A Kind of Grief (30 page)

“I'm more interested in how many believe in the two-headed sheep,” Don said to Frankie. Any reply was lost as Lorna came in, and, stating the obvious, she placed the envelope in front of the editor. “A telegram,” she said. She didn't linger to find out what was in it. Another point in her favor, Don decided.

The telegram was addressed to McAllister. He was concerned but not overly, as he'd spoken to his mother two days ago and all was well. After two wars where the news, always bad, came by telegram, receiving one was always unsettling.

He read it silently. The others in the reporters' room tried to pretend they were not curious. “Calum.” McAllister looked up, and trying not to laugh said, “Your mother wants to know why you don't return her phone calls.”

Rob and Frankie caught each other's eye and had to look away.

“I do, I always do.” Calum switched from a happy man, delighted with his new job and new colleagues, to a short-trousered wee boy.

Don lifted the telegram, read it, and sighed. He needed a junior reporter, not a junior schoolboy. “I think I know about this.” Taking the telegram with him, he went downstairs.

“Lorna.”

“Aye?”

He handed the telegram over.

“Oh,” she said. “Right.” From under the desk, she produced a stack of messages and handed them to the deputy editor. Each one had a date and a time and a similar message. “Mrs. Mackenzie called.” “Calum's mother called.” “Calum's mother.” “C's mother.”

Don sighed again; he was doing a lot of sighing over Calum Mackenzie.

“I give him at least three a day; that's enough.” Lorna was looking at Don through black-rimmed eyes, through a thick fringe of hair that reminded him of a Highland cow—only no Highland cow had eyes as blue as Lorna's. “I haven't the time to keep answering the woman and keep this office running properly. We're a newspaper, no the loony bin.”

“Lorna.”

“Sorry.” Her pale-pink-lipstick mouth set straight, she was trying not to grin.

He expected rebelliousness from her, as that seemed to be Lorna's default setting—weird makeup, weird clothes, and a taste for American poetry and novels that only McAllister had heard of but even he hadn't read. As for Lorna's “Ban the Bomb” badges pinned to her overlarge jumpers, her home-knitted hats, her duffel coat, Don ignored them, on McAllister's instructions.

He said, “Lass, no matter how tempting, it's not for us to interfere in someone's private life.”

“It is when it interferes in the running of the office, specially on deadline day.” She rifled through the stack of messages, putting the Wednesday pile separate. It was thick. “This is from yesterday. Today's pile is beginning to mount.” The phone rang. “
Gazette.
Good morning, Mrs. Mackenzie. Yes, I'll give him the message.” She disconnected the line. She said nothing but stared pointedly at Don.

He sighed. “I'll deal with it.”

Her sniff said she doubted it. “You'd better give him these.” Then she took the pile back. “On second thought, maybe not. I'll give them to him when he comes by,” implying there was no need to further humiliate poor Calum.

Don nodded. Another act in her favor.

“One other thing,” Lorna added. “I've had a few phone calls asking for Mr. McAllister, and when I ask for a name, he says, ‘A friend,' and I say, ‘Putting you through,' and then he hangs up. One, even two calls like that I don't notice, but there've been a few. Maybe it's a burglar checking if the boss is at work or something.”

“Thanks, Lorna.”

Don walked up the stairs, thinking,
or something
. And not at all pleased with thoughts of what that something might be.

“I have to go home,” Calum said as the deputy editor walked into the room.

“Aye, I guessed that,” Don told him. “Take a half day tomorrow. Go home for the weekend. But I expect you back first thing Monday morning.” The
or else
went unsaid but was understood. “McAllister, can I have a wee word?”

McAllister assumed the wee word would be about Calum. When he heard about his own phone calls, he asked, “What do you think?”

Don replied, “Nothing good.”

McAllister felt sick. “I've had enough of this.” Without an explanation, the editor left.

For home, Don assumed. He guessed he might have to put out a newspaper without Calum; one good reporter, half an editor, and an enthusiastic sales manager meant a major headache. Hector didn't count, as he couldn't write. “I'm too old for this,” Don muttered.

The solution came from Lorna.

When he asked her to put in an advertisement for a cadet reporter, she said, “I'll do it. I'm good.” He was thrilled. She'd scare the life out of the members of the town council—and maybe bairns and the churchgoing—but he liked the solution.

Don replied, “You're not good yet, but you will be,” and began composing an advert for a receptionist.

Late that afternoon, McAllister was summoned to the police station for a “chat.” He was not happy.

“I'm not yours to command,” McAllister said as he greeted Mr. Stuart.

“This is important,” Stuart said.

The lack of an apology annoyed McAllister. “Before you start, I have a question. Did you, or your cohorts, kill Alice Ramsay?” He'd had no intention of asking the question. He didn't even believe it probable. But the man and his arrogance, his upper-class Englishness, riled McAllister. A lot.

“No, we did not kill Alice Ramsay.” His clear distaste for the question from a mere editor of an insignificant local newspaper pleased McAllister.

Looks like he's sooking on lemon sherbet
. The formal tone, the word choice and phrasing, alerted McAllister. And the “we” meant it was unlikely that the man was a lone operator with a private grudge—unlikely, although not impossible. Did not kill her, he accepted. But did something to cause her death, directly or indirectly? He wouldn't rule it out.

“Again, I will remind you that you're bound by the Official Secrets Act.”

“Get on with it, man.”

“As you now know, Alice Ramsay is not the name she was using when she worked for us.” Her family surname carried the ancient Scottish title “of that Ilk.” It had always amused him. “However, some of the persons she came into contact with”—
concocted false identities for
, he didn't share—“knew her from the past.”

“Knew her by her real name, Alice Ramsay?”

“Quite. When she left us, she took some of the tools of the trade with her. Whether she used them for private commissions we don't know.” He hadn't shared his concern—later, anger—over the missing passports with his superiors. Nor had he mentioned the paper, the specialist ink, and watermark tools she had also purloined.

Neither McAllister nor DI Dunne commented. They could guess at the larger implications of false passports and faked identities, but the inner workings of the world of Mr. Stuart, the Man from the Ministry, were too remote, too murky for them.

“Our operatives and support staff such as Alice have as little contact as possible. Her job was simply to provide the necessary identification; she was not to intermingle with the individuals themselves. But as they were from the same social circles, it was perhaps inevitable. Then the scandal involving those persons . . .”

McAllister and Dunne had been speculating which governmental scandals Alice Ramsey had been connected to. Moscow, they both concluded, knowing this would never be confirmed or denied.

But now this.

“Did Alice Ramsay know the Cambridge spies?” McAllister knew he was unlikely to hear the truth, but he had to ask.

“That is classified information,” Stuart snapped. His body stiff, his eyes blank, the anger was clear, the affront at being questioned by a mere provincial journalist with a working-class accent.

McAllister and Dunne exchanged glances. Both well versed on the spy scandals, they were aware that one of the traitors who had defected to Moscow had the Scottish name, Donald Maclean.

McAllister tried again. “So Alice Ramsay
was
involved in the Cambridge spy ring. Interesting.”

Stuart jerked back in a motion that reminded McAllister of a man hit by a sniper's bullet. “I never said that.” He glared at both men. “That matter is over and done with. The traitors have escaped, and if I ever hear that either of you share such wild speculation or attempt to publish . . . If information should come your way, anything unusual, especially any documents, perhaps someone asking intrusive questions, I need to know. Immediately.”

“I know, I know,” McAllister said. “We'll be clapped in irons and thrown in the Tower of London if we don't.”

“Why did you want to talk to Mr. McAllister?” Dunne intervened. He could feel the animosity between the men building, and wanted Stuart gone; a quiet life in a quiet town was the sum of his ambitions.

Stuart cleared his throat, the nearest to an apology the inspector would receive. “Miss Ramsay's manuscript. We'd like to examine it.”

“How do you know about the manuscript?”

The involuntary tilt forward, the blood draining from the editor's face, the heel of his hand pushing hard against the table scared Dunne. “Manuscript?” the inspector interjected.

“It wasn't mentioned at the auction, so how do you know we have a manuscript?” McAllister's question came out as a hiss, as vicious and as fierce as a swan defending its young.

“One of our operatives was on the removal team that collected the pictures.”

McAllister thought back to that day. Had the manuscript been out on display? He didn't think so. Could he prove it had been locked in the writing box? Not without asking Joanne. Scaring her.

“I assumed you acquired it along with her books.”

McAllister did not believe him, and the sight of his eyebrows rising towards his hairline made Stuart realize his mistake. “It was Alice's plan to paint the flora of her glens and perhaps make a book of her work. Part of the reason she retired, she said.” He looked away. She had spoken of her progress the last time they saw each other. But that brief meeting in the Station Hotel he hoped to keep secret. “I told her I could perhaps help find a national publisher, in a private capacity, of course—our department does not deal in original works.”

This was as close to a joke as the man was ever likely to make, and Dunne, for one, was grateful.

McAllister nodded. His suspicion that the man somehow knew about Joanne's project had been confirmed. He wanted out of this room. Away from this man. He wanted to be home, music playing, girls laughing, Joanne looking up from a book or her knitting or the dinner table, looking at him with those green eyes, smiling. And him smiling back.

“I have a newspaper to attend to,” he said. “I hope we don't meet again, Mr. Stuart, or whoever you are.”

As he walked down the stairs, he heard nothing from the open door of the interview room where they had been for the last hour, only the constant ringing of telephones from below and the murmur of voices. From the remand cells in the dungeons, shouts from a prisoner echoed up the staircase. McAllister sympathized.
Poor sod, but it's probably better than freedom in the open prison of Moscow.

G
etting low on stock. The new commission needs nineteenth-century paper. Not that that woman would know the difference between eighteenth-, nineteenth-, indeed twentieth-century stock. But I have my standards, and it's fun going to auction sales looking for old books, old manuscripts, even old letters. It still startles me what treasures people throw out. I might ask Muriel Galloway to come with me if she can take time away from the hotel.

We could reminisce about that summer such a long time ago. Our last year at school ended, long light nights when you could read your book outdoors at midnight, when we would sneak out and roam around the sand dunes.