A Double Death on the Black Isle (2 page)

“Over there!” Rob pointed and grabbed Joanne's arm. They made for the lee of one of the bond warehouses where Hector, or
Wee Hec as he was usually known, was winding on a new roll of film. Then, eyes focused like a bird of prey, he popped out, took a series of quick shots with his second camera, stopped, surveyed the scene, and, absolutely sure of his judgment, crouched down and shot another series from a different angle.

A dull
whoomf
, more an implosion than an explosion, then a shout of “she's going down” brought an anguished cry from a fisherman standing on the edge of the towpath, oilskin leggings and wellie boots streaked with oil, face blackened with soot, his hair singed.

“This your boat then?” Rob asked going over to him.

“Get lost!” the man snarled.

“I'm from the
Gazette
. I just want to ask . . .”

Hector swung his camera towards the fisherman, clicking furiously. Two others from the crew, young lads, were coming up fast behind their mate. The three, legs akimbo, stood in a menacing line. Rob backed away, hands up.

“Okay, lads. Okay. I can see now's not the time. Maybe later, aye?”

He went to step forward, to offer a cigarette, but the skipper was after Hec.

“Get that bloody camera out o' ma face.”

Wee Hec stepped behind Joanne, trying his best to hide. The man reached around her, snatching at the precious Leica camera.

“Leave him be.” Joanne tried smiling.

Too late. The fisherman had Hector by his Clachnacuddin supporter's scarf. Joanne kicked Hec's assailant hard in the ankle. He let go and turned on her, more in surprise than in anger.

“Give him the film, Hec,” Rob shouted.

The man stopped.

“You only need the film, not his camera.” Rob was holding his hands up, attempting to placate the fisherman.

“I'm no giving up ma film.” Hec was trying to hide the camera inside his duffel coat.

“Then you'll no mind your nosy friend getting a dooking.” The man was on Rob in an instant.

“Give him the film, Hec. Give him the film.”

No chance. A huge shove, a yell, a splash, and Rob was in the canal. It was deep even at the edge, but his leather jacket, his pride and joy, was soaking up the water, pulling him down. His waterlogged bike boots didn't help. And to crown it all, Hec whipped out his camera and started taking pictures of the floundering reporter.

Hearing the clicks, the man turned back towards Hector. Joanne moved fast. Later, she and the skipper were to wonder where her strength came from. Straight at him, the high kick landed right in the stomach. With a loud “ooof,” he doubled up, more winded that hurt, more surprised than angry. And Wee Hec was gone, running up the path, his stubby legs pumping, his coat flapping, running towards the firemen and the shelter of the shiny red engine.

“Never. You didn't.”

McAllister interjected at all the appropriate moments. Encouraging. Amazed. Amused. Trying hard not to laugh. The editor-in-chief of the
Highland
Gazette
more than admired Joanne, and he loved the way she told a story with her face, her whole body describing the action.

“Where did you learn to defend yourself like that?”

My marriage,
she thought. “In the ATS during the war,” she said.

She could never explain that she had joined the women's army to escape her mother, only to become trapped by a husband.

“But go easy on Rob will you?” she asked.

“Well it's not every day you get rescued by a lassie.”

“That's what I mean.”

Joanne looked at McAllister. She saw a resemblance to a bust of a French philosopher; she noticed the touch of grey at the temples and thought, not for the first time,
what an interesting face.

“Half-drowned by some fishermen. Rescued by a lassie. Pulled out by the Fire Brigade . . . I've half a mind to print the account.”

“Don't you dare! Rob would never forgive me for telling you.”

“Sorry. I'll try to restrain myself.” He smiled. “But what was all that about? Not just an accidental fire, you said.”

“No, no accident according to the firemen.”

McAllister leaned back in his chair; Joanne opened her notebook and explained.

She had been at the fire station for the previous hour, talking with the chief fireman and some of the crew.

The firemen cheered Joanne when she walked in. They'd seen the fracas with the skipper, watched as he tried to get his breath back—not injured but severely embarrassed. Now, as they were cleaning and stowing their equipment, the men were quite happy to talk to her—along with some teasing.

Not that Joanne told McAllister this. What happened, no one knew for certain, she told the editor, but these men are professional firemen, they know their business. Two of them had been in the worst fires of the war—in the Clydeside blitz.

“It was what we call an ‘incendiary device,'” one fireman told her.

“Any clearer than that?” Joanne had asked.

“A petrol bomb in a milk bottle to you, dear,” an older crewmember said, and he knew a thing or two about those
weapons. He had been a member of the Billy Boys gang in Glasgow in his youth.

“Do the police agree?”

“The police take their report from us and we know our business.”

“Of course.” Joanne flushed slightly, not meaning to question their professionalism. Looking around her, seeing the men, the machines, the efficiency with which they treated their equipment, she knew that if the firemen said it was a petrol bomb that had started the fire, a petrol bomb it was.

McAllister heard Joanne out. “So, a Molotov cocktail, eh? The anarchist's favorite weapon.”

“I bow to your extensive experience in those sort of things.”

“Aye.” He shook his head and sighed. “I've seen the damage a simple Molotov cocktail can cause. It was a favorite of the International Brigade in Spain. But not very usual in these parts.” He thought about it for a moment. “Anything more?”

“It became a bit scary towards the end,” Joanne replied. “I know the skipper was distraught about losing his boat, but why so angry over a few pictures? And why would someone burn down a herring boat? Another thing, the boat is from the Black Isle, the skipper too, so the harbormaster said. So why were they going through the canal, all the way through the Great Glen to Fort William, with a full hold of fresh herring?”

“Why not to her home port you mean?”

“Exactly. And then there's the mystery of the crewmen, they're from the Isles.”

As McAllister was listening to Joanne, as the different strands of the story mounted, his night-dark eyebrows, the only part of him that betrayed his thinking, rose or wriggled with each complication.

“Why does a local skipper have strangers for a crew?” she asked.

His eyebrows signaled, “Why?”

“Fishing boat crews are like families. So if they're not family members, it's usually men from the same home port. The skipper on this vessel—
The Good Shepphard
—is from the Black Isle; the crewmen, they're not even from the east coast—they spoke Gaelic.”

When she finished, McAllister looked at his scrawled notes and saw how much information she had collected in only a few hours.
For a woman who had been the typist on the newspaper not three months since, she's come a long way.

“This is a great front-page story. Let me have your article by the end of the day.”

“Me?” Joanne stared at him. “But I'm new in the job. I've never done a major story.”

“I've been waiting weeks to launch the newly designed
Gazette
, you know that.” He pointed at the notes he had made. “This is the best news story we've had in a long while—it's dramatic, mysterious.”

Joanne looked down at her hands, nervous, excited, trying hard not to blush.
I'm too old to blush,
she told herself, “I'll do my best,” she told the editor.

“I wouldn't ask if I didn't think you were up to it,” McAllister was impatient with Joanne's lack of self-belief, “and don't forget, with Don McLeod as subeditor, most of what
you
think is your best writing will be cut by that ruthless red pencil of his. So, get the sequence clear in your head, then don't think too much, just write.”

As Joanne left the editor's office to cross the four steps to the reporters' room, she hugged herself.

“My first real story,” she muttered, “my first front page.”

Hector Bain, part boy, part man, part troglodyte, with a more than passing resemblance to Oor Wullie, that well-loved cartoon character from a Scottish Sunday newspaper, trudged through the promise of a spring morning. In a land where winter was said to reign for eight and a half months of the year, brisk would best describe the weather.

Such an innocuous word, “weather,” a word that only a native of the Highlands would use to describe the cloud-scudding, bone-crushing, ear-piercing, gusty wind that blew straight from the North Sea, down the Firth, down the Great Glen, over a succession of lochs, where it met the gales of another wind that arrived, unencumbered, three thousand miles from the wastes of Labrador. Locals would call these half hourly blasts of horizontal rain “showers” and outsiders would describe them as a “deluge.”

Not that Hector noticed. Trotting through the town, smiling at acquaintances, grinning at contemporaries, answering inquiries about the health of his granny with, “She's great,” or, “She's brilliant,” or, “She's grand, thanks,” up the steep cobbled wynd that clung to the lee of the castle, head down and coat held tight to protect his precious cameras. A right turn—he arrived at his destiny. Only the semi-spiral stone staircase in the tall, narrow building to climb and he would be there in the sacred lair, there in the reporter's room, the heartbeat of the
Highland Gazette
.

“Cripes, it's Oor Wullie!” Don McLeod said.

“No it's not. It's a gnome from my mother-in-law's rockery.” This came from Joanne.

“You're both wrong. It's Horrible Hector,” Rob declared with an uncharacteristic scowl. Addressing the cocky figure standing expectantly in the doorway he asked, “So, Wee Hec, what the heck are you doing here?”

The apparition stepped into the room proper.

“Hiya Rob. What like?”

At five foot two inches short, wearing clothes for an eleven-year-old and with two cameras round his neck, he looked like a wee boy dressed up as a photographer for Halloween. But the cameras round his neck were serious. Together, their net worth would buy a motorcar.

His red, sticking-up hair and his turnip lantern grin gave Don the Oor Wullie joke, but, so far as anyone knew, the cartoon character didn't have the orange freckles with matching sodium light hair.

Joanne's guess at garden gnome came from the lime green knitted woolen tourie—far too big for Hector's head and weighted down to one side by an enormous bobble. A black and white Clachnacuddin Football Club supporter's scarf completed the outfit. Hat and scarf had been knitted by his granny who could never find her glasses, and it showed.

Still grinning at the threesome sitting around the reporters' table, Hec waited. When it became obvious that neither Don nor Rob were going to introduce him, Joanne spoke.

“We weren't formally introduced yesterday. I'm Joanne Ross, I'm a reporter here. This is Don McLeod, deputy editor. You know Rob.”

“I know.” Hector continued grinning until Joanne decided this was the natural state of his face.

“So,” Joanne asked since her colleagues continued to ignore the apparition, “what can I do for you?”

“It's more a case of what I can do for you, Joanne.”

“Mrs. Ross to you, boy,” Don growled at the newcomer.

“Here's ma card.”

He handed the offering to Joanne. She peered at a hand-cut, hand-printed rectangle of cardboard the color of spam.

“Hector Bain. Photographer. The
Highland Gazette
.”

Rob reached over the shared desk and snatched the card from her.

“Did you use your wee sister's printing set?”

“
Highland Gazette
? What's this about?” Don's frown made the lines on his fifty-maybe-sixty-something-old face resemble a relief map of his native Skye.

“Morning. I see you've met our new photographer.” McAllister stood in the doorway, enjoying the consternation.

“Him? We're to work with him?” Rob poked a finger at Hector.

“I've heard of some daft things in my time, but this takes the biscuit,” Don McLeod told the editor.

McAllister shrugged. “You asked for a photographer. I got you a photographer.”

“Aye, but what else is he besides?” Don replied. “I know you're keen to get the new
Gazette
launched, and yes we're desperate for a photographer, but not that desperate.” He narrowed his eyes, squinting through the smoke of his fifth cigarette of the morning, which dangled from a corner of his mouth.