A Small Death in the Great Glen (40 page)

“I don't know what to say.” She started. But she did. “Rob, we have always taught you to believe in goodness and in kindness and honesty. So we must suppose that the reverse exists. Look at what's happened and is happening in Europe. Your father and I went through two wars. We know evil exists. I try not to see it, but it is there, in big and small ways. And always balanced by good.”

Rob nodded.

“This morning, in Grandma McLean's old house, for me a happy house, I felt something that made me feel sick.” He looked up at her. “The trouble is, well, it was nothing really. It just gave me the creeps, that's all.” He shook himself like a dog after a dip in a swamp. “I feel such a fool for overreacting.”

She listened, didn't say much, just murmured reassurances. But Margaret was seething inside, feeling that her only child, her sunny boy, was losing his innocence.

Rob left for work, having told her a simple version of what had happened. Yes, Rob assured her, he was fine. And no, Margaret assured him, she wouldn't say anything to his father about Rob being upset; she would just give him the facts. Then, after waving him and his motorbike out the gate, she called her
husband. She didn't know what to think. Rob assured her again that it was nothing. It was only some photos, he said. But her first reaction was the same as Rob's; there was something unsavory about the obsession with young boys. Dozens of photos, Rob said, and sheets and sheets of negatives, all of boys.

She phoned her husband. She told him. Quickly, quietly, no drama in her voice, she related the bare facts. No need to worry, she said; it's probably harmless, she said. She put down the phone, leaving Angus McLean to draw his own conclusions, to exercise his eminent sense of right and reason. She then went round the house locking every door, every window, closing curtains as though death had visited. She switched on every lamp in the house, banked up the fire and even then, she still felt chilled. She remembered. She could now see for herself how the idea had come about; a hoodie crow indeed. But the step between a distasteful hobby and the killing of a child, that was a step she could not contemplate.

Don walked into McAllister's room, a cup of tea in one hand and the layout in the other.

“Am I interrupting?” He nodded to Jimmy McPhee.

“Yes,” McAllister told him.

Don was not in the least offended—he knew he would find out what was going on eventually.

“When you're done here, a word?” he asked Jimmy.

“Aye, I'll see you after,” Jimmy agreed.

McAllister closed his office door.

Jimmy McPhee went straight to the point.

“I didn't tell you everything when you came to our place. But ma mother thinks you should know.” He left McAllister in no doubt that if he had had his way, this conversation would not be taking place.

He told his story straight, in his harsh, crackling voice,
speaking in the local dialect with the local speech pattern of glottal stops and swallowed words and sentences spoken on an ingoing breath. He dropped in the occasional Glasgow swear word, picked up from his time on the boxing circuit.

McAllister kept his head down through most of the monologue, allowing Jimmy McPhee a private space to remember.

“We were at the berries one summer, in Blair, I was eleven, but small, still am, and runnin' round, driving everyone daft. And I was always in fights.

“Ma, she had this notion to get at least one more of us educated and she had heard of a place in Glasgow where you could go to a good school for free if you were any good at sport an' if you were poor. We definitely made it in on the poor bit, an' I wasnae a bad boxer neither.”

Speaking with the ease of a natural storyteller, he told it as a tale from a distant past, a story that had happened to someone else.

“So there I was, a tough skinny wee tyke, boxing and training and trying to put on a bit of weight. We had some good instructors, fathers or brothers, mostly Irish, mostly fine fellows, tough but fair. And school, a boarding school it is, it wasn't so bad. I could read and write a wee bit, but I was a dab hand at the numbers. Helps me work out the odds.” He grinned.

“But you know how, as bairns, you just
know
some things. Not much is said, you certainly don't discuss it, and it's just a word here, a curse there, a warning or two. So, it wasn't long before I heard the talk about one of the fathers. Watch out for him, dirty old B, and they all laughed. But not as bad as that other manny, the one that was supposed to be a teacher, the one that left, said one of the boys. Aye,
him,
said another. I was right confused. The warnings, I had no idea what it was about, I thought it meant that some of them were a bit too rough in the ring,
nothing I couldn't deal with, me being tough an all. It was not like some of the stuff the boys from the orphanage had to put up with. That was a ferocious awful place.”

They simultaneously lit a cigarette.

“So not long after, I met this father they had warned me about. He was a big man a' right. Cheerful, smiling, Glasgow through and through. I ended up on his dormitory wing. The boys were no scared o' him, but they didn't like him. Me, I couldn't see the problem. He loved all his “innocent wee souls” as he put it. There were the photos, right enough, that was his hobby and he was a dab hand at it. He liked doing the private portraits as well as the usual group shots. You were in your boxing drawers and gloves and you did the poses. It all seemed harmless enough. He did harp on a bit about nasty wee boys with dirty habits. I'd no idea what he was on about.

“So all was fine, until you started changing—you know. Then, when we had the weekly bath night, it was—all scrubbed clean are we? I'd better check. That was the inspection to see if you were clean, everywhere. He'd peer in yer lugs, inspect yer fingernails and yer hair for nits, then, making a game of it, he would check your willie. Touch it. And he'd go on about keeping yerself clean in mind and body, about how filthy thoughts and filthy habits was how the devil got into you.

“Now, I'm a tinker an' I was that wee bit tougher than those boys, but the real difference was this; I knew my brother would listen. Keith, fifteen and strong, wi' a good heid on him, he'd help. So one day I told ma brother. It took me a while. The man was doing nothing wrong, not really. He was a decent fellow, mostly. We all liked him, sort of, but I knew it wasn't right.”

Jimmy looked straight at McAllister and grinned. “Us tinkers are brought up with the stallions an' mares, we know all about nature. This wasn't natural. So, next thing I know, Ma comes down
tae Glasgow to take me back to the Highlands. We're off on the road for the summer, she said, needs my help with the horses, she said.”

He stopped, remembering. “Aye. And that's no all she said. She said I was a grand lad.” He grinned again. A picture of his mother as she marched off to the office of the school's headmaster came into his head. He never knew what was said. He had no need. He never doubted his mother's capacity to put the fear of God or of the devil into anyone. And if that failed, Jenny McPhee would blast the culprit with a string of tinker curses—in Gaelic.

Jimmy wasn't finished.

“What he did, see, Father Bain, was built you up when you were young, 'specially the ones who were good boxers, made you feel so proud, someone special, he was like a real father to the boys, and many of them had no one. Then as soon as you started to become a man, he made you feel like shite. So it was nothing really, he didn't hurt you or harm you. There were others who were right sadists, and worse. No, he was one of the good ones. But he made you feel so dirty.”

Jimmy stopped. “That's it. If it helps.”

It took some moments for McAllister to recover.

“Jimmy, this Father Bain, was he the man who took the photos of my brother?”

“Aye, the same.”

“And have you seen this man since then? Maybe up here, in the Highlands?”

“No, I haven't. But that doesn't mean anything. I don't recall bumping into any priest since I came back up north.”

“Jimmy, would you do something for me?”

Half an hour later, McAllister was still off in some distant void, but returned to the here and now by the clatter of Rob running
up the stairs, banging around the reporters' room, asking for the whereabouts of the editor. He roused himself and yelled out the door.

“In here!”

Rob blew in, still in his motorbike gear.

“So?”

“Well …” Spiral notebook in one hand, drawing pictures in the air with the other, Rob started to describe the interview with the priest.

“It was all very civilized, chummy really.”

McAllister took a second look at his junior reporter. For all his brave, look-at-me-I'm-grown-up air, the lad was shaken.

“Sit.”

Rob did as he was told, then started again.

“I asked about his past assignments. He told me; very proud of his boxing club and community work in Glasgow. But the war put an end to the boys' club.”

McAllister stared. Then even before he heard what Rob had to tell him, he began to feel better; These shadows of coincidence, he thought, I've not imagined them.

“Next, he described his heroic service spent helping the bombed-out families in Dumbarton-shire. Then, after the armistice, he was running a church adoption and foster care agency that was also some kind of home. An administrative post, he says.”

“Involving children?” McAllister asked.

“Aye, all ages; babies, up to school-leaving age, orphans mostly. Then eight years ago he came here to the “retreat” next door to us. Only a few other people have stayed there as far as I know. He keeps himself to himself, never goes out much.

“So, all the while I was sooking up to him. You know, Father this and Father that and ‘Oh how interesting.' He lapped it up.
Then when I'd got my notes for the article, I decided to play a wee game so I could have a look around.

“‘Father Morrison,' I says, ‘I'm sorry, we don't have your picture. Do you still have that big camera of yours? You could set it and I'll push the button. I remember you being a dab hand with photos.'

“The silly old fool fell for it. Off he went to get his camera, me following behind. When he turned round and saw me in his studio, as he calls it, he didn't look too pleased, but I turned up the charm a notch. Told him how professional it all looked. He switched on a big lamp, showed me the big professional camera on a tripod. He fiddled with his light meter, the settings, then showed me how to take the picture. He posed against a white sheet. Pleased as punch he was. Vain too, combing over the baldy bit on his head in that stupid old man's way, you know, tramlines across his skull.

“Then I told him we didn't have anyone to develop the film. Could he suggest anyone? And could we have it soon, as I wanted the piece in the next edition? And the fool, just like that, says, ‘I'll do it myself,' he says, ‘won't take long,' and did I mind waiting? Mind—I couldn't have suggested better myself. ‘No problem,' I said, ‘I'll wait in the kitchen, write up my notes.' Then off he went into the darkroom and I had the house to myself.”

Rob paused. “You know it used to be our house?”

McAllister nodded.

“Well, when Grandma McLean lived there, my cousins would come to stay and we played hide-and-seek or Swallows and Amazons or Sardines. It's a big house, lots of cupboards and attics and the darkroom, that was once a dressing room, off what was my parents' bedroom.

“So there I was, alone, and naturally, I had to have a poke around. I looked in the bedrooms; all empty except for his one.
I checked his bedroom. A very large, very gory, very dead Jesus hanging above the bed gave me a bit of a fright. I checked the stuff on his table, his cupboards, his chest of drawers, and there, underneath his drawers, I found photos.”

Rob was so engrossed he didn't even laugh at his own joke.