A Small Death in the Great Glen (12 page)

“So?” Don demanded when they were back in the office.

“Well, I went up the glen to meet Archie Stuart and brought him back on my bike,” Rob began. “It was terrifying. He's a hopeless passenger, leaning the wrong way into bends and everything—”

“And I went to the council house, like you told me,” Joanne chimed in, “with Jenny and Jimmy and Keith and two, or was it three more McPhees, and this Polish sailor was there, oh, and Shona Stuart, and Rob turned up with—”

“Haud on, haud on.” Don held up his wee stubby pencil for silence, then hauled his short stubby body onto a stool by the big table, rearranged the piles of paper in front of him, reached for his spiral shorthand notebook. “Right. Ladies first.”

“Righty-oh.” Joanne took a deep breath, organizing her thoughts. “We”—Don waved his pencil in the air—“sorry, Jenny and I, sorry … Jenny McPhee, myself, I think three McPhee men,
including Jimmy, went to the house down the ferry, where we met Keith McPhee, who is living there with Shona Stuart—”

“Archie Stuart the ghillie's daughter?” Don looked up from his squiggles.

“And Archie Stuart the ghillie's sister,” Rob added.

“Wheesht, wait your turn,” Don warned him.

Joanne stopped, confused. Rob jumped in.

“This Polish man, Karel Cieszynski, had a fight with the captain, who is Russian, of the Baltic timber ship, and who had the Pole onboard illegally, for money, and the Polish man—Karl, as he wants to be called—jumped or was pushed overboard into the river, if you believe his story, that is. It was an ebbing tide and he was picked up by some tinkers who were fishing”—Don snorted—“or poaching for salmon,” Rob acknowledged with a grin. “And they, the tinkers, took him to their camp down by the council dump and let Peter Kowalski know about him because he was Polish and”—Rob picked up the look on Don's face—“and because there might be a reward in it for them. And because this Polish person knew Peter Kowalski's name.”

“Curious, that,” Don commented.

“So Peter took the man up to his fishing camp, an old but and ben up Glen Affric, because the man didn't want to go to the police until he had a chance to return to the ship to collect his belongings. So he said. Then the man Karl got young Archie to take him back to town so he could confront the captain and get his belongings and young Archie took him to the only person he knows in town, his sister—who is the fiancée of said Keith McPhee, son of—”

“Aye, I know all that.” Don stopped him and continued squiggling furiously.

“So where does Jenny McPhee come into all this?” Joanne queried.

“There has to be something in it for her.” Don looked up. “No, I take that back. It's most likely because Peter Kowalski got charged. That put the wind up them. See, Jenny McPhee, all tinkers, know that if Inspector Tompson and his ilk had their way, tinkers would be charged with any and every crime ever committed. So it's in their best interests that this man hands himself in and the less said about their role the better.”

“But they rescued him and, at the time, had no idea he was wanted by the police,” Joanne protested.

“What's that to do with the price of fish?” Don shut his book, slithered down from the high stool, stuck his pencil back behind his ear and reached for his hat. “Right, Rob, you finish up this story. We'll see how much we can print. Joanne, it's getting late, off home to those bairns of yours.” He caught her grateful look. “They'll be fine, you know; children have to learn one day that they too can die. It's all part of life.” He patted his pocket to check that he had his cigarettes. “If anyone wants me, I've gone to see a man about a horse.”

“In the Market Bar,” Joanne and Rob chorused.

The afternoon had been a long one for Angus McLean. Not only had he had to deal with a recalcitrant police inspector who was ignorant of the law as far as illegal aliens were concerned and was determined to charge Karl with something, anything, but Angus also had to sort out the legal status of both the Polish men, an area of the law he was not familiar with. Contested wills and property disputes had been the highlights of his career for the last ten years.

Inspector Tompson had gained his position in the police force as a direct result of his time as a military policeman, not from merit. A man with no imagination, no empathy, he had no understanding of the decisions some men make when death and despair are all around. He saw them simply as foreigners.

Angus McLean, solicitor, husband, father and well-liked citizen of the community, was a kind man. His mildness belied a tenacity that had often surprised clients and judges, but never his wife. While a student in Edinburgh, he had glimpsed the underbelly of Scotland's so-called egalitarian society; in the tenements off the High Street, the Cowgate, off the Royal Mile, in the drinking and gambling dens, on street corners where women huddled in doorways and on church steps, waiting for customers, Angus had witnessed another world.

“All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small … The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.” That was the Edinburgh of his youth.

A subdued group gathered around his desk—Gino, standing bail for his prospective son-in-law, Peter Kowalski, and Karel Cieszynski.

“Well now.” Angus started the proceedings. “The procurator fiscal's office says the charge against Karl—may I call you Karl?” He took the nod as a sign to continue. “It is all quite simple—illegal entry. There's a good chance an application for asylum will be looked at favorably; we will gather some sponsor and prepare the case. I'm hoping the charge against Mr. Kowalski—Peter—will be dropped. Now, I understand you are staying with Keith McPhee.”

“He has offered me a room.” The voice came out tobacco stained and weary, the accent thick but understandable.

“Yes, well, we may have to review that situation,” Angus McLean hurried on, “and I think perhaps, now that we are all together, you should explain to us exactly how you come to be here.”

Karl hesitated. “My English is not so good.”

“Good enough.” Gino wanted an explanation now.

“Karl,” Angus interrupted, “you will have to tell me—us—what happened if we are to support your application for residency in Scotland.”

“I am ashamed I have made trouble for Mr. Kowalski.”

Peter said nothing. He was so angry he felt he would explode and a seething silence was his way of keeping his temper in check.

Karl took a deep breath, sat up, backbone straight, a vagabond transformed into the long-lost Polish gentleman. He accepted a cigarette. Gino was smoking, Peter had a Balkan Sobranie alight and Angus was coping, just, with the fug-filled room.

“It happened so fast,” Karl started. “Poland betrayed, invaded. We were rounded up like ducks and told we had new owners. That is our history. I was an engineer in my father's mine so they needed me, but the Nazis turned the mines into death camps. To them we were human refuse, from Poland, then Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway, everywhere. I survived, but not my father.”

What he couldn't tell them about were the deaths by the day, the hour, of men and women, boys who had never left their mothers, dying as they slaved at the coal face, bodies pushed into unused shafts, someone else stepping up to take their place.

“But how did you get here?” Gino was impatient. Everyone had their stories.

“Sorry if I do not tell it right. I must explain from the beginning. So.” He continued. “The Russians liberated the mines, ha! I and a few other survivors now were sent to the Urals, to the coal mines there. Punishment for working for the Nazis.”

“My God.” Angus could not comprehend the horrors Karl had endured.

“I was lucky, you could say.” Karl gave a short barking laugh. “I was given a supervisor's job. They needed mine engineers. I had privileges. Later I married a fellow prisoner, a Ukrainian. She also survived a labor camp only to be rounded up by the Russians. But her health was not good. We had some small freedom in that camp, a small life, but a life. We found love. Now she is dead.”

He stopped. He couldn't tell them of the swing he had made her, the swing that had brought back her smile, the smile she had lost when she was dragged from her home by the Russians, the smile she found again as she swung herself up to touch the red apples with her toes.

Angus rose. “A drink, Karl? Anyone?”

“I want to finish. I can never say this again.”

“A dram first.” Angus kept a Tomatin Distillery malt. “I certainly could do with one.” The gentle Highland voice sent out an air of calm.

Karl took a swift slug of the water of life, then plowed on.

“I buried her in the orchard under an apple tree. I left her where she was happy.”

Gino envied Karl that.
He
had not been able to bury his wife; he had been a prisoner in North Africa before being sent to the camp in Scotland.

“One Russian helped me after my wife died,” the story continued. “The war was over, we were free—ha! Free! It took three years of my pitiful salary to bribe my way back to a mine job in Poland.

“I didn't want any of the Russians to know my background. I am from the bourgeoisie. I am just a miner, I told them. When I arrived back in Silesia, it is very hard, but in the country people eat better. In winter they hunt wild birds, that is if you know your way through the minefields. In summer the forests are full of people searching for fruit, nuts, mushrooms. It is like the Middle Ages.

“Then I get permission to visit my family village. I find that my mother is dead also. Then I meet my mother's friend Madame Kowalski, Peter's mother.”

Peter leapt from his chair, his long strong arms grabbing Karl by the lapels, shaking him, shouting, swearing at him in Polish,
yelling, “She's alive? What do you know? Why didn't you tell me?” followed by unrepeatable curses and finally tears.

Angus's secretary came bursting in to see what the commotion was. Gino reached up, patting his future son-in-law on the back, trying to soothe him as one would soothe a heartbroken child; Karl slunk lower in his chair, doing nothing to ward off the attack.

Angus waved his secretary out with “It's fine, it's fine” and when the commotion had subsided, he topped up the glasses with a healthy dram of whisky.

“I must tell you,” Karl said simply. “I must go on.” He took a gulp of the spirits and took up the story again. “My mother's family is Jarosz, they have been trusted servants on the Kowalski estates for centuries.”

Slowly, recognition dawned on Peter. He nodded.

“Madame Kowalski knows Peter went to Scotland. She had news from a priest who works with the Red Cross. She learned of the town where you are. She wants me to escape, to find her son, and she says to me to have a new life. She gave me gold. This is how I am here.”

Tiring visibly, he looked down at the floor.

“First, I had to find a ship. Gdansk, anywhere in Poland, is too dangerous, many guards, traitors reporting anyone looking for escape. So I take many months, through the marshes and forests, to make it to Tallinn, then weeks to find a captain who would take me. I give him all the money I have left.

“When we arrive here I want to go to the police. But the son of a Russian bear, he said no. He knows there will be big trouble for losing a crewman when he gets back home. He asks for more money, but I have none. He asks me what I hide in my coat, I don't tell him. He hits me, I hit him, but he is big, big man and he throws me into the river. I nearly die. But the fishermen catch me and take me to their Gypsy camp. That is my story.”

The rough kindness of strangers who had helped him out on many, many parts of his journey was a story for another, later time. And the final cruelty, the irony that broke his carefully constructed carapace of courage, what he was unable to tell his listeners just yet, was that he had failed in his mission. On the cusp of freedom, the precious, carefully guarded package, carried on the long march across the occupied Baltic states, across the North Sea, the package entrusted to him by Peter's mother, carefully hidden deep in the pockets of his greatcoat, was lost, stolen by the scoundrel of a sea captain.

It was Gino who broke the long silence.

“We have the necklace.”

“The necklace?” Karl stared in shock. “Madame Kowalski's necklace?”

Angus McLean looked completely lost.

“Why did you not tell Peter about his mother and the necklace?” Gino continued, “I do not believe you tell us
all
your story.”

The reply was a short sharp bark of a laugh, perhaps a cough.

“How to explain my idiocy, my cowardice, my failure …” He stopped, momentarily lost in thought, then stood, drew himself up and, in a quaintly old-fashioned gesture, bowed from the waist.

“Mr. Corelli, I promise you, as a Polish compatriot and a gentleman, I did not steal Madame Kowalski's necklace. Please believe me it is my deep regret I lost it. I came back to the town to get it from that lying Russian thief. But then I am told that the ship has sailed.”