The Low Road by A. D. Scott

Dochery.” He was trying to sound professional. He didn’t succeed. He wanted to see her. To chat. To laugh. To forget.
    â€œWhere are you?” she asked.
    â€œThe Herald .”
    â€œMeet me in Blythswood Square. The north side, in the middle. Give me half an hour.” And she was gone.
    He had to wait twenty minutes for the bus, it being Sunday, and was five minutes late. He stood on the pavement outside the black iron railings of the square park, under the full prima verdi canopy of trees. The sky behind the three-story Georgian terraces was an almost painful and very unlikely shade of deep blue. This looks more Madrid than Glasgow , was his immediate thought.
    What were once family homes of the wealthy were now mostly offices for solicitors, dentists, or doctors, or converted into flats. Many of the basements, once the kitchens and servant quarters, were now flats, often rented by students who didn’t mind the gloom or the damp. However, a few of the terraced housesremained intact, residences of the rich old-moneyed citizens of the city.
    He saw Mary emerge from one of the homes. As she was locking the large door behind her, he could see no sign of the numerous bells that would indicate multiple occupancy. She looked across, saw him, waved, and came towards him in her usual setting-out-on-an-adventure stride.
    â€œI’m desperate for breakfast,” she said. “There’s a great hole-in-the-wall café near the taxi stand at the back of Queen Street station.
    â€œI’ve just come from that direction.”
    â€œAye? I heard you’re a Dennistoun boy.”
    He grinned. Before he had time to ask her whom she’d heard that from she was jumping off the pavement into the street shouting, “Taxi.”
    He marveled as a taxi appeared from nowhere, thinking she was the kind of woman for whom taxis mysteriously materialized when no one else could find one.
    The café was indeed a hole-in-the-wall, and showing signs it had been busy early in the morning and was now in the lull between trains. They ordered mugs of tea, bacon rolls—two for Mary—and ate in silence. When Mary ordered a second tea, they both lit up, Mary again filching one of McAllister’s Passing Clouds.
    â€œYou like those, do you?” he asked, indicating the pale pink packet. “An acquired taste, I’m told.”
    â€œI’m trying not to smoke, but I take whatever is on offer.”
    He laughed. It felt good to laugh. There had not been enough laughs recently.
    â€œSo,” she said, blowing smoke towards what he thought were dark patches on the ceiling, only to realize they were congregations of flies, lazing in the heat of the fumes from the chip fryer.
    â€œSo,” he started, “after mass . . .” He saw the arched eyebrows, the ones that looked as though they had been brushed on but weren’t, rise. “To please my mother,” he explained. “I lost all religion in Spain—somewhere between Madrid and Barcelona.” He flicked the ash off his cigarette into the tin lid that served as an ashtray. “Gerry Dochery paid me a visit. My mother . . .”
    â€œWhat?”
    He smiled at her reaction. He described for her in ample detail the embarrassment—for both him and Gerry—of his mother’s insisting Gerry come in for tea, of his mother’s reminding Gerry of the family connection, of his mother’s more than hinting that Gerry should visit his father. He finished by relaying Gerry’s warning, word for word, as it was imprinted on his brain; Gerry Dochery knew of Jimmy McPhee, of that he had no doubt, and Gerry Dochery, or whoever he was working for, wished Jimmy harm.
    â€œSo you think it’s Gerry Dochery out to get your friend Jimmy McPhee. Why?”
    McAllister had no answer. “Search me.”
    Mary was leaning back in the chair—a posture McAllister was prone to using—staring