A Small Death in the Great Glen (57 page)

“Joanne will be round soon. Do you want supper before you go?”
Margaret was concerned by Rob's silence but said nothing. He'll tell me when he's ready, she thought.

Rob was regretting his offer to babysit. But he had promised, so to cancel would involve too many explanations and he wasn't good at lies. He was certain he could wheedle more details out of Annie; four hours ago he had been a boy, he still remembered how to talk to children.

The girls were in bed. Joanne left. Five minutes passed. Annie came down the stairs for a glass of water. She had her book with her. She sat opposite Rob and they talked about what they were reading. Rob showed her the lurid cover on the new Compton McKenzie thriller; Annie was rereading
Anne of Green Gables.

“Annie, I need to ask you something but it must be our wee secret.”

“You don't want my mum to know.”

He looked at her sharply. She replied in such an adult tone, he knew there was no point in being subtle.

“Your mother only wants to protect you, but yes, this must be between us only.”

The child nodded.

“I need you to describe to me everything you can remember of what you saw the afternoon Jamie disappeared.”

“You're looking for clues? Like the Famous Five?”

“Exactly.” Not exactly, Rob thought, the Famous Five didn't have to confront murderous deviants. “So tell me all you can remember and try to describe what the hoodie crow—the man—what he was wearing.”

McAllister thought everyone had left so he was startled when Don walked into his office.

“You wanted to talk to an inmate at the prison?”

“Probably a wild goose chase.”

“Aye, there are enough geese flying around right now to fill every Christmas table in the county.”

“You don't need to know any of this, Don. It's not something anyone should ever have to see.”

“Right.” He didn't move. “But you'll show me.”

“In the safe.”

Don took the envelope and emptied it onto the desk. McAllister turned away. Don leafed through the prints, ignored the negatives. He examined them carefully, in complete silence. He looked through them once more, laying two aside. He held them under the desk lamp. He examined the reverse. It was as though he was completely detached from the images, as though they were of the same interest as a corpse on a mortuary slab, fascinating, but with the soul removed. He stacked up the photographs except for two, put the rest back into the envelope and returned it to the safe.

“Firstly,” he started, “all these photos are old. Secondly, most of them are not from here. The paper is different. I think they are filth bought on the black market. But these two”—he poked them apart with his pencil—“these two are from someone's private collection. They're not recent either. I need you to look again. Look at the paper, the size of the print, the color tone.”

The man in the photograph was shown only from the neck down; the boy's face was in profile. McAllister couldn't bear to see the image, knowing he would take it to his grave, but knew he must. He looked at the borders. He looked at the printing technique. He turned it over and examined the watermark. He calculated the size. Then he nodded.

“I see what you're getting at. And yes, it looks exactly like the others.”

“Right.” Don handed McAllister a cigarette and went around to the filing cabinet for the whisky. “This man in the prison. Where does he fit in?”

McAllister explained.

“Leave it with me.”

It had taken all his guile to arrange the meeting. The prisoner, Davy Soutar, agreed to see the man as a favor to Jimmy McPhee. He had no idea that Don McLeod was in any way connected with a newspaper other than being an avid reader of the racing pages. He knew this because on the few occasions he had seen Don, there was always a copy of the racing pages protruding from the inside pocket of his jacket. A hint that Don might speak up for him on his application for a transfer to Glasgow also helped.

Stepping into the prison, built from the same stone as the castle, and the courts, and the police station, the temperature was colder inside than out. A stench that could never be overcome by the smells of wallflower and daffodils and buddleia and pine resin and mown grass from the gardens outside the walls made Don shudder.

Naturally, the prison guard knew Don McLeod. When given a nod, he stepped out of hearing. Don leaned across the table, talking rapidly. Davy Soutar listened. He closely resembled a weasel, with the same skinny narrow-shouldered frame and the same beady-eyed weighing-up-his-prey look in his eyes. He stared at Don, and when Don had finished speaking, he lost his feral confidence and instead looked exactly what he was—a victim. He wouldn't meet Don's eye and he refused to say a word. Don then placed a photograph between them. The Glasgow career criminal who had survived many stretches in prison, who ran with the razor gangs and the hard men, who had inflicted and had suffered knifings and beatings and killings and sadistic warders and a sadistic childhood, sat stone still, staring in any direction but that of the photo, his face as weeping wet as the walls of the prison cells.

“I canny,” Davy pleaded, “I canny. I canny tell you. No one listens to me, ever. Besides, it's all over with long since, and they got off with everything.”

“If I say the name, Davy, just nod or shake your head.”

“I canny. He'll get to me. He knows where I am, he himself put me here, and if I said a word, he'd finish me off. And he can, it'd be no problem to him.”

When Don reported back to McAllister, he counseled him to wait. Give it time, weeks, months, wait till it's all died down, then do whatever it is you need to do.

“I'm a star! I've hit the big time. Woo-hoo!”

Rob danced around the office waving that morning's Glasgow paper.

“Here, in features, my article.”

Joanne and Don would have liked to see the paper but with Rob whooping and laughing, waving it above his head, dancing a demented war dance, they couldn't.

“Hey, Geronimo! Give us a look.” Joanne grabbed the paper off him.

“Have it, I'm away to buy some more copies. I pinched this one from the guard on the train.”

Rob went flying out the door, straight into McAllister.

“Sorry, boss. And thanks for everything.”

“The lad did well,” Don commented.

“He did that.” McAllister agreed.

Joanne read quickly, then glanced at the editor.

“This is good. Did you help?”

“Not really. A bit of subbing. It's his work and his story.”

“He makes it very alive.”

McAllister nodded. “Let's hope we can turn out a newspaper with room for good, thoughtful stories.”

“But we've still one more paper for this year, so off you go and shut yourself in your wee room and don't come out until you've produced a leader worthy of this new future you're on about.”

“Yes, Mr. McLeod.” And this time McAllister did as he was bidden.

As a wordsmith, McAllister prided himself on knowing an apposite word or phrase for every occasion, every landscape, every weather; but the past weeks were beyond description. He concluded that
dreich,
that good old Scottish standby, was far too mild for the scale of awfulness.

Christmas had come and gone. In the Highlands, indeed in most parts of Scotland, the Dickensian Christmas was for storybooks. Church on Sunday, small gifts for the children and a fancier dinner than usual was Christmas for Presbyterians and their ilk. New Year was altogether another matter. Hogmanay, the house clean and tidy, sideboards heaving with drink, table laden with black bun and ham sandwiches, radios were tuned to a New Year ceilidh and those with a television watched Andy Stewart and the White Heather Club, everyone waited for the chimes of Big Ben to strike twelve. Then the New Year toast, first footing, more drink, black bun, lumps of coal, and many kept the tradition of giving a peck of salt. Hopefully your first-foot was a dark and handsome stranger. The round of visits to every relative and friend and neighbor went on as much as a fortnight into the New Year and longer in the far-flung islands that had not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar.

The collective hangover of New Year meant nothing much was done until at least the third week in January. Too many drinks, too many visitors, cars that wouldn't start, buses that didn't come, freezing nights that turned daytime sleet into black ice, burst pipes, sodden gardens and a dank layer of coal and coke
and wood and peat smoke, brought on a collective misery. And as often as not, the river was in spate and threatening to burst its banks.

Editorial finished for this week, McAllister reached once more for the list. He was convinced he knew who was responsible for the boy's death; the details of how he had died were a mystery; proving it was impossible. There was no evidence that would stand up to a good defense advocate.

At what point in his life the search for truth had become a quest, McAllister would never know. Coming to this small newspaper, having been given carte blanche to change it into what he knew it could be, that was a Herculean task that could not be completed by one man in one place, in one year. One decade might be more realistic. To change needed a change in the attitude of the community too. His time in Spain and his love of literature often conjured up memories that whisked him across the seas, across the Pyrenees, to mountains with no resemblance whatsoever to Ben Wyvis. It's a ridiculous thought; me—Don Quixote tilting at windmills, with Don McLeod as my Sancho Panza. He smiled a rare smile and the resultant twinge in his jaw brought him back to the here and now and the lost cause of justice.

The new version of the
Highland Gazette
; this could be a pioneering newspaper capable of tackling the great wall of silence surrounding the Church, the murky processes of the town council and the occasional rotten councilor like Mr. Findlay Grieg, who thought he was bomb-proof, the treatment of the unfortunates in children's homes and orphanages, the state of some old people's homes, which were only one step up from a poorhouse, our nineteenth-century prisons, our condemnation of unmarried mothers, our turning a blind eye to violence against women and children—the list could have gone on.