Complicity

CHAPTER 6: EXOCET DECK

I drive the car up the little single-track road leading towards the low hills; the headlights create a deep channel of illumination between the hedges. I'm dressed in black jeans, black boots and a dark blue polo-neck over a navy shirt and two vests. I've wearing thin black leather gloves. I find a track leading off the road into a stand of trees; I take the car up as far as it will go, then turn the lights out. The clock on the dash says it's 03:10. I wait a minute; no traffic passes, so I guess I haven't been seen. My heart is thudding already.

The night is cold when I get out of the car. There's a half-moon but it's obscured ninety per cent of the time by a lot of low, fast-moving cloud producing occasional freezing gusts of rain. The wind is loud in the leaf-bare branches overhead. I head down the track to the road, then look back to the car; it's almost fully hidden. I cross the tarmac and climb a fence, then take the ski-mask from my trouser pocket and pull it over my head. I follow the line of the hedge along the side of the road, ducking once as a car drives past on the road; its headlights sweep along the hedge above me. The car carries on into the night. I start breathing again.

I get to the fence leading downhill and follow it, stumbling now and again on the rocks and stones left at the side of the field; my eyes are still adjusting to the darkness. The ground underfoot is fairly firm, not too muddy.

At the hedge marking the foot of the field I have to look for a minute to find a way through. Finally I have to crawl through and underneath it, snagging my polo-neck. Trees heard but barely seen in the darkness make a great rushing, crackling sound above me.

I scramble down a muddy, leaf-littered bank and into a chilly stream at the bottom; it flows over one boot and I whisper, "Shit," and squelch up the far bank, holding onto the cold branches of bushes and the mud-slimy roots of trees. I force my way through some bushes at the top. I can see street lights ahead, and the geometric shapes of darkened houses. I keep crouched and make my way through the low bushes, heading diagonally through the wood towards the estate. I trip over a log and fall but don't hurt myself. I come to the two-metre-high brick wall which surrounds the estate and feel my way along it, stumbling over piles of earth and building debris until I get to the corner.

I measure sixty paces along the wall and then walk away from it to the nearest tree. A patch of moonlight means I have to wait nearly five minutes for the clouds to cover the moon again before I can climb the tree. I get far enough up to see the house and identify it by its position and the garden furniture, then I climb back down, go to the wall and jump up, catching hold of the concrete ridge tiles on top of the wall and pulling myself up. I rest on the top of the wall, my hands shaking, my heart pumping hard. I look at the dark house in front of me and the screens of tall shrubs and young trees on either side concealing the two neighbouring villas.

The moon threatens to come out from behind the clouds again and I have to jump down to the paving stones of the patio beneath. There is a small wall beside the greenhouse which rises to within a metre of the top of the estate wall; that's my escape route. There are infrared-sensing security lights on the wall of the house and if they go on then the whole thing's off; I'm up and over the wall and back into the woods and away.

I walk quietly over the patio, onto the grass and towards the house, just waiting for the blaze of light from the security lamps. It doesn't happen. I reach the lower patio where the garden furniture stands by the side of the tarpaulin-covered pool and crouch down by the ghostly perforated shape of the cast-iron bench. I feel up inside the overhang where the back of the bench joins the arm, the leather of my gloves catching on rough splinters of metal. I can't feel enough. I take my glove off and try again, the metal cold and edges sharp against my skin. I feel the putty, then the embedded key and its short length of string. I take hold of the string and pull gently. The key comes out, clinking quietly once. I put my glove back on.

I walk carefully past the conservatory to the back door of the house, slide the key into the lock and turn it. The door opens silently. The house is warm inside and smells of washing powder. I lock the door; as I move away from it, a small, faint red light comes on with a tiny clinking noise, high up in one far corner of the room. The sensor doesn't set the alarm off; the system isn't armed.

I move very slowly through the utility room and into the kitchen (another little red light clicks on). My boots squelch and squeak on the tiles. I hesitate, then kneel and quickly take the boots off, leaving them by the dishwasher. When I stand up I see the wooden block full of knives on the work surface, just visible by moonlight next to the gently gleaming stainless steel of the sinks. I pull out the largest of the knives, then turn and leave the kitchen, heading down the corridor past the dining room and the study to the stairs. Beyond and to the side is the split-level lounge; a shaft of orange street light sifting through the trees round the front garden shows leather settees, chairs, bookcases full of videos, CDs and books, a couple of coffee tables and a big metal hood over a raised central fireplace. Another sensor high in one corner glows red as I move towards the foot of the stairs.

The carpet on the stairs is thick and deep and I make no noise as I climb to the top, then pad along towards the master bedroom, tripping one more sensor. The bedroom door opens with only the softest of creaks.

At the head of the wide double bed there is a weak green glow. As I move round I see the numerals of a digital clock. The lime-coloured light spills faintly out onto white sheets and a single, sleeping face. I go closer, very slowly, the knife held in front of me. I watch her breathe. One of her arms lies outside the covers, hanging out pale and naked over the edge of the bed. She has short, dark hair and a slim, slightly boyish face; thin, dark brows, thin nose, pale lips with the hint of a pout, and a sharp triangular chin matching sharp, high cheekbones.

I creep closer. She stirs. I reach forward, the knife in one hand, the other glove touching then gathering and balling a fistful of duvet and then pulling it sharply, throwing it away behind me as I leap forward, seeing her pale nakedness in the same instant as I slap my hand over her mouth; her eyes open wide and she starts trying to push up; I force her back down into the bed, hand still over her mouth. I raise the knife so she can see it. She struggles, eyes widening further, but I pin her to the sheets with my weight and keep the glove firmly over her mouth even though she isn't making any noise. I rest the blade of the knife against her throat and she goes still.

"Make a noise and you're dead, understand?" I say. She seems not to hear, staring up at me. "Understand?" I say again, and this time she nods quickly. "Warning you," I tell her as I slowly take my hand away from her mouth. She doesn't call out.

I push myself up, still keeping the knife near her throat. I undo the zip on my jeans. I'm not wearing any underpants and my cock falls out, already hard. She's staring into my eyes. I see her swallow. A pulse beats at the top of her long, white neck, under her chin. Her hand is creeping to the side of the bed. I look at it, and it stops. Her eyes look terrified now. I put the blade of the knife against her neck again and look down to the edge of the mattress. She's trembling. I feel under the edge of the mattress, above the wooden frame of the huge bed. I feel a wooden handle; I pull out a ten-inch hunting knife with a serrated blade. I whistle softly, then throw it across the carpets towards the windows. She's staring at me.

"On your front," I tell her. "On your knees, like a dog. Now."

She starts to breathe raggedly, mouth open. Her whole body is trembling.

"Do it!" I hiss.

She rolls over, onto her front, then gets up onto her knees, taking the weight of her upper body on her hands.

"Face on the sheets," I tell her. "Hands up here."

She rests her face on the sheet and puts her hands behind her. I take the handcuffs from my pocket and snap them over her wrists. I stop to put a condom on, then climb onto the bed behind her, put the knife onto the sheets just within reach, grip her hips with both hands and pull her onto my cock.

She shouts as I enter her. She's soaking wet and within a few thrusts I'm ready to come and she's panting, then grunting then calling out, "Oh, fuck, yes!" and then it's all over and I collapse over her and then fall off her and almost cut my ear on the cool blade of the kitchen knife lying on the sheet.

She lies there on her side, facing me, watching me, still panting, hands still trapped behind her back, a strange, charged expression on her face, and after a bit she says, "Is that it?"

I breathe deeply and say, "No."

I haul her roughly back up onto her knees with her face down on the sheets again and spread her buttocks and stick an index finger into her anus, sliding it quickly half into her. She gasps. I position my head above her backside and let some spit fall down onto where the knuckle is caught on the ring of muscle, then push my finger fully into her. She gasps again; I start to move the finger in and out, stroking her clitoris with my other hand. I use two fingers after a while, then I'm hard again; I pull the first condom off and put on another one, then I spit onto my rubber-sheathed prick and, guiding it with my fingers, ease it slowly into her rectum.

She comes screaming; I don't think I'm going to but then I do.

We collapse together onto the bed, breathing in time. I pull myself out of her. There is a faint smell of shit. I undo the handcuffs and lie there, holding her. She pulls the ski-mask from my head.

"Where are your shoes?" she whispers after a while.

"In the kitchen," I tell her. They were muddy. Didn't want to make a mess."

She laughs quietly in the darkness.

"But I was in control," she says, over the noise of the streaming water as she soaps my shoulders and back. "All I had to say was your name, and it was all over. That's what we agreed; I trust you."

"But what's the difference?" I ask her, trying to see her over my shoulder. "Anybody watching that would have said I was a rapist and you were being raped."

"But we knew different."

"But is that all it is? I mean just thinking that? What if it had been a real rapist?"

"What if it had been the wrong house?"

"I checked the furniture."

"And you were just you; you moved like you, spoke like you; smelled like you."

"But-"

"Look; I enjoyed it," she says, soaping the small of my back and my buttocks. "I don't think I want to do it again, but it was interesting to live it out. But what about you? How did you feel about it?"

"Nervous as fuck — I was certain I wouldn't be able to get it up, I mean just certain, especially as I'm still feeling the effects from getting pissed yesterday — and then, well… aroused, I suppose, when… when I realised you were."

"Uh-huh. Not before."

"No!"

"No."

"I mean, I felt awful for long enough; I felt like a rapist."

"But you weren't." She slides her hand between the cheeks of my bum, then soaps my thighs and down my legs. "You were doing something I'd always fantasised about."

"Oh great, so that old fuck Jamieson was right and all women secretly want to be raped."

Yvonne slaps my calves. "Don't be stupid. Nobody wants to be raped, but some people have fantasies about it. The control isn't some detail, Cameron… knowing it's somebody you can trust isn't just by-the-way; it's everything."

"Hmm," I say, unconvinced.

"Men like Jamieson hate women, Cameron. Or maybe they just hate women who aren't totally in awe of men, women who aren't under their control." She runs her hands up my legs to my buttocks again, sliding her fingers between my cheeks, touching my anus and making me go up on the balls of my feet, then her hand runs back down my legs. "Maybe men like that should have it happen to them," she says. "Rape; assault. See how they like it."

"Yeah," I say, shivering suddenly despite the heat because we're getting into dodgy territory here. "All those wigs and garters and funny gowns; fuckin askin for it, in't they? Know wot I mean?" The steam gets to my throat and I cough.

I'm wondering whether I should say anything to her about the police, and about the retired Judge Jamieson being "assaulted', whatever that means. After my drunken afternoon with Al I don't feel the same need to offload as I did before, and I can't decide whether I ought to involve Yvonne or not.

She washes my feet. "Or maybe," she says, "the Greers and the Dworkins are right, and the Pickleses and the Jamiesons are right too, and all men are rapists, and all women want to be raped."

"Bullshit."

"Mm-hmm."

"But I still didn't like being made to feel like I was a rapist."

"Well, we won't do that again."

"And I still find the idea of you wanting me to do it… unsettling."

She's silent for a while, then says, "The other day" — she's soaping the front of my legs now, from behind — "when you had to sit through Eldorado in that really uncomfortable position; you enjoyed that, didn't you?"

She's smoothing her sappled hands up and down my thighs.

"Well… eventually," I concede.

"But if that had been somebody else doing that to you…" she says softly, so that I can hardly hear her over the quiet thunder of the shower. She's soaping my balls now, gently palping them, massaging them. … Somebody you didn't know — male or female — tying you up, leaving you helpless, somewhere where shouting couldn't help you, and there was a big sharp knife under the bed… how would you have felt then?"

She stands up and rubs her body up against me, stroking my still mostly limp cock. I gaze out through the steam and the rivulets of water running down the glass of the shower cabinet. I'm looking out at the moodily lit bathroom and wondering what I would do if I suddenly saw William appear out there, flight bags in hand, a Surprise, honey, I'm home! look on his face.

"Petrified," I admit. "I'd be scared stiff. Well, scared soft."

She's gently pulling on my prick. It doesn't really want to and I find it difficult to believe and I'm not sure I want to because I feel so fucking drained and sore, but the thing's actually responding, fattening and firming and rising in her kneading, soap-slick hands.

She puts her chin on my shoulder and a sharp fingernail against my jugular. "Turn round, bitch-boy," she hisses.

"Oh ha-bloody-ha."

Yvonne wakes me up after an hour's sleep and tells me I have to leave. I turn over and pretend I'm still asleep but she pulls the duvet off me and switches the lights on. I have to dress in my sweaty, dirty clothes and go back down to the kitchen, grumbling while she makes me a coffee, and I complain about my wet boots and she gives me a fresh pair of William's socks to wear and I put them on and drink my coffee and whine about never being allowed to spend the night and tell her how just once I'd like to wake up here in the morning, and have a nice, civilised breakfast with her, sitting on the sunny balcony outside the bedroom windows, but she makes me sit down while she laces my boots up, then takes my coffee cup off me and sends me out the back door and says I've got two minutes before she arms the alarm and puts the infrared lights on stand-by so I have to go back the way I came, over the estate wall and through the wood and down into the stream where I get both feet wet and cold and I fall going up the bank and get all muddy and eventually drag myself up and through the hedge, scratching my cheek and tearing my polo-neck and then trudging across the field through heavy rain and more mud and finally getting to the car and panicking when I can't find the car keys before remembering I put them in the button-down back pocket of the jeans for safety instead of the side pocket like I usually do, and then having to put some dead branches under the front wheels because the fucking car's stuck and finally getting away and home and even in the street light I can see what a mess of the pale upholstery my muddy clothes have made.

I feel too tired to sleep so I play some Despot when I get home but my heart's not in it and the Empire is still in a tattered-looking state after all the earlier disasters and I'm almost wondering if I should start again but that would mean going back to the fucking dawn of civilisation and the temptation in Despot is always to swap PoV, which people who don't know the game always think sounds sort of innocent, like some detail, but it isn't: you're not just swapping Point of View, you're swapping your current Despotic Power Level for something less, even if it's a regional lord or other king or a general or royal relation close to the throne, and it is not to be done lightly because as soon as you renounce the current Despot's PoV the computer takes over and it's a smart fucking piece of software. Try to swap too late, hold on too long and you get assassinated and that's it; that's you back to the cave with twenty other flea-bitten reduced-statures and the bright idea of bringing some fire into the cave! Swap too soon and the program takes over and performs some miracle that pulls the ass of the Despot you just abandoned out of the fire and next thing you know the secret police are banging down the doors and hauling you and your family off into the night and oblivion; the machine thereupon promptly declares itself the winner and it's back to that fucking cave again.

I give up after an hour of civilisational water-treading, hit Store and slope off to bed. I've smoked six fags without really meaning to.

I'm still heading for the hills. I get up bright and late. I phone Andy and confirm it's still all right to visit, then I ring Eddie and get the next three days off, tell the cops — they're based at Fettes, though the DI has gone back down to London, and no they're still not giving me back my new portable yet — and (after I've cleaned the car up a bit) head out of the city and across the grey bridge in a day of squally, buffeting rain that has the bridge's 40-limit signs on, high-sided vehicles banned and the 205 dancing its Dunlops sideways as the gusts hit.

Then it's up the M90, skirting Perth and heading northwards on the A9 with its frustrating mix of dual and single carriageways and its dire-warning signs about unmarked police cars before the fun begins at Dalwhinnie. Nirvana, Michelle Shocked, Crowded House and Carter USM provide the sound track. The rain eases as I head west; I catch the last of a wide, bloody-looking sunset over Skye and the Kyles and the floodlights turning Eilean Donan's grey stones green; I make it to Strome in four hours twenty minutes from home, arriving just as the stars are coming out above in the purple spaces between the dark, heavy clouds.

"You total bastard! You total utter and complete bastard! That's how you fucking do it! Bastard!"

Compensation and redemption; education, even. I'm in the dark hotel at the side of the black loch and it's close to midnight and I'm drunk but not stoned and so's Andy and his pal Howie and I'm sitting in the old ballroom on the lower ground floor, looking out over the waters to where grey ghostly moonlit mountains rise, tops glowing softly, capped with snow, and I'm playing computer games. In fact I'm playing Xerium, of all things, and blow me down, blow me up if I haven't just found out how to get over the Mountains of Zound at long, long last.

It's easy but sneaky; you ferry a dump of fuel, shielding, a nuke and a missile, load up on fuel and a nuke, fly out and up eight clicks, drop the nuke at the foot of the mountains, power-dive back down to base, load the shielding, fuel to the max with just one missile aboard (meanwhile the nuke explodes, shaking the ground; you don't want to be fueling at this point), then you climb like fuck, get to ceiling and then hover in the air above the rising mushroom cloud! The cloud comes up beneath you and carries you up with it over your normal ceiling. The shielding protects you — though you still need to do some fancy flying to stay stable within the radioactive thermals — then as the cloud dissipates you cut out and down, across the mountains — they look tiny! — swoop across the closed valley, loose the missile when the base's defence radar picks you up and use the last of your fuel to escape over the far side while the missile takes out the base. Simple!

"Bastard," I say, gliding the ship down to a fuel-dump and a gentle landing. I shake my head. "Riding the fucking mushroom cloud; never even occurred to me."

"You're not gung-ho enough," Andy tells me, refilling my whisky glass.

"Aye; you've got to be a real man to play this game," Howie says, winking and taking up his glass. He's a brawny Highland lad from one of the nearby villages, one of Andy's drinking partners. A bit rough and ready and with a highly incorrect attitude to women, but amusing, in a raw kind of way; a man's man.

"You have to be slightly crazy to play Xerium," Andy says, sitting back in his seat. "You have to be… just… crazy… enough."

"Aye," Howie says, draining his whisky glass. "No, no, thanks, Drew," he says as Andy goes to refill his dram too. "I'd better be away," he says, standing. "Can't be late for my last day with the Forestry. Nice to meet you," he says to me. "Maybe see you later." He shakes my hand; serious grip.

"Right," Andy says, standing too. "I'll see you out, Howie. Thanks for coming round."

"Not at all, not at all. Good to see you again."

"… wee going-away party tomorrow night?"

"Aye, why not?"

They wend off across the dully shining floor of the ballroom, heading approximately for the stairs.

I shake my head at the Amiga screen. "Riding the fucking mushroom cloud," I say to myself. Then I get up out of the creaking seat and stretch my legs, taking my glass over to the floor-to-ceiling windows which form one wall of the ballroom and look out over the gardens to the railway line and the shore of the loch. The clouds have shrunk to wisps and the moon stands somewhere overhead, filling the view with silver. A few lights burn further down the loch to the right, but the mass of mountains on the far side rises dark into the starry sky, grey becoming white at their snow-dusted summits.

The ballroom smells damp. It is illuminated only by the light shining from the stairwell and the desk lamp on the old trestle table which holds the computer. Torn, bleached-looking curtains hang at the sides of the six tall window bays. My breath smokes in front of me and mists on the cold glass. All the panes are dirty and some are cracked. A couple have been replaced with hardboard. In two of the window bays there are buckets to catch drips but one of them has overflowed and caused a puddle to form around it, discolouring and springing the parquet flooring, which looks burned in other places. Striped, faded wallpaper has unrolled down the walls in places to hang like giant shavings off a piece of planed wood.

The ballroom is scattered with cheap wooden chairs, tables, rolls of ancient, mouldy-smelling carpets, a couple of old motorbikes and lots of bits of motorbikes standing or lying on oil-stained sheets, and what looks and smells like an industrial-standard deep-fat frier with the associated hoods, filters, fan housing and ducting.

The hotel lies at the foot of a steep road which leads down through the trees from the main road. With the hill and the dark masses of the trees behind it to the south, the place doesn't get any sunlight in winter and not that much even in summer. The main road used to come here and the ferry took you over to the north side of the loch, but then they up-graded the way round the loch from a track to a road and the ferry stopped. The Inverness-Kyle railway still runs past and the train still halts if anyone requests it, but with the ferry gone and the road traffic diverted the place has gone to seed; there are a few houses, a craft shop, the railway platform, a wharf and an abandoned compound owned by Marconi, and the hotel.

That's it. There's a sign at the top of the road that's been there for years, ever since they opened the new road, and it says "Strome Ferry — no ferry', and that just says it all.

A door closes in the distance, somewhere overhead. I drink my whisky and look out at the inky loch. I don't think Andy ever meant to do anything with this place. Like the rest of his friends, I assumed he was going to run it, put money into it; develop it. We all imagined he had some secret new money-spinning idea and soon we'd all be amazed at what he'd done to the place, and coming here to marvel at the crowds he'd managed to attract… but I don't think he was ever looking for a site for some viable business venture; I think he was just looking for somewhere suited to his burned-out, fed-up, pissed-off mood.

"Right," Andy says in the background. He comes in from the stairwell and closes the double doors. "Fancy some narcotics?"

"Oh! You have some?"

"Yeah, well," Andy says, coming to stand near me and look out over the water. He's about my height but he's filled out a bit since he came here and he has a kind of stoop now which makes him look smaller and older than he is. He's wearing thick old cords worn smooth at the bum and knee but good-quality once, and what looks like a load of shirts and holey jumpers and cardigans. He's got a week's growth of beard which seems to be permanent, judging from the times I've seen him in the past. "Howie's like a lot of them up here," he says. "They like a drink but they have a weird attitude to anything else." He shrugs and takes a silver cigarette case from a pocket in one of his cardigans. "There are a few travellers live in the area; they're cool."

"Hey," I say, remembering. "Did the police call you?"

"Yeah," he says, opening the cigarette case to reveal a dozen or so neatly rolled spliffs. "Somebody called Flavell; asked about when I called you back the other night. I told him."

"Right. I think I'm supposed to go and report to the local polizei tomorrow."

"Yeah, yeah, it's a fucking police state," he says tiredly, offering the spliff case to me. "Anyway; fancy a blow, yeah?"

I shrug. "Well, I don't normally, you understand." I take one of the Js. "Thanks." I shiver. I'm wearing my jacket and my Drizabone but I still feel freezing. "But can we go somewhere warm?

Andy, the ice-boy, smiles.

We sit in the lounge off his bedroom, on the top floor of the hotel, smoking Js and drinking whisky. I know I'm going to suffer for this tomorrow — later today — but I don't care. I tell him about the whisky story and the chill-filtering and the colouring but he already seems to know it all. The lounge is moderately spacious and somewhere between shabby and cosy: scuffed velvet curtains, heavy old wooden furniture, lots of plump embroidered cushions, and — on a massive table in one corner — an ancient IBM PC; it has an external disk drive and a modem connected and the casing is sitting slightly askew. An Epson printer sits alongside.

We're sitting round a real fire burning logs, and a fan heater's whining away in the centre of the room's dark, threadbare carpet. I'm warm at last. Andy sits in an ancient bulging armchair, its fake brown leather rubbed through to the fabric net underneath in places and burnished to a deep black shine on the arms; he nurses his whisky and looks into the fire most of the time. His concession to the warmth of the room has been to take off his topmost cardigan.

"Yeah," he's saying, "we were the blank-cheque generation. I remember thinking in "79 that it was time to really go for something, to finally try something different; to be radical. It seemed like ever since the "sixties there had been just one brand of government in two slightly different packages and nothing much ever changed; there was this feeling that after the burst of energy in the early-mid-'sixties everything had been going downhill; the whole country was constipated, bound up with rules and regulations and restrictive practices and just general, endemic, infectious ennui. I never could decide who was right, socialists — even revolutionaries — or the arch-capitalists, and it seemed we'd never find out in Britain because whatever way the popular vote went it never really brought any real change of direction. Heath wasn't particularly good for business and Callaghan wasn't particularly good for the working class."

"I didn't think you ever thought much of revolution," I tell him, sipping my whisky. "I thought you were always a devout capitalist."

Andy shrugs. "I just wanted change. It seemed like what was needed. It didn't really matter which direction it came from. I never said much because I wanted to keep my options open. I'd already decided I wanted to go into the Army and it wouldn't have been a good idea to have anything on my record about supporting some left-wing group. But it had occurred to me that if there was ever any… well, I don't know; armed revolt, popular uprising…" He laughs lightly. "I can remember when that didn't seem so unlikely, and I thought, well, if anything like that does ever happen, and they're right and the establishment is wrong, then it wouldn't do any harm for there to be people like me in the Army who were basically in sympathy with the… movement, whatever." He shakes his head, still staring at the fire. "Though I guess that sounds pretty dumb now, doesn't it?"

I shrug. "Don't ask me; you're talking to somebody who thought the way to make the world a better place was to become a journalist. Marks me down as a prime strategic thinker, and no mistake."

"Nothing wrong with the idea," Andy says. "But if you're disillusioned now it's partly because of what I'm talking about; the radicalism of Thatcher that seemed so fresh. That promise, that lean, trimmed-down fitness we could all look forward to; here was the chance to follow one dynamic plan, pushed by somebody who wasn't going to chicken out halfway through. Stripping away all the inefficiencies, the cosy deals, the feather-bedding, the smothering worst of the nanny-state; it was a breath of clean new air, it was a crusade; something we could all take part in, all be a part of."

"If you were rich to start with, or determined to be a bigger bastard than your mates."

Andy shakes his head. "You've always hated the Tories too much to see any of that clearly. But the point is it doesn't matter who was right, and even less who would have been right; all that matters is what people felt, because that's what produced the new ethos of the age; consensus had led to impasse, care to sterility, so: deliver a shock to the system, take the sort of radical risk with the country that you have to take with a business at least once in its history if it's to succeed; go for growth, take the monetarist shilling." He sighs, takes out the cigarette case again and holds it out to me. I take a spliff.

"And I was one of those who did," he says, lighting the J with his Zippo. "I was a loyal trooper in the children's crusade to recover the lost citadel of British economic power."

He watches the fire while I smoke the spliff.

"Though of course before that I'd already done my bit: I was one of Our Lads, I was an Expeditionary, part of the Task Force that recaptured Maggie's surrendered popularity."

I don't know what to say, and, in a recently introduced policy initiative that has come with my advancing years, I don't say anything.

"Well, here we are," Andy says, sitting forward and slapping his hands on his knees, then taking the J when I tap him on the elbow. "Thanks." He tokes on the spliff. "Here we are and we've had our experiment; there's been one party, one dominant idea, one fully followed plan, one strong leader — and her grey shadow — and it's all turned to shit and ashes. Industrial base cut so close to the bone the marrow's leaking out, the old vaguely socialist inefficiencies replaced with more rabid capitalist ones, power centralised, corruption institutionalised, and a generation created which'll never have any skills beyond opening a car with a coat hanger and knowing which solvents give you the best buzz with a plastic bag over your head before you throw up or pass out." He sucks hard on the number before holding it out to me.

"Yeah," I say, taking it. "But it's not like it was all your fault. You did your bit but… Islagiatt."

"Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time…"

"Christ, man, I didn't think any of you guys should have been out there, but I don't think I could have done what you did, in the Falklands. I mean, even if there had been some war I did believe worth fighting, if I'd been called up or something, I'm a coward, I'm just not physically capable. You were. You did it; fuck the rights and wrongs of the war, once you're in there, under fire, and your mates are getting blown away around you, you have to be able to function. At least you did; I'm not sure I could."

"So what?" he says, looking at me. "So I'm more of a fucking man because I learned how to kill people, and did?"

"No, I just mean —»

"Anyway," he says, looking away again. "A lot of good any of that did when we had a captain who couldn't fucking hack it, didn't have the guts to admit it, and had to send good men into a fucking killing ground to prove how fucking brave he really was." Andy lifts a log from the hearth and puts it on the fire, hitting the other logs with it and making them spark and blaze.

"Yeah," I say. "Well, I can't —»

"And you're wrong," he says, getting out of his seat and going to the corner of the room. There's a half-open hatch there leading into what looks like a deep, oddly cube-shaped cupboard; it's a dumb waiter. He pulls the top part of the metal cover further up, and the lower half sinks at the same time; he reaches in and gathers an armful of logs, bringing them over to the hearth. "We all have responsibility, Cameron. You can't escape it."

"Chayzuz, Gould, you take a hard line, man, so ye dae," I say, trying to lighten things up but sounding pretty pathetic even to myself.

Andy sits, takes the offered spliff and arranges the logs neatly round the edge of the hearth, to dry. He glances at me. "Yeah, and a long memory; I still haven't forgiven you for not trying to rescue me on the ice that time." He takes a long draw on the J, while I sit there thinking, Oh shit, then he hands the number back to me again with a big grin on his face. "Only kidding," he says. "I've been out-machoing men and bedding women with that story for twenty years."

Andy shows me to my room, a floor down, at about four in the morning. It has a fan heater and an electric blanket on the single bed. Before I go to sleep I wonder about whether I should have said anything to him about Mr Archer and his phone calls and Ares. I came up here thinking I would; I assumed I'd need to offload on somebody, but somehow it never seemed to be the right time to introduce the subject.

Never mind. It feels good just to have had a talk.

As I drift off I have the start of the running-through-the-woods dream again but I get away from it and don't remember thing else.

The next day while Andy's still asleep I take (a) some painkillers and (b) the car into Kyle of Lochalsh to tell the local police I'm here.

Driving into the town I spot an Escort with a blue light or roof and pull up behind it. A sergeant appears from what a plate beside the door indicates is the dentist's and I go up to him and tell him my name and that I've been told to report my movement Detective Inspector McDunn. The gaunt, grey-haired sergeant fixes me with a studiously suspicious look and takes a note of my name and the time. I get the impression he thinks I'm a harmless crank. Anyway, he doesn't say much; maybe his mouth is still sore from his visit to the dentist's. I can't wait around to try and engage him in further conversation because my bowels suddenly decide they want to wake up too, and I have to make a dash for the nearest bar and the toilets.

God, I hate it when my shit smells of whisky.

Andy has a party that night, partly for me and partly because his pal Howie is leaving for a job on the rigs the following day. We go for a walk up into the hills in the afternoon; me puffing and panting and coughing after Andy as he strides quickly, easily up the rutted forest tracks. Back at the hotel, I help him clear up the lounge bar, which still bears the debris from Andy's last party a few months earlier. The bar is still stocked, though there is no draught beer, only cans. Andy seems to be assuming he'll be providing all the booze for the party, so I gather he's not quite as skint as I've heard.

Maybe a couple of dozen people show up for the party; about half locals — mostly men, though there's one married couple and a pair of single girls — and half travellers, New Age hippies from various scattered buses and vans parked in lay-bys and the highway equivalent of oxbows, where corners or short, twisty lengths of old roads have been replaced with more direct stretches.

In terms of people mixing, it's a party that at best emulsifies rather than combines; there's a hostility between some of the Highland lads (clean-shaven, short-haired) and the travellers (the opposite) that gets worse as everybody gets more drunk. I get the impression the indigenous locals know the travelling people keep disappearing to have some blow, and resent it. Andy seems not to notice, talking to everybody, regardless.

I do my best to mix as well. At first I get on best with the Highland laddies, matching them dram for dram and can for can, taking their cigarettes and suffering their remarks on the lines of "No I still smoke" when I offer them my Silk Cuts but gradually as we get drunker I start to feel uncomfortable with their attitude to the travellers and even more so to women, and Howie, the guy I met last night, talks about how he used to slap the wife around and now the bitch is in one of these fucking women's refuges and if he ever finds her he'll fucking kick seven kinds of shit out of her. The others suggest this isn't such a good idea but I get the impression they think this mainly because he'd only end up in prison.

I find myself gravitating towards the travellers.

At one point I see Andy standing staring out the windows of the lounge, towards the dark loch, his eyes wide.

"You all right?" I ask him.

He takes a moment to answer. "We're ten metres above mean sea-level here," he says, nodding out to the shore.

"You don't say." I light a cigarette.

"The deck on the QE2 on that level we called the Exocet Deck, because that's the height the missile rides at."

Ah, Falklands Lore. "Well," I say, peering out at the darkness and the far side of the loch, "unless you have an irate neighbour with particularly good contacts in the arms trade —»

"The only thing I ever have nightmares about," Andy says, his gaze still directed at the unseeable loch, his eyes still wide. "Isn't that ridiculous? Nightmares about being blown to fuck by a missile, ten years ago. I wasn't even on that deck; we were billeted two up from there…" He shrugs, drinks and turns to me, smiling. "You see your mum much?"

"Eh?" I say, confused at this sudden change in direction. "No, not recently. She's still in New Zealand. How about you? Been back to Strathspeld?"

He shakes his head and I get a shiver, remembering just that gesture of his, repeated and repeated so that it became like a nervous tic after a while, back in Strathspeld, after Clare's funeral in "89; a gesture of disbelief, refusal, non-acceptance.

"You should go," he tells me. "You should go and see them. They'd appreciate that."

"We'll see," I say. A gust of wind throws rain against the window and shakes the frame; it's loud and surprising and I flinch but he just turns slowly and looks out into the darkness with what could almost be contempt before laughing and putting an arm round my shoulder and suggesting we have another drink.

Later a storm breaks over the hotel; lightning flares above the mountains across the loch, and the windows rattle as the thunder booms. There's a power cut; the lights go out and we light candles and gas lamps and end up — a hard core of seven of us; Andy, me, Howie, another two local lads and a couple of the traveller boys — down in the snooker room where there's a beat-up looking table and a leak in the ceiling that turns the whole of the stained, green-baize surface into a millimetre-shallow marsh, water dripping from each pocket and dribbling down the bulky legs to the sopping carpet, and we play snooker by the light of the hissing gas lamps, having to hit the white ball really hard even for delicate shots because of the extra rolling resistance the water causes, and the balls make a zizzing, ripping noise as they race across the table and sometimes you can see spray curving up behind them and I'm feeling really drunk and a bit stoned from a couple of strong Js smoked out in the garden earlier with the travellers but I think this dimly lit water-hazard snooker is just hilarious and I'm laughing maniacally at it all and I put an arm round Andy's neck at one point and say, You know I love you, old buddy, and isn't friendship and love what's it's really all about? and why can't people just see that and just be nice to each other? except there are just so many complete bastards in the world, but Andy just shakes his head and I try to kiss him and he gently fends me off and steadies me against one wall and props me up with a snooker cue against my chest and I think this is really funny for some reason and laugh so much I fall over and have distinct problems getting up again and get carried to my room by Andy and one of the travellers and dumped on the bed and fall instantly asleep.

I dream of Strathspeld, and the long summers of my childhood passed in a trance of lazy pleasure, ending with that day, running through the woods (but I turn away from that memory, the way I've learned to over the years); I wander again through the woods and the small, hidden glens, along the shores of the ornamental lochan and the river and its loch and I'm standing near the old boathouse in that defeatingly bright sunlight, light dancing on water, and I see two figures, naked and thin and white in the grass beyond the reed beds, and as I watch them the light turns from gold to silver and then to white, and the trees seem to shrink in on themselves, leaves disappearing in the chill coruscations of that enveloping white blaze while the view all around me becomes brighter and darker at once and all is reduced to black and white; trees are bare and black, the ground smother-smoothed in white and the two young figures are gone, while one even smaller one — booted, gloved, coat-tails flying behind — runs laughing across the white level of the frozen loch.

Someone calls out.