A Kind of Grief (28 page)

“Not for the aristocracy or royalty, it's not. They own more than eighty percent of our country.” McAllister knew he meant Scotland, not Great Britain. “As for the traitors in their ranks turning up here, stranger things have happened an' a' that.”

“So?”

“So let's wait an' see.”

Don's pronouncement made sense to McAllister. Since arriving in the north from the city of his birth, Glasgow, he'd learned the Highland ways. He didn't always follow them, but he appreciated the lesson of sit back, do nothing, and wait for what unfolds.

Next morning, McAllister waited for the girls to leave for school and a second pot of coffee to brew before he told Joanne. He skimmed over the details of the interview, although “interrogation” would be a truer description of the meeting. There had been no overt threats. He understood the directive:
This is none of your business; if you try to publish anything, we will issue a D notice—a legally binding edict that stated “publish and you will be prosecuted”—perhaps in secret.

When he'd finished, he saw that
we have to do something
gleam in her eyes. He said, “Joanne, we cannot continue to be involved in this. Making ourselves of interest to whoever—”

“Whoever killed Alice.”

“If I thought for one second—”

“It's fine. I don't believe government people would leave us exposed to danger.”

He didn't contradict her. He didn't express his opinion that that was exactly what they might do. In his darker thoughts, he had considered that perhaps he—they—were being used to draw out traitors. Why else allow a journalist the freedom to keep asking questions? Why else share highly confidential information?

But protecting Joanne was all he cared about. “I don't want strangers in our home, so I've asked for the paintings to be taken to the town art gallery and examined there. They've agreed.”

That the discussion had become heated and that he'd asked DI Dunne to back him up, he didn't share. He also omitted to mention that at Don's suggestion, he'd typed up a statement of the events, leaving it with Angus MacLean, their solicitor, and made sure Stuart was aware of those actions.

Joanne looked once more at the paintings she had grown to regard as theirs forever. “We don't have a choice, do we?”

“Not really. They'll be collected later this morning, so I'll stay home until then.”

He was firm, decision made. She didn't object. He was her husband. He had the right to decide what happened in their household. “Alice's manuscript, can I keep that?”

“Nothing was mentioned about the manuscript or her books.” He grinned at her. His eyes, deep dark blue, crinkled with mischief, and she saw the little boy, the one his mother said was impossible to say no to, and she grinned back.

“What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over?”

“Something like that.” He was certain the manuscript was nothing more than what it appeared to be. And he enjoyed how much pleasure it gave his wife.

“Right, we'd better get started.” But she didn't move. She was gazing around the room, taking in each painting, every splash of color. She tried to imprint the images in her imagination, in case—in case of what, she didn't want to think about. Every thought of Alice Ramsay was tinged with regret, shadowed by the what ifs. “I uncovered a newspaper article wrapped around a cabbage. I followed it up because I was appalled that a woman could be openly called a witch in this day and age.”

McAllister was listening without comment, watching Joanne as she stared at nothing in particular, recounting what had led them to an encounter with an unknown government organization.

“I met Alice Ramsay. I liked her. I think she liked me. Then I betrayed her trust—or at least, I allowed myself to be duped into betraying her—and her name was splattered across a national newspaper. She died. We bought her pictures. And now you say the secret service thinks that classified information could be hidden within these pictures?” She was shaking her head slowly, slightly. “It's hard to believe.”

“I was thinking the same.”

Joanne didn't want this happening. That she was hiding two potentially valuable drawings, so mesmerized by them, so covetous of them, that she was possibly committing a crime—that was something she was not ready to admit, even to her husband. “Right. Let's get started. You lift the paintings off the wall. I'll stack the others in the hall. I'm not having strangers tramping through my house.”

“Your house?”

“Our house.”

“Does that mean you don't want the other house?”

“Yes. No. I don't know.”

“When the pictures are returned, this affair will be over. We can return to normal.”

“Never thought I'd hear my husband say that.” She grinned. She knew what he meant yet gave no indication she agreed.

“I'm serious. No investigating, no poking around, no asking questions.”

The flash of defiance in her eyes did not escape him.

“Joanne, I'm not ordering you to drop it. I would never do that. But after all you went through the last time you investigated a crime . . .” He stubbed out his cigarette, not wanting to look at her. “I can't bear the thought of anything happening to you again.”

“Me neither.”

The doorbell rang.

“If it's that brush salesman, tell him no thanks.”

The bell rang again. It was two men with a van to fetch the pictures.

Joanne called out, “Tell them to take their boots off.” Perhaps she needed that carpet sweeper after all.

That night, in bed alone, McAllister downstairs with a book and his music, Joanne tried to sleep. Couldn't. The images of the drawings came to her. A desire to creep down and open the box, open the folder, stare at them, perhaps touch them, was overwhelming her. That and a guilty conscience.

The key was in the small snuffbox on the mantelpiece. She'd told Hector she didn't have the head for heights anymore, and climbing up every time to fetch a key from on top of the picture frame was silly. Hector offered to take the drawing to his studio-cum-washhouse at his granny's place.

“They stay with me,” she'd snapped.

She remembered him staring at her, then shrugging, saying, “I know. Gets to you, a really fine work of art does.”

Possessiveness was new to her; acquisitiveness had never been her nature.

Wrapped in McAllister's dressing gown—she loved the smell of him that clung to the wool—she went downstairs. The sitting-room door was shut; he didn't want the music to disturb her. She went in, saw the top of his head above the armchair, and she melted. I love this man, she thought, and now I have to disappoint him.

“Can't sleep?” he asked when she took the chair opposite his. “I'll make some cocoa.”

“No. Sorry. I know I should have told you before.”

She explained about the drawings.

“I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner,” she finished.

“Maybe just as well. I would have had to inform
that man
.” He looked at her sitting, waiting, like a small girl in front of the headmistress or her father, awaiting punishment. “I'd love to see them,” he said, and smiled.

She smiled back. What flashed between them were the small steps, the vital, crucial, accumulative steps in a new marriage, a friendship, a relationship that held people, families, together. She watched him as he examined the pages, the small sketches that might, just might, she told herself, have been created centuries ago.

“Interesting.” He sat back, the closed folder on his lap. “I'd like to check the legal position first. We bought them fair and square—not that that is a defense in a court of law. How Miss Ramsay acquired them is another matter. If she obtained them illegally, we might be guilty of receiving stolen goods.”

“So shouldn't we tell the official from London about them?”

“The way it was put to me was that they wanted to examine the paintings we bought as a job lot.” He smiled. “It could be said I'm being obtuse, but I'll risk it.”

She sighed. “It might be better if we handed them over.” She meant safer.

“We will. But not yet.”

From his smile, from the way he was nodding his head slightly, she guessed he was plotting something. And she knew not to ask. Her husband's phrase “not yet” delivered when her eldest, Annie, would ask, “When are we going . . . ? When are we getting . . . ? When . . . ?” drove the girl crazy. Joanne now knew how she felt.

She stood and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Night night.”

He covered it with his. “I'll close up the house.”

“I'll wait.”

A
lice looks up from her handwriting exercises. The cloud cover is lifting, the light softening to pearlescent greys. She puts down her pen, chooses another nib.

What would my teacher, Mr. Smith—formerly Mr. Schmitt—say now?

The training had lasted only two weeks, but in that time she'd learned the basic principles of the psychology of handwriting.

She remembers how he had surprised her when, after asking her for a brief handwritten curriculum vitae, he'd guessed that although she was a native English speaker, she was not entirely English. Irish perhaps? Or Scottish? With a French education?

Swiss boarding school, she'd told him.

He even guessed I was estranged from a parent, or parents.

Mummy was too busy to look after me I told him. Daddy was a career soldier and died in the war. “My father also,” Mr. Smith had said. From the number tattooed on his wrist, she suspected more than one parent had perished.

Mr. Schmitt was the one who started me on a new passion, the study of graphology. His ability to discern, through handwriting, the sex, age, physical type, native or nonnative speaker, even a person's weight, was astonishing.

After a further two weeks of training, I began to grasp the tricks of replicating a person's handwriting.

We practiced with private correspondence obtained from who-knew-where. “Intimate letters are best,” he said. “See here, in the first paragraph, the letters are upright, evenly spaced, the handwriting clearly stating the writer's intention. Then in the middle section, the writing is looser.”

See this—he was using a letter with sections blacked out by the censors.“See how in the first paragraph the man is in control. The second, he is in a hurry to describe his situation. In the third, he slows down, the writing is sprawling, lingering, intense with longing for the person, the place, from which he is parted.”

“Perhaps written by a man who isn't certain he will return,” I commented.

“Just so,” my teacher said.

At the end of the training, I was deemed competent enough to work unsupervised. Star operative, Mr. Smith called me. I never heard from or of him again.