I was always good at drama. Starred in the school play every year. I suppose that’s why subterfuge comes easily to me.
Alice is looking at the painting in progress—a small illustration of a tiny wren sitting on a nest as small as a child’s hand—remembering her school days, remembering writing, in her best hand, to various aunts, pleading poverty, or family quarrels before asking for cash to be sent inside a card or a box—anything to fool that prying dried up stick of a devout Calvinist form-mistress.
It’s easy to deceive when you have practiced for years on family members. And men. Alice chuckles to herself.
The dog looks up. Five minutes, she promises, then we will walk.
Finishing off the delicate cross-hatching lines of the nest, Alice thinks of her archenemy.
Poor Mrs. Mackenzie. My nemesis. Little does she, or anyone, know that she is right. Not in what she has accused me of, but she knows there is something not quite genuine about me. She smells it, senses it. Perhaps she is the witch.
Don was shouting, “How do you expect me to fill these pages when I’ve no staff?”
Frankie Urquhart shrugged. “It’s my job to bring in the advertising. How else can the Gazette pay the wages?”
Fortunately, this was all he said. Pointing out that being understaffed was editorial’s problem and not advertising’s, would not have gone down well with the increasingly frazzled deputy editor. With Calum back in Sutherland and Joanne retired, filling the pages in the season leading up to Christmas was not easy.
“I’ve a picture of a two-headed sheep,” Hec said, chortling. “It’s a trick o’ the light, but it’s funny.”
“Get it,” Don ordered. “Nothing like a shaggy sheep story.”
Hec squinted at his boss, trying to figure out if he was serious.
“Get on with it, laddie!”
Don had reached growling point, so Hec knew it was time to run. He did, straight into McAllister. “Sorry, I have to fetch ma two-headed sheep shot.”
The editor was so inured to Hec’s bizarre behavior he didn’t comment. “Don, I need a word.”
“Unless it’s you offering to give me two five-hundred-word pieces, I haven’t time.”
“Done,” McAllister said. “You’ll have them when I get back.”
Don peered up through the bifocals perched on the end of his nose. And waited.
McAllister jerked his head to the left. “My office.”
Frankie said, “I was just leaving.”
Don knew it was impossible to shut the door to the reporters’ room. Age and damp and a good few kickings had left it hanging squint on the frame. Then the thought of the whisky decanter in the editor’s private lair made him climb down from the high stool and follow him.
“I’ve a summons from DI Dunne,” McAllister began. “A gentleman from London wants a wee chat. Says it can’t wait till tomorrow. Then I’ve an appointment in town.” He didn’t share that he was off to discuss the sale of his house and the purchase of another, not until he knew if his offer had been accepted.
“Aye, well, we’ve a newspaper to turn out, and it can’t wait either.” Don raised the decanter. McAllister shook his head. Not because it was too early, more that he needed a clear head for Dunne and company. The inspector had sounded most official when he’d asked for the meeting. He’d been ordered to do this, McAllister guessed.
“I told Dunne that.”
“Better to go to him than him come to the office.” Don was now intrigued. “A story in it, you think?”
“I doubt it.”
Don knew McAllister was telling him the details on the remote chance the editor would need bailing out. “Och well, if you’re not back in two hours, I’ll send for some o’ ma clansmen. Didn’t work out too well in ’45. But maybe this time.”
McAllister knew his colleague meant 1745, not the last war. “I’ll have those articles ready by two,” was all he said. He took his hat off the stand. He pocketed a notebook and pencil. He thought again about a quick dram. But as it was ten past ten on a Wednesday morning, he resisted.
“Sorry, but an interview room is the only private place in the station.” DI Dunne ushered them into a small cramped space off the winding stone staircase. The police station was in a building similar to the Gazette office, and it smelled the same: cigarettes and damp.
“Plenty room for two,” the gentleman said.
“Inspector Dunne stays.” McAllister nodded towards the policeman. “Otherwise no interview.”
“This isn’t an interview, more a friendly chat.”
The man was smooth. Oily as a cormorant’s back, McAllister was thinking. “Nonnegotiable.”
Dunne took a chair on the editor’s side of the table. He clasped his hands, not to lead them in prayer but in an I’m waiting and this better be good gesture.
“We haven’t all been properly introduced,” Dunne began. The room was chilly and damp. The atmosphere and the detective’s voice were equally cold. “You both know who I am. No doubt you’ve checked up on Mr. McAllister.” A slight bow of the head from the stranger acknowledged he had.
The visitor was silent for a moment. “Call me Stuart,” he replied.
“Of the Skye Stuarts? Or is it London?” McAllister asked.
“My name doesn’t matter.”
“You could have introduced yourself before now. Not at the auction, I grant you, and perhaps not at the golf club, but sending the inspector to issue your threats, that was clumsy.”
“It was. I apologize.”
McAllister did not actually remember seeing him at the auction, and his remark was a guess, so the confirmation only added to his suspicions.
Stuart leaned forward from the chest, his hands beneath the table, his face in a practiced, we are all friends expression. Seeing that it wasn’t washing with the Scotsmen, he sat back. “The person you know as Miss Alice Ramsay was a former colleague. I am greatly saddened by her death.”
There it was, out in the open, released into the stale air of the small room in the small town that felt as claustrophobic as the weather—cloud cover lowering the sky by miles, rain imprisoning all but the foolhardy.
“ ‘You know as Miss Alice Ramsay,’ you said? So she went by another name?” McAllister asked.
“Naturally.”
“So if she went by a pseudonym, how did someone know the article was referring to the same person?” And why were they interested? he didn’t ask.
“That is all highly confidential.” Stuart glared at McAllister, unhappy that the roles were being reversed and he was the one being interrogated.
From the sharp staccato reply, McAllister deduced Stuart didn’t know the answer either. So that’s why you are here.
“What department do—did—you and your former colleague work for?” Dunne had on his formal policeman’s voice, betraying nothing of his frustration. He had been seconded by his chief constable to facilitate this investigation but given no information.
“We are a branch of the Civil Service, in a department in Whitehall. Very boring, really.”
“Boring, maybe,” McAllister remarked. “Secretive, certainly. And, it seems, dangerous.”
“No, no. We are of no great importance.” The round head that seemed too small for his shoulders, the pale face with dark darting eyes, the mouth that barely moved as he spoke, were all the more memorable for being unmemorable.
McAllister fancied he could feel sorrow from the stranger, who would not, could not, say from where he came. “I’m sorry you lost a colleague,” he began. “She was a talented woman, and interesting. My wife certainly thought so.”
“Yes, she was a hugely talented artist.” Mr. Stuart—if that was his name—looked directly at McAllister, ignoring the inspector. “You are a signatory to the Official Secrets Act. DI Dunne is a professional police officer here as a witness.” Something in the set of his mouth and eyes indicated a change of attitude.
McAllister said nothing. Waiting.
“What I’m about to tell you concerns matters of national importance.” Stuart let that hang for some seconds.
McAllister smothered a smile; the theatricality of the man he found ridiculous.
“The woman you knew as Miss Ramsay worked for us during and after the war. Her role was to forge documents, passports, identity papers, letters from family, household bills, bus and train tickets—all the minutiae that make up a person’s history, their backstory.”
“Is that why she collected old paper?” McAllister asked, his mind racing.
“Yes, we—she—collected paper of the correct ages and types for the documents. We employed a former forger for watermarks. After fifteen years in the department, she resigned, saying she’d had enough of the city and wanted to pursue her dream of living simply and painting. I—we—told her we would miss her and asked her to reconsider. But she was determined. Had enough, she said, wanted to discover if she was talented enough to earn a living as an artist, she told us.”
That “us” again, McAllister was thinking. And no doubt Miss Ramsay was also warned that the Official Secrets Act was a lifelong pledge. “Is it departmental policy to keep a watch on your colleagues even in retirement?” McAllister was thinking how their watchfulness hadn’t protected the former forger.
“A distant watch, yes. There are emergency procedures, if required. Alice invoked one a week before her death.”
“Why?” He wasn’t sure the man would answer truthfully.
“She felt she was being observed.”
“Did she report this to the local police? Or anyone else?” Dunne was asking from a police perspective. “Did she have proof of her suspicions?”
“No. And none.” With a flick of his left hand at the questions, it was clear Stuart did not welcome Dunne’s intrusion into his performance.
“But still it had you worried enough to come north to meet with her.” Dunne was not deterred by the visitor’s dismissal of him; this was his police station, his territory.
“In the past, documents of an extremely sensitive nature passed through her hands, so yes, we took her concerns seriously.” He would not share, not even with his colleagues—especially not with them—that after Alice’s retirement, a departmental inventory had revealed the loss, or removal, of particularly sensitive material. And if she had not taken the material, the ramifications were even more worrying.
“The identity papers she worked on—were they used recently? Perhaps illegally, if you can call using forged documents illegal?” McAllister asked.
The man jerked in alarm. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Been reading one too many Ian Fleming spy thrillers, I suppose.” McAllister was enjoying the stranger’s reaction.
“That traitor. Done more to harm the service than . . .”
McAllister wanted to tease him with the names: Burgess and Maclean. As a newspaperman and someone who avidly followed the news of the Cold War, he was fascinated by the revelations of spying. The defection to Moscow of the Cambridge spies had occurred in early 1951. Yet the story was not confirmed until 1954. He had been on the news desk of the Herald. The headlines were sensational. The statement from the prime minister confessing that the spies had escaped on the cross-channel ferry to France was splashed across front pages, occupying the nightly television and wireless news bulletins. It had almost brought the government down and jeopardized their relationship with the United States secret services.
He remembered how many “D” notices, which banned publication of stories of “national importance,” were issued at that time. Even more than in wartime, it had seemed. And according to journalists’ and commentators’ gossip, there was still much information that the government was suppressing or that hadn’t yet been discovered. Rumors of a third traitor had circulated. Eventually, when none was discovered, they were no longer discussed in public. McAllister had heard from Sandy Marshall that it was still a topic of speculation and gossip and rumor in newsrooms and journalists’ clubs from Washington to Hong Kong and all territories in between.
Perhaps Miss Ramsay knew more? he wanted to ask, but didn’t, deciding the risk of a note in his secret file, or worse, wasn’t worth the fun of provoking a man who had been born lacking a sense of humor. That there was a file on him McAllister didn’t doubt; his time in the Spanish Civil War, if nothing else, would warrant at least a security check.
“So why are you here?” The deadline for two articles by two o’clock was pressing down on the editor.
“The paintings you bought at auction. I was distracted by the drama of the bidding for that one drawing and the antics of that art expert, so I missed the bidding for the job lot of pictures.”
McAllister bit back a quip, didn’t say, Careless. You also missed the boxes of books and papers the auctioneer threw in when we won the bid. He was desperate to ask if Stuart knew of the manuscript Alice had been working on, but he didn’t dare alert him if he wasn’t already aware.
Stuart’s face resumed the oily-feathers-bird’s-back look. “I’m afraid I have to insist you turn those paintings over to the Ministry.”
“Do you now?”
Stuart possibly understood and chose to ignore the threat in McAllister’s low, slow, drawn-out drawl, but Dunne heard it. “And by what authority can you do this?” the inspector asked. “I would need a good explanation should you seize those pictures.” He added, “Mr. McAllister’s solicitor would also, I’m certain, want to see the appropriate paperwork.”
Stuart looked ready to reprimand the policeman, but his training overrode his arrogance. “I’m sure Mr. McAllister and his good wife will cooperate.”
McAllister shrugged. “If, and when, you present the appropriate legal documents, I will give them to my solicitor. If he says we have a chance of fighting said documents in a court of law, I will. And remember, here we are under Scottish law, not some opaque, made up on a whim regulation.”
“It’s not the paintings as such,” the stranger began. Then stopped. “Official Secrets Act, remember?”
Silence.
“Miss Ramsay had information that could severely compromise other . . . officers. You needn’t know the details.” McAllister was certain he had been about to say operatives. “She may have concealed some material for safekeeping.”
“For God’s sakes, man, why didn’t you just ask?” McAllister was fed up with the game of amateur spies. The window was too high to see out of. And the grille in the door made him feel he was a prisoner. He wanted out of this place and away from this man. “All this palaver—warnings, threats—why not come straight out and say, May I examine the paintings you bought fair and square at that auction where I was so busy lurking, trying so hard not to be noticed that I made myself all the more noticeable? As for forcing Dunne here to deliver a threat over that photograph at the golf club, that was a total embarrassment.” He was shaking his head at the ham-fisted fiasco, asking himself how a secret service could be so inept.
Stuart, if he was a Stuart, smiled with his lips only. “You are right. We should have sent an experienced operator. I’m only an office wallah myself.” The smile meant to reassure did not work, and he could see that. “I apologize, Mr. McAllister, Inspector Dunne. And I accept the offer to examine the pictures.”
McAllister suspected Stuart seldom apologized. He also knew he had little choice but to let the man, or his minions, inspect the pictures. So he relented. “You can do that, but in my home.”
“I will need to request expert help.”
“Fine. Let me know when you’ll be coming round. In the meantime, I have a newspaper to put to bed.”
They all shook hands. McAllister left first.
Dunne remarked to the visitor, “You and your colleagues would do well to remember that we Scots don’t take kindly to threats.”
“I promise to remember.”
The inspector did not believe him. They left the room, both glad of fresh air. The London man invited the inspector to lunch. Dunne refused. Holding the man’s umbrella, watching him as he put on an overcoat the inspector knew would cost a month’s salary, he asked, “So does the attack on Mrs. Mackenzie have any connection with your inquiries?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t know?” Dunne saw confusion, the first and only sign of emotion, in the blank canvas of a face. Doesn’t want to admit he’s missed something else. The policeman sighed. “You’d better sit down again.”
McAllister was usually late home on Wednesday evenings. There was no need for him to stay in the office, but when the presses started to roll, he and Don had a little ritual. The first proof pages would be printed off and checked. Barring last-minute adjustments to be corrected on the stone, Don would give the Father of the Chapel the nod. Then the presses would roll.
Against all union regulations, McAllister was allowed onto the print-room floor. He was wise enough to keep out of the men’s way as they went about the controlled panic of the countdown to the printing run. The hammering and clattering of the printing press, the race of the machine that layered and folded, shooting out the warm, ink-damp newspapers onto the conveyer, always entranced him.
Watching the men and apprentices parceling, labeling, and loading the awaiting delivery vans gave him a satisfaction that could never be bettered. His words, his newspapers, were now on the journey to the people of the towns, the islands, the villages, to be sold in large news agents’ or wee general stores where everything necessary for the rural communities was available, except on Sundays, when even the petrol pumps were locked.
Then the two men, a Highland Stan and Ollie, would trudge up the stairs into the editor’s office and share a dram of a good whisky, a single-malt from whatever small distillery in the area they were of a mind to sample.
This time, McAllister brought out a favorite, a twenty-five-year-old Talisker. He felt he deserved it after the morning’s interview with the “Man from the Ministry,” as the deputy editor had baptized him.
Don lifted his glass. “Slàinte.” He took a sip. “A fine drop from the shores of my homeland,” he pronounced, then settled back to listen to what he expected to be a fascinating account of the morning’s interview. He was not disappointed. “The Cambridge spies?” He whistled. “Not what I expected to hear of in the Highlands of Scotland.”
“Me neither,” McAllister agreed.
“Aye. Fits, though. Some o’ them lords and lairds that come up here for the fishing and shooting, they were, and are, the regimental chiefs who used our young men as cannon fodder.”
McAllister knew the truth of Don’s statement. “Aye, but the spy scandals center around London, Berlin, Moscow, Washington, even Istanbul. It’s quite a leap from there to a glen in Sutherland.”
“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.”