The Low Road (40 page)

Once more the big man waded in, invigorated by the dark swelling that was spreading from Jimmy's ear to his face. But
Jimmy kept up the attack to the stomach. One rapid flight of blows made the big man bend forwards. He dropped his guard to clutch his belly. Jimmy landed two hard blows to the face. Blood flew. The crowd cheered. Gordon bellowed. From a distance the noise could be mistaken for the roar of an incensed bull. And, like the big dumb creature he was, this Gordon brother was most dangerous when injured.

He grabbed Jimmy in a clinch, wrapped his arms around him, and squeezed. With his chin he was drumming on Jimmy's skull. The referee stepped in. “Break. Break!”

Both men's seconds stepped in, trying to grab their charges and pull them apart.

Gordon shook off his second as though the man was no more than a flea and kept up the attack on Jimmy's head. All Jimmy could do was wriggle, move his head from side to side, and try to slip down from the clinch. When his opponent lifted him off the ground, his incongruously white sand shoes dangling a couple of inches above the ground, Jimmy was unable to save himself. Gordon tossed him across the cobblestones, and when he did not move, Gordon was immediately on him, kicking and punching at his ribs, his groin, bending down to pummel his head.

Mary saw blood from the big man's nose spraying out in a halo as he shook from the effort of repeatedly kicking and stamping as though trying to squash a giant and dangerous insect.

The two seconds tried all they could but could not stop him; Gordon was a man possessed. The baying from the crowd grew louder and louder. Three Travelers were trying to fight their way towards Jimmy but were being held back by some in the crowd. Another fight broke out to Mary's left.

The referee was blowing his whistle, splitting the evening air. In between shrills he was shouting, “Stop the fight! Stop the fight!”

Now a group of men, Travelers, were clambering onto Gordon as though he were a rock face, and he was pulled away.

Half stooping with exhaustion, he was snorting and panting, trying to get his breath back, still shaking his head from side to side as if recovering from a fugue, a blackout. The blood from his nose splattered the cobbles, and the red stains on the front of his vest were spreading into Rorschach blots.

Gordon slowly straightened. He raised his right hand, then his left, and clasped them together. He shook them above his head and let out a triumphant roar. Then he spotted Mary and grinned right at her; she felt her stomach lurch, and if it were not for the crowd surging forward, pushing and shoving, patting Gordon, trying to see what had happened, trying to get a glimpse of the casualty, she would have found some way of scratching his eyes out with her bare hands.

Jimmy too was surrounded by onlookers four or five deep, and nothing could be seen.

Shuggy had had an arm around Mary's shoulder for most of the fight. And she had been glad of the protection. Now he was pulling her back. And she was resisting. “Jimmy,” she was saying, “Jimmy . . .”

For all that Shuggy was skinny, he was tall and had seen what was happening. “C'mon, hen, we're off out o' here.”

“But Jimmy needs—”

“His people are here. They'll look out for him.” He was surprisingly strong. Mary remembered he had been a well-thought-of welterweight. Holding her by the arm, almost lifting her, he pulled her towards the parked cars. A few others had seen the way the fight was heading, didn't want to become involved, and were making for their vehicles.

“Hey, Alec, any chance o' a lift?” Shuggy called out.

“No!” Mary was wriggling, batting Shuggy's wrist. “I have to stay, I have to see Jimmy—”

“No. You're coming wi' me.” He pushed her into the back of his friend's van and climbed in after her. She stumbled over a box of carpentry tools and fell onto a paint-stained tarpaulin.

As they rode down the farm track, Mary realized Shuggy was trembling.

“It's a bad do,” the driver said. On the journey back to the city not another word was spoken until he dropped Shuggy and Mary off at a pub near Partick Cross.

Shuggy said, “Thanks for the lift, Alec.”

He replied, “Nae problem,” and drove off without making eye contact with Mary but shaking his head at the sight of a woman.
A wee lassie
, he later called her when he lectured Shuggy on bringing a woman to a bare-knuckle fight, a fight that quickly went down in the legends of bare-knuckle fighting, especially since it resulted in a death.

N
ext morning Don McLeod took a phone call.
“Gazette.”

Mary spoke with no emotion in her voice, telling it as though she were dictating to a copy taker. When he heard the news, Don understood her need to protect herself; journalists, ambulance crews, the police, all those dealing with the extremities of human behavior had to insulate themselves to survive.

She had been up all night, waiting, listening, praying even, that the telephone would ring and Jimmy would, once again, be on another of his nine lives. When the call came, the speaker did not identify himself, but from the voice she knew he was the driver and referee.

“Do as he asked, would you? Let his mother know.”

“Is he . . .” She knew the answer. But needed to hear the words.

“He's gone.”

Thinking she was about to be sick, she doubled over, dropping the phone. The dial tone seemed to be coming from a dark space beyond the stars. Then silence.

She hurt more than she thought possible. “Daddy,” she whispered, “help me.”

She waited until nine o'clock, knowing no one would be at the
Gazette
office until then. She called Don McLeod. Why him and not McAllister she wouldn't have been able to articulate.

It was a long phone call.

After she had assured him she would be fine, and he hadn't
believed her, yet knew he could do nothing to help from his eyrie in the
Gazette
building in the Highlands, they said their farewells.

He drove to McAllister's house.

McAllister answered the doorbell. Don spoke to him on the porch, not wanting to bring more news of death into Joanne's household. McAllister leaned on the wall in the hallway. Then his legs gave way and he slid down to the black-and-white-checkered tiles.

Don sat beside him, ignoring the creak in his knees as he lowered himself to the floor. He took out his cigarettes, lit one for himself and one for McAllister, and they smoked in silence.

Ten minutes later Joanne found them there. She stared. Then she too leant against the wall, knowing that whatever it was, it was bad.

“Jimmy's dead,” Don told her.

“Right,” she said as though he had just announced the late arrival of a train.

She was numb. It was too much to take in. So she said, “I'll make the tea,” and they got up and followed her into the kitchen. She wanted to cry but couldn't. That would come later. She put the tea mugs in front of them but neither man picked one up—not that she minded, making tea was what you did when news—good, bad, or life-changing—visited.

“Does Jenny know?” she asked.

“I don't know,” Don replied. He was looking his age—ancient. And Jenny being Jenny with her way of knowing, seeing, had already divined that her second son, the one she was closest to, was gone.

“Does this have to do with Bill's, my, debt? Was Jimmy killed for helping me and for threatening the Gordon brothers if they started business up here?” Her voice was flat. Trying to hide how sick she felt, she was staring at the wallpaper she had always hated and couldn't wait to tear down after they married.
If we marry
,
she was thinking. That she might be responsible for the events that led to Jimmy's death were constantly on her mind and was only partly dulled by the tranquilizers the doctor insisted she still needed when she'd protested she wanted to come off them.

“No, this had nothing to do with the debt,” Don told them. “Mary explained it was all about the past, a leftover from Jimmy's boxing days.” He nodded gratefully as McAllister added a dash of whisky to the tea. “Years ago, before the war, Jimmy was a fighter on the bare-knuckle fight circuit. One o' the Gordon brothers was his opponent and Jimmy knocked him out and he never really recovered. He died a few months back in the asylum in Glasgow. Attacked by another inmate, apparently. His twin was out for revenge. It was him who killed Jimmy.”

“How do you know? Maybe this Councilor Gordon will come back for me . . . it's an awful lot of money.”

“Mary was told no, all debts end with Jimmy's death. She was there at the fight,” Don added.

“Is she all right?” Joanne put a hand on McAllister's arm as Don said this and through the shirtsleeve, through the palm of her hand, she felt how the news had hit him. Hard. She had a fleeting moment of apprehension. Mary means more to him than he's admitting.
But she knew Mary would never settle for a man like McAllister.

“Right.” Don stood. “I'm away to find Jenny McPhee.”

“I'm coming with you.”

Neither Joanne nor Don contradicted McAllister. They knew he needed to do this.

“We'll be a few hours, lass,” Don said. “And I'll bring him back safe.”

McAllister was not fit to drive his car. So, with Don at the wheel, they were now on the upward climb at the top of the glen leading past Strathpeffer on the Ullapool road.

“You knew from the beginning that all this trouble concerned Joanne, and you didn't tell me.” McAllister spoke quietly in a flat calm voice, but neither of the men was fooled. His anger was so deep, so profound, they could feel the chill across the short distance between their seats.

“No, I had no idea, not until the photo of James Gordon appeared in the
Herald
. Jimmy, all the Travelers, keep their business to themselves.” Don spoke quietly, concentrating on the road. He was a slow driver, and there was a buildup of traffic behind him desperate to pass. At one point on the narrow winding roads leading to the glens, he pulled over to let the cars and lorries pass.

“Maybe I should have guessed, but I didn't.” He took the car back onto the road and continued, “This whole business wi' Bill Ross, and later Joanne, started three years ago. When it became desperate, she came to me asking where she could borrow money. It was then I found out the whole story of her husband's debts and these people up from Glasgow wanting to take over her man's contracting company when he couldn't pay. The accountant brother, he hoodwinked Bill Ross wi' the compound interest tricks. There was never any way he would be able to repay a debt that size.

“When Bill Ross refused to sign over his business, they came to Joanne's house, threatened her and her girls. I told Jimmy. I thought he was willing to sort it out coz it suited him not to have the Gordons in town taking over his own loan-sharking and such-like.”

McAllister knew Jimmy operated outside the law but hadn't wanted to know the details.

“It was only in these last weeks I heard Jimmy had a grudge wi' the Gordons going back years.”

“And Jimmy's grudge?”

Don thought for a moment. He'd known Jenny McPhee for
over forty years, and although divided by birth, they were both of the Gaidhealtacht. They had witnessed each other's lives, knew many of each other's secrets. And although he could never say he knew her, Don understood that all Travelers were secretive, Jimmy especially. He was never one to blether about the past—or the present and future. But Jimmy was dead.

“It was before the war,” Don began, “another bare-knuckle fight, wi' this Gordon brother, the twin. The fight was supposed to be fair—but Jimmy was set up. An' this manny, the Gordon twin, was huge, but raw, never been in a real fight. Jimmy won and the lad was injured real bad. Never quite right in the head even before the fight, he was a lot worse after, always in trouble fighting people, unprovoked I heard. He ended up in the asylum in Rutherglen on manslaughter charges, pleaded diminished responsibility, and was detained for life. He died recently in a fight wi' another loony. His twin, he's as mental as anything too, and he blamed Jimmy. The fight that got Jimmy locked up in Barlinnie, that was the start o' all this mess, and that same twin has now ended it just as he promised.”

“And Bill's debt? And the twin, the killer, what happens now?” McAllister knew, but he needed to ask.

“It's over,” Don said. “Them's the rules. Everything is settled. Over . . .”

“Like Jimmy's life?”

“Aye. That too.”

They reached the camp at the west side of Ben Wyvis and saw a van and a car already there.

When Don and McAllister approached, a dog ran out and began barking and snarling and darting in, trying to nip at their ankles. They stopped. Stood. Waited.

A man in a suit and white shirt came to the caravan door, spotted them, went back inside, then came out and gestured
towards the ring of boulders around a burnt-out campfire. It hurt McAllister to look at it. He remembered the spot well, remembered other conversations, late on a star-strewn night, with Jenny McPhee. And Jimmy. The sound of the burn was the same, and the sighing of larch and the rustling of birch and rowan. But the conversation would never be the same, not without Jimmy.