Galloway said nothing. But her silence spoke. She was standing proud, in her own hotel, amongst friends, out in the open, in full view, with her man. As bold as the figurehead on the Cutty Sark, glorious in her best silk dress—albeit covered with an apron in a clashing pansy print—and even though this skirmish in a twenty-year battle had just commenced, it was clear Mrs. Galloway would always be the winner.

  “You tried to kill me!” Mrs. Mackenzie shrieked at her. “I know it was your car that hit me. I know you want me dead. I know—”

  “I drive a van,” Mrs. Galloway pointed out.

  “It was you! I know it was you. It had to be . . .” The sentence faded. In truth, Mrs. Mackenzie hadn’t seen who knocked her over, had no explanation for the attempt to kill her, yet was certain that was what had been planned. For years.

  Muriel had been her husband’s childhood sweetheart. She’d lost him when she’d left the area. Returning as Mrs. Galloway but with no husband accompanying her, it was only a short time before the relationship with Mr. Mackenzie resumed. No one who knew all the protagonists involved was the least bit surprised.

  “Mum. Mum. Please.” Calum was shaking. “It’s Elaine’s special party.”

  Elaine thought her fiancé might cry. “We’ll be back home in an hour or so,” she said, “and I’ve saved you a piece of cake.” She was not going to let her future mother-in-law win. Not again.

  “How could you?” Mrs. Mackenzie turned on Elaine. “Having your party here instead of at my house? Inviting that whore?”

  She had a big voice for such a wee woman. The shriek from Mrs. Galloway was even louder. “Whore? Whore? You get out of here this instant, you dried-up auld b—witch!”

  “You let go of my husband, or I’ll—”

  “Or you’ll what? He’s been mine for near on twenty years, and he’s never coming back! Look at your son. He can’t wait to get away from you either.”

  “Mum, please.” Calum took his mother’s arm. “Sorry, Elaine,” he said. “I’ll take her home and be back soon.”

  As he propelled her out of the room, Joanne could see that the woman was far more mobile than she pretended.

  “Sorry, Elaine,” Mrs. Mackenzie called over her shoulder. Elaine was in no doubt that this was to placate her son; she had no intention, and never would have, of apologizing to Elaine. Mrs. Galloway had stolen her husband; no one was going to steal her son.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, friends.” There was a tapping of a teaspoon on a tumbler. Dr. Jamieson stood at the head of the table to make a speech. “Today is a day to say farewell to one of the best, one of the kindest people I know. Nurse Elaine.”

  The applause was loud and long, relieving the tension through hard claps, palm to palm, everyone wanting to show appreciation and support to Elaine.

  “We will miss you,” the doctor finished.

  “Hear, hear” rang out around the room.

  “Aye, lass, you’ll be sorely missed,” agreed an elderly gentleman with a thick thatch of white hair and a tweed jacket, its collar liberally sprinkled with a storm of dandruff.

  “Don’t leave us!” shouted an old lady with a walking frame decorated with little-girl-pink ribbon.

  Dr. Jamieson could see Elaine was teary and tired yet happy. He picked up the large parcel, wrapped in Christmas paper left over from the previous year, and handed it to her. “This is from all of us. We’ll miss you, but good luck in your new job.”

  Elaine oohed and ahed, didn’t mention that she’d chosen the gift herself, and kept exclaiming, “This is just what I wanted!” She beamed at the residents of the nursing home. They, including the toothless Mr. Meikle, beamed back.

  “I hear it’s right cold in the south,” she joked, “so I’ll be needing this.” She draped the tartan mohair stole across her shoulders—Mackenzie tartan, naturally—and thanked everyone for coming.

  “If the lass still wants him, she needs to kidnap thon fiancé of hers and flit to the moon.” This came from the old man, whose hearing may have deteriorated but not his intelligence.

  Mr. Mackenzie heard. He turned to Mrs. Galloway. “I’m so sorry, ma dear.”

  She replied, “Wheesht!” and took his hand. “It’s Elaine we should be sorry for. And your lad.”

  The scene between the women had shocked no one except the McAllisters.

  Wouldn’t have missed it for the world was the final judgment on the farewell do. The accusation of being deliberately run over by Mrs. Galloway was mostly dismissed. It would be gossiped about, and knowing Mrs. Mackenzie would never let go, they would hear the accusations repeated. Again and again.

  But that’s Mrs. Mackenzie for you was the general consensus. Aye on about nothing.

  “Twenty years,” McAllister said as he drove his family home. “No wonder Mrs. Mackenzie is bitter.”

  “I wish the girls hadn’t been there.” Joanne thought the children were asleep when she said this.

  Jean was, her head on a pillow of piled-up overcoats. Annie wasn’t; she loved listening in on adult conversations. “I’m glad we were there,” she said. From the jerk of Joanne’s head, she knew she’d said the wrong thing. “Us coming made Elaine happy.” The girl knew how to soft-soap her mother.

  “Yes. You’re right. She’s a lovely young woman,” Joanne agreed.

  Annie glanced up. They were passing through Invergordon. In the streetlights she caught McAllister watching her in the driving mirror. He winked.

  When McAllister switched off the engine, they sat in silence for a moment. The only sounds the ticking of the engine as it cooled and a faint whisper of wind in the cypress tree.

  “I’ll lift Jean up to bed,” he said.

  “And I’ll put the kettle on,” Annie offered. She went ahead with McAllister, using her key to open the door and switch on the lights. He had her sister in his arms, nothing waking her.

  “An atomic bomb wouldn’t wake you,” Annie had once said to her sister.

  “What’s an atomic bomb?” Jean had asked.

  Annie followed the wireless news and felt an explanation was too scary for a nine-year-old. “It’s a big, big bomb,” she’d said, not admitting that the news had given her nightmares.

  Joanne went straight to the sitting room. The fire was set but unlit and the room chilly. She sat on the sofa, easing off her shoes, and put her feet up.

  She sighed.

  Closed her eyes.

  Then suddenly opened them, all senses on alert. A smell, a draft—a sense of something awry, amiss, disturbed, touched, altered—made her freeze. She heard her husband move above. From the kitchen, she heard her daughter run the tap. She gazed around her—the pictures, nothing different; the ornaments, all in place; the rugs, the chairs, the flowers, gladioli she should have thrown out this morning but hadn’t time, nothing seemed out of place.

  She smelled the room. Taking slow shallow breaths, breathing through her skin, her scalp, breathing between her eyes, she was certain: someone, something, had been here.

  She went to the writing box. Still locked. She took the key and opened it. The perhaps Leonardo drawings were with Hector, as he wanted to photograph them and examine them with a strong magnifying glass. As for the manuscript, she couldn’t be certain, but the folders seemed in order, and nothing seemed to have been removed.

  She ached to call out to McAllister but didn’t want to seem foolish.

  “Night, Mum.”

  Joanne jumped.

  “What’s wrong?” Annie asked.

  “Tired, that’s all.”

  “It’s been a long day.” The girl turned away, not wanting her mother to sense her own fear.
The long illness after Joanne’s injury had terrified the child, terrified her into believing her mother would never again be the same. “She’s not herself” was the phrase she’d used. It had taken her stepfather a while to see that Annie was right. It had taken time for Annie to understand that nothing was the same for any of them after the ordeal. Not her mother, not McAllister, not herself, although she would deny that if asked. Even her sister had become more clinging.

  In a flash of insight beyond her years, Annie thought, Maybe that’s what happened to Mrs. Mackenzie, something terrible, and she’s never recovered.

  She went to bed, where she would write up the day in her diary, resolving to remember her insight when she was an author, writing about people.

  Joanne went up to their bedroom. About to put on her slippers, she stopped and began looking, sniffing, checking in drawers, smoothing out the bed linen. Here too, she thought. Someone has been in here.

  She reached for the musical jewelry box on the dressing table, a present from the girls last Christmas. The box played “Greensleeves” when opened. It was switched off, and the box unlocked. Did I switch it off? Did I unlock it? She hated that she couldn’t remember.

  Her few items of jewelry were all there, including her previous wedding ring, which she couldn’t bring herself to throw out or sell. The small gold thistle brooch with the purple amethyst—a present from Mrs. McAllister on their wedding day—a thin gold chain, her pearls inherited from her grandmother, they were all there.

  Nothing was out of place. Nothing missing. Yet her certain dread crawled up her arms, pressing against her throat, pressing into the base of her skull, making her feel nauseated.

  When she came downstairs, McAllister had a dram in his hand and was considering whether to light the fire. Even though only a few minutes past ten, early for him but an hour when most in the town were asleep, he was tired and wishing he’d set the bedroom fire as well as the one in the sitting room.

  He was a bad actor. He listened to her suspicions, doing his best to disguise his skepticism. He didn’t ask, How do you know? Why do you think that? He had the sense to not say, You’re tired, perhaps you are imagining it.

  Joanne accepted it was challenging for him, for anyone except their friend Jenny McPhee the traveler, to believe in intuition, believe the unbelievable. She held up her hands, palms outwards, to ward off his incredulity. “If you believe in me, trust me. I know someone was in our home when we were away. I know you doubt the sixth sense, but I am certain someone has been in the house.”

  To placate her, he began a conversation as to the who, the why, the when.

  The when was easy. “Today,” Joanne said. “This evening.” The why she was equally certain of. “It’s to do with Alice Ramsay.” What part in the mystery of Alice she could not say.

  And McAllister didn’t want to speculate. Nor did he want to articulate his theories regarding the who, for that would require at least two more whiskies, and the room was cold, and he needed his bed.

  Joanne’s answer surprised him. “I think someone is after the drawings.”

  “Not the manuscript?”

  “I immediately thought of Forsythe. He doesn’t strike me as the burglar type, though. Maybe it’s . . .” She shook her head. A strand of hair fell over her left eye. She blew it away. “I don’t have a sense of danger. But I thought that the last time.”

  “He might have hired someone. Leonardo drawings are a major find to an art expert like him.”

  She stood. Yawned. Then hastily covered her mouth. “Excuse me.”

  He smiled. He loved everything about her, even her yawns. “Do you want cocoa?”

  “No, thanks, I’m too tired.” The explanation that it might be Forsythe had calmed her, and she knew she would now sleep. Such an idiot, that man, she told herself as she climbed the stairs to bed, but harmless.

  McAllister bent over to switch off the table lamp. There was a spent match in the unlit fire. Why he picked it up he couldn’t say. It was just a spent match, he was later to say to DI Dunne. He threw it back into the fire, then switched off the lights.

  At the foot of the stairs, he froze. Went back to the sitting room. Switched on the overhead lights. Picked up the match. Looking at it, he understood that Joanne hadn’t been imagining things.

  “It’s too short,” he murmured. “It’s from a pocket box of matches.” He looked for their box of household-sized matches. It was underneath old copies of the Gazette in the wooden box along with a bundle of kindling.

  He put the spent match on the mantelpiece. He took a deep breath. Now he sensed it, a disturbance of the air, in the fabric of the room.

  He had a flash of him telling Dunne, No, nothing is missing, no signs of a break-in. But Joanne can sense these things. And I have a spent match that’s the wrong size.

  As evidence of a nonburglary, he knew it was flimsy. Yet he now believed someone had been in their home. Someone professional. But not quite professional enough.

  “We will talk soon, Mr. Stuart, or whoever you are,” he vowed.

  And went to bed.

  CHAPTER 17

  Of course I said no. I told him I couldn’t supply him with the documentation. He wanted the passports so desperately I knew it was wrong.

  He reminded me of our family ties, talking about “people like us” and all that nonsense. I told him that meant nothing to me.

  Then he’d explained just how deeply I was involved.

  “Remember when I asked you about P’s cover identity?” he’d asked. “Well, thanks to you, he was traced, and he’s now dead. Remember that document I asked you to forge, the one in Arabic? A network was uncovered, and all the operatives disappeared. As for D, he wouldn’t be sitting in his apartment in Moscow if it weren’t for the documents you supplied.”

  He’d said all this in a matter-of-fact voice, as if he were discussing the prospect of rain for the Wimbledon Fortnight. But his eyes, they’d betrayed him. His eyes, brown, soft, pleading. I knew that look. Soft and endearing if you didn’t know him. And the softer and more charming his behavior, the more dangerous he was.

  That shattered me. In hindsight, I suspect he may have been bluffing. So many identity documents and passports were available, and by that time, I was involved in less mundane work.

  I asked why he couldn’t use the identities already provided—all three sets of documents. “We suspect a leak,” he’d told me, “and being able to move without detection from our own people, this is my way of finding the traitor.”

  I did ask if he was one of the traitors. He’d laughed.

  I still can’t believe I believed him.

  “No Calum, then,” Don remarked before they began the Monday Morning Meeting.

  “Seeing how half the calls are from his mother, he should look after the switchboard,” Lorna said. “If he turns up, that is.”

  McAllister was inclined to agree but didn’t say so. “Right, what have we got for this week?” he began.

  “Lots of pre-Christmas and New Year advertising,” Frankie told them.

  “Just what I don’t need.” Don groaned.

  “I’ve done a piece on the rape of our architectural heritage, “ Lorna began, “and I’ve some interesting stuff on who exactly will benefit from the building contracts—amongst the names is a well-known former councilor.”

  “Like it,” Don told her, “but the ‘rape’ word is not in our vocabulary.”

  “It’s almost 1960. Whyever not?” she protested.

  “Because I say so,” the deputy editor replied.

  McAllister smiled. She’ll do well, this young lass, he thought. And the battle of wills and wits between her and Don was sure to be entertaining.

  He could see from their grins that Frankie and Rob agreed.

  Hector was too busy with his negatives to notice anything.

  Frankie had asked the woman who was a part-time bookkeeper for the Gazette to work full-time. So Mrs. Brown had taken over the switchboard and the
classified advertising. A quiet, nondescript middle-aged woman, she was a widow in need of the income. Frankie assured them she was efficient, but that was not what worried McAllister; he feared that when she was not in her place behind the reception desk, he might not recognize her.

  Don agreed. “She’ll no frighten the public,” he told McAllister.

  “What about Lorna?” the editor asked. “Are you not concerned she’ll terrify the public?”

  “She’ll do that, all right,” his deputy replied. “But bairns and grannies take to her.”

  Calum telephoned at noon.

  “You should’ve called first thing,” Don said.

  “Sorry. I’m really sorry. Can I speak to Mr. McAllister?”

  “McAllister?” Don looked across the table at the editor, who was thumping out an article on a proposal to phase out National Health orange juice.

  “No, he’s busy. You’ll have to make do with me.”

  Calum was not offended; Mr. McAllister was a lofty being in his eyes. “Miss Ramsay’s farmhouse was broken into. Even the floorboards were ripped up, and someone did something to the chimney; there’s soot everywhere.”

  “You went to the place?”

  “Aye, this morning. I heard about it from a pal in the police and went out with him.”

  “Local news from two counties away is not much use to us. Write it up anyhow, but I doubt we can use it.”

  “My old editor offered me my job back.” That Mrs. Mackenzie had threatened the editor, over a matter some eight years ago involving a junior typist and a weekend in Ullapool, Calum would never know. The editor decided he was more afraid of Mrs. Mackenzie and what she could tell his wife than he was of some mysterious man who seemed to have vanished southwards down the A9.

  “And?”

  “Elaine, my fiancée, starts her training today at Raigmore. But my mother needs me.”

  “Well, it’s straightforward: your mother or your fiancée. Your choice. But let me know your decision this week.” Don hung up. “You got all that?”

  McAllister answered, “I got the gist of it.”

  “I’m thinking that lad is more trouble than he’s worth.”