by A. D. Scott
She rolled her eyes, and he liked her the more for it.
“You have been excellent in your suggestions, so yes, you might be able to help, but purely with ideas.”
This time, he didn’t see her eyes, although Joanne was equally annoyed at Hennessey treating her as though she were a clever dog.
He was leaning back in the kitchen chair in a movement similar to her husband. “I am looking for a drawing. There have been references to it in a letter. And in a conversation recalled by friends. The subject is a group of young men, four friends, at a dinner table. This drawing could supposedly reveal—”
“I don’t want to know,” Joanne declared.
He sensed her fear and ignored it. “It is a small drawing, done in pencil, sketched at a dinner party. Do you have any ideas where she would hide it?”
“Perhaps it was hidden in the back of a picture and Mr. Stuart found it?”
“No. No, it wasn’t.”
How can he know that? She was longing to ask.
Hennessey continued, “If you think of something, please let me know.” He saw her nod agreement, and he was certain that finding the whereabouts of Alice’s drawing by herself would be a very tempting quest for Joanne Ross.
“Thank you again,” he said. “Especially for the scones. I will be off down south tonight, so in case we don’t meet again, write to me here when the manuscript is ready to show a publisher.” He handed her a simple card with a post office box number in Westminster.
When he was safely gone, and when her heartbeat had returned to near normal, Joanne leaned against the kitchen dresser and sighed. “Phew.” She had lied. She knew exactly where to look but couldn’t think how to search for the drawing without alerting anyone. Then Calum saved her.
In town for grocery shopping, she first stopped by the Gazette office; not because she needed anything, more for the company.
McAllister told her that Dougald Forsythe now knew he’d bought an expensive fake and that the Gazette and the Herald were about to print the story. She almost felt sorry for Forsythe. “He’s too ridiculous to be a real villain,” she said.
“He tried to cheat us,” McAllister reminded her.
“Aye, and he exposed Alice. But you can’t blame a fox for getting in amongst the chickens.”
In the reporters’ room, she listened in on a discussion between Lorna, whom she liked more and more, and Calum, whom she had less and less patience with. But still liked.
“Lorries are the best. Or commercial travelers—if you’re a lad. Not always so nice if you’re a girl, as they’re always making passes,” Lorna was telling Calum.
“Don’t blame them, you’re really pretty,” he replied.
When Lorna said, “That doesn’t make it acceptable,” Joanne was impressed, but could see Calum hadn’t a clue what she meant.
“I’m teaching Calum to hitchhike,” Lorna explained. “Telling him the best spots to wait for a lift.”
“Clachnaharry for northbound,” Joanne said. “Out past Raigmore on the A9, before it gets too steep. If it’s the Aberdeen road, I’ve no idea.”
Lorna laughed. “You pick up hitchhikers?”
“Always,” Joanne replied.
“I can’t afford more than one trip a month home,” Calum told them, “and my mother is up to high doh, so I promised I’d come home on Saturday.”
“I get the feeling she’s always up there,” Lorna said. “I used to take the calls, remember?”
“If you really need to see your mum, I’ll take you up. Then you can take your chances on a lift back on Sunday.”
He jerked up; the stool he was perched on wobbled. His smile and the Labrador-puppy-grateful-for-a-bone eyes made Joanne see him as a seven year old, not twenty-two. “Really? You mean it about giving me a lift?”
“Saturday morning, eight o’clock at your digs will get us to Sutherland when?”
“Around eleven thirty, twelve, depending on the rain. And if we take the high road, it’s shorter. But the A9 is easier.”
“Calum, Mrs. McAllister knows where she’s going.” Lorna was not being rude; five years younger, she had more common sense than him, and he knew it.
Joanne popped in to give her husband a hug, saying, “Must run, shopping and all that.”
He hugged her back. “Me too, editorial an’ aa’ that.”
She felt guilty for deceiving him. But excited by her idea. Once home, she dialed.
“Sutherland Arms.”
“Mrs. Galloway, Joanne Ross here.” She explained her mission, accepted the invitation to lunch, put down the phone. Then worried how, and what, and how much she should tell her husband.
It was he who said, “I hear you’re giving Calum a lift home. Want me to come too?”
“No, I’ll be fine.”
He knew she was determined to go and guessed that it had something to do with Alice Ramsay. From guilt, from curiosity, she would go north, with or without him. The consequences could be nothing. Or could awaken yet another visit from the shadows.
She didn’t see the concern on his face as he turned away. But she sensed it and knew she was being stubborn. “You’re right. I could do with a second driver.”
“How can I resist such a charming invitation?”
They dropped the girls off at their grandparents’, picked up Calum, and once more set off up the A9 northwards. Joanne never tired of the Highland roads, never tired of the spectacle of the firths and rivers and mountains and sea lochs and forests and moors of her native land.
At the turnoff at Alness, she stared at a deep winter-blue sky and hoped the cold, clear day was set to last. They were on the high ridge road—shorter in miles but longer in time—to Bonar Bridge, the crossing point over the Dornoch Firth to the county of Sutherland, when she became aware of an uneasiness in her stomach. She drew into a lay-by at the top of the pass, with the view to the mountains of Sutherland ahead and below the long, wide mudflats of the firth that divided the counties.
“I need to stretch my legs,” she explained. As they stood staring at the view, she felt hot in the cold air. What are we doing? Why can’t I leave well alone? Why am I so obsessed with Alice Ramsay?
“Bonnie, isn’t it?”
She jumped. She’d forgotten Calum was with them, as no one had spoken much on the journey.
“It is,” she agreed.
McAllister reached for a cigarette. Then put the packet of Passing Clouds back. Joanne wanted him to cut down on his smoking, and the air felt like pure oxygen. I’m behaving like a married man, he thought, and didn’t mind.
At the hotel, Calum thanked them for the lift.
“Time for a beer?” McAllister asked him.
“Best not,” the young man replied.
“Don’t tease him,” Joanne said as she watched Calum, shoulders slumped, walk across the square towards home.
“I think I’ll take a walk to the golf links. See you back here in an hour.”
“Aye,” she said. “The bar there will be open by now.” And, grinning, she waved him off to the clubhouse, where he could view the links and think his ungentlemanly thoughts about golf, “the ruination of a good walk” one of his more polite descriptions of the ancient game.
She’d told him she needed to ask Mrs. Galloway about the manuscript. Why she hadn’t told him her real plan was hard to admit. Her desire to find the treasure—to beat the professional searchers, to show him, and them, that she had a full working brain again—she knew was childish. He might even say dangerous.
Mrs. Galloway was at reception. “You made good time,” she commented. “I’ll fetch us a cup of tea.”
“That would be lovely.” Joanne took off her coat, settled into a chair in the lounge, where a good fire was warming the high room with large bow windows that looked across the town square. For once the passersby were not hurrying, the trickster of a sun fooling the locals into lingering in the bright, hard, yet cold sunlight.
After chatting, the conversation m
ainly centered around Calum and how he was faring, and with no mention of his mother, Joanne told Mrs. Galloway why she was here.
“I just need a quick look.” True, she told herself, no deceit there.
“I’ll call Nurse Ogilvie and tell her to expect us.” She’d sensed a tension in Joanne—the hand to her hair, the way she sat forward in the chair—and wanted to help, if only by keeping her company.
They went in Mrs. Galloway’s van. “Easier, as I know the way.”
Joanne asked, “Have they caught whoever knocked over Mrs. Mackenzie?”
“She’s on about it being someone in a big black car that did it.”
“A big black car.” Joanne stared at the gates of a sizable grey stone house, set back from the road at the end of a driveway that transformed into a tunnel when the oak and beech and elm and sycamore trees were in leaf. I shouldn’t be here. “She says it was a big black car?” I should have told McAllister why we’re really here.
“Aye, but you never know with her.”
Joanne wanted to turn back. She wanted to drive, fast, to the golf clubhouse, tell McAllister it was all a mistake, and drive home to her children, to her home, to a life without spies and mysteries and death.
“Mrs. McAllister. Or is it Joanne Ross?” Nurse Ogilvie had on a professional smile. She did not want the residents distressed, and everything to do with the death of Alice Ramsay upset them. “How can we help you?”
Muriel Galloway felt the chill in the nurse’s voice and said, “I’ll off and say hello to Mum.” In the car, she’d told Joanne how her mother had always recognized Alice Ramsay, how she was hoping that today her mother would recognize her, her own daughter.
“I’d like to examine Miss Ramsay’s picture and perhaps use it in a book of her work.”
“I see.” As she nodded, the nurse was examining Joanne, making her doubts about the excuse clear. “It’ll need taking down, then.”
The handyman was called. “This is the second time in two weeks someone has asked to see this picture,” he told her.
Joanne felt sick. “Oh, aye, and who was that?”
“A detective, so he said. Had a policeman’s badge, but he was English.”
Too late. I’m too late. “Did he say anything about the picture?”
“No. Poked around the back o’ it. But nothing else.”
The handyman was up the stepladder, unhooking the painting, when a shriek—a banshee wail was how Joanne later described it—cut through the muggy, overheated room.
“Alice, Alice, they’re stealing your picture!”
The man handed the painting to Joanne.
The sobbing woman was pulling at her hair, spittle flying out as she continued to shout, not words but shrieks. Nurse Ogilvie was trying to calm the woman, when other residents started to cry, to moan, to rock in their chairs. Two nurses bustled in, summoned by the brass hand bell used for emergencies. It seemed a perfect illustration from a Victorian novel on Bedlam and its inhabitants, and although not usually callous, Joanne was glad of the distraction, giving her time to examine the frame and the backing.
After levering out three tacks from a corner, she slipped the scalpel she’d borrowed from Hector into the back, between frame and tape. Slicing through, she peeled away the heavy card backing. Nothing. She lifted more tacks, pulled away another few inches of backing. Still nothing.
“Let me,” the handyman offered. With the back completely off, it was obvious there were no other pictures concealed behind the original. A fire blanket of disappointment made her miss what the man said.
“Finished?” he was asking.
“Sorry about the mess.”
“I can fix it up later.” In his outdoor overalls, he was hot and red in the stuffy airless room, and the sound of patients’ cries reminded him that he too might end up an elderly baby dependent on strangers.
“Thank you.” She too needed to leave the room. “God’s waiting room” was a common description of old people’s homes. A God lacking in charity, McAllister would have said.
Mrs. Galloway came back. She too looked like she’d been crying. “The nurse thought I should leave. Mother is not her best today,” she said. That her mother stared at the wall, saying nothing, recognizing no one, was a body without a mind or a soul, she didn’t share.
Joanne could see her blotchy face, her red eyes, and her hair no longer in its perfect hairspray-set waves, and all she could do was reach for her hand and hold it.
Muriel Galloway squeezed back. “It’s strange she took to Alice. Maybe it was that Alice said nothing. Didn’t fuss and never chatted—she just sat with the old dears and sketched.” On the short drive to town, she continued, “I’m sorry you didn’t meet my mother when she was all here. Lovely woman. Kindness itself. What with Mr. Mackenzie and all that, I caused her a lot of grief. It’s no wonder she doesn’t want to know me.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s a condition.” Joanne became passionate when mental health was discussed, confessing that formerly, she too would joke about the inmates of asylums, those with illnesses not understood and always feared. “I went through it myself briefly. Your mind goes, and it’s terrifying.”
Joanne could see it was no comfort. Thinking to distract her, she asked, “Has anyone been to ask you about your painting?”
“No really. Wait. After the auction, thon art expert came in for a drink and asked to look at it. We were right busy in the public bar, so I told him where it was and left him to it.”
Forsythe? What did he want?
“I love the paintings; they remind me of her. We were good pals when we were young, and it was a pleasure to get to know her again when she moved back here. Alice was never a snob. It made no difference to her that I was a hotel landlady and she was an aristocrat.”
“Did Alice know Mrs. Mackenzie back then?”
“We only saw her on summer holidays, when her family and friends were up here for the grouse shooting. All us children would play together, out all hours in those long nights.”
“And nothing . . .” Joanne paused to think how to phrase the question. “Nothing important happened when you were children?”
“Important enough for someone to want to kill her, you mean?”
Joanne had forgotten how sharp Mrs. Galloway was. And forgotten that she too had doubts. “No,” she began slowly, thinking out loud. “But I’ve found often that it’s the small things, what seems a silly childhood game or a trick or . . .” Humiliation, she was about to say. “They can poison people’s lives.”
“Big things too, like stealing their husband.” Mrs. Galloway began to laugh. “Sorry, shouldn’t laugh, but I’m right happy. We’ve decided, what with Calum living away from home, we—Mr. Mackenzie and me—are finally going to live together.”
No mention of divorce. Or remarriage. Only “live together.” And from Mrs. Galloway’s voice and her smile and the way she held her head up, looking straight at Joanne with no sense of shame, she wished them happiness.
“Congratulations. Take it from me, a divorced woman . . .”
Mrs. Galloway’s mouth dropped at that.
“You will not regret it. And to heck with what anyone says.”
“Thank you, Joanne.”
Mrs. Galloway fetched the ladder and took down the picture. Joanne laid it on a dining-room table, facedown, to examine it.
“Looks like someone has had a go at removing the back,” Mrs. Galloway said. “Why on earth?” She saw Joanne flush. “Maybe best not to know.”
They removed the back. Joanne checked the layers of backing board. Nothing. “That’s my theory shot to pieces,” she said.
“What are you looking for?”
“Mrs. Galloway—Muriel—I don’t want to involve you in something that could bring trouble to your door.” It was a trivial phrase to describe the horror of being watched, having the telephone line tapped, the house broken into and searched, her and McAllister’s private lives examined, to sense that someone w
as there in the shadows over her shoulder.
Muriel looked at Joanne. Her eyes said it all, but she added, simply and clearly, with no doubts, no hesitation, “I want to know why Alice died.”
“Me too.”
Joanne did not want to breathe, to break the spell, the magic of mutual understanding, the awfulness of saying out loud what they had both been avoiding. Someone killed Alice.
“There’s a drawing Alice did of me in my bedroom. Only Mr. Mackenzie knows about it.”
Standing in the large bow window of the bright, airy bedroom with a view over the graveyard, the intimacy of the room disturbed Joanne. The his and her sides of the bed. The scent of sleep. Above all, the tender eroticism of the drawing hanging above the high wood headboard made her feel an intruder into their lives. Their love.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“Aye. I told Alice it was far too flattering.”
Once Joanne might have agreed. Yet in the lines around the half-closed eyes, in the hair tumbling over freckled shoulders, in the tilt of her neck, in the soft folds of skin between the barely covered breasts, a different Muriel, perhaps the real Muriel, glowed.
Mrs. Galloway went over to the drawing and took it off the wall. “Right, let’s get it down and check.” She was embarrassed. And delighted. She’d wanted to show off the portrait to someone. Yet she knew no one she could share such an intimate portrait with. Until now.
Joanne removed small brass tacks with small electrical pliers. Next, she prized off an outer board of thin plywood.
“She framed it herself,” Mrs. Galloway said. “Very handy with carpentry tools was Alice.”
Joanne felt the extra layers and wished she were alone. But nothing would make Mrs. Galloway leave, not now it was clear there was something behind the picture.
“It’s a drawing,” Muriel whispered.
They took the portrait down to the empty dining room. Joanne turned back the protective cover and stared. The scene was a dinner party. The setting she guessed was Mediterranean, until she saw the outline of a minaret through an open arched doorway.
Three of the men were leaning inwards, heads almost touching. “Conspirators” was the word Joanne immediately thought of. To one side of the frame, as separate as Judas and drawn in profile, was an older man. “Observer,” she would say of him, but he, the fourth man, would be hard to identify.
