by A. D. Scott
“You obviously know something. Should I be nervous? At least give me a clue.” And that signature Mae Bell send-shivers-down-the-spine laugh filled the editor’s poky wee office.
“Are you a singer, Mrs. Bell?” McAllister was staring at her.
“Sure am.”
“Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky Stormy weather . . .”
The sound of her voice was loud; clear—clear as a bell—a phrase Don McLeod would delete if one of them used it in an article.
“Paris, 1948, that wee club on the Left Bank—but you weren’t Mae Bell then . . .”
“Oh, my, Mr. McAllister, now you’re giving away my secrets . . .”
“I saw you. You were, are, marvelous.”
“I took my husband’s name. I love the sound of Mae Bell . . .”
“So do I,” Rob joined in.
“The anonymous letters.” Joanne had enough of this heroine worship but immediately regretted sounding so churlish. Though no one else had noticed.
“Yes, the letters.” McAllister knew he had to call DI Dunne. “I’ll ask the inspector if he will come here to talk to you.” He thought it better that the inspector come to the Gazette, than that the unmistakable Mrs. Bell walk up the steps of the police station, alerting who knows who, maybe even the letter writer.
“Fiona also opened an anonymous letter addressed to the Gazette. I think from the same person . . .”
McAllister turned to Joanne. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He meant it as a comment, a we-could-have-talked-this-over, but the pink cheeks as she looked at the floor told him he’d upset her.
“My fault,” Mae intervened. “I told the young lady always to ignore anonymous communications and chain letters.”
Not quite accurate—Mae told Fiona to throw the note away.
But Joanne was grateful for the intervention. Her arms wrapped around herself to hide her shaking hands, she was looking at the floor where a carpet had once lain, leaving a lighter mark on the wood.
“Sorry.” Face pink, furious that McAllister should pull her up in front of Mae, she stood. “I have some work to do.”
Rob looked at his watch. “Me too. I’ll catch you later, Mae . . . Mrs. Bell . . .” He backed out of the room, clearly enchanted.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” Mae said to Joanne.
Joanne thought Mae must be psychic—the way she seemed to sense the undertow in a conversation, an inflection in a voice, a remark that seemed casual but wasn’t. She nodded at Mae. There goes my story. No one was interested until it got interesting. Not looking at McAllister, she followed Rob to the reporters’ room.
“Did you hear that voice? She’s a real jazz singer.” Rob spoke as though he’d just had an audience with Phil Everly, his hero.
“I heard,” Don McLeod joined the conversation. “So who’s the singer?”
“My friend,” Joanne said. She sat at the typewriter and began banging on the keys, typing at hurricane force.
Don looked at Rob. Rob shrugged. Ten minutes later, the sound of footsteps on the stairs made Rob look up. Joanne kept on with her work. The footsteps went into McAllister’s office. Rob half rose, thinking it might be Detective Inspector Dunne.
“None of our business,” Joanne snapped.
Rob went back to his notes on the plans to demolish Bridge Street saying, “We’ll find out eventually.”
“Aye,” Don agreed, “and hopefully before deadline.”
• • •
Joanne was out of sorts, was how she put it when she talked to Chiara later that day.
“Come round after work and hold wee Andrew, that always cheers you up. Bring Jean and Annie. Stay for tea—we’ve plenty of pasta.”
After they had eaten and Chiara had bathed the baby with the help of two besotted girls, and after Andrew was wrapped up tight like baby Jesus in swaddling clothes and delivered to his daddy, who sat with him and the girls watching television, Joanne and Chiara did the dishes—Chiara washing, Joanne drying. The soothing routine and the warm kitchen and the rich food, especially the orange cake they had for pudding, comforted Joanne, melting the cold lump in her chest.
“How’s McAllister?” Chiara asked, trying for innocent and failing.
Joanne didn’t look at her. “How’s McAllister? I don’t really know. I’ve only seen him at work lately.”
“Whose fault’s that?”
“I’ve been busy . . . what with the divorce and the girls and . . .”
“It’s me you’re talking to, Chiara, your best friend . . . or is this wonderful American woman now your best friend?”
“Never! And how do you know she’s wonderful? Of course, your dad. She’s charmed him too.”
“Joanne, I’m only joking. I know we’re best friends, and yes, she charmed Papa—he loves blond women, you should hear him go on about Grace Kelly—but you’re like a big sister, so I’m allowed to tell you when you’re behaving like an idiot.”
Joanne said nothing but wiped a large white dinner plate so often it was gleaming.
Chiara was not going to let up. “McAllister is a man. Single. Forty-five. Never been married. You have to train him. You have to—”
The doorbell rang. Peter Kowalski, Chiara’s husband, answered.
“Come in, come in. Chiara’s in the kitchen with Joanne if you want to say hello.” Peter came in carrying his bundle of baby, followed by McAllister.
“We were talking about you,” Chiara said as she dried her hands on a tea towel and came forwards for a continental-style double kiss. “Coffee? Tea? Wine?”
“Coffee please,” he said. He looked at Joanne. Smiled.
She smiled back, said, “McAllister,” then looked away. The large wooden table between them was as wide as a frontier, and as helpful.
When they were alone, the men having taken their coffee into the sitting room, and Chiara had the percolator on the stove for a second round, she felt, then saw, the irritation in Joanne.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“You never told me McAllister was coming over.”
“I didn’t know. But he comes here regularly for a game of chess with Peter. You know that.” Chiara was staring. “You, dear friend, have a problem. We will talk later. But first . . .” She was laying the tray with cups and sugar.
“First I have to get the girls home, it’s late.”
“No, you don’t. It’s Friday. They can sleep here and we can have a lovely night together, the four of us.”
“I can’t . . .”
“You have no choice. I’ve decided.”
And a lovely night they had. Then McAllister offered her a lift home. When they were in the car, Joanne remembered Chiara’s words. She hadn’t liked hearing her friend tell her she had a problem, but she knew she was right. “Can we go to your house? It’s ages since we talked alone.”
She could feel his reaction. Feel the pleasure emanating from him like the heat from her two-bar electric fire that she practically sat on top of on cold winter’s nights.
At his home, they talked. At first the conversation was about Nurse Urquhart. The viciousness of the attack had shaken everyone—especially women who could imagine it happening to them. They talked over the Why? They considered motives; an amputated leg in a shinty boot in Nurse Urquhart’s washing was a pretty sick joke; acid in the face had no explanation except hate. But shinty, whilst fierce, was not vicious off the field.
McAllister played a soft, haunting piece of music he told her was flamenco. They drank a little wine. He lent her a book. She asked for another, this one a book of poetry, some American woman called Emily whom she’d never heard of.
He kissed her. Once. But a nice kiss, she decided. Then he took her home.
Going to bed in her little prefab and the house empty, she enjoyed the rare solitude. And regretted she was never able to say to McAllister what she didn’t know she wanted to say, which was, I feel so inadequate. Naïve. Uneducated. Unsophisticated. Untraveled. Is that
a word? Mae Bell is much more your style than me.
Thoughts kept gushing out, unstoppable, like a burst water main. She gave in, got up, went to the kitchen, made cocoa, sipped it in bed. When sleep finally came, the thoughts transformed into dreams, where, in a running race with McAllister, Mae Bell, her girls, and her mother-in-law, she lagged far behind, watching the others disappear across the hill into bright sunshine, leaving her behind in the rain.
SEVEN
The following evening Joanne had a little more sleep—marginally.
“We need Nurse Urquhart and her warning notes,” Joanne muttered to herself when she finally finished remaking Annie’s bed and had the sheets soaking in the boiler. The thought of Nurse Urquhart sent a shudder down her spine.
The evening had started with Annie’s announcement—said with a whiff of superiority that irritated Joanne: “Maureen Forbes got sent home from school yesterday.”
Joanne had made cinnamon toast, her favorite, and she was busy fishing the skin off the cocoa, her pet hate.
Joanne knew what was expected of her—Annie would make these statements, then dribble out the information one sentence, one paragraph, one chapter at a time. Joanne blamed Enid Blyton for the way her daughter perceived the world.
“Nits.” The child was aware of the reaction the word would cause, and sure enough, Joanne stood, reached for Jean, who was cutting off the crusts from her toast. Her mother did not say “Eat your crusts, they’re good for your teeth”—she was too busy lifting the hair above her daughter’s ear searching for eggs and hopefully no hatched nits.
“Maureen says her wee brother, the one that’s always sick, is riddled with them.”
“She doesn’t have a brother,” her sister said, munching on toast whilst her mum parted her hair an inch at a time, examining each section as carefully as a mother chimpanzee searching her baby for fleas.
“Does.” Annie had never seen this brother but would not be contradicted by a sister two and a half years younger.
“You’re fine.” Joanne went around the table and stood over Annie, who flinched and tried to move her head out of reach.
“Sit still.” Joanne had a hold of a thick strand of hair crinkled from the pigtails she insisted Annie kept her hair in for school and which Annie hated and often threatened to cut off but was too afraid of what Granny Ross would say, or do, it being her belief that as well as jam making and chutney making and crunchy toffee cooking, her grandmother could brew up witch’s potions and cast spells.
Joanne couldn’t see any nits, but they were there, the telltale eggs dotted around the hairline and up in the nest of hair at the back of the head.
“Have you been scratching?” The colony above the ears was particularly thick, and on one side, where the scalp was inflamed, Joanne was certain she saw something move.
“It’s only dandruff.” Annie knew, from the way her mother stood back, trying to search without her hair coming anywhere near her daughter’s, that it wasn’t.
“It’s nits.”
“I’ll have to stay off school.”
The obvious satisfaction in her daughter’s voice made Joanne want to shout at her. But nits were no person’s fault, no respecters of family or fortune—a fact Nurse Urquhart agreed on.
“Into the bathroom,” Joanne ordered Annie. “Jean, you sleep in my bed tonight; this is going to take a long time.”
She was looking at the thick hair, the same chestnut brown as hers but with more red in it, thinking how many nights she would have to soak it with olive oil and comb out every nit, every egg, and even then with no guarantee she would get them all. She would never inflict on her daughters the method used by her mother from the one time she had caught them. Her eight-year-old self shuddered at the dire warnings about playing with the village children, and the loneliness she had to endure that summer, and the memory of paraffin rubbed into the scalp—a memory so strong that filling the paraffin heater in the winter still made her queasy.
“Give me a haircut like Nurse Urquhart makes the boys get.”
“That’s this short.” Jean held her fingers half an inch apart.
Annie felt rather than saw her mother consider the idea, before saying, “Into the bathroom. Now. I’ll bring the olive oil.”
“It’ll take forever and I want short hair and if I don’t get rid of them, I’ll be off school for ages and”—she was calculating what else would tip the battle in her favor—“and maybe Jean will get them, and you too.”
“You sit down, Mum; I’ll have a look.” The sweetness of her younger daughter’s offer, the girls’ assumption that Joanne might have them, her fear of losing her mane of beautiful hair she treasured so much that she always gathered rainwater for the final rinse . . . The argument was won.
“I can make it shorter.”
“No. Really, really short so the eggs don’t cling.” Annie’s pronouncement sounded like the quote it was. “Then the olive oil, then the comb, then wrap the head tight and do the same again in the morning for . . .” Weeks, Nurse Urquhart had said, but that sounded too long.
“I’ll use the dressmaking shears.” Joanne went to fetch her sewing basket.
Annie had enough sense not to cheer; she scratched more vigorously instead.
The haircut took place in the bathroom, the hair first cut in big chunks and dropped into a paper bag. Joanne wanted to burn the hair, burn the beasts alive. The rest of the haircut was traumatic for Joanne. She shuddered at one point, when holding up the scissors to examine the progress of the style—a pixie look was what she was trying for—and she saw something moving along the blades. She almost shrieked, before turning on the tap until it ran as hot as possible. She rinsed the scissors, and continued the cut, now moving more quickly. When she’d finished, Annie stared in the mirror. Joanne had to admit that her daughter looked more than good with a shorn head; she looked elegant and older and stronger, and the unfashionably short hair seemed to suit her daughter’s personality.
“This is better than a real hairdresser.”
Joanne knew the back was not even, but Annie couldn’t see that. She took the olive oil, rubbed it in, and began the tedious process of combing every section of the head, over and over, rinsing the steel comb under the tap until the hot water ran out and until all the eggs she could find were gone, but knowing there were more, there were always more, lurking. It was well after nine o’clock before Annie finally went to bed—she even helped her mother strip her bed and put the sheets and pillowcases in the washing machine and the quilt outside in the washhouse.
“Thanks, Mum, I love my new haircut,” Annie said.
“Wait until your granny sees it.”
“I’ll tell her I chopped my pigtails off ’cos of the nits, then you tidied it up.”
Joanne smiled and didn’t contradict her daughter. Granny Ross would believe the story, and Joanne would be saved that long look of disappointment she often received from her mother-in-law, along with the famous phrase, which summed up her relationship with her husband’s mother, “Whatever next?”
Next morning Joanne took Jean to school on the back of her bicycle, telling Annie to do some schoolwork, not to turn on the gas cooker, to leave the washing to soak, and to stay indoors—or at least not leave the garden.
“And don’t let anyone in the house,” was her parting shot.
• • •
Joanne was the first into the office. Rob next.
“Do me a favor, would you?” Joanne asked him.
“If I can.”
She turned her back to the window. “Would you check me for nits?”
“It’s easier if you sit down.”
This was one of the many reasons Joanne was friends with Rob; she could ask him almost anything. There might be a jokey comment or two, but with him, she didn’t feel awkward, she felt herself.
“I had to cut off all Annie’s hair.”
He was now examining the hair and scalp behind her left ear. “I bet she liked that.�
��
“She did.”
“Turn round a wee bit.”
“It’s as though the nits know Nurse Urquhart isn’t here and are taking revenge.” Joanne was joking, but the injuries, the sheer nastiness and pain of them, the thought how a face would look after an acid attack, were never far from her mind—nor were the threatening letters. And the why of it all that no one could work out.
“Frankie went to Aberdeen yesterday to see his mum. She was flown there by the Air Ambulance for an operation. He said his dad is falling apart without her.”
“Was it someone from the shinty?”
“I can’t see it. I know how fiercely they hate each other on field, but it’s a wee community. They’re mostly pals off the field. Naw, sick joke, probably after three too many drams is my theory on the leg in the laundry.”
“Am I interrupting?” McAllister stood in the doorway.
“No,” Rob told him before ruffling Joanne’s hair back into place. “No nits.”
“Rob!” she swatted his arm.
“Have you heard how Nurse Urquhart is?” McAllister started.
“Better, but she may never speak again. She’ll also have a lot of trouble swallowing.” Rob left out the worry about how Nurse Urquhart would breathe, which Frankie didn’t mention but which was implicit in his description of his mother’s injuries. “DI Dunne told Frankie and his dad they are doing all they can, but so far”—Rob shrugged—“no news.”
Joanne and McAllister were silent, absorbing the information.
“So what are we going to do?” Hector as usual had appeared in the room as though by magic. He still believed that his pictures of the leg, although not published in the newspaper, had started the whole catastrophe. He had said this to his granny, who told him not to be stupid, and to Fiona, who said it was not his fault. But the guilt would not go away.
“We?” Rob looked down at him. “Who’s we?”
“You, me.” He wanted to add Joanne and McAllister but didn’t dare.
“He’s right,” Joanne told them. “Rob should concentrate on helping Frankie find out who did this.” Then you can leave me to dig into the Robert Bell story, she was thinking.