by A. D. Scott
Mrs. Hardie was standing with her ample arms crossed, furious that her moment of revenge hadn’t materialized.
“I’ll keep your bag for you,” said the porter, who was Mr. Hardie but always known—even by his wife—as the porter. “You go and see your friends.” He took her elbow and led her out the door.
When Mae Bell left he turned to his wife, saying, “Where’s your Christian charity?” There was no reply; he hadn’t expected one.
Mae went as far as Gino’s café only fifty yards down the street. She took a seat near the counter, keeping the cheerful Gino in sight.
“Espresso?”
“Do you have anything stronger?”
“Sì.” He saw what he recognized as shell shock, a word his son-in-law had taught him. He poured grappa into the coffee and prepared a second cup just in case. He took it to Mae. She downed it in one. The second cup was indeed needed. She took her time over that one.
Gino phoned Joanne. It took four minutes for Joanne to come over, McAllister with her. Gino served the same drink to McAllister, but a cappuccino for Joanne. Then he served the same grappa-charged coffee for himself.
McAllister explained to Mae Bell what had happened. She chain-smoked three cigarettes after she understood exactly what was meant to have happened, calming down only after Joanne told her her opinion.
“It was a warning, Mae.” Joanne chose to believe that. McAllister disagreed but didn’t say so. Mae was on McAllister’s side.
DI Dunne arrived. Tea for him; he regarded coffee as an abomination. “Mrs. Hardie at the hotel called to say you were here.”
“I bet she did.” Mae laughed through the smoke, her voice as smoky as ever, but now with an edge.
She could be fierce if she needed to, Joanne thought.
“You were saying, Mr. McAllister?” DI Dunne asked.
“I was saying that I don’t feel the attack was meant on Mae personally, only as a warning—as with the letters—only more graphic.” McAllister decided to go along with Joanne’s more optimistic view of the attack.
“Reassuring.” Mae stubbed out a cigarette.
“I agree with Mr. McAllister.” DI Dunne sipped his tea, surprised it was real Scottish tea, having suspected they did not do tea in Italy. “The question remains, why you? What have you done to invoke such anger?”
“And how does this connect with Nurse Urquhart?” Joanne asked.
“Would you please excuse me?” Mae rose and made for the ladies’ room, quickly. She was there some time.
When she came back, Joanne asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m tired,” Mae said. She was looking as glamorous as ever, but the fresh lipstick, the eye makeup added, not quite hiding the redness of the rims, gave Joanne the true answer. “I need to rest,” Mae said. She needed to think. “First a long train journey, then this.”
“Ah, there might be a wee problem—Mrs. Hardie is not keen . . .” DI Dunne shifted from one buttock to the other.
“Inspector, she was never keen, as you put it. Loathed me on sight, but not my money.”
“You must stay at my house,” McAllister said. “There’s a spare key under the doormat. We can call a taxi from the hotel.”
“I can find another hotel,” Mae Bell said. But she meant differently. The shelter of a real home with good people after weeks in hotels, after strange discomforting news, after an attack she knew was meant to maim her, perhaps worse, made the offer hard to turn down. “And I have to talk with the police,” she added.
“You’re staying with us,” McAllister said. “I’m sure the inspector can wait till later.” It was not a suggestion, and the inspector only nodded. He had heard the “us,” a confirmation of the rumors he’d heard. He did not disapprove. Nor approve. But years as a policeman had taught him to suspend moral judgments.
“Later today,” DI Dunne said, “I’ll call round to Mr. McAllister’s house. You can give me a statement then.” Neither was this a suggestion. Nurse Urquhart had died from an acid attack, so the case was manslaughter, a particularly nasty manslaughter that, in Inspector Dunne’s opinion, was murder. He had no leads. This latest incident gave him hope of solving the case. Less than twenty-four hours later he was as confused as ever.
• • •
It took Rob to scare Joanne with what should have been obvious.
“Mae Bell at McAllister’s house? Aren’t you scared whoever’s after her will try to attack her there?” he asked when the editor explained what had happened.
Rob hadn’t meant to scare anyone and didn’t know Joanne and her girls stayed at McAllister’s regularly. He saw the attack at Mae Bell’s hotel as a warning and only half believed the attacker would strike again. “Anyhow, I don’t suppose anyone will know Mae is at your place,” he added.
“There’s no way anyone can find out,” McAllister said, more confidently than he believed. Everyone knows everything in this town.
“What did Mrs. Bell say about the attack?” Don asked.
“Not much. She wasn’t feeling well,” Joanne told him.
“Two reporters—in the same room as the would-be victim—and you didn’t ask?” Don asked McAllister—only half joking. “Young Robert. Jump on thon red chariot o’ yours and get round to McAllister’s and interview Mrs. Bell. I want a story with suitable quotes in . . .” He looked up at the eye of a clock. “In two hours—subbed and retyped—two and a half hours. Now, what’s next?”
He knew what was next—choosing which of Hec’s seventeen pictures of gamboling lambs to use in “Spring Is Here,” a maudlin pre-Easter story to placate the traditional readers of the Gazette.
The worry of an attack stayed with Joanne. That night, she was at home, enjoying her own house with her own books and her own night noises, not missing the company, knowing McAllister and Mae Bell would be prattling on about Paris and music and life in the city now that the war and occupation was a memory. “A bitter memory,” Mae told him, “but you know . . . it’s still Paris.”
• • •
The lilac was early. The scent had greeted Joanne as she pushed open the garden gate. The girls were already home. Annie had a key and although Joanne didn’t like it, she had no choice but to allow them to come home to an empty house. They’re nine and eleven now, she reminded herself, often.
“Hiya, Mum. Look, Snowy is happy we’re back. And I think Mrs. Murdoch”—this was the next-door neighbor—“she’s been feeding her too much, she’s right fat.”
Jean gave the cat to Joanne. She was examining it and discovering fat was not the problem when she saw the envelope on the table.
“Where did that come from?” she asked Annie, trying to keep her voice steady.
“It was on the doormat.” Annie took the cat from her mum and she too was examining it. “It’s no’ fat, silly, it’s kittens.”
“Really? Really and truly?” For once Jean wasn’t offended at her sister’s calling her silly. “Mum, Mum, we’re going to have kittens.”
Joanne didn’t answer until Annie dumped the cat back on her lap. She automatically rubbed her hand over the cat’s belly. She could feel the little wriggling creatures inside. “So she is,” she said.
“Who’s the letter from?” Annie asked.
“Ask no questions, tell no lies.” Joanne tried to make nothing of it. “It’s only something to do with work.” She forced her voice to a bright, cheery, joking tone, trying to keep everything normal.
Annie didn’t believe her. She knew of the divorce and was convinced that was what the letter was about. It wasn’t. The contents of the letter were beyond even her imagination.
YOU ARE NEXT.
Joanne wanted to grab her girls and run. Run all across town to McAllister. No. I need to show him I can look after myself.
She was wishing she could afford a phone. Wishing the wind would stop shaking the huge oak, throwing shadows across the curtains so it felt like Halloween, not springtime.
Never before, alone with her children, had she felt thi
s nervous about the unknown. Now every crack and groan and shudder the wind whipped up scared her.
When the yowls started at twenty to four in the morning, for a few seconds she was so terrified she froze. Then she recognized the noise.
“I’m coming, wee Snowy, I’m coming.”
• • •
Across town the wind was no less, but the house was built to contain weather. It was late and McAllister and Mae were reminiscing.
“Springtime in Paris,” she said smiling; a cigarette in a long holder in one hand, a glass of wine in the other, sitting sideways in the chair, her legs tucked in in an elegant swanlike pose. “It’s time I got back there, spring is almost over.”
“In Paris, not here,” McAllister pointed out. April in the Highlands, and May, were spring to him. “You’ll go back to Paris even though you didn’t find what you came for?”
“It’s my home. I’m the proverbial American in Paris.” Again he thrilled to hear her laugh, a sound coming from deep within her singer’s diaphragm. “And I’ve walked where Robert walked, I saw the sea, the river, the sand dunes at Findhorn, his favorite place—high and empty, and when the wind blows it whips up the sand, stinging your face and hands. I found sand in my bed the next morning. It took two washings to get it out of my hair.”
She took a sip of wine. Needing it.
“ ‘It’s cold,’ he wrote, ‘really cold, and wild, but beautiful.’ And it is.” She shivered. “I took my shoes off, put my feet in the sea. Boy, it was icy—in ten seconds my feet were blue . . .” She took another sip of wine to warm her. “Robert, he hated the cold. Hated it.”
McAllister topped up her glass before adding another log to the fire and putting on some music. Not jazz, this time Bach, an elegy for Robert, a man he would never know but was sure he would like.
“I met people who didn’t know him but remembered the American airmen as fun.” Mae needed to keep talking. McAllister was happy to be her audience.
“ ‘Right polite,’ the lady in the pub said.” Mae almost had the accent. “I read the newspaper stories, I saw the fatal accident report, I talked to some of the people on the base who were around at the time, and the local policemen. They all said the same. It was an accident. Bird strike was the theory. No sign of the aircraft, nor of Robert and the pilot and crew, so,” Mae finished, “nothing new. No more information. But I’ve seen what Robert saw, and it is beautiful.” She was almost telling the truth. But not the whole truth.
McAllister had had one glass too many to notice.
FOURTEEN
The next morning when Joanne was about to drag herself up the stairs to work, she met Rob in reception talking to Fiona.
“You look terrible.”
She started weeping.
He was appalled. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was only joking . . .”
“I didn’t get much sleep. The cat had seven kittens and . . .” She held up her hands and shoulders in the universal gesture of helplessness. “What am I going to do with seven kittens?”
“Let’s get out of here.”
They met McAllister on the steps outside the office. He too looked as though he hadn’t had much sleep.
“We’ll be back in half an hour,” Rob told him, shielding Joanne from the editor, in case it was her love-life that was upsetting her.
“What’s happened?” McAllister shouted after them, but they were halfway down the Wynd and didn’t hear.
“What happened?” he asked Fiona.
“Mrs. Ross’s cat had seven kittens,” she explained.
• • •
When the waitress left the coffees on the table—the one in the far corner, half hidden by the jukebox—Rob said, “What’s really wrong?”
“I had a letter.”
He knew instantly what kind of letter. “What did it say?”
She handed it over. “This is the second. I didn’t tell anyone about the first one—it came to the Gazette. This one was delivered to my house. Annie found it. They know where I live . . .” She was no longer crying, but her hand was unsteady as she lifted the cup.
“This is horrible.” He did not question her fear. Did not try to reassure her. She’s right to be scared. “These letters are getting more frequent.” And attacks, he had the sense not to add.
“Thanks a bunch, Rob.” She gave him a half-smile. She needed Rob to go straight for the jugular.
“That’s when people make mistakes.”
“Really?”
“I’ve no idea, but isn’t that what detectives say?”
She laughed even though she was terrified. She asked him, all in a rush, What am I going to do? Will my girls be safe? Why is someone after me? Would your mother take a kitten?
Then he was the one laughing. “My mother? Take a kitten? Only if you abandon one in the garage so she has no choice. Tell you what, I’ll put on a disguise, stand outside a school, and give kittens to little girls. They take them home, and the mothers have no choice but to keep them.”
“I was thinking of an ad in the paper, but your solution would work better.” She smiled at him. He smiled back. They were close to deadline, so they left, walking back arm in arm.
Disguise, she was thinking. I wonder. She didn’t have time to discuss it with Rob, and after that she forgot. Handing the letter—the warning—over to McAllister and seeing his face take on the look of the Grim Reaper, fear returned.
“I’ve bloody had enough of this.” He was shouting.
Don picked up the note, dropped it. “Cowardly, nasty, revolting . . .”
“So what are you going to do?” Hector asked. He didn’t say “we” because he still believed it was partly his fault for taking the pictures of the leg in the shinty boot.
Rob heard him. “It all started with the bloody foot.”
Once again, they were stuck. No connections, no ideas, nothing.
Joanne was remembering that the foot and Mae Bell’s appearance in town happened in the same week. “No, they didn’t,” she said suddenly, not realizing she had spoken aloud.
“What?” McAllister asked.
“Hold on, I need back copies of the paper. No. Dates. Don, help me. What date was the foot found? Right. The ad went in . . . right. Found it.”
For once she was grateful that recent copies of the Gazette were sitting in a big pile in the corner, waiting to be filed. She put the newspapers on the desk and turned to Lost and Found. Next she opened the week before’s newspaper.
“No. Not there,” she muttered. Then, “This is it.” She looked up at four pairs of eyes watching her with varying degrees of puzzlement—or rather three, because Hector was permanently puzzled.
“The first ad appeared in the Gazette two weeks before the foot was found: ‘Seeking friends and colleagues of the late Robert John Bell, USAF, based at RAF Kinloss 1951 to 1952.’ ”
“So what does that tell us?” McAllister asked.
“I don’t know.” The adrenaline flooded out of her. She sat down. She looked at the ads again. “I don’t know.” The timing bothered Joanne like an ever-so-slightly-off-key note from a single singer in a choir—not obvious to everyone, but discordant all the same.
“I don’t know either.” McAllister was considering her idea. “But however tenuous, it’s the only link we can find.”
With a wink at Joanne and a nod to McAllister, Don said, “Good luck telling your not-at-all-clear theory to DI Dunne.”
“McAllister, fancy a trip to Elgin after we get the edition out?” Joanne asked.
“A picnic? An Easter outing? A roll in the sand dunes?” He couldn’t resist teasing her; he loved the way her cheeks flushed, her eyes brightened.
“Behave. You’re too old to roll in sand dunes. No, just a wee journey . . .” She had thought of taking the girls, but this needed to happen on a weekday.
“Who’s too old for sand dunes?” He reached over and brushed her hair aside for her.
“McAllister. Behave. No, I’m thinkin
g this investigation needs a visit to Elgin—to the local newspaper, the library, the local registry office. We need to find out more about Robert Bell. Find out more about his life at RAF Kinloss before the accident.”
Don was enjoying the skirmishes between Joanne and the editor. He smiled and said, “I’m sure DI Dunne will have checked. And Mrs. Bell. But there’s nothing like the personal touch, one newspaper person to another. I’ll call the editor at the Northern Scot.” Don remembered Mal Forbes. “Mal Forbes worked there. He was there at the time of the accident.”
“You can ask him,” Joanne suggested. Lately she had begun to appreciate Mal Forbes. Possibly because he was seldom in the office but mostly because she saw how smoothly the advertising side of the Gazette was running. She had once tried to run the advertising department along with Betsy Buchanan. Never again, was her attitude about that side of the newspaper.
“Let’s go at the end of the week. Early. We should be back by late afternoon. I’ll make a picnic.”
“A picnic, then a roll in the dunes.” Don looked at both of them, nodded, and smiled a benediction.
She leaned across the table and tried to swat at his precious wee red pencil.
“No smutty talk in front of the juniors. McAllister and I are going to try to find a connection between Robert Bell and Nurse Urquhart.” Joanne loved it when Don teased her. Don McLeod, a man who should have been a father, a grandfather, but never was.
“Aye”—Don winked—“that too.”
• • •
Joanne found Mae’s presence in McAllister’s house comforting. Rob had given her one of his looks, the one that said, Really? Are you sure? when she told him.
She thought about the question, examined her feelings, and was certain.
“She livens the place up,” she said.
“Good, it needs it,” Rob replied.
He took to dropping in after work to have a glass of wine with them. Sometimes he brought his guitar. He and Mae sang. Not jazz. She said she needed a piano for that. They sang all the silly love songs and pop songs and war songs. Joanne joined in her voice clear and true and Scottish. Once, only once, after at least half a bottle of a decent burgundy, McAllister joined them on comb and tissue paper in an extended version of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” which Joanne was certain would have the neighbors knocking at the door it was so late.