Ghost Walk Read online

  His words had come home to roost with a vengeance. History was repeating itself with Detective Inspector Jack Macmerry who, whatever his emotions regarding his inaccessible and dead rival, would have shared his sentiments on that particular issue.

  I had no idea what were the views of Edinburgh City Police on the subject of female detectives or the milder term ‘lady investigators’, but I could guess that they regarded criminal investigation as a ‘men only’ province.

  I felt so impatient with authority. Would a day ever dawn when women ceased to be treated as playthings or breeding machines, when they would be given equal rights with men. My hackles rose in anger at the suffragettes’ gallant struggles as portrayed in a recent pamphlet which I had been at pains to keep concealed from Jack.

  Watching him eat his supper that evening, I observed that this had not been one of his good days. He was in a bad mood, his perplexed frown told me all I needed to know. His current investigation was not going well and it would not be a clever move on my part to bring up the subject of Sister Mary Michael’s mysterious note from Danny.

  So in my mind I went over and over the details of that brief and frustrating interview and realised that she had told me something of importance. That his relative Father Sean McQuinn, whom I had presumed would be dead by now, was not only alive but occasionally came into Edinburgh and visited the convent.

  And suddenly I was quite eager to visit Jack’s parents on the off chance that the priest might have news for me.

  Jack was surprised by this burst of enthusiasm but my preparations in the days that followed were accompanied by ghosts of the past, the agonies of the last three years with their false hopes and dreams.

  Reason and pride – of the wounded variety – insisted that if Danny were alive, he would never have allowed me to suffer so. We were a devoted couple. He was my only love and my despair, for I thought that love awakened when I was twelve years old would last forever.

  I had never imagined the remotest possibility that I could love again, desire and marry another man – and yet, Jack Macmerry was on the threshold of disproving that theory.

  I believed that Danny had loved me too, although doubts crept in sometimes that he was not quite as passionate or single-minded in his devotion as I had been. After all, I had pursued him to America and rather forced his hand if truth were told. That did arouse feelings of guilt, but I told myself firmly that such overwhelming emotions were more natural to womankind who stayed at home, raised families and waited on their men. Feelings which I had to admit sat uneasily alongside the women’s rights I so fervently supported.

  In the end, it all came back to that inescapable wounded pride and the reassurance I needed that if Danny were still alive and well and in Scotland, I was the first he would have got in touch with, the most important person in his life.

  And on days when logic needed extra sustenance I told myself that the old nun had been mistaken and for her, confused by the passage of time, three weeks could have been three years. So taking comfort and refuge in Sister Angela’s consoling explanation regarding common Irish names I looked forward to Eildon and meeting Father McQuinn.

  He would confirm that Danny was indeed dead and that there no longer existed any impediment to my marriage to Jack Macmerry.

  Chapter Four

  As it turned out, I was to travel alone by train to meet my future in-laws for the first time.

  Jack was summoned to appear as a police witness in a Glasgow court. This last minute change of plans put me in an ill humour, recalling as it did childhood occasions in the household of a Chief Inspector where my sister Emily and I soon realised that Pappa was never there when we needed him.

  In despair and anger, I thought, was this to be the set pattern of my life as a policeman’s wife – for the second time? Was I being foolish, indeed insane, to expect anything better?

  I should have realised when I followed Danny to America that life was to be no romantic bed of roses. Hazardous and uncertain, it had eventually made me a widow. I had now learned to live with that bitterness and grief but was I in my right mind even to consider a second marriage to a policeman, especially since I was independent, with a successful career?

  Although Jack certainly did not approve of my choice, he knew when to keep his mouth shut and to accept that I could deal with ‘discretion guaranteed’ cases that were not within the scope of the Edinburgh City Police.

  Domestic incidents involving the behaviour of relatives, cheating husbands and wives, betrayed mistresses. My logbook was full of them. Where the arrival of a uniformed policeman would have caused alarm and despondency, a respectable young woman could, without suspicion, gain access to houses to track down thieving servants, or fraud by close relatives. Such a convenient arrangement thus avoided scandals well-to-do Edinburgh families were eager to avoid at all cost, which also meant paying handsomely for my services.

  Such were my thoughts as I sat in the train awaiting its imminent departure from Waverley Station.

  However, even here it seemed that there was no escape from the Little Sisters of the Poor. At the last moment, a young nun ran down the platform and entered my compartment. As she sank breathless into the seat opposite, I greeted her sympathetically about being just in time.

  She merely nodded and fixed her gaze beyond the window.

  Not wishing to be unfriendly I tried another tack and said: ‘Your summer fair was extremely successful I gather, apart from the change in the weather.’

  She stared at me and nodded vaguely as if she had no idea what I was talking about. She looked embarrassed and I realised I was presuming she was from the convent. Such institutions were hardly thick on the ground in Edinburgh and I was certain that St Anthony’s was the only one of its kind.

  She turned towards the window again and did not sink back into her seat until the train began at last to move.

  Feeling rather uncomfortable I realised that my presumption was a natural mistake since all nuns at first glance look alike in their dress and hoods.

  This one looked young enough to be a novice and as her attention was clearly elsewhere I made some mental notes. She had not uttered a word but surely a novice would not yet have taken a vow of silence.

  There was something in her expression, not nun-like serenity but an expression furtive and anxious. I thought about her urgent attention to the windows not as trying to avoid conversation with me but perhaps expecting someone to join the train. She had now relaxed. Was she pleased – relieved even, that we were now under way?

  Her nun’s garb too was incomplete. No cross or rosary and as she leaned back more comfortably and closed her eyes I caught a whiff of perfume. A quite exotic perfume. I could have accepted incense or lavender water but this was much too worldly for convent life. It aroused thoughts of seduction, of amorous evenings with a suitor.

  My eyes travelled downwards to an elegant silk clad ankle in a fine leather shoe, far from the hard wearing practical footwear of the sisters.

  I didn’t look away hastily enough. Opening her eyes with a start as we came to the signals, she saw the direction of my glance and hastily thrust her feet out of sight under her robe.

  But I kept thinking about those shoes and stockings. Perhaps they were a present, and as a novice, this might indicate her last worldly fling before entering the cloisters. Her slim ungloved hands as she had rearranged her robe also gave cause for comment. Such nails, neatly manicured, pink and shining, slightly longer than was usual: I was observing the hands of a middle or upper class Edinburgh young lady who had never done a day’s manual work in her whole life.

  I was intrigued for I would never know the answer to this piece of observation, having fallen into the pastime I had learned from Pappa long ago. To while away the time on train journeys he had encouraged me to scrutinise fellow passengers secretly and make up character studies. After they left the train, we would discuss the results and decide who they were and what were their professions.
/>   For me there was only one conclusion. The young woman sitting opposite, despite her garb, was no nun, novice or otherwise.

  When the train reached our destination, to my surprise it was hers also. Which suggested the faint hope that she might have some business with the local church.

  Seeing her hurrying out of the station while I waited on the platform for the Macmerrys how I regretted that wasted train journey. It was unlikely that a Border stronghold of the Scots kirk would have more than one Roman Catholic church and had I been tenacious enough to discover where she was heading, I might have learned something to my advantage about Father McQuinn.

  An elderly man hurried breathlessly through the barrier, red-faced with the bewildered and anxious look of one who is meeting a passenger for the first time.

  His complexion suggested the farmer despite the smart bowler hat, apparently seldom worn, since his hand went to it constantly as if its rare presence nagged him. Then walking along the platform he tugged at the jacket of that handsome tweed suit, suggesting Sunday best made long ago for a fitting now considerably more ample than the tailor’s original measurements.

  Although shorter and more thickset, Andrew Macmerry’s resemblance to Jack was unmistakable. I smiled in his direction and he hurried towards me.

  ‘Rose, is it?’ His hand sought the familiar farmer’s bonnet and instead encountered the bowler hat. Raising it politely, face sweating with anxiety, he clasped my hand in a powerful grip.

  Introductions over, he laughed and picked up my luggage. ‘What a relief, I would have kenned you anywhere, lass. You’re exactly like Jack told us.’ A sideways approving glance. ‘Except that he didn’t do you justice.’ Added shyly, with a slightly embarrassed cough, ‘You’re far bonnier, lass, far bonnier that we thought you’d be.’

  ‘We’ indicated the missing Mrs Macmerry. As I paused and looked around, interpreting my glance, he said hastily:

  ‘The farm’s a wee step from the station so Jack’s ma has taken the chance of a bit of shopping. Ah, here she is now.’

  The picture in townsfolk’s mind is of farmer’s wives rosy and rotund. Jess Macmerry however was as far from that description as could be imagined. Taller than her husband and considerably thinner, her grey hair in a tight no-nonsense bun above a deep frown and a long rather sharp red nose, the kind that suggested a perpetual drip in winter weather.

  As we shook hands there was a smile that might have come through a tea-strainer and walking towards the station exit, the shrewd all-enveloping glance told me much about her character, as I read her summing up her son’s intended.

  She was a disappointed woman. She had firmly decided long ago that had this Rose McQuinn even sprouted angel’s wings and borne a message from heaven itself she would still have been no fit mate for Jack Macmerry. A widow woman, I was soiled goods, second-hand, while she had set her heart on a fresh young virgin as daughter-in-law, the only decent and suitable choice for her one and only beloved bairn.

  Seated together with Mr Macmerry in the driving seat of the dog-cart, she resumed her relentless scrutiny.

  ‘You’re much smaller than we thought you’d be,’ she said candidly and, with the expert eye of the farming community, that quick glance over my figure was assessing whether it was strong enough to produce – among an assorted bevy of lively and healthy grandchildren – a lad to some day inherit the farm.

  ‘There’s grand stuff in small bundles, Jess.’ I detected mild reproach as Mr Macmerry came to my rescue. ‘And that’s a right bonny head o’ hair ye have on ye, lass,’ he added gallantly.

  It was my turn to be embarrassed by my wild mop of yellow hair inexpertly tamed under a small and now, alas, unfashionable bonnet bought in a moment of optimism in an Edinburgh millinery sale.

  ‘I’ve always been told that a lot of hair drains your strength away.’ Mrs Macmerry’s sniff was a stern reminder that a man’s admiring eye could be deceived and turning to me: ‘Jack tells us you’re living alone in Edinburgh. In some old tower on Arthur’s Seat.’

  Her tone conveyed that living alone was not quite the done thing, and the tower unseen was exceptionally squalid and extremely ruined.

  ‘I would be terrified sleeping in a place like that all on my own. Doesn’t it scare you?’

  ‘It doesn’t bother me in the least. I feel quite safe.’

  She seemed surprised by this and I could hardly confess that most nights Jack slept by my side.

  ‘Rose is a right bonny name,’ said Mr Macmerry desperately.

  His wife regarded me solemnly. ‘Rose? Not very Scotch though, is it,’ she reminded him.

  He shook his head, his gentle laugh indicated that I was not to be offended. ‘I don’t suppose you know, Rose, but your father was once on a case in this area. I canna mind exactly, it was a fair time ago.’

  Pausing, he smiled. ‘But we never imagined then that our wee lad would one day be marrying the daughter of the famous Inspector Faro –’

  ‘Oh, did you meet him?’ I interrupted eagerly, ignoring Mrs Macmerry’s stony glance and grasping this new talking point for what it might open up.

  ‘Nay, lass, it was market day in Peebles that Friday.’ He sounded disappointed and as I was left wondering what the case had been, Mrs Macmerry put in sharply, ‘Of course, it was nothing involving any of our friends or the farming folk, thank goodness.’

  Mr Macmerry frowned. ‘Something to do with Fenians. I think that’s what it was.’ His vague tone suggested that national politics were beyond the range or interest of local farmers.

  As a silence ensued above the horse’s clip-clopping along the leafy road I suppressed a sigh. What I would have given for Jack’s presence at that moment.

  Surprisingly, his father must have sensed my anxiety. ‘The lad shouldna be long now,’ he said heartily, as if Jack had just gone down the road for a message from the shops.

  I smiled weakly, hoping that he was right. How little he knew the machinations of the criminal courts, where days were known to stretch into weeks and even months during trials. Again I suppressed that burst of resentment against the absent Jack for I didn’t relish the immediate future of unspecified days at Eildon Farm under his mother’s relentless gaze.

  ‘Jack said you were a teacher,’ said his father.

  ‘Yes, that was before I went to Arizona.’

  ‘Arizona?’ queried his mother.

  ‘That’s America, Jess, over in the west,’ she was told.

  ‘Ariz – ona,’ she repeated, making it sound what it was to folk who had never travelled further than the nearest town: the very ends of the earth, beyond imagination. ‘How long were you there?’

  ‘Ten years.’

  ‘You must have been just a bairn at the time,’ said Mr Macmerry kindly.

  ‘Not quite, I had been teaching for a few years.’

  And I was conscious of Mrs Macmerry at my side. She was moving her lips in some sharp mental arithmetic, shocked to realise what Jack maybe had not told them; that I must be at least thirty, perhaps even older than himself. Another altogether appalling revelation.

  A rather more uncomfortable silence followed, in which I received some searching glances. I was no doubt expected to carry on the conversation with accounts of my life in Arizona, what had taken me to this remote wilderness.

  I was saved. Crossroads and a signpost loomed into view. A sharp turn to the right and the leafy lane revealed distant houses, a village nestling in the folds of the Eildon Hills.

  Soon be home now, I was told.

  I felt a warming of the heart, my natural affinity to living in the shadow of ancient hills. There had been hills too, gigantic ranges of prehistoric red rocks, in Arizona, fringed by red desert. Perhaps that was what had endeared it to me, a place of destiny that I would never again see in this world.

  A life and a child lost forever.

  A husband too. For at that moment I did not doubt that the old nun had been mistaken and I would never see Danny again.


  Chapter Five

  A skeletal ruined abbey drifted into view, carefully railed off, its remains much abused by time and the removal of its stones from which most of Eildon had arisen.

  Mrs Macmerry drew my attention to a rather ugly modern church which had not been so fortunate in its architects.

  ‘That’s where we were married. Our Jack was baptised there. As you’re not attached to any particular church in Edinburgh,’ a sigh bravely lamented such a shortcoming, ‘we were sure Jack would like you to be married here among the people who have known him all his life.’

  A pause for a polite smile to indicate my approval as she went on: ‘The minister and his wife are close friends. They are very understanding.’

  ‘He won’t worry that you aren’t a regular churchgoer,’ Mr Macmerry put in hastily.

  While his wife took up the theme of similar weddings with bride and groom of different persuasions, I listened politely thinking, Well, well, Jack, I have been much discussed over your kitchen table. Our marriage has been a fait accomplait in this particular family long before I said yes to your proposal. A brand new version of the tough strong man who was my lover arose before me and I even wondered if Detective Inspector Jack Macmerry, in the role of obedient son, had asked his parents’ permission first.

  ‘Is there a Catholic church?’ I asked.

  Looks of horror were exchanged.

  ‘Oh, you aren’t an RC, are you?’ cried Mrs Macmerry in a voice of doom.

  ‘No. But my late husband was Irish and very devout.’

  ‘You didn’t turn, did you?’ she whispered in sepulchral tones.

  ‘Of course not. That was never expected of me.’ And taking the plunge headlong, ‘I’m only interested because one of Danny’s relatives was a priest down here.’

  Further mention of my late husband by name raised a sudden acute and embarrassed silence, broken at last by Jack’s father.

  ‘Would that be Father Sean McQuinn?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, expecting the worst.