North Sea Requiem (30 page)

She couldn't think of what to take, so she bought grapes and was horrified at the price. She caught the bus, leaving her bike at work. She walked up the path and rang the doorbell, thinking she had an hour before the children came out of school, which meant an hour to talk to Mrs. Forbes, see if she could help, and be back in time to finish an article on new traffic lights in Eastgate.

She rang the doorbell. It took a long time for an answer.

“Hello, I'm Joanne Ross, I work with Mal. I heard you're not feeling well so I brought you some grapes.” As she said it she realized how lame it sounded, how much of a busybody she must appear.

The small woman in front of her had an odd shape, short but wiry, reminding Joanne of a circus acrobat she had once admired. Dressed in a glittering leotard, it was the acrobat's muscular legs and arms and thick torso Joanne had noticed.
I bet she could lift a heifer,
she'd thought, and was proved correct when the woman bore the weight of her male partner on the high trapeze.

Moira Forbes had the same body shape, but her unwashed fair hair, the darkness around the light grey eyes, skin that resembled a garment that had been washed so often it no longer had an identifiable color, all showed she had been ill for some time.
This is more than flu,
Joanne thought,
this is a long-term illness.
She thought it might be the unsayable, cancer, and her heart went out to Mal Forbes and her family.

“I know about you,” Moira said in a tired voice, but there was a hint of malevolence in the whine.

Joanne thought she must be mistaken.
The poor woman's ill.

Moira's hand reached out, a surprisingly large hand for such a wee woman, and again Joanne was reminded of the trapeze artist. The eyes looking every way except at Joanne, she took the brown paper bag with the grapes, and without another word shut the door, leaving Joanne ashamed at her audacity in visiting a woman she'd never met, for reasons she couldn't quite fathom.

Joanne took a deep breath, her shoulders dropping as she blew the air out, telling herself,
Think how offended you would be if a complete stranger turned up on your doorstep . . .

The voice was too faint to give a name to, but not the tune.

Stormy weather, since my man and I ain't together . . .

It was coming from the back of the house. Joanne went to the high fence that cut the front garden from the back.

“Da da daaa, da dah da da, dada daa . . . stormy weather . . . hmm hmm hmm hmm hmmhumm, keeps rainin' . . .”

A shiver ran through Joanne. Mae! She wanted to call out “Mae Bell!” but knew she shouldn't. She went to the side of the house, to a gate, padlocked, and saw the fence continued three yards before joining with a high stone wall, with meager, child-sized footholds in the crumbling mortar.

Putting her handbag in an azalea shrub, Joanne clambered up, losing the skin from two knuckles before she was over and in a long back garden of mostly lawn. An old air raid shelter was at the far end. She moved quickly. Another two padlocks locked the door, and the single window was sealed up with corrugated iron that was not quite big enough, allowing gaps at the sides for thin shafts of light.

“Mae, Mae Bell, it's me, Joanne,” she was trying to shout in a whisper.

“Joanne! Oh, Joanne! Get me out of here. Please get me out!” Her voice was weak; her singing had been stronger.

Joanne could hear the tears. The panic. “The door's padlocked, I'll see if I can pull this off the window.” She had her fingers in the lower gap, was pulling as hard as she could when she felt rather than heard the person behind her—then a crashing, a thunderbolt of pain on the side of her head. Then no more.

•   •   •

“McAllister, it's Annie, I'm at Granny and Granddad's house because Mum didn't come home. Granny is really cross. Can you tell Mum to come and get us?”

“Your mother isn't here.” He knew Joanne hated leaving her children for that hour and a half between school ending and her arrival home from work. He knew she would never leave them longer unless something had happened.

“Where is she then?” Annie sounded scared. “Where's Mum?”

“Annie, what's your grandparents' address?” He tried to keep his voice calm but Annie could hear his fear.

“Come quickly.” She hung up the phone.

He ran to his car. He didn't have time to lock his front door. He drove so fast over the bridge he almost hit the sandstone pillars on the south side. Annie was watching out the window and had the front door open as he was halfway up the garden path.

“I think you should talk to Granddad,” she said. “Granny's in the kitchen with Jean and I don't want Jean to know.”

McAllister could see how pale the girl was, every freckle clear, in spite of the steady, I-can-cope-with-anything voice.

“Maybe you should join them,” he replied.

“No.” She was eleven years old yet she was aged; or no age; perhaps the universal age of a female worried to death about a loved one—husband, child, sister, brother, fading parent; a female
whose role was to sit and wait; to knit; to make tea, a role all too familiar in the twentieth century, a century of not-too-distant wars. “No.” Annie was certain. “I want to know what's happened to Mum.” She showed him into the sitting room.

Granddad Ross rose to meet McAllister, held out his hand, and thanked him for coming, saying, “I'm sure it's nothing,” and not meaning it.

Granny Ross looked in to see who the visitor was, nodded at McAllister, and said, “I'll put the kettle on.”

Annie began, “Mum didn't come home. She's sometimes late, but not as late as this.” It was twenty to eight—almost Jean's bedtime. “She wouldn't do that without telling someone.”

This time it was McAllister's face that said it all. He was terrified.

“Not five minutes since, we called the Royal Infirmary and Raigmore Hospital and she's not there,” Granddad said. “Then I phoned the police and they've heard nothing.”

There was a knock on the front door. Granny Ross answered. “Come away into the sitting room,” she was saying. It was DI Dunne.

“McAllister. Mr. Ross. Mrs. Ross.” He looked at Annie, wondering if he should speak in front of her. As no one dismissed the child, he continued, “My sergeant called me to say you were asking after Mrs. Joanne Ross. Is there a problem?”

From looking at them he could see there was a problem. He would not normally be concerned so soon after a person was missing—it being a matter of only hours, not days—but the phone call worried him. And with the anonymous letters, and the death of Nurse Urquhart, he was taking the nonappearance of Joanne Ross seriously.

“I'm going to phone Rob, just in case she's there,” Annie said, and left the room.

“Does the child know?” DI Dunne asked.

“It was Annie who had the presence of mind to come over to her grandparents' when Joanne didn't come home. Annie also called me to ask if her mother . . .” McAllister sat down.

Granny Ross came in and handed him a mug of tea.

Annie came back, saying, “Mum's not there and Uncle Rob's coming over.” This time she looked close to tears.

Her granny took her hand, saying quietly, “We mustn't let Jean see there's anything wrong,” and led her into the kitchen.

The roar of a motorbike shattered the quiet of Dochfour Drive. Rob ran down the path and came in through the back door.

“Where's Joanne?” He was looking as distraught as McAllister, but had not aged the ten years McAllister had in the past half hour. “What's happened to her?”

“Joanne's late home. She probably had an accident on her bike or . . .”

“No, she leaves her bike next to my motorbike. It was still at the office when I left,” Rob said. “When did you last see her?”

DI Dunne was about to ask the same but Rob got in first.

“Late this morning, around eleven.” McAllister couldn't remember if she had phoned anyone on the
Gazette
after that.
I must check.

“It's too early to worry.” DI Dunne took control. “In case she turns up at home, someone should leave a note for her.”

Rob nodded. “I'll do that.”

“Mr. McAllister, you'd best wait at your house.” McAllister nodded, relieved DI Dunne was taking charge. “We will check the hospitals, check around town. Please give me a list of her friends . . .”

“Her father died recently, maybe . . .” Granddad Ross was clutching at the proverbial straw.

“I'll call her brother-in-law—the Reverend Duncan Macdonald,” McAllister explained to the policeman.

“I'm off to Joanne's house,” Rob told McAllister. “Then I'm going to call in on Don, see if she's there. Then I'll come over to your place.” He wanted to do something, anything, to find Joanne. He was chilled with fear, and the memory of Nurse Urquhart, her fate, her funeral, kept surfacing as fast as he tried to block it out.

Annie came in. “Uncle Rob, I think you should tell Hector. He sees things other people don't notice.”

“You're right.” As Hector lived nearby, Rob volunteered to do that first.

“Everyone should call me at the police station if you hear anything, or think of anywhere Mrs. Ross might be.” The inspector was readying to leave, his request more a command. Despite his initial thought that it was too early to worry, he felt a great unease at the absence of Joanne Ross. “No matter how insignificant it may seem, if you have any information, call the police station.”

DI Dunne shook McAllister's hand, then Granddad Ross's, and left to organize a search. It was clear the detective was taking Joanne's absence seriously, and for that McAllister was eternally grateful.

•   •   •

When he walked into his own kitchen, McAllister found the letter on the table.

SO WILL YOU STILL MARRY THAT MEDDLING BITCH WITH HER FACE BURNED OFF AND HER EYES BURNED OUT AND HER DAUGHTERS THE SAME?

There was no need to wonder how someone got in—the door was unlocked, the key under the doormat. McAllister made straight for the phone to tell DI Dunne.

When Rob arrived, he said, “Sorry, Joanne is not with Don.”

Don came in behind him. McAllister pushed the note towards them. It was Don who said what Rob and McAllister were avoiding.

“This is from the same person as wrote the first letters.”

McAllister slumped in his chair, his head in his hands. “For God's sake, man, I can see that!”

DI Dunne first rang the doorbell, then walked straight to the kitchen. After a bustle of questions, the answers being “No,” “I don't know,” and “No idea,” and with neither McAllister nor Rob nor Don McLeod having anything useful to tell him, the policeman left with a sense of fresh urgency, taking the note with him.

McAllister was glad of the absence of the malignant piece of paper. He sat at the table smoking, replying to questions only in grunts.

Don waited out the night with McAllister, saying little, making tea, keeping the whisky consumption to a minimum, knowing they needed to think straight, returning the kindness the editor had shown him in his time of troubles.

Rob had no idea what to do with himself, so, finding the wireless in the kitchen wasn't working, he spread an old
Gazette
on the table and proceeded to take it apart. When he had put the wireless back together again, but before returning it to its Bakelite casing, he tuned it in, and was pleased to hear the shipping forecast. Less pleased when he realized a cold storm front was making its way across from Norwegian waters straight to Cromarty and the Moray Firth—their waters, their region.

McAllister thought that night the longest of his life. He knew it was a cliché, and he was a wordsmith who hated clichés, but the night and the clock stretched towards dawn with a reluctance that made him ache, physically hurt.

DI Dunne called around at seven in the morning with no
news. He found Don asleep on the sofa, Rob asleep in a chair, and McAllister awake in the kitchen.

“I'm sorry, Mr. McAllister, there's no news . . .” The inspector saw the life force drain out of the editor, from his face, his shoulders, his legs—so much so that McAllister had to sit again at the table.

“We're doing all we can . . .” the inspector added.

“No news?” Don came in and saw McAllister's face. “Right. McAllister, me and the boy are away to the office. We'll keep in touch.” Don motioned to Rob saying, “We've a newspaper to put out,” leaving McAllister to maintain the vigil.

•   •   •

Fiona came in to work at her usual eight o'clock and was amazed to hear sounds from the reporters' room so early in the morning. Hector came in half a minute later and explained. Fiona burst into tears.

Bill Ross called McAllister and asked if he could help. It was the first real, albeit brief, conversation they'd had, and McAllister was grateful for the offer. “Better to call DI Dunne,” he'd said.

Joanne's sister, Elizabeth, visited, bringing McAllister bread and bacon and eggs, and she cooked him breakfast. Mortimer Beauchamp Carlyle, one of the
Gazette
directors, called round and brought a bottle of the Glenlivet, offering help and feeling helpless, knowing all he could do was keep McAllister company as they waited out the hours for Joanne's return.

Then the gale hit. And the rain. It didn't let up. It rained and rained and the gutters flowed and the river rose and the trees waved and wept, and McAllister waited, along with everyone else.

But no one knew anything, except Mae Bell and whoever had locked her in the air raid shelter.

•   •   •

They were in a double-bricked-up space at one end of the small shelter. Not much wider than a coffin, their gaol was six feet long
and completely dark; the door was invisible from the outside, hidden behind a cupboard. There was a draft coming from somewhere, although Mae Bell was yet to identify the source. There was also a puddle of rainwater creeping into the semi-underground cellar. From where, again Mae couldn't tell.