A Double Death on the Black Isle Read online

  He was not in awe of Patricia Ord Mackenzie. At least he didn’t think he was. He had allowed the initial interview to be held at the house of Angus McLean, the solicitor, because Patricia was pregnant. It had nothing to do with her father’s friendship with the chief constable.

  “We will be as brief as we can, Mrs. Skinner, but I need to cover all the details so I can finish my report to the procurator fiscal.”

  Patricia had introduced herself as Ord Mackenzie. The inspector put that down to grief and addressed her as Mrs. Skinner.

  “Of course. And I’d like the formalities over and done with so I can go home.”

  “You and your husband left home early.”

  She gave a watery smile, her nose red. But her eyes seemed untroubled. Or perhaps it was the light. “We went through this earlier.”

  “Please bear with me, you were distressed. The sooner I get the sequence of events clear, the sooner the procurator fiscal can make his recommendation to the fatal accident inquiry.”

  And I need answers before you retreat to the safety of your mother, father, solicitor, chief constable, and family name, he thought.

  “Of course. Sorry.” She brought her handkerchief up to her eyes.

  WPC Ann McPherson was watching Patricia’s every move, as a good police officer should, she told herself, and couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all a performance.

  “We left before dawn.” Patricia spoke slowly, making it easy for Ann and DI Dunne to make notes. “We were taking a delayed honeymoon. Being May Day, we stopped at the Clootie Well on the Black Isle. Sandy’s idea.”

  “There were people there who saw you?”

  “Yes. But no one I know.” Patricia stopped. Sniffed. Started again. “We drove to town then, along the south side of the river towards Loch Ness. We stopped at the Dores Inn for tea, as I was feeling sick. After we left, we stopped near the Falls of Foyers because I was sick again. Sandy said since we were there anyway, he’d go and look at the Falls—he’d never seen them before.”

  He went to look at the Falls because we’d been fighting and he couldn’t stand the sight and sound of my retching, Patricia remembered. But she was not going to mention that to anyone.

  “I stayed in the car. I’m in a delicate condition, you know.” She smiled at him.

  Inspector Dunne was annoyed by the way she was trying to gain sympathy and ignored this.

  “When he didn’t return, what did you do?”

  “I told you, I went down the path, but only a few yards—it was so slippery and dangerous. So I went back and waited nearly an hour. By then, I was really worried, so I drove to Dores.”

  “Why not get help in Foyers? Dores is a much longer drive.”

  “I wasn’t thinking clearly.” Patricia put a hand on her forehead. “I’m sorry. Could I have a glass of water, please?”

  “Would you like some tea?” Ann McPherson offered.

  “Oh, no,” Patricia replied. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  “You drove back to the Dores Inn, not to Foyers, which is nearer,” Inspector Dunne continued.

  “I panicked. I had no idea in which direction I was driving.”

  “What time did you arrive there?”

  “I’m not sure. The people at the Inn will know. I told them I was worried, so the landlady’s husband and another man went off to look for Sandy. When they came back, they told me Sandy was dead. He’d fallen into the falls, they said, and they found him in the pool at the bottom. He was caught up in a fallen tree.”

  Good job too, they had told her, otherwise he might have been swept into the loch and may not have been found for weeks, if ever.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Skinner. I will let you know when we need to speak to you again.” DI Dunne was polite and left no doubt as to who was in charge.

  When they were alone the inspector asked, “Well, WPC McPherson, what do you think?”

  She was startled. Never before, in five years as a policewoman, had any of her superiors asked her for her opinion.

  “I . . .”

  “How did she seem to you?”

  “Calm, no, in charge.”

  “I expect that’s her upbringing.”

  “Yes.” Ann McPherson looked at her notes. “I’m not sure I got the time sequence right.”

  “No. I don’t think Patricia Ord Mackenzie, as she prefers to be known, did either.” DI Dunne waited, wanting to hear more.

  The policewoman hesitated, not sure if she should venture the obvious question, then asked, “Why did she drive all the way back to Dores, probably twenty minutes away, when Foyers is less than a mile?”

  “Yes. That is the question, isn’t it?” His grey eyes looked thoughtful. “So far, there is only one witness—the widow. Unless anyone comes forward, there is only her version.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “Type up the notes. We’ll talk again later.”

  As she left, Ann felt the thrill of being involved in a real case, not just sent out to comfort the bereaved, break up domestic disputes, and make tea for the lads.

  “He’s treating me like a real policeman.”

  Rob volunteered to babysit her girls so Joanne could visit Patricia. He did not say it, but he was pleased to get out of the house.

  There was an air of jollity when Joanne came into the sitting room. Margaret McLean had been liberal with the gin and tonic, and Patricia was flushed, laughing at some remark of Margaret’s.

  “Look who’s here,” a more than slightly sloshed Patricia greeted her. “Perfect mother and now star reporter as well.”

  “Why thank you,” Joanne laughed and curtsyed. The remark was said jokingly she knew, but it hurt. “How are you? Exhausted, I’m sure.”

  Patricia remembered her manners. “Yes, I am. The reality hasn’t sunk in. And I’ve just been told the news about Fraser Munro. Poor Mrs. M.” She turned to Margaret. “Thank you so much for offering me a bed for the night, I don’t think I could manage the drive home.”

  “Absolutely no need to thank us,” Margaret said. “Anyone would have done the same.”

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” Patricia replied.

  Margaret, who knew Janet Ord Mackenzie, did not contradict her.

  Joanne was not surprised that Mrs. Ord Mackenzie had not come to comfort her daughter, but she was shocked that Patricia had been left to drive herself home.

  I will never judge her harshly again, she vowed.

  When they had been at boarding school, she and Joanne compared parents. It was almost a competition to see which of them had the coldest mother and the most distant father. They swapped stories of epic silences, of disdain and disapproval, and gothic tales of being left alone to sleep in unlit, unheated bedrooms, down dark hallways, far distant from their parents’ rooms. All this for five-year-olds. No wonder they both enjoyed the escape to boarding school.

  “Would you excuse me?” Patricia looked at Joanne. “It’s been a dreadfully long day, I really need to lie down.”

  “Do you need anything?” Joanne asked as she rose to leave.

  “Thanks, Joanne. You’re a true friend. I’m exhausted. I shall sleep like the . . . God! How awful. I was going to say ‘sleep like the dead.’ This is still so unreal.”

  “Of course.”

  “I remind myself of the baby. He needs me. That will get me through. You know, the really terrible part of it all is that I wished Sandy dead—only for a moment or so when he was rowing with Mummy. And now he is.” She stopped, sobbed a strange, dry, deep, half-sob, half-gasp.

  Joanne came over and sat on the sofa next to Patricia, taking her hand, stroking it as she would if Wee Jean had fallen over or if Annie had had a bad dream. Margaret McLean saw it was time to leave the friends to themselves.

  “It took only a few days to discover he was a liar, that he had only married me because he thought he could get his hands on my family’s money. The marriage would have been a nightmare.” Patricia spoke quietly,
her voice flat-tired, emotion-drained. “For years I had been determined not to make the same mistakes as you. Then I found myself in exactly your situation.”

  Joanne couldn’t see the connection, apart from them both being pregnant before the wedding.

  Patricia rambled on. “When I found out you had to get married, I was amazed. You were always so in control. Always so certain of the path your life would take. School, university, you wanted to be a teacher, make a respectable marriage, maybe a wife of the Kirk like your sister. When I heard the news of you marrying beneath you, marrying a soldier, and with a baby on the way, I laughed. I was pleased that you had found a way out. Pleased that you had managed to spit in the eye of all those respectable Presbyterian expectations.”

  Patricia absently picked at a loose thread in the hem of her cardigan.

  “It was a few years before I uncovered what had been happening to you. A bit of gossip here and there made me wonder. Your visits to the emergency ward were not unnoticed. After all, your mother-in-law is from the Black Isle, so there were bound to be whispers. Not that you would ever let on, and we were all too polite to mention it. I’m sorry,” Patricia said, looking closely at her friend. “I should have done more. Been a better friend.”

  Joanne was silent, shocked at her friend’s version of her life.

  “Now my Sandy is dead,” Patricia continued. “I didn’t want that to happen. I really didn’t.” She looked up at Joanne. “I’m too tired even to cry,” she joked. Then the tears came. “Help me through this, Joanne. Help me. Please.”

  Joanne stroked Patricia’s hand, muttered all the soothing sounds she would use to her children, a mix of “there there” and “now now,” and “it will be all be allright,” and she was certain it would be allright, for Patricia.

  EIGHT

  Cycling home from the McLeans’ bungalow under a night sky so thick with stars, she thought they resembled the holes in a kitchen colander. Joanne smiled at such a prosaic comparison.

  Her legs ached, she was brightly awake with tiredness, all she could think about was bed.

  When Joanne arrived home, Rob wheeled his motorbike down the street before starting it. He knew she did not want to alert the neighbors to her late night.

  She was putting out the milk bottles on the step for the predawn delivery when a dark figure standing in the shadow at the side of the doorstep stepped out into the light.

  “Bill!” She jumped, almost dropping the bottles.

  “What the hell have you been up to?”

  She could smell him before she saw him. Her husband.

  “You’ve been drinking,” he snarled, as he stepped forward and she stepped back, grabbing the door for support. “Leaving my bairns with a stranger while you go off with your fancy man. You’re nothing but a common hoor.”

  “Leave me alone.” She slapped him, hard and loud, too outraged to fear the consequences. Breathing whisky and hatred, he grabbed her wrists, squeezing so tight she twisted in pain.

  “You hit me, Bill, and I will go to the police. I told you before. I mean it.” She tried to control her voice, not to show fear.

  “You’re my wife. I can do what I like.”

  And with that, he let go of her hands and punched her hard in the stomach. She doubled up, vomiting on the grass. He stood over her, kicking with a vicious malice, kicking her ribs, her back, her thighs. He couldn’t stop. She couldn’t find the breath to scream. A dog started to bark. The neighbors’ porch light came on.

  “Is everything all right, Joanne dear?” came the voice of the lady next door.

  Joanne could barely reply. Only moan.

  “Mind your own bloody business,” Bill shouted.

  “I’m calling the police,” came the frightened reply.

  Bill stopped. He bent down and whispered in Joanne’s ear.

  “If you say one word to the police, I’ll go for a divorce. I’ll stand up in court and tell everyone about you opening your legs for that bastard McAllister. Then we’ll see who’s on the front page. Everyone knows you were easy once, and they’ll believe you’re easy now.” He gave her one final shove. Her head struck the concrete of the path. “And I’ll get the girls off you.” He shouted, “They’ll no give bairns to a hoor.”

  Then he was gone.

  When the call came in, the sergeant on the nightshift alerted WPC Ann McPherson, knowing they were friends. When Joanne left in the ambulance, the policewoman called Joanne’s father- and mother-in-law and the girls were taken to their house in a police car. All Granddad Ross could think about was the children. His wife worried about the children too, but her main worry was the scandal.

  At seven the next morning, Ann McPherson called McAllister.

  “This is a totally off-the-record call from a friend. Joanne won’t be in for work today. She’s hurt.” The policewoman told him Joanne was in the Infirmary, but would probably be released later that day.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “I don’t think it is a good idea for you to see her. . . .” But McAllister had already hung up the phone.

  He was at the Infirmary car park in fifteen minutes. He found the ward, but Joanne was curtained off in a private cocoon.

  “Three cracked ribs. She was lucky.” The house doctor saw the look on McAllister’s face. “Sorry, I should rephrase that.”

  “No. I know what you meant.”

  WPC Ann McPherson saw McAllister waiting outside in the corridor and walked up to him.

  “Bill?” McAllister queried.

  She took his arm. “Let’s go out into the garden. I need to talk to you.”

  “And I need a cigarette.”

  They sat on a bench, huddled up in their overcoats. Snow had been forecast for hills above one thousand feet.

  “McAllister, it’s complicated.”

  “No, it’s not. He beat her. Badly it seems.”

  “I know. He thinks he can get away with it because they are married.” Her face was a picture of pity mixed with contempt.

  “Will she press charges?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “For God’s sake,” he was almost shouting, “what do we do? Wait until she is killed?”

  “I know, but it is her choice.” She put her hand on his arm as she said this, as much to control him as to comfort him. Ann was a tall woman, athletic. She could hold him back if she had to. She pointed to her uniform. “Don’t let this get in the way—I’m talking as a friend.”

  “Aye,” he muttered, and cupped his hands around the matches to light another cigarette.

  “You must have attended enough Magistrate’s Court hearings to know that in household violence, no one wants to prosecute. It’s one person’s word against another’s,” she continued. “Husband versus wife. For the woman, all sorts of allegations and innuendos will be made, and mud sticks. For example, Joanne sometimes goes to a public bar.”

  She held up her hands when he tried to protest. “I know, I know, with her colleagues, in the respectable saloon bar, but a bar nonetheless.”

  There was nothing he could say. He knew the truth in Ann’s words.

  “She works full-time, leaving her poor, defenseless children with their grandparents at least one night a week . . .” Ann McPherson was making a case from the procurator fiscal’s point of view, “when her husband has made it clear she has no need to work. Also,” the policewoman paused, unsure how McAllister would react, “Bill Ross is saying Joanne left her husband to take up with another man.”

  “What? I never knew that.” His sudden look at her betrayed a stab of hurt.

  “Well you should, because her husband is saying that man is you.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “So what? Some people will always believe the worst. McAllister, if Joanne brings charges, he will sue for divorce, naming you as co-respondent. He’ll ask for sole custody of the girls, out of spite. He has told her this. And I’ve a bad feeling he might win. Most people don’t take kindly to
women who have jobs and wear trousers. I’ve seen it happen before,” Ann said.

  “So have I” was all he could say. “So have I.”

  “So no visiting the patient, for her sake,” Ann McPherson advised. She also knew how deeply ashamed Joanne would be if McAllister saw her huddled, defeated form curled up in a hospital bed.

  I’ll never understand, Ann thought, why battered women feel it is somehow their fault.

  John McAllister was a man given to thinking. Politics, philosophy, literature, the state of the natural and unnatural world, all fascinated him. He had an inquisitive, inquiring nature, well-suited to a journalist.

  He used to joke, “I know a little about an awful lot, but not an awful lot about anything.”

  He leaned on the railing on the edge of the riverbank, watching the water flow, thinking. Joanne’s situation pained him deeply. His feelings for her scared him. This senseless beating reminded him of all the intellectual discussions he had had over a beer or two with colleagues in Glasgow. Violence toward women was accepted, and even the worst stories never ran to more than a line or two—except when the woman died. All the journalists knew that. And the police.

  A newspaper was a great place to be a bright young thing. Many of them became aging reactionary hacks in the end. Or drunks. But it was the place to be an idealistic young man. Or woman. Newspapers had a surprisingly large proportion of women working for them. In the Glasgow paper where he had trained, many a time he and his colleagues had laughed at the way a paternalistic Presbyterian rigid class-structured society treated women. But for the women, it was no joke.

  Marriage failure was not an option, not when you had promised to love and of course obey, “till death do us part.”

  For a woman, the scandal of a divorce was so absolute that few would choose that path. Many a divorced woman endured monetary disadvantage, being thrown out of the family home, and losing their children if they had dared to take another man.

  For the husband, divorce left a question mark, and not much else.

  Not everyone can be as lucky as Patricia Ord Mackenzie in their marital problems, he said to himself. An accident. An easy way out. Knowing the folks I know in Glasgow, that option is certainly possible. He laughed at the idea to hide the knowledge it was something he would contemplate.