Free Walking Wounded by William McIlvanney Page A

recited as if they were conversation. His father would sit apparently stunned into silent awe at the agonies she went through. They would all get back just in time for bed. As he worked, the governor was vaguely aware of an image prowling the perimeter of his interlocking thoughts. The image was the rumpled figure of McQueen.
    McQueen sat very still in his cell. With an almost mystical intensity, he was thinking himself beyond the enmeshing smell of urine mixed with disinfectant that had always for him meant prison. He had a method for doing this. He recreated in his mind big houses he had seen. This one was a big detached white house with a semi-circular balcony on the first floor. It faced the sea-front of an Ayrshire coastal town. Sometimes in McQueen’s head they were hard to getinto. This one had been easy. He put shaving foam on the burglar alarm and forced the kitchen window.
    McQueen landed on his stockinged feet on the kitchen floor. His shoes were on the draining board. He tied their specially long laces together and hung them round his neck. He listened. His eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Something brushed against his leg and he almost called out. It was a cat. McQueen bent down and stroked it gently. He straightened and looked slowly round the kitchen. The kitchen was well appointed, rich in the shining surfaces of affluence. It glowed dimly like the entrance to Ali Baba’s cave.
    McQueen moved without sound towards the hall. He was wondering what he would find.

6
    Homecoming
    â€˜ G oing home,’ she said.
    â€˜Graithnock,’ she said.
    â€˜London,’ she said.
    â€˜Frances Ritchie,’ she said.
    She treated his questions like spaces in an official form, impersonally, never digressing into humanising irrelevance. I am a stranger on a train, she was saying. She asked him nothing in return.
    But the man was persistent. He had come on at Dumfries, entering a coach clogged with the boredom of several hours’ travel, the unfinished crosswords, the empty whisky miniatures interred in their plastic cups, the crumpled beer cans rattling minutely to the motion of the train. Picking his way among the preoccupied stares and the occasionally stretched legs, he had sat down opposite Fran. The seats had only just been vacated by a mother and a small girl who had made Fran wonder if her own desire for children was as deep as she told herself it was.
    His persistence wasn’t offensive. It had none of the I-secretly-know-what-you-want-and-need machismo which Fran had learned to recognise from a distance like a waving flag and which caused her to shoot on sight. His persistence was gentle, slightly vulnerable, as if he had decided – for no reason that she could understand – that he wanted to pleaseher. Although it was a smoker, he asked if she minded him smoking.
    â€˜Just thought I’d check,’ he said. ‘The way it’s going these days, they’ll be issuing a leper’s bell with every packet.’
    Her smile disappeared like a mistake being erased.
    â€˜So what took you from Graithnock to London?’
    She looked out of the window. Would she have known that countryside was Scotland if the stations they passed through hadn’t told her?
    â€˜The train,’ she said. ‘The 12.10 I think it was.’
    The sharpness of her remark made her glance towards his silence. He was smiling.
    â€˜You gave some extra information there,’ he said. ‘Does that mean you’re softening towards me?’
    â€˜I wouldn’t bet on it,’ she said.
    But she was laughing. She noticed he had a smile as open as a blank cheque. In spite of herself, she felt the moment put down roots and blossom into one of those sudden intimacies between strangers. He discovered that she was a journalist. He claimed to have seen her by-line. (‘That’s what you call it? Isn’t it? A by-line?’) He convinced her by getting the newspaper right.