by A. D. Scott
“No, we’ve no enemies,” she answered. “Shinty folk are right friendly off the field.”
Joanne accepted her story, but there was something, she thought later, something in the way Mrs. Urquhart’s hands fidgeted with an invisible piece of knitting as she sat in the armchair by the fireplace with a cup of tea untouched on the nest of side tables.
But finding a severed leg in the washing is enough to make anyone nervous, Joanne reasoned.
• • •
Another edition of the Gazette came out, and the story was once more dissected and discussed, and argued over. Then one bright spark, a player on the Beauly shinty team, thinking to stir him up, asked his uncle, a gravedigger at Tomnahurich cemetery, if he had lost a body, or a body part.
His uncle was furious, denying that anything had ever gone missing on his watch. Then Double Donald, as he was known, remembered the earth on a fresh grave being disturbed, but not obviously so, when he had come to work the previous Monday morning.
So he, Donald Donaldson, phoned Sergeant Patience and asked him to come over but begged that it be kept quiet. Having made the request after he told his story, and after he had shown the sergeant the grave in question, he realized there was no chance of the matter being hushed up.
What Double Donald didn’t mention was that this funeral on that Thursday afternoon was late, due to some problems with the widow fainting and generally behaving with no decorum.
Hysterics; a sure sign that she didn’t give a damn for her husband, Double Donald always thought.
It was getting dark by the time the mourners left, and the pile of earth was almost frozen—the temperature not much above freezing all day. His feet were numb, his hands even colder, and Brian, his fellow gravedigger, was off sick with the flu. Double Donald was afraid of the dark, but never afraid of ghosts; there’s no such thing, he always said when asked about his job, but still he barely covered the coffin with earth.
He had pulled the tarpaulins over, weighting them with a shovelful of soil at each corner, vowing to get there earlier than usual the next morning, then took off before real dark set in.
Next morning, again the frost was thick, silvering everything in the cemetery, making it look as though ghosts had left their ectoplasm much as a snail leaves traces of its presence. He saw immediately that the grave had been disturbed, but as he was on his own, there was no need to tell anyone. He hurriedly filled it in, doing the job neatly and properly, and tried to think no more about it. Until his nephew reminded him.
“An exhumation order?” McAllister said when Rob, via Sergeant Patience, told him the news.
They were all seated around the reporters’ table, except for Mal Forbes, who was seldom in the office.
“You have to sell face-to-face,” Mal told Fiona. Often.
“An exhumation? Can I take pictures?” Hector was almost out the door in excitement.
“Only if no one sees you,” Don warned, speaking through a mouthful of cold plum duff. “Joanne, if McAllister keeps shilly-shallying around, I’ll marry you—this is the best pudding . . .”
“Who’s supposed to be in this grave?” Joanne wanted to change the subject. Although she hadn’t lied, she had led McAllister to believe she had slaved over a hot stove to test the plum duff recipe. When he asked for a second pudding to share in the office, she had to beg Mrs. Ross Senior to steam another one.
“He was a retired clerk in the county council,” Don replied, “married with a grown-up daughter, a man never known to play anything except lawn bowls, and curling when the lochs freeze over. He died of a heart attack and has no connection to any shinty team.”
“Joanne, you interview the widow,” McAllister decided. “Hec, you go too—and be tactful—better still, say nothing. Rob, any further with finding out why the leg was in the laundry basket?”
“There are more theories floating than on the true identity of the Stone of Destiny,” Rob replied.
“Well,” Don said, “keep digging,” and was rewarded with groans all round.
• • •
Double Donald and his workmate, Brian, dug down to the coffin. It was not buried deep. The grave was a communal family plot, with the deceased laid on top of his grandfather; his long-dead sister, who had not survived her fifth birthday; his father; and his mother, with little space left for his wife, who was fortunately extremely healthy for seventy-seven.
Reaching the coffin, the gravediggers stood back. They leaned on their shovels, watching a policeman and two men from the mortuary completing the final task—opening the coffin lid. A representative from the procurator fiscal’s office was on one side, noting everything on a clipboard. All that was needed was to check if the deceased had two legs. What state the body would be in was on all their minds.
“Easy does it!” one of the men at the graveside called out to his partner. The earth was wet, and he had a horror of slipping into the hole of the dead, and of putting a foot through the coffin lid.
There was the sound of a crowbar, or a genteel version thereof, echoing through the still air. Hearing the coffin lid crack, the men instinctively stepped back; through the gap a ghost, a vestige of the man’s essence, could escape, seek a living, breathing home in one of them, or perhaps remain lingering with the other spirits that inhabited Tomnahurich Cemetery, this home of the dead, this hill of the faeries.
All Double Donald could think was, Thank goodness it’s freezing, I can’t stand the smell o’ death. He was a gravedigger because his father had had the job before him, and after the war you took what work you could get.
The policeman nodded, the lid was replaced, the coffin secured. The men returned to the mortuary van and drove away. The policeman followed with no thanks, no explanation, no information offered to the gravediggers—not that they expected any from a policeman.
“So what did they find do you think?”
“Search me,” Double Donald replied to. They began to fill in the hole, making it as neat as possible; they took pride in their profession.
No one saw Hector. He was a little up the steep side of the volcanic plug around which the cemetery spread, hiding behind a cyprus. He had a lens that looked like an admiral’s telescope. And a roll of fine though gruesome shots.
An exhumation being highly unusual, the story and the speculation ran for a third week. Then the leg was reburied alongside the body of the retired clerk. Double Donald and his assistant were not happy about digging the grave for a third time. Donald helped with the spadework but made his assistant open the coffin lid whilst he went for a cigarette some distance away. The smell reached him all the same.
The police, the shinty community, the readers of the Gazette, the general population, and Rob McLean and Frankie Urquhart continued to be curious. The event was fast becoming one of the tales shinty lovers and players shared during the after-game drinking sessions and fund-raising events. Some even cut out and framed the front pages of the Highland Gazette and hung them in the clubhouse.
• • •
March soon came around. Once more there was a lack of good stories to fill the pages, but there was an abundance of advertising. The whole team was around the table discussing the next edition, particularly the ratios.
“We can’t continue like this,” Don complained. “Soon we’ll have more advertising than editorial.”
Mal Forbes overheard the remark and said, “What’s wrong with that?”
Joanne rolled her eyes and said, “We are a reputable newspaper, here to tell the news—not just sell newspapers.”
“And here’s me thinking we’re a commercial enterprise that delivers information—and that is what advertising is, information,” Mal said. “Besides, it’s the advertising that pays the wages.”
As always, he was right, and as always she found him irritating in his rightness. The conversation continued around her, washing over her like the distant sound of children in the playground. She was looking up through the rain-streaked window. She saw clo
uds—phantasmagorical creatures, sometimes threatening, sometimes playful, always interesting.
For her, March was cloud-racing season, and these North Sea clouds were superb at the hundred-yard dash. From east to west they would run, down the glens, following the fault line of Loch Ness, Loch Lochie, Loch Oich, to Ben Nevis, where, colliding with the mountain, they dissolved, weeing on the town and surrounding hills. The remnants—the victors—would tear off across the Western Isles to join the big bullyboys of the Atlantic.
“So we’re agreed then?” McAllister asked.
“Aye,” the others replied.
“Fine,” Joanne said. But she had no idea what she was agreeing to and assumed that nothing could be worse than more recipes and no one was interested in a story about clouds.
It was only after the meeting was over and everyone gone that she realized nothing had been said about her article on Mae Bell.
That means it must be boring, she told herself.
When the Gazette came out, she saw that Don had put the article on a right-hand page, separate from the Women’s Page and with a picture of the missing aircraft culled from the archives. Her first reaction was pleasure; her second, misgiving—wanting to keep Mae Bell and her exoticism all to herself—she dismissed as childish.
• • •
That same week, after the third edition featuring the lost leg, and just as Rob decided the story had, in newspaper parlance, lost its legs, he was on the right spot at the right time for the next episode.
Rob picked up the phone, only because Joanne was out. “Gazette. Hi, Frankie, what can I do you for? Tomorrow? Can’t promise. Okay, but only if it’s dry. Hector? Do I have to? Fine. See you then.”
Hector came in half an hour later.
“Tomorrow we’re covering the shinty match at Bught Park.”
“Do I have to?” Hector asked.
“If you want to make amends with Nurse Urquhart by making her husband look good, yes.”
That settled, Hector and Rob agreed to meet at two the next afternoon. For once Rob hoped for rain. For once March did not oblige, behaving like June.
The match started well. The locals were playing the team from Beauly, a well-supported, successful, and well-financed team—they had a change of shirts paid for by Lord Lovat, and they had won the Camanachd Cup a few times. Fast, noisy, the crack of stick upon stick, the players running from one goalmouth to the other with good speed, it looked to be a tight game—until halftime.
Rob and Frankie were standing a little away from the huddle of players who were standing, or sitting, or crouching down, sucking on the obligatory halftime quartered oranges. They didn’t hear the remark that started the stramach until after Nurse Urquhart had shipped two players off to the infirmary, only a short walk away, saying they needed stitches. Seeing Hector standing near the players, snapping away, Rob suspected, rightly, that Hec had had something to do with the ensuing fight.
“Hello, Mr. Donaldson,” Hector had said to Double Donald, “have you recovered from the fright over the leg?”
“What’s he got to do with it?” someone in the local team scarf asked.
“He dug the grave the leg came from,” Hector said.
“Aye, but it wasn’t anything to do wi’ him,” a man—Double Donald’s nephew, wearing a Beauly scarf, said.
It took a moment for the man, a big man with a few whiskies sneaked from a hip flask in him, to work out what had just been said. He turned on Hector.
“You’re saying that this manny here”—he jerked his thumb towards Double Donald—“was in charge o’ the grave the leg came out o’?”
“Aye.” Hector, shielding his camera inside his duffel coat, was not liking the way the man stood over him, leaning forwards as he spoke. Or growled.
“And what’s it all to do wi’ you?” the man asked the nephew, the Beauly supporter.
“He’s ma uncle,” the nephew in the rival scarf replied.
“Is he now?”
That was all the man needed. He stepped forwards. Pushing Hec out of the way, he hit the Beauly supporter full on the nose. The spurt of blood was instant and copious and sprayed onto the attacker’s jacket, but he didn’t care.
“Hey lads,” he shouted to the team, “this is the manny who dug up the leg.”
“No I never, I was the one who buried it.” Only after he spoke did Double Donald realize his mistake. I should have kept ma mouth shut, he thought as he sat on the damp grass with bright yellow stains on his face where Nurse Urquhart had applied iodine, her remedy for cuts, abrasions, gravel rash, and any ailment imaginary or otherwise.
Although they pretended otherwise, Rob and Frankie enjoyed the stramash—which was off the pitch for once. And Hector, in spite of being told by Coach Frank Urquhart that he was mincemeat if he caught him, took some glorious shots of the game—stramach and all.
“That was great,” Rob and Frankie agreed when they had a drink after the game.
“We must go more often,” Rob said, knowing they wouldn’t because both of them would be pestered to join the team by Frankie’s dad.
• • •
“This is great,” said Don McLeod when he saw Hec’s pictures on Monday morning.
“Given Hec started the whole fight, it’s a wonder he didn’t end up in the infirmary like some of the players,” Rob told them.
“You should take him with you more often,” Don said.
Once more the shinty team starred in the Gazette headlines, and once more Mr. Frank Urquhart and his wife were the talk of the community. And once again Hector was in trouble with Nurse Urquhart.
FOUR
Coach Frank Urquhart was not a man who noticed his wife much. He always assumed his tea would be on the table at six o’clock every evening, the bills paid on time, the washing done and ironed, and that Mrs. Urquhart—Nurse Urquhart, as he frequently thought of her—would, in spite of the incident of the foot in the boot, continue to launder the shinty team shirts. Which she did.
But Nurse Urquhart had other ideas when it came to bringing up her son.
That was another reason Frankie was friends with Rob McLean. Neither minded the washing-up. Both of them spoke with their mothers in words of more than one syllable, and in complete sentences. And both enjoyed their mothers’ stories: Rob’s mother, Margaret, about her high-society days in Edinburgh; Frankie Urquhart’s mother, Nurse Urquhart, of recounting the silly sayings of the pupils at the local schools and the ridiculous prejudices of some of the parents about health and hygiene and inoculations.
“They should know better,” was how she put it, “ ’specially with the polio scare.”
So when the two young men discussed Nurse Urquhart’s state of mind, it was with fondness. And concern.
Frankie Urquhart had called asking if Rob had time for a coffee in the Castle Brae café.
Rob asked, “Is it raining?” unable to tell through the only window in the reporters’ room, a window set so high, it reminded him of his Victorian primary school, where the architectural principle was never to set windows allowing pupils to see out, in case the view distracted them.
“Not yet.”
“I’ll see you in two minutes.”
From the window table, Frankie watched his friend run down the stairs and across the car park, the collar of his jacket turned up against a blustery wind that set Rob’s hair waving like seaweed in an underwater kelp forest.
“Could you do a wee story about my new jazz club?” Frankie asked after the coffee arrived.
“Jazz club?”
Rob knew that his friend’s taste ran more to jazz, but he had a fine appreciation of rock, particularly Elvis.
“It’s at the top of Castle Street, down a close—but you’ll never find it if you don’t know,” Frankie said.
“Thon place?” Rob laughed. “It’s a cellar with no windows burrowed into the hillside.”
“Aye, but I’ve had it done up, so it’s a great place for pulling the birds. My idea is
, one night jazz, one night blues, one night rock ’n’ roll, but I might have to borrow your Dansette until we’re more financial.”
Frankie grinned, and not for the first time, Rob saw from the glances of the females in the café that his old school chum and fellow devotee of most things musical from the U S of A was good-looking in a pop star kind of way, with great teeth and a great smile and very carefully chosen casual clothes. No wonder he’s star salesman in Arnotts’ gentlemen’s department, Rob thought.
“I’ll take a look, but it’s a no to the Dansette. It’s sure to disappear, and I couldn’t survive without my music.” Rob tucked the notes of the playbill in his jacket pocket. “How’s your dad? Has he recovered from this business with the leg?” Rob asked, grinning at Frankie.
“His pride is sorely battered,” Frankie replied. “He’s still getting no end of teasing at the shinty.” Frankie blew a long blast of cigarette smoke across the table, leaned back in his chair, and said, “No, it’s my mother I’m worried about.”
Rob sensed there was something serious going on.
“She hasn’t been herself the last couple o’ months. Then the leg business—it really got to her.”
“Doesn’t sound like your mother.” Mothers were not always people boys noticed—other than as a source of food. And clean clothes. They were not women; they were mothers.
But Mrs. Urquhart was also Nurse Urquhart. Rob remembered the brutal way she would grasp them by the hair and pull at the roots, checking for nits. The no-mercy way she would deal with any poor soul who was found with the wee beasties, the note they were given that said not to come back until the nits were gone. Then back at school, a further inspection, and if one nit, one solitary egg were found, further humiliation would descend on both child and the mother of the offender.
Tough as old boots, had been Rob’s mother assessment of Nurse Urquhart the one time when nine-year-old Rob was discovered harboring a bad batch of head lice.
“Your head is alive wi’ the beasties,” Nurse Urquhart had pronounced, “and you from a good family, too.”
