by Lesley Kelly
I’m not sure they’d have me. ‘Naw. I’m hoping to get another catering job, though.’
‘Well, no rush from my point of view. I’m enjoying being fed.’
He’s certainly changed his tune since I arrived. Amazing how much more people like you if you don’t take money off them.
I decide to build on Father Paul’s good mood and do some housework. I give the ancient Hoover a dance round the living room and attempt to tackle the dusting. I’m in the middle of ironing some cassocks when Wheezy arrives.
He looks at the pile of washing. ‘What are you doing?’
I resume my place behind the ironing board. ‘What does it look like?’
Wheeze looks round the room. ‘Father Paul away out?’
‘Aye – visiting old folk or some shite like that.’
Wheezy picks up one of the cassocks and examines it. ‘Did he take your balls with him when he went?’
‘It’s the twenty-first century, Wheeze – real men do ironing.’
He snorts. ‘Not in my house, they don’t.’
‘Ironing?’ I gesture at him with the iron. ‘You barely even wash, you clarty bastard!’
‘Enough! Have you seen this?’ He waves a copy of the Scotsman at me. ‘There’s more about that body up at Isa’s development.’ He holds the paper at arm’s length and, squinting, begins to read. ‘”Police have identified that the body is that of a woman,”’ he pats the paper for emphasis, ‘”a woman aged 14-25, and it is thought that the remains date from around thirty years ago.” Blows your Bruce theory out of the water, Stainsie.’
I grab the paper off him. The press is starting to take a real interest in all this. Today the story is on the front page, with a larger article inside. The photo of Mavisview makes it look fantastic, but the story is still the work of some over-imaginative journalist; there’s nothing resembling a fact in the whole thing.
I’m not sure where this leaves me. The body is so old it’s unlikely to be anything to do with Bruce. There’s still the matter of the missing laddie-with-dog but I’m no closer to finding a body for that. It’s maybe time to start my packing; I resolve to give it another 24 hours, then it’s goodbye Marianne and best of luck.
I fold up the paper. ‘Who do you think it is then, Wheeze?’
‘No idea.’ He takes the paper back off me and reads for a moment in silence. ‘Ach – it could be anybody. We’ve been thinking about this all wrong. We should have known that your key players don’t end up stuffed in a cupboard. We’ve been looking for a Hamlet, and that lassie’s a Rosencrantz or a Guildenstern.’
‘You think it’s a foreign lassie?’ Wheezy punches my shoulder. ‘What? What are you hitting me for?’
He shakes his head. ‘Never mind, you illiterate bastard - have a look at this.’
He hands me a piece of paper. ‘North Edinburgh Yesteryears Society? You want me to go to some history talk?’
He slaps the top of the page. ‘Look at the title of it, man!’
I read on. The original title – an examination of Mary Queen of Scots’ residences in Scotland – has been scored out and a new one written in by hand. ‘Priests’ Holes and Smugglers’ Holes: Hidden Rooms in Local Houses. Well, Wheeze, you’ve got to hand it to them for responding to the news.’
‘Aye, they probably thought they’d get a bigger turnout what with Mavisview making headlines.’
I’m not convinced. I’m not sure I can spare the time. ‘They’re barking up the wrong tree with Mavisview though – Jimmy said that the place where the body was found was modern.’
‘Doesn’t mean that there’s not other hidden rooms, but. And who knows what’s in them?’ He taps the leaflet again. ‘Maybe this mob know more about the house.’
‘So, we’re going to this then?’
‘Aye, so get your coat.’
I look at the leaflet again. ‘It says here the talk doesn’t start until 2 o’clock.’
‘I know, but I’m not sitting through that pish sober, so let’s get down to Shugs for a couple before we go.’
More folk are in the meeting room of Leith library than I had expected. I wonder if it’s the usual turnout for a history society talk, or if the change of topic has brought the ghouls out in force. We’re a wee bit late and the man’s already started. There’s not any seats left in the first few rows, so Wheeze and I shuffle our way apologetically to the back of the room. I can’t help but notice that Wheeze is swaying a wee bit.
‘Come in, come in, gentlemen.’
The lecturer seems pleased to see us at least. He’s shorter and younger than I was expecting. I was picturing beards and elbow patches.
‘I’m just making a start – defining what we mean by ‘hole’.’
Wheezy leans over. ‘If he doesn’t know that then he can’t be getting any.’
I look round in case anyone heard him. ‘Shut it, you.’
‘I’ll be discussing Smugglers’ Holes…’
‘Sounds like something you need ointment for.’
In spite of myself I laugh.
‘…and Priests’ Holes.’
I lean over and whisper to him, ‘bit of Holy Water sorts that out, Wheeze.’
Wheezy bursts out laughing.
The lecturer stops, pushes his glasses back to the top of his nose, and stares at us. ‘Can I help you gentlemen?’
‘No, no, sorry, pal.’ I try to sound as contrite as possible.
Wheeze pipes up. ‘Are you going to talk about the house where that lassie was found?’
The lecturer clears his throat. ‘Ah yes, the Mavisview case. I will, of course, be coming on to that in the fullness of time. If you gentleman can contain yourselves until then?’
Wheezy slides down his chair and crosses his arms. ‘Wake me when he gets to the interesting part.’
The lecturer’s got a kind of slide show set up and he flashes up a picture of a country house.
‘Why do people want to hide?’ he asks. That’s a very pertinent question to my situation. Personally speaking, I find it’s generally to avoid a kicking off of somebody.
‘Two broad reasons spring to mind. Firstly, persecution. Specifically, religious persecution.’
Like the aftermath of an Old Firm game. When I was fifteen I went to see Celtic play Rangers at Ibrox. I’d tagged along with some laddies from school but managed to lose them on the way back into town. Not being that familiar with the Glasgow landscape I managed to get completely lost, and turned down a side-street off Sauchiehall Street only to walk into a sea of blue and red. I only managed to escape with my life by ducking into a women’s clothes shop and hiding behind a rack of ladies’ smalls. The shop owner wasn’t well pleased, as I remember.
‘During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen,’ he clicks his mouse and a slide of Bessie duly appears, ‘Catholics were forbidden from celebrating Mass. This continued through the reign of James the First,’ we get a slide of Jamesie-boy, ‘especially after the Gunpowder Plot.’ He clicks again and we get a picture of a Catherine Wheel, which I think is a nice touch.
‘Throughout this period we see a development of ‘Priests’ Holes’ across England, that is small rooms where priests could be hidden, and the trappings of Catholic mass could be secretly stored. Classic examples of priests’ holes can be found in Hindlip Hall, Worcester, Braddocks in Essex, and Ashby St. Ledgers, Northamptonshire.’ Click, click, click. Wheezy’s nodded off by now, and his head’s bouncing off my shoulder.
‘Now to the second reason for hiding places – crime. Thievery and smuggling. We see a wide range of tunnels, sometimes stretching all the way from the house down to the sea.’ He flashes up a picture of a fireplace and tells us this is the entrance to a tunnel. ‘Hidden rooms, interconnected rooms, and secret passageways all helped to keep the smugglers, and their contraband, one step ahead of the customs and revenue men.’
‘And now to Mavisview – the reason I suspect many of you are here.’ He looks sternly round the room. ‘It’s likely that M
avisview falls into the second category here – smuggling rather than persecution. We have no strong records of priests being hidden in these parts, and close proximity to the sea makes smuggling a definite possibility. However, I would like to venture a third possibility. The closeness of Mavisview to the village of Newhaven and the Port of Leith meant that young men living there were at risk of entrapment by the Press Gangs, that is, gangs of men employed to ‘recruit’ men, usually against their will, into the navy. Therefore, these rooms might well be there to hide the young men of the family when rumours spread that the press gang was in town. A kind of forerunner of today’s panic rooms.’
He looks round the room again. ‘Any questions?’
I stick my hand up. ‘See Mavisview, right, what if the place where that lassie was found was actually only put up in, know, the seventies or eighties or that?’
He looks a bit put out. ‘There’s no evidence that I am aware of that that is the case. Do you have some additional information?’
‘Me? No, I know nothing about anything, but, just say, if it was modern, is it still likely that there is a secret room they’ve not found yet? Could Mavisview be full of wee rooms and passages like some of these other ones?’ Here’s hoping Mavisview has a couple of hidden rooms full of excise-free whisky. But knowing my luck there’s probably a few more old scores of Mrs Stoddart’s decomposing behind my fireplaces.
He nods. ‘An interesting question, but not one that I can answer, I’m afraid. At least not unless the Police decide to let us historians have a look at the building, before any further damage is done to it.’ The way he says it you can tell he’s just itching to get in there and have a poke about. I decide that if I do inherit it any time soon I’ll make his day and invite him round. ‘So, in answer to your question, the room where the unfortunate young woman was found could be the only hiding place, or Mavisview, particularly if it was the work of smugglers,’ he flashes us a smile, ‘could be riddled with them.’
There’s a couple more questions then he winds things up. I wake up Wheezy and as we make our way to the entrance I think that the talk has been a pretty good description of all the times I’ve hidden in my life: to avoid a sectarian kicking, because I’ve been up to no good, and the one time I should have hidden but didn’t, when I was press-ganged into doing something against my better judgement.
I head back to the Priest’s House. Just to spite Wheezy I take my time with the ironing and housework. There’s a knock at the door and I’m surprised to see Marianne standing there with some lassie I’ve never seen before.
‘This is Janine. Can we come in?’
The three of us sit round the kitchen table. From the look of this Janine lassie I’d say she has a habit: she’s skin and bone, with a complexion that’s seen better days. She doesn’t look at me when I speak to her but fixes her eyes so firmly on a point over my left shoulder that I half expect the Grim Reaper to be standing behind me if I turn round. Aye, I definitely have her down as a junkie, but I can’t picture Marianne palling around with an addict so I put the thought to the back of my mind.
‘Can I get you ladies a cup of tea or coffee?’
Marianne shakes her head but the Janine lassie says aye. Nobody’s saying anything so I try a bit of small talk while I make the tea.
‘Did you see that thing in the paper about the body in the house at Trinity? The house is owned by none other than – dan dan da - Isabella Stoddart.’
This statement doesn’t meet with the cries of amazement that I was expecting, and when I turn round with the cups the Janine woman is crying.
Marianne sighs. ‘That’s why we’re here, Stainsie. Tell him what you told me, Janine.’
‘It’s ma cousin.’ She’s still staring straight past me.
‘What about your cousin, hen?’ I’m trying to be sensitive but the woman won’t stop weeping.
Marianne rolls her eyes. ‘For Christ’s sake, Stainsie, she means the body in the house is her cousin. Tell him, Janine.’
I look at Janine and she stares over my shoulder. ‘See my cousin, right, she disappeared, right, and my mammy always said that she’d been murdered.’
And I’m thinking Cheers Marianne for bringing this nutter into my life, but I’m quite keen to get back in Marianne’s good books so I nod in what I hope is a suitably sympathetic manner. ‘I see.’
‘Marianne said you would talk to my mammy and get her to come through like?’
Good one. ‘Uh-huh. And seeing how she’s your ma would it not be better if you spoke to her?’
‘Naw, she won’t let me in the house these days.’
Probably a good plan judging by the state of her. Janine’s not looking well and I wonder if she is rattling. There’s something about her that looks almost familiar. I wonder if I knew her way back, and try to picture her a couple of stone heavier, but it’s no good. It doesn’t dislodge any memories from my brain.
‘Janine – are you all right, hen?’ She’s shaking like a shivery dog.
‘Aye Mr Staines, but I need to go and see someone. Could you lend us a tenner?’
I wait until Marianne goes to the toilet, then take the opportunity to hustle Janine out the door without giving her any money. I’ve not got much tolerance for junkies. Call it snobbery. There’s a finely developed hierarchy of dependencies, where the sobriety-challenged such as Wheezy and myself tend to look down on your more hard core addicts.
I slam the door on Janine’s bony arse and go back to find Marianne’s still sitting in the kitchen. ‘What was all of that about? Is your wee pal all there?’
Marianne lights up and rolls a fag across the table to me. ‘She’s not a friend of mine, I just know her ’cause she lives on my floor in the flats.’
‘So, how come she’s confiding all of this in you?’
‘She’s not confiding in anyone. She’s been shouting her mouth off across the scheme about that body being her cousin, and how she was done in by the Stoddarts years ago.’ Marianne gestures at me with her fag. ‘She needs to watch herself; Mrs Stoddart might be dead but those laddies that worked for her are still around.’
Damn right they are.
‘But I don’t see how any of this is your, and now my, problem.’
‘But it’s not a problem, Stainsie, it might be a solution. I asked my Ma if she could remember Janine’s ma and her cousin, and she could. Like Janine says, her cousin did go missing.’ She looks at me triumphantly.
So what, I think, but I nod solemnly. ‘Aye.’
‘According to my ma, Janine’s cousin was a right wee tart and everybody thought she’d run off with some laddie or other.’
I make a non-committal kind of noise.
‘Just go and see her mammy.’
I sigh. ‘I dunno. Having met Janine I’m not that keen to meet the woman that spawned her.’
Marianne looks for something to stub her fag out on, then gives up and drops it into her empty mug. ‘But are you not even a bit curious who that body might be?’
‘I’m curious about a lot of things, but I think it’s pretty rare that the sum of human knowledge has been added to by some heroin-dependent tart. Finding out who this body is isn’t going to help us find out who murdered Mrs Stoddart, or for that matter Lachie Stoddart, and I’m…’ I’m about to say ‘running out of time’ but manage to catch myself.
Marianne doesn’t say anything, just fixes her big blue eyes on me. I stare back but it’s no use. Eyeball-to-eyeball with a good-looking lassie I’m always going to blink first.
‘All right, all right, I’ll do it. Where am I going?’
She slides a piece of paper toward me and I look at the address.
‘Paisley? I’ve got to go to Paisley?’
1985
Florence Milligan was a forty-year-old divorcee when she met Grandad Joe. I always remember her being quite glamorous when I was a kid. She’d one of those hairstyles where the hair is piled up on top of the head, with a load of Kirby grips and hairspray to
keep it in place. She always wore the same combination of clothes: high heels, a straight skirt with a blouse tucked into it, and a cardigan draped over her shoulders. The temperature outside had to be around freezing before she would be seen actually wearing the cardie.
Florrie hadn’t had much of a life before she met Joe. Not that I knew this as a kid, but then who does really know their grandparents when they’re wee? Most of my knowledge of Florrie’s early life came from a conversation she had with Col and me one night when she was babysitting. Well, I say babysitting, but Col was twelve and I was the best part of fifteen, so it was not so much babysitting as youth containment. She’d come with Grandad on a rare visit to East Kilbride, and Dad and Grandad had buggered off to the pub leaving her in charge.
I don’t know why she decided to tell us all about her past; probably because Col was always bugging her for information, no doubt looking for sins that he could help her repent. It’s never too late to find salvation, or so I’m told. Col kicked open the conversation.
‘Have you always lived in Leith, Florrie?’
She nodded. ‘Aye, son, Leith born-and-bred. I grew up in a tenement in Cadiz Street.’ She always insisted on pronouncing it Kay-deez Street. I took this as the accepted pronunciation, which caused much hilarity on my first Iberian cruise.
Col pressed on. ‘Did you have brothers and sisters?’
‘Aye, son, six of them.’
‘Six?’ chorused Col and I in mutual horror.
‘Aye, two lassies and four laddies, and my Ma and Pa, and all of us living in a three-room flat.’
This sounded like hell to me. It was bad enough sharing with one brother. ‘Wasn’t it a bit cramped?’
‘Aye, son, but not that uncommon back then.’
Neither of us could think of anything more to say, and our minds were beginning to drift toward that night’s TV when Florrie carried on.
‘My father was a bastard.’
This was unprecedented. We’d never heard Grandad or Florrie swear before; even my dad tried, although mostly failed, not to swear around us. We were fascinated.
