A Double Death on the Black Isle Page 8

  He found a spot, risked a few shots. He moved farther back, took a few more frames looking up the cliff to the path above. Worried that the fine spray from the falls would penetrate his cameras, he repacked them into his schoolbag and picked his way back up. He climbed mostly on all fours until he reached the better track above. Panting, he stopped; a few more shots into the gorge below, he decided.

  He leaned against the stone cliff to steady himself, framing the shot. “Blast it!” Hec was not happy. “Thon rubbish in the pool spoils it.”

  With no thoughts of falling, he squeezed between a bush and a rock and the sheer drop. He took his time. One shot deep into the abyss, one shot, framed through fern and branches, up to the top of the falls. The rubbish was no longer visible so he took three more frames down into the falls.

  With the sun beginning to penetrate the trees and the ferns, he knew he had at last captured the depth and the height and the menace of the Falls of Foyers.

  Back at the car, he dried his cameras with a chammy leather, then stowed the camera bag on the floor of the backseat, where it joined wellie boots, a coat, a dog blanket, fish and chip wrappings, half a dozen copies of the first edition of the new Gazette featuring his first-ever published photograph if you didn’t count school exhibitions, and a watering can.

  Tootling along the road back to town, he was grinning, well pleased with his morning.

  Once home he developed the films. As the images slowly emerged from the chemical elixir, he felt a pleasure he could not put a name to but a pleasure he recognized. They were not newspaper shots—there were no people in them—but these were good. Wee Hec grinned so wide his gums were showing.

  Rob walked into the reporters’ room. He had slept through the May Day dawn. Joanne was on the phone.

  “Yes.” She held her hand to her lips to silence Rob. “Yes, I know the picture you mean, with the person running away from the fire. Really? You do? Can you give me his name? Really? Can I have your name? Can’t you tell me who he is? I’ll say it was an anonymous tip-off. Hello, hello . . .” She was left with the dial tone.

  “Rob . . .” She started. The phone went again. “Gazette.”

  McAllister walked in the door and bellowed at Rob. “What’s this about you joining the Aberdeen paper? I’ve had someone on the line asking for a reference.”

  “I haven’t made a decision.” Rob sat staring at his typewriter, trying to not look guilty.

  “I can’t believe you went behind my back.” McAllister was waving his cigarette; Rob was ducking the flying ash.

  “I was going to tell you when I’d made a decision.” Rob was furious at the Press & Journal for contacting McAllister without warning him first.

  “Maybe I’ll have to decide for you.” McAllister pointed a nicotine-stained forefinger at Rob. “I can’t abide disloyalty.”

  “McAllister,” Joanne interrupted, “someone phoned in a tip about the person in the photo on the front page, but wouldn’t give their name.”

  “Fine. Fine. Later.” He flapped his hands as though he was shooing hens from the vegetable garden.

  She shrugged a well-I-did-tell-you look, and turned her back on the both of them. This was not a discussion she wanted any part of.

  “I couldn’t talk to you about it.” Rob was near shouting. “You would’ve gone mental, like you’re doing now.”

  The phone rang again. Joanne picked it up, listened, and at first she couldn’t make sense of her mother-in-law. “Pardon? Fraser Munro? Yes. What? Oh no! Poor Mrs. Munro! Yes. We’ll talk later.” She put down the phone. “McAllister.”

  “I thought you were keen to be part of the new Gazette.” McAllister was still loud, still furious, still smoking like a kipper factory.

  Rob was saying nothing, staring at a blank sheet of copy paper. Joanne was wondering if they had finished; she wanted to speak to McAllister. The phone went again. It was Patricia.

  “Finish your cadetship here,” McAllister was saying to Rob, “then I’ll help you in the next step in your career. If you don’t keep going behind my back that is.”

  Joanne was half listening to the argument and half listening to Patricia.

  “I didn’t.” Rob stood. “There’s no use talking to you sometimes.” McAllister did not intimidate him and he had had enough.

  Patricia’s voice was faint, but her tone was calm.

  “Patricia. Say that again!” As Joanne listened, her forehead wrinkled between her brows. Something made Rob stop to watch, McAllister too. They waited and the office was quiet as though someone had said “shoosh!”

  “Where are you? Right. Of course. Call me whenever you need me.” Joanne put the phone down. She turned to look first at Rob, then at McAllister.

  “If you two have finished with the argy-bargy, I have some news.”

  Rob grinned. McAllister grinned back at him, then at her. In that instant, she thought, That McAllister’s a lovely looking man.

  They waited. She looked at the ceiling as though heaven would help her arrange her thoughts.

  “I’ve had a tip-off about the person who threw the petrol bomb. . . .” she started.

  “Great!” McAllister was pleased.

  “One of the farmhands on the Ord Mackenzie estate has died, maybe been killed. . . .”

  “Really?” Rob asked. “Who?”

  “And Patricia’s husband, Sandy Skinner, fell into the Falls of Foyers. He’s dead.”

  Wee Hec burst in the door, waving some prints. “Wait till you see the pictures I took the day. Magic.”

  Hec was completely ignored. But he was used to that.

  SEVEN

  McAllister sensed not to say it to Joanne, but it was another stroke of luck that the news came in before deadline and another coup for the Gazette. He gave Rob and Joanne and himself half an hour to make phone calls and called a news meeting for twelve.

  “Hec, go to the Market Bar and fetch Mr. McLeod.”

  “They won’t let me in.” Hec was sulking in a corner, still put out that no one was interested in his pictures.

  “Hector!” McAllister shouted.

  When Hec found Don, he had to put up with his annoyance too. Don had just ordered a pint and could only swallow half of it before Hec’s bleating forced him to leave.

  Joanne made phone calls to Achnafern farm—no reply, to her mother-in-law—Mrs. Ross knew only that Fraser Munro was dead.

  Rob called the police station—no statement was forthcoming. He called the procurator fiscal’s office—the same.

  McAllister started the meeting.

  “No one looked at my pictures.” Hector was petulant.

  “Shut up, Hec,” Don said, absentmindedly doodling on his spiral-bound notebook, a small, lined one from Woolworth’s that fit into his jacket pocket. He was drawing prison bars.

  “Let’s start with the major news—Sandy Skinner. Joanne?”

  “Can I go over everything from the beginning? There is so much happening.”

  “Fine.”

  She looked around, surprised that everyone was listening, waiting, as though her information and opinion mattered. She paused, looked at her notes and, even though she was shaken by all the news, tried to be as professional as possible.

  “First there was the anonymous call about the figure in the picture on last week’s front page. The person calling said he knew who it was. ‘Ask Sandy Skinner,’ he said, ‘he knows who threw the petrol bomb.’”

  She paused, no one interrupted.

  “Next, Mrs. Ross, my mother-in-law, called to tell me Fraser Munro, who is the son of the Ord Mackenzie’s housekeeper and whose father, Mr. Alistair Munro, is the foreman on the estate, was found dead this morning. My mother-in-law got the impression the death may not have been an accident.”

  She looked around. Everyone was making notes, waiting.

  “Lastly, Patricia Ord Mackenzie, sorry, Skinner.” Joanne remembered her annoyance when she picked up the phone to yet another call from Patricia. “She sai
d there had been a terrible tragedy and her husband, Sandy Skinner, was dead.”

  “You’ll never believe this,” Patricia had announced, “but Sandy fell over the Falls of Foyers. He’s dead. It is a terrible tragedy, I know, but accidents happen.”

  What a cliché, had been Joanne’s immediate thought, Don would never let that through.

  “Poor soul,” said Mrs. Smart quietly, bowing her head in respect for the dead. She was the only one in the room thinking of Patricia, not of a front-page story.

  “A body in the pool would’ve made a great picture.”

  “Shut up, Hec,” McAllister told him. “Joanne, anything else?”

  “Patricia called Angus McLean, and said she was on her way to the McLean house.”

  “What for?” Don looked mildly surprised at this information.

  “People like Patricia get their solicitor to do every little thing.” Rob knew from years of phone calls and summonses to his father—after hours, during meals—some clients expected their solicitor to drop everything and obey orders.

  “Aye, but why your father’s house, why no I’m the police station?” Don answered his own question. “I suppose being an Ord Mackenzie gets you different treatment.”

  “With Sandy gone, the tip-off about the person in Hec’s picture is dead in the water,” Rob said.

  “We’ll make a subeditor of you yet lad,” Don nodded approval.

  “The death of Fraser Munro will have to be a plain story at this stage, facts only,” McAllister decided. “The same with Sandy Skinner unless there is any more information before deadline.”

  “Never mind, two deaths, same day, same farm, and the day before deadline. Great.” Don started scribbling, trying to work it all into one short, sharp headline.

  Everyone at the Gazette was aware of that feeling that sometimes enveloped a newsroom, the air charged as before a thunderstorm. Events were in motion, and they were the hunters after the story.

  Rob and Joanne left to search for more information, Hector hurried off to bring a selection of photos for the front page, McAllister and Don went to the editor’s office.

  “Good timing, these stories.” Don lit a cigarette, McAllister likewise.

  “Aye.” McAllister let out the first draw of cigarette smoke. “As usual, it’s either feast or famine for the Gazette.”

  “You’re not your usual cantankerous but in charge self.”

  “I’ve things on my mind.”

  “Aye, and it’s getting obvious you fancy the lassie. So do something or forget it. But don’t be like me and spend thirty years doing nothing.”

  “I take it you’re attempting to give me advice on my personal life.”

  “If you have one, outside of books and jazz and the weird films you like.”

  “Don, it’s none of your business.” McAllister was annoyed, and when annoyed, his voice would develop a growl, his lips would compress. When Don saw the warning signs, he would sometimes drop the subject, sometimes not.

  “You’re right, it’s not my business—except when it interferes with the good running of this newspaper.”

  “She’s married.”

  That made Don laugh. McAllister had the good grace to smile at himself.

  “You could always arrange an accident,” Don suggested. “It seems to be the favorable way out.”

  “Patricia Ord Mackenzie?”

  “Who knows? What we do have are two deaths—same day, same farm. Also an anonymous phone call. Joanne is on the inside in both cases.”

  “Aye, but can she do it? It’s a big story, she has no experience.” McAllister was leaning, elbows on the table, hands clasped, thinking through the conundrum. “I get the feeling Patricia Ord Mackenzie is using Joanne.”

  “It could be an opportunity for her to learn how to be a cold, hard-bitten member of the press corps.”

  “Like you and me.”

  “Aye,” Don agreed, “and my Highland instinct tells me these stories will run for a whiley, so we’ll all be needed to join the dots.”

  The tall skinny editor and the short round deputy editor, one a Highlander, one a Glaswegian, entirely different in age, shape, education, opinions, shared one thing—a lust for the adrenaline of a newspaper.

  The predawn start to the day and the morning’s frantic events left Joanne sleepy and hungry and with no energy to cycle home for lunch. She bought a sandwich—a real extravagance for her—then walked up to the castle. She usually found solace sitting on a bench, watching the clouds and the river float past. Not today. Sandy Skinner’s accident, Patricia’s demands, the fear in her mother-in-law’s voice, and her own fear that her new job was beyond her, were all jostling for attention.

  Funny that, she thought, how this morning’s two hours of happiness are so quickly wiped out by thirty minutes of anxiety.

  She yawned. She stood. She stretched her arms wide. She rolled her shoulders. She walked back to the office, walked up the stairs, hadn’t time to take off her coat before the phone rang.

  “Gazette.” There was a pause on the line. “Patricia, I’ve been worried about you. Are you all right? What’s happening? Where are you?”

  “At the McLeans’ house.” Patricia sounded far away, as though she were calling from another country.

  “At my house,” Rob said as he came in.

  “Of course I wouldn’t mind,” Joanne reassured Patricia. “I’ll do it later this afternoon. You look after yourself. Bye.”

  “She has no need to look after herself,” Rob told Joanne. “She has everyone else looking after her.”

  “Who does?” McAllister came in.

  “Patricia, the grieving widow,” Rob told him. “She wanted me to bring the farm Land Rover into town. She left it at the Dores Inn after the accident.”

  There was something in the way Rob said accident, something in the way he waggled his head when he referred to Patricia that Joanne didn’t like. “I told Madame Ord Mackenzie that I had work to do,” he continued, “but I bet she’s inveigled Joanne into doing it.”

  “I offered,” Joanne fibbed, although she had no idea how she could get to Dores and back and still be in time for the girls coming home from school.

  “Both of you go now,” McAllister said. “Joanne, when you’re there, see if you can interview the landlady. Rob, you talk to the men who found the body. Off with you, I need the stories by the end of the day.”

  Joanne enjoyed the ride to Dores on the back of Rob’s bike. For a short while, the shadows of uncertainty were blown away.

  The road to the south side of Loch Ness followed the river out of town for a mile. It was a leafy journey through bright-green new growth and fern and roadside wildflowers. The trip was only fifteen miles, and she enjoyed every twist and turn. It won’t be such a nice journey back, she thought, driving an unsprung Land Rover instead of being a passenger on a shiny, red Triumph.

  At the small whitewashed inn, Joanne found the landlady and asked her if she would talk to the Gazette. The woman agreed, but she was in such a state of nerves, nothing she said made sense.

  “It was terrible. That poor woman. On their honeymoon. The police. Terrible.” The landlady spoke in statements, not joined-up conversation, and very little of what she said constituted a usable quote.

  “She had enough sense to make me pay for Patricia’s phone calls though,” Joanne told Rob when they were back in the office, writing up their notes. “Since Dores is out of town, it came to four trunk calls. I can’t exactly ask Patricia for my money back.”

  At first, the landlady had wanted payment for three calls.

  “I know it was an emergency, but I have a business to run,” the woman told Joanne. Then she remembered that Patricia had made a longer trunk call before she and Sandy had set off on the road to Foyers.

  “The woman paid for their tea, but no the calls, so I’ll have to charge ten shillings altogether.”

  Joanne used the last of her week’s housekeeping money.

  Rob w
as equally frustrated. He went out to the edge of the loch to talk to the man who had retrieved the body from the falls. He could barely get a word out of the man.

  “Aye” was all that the landlady’s husband said to everything. Then he would step back, cast his rod, and continue staring out across Loch Ness.

  “When did you hear about the accident?” Rob started.

  The man shrugged.

  “How did you retrieve the body?”

  The man said nothing, staring at the water.

  “He was dead when you got to him?”

  “Aye.” Another cast into the loch.

  “So you brought him back here?”

  “Aye.”

  “You didn’t wait for the police to arrive before fishing out the body?”

  That elicited a glare from the fisherman.

  It was only later in the newsroom, when he and Joanne were exchanging stories, that Rob remembered.

  “You know, the landlady’s husband was no fisherman. Even I know it was the wrong type of rod for Loch Ness. I don’t even know if there are fish in Loch Ness, the monster has probably eaten everything.”

  “He was probably trying to escape from his wife,” she said. “She babbles on like a burn when the snow’s melted, and makes as much sense.”

  “That would explain why the man only grunts and shrugs.”

  “Driving that rattletrap was really uncomfortable. You should have let me take the bike.”

  “Someone from the farm should have picked up the Land Rover. But I suppose it was too much for Patricia to think of that.”

  “Rob McLean.” Joanne leaned over and cuffed him on the shoulder, “Patricia’s husband had just died. . . . And Fraser Munro . . .”

  They looked at each other.

  “As Don pointed out, two men from Achnafern Estate on the Black Isle died on the same day.” Rob started to bang out the words on his typewriter. “Maybe they will be buried on the same day too. It’s a great story.” He grinned at Joanne.

  She had to agree. Great story.

  Mid-afternoon, and Detective Inspector Dunne was about to begin the formal interview with Patricia at the police station.