Page 6 of Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop

‘You’re sure? I can’t give you anything for your time?’ the mum said.

‘She just said she doesn’t want anything,’ the girl grumbled, mortified at nothing, the way only twelve-year-old girls can be.

The woman placed a ten-pound note in the jar as she left, singing the place’s praises. ‘That just saved me a couple of hundred pounds on buying a new Switch,’ she told everyone, and Sachin proudly added another chalk mark to the board on the wall.

‘She means we just saved another console from ending up in a rubbish dump,’ McIntyre called out, as he set about repairing an old coffee machine from the nineties.

‘Twenty-two repairs completed today,’ Sachin said, sitting back down. ‘And a good few quid in donations.’

‘And we’ve a full till here,’ added Senga.

‘We’ll need it for more zippers, and thread for the sewing machines,’ Roz chipped in before anyone else could claim it.

‘We’re almost out of glacé cherries and bicarb for the scones,’ Rhona put in.

‘Could do with a bit more silver solder, actually. And some paraloid B-72, and some chaser’s pitch, come to think of it,’ added McIntyre, scratching behind his ear.

There was always something the shed was running short on, meaning donations were immediately ploughed back into the community, just as McIntyre had intended when setting the place up.

Ally had been rubbing away the ache in her lower back from hunching over her workbench and was making her way to the door to turn off the neon sign when two men approached from the courtyard, police officers, both with serious, straight-lipped expressions.

‘Um… Dad?’ Ally called back into the shed.

‘Charlie McIntyre?’ the tallest of the men asked. He wore a black chequered cap and a high viz vest over his black uniform.

Ally stood back to let them pass. The smaller, younger man glanced at her with brown, wary eyes. He was dressed in all black and was hanging back a little, letting his colleague take charge.

‘That’ll be me,’ Ally’s dad identified himself, pulling his soldering goggles from the top of his head.

‘I’m Chief Inspector Edwyn. My colleague here is Special Constable Beaton. We’d like to have a word, sir, about your…’ He cast his hand around as though he wasn’t quite sure what kind of setup this was. ‘Repair business?’

‘Anything you want to say, the volunteers can hear it too,’ McIntyre replied genially.

‘In that case, I’d be grateful if you locked the doors,’ said Edwyn.

‘Sorry, but what’s this about?’ Ally chirruped, stepping between the Inspector and her father, her already frayed nerves zinging with alarm.

Sachin was locking them all in, having made sure there were no customers left hanging about the courtyard.

The Special Constable took exception to Ally challenging his senior officer and asked if she’d give his colleague ‘a wee bit of space, please, miss.’

Edwyn pressed on, undeterred. ‘We’ve reason to believe that you may have received and processed stolen property.’

This set the Gifford sisters off in vehement protest about how they’d done no such thing.

‘That doesnae sound very likely,’ Sachin chimed in, and even Cary Anderson put on a show of silent indignation, shaking his head and tutting at the very suggestion.

‘What evidence have you got to come in here bandying around accusations like that?’ Ally snapped, now facing down the brown-eyed man with a badge on his pocket confirming his name and rank, Jamie Beaton, Special Police Constable.

Edwyn was taking a plastic wallet full of images from under his arm, which drew the volunteers in a crowd around him to get a glimpse, except for Willie and Peaches who hadn’t dared move and were surreptitiously filming everything on their phones to show their friends at uni.

Roz came to stand beside her husband and, taking one glimpse at the pictures, her face fell.

‘Ah!’ said McIntyre.

‘Ah, indeed,’ the Chief Inspector echoed.

In his hands were stills from the Highland Spotlight programme that had aired the night before; close-ups of McIntyre’s hands and the laser as he carefully erased the engravings on those fine pieces of jewellery the day the news crew visited back in May.

‘Elaine,’ McIntyre tolled.

‘I’m going to need you to tell me everything you can about the whereabouts of that jewellery, sir.

Its rightful owner happened to be watching TV last night and spotted her late mother’s stolen possessions in your fair hands; some eight pieces of very expensive gold, silver and platinum jewellery taken from the family home in a robbery last Hogmanay. ’

‘You sound like you think Dad’s somehow to blame,’ Ally said, her voice surprisingly loud and pitchy, dodging the Special Constable to get at Edwyn.

‘Honestly, miss, it’d be best for everyone if you took a step back and let the Chief Inspector go about his job,’ Jamie Beaton said, reaching a hand towards her arm but not making contact.

‘It’s a very serious crime to be found in receipt of stolen goods,’ Edwyn went on. ‘Deliberately defacing such goods so as to disguise their provenance is also highly illegal,’ he added, not looking away from McIntyre whose ears were turning a little pink at the tips.

‘Dad couldn’t have known they were stolen!’ Ally yelped, still trying to dodge Beaton and address Edwyn directly.

‘The lassie came back for them, didn’t she?’ Ally’s father said with a gulp, looking to Sachin for confirmation.

Sachin was already way ahead of everyone and was producing his records – thank goodness he was as good a recordkeeper as he was a busybody.

‘That she did. See here.’ He showed the more senior policeman.

‘She collected them the same day she dropped them off, at two thirty to be precise. Left no tip in the jar.’

‘So it looks like you owe Dad an apology,’ Ally blurted, out of sheer relief, but evidently she wasn’t done yet.

Angrily, she went on. ‘We’re trying to do good here, but you waltz in like he’s some kind of criminal.

Did you actually watch the news programme last night? They called Dad a local hero!’

The Inspector turned to his younger colleague and gave him a meaningful nod, sending Jamie into an immediate response.

‘If you don’t calm down and step back, I’ll have to put you in the van for attempting to impede an officer in going about his investigations.’

Ally stared hard at Special Constable Jamie Beaton.

He was about her age, a couple of inches taller than her, with dark hair to go with his dark eyes and a clean-shaven, probably-works-out-a-fair-bit look about him.

Ally noticed his throat move as he swallowed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a much lower voice. ‘But please just pipe down.’

Edwyn had moved on and was asking questions about CCTV (the repair shop couldn’t afford anything like that), and informing everyone he’d need to collect witness statements and descriptions of the woman (Senga and Rhona were clambering over one another to offer their assistance), and he wanted to know whether McIntyre had indeed removed every trace of the engravings as that was going to make tracing the jewellery incredibly hard.

McIntyre had probably unwittingly quadrupled their street value.

‘Engraved jewellery is notoriously hard to shift,’ Edwyn crowed as he took out his notebook. ‘You must be far more vigilant in future. All of you.’ He cast a stern eye around the volunteers.

Peaches and Willie still hadn’t moved from their spot in the sewing corner and looked at one another scoffingly like they were hardly likely to be asked to fence stolen curtains any time soon.

‘Did you get a good look at the woman, miss…?’ Jamie asked Ally, taking her to one side while the café women tried to ply his colleague with baking and coffee, both of which Edwyn refused.

‘Miss McIntyre,’ she replied. ‘I mean Allyson McIntyre. No, just Ally. Umm, let me see, the woman? I… I don’t know.’ Ally brought a hand to her cheek, trying hard to recall her.

‘You were here when she brought the jewels in?’ Jamie pressed, with what she interpreted as a soft Lowlands burr, quite posh to her ears. Edinburgh, maybe?

‘I suppose so, only it… wasn’t a very good day for me.’

‘Oh?’ He had his pad and pencil poised in his hands.

‘I was distracted with… something else.’

‘And what was that?’ he wanted to know, his expression serious.

‘Does it matter?’

He fixed her with a dogged look.

‘I was getting dumped, OK? And on what I thought was going to be a lovely, romantic first anniversary, if you must know! It was right there, where you’re standing.’

Jamie Beaton glanced down at his heavy black boots and, somewhat apologetically, took a deliberate step closer to the wall, which Ally thought was odd, and possibly a tiny bit endearing.

‘Any other details you can remember?’ His voice was softer now.

‘I think the woman had a long coat on?’ she said. ‘Beige, maybe. With a furry trim, and embroidered all over. She didn’t look like a robber, if that’s what you’re asking.’ Now that she came to think of it, the woman had looked stressed and tired.

‘We suspect she was a girlfriend of one of a gang of robbers. If you think there’s no robberies in the Highlands just because it’s pretty here, you’ve got another think coming. And criminals can look just the same as me and you.’

This was beginning to feel like a lecture, and Ally instinctively drew back her neck. Who did he think he was? This outsider, fresh from some desk job in the south, no doubt. She wasn’t some na?ve country bumpkin.

If he could read her annoyance he didn’t show it. ‘If you saw her again, would you recognise her?’ he said plainly.

‘I…’ Ally began with optimism, before giving it up as a lost cause. ‘No, I doubt it.’ Her shoulders slumped.

That woman might have been vulnerable or afraid, or at least put upon by some bad boyfriend using her to run risky errands for him.

What use had Ally been to her that day? None at all.

She should have noticed something was obviously dodgy.

She could have helped her if she had kept her wits about her, been smarter, instead of getting in a tizz waiting for Gray to pop the question.

But then again, she’d learned recently how she was absolutely no judge of character. Oh aye, that she now knew.

Images of how that day had played out returned to her now: that poor woman coming in, her head down as though to hide her face; Dad, as proud as punch, working away at the jewellery in front of the camera lens; Gray tossing her aside as though twelve months meant nothing at all.

‘Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything at all?’ the man’s voice broke through her thoughts.

‘I told you what I saw,’ Ally said, pained, and far too snappy.

Jamie gave her a dismayed look, crumpling his full lips, bringing down his brows. ‘Right. Well, if you think of anything, or if you ever suspect someone is coming in here trying to trick you into disguising hot property again…’

‘All right! I get it,’ she interrupted, gripping her elbows in a defensive hug. ‘We’ll be extra vigilant.’

Across the room, Edwyn was echoing this warning, going on and on about how they’d be keeping an eye on the repair shop and how, if they so much as removed one padlock and chain from a bicycle or cleaned UV security marker from a laptop, he’d know about it.

‘Your friend could work on his dealing-with-the-public-skills,’ Ally muttered, watching the Chief Inspector holding forth. ‘Isn’t that something they teach you in police school?’

She cast her eyes down Jamie’s uniform, considering asking if he was still in police school, or if he’d had any training at all. Were Special Constables proper police officers or just well-meaning helpers?

‘He’s only doing his job.’ Jamie was putting his notebook away. ‘Trying to keep the Cairngorms National Park a safe place for everyone.’

‘Before we spoke to you, we met the news crew,’ Edwyn was telling the room. ‘We reviewed their footage, looking for images of the woman. Sadly, there weren’t any.’

‘That’s a pity,’ said McIntyre.

‘I hate to say it,’ Jamie all but whispered to Ally, ‘but that Füssli, the reporter? She was on this stolen property thing like a wasp at a picnic. I wouldn’t be surprised if you found yourselves back on the telly by bedtime.’

Ally only nodded, absorbing this information. She didn’t want to react in case her dad noticed. He could find out this particular bit of news if, or more likely when, Füssli broke it. He’d already had one big shock, and Ally had done more than enough overreacting for one day as well.

It was dawning on her that she’d done it again; made a fool of herself in public.

Still, the way that Chief Inspector had spoken to her dad had really been too much.

Charlie McIntyre was nothing but kind and helpful, if a little clutter-brained, but his heart was in the right place, and the officers had stridden in here like they were busting the HQ of some Scottish crime syndicate, or at least it had felt that way to Ally in the moment.

She felt herself shrinking. She wasn’t good at judging things these days. Her moods were erratic. It wasn’t a nice feeling, not being able to trust her own judgement. Gray’s parting gifts to her had been low self-esteem and chronic trust issues. She was jumpy these days too. She hated it.

‘We’ll be off, then,’ Edwyn announced.

Jamie Beaton fell in behind him on his way to the door. Sachin ran to turn the key and let the pair out into the sunshine, and the whole shed took a deep breath of the cool outside air.

As he left, Jamie threw Ally a sympathetic smile that made her feel even worse somehow, and later that evening, thinking back, she’d cringed with shame, trying to forget how defensive she’d been under the firm, calm scrutiny of his brown eyes.