A Small Death in the Great Glen Read online

  To my mother and my sister in memoriam

  PROLOGUE

  He dressed the boy’s body whilst it was still warm. Getting the clothes back on was easy. Such a skinny wee thing, the body weighed next to nothing. No, no weight at all.

  Dark came around five o’clock this time of the year and an hour or so later most people would be home in front of the fire. No moon either, luckily. Time to move, in the deep dark before anyone came looking; now was the time to get rid of him.

  He hefted the boy in a fireman’s lift over his left shoulder. Feet against his back, head and arms dangling down in front. His nose rubbed against the wool of the child’s jacket. The body had lost its smell; that sweet savory tang of boy had gone.

  The old greatcoat had once been home. He had slept in it, sheltered in it, flames and flying embers had singed it but not penetrated the thick felted wool. Just the job.

  Carefully he draped the coat over the body, fussed with the folds, arranging the collar to cover the head, making sure no stray hand or foot poked out. He gave a slow birl, checking the effect in the hall mirror. Fine. Looked natural enough.

  The streetlights, dim and far apart, were on one side of the road only. Large sycamores overhung the footpath, a sighing tunnel of black. He walked confidently, out for an evening stroll, his burden lightly carried. Not far to go. He met no one. But anyone noticing him and his bundle would never look twice.

  The last part was tricky. An exposed track, a hundred yards or so, ran up to the canal. Gorse, whin and elder bushes would give no cover. Luck was still with him. He reached the lock, peered through the dark, nothing, no one, not a sound.

  Holding it by the arms, he lowered the bundle. Feet, body, head then arms, it slipped down into the vortex. No splash, just a sigh as the water closed over the wee soul sending out ripples that set the stars dancing in the still water.

  The man, clasping his hands, muttered a prayer, smiled a half smile, put the greatcoat on. All done, thank goodness.

  ONE

  McAllister rolled yet another tiny piece of copy paper into the huge old Underwood typewriter. Needs the arms and the strength of an orangutan to type on this monster, he had often thought. Deflated ghosts of discarded prose lay crumpled in a top hat on the floor behind his chair. The typing was smudgy, faint; changing the ribbon was not an editor-in-chief’s job.

  “The obituaries are the only opportunity to be creative on this rag of a newspaper and I can’t find anything remotely interesting to say about this man’s life. Nor his death.”

  Elbows on the high reporters’ table, he cupped his chin in both hands, emphasizing his resemblance to a black-clad praying mantis. Deadline loomed.

  Rob and Joanne paid no attention to their new editor-in-chief’s comments. Five months and they were almost used to him. They worked on, busy with all the “wee fiddly bits,” as their subeditor called them. Livestock prices, community notices, school concerts, sporting fixtures, traffic infringements—if being drunk and in charge of a horse could be termed a traffic offense; all the usual fodder for a local newspaper in 1956.

  But news? That was for the Aberdeen daily and The Scotsman to provide. As Don McLeod, subeditor and all-round fusspot know-it-all told him when he started on the Highland Gazette, “We’re a local weekly, here to publish local information—not some scandal-mongering rag from down south.”

  McAllister hit the return on the typewriter as though he was whacking the gremlins of spelling mistakes from the bowels of the huge machine.

  “I mean, how can I be expected to write a decent obit?” He waved his notes at them. “All he ever did was attend meetings, chairman of this, treasurer of that, he was even on the committee for the Highland Games. May as well publish minutes.”

  Rob looked up. “Well, he’s been summoned to the final committee meeting of them all. I don’t know which angel keeps the minutes, but your man undoubtedly has an in with Saint Peter.”

  “That’ll be right,” Joanne contributed. “He went to Island Bank Church for forty years or thereabouts. An elder of the Free Kirk, no less. Bound to have a free pass straight to heaven.”

  “And I bet in school all he ever got were B’s.” McAllister had lost them.

  Rob grinned, relishing his role as straight man. He loved hearing the editor-in-chief expound on life, liberty and the state of Scottish football.

  “How’s that then?”

  “To get A’s in exams shows you as clever, different, a smidgen better than your peers. And God help those that stand out. Conformity, thy name is Scottish.”

  “But I got A’s at the academy.”

  “Point proven.”

  The newspaper would be finished by late afternoon, well in time for the final touches from the subeditor and typesetters, then the printers. McAllister despaired of a paper where meeting a deadline was easy. He glanced at his two reporters. Neither had had any real training, and Joanne worked only part-time. Her husband resented even that. Her mother-in-law backed him. Women didn’t work—it showed up their husbands, made them seem incapable of providing for their family.

  Don McLeod, chief and only subeditor, racing aficionado, keeper of dark secrets, walked in, ignoring Rob, as usual, but nodding to Joanne. She embarrassed him; too young, too bonnie, too smart, too married. Besides, like the boss she was an outsider. “Boss, a word?” He gestured toward the office.

  McAllister gave a theatrical sign. “Tell us all.”

  Don glanced at Joanne before continuing. “I just heard—they’ve fished a body out of the canal. A wee boy, he went missing last night, the lockkeeper found him first light.”

  “Oh no, the police were at the door last night looking for him,” she cried. “The poor parents.”

  “And you never thought to say anything before now?” McAllister glared at her. “This is a newspaper!”

  Don grimaced. He was right. A newspaper was no place for a woman.

  The steep hill that ran from the Highland Gazette office to the castle was cobbled; hard to walk on in the best of weathers, lethal in the rain. In the open expanse in front of the castle Flora Macdonald stood on her plinth, a stone Highland terrier at her feet. His raised paws and expressive face seemed to be begging Scotland’s most famous heroine to forget Bonnie Prince Charlie and the failed rebellion.

  “You’re right, boy.” Joanne patted the dog’s cold head, laughing at herself. “Flora, take heed. No man’s worth the wait.” But Flora’s sightless eyes kept staring out to her homeland in the Western Isles.

  Joanne Ross was affected by weather. A premonition, an almost visceral feeling, heralded a change. A distant storm she felt in her bones, well before the clouds formed. She moved in time to the weather; her tall lithe body stepped lightly in summer and strode into winter. Her eyes changed from blue to green with the light, her hair changed from brown to red in the sun, her freckles ebbed and flowed with the seasons.

  She found a bench out of the wind, keeping a close eye on the black-backed gulls suspended over her impromptu picnic, their sandwich-detecting radar on full sweep. One especially large bird hung effortlessly in a thermal current.

  Joanne went into a dwam, floating with the gull. Floating over the castle braes, over the river, across to the cathedral without a single wing movement, he (for it always seemed a him to her) drifted on toward the infirmary, back over to the war memorial, disappearing into the tangle of the Islands.

  She could feel herself nestling into the shoulders of the gull, oily satin-smooth feathers smelling of fish. Up into the thermals they floated, taking in the river, the town, the hills, the mountains, the Great Glen, the faultline that fractured the Highlands. Peaks and scree-strewn ridgelines were mirrored in the ribbon o
f deep dark lochs. Glens clad in a faded tartan of heather and bracken with splashes of green outlining abandoned crofts emptied by the Clearances were cut deep by drunken burns and rivers. A fierce and stunning landscape; it made Joanne want to sing.

  The cathedral bells were the first to strike two o’clock. Four more sets of chimes followed, overlapping, discordant.

  “A whole hour of sun.” Joanne smiled at the novelty, stood, shook the crumbs from her skirt, ready for the rest of the day. Then, remembering the boy, she shivered, fearful for her own children.

  “I’ll meet the girls after school today.”

  “Now I don’t want you two going anywhere near the canal.”

  The children looked at each other. First their mother collecting them from school, next a lecture. This was summer talk. No one went up to the canal in the cold. Although the secret den near the canal banks occasionally tempted them even in chill autumn, they had not been there for weeks. A dark sandy bowl in the roots beneath the elder and whin bushes, it was a perfect hiding place. In the long summer holidays, that is. Autumn, and rotting elderberries, wet slippery leaves and damp earth, made the den dank and scary.

  “Another thing, do you still have that den in the bushes near the canal?”

  Annie jumped. She knew it. Mum could read minds. How did she know about the canal? She held her breath, waiting for her sister to give the game away. Wee Jean squinted up through her thick fringe, saw Annie’s glare and decided she was more afraid of her than of their mother.

  “No, it’s too cold and too dark.” Annie was emphatic.

  Joanne believed her eldest child. This time anyway. Then came the next puzzle.

  “Do you know a wee boy called Jamie?”

  “No” came Annie’s automatic reply. Then, “Well, there’s a boy called Jamie but he’s not in my class. Not in Wee Jean’s class neither.”

  “But you know him,” Joanne persisted.

  “We sometimes see him on the road home. He’s in Miss Rose’s class.”

  As Joanne well knew, ages and sexes didn’t mix when you were eight and a half and six. Her mother’s questions alerted Annie, but she knew asking would get her nowhere. They reached their gate. Joanne wheeled her bicycle through, then turned back to her girls, her voice unusually stern.

  “If I ever catch you or hear from anyone that you have been up the canal banks, your father will hear about it.”

  That meant the belt. Whilst not a frequent occurrence, just the threat of a leather belt on a little girl’s bare bottom, always “for her own good,” was terrifying for Wee Jean. To Annie, the humiliation was worse than any pain. They ran up the stairs to change out of their uniforms. Behind the closed bedroom door Annie grabbed Wee Jean’s arm. She leaned over her wee sister and whispered fiercely, “If you say one word about Jamie, a giant worm’ll go up your bum when you sit on the lavvy pan.”

  “I won’t tell, I won’t. I’ll never tell.”

  And she didn’t, but constipation and a dose of syrup of figs were the inevitable consequence.

  Later, in bed, lights out, curtains closed against the night, Mum and Dad fighting downstairs, Wee Jean cowering under the blankets, Annie thought it through. Why did Mum ask about Jamie? And where was Jamie anyway? Sick again? Fearty, scaredy-cat Jamie, they often didn’t see him for days—asthma he said.

  Annie pulled the eiderdown over her ears, vainly hoping to muffle the sobs from her parents’ bedroom. Almost asleep, she felt a small warm body climb in beside her. Jean hated it when Mum and Dad fought. She let her sister coorie in, tried to drift off, but the remembrance of walking home, playing their game, of that last glimpse of Jamie, before they ran off, abandoning him, terrified they might not reach their house before their father came home, kept her from sleep for a good two minutes.

  “Truth, dare or got to,” the girls chanted, “truth, dare or got to!”

  They kept it up till Jamie, wee, skinny, timid Jamie, finally gave in.

  “Truth!” he shouted, scared of the girls but pleased to be one of the gang at last.

  “Truth,” said Annie. “We-e-ll. Is it true, you eat poo?” The other girls shrieked with laughter at the very mention of the rudest word they knew.

  “Big poo number two, big poo number two.” The girls circled him, chanting, laughing, no malice in their game. He joined in, relieved. They didn’t push him or try to pull down his pants, nor accuse him of being a wee lassie.

  On they skipped like skittish lambs, Annie, her sister, the two girls from their street, the boy Jamie, on they meandered through the darkening autumn, down the long long street, lamps coming on, past the respectable semidetached Edwardian houses, past the prewar bungalows with their neat gardens, past the big old mansions with their big old trees and their dark noisy birds settling for the night, on their way home from school.

  One particular mansion with graveyard dark trees the children avoided, crossing to the other side of the road, pushing and shoving, telling stories, and making ghostly noises to scare themselves. The curving gravel driveway disappeared into a tunnel of sprawling rhododendrons, but the double doors, set with vivid stained-glass scenes of some forgotten Victorian martyrdom, were clearly visible through a gap in the shrubbery. Annie stopped. The other girls ran on ahead.

  “Come on, Jamie, it’s your turn.”

  “Don’t want to,” he said, frightened, knowing what was coming, “don’t have to.” He was near to tears.

  “Cowardy cowardy custard, stick yer nose in mustard.”

  “No a’m no. I’m no frightened.” But he was.

  “Well then?” taunted Annie.

  Jamie knew. They’d played this game many a time. As yet, no one but Annie had dared. Simple enough: run through the legs of the menacing crablike rhododendrons, run across the oval of gravel in front of the house, run up the steps to the big dark door, reach up to the big brass bell, pull hard, run for the road as though the devil was at your heels, run, run, run to the safety of the dim scattered streetlight, grab the lamppost, bending double from the stitch in your side, panting, grinning, triumphant . . . did it!

  A distant ringing but this time, the first and only time, the door opened. Annie and Jean peered through the rhododendrons, eyes popped wide open, giggling with fascinated fear. The other girls were long gone. Annie’s games were too scary for them. A pool of light, like a pulsating evil halo in a horror film, backlit the misshapen figure that seemed to fill the double door frame. Annie grabbed her sister’s hand, and they fairly flew up the street, terrified the bogeyman was on their heels.

  They raced round the corner and ran till they could run no more.

  “I’ve a stitch in ma side.” Wee Jean staggered, her wee legs trembling, peching like a collie dog, winded after rounding up an unruly flock of sheep.

  “What was thon?” her voice squeaked. “What was that, in the door?”

  Annie had been as terrified as her sister but would never show it. “It was nothing.” Now she was scared her sister would tell on her. “It was nothing.”

  “Yes it was, I saw it, a great big black thing.”

  “Aye, a hoodie crow. That’s what it was. And it’ll come back and peck your eyes out if you tell Mum.” She poked a finger toward her sister’s eye.

  “I’ll no tell, promise, I’ll no tell,” Wee Jean wailed.

  So the hoodie crow was destined to become another of their secrets, their thrills, their nightmares.

  Flushed from running, from fright, they walked quickly home, clutching hands, holding on tight against hoodie crows, bogeymen, the dark starless night and their dad’s temper. And Jamie, poor, always-left-behind Jamie, was abandoned yet again. But Jamie was a boy. He would be fine. Bad things only happened to girls, everyone knew that.

  “Where is everybody?”

  Rob, late as usual for the Friday morning postmortem, grinned at Joanne and grabbed her copy of the paper.

  “Hey, get your own.”

  “I daren’t go downstairs. The office is unh
appy with me over my phone calls to Aberdeen. I didn’t put in for an approval chit for long-distance.”

  The Highland Gazette came out on a Thursday. Serving the town and county as well as the far-flung outposts of the western Highlands, it was a newspaper with a long history—and not much had changed since its inception in 1862. Advertising on the front page, a monotonous diet of county council, town council and church notices interspersed with the goings-on of various community groups; the highlight of the paper for some was the prices fetched at the livestock market. For others, Births, Deaths and Marriages was the first page they turned to, the obituaries the best-read section of all. Rob skimmed all eight pages of broadsheet, pausing only to read his own contributions, then gave the paper back to Joanne.

  “It’s not folded right. You’ve made a right bourach of it.”

  The phone rang.

  “Gazette. Right. Uh-huh. When? Right. See ya.”

  Rob stood, pulled Joanne up by the hand, the mess of newsprint floating to the floor.

  “A reprieve. We’ve one hour—back here at ten. McAllister’s out with Don, so are we. I’ll shout you a coffee.”

  “Seeing you’re paying, how can I refuse? And how come the boss is away with Don McLeod? They’re usually bickering like some old man and his wifey.”

  Rob, reluctant to admit he didn’t know, just shrugged. Then dashed down the stairs.

  “Race you.”

  Off he sprinted, his overlong barley-colored hair billowing out in the wind, giving him a close resemblance to a dandelion. For many a local girl, Rob was the epitome of a dashing hero of some ilk; a Spitfire pilot perhaps, a film star maybe, a romantic character in The People’s Friend possibly. He had a look that charmed. Even before he turned on his best blue-eyed, American-teeth smile. Whatever it was, all agreed he was a heartthrob.

  The two friends linked arms, strode through the stone arch out onto the bridge, a biting sea wind channeling down the firth, blowing the river into delicate white horses, stinging their ears and eyes. Below, the drowned paving stones of an ancient ford were clearly visible through the whisky-colored current, which at high tide deepened to a darker shade of full malt.