Beneath the Abbey Wall (13 page)

L
ate on Friday morning Rob finally managed to talk to McAllister. He caught the editor coming up the stairs, a sheaf of what looked like accounts in his hand, and the look of a man about to read his own death warrant. “Can it wait?” he asked Rob.

Rob saw the state of McAllister's hair—it needed washing and cutting, he saw his shirt was unironed, his shoes shabby, and replied, “No, it can't wait.”

McAllister sighed. “Right then, my office.”

“Why don't I come round to your place later? I'll bring some pies, and we can have your famous soup.”

“I haven't had time to make any.”

“In that case, I'll bring the supper, you supply the tea.” Before McAllister could object, Rob left and drove straight home to see what the housekeeper had left in their larder.

Two hours later, his mother's picnic basket balanced on the petrol tank of the motorbike, Rob drove across town to McAllister's house. He rang the bell, then let himself in, shouting, “Supper's up.”

“In the kitchen.”

Rob could smell the pine logs burning in the kitchen range as he walked down the unlit hall. McAllister pushed away the chaos of reports and accounts covering the kitchen table. He had stacked them into piles: dealt with, read, and undecipherable—by far the biggest pile. He gestured to them, saying, “My admiration for Mrs. Smart grows by the day.”

Rob said nothing, but the thought hurt. He put the basket down, found the gadget to light the gas oven, put the steak and kidney pie in to reheat, and started to lay the table with the ease of a waiter in a high-class hotel.

McAllister watched, and only when Rob produced a bottle of wine did he find the energy to get to his feet and fetch glasses from the sideboard. It took a good half hour for them to eat, drink, clear the table, and get down to the point of Rob's visit.

“I was talking with my father . . . ” Rob started.

McAllister lit a cigarette.

“He didn't say, but I get the feeling he hasn't found much to help with Don's defense.”

“That makes two of us,” McAllister said.

“So what I was thinking was this . . . ” When he became intrigued by a story, Rob was never put off by anyone or anything—not McAllister, his father, nor his obsession with who was in the 1957 Top 20 music charts, nor his motorbike, not even the disintegration of his long-distance relationship with a girlfriend in Glasgow—got in the way of his pursuit of a scoop.

“. . . I'll start by talking to the people who live in his court and the neighbors along that part of Church Street.” Rob spoke as though McAllister was the subordinate, not him.

“The police have already . . . ”

Rob ignored this. “Then I'll talk to the man who found the . . . Mrs. Smart.”

“He works in the railways.”

“Aye, I know. And, as I'm the only one who can get sense out of him, I'll talk to Hector.”

“Hector?”

“He knew that Mrs. Smart and Don were . . . seeing each other.” It was the only phrase Rob could think of; “having an
affair,” “courting,” “lovers” seemed inappropriate terms for people of their age.

“Hector did?”

“Aye. What's more, his granny knows more about Don McLeod than anyone—though getting information out of her might be hard.”

“You can always remind her that Don is about to be locked up with perverts and murderers for the rest of his natural life.”

Rob was shocked by the callousness of McAllister's statement. He reached for the wine bottle but found it was empty.

“McAllister, despair is not going to help. We have to do what you taught me, what we've done in the past—with spectacular results, I might add—we will investigate. We can ask questions without scaring people.”
Or at least I can,
he thought. “We can take shortcuts if we have to.”
None immediately come to mind, but bending the law might be necessary to clear Don's name.
“So, what have you discovered so far?”

It took a moment for McAllister to consider where to start. Then habit kicked in. He reached for a blank sheet of paper, picked up the pencil he had been marking the accounts with, and wrote the heading, INTERVIEW. Underneath he wrote:
neighbors, man who found body, Hector, Granny Bain.

There he stopped. “The will puzzled me . . . ” he started.

“The will?” Rob had been waiting for this; he knew he would find out the contents sooner or later.

McAllister had forgotten or not realized that Rob knew only of Mrs. Smart's bequest to the
Highland Gazette
.

“Perhaps it is better if you don't let your father know I told you, but . . . ” McAllister explained to Rob the bequest to Jenny, the bequest to Don, the leaving of the mansion in town to Sergeant Major Smart. He told Rob of Jenny's unhappiness at being left the inheritance, of the sergeant major's vow to fight the will,
the Mackenzie family's sheltering the Traveling people, and Jenny's advice to
start at the beginning
. But he did not mention the stolen boys; that was Jenny McPhee's business.

Rob was fascinated by the whole saga, and when McAllister ended he commented, “Good luck to the sergeant major taking on my father in a legal stouch.” He stretched out his legs, sighed, and said, “We'll need a load of luck, too. Mrs. Smart's will is certainly . . . provocative.” It was the only word he could think of to describe such a strange list of bequests. “Though I can see Jenny McPhee in Mrs. Smart's pearl necklace, I can't see Don McLeod as the laird of an estate in Assynt.” McAllister could almost see Rob's brain ticking in double time. “
Start at the beginning,
Jenny said. What beginning?”

“I'm not sure. Mrs. Smart was a Mackenzie . . . ”

“A well-known and well-liked family in Sutherland,” Rob supplied.

McAllister had forgotten that for all his youth and obsession with the new era, Rob McLean was essentially a product of traditional Highland gentry, related to half the other gentry of the north.

“Joyce Mackenzie met Don in a convalescent home for those wounded in the Great War,” McAllister started.

“Really?”

“In the early twenties, Don started work at the
Gazette,
and Joyce Mackenzie, as she was, went to India, where she married Archibald Smart.” McAllister was writing down a timeline as he spoke. “In the early thirties she returned to the Highlands—alone. Her father dies, in India, shortly after her return, so Beech told me, and Mrs. Smart, as she then was, inherited the estate and the town house.”

“And probably a pretty penny in the bank,” Rob added.

“Mrs. Smart started working at the
Gazette
in 1937 . . . ”

“Most unusual for someone of her social status—especially as there was no financial need,” Rob commented.

“Archibald Smart was invalided out of the army in . . . Actually, I'll have to check that,” McAllister said. “Rosemary Beauchamp Carlyle, Countess Sokolov, or Mrs. Sokolov, as she prefers to be called, was a neighbor and friend of Mrs. Smart. She had also returned from overseas, Shanghai, in 1936, and it seems she is the only person to have a close relationship with Mrs. Smart.”

“Apart from Don.”

“Aye. Apart from Don.”

“Start at the beginning . . . ” Rob considered the conundrum. “You know, for us Highlanders the beginning is always, ‘Who are your people?'” Rob said this in perfect imitation of a Gaelic speaker speaking English. “So maybe Jenny meant it literally. Start with the births, deaths, marriages, who inherited what—isn't that the classic stuff of disputed wills and murders?”

McAllister had his elbow on the table and was rubbing his thick back hair with his hand, staring and not seeing.

Rob saw the weariness. “We'll talk again when we find out more.” He stood, took his jacket off the back of the chair, zipped it up, saying, “McAllister, Neil is doing a great job, and Joanne; even Hector is helping, although I'm having to correct his English. We're using more pictures, and Beech is a handy proofreader—so leave the work to us. You concentrate on getting Don out of prison.”
And spending the rest of his natural life locked up
was what he didn't need to say. “I'll see myself out.”

Hearing the roar of the bike fade into the night, McAllister reached once more towards a stack of accounts awaiting his scrutiny, then pushed it back to join the chaos. “Not tonight,” he muttered, and without washing up, he walked upstairs to bed and nightmares.

*  *  *  

It took only one phone call but a long wait for Rob to talk to the man who had discovered Mrs. Smart's body. Someone had to go down to the railway marshaling yards to pass on the message, outside calls being forbidden to workers, but the man returned the call.

“I can meet you tomorrow, I work a half day on Saturday. One o'clock? The café at the bus station?” Mr. Kenneth Grant asked.

“Aye, that'll be grand.” Rob echoed the man's accent, lapsing into the Highland way of expressing himself. This was a part of Scotland where the dialect was light, it was more a way of speaking English as though directly translated from the Gaelic; the circuitous roundabout way of the sentences had a good-mannered graciousness; “Would you be having a cup of tea?”

“No, I didn't see anyone,” Mr. Grant told Rob when they met.

“No, I never heard anything,” was his answer to the next question.

“No, I'd never seen her there before that night.”

“No, I wouldn't know her from Adam. Or Eve.”

“No. And how would
I
know what she was doing there?”

Rob was stumped for another question, but there was something—a hesitation, a glance into the distance, the way the man shifted in his seat—that had made Rob certain there was
something
.

“Sorry to keep pestering you”—Rob gave one of his “I'm just a young lad doing his job” looks—“but Mrs. Smart was one of us, and everyone at the
Gazette
is pretty shaken up.”

“I can see that.” Mr. Grant lit a cigarette but said no more.

When Rob spoke, it was not to Mr. Grant directly, more in the way of an observation. “You know, sometimes when I
think
things over, I don't get it. But when I'm driving my motorbike or dropping off to sleep, I remember some little thing, something that I'm not even sure I really saw . . . ”

“Aye. I ken what you mean.” They did not look at each other, just sipped their cold tea. “Sometimes, in the railway yards, 'specially when you're on the night shift, the light plays tricks, bouncing off wet rails, or a red lantern winking in the wind between carriages, stuff like that . . . ”

“I can imagine.”

“You know thon steps?”

“Aye.” There was no need for Rob to ask “which steps?”

“I never saw nothing that night—excepting her body. But the churchyard up above . . . a right spooky place it is.”

“Especially on a dreich night.”

“Aye.” Mr. Grant leaned forward, as though delivering a secret. “I thought I saw something—it was no more than a flicker moving through the tombstones. Gave me a right good fright.”

“It would have scared the living daylights out of me”—Rob grinned—“'specially since some say there's a ghost from the time of the Blackfriars Abbey.”

“Aye, I've heard that. I canny say more because that is all it was—a flicker out the corner o' ma eye. Not something I'd swear to on the Bible.”

“Did you sense it was a person there?”

“Now don't be thinking I believe in ghosts.” The man was so indignant at the suggestion that Rob understood he
was
wondering if he'd seen a ghost.

“I don't believe in ghosts either,” Rob told him, “but I've seen and I've felt some things I can't explain.”

“Aye, that's it. A wee bit o' movement, a glint o' something you canny be sure of, canny explain.” He glanced at the clock, then stood. “I must be off.”

Rob knew that Mr. Grant was uncomfortable; this was women's talk, not the sort of thing a grown-up former member of the Lovat Scouts decorated for bravery at Anzio should be talking about.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Grant.”

“Aye. Well. As long as you don't make a song and dance about it in the
Gazette
 . . . ”

As they shook hands outside the café, in a haze of diesel fumes, to the noise of buses and a child's wailing, Rob knew the man
had
seen something. But what?

Tossing up whether to return to the
Gazette
office or continue his search, Rob found his feet had made the decision. Standing at the narrow passageway to the court where Don's tiny terrace, the end one of four, hid from passersby, he peered in. No one, nothing, moved.

He crossed Church Street, where the oldest buildings in town, mostly churches, were grouped together, to the top of the steps where Mrs. Smart had been found. At the back of the building on the right, a solid squat eighteenth-century affair with crow-stepped gable ends, there was a black iron gate set in a sandstone arch. It was a back entrance to the churchyard of the Old High Church, built on the site of, and probably using stones from, the ruins of the Abbey of the Black Friars. He looked, saw nothing remarkable, but noted that it was not locked.

He continued down the steps, trying to avoid staring at the back porch on his left, the back doorway into the church of a different denomination, trying not to picture Mrs. Smart's body abandoned not just to the dark loneliness of death, but to the horror of murder. Instead he examined the churchyard wall opposite, examining the moss, the lichen, the dark stains, not knowing what he was looking for, but knowing that as the tombstones were above, the bodies must be level with his eyes.