A Double Death on the Black Isle (13 page)

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.

C
ycling 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.

This woman is so implanted in my mind I'm considering violence.
The thought disturbed him.

He threw his cigarette into the river, and set off on the walk home, on the long but scenic route. He was a great believer in walking to clear the head.

On the Infirmary footbridge, he was buffeted by strong, icy gusts heading in from the North Sea. He strode along the footpath beside the river, passing the back gardens of the substantial houses lining this part of the riverbank. He headed up the steep steps that led to the upper part of the town. At the top of the escarpment, he stopped. There to the northeast, still in a mantle of snow, Ben Wyvis loomed big and squat over the Black Isle and the firths and the glens and the towns and the villages.

The lochs, trapped in the long, narrow glen by bleak and beautiful mountains, ended in an equally grand manner on the west coast. They could not be seen, but their presence, their geography, made the town what it is. And the people what they are.

What is it about this place,
McAllister thought?
At first you believe it is a quiet, respectable, innocuous community. Yet underneath, the currents run as deep as Loch Ness itself.

It was noon and Rob had the office to himself. He was not pleased at the death of Sandy Skinner. It meant the death of his story. So much had surfaced on both east and west coasts about Sandy Skinner's affairs, and together they all had the makings of a good piece of investigative journalism.

Rob was also unhappy at the state of his relationship with McAllister. His anger, quite unjustified Rob thought, rankled. He had not even given him the chance to explain. A phone call from Aberdeen pressing him for a decision had come five minutes ago, triggering his discontent.

“Can I have two weeks?” Rob had asked.

“You're no that special,” the voice on the end of the line had said. “But I like your cheek. I'll give you one week.”

Rob looked up and jumped when he saw McAllister looming in the doorway. Expecting the editor to continue the argument about his career, Rob was taken aback at the sight of his face.

The Grim Reaper looks more cheerful,
he thought, but for once he kept his flippant thoughts to himself.

“I need you to take over the news stories,” McAllister said. “Joanne fell off her bike and cracked a rib. She won't be in for a couple of days.” He was gone before Rob could ask any more.