Gently North-West (2 page)

By 10.15 they’d arrived at the south end of the Doncaster Motorway, and here Gently’s travel-plan allowed for a stop for coffee and petrol. The two cars pulled into the service station and parked with bumpers to the low parapet. Their crews tumbled out, stretching, sniffing, a little bemused by the quietness and non-movement.

‘It’s inside, I think,’ Brenda said to Bridget. ‘Did you notice that pig in the blue Cortina?’

‘Bridgy wouldn’t notice anything,’ Geoffrey said. ‘She’s one of those lucky people who can sleep in cars.’

‘Well,’ Brenda said, ‘
you’d
have noticed him. He passed you in the speed limit at Baldock.’

‘May have done, my dear,’ Geoffrey smiled. ‘But then, we were crawling through Baldock in any case.’

‘Oh,’ Brenda said. ‘You’re worse than George.’ And she went off with her nose tilted, towing Bridget after her.

They met again in the station’s large, comfortably fitted restaurant, which framed, with a range of huge windows, the sweeping view to the north-west. There, drinking your coffee, you apparently looked out into an animated industrial painting, in which the motorway, advancing from a roundabout in the foreground, led the eye to a majestic spoil-tip in the middle distance.

‘Perfect Lowry,’ Geoffrey apostrophized. ‘Though he was using somebody else’s palette. To see Ruskin justified like this is enough to make an artist hang himself.’

‘Of course, Geoff’s brought his paints along,’ Bridget said. ‘We’ll see some Monarchs of the Glen à la Doyly John.’

‘Well, there are deer at Strathtudlem,’ Geoffrey said. ‘At least, Maclaren swore there were when he offered me the cottage.’

‘And you believed him,’ Bridget said.

‘Yes – he was sober enough at the time. And he vouches for wild-cats in Strathtudlem Forest, and a golden eagle if we’re lucky.’

‘Did he vouch for Red MacGregors?’ Brenda asked.

‘Red MacGregors?’

Brenda nodded. ‘Who scour the roads in blue Cortinas – then sit down to coffee with their victims.’

She pointed along the line of booths, in one of which they were sitting. Above the back of the last of them they could see projecting a head of fiery red hair.

‘That’s your man, Superintendent,’ she said to Gently. ‘You’d better slip along and put the cuffs on him.’

‘What makes you so certain it’s him?’ Gently asked.

‘Intuition, O Highness. But I’m willing to check.’

She slid out of the booth and marched down the aisle to the booth occupied by the red hair. Attached to the wall near the booth was a vending machine and at this she paused, as though examining its wares. Then she turned to stare accusingly at the owner of the hair. Then she marched back and resumed her seat by Gently.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s him. Redbeard in person. He’s up to some devil’s work with papers and a notebook – most likely checking his score of probables.’

‘Pooh,’ Gently said. ‘He’s only a traveller getting his programme worked out.’

‘If you say so. But I’ll tell you one thing: he’s as Scotch as Wullie Wallace. He’s got one of those mighty and mournful faces they use on tins of shortbread, and a big agate pin stuck in his tie, and a tartan waistcoat with silver buttons.’

‘Is that a crime?’

‘I don’t know. But I wouldn’t want to meet him around Bannockburn. Are you going to run him in?’

Gently chuckled. ‘Not my day for it,’ he said.

‘
I
think his name’s MacLandru,’ Brenda said. ‘Or else he’s the Son of Rob Roy.’

When they rose to go the Cortina-driver was still sitting in his booth. Outside Brenda spotted his car. It was a G.T. model, much stained with travel.

The motorway took them into West Riding and the long, long Yorkshire miles, with Boroughbridge apparently receding before them and Leeds for ever riding their flank. The Sceptre had taken over the lead and was thrusting ahead through plentiful traffic, slipping tall trucks, frisky caravans, transporters loaded with bright new cars. Gently’s pipe hung dead in his mouth and his eyes were distant and dreamy. The pattern of traffic seemed always to unfold for him, move from him, give him road. Leeds was weathered at last and Borough-bridge erased from the signs. Ripon, Thirsk and Northallerton ceased to offer invitation. Then they were passing Catterick Camp with its long ranks of khaki trucks, and pointing up the straight to the great divide of Scotch Corner.

Gently glanced at his watch as he slowed for the roundabout.

‘Well?’ Brenda asked.

‘Good going. I think we’ll press on to Brough for lunch.’

‘I’m hungry now,’ Brenda yawned. ‘And when do we get to some scenery?’

‘Stay with it,’ Gently said. ‘We’ll perhaps have lunch and scenery together.’

He turned left onto the A66, checking that Geoffrey had turned behind him. At once the anonymity of the A1 was broken and they began climbing into hilly country. At Bowes they reached the 1000-foot contour and were still climbing across Bowes moor, with a great width of raw Pennine fells stretching beside and beyond them. They stopped short of Brough and lunched at a roadhouse at the highest point of the road. Photographs on the wall showed arctic-like snow scenes, taken when the roadhouse had been cut off in a recent winter. Behind them the moors peaked in Boldoo Hill, before them stretched to Bastifell, Tan Hill, Water Crag; while down the road which the legions had trod appeared the first blue promise of the lakeland mountains.

‘Oh,’ Bridget exclaimed, as they stood in the car-park and took photographs like other tourists, ‘why go any farther than this – what can Scotland have to beat it?’

‘It’s certainly a stunner,’ Geoffrey agreed. ‘I don’t know – what’s Scotland got, George?’

‘Scotland is bigger,’ Gently said. ‘That’s the important point about Scotland.’

‘Oh, nonsense,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What can being bigger have to do with it?’

Gently shrugged. ‘Just about everything. It’s big enough to lose people.’

He pointed to the traffic streaming past, the belching trucks, the shouldering cars, their hot tyres pounding, pounding, pounding the Romans’ road across the Pennines. Even to cross that road to the drystone wall was an enterprise of moment. Though the wall made the best vantage for the photographers, few were bothering to exploit it.

‘Yes,’ Brenda said, ‘I understand, George. Getting lost is what counts.’

‘George can say what he likes,’ Bridget said. ‘But he’s about the last person to get lost, anywhere.’

They drove on, by Brough, by Appleby, making the lake mountains climb higher, then turning their back on them at Penrith to join the fast carriageways of the A6. The Hawk was leading again now and Brenda had taken the wheel of the Sceptre. She drove with a flair that contrasted with Gently’s smooth discipline, which combined police coaching with natural poise and temperament.

They crept through rusty-faced Carlisle and bore left on the A74. Still it was England, though the classic boundary of the Wall lay behind them.

‘Oh Highness,’ Brenda sighed. ‘This Scotland is certainly a far country. I’ve a feeling that if we go this way much longer we’ll drive clean out at the top.’

‘Just a little farther,’ Gently said. ‘We cross the Border at Gretna Green.’

Brenda threw him a glance. ‘You kept that dark. If I’d known, you might have whistled for your Strathtudlem.’

‘Just drive,’ Gently said. ‘Keep your mind on the job.’

‘Yes, but it’s difficult,’ Brenda said. ‘Driving a man like you through a place like that.’

And she whistled a few bars of ‘Bonny Dundee’, lilting her head in time with it.

‘I suppose,’ Gently said, from the depths of his pipe, ‘on balance, your whiskery friend isn’t a traveller.’

‘Redbeard?’ Brenda said, surprised. ‘Have you been turning the trained mind on him?’

‘Force of habit,’ Gently grinned. ‘He’s the only likely material we’ve seen today. And now I consider it I’m inclined to agree with you. On balance, I don’t think he’s a traveller.’

‘Well, one up to my intuition,’ Brenda said. ‘Why don’t you think he’s a traveller?’

‘The car. It’s not the model a traveller would use, nor a model a firm would supply to its reps.’

‘A-hah,’ Brenda said. ‘But suppose he was in the car trade. Car-trade men often go for a hot car.’

‘Yes, but they can usually drive them, too,’ Gently said. ‘And Redbeard’s driving didn’t impress us. No, on balance we can eliminate travellers. Also, I wouldn’t place him in a profession. Professional men are required to conform in matters of dress and hairstyle.’

‘A musician perhaps.’

‘A musician is possible. But there again the car is unlikely.’

‘Why?’

‘Musicians are pariahs to insurers. He’d hardly get cover for a hot car.’

‘Hm,’ Brenda said. ‘You’re making it difficult. On balance, he soon isn’t going to exist. But there he was with his beard and buttons, singeing the tyres of his G.T. So who does the trained mind say he was?’

Gently puffed. ‘Could have been a farmer.’

‘Oh, no. Never a farmer!’

‘Why not? It fits most of the facts.’ He counted on his fingers. ‘One, a dirty car, with plenty of mud in the wheel arches. Two, a man who dresses flamboyantly and can’t be bothered with razors and barbers. Three, a man who drives impatiently as though he’s used to owning the road. Four, a man who employs a break in a journey to tot up figures in a notebook. Five, a man who uses a hot car but is satisfied with one of the cheapest. Add it up.’

‘I won’t,’ Brenda said. ‘You shan’t make my Red-beard into a farmer.’

‘I’d say he was in cattle,’ Gently said. ‘He’s just been south with a shipment of bullocks.’

‘He’s a bank-robber at the least!’

‘Probably from the Highlands,’ Gently said. ‘Your description of his features suggests that. Yes, a Highland farmer on his way home from a livestock sale.’

Brenda flickered him a venomous look. ‘You’re just rotten to me, aren’t you, George?’ she said. ‘You know I can’t stand up for myself, and you’re brutal to me all the time.’

‘It’s my job,’ Gently said. ‘I’m a brutal policeman.’

‘Well you are,’ Brenda said. ‘That’s you all over. I’ll bet you oil your thumbscrews every morning and blanco the webbing on your rack. Do you want to know something, George Gently?’

‘Tell me,’ Gently said.

‘We’ve just passed through Gretna Green – and I wouldn’t go back there if you paid me.’

And the tall sun, which had begun the day riding low on their right, was now standing to their left; and still the cars raced northwards. Eight spinning wheels turning, tilting the great globe itself, while the great globe itself revolved shining in its spaceway. But the drivers were growing tired now and speed was slowing with them, so that tyres occasionally scrubbed on a bend which arrived too fast; and eyes were wearying of impressions and seeing increasing sameness in every vista, with only enough of strangeness to make the fresh scene unfriendly. So the A74 became the A73, brushing Glasgow’s wide urbation and crossing the big east-west arteries; reached Cumbernauld, took another bite north as the A80, then skirted Bannockburn to lose itself in the anonymous streets of Stirling. They crossed the Forth, but at this end of the day the Forth was just another river; came to Balmagussie, its broad street closed to the west by some bald-browed ben; drove now slower, because the twisted road was squeezed between loch and jealous braeside, the last, longest, weariest miles to the glen village of Strathtudlem.

And there the wheels stopped spinning, by the low white walls of Maclaren’s cottage, the target of all those stretching roads from the Victorian villa in Finchley. And in the buzzing stillness a Scots voice was saying:

‘My guidness! From London this morning, did ye say? But you’ll be wanting your supper, that’s certain. Step in – step in. And you from London!’

I went wi’ Maggie up the glen,

Donsie, sonsie Maggie Mackay;

When think ye we cam doun again?

Whist! I mauna lie.

‘The Gauger’s Wooing’, attrib. Burns

A
ND YOU FROM
London . . . ! Perhaps no greeting could have been more salutary, Gently thought. At one stroke it turned them about from facing north to facing south. London, till then, had travelled with them like an aura they could not lose, but now suddenly a cord had snapped and London vanished below the horizon. They were in Scotland. The Town of Cockney from here was merely another town; distinguished by being distant, like Plymouth or Bristol, but not otherwise greatly remarkable.

‘You’ll be Mrs McFie?’ Geoffrey was saying to the plump, smiling woman who showed them into the cottage.

‘Ay, and you’ll be Mr Kelling, I don’t doubt, who sees to the Major’s law-work in England. How is the Major?’

‘Maclaren’s well.’

‘I had a letter from him on Tuesday. I’m to treat you like himself, the Major says, but no’ to plague you with tup’s head or haggis.’

‘Oh,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What would tup’s head be?’

‘If ye dinna ken, Mr Kelling, you’ll perhaps be better off without it.’

Maclaren’s cottage made no pretension to being grander than its name suggested. One stepped straight from the porch into a low-ceilinged living-room littered with old and shabby furniture. The flagged floor was overlaid with mats and the rough walls were simply whitewashed, and so massively thick that the small window seemed to be set in a tunnel. A Welsh dresser, weighty with crockery, occupied much of the back wall, and a case of books, mainly fiction and sporting, was arranged to conceal a door into another room. By the window stood a large, solid table, covered and laid for four people. Perhaps because the walls were so ponderous the room had an air of great silence.

Mrs McFie, having made their acquaintance, retired to the kitchen to brew tea; but since the kitchen was next door to the living-room the remove was small bar to her conversation. From the kitchen also they soon began to hear a suggestive sizzle of hot fat, and a rich smell of frying started to percolate through the cottage.

Gently was feeling bone-tired. He had not driven so far for many a summer, and now he was glad to sprawl on a board-hard couch and sip a mighty cup of strong, sweet tea. Geoffrey, he noticed with some surprise, seemed quite unmarked by the trip. He was spryly hauling in luggage from the Hawk and keeping up a running chat with Mrs McFie. Brenda and Bridget, lugging travel-bags, had vanished into a scullery-cum-bathroom, but this too was so closely adjacent that one heard their voices and the sound of running water.