A Small Death in the Great Glen

by A. D. Scott

  Don came in on the end of the conversation, took one look at Joanne and ordered her out. “Off you go. Right now. Go see your friends. They need you.”

  “Chiara said not to bother, or words to that effect.”

  “Saying it and meaning it are different things.” He shooed her out the door.

  “Now you, young Robert McLean, I want you to first check up on the damage to the chip shop, find out what you can about this jiggery pokery, put an article together.” Don continued with his suspicions. “There’s something no right about this arrest business. Too convenient. Thon Inspector Tompson is jumping the gun—again.”

  The grumbling terrier-like growl coming from the sturdy terrier-like body made Rob smile. He could almost see the hackles rising on the back of Don’s neck.

  “You’re beginning to sound like McAllister.” Rob agreed. There was something not right about the arrest. “If you think about it logically, what with what the watchman said about that night, and the tinkers …”

  “Aye, that’s what I mean, logic, there’s not a lot of that around.”

  The curtains were drawn in the deep bow windows that faced the street, as though announcing a death in the family. Joanne reached for the bell. As she followed Chiara through to the kitchen, she felt that the light of the house was diminished. The sense of sun and warmth and earth and orchards and olives and flowers and friends all seemed a memory. Their home was once again a respectable Victorian-Scottish-solid-Sunday-go-to-church, hard-to-heat house.

  The visit was a very long half hour. Aunt Lita had disappeared upstairs after greeting Joanne. Gino Corelli was nowhere to be seen. As they sat together at the table, Chiara filled her in.

  “We know very little,” she started. “Mr. McLean the solicitor will call us when he knows more. Peter is still out on bail, thank goodness, but he was questioned endlessly.”

  “What evidence have the police got against Karl?”

  “He didn’t do this, Joanne. I don’t know the man, but Peter’s word is good enough for me.”

  They were silent for a very long thirty seconds.

  “What happened at the chip shop?”

  “Idiots with bricks.” Chiara went silent again. “I’m sorry, Joanne, I can’t think straight. But thanks for coming.” They both stood. She reached up to give her friend a hug. “Not like me to be lost for words, eh?”

  As they parted at the front door, Chiara asked, “Are you all right? You look a bit down.”

  “I’m fine.” Joanne knew she would never share last Monday night with anyone. What would she say? Oh, by the way, I betrayed my daughter?

  “Chiara … you know, if you need me …”

  “I know.” She smiled back. “I know.” She nodded fiercely.

  Next afternoon in the office, the whole of the editorial staff, all four of them, were sitting around the reporters’ table putting the final touches to the edition.

  “I like this.” Don had proofed through McAllister’s editorial without one stroke of his pencil, cutting not a single word of the piece.

  “Can I see?” Rob snatched the piece of paper out of Don’s hand. “Oh, right.” He read it, then passed it to Joanne. “A bit hard, aren’t you? And not many people know what xenophobia means.”

  “Exactly.” McAllister knew that ripping up the typewritten words, scattering them in the river and chanting some ancient Gaelic curse would be equally as effective as his editorial. “But we have to try. Remember the lesson of the silent majority.”

  The war was not that long over, so his words hung in the air.

  “Rob, when this story becomes clearer, you write it up and I’ll see if I can get an article placed in the Glasgow press.”

  “Great. Can you really swing it with the editor? Aye, sorry, course you can.” Rob jumped up, so excited at the idea of writing for a prestigious newspaper that he fell over his words as well as his feet.

  “I just wish that my girls had it right. That it was a hoodie crow that snatched the wee boy up.” But Joanne said this quietly. McAllister registered her words, heard the touch of despair in her voice, but before he could take her up on her comment, Don announced, “Finish up, everyone. One hour. Can’t keep the presses waiting.”

  Peter Kowalski sat in his tiny sanctuary, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the scudding clouds. The outer office was a large square room with drafting boards all around the edges. The inner office was small and round, set in a turret sticking out to the corner of the street with views of church spires and a glimpse down an alley of the river. It had reminded him of an illustration from a childhood book of the tower in which Rumplestiltskin had spun straw into gold. He loved it. It was his. He had reinvented himself in this distant land through determination and hard work. And, as Inspector Tompson had told him repeatedly, he was about to lose it all.

  So, sitting in his sanctum, Peter went over and over the interrogation, trying to see how the inspector’s mind was working, where his questions were going, questions that had become stuck in Peter’s mind like an endless annoying tune picked up from the wireless, and the more you tried to banish it from your mind, the more it went round and around.

  Yes, he, Peter, alone, had picked Karl up that morning.

  No, he didn’t know who put the mysterious note under his office door.

  No, he didn’t have it anymore.

  Yes, he had picked Karl up near the canal bridge.

  No, he had no idea how Karl had got there.

  No, he had no idea where Karl had spent that night.

  Yes, it was the town side of the bridge.

  No, Karl wasn’t wearing a coat.

  Yes, he took him up the glen to give him a place to stay.

  No, he wasn’t hiding him; Karl had wanted some peace and quiet.

  No, nobody else was involved.

  No, Gino Corelli had nothing to do with it.

  No, he didn’t know Jimmy McPhee.

  Yes, he did expect the inspector to believe him.

  EIGHT

  Joanne thought of people’s lives as books; books she remembered, books she was yet to read, books she had read and returned to the library to a shelf marked biography or history or fiction or even romantic fiction. Remembered characters and fragments of a novel’s plot were often more real to her than actual events in her life. But the tantalizing possibility of a new chapter in the story of her life, even of a new book, was a recent idea.

  Of her own story, she would have written it thus: beginning—childhood; middle—the war; ending—marriage. I need a subcategory, she thought; romantic fiction—failed. For too long, she had been waiting for the scene, toward the end of the book, where he would turn to her and say, “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’ve been to hell and back. But the war is over and now …” She almost put “and with the help of a good woman” in her imaginary manuscript but could hear Don’s chortle as he edited out the cliché.

  “Journey to the West” was to be the next chapter heading. This is it, Joanne kept telling herself, a last chance. This time we have to talk. Then again—the thought would sting her like a paper cut—how many times have I said that.

  Sitting beside Bill, in the noisy, shaky, damp, smelling-of-fresh-wood-and-old-socks van, not much passed between them as they drove out of town in the dark. Not that they had spoken much all week. A driving rain accompanied them along the shores of the smelled but unseen firth. Their spirits matched the gloom. Dawn broke very gradually through dank cloud. On the higher passes between glens the water vapor was so dense it was as though they were driving into perpetual dawn like an airplane flying into perpetual sunset.

  The van reached the top of the pass, and Bill stopped in a passing place before the drop into the faultline that led to the west coast. A biblical shaft of sun shone down on a distant shepherd, his dogs working a flock of blackface sheep, bringing them to lower pastures.

  They had left behind the sepulchral cloud and the unease that hovered over them like a golden eagle sizing up a n
ewborn. The paper was finished and would be, by now, scattered throughout the Highlands and Islands, the girls were with their grandparents, and she was going on a holiday—three whole days. Joanne was determined. This was what they needed, this time she would make it work. And her mood lifted with the elusive sun and the sense of the distant Isles. She started the song. Bill joined in. They used to sing together a lot, in the days of the war. Everyone did. But the habit had died out. Joanne still whistled, but less and less.

  By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes,

  Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomon’,

  Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae

  On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomon’.

  Following the railway track, the van rattled along with the singing, westward to the sea. Giant boulders and scree scarred the hillsides. The distant navy-blue peaks, jagged as in a child’s drawing, were outlined against a sky-blue sky. Clouds scudded, their shadows racing each other, making the fern carpet flicker from dirty rust to brassy gold.

  The road up to the pass could be seen in the distance, sharp zigzags cut into an almost vertical hill. Passing places, marked by signs that would show in deep snow, protruded out over sheer drops with no soft landings in the rocks and heather below. Joanne was uncertain that the van could make it. It did, in first gear and at a walking pace.

  At the top, the Bealach na Ba leveled for a mile or two before a slightly less steep descent. A small slate-dark tarn seemingly with no edge hovered at the brink of the drop to their right, a perfectly formed mirror for the clouds to admire themselves. The sea that took up two-thirds of the moving picture dazzled bright one moment, dark silver the next, and the islands big and small, some only oversized boulders, disappeared to then magically pop up in a seemingly different spot. Joanne felt that she would not have blinked if a sea dragon had landed across the bay.

  Below, a sheltering of buildings and small clachans followed the curve of the shore. With a shop, an inn, a post office, a school, a harbor and twenty or so houses, the habitable land was a narrow strip squeezed between mountain and sea. Whitewashed but-and-bens, some still with thatched roofs, punctuated the slopes. A patchwork of tiny fields hemmed in by stone walls alternated with strip fields following the lines of the land. Breughel painting the countryside of the Middle Ages would have recognized the scene. But this is the land of the clans, of the Clearances, the land of the ever-diminishing Gaeltacht. And God.

  Bill had nursed the van up the pass with one eye on the temperature gauge. It was on the red. He decided to rest before the downhill stretch.

  “Five minutes before I can fill her up again.”

  “Right you are.”

  They waited to the gurgle and hissing and burping and sighing of the radiator and the smell of rusty water. A dark hairpiece of heavy cloud descended abruptly, and the light vanished; out here, weather changed by the half hour, seasons by the hour.

  The sound of running water got to Joanne. Tammy and scarf pulled tight, she stepped out into the mist, scouting around for bushes. There were none, only occasional tussocks of thin grasses and bog cotton and lichen-covered rock. A few steps and the van vanished. She crouched down. A cough from a spectral blackface sheep startled her, then the sun broke through a hole in the cloud. Caught squatting in the spotlight, half a dozen curious sheep for an audience, she saw the edge a few yards off, falling away to the shore hundreds of feet below. She burst out laughing.

  “Mind how you go,” Bill called out. “It drops away over there.”

  “Thanks. I’ve just worked that out for myself.”

  By the time the radiator was cool enough to refill they were chilled and damp, and Bill was impatient to get down the mountain. He had had enough of scenery. Joanne took a last look over to Skye, the cloud already a story tucked away for later. Or to share with Chiara.

  “When we reach the village, leave me at the inn and I’ll explore. We’ll have tea when you get back.”

  “Aye, it’s getting on and I’m to meet this man about the houses,” Bill replied.

  They freewheeled down the last of the hill, a bump, the engine caught and they motored into the village.

  She stretched and shook the cramps of the journey from her bones before going inside the hotel. A bar ran through to a small parlor where a brass ship’s bell hung above a handwritten notice, Ring for attention. She did.

  “I’ll be right with you,” a voice called out, and almost immediately Mhairi was there. Both women started, then stared. What startled Joanne into recognition of a girl she had barely met was her bright rosy red apple cheeks. Joanne collected words and clichés and was always pleased to come across an exact illustration, to be mentally matched to her list of favorites. What Mhairi felt when confronted with the guest was panic.

  “Don’t I know you?” asked Joanne.

  “I don’t think so.” The girl went bright pink. She was a hopeless liar.

  “I phoned about a room for tonight. Mr. and Mrs. Ross.”

  “Aye, I’ll show you up.”

  Mhairi seized the bag and hurried up the narrow steep staircase, Joanne following.

  “This is the room.” A pretty bedroom, the dormer window looking directly onto the harbor. “I’ll light the fire.”

  “Thanks,” said Joanne. “This is lovely. What’s your name?”

  “Mhairi.”

  “Mhairi, now I remember. I’m Joanne Ross—you worked for my sister Elizabeth Macdonald and Reverend Duncan Macdonald.”

  Mhairi turned from pink to red.

  “Och, I’m sorry. Me and my big mouth. Not another word. Promise.”

  The relieved look on Mhairi’s face said it all.

  “Will you be wanting supper?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  Joanne changed her shoes for wellies and set off in what was left of the afternoon light to explore the harbor and village.

  Mhairi MacKinnon worked away in the kitchen, the door to the bar left open in the unlikely event of guests arriving. With black pudding-basin haircut, white white skin and blue blue eyes, she could have been a Celtic beauty if only she had an awareness of herself.

  The owners of the inn were from Easter Ross but now lived over the mountain. The steep miles across the pass made this place another country. Mrs. Watt, her employer, knew most of Mhairi’s story but was only too glad to have someone reliable, willing to work with the “demon drink,” as the minister never failed to call it in his three-hour Sunday sermons. The water-into-wine parable had been passed over by the congregation of the Free Church of Scotland, or Wee Frees as they were commonly known.

  A lass already lost was how Mhairi saw herself, so one more sin, the serving of alcohol, wouldn’t matter. But the shock of meeting Joanne Ross, the shock of meeting someone from the town where her tragedy had played out, the very thought of someone who knew the truth of her secret and that very someone lodging at the inn, was worrying.

  Not that most in the parish didn’t know; it was more a matter of acquiescence to an age-old convention: Children born out of wedlock were given away, sometimes to the tinkers. Failing that, especially if the lass in question was young, the child was passed off as a sibling. Everyone knew, everyone accepted the lie; it was just the way it was done. To most, Mhairi’s family had done the decent thing. To others it was a disgrace and the whole family was made to feel the shame.

  Tales of girls told never to darken the door again, cast out into the proverbial storm, were many and ancient. Songs of betrayed lassies, kidnapped babies, babies being stolen by the faeries or lifted up by golden eagles, all those tunes, words, poems, were part of Scottish folklore. Mhairi was just another story, and a not uncommon one at that.

  Bill shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s seat, engine running, heater blasting hot to the body, freezing to the feet, waiting for the foreman to turn up. He stared at the unfinished buildings, his forced optimism seeping away. His picture of himself was that of a survivor, and by sheer beli
ef he had often been able to turn disasters around. This time, he thought, we’re cutting it very close. The contract, with a clause that he had skipped over, so desperate to sign, stipulated the end of December for completion of the job. Still possible, but where were the men that he needed in order to finish the job?

  Unexplained delays, materials not delivered, delivered but to the wrong port, bad weather, bad luck, a badgering bank manager; all this had plagued the project from the start. Then workers left; lack of lodgings, frozen out by the locals, the weather, the isolation and the west-coast Sabbath, so they said. “Acts of God,” the previous site foreman had said. Bill recalled the man as a strict Sabbatharian, dour but honest.

  “The site is jinxed,” another had complained to Bill as he collected his cards.

  The almost completed, desperately needed council houses, sitting forlornly waiting to be fitted out, were to have been Bill’s financial salvation. He was now certain sabotage was the root of his trouble.

  He’d seen enough. He wanted away from the site. A van drew up.

  “Mr. McFarlane.” Bill got out to greet the new foreman. “Let’s get to the hotel.”

  “They’ll no be serving,” McFarlane pointed out.

  “No. No for a drink.” Bill laughed, but he was offended by the assumption. He knew Andrew was a teetotaler. “Tea and a fire is what’s needed. It’s dreich and there’s that much rain over here, I’m thinking Noah would have had his ark built before I get these houses done. Well, no use girning, let’s get by the fire and see if we can figure a way out.”

  Back at the inn, Bill Ross and Andrew McFarlane were the only ones around, apart from Mhairi. Joanne was in their room curled up on the bed with a book, fire blazing. Sheer bliss, she thought, reading in the afternoon. The bar was dim although all the lights were on, the peat fire smoldered, with an occasional blowback smoking the room. Bill had the list of what needed doing to finish the job. The more he and the foreman looked, the more impossible seemed the task of unraveling this fankle.