A Small Death in the Great Glen

by A. D. Scott

  “Next thing, so it seemed, but really it was almost two years, he was found in the Clyde. The police said he had jumped, but the priest, the one that ran the boxing club, agreed to agree with my mother. He fell. That way, they could all do their hocus-pocus funeral flummery. Then all would be fine and dandy. Except for my mother. And for me.”

  The sounds of the wind, driving a horizontal rain, trying every trick to penetrate windows and doors, was providing the sound effects to the story. Now the fire added to the atmosphere, the wood construction collapsing in on itself, sending showers of sparks dancing up the chimney.

  “My mother used to say that these”—McAllister poked the fire, setting off another display—“the sparks, they were souls flying up to heaven.”

  “And the hoodie crow?” Don broke another long silence.

  “Aye. That.” McAllister’s bark of laughter made Don shudder in sympathy. “It reminded me, that’s all, brought it all back.”

  McAllister topped up their glasses and was surprised to find the bottle almost empty.

  “Aye, the sight of them, the priests and the brothers from the boxing club, huddled around his grave, made me think of a congregation of corbies—and you know how evil those birds can seem. So since then, I’ve always seen priests as crows. Corbie, hoodie crow, priest; it doesn’t seem far-fetched to me.” McAllister got up. “I’ve got that poem here somewhere, Edgar Allan Poe, he knew the power of ravens. Where did I put it?” He fumbled around the walls of books, gave up, sat back down, holding an empty glass, back to staring into the fire.

  Don waited. Ten minutes was it? No, more like five. But time seemed elastic by the fire, in the half light, on a night between Halloween and Armistice Day.

  “I know something happened to my brother. I slowly came to realize that whatever it was, it had been happening for a while, over a few years. That really shook me. I tried to find out. I started, and ended, at the boxing club. I began to get an inkling of what he had been through, but it was like trying to hold down smoke. Black, stinking, noxious smoke; I could smell it but never find the source. They could teach the Intelligence Services a thing or two could that lot.” He reached for a log, dropped it onto the fire, sending forth more souls.

  “McAllister …” Don sensed that there was nothing more would be said that night. So he did what he did. After all, wasn’t he the man who worked out the priorities, assigned the tasks, who would précis a story into digestible chunks? It was what he did best and this was no different.

  “You’re a journalist to the bone, McAllister,” Don started. “And you’re up here in the Highlands to show us teuchters a thing or two. But remember, for us, this is about the wee boy Jamie.”

  He held up a hand for his turn on the floor.

  “I know this has stirred the ghosts. I’m not saying a word about your wild ideas, although I think you’re off yer heid, no, what I’m saying is, we have to do what we do.” He instinctively reached behind his ear for his pencil. It wasn’t there. “Paper, McAllister, pen, pencil, anything, I can’t think without scribbling.”

  McAllister took a deep breath and forced himself back to now. His quest, his nine years of guilt, he could nurse another night. They went into the kitchen, sat at the table and started.

  “Right. Where are we? The Polish manny, Karl.” Don made a heading. “Did he do it?”

  “The tinkers are his alibi.”

  “And most of them are scattered the length and breadth of Ross and Cromarty and maybe into Sutherland.” Don wrote FIND JIMMY MCPHEE in block capitals.

  “Jimmy McPhee.” McAllister leapt up and came back with the photograph and laid it on the table. “This is Jimmy McPhee”—he pointed to the wee face with a closed-eyes grin in the third-to-back row. “And this is my brother, one row down.”

  “Well, well.” Don reached for his specs to examine the picture. “I know Jimmy was a champion boxer. I know he trained in Glasgow. This gives you another reason to find him. Next—see if you can find what really happened to Karl between jumping off the ship and him appearing back in town. Now …” Here Don stopped to think.

  “This business of a person unknown interfering with the boy, was it done to him by the person who killed him? Had it been happening on a regular basis? Do we know of anyone who does this to boys?” Don looked over his glasses at McAllister. “We must do this fast, for when word gets out the Polish man may not survive prison. Right. What else? Father Morrison.” Don printed the heading and yawned. “It’s late. But see, this is—what was it you called it? Investigative reporting? You’re aye hammering on about it to Rob, now you show us how it’s done.”

  He pointed the pen at McAllister. “This obsession of yours, priests and hoodie crows, that’s your affair. This”—he tapped the paper—“this is about the boy, not your boy, I grant you, but the wee boy here, in this town. Find out what happened to him, then maybe …”

  Maybe you can lay to rest the other ghost, he thought but didn’t say.

  He rose to go. He gathered his coat and his hat. McAllister went to the door with him. And Don being Don, he couldn’t leave without a parting shot.

  “McAllister, one thing more. I’ll no have an atmosphere in my newsroom. You owe Joanne an apology.”

  Although there was three-quarters of a bottle of best Highland single-malt in Don—for it was he who polished off the bottle—he pulled his hat down over his forehead, belted his coat tight, and with a wave good night, he trotted off into the wind and the rain and the black as though he was off into a sunny day at the races.

  McAllister shut the door. As he went about switching off the lights, damping down the fires and closing out the night, he felt grateful to Don McLeod; grateful he had stayed the course of a strange evening, grateful that Don hadn’t asked if he had read all the books—McAllister had had to drop an acquaintance for asking such an inane question—and most of all grateful that Don hadn’t said “sorry” at the end of the monologue on his private catastrophe.

  Maybe it was a hangover from Halloween, maybe it was the looming Armistice ceremonies, or perhaps it was the persistent drizzle, but in the quiet, by the fire, in other households in the town, more soul searching was taking place.

  Rob was still shaken by the scene in the office that morning. So he dealt with it the only way he knew how; he joked. That McAllister has some daft ideas, he told his mother, but this beat the lot. Hoodie crows, he laughed. Margaret McLean smiled at her son but said nothing. The child’s screams still rang around her head. She hadn’t a daughter, nor sisters, she couldn’t remember her own childhood, but in her limited experience, little girls screamed at everything and anything. So she tried to let the absurd idea go. But couldn’t.

  With the resident next door, Margaret had had only one quibble—the rhododendron forest. Like Burnham Wood, she had told him, it was preparing to march across their lawn and take over. Father Morrison smiled his friends-and-neighbors smile, nodded frequently as she explained how little light her sunroom was receiving, and did nothing.

  Rob thought the man harmless but … He remembered one unusually sunny summer—right after Father Morrison had arrived. Rob was eleven or twelve, and with two school friends, they were romping on the lawn in their swimming trunks, having water fights with the watering-can and buckets, playing at pulling each other’s trunks down, when they caught a glimpse of a figure lurking in the same, but shorter, rhododendron bushes. They spotted the camera. All three boys stopped their games, uncomfortable but not alarmed, and without a word being said either then or later, they went indoors. It was nothing.

  Angus McLean informed no one of McAllister’s visit. The passion behind the accusations had startled him. He heard McAllister out, made very little comment, thought about it for the rest of the day and then placed a phone call to an old friend, a former colleague who was now a distinguished member of the church hierarchy.

  And Chiara. She told Peter and she told Gino. Unlike Chiara and Joanne, they could allow that perhaps a rare
rogue priest could commit offenses against God and the Church. But Father Morrison? No, he was a good man. They knew him for a caring, charitable parish priest—better than many they had come across in different times and places.

  Duncan Macdonald, visiting his parishioners, attending the sick in the hospital, the infirmary and the asylum, or sitting by his fire trying to compose next Sunday’s sermon … in between, in the still moments, the memory of his niece’s shrieks echoed in his head. He knew of abominable practices in all walks of life—why not amongst the clergy; we are men after all. He had no time for the notion of celibacy—how could such a person understand the everyday pressures of family life? The pressures on the celibate, and the loneliness; a recipe for disaster was how he saw it. But Father Morrison? The Reverend Macdonald was certain he was a good man; kind, caring, with a rare understanding as well as compassion for some of the unfortunates that he helped.

  And Joanne; she was sitting alone in the newsroom, hoping to avoid McAllister and deep in thought. She did believe her girls, yet she still found it impossible to fathom their story. But the hoodie crow a priest? Never!

  “Can I have a word?”

  Joanne jumped.

  “McAllister, you scared the living daylights out of me.”

  She had her hand on her heart as she spoke. The room was empty; Don and Rob were doing whatever it was they were doing.

  “I owe you an apology. I wasn’t thinking. Too many things get covered up was what I was trying to say. I didn’t mean you when I—”

  “Apology accepted.” She rushed on to cover her embarrassment. “I’ve been thinking about what Annie and Jean saw. The idea of a priest being involved is so ridiculous but what if it was something like that, something similar, that they saw?”

  “What exactly?”

  “I don’t know, McAllister. I’ve been thinking on it till I’m dizzy.”

  “Can’t you ask them again?”

  “No, it’s impossible.” She shivered. The distance between her and Annie was as wide as ever. “Peter Kowalski is convinced Karl the Polish man did not do this. To prove where he was at the time, he needs the tinkers to come forward. But Karl will never give them up to the police, especially after they saved his life. And he says that the night after he jumped ship, the night the boy disappeared, he went back down the harbor to try to get his belongings from the ship’s captain. But the captain wouldn’t let him on board.”

  “Really? Tell me more.”

  “Ask Peter Kowalski. Karl told him what happened that night, no, two nights it was. Then Peter picked him up the following morning, near the canal bridge on the road north.” She frowned as she faced the possibility. “But if it wasn’t Karl, if it can be proven he couldn’t have done it, who else, what else, could have killed, and done things to, a wee boy?”

  FIFTEEN

  Don took over production of the Gazette. McAllister shut himself in his office, sitting at his desk like a hen on the nest, doing the jobs Don gave him, writing a perfunctory editorial, smoking enough to warrant a visit from the fire brigade, going over and over, again and again, the few facts that he had gleaned about the crime.

  McAllister had talked to Peter Kowalski with no mention of his alternative theory on the fate of the boy. The notion of a priest harming a child would be met with ridicule, he now knew that, and Peter and the Corellis were Catholic, after all. Peter said the charge against Karl was based on his being in the vicinity of the canal the night the boy disappeared. Also Karl’s greatcoat, the coat he had tried to retrieve from the ship, had been found on the canal banks. That, Karl couldn’t explain. Peter didn’t know why he believed him, but he did. Right time, right place, he had told McAllister, convenient at best, a witch hunt at worst, was how he put it. The coat was worrying, but there was bound to be an explanation. The tinkers, they could back up Karl’s story—but would they? Peter hadn’t been able to find any of the tribe that had rescued Karl from the river.

  Don pointed out that there were enough holes in the fugitive’s version of events to make it all very suspicious. He even told McAllister that it was possible that Inspector Tompson had it right. After all, they didn’t know the whole story. Time and place, yes; motive?—Fear of capture. Don had listed the points. Death an accident? Maybe. Involuntary manslaughter a possible verdict.

  “And the assault on the boy? Can you explain that away?” was McAllister’s objection to this scenario.

  The Gazette was out. Joanne was still wary of McAllister; she couldn’t bear the haunted figure he had become of late. His obsession with the boy’s death was raw and obvious. All her education and upbringing had taught her to leave such things to the police. They know what’s best, she reasoned, that was their job. She wanted the cynical McAllister back. She liked that version better.

  She liked the single Mrs. Joanne Ross much better also. With Bill away she was beginning to open herself up to possibilities. Her daydreams would start, One day I’ll …

  “Get ahold of yourself,” she muttered as she walked down Union Street, “a life of my own is as likely as …” She crossed the road trying to find a simile that, if written down, wouldn’t be deleted by Don with his stubby wee pencil.

  Joanne was on a mission. Six and a half weeks to Christmas and she hadn’t started baking—I’m not much of a wife and even less of a housewife. Christmas in Scotland did not reach the Dickensian fervor displayed by the English. Christmas was quiet, a time for church and children. New Year was another matter. The distillery lorries were already out delivering throughout the county. Market stalls were busy taking orders for fattened geese and hens. The grocery shop on Union Street was frantic with women buying ingredients for Christmas puddings and New Year black bun. Shiny elfin-sized shovels poked out from open sacks standing on the floor displaying flour (four kinds), lentils, barley, peas (two kinds), and gleaming butter beans big as river pebbles. In drawers behind the counter were raisins, sultanas, currants, spices, crystallized fruit and all kinds of nuts. Male shop assistants were expertly measuring out and weighing the brown paper bags before tying them with a neat double handle of twine and writing on them the name and address of the lady of the house, ready to be put on the afternoon trains or to be delivered by the emporium’s distinctive vans with the coat of arms proudly painted on the side. The store was an institution in the counties of the north.

  “Cash or charge, Mrs. Ferguson, or Lady Fraser, or Madam?” came the question as the orderly queue of ladies took their turn at the counter.

  “How are you, Mrs. Ross? The bairns keeping well?”

  “Fine thanks, Mr. Malcolm. Could I have a pound of currants, half a pound of raisins, some glacé cherries and some whole almonds?”

  “Baking a Christmas cake are we?”

  “Not a chance. I could never compete with my mother-in-law. Just a Dundee cake.”

  “Mrs. Ross senior finished her baking long since, I suppose?”

  “Aye, ten weeks she gives it, sitting in the larder, sooking up their daily dose of brandy. Black bun and Christmas cake take at least six weeks, so she tells me. I contribute the silver threepences for Christmas pudding, that’s all she’ll trust me with,” Joanne joked as she got out her purse. “What do I owe you?”

  Payment was placed into a small screw-top barrel that whizzed around the shop on a system of pulleys conveying the money to the cashiers, lording it in an office that looked down on the shop floor.

  “Hello, Mrs. Ross.” A blushing Mhairi stood with a list in one hand and a small case in the other. “Do you mind me?”

  “Of course, how could I forget? Mhairi from the inn on the West Coast. What brings you over here? Oh, I see, the Christmas list. Of course!”

  “I see Mr. Ross most days,” Mhairi told her. “He’s fine.” I see him every day and he’s usually well away, she thought. But she would never say that. “Aye, I had some business to see to. Then I’ve to get all these messages for Mrs. Watt. I hope I can find time to look for a present for wee Rosemary. Th
e train leaves back at four o’clock.”

  Joanne had finished her shopping and wasn’t due back at work for an hour.

  “Tell you what, let’s have a cup of tea. Coffee maybe? My treat.”

  Mhairi blushed. “I couldn’t.”

  “Nonsense. Give Mr. Malcolm the list. Come with me whilst the order’s being made up.” She took the girl’s arm and marched her off.

  To Mhairi, the noise, the coffee monster, the jukebox, the steamed-up windows, the unfamiliar menu, the casual way Rob McLean appeared and sat down to join them, were exciting and scary and bewildering all rolled into one.

  “A cappuccino for me,” Rob ordered.

  “Same,” said Joanne.

  The waitress licked her pencil, taking in Mhairi’s country face and clothes, waiting.

  “My friend will have the same.” Rob to the rescue.

  They drank their coffee, they chatted, then Rob told them he must dash.

  “Where are you off to in such a rush?” Joanne asked. “It certainly can’t be work.”

  “I’ll let you in a wee secret, Mhairi, I have a rock ’n’ roll band.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, the new music from America. I get the records from the airmen at the Lossiemouth base and I dance to it at the Two Red Shoes in Elgin.”

  “I’ve heard a wee bit o’ that,” Mhairi contributed, “on the wireless—Two-Way Family Favorites. But I really like Doris Day—‘What will be, will be.’”

  “Not quite my cup of cappuccino.” Rob laughed, and he went into an uncannily accurate takeoff of the radio show using his spoon as a fake microphone. “Next up we have a request from Sergeant Donny Douglas, BFPO 69 in Germany, for his sister Fiona in Ecclefechan—Bill Haley and the Comets—One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock rock.” He jiggled off, leaving Joanne and Mhairi in fits of giggles. “Great meeting you, Mhairi,” he called. “See you next time you’re in town.”