A Small Death in the Great Glen

by A. D. Scott

  McAllister was not about to reveal that he had only recently realized something was amiss and had ignored it as not his business.

  “. . . all I can say is, I’m used to Annie Ross being a storyteller. Her sister is a timid wee soul, but she too says she saw a hoodie crow. Whether she is following her big sister or not, I don’t know. But you know how children are, and I don’t know about you southerners, but here in the Highlands the hoodie crow as a metaphor for evil is a common tale.”

  “Aye, I’ve heard something of that.”

  “It was, is, a tale used to scare children. Like ghosts and bogies and faeries, our children are brought up with all these nefarious creatures hiding under the bed. For all our television and brave new world, this place still has its Celtic roots. Stories of crows pecking out the eyes of newborn lambs, well, it’s not that long ago that this town was fringed with working farms. And then there are all the other superstitions used to scare wee ones—”

  “Jamie’s parents say he would never go near water.”

  “Terrified. He wouldn’t even walk across the suspension bridge to swimming lessons. He also had bad asthma, the chlorine at the swimming baths set him off, so he was excused.”

  “I’m not trying to do the job of the police but there is something here that feels wrong. Or rather, the arrest of the Polish sailor feels too convenient.”

  “I did have some terrible suspicions myself,” Frank Clark confessed. “So I was relieved that the sailor was arrested, relieved that my worst nightmares were unfounded.”

  McAllister always found that the best way to elicit a story from those he was interviewing was to say nothing. Or at least look slightly perplexed. The explanation would surely follow.

  “I know you know the situation—”

  McAllister didn’t but he gave a slight nod.

  “—and I can trust you to be discreet—”

  Another nod.

  “—but at the time, well, I thought Annie Ross knew a lot more than she was saying.” He paused, considered whether to continue but knew he must, if he was to get a good night’s sleep. This thought had been gnawing away at him, asleep and awake; he needed to talk it through, if only to be laughed at. And he had no fear of McAllister’s mockery. He instinctively knew that the man sitting before him would give his fears due consideration and a measured opinion.

  “I was terrified Annie Ross might have pushed him into the canal.”

  “So you’re not one of those who is scared to think the unthinkable.” McAllister posed this less as a question, more as an observation. He too had been so accused. He too had dared to think the unthinkable, to accuse an untouchable.

  “Well, I’m not sure how involved the child is, but she certainly knows something.” Frank Clark gave a grim smile. “It’s quite a relief to know I am not the only one who can suspect even the most innocent in our society.”

  “I was with the International Brigade in Spain,” McAllister simply said. “And, I’m from Glasgow.”

  On his walk back to town, McAllister watched a gang of boys, newly released from school, swarming like ants over a half-demolished house, searching for firewood. Halloween was only a week away. It was the time of year, as much as the conversation with Mr. Clark, that added to his sense of foreboding. The ever-present image of another boy, another poor soul, drowned, this time in a river, not a canal, a boy whom McAllister had had to identify, came welling up like bile.

  The talk of ghosts hadn’t helped. The stairs he was walking up, the lanes where he took a shortcut, the Town House, the castle, the very cobblestones; like every place in Scotland they were soaked in history and ghosts.

  “You’re getting maudlin, McAllister,” he chivvied himself. “Time you took a break, a trip home, a few days, take the train, back to my own ghosts, aye, and a beer or two in my own pub.”

  “Mrs. Ross, a word before you leave?”

  He never quite knew how to address her. “Mrs. Ross” was normal office etiquette but the intimacy of that dance at the Highland Ball had him thinking of her as Joanne.

  “Certainly, Mr. McAllister.”

  Her reply and her smile turned it back on him. Joanne it would be.

  “Joanne, I’ve been thinking on what your girls know about the disappearance of the wee boy.” There was never any need to say which boy.

  “I know. But they’ll never say anything now.” She offered no more of an explanation.

  “I had a talk with Frank Clark. He worries about Annie in particular.”

  “Oh really? You were discussing my child with the headmaster?”

  “No, well, not really,” he said, floundering. “I was trying to find out more about what happened that day.”

  “Why? You have as much of the story as anyone. Besides, it’s all over. The man who did it is in jail.”

  “Look, Joanne—”

  “Look yourself, Mr. McAllister. You and Mr. Clark have no right discussing my daughter.” She caught his flush. “Or my family. I work here. That doesn’t give you the right to stand in judgment.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “No? You have no idea what it’s like in this town. You have no idea what I have had to go through. The talk, the snide looks, the pity. That’s the worst of it—pity. And this job, a job I love and a job I think I could be good at—”

  He nodded. “Of course you’re good. You’re—”

  “—you have no idea what I go through to keep working here.” She was standing, back to him, holding on to the windowsill, not seeing the rolling clouds and darkening sky. She took a huge breath. “I get enough from my mother-in-law and the fishwifies I live amongst.” She breathed out. “I hear it all the time,” she said quietly, “a woman working, a woman not suffocating at the kitchen sink, it’s just not done.” She turned. “I’ve even had to stop wearing slacks to placate my mother-in-law.” She leaned on his desk and looked straight at him. “I put up with enough without you gossiping about me.”

  She left his office, she left the building, she collected her bike, she pedaled across town and she kept up her anger, almost all the way home, before giving in to despair on the final hundred yards.

  “I can’t leave him. I can’t walk out. If they talk about me now, think how much worse it will be. And where would I go? I can’t put the girls through the disgrace. I can’t leave. I can’t put the girls through any more. I must stay. For their sakes. I can’t leave. For their sakes.”

  It was a strange and strained week. Even Don noticed the distance between Joanne and McAllister. Rob used it as an excuse to stay out of the office as much as possible. He now dutifully sat in the courtroom attempting to pay attention; drunk and disorderly, assault (fighting after the football), drunk in charge of a horse, cycling without lights. One charge, stealing fishing nets, broke the monotony, as no one in court could understand the Peterhead accents.

  His mind wandered, remembering Don’s suggestion that he quiz WPC Ann McPherson on the detective chief inspector newly arrived to oversee the investigation. He also remembered that Sunday at the seaside.

  “Seaside in October, we must be mad,” Ann had laughed. She was not happy at being seen with Rob around town, scared that Inspector Tompson might spot them. He was happy for the excuse to take the bike to the seaside town of Nairn, with a good seventeen miles of flat straight road to open up the throttle on the bike and stretch the speed limit with only the level crossing halfway to slow them. The wind, straight off the North Sea, gave them a good excuse to shelter in the dunes beneath his jacket. But Ann kept complaining of the sand getting in everywhere.

  “Next case.” The shout of the court usher made him jump. He had missed the verdict. A fine, and bound over to keep the peace, the fishermen would no doubt sort it out themselves and be back in court next week.

  “Driving whilst incapable” was next. Rob was too young to find a wooden bench uncomfortable, and the courtroom kept reminding him of the case that was on everyone’s mind. But Karl unpronounceable
would not be tried here, Rob reminded himself; no, that would be in the full panoply of the High Court; the peripatetic advocates and judge from Edinburgh would preside over the theater that that trial was sure to be.

  Don was not convinced that Karl could have killed the boy, didn’t like the timing nor the geography of it, he said. McAllister found the arrest too convenient. But no one quite knew the details of the case that Inspector Tompson had made to the procurator fiscal. Rob had asked, but Ann McPherson was not telling.

  But who else could have done it? Rob reasoned. Nothing really bad went on in a cut-off place like this, so it has to be a stranger, he rationalized.

  A general shuffling and rearranging and the next case, a boundary dispute between crofters, a dispute that had been simmering for forty-seven years, now started.

  Half listening, practicing his shorthand, or hieroglyphics as Don called it, Rob went off into another dwam. I’ll be out of here one day—of this he was sure—off to the big city, and then … He turned to a new page of his notebook, but instead of following the case before the court, he started to write like an automaton at a séance. He printed the boy’s name, JAMIE, at the top of the page. Start at the beginning, write down what you know, wasn’t that what McAllister was always harping on about? So …

  The boy—on his way home from school—disappeared down the road from the McLean bungalow. Hold on, Rob told himself, start again—the boy—walking home—with his friends Annie and Jean—playing at ringing doorbells. Next morning—first light—he was found drowned. No, that’s not right. Rob added a line—dead before he went into the water. He printed BEFORE.

  Another page. CANAL LOCK, he headed the new page, half a mile from where he was last seen. Right, what next? Rob pictured the track leading to the canal towpath and the locks. Lined with elder bushes, and stands of whin and gorse, there was not much cover there. The stretch of road where the boy had disappeared was a much more likely place to grab a small child. The Victorian and Edwardian mansions sat in large grounds, the curved driveways hiding the houses from passersby, quiet, ideal for the setting of a Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie mystery. When he was little he had thought of one of them as a Scottish version of Bleak House. The mature sycamores, the oak and the beech trees, one magnificent copper beech, a holly tree or two, a stand of firs where he used to collect cones for the McLean household fire—his mother loved the scent—chestnut trees, at this time of year thick with conkers and after school, thick with boys collecting said conkers, this veritable urban forest would provide great cover for nefarious deeds.

  Then there were the rhododendrons, a favorite of Edwardian gardeners, which with the soil of Scotland, not much different from their Himalayan home, had flourished. High roundels of dark green, with dark dry caves under the thick glossy leaves, it took a very heavy rain to penetrate the earth underneath. This enclave of middle-class respectability where Rob had grown up he now saw differently, changed by the knowledge of a terrible event. A great location for a horror film. Rob could see it. But a horror really did happen, he reminded himself. So …

  A policeman had rung their doorbell, that night, late, asking after the boy. No one had seen anything, his dad told the constable. Ringing doorbells—he smiled. His mother had tried to be cross with him, when he was wee, when a neighbor complained. He said he would stop ringing doorbells in their street, and he had. Just moved on to a street further away. A few nights ago his mother laughed, telling him about Joanne’s Annie. First time he had heard of a girl playing the game. Good for her, he thought, I like her, she’s brave, has a mind of her own. I wonder if she knows anything at all about what happened to Jamie. Says she doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean much. Except … Rob remembered the story of the hoodie crow—where did that come from? Maybe Annie will talk to me, her uncle Rob. I’ll bribe her with a shot on the bike.

  The gavel banged hard and loud. Rob switched back to the here and now; twelve o’clock, Monday, October, the sheriff’s court, the mid–nineteen fifties, the Highlands of Scotland, the world.

  “Twenty-eight days this time,” the sheriff pronounced. “I’m sick of the sight of you every Monday morning.”

  The drunk looked aggrieved. “Can you no make it three months? I’ll miss out on ma Christmas plum duff otherwise.”

  They were alone in the office; the others had left a good hour since.

  “I’m thinking I’ll go back down south for a few days. After we’ve got this edition to bed, of course.”

  Don grunted. He wasn’t not listening to McAllister; he was flicking through a sheaf of rejected copy trying to find something the right length to fill in a hole left by an advertisement dropping out—and it was five minutes before the presses were due to roll.

  “It’s time I saw my mother—” McAllister continued, but the phone interrupted. He reached across the reporter’s desk. “Gazette. No, he’s busy.” Don was shaking his head. “No. Can you call back? All right, I’ll tell him. Hold on.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s your man, Mr. Burke, says it’s important.”

  Don looked up at the clock, three minutes. He reached over for the phone.

  “A bit late for you to be calling. Aye. Aye. What?” He sat abruptly. “You must be very very certain. You are?” He listened. “Christ!” More tweetering came from the receiver. “No, of course not. Not a word to anyone.” He put down the phone. McAllister waited.

  “The boy was interfered with before he died.”

  TEN

  The glass-domed Victorian fancy-cake cathedral of a railway station never failed to impress McAllister. Platform after platform of puffing hissing engines resembling the starting gate at the racetrack, the nervous animals waiting for the off, was the first sight of the city for many arriving from the towns and villages and clachans of the Highlands and Islands.

  McAllister jumped on a tram and with a lurch it clanked off through the city. The Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank, Clydesdale Bank, Corn Exchange, all the monumental edifices around George Square, were familiar landmarks. He had passed them every day as a scholarship boy off to the Glasgow High School for Boys. The glories of wealth and history were pockmarked by bomb craters, bright pink with fireweed; daytime playground for children and dogs, nighttime territory of drunks and prostitutes. The tram trundled on up Duke Street. Glimpses of the cathedral and the necropolis flashed by up the steep side streets, marble angels silhouetted against the sky, wings outstretched, awaiting a photo opportunity.

  The tram halted outside Duke Street jail. The high walls as daunting as ever, songs and stories of the inmates, the executions, hung in the air; McAllister felt a frisson of childish fright that never quite went away, even in middle age. He walked swiftly up the hill to home, never lingering, never looking to left nor right, another habit from his school days, his body remembering the many kickings on these steep pavements. The uniform, especially the cap, was a shining invitation to those he’d left behind, betrayed, the high school badge marking him a traitor. And his being a Catholic in this Protestant stronghold was another reason for the terrors he had suffered as a small boy.

  He rang, waited. A faint shuffling came down the hall and the door slowly opened.

  “John.” The flat voice revealed no surprise, no emotion.

  “Mother,” he replied to the woman he had not seen for over a year.

  She shuffled back to her warm kitchen with the gas oven lit, the door left open.

  “It’s easier than fetching in coal.” She nodded to the cooker.

  “I’ll get some. Light the fire if you like.”

  “Suit yerself.”

  McAllister left his bag and coat in the hallway, took the battered brass coal scuttle outside to their coal hole in the back green, crouching under the scant city stars to fill it. He remembered the fights with his dad about his jobs.

  “I have to do my homework, Dad. It’s too dark, Dad. I did it last night, Dad. And the night before. It’s his turn, he never does anything.”

  H
e never ever won the argument. Never would now. His brother never made sixteen and his dad was another statistic of the firebombing of Clydeside; firemen, fire engines, a shipyard, all gone in one night.

  The coal caught slowly. The kindling, a splintered crate, sparked blue.

  “So, how’s it been, Ma? Did you get my letters?”

  “I’m no one for writing, you know that, John.”

  “I wish you’d let me get a phone in for you.”

  “Nobody in our street has a phone. What would the neighbors think?”

  No point in arguing; he knew he’d never win.

  “I’ll catch up with some auld friends at the Herald before I go back up north.”

  “Oh aye.” Huddling into herself, tugging her old cardigan tight, the tweed skirt wrinkled around her knees, she looked like a refugee.

  A refugee from life. McAllister sighed under the weight of the thought.

  “Will you be biding here long?”

  “Just the two nights, if that’s all right?”

  “It’s your home, John.”

  His home; from where he went to school, served his cadetship, left for a war and emerged the sole survivor of the family tragedies.

  “A pint and a half.”

  McAllister looked around. His pals from the news desk would be in for the mid-evening break any moment. The double swing doors let in a rush of damp cold air and two roly-poly middle-aged men so alike, they looked like a pair of wally dugs off the mantelpiece.

  “Mac, how’s it going?” Smiles and handshakes all round. “How’s the teuchters treatin’ you?”

  “Grand, just grand. What’ll you have?”

  “A pint an’ a half for us both. Still got a paper to get oot.”

  Both men poured their half gill into the pint in the traditional manner and gave a simultaneous sigh of satisfaction as the first sip relaxed them into their evening break.

  “What brings you down here, apart from needing to visit civilization now and again?”