A Small Death in the Great Glen (34 page)

It was Elizabeth Macdonald who answered the door. Monday was her husband's day off and she guarded his free time like a mother hen with a newly hatched chick.

“Mr. McAllister.” Her surprise at seeing him turned to concern when he took off his hat. (“A face of thunder, now I know what that means,” she remarked after he had left.)

“If you'd like to see the minister, he is at the end of the garden cleaning out the hens and I don't think he'll be in for a half hour or so. But you're welcome to wait.”

“Thank you, no. I'll go to see him.” He set off down the path, leaving her with the thought that such a wounded soul might not notice the stench of fresh chicken manure.

Duncan Macdonald closed the gate to the chicken run and walked to the middle of the lawn to converse with McAllister. His guest had refused all offers of tea or of waiting until the minister had cleaned himself up. This wouldn't wait, he could see that, but he was astonished when McAllister told him of his mission.

“Mr. McAllister, I know my nieces. They are a bit unsettled just now, what with their friend dying and everything. They are lovely children but with vivid imaginations. What happened at the Halloween party was understandable. In fact, a few other of the wee ones were scared too when Jean called out ‘hoodie crow,' but it's children, they don't mean anything by it.” He talked in this vein for five minutes—and got nowhere.

“Mr. McAllister, I know Father Morrison. We have worked together on some committees and suchlike. I know him. He is a good, hardworking, compassionate man.

“Mr. McAllister, you can't say that. It is wrong to make such absurd and unfounded accusations.

“Very well, Mr. McAllister, I will take you at your word. I know you don't spread rumors and I trust you to keep these allegations to yourself.

“McAllister, if you ever need to talk to someone, I'm always here.”

This offer Duncan Macdonald called out to the retreating back of John McAllister, who was fast disappearing into the drizzle that intermittently drifted in and out of the Monday morning in the first week of November, striding out on his mission, off to plead his case with anyone who would listen.

“Do you have an appointment?” Angus McLean's secretary asked the question knowing full well the answer. “Please take a seat, Mr. McAllister, I'll see if he is available.” She also knew the answer to that but liked to observe the formalities. Or demonstrate her power, as Rob would have it.

“I see.” He didn't, but Angus McLean interjected this and other such platitudes throughout McAllister's diatribe, growing more and more perplexed as he heard the wild conjectures from a man he had always regarded as the soul of reason.

“I hear what you are saying, McAllister, but it's very far-fetched.

“Now, hold on, McAllister, you are on very dangerous ground there. You can't make inferences like that, especially not on the word of two little girls.

“McAllister, the best I can advise you, as a solicitor and as a friend, is to think very carefully on what you are saying.

“No, McAllister, all I am saying is that you seem overwrought and perhaps you need to think through the conclusions you have come to. You have absolutely no proof of what you are saying.”

“Aye, I hear you, but this needs a dram, if not a bottle, before I can get my head around your thinking.”

Don stood in McAllister's office watching him sitting in the chair, knee jiggling, hand flicking a pencil in a frantic rhythm on the desk, fever-dark eyes staring out into the two o'clock semidarkness of dank cloud. He looks as though he's waiting for the executioner to appear, Don thought.

“Go home, McAllister, you're no use to us here. I'll be by your house when we've finished up. You supply the bottle though; one o' your single malts would go down a treat.”

Seven o'clock but it could as well be midnight, for the town had shut down against the weather; Don and McAllister were in the sitting room, which could have been mistaken for a stockade made from books, deep in chairs on either side of a fire. A solitary standard lamp in one corner cast a jaundiced yellow light, the blazing fire the only other source of illumination. The bottle, but no water, sat on a side table and with glasses charged, McAllister told Don why he had come to thinking what he thought.

“It was on Halloween, eight years, no, nine years now, that my wee brother Kenneth was found in the Clyde. …”

Don was a good listener. He listened without saying a word. He listened between the lines. He listened until the story was completely done.

“There was ten years between us—a lifetime at that age,” McAllister started. “I didn't really notice my brother—I was too busy being a wee big man. I started at Glasgow High School, where I won a scholarship when he was a baby. I was a cadet on the
Herald
when he went to primary school, and when he too went to the high school, like many another Glaswegian, I was in Spain with the International Brigade. Terrible times that was, but the best of times. When war broke out with Germany, I ended up writing propaganda for one of the ministries, as well as being back on the
Herald.
”

Don knew he would never hear more than this, the bare bones of McAllister's life. And he would never ask.

“And all the while, I never noticed. I never knew that, to my brother, I was a hero. I was straight out of the Saturday-matinee films he loved, I was a character from the Biggles books he read, I was a bona fide
Boy's Own
hero. There I was in the school uniform
with thon stupid cap, which he loved, there I was a cadet, on not just any old newspaper, but on the
Herald,
then there I was with all the Glasgow heroes—the intellectuals, the Union men, the poets—in Spain. And him, though only a wee boy, he followed and fantasized over my every move. Aye, I was a right hero and I never knew.

“So, the war was on, bombing at full tilt in Glasgow, especially around the Clyde shipyards. My father died in the Clydeside Blitz, 1941. It was a terrible time for all of us, and Kenneth, he was only ten. But still I never noticed my wee brother. I was living away from home, I was busy, I had my own friends, I had a woman in my life—I had endless excuses, but in truth, Kenneth McAllister was the boy who lived with my mother and who was mad keen on boxing, which I loathed.

“Anyhow, when he was fourteen, the war was ending, he started coming to visit me, usually on a Saturday afternoon. I didn't mind. We didn't do much, just mooched around, occasionally went to the football, sometimes to a matinee, and it didn't matter even when it was foreign films with subtitles, he just wanted company. He seemed a bit quiet. Not that I really took notice, as I didn't know him. My mother asked me to talk to him. She thought he was too quiet. She said he was quite the chatterbox before. And, she said, he had stopped going to his boxing club—which was his passion, all he was really interested in, outside of books.

“Next thing, so it seemed, but really it was almost two years, he was found in the Clyde. The police said he had jumped, but the priest, the one that ran the boxing club, agreed to agree with my mother. He fell. That way, they could all do their hocus-pocus funeral flummery. Then all would be fine and dandy. Except for my mother. And for me.”

The sounds of the wind, driving a horizontal rain, trying every trick to penetrate windows and doors, was providing the
sound effects to the story. Now the fire added to the atmosphere, the wood construction collapsing in on itself, sending showers of sparks dancing up the chimney.

“My mother used to say that these”—McAllister poked the fire, setting off another display—“the sparks, they were souls flying up to heaven.”

“And the hoodie crow?” Don broke another long silence.

“Aye. That.” McAllister's bark of laughter made Don shudder in sympathy. “It reminded me, that's all, brought it all back.”

McAllister topped up their glasses and was surprised to find the bottle almost empty.

“Aye, the sight of them, the priests and the brothers from the boxing club, huddled around his grave, made me think of a congregation of corbies—and you know how evil those birds can seem. So since then, I've always seen priests as crows. Corbie, hoodie crow, priest; it doesn't seem far-fetched to me.” McAllister got up. “I've got that poem here somewhere, Edgar Allan Poe, he knew the power of ravens. Where did I put it?” He fumbled around the walls of books, gave up, sat back down, holding an empty glass, back to staring into the fire.

Don waited. Ten minutes was it? No, more like five. But time seemed elastic by the fire, in the half light, on a night between Halloween and Armistice Day.

“I know something happened to my brother. I slowly came to realize that whatever it was, it had been happening for a while, over a few years. That really shook me. I tried to find out. I started, and ended, at the boxing club. I began to get an inkling of what he had been through, but it was like trying to hold down smoke. Black, stinking, noxious smoke; I could smell it but never find the source. They could teach the Intelligence Services a thing or two could that lot.” He reached for a log, dropped it onto the fire, sending forth more souls.

“McAllister …” Don sensed that there was nothing more would be said that night. So he did what he did. After all, wasn't he the man who worked out the priorities, assigned the tasks, who would précis a story into digestible chunks? It was what he did best and this was no different.

“You're a journalist to the bone, McAllister,” Don started. “And you're up here in the Highlands to show us teuchters a thing or two. But remember, for us, this is about the wee boy Jamie.”

He held up a hand for his turn on the floor.

“I know this has stirred the ghosts. I'm not saying a word about your wild ideas, although I think you're off yer heid, no, what I'm saying is, we have to do what we do.” He instinctively reached behind his ear for his pencil. It wasn't there. “Paper, McAllister, pen, pencil, anything, I can't think without scribbling.”

McAllister took a deep breath and forced himself back to now. His quest, his nine years of guilt, he could nurse another night. They went into the kitchen, sat at the table and started.

“Right. Where are we? The Polish manny, Karl.” Don made a heading. “Did he do it?”

“The tinkers are his alibi.”

“And most of them are scattered the length and breadth of Ross and Cromarty and maybe into Sutherland.” Don wrote
FIND JIMMY MCPHEE
in block capitals.

“Jimmy McPhee.” McAllister leapt up and came back with the photograph and laid it on the table. “This is Jimmy McPhee”—he pointed to the wee face with a closed-eyes grin in the third-to-back row. “And this is my brother, one row down.”

“Well, well.” Don reached for his specs to examine the picture. “I know Jimmy was a champion boxer. I know he trained in Glasgow. This gives you another reason to find him. Next—see if you can find what really happened to Karl between jumping
off the ship and him appearing back in town. Now …” Here Don stopped to think.

“This business of a person unknown interfering with the boy, was it done to him by the person who killed him? Had it been happening on a regular basis? Do we know of anyone who does this to boys?” Don looked over his glasses at McAllister. “We must do this fast, for when word gets out the Polish man may not survive prison. Right. What else? Father Morrison.” Don printed the heading and yawned. “It's late. But see, this is—what was it you called it? Investigative reporting? You're aye hammering on about it to Rob, now
you
show us how it's done.”

He pointed the pen at McAllister. “This obsession of yours, priests and hoodie crows, that's your affair. This”—he tapped the paper—“this is about the boy, not your boy, I grant you, but the wee boy here, in this town. Find out what happened to him, then maybe …”

Maybe you can lay to rest the other ghost, he thought but didn't say.

He rose to go. He gathered his coat and his hat. McAllister went to the door with him. And Don being Don, he couldn't leave without a parting shot.

“McAllister, one thing more. I'll no have an atmosphere in my newsroom. You owe Joanne an apology.”

Although there was three-quarters of a bottle of best Highland single-malt in Don—for it was he who polished off the bottle—he pulled his hat down over his forehead, belted his coat tight, and with a wave good night, he trotted off into the wind and the rain and the black as though he was off into a sunny day at the races.

McAllister shut the door. As he went about switching off the lights, damping down the fires and closing out the night, he felt grateful to Don McLeod; grateful he had stayed the course of a
strange evening, grateful that Don hadn't asked if he had read all the books—McAllister had had to drop an acquaintance for asking such an inane question—and most of all grateful that Don hadn't said “sorry” at the end of the monologue on his private catastrophe.