by A. D. Scott
Granddad Ross rose to meet McAllister, held out his hand, and thanked him for coming, saying, “I’m sure it’s nothing,” and not meaning it.
Granny Ross looked in to see who the visitor was, nodded at McAllister, and said, “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Annie began, “Mum didn’t come home. She’s sometimes late, but not as late as this.” It was twenty to eight—almost Jean’s bedtime. “She wouldn’t do that without telling someone.”
This time it was McAllister’s face that said it all. He was terrified.
“Not five minutes since, we called the Royal Infirmary and Raigmore Hospital and she’s not there,” Granddad said. “Then I phoned the police and they’ve heard nothing.”
There was a knock on the front door. Granny Ross answered. “Come away into the sitting room,” she was saying. It was DI Dunne.
“McAllister. Mr. Ross. Mrs. Ross.” He looked at Annie, wondering if he should speak in front of her. As no one dismissed the child, he continued, “My sergeant called me to say you were asking after Mrs. Joanne Ross. Is there a problem?”
From looking at them he could see there was a problem. He would not normally be concerned so soon after a person was missing—it being a matter of only hours, not days—but the phone call worried him. And with the anonymous letters, and the death of Nurse Urquhart, he was taking the nonappearance of Joanne Ross seriously.
“I’m going to phone Rob, just in case she’s there,” Annie said, and left the room.
“Does the child know?” DI Dunne asked.
“It was Annie who had the presence of mind to come over to her grandparents’ when Joanne didn’t come home. Annie also called me to ask if her mother . . .” McAllister sat down.
Granny Ross came in and handed him a mug of tea.
Annie came back, saying, “Mum’s not there and Uncle Rob’s coming over.” This time she looked close to tears.
Her granny took her hand, saying quietly, “We mustn’t let Jean see there’s anything wrong,” and led her into the kitchen.
The roar of a motorbike shattered the quiet of Dochfour Drive. Rob ran down the path and came in through the back door.
“Where’s Joanne?” He was looking as distraught as McAllister, but had not aged the ten years McAllister had in the past half hour. “What’s happened to her?”
“Joanne’s late home. She probably had an accident on her bike or . . .”
“No, she leaves her bike next to my motorbike. It was still at the office when I left,” Rob said. “When did you last see her?”
DI Dunne was about to ask the same but Rob got in first.
“Late this morning, around eleven.” McAllister couldn’t remember if she had phoned anyone on the Gazette after that. I must check.
“It’s too early to worry.” DI Dunne took control. “In case she turns up at home, someone should leave a note for her.”
Rob nodded. “I’ll do that.”
“Mr. McAllister, you’d best wait at your house.” McAllister nodded, relieved DI Dunne was taking charge. “We will check the hospitals, check around town. Please give me a list of her friends . . .”
“Her father died recently, maybe . . .” Granddad Ross was clutching at the proverbial straw.
“I’ll call her brother-in-law—the Reverend Duncan Macdonald,” McAllister explained to the policeman.
“I’m off to Joanne’s house,” Rob told McAllister. “Then I’m going to call in on Don, see if she’s there. Then I’ll come over to your place.” He wanted to do something, anything, to find Joanne. He was chilled with fear, and the memory of Nurse Urquhart, her fate, her funeral, kept surfacing as fast as he tried to block it out.
Annie came in. “Uncle Rob, I think you should tell Hector. He sees things other people don’t notice.”
“You’re right.” As Hector lived nearby, Rob volunteered to do that first.
“Everyone should call me at the police station if you hear anything, or think of anywhere Mrs. Ross might be.” The inspector was readying to leave, his request more a command. Despite his initial thought that it was too early to worry, he felt a great unease at the absence of Joanne Ross. “No matter how insignificant it may seem, if you have any information, call the police station.”
DI Dunne shook McAllister’s hand, then Granddad Ross’s, and left to organize a search. It was clear the detective was taking Joanne’s absence seriously, and for that McAllister was eternally grateful.
• • •
When he walked into his own kitchen, McAllister found the letter on the table.
SO WILL YOU STILL MARRY THAT MEDDLING BITCH WITH HER FACE BURNED OFF AND HER EYES BURNED OUT AND HER DAUGHTERS THE SAME?
There was no need to wonder how someone got in—the door was unlocked, the key under the doormat. McAllister made straight for the phone to tell DI Dunne.
When Rob arrived, he said, “Sorry, Joanne is not with Don.”
Don came in behind him. McAllister pushed the note towards them. It was Don who said what Rob and McAllister were avoiding.
“This is from the same person as wrote the first letters.”
McAllister slumped in his chair, his head in his hands. “For God’s sake, man, I can see that!”
DI Dunne first rang the doorbell, then walked straight to the kitchen. After a bustle of questions, the answers being “No,” “I don’t know,” and “No idea,” and with neither McAllister nor Rob nor Don McLeod having anything useful to tell him, the policeman left with a sense of fresh urgency, taking the note with him.
McAllister was glad of the absence of the malignant piece of paper. He sat at the table smoking, replying to questions only in grunts.
Don waited out the night with McAllister, saying little, making tea, keeping the whisky consumption to a minimum, knowing they needed to think straight, returning the kindness the editor had shown him in his time of troubles.
Rob had no idea what to do with himself, so, finding the wireless in the kitchen wasn’t working, he spread an old Gazette on the table and proceeded to take it apart. When he had put the wireless back together again, but before returning it to its Bakelite casing, he tuned it in, and was pleased to hear the shipping forecast. Less pleased when he realized a cold storm front was making its way across from Norwegian waters straight to Cromarty and the Moray Firth—their waters, their region.
McAllister thought that night the longest of his life. He knew it was a cliché, and he was a wordsmith who hated clichés, but the night and the clock stretched towards dawn with a reluctance that made him ache, physically hurt.
DI Dunne called around at seven in the morning with no news. He found Don asleep on the sofa, Rob asleep in a chair, and McAllister awake in the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, Mr. McAllister, there’s no news . . .” The inspector saw the life force drain out of the editor, from his face, his shoulders, his legs—so much so that McAllister had to sit again at the table.
“We’re doing all we can . . .” the inspector added.
“No news?” Don came in and saw McAllister’s face. “Right. McAllister, me and the boy are away to the office. We’ll keep in touch.” Don motioned to Rob saying, “We’ve a newspaper to put out,” leaving McAllister to maintain the vigil.
• • •
Fiona came in to work at her usual eight o’clock and was amazed to hear sounds from the reporters’ room so early in the morning. Hector came in half a minute later and explained. Fiona burst into tears.
Bill Ross called McAllister and asked if he could help. It was the first real, albeit brief, conversation they’d had, and McAllister was grateful for the offer. “Better to call DI Dunne,” he’d said.
Joanne’s sister, Elizabeth, visited, bringing McAllister bread and bacon and eggs, and she cooked him breakfast. Mortimer Beauchamp Carlyle, one of the Gazette directors, called round and brought a bottle of the Glenlivet, offering help and feeling helpless, knowing all he could do was keep McAllister company as they waited out the hours for J
oanne’s return.
Then the gale hit. And the rain. It didn’t let up. It rained and rained and the gutters flowed and the river rose and the trees waved and wept, and McAllister waited, along with everyone else.
But no one knew anything, except Mae Bell and whoever had locked her in the air raid shelter.
• • •
They were in a double-bricked-up space at one end of the small shelter. Not much wider than a coffin, their gaol was six feet long and completely dark; the door was invisible from the outside, hidden behind a cupboard. There was a draft coming from somewhere, although Mae Bell was yet to identify the source. There was also a puddle of rainwater creeping into the semi-underground cellar. From where, again Mae couldn’t tell.
It had taken hours of patient cajoling, but the boy now let Mae touch him. In this space, which he seemed familiar with, he leaned into her as they lay on the tarpaulin and blankets that the madwoman, as Mae called her, had thrown in after them. Then she and her husband—Equally mad! Mae had shouted at him—had padlocked the door before moving the cupboard back.
Mae was now seriously worried. Joanne had been unconscious for far too long. She bathed her friend’s head from the pail of drinking water. The bleeding had stopped, but even in the impenetrable black, she knew Joanne’s injury was bad. Perhaps, without help, fatal.
When the door was once more unlocked—in the morning, Mae thought, as she had lost track of time—she shouted, “Get Joanne out of here. She’ll die if she doesn’t get help.”
Moira Forbes whispered, “Shoosh. I told you, any sound an’ I’ll kill you.”
Mae could feel the child tremble. She hugged him and forced herself to slow her breathing.
Moira laid a tray with a cake tin of porridge and three spoons and a bottle of milk on the floor at Joanne’s feet.
“Now that Joanne is missing, they will come here looking for her,” Mae said. Keep calm. Always sound bored, she told herself, for the boy’s sake show no fear.
“Maybe, but if they do, I’ll throw the acid, and I don’t care which one of you it catches.”
“Moira,” Mae Bell deliberately used her name, “with Nurse Urquhart, I’m sure it was an accident. If Joanne dies, it will be murder. Please call the ambulance, a doctor, someone. Please”—she was pleading, but she couldn’t help it—“I’ll leave, I’ll never bother you again . . . please get help for Joanne.”
“And have them steal my boy? Never.” Moira stepped back, holding out the small, flat blue bottle as though warding off evil.
With the final sound of the door shutting, then the padlocks, Mae had to dig her overlong fingernails into her palms, almost breaking the skin to stop herself shuddering. And crying. The sound felt like the final closing of a coffin lid.
“Eat,” the boy said. So they did. And still Joanne had not stirred.
TWENTY-ONE
I will interview Mr. Forbes again, and if I find good cause, I will get a search warrant, but so far, there’s not enough evidence for one,” DI Dunne repeated for the third time.
“It’s a day and a half—nearly two nights. Joanne would never abandon her children.” McAllister was pacing in the narrow gap between table and wall, pulling at his hair, thumping the table, reaching the other end in a few paces, glowering at DI Dunne, who stood, coat on, hat in his hands, immobile, immovable. “Mal Forbes had the opportunity to steal the acid from the Gazette. He could easily have left the anonymous letters, he and Joanne are on bad terms . . .”
“Excuse me, Mr. McAllister . . .” It was Mal Forbes. “I couldn’t help overhearing . . .”
“The whole town probably overheard.” This came from Don, who was sitting at the far end of the reporters’ table watching the exchange.
“It’s not that I don’t get on with Mrs. Ross, we just see things differently.” Fortunately for Mal Forbes, he was standing on the other side of the table from McAllister; even with his long arms, the editor couldn’t reach him.
“Where is she?” His voice as harsh as a raven’s. “What have you done with her?” This time pleading, his voice lowing like a bull at the slaughterhouse gate.
“I’m sorry, Mr. McAllister, I haven’t done anything to Mrs. Ross.”
Don thought from the way Mal Forbes spoke and the way he held his head—the brilliantined hair, the gleam of his false teeth, the unconscious way he tugged at his equally gleaming shirt cuffs with regimental cuff links—he might be telling the truth. But he’s a salesman, Don thought, deceit comes naturally.
“You’re from Elgin.” McAllister was clutching at the proverbial straw, knowing there was nothing to connect Mal Forbes to Joanne’s disappearance, to Nurse Urquhart, nothing.
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.” Mal Forbes cocked his head to one side—the embodiment of puzzlement.
He is hiding something, Don decided, watching Mal’s every move, every blink, catching a twitch in the left corner of the man’s mouth.
“Mr. Forbes,” DI Dunne intervened, “would you mind coming to the police station and making a statement?” It was not a request. He needed to separate the two men.
“Not at all.” Mal went down the stairs with not a word more.
The inspector was buttoning his coat. The wind was still fierce. “McAllister, I’ll keep in touch, but as I said, you’re best off at home. Maybe Mrs. Ross will come back there, or call you, or . . . Good morning, gentlemen.”
The inspector, now he’s definitely lying, Don thought.
“What do we do?” McAllister slumped onto a chair, elbows on the table, head in hands.
“Is someone at your house in case Joanne turns up there?”
“Mrs. Ross Senior. She’s there until I get back.”
Granny and Granddad Ross had the girls staying at their house but had made them go to school.
“No one will harm the bairns now they have Joanne,” Granny Ross told her husband. “So no sense in worrying them by doing things different.” She was convinced Joanne had been kidnapped. Why, she couldn’t say. Worse she forced herself not to think about.
That morning, after leaving the girls at the school gates, Granny Ross continued on her bicycle to McAllister’s house. With only a Good morning, Mr. McAllister, she went straight to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and started to cook breakfast. She knew there was no news. He’d have said if there was.
Whilst he was eating, she started on the dishes. When he’d finished, she said, “Go to work, you’re worse than useless here. I’ll mind the phone. Dad is staying home in case she rings there.” She was in her usual flowery housewives’ cover-all apron, her hat she kept on, held to her scalp with the usual array of lethal hairpins. She spoke matter-of-factly—keeping busy was her solution to all dramas.
As he was making for the front door and work, she asked, “Where do you keep the hoover?”
He wanted to rush over to her and hug her but knew he might break down; the ordinariness of Joanne’s mother-in-law’s words concealed her emotions—and he had no doubts they were legion. And he knew that when he came home, his house would be scrubbed from top to bottom and the front step and the brass doorknob and knocker gleaming.
“McAllister, we have to get a newspaper out,” Don had told him when he arrived at work. As with Mrs. Ross, work was what McAllister needs, Don thought, else the wait will break him.
They took the layout Fiona had prepared, both too tense to notice how professional it was.
Hector came in. He said little; Fiona had told him there was no news. He handed over a larger-than-usual sports section, bigger pictures taking up most of the space. He was guessing, rightly, that without Joanne, and with McAllister in a mess, the Gazette would need filling with something, anything.
“I’ve added an article and a picture of the ladies’ hockey team as well as the usual football reports,” Hector said, giving the photo to Don.
“Thanks, lad.” Don sized it up, filled another page.
“I was wondering how I can help.” Hec
looked as miserable as the rest of them.
“Leave it to the police. We’re best getting the paper out.”
Hector walked down to reception. He was exhausted. And scared. He’d been out until late in the night, joining in the search party of friends, neighbors, Joanne’s brother-in-law, and many of his parishioners.
He knew Bill Ross was helping coordinate the search for the mother of his children. He had taken his van, and with three comrades from his old regiment, volunteered to search the Islands, knowing it was one of Joanne’s favorite places to sit and think—something he had never understood.
Hec was hoping against reason that she might have fallen, was hurt, But please, not fallen into the river. If she had, he knew well enough there was little chance of her being alive; although not deep, the river was wide and swift, impossible even for a strong swimmer.
He had seen police frogmen preparing to check the canal at Muirton. He knew the harbor had been searched and fishing boats in the firth were asked to keep a lookout. He knew the army would be called in next to search the outlying woods and hills and other likely places. He knew that meant they were searching for a body.
Hec also well knew that the town and countryside and glens and hills were easy places to lose a body; a swift-flowing river, deep, dark lochs and empty moorland, woods and wells and quarries all within easy reach of the town. And in the town itself, there were many places a person, or a body, could disappear.
“Still no word?” he asked Fiona.
“Nothing.” She was as scared as him and knew that publishing the newspaper was essential. “I wonder if the Gazette will run an appeal for information . . .”
“That’s two days off—they have to find her before then.” Hec leaned over and took her hand.
She let him, even though she had vowed to never show affection in public. “Hector, I’ve never been this scared in my whole life.”
