The Low Road (20 page)

“There will be a major story in tomorrow's
Herald
. No names mentioned—this time—but I was there on the Isle of Cumbrae and have written an article about the fracas.”

Joanne had been listening to the first part of McAllister's tale, then decided it was not a conversation she wanted to hear more
of. “My bedtime,” she said, and came across, laid a hand on McAllister's sleeve, smiling at Rob and Don and saying, “It's lovely to have the old crew together again.”

“Aye, it is,” Don replied.

Rob stood. Hugged her. “Sleep tight,” he said.

She smiled. “With these pills the doctor gave me, I'm out like a light.”

It was a reminder to them all of her condition. And Rob's. When he and McAllister had gone to Joanne's rescue, he had inadvertently killed a woman. That memory was not gone, though it was well buried.

Hearing the sound of the bedroom door shutting, McAllister relaxed. He refilled Don's glass and his own. Rob helped himself to more wine. The alcohol worked its magic.

“There might also be a small piece on an attack on me outside my mother's flat,” McAllister added.

“Jings,” Rob said, “you've been busy.”

“You'd better fill us in,” Don told him.

McAllister gave a quick description of the crime scene in Glasgow, the turf wars over protection rackets, loan-sharking, illegal bookmaking, and illegal boxing matches.

“I thought thon fights had died out long since,” Don said. “Except in Ireland.”

Giving Don and Rob the details about the boxing club fire and about the retired boxer who hid Jimmy McPhee and paid with his life, he then told them of the ex-boxer Jock McBride on the island.

“I remember reading about him,” Don commented. “He was good.”

“Jimmy's old friends are doing their best to help Jimmy. Whether all this ties in with the bare-knuckle matches or not, we don't know.”

Don noted the “we” but said nothing.

McAllister then described the fight in Millport, and Jimmy's escape on the fishing coble with Mary Ballantyne.

Rob was enjoying the tale. “It's like the plot of
Kidnapped
!”

McAllister left out the part about the donkey. It all seemed surreal enough without the donkey, and that was a story he wanted to laugh about with Glasgow friends, friends who knew and understood the city. And Mary.

To outsiders, it would sound bizarre: a fight with cutthroat razors, in front of at least seventy witnesses and a Salvation Army band, and no one intervening. In the city, in the impoverished, overcrowded, insanitary streets and alleyways and closes, when fights broke out—even fights to the death—if they took place in public in the daylight, everyone would look the other way, and say nothing. Everyone, the police included, accepted this as the code of the streets.

No wonder the city fathers want to clear the slums and move people out to the new high-rise schemes on the fringes of the city
, McAllister had heard more than once from nice respectable middle-class professionals in their nice respectable tree-filled suburbs.

“As to who is after Jimmy,” McAllister continued, “no one knows—”

“Except your old pal Gerry Dochery—” Don said.

“And he's not likely to tell, is he?” Rob asked.

“I know.” McAllister sighed. He didn't want to think about Gerry Dochery. The trip to Millport had reminded him of the good times. After winning his scholarship to Glasgow High School he had seen Gerry only twice—at his father's funeral, and at the funeral of his younger brother. Nothing of that funeral had registered, so even if he had talked to Gerry, he would not remember. But he was glad Gerry had come—for his mother's sake.

“Although it seems to connect with boxing, and it's most
likely about money, I can't find any reason for someone wanting to kill—harm—Jimmy.” He changed the word when he registered the shock on Rob's face.

“Not a good idea if you're wanting your money,” Don said, staring at his hands, which seemed to be moving with a life of their own. Something was bothering him and he couldn't fathom what.

“Kill him?” Rob asked, his voice low, flat, his stare somewhere beyond the cypress tree outside the bay window.

“I'm sure it's only threats.” McAllister saw that Rob was not reassured.

By now the light had dimmed, and the first stars were beginning to pop up in the washed-out navy-blue sky. Don sighed and stretched his shoulders. “Time to be off to ma bed. You'll speak to Jenny McPhee, will you?”

“Tomorrow,” McAllister promised.

He saw them out. He watched them walk out into the street, Rob to his motorbike, Don towards the hill and his house in Church Street.

He went back to the sitting room to clear up the glasses. But once again he was waylaid by a final dram, a book, and a record. With the volume low, the piano player reached him in a way nothing else could. Thelonious Monk, “ 'Round Midnight.” It was a tune of loneliness, of aloneness, a tune that, on first hearing, had become McAllister's theme song.

Past three o'clock, nearer to four, he awoke. His back and neck were stiff from sleeping in the armchair. The book had fallen to the floor and the bookmark had fallen out—something he hated—the whisky decanter was empty, and dawn was sending out the hesitant glow over the northern hills enveloping the town.

He stood, then changed his mind; instead of heading
upstairs, he made for the sofa, pulled down the multicolored blanket Granny Ross had crocheted, and went back to sleep.

• • •

Next evening, after supper, he excused himself, telling his mother and Joanne and the girls that he had to meet with Jenny McPhee.

“Can I come?” Annie asked.

McAllister looked surprised.

“I heard she's a witch and I want to talk to her because I'm writing a composition about witches for history,” Annie explained.

His mother's eyebrows were raised. Joanne was trying not to laugh. And seeing that Annie was completely earnest, he said, “Maybe another time.” He saw she was about to argue and held up his hand. “Not tonight, Annie. But I will mention it. Promise.”

As he was walking into the hallway to fetch his hat, he overheard his mother say to Joanne, “She's quite a character, your eldest.” But her tone was not disapproving.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings
, he thought as he left, not at all looking forward to the encounter with Jenny McPhee.

• • •

“So you've no idea where our Jimmy is,” Jenny stated, coming straight to the point, letting McAllister know her displeasure before he'd had a chance to take off his hat, greet her, or order a drink.

“I was told he is safe,” he said. Then he sat down, asked after her health, inquired if she wanted a drink, then ordered. Since their meeting last week, he thought he could detect extra lines on the map on her forehead.

“Don't worry, McAllister.” She'd been letting him squirm before telling him, “I know where ma Jimmy is, or at least in what part o' the world.”

“Perthshire?”

“Aye, and in a castle, no less.”

McAllister began to laugh. He had guessed a tinker's camp. He had no idea Mary would put Jimmy in the family castle. But it made sense. Whoever was looking for him was obviously intelligent, would know where the Traveling clans gathered, and might even risk an attack there. Who would guess that a McPhee of the road would be hiding in a castle owned by one of the most illustrious families of the land, a family with more lawyers than the Nuremberg Trials?

“So how did you find out where Jimmy is?”

Jenny glared at him. “My Jimmy knows his letters. And I can read.”
A wee bit, anyhow
, she was thinking. “And there's such a thing as the Royal Mail even in Muir of Ord.”

“Is he coming home?”

“That's where you come in,” said Jenny. “He needs to know it's safe. Jimmy says thon lass Mary told him you're the only one who can find out.”

Thanks, Mary
, he thought.

“All this would never have come to our door if Jimmy hadn't . . .” She downed her whisky, obviously a Laphroaig, in one swallow.

“So you do know what's going on.”

“No I don't. I'm only guessing.”

Or it's the legendary second sight.
Then he remembered Annie's request. “Annie, Joanne's daughter, wants to ask you about witches.”

It was Jenny's turn to laugh. “Does she now? Well, tell her I'll call round one day, see how her mother is doing, and we can all have a right good chat.”

The thought of Jenny McPhee, Granny Ross, and his mother in the same house made him think of cats in a sack. “That would be grand, Jenny. I'll let Annie know.”

When he left, Jenny McPhee called through the hatch to
the main bar for another dram. Then she sat back to think. She well knew why all the trouble was happening. But it was now clear McAllister knew nothing.
Should I tell him?
She considered the price her son was paying to be well beyond his obligation to Joanne Ross. But Jimmy had told her it had been his choice to help Joanne, then and now. His parting words to his mother,
and not a word to McAllister,
she remembered well.

“What's done is done,” Jenny muttered to herself, pulling her coat tight as though an evil wind had somehow managed to penetrate the thick walls of the small room, in the drear bar, in an insalubrious district, in the small Highland town.

“Where's thon whisky?” she shouted.

“Haud your horses, it's coming.”

She looked up, saw her second son standing in the doorway. She nodded.

“Took your time, Jimmy lad.” Her hand was trembling as she accepted the glass.

B
reakfast was chaotic with two grandmothers vying for the cooker and the frying pan, two children arguing over whose turn it was to set the table, and Joanne in the sitting room, practicing scales on the piano.

“I have some work to catch up on,” McAllister said and left for the peace and quiet at the
Gazette.

On the staircase to his office he smelled carbolic soap. It must have been strong, as his sense of smell was not the best, being a smoker of long standing. As he opened the door he was greeted with a curt “I haven't finished here” from the cleaner whom he had inherited when he became the first outsider appointed as editor. He didn't know her name; he seldom arrived in the office at the ungodly hour—for a journalist—of eight o'clock in the morning.

He walked back down to the High Street. He stood at the top of Bridge Street, looking down towards the stone arches of the bridge.

Soon to be demolished
, he remembered. Although he knew how inconvenient the old bridge was, the newfangled plans to demolish the bridge and replace it with another of no architectural merit whatsoever pained him, as did the plans to destroy the lovely but inconvenient rows of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses and offices and shops, and replace them with hideous, to his mind, boxes.

It will soon be the nineteen-sixties, the planners were quoted as saying, we have to move with the times.

Aye
, McAllister thought,
but at what cost to our heritage, our history?

He turned back once more, making for the office. Once more he climbed the stairs and went into the reporters' room. The smell here was of stale tobacco, but that he didn't notice.

He sat. He rolled a sheet of paper into a typewriter and stared at it for minutes. He was lost. He felt he was neither here nor in Glasgow, not at the
Gazette
or the
Herald.
His home was no longer the refuge he looked forward to at the end of a day, where excitement was a book and music. He was not sleeping well, not even sure which bed was his. And he dared not think about Joanne. The thought he couldn't rid himself of—s
he's not herself
—was even stronger after a trip away.

Thoughts of Mary Ballantyne made his stomach curdle. “For God's sakes, McAllister, grow up,” he muttered to himself.

“Talking to yourself, first sign of madness, you know.” Rob McLean was also in early.

McAllister looked at him. The cheery, handsome former boy-reporter was now a fully qualified journalist. And a man.
And he is no longer the old Rob either
. McAllister saw how thin he was, how his cheekbones had hollowed out, how his eyes seemed less blue, his hair less yellow, and, most of all, he was smoking.

“It's early for you,” was all McAllister said.

“We weren't expecting you back so soon, so lots to do.”

Don McLeod ambled in. “McAllister,” he said. Now three cigarettes were contaminating the air of the narrow high-ceilinged room. “You heard about Jimmy McPhee?”

“I heard he's safe.”