A Kind of Grief (13 page)

“Seven pounds I'm bid on my right. Sir?” the auctioneer asked the dealer. He shook his head. “Seven pounds to the lady.” The hammer fell.

“Eight pounds.” A voice came from the back.

“Too late,” said the auctioneer.

Joanne was pleased. She at least wanted a reminder of that afternoon.

“They're nice, those pictures.” Elaine smiled at her.

“I couldn't bear them being thrown out, seen as only worth the price of the frames.”

“Next lot. Writing box, pens, and inkwell.”

McAllister bid and won.

Joanne said, “No more; we haven't room in the car boot.” She then turned to Calum. “Maybe you could introduce us to Mr. Forsythe. And I'd like to meet Nurse Ogilvie.”

“What would you be wanting to meet her for?” Mrs. Mackenzie asked.

Calum frowned. “This is work, Mum.”

“I'll introduce myself to Mr. Forsythe.” McAllister had come back and immediately wanted to escape again. “And I'll pay for the pictures. Coming, Calum?”

Elaine jumped down from the bench where she had been sitting with Joanne. “Come on, Joanne, let's get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

Naturally, Mrs. Mackenzie had to say what Elaine and Calum and most of the crowd knew but would not say, not to a stranger. “I heard it was on thon beam over there, right above Mr. Duncan the auctioneer's head, that she hanged herself.”

Joanne had had to look up the word “schadenfreude” when she first came across it in a book. Confronting an example here, in real life, made her shiver.

“Come on.” Elaine tucked her arm through Joanne's. “You and me can check the farmhouse kitchen for the nurse. There's tea and biscuits set up over there.”

With everyone deserting her, Mrs. Mackenzie looked lost. Poor soul, Joanne thought.
She's no idea how she comes across.
But as she followed Mrs. Mackenzie's stare and saw the woman's look of malice fixed on the back of Elaine, her future daughter-in-law, making her way through the crowd, Joanne's sympathy vanished.
Oh dear, there's trouble brewing there
.

Joanne and Elaine dashed across the yard to the back door leading into the kitchen. The stove had been lit, and a tea urn and pink fishy-smelling paste sandwiches were there for people to help themselves. It reminded Joanne of an after-funeral spread. And depressed her just as much.

Elaine said, “Thanks. You handled the old witch well.”

Joanne had no doubt to whom she was referring. “Divide and conquer.” She smiled at Elaine, seeing a pleasant young woman.
She has gumption; she'll make Calum a good wife, as long as she can cope with a mother-in-law who will never let her son have his own life
. As she was thinking this, she was scanning the empty hooks where the paintings had hung. And the room itself, empty except for a trestle table where the kitchen table and chairs had been, was just that, a small farmhouse kitchen, practical but with no charm. And no life.

An immense sense of loss overcame her. “Sorry, Elaine, I have to sit. It was a long drive up, especially in this weather.” Joanne took a chair at the table.

“You just need a cup of tea,” Elaine told her.

Again Joanne was reminded of the universal—at least in Scotland—remedy for trouble, a nice cup of tea. She sighed. The only time she had been here in this glen, in this room, it had enchanted her; it had given her an immediate sense of home, of refuge. It had been warm, not just in temperature but in the love put into a collection of bric-a-brac and furniture and rugs and pictures. All the objects, old, new, and found, made the house a home. It was a place where you could dream, find inspiration, she thought.

Now, with no rag rugs, their color breaking up the grey of the stone floor, the boot marks and mud offended Joanne. Alice would never allow that, she was thinking, when she noticed the dog. Standing alone but not lonely, not wet, clean and brushed and obviously well cared for, the Skye terrier was observing the many visitors, not at all what he was accustomed to in the home of Miss Alice Ramsay.

“Hello,” she called to him. “Come here, boy.”

He did. He stood looking up at her. She saw the collar, blue for a boy. She tickled him behind the ears.

“So you've met Rover,” a voice behind her said.

Joanne turned and looked into lovely warm brown eyes and a lovely smile in a pale face.

“I call him Rover because he is always wandering.”

“I thought he was Miss Ramsay's dog.”

“Oh, no, he lives with me. But she did take him in one time. Not that I had ever been up here before now, so goodness only knows how he found his way.” The woman took the seat beside her. “I'm Janet Ogilvie, but everyone calls me Nurse.”

“Joanne Ross. Sorry, McAllister. Och.” She was shaking her head at still not being certain of her own name. “Just call me Joanne.”

Nurse Ogilvie smiled back. “Yes, Mrs. Mackenzie filled me in on the confusion over your name.”

“I bet she did.” Elaine was there with tea and a plate of scones for herself and Joanne. “Can I get you tea, Nurse Ogilvie?”

“Thank you, dear, that would be lovely. Nice girl, that,” she said as Elaine left. “Now, you wanted to talk to me?”

“I did, but . . .”

“But not now,” Nurse Ogilvie finished for her, looking towards the doorway.

Mrs. Mackenzie had just bustled in like a hen in search of a lost chick. “Have you seen Calum?” she asked.

“He's in the storage place out the back,” Elaine told her.

“He's—” Nurse Ogilvie looked up at Elaine. “Thank you for the tea, dear.”

“I know, I know, he's in the other room,” Elaine whispered. “I couldn't help myself.”

“Listen, we're supposed to be off to a golf match this afternoon, so how about we all get a sandwich at the hotel?” Joanne asked Elaine. “Then we can talk.”

“Better still, Calum can sign us in at the golf clubhouse. His mother won't follow us there. She thinks she's so important that she shouldn't have to pay the annual fees.”

“I'll round up my husband, then. And Hector the photographer. If we squash up, we can go in our car.”

Arrangement agreed, Joanne turned back to Nurse Ogilvie. “Do you mind if I ask you a bit about Miss Ramsay?”

“Not at all.”

“She visited the residents in the hospital?”

“Aye, but we're not strictly a hospital, we're an old people's home. Alice would visit the residents, mainly the ones who have nobody or are a bit doolally. She would sit with them in the common room, listen to their stories, sometimes sketching them—though I don't know why, because there are none o' them any oil painting.”

“And Miss Ramsay made them herbal tea?”

“Miss Ramsay would make them ordinary tea, herbal tea, cocoa, sometimes Horlicks. She baked Victoria sponge cakes for the residents—seeds and fruitcakes are no good with their false teeth.”

“So is that how the rumors started? Of her poisoning people?”

“Oh, no! Whoever gave you that idea? No, the poor lassie, or at least her man, they made the accusations. To be fair, she'd lost a baby, her third miscarriage—although no one knew that at the time—and she was right depressed. But the husband, he's . . . well, a bit o' a bully, so I heard.” She'd heard more than that but, unlike some, wouldn't repeat it.

Joanne could see Nurse Ogilvie was flustered and was trembling when she put down her teacup. Whether it was from passion or anger or perhaps grief, Joanne couldn't yet distinguish, and she was loath to ask the next question but went ahead. “And Mrs. Mackenzie, didn't she say Miss Ramsay had poisoned the woman?”

“Mrs. Mackenzie—you mustn't pay any heed to her havering. A woman in her situation, I'm surprised she . . . people in glass houses and all that.” The way the nurse spoke almost made Joanne laugh. Nurse Ogilvie would have been more charitable to the cannibal Lizzie Borden. “Who told you about Mrs. Mackenzie saying that?”

“I can't remember where I heard it.” Joanne was fibbing; she had heard it from Mrs. Galloway, the landlady at the hotel, who'd been furious at the gossipmongering from Mrs. Mackenzie and her clique.

Elaine came back. “Sorry I took so long. More tea, Joanne? Nurse Ogilvie?”

“Is that the time?” Nurse Ogilvie was consulting the upside-down brooch-watch she habitually wore even when not in uniform. “Thank you, Mrs. Ross, you've reminded me I need to be back for the residents' afternoon tea. We're short-staffed with Elaine on her day off and Miss Ramsay now gone.” At the door she paused, looking around the kitchen, perhaps sensing, as Joanne had, that the house was only walls and a roof without the presence of Alice Ramsay.

More people cared than you will ever realize, Alice, Joanne thought.

“Ready?” McAllister appeared.

“I'm coming with you to show you the way,” Elaine said.

“Good,” McAllister replied. He was also thinking she could protect him from Hector.

Joanne asked her husband when they reached the car, “Do you have the paintings?”

“In the boot. Mind you, one of the antique dealers was keen to buy them off me. Offered me double what we'd paid.”

“You didn't?”

“Too scared of my wife to sell, I told him.”

Joanne poked him in the ribs. “Quite right.”

They drove to the golf clubhouse, where Calum Mackenzie—miraculously without his mother—was waiting in the foyer to sign them in.

McAllister went with Calum to the bar to order. At the opposite end of the long curved counter, he spotted Dougald Forsythe. The editor knew it was not advisable for him to go anywhere near the man and had to turn away before he did something he knew he should regret but wouldn't—like punch the man's lights out.

Apart from being trounced by the art critic at the auction, the pain the newspaper article had caused Alice and Joanne were still sore subjects in the McAllister household. That revealing the life and locality of Miss Ramsay might have contributed to her death McAllister was uncertain, though his wife was not. But he had no doubts about Forsythe's unprofessional, self-serving attitude.

“Keep me away from that man,” he muttered to himself.

Calum overheard. “Aye, I will.”
Who signed him in?
Calum was thinking.

Ten minutes or so later, Calum watched an obviously inebriated Forsythe weave his way through the tables.

“Sorry, really sorry,” he said when he bumped a table, rattling the drinks.

McAllister had his back to the room and was contemplating the vista of a sea more white than grey, gorse bushes bent landwards by ceaseless weather, and huddled competitors waiting their turn to tee off only to have the balls return in their direction in the fierce wind.

Calum contemplated waylaying the art critic, but as the man was six feet tall and drunk, he hesitated.

Too late. Forsythe was standing there, swaying slightly from his heels to the balls of his feet. Calum longed to check if the southerner was wearing the infamous patent-leather shoes, but he daren't duck beneath the table.

“Mrs. Ross, isn't it? Joanne—you don't mind if I call you Joanne?” He didn't wait for an answer. “Mad at me for outbidding your husband for the drawing?” He had turned the straight-backed chair around and sat. Joanne thought the pose ridiculous. In other circumstances, she would have laughed, but she was aware of her husband's anger and afraid of a scene in a crowded room in a distant county in an incident that might attract the police. And be reported in the local newspaper.

“Who invited you?” McAllister snapped.

“Wheesht.” Joanne put a hand on McAllister's sleeve. “Mr. Forsythe, I wanted that drawing as a reminder of a lovely lady and a true artist,” she said. “You betrayed her. You don't deserve to have her work.” She straightened her neck and glared at him, waiting for him to deny the accusation.

“I never meant to harm her.”

“But you did. As my husband indicated, you are not welcome.”

“All I wanted was a reminder of a talented but sadly unacknowledged Scottish female artist,” he countered.

Joanne waved her hand, swatting him away as though he were a fly on a sandwich. “We bought some of her other works, so no problem.” She was angry, yes. And upset. But seeing him now, she thought him ridiculous. His sitting on a reversed chair, his ruby-red cravat, his overlong hair, brought to mind one of McAllister's words, said in a strong Glasgow accent: “poser.”

Caricature of an artist
was Joanne's kinder assessment.

Different
, Elaine was thinking.

He's a right character.
Dougald Forsythe dumbfounded Calum.

Now is not the time or place to give him a good hiding
, McAllister was telling himself. But his hands were shaking in the effort to keep them under the table.