We stood beside the observatory dome, on the battlements of Castle Gaineamh, facing into a cool westerly breeze. Lewis, in cords and a grease-brown stockman's coat, looked through the binoculars, his black hair moving slightly in the wind. Verity stood at his side, face raised shining to the winter blue sky, bulky in her thermal jacket, her ski-gloved hands clasped thickly under the bulge of her belly. The plain beyond the woods below, holding Gallanach and cupping the inner bay, was bathed in the deep-shadowed sunlight of late afternoon. Wisps of cirrus moved high above, tails trailing up, promising clear weather. A two-coach sprinter moved in the distance, on the viaduct at Bridgend, windows glinting in the sunlight. I took a deep breath and could smell the sea.
The unopened air-mail packet from Colorado, lodged next to my chest between shirt and jacket, make a crinkling, flexing noise, giving me a funny feeling in my belly. "No sign?" Verity asked.
Lewis shook his head. "Mm-mm."
Verity shivered. She hunched her shoulders, bringing them up and in towards her neck. "Brr," she went. She linked arms with Lewis.
"Ah," he said, protesting, still looking through the field glasses, though now at a slight angle.
Verity tutted, and with a gorgeously pretended scowl moved away from her husband and stepped over to me. She slid an arm round my waist, snuggling. I put an arm round her shoulders. She rested her head against my arm; I looked down at her. She was growing her hair a little. The sides of her head weren't actually shaved any more. She smelled of baby oil; Lewis had what sounded like the enviable job of smoothing it over The Bulge, in an attempt to fend off stretch marks later. I smiled, unseen, and looked back to the north.
"Is that what-do-you-call-it?" Verity said, nodding.
"No, that's thingy-ma-bob," Lewis said, just as I said,
"Hey; well remembered."
"Dunadd," Verity said patiently, ignoring both of us. She was looking at the small, rocky hill a kilometre to the north. "Where the footprint is."
"Correct," I said.
Lewis glanced at us, grinned. He lowered the binoculars a little. "Can't see it from here, but that's where it is."
Dunadd Rock had been the capital of Dalriada, one of the early and formative kingdoms in Scotland. The footprint — looks more like a bootprint, actually, just a smooth hollow in the stone — was where the new king had to place his foot when he made his vows, symbolically — I suppose — to join him to the land.
"Can I have a look?" Verity said. Lewis handed her the glasses, arid she leant against the stone battlements, supporting her belly. Lewis stood behind her, chin lowered onto her shoulder.
"Right at the summit, isn't it?" Verity asked.
"Yep," Lewis said.
She looked at Dunadd for a bit. "I wonder," she said, "if you had one of your feet planted there, when you gave birth…»
I laughed. Lewis went wide-eyed, drawing up and back from his wife. She turned round, grinning wickedly at Lewis and then me. She patted Lewis's elbow. "Joke," she said. "I want to be in a nice warm birthing pool in a nice big hospital." She turned back to the view. Lewis looked at me.
"Had me fooled," I shrugged. "Runs in the family, after all."
"Can you see that stone circle, too?" Verity said, lifting the binoculars to gaze further north.
Earlier that day, Helen Urvill, Verity and Lewis and I had been behaving like tourists. The land around Gallanach is thick with ancient monuments; burial sites, standing stones, henges and strangely carved rocks; you can hardly put a foot down without stepping on something that had religious significance to somebody sometime. Verity had heard of all this ancient stoneware but she'd never really seen it properly; her visits to Gallanach in the past had been busy with other things, and about the only place she had been to before was Dunadd, because it was an easy walk from the castle. And of course, because we had lived here most of our lives, none of the rest of us had bothered to visit half the places either.
So we borrowed Fergus's Range Rover and went site-seeing; tramping through muddy fields to the hummocks that were funeral barrows, looking up at moss-covered standing stones, plodding round stone circles and chambered cairns, and leaning on fences staring at the great flat faces of cup-and-ring marked rocks, their grainy surfaces covered in the concentric circular symbols that looked like ripples from something fallen in a pond, frozen in stone.
Did I ever tell you about the time I used to be able to make televisions go wonky, from far away?"
It was a bright and warm day, back in that same summer Rory had come out to the Hebrides with us. Rory and I were walking near Gallanach, going from the marked rocks in one field to the stone circle in another. I remember I had a pain in my side that day and I was worrying that it was appendicitis (one of the boys in my class that year had almost died when his appendix had ruptured). It was just a stitch, though. Uncle Rory was a fast walker and I'd been intent on keeping up with him; my appendix waited another year before it needed taking out.
We had been visiting some of the ancient monuments in the area, and had started talking about what the people who'd built the cairns and stone circles had believed in, and that had led us on to astrology. Then suddenly he mentioned this thing about televisions.
"Making them go wonky?" I said. "No."
"Well," Rory said, then turned and looked behind us. We stood up on the verge as a couple of cars passed us. It was hot; I took off my jacket. "Well," Rory repeated, "I was… a few years older than you are now, I guess. I was over at a friend's house, and there was a bunch of us watching Top of the Pops or something, and I was humming along with a record. I hit a certain deep note, and the TV screen went wavy. Nobody else said anything, and I wondered if it was just coincidence, so I tried to do it again, and after a bit of adjusting I hit the right note and sure enough, the screen went wavy again. Still nobody said anything." Rory laughed at the memory. He was wearing jeans and T-shirt and carried a light jacket over his shoulder.
"Well, I didn't want to make a fool of myself, so I didn't say anything. I thought maybe it just worked on that one particular television set, so I tried it at home; and it still happened. The effect seemed to work from quite a distance, too. When I stood out in the hall and looked into the lounge, it was still there, stronger than ever.
"Then we were going up to Glasgow, mum and I, and we were passing a shop window full of TVs, and so I tried this new gift for messing up TV screens on them, and hummed away to myself, and all the screens went wild! And I was thinking Great, I really can do magic! The effect is getting stronger! I could appear on TV and do this! Maybe it would make everybody's screens go weird!"
"Wow," I said, wanting to get home and try this myself.
"So," Rory said. "I stopped in my tracks and I asked mum. I said, 'Mum; watch this. Watch those screens. And I hummed for all I was worth, and the pictures on the screens went wavy. And mum just looked at me and said, 'What? And I did it again, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get her to see the effect. Eventually she got fed up with me and told me to stop being silly. I had screens going mental in every TV shop we passed in Glasgow that day, but nobody else seemed to be able to see it."
Rory grimaced, looking across the edge of the plain beyond Gallanach to the little rocky hill that stuck up from the flat fields.
"Now, I wish I could remember just what it was that made the penny drop, but I can't. I mean, usually a beautiful assistant says something stupid and the clever scientist says, 'Say that again! and then comes up with the brilliant plan that's going to save the world as we know it… but as far as I remember it just came to me."
"What?" I said.
Rory grinned down at me. "Vibrations," he said.
"Vibrations?"
"Yeah. The vibrations I was setting up in my own skull — actually in the eyeball, I suppose — were making my eyes vibrate at about the same frequency as the TV screen flickers. So the screen looked funny, but only to me, that was the point. And it made sense that the further away you were from the screen — as long as you could still make it out, of course — the more pronounced the effect would appear." He looked down at me. "You see?"
"Yeah," I said, "I think so." I studied the road for a bit, then looked up, disappointed. "So it doesn't really work after all?"
Rory shook his head. "Not the way I thought it did, no," he said.
I frowned, trying to remember how we'd got onto this. "What's that got to do with what we were talking about?" I asked.
Rory looked at me. "Ah-ha," he said, and winked. He nodded at a gate set in the low wall facing the road; beyond were the standing stones. "Here we are."
"Here we are." The stair-door creaked open; I went to help Helen. She handed me a tray with four pewter mugs. The mulled wine steamed; it smelled wonderful. "Mmm, great," I said. Helen took my hand and stepped out through the little half-size door onto the battlements. Her broad face was tanned and her body looked lean and fit after some early-season skiing in Switzerland. She wore Meindl boots, an old pair of leather trousers that had belonged to her mother, a cashmere sweater and a flying jacket that looked distressed enough to have seen action over Korea, if not Greater Germany. Her hair was shining black and shoulder length.
She took a mug. "Help yourself," she said. "Any sign of him?"
"Nope," I said. I held the tray out to Lewis and Verity, who made the appropriate noises and took a mug each.
Helen nodded at the corner of the airmail package inside my jacket. "Still incubating that, Prentice?"
I grinned. "Yeah."
We stood there sipping the hot, spicy wine, looking north.
"Prentice? Ash. He's done it."
"Who? Doctor Gonzo?"
"Yeah; printing it out now; mail you the hard copy tomorrow morning; he'll E-mail it to me too, I'll download the files and stick them on a disk your Compaq'll accept and bring it with me next week when I come up for Hogmanay… unless you got a modem yet, did you?"
"No, no I didn't."
"Okay; that'll be the arrangement, then. Sound all right to you?"
"Yeah; great. I'll write back to say thanks. He, ah… say what the files actually were in the end?"
Text."
"That all he said?"
"Yep. Prentice, he hasn't read whatever he found; well, probably not more than the first few lines to check they were in English, not gibberish. Once he'd cracked it I don't think he was really interested in what was actually written there. But it is text."
"Right. Text."
"Should get to you in a few days, airmail."
The big envelope from the States had arrived in the mail this morning, five days after Ash had called; the return address was Dr G, Computing Science Faculty, University of Denver, Co. I'd stared at the thing as it lay there on the front door mat, my mouth gone oddly dry. I had a slight hangover, and had decided — as I gingerly picked the disappointingly slim package up — that I'd open it after breakfast. Then after breakfast I'd thought maybe I should leave it until later, especially when Verity rang and invited me over to the castle.
It was the last day of 1990; a full twelve months after that fateful party when Mrs McSpadden had sent me down to the cellar for some more whisky. We were all back here for the usual round of parties and visits and hangovers. I was mostly looking forward to it all, even though I was still trying to find reasons not to ask Fergus the things I knew I ought to ask him about Mr Rupert Paxton-Marr. But then, maybe I oughtn't to ask them at all. Maybe what was in this airmail package would relieve me of the need to ask any questions (I told myself). I kept coming back to the distinct possibility that maybe I was making something out of nothing, treating our recent, local history like some past age, and looking too assiduously, too imaginatively for links and patterns and connections, and so turning myself into some sort of small-scale conspiracy theorist.
I had been immersed in my studies all term, and everything seemed to be going well. My professor, reading my tutorial papers and essays, had gone beyond noises of encouragement and vicarious complacency to a sort of uncomprehending peevishness that I'd contrived to fail so spectacularly the year before.
Meanwhile, in the history that we were currently living through, it looked like a war was going to start in just over two weeks, but — apart from a kind of low background radiation of species — ashamed despair because of that — personally I felt not too bad. Mum appeared to be holding out, despite Christmas and New Year traditionally being a bad time for the bereaved. She had actually started building the much talked-about harpsichord, turning a spare bedroom at Lochgair into a workshop which at the moment looked suitably chaotic; James had mostly rejoined humanity, to the extent that several times over the last few weekends before Christmas he'd taken his Walkman phones off long enough to have what could, with only a little generosity, be described as a conversation. Lewis was doing well, Verity was almost disgustingly healthy (apart from the occasional sore back and a bladder that appeared to have become inordinately susceptible to the sound of running water), and I actually looked forward to seeing Lewis and Verity now, much to my own amazement; there was still a distant pang when Verity smiled at me… but it was more remembered than real.
I looked at my watch. In four hours I'd be setting off for Glasgow Airport, for Ashley. She was booked on a late flight and I'd volunteered to go pick her up. She'd be working until half-five in London this evening, and it would have been pushing the old CV a bit to get to Scotland — let alone here — in time for the bells.
I scanned the skies to the north, watching for movement. I was looking forward to the drive, even if it was at night and I wouldn't be able to see the scenery.
The wind gusted a little and I supped my mulled wine. The woods — evergreen and deciduous-bare — swept down to the fields and then the town; forests rose on the hills to the east.
"Anybody heard the news today?" Lewis asked.
"Nothing special happening," Helen said.
I guessed she'd got an up-date from Mrs McSpadden, who tended to keep the TV on in the kitchen these days.
"All quiet on the desert front," breathed Lewis, taking up the glasses again and looking north towards Kilmartin.
"You sure he'll come that way?" Verity asked.
Lewis shrugged. "Think so."
"Said he would," Helen confirmed.
Verity stamped her feet.
"Hey," Helen said. "I never asked you, Lewis; you got any Gulf jokes?"
Lewis made an exasperated noise, still looking through the binoculars. "Na. I heard a couple of crap Irish ones, and the usual suspects in different disguises, but there hasn't been anything good. I was trying to work on a routine about if the Stealth bomber worked as well as it did in Panama, the B-52 as it did in Viet Nam and the marines as effectively as they did in Lebanon, then Saddam had nothing too much to worry about, but it wasn't funny enough." He brought the glasses down from his eyes for a moment. "In fact, it wasn't funny at all."
"I know a girl from school who's out there," Helen said. "Nurse."
"Yeah?" Verity said, stamping her feet again.
"Ha!" Lewis said suddenly.
"You seen him?" Verity said, clutching Lewis's arm.
He laughed, glancing down at her. "No," he said, and grinned at me. "But guess who got called up as a reservist?"
I shrugged. "I give in." I didn't think I knew anybody in the forces.
Lewis smiled sourly. "Jimmy Turrock. Used to be a bandsman. They're the stretcher-bearers in war time."
I frowned, not recognising the name. "Jimmy —?" I began. Then I remembered.
"The grave-digger!" I laughed.
"Yeah," Lewis said, turning away again, raising the glasses. The grave-digger."
I felt cold inside and my smile faded. "Wow," I said. "Some sense of humour the army has."
"Work experience," Lewis muttered.
"Who's this you're talking about?" Verity asked.
"Guy helped us bury dad," Lewis said.
"Oh," she said. She hugged Lewis.
"You going to go if they call you up, Prentice?" Helen Urvill said, not looking at me.
"Hell no," I said. "Which way's Canada?"
"Yeah," muttered Lewis. "Shame dad's dead; maybe he could have got us into the equivalent of the National Guard, if we have one."
"Traffic wardens?" I suggested. Lewis's shoulders shook once.
"You really wouldn't go?" Helen said to me, one eyebrow raised.
"I might send them some blood if they ask me nicely," I told her. "In an oil can."
"I suppose we can't use the telescope, can we?" Verity said suddenly, nodding at the white dome to our right. "As well as the binoculars I mean." She looked at each of us.
"Nup," Helen said.
"Too narrow a field of view," Lewis said.
"And upside down," I added.
Verity looked over at the dome. There was a smile on her face. "Do you remember that night we met in the dome?" she said, looking up at Lewis. "We hadn't seen each other since we were kids…»
Lewis handed the glasses to Helen, who held them one-handed, straps dangling. Lewis hugged his wife. "Of course I do," he said, and kissed her nose. She buried her face in his coat. I looked away, thinking about the drive up to the airport this evening.
Maybe I should allow another half-hour or so for the journey, just in case of hold-ups. And of course they were building new bits onto the airport at the moment; could be a problem parking, and tonight was bound to be busy. I'd leave early, no sense in leaving late and having to hurry. I had taken to driving a bit slower and more carefully these days. Mum still worried, but at least I could reassure her with a clear conscience.
I sighed, and the package against my chest flexed again. I looked down at it. Hell, this was silly; I ought to read the stuff. Waiting until I got back to the house and was sitting at the desk in the study was just putting it off.
"How's the wonderful world of Swiss banking these days anyway, Hel?" Lewis asked.
"Oh, wacky and transparent as ever," Helen said. They started talking about Zurich and London, and I sat down on the slope of slated roof, behind them. I pulled the airmail package out and opened it carefully. Verity looked back at me and smiled briefly, before turning back to Helen and Lewis to share some joke about the Hard Rock Café. My hands felt clammy as I slid the sheets of paper out of the thick white envelope. This is daft, I thought. It probably is gibberish, or Rory's job application for that travel programme presenter's job; a CV for the TV. Nothing important, nothing revelatory.
The first sheet was a letter from the good Doctor, arcane with acronyms and abbreviations, telling me how he'd deciphered the binary mush he'd been sent and turned it into what I held in my hands. He sounded like a likeable guy, but I kind of just glanced at the letter. I went on to the print-out.
There were about fifty or sixty pages of single-space laser print. The first twenty or so pages were taken up with pieces I recognised: articles and poems and the nameless play Rory had apparently decided to cannibalise for the end of Crow Road. Then came three passages of prose.
I glanced up at the others; Helen and Verity were still talking, Lewis was looking through the binoculars towards Gallanach. I started reading, and my mouth went dry.
I raced through each of the passages, my eyes bulging, hands shaking. The voices of the others, the cool December air and the chill slates under my backside seemed like they were all a million miles away, as I read what Uncle Rory had written.
"D'you know where the twins were conceived?"
"No idea," he said, and belched.
"Fucking McCaig's Folly, that's where."
"What, Oban?"
"The very place."
"Good grief."
'you don't mind me saying this, I mean talking about Fiona like this, do you?"
"No, no." He waved one hand. "Your wife; you talk about her. No. no, that's bad, that sounds bad. I'm all for women's lib."
"Might have bloody known. Might have bloody known you would be. Bloody typical, if you ask me. You're a Bolshie bastard, McHoan."
"And you are the unacceptable face of Capitalism, Ferg."
… That was how the first passage began. I finished it and realised my mouth was hanging open. I closed it and started, dazed, the next passage:
"Henriss… never liked him either; fat lipped beggar… queer, y'know; thass wha he's singing you know; d'you know that? 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy… disgussin… absluley disgussin…
"Fergus, do shut up."
"'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy'… bloody poofter coon."
"I'm sorry about this, Lachy."
"That's okay, Mrs U. You no going to put your seat belt on, no?"
"No; not for short journeys —»
"Lachy? Lachy… Lachy! Lachy; I'm sorry about your eye… really really sorry; never forgave myself, never… here, shake
"Holy fucking shit," I whispered, when I finished it. Suddenly my hands felt very cold. I looked at the slates I was sitting on, then over at the dome of the observatory, gleaming in the low winter sun.
"You okay, Prentice?" Verity said, frowning at me from the battlements.
I nodded, tried to smile. "Fine," I gulped. I turned to the third and last passage.
Fiona sat in the passenger seat of the car, watching the red roadside reflectors as they drifted out of the night towards her; she was thrown against one side of the seat as Fergus powered the Aston around the right-hander…
… And on through to the end:
… "Look —!"
And that was all. I looked up, brain reeling.
"Yo," Helen said, looking through the binoculars. She bent at the knees and put her mug down on the stones under her feet, then rose smoothly again.
"You see him?" Verity said, turning, still hugged within Lewis" arms, to look out over the battlements.
"Could be," Helen said. She handed the field glasses over to Lewis.
"Yeah, might be," he said. It was Verity's turn next with the binoculars.
I swallowed a few times, put the sheets of paper back in their envelope. I stood up and walked over to the others, in a kind of trance.
Verity shook her head. "Na, I can't see the damn thing." She handed the glasses to me. "You're looking pale, Prentice. You sure you're okay?"
"Fine," I croaked, not looking at her. I took the binoculars. "Thanks."
I'd seen the speck unaided by that time. Once I'd found it again the binoculars enlarged the dot into the frontal silhouette of a high-winged light aircraft, flying more or less straight towards us, its body pointed a little to the south west to compensate for the wind. It waggled in the air a little as it flew down the glen, encountering a gust high above Kilmartin.
"Christ," Lewis said. "It's a Mig on a bombing run; everybody down!"
I handed the glasses back to Helen, who didn't look particularly amused. She frowned at me. "You okay, Prentice?"
"Fine," I said.
"You should have loaned your dad your jacket," Lewis told Helen.
"Doesn't fit him," Helen said, binoculars at her eyes. I watched the dot of the plane drift closer towards us through the northern sky.
"You were in a sleeping bag," I heard Lewis say softly to Verity. He was holding her from behind, chin on the crown of her head. I must have missed what they'd said earlier. I felt weird; I was glad the battlements were too high to fall over if I fainted.
Verity smiled. "I remember. We were all smoking and playing cards and taking turns to look at the stars, and we got the munchies." She frowned. "There was Diana and Helen, and… what was that guy's name?" She glanced round and up at Lewis. "Wayne somebody?"
"Darren somebody," Lewis said. He accepted the glasses from Helen, held them with one hand and balanced them on Verity's head. "Hoy, stand still."
"Sorry, sir," she said.
"Darren Watt," I said. The plane was closer now but harder to see; it had dropped below the level of the hills behind and was no longer silhouetted against the sky. You could still see it with the naked eye, though. It glinted, once.
Verity nodded. Lewis tutted in exasperation. "He was the gay guy, wasn't he?" Verity said.
"Yup," Lewis said. "Sculptor. Good, too; fucking shame, that was."
"Oh God," Verity said. "Of course, he died."
"Bike crash," Helen said, scooping up her mug of cooled wine from the flagstones, and draining it.
The plane was flying over Gallanach now. I thought I could hear its engine. I remembered standing here once with mum, years ago. Fergus and dad were shooting at clay pigeons in a field to our right somewhere, and I remembered hearing the flat Crack… Crack noise of the guns, and thinking they sounded just like one plank falling on top of another. Blam! indeed. Remember, remember…
Verity laughed, making Lewis tut again. "You were doing your radio impressions," she said, "that night. Remember?"
"Of course," Lewis said.
"Why was I in a sleeping bag?" Verity said, frowning at the approaching plane.
"You were in the cupboard." Helen smiled. She waved out across the chill afternoon air above Gallanach. I looked back at the plane, which was switching its lights on and off.
"Oh," Verity said. "Yeah; the wee cubby hole."
"Ah ha," Helen said, as Lewis waved too, still watching through the binoculars, now elevated above Verity's head. "But it was really a secret passage."
"Was it?" Verity asked, glancing at Helen.
"Yeah. Di and I used to take the bit of wood off at the back and get into the attic. Wander all over."
"Anything interesting in there?" Lewis asked. The plane was in a shallow dive, angling towards us a few hundred metres away.
"Just pipes and tanks," Helen shrugged. There was a loft door into mum and dad's room." She smiled. "When we started getting interested in sex, we used to pretend we'd get up there one night and see if we could catch them at it, but we were too frightened." Helen laughed lightly. "Had us giggling ourselves to sleep a few nights, though. And anyway, Ferg had put a bolt on it."
The little white Cessna roared overhead, waggling its wings. Lewis and Verity and Helen all waved. I stared up, seeing the single tiny figure waving in the cockpit. The plane banked, circled round the hill the castle stood on and came back over, lower, engine loud and echoing in the woods beneath.
I made myself wave.
Oh dear fucking holy shit, I thought.
The plane waggled its wings again, then straightened out over Dunadd as Fergus took the Cessna — his Christmas present to himself — back north to its home at Connel.
That it?" said Verity.
"Yup," Helen said.
"What did you expect?" Lewis asked. "A crash?"
«Oh…» said Verity, heading for the door to the stairs. "Let's get back in the warm."
Blam! Remember, remember. Amman Hilton. Look —! JUST USE IT! Kiss the sky, you idiot…
"Prentice?" Lewis said, from the little door. I looked over at him. "Prentice?" he said again. "Wake up, Prentice."
I'd been staring after the departing plane.
"Oh," I said. "Yeah." On still shaky legs, I followed the others down from the wind-blown battlements and into the warm bulk of the great stone building.
"So the televisions weren't going wonky at all," I said, still struggling to understand.
That's right," Rory said. "It just looked like it, to me only." He plucked a long piece of grass from beside one of the standing stones and sucked on the yellow stalk.
I followed suit. "So it was in your head; not real?"
«Well…» Rory frowned, turning away a little and leaning back on the great stone. He folded his arms and looked out towards the steep little hill that was Dunadd. I stood to one side, watching him. His eyes looked old.
"Things in your head can be real," he said, not looking at me. "And even when they aren't, sometimes they… " he looked down at me, and I thought he looked troubled. "Somebody told me something once," he said. "And it sounded like it had really hurt him; he'd seen something that made him feel betrayed and hurt by somebody he was very close to, and I felt really sorry for this person, and I'm sure it's affected them ever since… but when I thought about it, he'd been asleep before this thing had happened, and asleep again afterwards, and it occurred to me that maybe he'd dreamed it all, and I still wonder."
"Why don't you tell him that?"
Rory looked at me for a while, his eyes searching mine, making me feel awkward. He spat the blade of grass out. "Maybe I should," he said. He nodded, looking out across the fields. "Maybe. I don't know." He shrugged.
I stood there, back at the same stone my Uncle Rory had rested against, a decade earlier. I'd left the castle and driven here to the stone circle shortly after we'd come down from the battlements. There was still plenty of time to get back to Lochgair for dinner before I had to set off for Glasgow, and Ash.
I leant against the great stone, the way Rory had when he'd talked about the man betrayed, the man who'd seen — or thought he'd seen — something that had hurt him. I looked ahead, out over the walls and fields and stands of trees. I shivered, though it wasn't especially cold.
"See?" I said, quietly, to myself.
Maybe Rory had been looking at Dunadd that day, as I'd assumed at the time. But beyond Dunadd, just a little to the right on this line of sight, I could see the hill where Gaineamh castle stood, its walls showing blunt and steel grey through the naked trees.
"Prentice!"
"… Yeah?"
"Food! Come on, it's getting cold!"
Mum had been calling from the bottom of the stairs. I was sitting at the desk in the study, curtains open to the darkness, just the little desk light on, its brass stalk gleaming, its green shade glowing. I looked back down from my reflection in the dark computer screen, first to my watch — still half an hour before I had to leave to pick up Ashley — and then to the thin, battered-looking pocket diary lying opened on the desk.
Fri F @ Cas, L.Rvr, trak, hills. Bothy;
fire, fd, dnk, js. (F stnd) rt in clng!
guns. F nsg. trs & scrts. F barfd
WELCOME TO ARGYLL!
I saw her hair first, shining tight-tied in a spotlight somewhere down the domestic arrivals concourse. I hadn't seen Ashley Watt for about six weeks, after that night in London when I'd seen but not talked to Rupert Paxton-Marr. Ashley was dressed in the same business-like suit she'd worn that night, and carried a big shoulder bag. Her smile was broad.
"Ash. Great to see you." I hugged her, lifting her off her feet.
"Woo!" she laughed throatily. "How ya doin, Presley?"
I winced, dramatically, but still offered to carry her bag.
"Prentice; you read a couple of things your uncle wrote and suddenly you're accusing people of murder? Come on."
"Haven't you looked at the files Doctor Gonzo sent over?"
"Of course not; not my business, Prentice." Ashley sounded indignant. "Oh; before I forget," she said, reaching for her jacket on the back seat and digging into a pocket. She took out a little three-inch Sony disk and handed it to me. "Present from Colorado. Yours to tinker with."
Thanks," I said, putting the disk in my shirt pocket. "I might, too; the spelling mistakes have been annoying me." I moved my head. "The stuff's in that envelope on the back seat."
"You don't want me to read it now, do you?"
"There's a torch."
"Am I allowed to finish building the spliff first?"
"Okay, but then read."
I'd waited till we were out of Glasgow before I'd told Ashley about the horrible ideas concerning Fergus that I just couldn't get out of my head.
Most of the journey from Lochgair up to Glasgow I'd spent thinking, trying to work out what might be true and what false in the fragments of writing that Rory had left on disk. The rat in the ceiling and the confession of something over-seen; that was what had taken me back to stand amongst the standing stones that afternoon, after I'd left the castle.
And remembering what Rory had said to me there had taken me back to that 1976 diary entry.
rt in clng! F nsg.
trs & scrts
And the 1980 diary with the words JUST USE IT! and the L that had been changed to a C; the L must stand for Lachlan Watt and the F for Fiona. That was the secret Fergus had told Rory, that mght in the bothy; the story of Fergus waking up after being brought home from Hamish and Tone's party and crawling through the castle roof-space to see his wife in bed with Lachy Watt. That was the party that Fiona and Lachlan had left together.
Of course, all I had was Rory's fictionalised word for any of it.
So I'd asked my mum, over dinner.
"Did Fiona… leave a party with somebody else?" she repeated, looking mystified.
"It's just something in one of Rory's poems," I said."… Not earth-shakingly important or anything, but there's an odd sort of note that… well, I just wondered if you knew, or had heard… " I shrugged, sipping my glass of water.
Mum shook her head, helping herself to some more peas. "The only time I ever saw Fiona leave a party with somebody else, Fergus was there too. In body, at least."
"Uh-huh?" I said.
… scrts…
I owed the last, absurdly simple part of the theory to a stag that had suddenly run onto the road while I was zapping down Glen Croe, between the Rest-and-be-Thankful and Ardgartan. One moment the road ahead was clear in the headlights, next second Wha! Something dark brown looking big as a horse with huge antlers like some twisted aerial array came belting out of the forest across the road and leapt the downhill crash barrier. I slammed the brakes on, nearly locking the wheels. The beast disappeared into the darkness and the car swept through the single cloud of steamy breath it had left behind.
I'd come off the brakes and accelerated again almost immediately, shaking my head and muttering curses at all kamikaze deer, and feeling my heart-beat start to slow again after my fright. I'd adjusted my seat belt and looked over at the passenger's seat. Something had moved there, when I'd braked.
I'd left the airmail envelope holding the print-out of Rory's pieces sitting on the passenger seat, because I wanted Ashley to read them. The envelope had slipped forward under the deer-induced sharp braking, plonking down into the passenger footwell. I'd tutted, waited for the straight along the side of Loch Long, checked for traffic, then reached over, retrieved the package from the footwell and put it back on the seat.
And that had set me pondering.
I'd passed through Arrochar in a daze, thinking, of course!
Ashley read the relevant passage while we travelled the new, fast stretch of the Loch Lomond road.
"Yeah," she said slowly. "Mm-hmm." She put the sheaf of papers down, switched off the torch, looked at me, then lit the J. "So this is Rory's idea of what happened just before Fergus and Fiona crashed?"
"Yeah."
"And is this Rory indicating your Aunt Fiona fucked my Uncle Lachy?" she sounded almost amused.
"Right," I said. I glanced at her.
"Kind of fanciful, isn't it?" she said. "Jeez, he was hardly ever here, and they didn't really move in the same social circles."
"Damn," I breathed. "Maybe you should have read the other two bits first."
"Hmm." Ashley drew smoke in, handed the J to me.
I took a small toke. "Yuk; what's this?"
"Herbal mixture," Ash said. "No point giving up fags and then smoking tobacco in Js."
"Hmm," I said, handing the number back.
"So what are you saying, Prentice? Did I miss something?.
Maybe." I shook my head, letting the car slow as we approached Tarbet. "Or maybe I'm reading too much into it… want to read the other two bits?
Ash sighed, accepted the J back and switched the torch back on.
We passed Tarbet, accelerating over the shallow neck of land to Arrochar, pottered through the village at less than forty, then gathered speed again as we curved round the head of Loch Long, passing the place where I'd retrieved the airmail package from the footwell a couple of hours earlier.
"Yeah, but what did Fergus tell Rory?" Ash said, finishing that part.
"Read the next bit," I said. I waved my hand when Ash offered me the joint.
The road started to climb along the dark shoulder of the hillside towards the Rest-and-be-Thankful, leaving the old road still down in the floor of the glen. I kept a careful look out for Mad Stags From Hell crashing across the road, but none appeared.
"Woof," Ash said, closing the last page, "Horny stuff towards the end there." She switched the torch off again. "You think that last bit is what Fergus told Rory in the bothy, if it really happened?"
"Yeah," I said. "There's a diary entry to back it up, and there is a way through the castle's attic from the observatory to the master bedroom, and a loft door. Helen mentioned it just today."
"But Prentice!" Ash laughed, coughing. "All you've got is Rory's… written word for it!"
"It's all circumstantial, I know. Although mum does remember the party at Hamish and Tone's, and Lachy did help Fiona take Fergus home."
"Wow," Ash said, tartly.
"So anyway, what's happened is: Fergus has spilled these beans to Rory, who's spent years trying to come up with some creative ideas for his big project and failed dismally, then decided Just Use It; use the one spectacular piece of real-life drama only he and Fergus know about; he's written this sort of diary piece about the time they were in the bothy together; another, more fictionalised bit about what Fergus actually saw; and then a third passage that… well, that's the point." I glanced over at her. "I was hoping you might see the same thing I did in that last bit, the bit in the car. I think that was what Rory was writing just before he borrowed the bike and went to see Fergus, because of what he had started to suspect, when he was writing that."
"Went to see Fergus?"
"Yes." I looked over at her. "And Fergus killed him."
"What? And Fergus killed him?" Ash said, voice high. "Why, Prentice?" She opened the window a crack and threw the roach out.
"I'll come to that," I said, holding up one finger. We were passing Loch Restil now; I was still watching out for stags.
Ashley shook her head. "Prentice, have you been reading crime novels instead of your history books?"
I gave a small laugh. "No. The worst crimes are always in the history books, anyway."
Ash undid her hair, reached into her bag and started to brush her hair with a long-tooth comb. "Hmm," she said. "Okay. So keep going."
"Right," I said. "That guy Paxton-Marr. He'd been sending dad those match-book covers… I mean match-book covers, right?"
"Yeah, so?"
"So he knows Fergus; Fergus was getting the guy to send them, making dad think Rory was still alive, farting around all over the world. Why should Fergus want to do that?"
"I don't know, but what's so special about match-book covers?"
I looked over for a moment; her face was pale in the lights of an on-coming car. "That bit in the bothy," I told her. "Rory tells Fergus he accidentally set fire to a barn on the estate when he was a kid. I think the only other person Rory'd ever told about that was dad, who thought that nobody else knew. So when these match-book covers came from all over the world, he thought it was a secret sign from Rory."
Ashley was silent for a while, then sighed. "What fertile imaginations you have in your family."
"Yeah," I said. "I'm afraid so."
We rounded the long left-hander into Glen Kinglas, where Verity had almost lost the back-end of the Beemer a year earlier. The long straight disappeared into the darkness. A few tiny red sparks in the distance were tail lights. I had another shivery feeling of déjà vu.
Ashley tapped her fingers on the dashboard, then ran them through her hair. After a while she said, "And what did Rory suspect?"
"Murder. His sister's murder."
Ash took her time before answering. "You think Fergus killed your Aunt Fiona as well?"
I nodded. "You guessed it."
"She was already dead when they had the crash?"
"Hmm, I hadn't thought of that," I admitted. I came off the power. I checked the mirror; there was nothing following us, and no headlights in front. "No, I believe Rory got it right in that bit he wrote, and she was alive when they crashed; I was thinking of something else."
"What?" Ash said.
braked smoothly as though we were approaching a sharp corner, not on a long straight. From the corner of my eye, I could see Ash looking at me. I changed down to second gear, let the engine brake the car. I reached over and hit the little red release button on Ashley's seat belt, then I slammed the brakes on. The Golf skidded briefly along the road on locked wheels. I heard Ashley shout something. Her hands went out in front of her. She shot forward, harder than I'd intended and went "Oof!" against the dashboard, blonde hair flying. Her head hit the screen.
The car juddered to a stop.
I stared in horror.
Ash sat rubbing her forehead. She glared at me. She was holding her chest just underneath her breasts with her other hand. She glared at me. "What the fucking hell was that for, Prentice?"
"Oh shit," I said, hand to mouth. "Oh God, are you all right?" I checked the mirror, put both hands to my mouth. "I didn't mean to actually hurt you."
"Well you actually did, you idiot." She looked down at her seat-belt anchorage, then at the buckle. One side of the belt was still wrapped round her. I sat staring at her, my back against the driver's door, my heart pounding. Ashley patted her forehead, studied her fingers, then scowled at me and sat back in her seat, re-fixing her seatbelt. She waggled her shoulders, sticking her chest out a little and grimacing through the screen at the dark grey length of road exposed to the headlights. "You complete fool, Prentice; I may never dance the rhumba again." She looked at me, then pointed forwards. "Drive."
"God, I'm sorry," I said. I got the car moving again.
Ash patted her chest and inspected her forehead in the mirror on the back of the sun-visor, using the torch she'd been reading with. "No lasting damage done, I think," she said, snapping the torch off and the visor shut.
"I'm really sorry," I said. I rubbed my hands on my trousers, one at a time. "I didn't mean —»
"Enough," Ash said. "I promise I won't sue, okay?"
"Yeah," I said, shaking my head. "But I'm really —»
"You think," Ash interrupted, "that your Uncle Fergus killed his wife by driving off the road and undoing her seat belt just before they hit?"
I took a deep breath. "Yes."
"Slow down, will you?" Ash said.
"Eh?" I said, slowing. We hadn't been going particularly fast.
Then I realised. "Oh. Yeah," I said, feeling even worse. "I pick my places, don't I?"
Ash didn't reply; we both watched, silent, as the Golf dawdled Past the parking place at the Cowal road junction where Darren Watt had died.
"Shit," I said. "Oh God, I'm doing an awful lot of apol —»
"Forget it," Ash said. "Let's get home."
I shook my head. "Oh shit," I said miserably.
The lights of Inveraray were off to our right, steady across the dark waters of Loch Shira as we rounded Strone Point, when Ash spoke again. "Bit of a risky way to top your wife, isn't it?"
"Convincing, though. And maybe… Don't laugh," I said, glancing over at her. "Maybe the perfect crime."
Ash looked at me dubiously. "Oh dear, Prentice. Really."
"I'm serious," I said. "He banged his head; he doesn't remember the last few miles of the drive. He even asked to be hypnotised, though they never did. Short-term memory gone, see? Hell, if he did it just on the spur of the moment, maybe even he isn't sure he meant it. He told me himself that he thought Fiona had been wearing a seat belt. I saw him just after the crash, while I was in hospital too, getting my appendix out. So nobody — maybe not even him — will ever know. It's fucking perfect. Risky but perfect, if it does work."
We stopped at traffic lights by the ornate, hump-backed bridge that took the road over the Aray. I sat staring at the red light; Inveraray sat ahead, round the side of the little bay, white buildings glowing in the sodium twilight of the street lights.
"But if he doesn't know he did it," Ash said, putting the sun visor down again and checking her forehead in the mirror in the lights of the on-coming stream of traffic, "why would he kill Rory anyway?"
I shrugged. "Maybe he does know he did it; but even if he doesn't, he might guess that he did. Maybe he was afraid Rory would publish something too close to the truth, maybe Rory was threatening to tell people about his theory; the police, for a start. Maybe neither murder was premeditated; maybe Fergus just reacted, both times. I don't know."
"Hmm," Ash said. She sat looking baffled for a bit, then shook her head. The lights changed and we crossed the bridge.
"If I'm right," I said, "Fergus probably had thought about killing her before he did. Maybe he only actually decided then and there, on the road that night; but he must have thought about it. Like I say; even if he isn't sure he did it himself, he knows he might have. I mean how hard do you have to think about something, how seriously, before it becomes something you could do, in the heat of the moment?"
"I give in," said Ash. "You tell me."
"Jeez," I said. "When I was feeling really bad last year I used to lie awake at night thinking that if there was some way of killing Lewis, quickly, painlessly, with no way of being found out, I might just do it, especially if I knew somehow that Verity would turn to me afterwards —»
"Oh for God's sake, Prentice," Ash said, turning her head to watch downtown Inveraray slide past. A minute later we were out, accelerating down the darkness of the loch side.
"Look," I said. "I was pretty fucked-up. I mean, I'm not saying it wasn't my own fault, Ash; I know it was. I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm just trying to explain that some crazy stuff can go through your head sometimes through love, or jealousy, and maybe, if it's triggered by something… I mean if somebody had actually given me a method of killing Lewis like that I'd probably have been horrified. I hope I couldn't even have thought about doing it any more once I knew it was possible. It was just a fantasy, a kind of warped internal therapy, something I day-dreamed about to make me feel better." I shrugged. "Anyway, that's the case for the prosecution."
Ash sat, mulling, for a while.
So," she said. "Have you checked out whether Fergus was alone the night Rory may or may not have gone to see him? I mean this whole thing falls to pieces if your uncle —»
"He was alone, Ash," I told her. "Mrs McSpadden had gone to visit relatives in Fife that weekend. Mum and dad had suggested the twins came and stayed with us. Fergus brought them over about tea time; I remember talking to him. He had a couple of drinks and then he left. So he was alone in the castle."
Ash looked at me. I just shrugged.
"Okay," she said eventually. She rested her elbow on the door, and tapped at her teeth with one set of nails. Her skirt had ridden up a little, and I stole the occasional glance at her long, blackly shining legs.
"So," she said later when we were in the forest, away from the loch side and a few kilometres out of Furnace. "What is to be done, Prentice?"
"I don't know," I confessed. "There's no body… Well, there is Aunt Fiona's, but that's neither here nor there. But Rory's still missing, in theory. I suppose I could go to the boys in blue with what I've got, but Jeez, can you imagine? Right, sonny, so you think this wee story that ye've read means yer uncle wiz kilt… Ah see. Would you mind just putting on this nice white jaikit? Aye, the sleeves are a wee bitty on the long side, but you won't be needing yer hands much in this braw wee room we've got for you with the very soft wallpaper."
We curved down into Furnace, the road finding the loch shore again. I could sense Ash looking at me, and chose not to look back, concentrating on checking the mirrors and the instruments. Eventually she took a breath. "Okay. Supposing Fergus did kill Rory, what did he do with the body?"
"Probably hid it," I said. "Not too near the castle… He had plenty of time; all night. He had a Land Rover; he could have got the bike in the back. Bit of a struggle maybe, but Fergus is a biggish lad, and a 185 Suzi isn't that heavy. It did occur to me he could have driven the bike himself with the body lashed to his back looking like a pillion. It's a bit Mezentian, but possible. But then he'd have had to have walked back from wherever he left it… " I looked over at Ashley, who was staring at me with a worried, even frightened expression. I shrugged. "But I think he took it up to one of the lochs in the hills, in the Landy; used the forestry tracks and dumped body and bike together into the water. There are plenty or places. The forest to the south of the castle, on the other side of the canal It's just full of little lochs up there, and there are tracks to most of them; it's the obvious… What's the matter?" I asked.
"You're right into all this, aren't you?"
"What do you expect?" I laughed, a strange, tight feeling in my belly. "What if I'm right? Jeez, this guy might just have killed two of my close relations; wouldn't you be kind of interested?"
Ash breathed out. "Oh dear, Prentice," she sighed, shaking her head and staring out of the window at the night as we swept through the forest towards Lochgair. "Oh dear, oh dear…»
We pulled up outside the Watt house in Bruce Street before eleven. Ash looked in the visor mirror again. She frowned and held her hair away from her face, turning her head from side to side. "Can't see a bruise," she said.
I looked over. "No, I think you're all right there." I spread my hands. "Look, I'm really sorry —»
"Oh, shush," Ash said. She nodded at the house. "Coming in?"
"Just for a minute. I'd like to ask a favour of your mum."
"Yeah?" Ash said, reaching into the back for her flight bag. "Let me guess; you want to get in touch with Uncle Lachy."
I turned the engine off and killed the lights. "Aye; I wondered if she might let me have his phone number in Australia. I'd like a wee word with him."
"Yeah, I bet you would."
We got out of the car and walked up the path towards the door.
I had a brief chat with Mrs Watt, gracefully refused a dram, and left after five minutes. A shower scattered raindrops in bright cones under the street lights as I drove away. I went up Bruce Street then took a couple of lefts onto the Oban road where it ran along the side of what had been the Slate Mine wharf.
When I saw the building site, I pulled in and stopped the car.
The site was lit with a sort of hollow orange dimness by the nearby sodium lamps. It was here I'd come with Ashley that night after Margot's percussive cremation; we sat here on the Ballast Mound, the World Hill. It was the night she'd told me about Berlin, the Jacuzzi, and the man who'd hinted there was some trick being played on somebody in Gallanach. She'd given me that piece of the Berlin Wall, shortly after we'd sat together here. The developers had been going to level the mound the following day, preparatory to putting up some new houses.
But it looked like they hadn't got very far.
The old wharf was derelict again; levelled all right, and with foundation trenches dug, but no more. Little wooden stakes were stuck into the ground near a few of the trenches; loose bits of wet string tied to them lay straggled across the ploughed-up ground. There were no earth movers or dumper trucks on the site any more, just a couple of loose piles of bricks, the bottom few layers already overgrown by weeds. A picket fence round the site had been knocked flat almost all the way round, and the developer's signboard hung flapping in the breeze, secured at only one corner to a rickety, lop-sided framework.
Gone bust, I supposed and, with a look at where the Ballast Mound had been, drove away.