Stonemouth

15

It’s another one of those diaphanous days, the Toun submerged in a glowing mist from dawn onwards. It’s supposed to lift later, according to the forecast, though the forecasting people are notoriously bad at getting the Toun’s weather right.

I’m up early, using the family computer in Dad’s office. It’s a Windows machine so it all feels a bit Fisher-Price after an Apple interface, but grit your teeth and it works, so I check gmail and do a bit of not very difficult detective work, looking for a photograph, then both send it to myself and print it out, A6, pocket size.

It’s one of those taken five years ago in the ladies’ toilet on the fifth floor of the Mearnside Hotel — the Mearnside Hotel and Spa, as the website politely insists we ought to call it now — the one that shows Anjelica’s red satin gloves raised, fists clenched, above the top of the middle cubicle door. I’ve never looked for this before, never seen it, or the others, showing legs and shoes and the base of a toilet bowl. I still don’t want to look at those, though I do, on the same anonymous Talc O Da Toun website, just to check. Jeez, I was still wearing Ys or jockeys back then; they’re very…stretched. Preposterously, just looking at this dimly lit, fuzzily focused, arguably rather sordid stuff brings back the memory of the night itself, and I start to get a hard-on.

Enough. I put the computer to sleep and pocket the print in the jacket of the black Paul Smith suit hanging on the back of my bedroom door, then go down to breakfast.

Muesli, fruit, wholemeal toast and tea. ‘Dad?’ I ask.

‘Work,’ Mum tells me, downing her tea and standing. She’s still in jeans and tee, hair mussed. ‘He’ll join us at the crem — ah, the cemetery. I’ll have to dash off after — only got the morning. Right. Dashing for a shower.’

‘I’ll clear.’

‘Ta.’

‘D’you know,’ Dad says, as we stand in the crowd gathered round the graveside on Hulshiers Hill, ‘I’m nearly fifty and this is the first actual interment I’ve been to.’

I glance at Al, surprised. ‘Really?’ I think about this. ‘Suppose it’s cos old Joe was a farmer once; attached to the land, and all that.’

‘Maybe,’ Dad says. ‘Couple of guys in the work, near retirement age, and they were saying the same thing. Only ever been to the crem. Hardly ever see people buried these days.’

‘It’s a good crowd,’ Mum says, looking round.

She’s right; a couple of hundred at least, all clustered like a dark parliament of crows on the hillside, our mass punctuated by the mossy gravestones of those gone before. The Murston family are graveside, of course, with seats. We’re bottom of the B-list, maybe C-list in terms of proximity.

Must have been some delay back at the house or the funeral parlour because we were almost all here by the time the slow-moving cortège nosed its way between the cemetery gates at the bottom of the hill and came crunching up the pitted tarmac like a procession of giant black beetles.

I caught a glimpse of Mr and Mrs M — him looking grim, her with her mouth set tight — and watched the three brothers in case they were trying to lock eyes on me, but they just stood at the back of the hearse, sharing their dad’s grim expression, as the coffin was unloaded. Then Murdo, Fraser, Norrie and their dad shouldered the big, gleaming casket along with two of the undertakers. Mrs M stayed tight-lipped as she followed the minister and the coffin up the path to the grave.

Mostly I watched Ellie and Grier. They walked together, looking straight ahead, beautiful in black, Ellie wearing a long skirt, a white blouse, a thin silk coat and flat shoes, Grier in a three-piece suit with a little pillbox hat and a spotted veil. Shiny heels brought her up to the same height as Ellie.

Old Joe, I didn’t doubt, would have thought they were both lovely.

The family got to the graveside and sat down, and I lost sight of the girls. I looked around, then spotted Ferg, further up the hill, passing a silvery hip flask to a tearful-looking, raven-haired girl next to him.

Ten minutes later and we’ve been through the recited, edited, rosified highlights of Joe’s life — him being part of Stonemouth’s premier crime family seems to have been spun out of existence — and now the minister’s blethering on about dust to dust and ashes to ashes, and Joe having the sure and certain knowledge of a totally spiffing life to come at the right hand of God or some such bollocks. I listen to this stuff and just get embarrassed. I mean, embarrassed for us as a species.

Life after death. I mean, really?

At the few funerals I’ve been to — like Al, I’ve only ever been to crematoria till now — I’ve always sort of tightened up when they start spouting all this shit and felt like I’m so close to just jumping up and shouting, ‘Oh, fuck off!’ or something equally guaranteed to ruin everybody’s day and make me even less popular. Honestly. I get the same thing at weddings when they start the same in-the-sight-of-God nonsense, though it’s not as strong, and the majority of weddings I’ve been to have been secular; they’re fine, they’re joyous. Only one secular funeral so far, and it was infinitely better than all this weak-minded, fantasy-and-superstition shite.

I remember feeling just as clear-eyed about all this when I was still almost a kid — thirteen or fourteen — and sort of half assumed that you just got more gullible and religious or whatever as you got older, but if it’s happening to me I see no signs so far; quite the opposite. I think I was plain wrong there and the new explanation is I just lack the credulity gene.

I still have a vague feeling that there might be more to existence than can be experienced with our surface senses, so technically I guess I’m an agnostic, but nothing’s more guaranteed to bring out my inner atheist than listening to the witterings of a holy man who thinks all the answers are already there in some book, whether it was written millennia ago or last week.

However, lesson over. The Murstons have stood up again and I can see Ellie once more. Could I really have gone through with our own wedding ceremony, the whole religious performance, in a church and everything? Now I’m kind of stunned I even contemplated it, but at the time I remember thinking that, precisely because the religious side of it was meaningless, it was okay to go along with it. And if there was any sacrifice of principles involved, I was making that sacrifice for Ellie, and to keep her family sweet; not because I was frightened of them or anything, but to convince them that I was a man of substance and moral fibre, that I did indeed love their daughter, I took my responsibilities seriously and I could be relied upon to do the right thing.

Obviously my minutes-long dalliance in a loo with the lovely Jel slightly worked against the wholesome image I was trying to project.

Jel’s here too, with Josh and Mike and Sue. Mrs Mac actually seems to be crying. Anjelica appears plain and severe, in a very dark grey suit with a knee-length skirt. She catches me looking at her and gives me the smallest of smiles. I nod back and we glance away again, pretending to listen to what the witch doctor’s gibbering on about now.

I think I catch the sparse, hollow sound of the first handfuls of earth hitting the coffin lid. It’s the most genuinely affecting part of the whole ceremony. Perhaps the only one, apart from just the sight of two generations of Murston hard men shouldering the burden of a third.

The family troop back down to the ancient Daimlers and stretch Fords and Volvos, and the rest of us disperse amongst the gravestones to find our own highly scattered cars and minibuses, while the sky above us teases out its cloudy wisps from gold to streaked and filmy blue, as a light breeze picks up off the sea.

16

We’re back to the Mearnside Hotel (and Spa) for the post-funeral-ceremony cold collation, as it is so charmingly entitled. The old place rises resplendently above its green-smooth lawns, clipped topiary and sculpted, surgeoned trees, its towers and turrets looking like they’re trying to snag the last departing traces of the low cloud, reluctant to let it go. A hazy roll of mist, full banked along the coast, reveals beneath its hem the glowing white waves breaking on the sands in the middle distance, but obscures the sea itself.

Dad and I get here last because we had to drop Mum at her school: hardly en route, but better than trying to take more than one car to the vehicle-unfriendly cemetery. Similar problem here. We have to park on the driveway down to the car park.

‘Aye, bloody good turnout,’ Dad says, loosening his tie as we walk down to the main doors and the usual huddle of smokers. ‘Doubt mine’ll be as packed.’

‘Al, please,’ I say to him.

‘Think I’ll get buried at sea,’ he says gruffly, though he’s grinning.

‘Fine. I’ll expect a discount on the hire of the dredger.’ Dad chuckles wheezily.

The funereal equivalent of the reception-line thing they do at weddings had been set up at the doors into the rather grand, east-facing, firstfloor reception room where the after-funeral drinks and munchies are being dispensed; however, by the time Dad and I arrive the line of mourning Murstons has dispersed, which comes as a mighty relief, though it does mean we’ll need to seek out the family and do something similar impromptu later. For the moment they’re up at the buffet tables, progressing with plates, so probably best to wait a bit.

Anyway, Dad has nipped to the loo. He does this rather often these days, apparently, though he claims to see no need to invoke medical opinion on this new development; Mum’s a lot more worried than he seems to be and has told him she’s going to start timing the intervals between toilet visits if he doesn’t go to the doc’s soon.

I make my way through the reception room; the place is set out with large round tables, laid for a light lunch and busy with people sitting chatting, already stuffing their gobs or still standing socialising. About a dozen staff are bringing tea and coffee and taking orders for drinks, plus the bar near the main doors is open. The Murstons have a reserved table of their own in the centre but everybody else just has to find their own place. The room’s pretty big: a first-floor image of the Mearnside’s main dining room, one storey below.

Ferg inspects me when we meet up in the giant bay window that forms most of the reception room’s eastern edge.

‘If it was beauty sleep you were after last night, I’d ask for your money back.’

‘Good to see you too, Ferg.’ I’m holding a whisky from the welcome table by the doors. Ferg, naturally, has two. ‘Who was that girl you were plying with drinks in the graveyard?’

‘Plying,’ Ferg says thoughtfully. ‘Plying. There’s a word one hears all too seldom these days, don’t you think?’

‘Avoiding the question. There’s a phrase one hears all too freq—’

‘Name’s Charlene. Used to cut what was left of the late Mr Murston Senior’s hair in the local tonsorial emporium. Emotional child. Probably cries after a good fuck. I hope to find out.’

I look round. ‘She still here?’

‘Back to work, but we sort of have a date afterwards, so I’m pacing myself, or will be once the grand behind the bar and the free bottles on the tables run out. Cheers.’

We clink glasses. ‘To Joe,’ I say.

‘Hmm?’

I sigh. ‘The deceased?’

‘Well, absolutely,’ Ferg says. We re-clink. ‘To the late Mr M.’ We knock back a whisky each like it’s cheap vodka. Splendid idea at this time of day on an empty stomach. We stash the empty glasses on the window ledge.

‘So…How was your quiet, or early, night, last night?’ Ferg asks. One of his eyebrows has bowed to an arch; this is almost enough to distract you from what is basically a leer filling the rest of his face.

‘Okay, what?’ I ask.

‘Oh, nothing. A friend said they saw you in El’s car yesterday evening, latish.’

I shake my head. ‘Fuck me,’ I breathe, ‘you get away with nothing in this town.’

‘Yeaah,’ Ferg drawls. ‘Tell that to the lady’s family.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Indeed I do. One reason I left. So?’

‘Experienced a visit from El’s brothers after I left Lee’s place yesterday.’

Ferg nods knowingly. ‘Thought you seemed a bit rattled yesterday, in the Formartine. They rough you up?’

‘A little.’

‘Fuck. I’m amazed you only look as rubbish as you do.’

‘Ta. Ellie heard and came calling just to mess with them.’

‘Retaliation. That the only way you can get a date these days?’

‘Wasn’t a date. We had a very pleasant drive, we talked a lot, she put together some dinner at hers and then drove me home. I was in her car and she was about to drop me off when you rang.’

‘What did you talk about? Anything salacious?’

‘Some interesting stuff; can’t divulge.’

‘Of course not,’ Ferg says, rolling his eyes. ‘You are a sort of bilge of last resort for interesting information, aren’t you, Stewart? You’re like one of these people who offer to accept the kind of chain-letter emails and texts that cretins think it’ll be unlucky to break: gossip gets to you and dies.’

‘One does one’s best,’ I murmur modestly in my best Prince Charles, tugging at a shirt cuff.

‘So you didn’t fuck?’

‘I can neither confirm nor deny—’

‘Oh, for—’

‘But no.’

‘Bodie!’ Dad says, arriving holding a whisky; he transfers it from one hand to the other to shake Ferg’s hand. ‘How’s it hingin?’

‘Little left of true, as usual, Stewart’s dad,’ Ferg says. Dad looks at him, puzzled. ‘Please call me Ferg, Al,’ Ferg asks.

Dad laughs. ‘What you two hatching? Looked deep in conversation there.’

‘Ferg is far too shallow to have a deep conversation with,’ I tell Dad.

‘Your son hits the nail on the cuticle as ever, Al,’ Ferg says with a sigh. ‘I’m only deep on the surface. Inside, I’m shallow to the core.’

‘Thank you, friend of Dorothy. Parker,’ I say, smiling.

Al sports a tolerant frown. ‘Okay,’ he says, tapping Ferg on one elbow. ‘I’m going to leave you two to it. Stewart; couple of minutes, then we’ll go over to pay our respects, aye?’

‘Sure thing, Paw.’

‘Okay; I’ll be over at Mike and Sue’s table. See you, Bodie,’ he calls as he turns away.

‘Cheers, Mr G,’ Ferg says, then swivels back to me. ‘So, how do things stand between you and Ellie?’

‘They stand erect, Ferg. Actually, they don’t; they more…recline.’ He looks at me. ‘You were expecting a straight answer, Bodie?’

Ferg looks at me for a bit longer, then finishes his second whisky.

‘You know, we ought to eat something. I mean, we ought to drink something, too, but we should line our stomachs or we could suffer later.’

‘You may have a point.’

‘Shall we to the groaning buffet tables?’

‘Yes, I suppose we—’

‘Stewart,’ a deep, purposeful voice says. ‘Ferg.’

‘Pow, hello,’ Ferg says, shaking the impressive mitt of Powell Imrie as he arrives to loom over us. Another visitor. My, we’re popular, or at least conspicuous. Teach us to stand in the middle of the window recess.

Dressed in formal black, Powell looks even more like a high-class bouncer than usual. He even stands — once he’s shaken our hands — with his hands clasped just above his crotch. Powell has a way of looking at a person — a sort of polite but tight, You still here? smile — that works on all known types of human.

Ferg takes the hint, holds my upper arm briefly. ‘See you at the comestibles.’

Powell watches him go, turns back to me. ‘Heard Murd and Norrie came to see you yesterday.’

‘That’s right,’ I agree.

‘You okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘Wasn’t anything to do with me, just want you to know that.’

‘Didn’t think it was, Powell.’

He glances smoothly round towards the centre of the room and the Murston family table. ‘I’ve had a wee word. Shouldn’t happen again,’ he says. And, as he says it, I completely believe him. Then, after a short pause, he adds, ‘…Aye.’

And just the way he says this — says that single, innocent-sounding, seemingly affirmative little word — suddenly it’s like there’s this sliver of fear sliding deep inside me. Powell glanced over at the Murston table again as he pronounced the word and there’s something about both his voice and his body language that shrieks uncertainty, even worry.

‘Thanks,’ I tell him. I think my voice sounds hollow, but Powell doesn’t seem to notice.

‘Just don’t mention it to Mr M, eh?’

‘Wouldn’t dream of,’ I tell him.

Powell is smiling. It’s a good, believable smile; I’m already starting to convince myself I was reading far too much into a single word.

‘Aye. Right.’ He nods sideways. ‘You coming over to say hello?’

‘Just about to; Al and I missed the receiving line at the start — taking Mum back to her school. We were waiting for people to finish their food.’

‘Ah, they’re mostly just picking. Apart from the boys, of course. Come on over.’

‘Be with you momentarily.’

‘Hunky McDory,’ Powell says, nodding. ‘See you shortly.’

He heads off, still smiling. I’m thinking I definitely need to be a bit less fucking paranoid. I go to the buffet, right behind Ferg, pick up a sausage roll and stuff it in my mouth. ‘Off to pay my respects,’ I tell him, with a degree of flakiness.

Ferg has assembled an impressive plateful. ‘Okay. Play nice with the big boys.’

I go to get Dad, say hi to Mike Mac, Sue and Phelpie, and cheekkiss Jel. She looks…very controlled. A girl with a tight rein on herself. I’m sort of getting inevitable resonances about this place and this occasion, this size of gathering; maybe they’re getting to Jel, too. However, I think I can guarantee that she and I will not be getting up to any toilet-cubicle-related shenanigans, not this time.

Al and I head to the Murston table.

‘Will I do the talking?’ he asks quietly, en route.

‘Fine by me,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll speak if I’m spoken to.’

The three brothers are wolfing into seconds and Mrs M is staring into a small mirror, reapplying make-up when we arrive. Donald has seen us coming and stands to shake our hands stiffly, formally.

There are a few aunts and uncles and some older relatives I recognise from family occasions way back. I stand like Powell did, hands over lower belly, a little back from where Dad is, and nod when any of this lot catch my eye; they look away again quickly if they do.

‘Aye, well,’ Dad’s saying, ‘a good innings, like they say south of the border, but still before his time, eh? He’ll be missed. He’ll be missed.’ Mrs M reaches out and holds onto Dad’s forearm, gripping it.

‘Thanks, Alastair. Thanks.’

She doesn’t look at me. The two junior brothers do. Murdo is calmly ignoring me, eating onwards, but Fraser and Norrie, ties pulled loose by now and just generally not appearing too comfortable in their best suits, are trying hard not to glower over-obviously in my direction. Still, their plates beckon invitingly before them and I’d give it thirty seconds at most before the call of the nosh consumes their full attention. Norrie must have sculpted his beard for the occasion, limiting it to a centimetre-wide strip like a strap down the sides of his face and under his jaw. It’s not a good look. Fraser has a fairly full beard these days, much like the one Murdo used to have, though redder.

Ellie’s watching me, a small, sad smile on her face.

Sort of beside her — there’s an empty chair in between them that I suspect is Powell’s — Grier is using her veil to good effect, not shifting her head but her gaze darting round the important players at the table, concentrating on her dad — back to grimly shaking Al’s hand as they trade platitudes about old Joe’s general wonderfulness — Ellie and me. At least I think that’s what she’s doing; the veil does make it hard to be sure.

Ellie rises elegantly, moves to me — all eyes round the table and quite a few throughout the room on her now — and leans in, one hand lightly on my wrist, to touch cheeks. ‘Double kiss,’ she whispers on that first pass, so we do the continental double-kiss thing. I have no idea what the hell this signifies in the Murston family bestiary of acceptable greetings and other physical gestures: just not being marked out for imminent execution after an overnight change of heart, I hope.

‘Very sorry about Joe,’ I mumble, which is the best I can do.

She nods and smiles a little and sits down again, smoothing her skirt under her. I think I see Grier sort of gathering herself to maybe get up too, but Ellie leans over to her just then and says something to her. Looks light, inconsequential — El pats her little sister’s hand gently, affectionately — but…good timing there, girl, I think, if that was deliberate.

Dad seems to be addressing the whole table now. ‘I’m sorry Morven — that’s my wife’ — he explains for the benefit of the farflung rellies — ‘couldn’t take any more time off after the funeral, but we all’ — he extends one arm a fraction to include me here — ‘want you to know we’re very sorry for your loss. A good man gone, and he’ll be sorely missed.’

Al nods a couple of times, then nods once more to Donald, who nods back, and we’re out of there at last, turning as one and heading away from this uncannily calm eye of the room.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I was holding.

‘I better get back to work,’ Al tells me, near the doors. He holds my elbow briefly. ‘You take it easy, chief, okay?’

‘Aye-aye, sir.’

‘No. Seriously, son.’

‘Seriously aye-aye, Dad. I’ll be fine.’

‘Aye, well, get some food down you and don’t stay too long.’

‘Will do, Pop.’

Dad gives me a very slightly dubious look, then departs.

Ferg is loitering by the end of the buffet table, filling his face and eyeing the desserts. I lift a sticky cocktail sausage from his plate.

‘Get your own, you freeloading bastard, Gilmour.’

‘Intend to.’ I inspect the sausage, eat a chunk and put it back on his plate. ‘But then we should get drunk.’

‘Back on-message at last. About time.’ He nods at the half-eaten sausage. ‘I’m still going to eat that, you know.’

I’m sitting minding my own business and tucking into my own plateful of food five minutes later at a half-empty table — I don’t recognise the other people — when a jolly-looking, well-upholstered lady with frizzy grey hair and wearing a dark-plum suit sits down beside me. Another half-remembered face.

‘Stewart, how you doing? You probably don’t remember me. Joan Linton. How you doing yourself, son? Oh, it’s awful good to see you again, so it is. Is it London you’ve been away to all this time? Aye? London? Aye? I’m sorry, here I am, blabbering away to you and you trying to get some food down you, I know; what am I like? A couple of Bristol Creams and I’m yacking away fifteen to the dozen. It’s that good food, though, isn’t it? D’you not think so? Wait till you try the desserts. Oh my God! I’ve had seconds, twice. I’ll be bursting out of this dress, I will! No, but, seriously, it’s a lovely send-off, is it no? They’ve done the old guy proud. Not think so? I didn’t really know old Joe that well, to be honest, but you can’t know everybody, can you?’

I’ve been waving my hand at my face during all this, trying to indicate that the only thing stopping me from answering — or at least attempting to interrupt — is the fact that I’ve got a mouth full of food, which I have, though this has also been a good way of giving myself time to try to remember who Mrs Linton actually is. How do I know her?

‘Mrs L,’ I say, swallowing. ‘Course. Was meaning to come over and say hi,’ I lie. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh, me? I’m great, I’m great, I’m firing on all cylinders, I am. Alan’s the same. Well, he had a wee heart thing last year and took a while off work but he’s fine now. Hardly slowed down at all. Taken up golf. Doctor told him to. Practically an order. I said, Can you get the green fees on prescription, then? But of course that’s just me having a wee joke, I’m no that daft! Anyway, here’s me stopping you enjoying your meal, I just wanted to pop over and say it’s great to see you again, so it is, it really is, and you’re looking lovely! Don’t you mind me saying that now, because you have, you’ve turned into a very handsome young man, you have. And it’s just a lovely thing to see. And I just wanted to say that I’m awful sorry about what happened. I’m not making excuses for anybody, I would never do that, but if it hadn’t been for those bloody cameras — excuse my language, but those bloody cameras — it might all have been totally different. It could, couldn’t it? And I’m not, like I say, I’m not making excuses for anybody, but we all know we’re none of us perfect and I thought it was very harsh on you, very harsh, that’s all I’m going to say. I’ve said to Alan umpteen times we should never have done that — who wants to look at a load of kids’ photies anyway? But of course he says it was actually our Katy’s idea and she says it was one of her daft friends — oh, we’re a terrible family for passing the buck, we are! — but it was us paid for the bloody things and Alan who showed those stupid photographs on the big screen and I know he’s felt bad about it ever since, even though he didn’t know and it was just bad luck. He’d apologise himself but he’s too embarrassed. No me; I don’t embarrass easily at all, but that’s what I wanted to say, is that okay? So I’m sorry, honey, you get on with your lunch there and I’ll just make myself scarce, okay? Those wee sausages are just the best, are they no? Must have had a dozen! Right, I better go. You look after yourself, Stewart, say hi to your mum and dad.’

‘Yeah, be seeing you,’ I manage, with a sort of strangled heartiness, as she retreats, waving.

Mrs Linton. Mother of Drew, of Drew-and-Lauren fame, the couple at whose wedding reception Jel and I slightly anticipated the happy couple’s traditional wedding-night activities, five years ago, in — why! — this very hotel.

Shame she didn’t think to have a natter with me or Jel on that occasion; we’d never have found the time to get up to our extracurricular misbehaviour.

‘He had this story about him and his pals coming back from the pub in Inioch each Sunday night. This was back when you had to be what they called a bona fide traveller to get a drink anywhere on a Sunday, like? And—’

‘Eh?’

‘No, seriously, you couldnae get a drink where you lived; you had to go to the next village or town or whatever, if it was a Sunday. It was the law. Anyways—’

‘Jeez.’

‘Ah know.’

I’ve drifted towards a crowd of people standing near the bar. The Murston brothers are reminiscing about old Joe, and Murdo has decided to tell a story.

‘Anyways,’ he says, supping quickly from his pint, ‘Joe and all his mates would hoof it over Whitebit Hill from — where was it, Fraze?’

‘Logie of Hurnhill.’

‘Aye, Logie—’

‘Probably The Ancraime Arms,’ Fraser adds. ‘That’s where they’d go to, probably.’

Murdo nods. ‘Right. Aye. Anyways, so they’d go past the old Whitebit Hill cemetery, which was fu even then and no really used, an it’s got this big wa all roon it and this pair a big iron gates right on the road — an there’s nothin else there, like, no back then, like, no buildins or nuthin, just the cemetery an some trees. And one o old Joe’s mates had this sorta tradition thing he’d always do when they all went past the cemetery; he’d stick his hand through the cemetery gates and he’d offer to shake hands with any ghosts or zombies or undead wandering aboot the place or whatever, right? Just for a laugh, right? An like he’d shoot oot, “Come on, ghoulies, ghosties, shake ma haun,” aye? And they’d all have a laugh at this, every week, cos of course they’re all pished, aye? Anyway, this one night, old Joe leaves the pub before the rest, saying he’s no feelin too good, like maybe he’s had one too many or eaten a bad crisp or somethin an needs the fresh air, so he’s like oot the door ten minutes early an awa doon the road. Only what he’s done is, he’s been an louped over the cemetery wa earlier in the day with this bucket o watter and he’s left—’

‘Naw, I think he tolt me he just foon the bucket there, Murd.’

‘Norrie, d’you mind? Anyway, he’s got this bucket of watter at the side of the gates, on the inside like, so he’s ower the wa, hunkered down there, inside the cemetery, waitin for his pals, and what he does is, he sticks his haun in the bucket o watter? Like, rolls up his sleeve an sticks his mitt in there up to like the elbow or whatever, like? An he’s like this for five minutes or ten or somehin.’

Norrie whistles. ‘That’d be fucken cold.’

Fraser nods. ‘Aye, ah think this was like the winter, too, he told me.’

Murdo gulps more beer. ‘Anyways; winter, summer, whatever, he’s like this for five or ten minutes with his haun gettin colder and colder an then he hears his pals comin doon the road, and does his pal no do whit he always does, an stick his hand through the cemetery gates, offerin to shake hauns with the deid? So Joe takes his haun — which is, like, totally freezin noo — and he grabs the hand o his pal, and gets it really tight and gives it a good fuckin hard shake. An of course there’s nae lights on the road then or anyhin, an he cannae be seen cos he’s in the shadows anyway an still behind the wa? Well, of course his pal screams like a fucken lassie and lamps aff doon the road, screamin blue murder and pishin his breeks, an Joe’s laughin so hard he’s nearly doin the same thing.’

‘An his mates,’ Norrie butts in, ’cos did he no tell them, like? Murd? Did he no tell them he was goin to do this fore he left the pub, aye?’

‘Anyways, his mates have to help Joe oot the cemetery cos his hand’s so cold he can hardly climb an they’re all laughin so much. An this guy — cannae remember his name — never sticks his haun through the cemetery gates again, even after they tell him it was just Joe. But, eh? Eh? Kind a guy he was. What a guy, eh?’ Murdo shakes his head in admiration and sups his pint.

We’re all laughing, forming a ring of hilarity around Murdo, whose big, beaming, ruddy face is grinning widely. Some of the laughter is a little forced, a little by rote, because of who Murdo is and the family he’s part of, but mostly it’s genuine. And I’m laughing, too, though not as much as I might be.

‘Ah’m tellin ye!’ Murdo says, loudly, looking around the faces clustered around him, soaking up the approval and general good humour. His gaze even slides over where I stand, on the periphery of the crowd, without his happy, open expression changing. Probably didn’t recognise me. ‘Ah’m tellin ye!’ he says again.

I sip towards the dregs of my pint. Yes, you are telling us, Murd. Only that’s not the way old Joe told it to me. When he told me this story it wasn’t about him personally at all; it was about one of his uncles who’d played this trick on one of his pals, years before Joe was remotely old enough to go drinking with his mates anywhere. The rest of the story’s similar enough, but it just never was about Joe himself.

I am so tempted to point this out — I really want to point this out — but I don’t. It’s cowardice, partly, maybe, but also just a reluctance to, well, throw a bucket of cold water over this warm wee festival of rosy-tinged remembrance. It irks me that history’s being rewritten like this, but if I say something now I’ll just look like the bad guy. I guess if Mr M was here he might set the record straight, but he’s not; Donald’s standing by the Murston table, talking to a couple of local businessmen. Best to keep quiet. In the end, after all, what does it really matter?

Only it always matters. I’m still not going to say anything, but it always matters, and I feel like a shit for not sticking up for the truth, no matter how much of a spoilsport or a pedant I might appear because of it. I finish my pint, turn away.

‘Aw, Stu? Stewart?’ Murdo calls out. I turn, surprised, to find that Murdo’s looking at me, as is everybody else, and a sort of channel through the crowd has opened between me and Murd. ‘You knew Joe a bit, did you no?’

‘Aye,’ I say. Nonplussed, frankly. ‘Aye, we used to go on the occasional hill-walk together. Aye, nice old guy.’

I’m horribly aware I’m sounding trite and slightly stupid, and I’m sort of lowering my conversational style down to Murdo’s level, almost imitating him. (I almost said ‘thegether’ instead of ‘together’, for example, body-swerving the more colloquial word so late in the brain-to-mouth process I came close to stumbling over it.) And was he a nice old guy? He was pleasant to me and kind enough, but he was still a Murston — the senior Murston — at a time when the family was settling deeper and deeper into its criminal ways, abandoning farming and even land deals, and diversifying into still more lucrative fields.

‘Must have taught you a thing or two, aye?’ Murdo prompts.

‘Cannae get everythin from a university education, eh no?’

‘Nup,’ I agree. ‘Sure can’t. Aye, he let drop the occasional pearl of wisdom.’

‘Aw aye?’ Murdo says, looking round with a smug look.

Fuck, I’m on the spot here. Since I saw his body in the funeral parlour a couple of days ago I’ve been trying to think of something wise or profound Joe said, and there’s really only one thing I can remember. Plus I feel like I’m kind of embellishing and improving the memory as I try to recall it, a process I’m pretty much bound to continue if I try to articulate it now.

Still, it’s all I’ve got, and — assuming that Murdo isn’t trying to fuck me up here, believing I’ve got nothing and so expecting me to embarrass myself — maybe this invitation to take part in the rolling familial obituary for the old guy is sort of like a peace offering. Maybe.

So I clear my throat and say, ‘Yeah, he said something once about …about how one of the main mistakes people make is thinking that everybody else is basically like they are themselves.’

‘That right?’ Murd says.

Joe really did say something like this, and even at the time I thought it might be one of the more useful bits of geezer lore he’d offer up. Not that we really expect to hear any great wisdom from the old these days; things move too fast, and society, reality itself, alters so rapidly that any lesson one generation learns has generally become irrelevant by the time the next one comes along. Some things will stay the same — never call on lower than two tens, men tend to be unfaithful — but a lot don’t.

‘Yeah,’ I say, looking around, talking to the whole group now though still glancing mostly towards Murdo. ‘He said that conservatives — right-wing people in general — tend to think everybody’s as nasty — well, as selfish — deep down, as they are. Only they’re wrong. And liberals, socialists and so on think everybody else is as nice, basically, as they themselves are. They’re wrong too. The truth is messier.’ I shrug. ‘Usually is.’ I spread my arms a little, and smile in what I hope is a self-deprecating manner. ‘Sorry; not as good a story as Murdo’s there.’ I sort of raise my glass towards Murdo, hating myself for it.

There’s a gentle breeze of sympathetic laughter around the group.

‘What was that story about them in that cesspit at the farm that time?’ Norrie says, and I’m able to slip away as people refocus on the three brothers again.

‘Aw, aye,’ Murdo says as the crowd clusters back around him once more, and he launches into another story.

‘Katy, isn’t it?’

‘Hiya.’

‘Hi. I’m Stewart.’

‘Hi…Oh. Yeah, of course. Hi. How you doing?’

‘I’m fine. Can I refresh that for you?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘The white, aye?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Lucky I happen to have a bottle right here, then.’

‘That’s very prepared.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Stewart,’ Jel says.

I’m back at the buffet tables, looking at the puddings and trying to decide if I’m remotely hungry or just being greedy. My organs differ in their opinions; however, I think I’m going to go with whatever one’s telling me I’m already completely full up.

‘We’re going,’ she tells me, putting one hand on my forearm, ‘but there’s a few people been invited back to the house later. Feel free, okay?’

‘Thanks. I might. How…how exclusive we talking — all invited?’

‘Well, no randoms, but otherwise bring who you like.’ She looks back into the room. ‘Saw you with Katy Linton there,’ she says, one eyebrow raised. ‘Little young for you, isn’t she?’

‘Young, but she knows things.’

‘Does she now?’

‘You’d be amazed.’

‘You think? Takes a lot to amaze me these days.’

‘Anyway, she’s twenty, twenty-one. But I wasn’t thinking of her when I was asking who I could bring.’

‘Ellie?’ Jel says, and her voice drops a little even as she tries to look unconcerned.

‘I was thinking more of Ferg.’

‘Okay. I’ll make sure the more valuable booze has been padlocked.’

‘I’ll call if we’re coming.’

‘Do. You back down south tomorrow?’

‘Yep.’

‘Let’s try meet up, like, anyway? Before you go? See you.’ She dives in with a small cheek kiss, turns and goes.

I’m at the bar, getting a pint for myself, plus one for Ferg and a large whisky too — he’s been keeping an eye on the bar over the last hour and he’s worried the thousand-pound float might be about to run out.

‘Stewart,’ Ellie says, slipping in beside me at the bar. She puts some empty glasses down, instantly catches the barman’s eye and adds a mineral water to my order.

‘Hey, Ellie.’ She’s looking at the three drinks. ‘Two are for Ferg,’ I explain.

‘Of course. Let me give you a hand.’

I smile at her, trying — out of the corners of my eyes — to see where Donald might be, or any of the Murston brothers. ‘We okay to be seen together?’ I ask.

‘I’m making it okay,’ she says, and lifts the whisky glass.

We wind our way through the press round the bar, heading for Ferg, back in prime position in the centre of the giant bay window.

‘So. How did it go for you guys?’ I ask Ellie.

‘Bearable,’ she tells me. She glances at a slim black watch on her wrist. ‘I’m taking Mum back home in a minute. Let me get out of these sepulchral threads.’

‘You look great. Black suits you.’

‘Yeah? Well, I feel like one of those sack-of-potatoes Greek grannies you see on the islands who look like they were born widowed.’

‘I guess comfort trumps being drop-dead gorgeous at a funeral.’

‘Steady.’

‘What are your plans after?’

‘Ha!’ Ellie says, and gives a sort of shoulders-in shudder. ‘Supposed to be a private party at the house for the rellies but I’m going to absent myself; bound to turn into a giant piss-up for Don and the boys and I’ve had enough of those.’ She looks round as we approach Ferg, who’s talking to a girl I half recognise. ‘Might come back here,’ she says. ‘Could even have a drink; leave the car. If there’s people still going to be around.’

‘That might depend on the life expectancy of the “free” component of the phrase “free bar”.’

‘I asked five minutes ago; barely over the halfway point.’

‘Blimey. I can tell Ferg to slow down.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Really, only halfway?’

‘Less than six hundred. People never drink as much as they think they do at these things, even at the Mearnside’s prices. Though Don gets a discount, naturally.’

‘Give it time. Hey, Ferg.’ I hand him his pint; Ellie presents his whisky.

‘Thank you, Stewart. And Ellie. Well, gosh, this is like old times.’

‘And how are you, Ferg?’ Ellie asks.

‘Oh, radiant. You know Alicia?’ Ferg indicates the girl he’s been talking to, a compact lass with a rather round face but fabulous long wavy red hair. Alicia is the daughter of one of the town councillors in attendance. I think Ferg is trying to flirt with her, but he’s just coming across as smarmy.

‘Don’t you have a hair appointment later?’ I ask him.

Ferg looks confused in what I decide is an insolent, What-are-you-talking-about-you-idiot? way, so I choose not to pursue the point. There’s some very so-whattish chat for a couple of minutes, then Ellie says she better be going; a mum to drop at the house.

‘You be here later?’ she says as she passes.

‘Yup.’

I watch for them going and it’s a good ten minutes before she and Mrs M make it to the doors and out, delayed by people wanting to say thanks for the do and how sorry they are.

A couple of minutes after that, as more people come to join us and the talk gets a little louder, I leave my half-finished pint on the window ledge and announce to no one in particular that I’m off for a pee.

There’s something I want to do before I get too pissed. And before Ellie gets back, though my reasons for feeling that way are opaque even to me.

Having already established that the lifts no longer ascend as far as the fifth floor, I take what might look like an honest-mistake-stylee wrong turn out of the loos, check the corridor for emptiness — it is satisfactorily full of it — then barge through double doors and, chortling at my own cleverness, head smartly up a service stairwell to the fifth floor.

Where I encounter a set of locked doors. Extraordinarily, even purposeful shaking doesn’t open them.

I go down to the fourth floor and the main stairs, prepared to be as brazen as you like regarding the dispensation of nods, hellos and so ons, but there’s nobody to be seen. More locked doors at the fifth; the lack of lit stairwell above the fourth floor might well have been a sign.

I head back downstairs a second time, mooch inconspicuously all the way along to the furthest service stairwell, ascend that, only to find more locked doors, then go down to the fourth floor — again; we’re becoming old friends, this fourth-floor corridor and me — take the exterior fire exit (bright outside, sea breeze; air’s bracing) and head up the fire escape towards the fifth, only to be stopped by the locked grille of a door halfway up. I look round, as though appealing to the white scraps that are circling gulls and the wispy remains of clouds.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ I mutter.

I button up my jacket and jump nimbly onto the hand railing, trusting to my childhood superpowers of Having a Head for Heights and Being Quite Good at Climbing.

I ignore the twenty-metre drop to the concrete at the back of the hotel, checking only to make sure there isn’t anybody looking. There isn’t; in the winter you’d be hung out to dry up here, easily visible by anyone watching from the exclusive new development of villas and timeshares that is Mearnside Heights, but, as it’s barely autumn, the gently rustling mass of foliage on the trees, spreading across the slope above the hotel — and Spa, shields me from any prying gaze. Oh, look; there’s the new Spa wing. Uh-huh. Undistinguished, frankly.

I swing round the obstructing wing of metalwork and jump neatly onto the little landing beyond. I shake my head at the lock securing the door. Is it even legal to lock a fire escape, no matter that the floor it serves is never occupied? What if people need to get to the roof? Anyway.

Still no entry to be gained from the exterior fire-escape doors at the end of the fifth-floor corridor. Well, pooh-ee to that.

I give in and do what I should have done at the start. I make my way back down to the ground floor and Reception, sweet-talk one of the receptionists and then the junior manager — possibly leaving the latter with the impression that I just want to revisit the site of an old conquest, mw-ah-ha-ha — then take the middle service stair to the fifth floor and let myself in.

The lights don’t work. They might have mentioned this.

I use the torch function on the rubbish phone: not as good as the iPhone’s. The wan, ghostly, white-screen light guides me along through the darkness of the deserted fifth-floor corridor to the offending toilet.

The place feels cold and gloomy, lit only by the phone and the watery light filtering through the etched glass of the single window. The green floral curtains that preserved the modesty of the undersink plumbing have gone, as have any towels and toilet rolls. The cubicles stand empty, doors open. I gently close the door of the middle one as far as it’ll go, which is about seven-eighths to fully.

I wait patiently while the rubbish phone sorts itself out to upload email, then I negotiate the clunky interface to find the attachment I sent myself from Al’s computer. I open up the photo of the red gloves. I take out the copy I printed earlier this morning too, comparing images. I reluctantly concede the phone’s image is the more useful even though it’s smaller, and put the print away.

So I stand there, looking up at the top of the middle cubicle’s door and holding the phone up and out and then closer to and further in, trying to get everything aligned.

There’s no problem with the photos taken from under the sinks, from beneath the curtain. Any kid could have taken them; so could any adult, prepared to stoop so low.

It’s this one, the one featuring the pair of red satin gloves hoisted ecstatically (if I may make so immodest) above the cubicle door, that poses credibility problems.

I squat on my heels, shoulders resting against the surface supporting the three sinks, but that doesn’t work. Nothing fits until I’m standing upright, the image — and, by implication, the camera that took it — at about adult head height. I turn and look down at the formica surface I’m resting against. I suppose a kid could have jumped up onto this and got the angle that way. Though in that case…they’d be even higher than I can plausibly hold the camera here. They might even have stayed standing on the floor but held the camera as high as they could, and trusted to luck…Maybe even that, plus jump and snap at the same time.

Except you wouldn’t expect a kid to do that. And Jel’s arms/hands were raised like they are in the photo only for a few seconds, max. (I remember; they came down to grasp me, hard, at the nape of my neck, immediately afterwards.) So not much time for a wee person to spot the gesture and scramble up here to take the relevant shot. Though of course some of the kids with cameras weren’t so small; a few were maybe ten or eleven: straw-thin beanpoles who looked like they’d fall over if you sneezed too close to them, but already maybe eighty per cent as tall as they’d be as adults. Maybe one of them could have stretched to the required height…

Oh well. I take a few photos with the rubbish phone; it insists on using flash. In my head these count as evidence somehow, though probably only in my head.

Altogether, nothing that would stand up in court, Your Honour, but pretty flipping suspicious if you ask me, and it’s me that’s doing the asking, so I ask myself and sure enough my self says, Yeah, pretty fucking suspicious, right enough, matey boy.

I pocket the phone, take a last, sad, nostalgic, slightly despairing look at the relevant toilet-bowl seat, then exit, pad along the gloomy corridor and walk slowly, thoughtfully back down to Reception, returning the keys with a smiling, borderline-unctuous Thank you.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Ferg asks.

‘I could tell you,’ I tell him, ‘but then I’d have to cut you dead.’

‘Hnn. Needs work.’

I go to walk past a table where Phelpie is sitting playing on a Gameboy while a couple of intense-looking boys spectate. The boys are maybe just pre-teenage and look uncomfortable in their slightly too-big suits. Phelpie finishes whatever level he’s playing on — it’s some dark, monstery, shooty game I don’t recognise — with a series of deft twists and a flurry of control taps, then hands the device back to one of the kids, who is obviously, if reluctantly, impressed. Phelpie stands up, saying, ‘There you go. Easy, really.’

‘Aye, ta,’ the first boy says, sitting down, while the other kid draws up another seat and they both hunch over.

‘Aw, hi, Stu,’ Phelpie says with a grin when he sees me.

‘That was quite neat,’ I tell him.

‘Aye, well,’ Phelpie says, grinning. He looks a little drunk for once, which makes such reaction-time-critical gameplay even more impressive.

‘How come you don’t play cards that fast?’ Phelpie shrugs. ‘No money involved. Just a game.’

‘Phelpie, come on; it’s just a few quid. You never bet big, and you’re not short of a bob or two.’

Phelpie stretches, interlaces his splayed fingers, then cracks his knuckles. He has an even bigger grin on his face. ‘Truth is, Stu,’ he says, ‘I just like listening to the guys talk.’

‘What?’ My first thought is that Phelpie means he wants to get people talking off-guard so they’ll spill some beans that might be useful for Mike Mac’s business dealings.

‘Aye,’ he says, slowly, as though this is only just occurring to him as he speaks. ‘We play too fast sometimes, d’you no think? I mean, we’re there to play the game, right enough, but…it’s no why we’re really there, is it? I mean, you could just play on-line sitting in yer underpants, know what I mean? We’re there to have a chat, have a laugh, just be with our pals an that, eh? But I just think the guys can get a bit too intense with the betting and the money and that, sometimes, so I just sort of like to slow things up a wee bit. The craic improves. I’m no razor wit maself, like, but I love listening to the likes of Ferg an that, know what I mean?’

‘Kinda,’ I say, looking on Phelpie with a degree of respect — albeit slightly grudging and even still a little suspicious — I wouldn’t have expected to be exhibiting five minutes ago.

‘Ye’ve no tae tell the rest, though, eh?’ he says, winking at me.

‘Dinnae want them gettin self-conscious or that, eh no?’

‘Aye, cannae be having that,’ I agree. I make a mental note to be very careful indeed if I ever end up in a head-to-head with Phelpie over serious money.

‘See you later, Stu,’ Phelpie says, and wanders off.

I try to get a word with Grier a couple of times, but at the same time I don’t want to just rock up to the Murston table, not with the Surly Brothers using it as their base for expeditions to the bar and with the disapproving relations in attendance.

The third time, in the corridor just outside the function room, Grier looks like she’s going to walk right past me again, ignoring me, even after a perfectly audible, ‘Grier?’

I wonder if she saw me talking to Katy Linton?

I step in front of her; she almost collides with me. She frowns, makes to go past. ‘Stu, do you mind?’

I block her again. ‘Grier—’

She tries to get past me again. ‘Get out the—’

‘Grier, can we—’

‘No, we can’t. Will you stop—’ She stands still, hands on hips for a moment, glaring at me, then tries to slip past to my right. I grab her wrist, already knowing this is a mistake.

‘Fuck off!’ she hisses, shaking my grip off.

‘What do you think you’re doing, Gilmour?’

Shit; it’s Fraser, right behind me, hand on my shoulder, turning me around. I’m half expecting his other hand to ball into a fist and come round-housing up into my face, or sweep in towards my belly. My head cranes back on my neck and my stomach muscles tense without me even consciously willing such desperate preparations.

However, Fraser isn’t quite at that stage yet. He looks close to it, though; his face is redder than his beard, he’s a bit sweaty and he has a slightly crouched, boxerish stance, like he’s just ready for a fight. Grier gets past me, looks like she’s about to continue on her way down the corridor, then stops, stands, arms folded, glaring at both of us.

‘Eh?’ Fraser asks, when I don’t reply immediately. ‘What the fuck’s goin on, eh?’

‘Nothing, Frase,’ I tell him.

‘You okay, Gree?’ he asks her.

‘Fine,’ she says.

‘This arsehole givin you grief?’

‘I wasn’t—’ I start.

‘No. Let’s just—’

‘Cos I’m just the boy to give him some back.’ Fraser rubs a meaty hand through his thin auburn beard like he’s trying to work out how best to start dismantling me.

‘Don’t,’ Grier says. ‘I can look after myself.’

‘Look—’ I begin.

‘Naw, it’d be a pleasure,’ Fraser says, smiling thinly at me. ‘This shite’s tried to coorie in with Callum, then Joe, then Ellie; bout time he was taught a lesson.’

Grier takes his arm, starts to pull him away. ‘Let’s go back to the table.’

‘What if I don’t want to—’

‘Come on, Fraser, see me back,’ she says, pulling harder on his arm.

‘Aye, well,’ Fraser says, and really does do that shrugging inside the suit thing, like he’s making sure his shoulders fit inside there. He takes one step away, then he’s back in my face while Grier’s still tugging at him.

‘One fucking day, Gilmour,’ he says quietly, close enough for me to smell beer and smoke and whisky off him. ‘One fucking day.’ He wags a finger in my face as Grier pulls him away.

Slightly shaken, I return to the room. I sit down and say hi to a whole table of people I vaguely recall from school. They seem to remember me better than I remember them, which ought to feel flattering but instead feels embarrassing. One of the girls, the cute one with short black hair, looks at me like we might have once shared a moment but for the life of me I can’t recall either her name or the incident. Besides, she looks far too young. Hopefully just a false alarm, then; there are enough ghosts of misdemeanours past haunting this pile.

I head for the bar. My hands were shaking for a bit there but I think I can trust myself to hold a drink again without spilling it.

The bar staff must all be on a fag break or something. I turn my back on the bar for a moment, draw in a deep, clearing breath and take a good look round the place as the numbers start to thin out a little.

There must be some critical density of crowd that lets you see the most; too many people and all you can see is whoever’s right next to you; too few and you’ll see mostly walls, tables: just stuff. The population of people remaining in the room has probably approached whatever that ideal concentration is, and I take the opportunity to look about them.

All the local worthies, all the important people in town, are either still here or on their way out or not long departed. No schemies, no junkies, no crack whores, probably nobody unemployed or who genuinely has to worry about being out on the streets in any sense over the coming winter. Just the nice folk, those of the comfy persuasion. High proportion of sole owners, partners — junior or otherwise — shareholders, execs and professionals. People who don’t have to worry too much even in these financially straitened times. Well, how nice for us all.

Doesn’t make us bad people, Stewart…

Well, no, and we will continue to look after ourselves and to some extent those around us, in concentrically less caring levels and circles as our attention and urge to care is attenuated. The inverse square law of compassion.

But still not good enough. Not ambitious enough, not generous and optimistic enough. Too prepared to settle, overly inclined to do as we’re told, pathetically happy to accept the current dogma, that’s us. My parents wouldn’t lie to me; the holy man told me; my teacher said; look, according to this here Bumper Book of Middle Eastern Fairy Stories…

Ah, I think. I’ve got to this stage of drunkenness. Usually requires a lot of drink and just the right mix of other drugs, though I’m sure when I was younger it could be brought on with alcohol alone. It’s a feeling of encompassing, godlike scrutiny, of mountaintop scope and reach, of eagle-like inspection, though without quite the same eye to subsequent predation. And I don’t want to be noticed; it’s not, Behold me, wretches! It’s more, Fuck, behold you; what are you like?

Comes with a high degree of preparedness to use mightily broad-sweep judgements, applied with eye-watering rapidity, to condemn or dismiss entire swathes of humanity and its collected wisdom, up to and including all of it. So, not for those deficient in sanctimony or lacking in self-righteousness; definitely not for the faint or smug.

I have stood in gatherings far more opulent and distinguished, more monied and glamorous, in London and elsewhere — though mostly in London — and felt something of the same corrupted disdain for those around me. It’s a fine, refreshingly cynical feeling in a way, and one that I know separates me from so many of my peers — in all this clasping, cloying pressure to accept and agree, a few of us will always pop out like pips, ejected by just those forces that seek to clamp us in — but much as I distrust it in principle and hate it for its unearned, faux-patrician snobbery, I relish it, almost worship it.

Oh, just look at you all. Self-satisfied but still desperate to get on, do better, compete, make more. And it’s okay because this is the way everybody is, this is what everyone does, so there’s nothing to be gained by being any different. That’s the new orthodoxy, this is the new faith. There was never an end of history, just a perceived end of the need to teach it, remember it, draw any lessons from it. Because we know better, and this is a new paradigm, once more. I have a friend — again, in London — who’s a Libertarian. Actually I have a few, though they wouldn’t all call themselves such. In theory it’s a broad church with a decent left wing, but everyone I meet seems to be on the right: Rand fans. Idea appears to be that people just need to be encouraged to be a bit more selfish and all our problems will be sorted.

I don’t think I get this.

And it’s so unambitious, so weak, so default and mean-spirited; in a way so cowardly. Is that really the most we can look for in ourselves? Just give in and be selfish; settle for that because it’s what the last generation did and look how well it worked out for them? (Fuck subsequent ones; they can look after themselves.) Settle for that because it’s easy to find that core of childish greed within us, and so simple to measure the strength of it, through power and money. Or, boiling it down a bit further, just with money.

Really? I mean, seriously? This is the best we have to offer ourselves?

Fuck me, a bit of fucking ambition here, for the love of fuck. However, I am interrupted. I always am.

‘What’s it like being returned to the scene of the crime, eh?’ a slightly slurred voice asks.

I turn towards the voice and it’s Donald Murston, still in his coal-black suit but with his fat tie loosened. His face is red and shiny with drink. His expression is still pretty hard — you imagine Don’s expression will be hard until the day he dies, and possibly some time beyond — but he looks friendly enough, so long as you make the requisite allowances.

‘Mr M,’ I say, nodding to him. I can feel myself sobering up again, fast, though whether it’s fast enough is debatable. Does he know about Grier and Fraser and me and our little confrontation ten minutes ago? Has he come over to tell me to get out? ‘Glad I was able to be here,’ I tell him. I’m on the brink of adding, Thank you for that…but some rogue remaining shred of self-respect intervenes and stops me. ‘I’m glad I’ve been able to say goodbye to Joe.’

‘Aye, and saying hello to a lot of drink I’m payin for, eh?’

His glittery eyes inspect me and I try to work out if he’s actually upset or just fucking with me for a laugh. Somehow I suspect he doesn’t know anything of the micro-tussle between me, Grier and Fraser in the corridor earlier. This is just a generalised piece of intimidation — if that’s what it’s meant to be — not anything triggered by specifics.

‘Well, thanks for that too,’ I tell him. ‘I’d have been happy to pay, but…I think everybody appreciates your generosity.’

I am being so fucking polite and restrained here. I’d be quite impressed with myself if I wasn’t all too aware how horribly easy it would be to really upset him. Always assuming he isn’t really upset already, of course.

He swings an arm, sort of slaps me medium-weight on the upper arm in what is probably meant to be a bluff, manly sort of way. ‘Nah, it’s all right. Just thought it might be funny for you, being back here after that night, you know?’

‘Well, it is,’ I admit. ‘I’ve…I’ve spoken to Ellie. Apologised to her. Took all this time to be able to do that, face to face. Which. Well…But, for what it’s worth—’

‘You behaving yourself down there in the big smoke, aye?’

Fair enough; I was starting to ramble. ‘Aye, yes. Working away, you know.’

‘You got anyone special?’

‘Eh? Well, no.’ This is a bit surprising. What age am I again? ‘No, I’m away so much—’

‘Good job we didnae catch you that night, eh?’

‘Aye,’ I say, breathing out with a sigh as I scratch the back of my neck. ‘Aye. It’s as well.’ I look into those small, sharp-looking eyes of his. I can see Powell Imrie sort of hovering a table away, hands clasped. ‘I understand why you were so angry, Mr M. I’m sorry,’ I hear myself say. Jeez, what am I getting into here? ‘You took me into your family and I—’

‘Aye, well, aye, never mind,’ Don says, seemingly made as awkward as I am with all this. ‘She’s my darling girl,’ he tells me brusquely. ‘I’ll do anything for her. Both the girls. Both of them. Always. But Ellie especially.’ His gaze shif ts from me to somewhere over my shoulder. He smiles. Real smile, too. ‘Ah, an talk of the devil, eh?’

Ellie, returned, wears smart but casual black jeans, lilac blouse and dark jacket. She walks straight up to us.

‘Dad, Stewart. You two okay?’ she asks, looking and sounding tense, wary, though hiding it well.

‘Fine, braw, good, aye,’ Don says.

‘You’re not running Stewart out of town again, are you, Dad?’ She smiles, to undercut the question a little.

‘No, well, he’s off tomorrow, that right, aye?’ Don says, fixing me with his gaze.

‘Aye,’ I say. ‘Back down the road tomorrow.’

‘And anyway,’ Don says, still looking at me, ‘we weren’t tryin to run him out of town the last time.’

I think his eyes narrow a wee bit. Do his eyes narrow a wee bit? I think they do. I think his eyes narrow a wee bit.

‘We were tryin,’ Donald says slowly, ‘to get our hands on him.’ That last sentence sounds like about half of a longer sentence, but Don has censored it.

‘I told Donald I’d apologised to you,’ I tell Ellie. My mouth is getting dry. I wonder where I left my pint.

‘Yes.’ Ellie looks from me to her dad. ‘And he did.’

‘Aye, well,’ Donald says. ‘But that doesn’t make everythin all right, does it?’

There is, technically, a question mark at the end of that sentence of Donald’s, but it’s about as vestigial as they come.

‘No,’ Ellie says. ‘Not by itself.’ She looks calmly at me, then says to Don, ‘Stewart tells me he still has feelings for me.’ Her gaze swivels in my direction while Don just stares at my nose. ‘Isn’t that right, Stewart?’

I take a moment before answering, ‘Ah. Ah, yes, that’s what I said. It’s true. I also said I didn’t expect anything—’

‘Aw aye?’ Don says, and he doesn’t sound or look even slightly drunk now. ‘That’s funny. I still have feelings for Stewart, too. I’ll bet the boys, I bet they still have feelings as well.’ He glances at Ellie. ‘But maybe no quite the same as your feelings.’

I glance over at Powell Imrie, who has his back to us now. He’s talking to Murdo, who is looking round Powell’s broad shoulder at his dad, Ellie and me, and might be trying to get past Powell to get to us. Powell seems to be placating him. No sign of the other brothers.

Ellie smiles calmly, first at me, then at Don. ‘Whereas the feelings that matter most here are mine, don’t you think, Dad?’

Don is back to staring at me. His eyes are definitely narrowed now. ‘Aye, if you say so, love.’ He seems to shake himself out of something and looks at her. ‘So what are your “feelings”?’ he asks. The quotation marks are as obviously present as the question mark, moments earlier, was effectively absent.

Ellie takes her dad’s upper arm in one hand and mine in the other, holding us like a ref before a boxing match. ‘To tell the truth, I’m not sure yet,’ she says. ‘I’m still trying to decide how I feel.’

Don shakes his head. ‘Hen, if you need to think about it, then—’

‘Actually, your dad might be right here,’ I butt in.

Don glares at me. ‘You a fuckin mind reader?’ he hisses at me. ‘You think you know what I’m goin to say? You think you know what I’m thinkin?’

‘I was trying to agree—’ I protest.

‘I don’t need you agreein with anything I—’

‘Will you both just stop?’ Ellie says gently. She squeezes my arm a little. Probably his too. ‘This is about me? Hello? And I’m still thinking, and we’ll talk about this, sensibly, I hope, when I’ve decided how I feel? That okay, Dad?’ she asks, tipping her head towards Don, her hair swinging gracefully. Don looks thoughtful. ‘Maybe,’ he concedes.

‘Stewart?’ she asks.

‘Wish I knew what this was meant to accomplish, I confess.’

‘Clearing the air,’ Ellie says, to both me and Don. ‘Just because you might not want to hear something doesn’t mean it doesn’t need saying.’ She looks at Don. ‘Dad, Stewart and I are going to take a wee walk, okay?’ She looks at me. ‘Okay?’

‘Okay,’ I say.

She looks back at Don. ‘Okay?’

‘Can’t stop you going for a walk, love,’ Don says. He seems more wary than angry now.

‘Good. Mum’s gone to her class,’ Ellie tells Don. ‘She’ll be back about four.’

‘Aye, okay. I’ll make sure the posse’s back for then.’

‘I’ll see you later, Dad.’ Ellie leans in to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Stewart,’ she says, letting go of her father and turning back towards the main doors, ‘shall we?’

17

We walk out of the hotel and down into the gardens. The af ternoon light, filtered through high cloud, makes the breaking rollers of the slack-water tide glow beneath the great standing wave of mist still banked over the margins of the sea.

As we walk down past the second terrace, between topiary and curved wooden benches, Ellie gives a small laugh, nods to one side and says, ‘I had my own little micro-fling here, an hour or two before you and Jel got jiggy.’

I look at her, eyebrows raised.

‘Dean Watts,’ she tells me. ‘Remember him?’

‘Yep.’

Ellie nods. ‘I sort of let him kiss me. Just back there,’ she says as we start down the next flight of steps.

‘Yep.’

She glances at me. ‘“Yep”?’

‘I know. I saw,’ I tell her.

She stops, and I have to stop too, so we’re facing each other, halfway down the flight of steps. ‘Was that why you went off with Jel?’ she asks. She looks as serious as she has all day.

I shake my head. ‘My guilty conscience did its best to persuade me it was, but… no. I don’t think it made a blind bit of difference, El. Too small to measure even if it did.’

‘So you saw me and Dean?’

‘Yeah. I wasn’t following you; just coincidence. But yes.’

‘Hmm. You never said.’

‘I didn’t get much opportunity before, and afterwards it would just have sounded petty, and like I was blaming you for something that was all my own work.’

She hoists one eyebrow. ‘And Jel’s.’

‘Well, yeah, though I don’t think she did it to get at you, if that’s any comfort.’ I shrug. ‘It was just two people thinking only of themselves, pure selfishness. Well, impure.’

‘Had you two ever…?’

‘No. Does that make it better or worse?’

Ellie looks down, considering. She shrugs. ‘Don’t know.’

We resume our descent of the stone stairs.

‘Grier told Jel that you’d always wanted to get off with her, with Jel, I mean,’ Ellie says. We keep on walking.

‘Did she now?’ I say, nodding. ‘I thought she might have.’

‘Jel let it slip once.’ El turns briefly to me. ‘Jel and I had a drunken night of blame, recrimination, apologies, forgiveness and some wine-fuelled tears and hugs a couple of years back,’ she explains. ‘Met up on the sticky carpets of Jings, of all places.’ She shakes her head, eyes wide. ‘Jings. Jesus.’

In any other town this would be a sort of double oath, but not here. Jings is the less salubrious of Stonemouth’s two principal night spots, though if you stood in the other one, Q&L’s, without having seen Jings first, you could be forgiven for assuming you must already have found the club deserving that particular distinction. Frankly they haven’t got much going for them beyond, well, persistence, but they’re kind of all we’ve got. I remember being with Ferg the first time he encountered the literal as well as metaphorical tackiness of the Jings’s carpet. He just stood there, shifting from foot to foot a couple of times and went, ‘Hmm. Mulchy.’

‘Well, I suppose I did fancy Anjelica,’ I admit. ‘Not many men who didn’t, just, you know: on first principles. However, I suspect Grier talked it up a bit beyond that.’

‘I have it on good authority Grier talked it up a lot beyond that,’ Ellie says.

‘You ever mention this to Grier?’

‘Never saw the point.’

I wonder whether I ought to mention the whole thing with the cameras and the photos of Jel and me, and the way my thoughts have been turning. But that might be too much. And anyway I could still be wrong.

We arrive at the lowest of the hotel’s terraces and lean on the stone wall — chest height here, a couple of metres tall on the far side — which separates the hotel grounds from the back nine of the Olness course. Beyond — over two thin fairways, a couple of access tracks and a lot of knobbly, knee-high rough — neither beach nor sea looks much closer.

‘You really not sure how you feel?’ I ask her. ‘About me, I mean,’ I add, and know the last bit was unnecessary the instant the words are uttered.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m really not sure.’ She studies me for a few moments. ‘I’m not even sure what you mean, Stewart. Saying you still have feelings. What does that mean? What are these feelings? I know people usually mean that they still like a person a lot, or love them a little, or a medium amount, even if they’re not what you’d call in love, or maybe they are, but, again, not that much.’ She raises her hands, lets them fall. ‘It’s all so…mealy-mouthed, isn’t it? It’s like a bargaining chip, like a first step in a negotiation: I’ll admit I might still like you a bit and we can take it from there if you want, and if not then I haven’t exposed my position too much and I won’t be too humiliated if you reject me because I only used the word “feelings” rather than “love”.’

She sighs, rubs her hands together, palms flat as she leans on the wall, looking out across the cropped and tended grass towards the sea.

‘I’m not sure what I feel about you,’ she tells me. The best I can put it is that I have these conflicting feelings. It’s not that I have to search for feelings about you, that they’re so minor or hidden I need to look hard to find them, it’s more that I have really…intrusive feelings about you, but they’re contradictory, they clash, and I can’t work out the balance of them. Not yet.’

‘So part of you still hates me?’ I try to make this sound helpful, air-clearing, rather than self-pitying, which I suppose it might be.

She sighs heavily. ‘Hate might be too strong. After you’d gone I would wake up sometimes, crying, raging, wishing I’d let the boys get you that night, but that never lasted long: seconds, minutes, just long enough to think it through and know it wasn’t what I wanted at all.’ She’s still staring out towards the waves. ‘But I felt wronged, Stewart: humiliated, embarrassed, made to look a fool. We’d been shaping up to have this ideal, idealised life together, the envy of all who surveyed us, and suddenly it was all gone and I was just a stupid, betrayed girlie who should have known better, who should have known what men were like, or at least what you were like, and I was thrown back into my family again, or confronted with the choice of doing whatever it was I really wanted for myself, and, even there, I sort of no longer knew. Lost my confidence, lost my certainty. So I blamed you for all that.’ She shrugs, glances at me. ‘Not so much now; kind of accepting you just exposed something lacking in me, maybe. Guess it would have surfaced at some point anyway, even if we’d got married and been happy together initially.’

‘Yeah, but we were talking about having children by then. That might have changed everything.’

‘I suppose. You’d have had your career, I’d have had children to look after, or a balancing act to perform between them and whatever I’d decided I really wanted to do, and we’d have struggled on, not the first couple to tie their fractured lives together with kids.’

We’re both staring out to sea now, leaning on the wall, elbows on the curved stone top, hands clasped. Jeez, this all sounds so depressing.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘But it might have been…great!’

El laughs, standing straight and throwing her head back and laughing loud and strong the way I remember her laughing in the old days. She turns her back on the sea, folds her arms and sits against the wall. ‘And there you are, see?’ she says, smiling at me as I turn round too. ‘You say something like that and it feels like…like my heart does a double-take or something, I don’t know.’ She leans, looks down, inspects the path beneath our feet.

I take a deep breath.

‘Look, I think part of me just wants to know you don’t hate me. Part of me just wants your forgiveness so I can feel I’m not that bad a person after all and then I fuck off back out of your life again so I can get on with my own life. That bit of me just wants the onwards-and-upwards stuff, wants to tie up loose ends, make whatever peace needs to be made and then forget about Stonemouth and families and even you — or at least, you-and-me, El and Stu. That element, that…faction wants to regard the first two decades of my life as a…a first stage, like a rocket? Something you need, but then have to discard, let fall away? But the more I think about it, the more that feels like an idiot bit, a childish part of me. And even the onwards-and-upwards shit isn’t looking so attractive these days.’

El looks at me, raises her eyebrows.

‘Oh, I think about what I actually do,’ I tell her, ‘and Ferg’s right: I point lights at big buildings. I’m an exterior decorator fussing over the phallic substitutes of rich boys. I window dress the grotesque status symbols of a kleptocratic worldwide plutocracy, the undeserving elite of the far-too-impressed-with-themselves über rich. It’s exciting, it’s rewarding, it’s well paid and it takes me all over the world, and so long as I don’t actually think about it I have a great time.’

‘What,’ Ellie says, ‘and then you think about it?’

‘Then I think about it and I think, What the fuck would my young self think of this? I mean, my young self was several tenths an idiot, but at least I had ideals back then.’

‘Your young self would appreciate the glitz and the travel and lifting your head to stare up at a night sky fixed into place by a building you’d lit.’

I take a breath to speak, then sort of trap it inside, look at her. ‘Yes,’ I say, after a moment. ‘Yes it would, he would, I would. But that’s…that’s like a drug rush. It comes, it goes, and then what? It doesn’t sustain.’ I sit back against the wall, like her. ‘And I think back to the last time I felt…connected with myself, all of a piece, and I think of you, I think of when we were together. And—’

‘Yeah, but maybe that’s just nostalgia,’ she suggests. ‘Maybe you just associate me with all that. And all that’s gone. All that had to go, one way or the other, because we all have to grow up. Even daft boys. Even you, Stewart.’

‘Maybe,’ I admit. ‘I don’t know. It’s all fankled, caught up in itself. Fucked if I can sort it out.’

We both half stand, half sit there for a while. I know what she’s saying is right, but I know I’m right, too, and this feeling that everything I’ve been doing for the last five years has been somewhat beside the point isn’t going to go away.

‘What do you want of me, Stewart?’ she asks eventually, softly. ‘What is it you want to ask me? Or tell me?’

I stare at the sand, dirt and pebble path beneath us. I take a deep breath and let it out. Oh well.

‘I’ll always love you, Ellie. Even if we never see each other again and I find somebody else, and I fall completely in love with her and she becomes the love of my life and we have kids and live happily together for the next sixty years, I’ll still always love you. But I can’t offer you any more than I did before, and I let you down then. I want you to have a great, brilliant, happy life and I don’t know that I’d trust myself to offer anything like that even if you were insane enough to trust me again.’

I look up at her, half convinced she’s going to be smirking for some reason, half certain that she’ll be staring at me with a look of …I don’t know: disdain, horror, victory, contempt? Instead she just has that calm, steady, serene thing going, washing over me with that elegant, contemplative regard.

‘Hmm,’ she says, at last. ‘Sounds like neither of us really knows what the hell we think. What a sound basis for a relationship.’

I try to read her expression, but I can’t tell if this is entirely sarcasm or not. ‘So,’ I say, clearing my throat. ‘I’ve kind of shown you mine here. How about you?’

She smiles. ‘I’ve stopped hating you. And I never entirely stopped loving you, even though I probably should have.’ She looks away, back to the hotel. ‘And whether that’s enough for us to be even friends again, never mind anything else …’ She shakes her head. ‘I just don’t know.’ She glances at me. ‘Looks like we’re sort of back to square one again, doesn’t it?’

‘I suppose,’ I agree. ‘But then square one for you…that means what?’

She shrugs. ‘I don’t know: before we knew each other? I don’t know. Maybe when you started coming to the house, coming to see Grandpa.’

I can’t help smiling. ‘I’d already fallen for you by then. At the Lido, years earlier. Hook, line and sinker, kid.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she says, smiling too. ‘You have told me that.’ She nods. ‘Hook, line and stinker.’

‘Stinker?’

‘A Grierism. From when she was a kid. Thought that was the phrase.’

‘Aha.’

She looks at me, serious again. ‘I’ll always be part of this family, Stewart.’

‘I know.’

There’s a pause, then she says, ‘The thing about Callum?’

‘What?’

‘He might have been pushed,’ she says, her voice flat. I just look at her. El shrugs. ‘And he might have deserved it.’

I think about this. ‘Uh-huh. Okay. So who did the pushing?’

‘The boys. Don, possibly.’

I can’t really take this in. ‘Hold on, wait a minute.’ I put one hand flat on my brow. ‘We are talking about your brother Callum, and the bridge, and your dad—’

El nods once. ‘We are,’ she says calmly.

‘Then—’

‘First thing I thought when I heard Callum was dead was that Grier had actioned her plan about accusing him — or threatening to accuse him — of raping her that night in his bed when she was still a kid. But it had gone wrong because he reacted by jumping off the bridge.’ She shakes her head. ‘Unless that was what she wanted, of course, though that may be taking the principle of not putting anything past the girl a bit too far.’

There’s a pause here, and I could say something, but I’m not going to.

‘Anyway,’ she says, in a measured voice, almost tired-sounding voice. ‘As it turns out, Callum…Callum might have been in talks with one of the businesses from Glasgow, the same people who tried expanding into Stonemouth a few years ago, and were …sent homeward to think again,’ Ellie tells me, turning her upper body and looking at me. ‘Maybe. Only maybe, from what I’ve heard, and I’m sure I haven’t heard everything.’ She looks away, back up the slope to the hotel. ‘Seemingly there was some circumstantial evidence, stuff passed on by somebody helpful inside the local police. Connected Callum with one of the firms who thought they’d have a second try, taking over, up here.’ She crosses her arms, hugs herself. ‘The idea seems to have been that Dad and Murdo would be persuaded to retire and Callum would be left in charge, running a sort of franchise operation for the Glasgow boys. Callum was negotiating on that basis over that last year or so and only pulled out when he started to realise neither Don nor Murdo would go quietly and what he was really getting involved with was a deal that would mean killing his dad and his elder brother. At least. And him doing the setting up to make sure this happened. So he broke off the talks.’ Ellie shrugs. ‘Too late, though.’

I’m staring at her. My mouth is open, and dry. I close it, swallow and say, ‘Fuck,’ which is about all I’m capable of.

El shrugs. ‘Just rumour,’ she says. ‘Speculation. Stuff I’ve put together, a few drunken asides, guilty looks, one or two hints people have dropped…Including something Grandpa said, in hospital, a few days before he died.’

I’m still not getting this. ‘But Don…he fucking doted on Callum. Didn’t he?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘I mean, it’s like he still does: keeping the pick-up and the portrait by the door …’

‘Hard to know what’s love and what’s…a cover.’

‘You still think he might have—’

‘Oh yeah,’ Ellie says, looking down at the path of beaten earth beneath her feet.

I blow out a breath, stare at the great stony façade of the hotel at the top of the tiers of steps and terraces. ‘So…Just…business?’

She laughs. Not loud or long, but it’s still a laugh. Bitter sounding. ‘No, not that,’ she says with a sigh, turning and looking back into my eyes again. ‘Broken trust, Stewart. Betrayal, love scorned. That would easily be enough.’

My turn to look down at the path.

She waits for a few moments, then flicks me on my knee with the back of her hand. ‘But I could be wrong. It could all be wrong.’ She flexes, using her backside to push herself away from the wall. ‘Come on; well past time I had a proper drink.’

I push away too. ‘Amen to that.’

It’s as we’re walking back up to the hotel that I remember the cute girl with the short black hair who was sitting at the table I visited just before I went to the bar and Donald started talking to me, maybe twenty minutes ago. Maybe it’s all this talk of conspiracy and plotting, but I suddenly remember where that nagging feeling of…whatever it was, came from.

Not from a quick fling or just a snog from ten or even five years ago — she really would have been far too young — but from a burst of confused conversation from just three nights past. I was very drunk and stoned but I recall she said something about it not being her fault, not these hands, not the famous photographs, and that ‘that girl’ could talk anybody into anything. That was why she was looking at me the way she was, when we were sitting round the table earlier. She must have seen that I’d forgotten about what she said to me at that back-to-whoever’s party on Friday night.

Relief. She was relieved I’d forgotten.

Except now I’ve remembered.

Ellie and I walk back into the half-emptied room where people are still talking, milling, eating and drinking — though there are a lot more cups of tea and coffee around now than before — but the table where the cute girl was sitting has been abandoned and I can’t see her or her friends anywhere.

There’s no seating plan to consult. I leave Ellie talking to an old Academy pal and tell her I won’t be long. There’s enough of a gossip quorum left in the room. Stonemouth being the size it is, it takes all of five minutes of just asking around to find out who the people at the table were and who the cute girl with the black hair is.

I even get her phone number. I take another walk outside.

‘Tasha?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Stewart Gilmour. We were talking earlier?’

‘Oh. Yeah. Hello again. Thought you didn’t remember me.’

‘Yeah, we were talking on Friday night, too, weren’t we?’

‘Well, yeah. Just…yeah.’

‘Tasha, you were saying something about how it wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t your fair hands that took those photos, you know?’

‘Yeah. That. Thought you’d forgotten?’

‘Well, I almost did. I take it you were one of the kids who had the digital cameras, at Lauren McLaughley and Drew Linton’s wedding, would that be right?’

‘Well, yah, obviously. Listen.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘I sort of spoke out of turn, you know? Didn’t mean to. I had, like, a couple of drinks? So, it’s not something—’

‘Well, I just wanted to ask—’

‘No, no, I don’t think I can—’

‘Well, look, could we perhaps meet up and—’

‘No. No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Sorry. Look, I have to go now.’

‘Tasha, just wait a second, please. You said somebody put you up to it, that she could talk anybody into anything. That was Grier, wasn’t it? You gave the camera to Grier, or let her take it from you, is that right?’

‘Uh…Gotta go now, bye.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I say quietly to an unresponsive phone.

I think the sheer weight of my own culpability — entirely deserved and duly acknowledged — might have blinded me to just how useful an only slightly guilty conscience, or two, can be.

I rejoin Ellie at the bar. She appears to have Ferg in tow, which is just as well, as he’s listing.

‘Gilmour,’ he says, eyes widening when he sees me, ‘you’ll do. This demented harridan refuses to escort me off the premises for the purposes of smoking.’

‘You need escorting, Ferg?’ I ask.

‘Trifle unsteady. Nothing a fag, a puff and a stiffener won’t sort. Excuse my entendres. We’re all going off to Mike Mac’s for a dip. You coming? Going to take me outside? Answer the second question first, to quote dear old Groucho.’

‘Yeah, I’ll take you outside,’ I tell him, holding him by the elbow as El lets go his other arm. I look at Ellie as Ferg sorts his feet out. ‘Mike Mac’s? Really? A “dip”?’

Ellie shrugs. She reaches up, undoes a couple of buttons on her blouse and pulls the material aside, revealing what must be the top of a light-blue swimming costume. ‘As it happens,’ she says, ‘I’ve come prepared.’

‘You were going beach swimming, weren’t you?’ I say, smiling at her.

‘Uh-huh.’ She redoes up one of the buttons. ‘Still might.’

‘Are you two quite finished wittering?’ Ferg says, breathing on me. ‘There’s a filter tip to be sucked on here.’

‘Come on,’ I tell him.

‘See you outside,’ El says. I nod.

‘I’m not really that drunk,’ Ferg confides as we pass through the lobby and he tries to work out which way up to hold the packet of Silk Cut so he can extract one. ‘But I’m definitely heading that way. I think I need some medicinal cocaine. That’ll sober me up.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Thanks,’ he says as we hit the open air and the hotel steps. Amazingly, there are no fellow puffers congregated. ‘Just prop me up here and I’ll wait while you score. Unless you’ve got some on you now, have you? Have you?’

‘No, Ferg.’

‘Well, just prop me up here and I’ll wait while you score. Oops.’

‘So you said.’ I pick up his lighter and give it back to him. He fumbles with it, drops it again.

‘What’s it?’ he says. ‘Gravity’s gone capricious again, fuck it.’

‘Let me,’ I tell him. I pull the fag out of his mouth, put it back in the right way round and put the flame to the end, shielding it from the breeze. ‘Ferg, you have to draw in air as I do this? Or it doesn’t work?’

‘Hmm? Oh, yes.’

Between us, finally, we get the cigarette lit and I stick the lighter into his breast pocket.

‘Well,’ he says, flapping one hand. ‘Don’t delay!’

‘Yeah, you’re going to be a lot of fun this evening,’ I mutter, and leave him propped against one of the porch’s pillars while I go to get Ellie.

‘And it has to be good shit!’ I hear him yell after me as I walk off. ‘None of that fucking drain-cleaner shite that makes your nose bleed frothy blue, d’you hear? I’ll pay you later! Be a generous tip! I’m good for it! Ha ha ha ha ha!’

Mike Mac’s place is less than ten minutes’ walk away, but it turns into a journey of nearly half an hour as Ellie and I escort Ferg there.

‘You’d be better off going home,’ I tell him as we approach the end of Olness Terrace and the turn that’ll take us — thankfully downhill — towards the MacAvetts’ house.

‘Don’t want to go home! I want to swim! And where’s my fucking coke?’

‘Don’t have any, Ferg.’

‘But I gave you the money!’

‘No you didn’t, Ferg.’

‘I gave him the money!’ Ferg says, turning to Ellie.

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t believe you did, Ferg.’

‘What? Are you mad, woman? Who you going to believe? This proven liar who betrayed you five years ago and left you standing at the altar or as good as, or me, Ferg?’ Ferg tears his right arm out of my grip and thumps himself on the chest. I pull his arm back.

Ellie glances over at me. ‘I’ll believe Stewart, Ferg.’

‘You’re mad!’ He looks at me. ‘She’s mad!’

‘Sure we can’t just take you home, Ferg?’ Ellie asks.

‘Certainly not! Are we there yet?’ We decide to ring Jel.

‘Is it okay if we bring Ferg?’ I ask her.

‘Is he sober?’ Jel sounds like she knows this is a purely rhetorical question.

‘I’m so glad you asked,’ I tell her. ‘He’s incredibly sober. Unbelievably sober.’ Ferg stumbles over a paving stone and I help support him. ‘Staggeringly sober.’

‘He’s filthy drunk, isn’t he?’

‘Filthy hardly covers it.’

‘Well, okay, but he’s your responsibility.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that, but all right.’

Ferg’s practically asleep when we arrive. Jel greets us, all happy, smiling, pleased to see us. Well, pleased to see two-thirds of us. We leave Ferg snoring in the recovery position behind some potted palms on the floor of the old conservatory and join the party in the pool extension.

Ellie tracks sinuously back and forth through the waters of the MacAvett pool, looking as effortless as a dolphin, as though the ripples and waves around her are what power her, not the result of her effort. She uses the crawl in pools, mostly; in the sea, in anything other than a flat calm, she prefers sidestroke. Whatever stroke she employs, El inhabits it like she invented it herself.

Mrs Mac brings lots of tea and coffee and more food, in case we all haven’t gorged ourselves sufficiently up at the Mearnside. There are sandwiches on home-baked bread, home-made scones — plain, cheese and fruit — and home-made jams too. I try a little of everything. It’s all delicious.

I’m sitting, about midway along the long side of the pool, on a lounger under the palms. Above, rolled-back blinds reveal the glass roof covering the whole extension.

There are maybe twenty people here, all in their twenties, I’d guess, apart from one eighteen-year-old and Sue, who must be late forties at least and looks like she dyes her blonde hair, but is still trim. A few guys are drinking beers, a few women white wine or spritzers. I’m on my second pint of tap water, pacing myself earnestly and rehydrating. Mike Mac is in bed, having a snooze.

I’ve checked on Ferg once so far. Hasn’t moved. Snoring like a pig. I’m feeling a little dozy myself here in the humid, sunny warmth of the pool area. I’ve been watching Phelpie through half-shut eyes, watching the way he watches Jel when she’s swimming or just walking around, sitting, talking. Does our Phelpie harbour certain feelings for the delightful Anjelica? I do believe he might. That’s sweet, I guess. Jel glances at Phelpie once or twice. Hard to tell if she’s appreciating this attention or bothered by it.

I shake myself properly awake, sitting up as straight as the lounger will allow. Ellie is doing double lengths underwater now, hyperventilating at the shallow end of the pool and then slipping under the surface, kicking away from the wall and swimming breaststroke along the bottom. The pale, wave-filtered light warps her slim form into fluid abstract shapes that seem to run like coloured mercury along the tiles beneath, her skin seeming gradually to darken under the increasing weight of water at the deep end.

Her roll and kick at the pool wall comes so easy and fast, it’s as though she reflects off the tiles rather than has to do anything so inelegant as physically connect and push. Her image trembles along the pool bottom again, growing paler as the water shallows, then she slows just before the wall and resurfaces gently, breathing barely any harder. She smoothes her hair back over her forehead. She sniffs hard, turns and looks round, sees me, smiles.

She pulls a few more deep, deep breaths — breaths so full you can see her chest expand and her body rise up within the waves with the extra buoyancy — then she exhales, like a long, extended sigh and slips under the water again.

Jel comes and sits down on the lounger next to me, holding a glass of something pale and bubbly. From the shape, probably a spritzer. ‘How you doing?’ she asks, with a glance at the pool.

‘Oh, fine,’ I tell her. ‘I’m swimming through my thoughts here.’ She’s in loose jeans and a half-open blouse over her bikini top, her hair still wet-dark from an earlier plunge. I was offered a loan of trunks but declined.

‘And how are you and Ellie?’ she asks.

I shake my head. ‘Not entirely sure.’

Jel is silent for a few seconds. ‘You can see the way you look at her,’ she says quietly, as though talking to her glass, before looking back up into my eyes.

‘Oh yeah?’

Jel’s smiling a small smile. She taps my forearm twice as she rises. ‘Best of luck.’

She goes off to talk to Phelpie and a couple of the others. I look after her for a moment, then turn back to watch Ellie.

She’s back under the water again, flowing along just above the glistening surface of the tiles on the pool bottom like something more liquid than the water itself.

18

A bunch of us head down to the beach, over the red sandstone wall at the bottom of the MacAvetts’ garden. There are a couple of steps on the garden side and a head-height, probably-about-time-it-was-replaced steel ladder down onto the sand on the other. The wall itself is smooth and solid on the garden side, pitted and half hollow on the face exposed to the spray and to a century of blown, scouring sand, leaving the pale mortar in skinny, granular ridges forming squared-off cells surrounding the striated scoops in the softer stone.

There’s Ellie and me, Phelpie, an awakened, groggy and still slightly grumpy Ferg, and Jel and Ryan. Ryan showed up from his own place in town ten minutes ago, maybe alerted to El’s presence in the family home by somebody because he looked sort of desperate and keen when he arrived, and not properly surprised when he saw Ellie.

She just smiled when she saw him, said hi. He’s tagging along now, keeping close to Jel and trying not to look at Ellie too much. Ellie’s in her swimsuit, skirted with one towel and holding another across her shoulders. Apparently the dip in the pool was all very well but it just gave her a taste for some sea swimming. The North Sea on an October evening with a stiff breeze blowing, crashing rollers and sand everywhere. It’s the very start of October, and the weather is still mild — warm if you were being generous — but still.

That’s my girl. Well, that was my girl. Let’s not get carried away here.

The two lanky, loping shapes of the MacAvett wolfhounds — apparently they’re called Trinny and Tobago — are already well into the distance, chasing each other through shallows and barking at the waves.

‘With you shortly,’ I tell Ellie, then drop back from the rest as they walk along. When I’m far enough back I take out my phone and call Grier. It sounds like the phone’s about to ring out and I’m thinking, Well, I’m carrying El’s jacket, and her phone’s in there; I could cheat and call Grier on that and stand a better chance of her answering, but it would be a mean trick. Then she picks up.

‘Hello?’

‘Grier? It’s Stewart.’

‘Yeah? What?’

‘You got a moment?’

I hear her sigh. ‘Been wanting a moment all day, haven’t you?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Okay. But tell me now: am I going to enjoy this?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Better keep it short then. Say your piece, Stu.’

‘Did you set it all up?’

‘Set what all up?’

‘Five years ago? The Mearnside? The kids-’n’-cameras idea. Telling Jel I was her biggest fan. Taking a camera off one of the children and making sure you got the right shot of me and Jel.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Just asking.’

‘Why the fuck would I do all that?’

‘I don’t know. Sheer devilment? Jealousy, maybe.’

‘Jealousy? Seriously; are you serious?’

‘Well, there was that time in London when you came to stay at my place. You seemed, kind of…interested, then? In me? In us fucking?’

‘Maybe you remember it different from me.’

‘Maybe. But not that different.’

‘You do flatter yourself sometimes, don’t you, Stu?’

‘So you didn’t really want to? I completely misunderstood you sliding a hand into my pants and lip-chewing my ear?’

‘Oh, there might have been a sort of transferred urge. That other guy, Brad, he turned out to be useless, remember? And maybe there was sort of an experimental thing, too? To see what Ellie had been getting all those years, sort of level-up with her? Just cos the opportunity had presented itself; not something I’d planned for or anything? And, frankly, if this is what you’re really like, then I’m really glad now it never happened. You did notice I didn’t exactly stalk you after that? Honestly, Stu, you’re not that…addictive. What makes you think I’m into older men anyway?’

‘Okay. Forget the motivations. Just tell me: is it true? Did you set up the thing with the cameras?’

‘No. And don’t be ridiculous.’

‘That your final answer?’

‘Yes. You’re fantasising.’

‘I don’t think I am.’

‘Well, I don’t believe I care what you think any more, Stewart. So, we done here? That your moment over? I’m sure I have better things to do.’

‘Sorry to have wasted your time.’

‘Yeah, sure you are.’ There’s a pause. ‘But, actually, no. No. If I can join in on this open-mike fantasy session you’ve got going here, why not think about it being about me trying to stop Ellie being happy, because I just didn’t like her? Didn’t like her easy way with everything, the way everybody said she was the pretty one, the way she could just do what she wanted and have who she wanted and never, ever realise how lucky she was, how privileged, how spoiled? Maybe it was all about teaching her a lesson. Maybe it had nothing to do with you at all, Stewart. Maybe you were just, like, collateral damage? Maybe you were just used. Maybe you were just a tool.’

I hear her take a breath, waiting for me to answer, but I keep quiet.

‘Yes? No? Plausible to you? Or not ego-massaging enough? Or it could have been Ellie, you know? Maybe she just got tired of you and wanted a plausible way out where she’d look like the victim? Maybe Jel was just doing her a favour, or El had something over her. No? That not acceptable either? Okay, here’s another thought. Maybe it wasn’t my idea in the first place; maybe I only helped a little, did what I was asked to do and was proud to be part of the family team for once, just following orders? Maybe it was Don. Maybe he set you up because he didn’t trust you, because he didn’t want somebody like you marrying into the family, somebody he didn’t understand who wanted to be a fucking artist and talked all this weird hippie bullshit about worshipping truth or whatever the fuck? Maybe you just failed the audition, Stu, and this was Don’s way of getting you out of the picture, even if it broke Ellie’s heart. Maybe all that, Stu. Maybe you should think of all that, if we’re entertaining all the possibilities, even the crazy ones. Getting caught with your pants down in a toilet stall by a little kid too fucking inglorious for you? Has to be a conspiracy, yeah? Fucking grow up, Stu.’

The phone goes dead. Then, a few seconds later, the screen lights up again, and it’s Grier’s number.

I put the phone to my ear and draw in a breath but she gets there first. ‘And don’t call me back!’

Dead again. Properly dead, too; no battery left. Oh well.

There’s a bit on the beach that’s just right for a swim, Ellie says, casting a knowing eye over the way the breakers are falling across low sandbanks and shallow channels, fifty metres out. To me, it looks just the same as all the other bits of beach and sea.

‘This where you usually swim?’ I ask her.

‘There’s no usually,’ she tells me. ‘Just wherever the waves are right. Changes every tide with how the sand lies. Today, here’s good.’

We take her word for it and hunker down on the dry sand with some blankets and towels and two cooler boxes full of soft drinks, wine and beer.

We’re about thirty or forty metres down the beach, more or less level with the broad, shallow slipway that marks the end of the Promenade; Olness golf course starts a little further on. Yarlscliff and Stoun Point are visible to the south through the slight remaining haze. Vatton forest, an hour’s brisk walk away in the opposite direction, remains invisible in the greyness; it would be only a dark line smudged across the northern horizon even on a clear day. The roll of cloud offshore seems to have dissipated into the pervading mistiness still covering beach and town.

Ellie drops the towels, looks at us all sitting on the blankets. ‘Really? Nobody else coming in?’

The onshore breeze might have slackened a little, but it still fills the air with the sound of the surf breaking all along the great multikilometre reach of this wide east coast, making everything that everybody says seem somehow distant, submerged within the vast white-noise shush of the sea.

‘Think you’re on your own,’ I tell her. I pick up the towels, drape them over the arm already carrying her jacket.

‘Looks a bit cold,’ Jel says. She appears tiny in a big green waxed jacket she picked up in the back porch; one of her dad’s.

Ryan looks like he’d happily volunteer to go in with Ellie, skinny-dipping if necessary, but can’t bring himself to say it.

‘We’ll just watch you,’ Phelpie says, with what might be a leer. He pulls the tab on a can of Irn Bru.

‘Yes. Do try not to drown,’ Ferg tells her, rummaging through one of the cool boxes, probably looking for the drink with the highest ABV.

Ellie is putting on a Day-Glo-yellow bathing cap, tucking her hair up into it. ‘I’ll try,’ she says.

‘I can life-save,’ Ryan blurts, holding up one hand, then immediately looking like he’s regretting it. Ellie just smiles tightly at him. He looks round at the rest of us. ‘El taught me,’ he says, voice dropping away.

‘Right, be good,’ El says, addressing all of us, and — with a last smile to me — turns to the sea.

She walks, then jogs away across the sands: poised, elegant, gazelle-graceful, the whites of her soles pale flashes against the sand and the honey tone of her calves and thighs. She splashes into the first shallow pools, pads across a sandbank, negotiates a deeper pool — bending to scoop and splash the water over her — then crosses another long hummock of sand into the line of breaking surf, raising splashes and continuing to rub water over her upper arms and shoulders as she keeps on striding forward, wading in to mid-thigh before suddenly arcing forward in a neat dive, disappearing.

I find myself letting out a breath. Around me, people are talking away, and have been for the past half-minute or so.

I hadn’t noticed.

Jel just grins and shakes her head at me. Ryan is still staring at the waves.

I sit down with everybody else, folding the towels and El’s jacket into a neat pile.

Ferg is sitting with a cigarette in his mouth, patting the side pockets of his jacket. ‘Where’s my—’

‘Try the breast pocket,’ I suggest.

‘Ah.’

I saunter over to Phelpie, sit by him for a bit. ‘How you doing, Phelpie? How’s life anyway?’

Phelpie grins at me, rotates his shoulders inside his tee and fleece, and nods. ‘Oh, fine.’ He glances — briefly, but definitely — at Jel as he answers. That was kind of all I wanted to know. ‘Funny old day, eh?’

I nod. ‘Funerals are, sometimes, I suppose.’

‘Heard there might have been a wee contretemps between you and Frase earlier, in the Mearnside. That right, aye?’

I waggle a hand. ‘Minor misunderstanding. Only just merited the term confrontation.’

‘Still, best be careful with Frase, eh?’ Phelpie sounds sincere and his big, open-looking face regards me with an expression of genuine concern.

‘Have been,’ I tell him. ‘Will be.’

He drinks from his can. ‘And Murdo,’ he says, thoughtfully. ‘And Norrie. And Mr M, too, of course.’

‘Of course.’

He glances at me, smiles. ‘Not to mention those two lassies.’

I smile back. ‘Not to mention the lassies.’

The two wolfhounds reappear suddenly, coming tearing past us in great, long, lolloping strides, pink tongues flopping from the sides of their mouths, their breath loud and rasping as they turn, filling the air in front of us with arcs of sand. They pile off towards a small flock of seagulls on a sandbar across a shallow inlet. The dogs are still twenty metres away when the birds rise as one, wheeling through the air as the wolfhounds run and bounce beneath, barking distantly.

‘Ferg, you’re upwind again,’ Jel says, waving a hand in front of her face.

‘Sorry,’ Ferg says, sighing.

He’s been pacing restlessly around, hands stuffed into jacket pockets, shoulders hunched, fag stuck into the corner of his mouth, occasionally wandering into a position where his smoke wafts over us. Jel complains each time. He spits the butt out and pushes it into the sand with his shoe, burying it.

Ellie’s been in the sea for about eight minutes. I keep scanning the water, staring into the ephemeral chaos of the waves, trying to see the yellow bathing cap. Ellie used to wear a dark-blue cap until about seven years ago when she was nearly run over by a jet skier, just about where she’s swimming now. She switched to the more visible colour. It should be easier to spot, but even though I’ve stood up a couple of times, I can’t see it.

I’m aware of people looking at me when I stand, and so I stretch and flex my back, pointing my elbows behind me and rolling my head around, trying to make it look like I’m just relieving some stiffness or something and that’s why I’m standing, though I strongly suspect I’m fooling nobody.

‘Is that somebody’s phone?’ Phelpie says, while I’m standing, easing a fictitious tension in my neck.

‘What?’ Jel says, then listens.

‘Thought I heard that a minute ago,’ Ryan says. ‘Wasn’t sure.’

I think I can hear something too: a ringtone like an old-fashioned landline. It’s hard to tell over the roar of the waves on the wind. The noise, if it’s there at all, ceases. I sit down again.

‘Not mine,’ Jel says. ‘Left it in the house.’

Ferg is checking his phone. ‘Me neither,’ he says.

‘Thought yours went “Answer the phone, ya fud”,’ I say.

‘Just for weekends,’ Ferg says, looking at something on the screen. ‘I have a more businesslike selection of tones based on who’s calling for when I’m at work. Thought maybe I’d reset it automatically this morning cos it’s Monday. But no; not me.’

‘That it again?’ Phelpie says.

Jeez, maybe it’s mine. I’m still not used to not having my iPhone ringtone and, now I think about it, I left the rubbish phone on default. It’s rung only once or twice since I’ve had it and even though the last time was about a quarter of an hour ago when Grier rang back, I can’t remember what the actual sound was; I was looking at the thing at the time and I might have answered as soon as the screen came alive. I pull the phone out, but of course the battery’s dead and I can still hear the rogue ringtone.

Everybody’s checking their phone now, but then the sound cuts out again.

Ellie’s. It could be Ellie’s. Her jacket is on top of one towel but beneath another. After a few seconds the old-fashioned telephone sound happens again. We can all hear it now, like we’re tuning in to it. I reach over, pull the towel up to expose El’s jacket and suddenly I can hear the sound clearly.

‘Ellie’s,’ Jel says.

‘Could be her dad,’ Ferg suggests. ‘Late for her tea probably.’

‘Maybe she’s got a waterproof phone out there with her,’ Phelpie says. ‘That’ll be her saying she’s on her way in, have a towel ready, eh?’

‘Yeah, it’ll be in one of those many pockets in her swimsuit,’ Ferg says.

Phelpie looks hurt. ‘I was just kiddin, like, Ferg.’

The ringtone cuts off.

We sit watching the waves for a few more seconds until it goes again. By now I guess we’re all thinking that — assuming it’s the same person calling each time — there might be some sort of emergency, because that’s usually the only time you ring and ring and ring rather than just leave a message.

‘Think we should answer it?’ Ryan asks.

‘At least see who it is,’ Jel suggests.

There’s a moment between Ryan MacAvett and me as we both look at the jacket with Ellie’s phone in it and then at each other. Finally I lift the jacket up, pull Ellie’s generations-old Nokia out and look at the screen. It says Grier.

‘It’s Grier,’ I tell the others. I don’t answer it.

‘And that’ll be me,’ Phelpie says, pulling his own phone out of his fleece as it starts warbling. ‘It’s your mum,’ he tells Jel. ‘Sue,’ he says into the phone. ‘What can I do you for?’

El’s phone stops ringing.

Phelpie’s frowning. ‘Right. Aw aye? Ahm…Probably okay, though, eh? Aye. Aye, well, aye. Aye, I’ll keep an eye out. Naw, just sittin waitin for Ellie Murston to come back from a swim. Aye. On the beach. Oh aye, keep you informed. Aye. Aye. Bye now.’

‘What?’ I ask Phelpie as he slips the phone away.

‘Nah, just Mrs MacAvett saying she got this call from Fraser. Fraser Murston,’ Phelpie says, looking round at us all. ‘Thought he sounded a bit drunk maybe or something. Few minutes ago. He was asking where people were; tried Ellie’s phone but no answer. Sue said we were on the beach.’ Phelpie frowns again, nods at me. ‘Asking where you were, Stu.’

‘Was he now?’ I say, trying to sound unconcerned.

I glance out at the waves again, but there’s still no sign of Ellie. She’s been out a while now. Well over ten minutes. Even at the end of summer when the water’s had months to warm up a little, even if you’re used to it and even if you’re as impervious to cold as Ellie claims to be, a quarter of an hour in the North Sea without a wetsuit is when you start to get really, really cold. I’ve tried it, swimming with Ellie, sort of daring each other to stay in longer, and after a while it hurts; it’s not just cold, it’s painful, so cold your nerves can’t tell whether they’re feeling heat or cold, just pain, just potential damage.

Her phone goes off in my hand, making me jump.

‘It’s Grier again,’ I tell the others.

‘I’d answer it,’ Jel says. She holds her hand out. ‘I will if you won’t.’

‘No, it’s okay,’ I tell her, lifting the phone to my ear and pressing the green phone symbol. ‘Grier, it’s Stewart. Ellie’s in the water. Can I help?’

‘Where are you?’ Grier sounds…un-Grier-like: tense and worried, maybe breathless.

‘We’re on the beach at the end of the Prom; north end.’

‘Listen, there’s been a situation up here,’ she says, words tumbling out of her so fast it’s hard to keep up. ‘Dad and Murdo got a bit lairy with each other, Murdo pulled — well, Powell’s gone, and—’

‘Powell’s gone? What do you mean—’

I’m suddenly aware of Phelpie looking very intently at me.

‘He’s left. Always said he would if — might come back; doesn’t matter. But, look, Fraser’s kind of gone off the deep end.’ I hear her stop, swallow, almost like she’s choking.

‘And Don and Murdo? They got—’

‘Knocking lumps out of each other. Stopped now I think. All gone quiet. Apart from Mum, still screaming herself hoarse. Lucky the rels were here or— But it’s Fraser.’

‘Fraser?’

‘Set off a couple of minutes ago. Roaring drunk, in his pick-up. Couldn’t stop him. Might be looking for you.’

‘Me?’

‘You, Stewart. Yes, you.’

‘Why—?’

‘Why do you fucking think?’ Grier yells, almost screaming. ‘You and Ellie. That’s what Don and Murdo came to blows over. That and stuff about Callum. Christ, you wouldn’t…Anyway, I guess he doesn’t know where you are, so—’

‘You could have tried calling me, not Ellie,’ I tell her, then slap a hand to my forehead, realising as soon as I’ve said this that of course the rubbish phone is out of power.

‘I did! Your fucking phone’s off!’

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ I’m saying. Then, ‘Wait a minute; Fraser phoned Sue MacAvett a bit ago and she told him we’re on the beach; he does know where we are.’ I glance up and down the beach, up to the Prom. The others, watching silently until this point, maybe frowning a little, are staring at me now.

‘Jesus fuck. Well, get away from there.’

‘Can’t. Ellie’s in swimming.’

‘What? So? Get away. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Okay, he might be carrying.’

‘What?’ I say, then realise what that word might mean. ‘WHAT?’

‘Christ, look, I can’t — this — this could be getting — I can’t …’ Grier sounds like she’s about to start sobbing, then she stops. I hear her take a quick breath and when her voice resumes it’s calm, clear, urgent. ‘Just get out of there. Off the fucking beach. Leave Ellie. She’ll be fine. Move. I’m phoning the fucking police. Jesus fucking H. Christ I’m phoning the fucking police.’ It’s like she can’t believe it herself. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—’

Then the phone clicks off.

‘We might need to—’ I start saying to the others, just as Phelpie — not looking at me now but up towards the Prom — says,

‘Uh-oh.’

I follow his gaze just in time to see a big black American pick-up, with a rack of hunting lights right across the top of the cab and gleaming chrome nudge bars, as it smacks into the metal bollards guarding the top of the slipway, riding part-way up the two middle posts as they get knocked back, lifting the vehicle off the ground at the front and stopping it. The noise, of the impact and the screech of buckling, shearing metal, follows a fraction of a second later.

‘Oh my God,’ Jel says, jumping up and starting towards the slipway.

‘Hold on,’ Ryan says, grabbing her by one wrist, stopping her. Jel pulls at her brother’s hand. ‘Ryan, what are you—’

‘That’s Fraser Murston’s wagon,’ Phelpie says.

‘Oh, I’ve got to get this,’ Ferg says, and pulls out his phone, holding it up in front of his face, pointing towards the crash.

I’ve got Ellie’s phone dialling 999.

The oversize pick-up hangs there, impaled, engine roaring distantly, then tips to the right, bouncing down, angled at about thirty degrees, one front wheel still spinning in the air and a load of grey-blue smoke coming from the rear. The engine stops suddenly, stalled.

Still thinking in right-hand drive, I’m surprised to see the left-hand door open part-way, then shut again as gravity takes over. Of course: left-hand drive. Whoever’s trying to get out is trying to open the driver’s door while it’s angled heavily upwards.

We’re all standing up by now. I glance round, to see if Ellie’s visible yet. No sign.

‘What was all that about?’ Jel asks me. She shakes her arm, still in Ryan’s grip. ‘Ryan, let me—’

‘Okay, but don’t—’

‘Not going to.’

‘Fraser’s looking for us,’ I tell her. ‘Well, me.’

Back at the black pick-up, the driver’s side door is thrown open again, looking more of a hatch than a door because of the angle it presents to the sky. Again it slams back down. Then it opens more slowly, and somebody squeezes and wriggles their way out and half jumps, half falls to the ground. Yup, that’s Fraser.

He’s holding something.

I should just run. Lots of beach. The guy is drunk. Okay: drunker than me. The Murston boys are all overweight. I’d outpace him, outlast him.

But just running away, especially with Ellie still in the water, seems cowardly, ignominious. Anyway, if that is a gun, then a lucky shot…and what about the others? Suppose we all just bail? Suppose only Ellie’s left for him to focus his anger on, when she comes cold and dripping from the waves?

‘—ervice do you require?’ says an operator’s voice from Ellie’s phone.

‘Police,’ I tell the guy calmly.

‘Fuck me,’ Phelpie says, ‘is that a fucking shooter he’s got?’

‘What?’ Ferg yelps.

‘Oh my God,’ Jel says.

Ryan takes hold of her hand, and they pull together, holding each other. Fraser Murston staggers a little, avoiding one of the other, undamaged bollards, then comes jogging down the slipway, straight towards us. Jeans and a white shirt, flapping open. You can see some of his chest tats from here. He’s shouting something, but it’s against the wind and lost in the roar of waves behind us. No shoes; he’s barefoot.

‘Stonemouth,’ I say, talking over the Emergency Services operator. ‘There’s a guy with a gun, a handgun, threatening people on the beach at Stonemouth, north end of the Promenade. Just crashed his vehicle. A black pick-up.’

‘—id you say—’

‘Armed. The guy is armed. He has a handgun. Walking towards us now. I’m just going to keep talking if you want to get some cops towards us right now. Stonemouth beach, north end of the Promenade. He’s walking towards us now. Got a handgun.’

‘Gilmour! Gilmour, you fucking cunt!’ Fraser yells, his voice made faint by the wind and waves.

‘You better get behind me,’ Phelpie says, moving slowly towards Jel. And, in the midst of this, just in the way Jel sort of shrinks, bringing her arms in, and moves towards Phelpie, pressing close to him while he puts a protective arm round her shoulders, I realise, of course: Jel and Phelpie. They’re an item.

‘You got a gun or anything?’ Ryan asks. He’s also trying to position himself somewhere behind Phelpie, though without making it too obvious.

‘No,’ Phelpie says. ‘I’ve got fuck-all.’ He takes his phone out with the free hand not holding Jel’s shoulder. ‘Calling your dad.’

Fraser looks wild, hair messed, blood about his mouth and smeared across one cheek, his face ruddy. He’s carrying the gun down at his thigh. Big-looking thing. Flat.

‘Automatic handgun, not a revolver,’ I say into Ellie’s phone, like this makes any fucking difference. I stop the call. I look at Ellie’s phone screen. I had a Nokia like this myself. I find the phone book, flick down to the Fs. Ryan tries to get Jel to move behind Phelpie, who is edging backwards and slowly holding both hands up and out, palms forward, fingers spread.

‘All right, Frase?’ I hear him say, trying to sound calm.

‘Fuck off!’ Fraser yells, only six or seven metres away now. ‘You keep the fuck out of this, Phelpie!’

‘Aw, I’m just sayin, like, Frase—’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ Fraser screams, still striding forwards.

We’ve all sort of pulled back a little without even noticing, except Ferg, who seems immobile, frozen with fear or something, off to one side, still with his phone in front of him, pointing at Fraser now so he must have swivelled a bit. The rest of us have retreated; the blankets and towels are in front of us. I’m furthest back, then Ryan, Jel and Phelpie.

I could still run. I can’t — I’m not going to — but maybe I should. Too late now anyway. It’s all too late. Oh fuck, this mad fucker’s going to fucking kill me. I’m fucking dead. I wait for some revelation, to discover I am religious after all, or some feeling of resignation or something, but I just feel annoyed, concerned. I feel some fear, but it’s not bowel-loosening, not trembling or collapsing terror, just a sort of acknowledgement that this could be it and it all ends here and, well, what a bastard, eh?

Fraser’s maybe five metres away. He brings the gun up, pointing at me. He looks at something over my shoulder, his face contorting with some emotion I’m not even sure I can decipher.

I have to look round, though I glance down at the phone in my hand as I do, and thumb the call button.

And of course it’s Ellie, running towards us through the last shallows of the surf like she thinks she’s the fucking cavalry.

‘Fraser!’ she yells, though I can hardly hear. Movement somewhere to our left, south, as I turn back to look into the eyes of Ellie’s brother over the top of the gun.

‘You fucking leave him—’ Jel starts screaming, and Ryan and Phelpie both have to grab her as Fraser and I glare at each other.

‘We shoulda fuckin hunted you down five fuckin years ago, you cu—’ Fraser is saying, quite quietly now, when something bounces off his head from the right, knocking him staggering to the side as whatever it was goes somersaulting up into the air. It’s a mobile phone, as thrown by Ferg, who starts towards Fraser, taking a single giant leaping step as Fraser turns, only half staggering now, recovering, and points the gun at Ferg.

The noise of the shot is quite flat: a single sharp point of sound, then nothing, and even most of that sound energy lost in the wide expanse of nothing around us. Fraser wasn’t quite steady when he fired and the recoil sends his right arm back and makes him stagger a little further back again.

Ferg folds, clutching at his right side, then pitches forward onto his knees. ‘Fucking aow, ya bastard!’ he bellows, then, still kneeling, looks at the palm of the hand he’s holding against the bottom right part of his ribs. It comes away covered in blood. He looks up at Fraser. ‘Cunt,’ he says calmly, as his face goes grey. He collapses back on his haunches and rolls over onto his left side, going foetal, holding both hands over his wound.

Jel is screaming and kicking and writhing in Ryan and Phelpie’s arms. It looks like it’s taking all their combined strength to keep her there.

Fraser shakes his head and points the gun back at my head. I can hear Ellie somewhere behind me, shouting, as the movement I glimpsed earlier resolves into two grey-black wolfhounds coming tearing across the sands, darting between Fraser and the area of blankets and towels. Fraser jerks back from them, gun hand going up. The gun fires again and the shot tears the air over my head. The wolfhounds are turning hard, barking furiously now as they come back towards us. Fraser points the gun at the dogs, starts firing.

One of the dogs drops instantly like a thrown fur coat, like something utterly lifeless, just collapsing. The other seems to jerk, startled by the sound or hit, then takes another couple of bouncing, uncertain steps towards Fraser, who screams something and keeps firing at it. Its head flicks back like something hinging open and it falls too, tumbling in a loose tangle of long hairy limbs. Jel’s screaming, Ellie’s screaming behind me, closer now. And Phelpie is moving, throwing himself at Fraser. Who turns and shoots him, right in the head, and Phelpie drops and just spreads himself on the sand in an X, unmoving.

I’m staring at Phelpie, so I miss the instant when Fraser tries to shoot me. The first I know of it is when I hear him screaming, ‘Aw, fuck!’ in a really high, anguished voice, as he points the gun at me again and it just clicks and clicks.

‘Fraser!’ Ellie screams, close behind me.

I turn and see her, only a few running strides away, not looking like she’s going to stop when she gets to me. Jesus, she’s aiming for Fraser. I move — finally — while Fraser digs into a back pocket of his jeans and pulls out a second ammunition clip. He’s holding the gun up; the empty clip exits the bottom of the handle, starting to fall to the sand as I throw myself at him.

I don’t know why I do a rugby tackle. I’ve never even fucking played rugby, but I throw myself at his knees, cracking into them with my right shoulder and wrapping both arms round his legs as he falls, both of us shouting, then I realise what a stupid move this was because he still has his hands free with the gun in one hand and the clip in the other, and so I let go and sort of kick forward with one knee to stop myself going flat out and grab at the hand that’s got the gun as Fraser’s shoulders hit the sand.

Something cracks against the side of my head, ringing my head like a bell, but some part of my brain isn’t having this and just takes a tighter and tighter grip of the hand with the gun. There’s a blur of movement and another terrific whack on the side of my head and then a scream and a flash of something pale, just to one side, and suddenly Fraser’s whipping backwards with a cracking sound and he’s gone limp and I’m falling down on top of him, still holding the gun hand, feeling the cold weight of the gun itself through lengths of my fingers while my head sings and the waves roar louder. There’s a phone ringing somewhere near my ear, a dog is whimpering and I think I can hear sirens.

That phone ringing near my head will be Ellie’s phone calling Fraser, probably. That was my cunning plan to distract him: phone him from Ellie’s phone. Well, that really worked, didn’t it?

Jeez, I think, as the roaring noise grows even louder and I get the start of tunnel vision, I might still be about to die and I’m being sarcastic with myself. Clever move, Stewart. Damn, there I go again…

Then things go a bit blurry for a moment or two.

When I’m able to sit up again I’m right beside Fraser, who is trying to roll off his back, and failing. There’s what looks like a lot of fresh blood coming from his mouth, and a couple of teeth, shockingly white, lying on the scuffed sand next to him. Ellie is standing near by, holding the gun and the spare clip. She throws the clip north, the gun south. The empty weapon bounces and somersaults along the sand.

Jel and Ryan are at Phelpie’s side, kneeling. Blood so thick it looks black is seeping out of his head, matting his hair and pooling around his face, half buried in the sand.

Ellie looks pale. She’s trembling. ‘You okay?’ she asks, limping over to me, wincing with each step.

I put my hand to my head. There’s blood. ‘Um, yeah,’ I say. I look over at Ferg, still curled up on his side. ‘He shot Ferg,’ I say.

‘Sit on Fraser,’ Ellie says, limping past me, heading for Ferg. ‘Sit on his chest.’

‘You okay?’ I ask.

I can definitely hear sirens now. I sit on Fraser’s chest. He grunts, tries to fend me off, arms flailing weakly. His nose looks broken too and blood is flowing and spitting from his mouth. His jaw, his whole lower face looks…wrong.

‘Kicked him too hard,’ Ellie mutters, touching the undamaged side of my head with her cold, shaking fingers as she passes.

Fraser starts moaning and making choking, bubbling sounds.

The whimpering sound from one of the dogs stops.

By Phelpie’s body, Jel, on her knees, puts back her head and howls.