A Kind of Grief (10 page)

“Yes, please.” Her voice was a whisper.

“I'm sorry, Joanne,” he said again before he hung up.

Not knowing what else to do, she put on her coat and hat and half-walked, half-stumbled to the
Gazette
office. She stopped at the bottom of Castle Wynd to take some deep breaths, not wanting her husband to see the depths of her distress. And guilt. But she needed company.

“Shocked” was not a word that could describe her feelings; “complete disbelief” was closest. She couldn't believe Alice Ramsay would kill herself. She was so alive; she'd created such a beautiful home. Leave the glen, yes, that she could understand, especially with winter coming on. But kill herself over some ridiculous gossip? No, not the woman Joanne had met.

McAllister was in the reporters' room with Don McLeod and Rob McLean. Hector Bain, the photographer, was there too.

“Hiya, Joanne. Nice to see you.” Hector's grin was reminiscent of a Halloween turnip lantern. His hair color also.

“Good to see you, Hector.”

“Are you all right?” McAllister asked.

“We've heard,” Don said. “Calum Mackenzie called.” He didn't mention that Calum had also asked if the
Gazette
would be interested in publishing the story. Joanne was glad she did not have to explain why she was there.

“Sad business, suicide,” Rob said.

“It wasn't.” Joanne, her back straight, her lips pressed tight as though keeping in the anger, the sadness, and the indignation, continued, “No matter what anyone tells me, no matter what the note implies, I will never believe she killed herself.”

“Note?” Rob was interested. At the age of twenty-four, he had finally grown up but still couldn't disguise his eagerness for a story.

“It wasn't a note. It was only the newspaper with that stupid article left on the kitchen table with my name and telephone number beside it.” Her voice was flat. Deliberately so. She wanted to shout,
It is not my fault!

Don said, “I never met the woman, but with suicide, you can never pick who will—”

“Don, she just wouldn't. Believe me.”

McAllister took her arm. “Let's walk.”

“The girls will be home from school soon.”

“I'll call Annie,” Rob volunteered, “tell her you're finally off on your honeymoon.” Even that did not raise a smile.

As they walked down the stairs, Joanne ahead of him, McAllister heard Hector asking, “What was that all about?”
Indeed,
McAllister was thinking,
what is this all about?
He hated not being able to protect Joanne from bad news; his greatest fear was that an upset, a scandal, would affect her, depress her, in ways he couldn't anticipate.

They walked across the castle forecourt, not seeing the view or the statue or the river. They walked down the steep brae to the riverbank and followed the path towards the islands.

No matter how many times they walked this walk, it always soothed them, putting fear and worry in perspective, gladdening the heart. Joanne had a dream of living on a river.
Much too pricy for us
, she'd said often as she admired the mansions of the wealthy townsfolk.

He had the good sense not to speak. And she didn't want to talk. So, in silence except for the quiet roar of rushing water, they crossed the bridge, walked over one island, and crossed a smaller bridge onto the next. At the final bridge, Joanne turned around and began walking back the way they had come.

Keeping to the middle of the path, avoiding the deep banks of autumn leaves lining the sandy walkways, she was looking up through the tunnel of bare branches. She watched one solitary leaf that had survived wind and weather come twirling down to fall at her feet. She couldn't resist. She jumped into them, began kicking up leaves, stirring up small clouds of red and orange and gold and dust and sand and a smell, a damp dank earthy scent. She relished it, until the memory of her father's funeral hit, the smell of freshly turned earth in a freshly dug grave.

“I wonder who will bury her,” Joanne said. “She told me she had no one.”

“I don't know,” McAllister replied. He was not one for funerals. He believed in the memory of the person, not the worship of a body when it was all too late.

“I will be there.”

He said, “I'll come with you.”

“Thank you.”

They didn't take the river path back, instead walking up the steep hill that wound through woodland to their home. Not until they reached Drummond Road and had their breath back did she speak.

“You'd have liked her. Like you, she lived in Europe for years. Before and after the war, I think. She spoke Italian, she said. And I think she spoke French—she had French books, anyhow. I can see her there. Living in the sun. Painting. Visiting art galleries and churches and . . . Sorry, McAllister. It all seems so wrong.”

“I know.”

The funeral would not be immediate; this they both knew. The procurator fiscal would institute a fatal accident inquiry, starting with a postmortem. Only after the finding—suicide, natural causes—would there be a funeral.

“We'll wait till the legalities are over,” McAllister said. “Then we will go to Sutherland to say farewell.”

Next morning, Joanne was once more on the phone to Calum Mackenzie. “It's about the trial,” she started—no need to say which trial. “I wanted to ask . . .” She had no idea what she wanted to ask; she just couldn't let go of Alice Ramsay.

“I don't mind. Maybe we could meet up?”

Joanne dreaded the thought of another drive. The last one had been fun, but it had taken her three days to recover.

“Me and my fiancée, Elaine, we're coming down your way,” Calum said. “She has a training day at the hospital, and I'm driving her down in ma dad's car, so I've all day to kill.”

“When?”

“Friday coming.”

“Perfect.” Joanne was pleased. “Phone me when you arrive, then come for a cup of tea. No, better still, let's meet at the
Gazette
office. I can show you around, introduce you to everyone.”

Now it was Calum's turn to be delighted. “Elaine has to be at the hospital at nine o'clock, so let's say . . .”

“Ten o'clock at the
Gazette
.”

Joanne sat in a visitor's chair in her husband's office, Calum in the other. Purloining McAllister's chair was one step too many. She had her reporter's notebook and a pen. She put on reading glasses. They reminded her that the surgeon had feared for her eyesight.

In her thinking, however, she'd reached a turning point in her recovery. For a long while, she'd believed that the attack was her fault. She wrestled with different scenarios in which she should have done this, could have done that, changing the outcome. She wrestled with what she should have said, or done, and after the fact decided that she was not clever enough. Or brave enough. Until McAllister showed her different.

Joanne guessed he would be unlikely to support her investigation into Alice Ramsay's death, but she was determined to find out more, if only to lessen her own guilt.

That stare, that sentence uttered in a cold voice on a cold day in the Station Square, would not go away.
I thought better of you.
Joanne had been, and still was, the victim of small-town gossip. And she in turn had gossiped with Dougald Forsythe. That she could not forgive herself for.

“The trial of Alice Ramsay,” she began. “Why was she prosecuted?”

This was a question that flummoxed Calum still. The charge was an obscure one; even the procurator fiscal had wrestled with it. Calum hated to think about the miscarriage, deliberate or otherwise. Anything to do with what he called “women's plumbing” he avoided.

“When you asked to meet, I gathered it might be about the trial, so I looked at my original notes.” He pulled out a small spiral-bound reporter's notebook. “There was the husband called for the prosecution. And the wife. There was Dr. Jamieson and Nurse Ogilvie.” He turned a page. “After the woman lost the baby, she didn't go to the hospital. The husband went with her to the doctor. The doctor said nothing could be done. The husband accused Miss Ramsay. The doctor apparently dismissed the notion. So the husband, he went to the police, saying Miss Ramsay gave his wife some medicine to make her vomit and cause an abor—”

“A miscarriage.”

“Aye, that's the word.” Calum was grateful. That was not the word he had been thinking of, and “miscarriage” was much preferable to the other term for losing a baby. “The husband insisted it was deliberate. But Elaine says—she's my fiancée—she says why would Miss Ramsay do that? For months, she'd been helping some of the old folk, giving them home-brewed tea and medicines. No one objected. Nurse Ogilvie said it was all harmless stuff like her granny used to make. And many women, so I'm told, suffer terribly from sickness when they have a baby.”

He remembered his mother gossiping about how Miss Ramsay was always interfering, especially at the old people's home, formerly the workhouse, and how she was only helping because she was after some old person's inheritance. Calum knew, as did most in the district, that this was a Council Home, and people there had nothing. Some didn't even have visitors, Elaine told him, and they were happy to see Miss Ramsay because she listened to their stories about the old days.

“The doctor gave evidence for the prosecution. He was their first witness.” Calum was remembering the morning session and how, in spite of his education and his reputation as a good doctor, he did not go over well in the witness box. “Too sure of himself” was his mother's phrase, and in this case she was right. The defense had torn him to shreds.

“You have the toxicology report on the mother's blood?” the fiscal had asked.

“The patient came to me too late to do tests,” Dr. Jamieson had replied.

“In other words, no.”

“Herbal concoctions can clear the blood quickly, and—”

“This herbal concoction Miss Ramsay gave the unfortunate woman, was that identified?' ”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It was
Rubus idaeus
.”

“Otherwise known as raspberry leaves.”

“Yes. It is suspected that in sufficient quantities, and taken early enough in a pregnancy, they can affect the tissue of the womb, causing—”

“Suspected? I see. And in what quantities are we talking about, a cup full, a pint, a gallon?”

“It's not an exact science, but a large dosage,” Dr. Jamieson, young, red-haired, impulsive, sure of himself, had now been defeated. Then again, he had not agreed with the charges against Miss Ramsay to begin with.

“Next they called Nurse Ogilvie,” Calum told Joanne.

“For the defense?”

“No, the prosecution. But it may as well have been for the defense, for all the good it did the fiscal's case.”

“Miss Ramsay was in the habit of visiting strangers in the old people's home, was she not?” had been the first question.

“I'm not sure if you could say they were strangers. Miss Ramsay comes from a well-known family who, up until the war, were major employers hereabouts, so as a child she knew many of the old people she visited, or their families.”

“But why would she visit them?”

“Simple charity.” Nurse Ogilvie had supplied the answer from her personal standpoint, from her understanding of the Gospels. It had been said with such conviction, such directness, it had taken the procurator fiscal some moments to recover.

“Now, these teas she supplied. Did you know about them?”

“I did.”

“Did you approve?”

“I approved of the chamomile tea to calm the nerves. And the cocoa she made in the nurses' kitchen. And the soups she brought in a flask—chicken soups, vegetable soups. She always made sure they was not too hot, not too cold, and she spoon-fed those who couldn't manage themselves.”