The Low Road

by A. D. Scott

  Gerry Dochery too was early. As he came in, most eyes in the pub acknowledged him. The barman went to pour his Guinness without being asked. He took a seat next to McAllister, knowing the porter would be delivered to the table once it had settled and the foam the perfect depth.

  Gerry was angry—almost as angry as McAllister had been when he’d learned of James Gordon and his brothers terrifying Joanne. His face was red, his voice almost a squeak and, speaking with his lips barely moving, the intensity of his words made McAllister reappraise his old pal—for the better.

  “You had no right seeking out ma family,” Gerry said.

  “You started it,” McAllister replied. “It was appalling what you had done to my mother’s place, an old woman who never harmed a soul.”

  Gerry didn’t look at him. “I’m sorry. It was that or something much worse.”

  McAllister half believed him, remembering the man beaten to death and dumped, as a warning, maybe, and wondered if that should have been his fate. “Picking on me, fair enough. But my mother? How come women are now a fair target?” He knew Gerry would know he meant his girlfriend.

  “You can’t tell anyone about Sheena. Or about Wee Sheena. Not even ma faither knows. And them, if they found out . . .”

  “I won’t. I know how it feels. So the same goes for me and mine.”

  “He already knew about your family.”

  “He?”

  There was silence between them. But not in the bar. Conversation was loud, but not inebriated loud, convivial conversation loud. A wireless was playing faintly in the background. Someone started on a halfhearted version of “The Minstrel Boy.” As yet no other singers were drunk enough to join in, and the song tapered off.

  “He?” McAllister repeated. This was what he’d come for. This was what he needed to know. But Gerry wasn’t answering, and McAllister saw he never would—at least not to a direct question, for that would make him an informer.

  “How did it all go wrong, Ger? We were pals. An’ you were always as bright as me, just not at book learning.”

  “Wrang? Wrang?” Gerry was furious.

  His answer, almost shouted he was so angry, made the barman look over, reach for the already broken chair he kept to deal with any troubles, then leave it at a signal from Gerry. He brought over two fresh pints. Back at the bar, he watched the two men sip their Guinness. They had dropped their hackles—or at least their shoulders. But he kept the chair handy.

  “It never went right.” Gerry lit a cigarette without offering McAllister one. “I hated you in those days.”

  But not now? McAllister thought, lighting a cigarette of his own, understanding that Gerry Dochery was not being rude, just remembering McAllister’s taste in cigarettes. That bond between them, knowing each other’s tastes in beer and cigarettes and football teams, pleased him. He was—is—my oldest friend.

  “Your mother, she was always ready wi’ ‘the poor soul,’ always showing me up as the boy to be pitied, always showing you aff as the boy who done good. An’ them holidays when she made me wear your auld clothes, us being the same size. And her chiding me on ma manners—‘What’s the magic word, Gerald?’ It was all, ‘Please, Mrs. McAllister. Thank you, Mrs. McAllister. Yes, missus, no, missus, three bags full, Mrs. McAllister.’ ”

  McAllister laughed.

  Gerry glared.

  “Sorry Ger, that’s ma mother to a tee. She’s a right stickler for manners, but she was no different to me and ma brother.”

  “Aye. I know. An’ I’m sure I’ll be the same to ma wee one.”

  Good, McAllister thought, now we’re really talking. “How old is she?”

  “Three. No one knows about her. I’m right sorry I can’t take ma faither to meet her. If thon man, or his psycho brother, finds out . . .”

  “You still work for him?”

  “I’ve never worked for him. Never. When the word was put out that whoever found the tinker could collect the one thousand pounds, well, no one could turn down that much money.”

  One thousand pounds. That made McAllister think. Same amount, same debt? “Jimmy? Is he a . . . around?” Alive, was what he wanted to ask.

  “No idea.”

  “He was shot at with an air rifle.”

  “Was he now?” Gerry’s expression gave away nothing.

  “At the warehouse in Whiteinch, he went into the river and no sight nor sound o’ him since.”

  McAllister kept watching Gerry. Nothing. He kept going. “The lad that died, the death DI Willkie tried to fit me up for, what was that about? I know the boy was sent to duff me up, and it was more luck than any skill on my part that he didn’t do worse damage, but why was he beaten to a pulp?”

  This time Gerry reacted. “Beaten, you say?”

  “A colleague saw the body. She said whoever did it was a right sadist.”

  “Mary Ballantyne?”

  “It was bad, Gerry. He was tortured.”

  “Thon maniac,” Gerry muttered and looked away, but not before McAllister caught his distress.

  Their glasses were empty. McAllister was about to return to the bar to order again when he saw the men come in. Two of them. Obviously brothers. One was wearing a Rangers football scarf.

  Outright provocation, McAllister was thinking, and enough to get a man glassed in a bar in the Gallowgate.

  From the way the room went quiet and no one heckled them over their colors, they were obviously known. McAllister guessed the barman and customers were waiting for the signal from Gerry, who gave a wave of his forefinger, and conversation resumed. But everyone was watching, and this time the barman had not only a chair within reach but also a loaded sawn-off shotgun, under the till.

  “Who’s yer friend, Ger?” One of the men was standing too close to their table, so close McAllister imagined he could feel his breath.

  Gerry Dochery showed no emotion. As though he was inquiring the time of the next bus, he asked, “What do youse want?”

  Then McAllister guessed who they were. The family resemblance was strong but these two looked like factory rejects, blurred, slightly unformed. He introduced himself. “John McAllister. Gerry and me, we were at school thegether.”

  “John McAllister, eh?” the shorter, rounder one said, making a play of scratching his head in puzzlement. “No’ the John McAllister, big-shot newspaperman.” He pronounced John the Glasgow way—Joan. His brother was giggling and grinning like a Halloween lantern.

  At the high-pitched-hysterical-wee-girl sound, McAllister looked more closely at the second brother. Only slightly taller, he had that look Scots would call glaichit—glazed, blank, lights on but no one home. And evil with it.

  The man giggled again. “I ken who you are,” he was saying to McAllister, “an Ah ken your Hieland friend.” He made a gun with his right forefinger. “Ping! Pop! Ping! Splash! The tinkie’s deid.”

  “Wheesht!” His brother poked him in the ribs. It did no good, and he kept pointing his forefinger but was now mouthing the sounds.

  McAllister was forcing himself not to move. As was the barman. And the customers. But how long Gerry could contain them was uncertain.

  Brother number one sensed it. “Right, we’ll be off. Good to meet you at last, Mr. McAllister. We’ll see you later, Ger.” He was all business. Polite. McAllister sensed that he was the brain—and, he decided, one between them was possibly all the brothers had. McAllister also surmised that the articulate brother was keeping his reputation for being the reasonable one intact, by using his sibling as a human Gatling gun.

  “You’d better leave an’ all,” Gerry told McAllister after the brothers had left and the swing doors finally stopped, and the murmur in the bar resumed.

  “That was the one who killed Jimmy.” McAllister was too shaken to be angry.

  “He’s the psycho in the Gordon family. Keep well away from him.”

  “James Gordon? As in the Gordon Brothers? Is that who you’re working for?”

  “I work for no one!” B
ut Gerry saw McAllister’s eyebrows reaching up to his hairline. “I take contracts now and then and . . .”

  “And one thousand pounds is an awful lot of money,” McAllister finished. He was not passing judgment. He knew how it was. And better Gerry is involved than some unknown gangster. “Gerry, if anyone comes near my mother again, or my fiancée, or her daughters, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what, McAllister? Get your hands dirty? Get someone else to do it for you? You have no idea what you are dealing with here. Thon manny . . .” He gestured towards the door where the brothers had left. “He’s no’ right in the head—a complete and absolute nutter, so he is.”

  “He shot at Jimmy.”

  “I believe you. Look what they done to the lad at your mother’s flat.”

  For the first time McAllister wondered if the young man was dead from a beating in order to implicate him. They had almost succeeded. And it had revealed the extent of the Gordon brothers’ influence—the police, perhaps the procurator fiscal’s office, and from what Mary was discovering, perhaps the City Council.

  “You knew the dead man?”

  “Aye, I did. A good lad.” Gerry fumbled with his cigarettes but didn’t light up. “And that, that is one more thing between me and . . . and a Gordon.” The finality in his voice, the way he slammed the box of matches onto the table, spilling them into a puddle of beer, made McAllister back off with the questions.

  Gerry took up the empty pint glass. Not wanting to look directly at McAllister, he was staring at the dark dregs and dirty foam flecks as though preparing to make his case to Saint Peter. “If you want to protect your missus, call off Mary Ballantyne. The rest is nothing to do wi’ you—it’s between him and the McPhee fellow.” He caught the question in McAllister’s eyebrows. “If he’s alive,” Gerry added.

  “It’s too late for me to back off.”

  Gerry nodded. Then sighed. “We were friends, weren’t we? Long ago?”

  McAllister understood the change of subject; Gerry Dochery would never rat on anyone, no matter how evil. “We were. I hope we still are.”

  “Sheena took to you.”

  Again it was McAllister’s eyebrows that asked the question.

  “The lass wi’ the bonnie brown curls.”

  McAllister nodded. “I took to her, too.”

  “If anything happens, would you see her right? Her and Wee Sheena? And tell ma da?”

  Gerry looked straight at McAllister as he asked this, and McAllister could detect no fear, only resignation. He knew not to spout empty assurances that all would be well because, likely as not, it wouldn’t. Maybe not this time, but some time, Gerry Dochery’s life would catch up with him. One way or another.

  “If Sheena should ever need anything, tell her to contact me at the Herald. Or the Gazette, the newspaper I edit in the Highlands. And Gerry, tell your father. He’s old and alone. Knowing about Wee Sheena would make his life worth living.”

  “And make up for having a son like me,” Gerry added.

  The conversation was over. Gerry held out his hand. They shook. Gerry left. McAllister left a minute later. He knew he should go to the Herald and tell Mary and Sandy Marshall what had passed between him and Gerry and the brothers Gordon. But he couldn’t.

  He walked back to the Herald, collected his car, drove to his boardinghouse. Parked. Was surprised it was not yet nine o’clock. Time to catch the late showing at the Curzon art cinema on the steep brae off Sauchiehall Street that led up to Garnethill.

  It was a French film, Et Dieu . . . créa la femme. He had no need of the subtitles. And the film, starring Brigitte Bardot, was not to his taste. It was the language he wanted hear, to remind him of another country, other times. The audience of students and the bohemian set of Glasgow were appreciative and respectful to the film, but not to the national anthem played at the end.

  As he and they strolled out into a balmy night, some discussing the film, some discussing where might be open for a late night drink, stars and planets and a half-moon lit the dim backstreets with a beauty that should have been a salve to his fear.

  Reaching the damp room in the dank boardinghouse, which even a long warm summer had been unable to make charming, he realized he had seen little of the film, little of the supposed charms of BB, and had no idea of the plot, if there had been one. All he could feel was a dread that the whisky he’d brought in his overnight bag could do nothing to dissolve. And fear.

  Remembering the talk of their childhood, his mother’s insistence on manners, on their washing hands and brushing teeth, her inspection of their necks and behind their ears, checking they had done it all properly, he remembered her insistence on bedtime prayers.

  He could almost feel the hard floorboards; himself and Gerry in the attic bedroom in the boardinghouse in Millport, kneeling side by side, his mother standing in the doorway saying the lines, and he and Gerry repeating them. And the intimacy of that summer, of two boys, closer than brothers could ever be, that he would never forget.

  Not being a religious man, having no faith in a God he couldn’t bring himself to believe in, nevertheless the prayer ran around his brain, and he couldn’t dismiss it. “Now I lay me down to sleep. Pray the Lord my—our—souls to keep . . .”

  TWENTY-ONE

  McAllister needed to return to the Highlands. He needed to know if Jimmy McPhee was alive. He needed his mother safe. And he needed a friend. He was a walking bag of needs.

  He was in reception in the Herald building and phoned upstairs to ask Sandy Marshall, “Have you time for a pint anytime soon?”

  “I’ll have the newspaper shout us lunch. We deserve it.”

  They met at Guy’s restaurant in Hope Street. It was busy, but the power of the Herald name secured them a table in a quiet corner.

  Sandy told the waiter to hold off on the menu but ordered a bottle of wine. Glasses filled, he listened to McAllister say his mother was fine, Joanne was fine, everything was fine. So, being McAllister’s friend, his conclusion was, Everything is definitely not fine.

  McAllister told him of last evening’s encounter with the Gordon brothers, his fears for Gerry Dochery’s safety—this surprised Sandy, but he made no comment. McAllister told him there were no hospital admissions that might have been Jimmy, no unidentified bodies in the mortuary, and no sightings from the river police.

  “So looks like there’s nothing else to do but return to the Highlands having achieved nothing.”

  After a sip of white wine, which hadn’t been chilled enough in the first place and was now warm, Sandy said, “Seems to me your life is a catalogue of misery.”

  McAllister flushed in anger, and for a second Sandy thought he would fling down the overlarge linen napkin and stalk out in high dudgeon. He quickly raised his glass and said, “So, let’s hope it’s onwards and upwards from here.”

  McAllister had the good grace to laugh. “Aye, here’s hoping.”

  They ordered. The food was good. This was one of the few restaurants in the city up to London standards. They finished with coffee and cigarettes. Then Sandy said his piece.

  “I can’t help you with Jimmy McPhee. He turns up or he doesn’t. Gerry Dochery, he’s chosen his life and it can be a short one in his game. Your mother is tough; you can’t protect her forever. And she has friends—she’s a ‘guidwife’ if ever there was one.”

  McAllister snorted at this description of his mother; it was a righteous Scottish word, and it summed up the indomitable women of the city, women who kept going under the yoke of poverty and too many children and not enough of anything, except friends and the pride of being Glaswegian.

  “On your personal life I have only this to say: you are bloody lucky.”

  McAllister nodded an I know.

  “From what Mary told me, your Joanne Ross is not only a good woman, she is beautiful and smart and a real catch. Don’t lose her.” Sandy said the last words slowly, carefully, his eyes fixed on McAllister’s face.

  They were good enough fri
ends he could say this, but still, McAllister felt a momentary surge of anger. But he knew Sandy was right. His neglect of Joanne was a mystery even to him. “I can’t give up, not yet,” he said. “Gordon and his brothers, they won’t give up. If they don’t get Jimmy, they’ll go for Joanne.”

  “Threatening Joanne is Gordon’s way of finding Jimmy. But face it, man, McPhee may no longer be alive.” Sandy wasn’t being cruel, just realistic. “If your family need protection, go to the police—and no, don’t give me that look. Apart from DI Willkie and a few like him, there are many decent policemen around. Go home, McAllister. Tell your local police. You must have friends there.”

  McAllister immediately thought of DI Dunne. “I do.”

  “Mary’s in Edinburgh. She says she’s found documents in Company House that might shed light on Councilor Gordon’s business activities.” Sandy was rubbing the back of his head as he spoke.

  A sure sign he’s uncomfortable.

  Sandy Marshall didn’t know if there was anything between McAllister and Mary Ballantyne, but suspected there was something. “I’m not counting chickens, and you know fine well that whatever we publish needs checking and double-checking and vetting by the lawyers. But maybe, just maybe, we might have something on the councilor. From what you told me about his house in Milngavie, he didn’t get that from a wee three-brother building business.”

  He signaled for the bill. “Go home, McAllister. Get married. Me and the family are looking forward to the wedding—I’ve dusted off ma kilt, and the wife’s new hat cost a fortune, plus I’ve promised the bairns a holiday in Nairn, so . . .”

  McAllister wanted to say, Don’t count on there being a wedding, but he knew it was too late to back out. He wanted Joanne. But marriage? He was not at all sure he could be a husband. “I hope Joanne will be well enough . . .” he started, but Sandy cut him off.

  “There you go again, incurable pessimist.” He was remembering his own wedding, how terrified he’d been. Not of the marriage, but of the relatives, the well-wishers, the pressure to settle down when he, like McAllister, had considered himself above all the conventional rot. They were young journalists going places, not potential husbands and fathers and property owners with enormous bank loans.