Beneath the Abbey Wall (20 page)

And, Rob knew, she would if she could.

I
don't want to pressure you . . . ”

“But the trial is only four weeks away.” McAllister completed Angus McLean's sentence for him.

They were in the solicitor's office. It was nine thirty on Thursday, publication day, and McAllister had not even bothered to glance through that day's
Gazette.

He looks terrible,
Angus McLean was thinking.

He looks like he needs a good night's sleep,
McAllister was thinking.

“So Don's still in the hospital?” It was more a rhetorical question, as Angus knew McAllister had been to visit Don late the previous night, after the
Gazette
had been put to bed.

“I was told I was not allowed to see him,” McAllister said, “but the sister relented. I think she felt sorry for Don.”

McAllister's eyes glazed over as he remembered the visit to the hospital. Angus saw his anguish. He began to fill his pipe, knowing to wait until the editor returned to the here and now.

When McAllister had arrived—to find the lights dimmed, the ward silent except for the hush of feet moving behind the screened-off bed McAllister guessed was Don's—he pulled the curtain to one side and looked in.

“Do you know the time?” the ward sister had asked.

“How is he?”

“He'll survive.”

“Aye, but for how long?”

The woman, who at first glance appeared to be a caricature of a ward sister—all starch and no comfort—took McAllister by the arm and led him out into the corridor. The ward doors closed behind them with a sigh of compressed air.

“Mr. McAllister . . . ”

“How do you know my name?”

“Wheesht,” she shushed him. “Of course I know who you are, the same as I know Mr. McLeod. It's a small town. And a big murder. Everyone's talking, and not everyone credits Don McLeod with Mrs. Smart's death.”

“You know, knew, her?”

“No, but my mother did.” She sighed. “She was a good woman. Everyone knew about them . . . ”

I didn't,
but McAllister was too ashamed to admit it.

“He couldn't have killed her. He loved her.” But the way she said it, the way her voice took on a misty tone, annoyed him.

“Not everyone thinks that way.”

“You're right. Many always want to believe the worst.” She shook her head. The white headdress crackled. “Come back tomorrow during visiting hours, you can see him then.”

“You're keeping him here?”

“Aye. The doctor knows Mr. McLeod, and we'll find reasons to keep him here as long as possible. But you didn't hear that from me.” She smiled and patted him on the arm. The touch of her hand, through the layers of coat and jacket and jumper and shirt, made him realize how long it had been since someone had touched him with love.

“Can I not just peek in to see him?”

She thought for a moment. “The guard is in the canteen on a break. If he finds you, you never got any permission from me.” She turned away, disappeared through a door into some
hospital netherland that could have been a cupboard or the secret entrance to Brigadoon.

McAllister tried to walk quietly, but that only made more noise, the leather of his shoes creaking in the unaccustomed position. Peering around the screens, he saw Don's head, his thick grey and white and black hair lit by the night-light shining from the wall above. His eyes were closed. The neck was not bandaged, but even in this light McAllister could see the dark semicircle of bruising. He saw the hand hanging outside the sheets, caught the glint of the bracelet of steel where Don was handcuffed to the frame of the bed. The feeling that he needed a chair overcame him, but the chair was at the end of the bed, and all he wanted to do was to sit and hold his old friend's hand.

“Did you bring a dram?” It came out as a garbled croak, but McAllister understood.

“You're alive.” It was meant as a joke, came out as surprise.

“Aye.”

McAllister bent down, touched Don's hand. “I can't stay. I'm not supposed to be here.”

“Aye.” Don gripped McAllister's hand. The grip was not strong. “Ask thon nurse, the young one, if she . . . ” Don started.

“I'll have to ask you to leave, Mr. McAllister.” Although the guard, the same man McAllister had met in the prison, spoke softly, McAllister knew he would have to go. He squeezed Don's hand again.

“He wants the nurse,” he told the guard as he left, unable to look at the shriveled old man who was once Don McLeod, cock o' the North.

When McAllister eventually went home, he spent the rest of the night reading, sleeping, awakening, making tea, adding a dram to it, taking the mug to bed, trying to read but rereading
the same paragraph or sometimes a whole page over and over, all the time the words of the nursing sister coursing around his brain.
He loved her.

And he knew he was jealous. To truly love someone, for that love to survive on only one Sunday evening a week alone together for two decades . . . he was jealous.

“McAllister.” Angus McLean summoned McAllister back from his contemplations. He had smoked one pipe to McAllister's two cigarettes, watched the editor staring out the window, had seen his face, particularly the minute shifts of the eyebrows, reflecting pain and loss and puzzlement. Now, Angus decided, they needed to plan.

“As I was saying,” the solicitor reminded McAllister, “the advocates for the defense are coming up from Edinburgh next week. I'd like to have something to tell them.”

“I have nothing. No ideas. Nothing.”

“Mrs. McPhee, has she information that might help the case?”

“I don't think so.” McAllister shuddered. The proverbial ghost had walked over his grave. “I'll talk to Jimmy McPhee again.” His voice had changed. There was a hardness to it that made the solicitor look up, see the grim set of McAllister's mouth, and he took comfort from it.

“Let me know if you hear anything, anything at all.”

They shook hands, and McAllister walked out to fetch his car. He would never tell Angus McLean, but he would find Jimmy, they would plan, scheme. If he had to lie and cheat and plant false evidence he would.
And Jimmy will help me.
This McAllister knew.

*  *  *  

It took a day and a half to find Jimmy through the elaborate system of leaving messages in various drinking establishments.

Late Saturday afternoon, McAllister was at home, having visited Don again, only for Don to keep his eyes tight shut and growl, “Go away.” So he did. But he'd keep visiting whether Don wanted or not.

When Jimmy McPhee phoned him at home in the late afternoon saying, with no word of greeting,
Jimmy McPhee here,
McAllister told him, “I need to speak to you.”

“I'll be round your place the night, but it might be late.”

Jimmy McPhee was late—half past ten at night late. He was sober, which surprised McAllister, and he was carrying a briefcase, which surprised McAllister even more. A second glance and McAllister decided it was not documents Jimmy was carrying, so he said nothing. He went to the shelf and selected a Dalmore single malt. Jimmy saw the bottle and grinned; it was a bottle produced not many miles from the McPhee encampment, and a bottle that Jimmy himself had once presented to McAllister.

“A fine taste in whisky you have,” he said.

“And a fine taste in friends,” McAllister replied. They raised their glasses. They drank. There was a comfortable silence as they savored the peat coursing through the veins.

“Your mother well?” McAllister broke the hush.

So it's to be the Highland way,
Jimmy thought.
Must mean some big favor he's wanting.

“She's well, feeling the cold in her bones, though.”

“Aye, my mother's the same.”

They contemplated the fire.

“The defense doesn't have to prove who did it,” McAllister started, “just raise enough doubt . . . maybe only show an alternative . . . the Procurator Fiscal, he'll have to show . . . ‘Beyond reasonable doubt' . . . ”

“'Specially in a murder case,” Jimmy finished.

“So have you thought more on Don's predicament?”

Jimmy liked how McAllister did not ask him for his mother's thoughts on the matter—although it was Jenny McPhee who would know the secrets of that time and that place, when Joyce Mackenzie and Donal McLeod were courting, and whatever else had happened—or not.

“Two thoughts,” Jimmy replied. “Who knew where he kept the knife? And could the sergeant major somehow have done it—because my mother is certain he is her killer.”

“Aye, the sergeant major.” McAllister was pleased Jimmy had brought up the subject. “I know he can walk, I've seen him. But with his legs, could he manage the steps?”

“Now that's what I was thinking.” Jimmy leaned forward, elbows on his thighs, both hands around the tumbler as though the liquor would warm his hands along with his insides.

“You know where she was found? On the back porch of the church?” McAllister's voice was too casual, and Jimmy too alert not to notice. “Suppose he somehow had a key to the church, was hiding there waiting . . . ”

“The police must have checked.” Much as Jimmy liked the theory, he couldn't see DI Dunne neglecting to check such a simple scenario.

“Really? When they were convinced from the beginning they had their man? Convinced by Sergeant Major Smart's accusations? By the contents of the will?” McAllister did not raise his voice, did not show anger; it was this that convinced Jimmy that he was right—McAllister
was
on to something.

“Aye, it's a possibility, but the higher-ups of the constabulary are quick to blame anyone as long as it's not one of their own. I'm sure they're sorry there was no convenient tinker around that night.”

“I'm sure they checked.” They smiled at each other when
McAllister said this. “I'll have to think this through, but could we suggest that the sergeant major might have been there that night?”

“Suggest?” Jimmy laughed. “You'd need to do more than
suggest
.”

No more needed saying, so McAllister got up to recharge their glasses.

“I met thon Canadian gadgie who's working wi' you,” Jimmy commented. “Seems decent enough.”

McAllister was now the one on alert. It was something in Jimmy's tone, not his use of the word “gadgie,” which McAllister now knew was not an insult, just the Northerner's word for a man.

“Aye, him and young Rob and Joanne Ross came to the Ferry Inn two Saturdays past, but ma mother was unsettled by him.”

“Really?”
What was Joanne doing on a Saturday night with Neil Stewart,
was what McAllister wanted to know. “Why was that?” was what he asked.

“There's no knowing what my ma thinks o' anything or anyone.” But he had a wild idea, and it was not one he wanted to think about. He drank the dram in a single gulp, stood, and saying only, “You know how to find me,” he left.

The sound of the front door closing and Jimmy's car starting and the clock chiming midnight made McAllister aware of how tired he was.

He checked the fire; he took the glasses into the kitchen and rinsed them. He went to switch off the lights but sat down again. One answer and one question, he thought; whatever was needed to raise doubts in the mind of a jury, Jimmy would help; whatever it was about Neil Stewart that has unsettled his mother, Jimmy was asking for help.

But what was Joanne doing out on a Saturday night with Neil
Stewart?
He had noticed that Neil and Joanne had become friends. He knew they had had the occasional coffee together, shared a sandwich sometimes.

Maybe shared more than a sandwich.
His attempt at a lightness he did not feel wasn't working. A slow sinking black despair had crept over him, pinning him to the chair.

Joanne. Neil. No. Never. It can't be.

He kept trying to persuade himself there was nothing between Joanne and Neil. And he kept coming back to a picture of them, in the newsroom, sitting just a little too near, their faces a little too close, laughing in that way lovers do.

He eventually fell asleep in the chair and awoke, cold-tired and unable to get back to sleep for a long time.

*  *  *  

“It's open,” McAllister yelled. He had heard Rob's motorbike even though he was in the kitchen, and as he had toast under the grill, he didn't want to leave it. He hated burnt toast.

“Not at church, then,” Rob said as he came in carrying the Sunday papers, which he had collected off McAllister's front porch.

“Keep your facetious remarks for a career in tabloids.”

“Not me, I'm going into television—remember?”