by A. D. Scott
He began slowly. “Your father is gone. Bill will be leaving soon. You are free to be whoever you want to be. All I hope is that there is a place for me in your life.”
She reached over, squeezed his left arm. Her palm felt like a flamethrower sending fire through the tweed and the cotton, directly to his skin, his body. She moved her hand to his wrist, touched the skin where the jacket rose up from his hand resting on the steering wheel. They were looking straight ahead, driving towards the remembered light of the river, seeing the evening dim as the streetlights came on.
“Is Mae still staying with you?” she asked.
“No, she’s in Glasgow for a few days—looking up long-lost relatives, she said.”
Joanne was too lost in her own little deaths to query yet another absence from Mae Bell.
McAllister turned left after crossing the bridge. The lights were out in Gino’s café. He was driving past the cathedral towards Chiara’s house, where her girls were staying. Chiara and the children were not expecting them until the next morning.
“Turn around,” she said as he slowed the car down, to park. “I want to stay with you tonight.”
She did not know it, but he did. He had been in battle. He had lived close to death, in the hills above Barcelona, in the suburbs of Madrid, in the aftermath of the liberation of Paris; the proximity of death brought a lust for life. And for sex.
He remembered something from the Bible about lust, sin, death. No doubt her father knew the quotation.
“Are you sure?” He was looking at her, unable to see her eyes in the dark, unable to put the question more directly, but the meaning was clear to both of them.
“You mean you want to wait until we’re married?” She was incapable of saying more, flippancy hiding fear, concealing emotion. The air in the car was stifling. She needed to roll down the window.
He turned the car around outside the cricket ground. He drove back across the bridge and up the hill to home. All in silence.
They went into the house. He went towards the kitchen.
“No,” she said, and took his hand. She walked up the stairs, him following, straight to his room. She did not switch on any lights, leaving the curtains open, allowing starlight to be their only illumination. She undressed, slid into his bed. And waited.
• • •
“What’s happening?”
McAllister walked into the reporters’ room to find Don alone, fiddling with a portable wireless, the whine and hiss and occasional faraway voices in Russian and German and English and Scots English beaming into the Gazette from outer space.
“Not much,” Don said. “How’s Joanne?” He asked out of interest, believing she was much better off without a father who would cast his daughter out over an error of human frailty.
“She’s fine.”
McAllister’s voice made Don look up. He was not hearing the horse race caller; although he said it was to listen to the national news, the reason he bought the secondhand wireless was to listen to the races from Musselburgh, Ayr, and occasionally from England. He heard a calibration in McAllister’s tone, an attempt at casual in the “She’s fine”—which McAllister might have carried off with anyone other than Don. Something has happened, he guessed from the nothing-is-happening attempt at nonchalance, and he tightened his lips to keep in the smile, saying nothing but thinking, Good luck to them, we could be doing with a wedding instead of death.
“Nothing’s happening. But that may be something it itself,” Don told him.
McAllister lit up, waited until Don had done the same, and then waited some more.
Don was blowing smoke towards the ceiling, watching it coil and spiral like a genie escaped from Aladdin’s lamp.
“Does this mean the end of it? The death of Nurse Urquhart solved the problem? Or the person has given up? What about the warnings sent to Mae Bell? Has she heeded them?” McAllister was impatient to see an end to the saga. He knew Joanne would not consent to a wedding whilst an anonymous letter writer was still on the loose. And an acid-throwing maniac—unless they were one and the same.
“Mrs. Bell is still looking for information about her late husband.” Don had never been certain that was all Mae Bell was looking for. The longer she stayed, the less he believed her. However, he knew McAllister was mesmerized by the American and would not welcome criticism.
“The police?” McAllister asked.
“There’s no evidence the printers were involved, except the bottle of acid came from the Gazette and the letters were delivered here.”
“Any ideas?”
“Aye an’ no. Joanne’s idea that we look again at how the letters were delivered makes sense.”
“Is Fiona still here?” It was Saturday morning, eleven thirty, a half day. Fiona worked until noon.
Don was never one for using the phone when he could shout.
“Fiona. Up here.”
She reminds me of Joanne, was McAllister’s first thought as the young woman came in—the look on her face that of the Scottish red-haired queen being led to her execution.
“We’re not going to fire you,” he joked, “you’re doing too good a job.”
“Aye, McAllister might have to answer a phone if you weren’t here,” Don agreed.
He had on his Nice Highland Granddad persona—much better than McAllister’s scary Glaswegian—so Fiona took one step farther into the room.
“Any more letters?” Don asked.
“No, I’d have told you . . .”
“I know you would.” Don shifted his weight on the stool. The wireless continued to hiss in the background but with no noise resembling a horse race commentary coming through the ether. “We’re trying to work out how the letters were delivered.” His smile, the way his face crinkled up, reminded her of the walnuts in her Christmas stocking her mother still insisted she hang up—even though she was sixteen, nearly seventeen, made her relax. Marginally.
“I’ve been thinking about it, too, but I can’t see how . . .” She did have an idea, but it was so preposterous, she would never tell Mr. McLeod and especially not Mr. McAllister—she was only the office junior. “Maybe someone gets in after the cleaner gets here.”
“The police talked to the cleaner. She says she locks the front door after she gets in.” McAllister had already asked DI Dunne about that.
“Maybe through the printers’ back door?” Fiona was hoping that was the solution.
“Only the father of the chapel had the keys to that door,” Don told them, remembering that even he, after repeated requests, could not get hold of a spare key. “You’re not suggesting he could have left the anonymous letters?”
“No. I don’t know anything about the man.” Except that he scares me, she didn’t add. “My mum’s in the Woman’s Guild with his wife . . .” Again, she didn’t add that the woman had a notorious tongue on her, that she hated Nurse Urquhart, or that Mum said it was because Nurse Urquhart had married her sweetheart, but Fiona couldn’t imagine Mr. Frank Urquhart being anyone’s sweetheart, him being so old.
“Come on, lass.” Don clambered down from his stool. “You and me are going out.” He saw the panic in her eyes. “Don’t worry”—he patted her arm—“Mr. McAllister will answer the phone.”
She stiffed a giggle and followed the deputy editor down the stairs. They walked across the bridge to Gino’s café.
Don bought a double chocolate cone for her and a strawberry and vanilla for himself. They walked along the river towards the Islands, where, finding a bench, he told her he had to rest his legs. She believed him because her granddad was the same. Twenty minutes later, they decided someone could have posted the letters in the outside boxes, but how did the letters find their way onto her desk after she had emptied the mailboxes? That would mean someone inside the building put them there.
“Lots of people pass the Gazette on their way to the library,” she added when they had discussed the possibilities. “So it’s not as though the Wynd isn’t busy.”
<
br /> “Right enough. And the anonymous letters were in the box for the classifieds?”
“I don’t know. I don’t always clear that box, and I can’t really remember if the letters came on the days someone else did.”
“Mr. Forbes?”
“Aye. He has another key an’ all.” Her English was deteriorating, and Don had dropped into dialect to encourage her. He had heard her say “really remember.” In a dialect of double negatives, the really was telling.
“So Mr. Forbes could, not that I’m saying he did, but he could have put letters in with the advertising?”
“Aye,” Fiona said. “Then again so could lots o’ people.”
Don groaned faintly, and Fiona took it as a sign he’d been sitting too long on a bench in the wind, not wrapped up properly as old people were meant to be.
“If you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. McLeod, I don’t think it was Mr. Forbes. The two times he saw the letters, he was really shocked. Aye”—she was picturing him leaving the building—“he was right upset.”
Don didn’t say more, not wanting to gossip with the office junior. But he listened. And heard her.
He glanced backwards at the Royal Infirmary clock, “Would you look at the time? McAllister will be having kittens if he’s had to answer more than two phone calls. He’s probably unplugged the switchboard by now.” He stood shaking the crumbly flakes of ice cream cone from his trousers. “When we get back, you take off early. Surprise your boyfriend.” It was a granddad joke. He was surprised when she gripped his arm.
“You won’t tell, will you?”
She was looking so alarmed, he smiled. “Don’t worry, lass, Mr. Forbes will hear nothing from . . .”
“It’s no’ Mr. Forbes. I’m not seventeen till next month and . . .”
“Your mother? She wouldn’t approve?”
“No. Ma father. He says no boyfriends till I’m eighteen.”
“I’ll no’ say a word.”
They were walking away from the spot, mid-bridge, where sixteen-soon-to-be-seventeen Fiona told him, her boss, a man older than her real granddad, of the first and, she was convinced, the only love of her life, the man she hoped to marry. She couldn’t believe she had shared her secret with him.
She never said his name. Don never guessed; he put it down to a first-love-young-lassie infatuation, not for a minute imagining he would soon be dancing at her wedding in an old-man kind of shuffle, at a wedding where the bride didn’t have to get married, the wedding that would make everyone in the Gazette glad.
• • •
“I knew it—that creep Mal Forbes.”
McAllister smiled, not so much at her description of Mal Forbes but more at her daughter-of-the-manse inability to use words higher up on the scale of nastiness.
“That creep, as you put it, left a condolence card for you at the office.” He handed her the plain black-bordered card printed with a Bible verse from the Twenty-third Psalm and a brief handwritten note in small left-leaning writing, Mal Forbes’s handwriting, McAllister knew—because he had checked.
Condolences on your sad loss from Moira and myself.
Malcolm Forbes
Joanne flushed and looked away. The man means well, only he gets me all het up with his attitude to women. She knew it was not just Mal but most of the population of the United Kingdom who disapproved of women working. She should be at home wi’ the bairns, was the cry to any woman other than a widow who dared work. Never mind that his own wife had a part-time job, never mind the hundreds of thousands of women who had contributed to the war effort in factories, on the farms, in the police, and, like Joanne, in the army.
“As Don said, there’s absolutely no proof it was Mal Forbes, other than he has a key to the mailboxes.” McAllister was not defending Mal Forbes; he was being realistic. “The key is hanging in plain sight in the downstairs office, and it’s labeled ‘mailbox.’ Plus, the police have questioned him and say he knows nothing.”
“They believe him?”
He shrugged. He did not want this discussion. Did not want to say he thought her unreasonable when it came to Mal Forbes.
They were at home, McAllister’s house, and the girls were watching early-Saturday-evening television.
Joanne was picturing the front of the Gazette building. There were two mailboxes on each side of the heavy glass doors, one marked Mail, the other Advertising and Notices. They had been introduced by the late Mrs. Donal McLeod. McAllister had a key to the mailbox that he had long since lost, the advertising manager had a key to both boxes, and Fiona was given a key to the Advertising box, but had somehow acquired the other as well.
Part of her job was to sort out what went to McAllister and what went to Mr. McLeod or the other reporters. Many went to Hector, who received a surprising amount of mail, mainly asking for copies of pictures, along with invitations to events far and wide, from sports meetings to children’s gatherings to golden wedding anniversaries to large holes in the roads neglected by the council.
“So the letters were in with advertising, not mail?” Joanne mused. “And all we have is Mal’s word he didn’t put them there?”
“And Fiona’s assertion that the letters appeared after she’d sorted through the mail.”
“Aye, that’ll be right.” Joanne had seen how much work Mal Forbes left to Fiona, preferring instead to be “out on the road chasing clients.” In a bar chasing drinks, more like. Although not a real drinker, frequenting hotel bars rather than pubs, Mal Forbes had become a well-known character in the short time he had been in town. To Joanne’s surprise, he was well liked. But not by people she had time for. His wife was in her church, his daughter in Annie’s class. There seemed to be some tragedy associated with their son, whom no one had seen, the rumor being he was disabled—physically or mentally, Joanne hadn’t heard.
She so wanted it to be Mal Forbes that she dismissed all other possibilities—Fiona, the cleaner, others in the office slipping the envelope into the box as they came in to work, or when they passed reception or . . . “Blast the man.” She was shaking her head.
“Dad?” Annie had walked into the kitchen, scared she was missing out on something.
Joanne said Mal Forbes without thinking, so horrified that her child thought of her father in that way.
“Maureen Forbes told me her dad’s a good dad, he smacks her an’ her brother only when they’re really bad. And Maureen’s dad never hits her mum.”
Joanne was upset by the thought of Annie comparing dads with her friends. “I never knew there was a brother.”
“He’s mental.” She saw her mother’s frown. “I mean, he’s no’ right in the head.” That wasn’t the phrase either. Annie sighed. “He’s disabled. Only a wee bit, so Maureen says. But I’ve never seen him.”
It was not for want of trying. She had tried to bribe Maureen with Bunty comics—preloved—and with sherbet dabs, but Maureen had been too afraid to take Annie to her house, afraid of her mother finding out, which was a pity, as Annie wanted to see what a boy who was mental looked like.
Joanne said no more but again, she felt guilty; she too now believed she was being unreasonable when it came to Mal Forbes.
On and off all evening they discussed it, in between getting the girls to bed, McAllister reading them a story, them dancing to a slow meandering song from Edith Piaf, a singer new to Joanne and whom she now loved.
When the conversations, observations, speculations ran out and they could put off the decision no longer, once again it was Joanne who took his hand and led him upstairs to his bedroom, making the decision for both of them.
She never knew how to tell him, but it happened at her father’s graveside, when he was there, out of sight, just a step or two behind her, when her mother had looked across and through not one drop of tears, had nodded to her. Then to him. He had moved imperceptibly forwards, so she could feel his presence; he put a reassuring hand on her arm when she turned to walk once again through the tombstones, this time bac
k to the manse where she had endured her childhood of little light and little love, and he was there with her, her support, her rock, her future husband. For it was then that she knew this was the man she could perhaps share her life with.
SIXTEEN
Mae Bell chose her outfit carefully. It was hard for her not to be noticed, especially her hair.
Ever since a child she had dressed with care and looked after herself. She did not have much else. No books, no toys, clothes handmade, often cut down from dresses and coats her mother was given by whatever household she was working in, for her mother never stayed long in a job, eighteen months being the longest she had ever stayed sober. Sober, what a delightful woman she was. Drunk, she was quiet, and it was hard to tell how far gone she was. But Mae always knew—from the cigarette to the lips; the cup, glass, spoon to the mouth as though the film had been slowed down; the too-careful placing of the feet; the odd angle her hat sat at when she came home from work, late—they kept me back to clean up for a late guest, or some other excuse she would offer—relieved when her daughter smiled and said, You must be tired, and she could take to her bed, the remains of a half bottle hidden in plain view by her pillow.
Her father was a traveling salesman specializing in sheet music. Seldom at home when she was a young child, often at home when she was in high school, when the work became less and less. When home, he joined in the “fun.” Fun meaning drink. He had a fine voice, about the only fine thing about him that she remembered, and in spite of, or because of, his love of the bottle, he became a fierce, but to her fake, evangelist in his middle age. A drunk or a puritan, Mae was never sure what was worse.
She examined herself in the mirror and was momentarily horrified by what she saw. She pulled off her transformation by dressing as her mother had for work. Scary. Her hair was no problem; she made a turban out of a scarf, one with pink and purple roses printed on synthetic silk. The only real problem had been shoes. Then she remembered sand shoes; her mother had worn them because she had a bunion.
