Beneath the Abbey Wall (35 page)

“I was looking for you on Saturday night,” Neil said to Joanne when they were alone. “I really missed you.”

“I was too tired,” she lied.

“I came to your house on Sunday afternoon, but you were out.”

“I was at my sister's,” she lied.

“I'm sorry we couldn't be together,” he said. “I wanted to spend time with you, but we'll have Wednesday night.”

She didn't reply.

He looked at her. Head down, she was writing furiously on some notes handed in by the secretary of the Old High Church Women's Guild, an event so boring she was tempted to add to the Christmas party notice,
Saturday, two o'clock, church hall, all invited, including the Whores of Babylon
—but the phrase was overlong to be a typo.

Neil resolved to take her out for coffee whenever they had a break and tell her his news then. He gathered up some subbed copy and went to McAllister's office.

“Do you want to check these articles?” he asked.

“I'm sure they are fine.” McAllister unscrewed his pen, got ink on his fingers, cursed, and signed the sheets of paper.

“I'm sorry to let you down,” Neil began, “but I need to leave earlier than I expected. Next week.”

McAllister said, “Sit down.”

Neil sat and continued, “I know it puts you in a bit of a hole, but my ticket to Canada can't be changed, and I have to look in the archives in Glasgow library plus the
Glasgow Herald
if possible.”

“I can arrange the
Herald
for you, the editor is a friend,” McAllister offered. “Will you be gone before the trial?” He watched Neil, alert for a reaction.

“Rob assures me Mr. McLeod has a good chance of being found not guilty.”

“Do you care?”

“I don't know the man.”

“Did you know Mrs. Smart?”

“I heard she was really Mrs. McLeod.”

McAllister said nothing.

“I met her once,” Neil said. “Mrs. Rosemary Sokolov introduced us. I wanted to look through her family papers. She agreed. But she died before I had the chance.”

“Was murdered,” McAllister reminded him. “She didn't just die.”

“Anyhow, I found the information I needed in Sutherland.”

The reminder was painful, but McAllister couldn't dislike Neil. At first he thought him all front, but underneath the shiny smiley exterior—which was only shiny in contrast to most of the citizens of Britain still, after twelve years, recovering from the war—there was a vulnerability in Neil that made him more likable. “Where were you in the war?”

That Neil had been in the war, McAllister had no doubt; he sensed a man who had seen too much.

“The Forty-eighth Highlanders of Canada.”

“Messina?”

“I was there.”

“Joanne's husband, Bill Ross, was there with the Lovat Scouts.”

It was on the tip of Neil's tongue to say,
So we've something else in common,
but common sense stopped him. “Like me, I imagine it is not someplace he wants to remember.”

There was a pause as they both considered their own roll call of the war dead.

“We'll miss you,” McAllister said and, to his own surprise, meant it. “You're a good journalist, and having you here has been a godsend.”

“I'm a competent subeditor, not a journalist.” Neil smiled. “I prefer archives; the dead rather than the living are easier for me to fathom.”

“Good luck.” McAllister could think of no more to say, but looking at Neil, seeing the way he was sitting, upright like a schoolboy before the headmaster, he sensed there was more in Neil's future than small-town newspapers.

When Neil left, McAllister tried to plow through the work
but couldn't concentrate; thoughts drifted in and out like the weather outside, and just as bleak.

Late in the afternoon, after dealing with the printers, who were complaining more and more about the lateness of the copy and constant changes to the layout, he returned to his thinking chair. He was vaguely aware of the sounds of the newspaper office winding down around him, the sounds of “cheerio” and “see you tomorrow” echoing up the stairwell. He rose once to switch on the lights—it was dark by five o'clock at this time of year, and twice he went to the filing cabinet and poured himself a dram from the bottle of Aberlour—not the Mckinlay on show for visitors.

He liked it like this—editor alone in his lair.

Footsteps coming up the stairs intrigued yet vexed him; lately, unexpected visitors had not brought welcome news.

“I'll have a drop o' the decent stuff, no' thon shite.” Jimmy came in, nodding towards the visitors' whisky.

“You're welcome to it. When I heard the footsteps, I was scared it might be the police.”

“I've never been mistaken for the polis.” Jimmy's eyes popped open wide, mock-askance at the very idea. He accepted a decent-sized dram before asking, “How long until the trial?”

“It's scheduled to start on Tuesday, a week tomorrow.” The warm single malt rolled around McAllister's tongue, reminding him of his theory that Scotland's literary and musical and philosophical brilliance, and the hardiness of her people, was because of whisky, the birthright of the nation.

McAllister hesitated before saying, “We might have to do something to help Don's cause.”

“Aye, I was thinking the same. Any ideas?”

“I fancy Smart for it.”

“Did he do it?”

“I can't see how—but maybe we could point a jury in his direction.” McAllister was surprised by his hatred for the sergeant major.

“Unfortunately the good folk of the town love a hero, especially a legless one. But the way he treats people, he deserves a wee whiley in prison.”

Jimmy looked bleak when he said this. Unlike McAllister, he knew what it was to be locked in a freezing prison cell with the hard men of Scotland. He finished off his drink. “No more for me,” he said, even though it hadn't been offered. “I came by to say Ma wants to talk to you.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Why?” The minute he asked, McAllister knew it was a stupid question; even if Jimmy did know, he wouldn't tell. “I'll lock up.”

“Ma car's outside—and bring the bottle.” Jimmy hadn't meant it as an order but McAllister did as he was told, knowing Jenny would appreciate the Aberlour single malt—one of the best of Speyside.

When Jimmy drove up Castle Street and turned left towards Crown Drive, McAllister was curious as to their destination. When the car stopped outside a house with few lights lit, Jimmy got out saying, “I won't be a minute.”

McAllister did not ask for an explanation, and was not disappointed.

When Jimmy walked back to the car, with Neil Stewart in tow, he said nothing except, “Evening,” and Neil nodded back. This was Jenny McPhee's show and they would know soon enough what was wanted of them.

*  *  *  

Jenny was staying in her eldest son's house, as he and his wife were in Glasgow. Keith McPhee was at the university, and Jenny
told anyone and everyone of her scholar son's achievements.
A tinker at university? Would you credit it?
she loved saying.

Now she had bleaker thoughts on her mind; although they had not seen much of each other over the years since they were young, the death of her friend Joyce was a deep wound to her soul.

“McAllister, Mr. Stewart,” she nodded as Jimmy showed them in to the small airless sitting room. The fire was banked up, the windows tight shut, curtains drawn; Jenny had been feeling the cold of late, and this worried Jimmy.

She gestured to the chairs. They sat down. Jimmy did not offer a drink.

That's ominous,
McAllister thought.

“Mr. Stewart, do you mind telling me your date of birth?” she started without preamble.

He stared at her, then smiled. It was a gentle smile, a smile from the eyes, and the heart. “I think you know that already, Mrs. McPhee.”

“Aye.” She let the word out in a long breathy drawl, “I think I do.”

“When did you realize . . . ”

“Who you are?” Again a long sigh, “It took a wee whiley. When I saw you, it was a shock, I couldn't take it in. Then you telling me our Chrissie was gone, and you being like ma Keith, into all them auld papers and suchlike . . . Did you come here to look for . . . ?”

“The solicitor told me where the money came from.”

“So that was it.”

Jimmy McPhee and McAllister were half following, and not quite making sense of all of it, but guessing. Neil was one of the stolen children. Which one was what McAllister wanted to know.

“Jimmy, we'll have a drink now.” Jenny seemed to settle herself into the chair more comfortably, loosening her shawl, easing her conscience. “You've turned out a fine man,” she said, “Chrissie would have been proud.”

“She was. She was a good mother.”

“She told you?”

“She left a letter. After her death, the solicitor gave it to me, but she kept her promise and didn't say who my birth mother is.”

“It was a terrible time.” Jenny nodded thanks to Jimmy as he handed her the glass. She sipped at it, and McAllister watched as her eyes took on that faraway look he had seen before, the face of the storyteller, only this time the fire was indoors, not out in the glens with the sound of running water and the sighing of the birches to add music to the telling.

“Chrissie, my mother, is she related to you?” Neil was breaking all the rules of Highland etiquette—wanting the ending, not the beginning, of his story.

“A right bonnie lass Chrissie, a lovely person.” Not once did Jenny look at Neil as she spoke. McAllister thought she was scared. “She was fourteen when she went to work as a maid in the Mackenzie mansion in town. And a right good worker she was too.”

Neil remembered his mother telling him of all the silver she had to polish and how she wore special gloves so as not to leave fingermarks. She said they polished the silver on rainy days when there was not much else to be done, and she loved sitting around the kitchen table blethering with the cook and the gardener, hearing their stories as she worked to make everything shine.
Shiny like her eyes when she told me about her life in Scotland
.

“Her father was in India, not many folk visited, so very few knew.”

This made no sense to McAllister.
Whose father? Joyce's?
Chrissie's? The father of Neil Stewart?
But it wasn't his place to ask.

“Sergeant Major Smart's father, a drunken eejit if ever there was one, he was the gamekeeper on the estate, and there was no keeping the truth from him.”

She looked into the fire. She could see the man, with his gun, shouting at the bairns, threatening the boys who were only trying to catch rabbits for the pot. He grudged them even that, although Joyce had made it clear that rabbits were there for anyone to take.

“Rabbits are a nuisance,” Joyce told him. “Anyone who traps them is doing us a service.”

“The man hated tinkers,” Jenny continued, “and his son, Archie, even as a boy, was full o' hate, but maybe that was because his father treated him right badly. Whenever he was drunk he would beat the boy, and often as not when he was sober too, saying it would toughen him up. It did that a' right.”

Spare the rod and spoil the child—
McAllister had heard that excuse for brutality often enough.

“Then, one day, when Joyce saw a poor wee tinker boy who'd needed a doctor after Auld Smart beat him within an inch o' his life
for stealing rabbits,
as he put it, Joyce sacked him.

“I don't think she told her father why, just wrote that the Smart family had moved to Perthshire. We all hoped that was the last we'd see o' them—but no . . . ” She did not need to continue.

“So, not long after the Smarts left, Joyce went to the town for a few days, to see to some estate business, and the men were working wi' the sheep in the hills, so I was on ma' own.”

She remembered the baby at her breast. She remembered cradling his head in her hand as he looked up at her as he sucked. She remembered that that was the way it was in those
days; no bottles and milk powder, whoever had milk, fed the baby that needed it. “Then the welfare came and stole you and wee Davey.”

She shook her head. Even after all this time, the day haunted her.

“Stole?” Neil could not believe the word. “Stole?” he repeated.

“You heard ma Ma.” Jimmy's voice was as sad and as deep and as harsh as a hoodie crow.

“Somebody reported us to the welfare saying we were not ‘fit and proper parents'—and me being a widow at the time made it doubly hard.” She was certain it was Auld Archie Smart's revenge, but she could never prove it.

The room was quiet, hushed—waiting for the next part of the story. But Jenny was spent.

“The welfare took tinkers' bairns.” She started to rush her words. “Said they were neglected. Told us they were off to a better life.”

“And they're still taking them. Even now in 1957.” Jimmy was almost spitting as he spoke; he knew what this better life was: in institutions or sent to the colonies, a life far worse than a life on the road with their kinfolk. “We are despised by many people, us and the Gypsies, just because we want to be left alone wi' our own way of life. What happened in Germany to the Traveling people in the last war is forgotten by some—but not us.”

“There is great ignorance and prejudice in Canada too,” Neil spoke quietly, remembering John Williamson, one of his school friends.
Dirty tink was the least nasty of the names the children shouted at him.
One time, he was about seven and knew no better, he had said to his mother,
John Williamson is a dirty tink,
and she had spanked him, shouting at him to never ever say that again. Traveling people, she had told him, are good people. He
never forgot because it was the only time she had given him a proper smacking.