A Small Death in the Great Glen (19 page)

Single men still in their working clothes, families out for a treat, courting couples, eating before making for the La Scala to see the latest Hitchcock film or
Oklahoma!
that seemed to have been running for forever—soon to exchange long passionate fish-and-vinegar-flavored kisses—ate at the tables. Young men in small groups, about to take off for the billiard rooms, hanging around the wondrous purple-lit jukebox, searching for Bill Hailey or Frankie Lyman—never Perry Como—also congregated in the comfortable, humid chip shop. But not tonight.

She wheeled her bike to the door where, attached with a single drawing pin, drooped a hand-lettered envelope saying C
LOSED
. She remembered the phone call and was appalled. Too wrapped up in the stifling, walking-on-eggshells truce that was her own home life, she hadn't been to see Chiara. She hadn't even called back. And now it was too late for a visit; she had to collect the girls from their grandparents'. This was the one time she wished they were wealthy enough to have a telephone at home. She spoke a promise to the stars. Tomorrow I'll call first thing. Tomorrow.

The phone call to Chiara did not go well. Joanne offered to meet for coffee.

“Joanne, the café is shut. And now the chip shop has to shut too; someone chucked a brick through the window. Peter has had a couple of nasty phone calls, clients cancel meetings, one contract has been postponed, and people he's known for years cut him dead in the street.” Chiara's voice faded in and out as though there was something wrong with the line. “So perhaps it's better if we wait and you come over when all this has died down.”

There was little Joanne could think of to say.

“Chiara, you're my friend,” she started, “none of this matters to me and I'm sorry I haven't called in but …”

“We'll talk when you come back from the west coast. Maybe
things will have calmed down by then.” Her voice went very faint. “…'Bye, Joanne.”

Rob was sitting across the table trying not to notice but taking in the gist of the conversation from the way Joanne hunched her shoulders, adding ten years to her age.

“Chiara?” he asked after she had hung up.

Joanne nodded.

“Aye, I saw the chip-shop window.” He was never one to pretend. “It will get worse, I think. This is such a terrible crime. The waiting, the trial, and Peter Kowalski charged with being an accessory, all this will be very hard on the Corelli family. And every other foreigner in town.”

Don came in on the end of the conversation, took one look at Joanne and ordered her out. “Off you go. Right now. Go see your friends. They need you.”

“Chiara said not to bother, or words to that effect.”

“Saying it and meaning it are different things.” He shooed her out the door.

“Now you, young Robert McLean, I want you to first check up on the damage to the chip shop, find out what you can about this jiggery pokery, put an article together.” Don continued with his suspicions. “There's something no right about this arrest business. Too convenient. Thon Inspector Tompson is jumping the gun—again.”

The grumbling terrier-like growl coming from the sturdy terrier-like body made Rob smile. He could almost see the hackles rising on the back of Don's neck.

“You're beginning to sound like McAllister.” Rob agreed. There
was
something not right about the arrest. “If you think about it logically, what with what the watchman said about that night, and the tinkers …”

“Aye, that's what I mean, logic, there's not a lot of that around.”

The curtains were drawn in the deep bow windows that faced the street, as though announcing a death in the family. Joanne reached for the bell. As she followed Chiara through to the kitchen, she felt that the light of the house was diminished. The sense of sun and warmth and earth and orchards and olives and flowers and friends all seemed a memory. Their home was once again a respectable Victorian-Scottish-solid-Sunday-go-to-church, hard-to-heat house.

The visit was a very long half hour. Aunt Lita had disappeared upstairs after greeting Joanne. Gino Corelli was nowhere to be seen. As they sat together at the table, Chiara filled her in.

“We know very little,” she started. “Mr. McLean the solicitor will call us when he knows more. Peter is still out on bail, thank goodness, but he was questioned endlessly.”

“What evidence have the police got against Karl?”

“He didn't do this, Joanne. I don't know the man, but Peter's word is good enough for me.”

They were silent for a very long thirty seconds.

“What happened at the chip shop?”

“Idiots with bricks.” Chiara went silent again. “I'm sorry, Joanne, I can't think straight. But thanks for coming.” They both stood. She reached up to give her friend a hug. “Not like me to be lost for words, eh?”

As they parted at the front door, Chiara asked, “Are you all right? You look a bit down.”

“I'm fine.” Joanne knew she would never share last Monday night with anyone. What would she say? Oh, by the way, I betrayed my daughter?

“Chiara … you know, if you need me …”

“I know.” She smiled back. “I know.” She nodded fiercely.

Next afternoon in the office, the whole of the editorial staff, all four of them, were sitting around the reporters' table putting the final touches to the edition.

“I like this.” Don had proofed through McAllister's editorial without one stroke of his pencil, cutting not a single word of the piece.

“Can I see?” Rob snatched the piece of paper out of Don's hand. “Oh, right.” He read it, then passed it to Joanne. “A bit hard, aren't you? And not many people know what
xenophobia
means.”

“Exactly.” McAllister knew that ripping up the typewritten words, scattering them in the river and chanting some ancient Gaelic curse would be equally as effective as his editorial. “But we have to try. Remember the lesson of the silent majority.”

The war was not that long over, so his words hung in the air.

“Rob, when this story becomes clearer, you write it up and I'll see if I can get an article placed in the Glasgow press.”

“Great. Can you really swing it with the editor? Aye, sorry, course you can.” Rob jumped up, so excited at the idea of writing for a prestigious newspaper that he fell over his words as well as his feet.

“I just wish that my girls had it right. That it
was
a hoodie crow that snatched the wee boy up.” But Joanne said this quietly. McAllister registered her words, heard the touch of despair in her voice, but before he could take her up on her comment, Don announced, “Finish up, everyone. One hour. Can't keep the presses waiting.”

Peter Kowalski sat in his tiny sanctuary, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the scudding clouds. The outer office was a large square room with drafting boards all around the edges. The inner office was small and round, set in a turret sticking out to the corner
of the street with views of church spires and a glimpse down an alley of the river. It had reminded him of an illustration from a childhood book of the tower in which Rumplestiltskin had spun straw into gold. He loved it. It was his. He had reinvented himself in this distant land through determination and hard work. And, as Inspector Tompson had told him repeatedly, he was about to lose it all.

So, sitting in his sanctum, Peter went over and over the interrogation, trying to see how the inspector's mind was working, where his questions were going, questions that had become stuck in Peter's mind like an endless annoying tune picked up from the wireless, and the more you tried to banish it from your mind, the more it went round and around.

Yes, he, Peter, alone, had picked Karl up that morning.

No, he didn't know who put the mysterious note under his office door.

No, he didn't have it anymore.

Yes, he had picked Karl up near the canal bridge.

No, he had no idea how Karl had got there.

No, he had no idea where Karl had spent that night.

Yes, it was the town side of the bridge.

No, Karl wasn't wearing a coat.

Yes, he took him up the glen to give him a place to stay.

No, he wasn't hiding him; Karl had wanted some peace and quiet.

No, nobody else was involved.

No, Gino Corelli had nothing to do with it.

No, he didn't know Jimmy McPhee.

Yes, he did expect the inspector to believe him.

E
IGHT
 
 

Joanne thought of people's lives as books; books she remembered, books she was yet to read, books she had read and returned to the library to a shelf marked biography or history or fiction or even romantic fiction. Remembered characters and fragments of a novel's plot were often more real to her than actual events in her life. But the tantalizing possibility of a new chapter in the story of her life, even of a new book, was a recent idea.

Of her own story, she would have written it thus: beginning—childhood; middle—the war; ending—marriage. I need a subcategory, she thought; romantic fiction—failed. For too long, she had been waiting for the scene, toward the end of the book, where he would turn to her and say, “I'm sorry. Forgive me. I've been to hell and back. But the war is over and now …” She almost put “and with the help of a good woman” in her imaginary manuscript but could hear Don's chortle as he edited out the cliché.