The Low Road Read online

  “Good enough,” he said back at her.

  Annie smiled, then, putting the marker in her book, she stood. “Night-night, McAllister. And don’t feel bad about leaving us for a few days, we’ll be fine.”

  He tried to settle back into the novel he’d been reading on and off for a week but unable to concentrate on. The benediction from a child had made him feel guilty. And the phrase would not go away, She’s not herself, running around his brain, a thought chasing a thought turning to dread: What if she’s never herself again? What if Joanne is never again the woman I love, the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with? There was only one place those fears would dissolve—the bottom of a whisky glass. So, tonight, as on so many nights recently, he reached for the decanter.

  Thelonious Monk was at the piano, the book was by Kingsley Amis, the whisky from Aberlour. He’d been sitting sipping, reading, dreaming for almost two hours when he became aware of a shadow flitting through into the room.

  “McAllister.” Annie’s voice was a whisper, and in a flannelette nightgown, the color washed out to an indeterminate shade of porridge, she seemed more phantom than child. Her hair, very short and looking as though she had taken the scissors to it herself—which she had—emphasized her blue-green eyes, giving her a resemblance to an Edwardian illustrator’s idea of a pixie or elf. Her long, lanky body spoiled the image, the resemblance being more that of an adolescent giraffe.

  “I can’t sleep,” Annie said, not looking at him, running her hand over her hair, massaging her skull, or her brain, a habit he found endearing. “It’s Mum.” She paused, searching for the words, but nothing in her vocabulary could express what she felt. “She’s not herself.”

  He was shaken to hear the phrase repeated back to him; he was certain he had never said it aloud. In the pause while he composed an answer to the girl, the clock struck eleven. Eleven in the evening in this town was “ungodly.”

  “Your mum has had a terrible experience. It takes time to get over something like that.” He immediately regretted the clichés. Annie deserved better.

  “I know.”

  She was quiet for a moment and as he watched her absorb the information, he caught a glimpse of the girl’s intelligence, and resilience, and suspected this would always save her.

  “I know it was terrible,” she repeated, “but Mum is not getting better.” She knew adults were not perfect—she’d learned that early from her father. But she expected more from McAllister. He should have noticed.

  And he was not himself either. But unable to recognize why. All he knew was that he had never known loneliness until he had fallen in love with Joanne Ross.

  In his need for solitude, if even for a few hours, he’d taken to staying up late into the night. After years on the evening desk of a national newspaper, his body rhythms were set for the early hours of the morning with the music playing quietly, the fire banked up even though it was midsummer, his book, the decanter of whisky, and a pack of Passing Clouds cigarettes at hand, this quiet was a now rare delight.

  Annie looked at him again. For a fraction of a second he felt himself being appraised. And again he felt he was failing her, and her mother. He had not seen, or chosen not to see, that the Joanne he loved, whose face and voice and laughter he carried in his head, was not the compliant, puzzled woman he had watched that morning in the garden. He saw her on a stripy deck chair in the sunshine, looking around with a nervous twist to the head, and commenting—to no one in particular—how the flock of cotton-wool clouds were forming and re-forming in an attempt at blocking out the sun, and failing. “Look,” she was saying, shielding her eyes with one hand, “look at the clouds. They’re like sheep. And those wispy ones, they’re like thistledown.”

  Annie looked at him, waiting for more. Then she understood that he was as afraid as she was that her mother might never be her old self again, that was something he, too, was terrified of. “ ’Night,” she muttered, and went back up to bed.

  He listened but didn’t hear the girl creep up the stairs. When he heard her door close, he shut his eyes. How to explain to a child the evil that had almost killed her mother, how to diminish the horror of the three days Joanne had been locked up in the dark with a head wound or tell her that, when rescued, she’d been given little chance of survival without serious brain damage by the surgeon and doctors—that was McAllister’s quandary.

  His head felt heavy, his shoulders tight, and running around his brain, like the repeat refrain from the backing singers of a particularly annoying song of the doo-wop variety on the radio, the phrase kept repeating, She’s not herself, She’s not herself.

  • • •

  Next morning, McAllister walked to the Highland Gazette office. When he climbed the spiral stone staircase to the reporters’ room, he found the others already there, seated around the long narrow table that almost filled the room. The far end of the table was territory the deputy editor Don McLeod had not visited in at least forty years; squeezing past colleagues and chairs and overlarge typewriters was beyond a round person like himself, so he reigned at the head of the table. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, his stomach spilling beyond the circumference of his high wooden chair, and with his wee red editing pencil tucked behind his ear, he resembled a potentate from Tales of the Arabian Nights.

  He looked up at the tyrant, as he called it, the wall clock, ruler of the newsroom. It was ten minutes to nine in the morning, early for journalists, and even though today was deadline day, and unusually early for McAllister, Don said nothing, because nothing was normal these days.

  “What’s happening?” McAllister asked, glancing at the layout spread over the table.

  “Not much,” Don answered.

  “Thank goodness,” Rob McLean said. With Joanne Ross sick, he was their one and only reporter. “Sheepdog trials is enough excitement for me right now.” Quiet felt good; school prize-giving ceremonies, ferry cancellations, and Loch Ness Monster sightings were all the excitement he wanted.

  This was not what an editor of a newspaper wanted to hear, but they had had enough of front-page headlines featuring death and damnation. Rob most of all.

  “Advertising is steady,” Frankie Urquhart, the newly appointed advertising salesman and Rob’s best friend, said. “No surprises there.” Everyone felt relieved at that except Frankie. He wanted a full-page ad from somewhere, anywhere, to prove that at twenty-four, he was old enough to be promoted to the position of advertising manager.

  “I’m thinking I’ll go to Glasgow on Thursday. Back Sunday night,” McAllister told them.

  “Oh, aye?” Don McLeod looked up at him.

  Perhaps he meant nothing by his question, but McAllister felt the need to justify himself. “Aye, my mother has written to me. I should go see her. It’s been too long . . .”

  He knew he was overstating his case. Knew his mother was not bothered if he visited or not—as long as he wrote regularly, she was content to live in solitude with only the noises of neighbors in the communal close for company. Why he did not mention Jenny and Jimmy McPhee, and their troubles, to a man he trusted, a man who knew more than he about the McPhees and the inhabitants of the town and county and Highlands and Islands, he did not know.

  “I’ll call in and see Joanne when you’re away,” was all his deputy said before turning to the layout for the next day’s edition. “Now where the hell is thon eejit of a photographer? I need the photos of the academy’s sports meeting.”

  And so the day went on. And so another deadline on the Highland Gazette was met. And on Thursday morning, after a cooked breakfast with Joanne and the girls, McAllister went in to the office, reviewed the edition, saw to some paperwork, signed off on the accounts, then walked to the train station.

  As he took his seat in the first-class compartment, hoping for solitude or at least a minimum of conversation, and as the train began the long slow climb over the pass of Drumochter, he admitted his need of a break from work, from the Highland town he had come
to, to bring the Gazette from the nineteenth century to 1958. That he could also be running away from the woman he was about to marry, the woman who was not herself, he buried deep down in a dark place, hoping his conscience could not reach that far.

  TWO

  The train arrived at Glasgow’s Central Station early Thursday evening. As the passengers disembarked he noticed the hesitant first-time-away-from-the-Highlands families, couples perhaps on holiday, solitary young men and women leaving home in search of work, all hesitant, looking around or upwards through the high vaulted ceiling where, even two hundred miles south and in the heart of the city, it was still bright daylight—just not their evening light; it was city light—grey, dense, and hostile.

  McAllister walked through the Victorian cathedral to engineering into streets that had been built with the spoils of empire. Street upon street. Terrace upon terrace, parks, public houses, museums, art galleries—all were products of this once prosperous city, this proud product of an empire few could ever imagine would vanish.

  And few of those proud Georgian and Victorian merchants could have imagined that a century later, grime would turn their buildings dark, bombs would obliterate warehouses, shipyards, and engineering works, and poverty would overrun their model housing tenements built for workers.

  For the people of Glasgow, one thing that never changed was the fierce loyalty to their city. There’s Scotland, then there’s Glasgow, was the saying, and the natives were Glaswegians first. And foremost.

  McAllister hesitated, then turned towards the street and the bus stop. Taking a taxi to his mother’s home would invite comments from the neighbors. “Come up in the world, has he?” Or, “Soon be too good for the like o’ us.” His mother hated that. To live an anonymous life was all she wished for.

  Along George Street, past the great edifice of the Glasgow council offices, and the statues in George Square, the bus lurched past the Duke Street gaol to his stop at the foot of the brae. As he tuned in to the passengers on the bus, the voices, the patter, he began to feel lighter, Glaswegian again. Then it was a climb up the oh so familiar streets, walked every day for his last six years of schooling in another part of the city. Before turning towards his mother’s ground-floor tenement flat, his childhood home, he paused to catch his breath and look for changes. To his left was the ancient bulk of the cathedral with tombstones and the monuments and stone angels in all their glory strewn throughout the graveyard, memorials of those who had brought the wealth of the colonies and the profits of the clipper trade to Glasgow. That kirkyard had been his favorite playground, and he doubted much would have changed. Just a few more graves.

  He let himself in, calling out, “Mother, it’s me,” even though no one else would have a key. The sound of the wireless came faintly from the kitchen, the one room his mother permanently inhabited. He suspected she would sleep there if a bed could be fitted in.

  “Hello.” He smiled at her. Patted her arm. This was as much affection as they ever allowed themselves.

  “You should have written. There’s nothing in the larder.” It sounded harsh. It wasn’t meant to be. They were not people who had much in the way of an emotional vocabulary.

  “I only decided to come down yesterday. Besides, with the chip shop just up the street, no need to cook.”

  “All the same . . .” she started. But from the way she stood, from the way she reached for the kettle and the tea caddy, with movements more spritely than the last time he had visited, he knew she was pleased. He saw that she was wearing a tweed skirt and a twinset and was happy that even for sitting solitary in her kitchen listening to the wireless, knitting, she had dressed. It hadn’t always been so; for many long years, almost twenty, after the death of his younger brother, his mother hadn’t often found the energy to get out of slippers and a dressing gown, far less visit her remaining son in his new home in the Highlands.

  They drank their tea. She asked about his work, and the fiancée she’d never met.

  He lied, telling his mother Joanne was getting better every day. He told her of Joanne’s girls, Annie and Jean, his soon-to-be stepdaughters. He painted a cheery picture of the Highland town, its river, its weather, and its inhabitants.

  His mother liked that. Although she had never been that far north, like all Scottish city dwellers, she had a romantic notion of the Highlands, the clans, the history. And Bonnie Prince Charlie.

  Nothing was said about the letter. McAllister did not mention he had paid it no heed. She did not mention she had been asking for help.

  “Another pot o’ tea?” she asked, it being her firm belief that the longer the journey, the more tea needed to recover.

  “How about I fetch some fish suppers?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” she replied. “If I’d known I’d’ve . . .”

  “Not to worry, our local has the best fish and chips in Glasgow”—by Glasgow he meant the universe.

  “Nothing for me,” she said, but he bought an extra fish anyway, hoping to persuade her to eat at least a half of it—which she did. They had a cup of cocoa, said their good-nights, then she went to bed, leaving him to listen to the news on the wireless and make his bed with the clean sheets she had left out. In the morning they’d speak of why he was here.

  All was as ever between them, and McAllister slept a long deep sleep untroubled by nightmares for the first time in a long time.

  At breakfast he let her boil him an egg, and he ate it with soldiers of toast—just as he had when a boy, when they could afford eggs; salted oatmeal porridge had been the childhood staple breakfast, eggs a Sunday treat.

  “I’m off to the Herald this morning, catch up with everyone,” he told her. “But whilst I’m here I’d like to talk to Mr. Dochery, see if I can find out what’s troubling him?”

  “I’ve been thinking on that.” Mrs. McAllister sighed, shaking her head slightly. “I’m no’ sure you should be getting involved. You’ve enough troubles o’ your own.”

  “Joanne will be fine.” He was saying what he only half believed. “Mr. Dochery was Dad’s friend . . .” He was not going to mention Jimmy McPhee. “And wasn’t he best man at your wedding?”

  “Right enough.” She was acknowledging that Mr. Gerald Dochery had the right to ask a favor, the first ever in over fifty years of their acquaintance. “I’ll see if I can get a message to him.”

  How the message would be delivered he didn’t ask, but McAllister remembered the notes wee boys, himself included, would run with from neighbor to neighbor, a farthing, or with luck a halfpenny, waiting for them when they returned. What the going rate was these days he didn’t know, but he knew it would be at least sixpence, plus, in Mr. Dochery’s case, the price of a bus fare or two.

  • • •

  “Well, well, well, the teuchtar comes to town.” Sandy Marshall was grinning as he used the disrespectful term for Highlanders. But he was allowed to be disrespectful; he and McAllister had been firm friends since, as seventeen-year-olds, they had started their careers as copyboys on the same newspaper, the Herald. “I suppose you need a favor. Or have you seen the light and come home to civilization?”

  “Both.” McAllister shook the proffered hand, sat down in the visitor’s chair, and after Sandy Marshall waved away McAllister’s preferred Passing Clouds and took a Player’s for himself, both men lit their cigarettes.

  McAllister blew the smoke towards the ceiling, observing his friend through narrowed eyes. Sandy had put on weight, and his hair and his skin made him look prosperous and as sleek as a well-fed seal in the zoo.

  “Still smoking thon Fenian brand, I see.” Sandy pointed to the packet of Passing Clouds on the desk.

  “Aye. And still a Celtic supporter through and through.”

  “I’d be careful where you shout that from these days,” Sandy told him. “There’s even more trouble about than usual.” He pushed a copy of that morning’s newspaper towards him.

  McAllister took it. Front page, large headlines, and an art
icle spilling onto page five told it all: the razor gangs had claimed another victim. One dead, two injured, three or more escaped, and the grass on Glasgow Green still stained red, no doubt. “Same old gang violence?” he asked. “I thought most of that had been cleaned up.”

  “Aye, it’s much better than the old days, but this is gangs, or so the police are saying. But one o’ my reporters doesn’t think so. She says it’s a turf war—who controls what areas, who collects the brown paper bag after the pubs close, after the billiard halls shut, the protection money from the stallholders at the Barrows, the garages, the boxing clubs—all the usual stuff. And”—it was Sandy’s turn to blow smoke towards the ceiling—“I’m inclined to believe her.”

  “Her?”

  “One Mary Ballantyne, a distant relation of the great journalist Thomas Ballantyne no less, and a real looker in a bluestocking kinda way.” Sandy grinned. “I’d introduce you, but aren’t you as good as wed?”

  McAllister ignored the comment. He knew, as did any journalist in Scotland, of the great nineteenth-century editor and publisher, but to find his female relative writing front-page crime stories nearly eighty years later was intriguing.

  “How can a woman come up with information on the gangs? Surely it’s dangerous?”

  “Aye. It is. I’ve warned her off, and she keeps coming back with more. I’ve another reporter backing her up, but no one comes close when it comes to accurate, timely reporting. She’s a woman on her way up. Manchester Guardian, like her forebear, is her next stop, so she says.”

  Now McAllister was intrigued. “So maybe she’d have contacts at Barlinnie Prison?” he asked.

  “More than likely.” Sandy looked up at a large clock placed in the center of the wall opposite the editor’s desk that every editor, past and present, knew must be obeyed. “She’ll be in in half an hour. I’ll introduce you. In the meantime . . .” He waved at the clock hands ticking down the minutes to deadline.