A Small Death in the Great Glen Read online

  The café on the corner served toasted sandwiches, pastries and its own ice cream and, wonder of wonders, had a real cappuccino machine. Huge, gleaming, its strangled gurgle and hissing blasts of steam could rival the Flying Scotsman. Next door was the chip shop, which also served as a social center after dark.

  Gino Corelli shouted above the noise as Joanne pushed through the doors.

  “Bella, how are ya? Shame, you just missed Chiara. An’ Roberto, ma boy, I seen your father a wee whiley back. Sit down. Sit down. I bring the coffee.”

  Gino, dwarfed by his chrome monster, beamed across the café at his daughter’s best friend, his cheerful chatter drowned out by the milk-frothing thingwayjig. He had been proud of his English until the day when Joanne told him he spoke Scottish English. The ensuing explanation as to what was English and what was Scottish became complicated.

  “Ah, I get it.” He beamed like a torch on a wet Highland night. “Like you have Italian and you have Sicilian. Like in my village.” He now cherished many Scottish words and phrases, although their usage was haphazard and often hilarious.

  Joanne leaned back into the fake leather of their booth dreamily taking in the creamy, frothy bliss of a cappuccino and the highly imaginative gelato-colored murals of famous Italian landmarks.

  “I wish I could go there.” She nodded up at the hot-pink lava pouring out of Vesuvius down to a turquoise sea.

  “Me too.” Rob sipped his coffee. “Mind you, it’s probably changed a bit.”

  “Bill was in Italy during the war. His regiment had a hard time of it. Sicily, Naples, Monte Cassino. The Lovat Scouts, all the Highland regiments, had a hard time. I doubt Messina looks like that anymore.”

  Her husband, her handsome brave soldier boy, had survived the battles but not the war. Towns and villages everywhere had their share of ghosts and the walking shells of lost men, boys most of them. Gone to fight in distant wars, fighting the battles of others, again and again the Scottish regiments had been in the thick of it. Mothers, sisters, wives, children, they too were the victims of wars, the unacknowledged victims. Down the centuries, in hopeless situations, in harsh conditions, when all looked lost, “Send in the Scots” was the cry of the generals—the Black Watch, the Lovat Scouts, the Cameron Highlanders, the Seaforth Highlanders, the Gordon Highlanders, the Highland Light Infantry, along with the thousands upon thousands of wild colonial boys. They’re tough, they’re fierce, the generals said. They’re expendable, they thought.

  Rob peered through his hair, watching Joanne spoon up the last of the coffee froth. He had been at the Highland Gazette a year, Joanne six months, hired because she could type and because McAllister had taken a liking to her. Long-legs, nut-brown shoulder-length hair, bright blue-green eyes, big smile, light freckles; a “bonnie, bonnie lass” incarnate. She loved swinging on the children’s swings, her bicycle, knitting, reading, singing and listening to music. And she was a battered wife.

  “Come in, number seven,” Rob teased.

  “Sorry. Away with the faeries.”

  “Life is but a dream, ssh boom, ssh boom, life is but a dream, sweetheart.”

  Rob mimed the song, a rolled-up copy of the Gazette for a microphone.

  “Aye. You have that right.” A laugh, a shake of the head; Joanne rejoined 1956. “And you’ve been hanging about with thon Yanks again.”

  “You should come, Joanne. You’d love it. They’ve got this great dance band and all the latest records from the U S of A.”

  “Me? Me dancing in the canteen at RAF Lossiemouth with American airmen? I can just hear my mother-in-law. To say nothing of my husband.”

  She had loved going to the dancing with her chums in the ATS during the war; dancing to Glen Miller tunes was her favorite. She had met her husband on the dance floor. The very idea of going to the airbase or the Two Red Shoes in Elgin thrilled her. But reality drowned out the daydreams.

  “So what’s the drama with McAllister? We never miss a Friday postmortem.”

  “Maybe something about the wee boy in the canal.”

  “It doesn’t bear thinking about.” She shuddered. “McAllister is furious with me for not mentioning it, but I’m only the typist. A policeman knocked on every door down our street, the girls were asleep and I didn’t like to waken them. Besides, I didn’t know if they knew him and I didn’t want to upset them, they’re too young.”

  “Aye, accidents happen.” Rob rose, went to pay, but Gino, flapping and waving his hands, was having none of it.

  “Away with you, away.” He grinned at Rob’s protestations. “An’ I have something else for you. A wee birdie told me a sailor jumped off a Baltic timber ship down at the harbor. Lookin’ for a lassie to cuddle I’m thinking, but now gone, lost, he is. Might be a story, sí?”

  Sounds of fierce arguing came spiraling down the stone stairway. Rob loved a good fight. He bounced up the stairs two at a time, Joanne fast behind. The square reporters’ room, with high ceiling, high square reporters’ desk, huge bulky typewriters standing along its edges like unexploded bombs, was not a good place for an argument. No room for gesturing, too close to your opponent in the narrow space between desk and walls, too far across the table for “in yer face” poking and pointing. But they managed it. The shouting paused only for a thundering “Shut the door!” from McAllister. He continued his diatribe, punctuating his sentences with slaps on the tabletop. Joanne sidled past Don, wishing she could turn down the volume knob.

  “This paper has been going since 1862,” Don interrupted. “We never run stories like this. That’s gutter-press-from-Glasgow style.” He waved the dummy layout at the editor.

  “This rag will never see 1962 if we don’t start doing something different.” McAllister gesticulated back. “This is a human interest story. A child has been found, in the canal, dead, with no explanation, for goodness’ sake!”

  “Aye, but no need to make such a meal o’ it! Accidents are all too common wi’ bairns—farms, rivers, the sea, falling off or into something or other. It does no good to put the wind up folk. Scaremongering—that’s what this is.” He waved the layout pages. “And sentimental. Gossip and scandal’ll be next. The father of the chapel will never stand for it neither,” Don warned McAllister.

  “Well, he’ll be without legs if we don’t. And another thing, I don’t see how you can possibly defend all these outdated trade union practices we have here. I run this newspaper, not the father of the chapel.”

  “Round one to McAllister on points.” Rob started to clap.

  They turned, and to Joanne’s amazement, they both stopped. And both men lit up, Don with his Capstan Full Strength, McAllister with his Passing Cloud. Joanne opened the windows, shifting the jam jar of hawthorn sprigs onto the reporters’ table. Fallen berries lay on the white windowsill like drops of blood in the snow.

  The argument was not new. It had been a sniping war for the first three months after McAllister was appointed editor-in-chief over Don’s head. A shaky truce had been observed over the last three months, McAllister agreeing to “see how things go” but adamant the front page must be changed. He won that battle and a temporary truce was called. That truce was now over.

  “Sit,” McAllister commanded them all. “The postmortem on last week’s paper.” He stood, picked up a copy of the Gazette, held it high with one hand as though it had been used to clean up puppy poo, then carefully tore it in two. Then into four. He dropped it into the top hat, turned, and demanded, “Anyone else, any further comments on last week’s rag? No? Right, let’s see if we can’t do better than that shite.”

  Silence.

  Don smoked furiously, sending out fumes that would shame a Clyde tugboat. Admitting to being fifty for the last few years, he had been with the Highland Gazette forty years. A short man, balding, beer belly, scruffy, wearing the same tie his mother had given him on reaching his twenty-five years as a newspaperman, a subeditor right to his bones. He sided with the compositors, the printers, the father of the chapel. The Gazette had been going well nigh a hundred years; why change?

  “I’ll follow up on the child in the canal. We may be a weekly but this is important to a safe wee community like ours.” McAllister wanted the meeting over with.

  “My girls are at school with him,” Joanne volunteered.

  “Anything else you haven’t told us, Mrs. Ross?”

  Joanne blushed, furious with herself.

  McAllister gave a theatrical sigh. “Rob, what have you got?”

  “Eh, well . . .” He thought frantically. “I’ve heard a seaman jumped ship. He was crew on a freighter out of one of the Baltic ports. I’m just away to ask at the police station.”

  “What for?”

  “What? Well, they’re the ones who’re looking for him—an illegal alien, I think they call him.”

  McAllister shook his head, reminding himself that there was not a real newspaper person amongst them except Don, who, McAllister privately thought, had been around since the printing press had been invented.

  “Where, who, when, how and why,” he counted out on his elegant long fingers. “The polis may help you with the first three, but the rest? That’s for real newspapers. Get off down to the harbor, laddie, and don’t come back till you have a real story. Right?” He turned to Joanne. She sank lower in her chair. In this mood, the dark hair and dark eyes and equally dark expression on McAllister’s gaunt face made her feel as though she was about to front the Spanish Inquisition.

  “I’m on the usual.”

  He stared.

  She mumbled.

  “Women’s Institute, Girl Guide and Scouts news, school stuff . . . oh, and there’s advance notices on Halloween parties I need to sort. You know,” she finished lamely, not knowing what was wanted of her.

  “Right. But maybe in amongst all that, you could find a story.”

  Her blank look annoyed him.

  “I know, I know, you’re only the typist as you keep telling me, but try. Something with a beginning, a middle and an end—preferably with the middle bit being of interest to our readers.” He saw that he had lost them. “Right, here beginneth the lesson.”

  The chuckles from Rob and Joanne were somewhat forced. Don kept ignoring the proceedings, but the atmosphere did lighten slightly.

  “Let’s all try something new. Let’s try to imagine that we are in the middle of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth, and that life as we know it is changing. Or is about to change. And if it’s not, at least we can nudge it in the direction of change.” He stared out of the window, watching the racing rain clouds as they scudded west to catch the mountains. “God knows we haven’t made a great fist of the first half.” He caught himself, shook his head and continued. “All I want is stories with some meat on the bones. Let’s try anyhow. Now away with you both. Bring me some excitement.”

  “What on earth did you do that for?” Don glared at him when they were alone again. “You know we can never print anything that’s different.”

  McAllister gave his skull-like smile and lit another cigarette. “We’ll see.”

  TWO

  McAllister stood on the gleaming red doorstep of the terraced fisherman’s cottage. The curtains were drawn, as were those of its neighbors. He took a deep breath, then knocked. The door opened reluctantly. Peering out from behind it was a woman with a blotchy red face and haunted eyes.

  “I’m sorry to intrude. John McAllister, Highland Gazette.”

  “You’d better come in.” She turned, and he followed her into the dim front parlor. The mirror above the unlit fire was shrouded with a shawl; a crowded china cabinet squeezed into one corner; a sideboard covered with pictures of their son stood by the window. Jamie’s father sat hunched at a heavy dining table that filled the remaining space. The room smelled of beeswax polish and damp. McAllister shook hands and murmured condolences to a man lost in grief and guilt.

  “One of us should have been home.”

  McAllister could not answer that.

  “Mr. Fraser, could you tell me something about Jamie? I’d like to do a piece in the paper about him.”

  “The police think it was our fault.”

  “Surely not.”

  “No one is here when Jamie comes home from school. We both work. He was up at the canal because no one was here to look after him.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “On the buses. I’m a driver, my wife’s a clippie.”

  “I used to be in the office but I went on the buses eleven months ago,” Mrs. Fraser explained. “We wanted nice things for Jamie. The shift work pays more.” She glanced toward a complete set of encyclopedias, as if to lessen the guilt. “He’s excused from swimming. I wrote to the school. He’d never go near the canal. Not even with his da. He’s a timid wee soul.” She had yet to change her tenses. “An’ I wasn’t here to make his tea.”

  Her husband didn’t move. “He near drowned as a bairn. I was fishing and he fell in the loch. Only three he was. Terrified of water ever since. He never goes near the canal on his own. Never. He won’t even cross the river by the footbridge, has to be the big bridge so’s he canny see the water. He was delicate, our Jamie.”

  Their whole lives were devoted to Jamie, McAllister could see that. They told him about his school, his obsession with trains, his stamp collection, small episodes in a barely lived life. They told him of their faraway Hebridean home and their family and them speaking Gaelic amongst themselves. McAllister was gentle, allowing the silences of grief to float between sentences. He listened until they had talked themselves out.

  “May I have a picture of Jamie? Would you mind?”

  “I’ve two of these.” She handed him a picture of a small boy, all bony arms and legs, clutching his mother’s hand beneath a towering tractor. “This summer at the Black Isle Show.” She pointed to a merry-go-round on one side. “He loved that.” Her eyes glazed over at the memory. “Will you find out what happened to my laddie, Mr. McAllister? He’d never ever go up there on his own.”

  McAllister had seen grief; as a cub reporter sent on similar interviews, as a war correspondent in Spain, as a crime reporter in Glasgow. And grief had consumed his own mother.

  “His friends, tell me about his friends.”

  They looked at each other in bewilderment.

  “I don’t know about that. . . .” The woman looked away. “He liked his own company.” She couldn’t look at McAllister. “He didn’t mind being by himself.” She gestured to a train set beneath the table. “We had to work so much. Buses run on Sundays too so he had to stop going to Sunday school. . . .” The shadow of guilt hung over her like a cloud darkening an already gloomy sky, becoming tears that dripped onto her cardigan, making no marks in the Fair Isle pattern. “We just wanted the best.”

  McAllister realized he had stepped into a well-worn argument. Breaking the Sabbath observance must have been a huge step for them, adding to their guilt immeasurably. Her husband stood. He had had enough.

  “Many bairns his age were already working when I was a boy.” He glared at his wife. “Well able to look out for themselves.” Then, looking down at the carpet, he added in desperate justification, as though the sin had already been flung in their faces, “It doesn’t matter what the kirk says about Sundays, you have to look after your family first.”

  It was time to go, McAllister knew. Stages of grief, like stations of the cross, were a ritual. There was no need for him to hear of their innermost fears, their self-recrimination and rehashed arguments and all the other stages of grief that loss of their only son would surely bring. All this he knew only too well.

  Walking gingerly on the wet cobbles, down the narrow street, back to the office, a thin mist shrouding him, he hunched his shoulders and pulled down his hat against rain and melancholy and the knowledge that Jamie’s parents had now entered the realm of the half people—parents who bury a child.

  Rob decided that a motorbike was essential to life as a star reporter. His mother’s respectable gray Wolseley was a woman’s car; he couldn’t keep borrowing it.

  “I’ll be twenty-one next year”—as though that made him an adult—“I’ll buy the bike myself,” he told his parents, and gave a solemn promise to never drive with a drink in him and never to use the bike if there was even a hint of black ice. They capitulated.

  Saturday was a half day at the Highland Gazette, but not for part-timer Joanne. She had Fridays and Saturdays off and was usually scrubbing floors, catching up on the washing, weeding the vegetables or plucking a chicken for the Sunday dinner at this time of the week. This morning, however, she was at the office early to meet Rob, who was off to chase the story of the missing sailor—at least that’s what he told Don. But first, they were hoping to buy a motorbike. And it was Don, Rob reasoned, who had taught him to never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

  Joanne knew about motorbikes. She’d been a dispatch rider in the uncertain days of 1944. She knew a surprising amount about the internal combustion engine.

  “The most important thing is—”

  “Carry a spare spark plug! I know,” said Rob.

  They drove to the outskirts of the town. ’Round the back of the bungalow belonging to an usher at the magistrates’ court gleamed a red Triumph 650. Rob walked around it a few times admiring the color. Trying to look knowledgeable, he sat on it, barely hiding his longing.

  “Hop on the back, I’ll take ye for a drive,” the owner offered.

  “Could Joanne take it out? She’s the friend I was telling you about. The one from the army.”

  “You niver said anything about your soldier friend being a lassie.”

  Joanne quickly launched into a technical spiel, asking all the right questions about cylinders, carburetor, power-to-weight ratio, then got down on her haunches to inspect the engine. Rob fooled around with the usher’s three children in the back garden, staying well clear of the discussions. Then they mounted the bike, Joanne driving, heading out toward Culloden to see how it handled the hills and bends.