The Low Road

by A. D. Scott

  The man diagonally opposite McAllister winked. His wife, sitting across from him, kicked his foot and he looked away, but not before McAllister caught the you-are-one-lucky-bastard grin.

  Mary took an apple from her shoulder-bag satchel and offered it to McAllister, who shook his head in refusal. She polished it on her skirt. When she bit into it, juice dripped down her chin. With a full mouth she mumbled, “breakfast,” and continued to crunch on the apple until a slim core was all that was left. Then she stood, and on tiptoe, slid open the top window, threw out the core, and grinned at the five sets of eyes that had been watching her every move—and her legs, in the case of the henpecked husband. She sat back down and said, “That was a great night last night, McAllister,” and she punched him on the arm before curling up like the proverbial cat, saying, “Wake me up when we get there.”

  McAllister looked out the window, carefully examining the flat stretch of moorland above Kilmarnock, trying not to laugh but unable to hide a tremor in his shoulders. Mary Ballantyne, whatever next?

  The arrival of the train could have been as shambolic as the departure from Glasgow, but five minutes before Largs station, Mary woke and said, “I’ll get us a taxi to the pier. But we’ll have to be quick.”

  Quick she was. McAllister had to trot to keep up with her. Outside, she turned in the opposite direction of the queue already gathered at the taxi rank. Twenty yards on, she turned, stepped into the gutter, and whistled with two fingers, and with the other hand waved a ten-shilling note in the air. A taxi broke free from the herd and hurtled towards them.

  “The pier,” she said.

  “But that’s no distance!” the driver protested, looking back at the queue of porcine bookmakers, regretting not waiting for a better fare.

  “Keep the change, but give me a receipt,” she answered, waving the note. The driver grinned, said, “You’re on,” and drove them to the pier.

  The ferryboat to Millport was waiting, swaying gently in the slight estuarine swell. Mary left McAllister to buy the tickets at the booth. At the head of the gangplank a man in uniform and cap held out a hand for her ticket.

  She gestured back towards McAllister. “My uncle has them.”

  Seeing McAllister coming towards him and looking back at Mary as she ran up the ladder to the top deck, the man snorted to himself, “Uncle. That’ll be right.”

  McAllister joined her in prime position on the prow of the top deck. They leaned on the polished brass railings and watched the holidaymakers boarding with as much ceremony as a herd of cattle being loaded. Eventually the boat let out a deafening blast, answered by a chorus of shrieks from the passengers. The engines rumbled, the ropes were cast off, and the ferry left for the short trip to Millport.

  “This is nice,” Mary said, hugging herself.

  “Really?” McAllister answered. “If it wasn’t that a man’s life may be at stake, I’d agree with you. And we should talk about last night. I was thinking, maybe Jimmy . . .”

  “McAllister, I’ve had six months of bad news and evil people. So I intend to enjoy every second of this journey.” And with eyes half closed, she stretched her shoulders back as though pausing from the typewriter and a particularly fraught story, and took a slow deep breath of unpolluted salt-laden air.

  He knew he was being churlish, spoiling the crossing. For himself. Not for Mary. Through deep dark water, the ferry chugged, leaving a dancing wake of parallel foam lines. The mountains of Arran to their left, the low hills of the Isle of Cumbrae to the fore, and the Isle of Bute to their right, a celestial blue heaven and bright sunshine completed the picture-postcard day. From the passengers came constant background of squeals of delight, murmurs of appreciation and excitement; the short trip was a magical time-out from a hard life in a hard city.

  And McAllister was jealous of their ability to enjoy the moment; it felt like an eternity since he had been happy.

  Mary was as quick off the boat as she was boarding, and she insisted on another taxi trip—on expenses, she told him.

  They were deposited in the center of a town that was really a village strung along two adjoining crescent moon bays. Towards one end, a straggle of a cliff rose up to woodland. Below was a row of boardinghouses, many freshly whitewashed for the brief summer season, all with No Vacancy signs dangling from chains or handwritten and propped in the windows with unusually hideous holiday ornaments. The hoteliers might complain about the workload, but this was their chance to make money, as few came to the island outside of the brief Scottish summer.

  On the south side were substantial homes for the smart people, built in Victorian or Edwardian times for the wealthy of Glasgow to escape the city. There was a pier halfway along this bay. As the tide went out, leaving the sea paddling-depth deep, and returned rapidly, only the locals who knew the tides berthed there.

  McAllister thought they had about fifteen minutes before the hordes would descend from the buses bringing them from the ferry. “Let’s ask at the local shop, find out if anyone has seen Jimmy.”

  “Breakfast first,” Mary decided.

  “I’ve already . . .” McAllister began.

  But Mary was opening the tearoom door. A bell let off a loud ping. A young man with a very bad case of acne came out of the back, over to the window table, where Mary was examining the menu—one sheet of paper with four items. The waiter, probably a schoolboy forced to work in his mother’s café in the long summer holidays, stood with pencil poised, receipt book open, waiting for Mary to order.

  “Three bacon rolls, two mugs of tea,” Mary told him.

  The waiter wrote without speaking, without once looking at her, but managing a blush that matched the red scarf tying up her hair. He left with a grunt that might have been a thanks.

  “Three bacon rolls?” McAllister asked.

  “One’s for you. I need two. Heaven knows what else there’ll be to eat here, apart from fish and chips.” She was staring around the room, up at the ceiling, and out the window, taking in everything and everyone. “Isn’t it one of the rules of being a detective or a reporter? Eat when you can because you never know what might happen next?”

  McAllister laughed, and when the food arrived, he discovered he was hungry. The bacon rolls were exceptional, and the tea came in a pot, with a hot water jug and cups and saucers.

  “My mother would love this,” he told Mary.

  “Are you close?”

  Close—not a word he associated with his mother. As for love—that was a word he was never certain of, except when it came to his beloved jazz. Some of the Latin nations and their almost worshipful attitude towards mothers mystified him. But having been brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, he reflected, he should understand the cult of the mother and of the Virgin Mary.

  “I mystify her. I try my best, but I no longer fit in her world.” He was aware that for many years he had not tried his best; he had neglected her as he tried to put distance between his upbringing and his invented self. “She’s my mother, and she is a good soul. You?”

  Mary understood and told him, “I was my father’s girl, and I was—okay, am—a wee know-it-all . . .” She grinned as she said this. “I drive my mother crazy. But I understand why only too well.” She wiped the flour off the corners of her mouth with the back of her hand, leaned back, and said, “You need to give me a cigarette before I tell this story.”

  He was about to say You don’t smoke, then realized she needed the cigarette for a prop as much as for the nicotine.

  When they were both puffing away, she started. “My mother, since she was widowed, sees herself as half a woman. I get it, I really do, because I worshipped my father and miss him desperately. But it’s been more than a decade. I once asked her if she was trying to emulate Queen Victoria and mourn him for the rest of her life.” Mary laughed at herself, but McAllister could see her mouth tighten with regret. “My only excuse is that I was at university and thought I was the bee’s knees.

  “Anyhow, Mother rattles
around in the far too big house, everything exactly as it was when Father was alive. We’ve even kept the castle, for heaven’s sakes. All the furniture, the kitchens, even old jackets and wellie boots, are exactly as they were the last time we had a shoot on the estate. She’s unable, or unwilling, to change anything. It’s like a museum. The same in the city house. When I wanted to turn the basement into a flat, it was a huge battle. I won by threatening to move to London. So we continue to live together, in a distant kind of way.”

  She stubbed out the cigarette that had been sitting in the ashtray smoking away to itself. “Right. We haven’t all day. Tell me quickly about McPhee. He must be important for you to be chasing after him like this . . .What does he look like, for a start? He was very young—we both were—when I saw him.”

  “What about last night? The fight?”

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Sorry, very unladylike,” she said.

  “You’ve flour on your cheek.”

  “Bare-knuckle boxing. Right.” She took a sip of tea. “Very popular at the turn of the century, now mostly an Irish Traveler tradition of settling disputes . . .”

  “Aye, I know all that, but what about now, in Glasgow?”

  “McAllister, you know as well as me that anywhere there is poverty there is gambling. For some young men it’s not a question of honor, it’s hard cash, and, yes, I’ve heard of the fights, but it’s not as huge as it used to be.”

  “I thought bare-knuckle boxing had died out. But,” he reflected, “maybe this’s why Jimmy is in trouble, he was in Barlinnie for fighting. And I’ve no idea if he was involved in that game when he was a youngster.”

  “It would make sense if he was the one organizing the matches, maybe stepping on someone else’s turf. I’m assuming there’s big money gambled on the fights.”

  “Jimmy is rumored to be involved in gambling in the Highlands. But I always thought it was small scale.”

  “Well, he’s your friend. Don’t you suspect this could be what’s going on?”

  “That fight last night was cruel. They’d’ve stopped a dog fight sooner.” He did not like to think that a vendetta over bare-knuckle fighting was why he was helping Jimmy McPhee and his mother. “I have a friendship, of sorts, with Jimmy but . . .” It was as much the realization that he had few friends as trying to describe his relationship to Jimmy that had him grasping for words. “He’s like me, a loner.”

  “You mentioned his mother?”

  “A proud woman.”

  “I hope you’re not a romantic, McAllister. Not one of those hopeless writers or academics who idealize the ‘raggle-taggle Gypsies, oh.’ ”

  He laughed. “The last thing I’d call myself is romantic.”

  “I told you I grew up near Blairgowrie,” Mary continued. “I’ve seen the tinker camps, the bairns, the dogs, the carts and covered wagons. I know how the women struggle to feed everyone. I heard the men knocking on the kitchen door looking for work, chopping wood, mending fences, or kettles, anything for a couple o’ bob. And yes, I’ve heard the songs, the stories, told around the campfire after a day picking raspberries. I’ve even seen a bare-knuckle fight. It was hard and fast and horrible. But the next day, it was as though nothing had happened between the families.” She was picturing that night. Under stars, bonfire blazing, dogs barking, one minute they had been listening to singing, the next she was aware of shouts from a group of men on the edge of the campsite. She’d caught a glimpse of two men, naked to the waist, circling each other. When she saw what was happening, the gamekeeper’s wife, who had come with Mary to enjoy the singing, whisked her charge back home, saying, “Never ever mention we were here, your mother will make sure ma husband loses his job if you do.” Mary, at eleven, knew that even though her father wouldn’t mind, her mother would never let the couple stay on at the estate.

  “A Traveler’s life is a hard hard life, McAllister. Never romantic. And it’s changing.”

  “The twilight of the Celtic age,” he agreed.

  “Save us! You are a romantic.”

  McAllister did not want to discuss his lack of romanticism; it reminded him too much of how deficient he was around Joanne. And he was lost as to how to describe his Traveler friend. “Jimmy McPhee is small, but he’s taller than a jockey.”

  “An average Glasgow size?”

  “Aye.” He smiled. “His skin is outdoors dark. Eyes dark—he’s . . .” He was about to say “unmemorable”—which Jimmy McPhee was, unless you looked at him directly. That didn’t happen often, as Jimmy had a way of avoiding your eye. “If he wants to hide, he can stay hidden. If he wants to be noticed, which is seldom, you’ll know it.”

  “Clear as mud, McAllister.” Mary was laughing as she stood and walked to the door, leaving him to settle the bill.

  Once outside and into the bright of mid-morning, they found the beach and the pavements crowded.

  “Hold on,” Mary said, then dashed back into the café. He watched her as she spoke to the schoolboy waiter. He watched, saw her elicit at least half a dozen words from him, and what looked like a map drawn in the air with a pointing gesture to somewhere above the village.

  That’s why Mary Ballantyne is an ace reporter, he told himself.

  “Right,” she said when she came out. “First we try the beach.”

  McAllister shrugged, took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulders, then hurried to catch up with Mary. By the time he arrived she was deep in conversation with a woman who had been trying to ignore her, trying to sell rides on a raggle-taggle assortment of donkeys and ponies to passing families, and so far not succeeding.

  “They’re only just arrived,” Mary reasoned with the woman, who looked like a man who’d seen hard times but wearing a dress. “They’ll hire a pony when the bairns get bored.”

  “You trying to tell me ma job?” the woman snarled.

  “If you help me, I’ll get out o’ yer hair . . .”

  McAllister thought that a strange comment, as none of the woman’s hair was visible under a floral scarf tied up turban-style.

  “I’m looking for an auld pal o’ my dad’s, Jimmy McPhee . . .” Mary persisted.

  “Never heard o’ him.”

  She brushed past her, almost elbowing her out of the way. But this made no difference to Mary Ballantyne. “He’d good wi’ horses . . . maybe he’s looking for work . . .”

  “Do these look like horses?” She was pulling a donkey’s ears through the slits in a battered straw hat. The donkey didn’t seem to mind; the hat and the placid creature looked so old, they had probably been a summer-holiday fixture for at least a decade.

  McAllister, standing a short distance away, was enjoying himself, noticing how Mary thickened her accent, made herself smaller, younger, playing up the ingénue.

  Sitting on a camping stool set up beside a sandwich board advertising the donkey rides was a man. He’s enjoying the conversation too, McAllister thought as he noticed the old man’s head swiveling like a spectator at a tennis match as the conversation went from woman to woman. Then McAllister saw the white stick lying beside the stool. He looked more closely. Under the shadow of the wide-brimmed hat dark around the band with sweat stains, the man’s head, looking as wizened as a witch doctor’s juju skull, held eyes that although open were empty of expression.

  McAllister hesitated, then went towards the old man, hoping he would be more talkative than the vixen-woman.

  Mary waylaid him first. “Come on, we don’t have much time.” She grabbed his elbow and steered him up the beach on to the esplanade and towards the west end of the town, where the rocky foreshore attracted fewer visitors.

  “Where are we off to?” he asked as they reached a row of normal shops—a grocer, a butcher, a bakery. A newsagent with a display of plastic buckets and spades, and a stand of postcards in the entranceway, had a billboard out on the pavement. Huge headlines from down-market tabloid read, “City Gang Warfare.”

  Mary saw it and said, �
�Steal all my stories that lot do, too chicken to chase it up for themselves.”

  “What are we . . . ?”

  “We’re going to hire bikes and cycle around the island,” she told him.

  He stared. “Bikes? Me? On a bike?”

  Seeing his dismay, she laughed. “Cumbrae’s a wee place—four miles round at most, and we’re only going to the top of the hill. On a day like this we can see forever, maybe spot horses in the fields. Jimmy has to be somewhere and the town is crowded, so maybe he’s on a farm.”

  It was a ridiculous plan—so McAllister thought. But when they reached the triangulation point at the top of the island, and when he managed to get his breath back, and they could see all across to the Isle of Arran and to Ailsa Craig, some forty miles distant, he appreciated the view. And appreciated how unfit he was.

  “Well,” Mary said, “I can see cows, but no horses. Come on, McAllister, we’ll check out the farmhouses.”

  “We’ve only just got here . . .”

  “It’s downhill from here on.” She was on her bike and off.

  They checked out the farms, all five of them. No sign or knowledge of Jimmy McPhee.

  “A tinker, ye say,” one woman asked. On Mary’s replying, “a Traveler,” she looked as though she might set the dogs on them.

  All day they searched. At farms, boardinghouses, pubs, tearooms, they asked after Jimmy, and discovered nothing.

  Mid-evening, it was bright light still. McAllister was exhausted. He desperately wanted beer and whisky and a sit-down, but they had to catch the ferry back.

  “We’d better find a taxi to get us to the pier,” he told her as she sat licking an ice cream bought from the same newsagent that sold everything, and then some, as well as hiring out bicycles.

  “Last ferry is long gone,” she said, swinging her legs as she sat on a bench that was fractionally too high off the ground.

  “Gone?”