Naming the Bones

Chapter One

MURRAY WATSON SLIT the seal on the cardboard box in front of him and started to sort through the remnants of a life. He lifted a handful of papers and carefully splayed them across the desk. Pages of foolscap, blue-tinted writing paper, leaves torn from school jotters, stationery printed with the address of a London hotel. Some of it was covered in close-packed handwriting, like a convict’s letters home. Others were bare save for a few words or phrases.

James Laing stepped out into an ordinary day.

Nothing could have prepared James for the. .

James Laing was an ordinary man who inhabited a. .

The creature stared down on James with its one ghastly fish eye. It winked.

Murray laughed, a sudden bark in the empty room. Christ, it had better get more interesting than this or he was in trouble. He reached into the pile and slid out a page at random. It was a picture, a naïve drawing done in green felt-tip of a woman with a triangular dress for a body. Her stick arms were long and snaking. They waved up into a sky strewn with sharp-angled stars; the left corner presided over by a pipe-smoking crescent moon, the right by a broadly smiling sun. No signature. It was crap, the kind of doodle that deserved to be crumpled into a ball and fired into the bin. But if it had been deliberately kept, it was a moment, a clue to a life.

He reached back into the box and pulled out another bundle of papers, looking for notebooks, something substantial, not wanting to save the best till last, though he had time to be patient.

Pages of figures and subtractions, money owed, rent due, monies promised. A trio of Tarot cards; the Fool poised jauntily on the edge of a precipice, Death triumphant on horseback, skull face grinning behind his visor, the Moon a pale beauty dressed in white leading a two-headed hound on a silver leash. A napkin from a café, printed pink on white Aida’s, a faint stain slopped across its edge — frothy coffee served in a glass cup. A newspaper cutting of a smiling yet serious man running a comb through his side parting; the same man, billiard-ball smooth and miserable on his hirsute double’s left side. Are you worried about hair loss? The solution to baldness carelessly cut through and on the other side a listing for a happening in the Grassmarket. No photograph, just the names, date and time. Archie Lunan, Bobby Robb and Christie Graves, 7.30pm on Sunday 25th September at The Last Drop.

Then Murray struck gold, an old red corduroy address book held together by a withered elastic band and cramped with script. A diary would have been better, but Archie wasn’t the diary-keeping kind. Murray opened the book and flicked through its pages. Initials, nicknames, first names or surnames, no one was awarded both.

Danny

Denny

Bobby Boy

Ruby!

I thought I saw you walking by the shore

Lists of names with the odd phrase scribbled underneath. There was no attempt at alphabetisation. He was getting glimpses already, a shambles of a life, but it had produced more than most of the men that went sober to their desks at nine every morning.

Ramie

Moon

Jessa* * *

Diana the huntress, Persephone hidden, names can bless or curse unbidden.

Murray would have liked photographs. He’d seen some already, of course. The orange-tinted close-up of Archie that showed him thin and bestraggled, something like an unhinged Jesus, his hands knuckled threateningly around his features, as if preparing to tear the face from his head. It was all art and shadows. The other snaps came from a Glasgow Herald feature on Professor James’s group that Murray had managed to pull from the newspaper’s archive. Archie always in the background caught in a laugh, squinting against the sky; Archie cupping a cigarette to his mouth, the wind blowing his fringe across his eyes. It would be good to have one of him as a boy, when his features were still fine.

Murray pulled himself up. He was in danger of falling into an amateur’s trap, looking for what he wished for rather than what was there. He hadn’t slept much the night before. His mind had got into one of those loops that occasionally infected him, information bouncing around in his brain, like the crazy lines on his computer screensaver. He’d made a cup of tea in the early hours of the morning and drunk it at the fold-down shelf that served as a table in the galley kitchen of his small flat, trying to empty his brain and think of nothing but the plain white cup cradled in his hand.

He would divide the contents of the box into three piles — interesting, possible and dross — cataloguing as he went. Once he’d done that he could get caught up in details, pick at the minutiae that might unravel the tangled knot of Archie’s life.

Murray had handled originals many times. Valuable documents that you had to sign for then glove up to protect them from the oils and acids that lived in the whorls of your fingertips, but he’d never been the first on the scene before, the explorer cracking open the wall to the tomb. He lifted an unsent letter from the box, black ballpoint on white paper.

Bobby

For God’s sake, find me some of the old!

We’ll wait for you at Achnacroish pier on Saturday.

Yours, closer than an eye,

Archie

No date, no location, but gold. Murray put it in the important pile, then took out his laptop, fired it up and started listing exactly what he had. He picked up a discarded bus ticket to Oban, for some reason remembering a hymn they’d sung at Sunday school.

God sees the little sparrow fall,

it meets His tender view;

Even this simple ticket might have the power to reveal something, but he put it in the dross pile all the same.

Murray’s interest in Archie Lunan had started at the age of sixteen with a slim paperback. He could still remember the moment he saw it jutting out from a box of unsorted stock on the floor of a second-hand bookshop. It was the cover that drew him, a tangerine-tinted studio shot of a thin man with shadows for eyes. Murray had known nothing about Lunan’s poetry or his ill-starred life, but he had to have the book.

‘Looks like a baby-killer, doesn’t he?’ The man behind the counter had said when Murray handed over his fifty pence. ‘Still, that was the seventies for you, a lot of it about.’

Once he owned the book Murray had been strangely indifferent to its contents, almost as if he were afraid they might be a let-down. He’d propped it on the chest of drawers in the bedroom he shared with his brother until eleven-year-old Jack had complained to their dad that the man’s non-existent eyes were staring at him and Murray had been ordered to put it somewhere where it wouldn’t give people nightmares.

He’d rediscovered the book the following year, when he was packing to go to university, and thrown it in his rucksack, almost on a whim. The paperback had languished on the under-stocked bookshelf in his bed-sit through freshers’ week and into most of the following year. It was exam time, a long night into studying, when he’d found himself reaching for the poems. Murray supposed, when he bothered to think about it, that he was looking for a distraction. If so, he’d found one. He’d sat at his desk reading and re-reading Archie Lunan’s first and only poetry collection until morning. It was an enchantment which had quietly shadowed Dr Murray Watson in his toil through academe, and now at last he was free to steep himself in it.

It was after six when Murray stepped out from the National Library. Somewhere a piper was hoiching out a tune for the tourists. The screech of the bagpipes cut in and out of the traffic sounds; the grumble of car engines, the low diesel growl of taxis and unoiled shriek of bus brakes. The noise and August brightness were an assault after the gloom of the small back room. He took his sunglasses from their case and swapped them for his everyday pair. A seagull careened into the middle of the road, diving towards a discarded poke of chips. Murray admired the bird’s near-vertical take-off as it swooped up into the air narrowly missing a bus, its prize clamped firmly in its beak.

It dawned on him that he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since the Twix he’d had for breakfast on the Glasgow to Edinburgh Express early that morning. He crossed the street, pausing to buy a Big Issue from a neat-pressed vendor who readjusted his baseball cap when Murray declined his change. There was a faint scent of salt in the breeze blowing through the city from the Firth of Forth. It suited Murray’s mood. His mind still half on the island where Archie had been born, Murray began to walk briskly towards the city centre. The Edinburgh Fringe was well under way. The town had taken on the atmosphere of a medieval fête and it was hard negotiating a path through the crush of tourists, rival ghost-tour operators, performers and temporary street stalls that swamped the High Street. He sidestepped the spit-spattled Heart of Midlothian, at the same time avoiding a masked Death, cowled in unseasonably warm black velvet. On other days the crush and stretched smiles of performers trumpeting their shows might have irritated Murray, but today their edge of cheerful hysteria seemed to echo his own optimism. He turned into Cockburn Street, his feet unconsciously stepping to the rhythm of a busking drum troupe, each stride on the beat, precise as a policeman on duty at an Orange Walk. Murray accepted leaflets shoved at him for shows he had no intention of seeing, still thinking about the papers in the box, and keeping his eyes peeled for a chippy.

In the end he settled for pie and beans washed down by a pint of 80/- in the Doric. He ate at one of the high stools by the bar, his eyes fixed on the television mounted on the wall above the gantry, watching the newsreader relaying headlines he couldn’t hear. The screen flashed to soldiers in desert fatigues on patrol then to a crease-eyed correspondent packed into a flak jacket, the background behind him half sand, half blue sky, like a child’s what-I-did-on-my-holiday drawing.

Murray slid his hand into his rucksack, brought out his notebook and read again the names he had copied from the red corduroy address book, wishing to God it had been a diary.

Tamsker

Saffron

Ray — will you be my sunshine?

It was a misnomer to call it an address book. It had contained no addresses, no telephone numbers, simply lists of unfamiliar names occasionally accompanied by phrases of nonsense. If he knew the identity of even one of them he’d have something to work with, but he was clueless, the knot still pulled tight. Murray folded the words back into his pocket, feeling the pleasure of possession, the secret thrill of a man on the brink of a discovery that might yet elude him.

His plate was cleared, his pint nearly done. He tipped it back and placed the empty glass on the bar, shaking his head when the barman asked him if he’d like another. It was time to go and do his duty.

Chapter Two

THERE WAS ALREADY a crush of people beyond the glass front of the Fruitmarket Gallery. Murray eyed them as he made his way towards the entrance. He couldn’t see the exhibits from here, but the bar was busy. He paused and took in the exhibition poster, the name JACK WATSON shining out at him from the trio of artists. He lingered outside, savouring the rightness of it all, suddenly wishing he’d bought a camera so he could record the event for posterity. When he looked up he noticed a young woman wearing an orange dress gathered in curious origami folds gazing at him from beyond the glass. Murray half returned her smile then quick-glanced away. He ran a hand through his hair and fumbled in his pocket for the ticket Lyn had sent him, getting a sudden vision of it tucked inside last month’s New York Review of Books somewhere midway down in the pile of papers that had colonised his couch. He hesitated for a moment then stepped from the damp coolness of the bridge-shadowed street into the warm hubbub of bodies and chatter, steeling himself for the embarrassment of getting Lyn or Jack to vouch for him. But no one challenged his right to be there. Murray wondered, as he helped himself to a glass of red and a leaflet explaining the artists’ intentions, how many people were here to view the art and how many had been drawn in by the vision of a free bar.

He was scanning the paper for Jack’s name as he turned, glass in hand. His rucksack jarred and a little wine slopped onto his cuff. ‘God, I’m sorry.’

The woman he had jolted glanced down at the clever folds of her dress.

‘You’re fine, no harm done.’

‘Are you sure?’ Her arms were bare and freckled, her nails painted the same tangy colour as the fabric. Murray realised that he was staring at the point in her midriff where the folds met and felt his face flush. ‘I wouldn’t want to spoil your dress, it looks expensive.’

She laughed. There was a small scar in the centre of her upper lip where long ago an operation had left its mark.

‘It was that.’ She had a Northern Irish accent, the kind that sometimes drew comparisons between harsh politics and harsh brogues. It sounded cool and amused. ‘You’re here to see Jack.’

Murray realised he was still wearing his sunglasses and took them off. The world blended into smudged brightness and the girl’s face slipped out of focus. He fumbled for his other pair, trying not to squint.

‘I guess that’s why we’re all here.’ He found his specs and slid them on. Everything sharpened. He held out his hand. ‘I’m Jack’s brother, Murray.’

‘I know.’ She took his hand and shook it. ‘Cressida. You don’t remember me, do you?’

Not for the first time Murray wished his brain were as efficient as his computer. How could he retain a minutia of dates, form and verse but dispense with the memory of a good-looking woman? He tried to sound sincere.

‘I remember your face, but not when we met.’

Cressida laughed again.

‘You’re a terrible liar. Jack’s up the stairs, his pictures are amazing. Have you seen them yet?’

‘No.’ He recalled something Lyn had said and repeated it. ‘I find openings aren’t the best time to see the exhibition. I just pay my respects then come back when it’s quieter and I can explore what’s on show properly.’

To his own ears the spiel sounded as stilted as one of his students tripping out a half-understood argument they’d read in a book, but Cressida nodded.

‘I see your point. But all the same, you must be keen to get a glimpse of them, especially with the subject matter and all.’ She’d gone serious, but now she rewarded him with another smile. ‘You know what might help?’

‘What?’

‘Do you mind?’ She reached up and took his specs from his nose, placing him back in a landscape of lights and smearing colour. He heard the quick exhalation as she misted his lenses with her breath then caught the orange flare of her dress as she rubbed them against its hem. ‘Now you can really see what’s going on.’

She returned them and the world slid back into focus just as a man in artfully distressed jeans and a blue and white striped shirt that for all its lack of red put Murray in mind of the Union Jack emerged from the press of people and wrapped an arm around Cressida.

‘Steven.’ She lifted her face to him and he kissed her on each cheek, his lips making contact with her skin, his arms pressing her into a clinch that made one of her feet leave the ground.

‘You clever girl. It’s amazing, by far the best thing you’ve done.’

Murray took the bundle of leaflets from his pocket, cursing his own ignorance and giving the couple the chance to escape. The exhibition guide was sandwiched between an advert for Richard the Turd, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic set in a toilet, and a flyer for the Ladyboys of Bangkok, the name Cressida Reeves printed just above Jack’s. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that this woman in her spectacular dress might be one of the trio on show?

Cressida extricated herself from the hug.

‘Steven Hastings, this is Murray Watson, Jack Watson’s brother.’

‘Jack?’

Steven rolled the name in his mouth, as if tasting it for the first time and unsure of the flavour. Cressida met his vagueness with a stab of irritation.

‘You know Jack. He’s one of my fellow exhibitors, we were at college together.’

‘Ah yes, Jack. The flayed corpse.’

Murray winced at the memory of Jack’s degree show, but he could remember Cressida now. Her hair had been shorter then, her thrift-shop-chic outfit tighter and darker than what she was wearing today. Jack had been impressed and maybe a little jealous. She’d won a prize, a big one, though Murray couldn’t remember what. He steadied his gaze at Steven.

‘He’s moved on since then.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

Murray felt an urgent need to knock Steven Hastings’ head from the high collar of his jaunty shirt. But he stifled the impulse and instead gave an awkward stiff bow that he couldn’t remember ever performing before.

‘I’m looking forward to seeing your work, Cressida.’

He turned towards the bar as Steven put an arm around the woman’s shoulders, guiding her towards the exhibition space and commanding, ‘Now, you’re going to explain everything to me in minute detail.’

Cressida rolled her eyes, but she allowed herself to be led away, giving Murray a last smile. He raised his hand in goodbye, then swapped his empty glass for a fresh red and went to look for his brother.

The paintings at the front depicted massive, candy-coloured Manga cartoon characters collaged into pornographic poses. Murray sipped his drink, taking in a doe-eyed schoolgirl in congress with an equally wide-eyed black and white spotty dog. The image was imposed onto a background of a devastated landscape, Nagasaki after the H-bomb. Murray checked the artist’s name, relieved to find it wasn’t Cressida or Jack, then headed towards the staircase. It was busy here too, the traffic going in both directions, people clutching their drinks as if they were vital accessories. He didn’t see Lyn until she was in front of him.

‘Hey.’ She stopped on the step above his so that their faces were almost level. Murray kissed her, smelling wine, cigarettes and fabric softener.

‘How’s the wee man?’

‘The wee man.’ She shook her head. ‘The wee man, as you call him, is doing very well, considering he’s been working till three in the morning practically every day for the last month and only finished hanging ten minutes before the doors were due to open.’

Murray grinned.

‘He should have given me a shout. I would have held the ladder for him.’

‘Rather you than me.’

Lyn was smiling, but there was an unaccustomed flatness in her tone that made Murray wonder if she and Jack had argued.

He asked, ‘And how are you doing? You’re looking well.’

His brother’s girlfriend had pale freckly skin that couldn’t endure sunlight. Maybe it was the contrast between her fairness and the unfamiliar red lipstick she was wearing, but Murray thought she looked a shade whiter than usual.

‘I’m doing great. Glad this has come round at last.’ She smiled hello to a couple going up the staircase then turned back to Murray. ‘You get yourself up there. Jack’ll want to see you.’

‘Jack will have a lot of people to talk to. I just came to show my support, I’ll not stick around getting in the way.’

Lyn raised her eyebrows comically.

‘And you’ve got a lot of work to be getting on with.’

‘A fair bit, aye.’

‘Well, you’d better go and pay your respects then.’ She slid past him. ‘I was about to get some wine before it’s all sooked up. Do you want a refill?’

Murray looked at his glass, surprised to see that it was almost empty.

‘Why not?’

‘Give it here then.’ She hesitated. ‘Murray, Jack talked to you about the show, didn’t he?’

He knocked back the last dreg of wine and handed his empty glass to her.

‘I think so, maybe a while ago.’

Lyn pushed a stray curl away from her eyes.

‘You’ve no idea, have you?’

He grinned, embarrassed at being caught out.

‘Maybe not.’

‘You might find it. .’ She hesitated, searching for the right word. ‘. . challenging.’

Murray laughed.

‘Aye, well, that won’t be a first.’

Lyn gave a weak smile.

‘Just remember it was done with love.’

‘No blood this time?’

‘No blood, but it was still painful for him, so be kind.’

‘When am I not?’

‘Never.’

She touched his arm gently as she descended the stairs to the bar.

Jack was at the centre of a small knot of people, but he saw Murray and broke away, flinging an arm around his brother’s shoulder. Murray wondered where it came from, this physicality. He couldn’t remember them ever touching as boys except when they were fighting.

‘Hiya.’

‘Hi, Jack.’ He put his arm round his brother, feeling the heat of his body through the fabric of his suit. ‘Congratulations.’

Jack’s face was shiny, his forehead beaded with sweat and his eyes bright. Murray could hear his brother’s voice coming from somewhere else too, a voiceover on a video installation he guessed. The words were indistinct, but Jack’s soft tones were cut through with another wilder, higher voice. The Jack in front of him looked anxious. He squeezed Murray’s shoulder and said, ‘I was keeping an eye out for you. Have you been round everything already?’

‘No, I just got here. All I’ve seen are those Japanese cartoon-collage things.’

Jack gave a quick scan of the room then whispered, ‘Pile of pish, eh?’

Murray laughed.

‘I don’t know about art, but I do know a pile of pish when I see it.’

‘Don’t let them put you off. Anyway, don’t congratulate me till you’ve seen my stuff. You might not like it.’

‘I’d better go and have a butcher’s then.’

The walls behind him were lined with photos. They looked more muted than Jack’s usual sharp-focused colours, but they were too far away for Murray to take in their detail.

‘Wait a moment.’ Jack took his sleeve as if worried that his brother would escape. ‘Murray, it’s all about Dad.’

Murray pulled himself gently from his brother’s grip. He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and walked into the heart of the exhibition.

Their father looked pretty much as he had when Murray had last seen him. He was propped up in the high-backed chair, wearing a pair of brown paisley-patterned pyjamas. His hands clutched the armrests. His head was thrown back, his old face lost in the crazy smile of another man. Jack’s camera had caught him mid-word, his mouth open, the wetness of saliva coating his lips. His eyes dazzled.

Murray shut his own eyes then opened them again, the vision of his father remained in front of him, exposed to the wine-drinkers. He could hear his father’s voice now, chatting to Jack. He walked to the curtained darkroom in the corner of the gallery, ignoring the display cases and trying to blinker himself to the other photographs. The two long benches inside the blacked-out cubicle were full, so he stood at the end of the row of people leaning against the back wall. The close-up of his father’s face was six foot high. Jack’s voice came from somewhere off-camera asking, ‘Mr Watson, can you tell me if you’ve got any children, please?’

Their father grinned.

‘I’ve got two boys, terrific wee fellas. Six and eleven, they are.’

‘Great ages, and what are they up to the now?’

The old man’s face fogged with confusion.

‘I don’t know. I’ve no seen them in a long while.’ He was getting distressed, his pitch rising. ‘They telt me they were fine, but how do they know? Have you seen them, son?’

‘I’ve seen them, they’re absolutely fine.’

‘Are you sure now?’

‘I know for certain.’

‘Aye, well, that’s good. On their holidays, aren’t they?’

‘That’s right. Away with the BBs.’ The old man on screen nodded, quickly comforted, and Jack asked him, ‘Do you remember who I am?’

The mischief was back in his father’s face.

‘If you don’t know, I doubt that I can help you out.’

The old man and Jack laughed together.

‘No idea at all?’

Their father stared at the Jack-off-screen intently. He stared at Murray too, his broken veins scoured and red. There was a patch of grey stubble on his chin that whoever had shaved him had missed.

‘I don’t think I know you, son.’ He hesitated and a ghost of something that might have been recognition flitted across his face, bringing a smile in its wake. ‘Are you yon boy that reads the news?’

‘Poor auld soul.’ The woman standing next to Murray whispered to her friend. ‘He doesnae ken if it’s New York or New Year.’

Jack-on-screen told the old stranger who had taken up residence in his father’s body, ‘You’ve rumbled me.’ And the old man slapped his knee in glee.

Murray pushed through the black curtains and out into the brightness of the white-painted gallery. Jack was standing where he had left him. Murray shook his head and jogged quickly down the stairs. Lyn was coming towards him, chatting to another girl, both of them clutching brimming wine glasses. She said his name, ‘Murray’, but he continued down onto the street, then further down still, towards Waverley Station and the train that would take him home.

Chapter Three

MURRAY LOOKED AT the neat piles of papers he’d assembled, then surveyed the list that he had made.

Jotters — 3

Address Book — 1

Loose Papers — 325

Newspaper Cuttings — 9

Bus Tickets — 13

Train Tickets — 8

Drawings/Doodles — 11

Tarot Cards — 3

Letters — 6

Photograph — 1

The jotters and address book were his biggest prizes, but the photograph pleased him more. Archie and Christie sitting on a rock laughing together, their hair caught in a bluster of wind, eyes screwed tight against the weather. Archie was wearing an old Harris tweed jacket that looked too broad for his thin frame. His hair was long and stringy, his laugh topped by an unkempt moustache. Christie’s blonde hair was long too, parted carelessly in the centre. Her wide-lapelled coat looked Edwardian, but it had been a period of retro and revivals, and maybe it had been the latest fashion. She’d stuffed her hands into her pockets, pushing them together through the fabric so it looked like she was hugging herself. Archie had one hand on his knee. His other hand was hidden. Clasped around Christie’s waist or lost in the closeness of the pose? It was difficult to tell. Archie’s face was half-obscured by his hair and moustache, but he looked alive in a way that none of the other photographs had shown him. Murray wondered when it had been taken. That last summer up on Lismore? The look was right, the seventies hair and careless clothes, the treeless scrub of heather in the background. He would take a copy with him when he went to meet Christie Graves. Perhaps she would remember the moment it was taken, and maybe that memory would prompt others.

He pulled the jotters towards him. They were similar to those he recalled using in primary school, with boxed-in lines on the front cover for the owner’s name, subject and class, which Archie had left blank. He lifted one in the air and shook it gently. A couple of dried leaves slid from between the pages. Murray laid them carefully to one side and added them to his list.

Leaves — 2

The words looked stupid. He scored them out then took one of the leaves between his thumb and index finger and held it up to the light, seeing the veins still branching beneath the crisp surface. There was no secret message scratched on its desiccated flesh. He placed it gently back on the desk and opened the notebook. A list of words ran close to the margin on the left-hand side of the page, vocabulary or notes for a poem cramped in Archie’s now-familiar script.

Dune

Dawn

Dream

Dome

Diadem

He could see no connection between the words and any of the poems in Moontide. Murray leaned back in his chair and started to read, making notes in his own Moleskine notebook as he went along. He was a third of a way through the jotter when he came across the entry made in another hand.

I love you and she will love you too.

Beneath, Archie had added:

She loves me! But how can she be so sure that my new love will be a she?

Murray made a note of the exchange, wondering if it offered some kind of insight or was simply a joke. He’d assumed Archie’s sexuality was confirmedly heterosexual, but then the seventies had been a time of challenged boundaries, even in Scotland, and Archie’s love affair with the drink had frequently placed him between berths. Maybe he’d occasionally flopped into men’s beds in the way that he had so frequently flopped (Murray imagined that the word was often appropriate) into women’s. It was worth considering. At this stage almost anything was worth considering.

Murray had propped the photo against the desk lamp. He looked at it again, the grinning face and flying hair. How long after it had been taken had Archie drowned?

He worked until two, then decided to take some requests for reference books to the front desk. He supposed he should eat something. He’d woken with a sore head and mild nausea, remnants of the wine he’d drunk at the opening and of the semi-sleepless night that had followed. He should phone Jack, tell him. . tell him what?

Murray filled in his request form neatly and went out into the corridor, closing the door gently behind him. He heard Mr Moffat’s jovial tones just before the man himself hove into view. The senior librarian was wearing his customary politician’s suit and tie. His sparse, white hair was cropped short in a style that might have looked thuggish on a less amiable countenance, but which lent Mr Moffat a jolly, monkish cast. He was walking fast, talking animatedly to an older, thinner man dressed in khaki trousers, a checked shirt and saggy cardigan.

Murray would have been content to let the pair pass with a friendly nod of the head, but the librarian hailed him warmly, his round face a testament to the pleasures of books and extended lunch breaks.

‘Good afternoon, Dr Watson.’ He shook Murray’s hand. ‘Everything working out okay?’

Murray’s voice felt rusty. He’d been in conversation with the remnants of Archie Lunan all morning, but this was the first time today that he’d opened his mouth to speak to the living.

‘Good, yes. I’m not sure what I’ve got yet, but it looks promising.’

‘Wonderful.’ Mr Moffat turned to his companion. ‘George, this is Dr Watson, through from Glasgow for a look at some Archie Lunan ephemera we didn’t know we had.’

‘Oh, aye.’

The older man looked unimpressed, but he held his right hand out anyway. Mr Moffat stood over them while they shook. For a bizarre moment Murray thought he was about to clasp their two hands together like a minister at a marriage ceremony, but the librarian confined himself to his usual easy grin.

‘George Meikle is our head bookfinder.’

Murray wanted to tell the bookfinder to call him by his first name, but the action seemed too awkward. Instead he indicated the request forms in his hand.

‘I was just heading in your direction.’

Meikle’s face remained dour.

‘I’ll take you along to the desk then.’

George’s surliness was at odds with his offer and Murray wondered if he was grabbing the opportunity to escape the weight of Mr Moffat’s cheerfulness.

‘Excellent.’ The librarian couldn’t have looked happier had he introduced Lord Byron to Percy Shelley. ‘Still, it’s a pity we don’t have more for you, Dr Watson. I often wish some poets had been more assiduous with their legacy.’

Meikle made a harrumphing noise that might have been a laugh or impatience.

‘Some of them are over-assiduous.’

‘George has a point.’ Mr Moffat lowered his voice as if he were about to tell a risqué joke. ‘We’ve been gifted signed notes to the milkman, but your man. . one slim volume and a cardboard box of papers. Tragic. It’s going to make your job pretty difficult.’

‘There’s more than you might think, references in other texts, letters and the like, and I’m hoping more will turn up once I start talking to people who knew him.’

‘I’m a great believer in optimism.’ Mr Moffat was already turning away. ‘And there’s always George. He’ll help you out where he can.’

Murray groped for some way of saying he didn’t need any help beyond the room already provided. But he was already looking at the broad back of Mr Moffat’s blue suit as he headed away from him, along the corridor to his office.

George snorted with the same mixture of amusement and impatience he’d shown earlier.

‘This way.’

He started down the hallway in the other direction and Murray followed him, too polite to let on that he already knew his way around. He couldn’t think of anything to say. It was like this sometimes when he had been deep in work, as if his mind stayed trapped in the wrong mode, the best part of him caught in the pages he was carrying.

Lunan had been trying to write a sci-fi novel. Murray smiled at the irony. He’d been hoping to uncover lost verses by a neglected poet and instead had chanced upon notes for a pot-boiler. Maybe Lunan had been bored, or perhaps he’d decided to fight penury with pulp fiction. The notes for the book had been sketchy, but the beginnings of the plot were unoriginal, a small colony of people trying to pick their way through a post-apocalyptic landscape. Murray supposed the setting might have been inspired by the isolation of Archie’s last home.

George broke the silence, jerking Murray back into the moment and the empty corridor that smelled of books and learning.

‘So have all the big boys been covered then?’

It was a question he’d been asked before, most notably by Fergus Baine, Murray’s head of department when he’d submitted his request for a sabbatical. He’d pulled out the stops then, explaining his perspective on the poet’s neglected place in the canon, how his story crossed boundaries not simply of literary style but of a country divided by geography, industry and class. He’d dampened his love of Lunan’s poetry from his voice and presented an argument based on scholarship and fact. Murray had been as passionate as a commission-only salesman about his product, believing every word of his own spiel, but the hours spent in the small room with Archie’s slim legacy had left him dispirited. As if the salesman had opened his sample case in the privacy of a hotel room and been confronted with the flaws in his merchandise. He felt a sudden stab of anger. Who was this guy, anyway? Stalwart of the stacks, a glorified janitor with his old man’s cardigan and wilted features.

‘I don’t get you.’

‘Archie Lunan. I’d have thought you’d have better folk than him to spend your time on.’

‘I still don’t get you.’

George turned his face towards Murray, his expression unreadable.

‘He wasn’t much of anything, was he? Not much of a poet and not much of a man, as far as I could tell.’

‘And you’d be the one to judge?’

‘I’m not a professor of English literature.’

Murray doubted his promotion had been an accident and didn’t bother to correct it. He remembered his joke of the night before.

‘But you know pishy poetry when you see it?’

‘I know a big poser when I see one.’

The words could have been directed towards Murray, Lunan or both. The corridor stretched ahead of them. He didn’t need the guidance of this misery. He knew where he wanted to go, could put on some speed, step quickly ahead and leave the old bastard to ferment in his ignorance. Instead he kept his voice cold and asked, ‘So did you see a lot of Lunan?’

‘You could see Archie Lunan propping up the wall of an Edinburgh pub any night of the week in the seventies.’

‘And you were out in the street with your nose pressed to the Christian side of the window when you saw him, I suppose?’

George Meikle’s laugh was harsh.

‘No, I wasn’t. But it’s not me we’re talking about, is it?

Murray felt weary with the weight of defending Lunan, a man who he suspected was probably as big an arsehole as George was implying. But it wasn’t the man he needed to defend. He said, ‘Archie Lunan may not have been Scotland’s favourite son, but he produced one of the most remarkable and most neglected collections of poetry ever to come out of this country.’

They had reached the foyer now. George turned to face him.

‘And you’re going to right that?’

‘I’m going to try.’

The older man’s voice was sweet with sarcasm.

‘A big thick book about a wee, skinny poet and his one, even skinnier volume?’

‘If I can.’

George shook his head.

‘And the greater part of it about how he went.’

‘It’ll be a part of it, but not the main part. I’m writing for the Edinburgh University Press, not the News of the World.’

‘Aye, that’s what Mr Moffat said.’ George hesitated, as if making his mind up about something. ‘You asked where I was when I spied Lunan in the pub. Half the time I was sitting opposite him, the other half I was sitting on the bench beside him.’

‘You were friends?’

‘Drinking pals, for a while.’ Meikle took a deep breath. ‘Why do you think Tuffet was bringing me along to meet you? You could find your own way to the request desk fine. He thought I might be able to fill in some gaps.’

‘And can you?’

‘I doubt it. All we ever did was hang about pubs talking pishy poetry. The kind of thing you no doubt get paid good money for.’

Murray grinned against the unfairness of George Meikle’s first-hand contact with Lunan.

‘I’d like to hear your memories of Archie, they could be a big help. Maybe you’d let me buy you a drink?’

‘I don’t drink.’

He wondered if anyone had conducted a study into the link between being teetotal and being a depressing bastard. But then the old man gave his first genuine smile.

‘You can stand me a coffee in the Elephant House when I knock off.’

Murray bought a ham and tomato sandwich from the newsagents opposite the library and ate it standing in the street. The bread was soggy, the tomato slick against the silvered meat. He forced half down then consigned the remainder and its plastic box to a bin. He’d turned his mobile off when he’d entered the library that morning, now he switched it on and checked for messages. There were two. He pressed the menu button and brought up Calls Missed. Jack had rung once, Lyn twice. He killed the phone and went back into the library. He had a lot of work to do before he met George Meikle.

The Elephant House was jam-packed, but Meikle had managed to bag the same seat that an insecure Mafia don would have chosen, near the back corner of the second, larger room commanding a good view of the café and ready access to the fire escape. Murray eased his way through the tables to greet Meikle and check on his order, then retraced an apologetic route back, past the glass cabinets stuffed with elephant ornaments to the front counter and the long queue to get served. When his turn came he asked for an Americano, a café latte and two elephant-shaped shortbreads, then negotiated his way back to the corner table, holding the tray carefully, praying he wouldn’t upset it, and if he did that it wouldn’t be over an occupant of one of the three-wheeled buggies that were making his journey so perilous.

Meikle folded the Evening News he’d been reading into a baton and slid it into the pocket of the anorak hanging on the back of his chair. Murray lowered the tray onto the table then unloaded the cups, slopping a little of the black coffee onto its saucer.

‘Sorry that was so long, there’s a big queue.’

Meikle gave the shortbread a stern look. ‘If one of those is for me, you’ve wasted your money.’

‘Watching your figure?’

‘Diabetes. Diagnosed three years ago.’

A vision of his father flashed into Murray’s head. He wrapped the shortbread in a paper serviette and slid it into the pocket of his jacket.

‘That’s not much fun.’

‘Eat your bloody biscuit.’ Impatience made George’s voice loud. One of the yummy mummies turned a hard stare on them, but he ignored her. ‘Biscuits I can stand. It’s the booze I find hard to watch folk with, and I’ve been off that twenty years.’

‘Since Archie went.’

Meikle shook his head.

‘You’ve got the bit between your teeth, right enough.’ He leaned forward. ‘An unhealthy obsession with your subject may be an advantage in your line, but remember Lunan only touched a small portion of my life. I’m sixty-five now, due for retirement at the end of the year. I’ve not seen Archie since we were nigh-on twenty-six. My quitting the drink had nothing to do with him. It was necessary, that’s all.’

Murray held up his hands in surrender.

‘Like you say, it’s a bit of an obsession.’ He took his tape recorder from his rucksack and set it on the table. ‘Do you have any objection to me recording our chat?’

‘Do what you have to.’

Murray hit Record and beyond the window of the small machine cogs began to roll, scrolling their voices onto the miniature tape.

‘So what was he like?’

George’s face froze in a frown, like an Edwardian gentleman waiting on the flash of a camera.

‘When I knew him he was a great guy.’

Murray rewound the tape and pressed Play. George’s voice repeated against the backdrop of café noise, When I knew him he was a great guy.

‘Jesus, I hope you’re not going to do that every time I say something.’

The young mother gave George another look. This time he held her gaze until she glanced away. He muttered, ‘You’d think no one ever had a fucking bairn before.’

Murray bit the head off one of the elephants and pressed Record again.

‘So what made him a great guy?’

Meikle answered with a question of his own.

‘What do you know about Archie?’

‘The work. Basic stuff, where he was born, his death of course, and a few things in-between. I’ve been interested in him since I was sixteen, but I’m only starting serious research into his life now.’

‘Have you talked to Christie?’

‘I’ve corresponded with her. She’s promised to meet me.’

‘And do you think she will?’

‘I hope so.’

George nodded his head.

‘Fair enough.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m not sure what it is you want to know.’

‘Whatever you want to tell me. First impressions. You said he was a great guy, what was so great about him? Did he consider himself a poet when you knew him?’

George raised the mug slowly to his mouth, as if it wasn’t the drink he wanted so much as the thinking time. He cradled the cup in his hands for a moment, then set it down, running a finger thoughtfully along the rim, rubbing away a thin brown stain of coffee.

‘When I first met Archie he didn’t know what he was. I mean I think he knew that he wanted to be a poet when he was in his pram. He was always straight about that, but he still wasn’t sure about who he was. He was a west-coaster like yourself, but he was living here in Edinburgh and he’d spent his early years on one of the islands, so his accent would scoot about north, east and west.’

‘Everywhere except the south.’

Meikle laughed.

‘That’s one thing that hasn’t changed. You don’t find many Scotsmen aspiring to come from the south, not the ones who stay, anyway. But what I meant was his voice reflected the way he was, unsettled, always trying out new personas. ’

‘So would you say his personality was split?’

‘Jekyll and Hyde? That would be convenient for your book, wouldn’t it? No, nothing as dramatic as that, not when I knew him anyway.’ He paused and took another sip of coffee, more thinking time. ‘But you could say that Archie had two sides to him, the Glaswegian who wasn’t going to take any shit and the mystical islander. Neither of them was a perfect fit.’

Murray scribbled in his notebook.

2 personas, hard v mystical, but not J & H

‘I’m not sure what else to say. We were just two young blokes who liked a drink and a craic.’

‘At a risk of sounding like Julie Andrews, start at the very beginning. How did you and Archie meet?’

Meikle shook his head. His expression was still stern, but Murray thought he could detect the hint of a smile behind the straight-set lips.

‘That was typical Archie. I had a room up in Newington at the time, not so far from where we are now, student digs, a bed, a Baby Belling, an excuse of a sink and a shared lavvy in the stair. I was coming home along Nicholson Street one night. It was late, but not quite pub chucking-out time. That road’s not so different now than it was then, unlike the rest of Edinburgh, that’s turned into a bloody theme park.’ Meikle took another sip of coffee and gave Murray a half-apologetic glance, as if he hated these tangents as much as his listener. ‘Aye, well, as I was saying, it was typical Archie, but I wasn’t to know that then.’

George grinned, getting into his stride, and Murray realised that this was a story he had told before. He wrote in his notebook, Well-established anecdote.

‘I turned off into Rankeillor Street. It was a rare night, cold but clear, with a full moon. I could see the outline of Salisbury Crags beyond the end of the street. I remember that distinctly because it was a Friday night and I’d been thinking about taking a climb up there in the morning. Maybe it was the full moon, they say that does funny things to you, but suddenly I felt like I had the energy for the climb right then. I was half-wondering if I should go ahead or if it was the drink that was doing my thinking for me and whether I might end up falling face-first off some cliff or catching my death from hypothermia. Maybe I was aware of the group of lads at the other end of the street, but I wasn’t really paying any attention, I was imagining what it would be like at the top of the hill in the dark with only the moon and the sheep for company. I’d more or less decided to go for it when I heard shouting. It was Archie, though I didn’t know that at the time. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but what I could see was that the other three lads were laying into him. I’ve never been much of a fighter, but it was three-to-one, and even from that distance and in the dark I could tell that Archie had a body more suited to wielding a pen than a pair of boxing gloves. So one minute I’m in quiet contemplation, the next I’m running towards the four of them, yelling my head off. They had your man on the ground by this time and they were beginning to put the boot in. I don’t know why my appearance on the scene should have made any difference. It still wouldn’t have been even odds, not with Archie on the ground the way he was. Maybe they’d finished with him, or maybe they didn’t have the stomach for more, because the lads kind of jogged off, not running, but moving at a faster-than-walking pace. They shouted some abuse, but I wasn’t going to let that bother me. Truth be told, once I stopped running and yelling, I started to get the shakes. Still, I think I was pretty pleased with myself, a bit smug, you know? Archie was still on the pavement. I leaned down to give him a hand up and that’s when it happened. He landed me a good one square in the face.’ George laughed and shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it. ‘Before I knew it, the two of us were scrapping in the street. Then came the blue light. I guess someone in the tenements must have called the police when the first fight was kicking off. They charged the pair of us with drunk and disorderly and shoved us in separate cells for the night. My one and only arrest.’

Meikle laughed and shook his head again.

‘It doesn’t sound like a very promising basis for a friendship.’

‘No, it doesn’t, does it? But someone in the station must have slipped up because we were booked out at the same time the next morning. I wanted nothing to do with him, of course. I mean one minute there I am thinking about moonlit climbs and the next I’m in a cell in St Leonard’s police station.’

‘So how did you and Archie end up pals?’

‘Oh, Archie was a charmer. He made a gracious apology and before I knew it we were in a café swapping our life stories over bacon rolls and coffee. Then it was pub opening time. We went on from there.’

‘So thumping people one minute and charming them the next, but not a Jekyll and Hyde character?’

‘You’re keen on that one, aren’t you?’ Meikle’s belligerence had vanished in the story. ‘He was full of life and sometimes his energy spilled over into something else.’

Murray glanced at the recorder still spooling their words onto tape and wondered how far he should push the older man.

‘He sounds like a violent alcoholic.’

Meikle winced, but his voice remained low and calm.

‘The alcoholic bit I don’t know about. He liked a drink, true enough, but he was young, it could have gone either way. Personally I think a lot of that’s to do with whether you’ve got an addictive personality or not. I do, my father did too, but I don’t make assumptions about other folk, especially the dead. The violence part? Aye, well, he got into fights, like a lot of young lads, but I don’t think Archie was violent per se. I used to, but I’ve had a bit of time to consider. I reckon that when he drank all his insecurities were given a free rein. Archie would hit you, right enough, but then he’d drop his guard and let you give him a proper doing. I got a fair few blows in that night before the police pulled me off him. That was part of the reason I went for a drink with him the next day. I couldn’t believe the mess I’d made of his face.’

Meikle ran a hand over his thinning hair. Murray reached forward and turned off the tape recorder. Their cups were empty, the elephant reduced to crumbs. He asked, ‘Would you like another coffee?’

‘Make it a Diet Coke.’ The older man gave him a tired smile. ‘There’s only so much coffee you can drink.’

Meikle was on his mobile phone when Murray returned. He looked away, as if to guard his privacy, but his telephone voice was as loud as his cursing voice.

‘Aye, about half an hour or so. No, don’t worry. I can fix myself something when I get in. Yes, okay, love. You too.’ He cut the connection and looked at Murray. ‘I’ll need to be heading off soon.’

‘You’ve already been generous with your time. You said you and Archie talked a lot of poetry.’

‘I was bumming myself up a bit there. He talked and I listened. I was more into the politics. I tried to turn Archie onto it.’ Meikle snorted. ‘That was the way we talked then, you didn’t get someone interested in something, you “turned them onto it”.’

‘Quite a sexual turn of phrase.’

‘Aye, it was all sex then, except it wasn’t. Maybe down in London, but not up here sadly. Archie maintained that poetry had nothing to do with politics. We used to argue about that. They were happy times — you could even say the best of times — but when you ask me what we did, it’s all of a same. Keith Richards isn’t the only one that can’t remember the seventies. I mean, how well do you remember your student days?’

‘Pretty well.’

Meikle laughed.

‘That figures. No offence, but look at you. You were probably bent over your books half the time and in lectures the other half.’

‘More or less.’

‘Aye, well, we weren’t. What I remember is the odd rumpus, the occasional one-night stand, a lot of parties, a lot of laughs, a good time. For me, Archie was just a part of all that. What they call a wasted youth.’

‘Except it wasn’t.’

Meikle gave him a sad smile.

‘No, I don’t think it was. It was what came later that was the waste.’

Chapter Four

HE’D MISSED THE main thrust of the rush hour, but most of the seats on the Edinburgh to Glasgow Express were taken. Murray squeezed himself into a spare place at a table for four, smiling his apology at the businessman opposite as he felt the softness of one of the man’s smart shoes beneath his own scuffed trainer. The man winced but nodded his acceptance without raising his eyes from the spreadsheets in front of him. Murray glanced down the carriage at the tired eyes and limp collars, the half-read novels and glowing laptops. This was what people called the real world, he supposed, a mortgage, kids and a commute that added a day to every working week. It wouldn’t be so bad. He would make it reading time and fuck the spreadsheets.

A recorded message trailed through the scheduled stops as the train slid out of the station. Murray leaned back in his seat, keeping his knees bent to avoid contact with his opposite neighbour.

Meikle had looked tired by the time they’d finished. Murray had offered to get the bookfinder a taxi, but he’d produced his bus pass from his wallet with an ironic flourish.

‘No need. I’ve got this, a licence to ride.’

‘Brilliant.’

The older man’s surliness had returned.

‘Aye, great compensation for fuck-all of a pension. Take my advice, if you’ve got any money spend it now while you’re still young enough to enjoy it. Don’t get conned into saving it for bankers to piss up the wall, the way we were. Old age is no fun when you’re skint.’

Murray almost told him that old age had let him in on its dubious charms early and it was no fun full-stop, but there was no point. Instead he smiled to show he agreed and cut the sympathy from his voice because the older man would dislike it.

‘Better than the alternative.’

Meikle gave Murray a tough look, and then granted him a grin.

‘Mibbe so, mibbe no. I guess we’ll all find out eventually.’

He’d headed towards his bus stop, wherever it was, raising his hand in a wordless goodbye as he turned away.

Murray felt infected with Meikle’s weariness. He could see the glowing squares of house windows as they passed Broomhouse. It made him think of when he and Jack were boys. The kitchen window steaming with condensation as their dad cooked the dinner, Jack watching Vision On or Blue Peter while Murray did his homework at the table in the corner of the living room. Eventually there had been the second-hand paraffin heater in their shared bedroom so Murray could study in heady fumes and privacy.

The woman sitting next to him was reading a gossip magazine, flicking through photographs of celebrities shopping on sunlit streets, large black shades and pained expressions. He glanced at her, half-expecting a cut-price version of the girls in the pictures, but she was in her forties, neat rather than fashionable, her clothes carefully chosen. Did she wish herself young and in LA? God knows he did, though the idea had never occurred before. Maybe he could go there, become a movie star. That would show them. It would indeed.

The woman gave him a sharp glare and pointedly turned the page. He looked away. They were out of the city now and there was nothing but darkness in the beyond. He could see his own face reflected in the window; the shine of his glasses against the pits and bumps on the lunar landscape of his skin. Maybe he should shelve the idea of a movie career.

Murray unzipped his rucksack and slid out the manila folder containing the letter from Christie’s agent.

Dear Dr Watson

I have passed on your letter to Ms Graves, who has asked me to let you know that she will give your request for an interview serious consideration. To help her in her decision, she invites you to forward through me a copy of your CV, a list of previous publications and a synopsis of your proposed biography of Archibald Lunan.

Regards

Foster James

Niles, James and Worthing

He wondered why he had lied to George Meikle about Christie having already granted him an interview. He’d sent the requested documents six weeks ago. They would confirm his credentials, the scholarly nature of his interest. Would that be enough?

Murray’s phone chimed with news of a new text. He drew it from his pocket and watched the tiny electronic envelope twirl and open, half-anticipating a self-justifying missive from his brother.

Where are you?

There were people standing further down the carriage. To get up would mean losing his seat, so he dialled where he sat. He expected her voicemail, but Rachel picked up on the third ring. He said, ‘Hi, it’s me.’

‘I wondered if you’d get my message. I’d like to see you.’

‘I’d like to see you too.’

‘Good.’ Her voice was all business. ‘Where are you?’

‘I don’t like to say.’

‘I don’t have much time, Murray, Fergus has got his big deal of a dinner party later.’

‘I’m on the train.’

‘Heading where?’

‘Home.’

‘Can we meet at your office?’

He hated meeting her there, disliked the risk, the clash of associations.

‘Okay, when?’

‘When can you make it?’

Murray glanced at the display above the carriage door. They were approaching Croy.

‘I’ll jump in a cab at Queen Street and be with you in thirty minutes.’

‘Good.’

She cut the connection without saying goodbye. Outside, the train window started to speck with rain.

Chapter Five

MURRAY’S TINY OFFICE was almost, but not quite, dark. Enough light shone in from the streetlamp beyond the trees for him to see Rachel Houghton’s features soften. A blast of hail shot against the window and Rachel’s pupils widened, edging nearer, but still too self-aware to be there yet. Murray matched his rhythm to the shadows cutting across the room, blessing whatever procurer of office furniture had managed to issue him with a desk of exactly the right height. He clasped Rachel’s naked rump, her arms tightened around him and he lifted her from the desk. She gasped and raised her lips to his. Her nipples rubbed against his chest, smooth and hard, sweat-slick. Rachel groaned. Her body stiffened, pelvis pressed down into his. Murray felt the soft leather of her shoes, the spike of their stilettos as they spurred him on.

‘No,’ he said, ‘don’t or. .’

Her ankles gripped him tighter. Murray felt a draught touch his exposed rear and a thin slice of light cut into the room, illuminating Rachel’s face, her eyes slitting against the sudden brightness, looking beyond him to the opening door. Murray felt her hands pushing him away. He followed her gaze, unsure of what was happening, and saw the intruder standing in the doorway, face shadowed in the gloom of the room. Murray heard him release a soft shuddering sigh akin to the groan that had escaped his own lips only a moment before.

‘Fuck!’ Murray’s curse acted like a sniper’s near-miss. The figure darted swiftly away. Murray extricated himself and stumbled into the hallway, almost catching the door before it closed. He shouted something as he ran, some bark of protest, his unfastened shirt flapping open, the air of the darkened corridor cold against his chest. But whoever it was had vanished, lost in the murky hallways that made up the old buildings. The only comfort Murray had was that he’d remembered to hold onto his trousers instead of letting them ambush him by the ankles and send him sprawling, like the comedy lover he so obviously was.

‘I’ve no idea who it was. Probably a porter doing his rounds.’ Rachel stepped behind the desk and began to pull on her abandoned tights. ‘More frightened of us than we were of him.’

A few years ago they would have had the surety of a cigarette to smooth the post-coital awkwardness. But these days smoking in university buildings was grounds for dismissal. Fortunately, fucking didn’t set off the sprinkler system. Murray fumbled his belt buckle into place and sank into the chair usually designated for visiting students. He lifted a first-year essay that only seconds ago had rustled beneath Rachel’s bottom and tried to smooth out the creases in its paper.

. . he succeeded against the odds. Though his lifestyle was deemed unacceptable by mainstream society his. .

The page bounced stubbornly back. Murray replaced it on the desk, weighting the bent corner with a mug. A little cold coffee slopped onto the neatly printed words.

‘Fuck.’ He blotted the stain with the front page of the Guardian. ‘Was he wearing a porter’s uniform?’ Murray peeled the newspaper back. A dark shadow of newsprint remained, stamped across the dutifully prepared argument. ‘Shit.’

‘I told you, I didn’t get a good look at him. It was dark and I was. . slightly distracted.’

Murray wondered if he should have carried on chasing the intruder. He had been breathing in the distinctive reek of recalcitrant students, frustrated scholars and books since he was a seventeen-year-old undergraduate. The corridors’ twists and turns were mapped on his mind. He knew all the cubbyholes and suicide steps. The lecture halls racked with seating, the illogical staircases that tricked the uninitiated but led eventually to the out-of-bounds attics from where a man could lose himself and emerge on the opposite side of the old campus. The chances of catching whoever it was were radically slimmer than the odds of looking like an out-of-breath idiot. But the part of him that imagined grabbing the peeping Tom’s collar and administering his boot to the seat of their breeks wished he’d given it a shot.

Rachel tugged the hem of her skirt down. Usually she wore trousers. She had, he realised, very good legs.

‘You look nice.’

Rachel flashed him the same bright smile that she gave to shop assistants, students, fellow lecturers, porters, her husband, anyone who crossed her path when her mind was elsewhere. He watched as she took a small mirror from her handbag. Her lipstick was hardly smudged, but she perched on the edge of his desk and reapplied it anyway. Murray was reminded of an early author photograph of Christie Graves, long legs, sharp angles and red lips. It was a good look.

The memory of the opening door, the light shifting across Rachel’s face, returned and spoiled the knowledge that she’d dressed up for him. He measured the trajectory between their clinch and the door with his thumb and forefinger.

‘You don’t think it was someone from the department?’

Rachel’s smile grew tight. She dropped the mirror back into her bag and zipped it shut.

‘It’s Friday evening. No one else would be in their office at this time. Most of them have something that passes for a life. Don’t worry, I imagine we made his night. No doubt he’s crouched in the gatehouse right now, reliving the memory.’

‘Of my white arse? I bloody hope not.’

‘Irresistible. Your white arse will have a starring role in that little bit of ciné film that plays behind his eyes when he goes home and rogers his tired, but pleasantly surprised, old wife for the first time in months.’

Rachel was on his side of the desk now. Her skirt was made of some kind of shiny, silver-grey fabric, stretched taut across her hips. Murray ran a finger down her leg, feeling the satin slide of the material. She placed a hand on his, stopping its progress, and he leaned back in his chair.

‘So what’s the occasion?’ He wanted to keep her there a while, or maybe be with her somewhere else. Somewhere with subdued lighting, candles, soft music. What a cliché. It was Friday night and most people had a life. ‘Fergus taking you somewhere nice?’

‘Fergus doesn’t take me places. We go together.’

Murray put his foot against the desk. If he were a cowboy, he’d have tipped his hat forward. She hadn’t dressed for him after all. He tried for playful and failed.

‘We could go together better.’

Rachel bent towards him. He felt her breath, warm and sweet, with a faint scent of peppermint. She’d started smoking again.

‘One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Fergus, he’s never boring.’

‘He bored me rigid at the last faculty meeting.’ Murray reached into his desk drawer and fished out the bottle of malt he’d bought weeks ago in the hope of tempting Rachel to stay longer than the time it took to straighten her clothes. ‘I think I need a drink. Do you want to join me?’ He hesitated. ‘Or we could go somewhere, if you’d prefer a glass of wine?’

Rachel glanced at the clock above the office door. Murray wondered if she’d been keeping an eye on it during their lovemaking.

‘I told you. I can’t stay long. We’re having people round for dinner. Fergus is making his famous shepherd’s pie.’

‘Proletarian heartiness the latest smart thing?’

‘I hope so. It’s certainly more economical than some of his other enthusiasms. Here,’ She reached into her bag and drew out a bottle of Blackwood’s. ‘I’ll have a splash of this. My alibi.’

Alibi. The word irritated him.

‘How long will it excuse you for?’

‘Long enough. Fergus was determined to have Shetland gin for aperitifs. They don’t sell it everywhere. Why?’ She had a pointed face, like a sly little fox. Sometimes, when she smiled, she looked a short leap away from a bite. ‘Are you scared he might hunt me down?’

Murray got up and washed his coffee cup. The light stretching across the room was snagged in his mind. Fergus was around twenty years older than Rachel, somewhere towards his sixties, but he’d run the 10K last year. Could he have covered the stretch of the corridor in the time it had taken Murray to get to the door? But why would Fergus run? He had the power to fell Murray without lifting a fist. He ignored Rachel’s question, taking the gin from her and pouring a little into the clean mug.

‘Sorry about the crockery, not very suave.’

‘Not being very suave is part of your charm.’

‘Then you won’t be surprised to hear I can’t offer you ice and lemon.’

‘A little water will be fine.’

It was part of what he’d liked about her, this posh gameness. In another era she would have made a great lady explorer. He could imagine her cajoling a team of native carriers through the jungle, taking one of them to her tent at night then ordering him to pick up and carry her bundles the next morning.

Murray went to the sink. Usually he drank the bottled stuff, convinced he could taste the liquorice taint of lead in the university tap water, but there was only a small dreg left in the plastic bottle of Strathmore in his rucksack. He let the cold run for a moment then added a dash to her cup.

‘Thanks.’

Rachel smiled, holding it against her chest while he poured himself a nip of the whisky. He was going to clink his cup against hers, but she took a sip of the gin, grimacing then coughing against its burn.

Murray laughed.

‘A hardy people, these Shetlanders.’ He tasted his own drink. ‘Doesn’t it bother you? Our visitor?’

‘You shielded me.’

He toasted her with his mug.

‘Instinctive chivalry.’

‘Of course it bothers me.’ She glanced at the clock again. ‘But what’s the point in torturing ourselves? A rumour will start or a rumour won’t start. We’ll worry about it if it does. The thing we have to make sure of is that it doesn’t happen again.’

‘You’re right. It was stupid, doing it here.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’ She saw the expression on his face and smiled. ‘We both know it can’t go on.’

He couldn’t trust his voice. He hadn’t known, didn’t know.

‘And you’re going to be on sabbatical for a year.’ She brightened, like a children’s nurse who had applied Dettol to a skint knee and was now about to use a sweet to distract attention from the sting. ‘You won’t have time for all this.’

He tried to keep his words light.

‘There’s only so much time you can spend on research. I’m sure I could have squeezed you in.’

She looked away. For a moment he thought she might relent, but then she turned her bright eyes on him.

‘We agreed it would only ever be a bit of fun. Anyway, term’s almost over, Fergus and I are going to Umbria for two months, and you’re starting your sabbatical. It makes sense.’

‘If we hadn’t been interrupted?’

‘What does it matter?’ She leant forward and kissed him gently on the lips. ‘We had fun. We like each other. Let’s keep it that way.’

His voice was steady. He’d read about well-integrated autistics, they had to think about every gesture, smile, make eye contact. He formed his mouth into a grin.

‘You’re right. It was fun while it lasted.’

Rachel touched his arm.

Don’t flinch, don’t argue, don’t push her away.

‘It’ll be a great book. You’re always saying how underrated Lunan is. This is your big chance to put him on the map.’

‘I hope so.’

‘I know so. Fergus does too.’

The pair of them discussing him. Where? Over dinner? In bed? Did he ever feature in the little bit of ciné film she ran behind her eyes while Fergus fucked her?

He said, ‘Rachel, Fergus can’t stand me.’

She took her coat from the hook on the back of his office door.

‘Don’t be so paranoid, Murray. You know Fergus. If he didn’t think you were a valuable member of the department, you wouldn’t be enjoying a year’s sabbatical, you’d be looking for a new post.’

Murray stood at his office window. It was still wild outside. The wind caught at Rachel’s hair, blowing it across her face. She struggled for a moment with the car door, then she was in, headlamps on, reversed out and away, her only backward glance at the road behind though the rear-view mirror. It was the last time. He wondered if it was the peeping Tom or his own invitation to go for a drink that had pushed Rachel away. Maybe she had always intended to it end like this. Murray stood at the window, watching the trees fingering the sky the same way they would if he weren’t there. On his way out he stopped by the gatehouse and handed the almost-full bottle of malt to the porter, who received it with grateful, bland surprise.

Chapter Six

THE REASONS MURRAY WATSON usually avoided Fowlers were clustered around their customary corner table, looking like a eugenicist’s nightmare. The pub wasn’t busy, but it was warming up with the overspill of office workers and students from more popular establishments so he was halfway to the bar before he spotted Vic Costello, Lyle Joff and Phyllida McWilliams and remembered that this was where they congregated late on Friday afternoons, playing at being the Algonquin club and staving off the wretchedness of the weekend.

Maybe the need to suffer that misery so often brings in its wake would have led him into their company anyway, or maybe he would have settled for a lone pint and a nod in their direction, but then he felt a hand on his elbow and turned to see Rab Purvis’s face, shiny with sweat and bonhomie.

‘I’ll get this, Moira.’ It was typical of Rab to be on first-name terms with the manageress; typical too of him to add Murray’s drink to the round and a tip on top of the price. Mrs Noon nodded her thanks and Rab gave Murray’s elbow a squeeze that told him his friend was at least three pints to the good. ‘Come away into the body of the kirk.’

It had drifted beyond the time where even late diners could pretend to be having a pre-prandial and the department’s dwindling stock of alcoholics welcomed Murray with hearty relief. He was the fresh blood, the bringer of new topics, the excuse to get another round in and postpone the moment when the pub door swung home and they each stepped out alone.

‘Hello, stranger.’ Phyllida McWilliams’s voice had lost its usual edge and now held the full throaty promise of a pack of unfiltered Camels. She leaned over and gave Murray a kiss. ‘Why do we never see you?’

Murray didn’t bother to mention that she’d passed him in the corridor three days ago, her head bowed, looking like Miss Marple’s hungover younger sister.

‘You know how it is, Phyllida. I’m a busy little bee.’

Phyllida picked a blonde hair from Murray’s lapel and raised her eyebrows.

‘He’s a B, all right,’ said Vic Costello. ‘Leave him alone, Phyl, you don’t know where he’s been.’

The woman let the hair fall from her fingers onto the barroom floor. She nodded. ‘Many a true word.’

‘He flits from flower to flower.’

Rab conducted a little minuet in the air with his hand.

Phyllida laughed her barmaid’s laugh and started to recite,

‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I:

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fly. .’

It was worse than he’d thought. They must have been there for hours. Murray wondered if they suspected about Rachel. He should go home, make himself something to eat, think things through.

Lyle Joff began an anecdote about a conference he’d attended in Toronto. Phyllida clamped an interested expression onto her face and Vic Costello rolled the beer around in his glass, staring sadly into space. Over by the bar Mrs Noon turned up the music and Willie Nelson cranked into ‘Whisky River’. Vic Costello placed his hand on top of Phyllida McWilliams’s and she let him keep it there for a moment before drawing hers away. Murray wondered if Vic’s divorce was finalised and if he had moved out of the family home yet, or if he was still camping in the space that had once been his study.

Phyllida leaned against Murray and asked, ‘Seriously, where have you been?’

She took his hand in hers and started to stroke his fingers.

‘Around.’ Murray tried to return her flirt, but he could see Vic Costello’s slumped features on Phyllida’s other side and, despite the rips in its fabric, the banquette they were sharing was reminiscent enough of a bed to invite unwelcome thoughts of ménage à trois. ‘I was at the National Library today, working though what’s left of Archie’s papers.’

‘Oh.’ Phyllida’s fascination was a thin veneer over boredom. ‘Find any fabulous new poems?’

‘No, but I did find notes for a sci-fi novel.’

‘Poor Murray, out to restore and revive, and all you get is half-boiled genre fiction.’

Murray laughed with her, though the barb hurt. He took out his notebook and flipped it open at the pages where he’d copied down the contents of Archie’s jotter.

‘I found this, a catalogue of names.’

Phyllida glanced at the scribbled page.

‘Obviously trying to work out what to call his characters, and doing rather badly, poor sod.’

Murray wondered why he hadn’t realised it earlier. The disappointment sounded in his voice.

‘You think so?’

She gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze.

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Shit, I thought it might have been something.’

He snapped his notebook shut.

Murray’s curse seemed to wake Vic Costello from his trance. He necked the last three inches of his beer.

‘It’s my shout.’

‘Not for me, thanks.’ Lyle Joff raised his glass to his lips and the last of his heavy slid smoothly down. ‘It’s past my curfew.’ He gave Murray a complicit look. ‘Bedtime-story duty. Winnie the Pooh — a marvellous antidote to a hard day at the coalface.’

As preposterous as the image of chubby Joff at a coalface was, it seemed more feasible than the picture of him sitting at the bedside of freshly washed, pyjama-clad toddlers reading about a bear of little brain. Murray had been introduced to Joff’s wife at a faculty party once; she was prettier than he’d expected. He wondered how they’d met and why Joff was so often in the early-evening company of people for whom the only alternative to the pub was the empty flat, the armchair tortured with cigarette burns and the book collection that was only so much comfort.

Vic Costello looked at his watch.

‘It’s gone half-nine. They’ll be safe in the land of Nod by now surely, long past breathing in your boozy breath, Lyle.’

Lyle Joff looked at his own watch as if astonished to see that the hands had moved round. He hesitated, then looked at his glass as if equally amazed to find it empty.

‘You’ll get me shot, Costello.’ He grinned. ‘Just one more for the road then.’

Vic raised his empty glass in the air until he caught the attention of Mrs Noon. He held five fingers up and the manageress gave a curt dip of her head to show she’d oblige, but only for the moment.

Phyllida leaned over and whispered, ‘You’re a cunt, Vic. You won’t be happy until that boy’s marriage has gone the same way as yours and you’ve got a full-time drinking companion.’

‘Why would I need that when I’ve got you, Phyl?’

Costello gave her a hug. Phyllida pushed him away.

‘You forget yourself sometimes.’

Drink took the sting from the scold, but there was a seed of bitterness in her voice that would blossom with more watering, and when Vic Costello tried for a second squeeze her shove was impatient.

The tray of drinks arrived and Lyle Joff helped himself to a fresh pint. He took a sip and wiped the foam from his top lip.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my marriage.’

‘I’m sure it’s rock solid.’ Rab patted Lyle’s arm and asked Murray, ‘Have you met Lyle’s wife? A beautiful girl, classical profile, a touch of the Venus de Milo about her.’

He winked and Murray wearily took his cue.

‘Armless?’

‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

Phyllida laughed and Lyle said, ‘Built on strong foundations. Love, affection, shared values.’

He looked into the middle distance as if trying to recall other reasons his marriage would endure.

‘Children,’ Phyllida said. ‘Children are a blessing.’ Vic Costello excused himself to go to the gents.

Keeping his voice uncharacteristically low, Rab turned to face Murray, cutting the pair of them off from the rest of the company.

‘I’m glad you dropped by.’ The phrase sounded old- fashioned, as if Murray had accepted an invitation to afternoon tea. ‘I owe you an apology, for coming on too strong when I saw you last. Just because I’m not getting any doesn’t give me a right to become one of the moral majority.’ Rab’s face set into a stern inquisitiveness, eyebrows raised almost to the ridges of his brow. It was only acting. The look he gave nervous students to encourage them to speak up. He held out his hand. ‘Shake?’

Murray had let slip about Rachel a month into the affair. The two men had eaten dinner with a visiting speaker then gone for a drink on their own to discuss the lecture free of its author. Maybe it was the combination of wine and beer or maybe it was the rose-tinted evening. Maybe he was boasting or maybe, just for that instant, Murray had thought his friend might be able to help. Whatever it was, as they’d left the pub, skirting the exiled smokers loitering on the pavement outside and stepping into the gloaming of a pink sunset, Murray had found himself saying, ‘I’m having a bit of a thing with Rachel Houghton.’

Rab Purvis had been more forthright than a casual listener might expect a professor of chivalric romance to be.

‘She’s a ballbreaker. I wouldn’t touch her with a bargepole.’

Murray had glanced at his friend’s tubby abdomen and tried to imagine Rachel propositioning Rab as she had him, shutting the door of his office on sports afternoon Wednesday, pushing the essays he’d been trawling through to one side, sitting on the edge of his desk, so close he’d wondered, then guiding his hand under her sweater so that the quality of his wonder had shifted and magnified.

‘It wasn’t a bargepole that I was thinking of.’

‘Any kind of pole. Leave well alone, if you know what’s good for you.’

‘What if it’s my one last chance of true love?’

‘Then run for the hills. Rachel Houghton isn’t looking for love, Murray. She’s happy with Fergus. She simply likes spicing things up by screwing around.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing, if shagging your head of department’s wife doesn’t bother you.’

‘Why should it?’

‘Would you like me to give you a list?’

‘Not really.’

But his friend had gone on to recite a long, frequently crude but eminently sensible catalogue of reasons why Murray Watson should steer clear of Rachel Houghton. It hadn’t made one iota of difference. The affair remained acknowledged but unmentioned again, until now.

Murray took Rab’s proffered hand and shook it.

‘She just dumped me.’

‘Ah.’ Rab sucked another inch off his pint. ‘In that case I take back my apology. You’re better off out of it. You know what the department’s like. A busy little hive with bees swarming all over each other and Fergus at the centre, gobbling up the golden globules of honey we lay at his feet.’

‘Pollen.’

‘What?’

‘Pollen. The bees bring the queen pollen and she makes it into honey.’

‘Pollen, honey — it’s all the same.’ Rab abandoned the analogy. ‘The place is a poisonous rumour mill. Look,’ his voice took on the fatherly tone that indicated advice was about to be proffered. ‘It’s not easy working where we do. Bad as being a diabetic in a candy shop, all those delectable sweet things passing through your hands every day and you not even allowed the tiniest little lick.’ He laughed. ‘That was slightly filthier than I intended.’

‘It’s okay, I get your drift.’

‘You don’t have to tell me how frustrating it can be. When I started it was different but. .’ Rab drifted off for a moment to the happy land where lecturers and students were still compatible. ‘But times change.’ He sighed, staring into the middle distance. ‘I was having a nice drink until you came in looking like Banquo’s ghost and reminded me how everything has gone to shit. You had a good time and now it’s over, just thank whatever ancient gods it is you worship that you didn’t get caught.’

‘We did. Someone saw us.’

‘Ah,’ Rab sighed. ‘I suppose that would put a different complexion on things.’ He took another sip of his pint. ‘Come on then, don’t leave me in suspense. Who?’

‘I don’t know. Someone. A porter maybe. I had my back to them.’

‘Spare me the gory details,’ Rab grunted. ‘I hope to God it wasn’t a porter. They’ll tell the cleaners, who’ll let slip to the women in the canteen, and once it gets to them you’re lost. Might as well take out a full-page ad in the Glasgow Herald, except there’d be no need.’ He shook his head. ‘If you don’t know who it was, you can’t be sure there’s a problem.’

‘They didn’t see us standing too close in the coffee lounge or exchanging notes in the quads, they saw me rogering her on the desk of my office.’

‘Rogering?’

‘“Making the beast with two backs”, “putting the horns on old Fergus”, or whatever you Romantics call it.’

‘Shagging.’

‘What do you think I should do?’

‘What can you do?’ Rab patted his arm. ‘Get a round in.’

Fowlers had quenched thirsts for at least a hundred years. Its high ceiling was iced with intricate cornicing, its windows frosted with etchings advertising whiskies and beers, which let light filter into the bar, but allowed privacy from passers-by to priests, poets, skivers, fathers on errands or men seeing about dogs, idle students and lovers budgeting towards leaving their spouses. Mrs Noon kept things tight and it was rare to wait too long to be served or to see a fight that got beyond the third punch. Fowlers should have been a nice place for a drink, but it was a dump, a prime contender for a brewery theme-pub revamp. There were no ashtrays on the table, but the ceiling retained its nicotine hue and the smell of unwashed old men, stale beer and the cheap bleach used to sluice down the toilets was no longer masked by cigarette smoke. The bar stools, which harboured men who remembered the city when it was all soot and horseshit, were as scuffed and unsteady on their pins as their occupants. The patterned orange and blue carpet, once loud enough to drown out the Saturday night crowd, had sunk to sludge. Murray tipped back his fifth pint of the evening and decided this was where he belonged.

Phyllida McWilliams and Vic Costello had left an hour or so ago, taking their quarrel to one of the West End restaurants where they were known and dreaded. Phyllida had had trouble getting her arm into the sleeve of her jacket and Murray had guided her hand into the armhole while Vic strode to the door with the single-minded purpose of the practised inebriate.

‘You’re a lovely man, Murray. Take my advice.’ She gathered her bags of shopping; ingredients for another Friday night dinner she was destined not to cook. ‘Never get involved with someone who isn’t available.’

‘What made you say that, Phyllida?’

She shrugged and gave him a silly grin. ‘I have been drinking, you know.’

Now there were three of them left. Lyle Joff, quieter after his phone call, Rab and Murray. They were still at the corner table, but in the hours they had sat there the pub had transformed from a peaceful place where men could swap confidences into a red-faced rammy. The bar was three-deep, the staff quick-pouring wine and pressing more glasses to optics than they had earlier in the evening, but it was still pints that ruled; a shining spectrum of gold, yellows, browns and liquorice black. Not that anyone stopped to admire their drink. People were knocking them back faster than it was possible to serve and from time to time a barmaid would squeeze into the throng and return with a tall column of tumblers, as if gathering ammunition for a siege.

Two thoughts were pinballing around Murray’s brain. The first was his need for another drink, the magic one that would make everything click into place. The second was that he’d drunk too much and should get home before he shipwrecked himself.

Maybe it was the bell that made him think of shipwrecks. It was loud and clanging and spoke to him of treacherous rocks and shattered hulks. What was it like to drown?

‘Pushing the boat out tonight?’

That’s what they were doing, setting out into perilous waters, and none of them in possession of their sea legs. Murray raised his head. Mrs Noon was holding a tin tray loaded with empty tumblers, their rims edged with tides of dead froth. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the woman out from behind the bar before.

‘I didn’t know you had legs, Mrs Noon.’ He grinned. ‘I thought you were a mermaid. Great singers, mermaids. They lure poor sailors to their deaths, just for the fun of it. Beautiful creatures, beautiful and cruel.’

‘You wouldn’t want to hear me sing.’ The manageress placed his half-full glass in amongst the empties on her tray. ‘That really would be a cruelty.’ She watched Rab neck the dregs of his pint then took his glass from him. ‘Time to head home, gentlemen.’

She was right. They should have left hours ago. Now here he was, drunk and sober at the same time. Each half of him disgusted at the other.

Someone had propped the doors open. The crowd was thinning, people sinking the last of their drinks, reaching for their jackets, all the heat and chatter drifting out into the night. He stretched an arm towards his beer, but Mrs Noon sailed the tray up and away, beyond his reach.

‘What happened to drinking-up time?’

It came out too loud. He caught the barman throwing Mrs Noon a questioning look and the woman’s answering shake of the head.

‘You heard the bell, that’s drinking-up time over. Do you want to get me into trouble?’

He was a lecturer in English literature at a distinguished and ancient university. He straightened himself in his chair and summoned forth the spirit of Oscar Wilde.

‘Don’t you think you may be a little old for me to get you into trouble, Mrs Noon?’

‘No need for that now.’ Rab was pulling on his jacket. ‘You’ll have to excuse my colleague. He is the recipient of bad news.’

Murray lumbered to his feet. The battle was lost, there was no more drink to be had, no possibility of reaching the required state here. The landlady disregarded Rab’s apologies and turned her practised smile on Murray: ice and glass. She’d once told him she had a daughter at the uni.

‘I was just thinking the same thing of the pair of you. You’re both too old to be getting into trouble. Go home, gentlemen.’

Outside black cabs and private hires edged along the road accompanied by the bass beat and infra-bright lights of sober boys in souped-up cars. It was another kind of rush hour, Friday night chucking-out time, louder, younger and messier than the into-work-and-home-again crowds. Here came the smashed windows, spilled noodles, lost shoes and sicked-up drinks, the pigeon breakfasts and trailing bloodstains.

Two teenage girls perched on the windowsill of the late-night Spar passing a bottle between them while a yard away their friend snogged a youth in a tracksuit, their joined mouths sealed vacuum-tight. The boy’s hand slid up the girl’s crop top. One of the drinkers tipped back a swig from the bottle, arching her body, her short skirt riding up her thighs. For an instant she looked like an advert for the elixir of youth. Then she lost her balance and bumped against her companion. Both girls giggled and the one who had nearly fallen shouted, ‘Fucking jump him if you’re gonnae or we’ll miss the bus.’

The boy broke the clinch, grinning at his audience, then pulled the girl back to him, whispering something that made her laugh, then push herself free, staggering slightly on her high heels as she tottered towards her friends.

‘Virgin,’ the teenagers taunted, passing her the bottle.

Lyle Joff gave them a stern look. ‘I should bloody hope so.’ The girls sniggered, nudging each other, and Lyle took refuge in his kebab. He didn’t speak again until they had passed the group.

‘If I caught Sarah or Emma behaving like that, I’d lock them up until they were thirty. Fuck it, thirty-five. I’d lock them up till they were thirty-five and even then I’d still want some guarantees.’

Murray looked back at the girls. They were at the bus stop now. One of them — he wasn’t sure if it was the one who’d been doing the kissing — pushed the boy. The youth stepped into a half trot, shouting something. The girls roared back, united now as they rushed at him, their high heels clattering against the pavement, laughing, full of victory as the boy ran off down the street.

Murray joined in the laughter. Some people had more talent for life.

‘Brief Encounter.’

Lyle said, ‘It’s not funny, Murray. Boys like that take advantage of young girls.’

Rab asked, ‘What age are Sarah or Emma now? Five and seven? You don’t need to worry about that for a few years.’

‘Three and six. Remind me to look up convent schools in the Yellow Pages in the morning. Here, hold this a minute.’

Lyle thrust his half-eaten kebab into Murray’s hand and nipped up a lane. Murray lifted the swaddled meat and salad to his mouth, crunching into vinegar, spices and heat. When had he last eaten? There had been a packet of crisps in the pub, but before that? Some sauce escaped the wrap and ran down his chin.

‘Hey.’ Lyle emerged from the alleyway. ‘I said hold it, not eat it.’

‘Sorry.’ Murray wiped his face. He took a second bite then handed it back. ‘I don’t know how you can stomach that stuff.’

Lyle fed the end of the kebab into his mouth and started picking at the shreds of salad and onion left in the paper. ‘I used to live on these before Marcella got her claws into me.’

His expression looked like it might crumple and he tore at the kebab with his teeth again, as if seeking solace.

They were passing the queue for The Viper Club now. Murray recognised a girl from his third-year tutorial group. She’d caught her long, straight hair back in an Alice band. Her dress was short, her white boots high. She made him think of the test-card girl, all grown up and gone kinky.

‘Hello, Dr Watson.’

He nodded, trying not to stagger. Ah, what the fuck? He was allowed a private life, wasn’t he?

Rab echoed his thoughts.

‘Sometimes you need to cut loose, connect with the elemental, remind yourself of the beauty of your own existence.’

Lyle scrunched the kebab’s wrapping into a ball and tossed it into a bin already brimming with rubbish.

‘For tomorrow we may die.’

The paper trembled on the peak of the pile, and then tumbled to the ground. Rab bent over, picked up the wrapping and stuffed it carefully back into the bucket. A look of satisfaction at a job well done settled on his face.

‘Right, what den of iniquity are we headed to next?’

* * *

The thin man with the long hair and the bandanna wanted a pound before he would let them in. Rab dropped three coins into the old ice-cream tub that acted as a till and they went up the stairs and into the electric brightness of the pool hall.

‘I should head back.’ It had been Lyle Joff’s mantra since he’d phoned his wife two hours ago, but he joined the queue for the bar with the others and accepted his pint. ‘Just the one, thanks. I’ll need to be thinking about getting home.’

The room was busy with the quiet clack of billiard balls and the low murmur of conversation. They were in the first wave of pub exiles and serious pool players still outnumbered those for whom the hall was just another stop on the night’s drunken highway. It was about a year since Murray had been here, a night on the town with his brother Jack, but it was as if he’d just stepped out to take a piss. There were the same faces, the same closed looks and poker expressions. The same mix of scruff and cowboy-cool, the lavvy-brush beards, arse-hugging jeans, Cuban heels and tight-fitting waistcoats. Fuck, you’d have to be hard to wear that gear in Glasgow.

Rab lowered himself behind a free table.

‘Welcome to Indian country. What time does this place stay open till?’

‘Three.’

Rab’s sigh was contented, nothing to worry about for two hours.

Lyle stared silently at his pint, as if it might hold the possibility of enlightenment. Slowly his head sank onto his chest and his eyes closed.

A woman bent across the baize, lining up her options. Murray found himself following the seams of her jeans, up the inside of her raised thigh to the point where they met in a cross. He looked away. Would the tyranny of sex never stop?

He nodded towards Lyle.

‘Is he all right?’

The woman telescoped her cue back towards their table and Rab shifted his drink beyond its reach.

‘He’s fine, he’ll wake up in a moment.’ Rab indicated a pair of women sitting near the back of the room. ‘Why don’t you go over there and ask them if they want a drink?’

The women might have been sisters, or maybe it was simply that their style was the same. Strappy tops and short feathery hair whose copper highlights glinted under the bright lights. They were grown-up versions of the girls he’d gone to school with. They’d never have looked at him then, but now?

It was stupid. He didn’t fancy either of them, and besides, he wasn’t up to the aggressive dance of tease and semi-insults that constituted a chat-up.

‘They’ve got drinks.’

‘Well, get up, pretend you’re going to the gents’ and offer them another one en route.’

‘Is that how James Bond does it? Hello, ladies, I was on my way for a pish and wondered if I could bring you anything back? Ever wondered why it’s going to say “confirmed bachelor” on your obituary?’

‘It must be better than mooning over Ms Houghton.’

Lyle Joff awakened slowly, like an ugly toy twitching into life in a deserted nursery. The flesh beneath his eyes trembled and then the eyes themselves opened. He blinked and turned his fuzzy gaze on Murray.

‘Rachel Houghton.’ He smiled dreamily. ‘Good arse. Good everything else too.’

‘Lyle.’ Rab’s voice was warning. ‘We’re talking about a colleague.’

Lyle’s brief sleep seemed to have refreshed him. He wiped away the glue of saliva that had formed at the corners of his mouth and took a sip of his pint. ‘Listen to Professor PC. ’

Rab said, ‘Shut up, Lyle, you’re drunk.’

A couple of the pool players looked over. Murray raised his beer to his lips. It tasted of nothing.

‘We’re all drunk. Say what you were going to say, Lyle.’

‘Lyle, I’m warning you.’

Rab’s tone was low and commanding, but Lyle was too far gone to notice. He patted Rab’s shoulder.

‘Murray’s one of us, the three mouseketeers.’ He giggled. ‘It’s top secret. Rab said Fergus would have his balls strung up and made into an executive toy for his desk if he found out.’

‘The three musketeers, great swordsmen.’ Murray turned to Rab. ‘What’s the big secret?’

‘Nothing, Lyle’s just being provocative, aren’t you, Lyle?’

‘Not as provocative as Rachel.’ Lyle put an arm around Rab. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.’

Rab lifted the arm from his shoulder. His eyes met Murray’s and all of the ruined adventure was in them. There was no need to ask what had happened, but Murray said, ‘Tell me.’

Lyle looked from one to the other, wary as a barroom dog whose master is on his fourth drink.

Rab sighed wearily.

‘What’s the point? She’s a free spirit, Murray, a generous woman.’

‘I want to know.’

A little beer had slopped onto the table. Rab dipped his finger in it and drew a damp circle on the Formica. He looked his age.

‘A one-off mercy fuck, that’s all there is to it.’

‘When?’

‘The end of last term. You remember all that hoo-ha about my introduction to the new Scottish poetry anthology?’

Murray did. Rab had been forthright in his assessment that a new wave of Scottish poets were throwing off the class-consciousness, self-obsession and non-poetic subject matter of the previous generation and ushering in a golden age. The new wave had leapt to the defence of their predecessors while balking at Rab’s description of them as non-political. The elder statesmen had been vitriolic in their assessment of academics in general, and Rab in particular. It must have been a week when war and disaster had slipped from the news because the row had hit the broadsheets. Rab had been derided by academics and pundits north of the border and a source of amusement to those south of it.

‘It all blew up in my face a bit. Some people thrive on controversy, Fergus for example, but I don’t. It got me down. Rachel dropped into my office one afternoon to commiserate and we went for a few drinks, quite a few drinks. Then when the pub closed I remembered that there was another bottle at my place. There’s always another bottle at my place.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘I didn’t expect her to come and then when she did I didn’t expect anything more than a drink. I was going to tell you.’ He laughed almost shyly. ‘But a gentleman doesn’t talk about these things.’

‘You bloody talked about it to Lyle.’

‘Oh, come on, Murray. I’m an overweight fifty-five-year-old poetry lecturer and Rachel’s a thirty-five-year-old dolly bird. I had to tell someone. Anyway, I’d been drinking.’

‘You’ve generally been drinking.’

‘That’s a prime example of why I didn’t tell you. You can be such a fucking puritan, I thought you wouldn’t approve.’ He gave a low laugh. ‘And then you told me that you and she. . Well, I was jealous, I admit, but not jealous enough to throw it back in your face.’ Rab raised his pint to his lips and then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. His tone slipped from apologetic to defensive. ‘I don’t see what you’re getting so hot under the collar for, anyway. She’s another man’s wife. She doesn’t belong to you, me or anyone else in the department she might have fucked, except maybe Fergus, and if so I’d say he’s doing a very poor job of holding onto his property.’

It was the female player’s turn again. Rab moved his drink as she pulled the cue back then fired a white ball across the baize. Murray watched it sail into the depths of a corner pocket, sure as death.

He imagined taking the pool cue from her hand and smashing it into Rab Purvis’s beer-shined face. Teeth first, then nose. He’d leave the eyes alone. He’d always been squeamish about that kind of thing.

Lyle said, ‘Are you okay, Murray?’

He didn’t answer, just got to his feet and left before any more damage could be done.

Murray had been walking for a long time. Once a police car slowed and took a look at him, he ignored them and they drove on past, but their interest seemed to be the signal for his feet to start a winding route home. He left the main road and wandered uphill into the confluence of wide lonely streets that made up Park Circus, the jewel in the crown of Glasgow’s West End. Sometime after parlour maids and footmen decided they’d rather risk their health in munitions factories or the battlefield, the smart residences had been converted into hotels and offices. Now they’d been deserted for city centre lets and were slowly being reclaimed by speculative builders. Murray drifted past the weathered To Let signs, half-seeing the sycamore shoots sprouting from neglected guttering, the broken railings and chipped steps that might tumble the unsuspecting into the dank courtyards of window-barred basements. The plague-town atmosphere of the shuttered houses and empty streets matched his mood.

He took his mobile from his pocket and accessed the number he’d taken from a list in the front office and stupidly promised himself he’d never use. The night was starting to turn. He’d reached the top gate of Kelvingrove Park. Down below in the parkland’s green valley, birds were beginning to sing to each other. Murray pressed Call and waited while his signal bounced around satellites stationed in the firmament above, or whatever it did in that pause before the connection was made. He let it ring until an automated voice told him the person he was looking for was unavailable, then hung up and pressed Redial. This time the other end picked up and Professor Fergus Baine’s voice demanded, ‘Do you know what time it is?’

Murray cut the call. He sat on a wall and listened to the birds celebrating the return of the sun, then after a minute or two his phone vibrated into the stupid jingle he’d never bothered to change. He took it out, glanced at the caller display and saw the unfamiliar number flashing on the screen.

‘Hello?’ His voice was slurred.

‘Is that you, Murray?’ Fergus sounded wide-awake. Did he never sleep? ‘What do you want? Something urgent, I imagine?’

‘I wanted to speak to Rachel.’

It was ridiculous, all of it, stupid.

‘Rachel is asleep. Perhaps you can call back in the morning?’ The professor’s politeness was damning.

Somewhere in the recesses of Murray’s brain was the knowledge that now was the time to quit, while he still had the slim chance of writing the call off as a drunken indiscretion. But in the morning he would have lost his courage.

‘I need to talk to her now.’

‘Well, you can’t. Call back at a decent hour.’

The line went dead.

Murray stood and soberly surveyed the sunrise. A door in the empty street opened and some party-goers reeled out, their voices high and excited. A young girl drifted over and draped an arm around his shoulder.

‘Look, Dr Watson.’ She pointed unsteadily across the parkland. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’

The sun was fully up now and only a few streaks of pink remained smeared against the blue. The morning light glinted against the River Kelvin and caught in the trees, shifting their leaves all the greens and yellows in the spectrum. The birds had ceased their revels and calm had settled. Even the concrete hulk of hospital buildings in the distance seemed at one with the day. Murray looked at the new-minted morning and agreed that yes, it really was beautiful.

Chapter Seven

MURRAY WOKE SUDDENLY, not knowing what it was that had roused him. The blind was only half down, daylight filtering weakly into the room. He glanced at the radio alarm, but its plug had been pulled, the glowing numbers dead. Saturday or not, he’d intended to be at the library in Edinburgh for opening time, but his drunken self had opted for uninterrupted sleep. His clothes were draped carefully over the chair in the bedroom, the way they always were when he’d drunk too much. His watch lay on the top of the chest of drawers, amongst the kind of small change a man on a spree accumulates. Five past twelve. He felt like Dr Jekyll, his scholarly intentions ruined by a fiend of his own fabric. Murray slid from under the duvet, found his boxer shorts and pulled them on. Then he paused on the edge of the bed and listened.

Somewhere in the distance a road drill rumbled, but otherwise it was quiet. He went barefoot into the hallway and opened the front door, screening his half-nakedness behind it. He’d neglected to lock up the night before, but no keys trembled in the keyhole. Murray shut it gently. The rush of air caught on the hairs on his legs and he realised he was cold. There was a sudden clatter of footsteps in the stairwell outside. He felt ridiculously vulnerable standing there in only his boxers. Murray turned towards the bathroom, but the snap of the letterbox brought him back into the hallway and the letters sprawled on the mat.

He took his dressing gown from the hook on the back of the bathroom door and went into the kitchen. There was no mineral water in the fridge so he filled a mug with water from the tap, drank it quickly and then poured himself a second. Christ, was this what it was like to be an alcoholic? If Archie had felt this way every morning then it was no wonder his published work consisted of a single collection.

Murray didn’t want to think about the night before; the row with Rab, the phone call to Rachel, Rab and Rachel. The romance had been a knot in Murray’s stomach since it started, but now that it was over — more than over; now that it was ruined — the knot was replaced by a leaden deadness. He realised he’d been sustained by the thought that Rachel — Rachel, to whom he’d have addressed poems if only he could write — Rachel had chosen him. His knuckles tingled where he wished he’d slammed them into Rab’s face.

It wasn’t Rab’s fault. He should send him an email, apologise.

It changed everything; the knowledge that Rachel had slept with him too; Rab’s mouth kissing where he had kissed, his hands on her body. The thought disgusted him, even though he’d supposed she still slept with Fergus.

Fergus.

The phone call came back to him, the memory of the professor’s voice slick with anger. He groaned out loud. His sabbatical stretched ahead, twelve months for his head of department to nurse his wrath and engineer Murray’s successor.

He felt like going back to bed, pulling the sheets over his head and letting temporary death overwhelm the after-drink urge to kill himself. Instead he sat on the couch cradling the cup of water in his hands. A double-decker bus rumbled along the road outside. Murray watched the small ripples disturbing the surface of his drink.

Had there been a moment, a flash of mental clarity in the midst of the storm, when Archie had known he was going to die? He would have been wet already, soaked through by the rain and toppling waves, but the shock of water when the boat upturned must have taken the breath from him. How many times had he gone under before the final descent? How long had it taken? The sea sucking him down then spewing him back to the surface, the frantic struggle to stay afloat, the desperate grab for some purchase met by froth and foam. Or had he been knocked unconscious before he even hit the water? It was possible. The night had been wild, Archie sailing solo. Maybe he had fallen and hit his head against the side or been attacked by the boom. Archie had been careless with his life, sailing into the storm. Perhaps he’d been a careless sailor too. His body had never been found. It left no clues for the coroner. There was no convenient sheaf of newly forged poems slid safe in a waterproof envelope in his jeans pocket, no clues for the biographer either.

Murray wandered through to the kitchen and looked down onto the backcourt. An old man in carpet slippers was scavenging through the bins. He watched him for a while then went into the hallway, picked up the phone and dialled the police. The phone rang for a long time, and then a deep voice said, ‘Sandyford police station.’

‘Hello, there’s an old man out the back of my building going through the rubbish. He’s in his slippers and I’m worried he’s got dementia or something.’

‘Have you spoken to him?’

‘I’m not dressed yet.’

The voice at the other end of the phone was weary.

‘Do you think he’s looking for receipts or anything?’

‘Receipts?’

It was like a foreign word. Murray couldn’t think what it had to do with the conversation.

‘Identity fraud.’

It was in his mind to say that the old man would be welcome to his identity, but he answered, ‘No, I don’t think he’s doing any harm. I just thought he might be confused.’

‘Okay,’ the policeman sighed again. ‘Give me your name and address and we’ll send someone round when we can.’

‘When will that be?’

The voice contained the full quota of contempt that an early-rising man in uniform could hold for a civilian who had only now crawled out of bed.

‘I couldn’t say, sir.’

Murray gave his details, hung up and went back to the window. The old man was gone. He stood there for a moment debating whether to call the police again or get dressed and hunt for him amongst the backcourts. In the end he did neither, simply clicked the kettle on and lifted his mail from the table.

A bill from the factors, a leaflet from the local supermarket outlining their offers in colours bright enough to sicken the famished, a bank statement that would show he earned more than his needs, a plain white envelope and a letter stamped with the logo of Christie’s agents. He hesitated between the final two, and then tore at the seal of the agent’s letter.

Dear Dr Watson

Ms Graves has asked me to advise you that she has given your request serious consideration, but has regretfully decided to decline. Ms Graves has strong views on the privacy of artists, and while she wishes you every success in your critical analysis of Archie Lunan’s poetry, she does not see what a discussion of their time together would achieve. She now considers this correspondence closed and has asked me to bring to your attention the government’s recent anti-stalking legislation.

Yours sincerely

Foster James

Niles, James and Worthing

Murray swore and crumpled the letter into a ball.

The airwaves were full of people talking. Child-murderers and drugs casualties, people who had once sat next to someone famous on the bus, even the dead were in on the act, revealing scandals from beyond the grave. Everywhere people were blogging, Twittering and confessing; TV shows ran late into the night detailing private lives that would have been better kept private; but Archie’s old love would consider a second approach grounds for prosecution.

He smoothed the letter out and re-read it. The trick would be to bump into Christie casually, at a poetry reading perhaps. Somewhere with wine and easy company where he could lay on the charm, get her talking about old times before he admitted that yes, it was he who was writing Archie’s biography.

Some chance.

He smoothed the paper again, knowing it had to become part of his file. Did it tell him anything beyond what was said?

Murray whispered. ‘You never left, never got any distance. That’s why you care so much.’

He slit open the second envelope with his thumb, wondering what the penalties for stalking were and if stalkers were still allowed to teach. The green paper inside had been carefully folded in half. The type suggested that the sender had only recently come into possession of a word processor. Fonts battled for prominence, but boldest of all was the heading: God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Service times were detailed beneath.

Murray crumpled the page and balled it into the recycling bag, trying to smile at the thought that — Rachel aside — it was the best offer he’d had in a while.

Chapter Eight

MURRAY SEEMED TO have been waiting a long time. He decided to count to a hundred then ring the doorbell again. He’d reached eighty-five when a shadow appeared, advancing slowly towards him beyond the thickened safety glass.

‘Aye, aye, just a minute.’

Professor James’s voice was cracked with age and sharp with irritation. Murray thought of Macbeth’s porter, provoked by the knock at the castle door, comic in his anger, the moment of calm before the discovery of horror.

James fumbled with a set of keys and his sigh was audible through the locked door, but it was only when the professor pushed it wide that Murray realised how badly he’d aged. It was almost twenty years since they’d met, but somehow he’d still expected to see the stern-faced lecturer who had approached the lectern like a United Free Church of Scotland minister about to deliver a sermon to a congregation set on damnation. Pipe-smoking, bespectacled and bad-tempered, his stocky body packed into an old tweed jacket, James had been everything that Murray, fresh from a comprehensive school staffed by corduroy-clad progressives, had desired in a university professor.

James shook his hand. ‘Come away through.’

The professor had never been handsome, but he’d been a vigorous presence, with the barrel chest and bullet head of a pugilist. Old age had shrunk his body and bent his spine, rendering his face oversized and jutting. The edge of his skull was decorated with a patina of freckles and grave spots. The effect was grotesque, an ancient, nodding toddler with an eager grin.

‘This is a rare treat. Two names from the past in one day.’

Murray followed James down a small hallway decorated with photographs of the professor’s children and grandchildren. The glass front door had presumably been designed to let in light, but perhaps the house faced the wrong way, or maybe the day was too dull to extract any brightness from, because the hall was dark, the smiles in the pictures cast in shadows.

‘Two names?’

‘You and Lunan, outstanding students the pair of you.’

It was strange, hearing himself coupled with the poet.

‘My student years certainly feel a long time past.’

‘You’ll be part of a million pasts by the time you’re finished. Teaching confers its own brand of celebrity. You get hailed by folk you’ve no memory of. My tip is allow them do the talking and don’t let on you’ve not got a clue who they are.’ James led Murray into a burgled-looking sitting room. He lowered himself gently into a high-backed armchair and nodded towards a chintz couch. ‘Shift those papers and make yourself comfortable. As you can see, I’ve reverted to a bachelor state.’

Murray lifted a pile of handwritten notes and placed them on top of a stack of library books.

‘Ah, maybe not there. Helen’s coming round later to return those for me and if they’re hidden she’ll miss them.’ James scanned the room looking for a suitable berth amongst the books and documents crowding the room. ‘Why not put them. .’ He hesitated while Murray hovered uncertainly, papers in hand. ‘Why not put them here?’ He nodded to the floor in front of him. ‘That way if I forget about them they’ll trip me up and the problem will be redundant.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘It would be a suitable ending for an aged academic, tumbled by words.’

Traces of James’s dead wife clung to the house. Professor James would surely never have chosen the floral curtains that screened the small window in the hall, nor the sets of figurines gazing unadored from behind the dull glass of the china cabinet, but the tone of the place had shifted from a respectable family home with a feminine bent to an old bachelor’s bed-sit.

The kettle was in the sitting room, where it could be easily reached. An open packet of sugar, a cardboard box spilling tea bags and a carton of suspect milk stood next to it. The coffee table was stacked with books, each of the piles tiled together with the precision of a Roman mosaic. A smaller occasional table at James’s side held a glass of water, a selection of medication and yet more books. Murray noted a copy of Lunan’s Moontide on top of the pile, within easy reach of James’s right hand.

They parleyed a little about the department, but Murray sensed that the older man’s questions were merely form. The part of himself he had given to the university now occupied the books and papers that scattered the room. Murray’s presence was a brief distraction, a meeting on the shore before the tide of words dragged him back.

Murray reached into his rucksack, placed his tape recorder on top of one of the piles between them and pressed Record. James cleared his throat and his voice slowed to lecture-theatre pace.

‘I’ve only ever kept an appointments diary, so I’m afraid you won’t get any great insights from me, but I did look up the year in question and found a reference to a meeting I had with Lunan immediately after he was told his presence on our undergraduate course would no longer be required.’ James produced a daily diary stamped 1970, opened it at a bookmarked page and passed it to Murray. It had been a hectic week. James’s lectures were marked clearly in black ink, but the rest of the page was scattered with scrawls in several different colours, black battling blue and red, pencilled scribbles and underlinings. ‘He was a Tuesday appointment, afternoon of course. I don’t think Archibald Lunan was ever a friend of early mornings.’

Murray saw AL 2.30 jotted in the margin of a busy day. He asked, ‘How did Lunan react to being sent down?’

‘Sent down?’ The tone was mild. ‘I wasn’t aware we were in Oxford or Cambridge.’

‘No.’ Murray leaned back in his chair wondering how, for all his preparations, he could have forgotten the pedantry that lay behind James’s smile. ‘Was he upset?’

‘He may have been. But as far as I can recall, he took it like a man.’

‘Standard procedure would have been to send Lunan a letter. Why did you feel the need to inform him personally?’

‘I asked myself exactly the same thing when I saw the appointment in my diary.’

James’s manner shifted and Murray realised he’d hit on a question that interested the old man. He remembered this pattern from his undergraduate tutorials, the professor’s initial impatience set aside as he got into the meat of the matter, as if the verbal barbs were self-defence against boredom.

‘Let’s just say, whatever it was, I wouldn’t have trusted Lunan to anyone else in the department at that time. Even I could see we were a bunch of stuffed shirts.’ James moved slightly against his cushions as if trying to settle his bones. ‘Perhaps it says something about my own prejudices, but Archie looked belligerent. Long hair, cowboy moustache, scruffy clothes. . there’s a particular leather coat that sticks in the memory.’ James gave a scholarly chuckle. ‘Ten years later teachers and lecturers had adopted the same look, with the exception of a few diehards like myself, the tweed jacket and suede shoes brigade. But back then, in Scotland at any rate, that kind of image still had counterculture connotations. So couple it with Lunan’s poor attendance. . I was possibly worried he might get the stuffing knocked out of him. Despite his posturing, Lunan always struck me as delicate.’

‘In what way?’

‘He was sensitive, not a prerequisite for poets as you no doubt know. He looked the part, as I said, the leather coat, the ready fists, the all-too-frequently cut lip and black eye, but he wasn’t as robust as he made out.’

Murray asked, ‘How do you mean?’

James paused and looked at the ceiling as if searching for an explanation in its shadowed corners.

‘In those days I had a little group who used to meet once a month and discuss their own verse.’ James was being modest. His ‘little group’ had fostered a school of writers whose reputation had spread far beyond the literary circles of their city. Some of its members had later helped define their nation to the world. ‘The first poem Lunan presented was plagiarised. It was badly written enough to be the work of an undergraduate so there’s a good possibility I wouldn’t have rumbled him, if I hadn’t had a poem published in the same back issue of the journal he’d lifted it from.’ James shook his head in wonder. ‘Amazing.’

‘What did you do?’

‘My first instinct was to ask him about it in front of the group, but I resisted. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was already aware of Archie’s vulnerability. I simply took him aside and told him I knew. I think I expected that would be the last we saw of him, but for all he was weak, Archie was tough too. He came to the following meeting, this time with his own work. I must have been curious because I agreed to read it.’ James grimaced. ‘The poems he gave me were good. Not perfect, but original.’

Murray nodded towards Lunan’s book, perched on top of the pile at the professor’s elbow.

‘Did any of the poems he showed you appear in Moontide?’

‘One of them. “Preparation for a Wake”. It was revised and tightened up by the time the collection was published, of course, but the concept was there at the start: the raising of the dead man, the play on words between a wake and awake, the horror his drinking companions feel when their dead mate sits up ready to join in the merrymaking. The lyricism of the language wasn’t as successful as it was in the published version, but it was still remarkable.’

‘What did the rest of the group make of it?’

‘I don’t recall any particular debate. You have to remember it was a long time ago, and we were privileged to be at the birth of many remarkable pieces.’

James looked Murray in the eye. It was like a door slamming.

‘How did Archie get on with the group in general?’

‘Okay, as far as I remember. But as I said, it was a long time ago.’

Another door shut.

James gave the kind of smile favoured by American presidents on the stocks, but the professor’s teeth were yellowed, his gums pink and receding.

‘What about your own response to his work?

‘My own response?’

The professor made the question sound preposterous.

Murray smiled apologetically.

‘What was your initial reaction when you eventually got to see his writing?’

It was a sunny day outside, but the sitting room windows had taken on the smoky taint that glass acquires after a year or two’s neglect and the pair were stuck in murk and shadow. The dust that coated the air was formed from James and James’s wife, decayed and merged. Murray wanted to brush them from himself, but instead he smiled and waited.

James moved a hand against the arm of his chair, as if trying to make his mind up about something. When he spoke his voice was dangerously gentle.

‘Are you asking if I was jealous of Lunan’s ability?’

Murray hesitated, surprised by the revelation in the old man’s question.

‘Your professionalism is beyond reproach.’

James lifted the copy of Moontide from the table next to him and looked at Lunan’s Rasputin face. Somewhere a clock ticked.

‘I was jealous, of course, but I was jealous of others too. Maybe we were all jealous of each other, beneath the comradeship. I honestly don’t think I ever let it affect my dealings with him, and then. . well. . how can you be jealous of a dead man?’ He put the book back on the table and smiled at Murray. ‘But I am, of course, every time I read his poems.’ He laughed and gave the chair a slight slap as if rousing himself to business. ‘The strange thing was that the filched poem he’d presented was way beneath the standard of what he was capable of creating. That’s what I mean about a vulnerable streak. Archie was over-sensitive, lacking in confidence and yet at the same time burdened with an exaggerated ego.’

‘Not the most attractive combination.’

‘No, but Lunan could be attractive. He had the gift of the gab and a sense of the absurd. When he was in the right frame of mind, he was good company.’

‘And when he wasn’t?’

‘Morose, sarcastic, inclined to drunkenness. I had to ask him to leave the session on two separate occasions. If he’d been anyone else I would have told him not to come back. There were precedents: at least one drunken writer had been barred.’

‘But he was too talented to dismiss?’

James leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling again. It was a theatrical gesture, a pause that preceded a point to be underlined.

‘Talent’s an odd thing, essential of course, but no guarantee of anything. To be perfectly frank I doubted he had the discipline to succeed. I thought he was more in love with the idea of being a writer than with the need to create.’

‘What made you think that?’

‘Partly, I suppose, because I’d seen it before. We never turned any sober customers away from these get-togethers, you know. We didn’t advertise them, of course, it was strictly word of mouth, but from time to time you’d get romantic heroes wafting in. They couldn’t play an instrument so they thought they would wield a pen. It’s a very powerful image — young Thomas Chatterton, Percy Shelley, Jack Kerouac — the disaffected writer battling the world before dying young and beautiful.’ He laughed. ‘Well, maybe not so beautiful in Kerouac’s case, killing yourself with alcohol tends to be a bit bloating, but you get my drift.’ The professor sighed. ‘Working with young people for as long as I have, it’s inevitable that one is going to encounter untimely deaths, a car crash, an overdose, a climbing accident.’ He paused. ‘A drowning. It’s a cliché to say it’s a waste, and yet what else is it? A bloody waste.’ There was another pause as if he were silently mourning the young people who had died before their span. ‘So, to answer your question, yes I was aware of his talent early on, but I thought it squandered on him. Remember the poems I saw had potential, but they weren’t there yet.’ He grinned. ‘And there was I with my reservoirs of discipline and hard-won knowledge unable to create the magic that he could.’ James shook his head. ‘My God, I was ripe for some Faustian pact.’ His eyes met Murray’s. ‘But I wasn’t the only one.’

The professor laughed and a taint of decay scented the dead air of the darkened room. Murray cleared his throat then asked, ‘So how did he take his expulsion?’

‘I told you: stoically.’ The old man shook his head. ‘No, not stoically, casually. Shook my hand and wished me well. I was keen for Lunan to repeat the year, and he said he’d think about it. But I got the impression he was humouring me. It was infuriating. I remember I smelt beer on his breath and thought that if I were his father I’d knock some sense into him.’ James gave a second chuckle, though this time it sounded hollow. ‘That was the way we thought in those days. But we’d been brought up by men who’d gone to war, and gone to war ourselves.’ James sighed. ‘Lunan was like a man squandering an inheritance. He had the brains to do well, but he wasted them, the same way he wasted his talent and ultimately his life. He let that slip from him as casually as he idled away his university career.’ Professor James looked up at Murray; his too-big head grinning like a Halloween mask. ‘I’m glad you’re doing this book. Those of us who were left behind could have served his work better. Debts owed to the dead seem to grow heavier with time.’

Murray nodded, though he could think of no debt the old man might owe the dead poet.

The professor’s voice took on a lilting cadence and he recited,

‘My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –

It gives a lovely light!’

‘Archie despised poems that rhymed, but that describes him perfectly: a fragile light that burned brightly, but all too briefly.’

‘So you weren’t surprised to hear of his death?’

‘Surprised?’ James’s voice dropped an octave as if some of the shock still lingered on in his memory. ‘Of course I was surprised. I still remember discovering that he’d drowned.’

The old man’s head hung forward his mouth slightly open, a gleam of saliva wet behind the oxblood lips. The room sank into a long silence. Murray found himself watching the professor’s chest. It rested thin and unmoving behind the stains on his woollen pullover. When James eventually spoke his words were slow and measured, as if the old man had conjured up the past and was relaying events as they unfolded before him.

‘Valerie and I were going to watch our son Alexander play rugby. It must have been before he got his driving licence, because we were giving him a lift to the grounds. My daughter Helen was heading out on a date and Valerie was determined not to leave before her beau picked her up. She didn’t want them left in the house on their own, you see, worried about impropriety.’ James paused. Murray got the impression he was hesitating over a revelation, but then the professor continued. ‘The young man in question phoned to say he’d be delayed. So we were not a happy home that Sunday morning. There was Helen stewing because her mother didn’t trust her, Sandy desperate to get to the game, and Val finding tasks to delay our departure. Are you married?’

The question was unexpected and Murray stuttered slightly.

‘No, not yet.’

‘I recommend it, if you’re lucky like I was and manage to find the right woman, but it’s not all sunshine and roses. After a while you get an instinct for when to disappear and that morning was one of them. I made myself a coffee, lifted the Sunday Times from the kitchen table and sat in the car where I could read it in peace.’ There was a pause as James cleared his throat. ‘It was a tiny notice, just a few lines: “Man missing, believed drowned.” I’m not sure why it caught my eye. I’ve never been sailing unless you count rowing Val round Dunsappie Loch when we were courting, and I’m not particularly familiar with the part of the world where Lunan ended up, but for some reason I read it. I saw his name — “Archie Lunan, aged 25” — and knew then and there that he was dead.’

‘What made you so sure?’

Professor James hesitated.

‘I don’t know. I never considered Archie suicidal. Quite the opposite. I still think of him as someone with a keen appreciation of life. His nature poems are full of wonder at the world. Maybe it was just that he wasn’t the type for heroics. And the last time I’d seen him he’d been. .’ James paused again, as if searching for a word that would convey Archie’s state of being without slandering him. ‘He’d been over-elated.’

‘Under the influence of drugs?’

‘I’m not sure I would have been able to tell back then. But I don’t think so. It was more like the kind of rapture you see on the faces of the recently converted. Do you remember the Hare Krishna?’

‘Hare, hare, rama, rama?’

‘They were all over Edinburgh in those days. Helen was frightened of them when she was little. Too noisy, I suppose, with all their chanting and bells, but I liked them. They added a bit of colour to what was still a drab city. That’s what Archie reminded me of the last time I saw him, a freshly recruited Hare Krishna. One that hadn’t yet experienced living through a Scottish winter with a shaved head, wearing not much more than an orange bed sheet. Convention demanded I delivered my speech while Archie hung his head, but it was as if he couldn’t sit still. I remember he picked up a photograph of Helen and Sandy when they were toddlers and asked what they were called. I was so surprised, I told him. He nodded his head, as if to say “not too bad”, and then enquired how we’d managed to choose these particular names out of all the ones available in the world.’

‘Did you tell him to mind his own business?’

‘No, it was a poet’s question. Suddenly we weren’t tutor and student, but two wordsmiths. Maybe I already realised he was master over me in that realm. I told him they were family names. Archie laughed and said that would never be an option for him, but he didn’t sound bitter, just happy, as if he was anticipating a future in which he might father children and give them names that would help shape their future in turn.’ James’s voice faltered and he asked, ‘Do you mind if we take a break?’

He wanted to coax the old man on, but Murray closed his notebook.

‘Of course. Would you like me to come back some other time?’

‘Hadn’t you better get it all down before I pop off?’

He looked into the rheumy eyes and lied.

‘I’m sure you’ll be here for a while yet.’

James snorted.

‘I’m eighty-seven. My father died at eighty-six and my grandfather at eighty-two. I switch on the light in the front room at seven-thirty every morning and evening, it’s gloomy enough for it to show even in the so-called summer. If my opposite neighbour looks out and all’s in darkness, she has instructions to approach with caution.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s have a coffee. My taste buds are shot so, please, make it strong.’

Murray filled the kettle in a kitchen piled with dirty crockery. He noted the microwave, the discarded cardboard sleeves from consumed ready meals and recognised a scene from his own life.

James shouted from the other room, ‘Ignore that mess. Irene will be in tomorrow with her mop and brushes to put everything to rights.’

Murray brought the kettle back into the lounge, set it on the dining table and plugged it in, wishing he’d had the foresight to bring along a packet of biscuits.

‘Maybe I should get Irene’s number.’

‘It’s a closely guarded secret. It’d be less trouble for you to get married. Not that that would necessarily solve your domestic problems these days, from what I’ve seen.’

The kettle reached its peak. Murray poured hot water over the instant brown stuff he’d already spooned into their mugs.

‘Sadly not.’

‘Don’t try and ingratiate yourself with misogyny. Times have moved on, and for the better too. Look at your head of department and his wife, top-class academics the pair of them, though Rachel is the better scholar, of course.’ The old man looked at him slyly. ‘How do you find Fergus Baine as head of department?’

Murray wondered if news of his affair with Rachel had spread as far as here, the self-contained bed-sit in the heart of what used to be a family home. He took a sip of coffee. He’d put in too much of the instant powder and it tasted bitter on his tongue.

‘Very efficient.’

‘Yes, efficiency has a habit of propelling men to the top.’

Tiredness was slackening the professor’s face. If Lunan had been a bright, short-lived flame, James was wax, his features melting with time. Murray turned the tape recorder back on.

‘Tell me about Christie Graves. Did you see much of her?’

James sighed, as if disappointed to be abandoning the subject of Murray’s head of department.

‘Not at first, but pretty soon Christie became part of the package. She was Archie’s shadow, or maybe he was hers, who knows? She was very beautiful in a way that was fashionable back then: big eyes, pale skin and that red hair, very pre-Raphaelite. She’s always credited as being part of the group and, in a way, I suppose she was. She was certainly there a lot that year, but she never contributed anything, just sat there quietly with a Giaconda-like smile on her face. It irritated the hell out of me.’

‘She must have surprised you later.’

‘Oh, yes, Christie was a big surprise. Of course, in a way, Lunan’s death was the making of her. Maybe that’s a resurrection of sorts, though it didn’t seem so at the time.’ James took a sip of his coffee. The ancient goblin features drooped with the weight of memories. ‘There was no funeral. Lunan’s body was lost but somebody organised a wake in Mather’s, and someone else was mawkish enough to give a reading of “Preparation for a Wake”. Needless to say, Archie didn’t rise up like some thirsty messiah, ready to join in the drinking. Those that did attend got horribly drunk, myself included. Christie stayed away. I can’t say I blamed her. I only saw her once after Lunan drowned, quite soon afterwards in fact, walking down the Bridges. She’d cut her hair. I remember being terribly touched by that. She’d had such beautiful hair, been quite aware of it too. But it was gone, hacked off. I crossed the street to offer my condolences. She saw me, met my eyes and nodded, but she didn’t stop. I didn’t hear anything of her until a few years later when her book came out.’

‘What did you make of it?’

‘What could you make of it? It was good. A funny word to apply to a book like that, but it was. Terrible and good.’

‘Did you think any of it was based on fact?’

‘What does it matter? Would it make it a better book?’

‘Not necessarily better, but it’s an interesting question, from my perspective.’

James leaned back in his chair and raised his wilting features to the ceiling, showing the full stretch of his tortoise neck.

‘Authenticity. . was it authentic? It existed, I held it in my hands and it impressed me. I think it had something better than authenticity. It had integrity, and that’s all the truth that we can ever hope for.’

James accompanied Murray to the front door despite his protestations that he could find the way himself. They shook hands on the doorstep and James asked, ‘Are you going to interview her? Christie?’

‘Apparently not. My requests have been turned down.’

‘A pity. Now that would have been a coup.’

He was halfway down the path when James called him back.

‘It’s up to you what kind of book you want this to be, but I think you have to find a way of seeing her.’

The older man was a head shorter. Murray looked down into eyes sparked with youth. He remembered James’s description of Lunan as an over-elated religious convert and thought it could also be applied to this elderly face brimming with conviction.

‘Easier said than done. She’s threatened to prosecute me if I try.’

Professor James snorted.

‘And you’re going to let that stop you?’

He shrugged and the professor shook his head in mock despair.

‘Let me tell you something. My father was an engineer at Barr & Strouds, a stalwart of the union, free with his opinions on everything bar sex. He only gave me one piece of advice in that area. A woman you don’t have to chase is a woman not worth having.’

Murray softened his voice with the respect due to dead fathers.

‘I’m sure he was a clever man, but that particular counsel is as out of date as mass industrialisation. Anyway, I want to interview her about a troubled episode in her past, not marry her.’

‘What if she’s simply playing hard to get?’

‘Why should she?’

‘I don’t know. Habit? She set herself against talk of Archie for sound reasons, but time has passed and times have changed. Maybe she needs to be reminded of that.’ James put his hand on Murray’s arm. ‘You’re a bright lad. I’m sure you’ll manage if you set your mind to it.’

Chapter Nine

MURRAY SHOVED THE carrier bag of books into his rucksack, hefted it onto his shoulder and stepped out of the second-hand bookshop into Edinburgh’s West Port. He hadn’t found any reference to Lunan in the poetry journals the book dealer had phoned him about, but the bubbled capitals and monochrome type of the adverts for now defunct magazines and readings long past had provided a quick spark of connectivity to the poet’s era. Time travel through typeface. The thought made him smile.

He waited at the traffic lights then crossed the road, his mind turning towards lunch; maybe a bowl of soup somewhere in the Grassmarket where he could jot down a couple of points that had occurred to him while browsing the bookshelves. He remembered a quiet café where the service was slow and customers could linger. Perhaps he’d allow himself to continue perusing the journals he’d bought, before returning to the library. He might yet justify the leaden purchase by finding some passing reference to Lunan or his associates. The day was taking shape.

He was trying to remember where the nearest ATM was when he saw his brother’s girlfriend turning the corner. Lyn was wearing her work clothes: flat shoes, loose-fitting jeans and a T-shirt topped by a long-sleeved blouse. Murray recalled her joking that she would wear a burka to work if she could get away with it.

‘Except the filthy buggers would imagine I was wearing head-to-toe Ann Summers underneath.’

Jack had asked if Ann Summers stocked head-to-toe outfits and she’d given him a wink.

‘You’d be amazed.’

Lyn was too intent on talking to the scruffy man in an electric wheelchair who was rolling along beside her to have seen Murray yet. The bookshop was three streets since, the nearest turning a block ahead, but he was almost level with a pub. Murray stepped up his pace and slipped smartly through its door.

His first impression was of darkness and music cut through with the scent of stale beer and something else, a sharp tang that was close to sweat. The couches that lined the room were empty and only a couple of the bar stools were taken. But either the pub’s clientele favoured late lunches, or the management were simply optimistic business would pick up, because they had laid on entertainment.

On a stage in the far corner a tall woman in a G-string lazily circled a silver pole. The dancer’s face remained blank, but Murray’s entrance seemed to be the cue for her to up-tempo. She gripped the pole with both hands and launched herself into a spin that lifted both feet from the air and twirled her into a kaleidoscope of

Breasts

Bottom

Breasts

Bottom

Breasts

Bottom

She hooked a leg around the prop, slowing her progress again and slid into the splits. Murray restrained a polite urge to clap. No one else seemed impressed. The barman glanced at Murray over the newspaper he’d leant against the beer taps, and the men on the bar stools kept their eyes on their pints, all except for a compact man in a grey sweat-suit who turned and looked straight at him.

The dancer resumed her slow gyrations and Murray made his way to the bar, readjusting his rucksack. He’d always liked Lyn. Would meeting her after his defection from Jack’s exhibition really be worse than a drink in this dump? But talking to her would mean talking about his brother, and he couldn’t face that yet.

The music slid into a series of judders. The dancer ignored it for a moment, then when no one moved to remedy the noise shouted, ‘Malky, are you going to fix that CD or do you want me to start fucking breakdancing?’

The barman roused himself from his newspaper, took the disc from the player and wiped it against a bar towel.

‘I’d like to see you fucking moonwalking. On the moon.’

His voice was too low to reach the stage, but one of the men laughed and the girl threw the barman a look that promised later suffering.

‘You’ve blotted your copybook there,’ the man said.

The barman shrugged his shoulders and slid the disc back in the machine. Sade started singing about a smooth operator and the girl began weaving her hips, keeping her movements close and contained, as if dancing inside an invisible box.

Murray slid his hand into his jeans pocket and found a two-pound coin.

‘Coke, please.’

The grey man on the bar stool turned and gave him the smallest of smiles. His voice was low, but Murray had no trouble hearing him over the beat of the music.

‘Are you a member, sir?’

Murray took in the uncarpeted floor, the couches draped with cheap cotton throws, the stubbled bartender back in the sports page of his tabloid.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘No problem. I can sign you in.’

‘Cheers.’

He hoped the man wouldn’t expect a drink in exchange.

‘There’s a ten pounds entrance fee for non-members.’

Murray felt his eyes drifting back towards the stage. He forced himself to look at the bouncer.

‘I wasn’t planning on staying.’

‘Fair enough.’ The man slid from his stool and put a firm grip on Murray’s elbow, but his tone was as courteous as Professor Fergus Baine correcting a departmental rival’s slip in literary theory. ‘I’ll see you to the door.’

‘I mean I’m only stopping a minute.’

‘In that case it’ll be a tenner.’

‘The thing is,’ Murray gently disengaged himself and leant against the bar, striving for a mateyness he’d long known was outside his repertoire, ‘there’s a girl I want to avoid.’

The barman raised his eyes from the paper.

‘I ken the feeling.’

Murray smiled at him, keen to win an ally.

‘So if you’d just let me stop here for a moment, three minutes at the most, you’d be doing me a huge favour. I’m happy to buy a drink.’

He opened his palm, revealing the two-pound coin within. It looked pathetic and he closed his fingers round it again.

‘No problem.’ The bouncer’s voice was slick with the complacency of a school bully extorting dinner money from a swot. ‘You can stay for as long or as short a time as you want, but the fee remains the same, ten pounds.’ His smile showed surprisingly white teeth. ‘We accept all major credit cards.’

Murray wondered if Lyn and her companion had already passed by, but there had been a vintage vinyl shop between them and the pub. The man in the wheelchair had looked the type to linger at its window.

‘I’m happy to buy a pint, but you can’t really expect me to pay ten quid for one drink?’

The bouncer put his hand back on Murray’s elbow.

‘Be more like fourteen quid, mate, the drinks aren’t free. Anyway, it depends how much you want to avoid her.’

They were approaching the exit now. Murray made one last appeal.

‘What harm would it do?’

‘Immeasurable, mate.’ The man nodded towards the girl on stage. ‘Strictly-Cum-Dancing would report me to the boss, and I’d be out on my ear.’ He opened the door. ‘Nothing personal.’ And gave Murray a gentle shove out into the sunshine.

Murray scanned the street. Lyn and her companion were walking away from the pub, their backs towards him. He was safe. He grinned at the bouncer. ‘I’ll let you get back to the Ritz then.’

The man gave Murray a good-natured smile.

‘Is that her there, the skinny piece with Ironside?’

‘No.’

Murray started to walk away, just as the bouncer shouted, ‘Hey, doll, he’s over here.’

Lyn turned. A look of confusion clouded her face, but she raised a hand in greeting. She said something to her companion and started to walk back to where Murray now waited.

The grey man grinned. ‘Next time, pay the entrance fee.’ He let the door swing behind him, shutting out the darkness and music, leaving Murray to face his brother’s girlfriend.

‘Hello, stranger.’

Lyn’s expression was out of kilter with the jaunty greeting and Murray wondered if she’d noticed what kind of pub he’d been in. Usually when they met they kissed, but neither of them made the first move and the moment was lost.

‘Hi.’ He readjusted his heavy bag, fighting the urge to take it from his back. ‘How are you?’

‘Good.’ Lyn pushed a strand of loose hair away. The sun was in her face and she narrowed her eyes as she looked up at him. He was reminded of a photograph Jack had taken of her wearing the same expression, battling the light. ‘I didn’t know you were coming through.’

Her voice was free of reproach, but he felt it anyway.

‘I’m here most days at the moment, working up at the library.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘Aye, fine.’ He sought for something else to say. ‘I’m getting into it.’

Lyn turned towards the man in the chair.

‘Frankie, this is my brother-in-law, Murray. Murray, this is Frankie. We were just on our way to the shops.’

Frankie pulled his hat up on his forehead and stared Murray out.

‘Any good in there?’ He nodded back towards the pub.

Lyn said, ‘Frankie.’ Half-cajoling, half-warning, and Murray realised that his visit wasn’t a secret.

‘No.’ He tried to keep it light. ‘Ten pounds entrance fee and the music was too loud.’ He looked at Lyn. ‘I went in by mistake.’

She glanced at the A-board outside on the street advertising: LAP DANCING, FANTASY CABINS, EXECUTIVE BOOTHS, EXOTIC DANCERS, OFFICE DOs AND STAG PARTIES WELCOME.

‘Easy done.’

‘No disabled access.’ Frankie zizzed the chair into life. ‘That’s against the law.’ He rolled back and forth, letting the tyres hiss his impatience. Come on, come on, come on, come on.

A wheel nudged Murray’s foot and he took a sharp step back.

‘Frankie.’ Lyn’s voice held an unfamiliar, scolding edge. ‘We’re only going to Lidl’s. It’ll still be there if we spare a moment to say hello.’

‘But some of those great offers won’t be, Lyn.’ Frankie glanced up at Murray. Standing, he might have been the taller of the two. ‘No offence, man, but you know how it is.’

Murray didn’t, but he nodded anyway.

‘I wouldn’t want to hold you back.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Frankie snapped the electric chair around and careered ahead.

‘Jesus fuck.’ There was a break in Lyn’s voice that might have been amusement or despair. ‘Watch him go. I’d like to get my hands on the genius that issued him with that thing.’

‘They must be cracking offers. Should you go with him?’

‘He’s a grown man.’

‘Difficult customer?’

‘Easy customers needn’t apply.’

‘Aye, I suppose.’ He nodded back at the pub. ‘I really didn’t notice it was a go-go bar before I went in.’

‘Go-go bar.’ Lyn laughed. ‘You’ve some turn of phrase.’ She looked beyond him, following Frankie’s progress with her eyes, before turning her attention back to Murray. ‘It wouldn’t be any of my business if you did.’

‘But I didn’t.’

‘Must have been a shock to the system.’

‘A wee bit. I was looking for somewhere to get a bowl of soup.’ They laughed together and for the first time he was glad they’d met. Lyn glanced back in the direction Frankie had taken. He was a block ahead now, talking to a Big Issue vendor. Frankie reached into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and the vendor sparked them both up.

‘I’d better go after him, our bus is about due. Have you got time to walk to the stop with me?’

It was the opposite direction from the one he’d intended taking, but Murray nodded and they started to follow slowly in Frankie’s wake, like parents who had let their child run ahead on a weekend walk.

‘So is Frankie your main man at the moment?’

‘There’s a horrible thought, but now you mention it, I do seem to spend more time with him than I do with anyone else, including Jack.’

‘How is Jack?’

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

‘I will, when I have a moment.’

Lyn sighed.

‘I’ll tell him you were asking after him.’

‘Thanks.’ Murray hesitated. ‘Could you tell him that I might. .’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘What?’

Lyn started to run.

‘That’s our bus.’

Ahead of them Frankie stuck out his arm and a maroon double-decker slowed to a halt. Lyn was fast, but she was too short to be a sprinter. Murray shouldered his cursed bag and broke into a dash. The bus’s suspension sank until its platform was level with the pavement, and its doors concertinaed open. Frankie raised his arm in farewell to his friend and started to steer himself aboard. Murray shouted, ‘Hoi!’

The vendor saw Murray and put a foot on the bus’s platform, holding it there.

‘Cheers.’ Murray’s words were a whisper. He reached into his pocket and his hand closed on the same two-pound coin he’d tried to spend on a Coke. It was too much, but he pressed it into the vendor’s palm anyway.

‘Nae bother.’ The man stepped free of the bus. ‘They’re not going anywhere.’

He offered him a paper, but Murray shook his head and climbed aboard.

The driver had unlatched the door of his cab and managed to open it a crack, but Frankie had parked his chair against it, blocking his exit. Murray smelt smoke, saw the lit cigarette in Frankie’s hand and understood. The driver sank back into his seat, casting an envious glance at Frankie’s Mayfair.

‘Listen, mate, I’m off shift at five whether I get to the depot or not, but there’s folks here got things to do and you’re stopping them getting to where they’re going and doing them. Why not let them get on their way?’

‘You heard the driver.’ An elderly woman leaned out from her place halfway down the aisle. ‘Get rid of the cigarette or sling your hook.’

Frankie turned his chair to face his audience.

‘Do you know the first person to ban tobacco? Adolf Hitler.’ Frankie drew forth his pack of Mayfairs and slid another cigarette free. ‘Sometimes folks can be too obedient.’

An old man got to his feet. ‘I’m betting it was that kind of lip landed you in that chair.’ He shifted his shopping bags and seemed about to go down the aisle. But the old women around him broke into choruses of ‘Well said, Mr Prentice’ and ‘You tell him, Jim’, and he stayed where he was, chest puffed up beneath his anorak, an elderly pasha surrounded by his well-wrapped-up harem.

‘What’s going on?’

The run had freed Lyn’s hair from its clasp. It burst around her face in a riot of tangles. Her cheeks were flushed, though whether from the exertion or annoyance it was hard to tell.

Murray turned towards her, but it was Frankie who spoke.

‘I was holding the bus for you.’

He took the cigarette from his mouth, expertly nipped its lit end and placed it back in the pack.

The driver shut the doors and restarted the engine.

‘Fuck’s sake, I would have waited if you’d asked.’

‘Aye, right.’ Frankie backed his chair into the space by the door, slotting himself next to a toddler in a buggy. The child gave him a baleful look and Frankie nodded back. ‘How you doing?’

‘Sorry.’ Lyn scrabbled in her purse and put the fares in the slot.

‘Don’t apologise, dear.’ The driver issued the tickets, smiling sadly like a man who’d seen it all now. ‘You’ve got my sympathy if you’re shackled to that article.’

Murray said, ‘She’s not. .’

But the driver’s eyes were on the road, the bus gliding from the stop, just as Murray remembered he hadn’t intended on travelling anywhere except the library.

In the end he went round the supermarket with them too, listening to Lyn and Frankie discussing the relative merits of the produce on offer. Lyn asked him if he didn’t want to get a few things for himself, but he shook his head. He wouldn’t know where to start. Frankie, on the other hand, seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

Frankie rolled to a halt by the wine shelves, scanning them with an expert eye. ‘I think we’ll have a couple of bottles of that cheeky burgundy on special, please, Lyn.’

Murray noticed Frankie checking out Lyn’s rear as she reached up to the top shelf to retrieve the wine.

‘You enjoy cooking?’

‘Beats starving.’

Lyn put the bottles amongst their other groceries and they continued their slow patrol of the shelves.

‘Frankie’s a bit of a gourmet.’

‘Food’s one of the few pleasures left to me.’

Lyn snorted. ‘Plus the booze, fags and all the rest.’

‘All the rest? Are you offering?’

Lyn gave the wheelchair a small push Murray was sure contravened professional guidelines. She looked at Murray.

‘So tell me more about how the research is going.’

It occurred to him that she was humouring him the way she’d just humoured Frankie, the way she probably humoured Jack.

‘It’s dull. You know what I’m like when I get onto that, a train-spotting stamp-collector.’

Murray picked a bottle of oil from a shelf. It had red and black peppercorns suspended in it. He turned the bottle on its side and watched them slide slowly through the yellow viscous, like migrating stars in a steady firmament.

‘Come on, you know I like hearing about your mad poet.’

The oil was the same pale yellow as lager. He remembered a night in the pub years ago, Lyn pouring the remains of her pint over Jack in response to something she’d deemed sexist. He remembered the surprise of it, Jack’s expression and his own astonished shock of admiration. He remembered laughing then taking a deep draught of his own drink before drenching his brother with the dregs. Their drunken dash to outrun the bartender’s curse — Yous’re all barred!

He put the oil back on the shelf.

‘I don’t think Archie was mad, not at the start anyway. Sure, he behaved crazily sometimes, but from what I’m hearing he tanked it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t drugs somewhere in the mix too.’

‘You sound almost hopeful.’

‘It’s in the past. I can’t fix it. All I can do is make sure I get the facts right.’

Lyn’s voice was soft.

‘Can’t you cut your brother’s exhibition the same slack?’

The comparison bewildered him.

‘As long as I’m around, our dad isn’t in the past. I’m surprised Jack doesn’t feel the same way.’

‘He does, Murray. He just has a different way of expressing it.’

Perhaps Lyn sensed the pressure at the back of his eyes, because she took another tin from the shelf and asked again if he was sure he didn’t need anything.

* * *

The three of them waited together at the checkout behind an elderly couple. The old man placed his wire shopping basket at the end of the counter and his wife set four tins of dog food, a packet of cornflakes and a bottle of Three Barrels brandy on the conveyor belt. It scrolled forwards and Lyn started to unload Frankie’s trolley.

‘You had something you wanted me to tell Jack.’

‘Did I?’

He didn’t want to discuss anything in front of the other man.

‘Yes, just before the bus came. It got lost in the commotion.’

‘It wasn’t important.’

The cashier started to check their stuff through and Lyn and Frankie began bagging it. Murray moved to help, but Frank said, ‘You’re all right, mate, we’ve got a system.’

Lyn gave him an apologetic look.

‘Weeks of practice. Frankie and I have to get all this back now, but that’ll be me finished for the day. Maybe we could grab a coffee, if you’ve got time?’

He knew that coffee was code for pub. It would be easy to go with her, slip into the comfort of alcohol and company, allow his defences to drift until he was willing to become reconciled to Jack’s betrayal of their father’s dignity.

‘Sorry, I shouldn’t even be here. I’ve masses of work to do and I’ve got to start my packing.’

‘Is that what you were going to tell me?’

‘What?’

‘That you’re going away.’

‘For a week or so, to Lismore.’

She laughed.

‘For a moment I thought you were going to tell me you were emigrating.’

‘No, just a wee trip to fill in some background. It’s where Archie ended up.’

‘Where he drowned?’

‘Yes, I thought I’d take my notes up there, get a feel for the place.’

He meant get a feel for Archie, but it would sound stupid out loud.

The bags were packed. Lyn slung one on the back of the wheelchair. Frankie rolled his wheels to and fro then said, ‘Stick another couple on there.’

‘I don’t want to topple you.’

‘Nah, that’ll not happen again. I’ve got the hang of it now.’

Lyn made a face behind his back, but she did as he asked and the three of them made their way slowly out of the supermarket. The sky had clouded over in the time they’d spent shopping and it felt as if it might rain. The promise of the day had gone. Cars edged along on the main road, but the landscape beyond the shop held a concrete bleakness that made it easy to imagine the bombed-out world of Archie’s sci-fi novel. Lyn placed a hand gently on the back of Frankie’s chair, steadying the bags. She’d restrained her curls, but the wind blowing across the car park threatened to free them again. She pushed a strand of hair from her eyes and gave Murray a smile.

‘Are you sure about that coffee?’

‘I’ve got to get back.’

‘To your dead poet?’

‘He’s beckoning through the waves.’

And for a moment it was as if Murray could see Lunan against the dreary expanse, hair floating wild in the water, arms outstretched as he drifted with the current.

‘Excuse me, Lyn.’ Frankie’s voice was weighted with exquisite politeness. ‘I’m going to have to use the toilet.’

‘No problem.’ She was brisk, all business now. ‘The staff facilities have good access here. Can you hold on while I get someone to let us in?’

‘It’s not an emergency.’ Beyond the grey of the car park a Burger King sign glowed red. Frankie nodded towards it. ‘Why don’t we go over there and you can have your coffee.’

‘Ach, I don’t know, Frank. .’

‘If you grab me an Evening News, I can sit on my own and let yous have a catch-up. I don’t mind.’

Lyn looked at Murray. He shrugged his shoulders, defeated. It was nigh-on forty years since Archie had drowned, his corpse was long since gone and the best Murray would do was revive his reputation. It could wait an hour or so.

‘Why not?’

Murray went into the Burger King with Frankie and the shopping bags, while Lyn went in search of a newsagent’s. He followed him awkwardly to the door of the disabled toilets. Frankie halted his chair.

‘Do you like to watch?’

‘No.’

‘So fuck off. I might not be able to piss standing up any more, but I’m still capable of wiping my own arse.’

‘One of the few pleasures left to you?’

‘Not even close, mate, not even close.’ He beckoned Murray towards him and when he got close whispered with breath that smelt of smoke and onions, ‘Tell your brother to take better care of her or I’ll be in like Flynn.’

Murray’s snort of amusement surprised them both.

‘I’ll pass the message on.’

‘Laugh all you want, pal. She’s too good for that poofy git. I’m what they call a catch these days.’

‘I guess times are tough.’

‘Not for me, they’re not. I’m getting decent money, I’ve got my own place and I’ve knocked the drugs. But do you know what my biggest advantage is?’

‘What?’

‘I’m a project. Lassies like a project. I’ll let her reform me, don’t you worry.’

He leered and rounded the chair into the cubicle.

Murray bought three coffees, garnishing his tray with a few sugar sachets and little tubs of whatever substituted for milk. He set it all at a table near the window then got out his mobile. There were no messages. He started to compose a text to Rachel but only got as far as Sorry before he spotted Lyn entering with Frankie’s paper. Murray shut the phone down without pressing Send. He couldn’t think what he would have said. After all, he could hardly describe himself as a catch.

Frankie sat on the other side of the room, resolute about ‘giving them space’, though Murray noted he’d chosen a seat with a clear view of their table. Lyn sipped her coffee.

‘We’d best not take too long. So what have you been up to?’

‘Nothing. The usual, just work.’

‘Just work. You should take a tip from Frankie’s book, get out more.’

‘I’ve been out all day.’

‘Visiting strip clubs, browsing round supermarkets. It’s some life you literary doctors lead.’

‘It’s all go.’

Murray drank some of his coffee. It had been a mistake coming here. The sooner he finished it, the sooner he could leave.

‘Will you come and see us before you head off?’

It was as if Lyn had read his mind.

‘Sure, if there’s time.’

She nodded. They both knew that there wouldn’t be. Murray felt Frankie’s eyes on them. Was it pathetic to feel jealous of a paraplegic? A recently homeless paraplegic, if he was under Lyn’s care.

Lyn regarded him over the rim of her paper cup.

‘Jack’s exhibition has had good reviews.’

‘Great.’

His brother’s treachery soured the pleasure Murray would normally have felt in his success.

Lyn held his gaze in hers.

‘Is that all you’re going to say?’

He shrugged, sullen as a recalcitrant first-year presented with a low mark they knew they deserved.

‘I met one of the other artists. Cressida something. How’s she getting on?’

Lyn raised her cup to her mouth.

‘Cressida Reeves? She’s more Jack’s friend than mine. They were at art college together.’

‘So were you.’

‘Yes, but they were in the same intake. I didn’t appear on the scene until Jack’s third year. I’d not seen her for years before this show.’ She looked at Murray. ‘Did you see her work?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe you should.’ Her voice was dry. ‘Cressida puts a lot of herself into it.’

‘Preferable to exploiting someone else’s weaknesses.’

Lyn sighed. She took another sip of coffee and kept the paper cup cradled in her hands as if trying to thaw them, though the fast-food joint was warm after the chill of outside.

‘Jack should have told you what his exhibition was about, but you can’t think badly of him for creating it.’

‘He didn’t create anything, just pointed a camera and took a shot.’ Murray folded his hand into the shape of a gun and pulled the trigger. ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’

‘Suit yourself.’ Lyn’s face flushed red. She put her cup down and glanced over at Frankie. ‘I’d best get going.’

He wanted to apologise, but instead asked, ‘You’re supporting disabled people now?’

There was a shine to her eyes, but her voice was steady.

‘No, same job, same chronic pay. Frank’s an existing client who happens to have become disabled.’

What was wrong with him that he couldn’t feel pity for a homeless man in a wheelchair?

‘Sleeping on the streets has got to be tough in his condition.’

‘He’s not on the streets any more. That’s why I’m here, supporting his transition from hostel to independent living.’

‘So a lucky accident?’

She gave him a look, but didn’t rise to the bait.

‘It wasn’t so much an accident as. . I’m not sure what you’d call it. A cry for help? A drug-inspired psychotic episode? One day Frankie finds himself walking near the M8, no idea how he got there, just comes to, aware of the lights of the cars going by. It’s dark, but it’s winter and it’s only around five in the afternoon, so it’s busy, everyone coming home from work. He sees a motorway bridge, climbs up, and throws himself over the top.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yes, shit.’

‘Did he cause a pile-up?’

‘No. Jack says that Frankie’s the luckiest suicide artist in the business. He hit the roof of a lorry, bounced off the edge and onto the central reservation. It should have killed him, but instead he ended up in a chair. The funny thing is, we’d tried to re-house Frank before, but it was a disaster. It was too much for him, the responsibility. But ever since he got out of hospital he seems better. I mean, he’s still got problems — some days we do this he’s three sheets to the wind — but he’s trying to help himself. He’s cooking — he was a chef when he was in the army — and he’s trying to look after the flat. He’s not missed an appointment with me. Yeah, he’s still a pain sometimes. But it’s like Frank’s decided to live. Almost as if suicide’s been the making of him.’

‘He fancies you rotten.’

‘They all fancy me. I’m the only woman they get to speak to who isn’t a barmaid.’

‘So the feeling’s not mutual?’

‘God, Murray, Jack’s right about you. You’re not of this world.’ Lyn glanced at Frankie again. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘I guess you do, the world’s waiting.’

Lyn’s face flushed. She pushed a curl from her eyes and leaned across the table, so close he felt her words on his face.

‘It’s my fucking job, Murray, and it’s just as important as your book or Jack’s bloody art.’

‘I know that.’

She looked like she wanted to slap him, but she stretched over and kissed him instead. ‘No, you don’t.’ She squeezed his arm and was gone.

He watched them through the window as they made their way towards the taxi rank. Frankie said something and Lyn laughed, shaking her head as if amused against her will.

Murray poured more sugar into his cold coffee and stirred. Lyn was right, of course, her job was vital, he of all people should know that. But still, he couldn’t reconcile the thought that fetching Frankie’s messages was as important as uncovering Archie Lunan’s life. There were a million drunks in the city; Archie had been one himself. But he had also been a poet, and there were precious few of those in the world.

He took out his Moleskine notebook and looked again at the list of names he’d copied from Archie’s jotter:

Danny

Denny

Bobby Boy

Ruby!

I thought I saw you walking by the shore

Ramie

Moon

Jessa* * *

Tamsker

Saffron

Ray — will you be my sunshine?

Perhaps Lunan had whiled away the hours composing names for the protagonists of his sci-fi novel, but the jaunty phrases suggested something else. Murray read the list again, and wondered what it could be.

Chapter Ten

THERE WAS A voicemail message on Murray’s mobile. He checked Missed Calls and saw an unfamiliar Glasgow number. How had he got to the point where an unfamiliar number was a relief? The voice was female and infused with the same assured tones that dominated the university’s corridors and lecture halls.

‘Hello, I’m phoning with regard to your advert in the TLS. My late husband Alan Garrett did some research into Archie Lunan’s death.’ The woman stalled as if expecting someone to pick up, then continued less confidently, ‘Anyway, give me a call if you’re interested.’ A number and email address followed, succeeded by a click on the line as the widowed Mrs Garrett hung up.

Rachel had suggested the advert to him on one of their early dates. She’d driven them swiftly along the unlit road, the dark nothingness of the reservoir below them, the lights of the city trembling in the beyond. Rachel had guided the car surely round the tricky bends and Murray had tried not to dwell on how well she knew the road. She’d slowed as they got closer to their destination, uncertain at the last moment of their turning, and a stag had started into the full beam of their headlights. Murray caught a glimpse of bright eyes blackly shining, a candelabra of horn, before the creature darted back into the night. He remembered a news report about a driver colliding with a stag, the beast’s antlers piercing first the windscreen, then the man’s chest, the injured animal tossing its head frantically trying to escape, the ruin of bodies found hours later.

He asked, ‘Are you okay?’

Rachel laughed, ‘Yes, that was a close one’, and pressed down on the accelerator. The turn-off appeared soon after on their left and she bumped the car gently into the pitch-darkness of the car park. ‘Here we are.’

He pushed his chair back. Rachel killed the engine and clambered quickly from the driver’s seat into his lap. They were kissing, her hands moving thrillingly down to his fly, his fingers unfastening her blouse, tracing the line between the lace of her bra and her not-yet-familiar-breasts, when Murray saw the shadowy form of another car resting mutely in the darkness. He stayed his hand.

‘There’s someone else here.’

‘Mmmm.’ Rachel had set him free and was rubbing herself against him. She wasn’t wearing any knickers and the thought that she’d driven him there naked beneath her skirt gave him a quick frisson of excitement. But the knowledge of the other car bothered him.

‘Do you think they can see us?’

Rachel leaned back and turned on the interior light. Her breasts shone whitely beneath their lace.

‘Let’s make sure.’

He reached up and quickly clicked it off.

‘You spoilsport, Murray.’

‘I don’t want an audience.’

‘Shame.’

She snapped open the front fastening of her bra and let her breasts fall softly against his face. They’d kissed and resumed their play, but the awareness of the car lurking in the opposite bay remained with him, and their coupling was clumsy and hurried.

They’d driven back down from the country park in silence, Rachel taking the turns more slowly this time, only gathering speed when she reached the straight road that bordered the reservoir.

She’d been hitting seventy-five when the headlights of another car shone in from behind, illuminating the dashboard. Murray turned and saw Rachel’s face caught in shine and shadows like a black and white photograph, her jaw set somewhere between a smile and a grimace. He realised she would have seen the car’s approach in the rear-view mirror and wondered if it, rather than the straightness of the road, had prompted her increase in speed.

The car was a Saab. It started to overtake and Rachel hit the accelerator, staying level with it, racing. Up ahead the road curved into a bend. Murray’s right foot pressed on an imaginary brake, the Saab zoomed on and Rachel dropped speed, letting it pull in front. Up ahead the car’s brake lights shone red. Rachel tailed it down to the cross, where the Saab made it through the traffic lights. For a second Murray thought Rachel was going to put on a spurt and follow it through, but at the last minute she hit the brakes. Murray jarred forward. The seatbelt’s inertia reel held him tight.

‘Sorry.’ Rachel looked at him. ‘Bit of a bumpy ride.’

Murray tried to reconstruct the shadow of the parked car in his mind, but it had only been a shape in the dark. There was nothing except his intuition, or perhaps it was paranoia, to suggest it had been the Saab Rachel had raced.

‘You had me worried for a moment.’

‘You’re always worried, Murray, it’s your default setting.’

‘That’s not fair.’

She put a reassuring hand on his knee.

‘Your being old school is part of what I like about you.’ Rachel glanced away from the road, letting her eyes meet his for a moment. ‘How are you getting on with the elusive Archie?’

‘Elusive is the word.’ Murray’s voice grew warmer. She’d never said that she liked him before. ‘I’ve been on the phone to the National Library. They have a few boxes of bits and pieces they’re going to let me have a root aboot in. What I’m really missing is first-hand accounts, contact with people who knew Lunan. It’s amazing how many of that generation are no longer with us.’

‘That generation.’ She laughed. ‘He wasn’t much older than Fergus, you know. Maybe you should interview him.’

‘I doubt they moved in the same circles.’

‘You’d be surprised at the circles Fergus has moved in.’

Her archness matched the grudge in his voice.

They drove on in silence, the city taking form for Murray as they began to get closer to the university. He looked again at the clean lines of her profile and wondered why she betrayed Fergus with him, him with Fergus.

They waited at the pedestrian lights on the Great Western Road. He could see the fish fryer in the lit window of the Philadelphia shovelling fresh chips into a vat of hot fat. Maybe he should offer to buy Rachel a fish supper, drive the scent of their sex from the car with deep-fried cod and vinegar. The lights shifted to green and she swung the car round a dawdling pedestrian.

‘You should seek them out.’

‘Who?’

‘Old associates of Archie’s.’

‘I intend to.’

‘It could be fun, like being a detective. Maybe you’ll go undercover.’

He put a hand on her knee.

‘I’d rather go between the sheets.’

‘I prefer you in your natural habitat.’

She changed gear, knocking him away.

‘The library?’

‘Now there’s a thought, between the stacks.’

She hit the emergency flashers and drew into the side of the road, double-parking so he could get out and catch the underground the rest of the way home.

He’d placed the same small classified ad in the Herald, Scotsman, TLS and Scots Magazine the following day.

Doctor Murray Watson of the University of Glasgow’s Department of English Literature seeks memories of the poet Archie Lunan from anyone who may have known him.

It had resulted in nothing, until the phone message. He pressed Return Call and listened to the telephone ring out at the other end. He counted to twenty then broke the connection and dialled again. The ring had its own tone, its own rhythm, regular as a heartbeat. It jangled on, until he cut the call.

He thought back again to the drive home, Rachel in the seat beside him, her hand guiding the car down the gears as they descended into the city. Sometimes lately he remembered their moments together as if he were on the outside, a viewer watching a film, or a man behind the wheel of a car in a darkened car park.

Chapter Eleven

MURRAY WASN’T SURE what happened to widows in the first three years after their husband’s death, but if he’d imagined Audrey Garrett at all, it was as stoical and underweight, a lady depleted if not destroyed.

The woman who buzzed him up to her third-floor tenement flat was well-nourished, with pale skin flushed red, and strawberry-blonde hair tied firmly back in a thick ponytail. Her black jogging pants, white Aertex top and air of no-nonsense vigour reminded him of the members of the Officer Training Corps he sometimes saw loading the university minibuses. Then she smiled, and the impression was dispelled.

They shook hands at the door. Her palm was warm to the touch. Murray was aware of a savour of fresh sweat and realised she was straight from exercising. He’d brought her flowers, a small bunch of yellow roses, conscious of avoiding anything flashy or funereal. He shoved them at her nervously, like an awkward suitor.

‘Thank you, but there was no need.’ She softened her words with a smile. ‘It’s a pleasure to share Alan’s work with someone who might be able to turn it to some use.’ Audrey raised the bouquet to her face, dutifully searching for scent in the cellophane-wrapped blooms, and Murray saw he’d forgotten to peel off the garage’s price sticker. ‘Come on through.’ She led him into a square entrance hall, messy with half-opened cardboard boxes, a jumble of bags and tangle of bikes.

He’d thought she was English, a Londoner perhaps, but now he recognised an antipodean inflection to her accent: Australia or New Zealand? He couldn’t tell.

‘You’ll have to excuse the mess. As you can see we’ve just moved in. Normally, of course, we’re a super-tidy household.’

She turned to check that he had got the joke and Murray met her eyes guiltily, wondering if she had seen his gaze drop reflexively to the tilt of her bottom. He looked away and met another pair of eyes peering at him from behind an open door in the hallway. They belonged to a small, solemn-faced boy with a mass of dark hair. Murray couldn’t judge his age: older than five but younger than ten, he guessed.

‘Hello, I’m Murray.’

The boy’s expression remained grave. He silently pressed the door to.

‘You’ll have to excuse Lewis. He’s shy of new people. My sister-in-law’s coming round to take him swimming in a while.’ Audrey Garrett glanced at her watch. ‘She should be here by now, but as you can see everything’s running late — as usual. I meant to be showered and changed before you arrived.’

‘I’m grateful you made time to see me at all.’

Murray glanced back towards the boy’s bedroom and saw Lewis Garrett’s eyes peering out again from the slit in the open door. He wondered if he should play the uncle and slip him a pound. But the boy saw him looking. This time he slammed the door.

Audrey said, ‘Lewis, that’s not very polite’, but didn’t stop to argue the point. She led Murray into a large bay-windowed sitting room piled high with boxes, like a fence’s secret warehouse.

‘Chaos reigns supreme.’ She flung herself down on the only piece of furniture in the room, a large right-angled couch that made Murray think of airports and long delays. ‘Lewis was only three when his father died. I’m afraid he’s a little shy of men, while also being completely fascinated with them, of course. He’s currently very taken with Mr Sidique across the landing. His beard is a big part of the attraction — reminiscent of Santa’s apparently. He may get his courage up and come through to interrogate you in a while, if Lisa doesn’t get her skates on.’

Murray perched on the far promontory of the settee and rubbed his chin.

‘No beard.’

‘No, that may put you at a bit of a disadvantage.’

He smiled, unsure of whether he should declare himself relieved or disappointed. Instead he said, ‘Lewis, after RLS?’

‘No, the spelling’s different. Choosing names for a child is an unexpected trial. Alan and I made a lengthy list. In the end we chose one we thought original only to spot it a month later, somewhere near the top of the most popular boy’s names in Scotland.’ She laughed. ‘Never mind, it suits him.’

Murray remembered the collection of names he’d found in Archie’s effects and wondered if it resembled the list Audrey Garrett and her husband had made. He contemplated showing it to her, but Audrey had moved on. ‘I’ll make us some tea in a moment. I’m absolutely bushed. I’m usually working when Lewis is at school, but I played hookey this afternoon and went running before I collected him. I’m afraid I overdid it.’

She stretched out a leg. Her feet were bare, their soles dirty, as if she had been sprinting shoeless through the city.

Murray found her friendliness disarming. He wondered if it was typical or if her chatter was a delaying tactic; a means to avoid discussing her husband’s work with a stranger.

He leant forward.

‘Don’t worry about tea. You’ve enough to do with your boy and all this.’

He waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the boxes.

Audrey Garrett smiled and said, ‘You’re wondering when I’m going to shut up and let you get on with it.’

‘No, not at all.’

‘I guess I should tell you. He was in Lismore researching Archie Lunan when he died.’

Just for a second Murray couldn’t think which man’s death she meant, then it struck him and he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

She shrugged, managing to acknowledge his consolation and its uselessness at the same time.

‘I thought it might be better to get it out there so you understand if I’m a little. . well. .’ She smiled. ‘Even after this space of time, I’m not always sure how things are going to affect me.’

‘No.’ He looked away from her towards the piles of brown boxes piled high like a defence, wondering what the correct response would be. ‘Perhaps you’d like someone else to join us, your sister-in-law maybe?’

‘Lisa?’ Audrey Garrett laughed. ‘She’s worse than me. No, we’ll be fine.’ The doorbell rang and she got to her feet. ‘Speak of the devil and smell smoke. Excuse me a moment.’

He heard a cheerful exchange of women’s voices, laughter and a child’s high, excited tones. Then the front door shut and there was a pause. He imagined her standing barefoot in the suddenly still hallway, gathering her strength. The new apartment held an atmosphere of brittle bravery. Murray pressed his hands together and sandwiched them between his knees. There would be a point when his own life tipped and the absent outweighed the living.

‘Peace, perfect peace.’ Audrey flung herself back on the settee, which shifted a little beneath her weight. ‘Lisa takes him overnight once a week to give me a bit of a break.’

He unfolded himself and leaned back.

‘I’m interrupting your evening off.’

‘Don’t let it bother you. But you’re right, we should get down to business.’ She straightened up and turned to face him, brushing a loose strand of hair from her eyes. ‘I donated most of Alan’s reference books to the department library and some of his colleagues kindly packed up his university office for me a decent-ish interval after the accident.’ She gave an ironic smile. ‘As you know, space is at a premium up there. Most of what they packed is still in boxes. I kept all of Alan’s stuff together when we moved, so you’re welcome to work your way through it. .’

She hesitated and he said, ‘But?’

‘But inevitably I disposed of some stuff. It’s important we start to move on. Not forget, just. .’ She sought for another phrase and gave up, smiling. ‘Just move on.’

‘Of course.’ He wondered what insights into Archie’s life had ended up in the recycling. ‘I understand Dr Garrett was a social scientist?’

‘Alan did a joint undergraduate degree in psychology and sociology, they both continued to inform his work.’

‘And his ongoing research was into artists who die young?’

‘Actually, it was more specific than that. Alan was interested in artists who commit suicide.’

There was something shamefaced in the way that she said it. Murray wanted to tell her not to worry, that he had read weirder research proposals, invitations to the psychiatric ward or prison cell. But instead he nodded and asked, ‘He believed Archie came into that category?’

‘I suppose he must have. We never talked much about that aspect of his work. I found it morbid.’

‘I guess I can relate to that, but sometimes when you’re doing research,’ he paused, searching for a way to explain. ‘Things lose their power to disturb. You get fascinated with the minutiae and the subject becomes abstract.’

‘Maybe that’s part of what bothered me, the desensi-tisation.’ She wiggled her foot, looking at her toes as if she had just noticed them. ‘It’s sad something that meant so much to him became almost taboo between us. It’s one of my regrets. Perhaps if I’d paid more attention to Archie Lunan’s death, to the deaths of all the people he studied, I’d understand Alan’s more.’

Murray felt the weight of the empty flat around them and wished the child hadn’t left. He rolled the pen he’d taken from his pocket between his palms then, when she remained silent, asked, ‘What do you mean?’

It was as if the words had been waiting to tumble out.

‘When a sober man who’s fascinated with suicide slams a car with perfectly good brakes into a tree, you have to ask yourself if it was deliberate.’ She looked up. ‘I spoke with his doctor and searched his stuff, his effects. But Alan had no secret history of depression, no stash of happy pills he’d suddenly stopped taking. The inquest decided it was death through misadventure. A polite way of saying his own carelessness was to blame. Maybe he was tired, trying to squeeze everything he needed to do into too short a time so he could get home to us — except, of course, that he didn’t.’ Audrey got to her feet. ‘Sorry, that’s exactly what I was trying to avoid.’ She was all briskness now. ‘I’ve shoved Alan’s boxes together and marked each one with an X. I’m not sure if you’ll find much. I don’t know how long he’d been looking into your mutual friend, but I do know he’d taken some of the relevant notes up there with him. Presumably they were in the car when he crashed. I didn’t get them back.’

She paused. Blood and shattered glass were in her silence.

Murray imagined the dead driver slumped against a steering wheel, the unbroken blare of a car horn, precious pages streaming through a smashed window, littering the fields beyond, fluttering down towards the ocean where Archie had drowned.

‘I gave his computer to a Malawian appeal. I guess I should have held onto it, but you know how it is.’

‘Yes,’ he said. Unsure of whether he did.

‘It was wretchedly old-fashioned, anyway. The Malawians were probably appalled when it arrived. I imagine they’re hooked up to solar-powered broadband by now, surfing porn like the rest of the world.’ She pulled at the hem of her top, straightening creases that bounced back into place. ‘Did that sound racist? It wasn’t meant to.’

‘No, of course not, you just meant we shouldn’t lumber charities with our junk.’ He realised what he’d said and coloured. ‘I didn’t mean. .’

But Audrey laughed and some of the tension lifted.

‘No, I know you didn’t.’ She was still smiling. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got plenty to occupy me. Shout when you’re finished.’

* * *

There were half a dozen cartons; less than he’d expected. There was always less than he expected, but when Murray started to work through their contents he realised they contained no teaching notes or delayed fragments of admin, no abandoned research proposals or half-written lectures. Everything related to the doctor’s suicide studies. The idea that Audrey Garrett had taken time to isolate the right boxes when she had a child, a job and a house full of unpacking touched him. But perhaps it was simply a way of speeding his departure.

She had left the door to the living room ajar and Murray could hear the sound of a shower starting up somewhere beyond the hall. He got up and closed the door, pushing away an uninvited image of bathroom mirrors steaming with condensation and Audrey stepping naked beneath the spray.

He took off his jacket, laid it on the couch, then crouched on the bare floorboards and opened the first box. The topmost folders held tables of statistical analysis that made no sense to him. He set them to one side, pulled out bundles of the Bulletin of Suicidology and flicked through a couple of issues. It was like every professional journal or hobbyist magazine he had ever come across: of no interest to anyone outside the group, but manna to the initiated. The abundance of adverts for books, courses and conferences suggested suicide was a booming industry. What would suicidology conferences be like? Rambunctious affairs where the bars roared with laughter, with Russian roulette in the halls and one less for breakfast every morning?

He could understand Audrey’s squeamishness. But if Archie had topped himself it might make sense for Murray to read up on theories surrounding suicide. Topped himself. It was too flippant. He couldn’t remember using the phrase before. Maybe he was reacting to the soberness of the pages in front of him, like a mourner at a funeral suddenly felled by giggles.

Murray extracted a bundle of loose papers and began sorting through them, careful to maintain the order they’d been packed in. A printed list from some website snagged his attention.

Put on his best suit and shot himself.

Gassed herself after bad reviews of her recent exhibition.

Overdosed on sleeping pills in Baghdad.

Threw himself on a ceremonial sword, then lingered for another 24 hours.

Committed suicide in a psychotic fit, but not before killing his family.

Jumped out of a window in Rome.

Overdosed on barbiturates, and left notes about how it felt for as long as she could. Shot himself, then cut his throat.

Hanged himself in the doorway of his father’s bedroom.

The scant details seemed arbitrary; a method, a location, a reason. Could there ever be a good reason? He imagined how Archie’s entry would read.

A poor sailor, he sailed out into the eye of a storm in an ill-equipped boat.

Extreme pain would be a reasonable motive. But then he supposed it would be euthanasia, not suicide. There was a difference. The thought made him stop and stare into nothingness for a moment. Pain that you knew would only get worse. It was just cause.

The room was growing darker; outside the sky was streaked with pink. It had been raining on and off all day, but it was a lovely evening, the turn into night, peace after the storm. Murray got up and clicked on the light switch, but the room stayed in shadows. The light-fitting was empty, the room bereft of lamps.

‘Fuck.’

He dragged the box over to the window and continued sorting through it by the urinous glow of the streetlamp.

Alan Garrett had been a biographer of death, every step of the lives he researched travelling towards their final moments, the cocked gun, the knotted rope, the ready pills and waiting cliff. But that was what biography was, a paper facsimile of life hurtling towards death. Murray’s book could only end in the freezing waters around Lismore with Archie sucked breathless beneath the waves.

Had it occurred to him that Archie’s death might have been deliberate? Garrett’s hypothesis wasn’t a surprise. But he hadn’t considered it so boldly before. It might be good for the book if it were, he supposed. Misery and suicide were more dramatic than self-indulgence and stupidity. Perhaps Murray’s could be one of the few academic works that slipped into the mainstream. He caught a quick vision of himself explaining his methodology on Newsnight Review, looking like an arse, tongue-tied and over-impressed, trying to avert his gaze from Kirsty Wark’s buttoned-down cleavage.

Could Archie have been certain the boat would sink? However great the odds, the fierceness of the storm multiplied by his poor sea legs and simple craft, there was surely a chance that he might escape and sail beyond the squall into clear waters. Was it suicide to consign yourself to the fates? Murray wasn’t sure. But there must be a wonderful freedom in not caring.

Murray looked down into the street below and wondered who would miss him if he were to smash his well-educated brains against the pavement. The news would probably work as an aphrodisiac on Rachel. Rab Purvis would organise a piss-up and Jack’s grief would no doubt be tempered by the prospect of whole new exhibition: My Only Brother’s Suicide — film, photographs and mixed media.

He was getting maudlin. Maybe it was the relentless parade of young suicides or perhaps it was that he was on box three and had still found no mention of Archie. He supposed it was possible that all of Garrett’s notes on the poet had perished with him.

Archie might be evasive, but he was getting a feel for Garrett. He’d been an organised scholar, thorough and not afraid of the legwork involved in primary research. Murray backed up his own research on a memory stick he guarded as carefully as his wallet. He wondered if he should ask Audrey if she had found anything similar in her husband’s effects. Perhaps he could work the conversation round to it by mentioning his own experience of sorting through the detritus the dead left behind.

No, that would be crass and insensitive. He rejected the thought just as there was a knock on the sitting room door and Audrey stuck her head into the room. Her hair was damp and she smelt of something zesty. She’d changed into a scruffy V-neck and a pair of loose cotton trousers. He couldn’t imagine Rachel ever dressing like that, but perhaps she sometimes did in the privacy of her home; she and Fergus sharing a bottle of wine and watching a DVD, their bare feet occasionally touching, eyes shining with the prospect of bed.

Audrey smiled.

‘I promised you a cup of tea.’

‘No, thanks, you’re fine.’

‘A glass of wine?’

He didn’t want it, but smiled and said yes, so she wouldn’t have to feel she was drinking alone. Audrey slipped into the darkness of the flat beyond and returned with a large glass of red.

‘Can you see okay over there?’

‘Aye,’ he lied. ‘It’s fine.’

‘The people who sold us the apartment took all the light bulbs with them. They must be rolling in it, the amount I paid. How could they be bothered to be so mean?’

‘The rich are different from the rest of us.’

‘Yes, they’re bastards.’ She handed him the glass. ‘I won’t interrupt you again.’

‘I’m making you an exile in your own home.’

‘It isn’t home yet.’ Audrey grinned. ‘But it will be.’

She closed the door gently. Murray turned back to her husband’s papers and started skimming through a collection of newspaper cuttings.

A promising artist walked out of his studio on the eve of a forthcoming show and was found a fortnight later, hanging from a tree on a nearby country estate. A poet put his affairs in order, travelled to London where he rented a room in a hotel, hung up the Do not disturb sign and threw himself through an unopened window onto the street, twelve storeys below. A couple, both performance artists, committed suicide within a week of each other. She went first with a belt-and-braces routine: pills, alcohol, a warm bath and slashed wrists. He dived off the Humber Bridge, ignoring a member of the public’s attempts to talk him down. Some performance that must have been.

He wished Garrett had included more of what the artists had produced when they were alive. The cuttings seemed to define each of them by their suicides — as if the only thing they had ever created was their own death, their final audience an unfortunate chambermaid or shocked dog-walker.

He glanced at a transcript of an interview Garrett had conducted with an associate of one of the suicides.

He was always cheerful, in a depressed sort of way if you know what I mean, cynical, down on everything, but funny with it. I wouldn’t have said he was more depressed than anyone else. Everyone’s depressed, right? I know I am. Especially since I found him. I can’t quite get it out of my head. The smell. I can’t remember him talking about suicide. I wish he had. They say the people who talk about it never do it, right?

Murray was willing to bet that was wrong.

He lifted his glass and took a drink. This was getting him nowhere. He put the papers back in the now-empty box and opened the next one. More charts and tables, death graphs and suicide logs. He’d forgotten how scientific social scientists were. There were things that couldn’t be measured, of course. Maybe that was part of what had propelled Alan Garrett’s car against a tree.

Murray was halfway through the box when he uncovered a bundle of cardboard folders, each labelled with a name. He flipped through them, not recognising anyone until—

‘Bingo.’

He slid out a powder-blue file marked A. LUNAN. Murray slugged back some more wine, then flipped open the flap and pulled out a few pages of foolscap.

A photocopy of the cover of Moontide, a copy of a familiar newspaper cutting noting Archie’s disappearance, a brief obituary from a poetry fanzine and a short handwritten list:

Absent father

Mother may have been agoraphobic

Dropped out of university education

Prone to mood swings

Highly creative

Intense relationship with girlfriend?

Uprooting in adulthood that mirrors uprooting as a child — catalyst?

Interested in the beyond

He wondered how much Garrett knew of Archie’s early life. He was willing to bet that the list had been a summary of long hours of interviews conducted with people Murray was yet to meet — yet to know the existence of. Perhaps he should be glad he wouldn’t have to credit a dead man as co-author, but the loss of the sociologist’s research sat heavy on him.

Interested in the beyond.

Archie’s poetry was balanced between the anarchic joy of sex, heavy drinking and a pantheistic rapture. He wondered if Alan Garrett had been referring to the poet’s desire to push the limits of the senses, or if there were something else, a religious twist to the poet’s life he was unaware of. Maybe he’d been thinking of Archie’s science-fiction habit. Was outer space sometimes described as the beyond?

It was after nine by the time Murray finished going through the rest of the boxes and when he straightened up his legs felt stiff. He re-sealed the tops of the cardboard cartons, and pushed them together the way he’d found them. The hallway was unlit save for a sliver of light leaking from beneath a closed door at the far end. Murray knocked gently.

‘Come in.’

The room was more finished than the one he had just left. A rug woven in warm colours lay on the polished floorboards and the far wall was lined with bookcases, already loaded with books. A reading lamp cast a single pool of brightness, spotlighting Audrey, who was sitting on the floor resting her back against an elegant modern chrome and black-leather chaise in the centre of the darkened room. On the floor beside her sat a box of papers, a full binbag and a half-empty glass of wine.

‘It would have made more sense to sort these before we moved, but I’m afraid it all got out of hand.’ She laughed. ‘A bit galling to know I paid a removal firm a fortune to move a lot of crap.’

‘I’m sure it’s not the first time,’ Murray said, and because he didn’t know what else to say added, ‘Nice room.’

‘The biggest in the house and it’s all mine.’ She raised herself up onto the couch. ‘That’s not as selfish as it sounds. It’s going to be my consulting room.’ He must have looked mystified because she added, ‘I’m a psychologist. It’s the main reason for this move actually, so I can have space to meet with clients and still be around when Lewis gets home from school.’ She sipped her drink. ‘How did you get on? Find anything useful?’

‘I think I might have, yes.’

He handed her the page he’d found.

Audrey drained the last of the wine from her glass.

‘Typical Alan, always making lists. Anything you didn’t know before?’

‘I don’t know anything much about Archie’s childhood, except that he moved around a bit. But it’s the last entry that’s intriguing. Archie was working on a science-fiction novel. I wondered if it might refer to that.’

Audrey lowered her eyes to the paper again. A small crease appeared between her eyebrows.

‘You mean “to go where no man has gone before”?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I suppose it could do. But that’s not what “the beyond” suggests to me.’

‘What do you think?’

‘The afterlife.’ She made a moue of distaste and handed the list back to Murray. ‘You can keep that.’

The chaos of the move resumed in the kitchen. A pine table was pushed up against one wall and stacked with brimming boxes. Four chairs balanced precariously on top, their rush seats tilting against the jumble beneath, their feet pointing at the ceiling. The arrangement looked like a neglected fortification on the edge of ruin. The room was lit by small lamps better suited to bedside tables. The piled furniture threw up crazy shadows against their dim glow.

Audrey lifted a strappy sandal from the top of one of the boxes.

‘I don’t think I’ve worn these since before Alan died. God only knows where its partner is.’ She let it drop. ‘When I said put the kettle on, I meant boil a pot. The kettle has yet to resurface.’

Murray laughed.

‘Don’t worry about me. I’ve had my tea ration for the day.’

‘In that case let’s open another bottle of wine.’ Audrey reached into a cupboard and pulled out a fresh bottle of red. ‘Screw-top. The corkscrew’s also missing in action.’ She twisted the cap free and fired it into a corner. ‘I guess I should have supervised the removal men better. Everything’s all over the place.’

‘Thanks.’ Murray raised his glass to his lips, wondering how much she’d had to drink. ‘Can I help?’

She looked squarely at him, as if trying to assess whether his offer was genuine or made for politeness’ sake, and he added, ‘I’m not doing anything else and there are still a few things I’d like to ask you about your husband’s research, if I may.’

‘Okay.’ Her smile was suddenly wary. ‘But I’m not sure there’s much more I can tell you.’

Murray set the chairs on the floor and piled the boxes neatly in a line against the far wall while Audrey started to unpack, then together they heaved the table into the centre of the kitchen and set the chairs around it. He straightened the last one and asked, ‘What next?’

She was rooting around in a plastic laundry bag and didn’t bother to look up.

‘I thought you wanted to ask me some questions?’

‘Okay.’ He leaned against one of the kitchen units, waiting to see what she was looking for. ‘A lot of your husband’s research seems to have been direct interviews with people who knew the deceased artists.’

‘Yes, that was Alan’s preferred method.’ Audrey pulled out an electric drill and went back to rummaging in the bag. ‘He’d completed a historical section, looking into artists of the past — people whose contemporaries and doctors were long gone, but had perhaps left written impressions of the subject’s state of mind. Now he was working on modern-day artists. It gave him a lot more scope. His final intention was to do a comparison, see if society’s attitudes, artists’ attitudes in particular, had altered.’ She pulled out a paper bag, ‘Aha, gotcha’, and poured a selection of drill bits onto the table. ‘I shouldn’t do that. I’ll end up scratching the surface.’ She turned and lifted a large carrier bag from behind the door. ‘Ask me another.’

‘Do you know if he interviewed associates of Archie Lunan prior to his trip to Lismore?’

‘No.’ Her voice was impatient. ‘Like I said, I didn’t want to know the details of who Alan was interviewing. I can give you an outline of Alan’s methodology, beyond that I’m not much good to you.’

‘Okay.’ Murray injected a false brightness into his voice. ‘I’ll settle for a summary.’

Audrey shot him a glance.

‘The obvious way to begin would be by dividing the subjects into categories.’

‘What kind of categories?’

‘The classic ones, I imagine.’ His face must have looked blank because she started to explain. ‘Sociological theory classifies suicide into three main categories, altruistic, egoistic and anomic. The first two are pretty self-explanatory. Killing yourself for the greater good of others. Captain Oates is the classic Western example, “I’m going out now and I may be some time.” But it’s not unknown in tribal societies for old people to pop off rather than hold back the rest of the clan. I sometimes think our pensioners could learn something from them instead of living on to a hundred bemoaning the state of the NHS while sucking up most of its resources.’ She saw Murray’s expression and laughed. ‘I’m only joking. How are you at heights?’

‘Okay, I think.’

‘Good, I’m terrible at them.’ She pulled a roller blind from the bag. ‘How would you feel about putting this up for me?’

He looked up at the top of the window, ten feet or so above their heads.

‘Do you have a tall enough ladder?’

‘Sure do.’ Her eyes shone with the fun of a good dare. ‘I’ll even hold it for you.’

The ladder turned out to be a little short for the task, so Murray stood on the topmost rung, his feet covering a paper sticker that read, ‘Warning! Do not stand on this step.’ He waited until he’d drilled the holes for the rawl plugs before asking, ‘What defines the other types?’

‘Of suicide?’

‘Yes.’

Audrey seemed a long way below.

‘Well, egoistic is pretty obvious, I guess: an individual feels dislocated from society and decides to take their own life. In a way it’s the opposite of altruistic suicide. Most of your artistic suicides get placed in this category, the romantic agony and all that.’ The ladder wobbled a little and she asked, ‘Are you okay up there?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Of course, there’s an extra investment for artists — the chance that if he or she manages a memorable death, they’ll stake a place in posterity.’

‘Does falling off a high ladder count?’

‘Not unless you’ve been drinking absinthe and snorting coke cut with your father’s ashes. Anyway, it’s nonsense. I’d never heard of half the suicides Alan studied.’

Murray finished inserting the rawl plugs and started to screw in the brackets that would hold the blind in place. He risked a look down.

‘And the final category?’

‘Anomic suicide. The result of a big change in someone’s life: divorce, death of a loved one, financial collapse. It all becomes too much, and so they end it.’

‘Simple as that?’

‘No, rarely simple. That’s why Alan and his colleagues could theorise endlessly about it.’

One of the screws was refusing to go into its plug. Murray turned the screwdriver round and used its handle to batter it in place, hoping Audrey wouldn’t realise what he was doing.

‘You said you didn’t know much about your husband’s research, but that’s a pretty impressive summary.’

‘I was more involved in the early days. It’s the old story, Alan was one of my PhD supervisors. Looking back, I can see it was as his research developed that I started to get a bit squeamish. Maybe it’s something to do with having Lewis. Motherhood alters your perspective on some things. I started to find it hard to listen to a catalogue of young lives snuffed out. Too threatening, I suppose, when I had a young life to take care of.’

‘Is that the psychologist talking now?’

He pulled the next screw from his pocket and started to twist it home; it went in smooth as butter.

‘I wasn’t very psychologically aware at the time, I’m afraid. I could get quite vicious about it.’

He was on the final bracket now.

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘That’s because you don’t know me.’ She snorted. ‘We had a massive row one Sunday morning. It’s the climax of the British week, isn’t it, Sunday morning? A cooked breakfast, the Archers omnibus, Sunday papers — peace perfect peace, or boredom bloody boredom, depending on how you look at it.’

Except for a guarantee of no teaching, Murray’s own Sundays didn’t particularly differ from the rest of his week, but he said, ‘I suppose so.’

‘Well, that particular Sunday, the Observer carried a front-page story about a young British artist who had committed suicide at the age of forty-one. Walked off into the woods and didn’t come back. His body was found a few weeks later. It would be wrong to say the news made Alan happy, he wasn’t a complete ghoul, but he was energised by it, abandoned his breakfast and went off into his study to start downloading the artist’s work. Not quite whistling, but purposeful. For some reason it incensed me. His cheery, workmanlike mood, while somewhere some mother, wife, or girlfriend was breaking her heart.’ She laughed, half-embarrassed. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’

‘Perhaps because I didn’t know Alan.’

‘Perhaps.’ Her face was turned away from Murray, the red-blonde crown of her head glossy against the streetlamp’s glow. ‘It’s not like it caused a rift between us or anything, but looking back, I think after that row he told me less about his research and I didn’t ask.’

She passed the blind up to Murray and he slid it into place, feeling a spurt of achievement. Perhaps he’d feel like this every day if he’d learned a trade instead of going to university.

‘How does it look?’

‘Perfect, thanks. Safe from peeping Toms.’

She held onto the ladder as he descended. He turned, ready to step from it, and glimpsed the hollow between her breasts. He imagined each one snug in its lace cup. Sometimes he wished he could smother his sex drive. It was like a second pulse, forcing his blood, fiercer than his heart.

‘Have you eaten?’

‘What?’

‘Have you had your dinner? Your “tea”, as Alan would have said?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘I was going to order Chinese. Would you like to join me?’

If she hadn’t mentioned her dead husband he might have declined, but somehow his presence made it safe. She phoned in their order while he climbed the ladder again and replaced the absent light bulb in the hallway.

The door to Lewis’s room was ajar. Murray clicked on the hall light to check it was working and then pushed the boy’s bedroom door wide. Audrey must have started her unpacking here. It was messy, but it was a young boy’s normal untidiness rather than the disorder caused by moving.

Posters of fluffy animals and pumped-up superheroes hung on the wall; a small bookcase stacked with books sat next to a comfortable armchair perfect for an adult and child to squash in together and share a story. Lewis’s quilt cover was printed with a picture of a wide-eyed cartoon character Murray didn’t recognise. On the bedside table, next to the nightlight, was a framed photograph of a man in climbing gear hanging onto a rock face somewhere high above the world. A grin split the man’s face, emphasising the deep creases radiating from the corners of his eyes. Alan Garrett looked more alive than anyone Murray could remember seeing.

‘Do you have children?’

He hadn’t heard her come off the phone and her voice startled him.

‘No, not yet.’ He turned towards her. The light bulb he’d used was too high a wattage, it stung his eyes and seemed to bleach the colour from her skin. ‘I’d have to find a wife first. ’

‘Very proper of you.’

‘I’m a proper kind of guy.’

She was standing close to him now.

He wasn’t sure.

Then he was and they were kissing. He slid his hands down the back of her trousers, feeling the smooth roundness of her, slid his fingers up the ridge of her spine, managing for once to undo her bra in one fumbling movement, feeling her gasp. He backed into the room, towards the cartoon-covered bed, holding her close, their lips pressed together.

She pulled away. ‘No, not here.’ And led him through to the sitting room.

He realised he didn’t have a condom, wondered guiltily if she slept around, if she wanted another child, even. They were on the couch now, his hand roaming beneath her top, her fingers pushing under his jumper, below his T-shirt, skin touching skin.

‘I don’t have anything, protection.’

She pulled her top off.

‘It’s okay, I do.’

Her breasts were almost as he had imagined them, high and rounded; the nipples stiff and proud.

He lowered his head.

‘Wait.’ She slid from him. ‘I’ll only be a second.’

Murray watched as she left the room, taking in her smooth back, the faint hint of a tan-line, remnant of some earlier holiday. The door swung gently behind her and he was alone, wondering what the fuck he was doing.

He kicked off his shoes and hauled his jumper and T-shirt over his head in one swift movement, averting his eyes from Alan Garrett’s boxes of research and pushing the university code of ethics from his mind. Then she was back, stripped and clutching a packet of condoms. Murray thought he’d never seen a woman who looked so natural, so right, naked. He got rid of the rest of his clothes, pulled her towards him and onto the sofa.

The doorbell rang just as they finished. Murray flinched and Audrey laughed, ‘Perfect timing.’ She walked naked from the room. There was a second ring and he heard her shout, ‘Two secs, just finding my purse.’

He pulled his clothes back on, wondering if the urge to sneak away was social awkwardness or some deeper evolutionary instinct. The aroma of Chinese food wafted into the room, a sweet scent suffused with a hot tang; jasmine and chillies. He hadn’t eaten since that morning and was suddenly ravenous. Was this all he was, a creature ruled by appetites?

He found Audrey in the kitchen wrapped in a long cotton robe, taking the fast-food cartons from a carrier bag and setting them on the newly installed kitchen table. She looked like Lewis’s mum again. Could she consciously turn her sex appeal on and off, or was it another of nature’s tricks? He put his arms awkwardly around her and gave her a squeeze. Her body stiffened and he released her. Audrey screwed up the empty plastic bag the food had came in and flung it towards the piles of boxes.

‘I could get used to being a slob.’ She peeled back the paper lids from the cartons, stuck a spoon in each of them and handed Murray a plate. ‘Mrs Wong’s finest. Tuck in.’

The room was too dark for them to see their food properly. Murray noticed two unlit candles on the table. Perhaps the matches were lost too, packed away in the same box as the kettle and the corkscrew. They ate in silence for a moment, then she jumped to her feet and fetched the wine.

‘Sorry, I forgot.’

Murray felt her nervousness and knew he should say something to put her at ease. He poked at a piece of pork with the wooden chopsticks the restaurant provided.

‘This is great, good food.’

‘Thanks.’ She smiled as if he had said something amusing. ‘Are you going to go to the island?’

‘Lismore?’

‘Where else?’

‘Yes.’ He hesitated, looking at the unlit candles. ‘Sooner or later.’

‘And will you meet her?’

‘Who?’

‘Christie Graves, his old sweetheart.’

‘I’d like to, but she doesn’t seem too keen on meeting me.’

‘I’m surprised. She struck me as a man’s woman.’ He looked up at Audrey and she said, ‘Did I tell you that I met her?’

‘No.’ He wondered if she knew how important Christie was to Lunan’s story. ‘What was she like?’

‘Creepy. She came to Alan’s funeral.’

‘Here in Glasgow?’

‘I was hardly going to have him buried over there.’

‘No, I guess not. Sorry.’

Audrey sighed.

‘It should be me that’s sorry. I’m such a grinch sometimes.’ She forced a cheerless smile. ‘I didn’t like her.’

‘Christie?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s hard to say, exactly. She did all the right stuff, arrived in good time, said lovely things about Alan. She even brought me some photographs of him in his last days there, beautiful photos, much better than I ever took. But I didn’t like her. None of it seemed sincere. I felt she was playing the part of a concerned acquaintance. She spoke well, her tone of voice was just as it should be, her face arranged in a sad expression. But I kept on feeling that if I turned my head suddenly, I might catch her smirking. That’s a horrid thing to say, isn’t it? But it’s true. She gave me the creeps.’ Audrey paused and they sat in silence for a moment, their food forgotten. ‘She asked me if I would like to visit the island, invited me to stay with her.’

‘Did you go?’

‘Yes, but not to her. My mother came with me and we stayed in a little B&B. I’m afraid I neglected to get in touch with Miss Graves, but of course inevitably we bumped into her one day at the shop. She was charm itself. My mother thought she was delightful, but she made my flesh crawl.’ Audrey sighed. ‘Perhaps that’s inevitable too. You see, Alan was coming back from her house when he crashed.’

‘But you don’t think it was anything to do with her?’

‘No, of course not.’ She closed her eyes for a second, as if trying to hold onto herself then said, ‘At first I did wonder whether they’d been drinking. Alan would never normally drink and drive, but he was sociable, keen to put people at their ease, especially when he was interviewing them, and you know what it’s like on small islands, normal rules don’t necessarily apply.’

Murray kept his voice soft, wary of provoking her.

‘But he wasn’t over the limit?’

‘No, apparently not. There were no traces of alcohol, or drugs for that matter, in his bloodstream. It was just one of those things, a bloody unfortunate accident. I guess blaming Christie is easier than blaming Alan, or blaming myself.’

‘I know accidents provoke guilt, but it couldn’t be your fault, you weren’t even there.’

‘Ah, but there’s the rub. Alan wanted Lewis and me to go with him, to make the trip into a short break, but I refused. I had work to do and I didn’t want our holidays to start revolving around his research. Around suicides.’

‘You don’t know that anything would have turned out differently.’

‘He was always extra careful when Lewis was in the car, he would never have put his son, or me, at risk.’ Her voice held a fractured edge. She paused again, and softened her tone. ‘It would have been the perfect place for a holiday. The island is beautiful, really, really lovely, and everyone was nice to us.’ She gave him her sad smile. ‘But I won’t be going again.’

It was midnight when she saw him to the door. He hesitated in the close, unsure of whether it would be crass to thank her, but she beat him to it.

‘Thanks for all your help.’ Her voice was a peep above a whisper. ‘Lights to see by and blinds to hide behind.’

He kept his own voice low, careful of disturbing her new neighbours.

‘I was going to thank you.’

Audrey raised her eyebrows, ‘For what?’ They both laughed. She held a finger to her lips, ‘Shhhsh.’

‘For a lovely evening.’ He hesitated. ‘Can I give you a ring sometime?’

She leaned on the door, half in, half out. Her smile was gentle.

‘I think we’ve covered everything, don’t you?’

‘I wasn’t thinking about work.’

‘No,’ she smiled again. ‘I know, neither was I.’

‘Ah, I see.’

‘Please, don’t take it personally. Remember I’m a psychologist. In my professional opinion, I’m not ready for anything serious yet. Sex is easier than all the other stuff. I don’t feel disloyal having sex with another man — not that I make a habit of it — but dating. .’ She let the sentence tail away.

‘I guess I should feel used.’

‘Do you?’

‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘I wasn’t thinking about anything heavy, just dinner sometime, a drink if that would be easier, no strings attached.’

Audrey plucked at the door chain. It clinked as it hit the wooden jamb.

‘Perhaps.’

Murray reached into his pocket for pen and paper to write down his number, but she stopped him.

‘I’ve got your number already. I called you, remember?’ She stifled a yawn with her hand. ‘Sorry, it’s been a long day. Lewis gets me up at the crack of dawn.’

‘I’ll let you go then.’

They exchanged a chaste kiss and he jogged down the stairs. He heard the door shut softly behind him before he reached the next landing.

Chapter Twelve

MURRAY WALKED SWIFTLY along the empty corridor, his trainers silent against the wooden floor. He’d chosen a quiet time of day, too early for tea breaks or sandwich runs, a mid period when those with classes would be safely ensconced in offices and lecture theatres. The place was studiously silent, no hint remaining of the clatter of students who had milled here fifteen minutes ago and would assault the stillness again soon enough. But behind some of the closed doors his colleagues bowed their heads over books and computers and at any time a sudden thought might send one of them out to the library in search of a remembered text or into the shadows of the quadrangles for a leg-stretch and a smoke.

Murray fished his keys from his pocket and selected the one to his room as he walked, ready to nip in swiftly, safe from fumbles. It felt strange, creeping like a thief towards his own office.

He passed Fergus Baine’s door, closed and blessedly silent, then Lyle Joff’s, Vic Costello’s, Phyllida McWilliams’, each shut and graveyard-still. Rab Purvis’s door was ajar, a signal that he was in residence and not averse to being interrupted. Murray increased his pace and slipped by, catching a glimpse of Rab’s arm resting against his desk, his hand tapping out a smoker’s unconscious rhythm as he worked.

Rachel’s office lay at the end of the hallway. He looked towards it, willing the door to open and Rachel to step out, half-dazed from reading, brushing the hair from her eyes, forgetting not to smile. The door stood firm, Rachel behind it or elsewhere, beyond him.

There were new posters on the noticeboard by his office, calls for papers, announcements of forthcoming lectures, a Keats/Shelley essay competition he’d once entered when he was a student. He glanced at the dead poets’ death masks, side by side above conditions of entry, then turned the key in the lock and went in, closing the door gently behind him.

Everything was as he had left it. The dried stain of coffee still slopped over the essay he should have handed back a week ago, the two mugs drained of whisky and gin set side by side, his chair pushed a little away from his desk.

He ran the mugs under the tap and placed them on the edge of the tiny sink to dry, then glanced at his watch. Eleven-thirty. If he was quick, he might escape before classes changed.

He started to gather the books he’d come for. An anthology of Scottish poetry that didn’t feature Lunan, but might be a useful reminder of chronology; a biography of a dead contemporary that mentioned the poet; a seventies literary review citing him as the next big thing.

Murray’s copy of Moontide was propped face-out on a high shelf. He reached up and tipped it from its perch, the book slipping through his fingers and landing with a slap on the ground. Lunan looked up at him from the front cover. His had once seemed an old face to Murray. Now he could see the youth screened behind the braggadocio of long hair and beard. He picked the book up and slipped it gently into the front pocket of his rucksack.

Christie’s books came next. The later ones were of no great concern, but he packed them anyway. As far as he was concerned she’d got stuck in the same weave, horror stories laced with Celtic folklore that sometimes started well, but always descended into a chaos of fantasy and false connections. Critics sneered, but her fans still bought them and so did Murray. He read each one quickly, greedy for a glimpse of Lunan, barely bothering to follow permutations of plots he considered all repetition.

Christie had found her subject in her first novel, Sacrifice: a group of young, overreaching outsiders whose lack of respect towards nature invoked their own fall. Murray had written an article on Christie’s later novels for one of the more ‘out there’ literary websites, Scooby Doo and the Fall: Paradise Fucked Up. He’d been pleased with the title at the time. Now he hoped that Christie hadn’t come across it.

Sacrifice was the final book in his pile. He’d marked a quote on the opening page that he hoped to use in his biography, if he could get permission. He opened the novel and read,

The cottage was six miles from the village, set back from the road along a rutted path. We had no visitors in those early days and when we left the shelter of our tiny cottage it was usually to go down to the loch side. Over the summer the path became overgrown so no one would have known we were there, except of course that they already did. We were the topic of conversation around hearthsides and dinner tables, in byres and country lanes. The islanders discussed us as they left church, hearts shrunken with the conviction of the saved. They mulled over our vices as they filled their vans and tractors with petrol at the one pump station, expanded on them in the mothers’ union and the ceilidh house. When we went down into the village to buy what we couldn’t make, every detail of what we wore, what we said, what we bought, was stored by those lucky enough to encounter us. Later we gave them something to talk about.

Murray closed the book and slid it beside the rest. The whole operation had taken less than fifteen minutes. If he left now, he might get clear of the building without meeting anyone. He shouldered the weight of his bag and slipped out into the corridor, locking the door on his office.

Murray was at the top of the spiral stairwell when he heard Fergus Baine’s laugh echoing up from the floor below. Loud with a false note of heartiness, the kind of chuckle an inquisitor might give before the final turn of the screw.

‘Shit.’ Murray hesitated, caught in a stab of shame. He could still make a getaway back to his office or up onto the floor above, but now Fergus was upon him the whole foolishness of hiding became clear. He had to face the professor sometime. He started down the stairs, forcing his feet into a brisk rhythm. If he was lucky Fergus would be in a hurry and they could pass each other with a sober nod of recognition.

‘His later work is technically far superior, of course.’ Fergus conceded a point to whoever he was talking to. ‘But it lacks the fire in the belly of his early stuff.’

‘It’s not often I hear you extolling passion over technical expertise.’

Fergus laughed again and Murray stopped dead, caught by the last voice, the only voice he wanted to hear.

Rachel was wearing a white silk blouse that buttoned and tied at the neck. There was something provocative about its double-fastening, as if it had been designed to be unpicked. Her grey linen trousers were snug at the hips, flaring down to open-toed sandals. Her toenails were painted pink. All her focus was on her husband. She touched his arm as they turned the corner. It was a simple gesture and Murray wondered if it was his foreknowledge that made it seem a move beyond collegiate.

‘Murray.’ Fergus’s voice lost none of its heartiness, none of its hint of the inquisition. ‘I’ve been hoping to catch up with you.’

Rachel met Murray’s eyes. He felt himself colour.

‘Fergus, Rachel.’ He forced a smile.

Doors were opening in the corridors above and below, noise building as students began to crowd out from classes. Rachel frowned. ‘I’ve got a third-year tutorial group due in sixty seconds.’

For a split moment he despised her. ‘Sure, see you later.’

Fergus squeezed her arm, a mirror of the way she’d held him. ‘See you at home.’ The professor watched Rachel until she reached the landing and when he turned away it was as if he still held her in his eyes, her slim figure disappearing into the black corridor of his pupils. ‘On your way out?’ Fergus smiled as if there had been no five a.m. phone call. No drunken demand to talk to his wife.

Murray had a ridiculous urge to mention he’d bedded Audrey Garrett. Instead he said, ‘I just dropped by to collect some books.’

‘Of course, you’re abandoning us.’

‘Temporarily, I’m sure you’ll cope.’

Fergus gave a slow smile.

‘Yes, I’m sure we’ll manage.’ The staircase was crowded, Murray and Fergus a dam in the ascending and descending streams of students. ‘Shall we get out of here?’

The professor turned and started to walk down towards the exit without waiting for Murray’s reply.

It had rained in the short time he’d been indoors and the air outside was fresh, the flagstones drenched black. The wind tumbled the kinetic sculpture in the courtyard as they crossed the quadrangles together, Fergus setting the pace. It was going to rain again soon. Murray glanced, as he often did, at the wrought-iron bench dedicated to a twenty-one-year-old student he’d never known. It was too delicate to sit on, but it drew the eye.

Fergus asked, ‘Book going well?’

‘Yes, fine.’

The professor’s suit was almost the same cold stone shade as Rachel’s linen trousers. Murray wondered if they had bought them together, on their honeymoon in Italy, the Mediterranean sparkling blue on the horizon behind them. He imagined Fergus in a white hat, Rachel in a summer dress, and felt jealousy hot in his stomach.

They cut down an outside staircase, into a smell of damp and ancient mortar roused by the shower, and entered a broad tunnel. Fergus’s footsteps sounded hollow against the cobbles. A porter pushed a trolley laden with boxes through a large archway and they stepped aside to let him pass. Fergus nodded, a country squire passing a tenant on the road. The porter returned the greeting, but the professor had already turned his attention back to Murray.

‘In a rush?’

‘Not really.’

‘Good. Walk me to the car and tell me what you’ve been up to.’

Fergus slowed to a stroll.

‘I’m making progress.’

‘Excellent. Any thoughts of putting a research student on the trail, see what they might dig up for you?’

‘I prefer to do the research myself. It’s slower, but at least that way I feel I’m covering all the bases.’

‘Yes.’ Fergus sighed. ‘I suppose those days have passed. Did I ever tell you I knew him?’

‘Rachel said you might have.’

The foolishness of the statement rose like bile in his throat. He waited for the professor to ask where they were when she’d mentioned it. But he gave a dry smile and said, ‘Good to know she thinks of me when I’m out of sight. Drunk, of course. Archie, that is, absolutely legless. I’m afraid I didn’t rate him much. Never managed to get to grips with the poetry either, too fey for my tastes, too Romantic.’

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘In a pub after some poetry reading or other.’ Fergus laughed. ‘Where else? To me he epitomised all of the clichés of the working-class poet. Drunken, unwashed, boorish, predatory towards women. At least Dylan Thomas had genius on his side. Lunan? Well. .’ He grinned at Murray. ‘Sorry, I never got the hang of revering the dead. I didn’t intend to slight your hero.’

‘I’m not sure hero is the right word.’

Fergus shrugged. They were almost at the end of the car park now, the bays next to the anatomy building before the path swept down and away from the bounds of the university. He pulled his car keys from his pocket and the lights flashed on a black BMW. ‘Let’s just say you’re keen to give Lunan his place in history.’

It was the same car that Rachel had driven him home in. Murray took in its solid curves, realising he had half- expected Fergus to be driving the Saab which had tailed them down from the reservoir. His voice sounded vague to his own ears. ‘I want to bring his poems to a wider audience.’

‘And you think biography is the best way to do it? The life rather than the work?’

‘The life and the work.’

‘Maybe. After all, the life destroyed the work.’ Fergus opened the driver’s door and leaned against it. ‘I know I said I didn’t like Lunan’s poetry, but I can recognise he had ability. The problem is he pissed it up against the wall.’ He levelled his gaze and Murray knew that if this were a lecture, whatever came next would be the key point, a statement to be underlined and regurgitated in the exam. ‘It happens sometimes to self-starters. They burn out, as if the effort of pulling themselves up by their boot straps was too much to sustain.’ Fergus turned his mouth down at the corners in a parody of a sad smile. ‘They do something foolish — sabotage their own hard work — and then, of course, they’ve got no real support when they get into difficulties, no access to the old-boy network.’ He grinned. ‘They’re on their own, and that can be rather lonely. Whatever one’s occupation, it’s always important to have allies.’ He gave Murray a parting smile, ducked into the BMW and slammed the door. Murray went to turn away as the engine started, but then the window slid down and Fergus spoke again. ‘One last thing.’

Murray turned back.

‘Yes?’

‘Whatever went on between you and my wife, it’s over now. Understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘I knew you would.’

The BMW swung out from its parking space and Murray walked towards the sloping pathway home. Fergus passed him on University Avenue. Neither of them waved goodbye.

Chapter Thirteen

GEORGE MIEKLE HAD lost none of his gruffness. The bookfinder nodded down at the pavement with the gravity of a funeral director presenting a newly embalmed corpse to its relatives.

‘That tells you all you need to know about Edinburgh’s road maintenance. Nigh on forty years it’s been there.’

Murray could make out the name Christie etched roughly into the concrete. He took out his mobile phone, lined up the camera function and snapped. It looked shit, the letters lost in the greyness of the concrete and the damp morning. Done well, it could make a nice image for the book. His brother would know how to capture it. He pushed the thought away.

‘Were you here when he did it?’

‘I was, yes.’

‘And Christie?’

‘Christie? No, she wasn’t there.’

Meikle turned and started to walk down the street. Murray took another useless shot with his camera-phone, and then followed, jogging a bit of the way before catching up with the bookfinder.

‘Archie obviously thought a lot of her.’

‘Aye, he did.’

The older man spoke without looking at him, his face set straight ahead. Murray supposed this was what fishing was like, flinging out your line, watching it drop into the deep waters, and then waiting patiently for a pull on the lure.

‘So what did he do? Wait till the workies were away, and then fire in with a stick?’

Meikle gave him a curt nod.

‘That’s about the size of it.’

They walked on in silence, the older man setting the pace. A bus disgorged its passengers onto the street and Murray forced his way through the waiting queue, muttering a mantra of ‘Excuse me’, ‘Sorry’, ‘Excuse me’. Meikle had drawn further ahead and Murray had to negotiate a squad of draymen unloading a beer lorry, before he drew level.

‘Can you spare time for a coffee?’

To his own ears he sounded like a desperate adolescent trying to set up a first date, but Meikle glanced at his watch.

‘I’ve got thirty minutes before I’m due back. There’s a place over the way, if you’re not fussy about hygiene.’

Meikle stepped into a queue of traffic stalled by a double-parked delivery van. Murray hesitated then hurried after him just as the delivery driver pulled away. The van tooted its horn and Murray raised an open palm in a gesture that was part command, part apology.

Meikle was already climbing the entrance steps to the café. Murray followed him into a broth of hot fat, hamburgers and chips. His bowels shrank, as if giving him due notice of what would happen if he dared eat anything. A motherly waitress in a blue tabard leant against the counter chatting to an old man who sat alone over a cup of rusty-looking tea. ‘Naw, hen,’ the old man said, ‘I’m sweet enough.’ They both laughed, and he repeated it, ‘Sweet enough’, though it wasn’t much of a joke the first time. The aisle was almost blocked by a toddler strapped tight in its buggy, like a dangerous criminal under restraint. Its mother sat at a table next to it, reading Heat. A milky coffee congealed in front of her, beside a plate of chips smothered in tomato ketchup. She pressed a chip into the redness, with a gesture that suggested a lifetime of stubbed-out cigarettes, and placed it in the child’s outstretched hands. The toddler squeezed it into puree and let it drop. The woman muttered, ‘For fuck’s sake, Liam’, and started to pick the mess from his jacket.

Meikle tucked himself into a plastic bucket seat at one of the free tables and set his elbows on its Formica surface.

‘Twenty-five to, the clock’s ticking.’

Murray shifted a scattering of white sugar with the edge of his hand, a snow plough piling through a fresh fall, and set his tape recorder on the table.

‘I wanted to ask you about Christie.’

‘I thought it was Archie you were interested in.’

‘It is, but Christie’s a big part of his story. What did you think of her?’

‘I didn’t think anything. She was his girlfriend, his bird as we used to call them, that was all. I guess you could say she was the Yoko Ono of the group.’

‘She split you up?’

‘We were pals, not bloody civil partners.’

The waitress ambled over, leaned her bottom against the opposite table and asked what they wanted. Murray noticed the home-made UDA tattoo on her wrist as she wrote their order on her pad. She gave the table a half-hearted wipe, and sugar grains rained onto Murray’s lap. Meikle waited till she had gone and then said, ‘Not that I’ve anything against gays.’

Murray tried to dust himself down, but some of the grains were caught in the trouser-folds around his groin and he gave up.

‘Of course not.’

‘It’s just that I’m not one, so mind you don’t put otherwise in your book.’

‘Message received and understood.’

The woman with the magazine put a chip into her own mouth and the toddler let out a pterodactyl caw.

Meikle said, ‘And don’t put any of that “doth protest too much” stuff in there either. I’m just setting the record straight.’

‘Straight as a die, George.’

The older man gave him a stern look that turned to a laugh. The waitress smiled as she set their coffees on the table between them.

‘Somebody’s happy, anyway.’ She took the bill from her pocket and placed it between the cups, asking, ‘Whose shout is it today then?’ as if they were seasoned regulars.

Murray pulled his wallet from his jacket and handed her a five-pound note.

‘Quite right. I bet your dad shelled out enough on you over the years, eh?’

Murray said, ‘He’s not. .’

But she had already counted his change onto the table and was making her way to a trio of workmen in fluorescent waistcoats.

‘Nosy besom. See she’s serving the Diet Coke men quick enough, anyway. No waiting around for them, eh?’ Now that his venom had been spent, Meikle softened a little. ‘Christie was all right as far as I was concerned. I mean, you wouldn’t have expected Archie to go for someone run of the mill. She was a good-looking girl. Didn’t say much, but nice to have around. Good wallpaper. I called her Yoko because after she came on the scene Archie and me saw less of each other. That’s the way it is with some guys once they hook up. They don’t hang out with the lads any more. Maybe it’s no bad thing. I spent too much time hanging out with the lads over the years. Look where it got me.’

‘I spoke to Professor James. He said Christie never said a word in his writing workshops.’

Meikle’s voice was low.

‘What else did he tell you?’

‘That Archie had the potential to make it big, but he wasn’t sure he’d have had the discipline.’

‘He’s changed his tune.’

‘Oh?’

Murray stirred his coffee, wary of losing the other man with the wrong question.

‘James couldn’t stand Archie or his poetry. It was him who made sure Archie was chucked out of uni.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Who do you think? It’s not like I spent my time hanging around with professors.’

‘If he wasn’t welcome, why did Archie keep going to the poetry workshops?’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

Murray could hear the heat of pub arguments and long-ago resentment in the older man’s voice. He levelled his own tones and said, ‘No reason, but why go where you’re not wanted?’

Meikle sighed. The anger was still there, but now he spoke with resignation.

‘They were good at what they did, right?’

Murray nodded.

‘Some of them became world-class.’

‘The way I read it, Archie wanted to be part of their gang, but for whatever reason they didn’t want him. Maybe I can see their point. They were university types — no offence intended — but you know what I mean. Serious guys. And Archie was wild, too wild sometimes.’

‘According to James, it wasn’t unknown for Archie to turn up drunk and obnoxious. He said that if Archie hadn’t been so talented, he would have told him not to come back.’

Meikle sipped his coffee. He gazed beyond Murray and he might have been looking through the café’s unwashed window to the busy street outside or into the past. ‘That type of thing wasn’t unusual, but there was more to it than just drunkenness. Archie had this extra energy. It’s hard to explain. Like he had a tincture of quicksilver running through his blood. I think that was part of why he drank so much — to damp his energy down.’ Meikle looked at his watch again. ‘I’m going to have to head soon. You asked me if I was there when he wrote Christie’s name in the concrete.’

‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t show you it to make a good picture for your book. The night he did that was the night Christie introduced him to Bobby Robb.’

They left their cold coffee cups on the table along with the tip and headed back into the street. This time the bookfinder kept Murray close.

‘I blamed Bobby for Archie’s death much more than I ever blamed Christie. She was only a young lass. Bobby was old enough to know what he was doing.’

The name rang a distant bell, but Murray resisted asking who Robb was for fear of breaking the spell. Meikle continued, ‘If I’m honest, I’d been losing patience with Archie for a while.’ He glanced at Murray. ‘You’re too young to remember what the city was like in those days. The phrase “wine bar” hadn’t been invented. Men were meant to behave like men, drink as much as they could get down and only greet when their team lost the cup. People were used to blokes with long hair by then, but you’d better bloody act like a man if you knew what was good for you.’

‘And Archie didn’t?’

‘Nowadays, odds are he would be okay. Anything goes, right? But not back then. Archie was too loud. He’d get steamboats and start mouthing off, on sex, religion, politics, poetry — the kind of stuff that gets up people’s noses. He attracted aggro and whoever was with him got dragged in. It was beginning to piss me off.’

‘And Bobby?’

‘Bobby was bad news. I’d heard a bit about him: Edinburgh’s a small city and a guy like him doesn’t go unnoticed. He was one of those leeches that attach themselves to students — you know the type, that bit older with the kind of contacts some youngsters find impressive.’

‘Drugs?’

‘Drugs, wideboys, who knows what else. In those days students got decent grants and Bobby Robb was just the boy to help spend them. But even if I hadn’t heard of Bobby, I’d have tagged him as trouble as soon as Christie walked into the bar looking up at him like he was Jesus Christ resurrected and ready to turn beer into whisky. There was something Victorian about the whole thing. Like she was a little milkmaid fresh from the country and he was an old villain ready to sucker her in and pimp her out.’

They approached a building under renovation and fell into single file as they entered a tunnel of scaffolding, its supports bandaged at head height with sacking to save careless drinkers from cracking their skulls. On the wooden walkways above men in hardhats hammered into the stonework. Mineral dust powdered the air. Murray held his breath until they emerged on the other side. Meikle picked up the tale.

‘Archie favoured working men’s pubs. Like I said, there wasn’t much else unless you wanted to drink in a hotel. But he went for the rougher end. The bar we were in that night was the kind of place where you’d expect Christie to get a comment or two. The punters stared at her, right enough, when she came in. Then they saw Bobby and concentrated on their pints. It’s always struck me as funny that guys with scars get a reputation for being hard. It’s the ones that cut them you should be looking out for, right?’ Murray nodded and Meikle went on. ‘Bobby had a scar running from the corner of his mouth up to his eyelid, looked like he’d been lucky to keep his sight. Side-on, it gave him this horrible, sneering smile, a bit like the Penguin.’

Murray looked at Meikle blankly and he said, ‘You know, the baddie in Batman.’

‘I think you mean the Joker.’

‘Shit.’ Meikle shook his head. ‘That’s what my wife calls a senior moment. Sideways, he looked like the Joker, but the funny thing was, he was the kind of ugly git women would be attracted to.’

Murray knew the type, but he asked, ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Something about his confidence maybe, the way he carried himself, the fact he looked like a bastard. Some women like that.’

‘So you thought Christie might go off with him?’

‘There were stars in her eyes when she looked at him right enough, but I got the impression it was Archie he was interested in. Homed right in on him and started to give him the gab.’

‘Did Archie reciprocate?’

‘Oh, he was taken with him, yes.’

Murray hesitated.

‘Are you saying Archie had homosexual tendencies?’

The bookfinder glanced at him.

‘If you’d asked me then, about Archie maybe being gay, I would have called you a poof for thinking it. But looking back, I don’t know. I don’t think so. He never tried anything on with me, but who can say? I guess Archie was the kind of guy that would try anything once, twice if he liked it.’

They were close to the library now. Murray looked at his watch. Five to the hour.

‘So, him and Bobby?’

‘You’re asking the wrong man.’

‘But you had your suspicions?’

‘No, I had no opportunity for suspicions. I never saw him or Christie again after that night.’

They passed a pub and had to fall into single file again to pass the smokers loitering outside. When they fell back into step, Murray asked, ‘What happened?’

Meikle sighed. ‘There were a few of us drinking that night. Archie had brought along a student pal that liked slumming it and I was with a couple of mates from the Socialist Workers’ Party. They tolerated Archie for my sake, and I put up with his wee snob of a pal for his. It was an uneasy balance, but it was a balance all the same.’

‘And Bobby Robb upset it?’

‘Big time, as my granddaughter would say. Bobby was all charm, but he wasn’t trying to charm me. It was like he was presenting a mask to Archie and Christie, but from where I was sitting I could see the line between where the mask finished and the real Bobby began. And he knew it. He kept turning round and giving me these sly nods and winks. I would have coped with that — after all, it was Archie’s business who he hung about with — but then Bobby pulled out a pack of Tarot cards and started laying them out in front of Christie.’ George shook his head. ‘When it comes to chat-ups, fortune-telling is up there with foot rubs and neck massages.’

Murray had never considered it before, but he could see how the tactic might work.

‘I guess it lets you get up close and personal.’

‘Exactly. I was a bit pissed off on Archie’s behalf, but it was still none of my beeswax and, anyway, something told me Robb was doing it to get Archie’s attention, so I let them get on with it.’

‘Did Archie join in?’

‘Oh, aye, before long he was right in the middle of the hocus-pocus. That made it worse. He was meant to be my mate and here he was giving me a showing-up in front of these serious socialists. Then I heard what Bobby Robb was saying and lost my rag.’

Meikle paused and his face grew tight, as if remembering brought back his anger. Somewhere a car radio cried advance warning of the lunchtime news bulletin and Murray remembered time was against them.

‘What was he talking about?’

‘Reincarnation.’

‘Surely that kind of thing was big back then?’

‘Oh, aye, it was. Hinduism and all that. Not my bag, but I didn’t have a problem with it. No, Bobby Robb was waxing on about how you could gain access to other worlds, other minds, through rituals. According to him, if you hit on the right spell, you’d be able to outlive death. Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was the drink, who knows? He’d had a fair few pints by this time, we all had. But according to Robb, the most valuable ingredient was the blood of an innocent, a virgin. You wouldn’t necessarily have to kill the girl to get it, Robb said, just cut her. He asked Christie if she’d oblige, and when she told him she didn’t qualify, started quizzing her on whether she had any friends who did. I waited for Archie to shut him up and when he didn’t, I told Robb he was talking a load of pish. The next thing I know, we’re scrapping outside on the pavement.’

‘You and Bobby?’

‘No.’ Meikle gave a bitter laugh. ‘Bobby wasn’t the kind to fight his own battles. Me and Archie.’ They had reached the library doorway now. Somewhere a clock struck one, but the bookfinder made no move to return to his post. ‘I went round to his flat the next day, but Archie was either out, or not answering. I reckoned if he wanted to see me, he knew where to look. A month later his book came out. No doubt he launched it on a wave of drink. Eventually I heard Archie and Christie had gone off to one of the islands. Robb was with them.’ The bookfinder’s voice took on a definite tone, making it clear he was drawing a line under the subject. ‘Now you know as much as I do.’

‘Except why you blame Bobby Robb for Archie’s death.’

‘It’s just my opinion.’

‘But you’ve got a reason. I’d like to hear it, if you’re willing to share it with me.’

The older man stood silently, looking down the street in the direction of the crossroads.

‘Fuck it.’ He took his mobile from his pocket and dialled. ‘Fiona? Aye, I’m fine, hen, but I’m going to be a wee bit late back.’ He paused while the person on the other end of the line said something, and then answered, ‘No, no problem. Just something I’ve got to deal with. Aye, I remember, I’ll be back in time. Thanks, Fiona, I’ll do the same for you sometime. Cheers.’

He hung up and Murray said, ‘Do you want to go somewhere?’

‘No, I can’t. I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes. Let’s step away from the door, though. I don’t want to chance my luck.’ They walked down the bridge a little way and stood looking down onto old Edinburgh. Meikle nodded at the darkened street below. ‘From up here, it could be a hundred years ago.’ He sighed. ‘You’re right. Archie was a stupid bastard at times, and I’ve no evidence Bobby had anything to do with his death. But there were rumours.’

‘What kind of rumours?’

‘Nothing substantial, only that things got out of hand once they got to the island. Something happened to make Archie do what he did, and Bobby Robb wasn’t an innocent party.’ He looked Murray square in the face. ‘He came back to Edinburgh afterwards, but someone gave him a doing and he moved on.’

‘You?’

‘What does it matter? It was a long time ago.’ In the street below, two old men with open cans of lager in their hands made unsteady progress, arm in arm. ‘Classic Edinburgh: up here it’s hustle and bustle, down there it’s drink and decay. Like lifting a stone.’ Down below, the old men lowered themselves onto the kerbside. One of them gestured expansively, elaborating on some point while his companion tipped his beer can to his mouth. Transport them to a gastro-pub and they might be two professors of English literature debating the finer points of theory.

Murray said, ‘I still don’t see why you blame Bobby rather than Christie.’

Meikle gave Murray a defiant stare.

‘Bobby Robb was a walking pharmacy. Archie had no self-control. Put him on an island with someone like that and what happened was almost inevitable.’

‘There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?’

‘No.’ The bookfinder looked away. ‘Except. .’ His phone rang and he took it from his pocket. ‘I’m on my way.’ He stowed the mobile and turned his attention back to Murray. ‘Bobby Robb was a drug-addled opportunist, but even I could see he had some kind of magnetism. And Lunan was looking for a guru. Maybe that was why he palled up with me in the first place. Problem was, I had enough trouble keeping myself straight.’

He turned to walk away.

‘George.’ Murray put a hand on the other man’s arm. ‘You’ve been frank with me. I appreciate it.’

The bookfinder’s gruffness had returned. He hesitated an uncomfortable beat, then took Murray’s proffered hand and shook it.

‘I’ve thought about it nigh-on thirty years, and I believe whatever happened up on Lismore, Bobby Robb was at the bottom of it.’

Murray asked, ‘Did you ever see Christie again?’

‘Once, I saw her in the street not long after Archie’s death.’ Meikle shook his head. ‘That night in the pub, I remember thinking how beautiful Christie was. She was glowing and her hair. . well, it was always lovely, but it seemed thicker, shinier.’ He paused as if deciding whether to go on, then continued, ‘The last time I saw her, it was as if she’d aged. She’d lost weight. It made her features look sharper, witchy. Suddenly I felt that I would have as soon talked to the Devil. I crossed the road to avoid her.’

They started to walk together, back in the direction of the library. George Meilke asked, ‘So what next?’

‘It’s all baby steps at the moment. I’m planning on heading to Lismore, see if I can get Christie to give me her account. And I guess I’ll have to try and track down Bobby Robb.’ He gave Meikle an apologetic glance. ‘Even if he turns out to still be as bad as he was when you met him, I need to hear his account.’

Meikle nodded. They walked on in silence for a while. The lunchtime rush was over, but these days the city was never quiet and there was still a slow crawl of cars edging along George IV Bridge towards the lights.

Meikle gave a tired grin. ‘I know where he drinks.’

Murray looked at the older man, wondering if he had intended to keep this last piece of information to himself.

The bookfinder misinterpreted his expression.

‘Don’t worry. I’ve not fallen off the wagon. I saw him in the High Street a couple of years back.’

‘And recognised him? After all that time?’

‘You never forget an ugly mug like that. I’d thought about Bobby Robb from time to time, always regretting I didn’t somehow call his bluff that night. But when I saw him again. .’ the older man shook his head. ‘It was like I was glad to see him, even though I can honestly say I hate Robb for what he did to Archie. It was around about Christmas time. I remember that because I was going to look in some of those fancy shops they have up there for a nice scarf or something for the wife. But when I caught sight of Bobby I didn’t hesitate, just reeled round and followed him, like he was the bloody Pied Piper of Hamelin. I had a hard time keeping up. He’s probably got a good ten years on me, but he’s fast on his pins, I’ll give him that. He went down Cockburn Street and into Geordie’s. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve had a drink there.’

‘In that case you’ve maybe even seen him and not kent it.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Nothing. Ordered myself a Coke and stood drinking it at the bar, watching Bobby in the mirror. It was him, right enough. I’ve dropped by a couple of times since, to check he’s still around. He always is. Sat in the same seat, no newspaper, no book, no company, just a pint stuck in front of him ’

Something in the older man’s voice made Murray ask, ‘George, you’re not planning on doing anything, trying to get revenge for Archie?’

Meikle gave a bitter laugh.

‘No, son, I’ve got a lot going for me these days: a nice wife, a family that’s doing well. I just like to see him occasionally, sitting there all alone over his pint, like he does night after night, that creepy scar of his grinning away on one side, while his mouth droops on the other. That’s the best revenge I can think of.’

Chapter Fourteen

A MAN COWLED in a brown blanket sat at the top of the stairway, holding a Starbucks cup in his outstretched hand. Murray dropped some loose change in it, and then loped down into the darkness. Fleshmarket Close was caught between the tourist throng of the Old Town and the Tannoy announcements of Waverley Station, but down here in the piss-fragrant gloom it was as if all that commotion belonged to another city. The bar was set into the basement wall of the high tenements that shadowed the dark wynd. He stepped through its door and back forty years.

Maybe the tartan carpet and framed portraits of clan chiefs had been intended to attract the tourists. But it seemed the Americans and Scandinavians who busied the rest of the city preferred brighter watering holes because the grim faces in the pictures girned down on empty tables.

Murray stationed himself at the small bar. Up in the far corner a mute television played out highlights from the racing at Goodwood. He watched the horses thundering silently towards the finishing line in races already lost and won.

After a while a barmaid appeared from the backroom with a paperback in her hand. Murray ordered a pint of lager. The girl set her book on the counter, took a glass from beneath the bar and went wordlessly to the pumps.

A barefoot man was caught on the paperback’s cover, frozen in the act of climbing a steep street with a box on his back. His expression was resigned, as if he knew this was all life held for him and was reconciled to the endless trek. Large block letters, heavy as stone, declared The Myth of Sisyphus.

‘Great book. Enjoying it?’

The girl placed his pint in front of him.

‘I’m not sure what the point is.’

‘No, I know what you mean.’

Murray told her to take one for herself, like detectives did in the movies when they were trawling for information.

‘Thanks, I’ll have a half of lager when I knock off.’

She put a pound in the tips jar, took her book and disappeared again. It wasn’t how things were meant to go.

Somebody had left the previous day’s Evening News behind. Murray spread it across the counter and took a sip of his drink.

A man had pleaded guilty to stabbing his wife of thirty-five years, though all he could remember was his seventh pint. A teenager had hung himself in his bedroom after a flurry of threatening texts from classmates. A ten-year-old cancer sufferer, who the newspaper had been collecting money for, had died before she could go on her dream trip to Disneyland Paris. Murray looked at the photograph of a little girl in a floral baseball cap, her face split in a broad grin, and wondered why life was so shit.

He was almost halfway down his glass when an old man came in, leaning heavily on a walking stick.

‘Afternoon.’ He took his bunnet off, gave it a shake and bent it into the pocket of his overcoat. ‘She in the back?’

Murray folded the newspaper away.

‘Aye, I think I scared her off.’

‘Always got her nose in a book.’ The old man rapped on the counter with his stick. ‘I keep telling her this is a pub, not Boots Lending Library, but she doesn’t listen.’

The barmaid reappeared and he ordered a half and half. Murray wondered about offering to pay, but hesitated, worried the pensioner would be offended, and the moment passed. He needn’t have bothered. He hadn’t finished describing Bobby Robb’s scar before the old man interrupted him.

‘So that was his name, eh? Bobby Robb. We called him Crippen.’ He put a hand over his mouth. ‘You’re not a relative, are you, son?’

Murray hesitated.

‘His nephew.’

The pensioner held out his hand.

‘In that case I’m sorry for your loss. I’m Wee Johnny.’ They shook and the old one gave a smile that showed the full length of his dentures. ‘I hope you didn’t take offence at what I said there. We like a wee laugh and a joke in here. Don’t we, Lauren?’

The barmaid nodded. ‘Aye, Johnny, laugh a minute in here.’

She slipped back to her sanctuary, leaving them alone in the empty bar.

Murray knew the answer, but he asked, ‘Are you saying Bobby Robb’s dead?’

‘Christ, I’m no the one to break it to you, son, am I?’

The dentures disappeared behind a frown.

‘Don’t worry. We weren’t close.’

He felt bereaved. Another chance of reaching out to Archie gone.

‘That’s something, anyway.’ Johnny stared at him. ‘Aye, now that I get a better look, I can see the resemblance. You’ve not got the scar, but you’re like him round the eyes.’

‘People always say that.’

Murray took an inch off his pint. There was no longer any point in hanging around.

‘Three days earlier and you would have caught him.’ Wee Johnny nodded towards a corner table. ‘Could have sat there all night, except Lauren noticed he was still on his first pint when he should have been on his third and went to check on him. She’s a good lassie at heart. Some reader, though.’ He shouted through to the back room, ‘I bet you’d have liked to get your hands on some of Crippen’s books, eh, Lauren?’ No reply came, and it seemed the old man didn’t expect any because he continued, ‘He had a whale of stuff, your uncle. A whale of stuff — the books — gee whiz.’

He shook his head in wonder at the size of Bobby Robb’s library and sank the dregs of his half pint.

Murray put a hand in his pocket.

‘Could you manage another?’

‘That’s good of you. I’ll take a pint.’ Johnny knocked back his whisky. ‘And a wee malt of the month to chase it down, if it’s no trouble.’

He rapped the counter with his stick and Lauren emerged wearily into the bar. Murray gave their order then asked Johnny, ‘So how do you know about his book collection?’

It was Lauren who answered.

‘Mr Robb rented a flat from my Uncle Arthur that manages this place. He told us about it.’ She poured two pints of lager. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘Thanks.’ Murray took his beer from her. ‘So have you any idea what happened to his books?’

Lauren avoided his eyes.

‘Uncle Arthur burned them. It took him all afternoon.’

‘Aye, well, he agrees with me.’ Wee Johnny beamed, enjoying the conversation. ‘There’s a time and a place for books.’

‘He’s a Nazi. One minute he’s saying I can go through them and have my pick, the next he’s splashing petrol all over the place. The neighbours weren’t too happy when they saw the state he’d made of the drying green.’ She reached up to the gantry and poured a measure of malt into a glass. ‘He got a red face when Mr Robb’s ex-wife turned up looking to collect his effects, though. I guess that’d be your aunty.’

‘Ex-aunty.’ Johnny took his nip from Lauren. ‘He didn’t even know the old boy was dead.’

Lauren’s eyes widened.

‘You do know your uncle’s funeral’s this afternoon?’ She turned to Wee Johnny. ‘You did tell him?’

The old man put a hand protectively around his drinks, as if afraid they might be confiscated.

‘I never thought.’

Lauren glanced at the five-minutes-fast clock above the bar.

‘Seafield Crematorium. If you get a cab, you might just make it.’

Murray shoved some money on the bar and headed for the door. Behind him Wee Johnny said, ‘Haud on while I finish these, son, and I’ll hitch a ride with you.’

But Murray let the door swing shut. He headed back out into the murk of the alley, then down towards the station taxi rank, hoping to be in time to see Bobby Robb make the big fire.

Chapter Fifteen

MURRAY FELT THE taxi driver taking in his scuffed trainers and worn jeans and attempted a joke. ‘My mother always said I’d be late for my own funeral.’ He handed over a tenner. ‘Keep the change.’

The driver rattled some coins onto the little tray set in the grille dividing them.

‘There are times when it doesn’t hurt to show some respect.’

He waited until Murray shut the door, then spun the cab round and away, a look of disgust pasted to his face. Murray pocketed his change. As insults went, ‘keep your money’ was a good one. But it lacked sting when the sum involved was fifty pence.

The crematorium looked like a solid place to transform flesh into dust. It had been built sometime in the 1930s, when white facades and art deco symmetry were in vogue. Five frosted glass windows flanked a door wide enough for a coffin and pall-bearers; a giant mouth bounded by milky eyes. There was something grimly cinematic about the whole arrangement; a sombre invitation to a show you might not want to see. Virginia creeper covered the building’s front, a shaggy hairdo at odds with otherwise dignified features. The ivy seemed in bad taste to Murray, a graveyard escape reaching out its tendrils to the living, who had only come to bid goodbye.

A few mourners had gathered a short distance from the front door, waiting on the next event. The dark suits, black ties and cupped cigarettes made the men look like members of a pale-faced Mafia family. The women’s mourning clothes were less assured, combinations of grey, navy and black, outfits pieced together with emphasis on colour rather than style, as if the occasion was unexpected and they had been forced to rifle their wardrobes for something suitable at the last moment, which Murray supposed they probably had.

The name Robb was on a little sign outside the chapel. He shouldered his rucksack, took a deep breath and climbed the entrance steps, feeling the waiting mourners’ disinterested eyes on his back.

Inside it was strangely bright after the grey of the cemetery. He slipped quietly into the back row, his trainers silent against the polished oak floor. The minister was reciting a prayer, but the two pints he had sunk with Wee Johnny seemed suddenly to be working on him and Murray couldn’t make out the words. He bowed his head, clasped his hands and focused on his interlocked fingers.

Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, look inside and there’s all the people.

No one else had come to see Bobby Robb off. Murray glanced down the chapel, past the empty regiment of seats, to where the coffin still waited. Bobby was inside it, his scar grinning on into death, his secrets destined to be consigned to the fire with him.

It was too warm and there was a bad taste in his mouth. Murray was almost sure he could feel the grit of burnt cinders beneath the savour of stale malts. He wondered if the crematorium powered their heating from the bodies. It would make good sense, though he guessed it was an ecological triumph they might not want to advertise. The minister’s words were familiar now.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;

Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Murray’s head began to nod. He dug his knuckles into his forehead and blinked his eyes open.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;

Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

How much credence did he give to George Meikle’s theory? The bookfinder was sincere, but that didn’t make him right. His story was based on a bad feeling he’d had under the influence forty years ago and a few unsubstantiated rumours. Odds were Bobby Robb was just another waster who’d grown into a lonely old man. There were enough of those in the city.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

The minister was asking him to rise now. Murray unclasped his hands as the organ croaked into a suitably sombre tune. Murray felt a weight of self-pity in his chest. Was this his ‘Ghost of Christmas yet to come’, a foretaste of his own funeral, the empty chairs and uninterested minister?

He stood up as the tasselled velvet curtain drew magically across the coffin, veiling it from view. A decision forced itself on him.

It was stupid to waste time on quarrels. He would phone Jack.

Down in the front row a short figure he hadn’t noticed also got to her feet. Murray slipped from his place and silently left the chapel as the boxed remains of Bobby Robb slid into the furnace.

The waiting mourners’ number had expanded while he’d been inside. Murray crossed the pathway and stood a little away from the main body of the group, distant enough not to be accused of gate-crashing, but close enough to be mistaken for one of their number.

He’d only caught a glimpse of the back of the woman’s head as she rose from her chair. If Bobby Robb was as bad as Meikle painted him, then odds were the lone mourner was some unfortunate soul Bobby had leeched onto, to look after him in his final years. But a scintilla of excitement had slid into his chest at the sight of her.

An elderly man in the waiting crowd gave Murray a quizzical look, as if trying to place him. Murray straightened his jacket, wishing he didn’t look so scruffily conspicuous, then pulled his phone from his pocket and put it to his ear, the ideal alibi.

He called Jack on speed dial, but a robotic female voice primly told him the number was unavailable and cut the call without giving him the opportunity to leave a message. The woman emerged from the chapel and limped painfully down the stairs, resting her weight on a walking stick. She was shorter than he’d imagined. He supposed her height, combined with the chapel’s high-backed chairs, had conspired to hide her from him. It certainly wasn’t the sobriety of her outfit.

Bobby Robb’s only mourner was dressed in a pale lilac trouser suit, with a pink scarf tied loosely at her neck. The colours should have clashed with her hair, but the ice-cream pallet cleverly set off its russet tones. It would only take a posy of flowers to make her look like a tastefully dressed, mature bride. Murray overheard an elderly female mourner whisper, in tones that seemed to hold an equal share of admiration and disapproval, ‘The merry widow.’

He would have been inclined to agree, were it not for her tilting gait and grim expression; the kind of look a mother might adopt as she determined to switch off a suffering child’s life-support.

Murray took his phone, lined it up as best he could without being obvious, and snapped a picture, hoping the result would fare better than his earlier attempts. His quarry laboured towards the car park, her right shoulder dipping a little with the strain of her limp. He followed her at a distance, hoping for another shot, wary of being spotted, but unsure why. After all, if his instinct about the mourner’s identity was right, this might be the perfect opportunity to present himself. He could invite her for coffee somewhere smart — high tea at the George Hotel — and explain his project in full.

The woman stopped, adjusted her scarf and then turned to look back at the chapel, as if searching the sky for evidence that the deed was done. Now was his chance. Murray stepped purposefully forward, his feet crunching on the gravel.

Green eyes flecked with amber flickered towards him. Murray meant to continue on, extend his hand and offer his condolences, but he stalled. The woman’s eyes glanced him up and down, then dismissed him. She turned, walked to a red Cherokee and got in, slamming the door.

Murray breathed out. He felt like a mouse that had frozen in the beam of a night owl’s reconnaissance flight, only to be inexplicably spared. He watched as the woman he was almost sure was Christie Graves drove down towards the gates of the crematorium and away.

Chapter Sixteen

SOMEWHERE ABOVE HIM Murray’s father was smiling as he told Jack all about his two wee boys. Murray quickly surveyed the Fruitmarket Gallery’s café and bookshop, and then asked a young attendant if Jack Watson was around.

‘Jack who?’

The boy was heroin-chic pale, dressed in shrink-tight black jeans and a too-big studded belt. He glanced Murray up and down, then looked away, as if he had seen enough.

‘Watson, he’s one of your exhibitors.’

The boy pulled a leaflet wearily from the plastic holder on the wall beside him and flicked it open.

‘Six o’clock.’

It had been a long day, punctuated by disappointment and cremation. Murray marshalled his patience.

‘What happens at six o’clock?’

All the weary weight of time was in the boy’s voice.

‘Jack Watson’s artist’s talk.’

Murray wondered if the date of the talk had been stored somewhere in his unconscious, the better part of him making moves towards reconciliation his sour consciousness couldn’t concede.

He glanced at his watch. There was an hour before Jack was due to speak. He wouldn’t stay to hear him talk about how their father’s illness had inspired his art — the very thought of it invoked a burr of impatience — but if he could catch him beforehand perhaps they could grab a pint together and patch things up.

‘If you see him, will you tell him his brother’s here, please?’

The boy leaned against the wall, his eyes trained on something beyond Murray’s view.

‘Sure.’

He made the prospect sound as likely as world peace.

The same Manga cartoons he and Jack had made fun of the last time they’d met still dominated the first room of the ground-floor gallery. The colours were still bubblegum bright, the bug-eyed girl still surprised by the spotty dog’s attentions. But now their devastated backgrounds seemed to dominate the image. He felt a sudden kinship with the citizens of Nagasaki who had crawled from the matchstick remains of their homes to find their city gone. Did they wake believing themselves dead? And when they realised the truth, how many committed suicide and regained blessed oblivion?

He had been wrong to laugh. Murray wasn’t sure if the artist was suggesting the H-bomb had led to a coarsening of culture, or that cartoons and pornography were destructive forces on society, but he was sure they viewed the world as a lost cause.

‘A cesspool.’

The words came out in a whisper, but he glanced round guiltily as he made his way to Cressida Reeves’ exhibition space, relieved there had been no one there to overhear him.

Perhaps it was the dust of Seafield cemetery still clinging to his soles that made the dim-lit room seem like a tomb. Or maybe it was the hundreds of faces staring from the walls, like supplications for healing from a saint who needed to be reminded what the sufferer looked like before intervening.

Murray began at what he assumed was the beginning: a cluster of baby photographs, children with cleft palates smiling delightedly for the camera. Some had clearly been taken in hospital, clinical assessments prior to operations, he supposed. But most were the usual bare-bum-on-fluffy-rug style of baby portrait. The distorted grins shone cheerfully beneath bright, fun-filled eyes. Murray felt ashamed by his own quick stab of revulsion at the warped lips and wet gums.

The next grouping was composed of children’s birthday parties. There was no sign of the cleft palates now. Murray wondered if they were the same subjects post-surgery, but other visitors entered the gallery and he resisted the temptation to scrutinise the beaming faces too closely.

The sets of photos continued through children’s calendar days: the opening of Christmas presents, first day of school, teenage friends. The samples were becoming smaller, some of the faces beginning to repeat. Murray returned to the information board he’d snubbed on the way in.

Cressida Reeves’ work is concerned with anonymity, identity and rites of passage. In her installation, Now You See Me, commissioned by the Fruitmarket Gallery, Reeves begins by inserting a baby photograph of herself into an anonymous sample of one hundred children also born with a cleft palate or ‘hare lip’. The condition is absent from succeeding groupings, reflecting the ease with which it is corrected. Each subsequent set relates a shared experience; birthday parties, Christmas mornings, first day at school, teenage discos, first love, college etc. Reeves includes increasing numbers of images of her friends and family in each set, until she is no longer an anonymous disfigured child surrounded by other equally anonymous infants, but an adult surrounded by people she has chosen to know.

He went back to the birthday photos, wondering if he could identify Cressida in amongst the excited children. The images were simple, snaps executed with no great skill, meaningless beyond their family group. But they might be amongst the first possessions people grabbed if their house were burning, the belongings they mourned most in a flood.

The sitting room wallpaper in his childhood home had been bold and brown, like the wallpaper on the photo he was looking at now. He remembered some of the toys the children were playing with too. A Christmas morning shot showed a little boy stripping the wrapping from a Transformer Jack had coveted. A toddler in kung-fu pyjamas posed military-style with a light sabre. Murray remembered him and Jack jumping around their shared bedroom, swinging the glowing, plastic sticks, battling for the right to be Han Solo. He would remind Jack of the light sabres later. And maybe sometime much later they would sort through some photos together. It was time.

Murray skipped the first days at school, and the school-uniformed shots that followed, and went directly to the teenage years. Now he could spot Cressida amongst the crowding faces. The ribbons coiled in her long hair, and the black fedora that topped the arrangement, declared her a fan of Boy George. That made her younger than Murray, but only by a few years.

He could see the tiny scar, faintly visible beneath the thick make-up. It had very likely tormented her through her teens, but it was already adding character to features that might otherwise have been too sweet for substance. How would it feel to kiss her there, on the slight pucker above her top lip? He walked swiftly to the college shots that comprised the next section, feeling ashamed of the sudden spark of desire that had transferred itself from grown-up Cressida to her teenage counterpart.

The art school crowd that she’d hung around with later looked edgier and more fashion-conscious than he supposed he and his university friends had, but Murray could still relate to the camaraderie in the images. He was searching for his brother’s face too now, and found him, beer bottle tilted to his mouth, hair gelled into a DA, the collar of his leather jacket turned up.

Murray smiled, recalling his father’s outrage when Jack had borrowed his car and driven it over the squeaky new leather jacket to scuff it up. It had looked good when he’d finished, though, a montage of monkeys, skulls and roses painted in red and black over the grazed surface.

They hadn’t seen much of each other in those days, each forging their own way, occasionally meeting back at their dad’s, going for a beer when their paths crossed, but no more than that. The closeness had returned later.

Jack appeared again, looking very young, in a group shot with others from his class. A youth with a green Mohican who Murray vaguely remembered stood on Jack’s right side, Cressida on his other, her arm around his waist, hugging him close. She too looked much younger, her hair back-combed into a massive halo, her black leggings tucked into Doc Marten boots in a style that had always reminded him of Max Wall. She’d looked better on the night of the opening, older but more sophisticated, assured.

He scanned the rest of the set, realising that though the fashions in the photographs might vary, these records of college experience were as similar to each other as the childhood parties had been; as if the beer-drinking, lamppost-climbing, face-pulling and kissing had also been organised with tradition in mind.

He checked his watch. Five-thirty. Maybe he should step out and see if Jack had arrived. Murray turned to go, but something snagged on the edge of his vision and he returned to the display. It would have been easy to miss, and yet he wondered how he could ever have overlooked it: a black and white photo-booth strip. The one-after-the-other shots managed to both capture and animate the moment when his brother and Cressida turned towards each other laughing, touched lips, tongues, and then broke away, still laughing.

He paused for a moment in the next room, letting his eyes rest on Nagasaki. He wondered if Lyn had seen the photos, remembered her strained look on the exhibition’s opening night, her curtness in the Burger King when he asked if she knew Cressida. Exploiting a memory that should have been kept private was exactly what he had accused Jack of doing. He wondered if his brother minded, and realised that he hoped he did.

Murray was almost in the street before he become conscious that the young gallery attendant had said something as he passed. He retraced his steps and the boy repeated it.

‘Your brother’s in the café.’

‘Cheers.’

His voice was harsh with ill-use and the strains of the day, but it seemed he’d unintentionally hit on the right note because the young man’s belligerence was replaced by solicitude.

‘I tried to tell Jack you were here, but he and his girlfriend went past before I could catch them.’

Murray had an urge to enquire if his arse was superglued to the seat, but he ignored it and hurried through to the café, relieved to have the opportunity to see Lyn as well before Jack’s show got on the road.

The café was busy. Murray scanned the room, unable to spot Jack and Lyn amongst the close-packed tables. Then suddenly it was as if the photo-booth pictures had come to life.

Jack and Cressida were at a corner table by the window, kissing.

‘Jesus.’

Murray stepped forward unsure of what he was going to say.

There was nothing he could say.

A waitress approached, menu in hand, and he turned to leave, desperate to escape before they saw him. He felt his rucksack hit the counter, heard the waitress’s gasp and the echoing shatter of glass against concrete, loud as sudden gunshot. Water flashed across the floor as a massive arrangement of Stargazer lilies hit the deck.

Cressida and Jack broke their clinch, principals in a brilliantly choreographed move that had every head turning in perfect unison towards the smash. Murray saw his brother get to his feet, heard the hum of conversation build from the silent instant that had followed. He turned and walked from the building, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him, like a pathway to disaster.

‘Murray, wait.’

His brother’s boots sounded loud on the pavement. Who the fuck wore segs in their shoes? It was another affectation, part of the all-surface-no-substance shit that defined Jack these days.

‘Wait.’

‘Get to fuck.’

Murray caught the curious stares of the schoolchildren waiting to enter the Edinburgh Dungeons. The bored-looking ghost at the door said, ‘Mind your language or it’s the bloody stocks for you.’ And the queue giggled beneath their teacher’s disapproving gaze.

Murray felt a hand on his shoulder and turned, his fists balled.

‘Piss off, Jack.’

‘Wait a second, will you?’

Jack’s shirt had escaped his trousers. He was breathing heavily and there was a smudge of Cressida’s lipstick on his upper lip. One of the waiting children opened a bag of sweets and passed out an allotted ration to his friends, ready to enjoy the show.

Murray turned the corner down onto Waverley Bridge, towards Princes Street.

‘Why? Are you going to tell me things aren’t what they seem?’

Jack caught his arm, holding him there. He looked Murray in the eyes, no longer as young as he’d been in Cressida’s photographs, but just as handsome. More handsome, perhaps. The thought surprised Murray: he had never thought of his brother as good-looking before.

‘No, things are exactly as they seem.’

It was almost as much of a shock as seeing them together. The anger left him for a moment and he asked, ‘Does Lyn know?’

‘Not yet.’

Jack wiped a hand across his face. He saw the red lipstick on his fingers, took a hanky from his pocket and rubbed at his mouth.

‘What a fucking mess.’

He looked at the red stains again, then at Murray, and it wasn’t clear whether he meant his lipstick-smeared face, or the state of his love life.

‘Are you going to tell her?’

‘Yes.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jack.’

‘I’m in love with Cressida.’

‘Just like that? After twelve years, you’ve suddenly found someone else?’

‘We knew each other before.’

‘So I saw, but time’s moved on.’

Murray pulled free from his brother’s grip. Jack raised his hand as if to snare him again, and then let it fall.

‘Life’s too short not to live it, Murray. You should know that.’

A group of youths passed them on the pavement. One of them shouted, ‘Why don’t you kiss and make up?’ and his companions laughed. Murray felt the urge to lay into them with his fists, land a good few punches before they beat him senseless. Instead he kept his voice low and asked, ‘What about Lyn?’

‘I’ll make sure Lyn’s okay. She’ll get over it. She’s a survivor.’

Murray shook his head.

‘You’re a prick, Jack.’

He turned his back on his brother and walked away. This time no one followed him.