North Sea Requiem

For Maeve Nolan

“Stormy weather,

Since my man and I ain't together,

Keeps raining all the time.”

—“S
TORMY
W
EATHER
”
BY
H
AROLD
A
RLEN
AND
T
ED
K
OEHLER

M
rs. Frank Urquhart was dead set against the Sabbatarians. What right did religious folk have to tell others they couldn't do anything other than pray on a Sunday? How could they dictate no hanging out washing on a fine day—which Sunday often was?

Here I am with the whole of the shinty team's shorts an' shirts, and I'm expected to leave the washing until Monday? No chance. God must be a man,
she always complained.
No woman would ignore grass stains and mud stains, to say nothing of the blood, for two whole days.

It was Saturday night; she was waiting for the water to boil in the washhouse attached to their council house on one of the new schemes of homes built for decent working families.

They'll need a good long soak this week,
she thought as she sorted through the big wicker hamper, the one with the leather handles that was delivered to her house a couple of hours after the match ended if it was a home game, Monday if it was away.

The smell didn't bother her—she was a nurse. This job she accepted as her duty, her husband being the manager of the town shinty team.

“Would you look at yon?” she muttered when she reached in for the socks, “one of those eejits has left his boot in with the dirty washing.”

When she pulled the boot from the pile and found a foot in the sock inside, she screamed loud enough and shrill enough to set the dog barking, her daughter running, and wake her husband
up from his chair in front of the fire, where he was dreaming of the team winning the competition and drinking whisky from the silver Camanachd Cup itself.

Her daughter, Morag, who was sixteen and a replica of her mother, ran in to see what the noise was about. She almost threw up at the sight, but had the sense to relieve her mother of the boot—and the foot—and lock it in the pantry out of reach of the dog. But not before her father, the feared coach, had seen the end stump of the leg and passed out on the washhouse floor, where Nurse Urquhart used an already bloody pair of shorts to stem the flow from the cut on his forehead. Then Morag called the police.

The confusion in the ensuing forensic investigation came about because no one dared mention that Coach Frank Urquhart always fainted at the sight of blood.

F
or once, Hector Bain, the
Highland Gazette
's photographer, was first in the office for the obligatory Monday morning news meeting. He needed to match the names of the players to the shots from an unusually high-scoring shinty match the previous Saturday.

The team list, written in Hector's tiny wee script that even he had trouble deciphering, was in the cheapest notebook available, a school jotter, which Hector bought by the dozen. The prints and the contact sheet were in the plain brown envelope preferred by the legal profession, with a red ribbon wound around a circle of cardboard the size of a half-crown piece.

“Right,” he was muttering, “this is definitely Willie Fraser, the captain.” The captain looked like a thug. But then again, so did most of the shinty team when on the field.

Hec scratched his head, hoping his carrot-colored hair would cause whatever Celtic goddess was the patron of memory to look favorably on him and give him a clue to who the other players were.

Last Saturday's game had been fast and furious—games in the Highland League were legendary for their competitiveness. By halftime, Mrs. Urquhart, a nurse as well as the coach's wife, had been busy, her first aid kit almost empty.

Shinty is the game of warriors—so many players believed. An ancient game, predating the Celts, it gave birth to ice hockey; it reawoke the fiercesome rivalries that had all but died out with
the dispersal of the clan system. Team rivalries were intense; the games fought as fiercely as ancient clan battles but with a small concrete-hard ball and double-sided hockey-style sticks instead of claymores.

The phone rang. Hector ignored it. Fiona the receptionist called up the half-spiral stone staircase, “Hector, pick up the phone, it's for you.”

Even though there was no one else in the reporters' room, and no need to feel embarrassed, Fiona's voice made him blush.

“Hello, Hector? It's me, Frankie Urquhart.”

“That was a great game on Saturday,” Hector said. Frankie was a friend as well as a neighbor.

“Aye, well, it was. But we lost, so ma dad's no' in the best of moods. Listen, I'm phoning you from work so I can't be long. I just wanted to tell you that Sergeant Patience wants to know why you took a picture o' the leg my mother found in the shinty boot.”

“Sergeant Patience?” Hector was not happy to be involved with Sergeant Patience again; their truce was fragile. “Do you still have the leg?”

“Naw, the police took it away. Took the whole hamper and we don't know when we'll get it back. Dad is livid 'cos we don't have spare shirts and we're away to Kingussie next Saturday.”

“Pity.”

“Aye. Dad wants you to write about what happened in the newspaper, ask if anyone . . .”

“Has lost a leg?” Hec was laughing at his own joke when Joanne Ross and Rob McLean, reporters on the
Gazette,
walked in. “I'll get Rob to talk to your dad,” said Hec and hung up.

“No favors,” Rob said, “I am not writing up some stupid story so your pals can have their names in the paper.”

Rob and Hector and Frankie had known one another since primary school, and although Rob regarded Hec as nineteen and
sixpence in the pound, they were all good friends in the known-each-other-since-in-their-prams kind of way.

“Suit yourself.” Hector turned to Joanne, who was sitting next to him, wondering if it had warmed up enough to take off her scarf and Fair Isle beret.

“Mrs. Ross . . .” His ginger-cat-colored eyes fixed on her. “My friend Frankie Urquhart, his mum found a boot in the shinty team's dirty washing and there was half a leg in it wearing their team sock, and I took some pictures.” He shook some prints out of a large brown envelope onto the table.

“Horrible!” Joanne shuddered, not wanting to examine the picture of the severed limb too closely.

“Brilliant!” Rob was staring at the pictures, seeing a good story and even better headlines of the “legless” variety. Somehow Hector had managed to capture the end of the stump in vivid Technicolor—even though the film was black-and-white.

McAllister, the weekly newspaper's editor, and Don McLeod, the deputy and chief sub editor, walked in. The town bells struck nine o'clock, and McAllister started the news meeting.

“Right, what have we got for this week?” McAllister wanted the meeting over with because he had a bad case of chilblains and his feet were horribly itchy.
Serves me right for buying those newfangled nylon socks—they don't even keep your feet warm.

“I've got these.” Hec pushed the shots across the table to the two editors. A miniature cloud of cigarette smoke hovered above them, the tall, narrow room being too cold for smoke to rise.

Don McLeod, a short stubby man who, after many weeks in gaol for a crime he did not commit, looked all of his sixty-six years. Chain-smoking did not help his health, and his skin had taken on a distinct tobacco tinge. “What team is thon sock from?”

“Our local,” Hec said.

“Great.” Being a man of Skye, any team other than his island
team was Don's dire enemy when it came to shinty. “So, Hector Bain, in less than thirty words”—he poked a particularly lurid close-up with his wee red editing pencil—“how did you come by these pictures?” He said this knowing it was impossible for Hec to tell the simplest story in less than ten minutes.

When he had finished, McAllister was glad Hector Bain was the staff photographer, not a reporter; for Hec, putting events into sequence was impossible.

“So the coach, Mr. Urquhart, where does he live?” the editor asked.

“Two doors down from me in Dochfour Drive.” Hector registered McAllister's impatience rising to nine on a scale of one to ten. “The team was playing at home on Saturday. Mrs. Urquhart does the washing for the team . . .” It was the only way the coach could ensure every one of his part-time players turned up in full team strip. “And when she found the leg she screamed and ma granny went round to see what was wrong, but it was her husband Frank Urquhart who was bleeding, 'cos he'd hit his head, and this leg, it was lying on the floor, so . . .”

“Since you take your camera everywhere,” said Don, eager to get on with the news meeting.

“Probably sleep with it,” Rob quipped, and was rewarded with the sight of Hec going as red as his hair.

“I took a few shots, but Frankie, that's my pal, had to call the doctor for his dad Frank 'cos his head needed stitches, then police came . . .”

Hector didn't say, but when he recognized his nemesis, Sergeant Patience, climbing out of a police car two sizes too small for his ample body, he jumped the fences between the back gardens, ran home, and hid in his studio cum shed cum washhouse, putting up the red No Admittance sign before developing the film of the leg in the shinty sock and boot.

“This is my story,” Joanne announced. “Rob isn't interested.”