The Low Road

by A. D. Scott

  He was staying at Mary’s flat. She had moved upstairs to be with her mother. What she didn’t tell him was that her mother, with a mother’s radar, suspected the relationship had changed and had ordered Mary upstairs. “For propriety’s sake.” For once she took her mother’s advice.

  He wasn’t sleeping well; any movement of wind or tree or footsteps on the pavement above startled him into thinking it was Jimmy returning. And in the night, thinking of Mary, he knew he should be ashamed, yet he knew what had passed between them for what it was: a gesture of life in death, a gift of comfort and affection, a single episode never destined to be more than it was.

  “Do I have to?” Mary was wriggling in her seat. “I mean, if I do have to I might strangle the man even though he’s three times my weight.”

  Mary’s protests brought him back to the editor’s desk, back to the argument.

  “It’s potentially a good story, Mary. And much as you dislike the man, he’s a thorough journalist, just doesn’t have your connections.”

  “Was. Was a half-decent journalist. Past tense. He’s living on his former reputation . . .” She could see she’d gone too far. “All right, all right, you’re the editor, but the moment anything comes up about Jimmy . . .”

  “You can put the City Corporation investigation to one side.”

  “I’m off first thing tomorrow,” McAllister told them. “I promised to be back . . .”

  “We’ll let you know the minute we hear anything,” Mary promised.

  “Aye,” Sandy said. “Get away home. Your mother and your sweetheart need you.” He did not add that his friend was bruised and battered—and that was only his body—and having him here was like hosting the proverbial specter at the feast.

  “I’m off to Edinburgh in an hour, researching in the companies register. I may stay with friends there tonight,” Mary told McAllister. “So post the spare keys through the letterbox.”

  He looked at her.

  But all she did was gather her notes and, with a grin and a sigh, say, “Maybe I’ll get a pay rise for putting up with Mr. Sleazy.”

  Sandy was smiling. “Cheeky bissom,” he said as she left, and winked at McAllister.

  But there was no response.

  • • •

  McAllister spent that evening searching the public houses around the Trongate. He checked into billiard halls, he went to the pub he knew the boxing aficionados frequented. No one knew anything. Or at least said they knew nothing. Back in Mary’s flat he spent the remains of the evening listening to the wind in the trees in the park in the square. Mary did not return. Nor Jimmy. Eventually he slept.

  The clink of milk bottles being delivered to upstairs woke him. When he reached the station, early for the train, he realized he hadn’t checked at his mother’s flat. Maybe Jimmy went there. No. Unlikely. He reached the newsagent’s kiosk. Searching in his pockets for change for a copy of the Spectator the thought came, the mess at the flat, I’ve done nothing to tidy up at least the worst of the damage. He turned back. Then Joanne’s face came clear through the fog of indecision, I made her a promise. And again he went towards the platform. He was so tangled up in a fankle of anxiety he nearly missed the train he had been three-quarters of an hour early for.

  The final whistle from the guard saw him leaping into the carriage, hurtling into a man who was hauling a cabin trunk large enough to contain a body. He almost asked if Jimmy was inside.

  The long journey stretched even longer. The dining carriage running out of kippers for breakfast made him furious. “Bloody tourists,” he complained, not quite quietly enough for an obviously English couple sitting behind to miss hearing.

  The empty stretch of moorland on the Cairngorm plateau depressed him; not seeing the flashes of loch and lochan, the running peat-brown burns, a solitary golden eagle hovering above the heather, the rowan and birch and pine around Aviemore, he took no comfort in the grandeur of the landscape. A delay at the water tower at Carrbridge made him seethe. And when the train finally drew into the station he found he had crushed the ticket so tightly the inspector told him off. The man recognized McAllister and had been joking. But glimpsing the Grim Reaper countenance only partially obscured by the brim of the hat, he said no more and waved the passenger through.

  It was late afternoon when the taxi dropped him home.

  Leaving his bag in the hallway, he made for the kitchen.

  “You made it.” Joanne was smiling.

  “I said I would.” It came out shorter than he intended, but he reached for her hand to soften the hurt he saw flit across her face.

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” Granny Ross said.

  “I’ll butter some o’ my new gingerbread,” his mother said.

  “Did you bring me a present?” Jean asked.

  “Jean!” her mother chastised her.

  Annie, standing back from the fuss, was examining him in an I’m not examining you way. She was gauging his mood, looking for change, for damage, not knowing it was her own behavior that betrayed damage.

  The front doorbell rang. Mrs. Ross went to answer it.

  His mother was shooing a kitten off the table away from the butter.

  Surely that cat is new, he was thinking as he sat at the table trying to ignore the girls, who were squabbling like seagulls over whose turn it was to clean out the rabbit’s cage.

  “Outside, both of you!” Joanne said loudly, and for the second time.

  Mrs. Ross came back.

  “Who was at the door?” Joanne asked.

  “Mrs. McPhee, the tinker woman,” her mother-in-law answered. “I sent her to the back door. The cheek o’ the woman coming to the front . . .”

  “You did what?” His shout echoed off the ceiling, bounced down to the table. Everyone stood still like a game of statues in the schoolyard.

  Granny Ross’s mouth took on the texture of a prune. “She’s a tinker,” she said. “You can’t let her in through the house.”

  “Scared I’ll steal the silver, are ye?” Jenny McPhee stood on the kitchen doorstep, the door being wide open in the unusual summer warmth.

  “This is my house. Mrs. McPhee is my visitor. She is to be treated with respect.” McAllister’s voice was harsher than intended.

  “Why is she here? Why is she getting you to run thither and yon at her bidding, risking your life—aye, I’ve heard it all. She’s no’ even family. But here you both are, upsetting my daughter-in-law . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then Mrs. Ross undid her apron, took her handbag off the dresser, and left by the front door.

  Silence.

  Mrs. McAllister could sense there were to be no answers to the questions she too had been puzzling over. So she said, “I’ll see to the rabbit,” and went into the garden, nodding at Jenny McPhee on her way out.

  Annie took her sister’s hand, and they followed.

  Joanne said to Jenny McPhee, “Mrs. McPhee, can I offer you tea? Or maybe something stronger?”

  McAllister looked at the tinker woman. He saw what Joanne had seen. Jenny McPhee knew. What, he didn’t know. A tremor ran through him, terrified there was more news. Worse than the news he had come back to break to her.

  In the sitting room, after fetching a glass of whisky for McAllister and Jenny, Joanne sat on the piano stool, hesitating. “Do you want me to leave you together?” She was looking at Jenny, one eye squinting through her new spectacles, the damaged eye hidden behind a horrid piece of flesh-colored sticking plaster, roughly cut to black out the lens.

  Jenny was shaking her head. “Up to you. But maybe you’re no needing bad news after all you’ve been through.”

  “I’ll stay,” Joanne said, and crossed the room to sit on the sofa with the old woman.

  “I’ve just arrived back. I was coming to tell you,” McAllister said. “Jimmy is missing, but I’m sure he’s fine. You know your son, nine lives and all that.” He was forcing a cheerfulness he did not feel, and neither woman was fooled.

  “I couldney se
nse him,” Jenny said. “A was lookin’, listenin’, right feart he’s gone.”

  McAllister did not understand. “He’s missing, hiding out somewhere. He’ll be fine.”

  “If he’s gone,” she continued, “I want his body. I need to see ma son buried the old way. That’s what he’d have wanted. The old way.”

  “You can’t be sure he’s gone, maybe he’s . . .” He stopped. He’d asked himself the same questions over and over. And come up with no answers.

  Joanne knew that reassurances were only words. She looked at Jenny. “Mrs. McPhee, McAllister will do all he can to see Jimmy is returned to you.” One way or another, she was thinking as she frowned at him, willing him to say no more.

  “Good enough.” Jenny was nodding, almost rocking, as though in prayer. Then she gathered her shawl around her, put her bag over her arm, and with an effort akin to that of an invalid, she unbent and stood. “Thank you, Mr. McAllister. Thank you, lass.”

  “I’ll let you know the minute I hear anything,” McAllister promised.

  But she only nodded.

  Joanne saw Jenny McPhee to the front door. She was gone a few minutes. When she came back she stood on one side of the empty fireplace. The light was behind her, but directly on him, and it did not flatter. She examined him. Slowly. She saw his dark blue eyes, now nearer black. He was looking at the box of Passing Clouds as though they were a precious artifact. She took in his hands, which were unsteady when he struck a match for another cigarette. She felt there was a difference to him, something she would not have been able to describe if asked, something that, after a second of panic, she put down to fear. And she knew, no matter how much she did not want to, she should listen.

  “I have to deal with the real world sometime. When you hide things from me my imagination makes it far worse.” She said this quietly but he heard what he took to be anger in her voice.

  But it was not anger, it was frustration—utter infuriating frustration upon frustration: the headache behind the eyes which came and went in waves that she could not control; the fantasies that overpowered her—one in particular—when she opened a book, it only happened when it was a novel, she fancied the pages damp with a colorless blood, sticky, with a hint of a smell, a sweet cloying presence that would never leave her fingers if it touched her; and the air, in every room in the house, anywhere indoors, she felt a pressure on her skin, her throat in particular, so the only place safe was outdoors, amongst flowers, in a breeze or a wind. She shared this with no one, especially not the doctors. The mass of Craig Dunain, filling the western corner of the horizon in the hills above the town, the place of so-called asylum but to her mind imprisonment—why else were there bars on the windows?—terrified her.

  “Tell me what happened. All of it.”

  “How could Jenny think Jimmy was gone? No one knows what happened, so why . . .”

  He gestured to her to sit down. With a generous measure of whisky in his glass, he began. He told her of the destruction of his mother’s home. He told her of his struggle with the young man, now deceased. He glossed over his night in the cells, saying it was no more than DI Willkie going on a fishing expedition. He described the visit to Mr. Dochery. He left out the bare-knuckle fight. Then there was nowhere to go but the dark night at the warehouse down by the Clyde. When she heard him describe the splash and the water and the tide and his fear, she knew he had been searching for two people—Jimmy and his brother.

  • • •

  That week McAllister went to work for a few hours each day. Mostly he stayed at home, in a dwam. The others in the household, but not Granny Ross, who had not been seen since he’d asked her to leave, kept clear of him. Even Annie knew not to pester him with questions. She was longing to know what was happening and gathered it was serious and was scared; the wedding meant more to her than she knew.

  Passing the hours by attempting to read until it was time to sit down with his best friend, the whisky bottle, McAllister was desolate at his failure. He recalled every visit to every pub and dive and sleaze pit and boxing club. He counted the money he’d paid out and the favors he’d pulled in.

  Mary had done the same. And she had put out the word to her vast network of informants that she’d pay ten pounds for information—an unheard-of amount of money where five pounds or less would pay for a kneecapping. Or worse. So far, no news.

  The extended McPhee clan, Jenny’s eldest son, her younger sons, and her cousins—who were legion—they were all searching for Jimmy.

  No news.

  Mary rang daily, talking mostly to Don McLeod. Thankfully, McAllister thought, as he did not want a conversation with Mary lest he was tempted to return to his city.

  No news.

  And every time the telephone rang, at home, at work, every time the postman delivered the mail, his heart began to pound, until he heard the news—no news. The days passed, a week passed, nearly two weeks; McAllister finally gave up hope of ever seeing Jimmy McPhee alive.

  The river took him, just like it took my brother, he thought. Then changed his mind. No, it was that bastard Gerry Dochery. But he didn’t know it was Gerry. Whoever it was, I’ll get you. And he vowed, just as he had when he discovered who had driven his brother to take his own life, I’ll get you. Maybe not now, maybe not next week or next year, but I’ll get you.

  Five more days elapsed. It was Thursday morning, the day after deadline, so a late morning for McAllister. He was sitting at the kitchen table, enjoying the morning quiet that had descended since Granny Ross no longer came around when he was at home; no more muttering when he refused a cooked breakfast, preferring his usual coffee and cigarette. No more arguments between Annie and her grandmother over what she was wearing—too scruffy; what she was reading—too adult; how she was sitting—slouching in her chair; her reading and eating toast—getting crumbs everywhere.

  And no longer came the whine of the vacuum cleaner weaving in and around his feet when all McAllister wanted on the morning after deadline was to sit quietly and read the national newspapers, with his second cup of coffee. Sitting around reading was not an occupation Granny Ross approved of, her being convinced it was bad for you. “Gives you headaches,” she said. Makes you too big for your boots, all thon ideas, she thought.

  McAllister read the Herald first, glanced through the Scotsman next, read the headlines of the Aberdeen newspaper, and ignored the Gazette. He was on page five, reading the follow-up article to the front-page headline story written by Mary Ballantyne. Although there was no byline, he recognized her style, and was interested in, but not surprised by, the exposé of City Council corruption.

  Joanne was sitting opposite him reading the Gazette. She glanced up at the headlines in the Herald. With her one-lens glasses she couldn’t see clearly, but the headline jumped out at her. She squinted at the picture, but even with her weak vision, she recognized the man. “McAllister,” she whispered.

  “Mm-hmm?” he replied.

  “McAllister . . .” The color in her face, which had only just returned to her cheeks, had drained to a pale corpselike pallor.

  “Joanne, what is it? Is it your eyes?”

  “That man . . .” She pointed to the newspaper. “Don said it was all over . . .”

  Her cup shattered on the tiled floor. Joanne slumped sideways. He raced to her, his chair clattering to the floor, gripping her under the arms. “Here, put your head on the table. I’ve got you. It’s fine, I have you.”

  “The newspaper, it’s getting wet, it’s . . .” She was reaching for the newspaper, trying to rescue it from the pool of spilt tea.

  “What’s happened?” Annie rushed in, still in her nightie.

  “What’s wrong?” His mother was in the doorway, bringing with her the scent of warm bread.

  “What have you done to her this time?” Granny Ross had come in the front door, having forgotten this was McAllister’s late morning.

  “Annie, call the doctor.” The grannies he ignored. “Here, my love, let�
��s get you onto the sofa. Can you stand? Here, lean on me.”

  They stumbled into the sitting room. She lay down. Annie came back. “The doctor will be fifteen minutes.”

  She came over, sat beside her mother, calm, scared, in charge. “McAllister, bring the pills from the kitchen dresser. And water.”

  “Are you sure?” An almost-twelve-year-old had more presence of mind than himself, and he did as he was told.

  The grannies were at the kitchen table, cleaning up the spilt tea, picking up the shattered teacup. They looked up as he came in. He saw how old they were, and how frightened.

  “She’s had a turn, she’s tired that’s all.” He knew that to be untrue; something she saw in the newspaper had shocked her. What, he didn’t know. But he would find out. He reached for the bottle of pills, then poured a glass of water. Remembering the Herald, he quickly folded it, putting it in the dresser drawer. “Don’t worry. The doctor will be here soon.”

  When her son had gone, Mrs. McAllister went to the stove and lifted the kettle. “Tea, Elsie?” she asked.

  “That’d be grand,” came the reply from Mrs. Ross. They nodded at each other. Truce.

  The doorbell rang. Annie answered, saying, “Hello, Dr. Matheson, you were quick.” She showed him into the sitting room and at a glance from McAllister she left.

  Annie went to the kitchen. “Mum’s fine. She just fainted,” she said. Then she went upstairs, because she felt like crying and didn’t want anyone to see her.

  After the doctor left, and after Joanne went to bed to sleep, and after his mother left with Granny Ross to visit her house, he telephoned the Gazette and spoke briefly to Don McLeod.

  “Buy the Herald,” he told his deputy, “and when you’ve read it, come over to my house. I want an explanation.” He hung up without the usual courtesies. For the next half hour he read and reread the article and was none the wiser.

  When Don arrived he was faced with a man he did not recognize, a man in such a fury Don was afraid the editor might have a heart attack.