A Double Death on the Black Isle Read Free

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.
    â€œThis is a great front-page story. Let me have your article by the end of the day.”
    â€œMe?” Joanne stared at him. “But I’m new in the job. I’ve never done a major story.”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œMy 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
.
    â€œCripes, it’s Oor Wullie!” Don McLeod said.
    â€œNo it’s not. It’s a gnome from my mother-in-law’s rockery.” This came from Joanne.
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œHiya 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