A Small Death in the Great Glen (17 page)

“Why you want to know all this is beyond me,” Jimmy teased, but he too enjoyed reminiscing on times past. The McPhee family still traveled, but these past three years, they had camped in benders by the river in Strathconnon for the winter months.

“I know.” Keith laughed tolerantly. “When we were wee, you couldn't see the sense of joining the Dingwall library, far less getting an education, and as for going to university …”

“We even had to get the doctor in Beauly to stand guarantor in case we used the books to wipe our arses,” Jimmy told Shona. He laughed, but he regretted that his reading and writing were of the basic, learned-in-prison level. Still, he could read the form
guide and that was enough. “But Ma is certain you're the first tink to graduate from Glasgow University.”

Keith was notoriously backward in coming forward, but this pleased him. Now he was a schoolteacher, collecting the lore and the songs—“tinkers' tales,” as some would have it—from his mother, her mother, the old folk, black tinkers so-called, the river pearl fishermen, the itinerant farmworkers, and around campfires, in the back of wagons, picking the berries, at the tatties, at the agricultural shows, at the horse fairs, he asked questions and he listened.

“Who better to record tinkers' tales than a tinker?” he told his brother.

“Who will be interested?” Jimmy replied. “All that stuff is for bairns—faerie circles and clootie wells and what time o' the moon the lassies collect dewdrops to wash their face. Anyone who buys a book on that must be awfy keen on nonsense.”

The banging on the door brought the cheerful blethering to a halt.

“Polis,” Jenny sighed.

Shona was about to ask “How do you know?” but thought better of it and went to the door. Before she could even say “Come away in” the inspector had pushed past her, followed by an apologetic WPC Ann McPherson. She was only there because she had to be, and to take notes.

Inspector Tompson went over and over the same points for a good hour, getting nowhere.

“Who picked up the Polish man?” He didn't even glance at Karl. Spoke of him as though he wasn't in the room. Who had taken him where on the night of his escape? He was in the camp by the shore, wasn't he? And they had hidden him from the authorities, hadn't they? And who had told Peter Kowalski?

The “no” and the “don't know” and the “no idea” and the “no I
never” or the shrugs and the silence and the looking down or away or up at the ceiling should have had the inspector in an apoplectic fit. But WPC Ann watched carefully as each refusal to give information, instead of infuriating him, drove him on, made him more sure of himself, leaving her puzzled, then deeply worried.

How did the man know about them? How had he gotten here? Why had they hidden him in this very house? Didn't they know they were harboring an illegal alien? Didn't they realize that if Keith McPhee was charged, the education board would be the first to find out? He himself would make sure of that. Shona was the only one distressed by the barrage. The idea that Keith could be reported and lose his job, his reputation, terrified her.

“It wasn't him, it was me, I gave him shelter,” Shona blurted out.

“Lass, lass,” Jenny sighed. “Never say anything to anyone. Now you see why I'm feart for you. Marrying into a Traveling family is no easy.”

“Enough.” Tompson stood. “Jimmy McPhee, with your past record, the sheriff would no look kindly on a charge of helping a fugitive. As for you, Keith McPhee, be grateful I'm not charging you either. But don't think this is the end of it.”

He pulled himself to attention and announced in his best parade-ground voice:

“Karel Cieszynski, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder. You do not—” The rest of his words were drowned out in the uproar from the McPhees. Karl looked around, bewildered, with no idea what was going on.

Tompson produced his handcuffs. Ann McPherson stood gaping and wondered, What on earth is that idiot of an inspector up to? But she had no choice. She helped her boss rush the arrested man down the stairs and into the police car before a riot erupted.

Joanne got the story from Chiara—the phone had rung in the reporters' room in the late afternoon just as she was about to leave. As ever, no one else was about to pick up the phone.

“Gazette,”
she sighed. “Chiara.” She listened. “Slow down.” She held the receiver out, flicking her hair from her ear. “I can't. Not tonight. Tomorrow?” She listened again. “What?” Then a sound like the chatter of a flock of starlings came out of the phone in a long burst. “Never!” By now the other three in the room were interested. “I can't believe it!” Joanne sat down. “Aye, I'll tell them. And if we can help, call”—she looked around—“McAllister.” She put down the phone. “Chiara Corelli.”

She shook her head, not knowing what to think. “They've arrested Karel what's-his-name, Karl—the Polish man. He's been arrested for murder.”

That afternoon, a larger-than-usual gathering of mothers waited outside the school. Shifting and re-forming, restless, chatting in that hushed tone reserved for funerals or really meaty scandals, they stood in a herd waiting for the bell. In a place where five-year-olds walked to and from school unaccompanied, where children played, alone or in small groups, in streets and parks and fields and woods, their only fear being bullies or bogeymen or ghosties, where everyone knew everyone, strangers were not a danger because they hardly ever saw anyone they didn't know, or know of.

Bill was the only man waiting. He hated that.

“Where's Mum?” Wee Jean stopped still when she saw his van outside the playground gates, anxious. “Is she a'right?”

“Course your mum's all right,” he snapped, irritated that Joanne wasn't there being a proper wife and mother and annoyed at the implications in the question.

“You're going to Granny and Grandad's. Mum'll be there by teatime.”

Mum and Granny and Grandad all having tea together cheered the little girl. Annie knew better. First her mother's questions, then their dad picking them up from school, all the other mums at the gate, teachers quiet, and a special assembly tomorrow morning—it had to be about Jamie.

As though sensing the mood of the town, dark came early that day. Joanne, pushing her bicycle, walked home from her in-laws' with the girls. She was pleased the fear was over. An arrest coming so quickly, that's a relief, she thought. Chiara's worry that she, Peter, all foreigners, would be somehow blamed, Joanne dismissed. Watching her girls running on ahead, leaping from pool to pool of grub-white street light, trying not to stand on the lines between the paving stones, chanting out the childhood rhymes, just as she and her friends had done, she convinced herself that life would soon be back to normal. Except for Jamie's family. Poor souls.

Annie sat at the kitchen table, hands black with Brasso, polishing away at her brass imp. She had even ironed her Brownie uniform herself.

“Mum, next year, when I fly up to the Guides, I get a much nicer uniform, blue, not yuch brown, and you go camping in the Guides.” She kept polishing, her tongue sticking out in effort.

Joanne had said nothing to the children about Jamie, the arrest; she had not mentioned the subject to them. She had sometimes thought that they would be fine hearing of such things, but it just wasn't done.

“I'm going for another badge tonight.”

“Oh really, which one?”

“Storytelling. Brown Owl asks questions on a book you've read, then next, she gives you three choices an' you tell a story on one of them for five minutes.”

“So that's why you can't put down
Kidnapped.
” Joanne smiled at her daughter's excitement. “Then you'll have seven badges altogether.”

“An' if our six get two more badges tonight we beat the Bluebells.”

The Bluebells, led by Sheila Murchison, Annie's sworn enemy, were archrivals to the Snowdrops. Secretly, Joanne agreed with Annie. Sheila at nine was exactly like her mother: a snob, a gossip and a pillar of the community. Mrs. Murchison had somehow found out the date of Joanne and Bill's wedding anniversary, put two and two together and shared this information with all who would listen.

Wee Jean and Joanne enjoyed being on their own by the fire, Jean coloring in her
Bunty
comic, Joanne knitting, Annie out, and Bill not yet home.

“That was Jimmie Shand and his band with a selection of jigs and reels. Next we have Kenneth Mackellar with some favorites from Rabbie Burns.” The sweet tenor floated from the wireless—“My love is like a red red rose”—when the doorbell made them jump.

Joanne had no idea who the short round brown creature was, wispy gray hair escaping from a brown hat squashed down low on the forehead, round National Health glasses and, with that myopic glare of the shortsighted, squinting in the bright light from the open door.

“I'm Tawny Owl.”

Half-owl, half-busybody, Joanne thought, so she had to suppress an involuntary giggle when the woman introduced herself. “Oh, yes. I'm Joanne Ross. What's wrong? Annie, are you hurt?” Annie didn't answer. “Come on in—er, Tawny Owl.”

“I have to talk to you, Mrs. Ross. It's serious.”

“Jean, up to bed with you.” She shooed the little girl out the room. “Can I get you a cup of tea?”

The woman refused tea, wouldn't sit down, her outrage, like a topsail in a storm, carrying her onward.

“I'm not stopping long, Mrs. Ross. Brown Owl asked me to bring Annie home. The child has been telling lies, she was rude, she talked back, refused to listen to Brown Owl. We had to fail her in her storyteller's badge. We can't have that sort of behavior in the Brownies.”

Annie, by the side of Tawny Owl, the woman gripping her thin arm, was cowering like a mouse snatched from a field of stubble. Instinctively Joanne sided with her daughter. Brown Owl, a good friend of Mrs. Murchison, was someone Joanne would nod to in church but had never wished to make a closer acquaintance. “Tell me exactly what happened.”