Beneath the Abbey Wall by A. D. Scott Page A

now.
    â€œThank Sergeant Patience.”
    â€œHe’s no’ a bad manny under all that flesh and bombast.”
    A long five minutes passed before Don spoke again, but McAllister didn’t mind.
    â€œI’m no’ coming back.”
    â€œFine,” McAllister said, “but I’d appreciate it if you could come in and help out until we find a replacement.”
    â€œI’ll do that.” Don was beyond noticing McAllister’s apparent lack of sympathy, beyond seeing McAllister’s dismay.
    â€œThere’s a bed made up . . . ” was all the editor could think to say.
    â€œNo. I’m off home.”
    McAllister doubted that. The nearest public house was the most likely destination, he thought. “Don, I need your help to find whoever killed Joyce.” As he said the name, he saw the flinch, the shudder, the pain. It was as if a knife, the same knife that had killed her, had penetrated between Don’s ribs straight to his heart. The shaking, the trembling, the snorts were not an alcoholic aftermath; he was crying. Don was holding his head between his square ink-stained hands, sobbing in heaving silent spasms. McAllister went to the drinks cabinet and brought out the big gun, a Glen Farclas 110 proof, a whisky he called the Lazarus cure.
    He put the glass into Don’s hand and poured a lesser measure for himself, and sat out of sight of his friend, gifting him the invisibility to recover. He waited. When the sobbing subsided into sniffing, into blowing the nose, into finishing the dram, McAllister took the analyst’s role, asking, “When did you first meet her?”
    â€œRight after the first war.”
    With the patience of a heron stalking minnows in a lochan, McAllister waited.
    â€œI had bad burns.” Don didn’t say from what. “She was only a young thing, nineteen, born on Hogmanay on the last day of the old century, ‘a foot in each century,’ she’d joke. She was a volunteer nursing assistant in a place for wounded soldiers—in Stirlingshire it was. She was staying with family friends, hoping to get in to university.” He didn’t tell McAllister it was a castle with titled gentlefolk she was living in, and there was no need to explain how unusual it would be for a young woman of any class to go to university in those days.
    â€œI was the only sailor there,” Don continued, his voice faint, speaking through the thick yarn of time. “When I was admitted, I was delirious, only speaking the Gaelic.” He took a sip of the whisky, the water of life. It acted better than a blood transfusion. “Not that her Gaelic was great, but she’s from the Northwest, she’d heard it enough around the estate. Spoke it wi’ the local bairns.”
    â€œAnd you became friends.”
    â€œAye. We became friends. I recovered and was going back to Skye but somehow got waylaid here and found myself on the Gazette . I think they gave me the job out of pity and because I could spell and besides, I was the only one the printers would listen to.”
    â€œRight Bolshie lot printers can be sometimes.” McAllister laughed.
    â€œThat’s rich coming from a Glaswegian.”
    McAllister heard the lift in Don’s voice. “So you met up with Joyce again here?”
    â€œAye. She was in India, came back in the early thirties. Thon soldier fellow came back five years later and not long after, Joyce came to work at the Gazette .”
    That the wife of Sergeant Major Smart, a decorated and wounded former soldier, took a job was highly unusual. That a woman of Mrs. Smart’s wealth and background and education had done so was more than unusual, it was a mystery. One of the many mysteries surrounding Mrs. Smart, thought McAllister. Then he remembered the sergeant major’s bullying and decided that was why she had taken a job.
    â€œSo how does, did, Mrs. Smart know Jenny