A Small Death in the Great Glen

by A. D. Scott

  In this particular glen, what land had not been claimed by the sheep was now underwater, flooded to bring electricity to the towns and villages of the rich farmland below, to a booming population born to replace the souls lost in two world wars.

  Rob reached the only habitation at the very head of the glen, and with the engine switched off, the silence of nature—with the birds, distant water, a low drone of insects and the wind rustling the birch and rowan and setting the pines to sighing—he took it all in in a second and was enchanted.

  “Come in, come in.” The old man welcomed Rob heartily, shaking his hand. The grip was excruciating. Rob tried not to wince.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Stuart.”

  “Archie, lad, call me Archie. Mind, now they call me Auld Archie. How’s your father? And your mother? I remember her fine from the dancing in the Strath. A fine bonnie lass your mother. Didn’t think young Angus had it in him to land such a catch.”

  “Young Angus?” Rob was bemused. His father young was a strange concept. “It’s good of you both to see me.” He nodded to the younger replica standing behind the table.

  “Aye well. It’s been on my mind to talk to someone. I just never got round to it.”

  “There’s not much to tell anyhow,” joined in young Archie. “It’s not as if them old crofts have been lived in for near a century. Didn’t his lordship sell that one off?”

  “Not sell, no. An understanding I heard. And only to Peter,” Auld Archie explained.

  “Peter? Peter the Pole?” Rob was excited. His trip up here had not been wasted.

  “I thought that was why you came, lad.”

  “Oh aye. To help Peter. But we can’t help Peter till we find this other man, the other Pole. Peter’s been charged with hiding him, Mr. Stuart.”

  Father and son looked at each other, shocked.

  “Charged, you say? Well, well. That changes things, surely it does.”

  “My father’s his solicitor, and he got Peter out on bail, “ Rob explained. “But the best way to help Peter is to find this missing sailor and persuade him to turn himself in to the police.”

  “Da, you might as well tell him.” A look went between father and son.

  “He’s no sailor, lad, that I can tell you. He wouldn’t know a half hitch from a granny knot.”

  His son nodded in agreement.

  “No, we thought he was Peter’s friend. Peter asked us to keep an eye out for him and take up some supplies. Not that your man was grateful. Oh no, always girning on about summat.”

  “You say he’s gone?”

  “Aye, he’s gone aright.”

  Rob was stunned. “So where is he? Do you know?”

  “Aye, we do that, young Rob. A cup o’ tea?”

  “No thanks.” Rob recovered quickly. He knew Highland etiquette. You waited. Talked about this and that. The son would follow the father, saying nothing except to agree or back him up. “Well, only if you’re having one. That would be fine.”

  The old man in his widower’s kitchen made a fine cup of tea, but no homemade cake appeared, only shop biscuits, and Rob was starving. He tried to sit still as he waited the excruciatingly long time it took the kettle to boil on the wood-burning stove. He tried to stop his fingers tapping invisible typewriter keys, writing up his scoop in his mind. He could see the headline: “Local reporter finds missing Pole.” No, “. . . missing sailor.” No …

  “Sugar, lad?”

  Early afternoon saw Jenny McPhee, with Joanne at her side, lead a curious procession down the street and stop in the mud-patch garden of a gray-harled council house that looked as though it had been designed to encourage a quick turnover of tenants via the mental asylum or suicide. If there was grass, it was in single blades. Trees were sticks with a side limb or two poking up through the moonscape. Broken prams, rusting bikes, skeletons of cars and vans and broken dreams, made a playground for the tribes of bairns and dogs that roamed the council house scheme.

  Joanne had taken the phone call.

  “Don, it’s for you.”

  She couldn’t help but hear the conversation.

  “No, Jenny, I canny come over. Jenny, I’ve a newspaper to put out. Aye, uh-huh, no, I haven’t the time. No. Really? Hold on a wee minute. …” He turned to Joanne, raising his eyebrows in a question.

  “Yes, I’ll go.” She had no idea why or where she would be going, but anything involving Jenny McPhee intrigued her.

  “Jenny? Joanne Ross will be over. And remember, you’ll owe me.”

  He scribbled down an address and hung up. When he explained, Joanne was at a loss as to why she should be there.

  “A witness, that’s what Jenny wants. No one, especially Inspector Tompson, will ever believe a tinker. They want you there as a witness to whatever the blazes is going on.”

  They stopped outside one of the houses. Jenny quietly gave the orders. “One of you, round the back. Jimmy, Geordie, wi’ me.”

  Firmly clutching her disreputable bag under one arm, she banged on the door. No answer.

  “Keith, Keith.” Adding quite unnecessarily, “It’s your ma.”

  “Keith?”

  “Ma eldest.” Joanne was astonished. How many more McPhees were there?

  “Not a drop o’ common sense that one—for all his fancy education. And living in sin, he is. What’s the world coming to? We’re Travelers and proud of it. No sin in our family.” She smirked. “Weel, a few close calls maybe.”

  She continued banging on the door.

  “I’m comin’. Hold yer horses.” A voice echoed down the hallway.

  The door was opened by Keith McPhee. That he was a McPhee there could be no doubt. He had the ginger hair and as many freckles as stars in the sky.

  “Ma, Jimmy, I’ve told you. It’s no good. I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “Where’s your manners, boy? Are you no going to ask us in?”

  Keith stared at Joanne, glanced at the woman hovering at the end of the hall. “It’ll have to be the kitchen. We have a friend staying. He’s … he’s sleeping.”

  Joanne and Jimmy followed Jenny, and the three of them sat round a small table in a small kitchen with Keith standing by the sink, Geordie waiting in the hall. The unknown woman stood by the door, ignored. Joanne was curious; no doubt this was the scarlet woman. Older, late thirties maybe, well dressed, a country air about her, she would not have been out of place presiding over a Women’s Institute meeting. And the kitchen was tidy and nicely decorated with lace tablecloth and lace curtains and a busy lizzie in a pot on the windowsill growing up and over, framing the view toward the firth. Joanne wondered all over again what on earth was going on.

  No introductions were made, so Joanne smiled at the stranger. “Joanne Ross, pleased to meet you.”

  “Shona Stuart. Pleased to meet you too.” The woman blushed.

  “It’s no you we’ve come about, lass. It’s your visitor.” Jenny started. Half a second later there was a commotion in the hall. Jimmy McPhee ran out, sending the chair flying. He returned dragging a tall stranger, held on one side by Jimmy and on the other by Jimmy’s clone, Geordie.

  “You’ve picked the wrong McPhee to run into, Mr. Missing Polish Seaman,” chortled Jenny. “Ma Jimmy may be half a foot shorter than you but he wis the army bantamweight boxing champion.” As most Scottish fighters were bantamweights, it was quite a claim to fame.

  Everyone was still for a moment. In the crowded kitchen, with no one sure of the next move, Joanne took charge.

  “Shona. Why don’t you and me make a cup of tea and then we can all sit down and sort this out.”

  “Aye, lass, a nice cup o’ tea would be welcome.” Jenny McPhee reached into the voluminous bag, then handed Shona her contribution, a half bottle of whisky.

  “Add a wee drop to mine, would you?”

  Shona Stuart was so astonished at Jenny’s even speaking to her that she forgot the invasion of her house. And everything else besides.

  “She’s n
ot such a bad soul, ye know,” said Jenny in a loud whisper to Joanne. “It’s that boy of mine that’s led her astray.” This of a man nearing forty.

  Another knock at the door.

  “That’ll be Allie, ma second-youngest,” Jenny explained. “He was out the back in case thon one”—she nodded toward the stranger still held in Jimmie McPhee’s embrace—“made a run for it.”

  Keith went to open the door to his brother. Rob was there too. So was a windblown and bowlegged Auld Archie Stuart. Rob had given him a lift on the back of the Triumph all the way from Glen Affric.

  “Dad!” cried Shona in astonishment.

  “Lass,” he replied.

  “Archie,” said Jenny.

  “Jenny,” came the reply.

  “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” pleaded a completely confused Joanne.

  “So?” Don demanded when they were back in the office.

  “Well, I went up the glen to meet Archie Stuart and brought him back on my bike,” Rob began. “It was terrifying. He’s a hopeless passenger, leaning the wrong way into bends and everything—”

  “And I went to the council house, like you told me,” Joanne chimed in, “with Jenny and Jimmy and Keith and two, or was it three more McPhees, and this Polish sailor was there, oh, and Shona Stuart, and Rob turned up with—”

  “Haud on, haud on.” Don held up his wee stubby pencil for silence, then hauled his short stubby body onto a stool by the big table, rearranged the piles of paper in front of him, reached for his spiral shorthand notebook. “Right. Ladies first.”

  “Righty-oh.” Joanne took a deep breath, organizing her thoughts. “We”—Don waved his pencil in the air—“sorry, Jenny and I, sorry … Jenny McPhee, myself, I think three McPhee men, including Jimmy, went to the house down the ferry, where we met Keith McPhee, who is living there with Shona Stuart—”

  “Archie Stuart the ghillie’s daughter?” Don looked up from his squiggles.

  “And Archie Stuart the ghillie’s sister,” Rob added.

  “Wheesht, wait your turn,” Don warned him.

  Joanne stopped, confused. Rob jumped in.

  “This Polish man, Karel Cieszynski, had a fight with the captain, who is Russian, of the Baltic timber ship, and who had the Pole onboard illegally, for money, and the Polish man—Karl, as he wants to be called—jumped or was pushed overboard into the river, if you believe his story, that is. It was an ebbing tide and he was picked up by some tinkers who were fishing”—Don snorted—“or poaching for salmon,” Rob acknowledged with a grin. “And they, the tinkers, took him to their camp down by the council dump and let Peter Kowalski know about him because he was Polish and”—Rob picked up the look on Don’s face—“and because there might be a reward in it for them. And because this Polish person knew Peter Kowalski’s name.”

  “Curious, that,” Don commented.

  “So Peter took the man up to his fishing camp, an old but and ben up Glen Affric, because the man didn’t want to go to the police until he had a chance to return to the ship to collect his belongings. So he said. Then the man Karl got young Archie to take him back to town so he could confront the captain and get his belongings and young Archie took him to the only person he knows in town, his sister—who is the fiancée of said Keith McPhee, son of—”

  “Aye, I know all that.” Don stopped him and continued squiggling furiously.

  “So where does Jenny McPhee come into all this?” Joanne queried.

  “There has to be something in it for her.” Don looked up. “No, I take that back. It’s most likely because Peter Kowalski got charged. That put the wind up them. See, Jenny McPhee, all tinkers, know that if Inspector Tompson and his ilk had their way, tinkers would be charged with any and every crime ever committed. So it’s in their best interests that this man hands himself in and the less said about their role the better.”

  “But they rescued him and, at the time, had no idea he was wanted by the police,” Joanne protested.

  “What’s that to do with the price of fish?” Don shut his book, slithered down from the high stool, stuck his pencil back behind his ear and reached for his hat. “Right, Rob, you finish up this story. We’ll see how much we can print. Joanne, it’s getting late, off home to those bairns of yours.” He caught her grateful look. “They’ll be fine, you know; children have to learn one day that they too can die. It’s all part of life.” He patted his pocket to check that he had his cigarettes. “If anyone wants me, I’ve gone to see a man about a horse.”

  “In the Market Bar,” Joanne and Rob chorused.

  The afternoon had been a long one for Angus McLean. Not only had he had to deal with a recalcitrant police inspector who was ignorant of the law as far as illegal aliens were concerned and was determined to charge Karl with something, anything, but Angus also had to sort out the legal status of both the Polish men, an area of the law he was not familiar with. Contested wills and property disputes had been the highlights of his career for the last ten years.

  Inspector Tompson had gained his position in the police force as a direct result of his time as a military policeman, not from merit. A man with no imagination, no empathy, he had no understanding of the decisions some men make when death and despair are all around. He saw them simply as foreigners.

  Angus McLean, solicitor, husband, father and well-liked citizen of the community, was a kind man. His mildness belied a tenacity that had often surprised clients and judges, but never his wife. While a student in Edinburgh, he had glimpsed the underbelly of Scotland’s so-called egalitarian society; in the tenements off the High Street, the Cowgate, off the Royal Mile, in the drinking and gambling dens, on street corners where women huddled in doorways and on church steps, waiting for customers, Angus had witnessed another world.

  “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small … The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.” That was the Edinburgh of his youth.

  A subdued group gathered around his desk—Gino, standing bail for his prospective son-in-law, Peter Kowalski, and Karel Cieszynski.

  “Well now.” Angus started the proceedings. “The procurator fiscal’s office says the charge against Karl—may I call you Karl?” He took the nod as a sign to continue. “It is all quite simple—illegal entry. There’s a good chance an application for asylum will be looked at favorably; we will gather some sponsor and prepare the case. I’m hoping the charge against Mr. Kowalski—Peter—will be dropped. Now, I understand you are staying with Keith McPhee.”

  “He has offered me a room.” The voice came out tobacco stained and weary, the accent thick but understandable.

  “Yes, well, we may have to review that situation,” Angus McLean hurried on, “and I think perhaps, now that we are all together, you should explain to us exactly how you come to be here.”

  Karl hesitated. “My English is not so good.”

  “Good enough.” Gino wanted an explanation now.

  “Karl,” Angus interrupted, “you will have to tell me—us—what happened if we are to support your application for residency in Scotland.”

  “I am ashamed I have made trouble for Mr. Kowalski.”

  Peter said nothing. He was so angry he felt he would explode and a seething silence was his way of keeping his temper in check.

  Karl took a deep breath, sat up, backbone straight, a vagabond transformed into the long-lost Polish gentleman. He accepted a cigarette. Gino was smoking, Peter had a Balkan Sobranie alight and Angus was coping, just, with the fug-filled room.

  “It happened so fast,” Karl started. “Poland betrayed, invaded. We were rounded up like ducks and told we had new owners. That is our history. I was an engineer in my father’s mine so they needed me, but the Nazis turned the mines into death camps. To them we were human refuse, from Poland, then Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway, everywhere. I survived, but not my father.”

  What he couldn’t tell them about were the deaths by the day, the hour, of men and w
omen, boys who had never left their mothers, dying as they slaved at the coal face, bodies pushed into unused shafts, someone else stepping up to take their place.

  “But how did you get here?” Gino was impatient. Everyone had their stories.

  “Sorry if I do not tell it right. I must explain from the beginning. So.” He continued. “The Russians liberated the mines, ha! I and a few other survivors now were sent to the Urals, to the coal mines there. Punishment for working for the Nazis.”

  “My God.” Angus could not comprehend the horrors Karl had endured.

  “I was lucky, you could say.” Karl gave a short barking laugh. “I was given a supervisor’s job. They needed mine engineers. I had privileges. Later I married a fellow prisoner, a Ukrainian. She also survived a labor camp only to be rounded up by the Russians. But her health was not good. We had some small freedom in that camp, a small life, but a life. We found love. Now she is dead.”

  He stopped. He couldn’t tell them of the swing he had made her, the swing that had brought back her smile, the smile she had lost when she was dragged from her home by the Russians, the smile she found again as she swung herself up to touch the red apples with her toes.

  Angus rose. “A drink, Karl? Anyone?”

  “I want to finish. I can never say this again.”

  “A dram first.” Angus kept a Tomatin Distillery malt. “I certainly could do with one.” The gentle Highland voice sent out an air of calm.

  Karl took a swift slug of the water of life, then plowed on.

  “I buried her in the orchard under an apple tree. I left her where she was happy.”

  Gino envied Karl that. He had not been able to bury his wife; he had been a prisoner in North Africa before being sent to the camp in Scotland.