Blackstone's pursuits

In which an unhappy sister lends us her car and plots her own escape

We decided that French Grand Prix should be postponed until another night.

Neither of us said anything, but we knew that it just wouldn’t have been right in that unhappy house, under that roof. Instead, we lay together in the big iron-framed bed which almost filled the room, Prim in her nightshirt, me in my boxers, making our plans for the last stage of our journey, and trying not to dwell on the danger which might be lying in wait for us.

Next morning, when I wandered downstairs at seven o’clock for a glass of water, Allan was gone.

Over breakfast, with Jonathan packed off to school and Colin sent into the courtyard with a bun and a football, Ellen tried to keep her brave face on it, and I tried to go along with it. But it was no use.

‘What is it, Ellie?’ I asked her. ‘D’you feel homesick, or what?’

She shook her head. ‘No, wee brither. I feel bored. I feel uncared for. I feel abandoned. Try to imagine what it’s like living here. The place is lovely, sure, but so what. It’s in the middle of nowhere, the natives are unfriendly. Bloody Hell, the place even has a wall round it. It’s a place to visit, not to live, and yet I’m stuck here full-time with nothing to do but eat pastries and go quietly out of my mind. Look at the size of me, Oz. I’m like a bloody bus.

‘How would you fancy this for a life? How would you, Prim?’ Prim rolled her big eyes, and shook her head, solemnly.

‘But Ellie,’ I said, ‘shouldn’t you have thought all this out before you bought the place?’

She glared at me. ‘I didn’t buy it, brother. Allan did. He took the job, the company came up with this and he said okay. You don’t think he consulted me about any of it, do you!’

I watched her as she savaged her third croissant. ‘You know what, Ellie?’ I said. ‘I reckon that’s mostly shite. You were brought up in Anstruther, for heaven’s sake. That’s hardly a bloody metropolis. Yet you could handle that, and, if everything else was okay, you could handle this.

‘But we both know that right now, if you were living in the middle of the Champ d’Elysee, you’d still be bored out of your tree, and we both know why.’

But she wasn’t ready for such fundamental truth. She shook her head and stood up, to fetch more coffee from the big range cooker. ‘Enough about me,’ she said, sitting back down at the table.

‘Are you going to tell me, finally, what it is that’s brought you two out here? And don’t say you just came on holiday. You’re a creature of habit, Oz. You take your holidays in July, like the rest of Scotland.’

Normally, Ellie’s the third person in the world, alongside my Dad and Jan, that I’d have trusted with our problem. But all of a sudden I wasn’t sure. She had problems of her own.

‘Are you working up to telling me something bad about Dad?’ she probed.

I shook my head. ‘No, not at all. It’s nothing like that. Look if I told you you’d think I’m mad.’

She looked me dead in the eye. ‘Oz, remember when we were kids? Who did you come to when you were in bother? And who sorted it out for you? As for being mad, what’s new?

‘So come on boy. Out with it.’

So, just as I had with Jan and my Dad, I told her. I left out not a scrap of detail, from the size of Willie Kane’s organ, to the size of his wife’s betrayal. When I had finished, my sister was smiling. ‘It’s just like when you were Jonathan’s age.

‘You know, Prim, this bugger never got into ordinary bother like other kids. He did it in the grand style. I remember one summer: the man next door grew garden peas, on stalks, and they were right up against the boundary fence. This yin here, he reached through the fence, and he stripped all the peas out of nearly all the pods, but left them hanging there. When the man’s wife went out to pick her peas, all she found was empty pods, hangin’ there looking pathetic, like blown green condoms. There was hell to pay. He’d maybe have got away with it too, only he kept the evidence in a basin in his room!’

All of a sudden she was serious. ‘Are you sure you’re right about this man Ross?’

‘As sure as we can be.’

‘And you can’t go to the police?’

I shook my head. ‘He is the police. We’d wind up in the nick ourselves, and my client’s business would be bust. There is the other angle too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If we can avoid Ross, and get the money back to Archer, we collect ten per cent commission. That’s ninety thousand, Ellie.’

‘I’m a teacher. I had worked that out!’ She shot me her old familiar glower. Everything was all right again.

‘So you reckon that Ross’ll have come after you.’

‘Sure. He isn’t just after ten per cent. He’s after the lot.’

‘So what’s your next step? Geneva?’

I nodded.

‘Right. If he’s there he’ll be looking out for Jan’s car. So you two take mine. Just you drive right up to the door of the bank and march straight in. Once you’ve got the money, don’t come back here. Head north. I’ll take Jan’s car back. It’s time the kids saw their Grandad again.’

‘What will Allan say about that?’

She looked at me, and it was as if I was back in the school playground. ‘Not a bloody word, unless he wants his legs slapped!’