A Risk Worth Taking

by Robin Pilcher

Unfortunately, Ronnie was acquainted with him. It wasn’t that Maxwell Borthwick had ever done him any harm or injustice. It was just that he was one of those self-opinionated, thick-skinned, conniving individuals that Ronnie had done his best to avoid most of his life. He came from Inverness and spoke in a thin, whining accent, and Ronnie had always imagined him as the kind of young boy who either would have been dragged off into some teacher-free corner of the school playground to get beaten up quite regularly or, if he was ever lucky enough to be involved in a game with the other boys, would have been made to play the role of “the enemy.” That was probably the reason why he had gone into politics—to give back a little of what he had received, and to give himself the power that he knew he had so blatantly lacked in his earlier days.

  Not that his chosen career had been as successful as he would have liked. When the new Scottish Parliament had been formed, he had put himself forward as a Scottish Socialist Party candidate for the Highlands and Islands. He wanted to see a Democratic Scotland—power to the people and not allegiance to the Crown. He wanted Scotland for the Scots and he wanted to rid the country of the parasitic presence of its landowners, no matter if they were English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, or whatever, those who lived privileged existences, in many cases in absenteeism, off the struggling labours of those unfortunate enough to work for them or live as tenants on their vast estates. Absolute partition was the only way forward.

  It was a simplistic manifesto, yet an emotive one, and during the run-up to the election, Maxwell’s words were seldom out of the local press, his high-pitched voice constantly heard on Moray Firth Radio, expounding his views with such nationalistic vehemence that it appeared that he was not going to be satisfied until he had seen every haw-haw–speaking toff living in Scotland lose his head on the guillotine. He wanted a new pecking order in his country, and he wanted to be at the top of it.

  Maxwell felt that nothing could stop him from taking his seat in the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh, and he therefore adopted for himself an image that he thought reflected the importance of his new status. He bought his clothes from Austin Reed, joined a new golf club on the outskirts of Glasgow that was frequented by some of the hierarchy of Scottish politics (even though it was a good four-hour drive from his home in Inverness and he barely knew the difference between a driver and a putter). He made sure he was seen at all the events that would be featured in Caledonia magazine, and to transport himself from Inverness to his place of work in Edinburgh, he had purchased the second-hand BMW 525i.

  However, it was all to no avail. Five weeks before the election, he had had to undergo an operation on a delicate part of his anatomy, and even though he craved notoriety and publicity for himself, he was mortified when some Conservative-voting doctor or money-grabbing porter in the hospital had leaked it to the newspapers. Most of the tabloids had picked it up, but the most humiliating for Maxwell was the Daily Star, which printed a short, four-line paragraph directly opposite the right nipple of the Page 3 girl under the headline “Borthwick Drops a Ball.” It was assured that everyone was going to read it.

  Maxwell had thereafter gone to ground, or to be more precise, had hidden himself for a week beneath the stiff white sheets of his hospital bed before leaving the scene of his betrayal in sunglasses and a broad-rimmed hat to return, tail between legs, to the neat little council house of his doting mother in Inverness. There, he had been able to unleash the full power of his political authority by banning her from reading a newspaper or watching any programme on the television. Not that anyone in the media was remotely interested in Maxwell Borthwick anymore.

  But then he had bounced back, still fired by his convictions, and found himself a job as a junior councillor with the Highland Regional Council. It was only a stepping-stone, in Maxwell’s view, until the realms of Holyrood opened up their arms and welcomed him as a key figure in the development of the New Scotland. Until then, he made sure that he was going to be seen in all the places where he felt there were ardent, “grass-roots” feelings for his policies. Places like the Cormorant Café in Oban.

  He took the cup of coffee that Eck had banged down on the counter, and having poured the contents of the saucer back into the cup, he gently stirred it with the bent teaspoon as he glanced around the place.

  “My wordie, he’s seen us,” Ronnie said, rubbing his fingers across his forehead.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Maxwell said brightly, his voice sounding like an over-revving chainsaw. “Would you mind if I have a seat at your table?”

  “Ye can have mine, if ye like,” Billy said, getting up from his chair.

  “I’m sure that Mr. Borthwick can quite easily pull one over from another table,” Ronnie responded, giving Billy a look that dared him to leave at his peril.

  “Of course I can. No need to move, Billy.” He put his cup down on the table, and as he turned his back on them to retrieve a chair, Billy shot Ronnie a sneering thanks and sat down again.

  “So,” said Maxwell, spilling his bulk over the edges of the red plastic chair, “what’s the trade been like?”

  “Above average,” Ronnie replied, knowing that the man’s understanding of the fish trade was below minimal and that he could have said anything. Billy, however, had decided not to be so forgiving.

  “Prawns the size of elephants this morning. It’s aye good when the boats are fishin’ aff the Azores.”

  Maxwell nodded understandingly. “Yes, so I have been told.”

  The two buyers caught each other’s eye across the table. Ronnie took a drink of tea to stop himself from laughing and Billy dug frantically in his pocket for a handkerchief and gave his nose a prolonged blow.

  “So who have you been buying for today, Ronnie?”

  “Seascape.”

  “Ah, right. I hear that the Englishman is not keeping so well.”

  Ronnie glowered at the man. “Now, would that be Patrick you’re talking about, MacSwell?” He always liked to get the accent wrong on his name. He felt that it was more fitting for the bumptious blimp of a man.

  “Of course. There’s no other Englishman that works for Seascape.”

  Ronnie cocked his head to the side. “Well, that’s where you’re wrong, MacSwell. Seemingly, Patrick has just hired another man to help him. From London, I believe. A banker, no less.”

  Maxwell stared at Ronnie, unaware of the dribble of coffee that ran down the deep, podgy cleft at the side of his mouth. He placed his cup with a clatter onto its saucer. “Now, that’s just typical, isn’t it?”

  Billy drummed his fingers on the table. “Whit dae ye mean by that?”

  Maxwell clasped his sausage fingers together and rested them on his stomach. “Well, it just seems to me that there are plenty of good men up here looking for jobs. Why give priority to someone coming up from the south?”

  Ronnie let out a quiet sigh. He was a Scotsman through and through, yet he didn’t like these “us and them” ideas that Maxwell had spouted so readily to the media. His own father had been a forester all his days, working on an estate up near Lochcarron in Wester Ross. Ten years ago, it had been bought by a Danish industrialist who had ploughed money into the place to improve its infrastructure. He employed thirty staff where before there had only been ten, and had funded the building of the new community hall, which thereafter became the main focal point of the area, being the venue for the various local council meetings and for the Saturday night ceilidhs. His father had always maintained that the Dane would have got a poor return on the capital that he had invested in the property.

  “So what brings you down to these parts, Mac-Swell? You’re a long way from your jurisdiction, are you not?”

  “Always good to get out and meet the people,” Maxwell replied with a smug smile.

  “Does yer boss ken that ye’re doon here?” Billy asked, narrowing his eyes at the man.

  Maxwell drew himself up in his chair. “I am my own boss, Billy. I have been for some time now. I am one of two coordinators of b
usiness development for the Highland Regional Council.”

  Billy scratched his head quite theatrically, giving the impression that he was totally perplexed. “Aye, that may be so, but are we not in Argyll at the minute?”

  “Well, yes, but . . .” Maxwell spluttered.

  “Maybe he was just wanting to give the car a wee bit of a run,” Ronnie said to Billy, a wry smile on his face. “It’s still going well, I suppose?”

  “Like a dream,” Maxwell replied, glad that the direction of the conversation had changed. “I had it tuned the other day by Frangalini Motors in Inverness.”

  “Tuned, eh?” Ronnie sang out as he drained the last of the tea from his mug. “Well, there’s a thing.”

  Maxwell glanced over both shoulders, and then leaned forward in his chair. “I got it up to a hundred and fifteen miles an hour on the A9 this morning.”

  Billy had taken a tin of tobacco from his pocket and was busy rolling an anorexic cigarette. “In that case, ye’d better watch oot for yersel’, boy.” He licked the paper, squeezed the cigarette, and put it in his mouth. “Itherwise ye’ll soon be withoot yer precious car.”

  Maxwell flumped back in his chair. “Oh, I don’t worry about that kind of thing. I’ve got a radar detector fitted.”

  “Aye, I reckon you would have,” said Ronnie, picking up his notebook and mobile phone. “Well, gentlemen, it’ll do me no good sitting around gossiping all day.” He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “So if you will both excuse me.”

  “Aye,” said Billy, hurriedly getting to his feet. “And I’ve got tae see a man aboot a dog.”

  Maxwell watched the two men as they hurriedly paid Eck at the counter and then jostled with each other to get to the door. He turned back to the table and finished off his cup of coffee with a smack of his lips. So the trip had been worth it. He had found out about this new Englishman working for Seascape. That was not good news. That bloody man Trenchard had always got up his nose. Maybe the time would be right to have a quick word in the ear of Allan Duguid in Buckie. His prawn business had been suffering from the day that Trenchard took over Seascape. A little leverage on his part in Allan’s favour might well be rewarded quite handsomely.

  As Maxwell pushed himself to his feet, pulling the folds of his overcoat around his stomach, a mobile sounded in his pocket. He extracted it from the depths and pressed the button.

  “Hullo? . . . Oh, yes, good morning, Cyril. . . . Where am I? Oh, well, at the minute, I’m in, er, Dingwall. . . . Yes, Cyril, as soon as I can. . . . Well, I can’t be there that soon because my, er, car is in the garage. . . . No, I can’t take the bus, because the garage is here in Dingwall, and I couldn’t then . . . all right, Cyril, I’ll get there as soon as possible. Thank you, Cyril. . . . Goodbye.”

  Maxwell’s face had changed from ruddy red to deep purple. He waddled quickly over to the counter and paid his bill, then left the café at speed. It would be that creep Cyril Bentwood, he thought to himself, as he pressed the key fob to open the doors of the BMW. He had always seen it as the final insult, having an Englishman as a boss.

  17

  As Betty, the office manager at Seascape, had hoped, the weather settled into the warmth of a prolonged Indian summer that spilled over from September into the first few weeks of October. The garden at the cottage, which had been a colourless wilderness when Dan and Josh had arrived, took on a new lease of life, bursting forth in resurgence with hollyhocks, larkspur, and foxgloves that splashed pink and blue and purple along the narrow border of the property. Even the dormant honeysuckle that had clung so miserably to the front wall of the cottage responded by producing a thin covering of dark green leaves and even the occasional small but heavily scented flower.

  Although Josh was working most days in the factory, he found time to plunder Patrick’s tool shed for the necessary hardware to restore order to the garden. He pulled free the wind-blown sections of the fence from the tangled matt of overgrown grass and hammer-and-nailed them back into place with a volley of missed blows and wind-absorbed expletives. He then put to use his teenage ingenuity by enticing an itinerant Blackface ewe into this now secure palisade to eat down the grass, but her gourmet tastes turned out to be more for the sweet stalks of the flowers than the rank, tasteless roughage. Consequently, Josh had to hurriedly dispense with her services by wrestling her reluctant form from the garden, during which exercise he was given little creditable assistance from the dogs. Biggles sat cowering by the front door of the cottage, having never before encountered on his jaunts around Clapham Common anything quite so weird as this long-haired, violent creature, while Cruise, who had not scented one decent bitch in all the time that he had been in Scotland, sniffed hopefully at the ewe’s backside. The unfortunate result of this failed experiment was three hours’ hard labour on Josh’s part, kneeling on damp ground with a pair of rusty garden shears, to get the grass to a height that could be managed by Patrick’s mower. Having discarded the raked-up piles over the fence to the expectant Blackface ewe, who was now content with any slim pickings, Josh had steered the groaning mower up and down, and at the end of a further hour, stood back with pride as he surveyed his new, perfectly striped and perfectly yellow front lawn.

  The interior of the cottage had also been restored to full working order. Dan had managed to conquer the temperamental idiosyncrasies of the cooking stove, his success being such that even with the vents shut right down and with the wood barely glowing, he was forced to throw open the front windows to allow out the heat generated both by the stove and by the hot water tank that gurgled as dangerously as a capped geyser. The walls throughout the cottage had been given a fresh coat of white paint, courtesy of Patrick and the odd-job man at Seascape, the kitchen table adorned with a new oilcloth, while the three-piece suite, now swathed in a mass of brightly coloured bothy rugs, had been rearranged so that each seat commanded an excellent view of the new television-cum-video that Dan had rented from a small electrical store in Fort William.

  Not that their new daily routine allowed much time for watching it. They would set out each morning at six-fifteen, leaving the front door wedged open to allow the dogs the run of both the house and the garden, and then drive along the narrow road to Auchnacerie, the headlights of the car beaming forth bravely into the soulless black void of the surrounding countryside. At first, Dan had felt his skin creep with uneasiness at the eerie desolation that enfolded him, having never before driven without a set of headlights blasting into his rearview mirror and the red taillights of the preceding car only yards in front of him. But now, he had come to find it exhilarating, as if every day he and Josh were setting out on a new voyage of discovery, “going where no man had gone before.” Josh would then drop him off at the end of the road leading up to the Trenchards’ house, where Dan would stand watching as the lights of the car twisted through the bends in the road, like the sweeping beams of a lighthouse, until they disappeared around the edge of the hill that dropped sharply down into the depths of Loch Eil.

  After the first few weeks of this routine, Dan had tried his best to change it. At the outset, he had always found Patrick in the kitchen, sitting expectantly at the table and beginning his slow ascent to his feet as soon as Dan walked into the room. But soon, it was Dan who had to wait while he listened to the frustrated oaths that rang down the stairwell from the Trenchards’ bedroom above. Later still, both he and Katie would sit in the kitchen discussing how best they could persuade Patrick to take things easier while he slept on, undisturbed by the blast of his alarm radio. On such mornings, it was always Katie who bore the brunt of Patrick’s fury as he castigated her for not making sure that he was awakened when the alarm went off.

  Yet Patrick was not for persuasion. Dan suggested that he could quite easily handle the buying at Mallaig by himself, but this was met with that steely glint of determination in Patrick’s eyes. “Nothing wrong with me, Dan,” he had said. “Body may be a bit tired, but the brain’s still active. Anyway, you’ve st
ill got a lot to learn.”

  And so they had continued to head off on their buying trips together, Patrick more often than not falling fast asleep in the passenger seat as soon as Dan had the old Mercedes in motion. As he drove, Dan would study the slumbering form of the man, every day seeing visible changes in his features. His face had lost its weather-beaten glow and the skin on his sunken cheeks had now taken on the colour and texture of putty, whilst the sheer effort of concentrating on the movement of his limbs had produced lines on his forehead that were as deep as plough furrows. Witnessing this decline in Patrick’s health, Dan now had mixed feelings as to whether his decision to come up to Scotland had been the correct one. Patrick would have continued to use a buyer at Mallaig and would not have been capable of getting into the office so much. He would have had to stay at home, using the kitchen table as his workplace, taking it easy, pacing himself, and no doubt every day getting more and more frustrated and angry with the world. So it was a no-win situation. Yet what really upset Dan was to have met this man with whom he had such an immediate and powerful rapport and to be able to do absolutely nothing but watch as this deterioration took place. And if he felt that way after such a short space of time, he could not begin to quantify the emotional turmoil that Katie had to be suffering.

  There was, however, an up side to it all. Dan hadn’t felt as exhilarated in a job since the days when he had worked as a money broker on the Stock Exchange floor. He loved the atmosphere of the auction, the wry smiles and cutting banter that were exchanged when he and Patrick had caught out a rival bidder. He loved the postmortems in the harbour café afterwards when they would sit with the other buyers, discussing over a gargantuan and totally unhealthy breakfast the quality of the day’s catch. He loved dealing directly with the fishermen in the smaller boats, watching with incomprehension as the spokesmen for their buying cartel gathered lobster creels into a circle on the quayside and sat in a waft of cigarette smoke while they discussed in Gaelic the various offers for their prawns. A man would eventually turn from the group, there would be a click of fingers, and simultaneously he would point to the purchaser and call out his name in an accent that was as foreign to Dan’s ears as any that he had heard before. “Meester Trrenchard, ye can tek eet feer Seascape the day.”