A Small Death in the Great Glen

To my mother and my sister in memoriam

P
ROLOGUE
 
 

He dressed the boy's body whilst it was still warm. Getting the clothes back on was easy. Such a skinny wee thing, the body weighed next to nothing. No, no weight at all.

Dark came around five o'clock this time of the year and an hour or so later most people would be home in front of the fire. No moon either, luckily. Time to move, in the deep dark before anyone came looking; now was the time to get rid of him.

He hefted the boy in a fireman's lift over his left shoulder. Feet against his back, head and arms dangling down in front. His nose rubbed against the wool of the child's jacket. The body had lost its smell; that sweet savory tang of boy had gone.

The old greatcoat had once been home. He had slept in it, sheltered in it, flames and flying embers had singed it but not penetrated the thick felted wool. Just the job.

Carefully he draped the coat over the body, fussed with the folds, arranging the collar to cover the head, making sure no stray hand or foot poked out. He gave a slow birl, checking the effect in the hall mirror. Fine. Looked natural enough.

The streetlights, dim and far apart, were on one side of the road only. Large sycamores overhung the footpath, a sighing tunnel of black. He walked confidently, out for an evening stroll, his burden lightly carried. Not far to go. He met no one. But anyone noticing him and his bundle would never look twice.

The last part was tricky. An exposed track, a hundred yards or so, ran up to the canal. Gorse, whin and elder bushes would
give no cover. Luck was still with him. He reached the lock, peered through the dark, nothing, no one, not a sound.

Holding it by the arms, he lowered the bundle. Feet, body, head then arms, it slipped down into the vortex. No splash, just a sigh as the water closed over the wee soul sending out ripples that set the stars dancing in the still water.

The man, clasping his hands, muttered a prayer, smiled a half smile, put the greatcoat on. All done, thank goodness.

O
NE
 
 

McAllister rolled yet another tiny piece of copy paper into the huge old Underwood typewriter. Needs the arms and the strength of an orangutan to type on this monster, he had often thought. Deflated ghosts of discarded prose lay crumpled in a top hat on the floor behind his chair. The typing was smudgy, faint; changing the ribbon was not an editor-in-chief's job.

“The obituaries are the only opportunity to be creative on this rag of a newspaper and I can't find anything remotely interesting to say about this man's life. Nor his death.”

Elbows on the high reporters' table, he cupped his chin in both hands, emphasizing his resemblance to a black-clad praying mantis. Deadline loomed.

Rob and Joanne paid no attention to their new editor-in-chief's comments. Five months and they were almost used to him. They worked on, busy with all the “wee fiddly bits,” as their subeditor called them. Livestock prices, community notices, school concerts, sporting fixtures, traffic infringements—if being drunk and in charge of a horse could be termed a traffic offense; all the usual fodder for a local newspaper in 1956.

But news? That was for the Aberdeen daily and
The Scotsman
to provide. As Don McLeod, subeditor and all-round fusspot know-it-all told him when he started on the
Highland Gazette,
“We're a local weekly, here to publish local information—not some scandal-mongering rag from down south.”

McAllister hit the return on the typewriter as though he was
whacking the gremlins of spelling mistakes from the bowels of the huge machine.

“I mean, how can I be expected to write a decent obit?” He waved his notes at them. “All he ever did was attend meetings, chairman of this, treasurer of that, he was even on the committee for the Highland Games. May as well publish minutes.”

Rob looked up. “Well, he's been summoned to the final committee meeting of them all. I don't know which angel keeps the minutes, but your man undoubtedly has an in with Saint Peter.”

“That'll be right,” Joanne contributed. “He went to Island Bank Church for forty years or thereabouts. An elder of the Free Kirk, no less. Bound to have a free pass straight to heaven.”

“And I bet in school all he ever got were B's.” McAllister had lost them.

Rob grinned, relishing his role as straight man. He loved hearing the editor-in-chief expound on life, liberty and the state of Scottish football.

“How's that then?”

“To get A's in exams shows you as clever, different, a smidgen better than your peers. And God help those that stand out. Conformity, thy name is Scottish.”

“But I got A's at the academy.”

“Point proven.”

The newspaper would be finished by late afternoon, well in time for the final touches from the subeditor and typesetters, then the printers. McAllister despaired of a paper where meeting a deadline was easy. He glanced at his two reporters. Neither had had any real training, and Joanne worked only part-time. Her husband resented even that. Her mother-in-law backed him. Women didn't work—it showed up their husbands, made them seem incapable of providing for their family.

Don McLeod, chief and only subeditor, racing aficionado,
keeper of dark secrets, walked in, ignoring Rob, as usual, but nodding to Joanne. She embarrassed him; too young, too bonnie, too smart, too married. Besides, like the boss she was an outsider. “Boss, a word?” He gestured toward the office.

McAllister gave a theatrical sign. “Tell us
all
.”

Don glanced at Joanne before continuing. “I just heard—they've fished a body out of the canal. A wee boy, he went missing last night, the lockkeeper found him first light.”

“Oh no, the police were at the door last night looking for him,” she cried. “The poor parents.”

“And you never thought to say anything before now?” McAllister glared at her. “This is a newspaper!”

Don grimaced. He was right. A newspaper was no place for a woman.

The steep hill that ran from the
Highland Gazette
office to the castle was cobbled; hard to walk on in the best of weathers, lethal in the rain. In the open expanse in front of the castle Flora Macdonald stood on her plinth, a stone Highland terrier at her feet. His raised paws and expressive face seemed to be begging Scotland's most famous heroine to forget Bonnie Prince Charlie and the failed rebellion.

“You're right, boy.” Joanne patted the dog's cold head, laughing at herself. “Flora, take heed. No man's worth the wait.” But Flora's sightless eyes kept staring out to her homeland in the Western Isles.

Joanne Ross was affected by weather. A premonition, an almost visceral feeling, heralded a change. A distant storm she felt in her bones, well before the clouds formed. She moved in time to the weather; her tall lithe body stepped lightly in summer and strode into winter. Her eyes changed from blue to green with the light, her hair changed from brown to red in the sun, her freckles ebbed and flowed with the seasons.

She found a bench out of the wind, keeping a close eye on the black-backed gulls suspended over her impromptu picnic, their sandwich-detecting radar on full sweep. One especially large bird hung effortlessly in a thermal current.

Joanne went into a dwam, floating with the gull. Floating over the castle braes, over the river, across to the cathedral without a single wing movement, he (for it always seemed a him to her) drifted on toward the infirmary, back over to the war memorial, disappearing into the tangle of the Islands.

She could feel herself nestling into the shoulders of the gull, oily satin-smooth feathers smelling of fish. Up into the thermals they floated, taking in the river, the town, the hills, the mountains, the Great Glen, the faultline that fractured the Highlands. Peaks and scree-strewn ridgelines were mirrored in the ribbon of deep dark lochs. Glens clad in a faded tartan of heather and bracken with splashes of green outlining abandoned crofts emptied by the Clearances were cut deep by drunken burns and rivers. A fierce and stunning landscape; it made Joanne want to sing.

The cathedral bells were the first to strike two o'clock. Four more sets of chimes followed, overlapping, discordant.

“A whole hour of sun.” Joanne smiled at the novelty, stood, shook the crumbs from her skirt, ready for the rest of the day. Then, remembering the boy, she shivered, fearful for her own children.

“I'll meet the girls after school today.”

“Now I don't want you two going anywhere near the canal.”

The children looked at each other. First their mother collecting them from school, next a lecture. This was summer talk. No one went up to the canal in the cold. Although the secret den near the canal banks occasionally tempted them even in chill autumn, they had not been there for weeks. A dark sandy bowl in the roots
beneath the elder and whin bushes, it was a perfect hiding place. In the long summer holidays, that is. Autumn, and rotting elderberries, wet slippery leaves and damp earth, made the den dank and scary.

“Another thing, do you still have that den in the bushes near the canal?”