A Kind of Grief (33 page)

She smelled the room. Taking slow shallow breaths, breathing through her skin, her scalp, breathing between her eyes, she was certain: someone, something, had been here.

She went to the writing box. Still locked. She took the key and opened it. The perhaps Leonardo drawings were with Hector, as he wanted to photograph them and examine them with a strong magnifying glass. As for the manuscript, she couldn't be certain, but the folders seemed in order, and nothing seemed to have been removed.

She ached to call out to McAllister but didn't want to seem foolish.

“Night, Mum.”

Joanne jumped.

“What's wrong?” Annie asked.

“Tired, that's all.”

“It's been a long day.” The girl turned away, not wanting her mother to sense her own fear. The long illness after Joanne's injury had terrified the child, terrified her into believing her mother would never again be the same. “She's not herself” was the phrase she'd used. It had taken her stepfather a while to see that Annie was right. It had taken time for Annie to understand that nothing was the same for any of them after the ordeal. Not her mother, not McAllister, not herself, although she would deny that if asked. Even her sister had become more clinging.

In a flash of insight beyond her years, Annie thought, Maybe that's what happened to Mrs. Mackenzie, something terrible, and she's never recovered.

She went to bed, where she would write up the day in her diary, resolving to remember her insight when she was an author, writing about people.

Joanne went up to their bedroom. About to put on her slippers, she stopped and began looking, sniffing, checking in drawers, smoothing out the bed linen. Here too, she thought. Someone has been in here.

She reached for the musical jewelry box on the dressing table, a present from the girls last Christmas. The box played “Greensleeves” when opened. It was switched off, and the box unlocked. Did I switch it off? Did I unlock it? She hated that she couldn't remember.

Her few items of jewelry were all there, including her previous wedding ring, which she couldn't bring herself to throw out or sell. The small gold thistle brooch with the purple amethyst—a present from Mrs. McAllister on their wedding day—a thin gold chain, her pearls inherited from her grandmother, they were all there.

Nothing was out of place. Nothing missing. Yet her certain dread crawled up her arms, pressing against her throat, pressing into the base of her skull, making her feel nauseated.

When she came downstairs, McAllister had a dram in his hand and was considering whether to light the fire. Even though only a few minutes past ten, early for him but an hour when most in the town were asleep, he was tired and wishing he'd set the bedroom fire as well as the one in the sitting room.

He was a bad actor. He listened to her suspicions, doing his best to disguise his skepticism. He didn't ask, How do you know? Why do you think that? He had the sense to not say, You're tired, perhaps you are imagining it.

Joanne accepted it was challenging for him, for anyone except their friend Jenny McPhee the traveler, to believe in intuition, believe the unbelievable. She held up her hands, palms outwards, to ward off his incredulity. “If you believe in me, trust me. I know someone was in our home when we were away. I know you doubt the sixth sense, but I am certain someone has been in the house.”

To placate her, he began a conversation as to the who, the why, the when.

The when was easy. “Today,” Joanne said. “This evening.” The why she was equally certain of. “It's to do with Alice Ramsay.” What part in the mystery of Alice she could not say.

And McAllister didn't want to speculate. Nor did he want to articulate his theories regarding the who, for that would require at least two more whiskies, and the room was cold, and he needed his bed.

Joanne's answer surprised him. “I think someone is after the drawings.”

“Not the manuscript?”

“I immediately thought of Forsythe. He doesn't strike me as the burglar type, though. Maybe it's . . .” She shook her head. A strand of hair fell over her left eye. She blew it away. “I don't have a sense of danger. But I thought that the last time.”

“He might have hired someone. Leonardo drawings are a major find to an art expert like him.”

She stood. Yawned. Then hastily covered her mouth. “Excuse me.”

He smiled. He loved everything about her, even her yawns. “Do you want cocoa?”

“No, thanks, I'm too tired.” The explanation that it might be Forsythe had calmed her, and she knew she would now sleep. Such an idiot, that man, she told herself as she climbed the stairs to bed, but harmless.

McAllister bent over to switch off the table lamp. There was a spent match in the unlit fire. Why he picked it up he couldn't say. It was just a spent match, he was later to say to DI Dunne. He threw it back into the fire, then switched off the lights.

At the foot of the stairs, he froze. Went back to the sitting room. Switched on the overhead lights. Picked up the match. Looking at it, he understood that Joanne hadn't been imagining things.

“It's too short,” he murmured. “It's from a pocket box of matches.” He looked for their box of household-sized matches. It was underneath old copies of the
Gazette
in the wooden box along with a bundle of kindling.

He put the spent match on the mantelpiece. He took a deep breath. Now he sensed it, a disturbance of the air, in the fabric of the room.

He had a flash of him telling Dunne, No, nothing is missing, no signs of a break-in. But Joanne can sense these things. And I have a spent match that's the wrong size.

As evidence of a nonburglary, he knew it was flimsy. Yet he now believed someone had been in their home. Someone professional. But not quite professional enough.

“We will talk soon, Mr. Stuart, or whoever you are,” he vowed.

And went to bed.

O
f course I said no. I told him I couldn't supply him with the documentation. He wanted the passports so desperately I knew it was wrong.

He reminded me of our family ties, talking about “people like us” and all that nonsense. I told him that meant nothing to me.

Then he'd explained just how deeply I was involved.

“Remember when I asked you about P's cover identity?” he'd asked. “Well, thanks to you, he was traced, and he's now dead. Remember that document I asked you to forge, the one in Arabic? A network was uncovered, and all the operatives disappeared. As for D, he wouldn't be sitting in his apartment in Moscow if it weren't for the documents you supplied.”

He'd said all this in a matter-of-fact voice, as if he were discussing the prospect of rain for the Wimbledon Fortnight. But his eyes, they'd betrayed him. His eyes, brown, soft, pleading. I knew that look. Soft and endearing if you didn't know him. And the softer and more charming his behavior, the more dangerous he was.

That shattered me. In hindsight, I suspect he may have been bluffing. So many identity documents and passports were available, and by that time, I was involved in less mundane work.

I asked why he couldn't use the identities already provided—all three sets of documents. “We suspect a leak,” he'd told me, “and being able to move without detection from our own people, this is my way of finding the traitor.”

I did ask if he was one of the traitors. He'd laughed.

I still can't believe I believed him.

“No Calum, then,” Don remarked before they began the Monday Morning Meeting.

“Seeing how half the calls are from his mother, he should look after the switchboard,” Lorna said. “If he turns up, that is.”

McAllister was inclined to agree but didn't say so. “Right, what have we got for this week?” he began.

“Lots of pre-Christmas and New Year advertising,” Frankie told them.

“Just what I don't need.” Don groaned.

“I've done a piece on the rape of our architectural heritage, “ Lorna began, “and I've some interesting stuff on who exactly will benefit from the building contracts—amongst the names is a well-known former councilor.”

“Like it,” Don told her, “but the ‘rape' word is not in our vocabulary.”

“It's almost 1960. Whyever not?” she protested.

“Because I say so,” the deputy editor replied.

McAllister smiled. She'll do well, this young lass, he thought. And the battle of wills and wits between her and Don was sure to be entertaining.

He could see from their grins that Frankie and Rob agreed.

Hector was too busy with his negatives to notice anything.

Frankie had asked the woman who was a part-time bookkeeper for the
Gazette
to work full-time. So Mrs. Brown had taken over the switchboard and the classified advertising. A quiet, nondescript middle-aged woman, she was a widow in need of the income. Frankie assured them she was efficient, but that was not what worried McAllister; he feared that when she was not in her place behind the reception desk, he might not recognize her.

Don agreed. “She'll no frighten the public,” he told McAllister.

“What about Lorna?” the editor asked. “Are you not concerned she'll terrify the public?”

“She'll do that, all right,” his deputy replied. “But bairns and grannies take to her.”

Calum telephoned at noon.

“You should've called first thing,” Don said.

“Sorry. I'm really sorry. Can I speak to Mr. McAllister?”

“McAllister?” Don looked across the table at the editor, who was thumping out an article on a proposal to phase out National Health orange juice.

“No, he's busy. You'll have to make do with me.”

Calum was not offended; Mr. McAllister was a lofty being in his eyes. “Miss Ramsay's farmhouse was broken into. Even the floorboards were ripped up, and someone did something to the chimney; there's soot everywhere.”

“You went to the place?”

“Aye, this morning. I heard about it from a pal in the police and went out with him.”

“Local news from two counties away is not much use to us. Write it up anyhow, but I doubt we can use it.”

“My old editor offered me my job back.” That Mrs. Mackenzie had threatened the editor, over a matter some eight years ago involving a junior typist and a weekend in Ullapool, Calum would never know. The editor decided he was more afraid of Mrs. Mackenzie and what she could tell his wife than he was of some mysterious man who seemed to have vanished southwards down the A9.

“And?”

“Elaine, my fiancée, starts her training today at Raigmore. But my mother needs me.”

“Well, it's straightforward: your mother or your fiancée. Your choice. But let me know your decision this week.” Don hung up. “You got all that?”

McAllister answered, “I got the gist of it.”

“I'm thinking that lad is more trouble than he's worth
.
”

The editor did not disagree.

“He phoned to say there's been a break-in at the late Miss Ramsay's house.”

McAllister told him of Joanne's certainty that they too had had an intruder. He explained why he agreed.

“A spent match, not very much,” Don said. “But since your missus says someone's been there, well . . .”

McAllister could tell his deputy believed Joanne. And him—maybe. An old Highlander, Don McLeod knew there was more abroad than what could be seen or touched.

“Alive and dead, your Miss Alice Ramsay is at the heart of some great secret.” Don knew that Joanne would not give up until she knew, or was thoroughly convinced she would never know, the mystery of the artist's death. Therefore, her husband wouldn't either. So he might as well become involved too. “Time to ask this man from London if he's responsible for these visitors.”