North Sea Requiem (22 page)

“Joanne,” he started again, “you are never a person who does whatever you want; you think of others . . .” He did not know how to tell her, or whether to tell her, that her habit of putting others first, of holding back her ideas, her opinions, her needs, how she looked to others—himself, Mae Bell, even Rob—to seek approval, to validate herself, drove him crazy.

He knew that what he said now, in the cocoon of the car on the last miles through the dark tunnel of trees, around the bends and turns down to the firth shore and the railway tracks and the beginning of town, would stay with them.

He began slowly. “Your father is gone. Bill will be leaving soon. You are free to be whoever you want to be. All I hope is that there is a place for me in your life.”

She reached over, squeezed his left arm. Her palm felt like a flamethrower sending fire through the tweed and the cotton, directly to his skin, his body. She moved her hand to his wrist, touched the skin where the jacket rose up from his hand resting on the steering wheel. They were looking straight ahead, driving towards the remembered light of the river, seeing the evening dim as the streetlights came on.

“Is Mae still staying with you?” she asked.

“No, she's in Glasgow for a few days—looking up long-lost relatives, she said.”

Joanne was too lost in her own little deaths to query yet another absence from Mae Bell.

McAllister turned left after crossing the bridge. The lights were out in Gino's café. He was driving past the cathedral
towards Chiara's house, where her girls were staying. Chiara and the children were not expecting them until the next morning.

“Turn around,” she said as he slowed the car down, to park. “I want to stay with you tonight.”

She did not know it, but he did. He had been in battle. He had lived close to death, in the hills above Barcelona, in the suburbs of Madrid, in the aftermath of the liberation of Paris; the proximity of death brought a lust for life. And for sex.

He remembered something from the Bible about lust, sin, death.
No doubt her father knew the quotation.

“Are you sure?” He was looking at her, unable to see her eyes in the dark, unable to put the question more directly, but the meaning was clear to both of them.

“You mean you want to wait until we're married?” She was incapable of saying more, flippancy hiding fear, concealing emotion. The air in the car was stifling. She needed to roll down the window.

He turned the car around outside the cricket ground. He drove back across the bridge and up the hill to home. All in silence.

They went into the house. He went towards the kitchen.

“No,” she said, and took his hand. She walked up the stairs, him following, straight to his room. She did not switch on any lights, leaving the curtains open, allowing starlight to be their only illumination. She undressed, slid into his bed. And waited.

•   •   •

“What's happening?”

McAllister walked into the reporters' room to find Don alone, fiddling with a portable wireless, the whine and hiss and occasional faraway voices in Russian and German and English and Scots English beaming into the
Gazette
from outer space.

“Not much,” Don said. “How's Joanne?” He asked out of
interest, believing she was much better off without a father who would cast his daughter out over an error of human frailty.

“She's fine.”

McAllister's voice made Don look up. He was not hearing the horse race caller; although he said it was to listen to the national news, the reason he bought the secondhand wireless was to listen to the races from Musselburgh, Ayr, and occasionally from England. He heard a calibration in McAllister's tone, an attempt at casual in the “She's fine”—which McAllister might have carried off with anyone other than Don.
Something has happened,
he guessed from the nothing-is-happening attempt at nonchalance, and he tightened his lips to keep in the smile, saying nothing but thinking,
Good luck to them, we could be doing with a wedding instead of death.

“Nothing's happening. But that may be something it itself,” Don told him.

McAllister lit up, waited until Don had done the same, and then waited some more.

Don was blowing smoke towards the ceiling, watching it coil and spiral like a genie escaped from Aladdin's lamp.

“Does this mean the end of it? The death of Nurse Urquhart solved the problem? Or the person has given up? What about the warnings sent to Mae Bell? Has she heeded them?” McAllister was impatient to see an end to the saga. He knew Joanne would not consent to a wedding whilst an anonymous letter writer was still on the loose. And an acid-throwing maniac—unless they were one and the same.

“Mrs. Bell is still looking for information about her late husband.” Don had never been certain that was all Mae Bell was looking for. The longer she stayed, the less he believed her. However, he knew McAllister was mesmerized by the American and would not welcome criticism.

“The police?” McAllister asked.

“There's no evidence the printers were involved, except the bottle of acid came from the
Gazette
and the letters were delivered here.”

“Any ideas?”

“Aye an' no. Joanne's idea that we look again at how the letters were delivered makes sense.”

“Is Fiona still here?” It was Saturday morning, eleven thirty, a half day. Fiona worked until noon.

Don was never one for using the phone when he could shout.

“Fiona. Up here.”

She reminds me of Joanne,
was McAllister's first thought as the young woman came in—the look on her face that of the Scottish red-haired queen being led to her execution.

“We're not going to fire you,” he joked, “you're doing too good a job.”

“Aye, McAllister might have to answer a phone if you weren't here,” Don agreed.

He had on his Nice Highland Granddad persona—much better than McAllister's scary Glaswegian—so Fiona took one step farther into the room.

“Any more letters?” Don asked.

“No, I'd have told you . . .”

“I know you would.” Don shifted his weight on the stool. The wireless continued to hiss in the background but with no noise resembling a horse race commentary coming through the ether. “We're trying to work out how the letters were delivered.” His smile, the way his face crinkled up, reminded her of the walnuts in her Christmas stocking her mother still insisted she hang up—even though she was sixteen, nearly seventeen, made her relax. Marginally.

“I've been thinking about it, too, but I can't see how . . .” She
did have an idea, but it was so preposterous, she would never tell Mr. McLeod and especially not Mr. McAllister—she was only the office junior. “Maybe someone gets in after the cleaner gets here.”

“The police talked to the cleaner. She says she locks the front door after she gets in.” McAllister had already asked DI Dunne about that.

“Maybe through the printers' back door?” Fiona was hoping that was the solution.

“Only the father of the chapel had the keys to that door,” Don told them, remembering that even he, after repeated requests, could not get hold of a spare key. “You're not suggesting
he
could have left the anonymous letters?”

“No. I don't know anything about the man.”
Except that he scares me,
she didn't add. “My mum's in the Woman's Guild with his wife . . .” Again, she didn't add that the woman had a notorious tongue on her, that she hated Nurse Urquhart, or that Mum said it was because Nurse Urquhart had married her sweetheart, but Fiona couldn't imagine Mr. Frank Urquhart being anyone's sweetheart, him being so old.

“Come on, lass.” Don clambered down from his stool. “You and me are going out.” He saw the panic in her eyes. “Don't worry”—he patted her arm—“Mr. McAllister will answer the phone.”

She stiffed a giggle and followed the deputy editor down the stairs. They walked across the bridge to Gino's café.

Don bought a double chocolate cone for her and a strawberry and vanilla for himself. They walked along the river towards the Islands, where, finding a bench, he told her he had to rest his legs. She believed him because her granddad was the same. Twenty minutes later, they decided someone could have posted the letters in the outside boxes, but how did the letters find their way onto her desk after she had emptied the mailboxes? That would mean someone inside the building put them there.

“Lots of people pass the
Gazette
on their way to the library,” she added when they had discussed the possibilities. “So it's not as though the Wynd isn't busy.”

“Right enough. And the anonymous letters were in the box for the classifieds?”

“I don't know. I don't always clear that box, and I can't really remember if the letters came on the days someone else did.”

“Mr. Forbes?”

“Aye. He has another key an' all.” Her English was deteriorating, and Don had dropped into dialect to encourage her. He had heard her say “really remember.” In a dialect of double negatives, the
really
was telling.

“So Mr. Forbes
could,
not that I'm saying he did, but he
could
have put letters in with the advertising?”

“Aye,” Fiona said. “Then again so could lots o' people.”

Don groaned faintly, and Fiona took it as a sign he'd been sitting too long on a bench in the wind, not wrapped up properly as old people were meant to be.

“If you don't mind me saying so, Mr. McLeod, I don't think it was Mr. Forbes. The two times he saw the letters, he was really shocked. Aye”—she was picturing him leaving the building—“he was right upset.”

Don didn't say more, not wanting to gossip with the office junior. But he listened. And heard her.

He glanced backwards at the Royal Infirmary clock, “Would you look at the time? McAllister will be having kittens if he's had to answer more than two phone calls. He's probably unplugged the switchboard by now.” He stood shaking the crumbly flakes of ice cream cone from his trousers. “When we get back, you take off early. Surprise your boyfriend.” It was a granddad joke. He was surprised when she gripped his arm.

“You won't tell, will you?”

She was looking so alarmed, he smiled. “Don't worry, lass, Mr. Forbes will hear nothing from . . .”

“It's no' Mr. Forbes. I'm not seventeen till next month and . . .”

“Your mother? She wouldn't approve?”

“No. Ma father. He says no boyfriends till I'm eighteen.”

“I'll no' say a word.”

They were walking away from the spot, mid-bridge, where sixteen-soon-to-be-seventeen Fiona told him, her boss, a man older than her real granddad, of the first and, she was convinced, the only love of her life, the man she hoped to marry. She couldn't believe she had shared her secret with him.

She never said his name. Don never guessed; he put it down to a first-love-young-lassie infatuation, not for a minute imagining he would soon be dancing at her wedding in an old-man kind of shuffle, at a wedding where the bride didn't
have to
get married, the wedding that would make everyone in the
Gazette
glad.

•   •   •

“I knew it—that creep Mal Forbes.”

McAllister smiled, not so much at her description of Mal Forbes but more at her daughter-of-the-manse inability to use words higher up on the scale of nastiness.

“That creep, as you put it, left a condolence card for you at the office.” He handed her the plain black-bordered card printed with a Bible verse from the Twenty-third Psalm and a brief handwritten note in small left-leaning writing, Mal Forbes's handwriting, McAllister knew—because he had checked.

Condolences on your sad loss from Moira and myself.

Malcolm Forbes

Joanne flushed and looked away.
The man means well, only he gets me all het up with his attitude to women.
She knew it was not
just Mal but most of the population of the United Kingdom who disapproved of women working.
She should be at home wi' the bairns,
was the cry to any woman other than a widow who dared work. Never mind that his own wife had a part-time job, never mind the hundreds of thousands of women who had contributed to the war effort in factories, on the farms, in the police, and, like Joanne, in the army.

“As Don said, there's absolutely no proof it was Mal Forbes, other than he has a key to the mailboxes.” McAllister was not defending Mal Forbes; he was being realistic. “The key is hanging in plain sight in the downstairs office, and it's labeled ‘mailbox.' Plus, the police have questioned him and say he knows nothing.”

“They believe him?”

He shrugged. He did not want this discussion. Did not want to say he thought her unreasonable when it came to Mal Forbes.

They were at home, McAllister's house, and the girls were watching early-Saturday-evening television.

Joanne was picturing the front of the
Gazette
building. There were two mailboxes on each side of the heavy glass doors, one marked Mail, the other Advertising and Notices. They had been introduced by the late Mrs. Donal McLeod. McAllister had a key to the mailbox that he had long since lost, the advertising manager had a key to both boxes, and Fiona was given a key to the Advertising box, but had somehow acquired the other as well.

Part of her job was to sort out what went to McAllister and what went to Mr. McLeod or the other reporters. Many went to Hector, who received a surprising amount of mail, mainly asking for copies of pictures, along with invitations to events far and wide, from sports meetings to children's gatherings to golden wedding anniversaries to large holes in the roads neglected by the council.