North Sea Requiem

by A. D. Scott

  She was teasing and Joanne didn’t mind. She knew she should be jealous, but somehow Mae Bell’s fancying him, even in jest, only put McAllister up in her estimation.

  They were smiling and chatting about shoes and weather as they made their way back down the steep slope of Castle Wynd.

  Mae Bell may or may not have known, but her approval of McAllister made Joanne reexamine the man who was courting her. Mae Bell finds him attractive, she was thinking, and Mae Bell should know, she’s from New York and Paris. So why do I hesitate?

  She was back on the same seesaw of emotion. Perhaps fear. And it frustrated her almost as much as it frustrated McAllister.

  NINE

  Rob McLean was a good friend to Frankie Urquhart, especially in the days and weeks following the death of Nurse Urquhart. He had liked Frankie’s mum. He thought her funny and kind and always ready to laugh at the boys’ shenanigans—even the memorable nit outbreak, she would laugh about later. He wanted to find whoever had done this to her. He also wanted a front-page scoop.

  Rob knew he would one day leave the Highlands. He was certain that one day he would be somebody in the world, and television was the world he would star in. He applied twice to Scottish Television for a position as news reporter. He was turned down, but not left without hope. The rejection letter advised him to finish his cadetship on the newspaper and then reapply. By this summer, after five years training, he would be a fully qualified journalist. Next stop, stardom.

  But the coming of McAllister to the Highland Gazette had not only changed the newspaper, it had changed Rob. The role of bright young investigative reporter and lead singer in a small-town rock ’n’ roll band was alluring, flattering even. He was the proverbial golden fish in a pond of sticklebacks.

  His mother, Margaret McLean, saw this. And she was worried.

  It was not that she wanted her son to leave home; it was that she did not want him to accept second best. She could see how entrenched he was becoming at the Gazette. She could see him being appointed senior reporter, deputy editor, editor, accepting life—a good life, here in the Highlands, marrying, having children—all of which she knew she and her husband, Angus, would love, but there was more to her only child than that.

  Margaret McLean believed that everyone was born with wings but only a few knew how to unfurl them, stand on the edge of the precipice, and fly—or crash; but to die without trying, that was sad. She encouraged Joanne to find her wings and she wanted Rob to unfurl his. She saw in Joanne’s daughter Annie a child she felt would need little encouragement; and she herself had flown and tasted the rarefied air and had made a choice, out of love, to settle, to have a child, her wings folded—temporarily. Now it was her son’s turn. And in the article she was reading in The Scotsman, she believed she might have found the solution.

  “Do you know who, apart from printers, would need sulfuric acid?” Rob asked, breaking into his mother’s bubble of dreams for her son.

  Margaret thought for a second. “Ask your old chemistry master at the academy.” She had a horror of acid. She knew what simple drain cleaner could do to the skin. “And try to think why someone would choose acid . . .”

  “As opposed to . . .”

  “An axe, a shotgun, a motorcar . . .”

  “Poison?”

  “Ah . . .” Margaret paused here. “Throwing acid, combined with writing anonymous letters—it all feels female to me.”

  “Maybe.” Rob bounced out of his chair and was across the Persian rug and kissing his mother’s cheek in one bound. “Thanks.” He stood back, saw her fair hair had now more silver than gold, and with a flash of sadness, he knew she was right; their time together was coming to an end.

  The eye contact between them lasted perhaps two seconds before she had to look away.

  “I’ll be late tonight,” was all Rob said before leaving.

  She heard the kitchen door close. Then the gate shut. Then the motorbike start. She shook open the newspaper to the article she’d been reading, folded the pages back, took it to the writing bureau, copied out the information. Rob was never annoyed when she tried to organize his life, his career, and this was a perfect way for him to gain a foothold in the world of television. No harm in sending for the prospectus, she thought as she started to write the letter.

  • • •

  “My mother feels it could be a woman who threw the acid,” Rob said.

  “Never.” Joanne was indignant at the thought. “A woman knows how disfiguring acid is, how painful, how . . . Never.”

  “I’m off to ask my old chemistry teacher the places sulfuric acid can be found. Catch you later.” Rob was gone. He didn’t feel like arguing the point. Whoever threw it, male or female, it was a shocking thing to do, in Rob’s opinion; it showed a viciousness, yes, but was cowardly too.

  McAllister stopped typing. He was thinking about Margaret McLean’s idea. He looked across at Don, who shrugged. Since the death of his wife six months previously, Don McLeod worked, lived quietly, chatted and joked, but with no real interest: he was living a surface life; without love he was half a man—a cliché he would strike out with his wee red pencil if presented to him in an article, but true nonetheless.

  “I’m not much help,” Don said to McAllister, not bothered that Joanne was listening. “Since I’ve all but given up the drink, I’m no good at thinking.”

  “Maybe, but you’re much more handsome,” Joanne said.

  “Better stake your claim, McAllister, she’s almost divorced . . .” Don saw her blush. “Thanks all the same, it does an old man good to flirt wi’ a bonnie lass.” He gave her a pat on the arm, slid off his stool, and went down to the print room with a sheaf of copy to be set.

  She watched him. She worried about him. Since the death of his wife, he seemed so much older. And since he was the nearest she had come to a real father, his well-being mattered to her. Greatly. She shook her head. Beneath this news story, she sensed an undercurrent. The intent may not have been murder. It may have been to disfigure only. Only? She thought. Evil, she felt. But why? Why throw acid?

  “Is that what you think? That a woman could have done this?” Joanne asked McAllister. As all at the Gazette were writing about, thinking on, and investigating the attack, there was never a need to explain what “this” referred to.

  “I think a woman could have written the letters,” he began. “But the little I know of that particular crime—revenge, wanting to destroy them by disfiguring them—is that it’s usually men against women. A woman doing this? I couldn’t say.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want to live if I was that disfigured—not being able to speak; breathing and eating really difficult. Someone must have really hated her.”

  Joanne had been brought up in the hell and damnation version of Christianity. She knew that if there was love, which she believed there was, there surely must be its opposite. Hate. She thought she knew love. And dislike—occasionally intense dislike. But hate?

  She sighed. “McAllister, I’ve had enough of miserable news. Let’s go to the pictures. Something cheerful.” She reached for the Gazette. “Doris Day? She sings that song ‘Que Sera, Sera.’ You know the one . . .” The one you love, she was going to say, knowing he hated it. One o’ those songs that get stuck in your head and drives you to drink, he told her when the song had blasted out of the wireless for the umpteenth time.

  McAllister was saved by the phone. Joanne answered. “Yes, he’s here. DI Dunne,” she said as she handed over the receiver.

  “Yes, they’re all here.” McAllister was nodding and doodling the chemical equation for sulfuric acid on a sheet of copy paper. “Aye. Right. Use my office.” He put down the phone, “Sorry, Joanne, we’ll have to make the pictures some other night. The police want to interview the printers, so it’s best I stay here.”

  “Liar. You’re not in the least sorry.” She laughed. He grinned back. “McAllister, I was teasing. I would never put you through a Doris Day film.”

  It
was the last cheerful moment in what turned into a long and fractious day.

  • • •

  Later in the morning, Rob came in, talking as he stripped off the layers of protection needed to drive a motorbike in March in the Highlands. “Mr. George, at the academy, he says finding sulfuric is not hard if you know where to look.”

  “Including here.” Joanne knew that acid was kept in the Gazette typesetting room. “And in Hector’s studio,” she added, “but I made him get rid of it and told him never to mention he kept acid. You know how bad that would look to Sergeant Patience.”

  “Good thinking.” McAllister knew this may not be strictly legal but was glad of Joanne’s decision. He had also warned Don, whose job it was, laid down in union rules, to liaise between journalists and printers, to be careful not to upset the printers. A temperamental lot, printers, he’d said after DI Dunne had explained to him, “We’re only here to find out about the missing bottle.” His tone had been that of a curious archaeologist trying to identify a rune.

  “None in the print room are happy,” Don said. “They’re offended anyone should think one of them guilty of throwing acid.” That’s a right cowardly act . . . none o’ us would do such a thing, the father of the chapel told him, affronted at any interference in his bailiwick.

  • • •

  Midafternoon, McAllister was in the reporters’ room. He had asked everyone to attend, so, along with Don, Joanne, Rob, and Hector, Mal Forbes was there with Fiona.

  “The police don’t know if the acid came from here,” McAllister started. “The bottle was smashed to bits. Our men have had their fingerprints taken, including the father of the chapel. DI Dunne asked if we would volunteer to have our prints . . .”

  “Gazette,” Joanne answered. “A moment please.” She handed the receiver to McAllister.

  “Aye. Right. I see.” McAllister was doodling naughts and crosses on a piece of copy paper as he listened. “Never!” His pencil stabbed through the paper and broke. “Have you arrested them? Aye, I know . . . helping with inquiries. Aye. Thanks for letting me know.” He hung up the receiver. The others were watching him, waiting, as he lit a cigarette. “The bottle came from here.”

  Rob was indignant that the printers should be suspected. “None of our people—”

  “DI Dunne has taken Alan Fordyce, the apprentice compositor, in for questioning. His thumbprint is on a piece of glass from the bottle found at the scene.” McAllister blew out a long stream of smoke towards heaven.

  “Never.” Don was indignant. “He’d never . . .” The others saw a thought as obvious as a cloud crossing the sun at midday. “He plays for Glen Achilty.”

  Joanne took a moment longer than the others to work this out. “Shinty?”

  “Aye, lass, shinty.” Don climbed down from his stool. “I’d better go and speak to the father of the chapel.”

  “Too late. Another print matches his.” McAllister was partly horrified at the thought someone at the Gazette might be involved, partly concerned that the printers would not be released in time to print the next edition, and mostly confused. The father of the chapel was the epitome of respectability.

  “So, no need for us to give our fingerprints then,” Mal Forbes said.

  Joanne ignored Mal. “What will we do?” she asked McAllister.

  He shrugged. “Wait.” He saw she was waiting for more.

  Don was beginning to take an interest. “Mislead, confuse, confound—all and more of the above—then cobble together an article . . .” This was his territory—the print room, shinty, the men he worked with, some he had known for twenty years and more.

  “Send the readers off in different directions,” Joanne continued.

  “Anywhere but the print-shop of the Highland Gazette,” McAllister finished.

  Forty minutes later, Don remembered. He waited another hour until everyone had left, then asked McAllister did he fancy a drink. “Only a pint,” he said, “that doesn’t count as alcohol.”

  Don didn’t want to talk in his usual haunts, so they walked across the river to a pub on Glen Urquhart Road. It was midweek quiet. They found a corner where only the observers on the top deck of the buses stopping outside could see them, and only if they squinted through unwashed windows into the shadows of the nineteenth-century bar lit with 40-watt bulbs filtered through lampshades as old as the pub.

  “The father of the chapel lives on Planefield Road,” Don started, and then remembered that even after two years, McAllister did not know every street, lane, and vennel in the town. “Planefield Road runs along at the back of the school. That’s the entrance to the playgrounds where Nurse Urquhart was attacked.”

  “A coincidence surely.” McAllister leaned forwards, staring at Don. “It has to be.”

  “Aye, probably. But let me think on it, and I’ll ask around.” He didn’t say, but Don had heard something about Nurse Urquhart and the printer’s wife. He couldn’t remember what; recent or past he couldn’t recall, either.

  McAllister knew that if there was anything to be found out about the vendettas of the town, Don would find it. “DI Dunne will know this?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Make sure we get the paper out.” Don was not being heartless, just realistic. “That’s the best way to help the Urquharts—keeping the story in the news, maybe jogging someone’s memory. You know.”

  McAllister did indeed know. What he also knew was that if this evil originated in the Highland Gazette, their rivals would love to splash the news with front-page, heavy-type, large-font headlines.

  “And the father of the chapel, you’ll talk to him?”

  Don nodded. It was not a meeting he was looking forwards to. The man was obstinate, and more negative than one of Hector’s contact sheets. “Aye, I’ll speak to him. Just pray he doesn’t call a strike over some wee procedural error . . .” He saw McAllister’s eyebrows shoot up. “Revenge for being questioned like a criminal.”

  The chip shop was a few doors away from the pub. They ended the evening walking back across the bridge, not saying much, eating, scalding their fingers on the hot chips and fish batter, glad of the company. And for once, neither of them stumbled home to their respective beds drunk or hungry.

  • • •

  The same evening, Rob met up with Frankie Urquhart for a game of billiards. Thinking to take Frankie’s mind off his mother’s death, he had invited him for a game. The first game Rob won by a large margin. And the second.

  “Sorry, I can’t concentrate.” Frankie was setting up for another, then changed his mind. They took a seat to watch a game on a neighboring table—a tight game between a local and a man from Elgin, who was good, very good. As the balls clacked and spun, Frankie, speaking quietly so as not to disturb the players, said again, “Have you heard any more about—you know?”

  Rob’s silence before attempting a casual “Not much” alerted him.

  “Tell me what you heard. I have a right to know who killed my mother.”

  “It’s ridiculous.” Rob was tossing a cube of chalk, worn to almost a hole in the middle, from hand to hand. He had a feeling he shouldn’t be telling Frankie this.

  “So you have heard something?”

  “Not really, it’s just that the bottle of . . . the bottle might have come from the Gazette print room.”

  Rob knew he was right when Frankie burst out, “Alan Fordyce!”

  The yell put the Elgin player off his shot. He turned and growled, “You! Shut yer bloody trap!” He turned back to his opponent. “I’m taking that shot again.”

  “No, you’re no’,” his opponent replied, and his pals—for this was their town, their billiard hall—rose from their seats.

  Rob grabbed Frankie’s arm and pulled him towards the steps, keeping hold of him as they came out into the dark and damp of a desolate Thursday night where only the drunk could withstand the wind and rain.

  “Back to my house.”

 
Margaret McLean was still up though it was past ten o’clock. She went into the kitchen; saw the state of the “boys,” as she always called them. They were wet and cold and shaken. She handed each of them a towel. “Whisky, Frankie? Gin?”

  “Cocoa for me,” Rob answered, “and I’ll make it.”

  “Frankie, telephone your father. Tell him where you are.” Margaret was giving an order, not a request. Even though Frankie was twenty-three and hadn’t had to inform his father of his whereabouts in seven years, he did as he was told.

  When they were by the fire in the sitting room, it seemed natural for Margaret to join them. It was a good move, Rob thought later. His mother had a way of calming people. And her contribution to the conversation made sense.

  Rob told them both about the bottle coming from the print room. He told them of the fingerprints and whose they were, found on the broken pieces. He managed throughout the telling to avoid the word acid. He ended with the question, “So why did you get so het up over Alan Fordyce?”

  “He used to be in our team, but ma dad sacked him for dirty play.”

  Rob considered this. To be thrown off the team for dirty play in a game as rough as shinty would be hard.

  Frankie continued, “He swore revenge on Dad. Then he joined the Glen Achilty team. Every game we’ve met since, he’s been right vicious.”

  “Do I know him?” Rob asked. He couldn’t put a face to the name.

  “He’s thon skinny wee runt, the one they call ‘Ferret.’ ”

  “He’s short, nearly as wee as Hector.”

  “It didn’t take height or strength for the attack on Nurse Urquhart,” Margaret pointed out. “Sorry, Frankie—I shouldn’t have mentioned that.”

  “No, I prefer people to speak to me normally. Many people can’t even look me in the eye. My mother’s death is embarrassing enough, but to be a victim of . . .”