A Small Death in the Great Glen (3 page)

“Come in, number seven,” Rob teased.

“Sorry. Away with the faeries.”

“Life is but a dream, ssh boom, ssh boom, life is but a dream, sweetheart.”

Rob mimed the song, a rolled-up copy of the
Gazette
for a microphone.

“Aye. You have that right.” A laugh, a shake of the head; Joanne rejoined 1956. “And you've been hanging about with thon Yanks again.”

“You should come, Joanne. You'd love it. They've got this great dance band and all the latest records from the U S of A.”

“Me? Me dancing in the canteen at RAF Lossiemouth with American airmen? I can just hear my mother-in-law. To say nothing of my husband.”

She had loved going to the dancing with her chums in the ATS during the war; dancing to Glen Miller tunes was her favorite. She had met her husband on the dance floor. The very idea of going to the airbase or the Two Red Shoes in Elgin thrilled her. But reality drowned out the daydreams.

“So what's the drama with McAllister? We never miss a Friday postmortem.”

“Maybe something about the wee boy in the canal.”

“It doesn't bear thinking about.” She shuddered. “McAllister is furious with me for not mentioning it, but I'm only the typist. A policeman knocked on every door down our street, the girls were asleep and I didn't like to waken them. Besides, I didn't know if they knew him and I didn't want to upset them, they're too young.”

“Aye, accidents happen.” Rob rose, went to pay, but Gino, flapping and waving his hands, was having none of it.

“Away with you, away.” He grinned at Rob's protestations. “An' I have something else for you. A wee birdie told me a sailor
jumped off a Baltic timber ship down at the harbor. Lookin' for a lassie to cuddle I'm thinking, but now gone, lost, he is. Might be a story,
sí
?”

Sounds of fierce arguing came spiraling down the stone stairway. Rob loved a good fight. He bounced up the stairs two at a time, Joanne fast behind. The square reporters' room, with high ceiling, high square reporters' desk, huge bulky typewriters standing along its edges like unexploded bombs, was not a good place for an argument. No room for gesturing, too close to your opponent in the narrow space between desk and walls, too far across the table for “in yer face” poking and pointing. But they managed it. The shouting paused only for a thundering “Shut the door!” from McAllister. He continued his diatribe, punctuating his sentences with slaps on the tabletop. Joanne sidled past Don, wishing she could turn down the volume knob.

“This paper has been going since 1862,” Don interrupted. “We never run stories like this. That's gutter-press-from-Glasgow style.” He waved the dummy layout at the editor.

“This rag will never see 1962 if we don't start doing something different.” McAllister gesticulated back. “This is a human interest story. A child has been found, in the canal, dead, with no explanation, for goodness' sake!”

“Aye, but no need to make such a meal o' it! Accidents are all too common wi' bairns—farms, rivers, the sea, falling off or into something or other. It does no good to put the wind up folk. Scaremongering—that's what this is.” He waved the layout pages. “And sentimental. Gossip and scandal'll be next. The father of the chapel will never stand for it neither,” Don warned McAllister.

“Well, he'll be without legs if we don't. And another thing, I don't see how you can possibly defend all these outdated
trade union practices we have here. I run this newspaper, not the father of the chapel.”

“Round one to McAllister on points.” Rob started to clap.

They turned, and to Joanne's amazement, they both stopped. And both men lit up, Don with his Capstan Full Strength, McAllister with his Passing Cloud. Joanne opened the windows, shifting the jam jar of hawthorn sprigs onto the reporters' table. Fallen berries lay on the white windowsill like drops of blood in the snow.

The argument was not new. It had been a sniping war for the first three months after McAllister was appointed editor-in-chief over Don's head. A shaky truce had been observed over the last three months, McAllister agreeing to “see how things go” but adamant the front page must be changed. He won that battle and a temporary truce was called. That truce was now over.

“Sit,” McAllister commanded them all. “The postmortem on last week's paper.” He stood, picked up a copy of the
Gazette,
held it high with one hand as though it had been used to clean up puppy poo, then carefully tore it in two. Then into four. He dropped it into the top hat, turned, and demanded, “Anyone else, any further comments on last week's rag? No? Right, let's see if we can't do better than that shite.”

Silence.

Don smoked furiously, sending out fumes that would shame a Clyde tugboat. Admitting to being fifty for the last few years, he had been with the
Highland Gazette
forty years. A short man, balding, beer belly, scruffy, wearing the same tie his mother had given him on reaching his twenty-five years as a newspaperman, a subeditor right to his bones. He sided with the compositors, the printers, the father of the chapel. The
Gazette
had been going well nigh a hundred years; why change?

“I'll follow up on the child in the canal. We may be a weekly
but this is important to a safe wee community like ours.” McAllister wanted the meeting over with.

“My girls are at school with him,” Joanne volunteered.

“Anything else you haven't told us, Mrs. Ross?”

Joanne blushed, furious with herself.

McAllister gave a theatrical sigh. “Rob, what have you got?”

“Eh, well . . .” He thought frantically. “I've heard a seaman jumped ship. He was crew on a freighter out of one of the Baltic ports. I'm just away to ask at the police station.”

“What for?”

“What? Well, they're the ones who're looking for him—an illegal alien, I think they call him.”

McAllister shook his head, reminding himself that there was not a real newspaper person amongst them except Don, who, McAllister privately thought, had been around since the printing press had been invented.

“Where, who, when, how and why,” he counted out on his elegant long fingers. “The polis may help you with the first three, but the rest? That's for real newspapers. Get off down to the harbor, laddie, and don't come back till you have a real story. Right?” He turned to Joanne. She sank lower in her chair. In this mood, the dark hair and dark eyes and equally dark expression on McAllister's gaunt face made her feel as though she was about to front the Spanish Inquisition.

“I'm on the usual.”

He stared.

She mumbled.

“Women's Institute, Girl Guide and Scouts news, school stuff . . . oh, and there's advance notices on Halloween parties I need to sort. You know,” she finished lamely, not knowing what was wanted of her.

“Right. But maybe in amongst all that, you could find a story.”

Her blank look annoyed him.

“I know, I know, you're only the typist as you keep telling me, but
try.
Something with a beginning, a middle and an end—preferably with the middle bit being of interest to our readers.” He saw that he had lost them. “Right, here beginneth the lesson.”

The chuckles from Rob and Joanne were somewhat forced. Don kept ignoring the proceedings, but the atmosphere did lighten slightly.

“Let's all try something new. Let's try to imagine that we are in the middle of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth, and that life as we know it is changing. Or is about to change. And if it's not, at least we can nudge it in the direction of change.” He stared out of the window, watching the racing rain clouds as they scudded west to catch the mountains. “God knows we haven't made a great fist of the first half.” He caught himself, shook his head and continued. “All I want is stories with some meat on the bones. Let's try anyhow. Now away with you both. Bring me some excitement.”

“What on earth did you do that for?” Don glared at him when they were alone again. “You know we can never print anything that's different.”

McAllister gave his skull-like smile and lit another cigarette. “We'll see.”

T
WO
 
 

McAllister stood on the gleaming red doorstep of the terraced fisherman's cottage. The curtains were drawn, as were those of its neighbors. He took a deep breath, then knocked. The door opened reluctantly. Peering out from behind it was a woman with a blotchy red face and haunted eyes.

“I'm sorry to intrude. John McAllister,
Highland Gazette.
”

“You'd better come in.” She turned, and he followed her into the dim front parlor. The mirror above the unlit fire was shrouded with a shawl; a crowded china cabinet squeezed into one corner; a sideboard covered with pictures of their son stood by the window. Jamie's father sat hunched at a heavy dining table that filled the remaining space. The room smelled of beeswax polish and damp. McAllister shook hands and murmured condolences to a man lost in grief and guilt.

“One of us should have been home.”

McAllister could not answer that.

“Mr. Fraser, could you tell me something about Jamie? I'd like to do a piece in the paper about him.”

“The police think it was our fault.”

“Surely not.”

“No one is here when Jamie comes home from school. We both work. He was up at the canal because no one was here to look after him.”

“Where do you work?”

“On the buses. I'm a driver, my wife's a clippie.”

“I used to be in the office but I went on the buses eleven
months ago,” Mrs. Fraser explained. “We wanted nice things for Jamie. The shift work pays more.” She glanced toward a complete set of encyclopedias, as if to lessen the guilt. “He's excused from swimming. I wrote to the school. He'd never go near the canal. Not even with his da. He's a timid wee soul.” She had yet to change her tenses. “An' I wasn't here to make his tea.”

Her husband didn't move. “He near drowned as a bairn. I was fishing and he fell in the loch. Only three he was. Terrified of water ever since. He never goes near the canal on his own. Never. He won't even cross the river by the footbridge, has to be the big bridge so's he canny see the water. He was delicate, our Jamie.”

Their whole lives were devoted to Jamie, McAllister could see that. They told him about his school, his obsession with trains, his stamp collection, small episodes in a barely lived life. They told him of their faraway Hebridean home and their family and them speaking Gaelic amongst themselves. McAllister was gentle, allowing the silences of grief to float between sentences. He listened until they had talked themselves out.

“May I have a picture of Jamie? Would you mind?”

“I've two of these.” She handed him a picture of a small boy, all bony arms and legs, clutching his mother's hand beneath a towering tractor. “This summer at the Black Isle Show.” She pointed to a merry-go-round on one side. “He loved that.” Her eyes glazed over at the memory. “Will you find out what happened to my laddie, Mr. McAllister? He'd never ever go up there on his own.”

McAllister had seen grief; as a cub reporter sent on similar interviews, as a war correspondent in Spain, as a crime reporter in Glasgow. And grief had consumed his own mother.

“His friends, tell me about his friends.”

They looked at each other in bewilderment.

“I don't know about that. . . .” The woman looked away. “He
liked his own company.” She couldn't look at McAllister. “He didn't mind being by himself.” She gestured to a train set beneath the table. “We had to work so much. Buses run on Sundays too so he had to stop going to Sunday school. . . .” The shadow of guilt hung over her like a cloud darkening an already gloomy sky, becoming tears that dripped onto her cardigan, making no marks in the Fair Isle pattern. “We just wanted the best.”