modern geography teachers. My biggest expense, more than the tent, was a pair of heavy walking boots.
The salesman insisted I try them on with a pair of heavy socks and walk around the store with the boots on. I appreciated his professionalism: I already knew from my army days that the wrong size of boots could end up crippling you. In the army your boots, after your gun, were your most important piece of kit. What was more, my feet were still painful from my sock-soled flight across Glasgow and needed the best protection I could give them.
Adding three pairs of heavy socks to wear with the boots and an oiled wool turtleneck that would have stood up on its own, I picked out a pair of waterproof trousers and another flat cap, something I would normally not be seen dead in. I really was pushing my luck, making the salesman’s day by buying the whole camping caboodle. In November. And that meant he would remember me.
I fed him some baloney about buying the tent as a Christmas present for my nephew, and I was getting myself kitted out because, although I’d never been camping before, I had promised to take my nephew on a trip to the Trossachs in the spring, as soon as the weather improved. It was all a strain, because I went through the whole process putting on a vaguely Glaswegian accent. Or at least what I thought would sound like a Glasgow accent, but somehow came out more Boston Irish than anything else.
He’d probably remember that too.
When he took me to the cash desk to pay for the gear. I thought I caught the girl at the desk eyeing the bruises on my face, despite me doing my best to present everyone with my unblemished side as much as possible. The salesman was so pleased with my custom that he insisted on helping me out with the stuff, ignoring my repeated assurances that I could manage myself by making a couple of trips to the car. I had deliberately parked the Cresta out of sight of the shop, but my continued insistence on carrying the stuff myself would soon become in itself suspicious.
Piling the clothing into the back seat, I got the salesman to place the tent and the rest of the hardware in the trunk of the car. I’d forgotten that the bolt cutters were in there, but my overly helpful assistant seemed to pay them no heed, pushing them to the back as he carefully organized my purchases in the trunk.
I repeated my act in a grocer’s in Milngavie, on the way out of the city, picking up some extra provisions. It was getting better. The trick, I learned, was not to work at it too hard. So instead of trying to do an impersonation of a Glaswegian, which always turned out bizarre, I used my natural voice but bent the Canadian a little and rolled the r’s more. If there was one thing I could say for the fugitive lifestyle, it was that it exposed talents and abilities you didn’t know you possessed. Music Hall now beckoned along with the laundry business as a possible postprison career.
The grocer’s was one of a small knot of shops in the centre of Milngavie, so I called into the newsagent- cum-tobacconist kiosk in the middle of the small square. The hunch-shouldered kiosk man tucked behind the counter with his paraffin heater was small and mean-looking and eyed me with suspicious loathing. I tried not to read too much into it, because that, I had found, was one of the two standard customer service ethics in Scotland: you were served either with intense hostility or embarrassing servility, with no middle ground between the two extremes. But, again, I thought he had examined the bruising on my face just that little bit too closely. I asked for four packs of cigarettes, two boxes of matches and a local newspaper.
It was all over the front page.
The police, the headline stated, were investigating the murder of Andrew Ellis, who was found dead from stab wounds in a city centre office. Ellis, who was a prominent member of the city’s business community, had left a widow but no issue. Police were now keen to ascertain the whereabouts of…
And there it was. My name. The fact that I was a Canadian national. And a pretty damned good description. The only thing I was grateful for was that there was no mention of my bearing any marks or bruises on my face.
I folded the paper under my arm and paid the newsagent as matter-of-factly as I could. Then, looking behind him, I saw a rack of pipes. As if acting on a whim, I asked him for the most expensive of the pipes and a tin of ready-rub. It would go with my new image of the Scottish outdoorsman, I thought.
Maybe I was being paranoid — or more paranoid, as that had become more or less my permanent state of mind — but I was pretty sure that the little, hostile tobacconist was watching me from his kiosk as I walked back to the car. Fortunately, I had again taken the precaution of parking out of sight.
Heading first west to Dumbarton, then north to Loch Lomond, I pulled up in a lay-by off the road once I was out of town. This was one of the main routes north from Glasgow and there was a fair amount of traffic passing in both directions, so I couldn’t very well step out of the car, peel off my clothes and change. Instead, I struggled in the confines of the Cresta, wriggling into the waterproof trousers over my flannels.
Sliding over to the passenger side, I opened the door and swung my legs out, out of sight of the traffic. I slipped a heavy pair of socks over the silk ones I already had on and laced up the hiking boots. After my barefoot experiences, it felt good to have something so solid on my feet. I took off my jacket, slipped on the oiled wool turtleneck and planted the waxed flat cap on my head. I left the smock-anorak for the moment. My new outfit opened up the opportunity to be worn with either the duffle coat or the tweed jacket, as well as the anorak, depending on the particular rugged dash I was trying to cut.
The main thing, though, was that my new outfit and equipment had been chosen for purely practical reasons. Scotland — this real Scotland — in November could be lethally unforgiving.
My main hope was that the bivouac in the trunk would not have to be pressed into service, but if my mission lasted longer than I hoped, then I was going to have to take care of my own accommodations. And, anyway, I had in my time spent plenty of nights under canvas with more than the inclement weather to worry about.
I drove up the side of Loch Lomond, a massive expanse of water and the biggest lake in Britain. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but I had to drive carefully as the roadway sparkled white with frost. After the gloom and grime of Glasgow, it made everything look fresh and crisp and clean. It was funny, I thought, how any sun — even hard, warmth-less sun — lifted your mood.
Halfway up the loch, I stopped at a roadside tearoom with a view out over the water and ordered some cheese sandwiches with coffee. The woman who served me was in her early forties, with fresh, pale skin and dark blonde hair. She was slim but sexy and I promised myself a return visit in happier times; but there was something about her nagged at my gut. I realized that she reminded me, in an odd way, of Fiona White. She had only one other guest in the place and I had to dance around her questions about where I had come from, where I was going, what I was going to do there… the routine building blocks of conversation she must have used with every guest she chatted with. I had given up on trying to sound Glaswegian or Scottish and simply sought to neuter my speech to a standard English.
She had probably seen the way I had looked at her and it was obvious she didn’t mind at all and we chatted about nothing, all the time laying out our stalls in the indirect and abstract way you do before you seal the deal.
What the hell, Lennox, I suddenly said to myself, do you think you are doing?
I paid her and left.
I may have been picking up many of the skills of the fugitive; making myself forgettable was not one of them.
I cleared the top end of Loch Lomond and was well into the Highlands by the time the sun started to play peek-a-boo behind the mountains.
I stopped a couple of times to check Ellis’s map and make sure I didn’t miss my turning, but in the event I did. In the gloaming the landscape had started to melt into soft shapes and splashes of dull red light and shadows, and I drove past the exit and had to drive farther along the ribbon of lakeside road before I found a spot safe enough to execute a three-point turn.
It wasn’t really surprising that I had missed it — a narrow, bush-flanked mouth that led off the main highway and up and away from the loch. I turned and followed it up a steep hillside and across an empty, darkening landscape of umbrous hills and deep gorge. There was one thing that was for sure: I wasn’t being tailed. This was the Scotland of glens empty of anything other than sheep, wildcats, adders and eagles, and I would have spotted other headlights ten miles away.
After the adventures of father-and-son Catholic pretenders to the British throne, the lairds and lords of the Highlands had followed, with enthusiasm and vigour, the Hanoverian edict that the Highlands had to be cleared of troublemakers. Scotland’s loss had been North America’s gain, with whole Gaelic families of every generation being
