A Kind of Grief (39 page)

“I didn't think.”

“I don't want to fall out with you. So next time, share.”

“I'm really sorry.” He bit back a comment about her not sharing the drawings.

“Serves me right for marrying a confirmed bachelor.” Joanne poked him in the arm and opened the car door before he could say more.

She walked quickly up the front path, past the rockery now denuded of all but heather. She walked around the side to the back garden. The house felt empty, but a notice on the door of the concrete washhouse said “RING BELL” with (if you must) written in red pen underneath. She rang the bell. McAllister came up behind, and she squeezed his hand.

He put an arm around her shoulders.

“What do you want?” Hec shouted.

“Your money or your life!” she shouted back.

“Have you brought more pages?” Hec opened the door a fraction.

“Hello, Hec. Yes, I'm very well, thank you for asking.”

“Wipe your feet,” Hec told McAllister.

McAllister looked down. Seeing Hec in slippers, he did as he was told.

Door shut and locked, his granny's blackout curtains left over from the war pulled to, Hector was working in the dim. Pools of brightness from overhead retractable lamps shone down over a table bench, and what looked like a microscope, cobbled together from a spare lens, was sitting in the middle. Under the lens was an enlarged print of a list of numbers.

Hec said, “Let's try another page.”

Joanne handed him a page of practice handwriting.

“More numbers.” With the small Leica, he took two shots. “That's enough. Next?”

Joanne and McAllister, mostly silent except for the odd “hmm” or “I see” or “interesting,” watched as Hec did his magic with eight sheets, all of which had some form of numbers in lists, groups, or paragraphs.

When he'd finished, Hec asked, “That's the lot?”

McAllister answered, “Yes.”

Joanne added, “Maybe.” Answering the unsaid question, she continued, “If I wanted to really hide invisible writing, I'd put it in the middle of a picture—you know, in the gaps of color.” She was imagining one of Alice's illustrations. “There's space between the lines of her writing and between paragraphs and drawings. I thought it was all artistic, done that way.”

“For the composition.” Hec felt his knees shoogle with excitement. “Brilliant, Joanne, brilliant. Maybe you could go home and fetch them?” He was less asking, more commanding his boss to run the errand. McAllister surprised himself by agreeing.

An hour and eleven minutes later, they found what Joanne decided was “the treasure.” “That the writing is in Russian is fascinating. But what's really interesting is how carefully it's hidden, the writing interwoven into drawing of the curlews and their nests. See how these tiny letters are placed between the twigs and feathers of the nest?”

“We could ask Peter Kowalski to translate,” McAllister suggested.

“And put him and Chiara and the baby in danger?” Joanne was shaking her head. “No, please don't.”

Peter, married to Joanne's best friend, was Polish, and he spoke and read Russian fluently. McAllister had once joked about him speaking five languages, and Peter had contradicted him, saying he spoke seven but only read and wrote five.

“Hector, when will the prints be ready?” McAllister asked.

“As soon as you get out ma road, I'll start. Say late this afternoon?”

“No. Tonight. Come to our place after supper,” McAllister did not tell him that in sharing, he would be breaking the Official Secrets Act.

The gathering was like old times, except Elaine joined them. She'd called to say she and Calum were going out but couldn't agree on a film. “What's that one you saw last week?” she'd asked Joanne.

“Don't. I thought I liked Doris Day, but she was so perfect it was nauseating.”

“I wanted to see the Hitchcock, but Calum gets nightmares after scary films.”

“Come round here,” Joanne had said. “Is nine o'clock fine for you?”

“For me, yes. For Calum, no. His landlady locks up at nine on the dot. And no passkey.” She'd giggled. “Worse than being at home—almost.”

The others had walked in without ringing the doorbell, so when it did ring, McAllister answered. It was Elaine. She'd put lipstick on and her hair up, needing to be herself after days and weeks and years of being Nurse Fraser—except with the old people where she was always Nurse Elaine—and McAllister almost didn't recognize her, as she'd gained a decade of sophistication.

Seeing the others, Elaine said, “Hope I'm not intruding.” She grinned at Hec and Rob, who were sitting together on the sofa. “Budge up, lovebirds.”

They moved without comment, Rob happy to have her so close, even if she was Calum's fiancée.

“So, what do we think?” Don asked again.

“We're trying to make sense o' these numbers,” Hec explained, handing Elaine copies of the photographs.

“Right, Miss Ramsay's drawings. I'd recognize them anywhere.” She was staring at the lines interspersed between Alice's handwritten notes on the curlew, its nesting habits and territory. “This is some kind of number system.”

“One column is passport numbers,” McAllister said.

“Right.” Elaine was holding the print of the drawing at arm's length, as though she needed reading glasses. “In this list here”—she was looking at another photograph of a page with a long sequence of numbers—“the numbers of the passport identify the person, so the next set is the date of birth, and then date of death. The rest of the set is possibly a number-letter code.” She looked up at Joanne. “I don't have a passport, but it's my dream one day to go abroad and— What? What have I said?”

“No, no, lass, you're doing grand.” Don did his kind old granddad grin.

Elaine smiled back.

“What about these?” Joanne passed another photograph to the nurse.

“Same first code, then . . .” She stared.

“I get it.” Rob was sharing the page with her and followed her finger as it rested on part of the set of numbers. “It's dates of birth of bairns. Babies.” He added the obvious. “It's rare that a baby would have a passport.”

“Explain again, lass,” Don asked.

Only then did Elaine realize that almost everyone from the
Gazette
was there, barring Lorna, as neither Don nor McAllister was ready for an eighteen-year-old to join the crew, and they were all staring at her.

“Right, photo four,” Elaine began. “See the dates of birth. Now, look at the list of passport numbers. They start with the three identifying numbers, then the date of birth, then a six-number code.”

“No death dates,” McAllister muttered, knowing that obviously that would not be checked when applying for a passport.

“How did you work it out?” Frankie Urquhart asked Elaine. He'd come to the meeting because he was curious, not because he had much to contribute to the proceedings.

She explained, “I'm trained in patient identification numbers, dates of birth, operation procedure numbers, medication codes, all the paperwork that goes with a hospital admission.” She left out that the date of death was a number she'd had to enter more and more regularly in the Old People's Home, especially as winter set in. “What's this all about?” Elaine addressed her question to Joanne.

“Not sure” was the answer.

“Long story,” McAllister added.

“Well, you can't show me these,” Elaine lifted the two photos up, “then leave me hanging.”

“It can't leave this room. And above all, don't tell Calum,” the editor warned.

“Because Mrs. Mackenzie can read her son's mind.” Elaine smiled. They all smiled back.

It took half an hour to tell her and another half to discuss the possibilities thrown up by Elaine's insight. When the clock struck ten thirty, she said, “I have to go, I've a curfew.”

“I'll drive you back,” McAllister offered.

“Sorry I can't give you a lift,” Rob added. “The bane o' my life is with me.”

Hector chortled at the old joke.

Frankie said, “I'll take you. I need to get back anyhow, make sure my wee sister is no reading in bed till midnight.”

They said good night, and Joanne saw them to the door.

“Night, Frankie. Night, Elaine. Come and visit on your next day off.”

“I'd like that.” Elaine was hovering on the doorstep.

Joanne fancied she could see Elaine's brain working, trying to decide whether to ask.

“Do you think there's any connection between Miss Ramsay's death and Mrs. Mackenzie's accident?”

“I don't know.” Joanne had thought about it often and could see how there might be a link. A car, in the dark and the rain, had hit her. Had Mrs. Mackenzie seen something? Was the intention to kill her? Was it a sheer accident? Or had she invented a story that ended up putting her in danger? Joanne had no answers. Nor did the local police. “We may never know.”

“She has enough enemies,” Elaine said, “but enemies who would want to kill her? I can't see it.”

When it was only the three of them, and after Joanne had yawned once too many times and gone to bed, McAllister poured a nightcap for himself and his deputy.

“A grand bunch,” Don said, toasting their young friends and colleagues.

“They are that.” McAllister raised his glass. An Islay malt this time, the clear oily burnt peat and seaweed flavored liquid rolled over his tongue. He remembered his one trip to the island, when the mist was so dense, the rain so heavy, there was nothing to do but hole up in the hotel and sample the bottles of malt, starting at the top left, working down to the bottom right of three shelves, ending up with a horrific bar bill.

“So,” Don asked, after he'd had his private moment of reminiscence, involving his late wife, a wondrous few days in Skye, and an Islay malt, “what do we think?”

“I think this is what whoever they are has been looking for.”

“Aye, but who are they? And what would Miss Alice Ramsay be wanting with those numbers?”

McAllister appreciated Don's Highland way of putting words together and smiled. “Insurance?”

“Blackmail?”

“Maybe she was continuing her trade up the glen and—”

He said, “ ‘Maybe,' and, ‘If,' and, ‘But,' and ‘Perhaps'—I'm hearing too many doubts to be comfortable.”

“We do know Miss Ramsay was known to some or all of the traitors who escaped to Moscow.”

“Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean.” Don and every other journalist in the Kingdom knew the names by heart.

“There were, are, rumors that not all the traitors were revealed.”

“And Alice Ramsay's information might lead to them?”

“Or her.”

“Her? She might be the traitor? That's too deep for us.” Don was deeply suspicious of government agencies, official or otherwise. As a newspaperman, he always assumed there were stories beneath the stories. He believed he was honor bound to expose those who tried to keep everything and anything from the public. He loathed how those self-same self-serving officials believed they knew best.

“Aye, and they still believe in the divine right of the aristocracy to rule over us peasants,” he'd told McAllister—more than once.

“Those birth certificates used to create a new identity, the chances of them being discovered are as remote as the parishes they come from.” Don was metaphorically tipping his hat to Miss Ramsay.

“The method used to hide the information, hiding it in plain sight, that's clever.”

“Aye, yet so simple thon clever chappies from Intelligence couldney see it.”

“Because we have the manuscript.”

“You will have to inform them.”

McAllister agreed with Don. He went to bed unhappy that they would have to share the manuscript. Although fearful of Joanne's reaction to the news, he was pleased at the thought of showing Stuart what the professionals had missed and what a group of Highland amateurs had found.

Until twenty past three in the morning.

What woke him he didn't know—wind in the trees, an owl shriek, too many cigarettes. He went quietly downstairs, checked that the manuscript was locked tight in the box, then went to make tea.

Handing the manuscript over to a man who had yet to return one of Joanne's favorite paintings would be more than hard for her. It was her link to a woman she'd admired from afar. It was a project in which she was learning how an author organized a manuscript. It gave her an understanding of how competent she was. And it gave her pleasure.

So how do I tell them what we've discovered and make sure Joanne keeps the manuscript?

He still had no answers.