by A. D. Scott
She found the envelope of Hec’s pictures still in the bureau. She spread the contents over the table and began to list all those she recognized, making note of others she needed Calum to identify.
Humming, she continued with the list. “The auctioneer. Connection to Alice? None that I know. The doctor . . .” On the column opposite his name, she wrote, “hostile witness.” Nurse Ogilvie. Mrs. Galloway. Forsythe. The sheriff.” She crossed out the sheriff. “Now you’re being ridiculous,” she muttered. Right. Now what? OK, cross-reference all those involved in the trial with all those who were at the auction.
That evening, McAllister asked Joanne how her work was progressing with Alice’s manuscript.
She smiled. “Early days.”
The tranquillity of working with the color and beauty of the illustrations made her feel a connection to the woman. It also helped her in her own work; enthusiasm, energy, thoughts, and ideas seemingly coming from outside of herself.
Earlier, in that precious first hour of writing time, ideas poured out. The central character was a postman working in a remote community up the glens. The words had flown off the ends of her fingertips onto the keys, onto the paper. This she also kept to herself; more from superstition than logic, she felt that talking about it might make the muse desert her. How to fit in the topic of witchcraft she had yet to figure out.
A letter rejecting a story she had submitted three weeks earlier had arrived that morning. With a ring at the bell and a cheery “How are you today?” the postman she was basing her character on handed it over. For one moment, she was worried he might guess she was studying him.
She smiled. “Thanks, Archie.”
“You look like you’re doing well.” His grin and his wind-sun-rain-red cheeks cheered her.
“Thanks for noticing. I am.”
She and all the neighbors knew that he kept a check on anyone elderly or infirm or, Joanne suspected, anyone who might give him a quick cup of tea on winter days.
She read the letter quickly, and the disappointment didn’t overwhelm her. I can do better, she told herself.
The letter was on the hallstand when McAllister came home for lunch. He would never read his wife’s mail but was curious.
“A rejection letter,” she said.
“May I read it?”
“If you like.”
He did. “This is not a rejection letter. It’s . . .”
“They don’t like my story.”
“No. And yes.” He held out the letter at arm’s length. He would never admit he needed reading glasses. “It says he? She? Anyhow, Drummond says this particular story doesn’t fit in with the editorial thrust of his magazine, too much in the romantic vein for them, but he likes your style, particularly your characters. He goes on to say if you want to submit stories with more reference to place—I think he means more Scottish—featuring your obvious talent for character development, he’ll be happy to consider them. Joanne, this is extremely positive, particularly from this magazine. It publishes some of the best writers around.”
“I know. I thought when I posted it I was being overambitious.”
“You can write. I know you don’t believe me, think I’m biased, but you can write. From this letter, the editor thinks so too.”
“So I should write what I know?”
“Start there. See where it takes you. Now, wife, where’s ma dinner?” He thumped the table with his fist. She laughed and stuck out her tongue.
An hour later, and with her husband back at work, she took up the rejection letter and read it again, thinking, I’ll start again. Maybe that postman idea will work after all, if I can find a twist. Maybe the postman can be a postwoman—and a witch.
Neglecting the lunch dishes and leaving the ironing for another time, she settled down to work. Again, she couldn’t concentrate.
I’ll clean Alice’s pictures first. Maybe they will inspire me.
She dusted them. Next she polished the glass with a vinegar and water mix, finishing off with a final rub using an old copy of the Gazette. The middle-sized paintings, two of them in simple wood frames, she propped up on the sideboard behind the decanter and glasses and an empty flower vase.
One in particular she loved. It was a still life of a kitchen table with checked cloth, a wicker basket with grapes, a string of red onions hanging off the table’s edge, and three flowers in a vase filling the top corner. The other, a simple depiction of wildflowers, reminded her of what little she knew of the work of Charles Rennie Macintosh.
Tackling the larger oil painting was hard, as it was too heavy for her to lift. Kneeling on the floor, she pulled it towards her. The ornate gilded frame was a boxlike construction, perhaps two inches and a half deep, perfectly in keeping with the subject, a gloomy portrait of the Virgin and Child. It was not to her taste or that of the Scottish Presbyterian Church.
No wonder that antique dealer only wanted the frame; baby Jesus looks more like twenty years old than twenty months.
She did not know this was a convention of the time and might date the oil painting to the sixteenth century. It couldn’t be valuable, she decided; not even the fair Dougald had bid for it. Then again, a real work of art would not be for sale at a local farm auction.
She wanted the other large oil painting—of a clergyman skating—above the mantelpiece, but it was also too heavy to lift. She left both propped against the wall.
She was curious about their provenance and resolved to borrow a book from the library. Can’t ask Dougald Forsythe. He and people like him, all those arty types, they’d turn a simple question into a lecture, making you feel a right Philistine.
Joanne was interested in art but acknowledged she was woefully uneducated. At boarding school, there had been occasional visits to the art gallery in Edinburgh—until the headmistress discovered the many nudes on display, some of them naked men with not even a fig leaf. The trips were soon changed to visits to the Royal Observatory.
What Joanne liked most was the manuscript with Alice’s botanical watercolor illustrations. She admired how the flowers were drawn, or a tree, or a leaf, with a color wash light and free over the top of the pen-and-ink outlines.
One illustration had an ink drawing of a section of the plant, showing the leaves and roots, and the plant in full bloom. There was a date and a map reference of where the plant had been collected. “Bladderwort,” it said, with “Butterwort” in brackets, and the pale gold wash over the flowers reminded Joanne of sun and summer.
Maybe I should identify the work with a map reference. Ordinance survey maps fascinated Joanne; the shading of the color to accentuate the contours of a landscape spoke to her, helping her visualize the glen or the mountain or the seashore.
Maybe the postman, or postwoman, in my story covers a big district. The flower illustration was sparking off more ideas. Maybe he checks how everyone is and carries the news and the gossip as well as letters and parcels.
Grabbing a notebook before the idea vanished, she began to scribble, her pencil flying across the lined paper. Only when her wrist ached did she stop. Then, stretching her back, she grinned. She had once told her daughter Annie that catching ideas was as hard as chasing and catching a wild rabbit. Today, at least, she could say, “Got it.”
In this fugue, twenty-three minutes passed, and she captured the postie’s route as though she had been in the passenger seat with him as he drove up into the hills, crossing burns and rivers, driving through fords, through mist and rain and deep shafts of sunlight. She breathed the air, smelled the heather, the rotting bracken, the fresh-tilled earth. And as she imagined his cheery wave, his voice as he called out, “Fine day the day,” she experienced his life and his part in the life of the scattered community.
People informed her writing, people she had met or merely observed. The secrets of total strangers, seen from the top deck of a bus or on walks through the islands or spotted through the window of a tearoom or café, set her mind racing as she invented lives for the
m. But what inspired her most of all, what infused her work over her twelve years in her adopted home in the Highlands, was the splendor of the lochs and glens and mountains.
Getting up from her chair, she glanced again at the pictures on the floor. They look lovely there; maybe no need to hang them. Then it hit her. If someone came forward to claim the estate, could they claim the manuscript too? It hadn’t been part of the sale; it had been inside the box, and not acknowledged as part of the estate. After the initial flash of panic, she knew she wanted these papers more than anything.
She telephoned Calum Mackenzie.
“The paintings and books and papers we bought, has anyone a right to claim them back?”
“You bought them fair and square,” he said. “Whoever inherits would receive the proceeds of the auction, or at least I think so. I’ll check with the newspaper’s solicitor. I did hear that someone got in touch with the solicitor about the estate.” That he could find out nothing frustrated him, and for once his mother knew nothing.
“Really? That’s interesting.” That is very, very interesting, Calum, so why didn’t you tell me immediately?
“I’ll see if I can find out more,” he offered. “Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of. Thanks, Calum.”
She was struck by how uncurious Calum Mackenzie seemed. Yes, he did his job, but information came to him, and he followed leads only after being asked to. Probably hadn’t ever had to investigate, she guessed. He had his mother to do it for him.
CHAPTER 9
I should tell him.
“Anything, anyone unusual,” he’d said, “write. In an emergency, call. You have the number. You know the protocol.”
She puts the binoculars back on the hallstand. Then, changing her mind, she hangs them around her neck, tucking the leather strap under the collar of the soft checked Viyella shirt, a man’s shirt that she uses as an artist’s smock.
“I’m probably imagining it,” she says to the wee dog. There’s no actual sign of anything, she reminds herself, or anyone unusual. But I can feel it in my bones—I’m being watched.
He whines his agreement. He too is restless, ears pricking at shifts in the wind, at distant unheard sounds.
Jumping onto the window box seat, he watches, gives up, goes back to his bed, then repeats the ritual five minutes, or half an hour, or two hours later. She, like him, had her ritual: pace, stare out the windows, grab the binoculars, walk down to the heather line, sweep the edges of the woodland, the ridges above, the burn down below, the track scar across the landscape. Once she watched a small herd of deer—six of them, five does plus one magnificent stag—pick their way down to the water. Apart from them, nothing. Yet still she searches.
Framed by the window, in a not far distant fold made by an intermittent burn flowing to the larger burn, almost a river, that dissects the glen, a last gasp of heather is in bloom. The bright of the blue far above, the ink stain of the conifered horizon, the dirty stain-splotch-splash pink-purple, grips her heart.
That’s my cover illustration.
She loads a new roll of film. Takes her binoculars.
“Come on, boy,” she says. “I need to take photographs. Let’s go for a walk.”
He only heard “walk.”
On Monday, in his office at the Gazette, and an hour or so after the sacred Monday Morning Meeting, McAllister was visited by Detective Inspector Dunne. His past experience of many police officers was not positive; his experience being that journalists and policemen were on opposing sides. But although they were wary of each other in a professional setting, the inspector and the editor had worked together before and respected each other.
“First, I need to say this is an unofficial visit.” Dunne had his overcoat buttoned up over his plainclothes detective’s uniform of navy-blue suit, gleaming black shoes, white shirt, and regimental tie.
McAllister waited, saying nothing.
“There’s been some concern shown over a picture you published,” Dunne started, “but . . .” He hesitated. Not because he was unwilling to share the information—he was here, after all, in the editor’s office—but because he did not know what to make of the summons he’d received from the chief constable.
“I’ve been asked to explain why, how, you came to publish a photograph of the chief constable, and the sheriff of Sutherland-shire, in a bar.”
“We didn’t . . . Oh, you mean the golf clubhouse shot?” McAllister was thinking fast. What is this about? “That was taken in Sutherland, so what’s it got to do with here?”
The detective didn’t—couldn’t—answer.
“Let’s get the photograph, and you can point out what has offended such high panjandrums.”
They examined the picture in the sports section of the Gazette. Neither subject was holding a drink. Neither had a finger near his nose. Or his flies open. The third man in their group had his head turned away; it would be nigh impossible to identify him.
“These men are background only. You could only make out their identity if you were looking closely and knew them. So where’s the problem? Is it because they are in a bar? Offending the Temperance League? The Kirk?”
“I don’t know.” Dunne was shaking his head slowly.
“The third man.” McAllister was poking at the image with a pencil. “I think it was him in the car that almost ran us off the road.”
Dunne was surprised. “I never heard about that.”
“I didn’t see the point in complaining. It was on the Dingwall road, after that photo was taken. The car was traveling well above the speed limit.”
The detective was looking closely at the photograph. “It would be hard to identify anyone from this.”
“Aye. So why the complaint?”
“I don’t know. I was order—told to talk to you and tell you to never print pictures of senior police officers without permission.”
“Tell your chief constable the Gazette will never publish pictures of him again. Or his wife.”
“I’ll let him know.” Dunne smiled; he and McAllister knew the policeman loved having his picture in the newspaper, handing out cups and medals and handshakes. His wife even more so.
But from the way the detective was looking anywhere but at McAllister, he knew there was more.
Dunne was visibly struggling with the task given to him by his superiors, so he came straight out with the statement. “You signed the Official Secrets Act in 1942 when you were a war correspondent. I’ve been told to remind you that the agreement still stands.”
McAllister stared in astonishment. The Official Secrets Act was only invoked in the protection of matters of national security. “Are you implying we are on a war footing here? That publishing that picture in a local newspaper is of national importance?”
Dunne didn’t answer. He had been as astonished as the editor. In all his years in the army, then as a police officer, he had never come across a matter of state security. And he did not believe that he, a provincial policeman, should be involved in state secrets. Heavy-handed and a major breach in protocol, he thought. He also resented being treated as an errand boy with no reason or explanation given. “That’s all I know.”
McAllister knew that the “ours not to reason why” ethos pervaded the police force as much as it pervaded the army. “Why warn me?” he began. “If you want to keep something a secret, why raise the issue with a journalist? Red rag to a bull, that.”
“I considered that, and . . .” Dunne was fiddling with his hat. His hat had no answers either, so he stood. “I’m just the messenger, McAllister.” He held out his hand. “Thank you for your time.”
Seeing this as official police-speak for Consider this a warning, but we will talk more when I’m off duty, McAllister joked, “Message received, DI Dunne.” And in no way understood, he implied with a shake of his head.
He saw his visitor to the door.
“Miss Alice Ramsay, her trial, her death—it’s all very interesting, don’t you
think?”
The inspector gave no hint that he’d heard. “Thank you for your time, Mr. McAllister.”
Once alone, with the photograph from the golf clubhouse propped up against the cigarette box, McAllister wondered why the fuss. He leaned back in his chair in his favorite thinking position. Perhaps Joanne is right; perhaps the death was . . .
He was unwilling to consider that possibility—that someone had caused harm to Alice. And he was decidedly unhappy at Joanne involving herself in a story that might be even remotely dangerous. He decided not to tell her of the inspector’s visit. If she was ignorant of the visit, she would have no reason to suspect that the fate of the late Alice Ramsay now also intrigued McAllister and DI Dunne. The man he’d seen in the car, and at the golf clubhouse, only added to the mystery. Who was he? Was he at the auction? McAllister couldn’t remember seeing him, but as it was crowded, it was possible he had been there.
As for Dunne’s invocation of the Official Secrets Act, that practically guaranteed that McAllister would look for answers.
Perhaps that was the intention.
On Tuesday morning, McAllister took a phone call.
“Mr. McAllister, it’s Calum Mackenzie.”
“What can I do for you, Calum?” He leaned back in his chair, trying to avoid a fierce draft coming in the half-open door he’d been too lazy to get up and shut. It felt as though the North Sea gale was coming through every crack in the walls, every window, every skylight in the old stone building. “Calum? Are you there?” He was hearing weird snuffling noises down the crackly telephone line, voices fading in and out as though they were at sea. Is he crying? Can’t be.
“I’ve lost ma job.”
“What?”
“I’ve been fired.” There was a sound of someone blowing his nose. “Mr. McAllister, I can’t work out what’s happening. The editor . . . I told Elaine, and she said I should talk to you, you being a newspaper man. But I canny use the phone at home cos my mother—”
