Beneath the Abbey Wall (19 page)

“He didn't do it.” She almost barked the reply.

“I know, but the police have a good case.”

She looked at him. He saw where Hector got his eye color, but there was something disturbingly knowing about the stare in Granny Bain's eyes. “Does your father think Donal stuck the knife in her?”

Rob's pencil clattered to the floor. As he bent to pick it up he
felt a wave of nausea. He tried to compose himself and straightened up. “No, he believes Mr. McLeod is innocent.”

“Aye, and sorry, laddie, I can be a wee bit direct sometimes.”

“Direct” was not the word Rob would have used, unless maybe “direct as a heart attack.”

“So, how do you mean I can help Don McLeod? I don't know nothing about what's happened.”

“Mrs. Jenny McPhee said it was all in the past, she said to start at the beginning. Only I don't know where to find the beginning.”

“Her mother had her here in town, that's the beginning, then her mother, God rest her soul, died when Joyce was a bairn, that's another beginning. The old colonel kept Joyce at home, sending her to the local school wi' crofters and, aye, tinker bairns even, until she was eleven or thereabouts when she was off to school in Edinburgh and the colonel off to India. I never knew her then. Next thing, she appeared back in town when she was twenty or thereabouts, same time as Donal came back. They'd met somewhere when he was convalescing from his wounds, burns it was, in the Dardanelles he was when his ship sank. Of course I never knew her that time neither, just to say hello to, her being right friendly with Donal.”

“And you knew Don, Mr. McLeod . . . ?”

“His granny and my granny were cousins.”

“And he and Mrs. Smart were . . . ”

“None of your business.” She was thinking it over, trying to see how all this, from all that time ago, could be relevant now. “Aye, they were good friends. Not that their friendship could amount to anything, she being gentry, the only child of a well-to-do laird, him being a crofter's son, never mind that he was a clever one, ending up at the
Highland Gazette
and doing well for himself. No, it would never do.”

“Is that why she went to India?” Rob had a vision of thwarted love, broken hearts, and wretched farewells.

“How should I know?” Granny Bain's voice was sharp and scary.

“Because it might help Mr. McLeod if you did know, and you told me.”

“So you can make up a story for the newspaper?” She said this as she was standing, gathering her cardigans and coat around her, and what looked to be a baby's lace shawl but was probably a scarf with many holes not in the right places, ready to do battle with the wind. He had already noticed a number of hatpins holding down a misshapen piece of felt to her grey-white hair and was suitably intimidated by their deadliness.

“Sorry, lad, you've stirred up the memories. My man went down on that same ship.”

He was looking down at her; so tiny she was, in a formidable kind of a way. He liked Granny Bain; he wished she were his granny.

“Granny Bain, sorry, Mrs. Bain . . . ”

“Granny Bain is fine.”

“If you can help my father help Mr. McLeod . . . ”

“I will.”

*  *  *  

Walking into the empty reporters' room to write up the story, Rob was glad to hear the radio on in McAllister's office.
Some sign of life,
he thought, even if it is just the Third Programme. When he realized the music was Wagner, he began to worry again.

“What?”

Even across the landing, even above the radio, he heard McAllister roar like a wounded lion.

By the time Rob recovered, McAllister was already halfway down the stairs. He ran after him but stopped when he saw Betsy holding the telephone receiver away from her, glaring at it as though the instrument was responsible for the shock.

“What is it?” Rob asked.

“I wasn't listening in.” She dropped the receiver. It missed the cradle. She put it back. Not looking at Rob, she gave a most unladylike sniff. “I don't listen in, not anymore.”

“Betsy, I don't care if you did listen in, tell me why McAllister rushed off. It sounded really important.”

“I put the call through,” Betsy said, “that's all.”

“Betsy,
who was it
?” Rob shouted, and as Rob never shouted at anyone, she burst into tears.

“It was Detective Inspector Dunne.”

“Get me the police.”

Betsy dialed, handed the phone to him, then backed away into the secretary's cubbyhole of an office to hide.

Rob knew immediately the voice that answered. “Sergeant Patience, it's Rob McLean. What the hell is going on?”

“I don't know if I should tell you.”

“I'll be round the back lane in one minute.”

*  *  *  

“Mind, you never heard the news from me,” Sergeant Patience said for the third time as Rob ran off to get his motorbike.

The hospital was on the outskirts of town, and Rob decided the quickest way was by the longer main road rather than through the winding back streets and suburbs of town, fighting his way through the Saturday-morning-shopping traffic.

He overtook lorries laboring up the hills and through the twisting bends. A dark road, enclosed by steep hills and thick trees on both sides, it was treacherous in winter black ice and treacherous in flickering summer light. He passed slow vehicles
recklessly, sounded his horn futilely. He lost all sense of his own mortality. Don was “at death's door,” as the sergeant had put it.

Leaving his bike parked illegally, Rob ran towards the emergency department doors. He spotted McAllister pacing, smoking, making tracks in the narrow strip of grass that bordered a bed of withered wallflowers. “Is he alive?”

“Aye,” McAllister told him, “just.”

“What happened?”

“Tried to hang himself.”

Rob could barely take in the notion. “Don? Hang himself?”

“The doctors are with him. He can't speak. And they're worried about brain damage. Technically he died, but the guard resuscitated him.” McAllister had a flash of the man, the Highlander, the gentle big man who spoke to Don in the Gaelic, and was grateful.

Rob sat on the grass, put his head in his hands.

McAllister threw his cigarette butt into a patch of weeds to join the dozens of others, discarded by those waiting for the good the bad and the tragic news that was the lot of hospital emergency departments. “No visitors allowed. The police have posted a guard outside his room. Anyhow, Don can't talk, so there's no point in going in.”

“Yes, there is.” Rob stood. “Just go in there.” He was shouting. “He'll know somehow. He'll sense a friend.”

“Aye.” But McAllister could never admit he was not up to the sight of his old friend so diminished he would try to take his own life. “Maybe you should go.”

Rob thought for all of one second. “I will.” He rubbed his hair, his head, as though the massage would set his brain cogs working. As he left through the swing doors into the Valhalla of the hospital accident and emergency department, he thought,
Don really must believe there is no escaping a guilty verdict.

McAllister was asking himself a similar question. “What the hell would make you want to end it all, Don McLeod?” he muttered to the heavens. He refused to consider that Don might be guilty.

The woman behind the admissions counter looked as friendly as Cerberus at the entrance to the underworld, so Rob stood in the corridor searching for someone who might give him news of Don's condition. He saw the nurse in the distance, and even though her back was turned, he was certain it was Eilidh.

He hurried down the corridor trying in vain to diminish the clatter from his motorbike boots.

“Eilidh.”

She turned. She looked around. The corridor was still empty.

“If I'm caught talking to you, the matron will have my guts for garters.” But she was smirking as she said it.

“Do you know anything about Don McLeod?”

“Aye, but you'll not be able to see him. There's a prison guard outside his room.”

“Blast.” Rob shook his head as though that would clear the darkness.

“He'll be fine. The guard caught him in time.”

Her voice sounded oddly callous.
No,
Rob decided,
she sounds like a nurse. They're all pretty matter-of-fact about death and injury.

“I'm sorry, Rob, I really do have to go.”

“Can we meet later?”

“I'm on late shift, so not really. But I'm coming to the dance to hear you play.”

“Smashing. I'll leave your name on the door.” He called this after her, as she was hurrying off, having caught sight of a sister bearing down on them, her nursing headdress making her look like a galleon in full sail.

“Can I help you?” her voice implied that she knew he was up to no good.

“Rob McLean,
Highland Gazette
. I'm wondering if I can visit our deputy editor, Mr. Donal McLeod.” He tried his signature grin without much hope, and he was not disappointed.

“He is not allowed visitors.” And she sailed on.

Off to intimidate other targets,
Rob guessed.

When he went out to find McAllister, the editor had vanished. When he went home, his parents were out. He made himself some tea, warmed up the supper his mother had left in the oven, switched on the television, switched it off again; he couldn't stand shows with big bands featuring big-haired singers.

He went out again. He drove to Joanne's house. He found the place empty, no lights, no music, no shadows behind the curtains. He was on the edge of desolate when he remembered.
Hector lives around the corner; he'll be in his studio cum washing shed. He'll be developing film. He'll keep me company.

He went round the back of the house. Hector wasn't in the studio. But there were light and noise coming from the kitchen. He knocked. Granny Bain took one look at him and said, “Best come in.”

She took his bike jacket. She handed him tea from the pot on the stove, then said, “Tell me what's happened.” So he did. When he had finished, she said nothing, just sighed.

The kitchen clock, big and round like a single frame of a giant's wire spectacles, was ticking away Saturday night, a night when a young man should be out enjoying himself, not sitting in despair with a Highland granny.

When she started speaking, her accent thick with soft Gaelic sibilants, it was as though the sea had decided to speak.

“I remember that time as though it was yesterday, because Donal was the only one who could give me the whole story. The
ship went down, holed by a German battleship. But before she sank, she went on fire. Terrible. Only a few survived. And it was three years after it happened before Donal got back to tell me, him having to recover because he'd lost most of the skin off of his back.”

What is it about this century?
Rob was thinking as Granny Bain went into another silence.
All these deaths, all this war?
He knew of his own family members lost in both world wars; he knew every village, every town had its war memorial, breaking your heart as you read the long columns of the names of the fallen, often several from the same family. He knew Armistice Day was almost upon them and how somber his family and their friends and the towns and villages became on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

He had been terrified he might be conscripted when Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden declared war on Egypt over the Suez Canal. He had listened to what little news there was from the invasion of Hungary, watching the newsreels in the cinema in horror. But instead of feeling safe in his Highland hideaway, it made him determined to leave,
as soon as possible
he was now thinking.
I need to get out into the world. Become a real journalist.

“. . . loved each other,” Granny Bain was saying. Rob was not sure who she meant, was it her and her husband; Don and Mrs. Smart?

“But it was impossible. One thing I do know is that he regretted it all his life.”

Rob did not feel he could interrupt the tide of memories with questions. Rather, he felt that by letting it go, the story would unfold. And it did.

“She was prepared to give up everything, her name, her reputation, her home, her inheritance, so Donal told me, but he said
no, he told her he couldn't ask that of her. It was like
he
was the snob, no' her—even though she was from the gentry.” She shook her head at the folly of it all. “So, he sent her away.”

She reached for her tea. She would never tell anyone that after Joyce Mackenzie left town, Don had drunk himself stupid, that he only told her his miserable story because she had picked him up from the gutter outside his wee house in Church Street, that at that time, just as now, he was well on the way to killing himself.

“Later, after she came back from India, he never said, but I know he blamed himself for her ending up with thon Smart fellow. A jumped-up-too-big-for-his-boots manny thon—and his father no more than a beater on an estate in Perthshire—so I've been told.”

“So what's all this to do with . . . ”

“Rob?” Hector stood in the doorway staring. They hadn't heard him come in. “What're you doing here?”

“Come to check on the story about the sword dancing competition,” Rob answered. “Your sister is a star.”

“And out too late for her age,” Granny Bain said. “Hector, off with you and fetch her from Mrs. Grigor's house.”

“But it's only half past eight.”

“Hector.”

Hector fled. Granny Bain handed Rob his jacket. He knew he would learn nothing more.

“Thank you. And if you should think of anything . . . ”

“I'll let you know.”