Beneath the Abbey Wall (6 page)

“That is entirely up to you. However, your late wife's will is legal and unequivocal.” As Angus McLean said this he saw Jenny McPhee whispering to her son Jimmy. She did not look at all happy at the news. Even among Travelers, who were known to keep themselves to themselves, Jenny McPhee was a secretive woman. No one knew what bound her to Joyce Mackenzie—as she always called her friend. Neither woman was ashamed of the friendship, and no one, not even Jimmy McPhee, knew of their shared past. Until now.

Angus McLean too was curious as to why Jenny McPhee was a beneficiary but would never ask. He looked down at the document and continued, “The sum of two thousand pounds is left to Bahadur Gurung in recognition of his devoted service to my late father.”

Jimmy whistled when the substantial sum of money was read out. The Gurkha soldier remained as impassive as a painted deity from his homeland.

“Next”—Angus was holding up the document in front of
him as though to ward off the venom wafting across the deck—“the marital home at Ness Walk is left, unencumbered, to Sergeant Major Archibald Smart.”

No comment from the sergeant major this time.

“Next. All monies in the bank account in the name of Joyce Eileen Smart are bequeathed to the local orphanage. Joint bank accounts revert to the widower.”

“What bank accounts? I know nothing of a separate account. How much is in there? I have every right to know.”

What an auld eejit,
Jenny thought.

“We can discuss that later.” Angus wanted to get on with the reading, knowing there was worse to come. He took a deep breath. “The estate in Assynt, Sutherland, is left, in its entirety, to Donal Dewar McLeod.”

This time Angus began wondering if Sergeant Major Smart would need an ambulance.

“I knew it! That man.” Sergeant Major Smart pointed at a now more alert Don, or at least a man with his eyes only half shut. “That man murdered my wife.”

Don was immediately on his feet. Jimmy put an arm between him and the sergeant major, who was attempting to rise from his chair. The Gurkha jumped between him and Don. McAllister was saying, “Calm down, calm down.” Jenny was sitting back enjoying herself. And Angus was glad of the width of the partner's desk between himself and chaos.

“If you don't need him anymore, I'm taking Mr. McLeod wi' me,” Jimmy said.

Angus nodded gratefully. “We can go over the details another time.”

Jimmy's grip on Don's arm and the strength he was using to propel him out the door left Don with no choice. There was no energy left in him; three weeks of steady drinking had seen to that.

“I shall be reporting this to the police,” Sergeant Major Smart called after them. “This proves motive, you know.” But everyone ignored him.

Angus McLean wanted the gathering over and done with. “I have informed all the beneficiaries of the contents of the will, as is my duty as executor. My office will be in contact to sort out the details.”

“I will fight this.” The sergeant major's voice was still loud but had lost a little of the arrogance.

“The will is properly drawn up and will be properly executed.” Angus had never liked the man, and not for the first time wondered how a person as obviously decent as Mrs. Smart had married such a popinjay. “To fight the will would be expensive. The law will take into account your inheritance of a property of substantial value, worth more than fifty percent of the total value of your late wife's estate.”

“I will do everything in my power to see that that McLeod man inherits nothing.” He next turned on Jenny McPhee. “As for you, I will make certain you do not inherit a single piece of her jewelry.”

“I canny stop you, Mr. Smart”—Jenny's nonuse of his title was deliberate—“but know this; she was a far better woman than you ever deserved, and she is sorely missed.”

When the sergeant major had been wheeled out of the room, Jenny waited a minute to avoid meeting him again, then she too rose to leave.

“Thank you, Mr. McLean. What happened to Joyce is beyond belief and pains me greatly, and this”—she gestured to the papers on the desk—“does not make me any happier.”

McAllister saw the back of her hand, brown and wrinkled, and he knew she was much older than she seemed.
Don's age,
he thought. He also noted her saying “Joyce,” and considered
that she might know the secrets of Mrs. Smart. Not that Jenny McPhee was likely to share her knowledge with anyone other than her son Jimmy.

“I'll miss the woman.” Jenny lifted a handbag that resembled a badly cured reptile, pulled down a hat that resembled a tea cozy, and added, “But I wish she hadn't landed me with this inheritance. It'll only lead to trouble.” She nodded—“Mr. McLean, McAllister”—and made for the door.

“Could you give me an address where I can write to you?” Angus McLean asked.

“Care of the Ferry Inn will get me.”

When he and the solicitor were alone, McAllister sat down and lit a Passing Cloud, hoping the fragrance would clear the malice from the air.

“I suppose you are used to it,” he said, waiting as the solicitor filled and lit his pipe, setting off enough smoke to kipper a good dozen herrings. “But from all I know and read, wills bring out the worst in everyone, and this will is certainly intriguing.”

“I couldn't pass an opinion on a client's mind.” Angus smiled. “All I do is administer their wishes. In this case I fear it may be a long-drawn-out, perhaps bitter, process.”

“Rather you than me.” The banality of the comment covered McAllister's curiosity. He knew he would get few answers from Angus McLean—but maybe a few discreet directions. “It was good of her to leave a scholarship to the
Gazette
.”

“She was a good woman.”

“She and Jenny must have been close.”

“Indeed.”

“An estate in Sutherland—does that make Don a laird?”

“Quite a thought.” Angus McLean smiled, but he was giving no more information than absolutely required of him by law.

They shook hands. McAllister left to walk to the
Gazette
office. In the act of walking he did his thinking; he would consider yet another layer of complexity in the character of the much-missed Mrs. Joyce Eileen Smart, née Mackenzie, of the Assynt Mackenzies.

The scholarship for a young person from the Gaeltachd was novel and welcome and much needed. The bequests to Jenny McPhee and Don McLeod were perplexing.

In former times Jenny and Mrs. Smart must have known each other well. McAllister had not been aware of a connection between them; the friendship seemed unlikely—one being a tinker, the other a lady. Although he could say he knew Jimmy McPhee and his mother, he could not say he
knew
them; the Travelers were secretive, and knowing the hostility towards them from the majority of the population, he didn't blame them for distrusting outsiders.

As for an estate in remote Assynt—what would Don do with it? There was nothing there but heather, peat bogs, lochs, and lochans, fortified by fiercesome mountains. In McAllister's opinion, summer in the Northwest, with its nine-and-a-half-month winter, did not make it the Highland paradise of song and legend and maudlin expatriate memory. A Glasgow public house was his idea of real Scotland.

Not that he knew the area well. When a young journalist in Glasgow, he had been as far as Lairg once, in June, and had been driven back by rain interspersed with occasional sleet. Two years later, in August, he had driven up the west coast to Ullapool and on to Lochinver, on some of the most beautiful roads in Scotland. The purple-heather-clad hills were spectacular, though the shocking clouds of midgies that could bite through cowhide made walking nigh impossible. The way the locals examined a stranger as though he was a green man from Mars, the absolute ban on any activity on the Sabbath, and the desolate glens with
abandoned crofts overgrown with grass a brighter green than the surrounding moorland depressed him. He knew the history of the Clearances and the stories still hurt.

Yes, there was something majestic about the ancient scarred mountaintops, particularly Suilven. Yes, the late-night-never-quite-dark light was enchanting, but he was a city man then, too young and self-absorbed to fall in love with landscape. So he went scuttling back to the warm comfort of his beloved hard man land of Glasgow.

McAllister thought again about the woman he had worked with but barely knew. He hadn't known her husband was wheelchair-bound. He hadn't known she was wealthy. He hadn't known she had lived in India. There was much he hadn't known. But he agreed with the many people who'd said, “She was a good woman.”
Such an old-fashioned phrase that,
he thought,
and in Joyce Smart's case, absolutely true.

He had reached the
Gazette
without being aware he was there. Climbing the staircase, he thought,
Jenny McPhee is right, there's trouble brewing.

O
nce more, settled in his armchair with the fire blazing and the wireless playing Mozart, McAllister was startled out of a good book and a good malt by a late-night visitor. This time it was Saturday, but again the thought came to him,
It's almost the Sabbath, who on earth is about in this town, this late at night?
Again, he knew it would not be good news.

The visitor was Sergeant Patience, a man whom all considered most inappropriately named.

“Mr. McAllister, sir, you're needed down the station,” the policeman told him.

“Nothing serious, I hope?”

A big barreled bulk of a policeman, the sergeant was not always popular but had lately formed an odd alliance with Rob McLean over motorbikes.

“It's Donnie McLeod and it's no' serious—yet,” the sergeant said, “but if he carries on like this much longer, there's no saying what might happen.”

“I'll get my coat and meet you at the station.”

*  *  *  

Don was in a cell, but the door was open. The smell of drink and vomit and stale urine was nasty, but what really appalled McAllister was the state of the man; he looked like one of those lost souls who had suffered in either or both of the wars, wandering the country, living a half-life, surviving on the kindness of strangers and the Salvation Army.

“Are you charging him?” McAllister asked.

“No' this time,” Sergeant Patience told him, “but it's no' always me who finds him and I canny vouch for some o' the other police officers who don't know him like I do.”

“Would you help me get him to my car?”

“Nae bother.”

On the short ride home, McAllister worried Don might vomit. He wasn't scared for his car, just afraid Don would choke.
One death at the
Gazette
is enough
.

It took McAllister much more effort than it had the policeman to get Don out of the car, down the garden path, and inside the house. At the doorstep, while McAllister was fiddling with his keys, Don leaned against the porch door, then slid to the checkerboard tiles, and collapsed in the middle like a sad Victorian sponge cake. All the while Don was muttering, arguing with himself, in Gaelic. To McAllister, who knew no Gaelic, the words washed over him like a Highland burn, running to the sea.

Getting Don upstairs to bed was beyond him. Getting him to the bathroom was difficult, but McAllister managed. Stripping off trousers, jacket, and shirt that had been slept in since the day of the reading of the will, a week ago, was relatively easy, as Don was snoring on the kitchen floor; getting him into the sitting room and onto the sofa was achieved without putting McAllister's back out. He tucked a blanket around his deputy; then, in case of accidents, he spread old newspapers around the floor near Don's head before retreating to his armchair to sit the night out, on watch for the man he admired and cared for sleep the sleep of the unready.

The ringing of his doorbell awoke McAllister.

“Not again,” he muttered as he massaged the crick in his neck from sleeping in the armchair. He had slept in fits and starts, had
woken in the grey dawn—which was not that early this time of year—to help Don to the bathroom, had made a cup of tea, then dozed off again. By the sound of various church bells, from a simple toll to a full peal from the cathedral, he knew it was now mid-morning.

“Good morning, Mr. McAllister.”

“Is it?” McAllister peered at the bruised sky and smelt imminent rain.

“I won't come in . . . I don't suppose Donnie McLeod is still with you . . . ” The big man shifted uncomfortably on his small neat feet.

“He . . . ” McAllister did not have a chance to elaborate.

“No, I don't suppose he's here.” Sergeant Patience was speaking in a deliberate, penetrating voice, knowing it would carry down the hallway. “And I don't know where he went to last night . . . ”