A Double Death on the Black Isle Page 7

  “No, he saw me and I saw him, so I hid.”

  “He only wanted to take your statement about what you saw.”

  “Why me? There were plenty other folk there. He’s always picking on me.”

  The Inspector tried again. “You saw someone running away from the fire?”

  “No, I never.”

  “But I thought you did.”

  “I never.”

  “Hector.” McAllister knew it was time to intervene.

  “What? Rob found this picture. There is somebody running. But how was I to know they wis running away from the fire? Maybe they wis going to the lock keeper’s house, or the swing bridge on the railway line ’cos the other bridge was closed—I mean open. Maybe they wis late for work, maybe . . .”

  “You took his picture,” Inspector Dunne said.

  “No, I never.”

  “You took a picture and in the picture was a man running. . . .”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I’m not sure he wis a man.”

  “Hector.” McAllister nudged him.

  “I was taking pictures of the fire. The person happened to be there. I happened to take this photo. I didn’t pay any heed ’cos I was that busy taking that many shots. Rob saw the picture. Then Mr. McAllister told me I had to come here and show it to you. So I’m here.”

  McAllister guessed where the conversation might lead. “I apologize for not getting this photo to you sooner,” he spoke to DI Dunne in a formal, official manner. “We only found out about its existence today. The Highland Gazette would never withhold evidence.”

  “Apology accepted,” DI Dunne said. “I’m glad you didn’t go ahead and publish before showing it to me.”

  No, thought McAllister, I won’t tell him that I was sorely tempted. Better to keep on the good side of the police.

  “Hector, thank you for providing the photographs.” DI Dunne was once more the formal policeman. “But in future, if you have anything that will help us in our inquiries, try to get it to us sooner rather than later.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hector was so relieved he jumped off his chair and was out the door before McAllister or the inspector could say another word.

  As he walked back to the office, McAllister thought of the new detective inspector with respect, admiration even; how the man refrained from reaching across the desk, grabbing Hec by the neck, and throttling him, he would never know.

  McAllister was about to leave for the day when his phone rang.

  “McAllister.”

  “Angus McLean here.”

  McAllister knew from the tone that this was a formal call.

  “The Ord Mackenzie family and Achnafern Estate on the Black Isle are my clients,” Mr. McLean explained.

  “Yes.”

  “I am giving you the courtesy of a call before I write to you on behalf of Mrs. Alexander Skinner née Ord Mackenzie.”

  “And?”

  “She asks that you stop publishing articles about a private family matter. If you do not do so, she will be forced to take further steps.”

  “A fishing boat set alight by a Molotov cocktail, in a public waterway—namely the canal—attended to by the fire brigade and the police and subject to an inquiry by the procurator fiscal, is hardly a private family matter.”

  “I’ve told her that.”

  “Thank you, Mr. McLean, I will note that you called and I will make sure that we do not publish any story that could be deemed as private family business.”

  “Thank you. I will draft a letter accordingly.”

  “Yes.” McAllister knew the formalities were over and dropped into the not-for-publication, friendship mode, “But Angus, just so you know, I have no intension of being bullied by any member of the Ord Mackenzie clan.”

  “Quite so.”

  McAllister could hear the smile in the solicitor’s voice as they said their good-byes.

  Threaten all you want, Mrs. Skinner née Ord Mackenzie, McAllister thought, but your husband’s affairs will be on the front page of the next edition and there is nothing you can do about it.

  SIX

  Chiara Kowalski née Corelli was the one person with whom Joanne felt she could completely be herself.

  “We’re both outsiders,” Joanne joked. “I may be Scottish, but I could live my whole life here and I’d still be an outsider.”

  Not much younger than Joanne, Chiara had come to the town with her aunt to join her father, Gino Corelli. He, as well as hundreds of other men released from prisoner-of-war camps throughout Scotland, had decided to make this country home.

  Gino Corelli started with a mobile fish and chip van, and now his café and chip shop was as much a part of the town’s landscape as the castle.

  Living in the north was a mixed blessing for the Italians. Highland regiments had served in Messina, Sicily, at the battle for Monte Cassino, and many other skirmishes on the long march through Italy. Flesh wounds healed, but memories didn’t. Many remembered all too well that Italy had been on the side of the Germans initially. Joanne’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Ross, was one. Being called a turncoat was one of the milder taunts Gino had had to put up with.

  But Italians had been a presence in Scotland for centuries, contributing to the life of the community with not just cafés; they were citizens as much as any native-born Scot. Then the war came. Men were interned in freezing barracks in desolate parts of the countryside, leaving the women and children to run the businesses. When the war ended, they remained and rebuilt their lives. Keeping to themselves mostly, the bright ice-cream parlors, the cafés, the chip shops, and vans with “O Sole Mio” jingles were welcome—as long as no one mentioned the war.

  Chiara had been a teenager when she and her aunt had left Italy to join her father. After a journey that she never spoke about, through a desecrated Europe, they were reunited; she attended the local convent school, studied, made friends, and married another of the war’s casualties—a Polish aristocrat who, along with thousands of his compatriots, had escaped in the weeks before the occupation.

  Joanne remembered a February evening in the Corelli home, when the wind was fierce outside, the curtains shifting as it penetrated invisible cracks around the window frames. Chiara put another log on the fire, complaining that she’d never been so cold.

  “My darling,” Peter had said to his now wife, “you have no idea of real cold. Before I came to Scotland, I was used to freezing Baltic winds, but a winter in the Hebrides showed me what real cold is.”

  Peter Kowalski had survived both the war and the Scottish winter of 1944–45 flying over the Atlantic from the island of Benbecula with the “Land of Silesia” Squadron of the Polish Air Force, then on Coastal Command.

  Joanne loved hearing the stories of the Corelli and Kowalski families. She loved hearing there was a big world out there, a world she knew she would never know. But most of all she knew that Chiara and her family cared for her, and their affection and laughter and teasing came without strings.

  Unlike Patricia, Joanne sometimes thought.

  The café down by the river was full when Joanne arrived. The lunchtime crowd was tucking into sandwiches and tea with the occasional daring customer trying something more adventurous. Like spaghetti.

  “Some Scots say they don’t like Italians, but they like our cafés,” Chiara had told Joanne.

  The friends were settled in their favorite window seat with a view of the castle and the bridge.

  “Have you heard from Bill?” Chiara was the only person who ever asked Joanne about her husband.

  “We’ve been separated nearly four months,” Joanne started slowly, thinking through her situation. Why she hadn’t seen or heard from Bill Ross puzzled her as much as it puzzled Chiara. “And I haven’t seen him once.”

  “Has he seen the girls?”

  “He saw them at their grandparents’.” Joanne was reluctant to say more, even to Chiara. She knew her husband was not really interested in the children, or perhaps it
was that he was not interested in daughters, and she didn’t want to say, but the longer he stayed away, the happier she was.

  Chiara noticed the way her friend was fiddling with the salt-shaker as she talked. It was as though Joanne thought that in avoiding talking about her husband, she might be able to forget his existence. But Chiara knew he was not a man to let his wife leave without taking revenge. She also knew when to change the subject.

  “So, tell me more about May Day in Scotland,” Chiara asked. “What’s all this about dancing around a phallic object for fertility?”

  “I was only teasing.” Joanne looked around to see if anyone had overheard her friend. “You don’t really believe all those May Day superstitions, do you?”

  “Of course, I’m from good old Italian peasant stock.” Chiara pulled back her thick, black hair so it was tight against her skull and did an impression of an ancient crone. “No,” she laughed and shook her hair so it tumbled in a thick, black curtain over her shoulders. “In southern Italy where we come from, superstition is deeper than even the Church. The fertility rites over there predate the Romans. Peter and I so want a baby that I’ll try anything.”

  “How long have you been married? Six months? Just keep on trying is my advice.”

  “Oh, we do that all right.”

  Gino looked through the steam of the coffee machine at the sound of laughter coming from the window table. He beamed at his daughter and her friend.

  Half past four o’clock the next morning was early for Joanne and Chiara and very early for the girls. Chiara drove her father’s fourthhand but beloved Wolseley, the leather seats making a comfortable bed for the children. Chiara’s Aunt Lita had decided to join them and she sat in the middle of the backseat, with Annie snuggled against her on one side, Jean’s head cradled on her lap on the other.

  Faint whispers of grey along the horizon forecast dawn. The pearly light was soon lost as the car descended to the river valley. They followed the murmur of the fast-flowing water towards the site of the ancient burial mounds and standing stones.

  The grove of oak, beech, rowan, and birch sighed expectantly, waiting for the arrival of the sun. The larch and pine joined in with a seashore sound. The river running over gravel and stone added darker notes. Distant bleating of sheep added higher notes. With a caw or twenty, the rooks awoke. The blackbirds and thrush and tits and other invisible hedgerow birds sang the high-register trills, arpeggios, and soprano solos until the glade echoed with the sound of the dawn chorus.

  The women and girls had to walk a little from the road along a well-trodden pathway leading to the stones. The smell from late hawthorn was not as strong as it would be if the sun was up. Wild garlic was another smell just distinguishable amongst the scent of vegetation. The bluebells were not yet out, the primrose not yet open, the pink blooms of Herb Robert were plentiful, and Joanne knew that in summer this woodland hedgerow would be thick with dog roses.

  The children were nervous, sensing the night creatures departing with the dawn, sensing the spirits that never left, day or night, not quite knowing why they were here or what to do.

  “Wash our faces in the morning dew,” Joanne whispered through the silence. It almost seemed sacrilegious to talk in such a setting. This grove of the ancients is a natural cathedral, she thought, far more sacred than any church.

  The children looked around, remembering the ritual from previous years. “Wash our faces in the morning dew, the morning dew, so early in the morning,” Annie started and Jean joined in.

  “Will it make me beautiful, Mum?” Wee Jean asked.

  “You’re beautiful already,” her Aunty Chiara told her as they gathered dew in their cupped hands to wash their faces.

  The girls galloped around the ring of standing stones, shrieking in sheer exhilaration. The women went in different directions on private meanders.

  I want that man out of my life, Joanne made the silent wish.

  Crouching down, she wet her hands with soft grassy glittered in the rising sunlight dew, and with baptismal reverence she again washed her face and combed her hair.

  Chiara too made her own ritual.

  “A baby. A new life. For my Peter and my father,” she half-prayed, half-wished, walking round and round the biggest standing stone.

  Aunt Lita walked slowly, seemingly aimless, in and out of the prehistoric stone circle. Nothing was heard from her except a curious rising and falling toneless mumble. She was remembering other May Day rituals; the deep thread of ancient rites had not all been obliterated by the Church. She remembered family, and named them; friends and neighbors, and named them; the village, the hills, the countryside of her birth, she named them. Much had been destroyed. Orchards in ruins. Thousand-year-old olive groves up in smoke. Wineries devastated. Many buried without ceremony. Lita gave thanks, ritually listing her blessings. She did not ask for much. She hoped for another year of health and contentment. She would never tempt fate to ask for more. Survival was enough.

  “Look at me,” Annie cried. She stood on the top of the long, rounded burial mound, arms stretched out wide, silhouetted against the rising sun, framed in a halo of light. Instinctively, she knew this was the moment. Calling out in a laughing but solemn voice the young girl pronounced the blessing.

  “Thank you for the sun and for this morning.”

  To her delight her mother repeated the refrain. “Thank you for the sun and this morning.”

  Her Aunty Chiara and Aunt Lita joined in and whooping and cheering and jumping and running, the five friends shouted in variations of the chant.

  “Thank you, sun. Thank you, morning.” Aunt Lita repeated the blessing in Italian. Eventually she brought them to heel with a “Who’s for breakfast?”

  They picnicked on a flat stone in a chilly but sunny corner of the woods. Breads and hams and cheeses and sweet pastries were all the more tasty for the early hour, the outdoor setting and the conspiracy of friends. Tired, content, satisfied, and about to face a day at school or at work or in the kitchen, they packed up and returned to the car, all five of them, knowing that this was a May Day to cherish.

  On the drive back to town, Chiara and Joanne agreed to have coffee before starting work. The girls could walk to school.

  Driving across the bridge, Chiara slowed the car at the narrow passage between the sandstone pillars that anchored the suspension cables. Joanne was dozing and didn’t notice the car until it had passed. She looked back.

  “That was Mrs. Ord Mackenzie’s car,” Joanne said.

  “Really?” Chiara had not been paying attention. Besides, she only knew of Mrs. Ord Mackenzie from Joanne’s stories.

  “Maybe not,” Joanne yawned. “Those Rovers are common enough cars.”

  “Aye, if you can afford one,” Chiara replied.

  If you can afford one. . . . The reminder of the difference in status between Joanne and her oldest friend jolted her back to a memory that had her burning in shame—then and now.

  “What’s this?” A seven-year-old Patricia had shouted. “Morag Gillespie? That’s not your name.”

  Joanne knew her parents bought her school uniform secondhand, she knew the name of the previous owner was written in indelible ink on the blazer label—and she had thought nothing of it.

  “Can’t your parents afford a new blazer?” Patricia had asked, astonished at the idea.

  It was then Joanne discovered exactly what being a “scholarship girl” meant. It was then that Joanne knew, for the first time ever, that in spite of her father being a minister of the Church of Scotland, they were indeed poor.

  What was worse, Patricia knew it too, and although she never teased her new friend, her sympathy for the “poor girl” made Joanne feel worse.

  Hector had it all wrong. That often happened to him, as he gleaned most of his misinformation by listening in on other people’s conversations. Phone calls and even letters did not escape his curiosity. He was a person who had no life of his own. He had his photography. He had his gr
anny and his little sister. That was it, his life. Now he had his job.

  “Dancing in the May Day dew” was what he had overheard Joanne say. When was obvious. Where was the problem.

  He asked Rob as discreetly as he could.

  “Those strange folk at Boleskine House near Foyers will probably dance naked in the May Day dew,” Rob told him.

  Hector believed him, so he drove to Foyers, hoping for an early-morning rendezvous with white witches or druids or some such nutters, as he thought of them.

  A May Day ceremony, naked, preferably, but robes and ritual would do, Hec thought.

  He waited. And waited. By seven he gave up. Nothing stirred, except for the usual countryside busyness. He was not disappointed. Hector never had expectations. He never had disappointments. But a journey was a journey, and if he wanted petrol money from Mrs. Smart, he needed some pictures. He shot off a reel of film in the graveyard. He went down through the village to the edge of the Loch Ness to take more pictures. He waited—no monster about this morning. He started back to town, then decided to stop and photograph the lower part of the Falls of Foyers.

  The burn was full, the water falling in a thick, heavy rush.

  “Magic,” he said, as he watched swirling, misty rainbows dance above the breaking water. It’ll be even better in the main fall.

  He was careful walking down the muddy track, sheltering his cameras under his coat. He stopped at the viewing point halfway down. It was nothing more than an outcrop of rock protruding out into the void. The spume from the main fall was fierce. Too wet for cameras, Hec decided, and continued down.

  The path disappeared. There was a way down, but it was little more than a sheep track. Creeping on in a crablike motion, sometimes on all fours, clutching at rocks and ferns and overhanging tree trunks, Hec reached the bottom. The roar was loud, and louder the lower he went. It was worth it. The fall of water was spectacular. Hector wasn’t sure, but he seemed to remember the drop was around a hundred and forty feet; it certainly looked it.