The Low Road

by A. D. Scott

  “I’ll hunker down in a corner of the newsroom, if I may?”

  “Aye. I owe you after the last story you shared. It must have been hard to write up a vicious crime story concerning your own fiancée.” Sandy said no more, sensing that a discussion of the events involving the Gazette reporter Joanne Ross was not welcome. Not yet, anyhow, he thought, if ever; a man for keeping his own council is John McAllister.

  • • •

  McAllister was at a borrowed desk in the newsroom, considering who amongst his former contacts might know of Jimmy McPhee, when a young woman, small, wiry, with long hair the color of sloe berries, strode into the newsroom and took a notebook from the desk next to his.

  “You new here?” she asked. She looked closely at him.

  He saw aqua-blue Celtic eyes, similar to wee Jean’s china doll’s eyes, the painted staring ones that gave him the creeps.

  She saw a middle-aged man, handsome in a raddled way, with navy-blue eyes, and black hair now greying at the temples, looking back.

  He held her stare, amused that she was obviously calculating if he was someone she needed to know.

  “I used to work here a few years back,” he told her. “John McAllister.”

  “Mary Ballantyne.”

  “I’ve heard about you,” they said in unison. She laughed.

  “You first,” he said.

  “Our esteemed editor told me of you, and I like the stories you send from up in the wilds. Sorry about the spot of bother your reporter had to endure.”

  Spot of bother was not how he would have put it. But he didn’t elaborate. “Goes with the job.”

  “Tell me about it.” Her voice was posh Scottish. Her confidence also. She was clearly the product of a private girls’ school. But there was a touch of a Highland accent, not Edinburgh.

  “I was wondering if you could help me track down someone from the Highlands. Jimmy McPhee, last heard of doing thirty days in Barlinnie, now released.”

  “I know the name . . .” Her eyes opened a fraction wider as a recollection popped up. “He’s a tinker, is he?”

  “His mother would prefer the term Traveler.”

  “This is Scotland, McAllister. Not likely they’ll ever get the respect of ‘Traveler.’ ” She was giving it some thought. “I’ve heard that name recently, but I can’t remember where. I’ll ask around.”

  “I’m here today and tomorrow. Leave on Sunday.”

  “Right. Good to meet you, McAllister.” And she was off, waving off his call of “Thanks,” walking past the subs’ desk, where she stopped for a brief word before swinging a leather bag with a long strap over her shoulder and, with nary a look back, making her way out the door where she had just come in.

  “So you’ve met the star reporter,” a voice said from across the room. “Make the most of it, she won’t be here amongst us mere plebs for long.” There was a bitterness in the man’s voice that McAllister put down to jealously or unrequited love. A glance at the man and his beer belly made him change his mind on the second option.

  “Reporter, is she?” McAllister asked, knowing the answer.

  “Chief crime reporter, according to her,” was the reply. “And her no’ that long out of university. Has all the right connections is why,” he said to an unasked question. “And I don’t mean street connections. More wi’ the top brass, if you get ma drift, her family being who they are.”

  The phone on his desk started to ring. McAllister knew it wouldn’t be for him but answered regardless, wanting no more conversation with the fellow. He was right, so he transferred the call back to the switchboard, feeling bad that he hadn’t called Joanne. He knew he should but reasoned he had only been away one night and the conversation was too private to have with the radar-eared journalist listening in. I’ll call her from the phone box later on, he promised himself.

  Guilt assuaged, he made his way to the newspaper library and archives. He put in the request for all recent editions dealing with gangland activity.

  “Can you no’ narrow it down a bit?” a peevish wee moorhen of a man asked.

  “Recent stories from Mary Ballantyne, say, the last six months?” McAllister suggested.

  “I’ll make that front pages, then, else you’ll be here aa’ day.”

  Two hours later, McAllister had a pub lunch of pie and peas with his former editor and friend. McAllister made a comment about what the world was coming to when a pub served food. Sandy agreed it did not go down well with the purists, and both agreed that the world was indeed changing. Rapidly.

  In the late afternoon on the now busy editorial floor, McAllister sat at the desk, once more engrossed in the many articles written by Mary Ballantyne. He admired her writing, as well as her research. He knew from the stories that she must have contacts in the police as well as amongst the criminal fraternity.

  “You still here?” It was said with a laugh.

  He looked up. Same ice-blue eyes, same blue-black hair, same grin greeted him.

  “It seems your Jimmy McPhee was indeed in the Bar L. He did his thirty days, was released, and no one’s heard of him since.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So what’s the story, McAllister? One of my contacts says there’s a reward out for information on this McPhee fellow.”

  A current of cold ran down McAllister’s spine. “Reward?”

  Mary Ballantyne looked at him, and in that look he saw she was older than her years. A few years out of university she might be, but she’d been around.

  “Maybe not reward, but it will be ‘considered a favor’ if news of him is passed on.” Her voice went hard. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  He understood. Sharing information went two ways, and she had done her share.

  “Maybe nothing, but . . . An old family friend, he came to see my mother, wanting my help. Seems his son might be involved in . . .” He couldn’t think how to phrase it without slighting his childhood friend. “Might be on the wrong side of the law.” He saw her eyebrows, eyebrows the shape of arched bows, raised in a what else question. “Mr. Dochery . . .”

  “Gerry Dochery?”

  “The father. Do you know him?” He was wondering if she had the second sight.

  “Gerry Dochery, the son, is one of the hardest hard men in this city of hard men.”

  “Oh.”

  “Right. Oh. This calls for a drink.”

  Once again Mary Ballantyne surprised him. She led him not to the local journalists’ hangout but to a discreet cocktail bar in the square where the Stock Exchange building took up central position, roads on three sides, the outward, columned, moneyed facade looking towards George Square, the side opposite the bar facing the Athenaeum, home of the colleges of music and drama. The bar was in the basement of a grand early-Victorian building and was all soft lighting and soft seats. The clientele wore suits, and McAllister suspected that smoking black Sobranie cigarettes would not be out of place.

  “No self-respecting journalist would be seen dead here,” she said as he brought the drinks—whisky with a dash of water for her, neat for him.

  Looking around, he agreed; it was all city types, moneyed, or intellectuals, definitely not moneyed, but with style.

  She took one of his proffered cigarettes, not noticing or not commenting on the sweetish taste of the tobacco. She started to speak without filling him in on the current state of the gang wars of Glasgow. He’s from Dennistoun, he will know, was her thinking.

  “This past year it’s been more than tribal, religious stuff,” she said. “Only not everyone believes me. The police certainly don’t. Or, more likely, don’t want to know—easier to pass it off as the usual nutters. The name Gerry Dochery has been heard around for a while, but in this last year even more so. He has his own men, but he’s also an enforcer for hire. Only trouble is no one knows, or if they do know aren’t telling, who it is he’s enforcing for. I’ve been investigating for the past six months, and I’m no nearer finding the name of th
e head man of this particular gang than when I started. But whoever he is, he’s a right evil bastard.” She said all this without sipping her drink, without puffing her cigarette, without looking anywhere but straight at him.

  McAllister could feel the force of her concentration, hear her intellect and, yes, her courage; it was a brave or foolhardy person who mined the blackness for information on Glasgow’s criminal fraternity. Slashing a face open with a cutthroat razor was just for starters when someone was found asking too many questions, or even suspected of it.

  “What particular area are they working on?”

  “All the contracts for the slum clearance, the new housing schemes, the rebuilding of the city.”

  “That’s huge.”

  She nodded. “Aye, it is.” She looked at him. She’d shown hers, it was his turn. “So. What do you have on Gerry Dochery?”

  “Mr. Dochery, the father, was my dad’s best friend. Wee Gerry . . .”

  She ignored the sobriquet, knowing “wee” meant either he was huge or the son, and in this case both.

  “We grew up together. His dad and mine were firemen at the same station. We stood out, both being tall, and we sort of looked out for each other. Gerry’s mum died when he was wee, so my mother helped out when she could. Once, on the Fair Fortnight, we all went on holiday together, to Millport. When we were boys, we hung around the fire station, always trying to cadge a shot at pretending to drive the engine, or sliding down the pole. You know.” He paused. Tried the whisky. Was pleased at how good it was. She was waiting, and again he knew she was good; a good reporter knew how to listen.

  “I won a scholarship to Glasgow High School, escaping the Jesuits, escaping Dennistoun,” he told her. In this he was telling her which side of the Glasgow divide, religious and social, he’d been born into. “Gerry went on to the local, but he left at thirteen.” He did not have to explain how decisive a rent in a friendship that meant, especially for boys from a hard, harsh neighborhood like Dennistoun. “We never really met up much after that. But when my father, and all on his engine, were killed in the Clydeside Blitz, Mr. Dochery, a good man, kept an eye on my mother, as I was too busy being the big-shot journalist.”

  McAllister surprised himself by saying that, but it was the truth, and something about Mary demanded the truth.

  “And this McPhee fellow, he a friend of yours?”

  “Kind of.” He was nodding his head slightly as he tried to sum up his relationship with Jimmy McPhee. “Let’s say there’s a mutual respect. For him and his mother.”

  She understood. The Traveling people were a part of Scottish folklore, past and present. Having grown up in the country near Perth she knew the farms and fruit growers could never harvest the crops without the tinkers. She also knew that the Travelers were too different, too separate in their language, their way of life, ever to form close relationships with outsiders. She also knew well the widespread prejudice against them.

  “McAllister, I’ll do what I can to help you find your tinker friend, but if Gerry Dochery, or whoever he’s working for, finds him first, it will be nasty.”

  They both took a good mouthful of whisky to swallow that thought.

  “Maybe you should ask your old pal Gerry yourself.”

  “Maybe.” He was reluctant.

  She sensed it. “Keep me in the picture. Here’s my home number if anything comes up.”

  The way she said this, he knew he would regret it if he ever crossed her. He nodded, asked her if she wanted another drink. She did. He fetched them.

  They toasted crime and punishment. She asked about his time in the war in Spain, teasing him by saying she’d studied his reporting in modern history at university. She wanted to know about Paris after the liberation. He told her of the artists and writers he’d met. Of the cafés and art galleries and music venues he’d frequented.

  She told him of her very proper family, her father dying in Thai-Burma railway as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, her isolated childhood in a freezing, almost derelict, castle in Perth-shire, her even harsher isolation in a girls’ school where the pupils were expected to study hard but not too hard, the principal purpose of their education being to marry well.

  Not once did the twenty-year age difference, and the class divide, and her being at the start of her career and him beginning to feel in the twilight of his, make any difference to their ability to talk and talk and talk.

  It was closing time before he knew it.

  “See you around,” Mary said as they parted on the pavement outside the bar. Without a wave or a thanks, she was gone up the street. From a distance her small figure looked as though she was speed-skating.

  And he hadn’t phoned Joanne. And now it was too late.

  • • •

  It was Saturday morning, two days since he’d left, before he made the phone call to Joanne. He’d bought the Saturday papers, and then found that the local newsagent cum corner shop no longer stocked his brand of cigarettes.

  “You’ve been away that long,” Mr. Cruickshank reminded him.

  When McAllister asked for change for the phone, the newsagent scolded him, saying, “Wi’ you now living in the back o’ beyond, the least you can do is put in a phone for your auld ma.”

  McAllister agreed. “If you can persuade her to have one put in, I’d be delighted to pay.”

  They grinned; this was a man who had known McAllister, a man who, with his wife, had kept an eye on his mother through wartime and widowhood and the death of her son. He teased, “Seein’ it’s yerself . . .” and counted out florins and pennies to the value of ten shillings.

  McAllister went to the call box on the corner that did not smell of urine, it being the newsagent’s wife’s contribution to the community to sluice it out every morning.

  Annie answered the phone. “Why didn’t you call last night? We were waiting.”

  He took no offence at being lectured by a child, feeling he deserved it.

  “Sorry. I got caught up with some colleagues.” He knew his excuse was pathetic. “How’s your mum?”

  “No change.” There was a clear sigh from the phone receiver. “Wait a minute, I’ll get her.”

  “I’ve lost my book, and I can’t decide if we should have fish or a nice bit of lamb for dinner . . .” He winced at the lack of a “hello” or “how are you?” or acknowledgment that he was not at home.

  “Maybe you could stop by the butcher on St. Steven’s Brae,” she continued.

  He heard Annie’s voice call out, “Mum, McAllister is in Glasgow.”

  “Sorry, sorry, you’re not here, are you?” Joanne’s voice trailed away. Her voice was light and sweet and breathy, and it terrified him. It was as though there was no substance to her. As though she were a glass with no contents.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. “Can I bring you anything? Books? Magazines?”

  “You come back safe,” she said, “that’s enough.”

  “Are you well? Are the girls well? Is everyone looking after you?”

  “You’ve only been gone a night.” She hadn’t noticed it had been two. “I know, bring me music, Scottish music. See if that new singer I heard on the wireless, Moira Anderson, has made any records. Or that singer on the television, Kenneth McKellar.”

  Not to his taste, he loathed The White Heather Club, now Joanne’s favorite program, but he said, “I’ll go shopping today.”

  “I have to go now, the roses need watering. ’Bye, McAllister.” And she was gone.

  Gone before he had a chance to reply, a chance to connect with the once laughing, teasing, woman he loved. He was left holding the receiver and wishing that candid news of Joanne’s health, her state of mind, would mysteriously transmit through the ether, reassuring him all was well. Or otherwise. He thought of calling back. He didn’t. He considered calling the Gazette and asking Don McLeod his opinion. But didn’t. He left the call box, knowing that only thirty-six hours had passed. It seemed so much more.

>   The miles between himself and his fiancée were not the only distance between them. He accepted this as a consequence of her injuries. His fading enthusiasm for the post of editor of a local newspaper, in a place so foreign to a Glaswegian it might as well be Iceland, was not a new sensation. But never before was it so plain.

  Unable to resolve his unease, he did not wait for a bus. Instead, in unusually clear sunshine, he strode out for the Herald office. The light showed just how shabby the city was; the coal-smoke-encrusted sandstone facings of the elegant but intimidating architecture around George Square seemed more pigeon-splatted than he remembered. The empty spaces around Queen Street train station, where a stray wartime bomb had fallen, were bright with fireweed. And all around, morning traffic was building up, and the crowds on the pavements were moving quickly, in and out, shoppers busy shopping, before the Saturday noon closing time.

  He made his way down Buchanan Street, between the substantial buildings with ornate doorways and foyers with carved stonework around the windows of the upper floors invisible to the passer-by. The offices of the law firms and businessmen and insurance companies loomed over the street, turning it into a canyon of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture.

  He first stopped at the tobacconist he knew kept his brand. That done, he visited his favorite record and sheet music shop. He bought jazz for himself, the requested Moira Anderson for Joanne and, on a whim, also bought her a new recording of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

  Once more at his borrowed desk, he realized he should have bought something for the girls. Books, he decided. He was on his way out when he ran into Mary.

  “Where’re you off to?” she asked.

  “To the bookshop to buy presents for the girls.” Why he left out that they were his fiancée’s daughters he didn’t know. But he was aware of being equivocal.

  “How old are they?”

  “Nine and eleven and a half.”

  “I’ll come with you. I’m good at choosing presents for girls.” She was remembering all the birthday presents from relatives who always underestimated her intelligence. “Besides, any excuse to spend time in a bookshop . . .” She laughed.