Beneath the Abbey Wall (24 page)

“I forged my mother's signature as guarantor, else they wouldn't give me the credit.” She took Bill Haley off and put Elvis on. “Mr. McLeod's lady friend once told me she thought the music was too loud, especially on a Sunday, but I told her to mind her own business.
You ain't nothing but a hound dog, cryin' all the time . . . ”

Rob endured it for the three minutes and something seconds it took to finish, then grabbed her in a clinch and started to nuzzle her neck.

“Hey, you're not backwards in coming forwards.” She giggled, did not resist, and after a minute or so, joined in with a passion to match her dancing. It was Rob who was overwhelmed by Nurse Eilidh Davidson of Kiltarlity, not the other way around, so he didn't get to ask her any more about the night Mrs. Smart was murdered. And he completely forgot to ask about the knife.

J
immy McPhee was a man whom many knew of, but few knew. He was an outsider. An observer. A man who thought human frailty a weakness. He would take note of people and their conversations, of objects, of places, and squirrel them away in the recesses of his memory. And like most people born into an oral culture, he had a prodigious memory. When the time was ripe, he would retrieve stored memories and impressions, the taste of the place and the weather, and his timing was very good indeed. That is what made Jimmy McPhee a man never to be underestimated.

His mother's withdrawal into silences longer than usual, her wanting to be on the road even though she well knew that rain or sudden snow was likely, concerned him. The anniversary of the theft of the boys was in November. And that anniversary was soon. And that was why his mother was not herself, or so he kept assuring himself.

Then there was Neil Stewart. Here he was, noseying around, asking his mother to help with the book he was writing, on the same subject as his older brother Keith—why should his ma help a stranger?
The cheek o' the man,
Jimmy thought.

Then there was the notion that Neil might be a relative.
Nah,
Jimmy told himself at first,
I'm sure I'd know
. As the weeks went on, he was less certain.

He believed he had inherited some of his mother's sixth sense, and would know if this man was of his flesh and blood.
But, he remembered, he had been a child, nearly five, when the young ones, babies really, were snatched, and he retained only an impression of them. Neither of them had his red red hair, but hadn't the older boy been golden-headed? He couldn't remember the boy's face—he mixed it up with the younger brothers who came along later when his mother remarried.

What he could remember was the crying, the screaming, the gut-wrenching keening from his mother for days after.

He was not yet five. He could only stand and stare as a woman reached into the big coach-built pram that someone had given them. He remembered that when he was wee, he thought that's how babies arrived: in a pram.

The baby was wailing a high-pitched squeal—like the seagulls when you went stealing their eggs. His mother came running up from the lochan. She started screaming at the two men and the woman, who was now in the back of the car doing nothing to comfort the baby, who cried as though he knew what was happening, filling the car with his anguish.

He remembered the grim face of the woman, who he later recalled looked like a prison warden, and the wailing, drowned out by screeches, from his mother, who was held back by one man, a constable, as the other grabbed his next brother, three he was, and his mother was shouting, “Run, Jimmy! Run! Hide! Run, Jimmy!”

He ran, but when he looked back he could see that the men had their hands full of one kicking struggling child and one kicking struggling biting screaming woman, until the constable holding her gave her an almighty shove, and his mother tumbled into the heather while the policeman ran to the car, where the others were locked in the backseat holding onto the howling bairns.

The constable, not a local man, started the engine, and by the time his mother recovered, Jimmy still watching from his hiding
place behind a big boulder, the car had disappeared down the track, away from their encampment, away for forever, and never forgotten.

And he saw, as though he was back there in that place and time, the papers the man from the welfare had given his mother, the papers she had thrown back at him, blowing in the wind, down the track, trying to catch the departing children, white papers like tiny ghosts trying to catch the wee souls they had formally inhabited.

“They gave me a receipt for them as though they were parcels,” Jenny had told Joyce Mackenzie. Jimmy had overheard the conversation and it had puzzled him, and whenever the postman came with a parcel for them, which was rarely, he wondered if it might be one or other of his brothers coming home in a box. What made him the hard man he was, was his mother; there was nothing he could say to her, or do for her, except to be close to her, waiting, enduring, being her shadow son. And that was the day, even though he was only four and three-quarters years old, that Jimmy McPhee vowed,
No one will ever capture me, never capture my body nor my soul.

*  *  *  

On Tuesday, at half past eleven on a morning that was weeping at the loss of autumn, Jimmy walked into the bar on Baron Taylor's Lane.

“Thon McAllister fellow was asking after you,” the barman told him.

Jimmy left without stopping for a drink, crossed to the Station Square, went into the telephone box, inserted the pennies, and dialed the
Gazette
.

“Your place at seven the night,” he told McAllister. Without waiting for a reply, he walked back to the bar. This time he ordered.

*  *  *  

“Rob,” McAllister yelled without getting out of his chair. The yell carried across the landing into the reporters' room, then spiraled down the staircase, so that the new junior, Fiona, heard only the roar. A nervous girl with black hair and a fresh crop of pimples, she considered phoning her mother, who worked as an assistant at the bakery and provided her daughter with a constant supply of day-old doughnuts. Fiona wanted to say she couldn't take another day at the
Highland Gazette,
but she didn't, only because it was a toss-up as to whom she feared most—McAllister or her father.

“Yes, master,” Rob said as he shut the door behind him.

“The advocate from Edinburgh will be here on Thursday.”

“Not you, too,” Rob complained. “My father's so jittery you'd think he was practicing tap-dancing.”

McAllister rubbed his eyes with one hand and said, “Thank you, Rob, I needed that.” He smiled, but the smile did not lift the sadness from his eyes.

Rob knew that all he could do was to be practical. “What are you and my dad going to tell the Grand Panjandrum from the Faculty of Advocates?”

“That's why we need to talk.”

“The advocate has asked if he and his assistant can walk through the crime scene before they interview Don.”

“Who is now back in prison.” McAllister felt his skin crawl at the thought of the dank cell with little light and far less comfort than a hospital bed. “Jimmy McPhee is coming to my house tonight. I'm hoping he has more than ‘look in the past' stuff to tell me. Because I've looked till I'm blind and I've seen nothing.”

“Maybe you should ask Neil if he came across anything when he was searching the parish records in Inchnadamph . . . ”
He saw he had lost McAllister. “That's Mrs. Smart's—the Mackenzie—parish church. Joanne said they saw her grave. Apparently there's no headstone, but people have been laying flowers and . . . ”

McAllister had turned his head away, but Rob saw it. McAllister looked as though he too had been stabbed in the heart.

It took Rob half a second to realize what he had said.
They. Neil. Joanne.

And he had enough sense not to dwell on the subject. “Firstly, the gate to the close where Don lives . . . ”

He watched McAllister take up a pencil, making an effort to concentrate.

“Was the gate locked that night?” Rob continued. “It seems Mrs. Smart made a point of making sure it was locked on the nights she visited, probably to keep her husband from confronting them. Apparently she had her own key.”

“So, point one, did she lock the gate, did she have the key on her? If she locked the gate, did the killer take the key so he could return the knife to the hiding place?” McAllister was doing all he could to forget what Rob had said, but, like an attack of tinnitus, the words echoed in the periphery of his hearing—
Joanne, Neil, they.
“You said the railwayman thought he saw something in the churchyard?”

“He might deny it, but I'm certain it wasn't a ghost that he saw.”

“So, in the time it took the man to run to the police station, the killer could have gone to the courtyard and put the knife back in the wall.”

“Aye,” Rob agreed, “we're back to the knife. Eilidh, Don's neighbor, says any number of people might have known where it was kept.”

“Who also had a reason to kill Mrs. Smart?”

“Which brings us back to her husband. Two motives—jealousy and greed.”

“The same motive could apply to Don.” McAllister tipped his chair back into his thinking position. “I still keep thinking, why now? This situation had been going on for years.”

“I have one more thought. The Gurkha. Everyone says he was devoted to the Mackenzie family, that's why he's not a suspect. But what if he'd had enough of the sergeant major? What if something ordinary became too much and he snapped? What if he knew about the legacy—it's a fortune in his terms, enough to last him the rest of his life. He has no alibi. He knows how to use a knife. I've looked them up in the library—Gurkha soldiers are fiercesome killers.”

“I'll talk to Beech again, but they say he was devoted to Joyce.”

“Maybe I could join you and Jimmy tonight.”

“Fine, but if he tells you to go . . . ”

“I'll be gone.” Rob stood. “And we've still to get out a newspaper, so have you done the op-ed yet?”

“Later.”

When Rob returned to the reporters' room, he decided that later might be never, so he called Beech, asked him to write the editorial and two obituaries, and when asked why, said, “McAllister isn't feeling too well.” When he put down the phone he saw Joanne and Neil had been listening.

“Is McAllister okay?” Joanne asked.

“No, not really—but I'm glad you've noticed.”

He saw her flush, then look away. Rob hadn't meant it callously; he was just stating the world as he saw it. Plus, he was busy searching his pockets for a ten-shilling note, all he had to last him until payday at the end of the week, and couldn't find it, so he did not notice he had hurt her.

The remark cut, making her shiver, making her, for a brief moment, grasp the fugue she was in, reality gone. Rob was her friend. McAllister was a friend, a man she more than liked, and although she had fantasized that he might one day look at her in more than friendship, she had scorned the idea.

McAllister thinks I'm not too bright,
she told herself, forgetting the times when they had talked and laughed as though they had known each other their whole lives.

“Hello, is anyone there?” Rob was waving the ten-shilling note at her, found inside his spiral-bound reporter's notebook.

Joanne's eyes came back into focus.

“I'm off to interview a visiting Canadian evangelist. See you when I see you.” Rob left her to her doubts, and ran down the stairs two at a time.

Neil had been mostly ignoring their exchange, focused on the correct spelling of a Gaelic name. He looked at Joanne and said, “It must be hard for McAllister. Were he and Don McLeod close?”

She grabbed on to the question, dismissing thoughts of her own culpability in McAllister's descent into melancholy, and answered, “Yes, I suppose they were, are—in an odd, bickering old couple, way.”

“The best we can do is get this paper out.” Neil smiled and went back to typing.

His smile worked—as always.

“Good idea.” She did the same.

It's nothing to do with me,
she tried telling herself as she sorted out the community notices for the next edition. But she knew this was not true—
We were once more than colleagues. We came close to. . . .
She tried not to think how close she had come to spending a night with McAllister—until common sense had come to her rescue. And she tried to push away the awareness
that she was not being a good friend to him when he was obviously in distress.

Some months back, when her husband, Bill, had beat her so badly she ended up in hospital, she needed a friend. And McAllister had listened to her, helped her stick to her resolve to leave the marriage, had not once been judgmental. But not once had he indicated he cared for her—except as a good friend and colleague.