A Small Death in the Great Glen (23 page)

N
INE
 
 

Rob was running up the lane toward the
Gazette
office when he saw McAllister up ahead. He caught up with him but instead of going inside, McAllister took Rob by the elbow and led him to the entrance of a close that ran between and under the building in the three-story terrace built circa 1680. The smell of damp earth put Rob in mind of a grave. The door at the far end led to stairs going down into the basement and sub-basements where the machinery was housed. It baffled Rob how the machinery got down there; he half-believed Don's story that the building had been constructed around the printing press. And the printers came with it, Rob had quipped, only to be hit on the head with a rolled-up
Gazette.

Back against the wall, legs crossed, McAllister produced a packet of Passing Clouds, offered one to Rob. Rob refused. McAllister struck a match on a patch of stonework, pink with enough phosphor to blow up the building. Generations of journalists and printers had sheltered in this exact spot, to smoke, to contemplate the weather and the state of the nation. This same refuge had probably been used to discuss the progress of the battle of Culloden or Waterloo, or to form the elaborate union rules, zealously enforced by the father of the chapel, that were a bane to journalists everywhere.

“So. Tell me.” McAllister blew the smoke through his nostrils like the proverbial dragon. “Hoodie crows?”

“Big, black and scary,” Rob shot back.

McAllister made a fair impression of Robert Mitchum squinting down the length of the cigarette.

“Actually,” Rob continued, “I was thinking on the same thing myself a wee while ago. Joanne said the girls were adamant; a hoodie crow picked up the boy and took him off. But now, for some reason, they won't talk about it. Don thinks it's all wee girls' havers. But my mother is not so sure. And I got to thinking. …”

“A conspiracy of crows,” McAllister muttered. “Is that the collective noun? I know it's a parliament of rooks.” He threw the butt into the gutter. “What else have you heard?”

“Best ask Joanne.”

“Aye, probably best.” Though he wasn't certain that it was. Joanne had been uncharacteristically unpredictable lately. The usual cacophony of bells struck nine. “We've thirty seconds to get to the Monday meeting on time.”

“Race you up the stairs.”

Rob was off before he could see the expression on McAllister's face.

Me? Race? he thought. Me—the Grand Panjandrum of the
Highland Gazette
?
And
a two-pack-a-day man?

“Let's get started.” Don was in the chair at the head of the table. Rob was perched on the edge of the table. Joanne was slumped on a stool, elbows on the table. McAllister was leaning back, the chair balanced on two legs and at that delicate angle where a degree or two more and he and the chair would go tumbling.

“McAllister?”

“I've nothing that's fit to print—yet.”

Don rolled his eyes. “Well, whatever you write, can you make it more relevant? No more xenophobia stories. Most of our readers had to look that one up in the dictionary—if they could be bothered, that is. As for your lecture on Suez—putting the prime minister in his place, your diatribe on Hungary, your campaign on Scottish independence and I don't know what else besides, I've
told you, we're a
local
paper, we report on
local
news. We don't investigate, we don't write about stuff that's none of our concern—”

“So tell me, where do
you
go for a fish supper now that the local vigilantes have targeted the Corelli business? All the way across town to Eastgate?” He didn't get het up, he didn't raise his voice, but the passion swept the room like a sirocco from the Sahara. “Isn't this how it started on the Continent? Isn't this what we fought against?”

“Aye, all right, all right, you've got me.” Don held his hands up in surrender. “But please, no words of more than two syllables. And no being a cleverclogs wi' your quotes in Latin.”

“I did Latin,” Rob volunteered.

“So did I,” Joanne added.

“Aye, but can you box the compass or calculate the odds for the three thirty at Ayr? Or do anything useful with all your learning? No. So, what next?”

“Follow up on the Polish gentleman in gaol?”

“Enough of that for now.” Rob looked disappointed. “Leave it with me, though, I'll fish around,” Don promised. “I've heard that the detective from down south has arrived. Maybe your contact in the polis”—at the word
contact
he wiggled his eyebrows—“maybe she can tell you more. For now, get the sports done and check if there's anything other than drunk and disorderly at the sheriff's court. Joanne?”

“The usual. There is one thing, though … but it's not news.”

“Let me be the judge o' that,” McAllister interjected.

“Well, when Bill and I were out west, we came across the new scheme that Mr. Findlay Grieg has going. It's a great big hunting and shooting and fishing affair with at least twenty rooms. Mr. Grieg calls it a lodge. Bill says it would cost a mint to build.”

McAllister whistled. “That
is
news. Has anyone seen the planning application?”

“I was going to check at the county council.” Joanne was slightly hesitant, assuming that one of the others, the professionals, would take over the story, if it became a story.

“Good thinking. You do that. Get a copy of the planning application. I'd be very interested in whose name the application was made. Don here would certainly have noticed if it was in Mr. Grieg's name.”

Joanne sat up straighter than she had done for a while.

“Another thing, Joanne: hoodie crows?”

Don groaned. “You're off with the faeries again. Hoodie crows! I'll leave you to it. Some of us have real work to do.” He waved a pile of copy at them and left.

“He thinks it's all wee girls' havers,” Joanne told McAllister.

“I love the story of Annie ringing the doorbells.” Rob reached for his motorbike jacket. “I'm off to collect the football reports. See ya.”

“Right, Mrs. Ross, from the beginning, doorbells, hoodie crows, the lot.”

Joanne smiled. “Well, that afternoon he disappeared, my girls were coming home from school with Jamie, the boy that drowned, or was killed, well …”

McAllister was back in his office, feet up, cigarette in hand. He thought over Joanne's story. He didn't agree with Don. There was something that bothered him about the girls' story. He reached for the phone. Mr. Frank Clark the headmaster; if anyone would know anything, it would be him. He put the phone back in the cradle. Better to talk face-to-face. He'd walk over to the school.

Hoodie crows; thoughts of them accompanied his walk down through the old part of town, past churches and shops and bars, past the back of the market and the auction rooms, left at another church, to the stone stairs, the treads of which were bow-shaped
by centuries of people making their way down to the river.The vista to the north of the town was framed by the buildings, and the resemblance to a Victorian etching was made all the more authentic by the churchyard and moss-covered gravestones that lined the stairway to the right. Farmland covering the distant hills formed the backdrop of the picture. Friesian cows were mere specks in this landscape. McAllister could visualize them; heads down, obsessed with the rich green grass, occasionally looking up, they would ruminate to the spectacular views of the firth and the town and the distant haze of moorland and history.

The pedestrian suspension bridge across the river not so much swayed as buckled, wind blasting into his right ear. Walking the short distance to the school he kept shaking his head, trying to dislodge the evil vacuum where the wind had managed to penetrate right through the eardrum.

The school was the usual intimidating late-Victorian Gothic of the 1880s but seventy years later, mature wild cherry and sycamore trees softened the gaunt structure. Their roots had escaped up through the tarmacadam in many places; covered by fallen leaves and the propellers of sycamore seeds, they tripped the unwary. They scared Wee Jean; she thought of them as tree fingers, tunneling their way up through the earth, searching for the rapturous light, like the illustration of the Resurrection in her Sunday school picture book.

During the day, the school echoed to the ebb and flow of five hundred children. The smell of generations of pupils, of damp wool, forgotten gym shoes, of stale milk and school dinners and carbolic soap, reminded McAllister of his own primary; the same high windows you could never see out of even when you stood on top of your desk, the same school hall, where the morning assembly, with obligatory prayers, reading of announcements and the occasional public belting of the worst offenders, took place.
And the same feeling that no matter how clear your conscience, you might be picked out and punished for an offense you couldn't remember committing. Or worse, you could be nominated for some mention or award or prize, the result of which was at the very least a Chinese burn from the other boys come playtime.

He walked through the hall that doubled as the gym. Supervised by their teacher, following the instruction sheets, children would exercise to the music broadcast on the Home Service of the BBC. In thousands of schools, tens of thousands of children jumped as one to the fruity voice of the announcer, setting the kingdom all atremble, the calisthenics and marching done, out of time, to the tune of “The Grand Old Duke of York.” He was swamped by memories, and he shuddered.

“Hello. Can I help you? Oh, Mr. McAllister, it's yourself.”

Frank Clark's voice cut short the reverie. McAllister had met the headmaster through the committees and social functions that their respective positions condemned them to. They liked what they saw and what they had heard of each other.

After the handshake and social niceties, McAllister began. “I wanted to talk about the boy.”

“Jamie.”

“Not for publication, just to try to understand.”

Mr. Clark looked closely at his visitor. He was not about to give information for the gratuitous delight of the morbid. He'd already had the tabloids onto him.

“Such a tragedy. I've never come across the like before.” Frank Clark started. “Of course the children are distressed, as we all are. The Ross girls in particular.”

“Joanne Ross? Her children?”

“Sorry, none of our business. But I thought she'd have said, you working together.”

McAllister rubbed his face with both hands. “Of course, her
children were the last to see the boy.” He shook his head, trying to settle the mind shift. He was uncomfortable with the way the conversation was heading. “Mrs. Ross told me about the interview with Inspector Tompson and the hoodie crow story.”

“Annie lives in a fantasy most of the time. But that's typical of children in her situation.”

McAllister could not quite fathom what that meant but let it go.