A Small Death in the Great Glen Read Online Free Page A

something about Jamie? I’d like to do a piece in the paper about him.”
    â€œThe police think it was our fault.”
    â€œSurely not.”
    â€œNo one is here when Jamie comes home from school. We both work. He was up at the canal because no one was here to look after him.”
    â€œWhere do you work?”
    â€œOn the buses. I’m a driver, my wife’s a clippie.”
    â€œI used to be in the office but I went on the buses elevenmonths ago,” Mrs. Fraser explained. “We wanted nice things for Jamie. The shift work pays more.” She glanced toward a complete set of encyclopedias, as if to lessen the guilt. “He’s excused from swimming. I wrote to the school. He’d never go near the canal. Not even with his da. He’s a timid wee soul.” She had yet to change her tenses. “An’ I wasn’t here to make his tea.”
    Her husband didn’t move. “He near drowned as a bairn. I was fishing and he fell in the loch. Only three he was. Terrified of water ever since. He never goes near the canal on his own. Never. He won’t even cross the river by the footbridge, has to be the big bridge so’s he canny see the water. He was delicate, our Jamie.”
    Their whole lives were devoted to Jamie, McAllister could see that. They told him about his school, his obsession with trains, his stamp collection, small episodes in a barely lived life. They told him of their faraway Hebridean home and their family and them speaking Gaelic amongst themselves. McAllister was gentle, allowing the silences of grief to float between sentences. He listened until they had talked themselves out.
    â€œMay I have a picture of Jamie? Would you mind?”
    â€œI’ve two of these.” She handed him a picture of a small boy, all bony arms and legs, clutching his mother’s hand beneath a towering tractor. “This summer at the Black Isle Show.” She pointed to a merry-go-round on one side. “He loved that.” Her eyes glazed over at the memory. “Will you find out what happened to my laddie, Mr. McAllister? He’d never ever go up there on his own.”
    McAllister had seen grief; as a cub reporter sent on similar interviews, as a war correspondent in Spain, as a crime reporter in Glasgow. And grief had consumed his own mother.
    â€œHis friends, tell me about his friends.”
    They looked at each other in bewilderment.
    â€œI don’t know about that. . . .” The woman looked away. “Heliked his own company.” She couldn’t look at McAllister. “He didn’t mind being by himself.” She gestured to a train set beneath the table. “We had to work so much. Buses run on Sundays too so he had to stop going to Sunday school. . . .” The shadow of guilt hung over her like a cloud darkening an already gloomy sky, becoming tears that dripped onto her cardigan, making no marks in the Fair Isle pattern. “We just wanted the best.”
    McAllister realized he had stepped into a well-worn argument. Breaking the Sabbath observance must have been a huge step for them, adding to their guilt immeasurably. Her husband stood. He had had enough.
    â€œMany bairns his age were already working when I was a boy.” He glared at his wife. “Well able to look out for themselves.” Then, looking down at the carpet, he added in desperate justification, as though the sin had already been flung in their faces, “It doesn’t matter what the kirk says about Sundays, you have to look after your family first.”
    It was time to go, McAllister knew. Stages of grief, like stations of the cross, were a ritual. There was no need for him to hear of their innermost fears, their self-recrimination and rehashed arguments and all the other stages of grief that loss of their only son would surely bring. All this he knew only too well.
    Walking gingerly on the wet cobbles, down the narrow street,