A Double Death on the Black Isle Page 18

  Betsy fled.

  Joanne looked down, smiling.

  “Don’t forget my offer, Mrs. Ross.” Don picked up his racing guide to leave. “I’m available anytime.” He waggled his head, his eyes wide, his grin wider.

  That evening, Joanne discovered the plot. A harsh word, “plot.” A word with resonance for every Scot brought up on a history of plots—successful plots, rare; failed plots, common; plots by the English; plots by the clan chieftains; plot upon plot. Now plotting had come to the Ross family.

  Granddad Ross? How could he? Joanne felt the betrayal keenly. She loved her father-in-law. Then she dismissed the idea. No, he probably has no idea. And if he did know, he wasn’t party to the plotting.

  Annie and Wee Jean always spent Wednesday nights, press night, with their grandparents. Other days, the girls walked home from school, let themselves in, and were alone for an hour before their mother came home. Joanne didn’t like it, but it wasn’t unusual for children to do this, and they were safe.

  They would listen to Children’s Hour on the radio, Joanne would prepare supper, Annie would do her homework, then it was time for a game or crafts before bed.

  This evening, Wee Jean was at the table, immersed in making a picture of a Highland cow from scraps of wool and fabric. Lots of paste was involved. Annie was cutting out paper planets to color in. The tip of the child’s tongue was sticking out the left of her mouth as she concentrated on making every planet perfect. She wanted to beat Sheila Murchison, who, Annie was certain, got her mother to do her projects for her.

  “Jean, I told you before. Rest the brush on the saucer. I don’t want paste all over the table.”

  “Sorreeeey Mum,” Jean replied for about the third time.

  “These rings on Saturn are so difficult,” Annie wailed. “I’ve cut them too thin.”

  “Stick them in the book first, wait for them to dry. Then color them in.”

  “But I haven’t time to wait. I need it for tomorrow.”

  “There’s an hour and a half to bedtime. They’ll dry soon.” Joanne spoke calmly, used to Annie’s dramatics.

  “Granny won’t let us use paste. When we live with her, we’ll never get to make a mess,” Jean reminded her big sister.

  Annie glared across the table and whispered, “You promised.”

  “Promised what?” Joanne asked.

  “Nothing.” Annie kept cutting, but her scissors were trembling.

  “Tell me,” Joanne asked, trying to control her voice, “I’m your Mum. We don’t have secrets.”

  Annie took two seconds before making the decision. She too had promised to keep it secret, but she was unhappy with the whole idea.

  “Granny says Dad says we can’t live with you anymore, but we won’t have to live with him. We’ll live with Granny and Granddad instead.”

  “But we’ll see you nearly every day,” Jean assured her mother. “And Granny says I can bring Snowball with me even though she doesn’t like cats.”

  “We’ll have a room each at Granny and Granddad’s house,” Annie told her mother. This was the only point that appealed to her. “We won’t have to share anymore.”

  Joanne knew from long habit that to stop her voice quavering—in hurt, in anger, in pain—speaking loudly and brightly helped. “You are not going anywhere. Now, who’d like cocoa?”

  “Me please,” the girls chorused.

  Joanne went to the kitchen, stood at the sink, gripping the edges of the stone, the cold tap running unnoticed, splashes wetting her dress. She breathed deeply to quell the nausea in her stomach, she shut her eyes tight to hold back the tears.

  It was more than outrage—it was the betrayal that hurt her most.

  Surely not, her mind was racing, not Granddad Ross . . . he wouldn’t . . . Granny Ross, maybe . . . no, she wouldn’t, but Bill can twist her round . . . but surely not Granddad.

  Joanne poured out the milk. She spooned the cocoa into the pan, then the sugar. She whisked the mixture furiously. Every movement she made, every action, was instinctive—making cocoa was a nightly routine. She was in the sitting room, mugs in hand, before she knew how to continue the conversation.

  “I like the Highland cow,” Joanne started. “Annie, your planets look great.”

  “Thanks, Mum,” Annie yawned. This set Wee Jean off yawning.

  “It was really nice of Granny to say you could stay with her,” Joanne forced the words out. “She knows how upset you both get when Dad is angry and says he will take you away.”

  “Can you come too, Mum? Then you’d be safe an’ all.” Jean was as oblivious as a newborn. The sweet voice, the innocence of her, was almost the undoing of Joanne.

  “No.” It was Annie who answered her little sister. “I like this house. I want to stay.”

  Against all her principles on not questioning her children about the Ross family, Joanne had to know.

  “What does Granddad say to all this?”

  “It’s a secret. Granny says we’ll surprise Granddad later.”

  Annie wasn’t fooled. Her ear, finely tuned to the nuances of life with warring parents, caught Joanne’s anguish. She had no faith in her mother’s ability to stand up to her father. They didn’t live with their dad anymore, granted, but after years of arguments and fighting and her mother hiding the bruises, Annie seldom believed the word of an adult.

  She thought her mother beautiful and funny and clever. She thought their life in their little house was lovely. But Annie kept waiting for it all to end—her mother would give in to their dad as she had so many times before. Mum will say, “We have to pack up and go back, Dad promised this time it will be different.” Annie could hear the conversation in her head.

  It will never be different, she thought. That was why part of her agreed with her grandmother’s plan. Dad will never do anything with Granny and Granddad around, she reasoned. But Mum will be on her own, was her next thought, and maybe next time he’ll hit so hard she will be really hurt, maybe even . . .

  Annie had been coloring the planet Mars a deep red. Her pencil caught in the paper, and looking down she saw she had pressed so hard with the pencil there was a hole in the paper. Afraid she would cry, she left the table and went to the bathroom, locked the door, and ran a bath. When I’m grown-up, I’ll get him, she thought. I’ll be a policewoman like Mum’s friend WPC Ann. I’ll put him in prison. He’ll be locked up and stay there for a long, long time, even if he says he’s sorry, and he’ll never hurt Mum again.

  Twenty past four in the morning, Joanne tiptoed into the kitchen for a glass of water. She knew she must have slept some of the time, although it didn’t feel like it.

  The water tasted bitter. She emptied out the glass, rinsed it, and ran fresh. It too tasted bitter. It’s me, she realized, my mouth tastes foul. She made tea instead.

  She tried to read, then shut her book when she realized she had read the same paragraph over and over with no comprehension.

  Joanne knew she was weary to the point of exhaustion. The first faint twitter of the dawn chorus started. As the predawn light spread over the garden, she kept thinking, I can’t go on like this. I am allowing Bill to win.

  It was as though by merely thinking this, she reached the tipping point. I will no longer let him win.

  Feeling lighter than she had in years, she smiled to herself, curled like a cat, and fell asleep with her head on her arm. She didn’t see the slight crack in the girls’ bedroom door. She didn’t see Annie.

  The child stood, feet chilled blue on the bare linoleum, watching over her mother, only relaxing her guard when at last her mother fell into a proper sleep. Then sensing a change, a lightness and rhythm to her mother’s breathing, she went back to bed and she too went to sleep.

  Next morning, Joanne woke exhausted, but with a sense of clarity like the light on the sea after a storm. For Bill to attack her was one thing, to use their children another. She was yet to recognize it, but the metamorphosis had begun.

  Saturday was
usually a half-day at the Gazette. Being the end of the football season, Joanne knew Hector and Rob and even Don would be working most of the day and celebrating or consoling themselves in the pub afterwards.

  The girls were with their granddad. First it would be the matinee at the Palace cinema, then the library.

  Public libraries throughout Scotland allowed the borrower four books. The rules were a work of nonfiction for each work of fiction. Luckily, Annie and Granddad Ross had the same taste: travel books, history books, geography books—any book on foreign lands.

  “Thon book on the Canadian Mounties was smashing,” Granddad said to Annie. “There’s lots of pictures. Right bonnie, Canada looks.”

  “I read about Canada in Anne of Green Gables,” Annie told him. “I liked this book on China. The women have bandages on their feet, so they can’t walk.”

  “Surely no?”

  “Aye, that’s what it says.”

  “Let’s borrow a book we can read thegether.”

  Annie was thrilled. There was nothing better than having someone to talk about books with. These days, her mum was always working or too tired, her friends weren’t interested in “grown-up’s books.” Only Granddad understood. He’d been abroad too, she remembered, in Belgium and France, but he wouldn’t talk about it.

  It’s nice being with Granddad, she thought, but I want to live Mum. Why can’t Dad be dead like Auntie Patricia’s husband?

  The child felt no guilt thinking this. It was a logical solution to her fear of her father. At almost ten years old, she knew the thought was wicked, and she was wise enough to keep the idea to herself.

  The Gazette office was one minute’s walk from the library, but Joanne had left already, leaving a message that she could be contacted at the McLean house. She needed Margaret McLean’s advice.

  When Joanne finished telling her friend her dilemma, Margaret surprised her. She clapped her hands at Joanne’s story and laughed.

  “How wonderful. It is as good as any story from The People’s Friend. Family dramas are always so, so . . . ?”

  “Nasty?” Joanne asked.

  “Gothic, I was thinking.”

  “Margaret!” Joanne was outraged and laughing and embarrassed, and this was why she had come to visit.

  “I know a thing or two about mother-in-laws and wicked stepmothers too,” Margaret continued. “This doesn’t strike me as either. It seems more like a sounding out of possibilities.”

  “Maybe.” Joanne was not so sure.

  “Mrs. Ross is besotted with her only son. As am I with mine. She will do anything to help him—within reason. From what you have told me, she would never harm those girls.” Margaret was firm. “If Mr. Ross doesn’t know, and I cannot believe he does—such a nice gentleman Mr. Ross—then I have a strategy which always works.”

  “You do? Yes, of course you do.”

  Margaret McLean made Joanne feel she could say anything. And she was the only person really interested in Joanne’s career at the Gazette. She never mentioned Joanne’s marriage unless invited, never mentioned Joanne’s past, but would discuss it if Joanne wanted.

  Margaret entertained Joanne with tales of dancing in Paris and London and Edinburgh and in drafty castles or baronial keeps in the Highlands and islands and Lowlands of Scotland. They talked about books and music and legends and Margaret’s deep, abiding passion for couture clothes and shoes. “You could ask Angus for advice. If it comes to your husband attempting to divorce you, with you as the guilty party, he would help,” Margaret offered. This was only said to give Joanne hope. Margaret knew her husband’s opinion and his horror of divorce cases.

  It was not that Angus McLean was prejudiced against women suing for divorce, it was more his experience that divorce was a scandal that marked a woman for life. And the children by association.

  “Thank you,” Joanne said. When could I afford a solicitor? She thought. “There is nothing that will satisfy Bill Ross other than me giving up my job and crawling back to him.”

  “If it were me . . .”

  Not likely, Joanne thought.

  “. . . I’d do nothing,” Margaret continued. “Keep smiling, always be cheerful, greet your enemies with overwhelming niceness. That really rattles them. And makes them feel guilty.”

  Joanne thought that a very odd approach, but appreciated the logic.

  “Margaret, you’re a wonder. I shall do exactly that. It won’t work with Bill, but I’ll try it on his mother. Doesn’t take much to make a Scottish woman feel guilty about something. My mother-in-law is not such a bad soul. She just thinks her son is . . .”

  “Her sun,” Margaret supplied.

  The joke was lost in the saying, but whatever way Joanne looked at it, Margaret’s advice was good advice.

  As she was wheeling her bike out of the gate, Margaret called out, “Remember, dazzle the enemy. Smile like a car’s headlights on high beam.”

  In the days and weeks to come, Joanne did just that.

  SEVENTEEN

  Jimmy McPhee’s visit, he had enjoyed. Calum Sinclair was now finding the case against the McPhee brothers intriguing.

  At lunchtime, he went to the Station Hotel bar. He limited himself to a half-pint. The landlady prepared the thick ham sandwiches for him alone. Food was seldom served in a Scottish bar.

  From here, in the company of men likely to be summoned for jury duty, he knew he could gauge the atmosphere in the community. Here, he could anticipate the thinking of a jury and be prepared for the trial ahead.

  He settled in with The Scotsman’s crossword for camouflage, but really, he was imaging the proceeding against the McPhee boys. In his mind’s eye, he was watching the performance, as it would be played out before a judge and jury. First the prosecution, then the defense, the witnesses in the case for and against his clients—he could hear the voices in his imaginings. Finally came the summing up. At this point, he could only offer a fair, impartial summing up, and with a judge, this did not always happen.

  The evidence was circumstantial. But, Calum conceded, it was possible a stray kick or slap or punch had caused a brain injury. There was no evidence though. A fair summing up would warn the jury against this, and against prejudice. Calum supposed it would be just as hard for a Campbell to find justice in Glencoe.

  “Can I interrupt?”

  The sound of a female voice in the public bar of a public house gave him a start.

  “Patricia Ord Mackenzie.” She smiled down at him.

  He stood, clumsily knocking the table and almost upsetting the beer over his papers.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Really?”

  “I recognize your voice from the phone conversation. Plus, there are not many women who will enter a public house.”

  “There is no law against it, although some men would like there to be.” She smiled. “I know it’s scandalous and I don’t care.”

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “A lemonade would be lovely.”

  While waiting for the drinks, Calum watched Patricia in the bar mirror. She was looking around, and she nodded to a couple of men at a table across the room and smiled at the man who turned to glare at her for daring to be in a man’s domain.

  “Do you want to move to the snug?” Calum asked when he returned.

  “Perhaps we’d better.”

  The cramped room behind the bar smelled of damp and disuse—all the better to discourage women from drinking, Patricia thought.

  “I’d better warn you. I asked one of the secretaries in your office where to find you, so expect more gossip.”

  Calum laughed. “I’m sure it will enhance my reputation being seen with you.”

  “Thank you, kind sir.” She dipped her head, extended her elbows, in a mock half-curtsy. “I ought to be able to move in a man’s world, as I am as good as any farmer hereabouts. But no, the success of Achnafern Estate is credited to my father. Never mind that he rarely stirs from his study. His obsession with Napoleon ma
kes life at the turn of the nineteenth century more real than the present for Daddy. It’s a shame I wasn’t born a boy, is, I believe, the general opinion of the community.”

  Calum was examining her as she spoke—her body, her face were animated. She smiled a lot. With white, even teeth, clear skin, shining reddish-gold hair, she had the glow of a Russian propaganda poster showing a classic countrywoman harvesting the wheat.

  “I shouldn’t complain, but the attitude annoys me. Just last month, I overheard the remark that I was a good judge of livestock, ‘for a lassie.’” She laughed.

  Calum smiled back.

  “So, it’s good to meet you in person. And as I said on the telephone, I’m pleased you agreed to help the Skinner boy, my brother-in-law I should perhaps call him.”

  “Not at all, I’ll do what I can.”

  “There is no need to involve me in this business. In fact,” Patricia looked at Calum, “the Skinner family want nothing to do with me. Other than pay the bill of course. So it might be best if you don’t mention my name.”

  “I see,” Calum said. He didn’t, but it was obviously not a matter Patricia wanted to discuss. “Won’t you want to know the outcome of the Skinner boy’s case?”

  “I shall probably read about it in the Gazette.” She smiled. “But yes, I’d like to know how he gets on.” Patricia glanced at her watch. “Heavens—I must go. I have to meet my housekeeper, Mrs. Munro. She’ll have a fit if I keep her waiting—she’s terrified I’ll be burnt to a crisp by a biblical bolt of lightning. Although I did ask exactly where in the Bible God commanded ‘thou shalt not visit a public bar if thy name be woman.’”

  “I must get back to work too.” But he didn’t make a move.

  “Thank you.” Patricia stood and held out her hand.

  “Not at all.” He stood and took the hand. It was warm and slightly rough. A farmer’s hand, he thought, and liked her all the more for that.

  As she made her way towards the swing doors, Patricia waved her fingers at the overawed barman. When she left, a buzz ran through the room like a swarm of bees in June. She enjoyed that.