The Crow Road (56 page)

‘What an astronomical imagination you have, Diana,’ I said. ‘Getting enough oxygen up on Mauna Kea, yeah?’ I grinned.

‘Just a pet theory, Prentice.’ She finished polishing the ewer. ‘Better than believing in,’ she said, and handed me the elaborately carved jug, ‘crystals.’

‘Well, that’s true, in a very un-Californian way, isn’t it?’ I filled the inside of the ewer up with little polystyrene beads from another giant sack, a broad smile on my face as I remembered.

 
 
 
She cried out and the crystal sang in reply.

Later, we exchanged signals.

 
 
 
‘Help me fold these sheets, will you?’

 
 
 
The day after all the excitement at Lochgair, I sat at the dining table with what looked like a turban on my head. It was a towel wrapped round one of those sealed liquid containers you freeze and put in cool boxes.

I signed the statement.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Davey, stop calling me “sir”, for God’s sake,’ I breathed. Constable David McChrom had been in my class at school and I couldn’t bring myself to call him “officer”. His nickname had been Plooky, but that might have been carrying informality a little too far.

‘Ach, second nature these days, Prent,’ he said, folding the papers and standing up. He looked depressingly fresh and well-scrubbed; joining the police force seemed to have done wonders for his skin condition. He lifted his cap from the table top, turning to my mother. ‘Right. That’s all for now, Mrs McHoan. I’ll be getting back, but if you think of anything else, just tell one of the other officers. We’ll be in touch if we hear anything. You all right now, Mrs McHoan?’

‘Fine, thanks, Davey,’ mum smiled. Dressed in jeans and a thick jumper, she looked a little dark around the eyes, but otherwise okay.

‘Right you are, then. You look after that heid of yours, okay, Prentice?’

‘As though it were my own,’ I breathed, adjusting my towel.

Mum saw him out.

The CID were still in the study, looking for fingerprints. They’d be lucky. I looked out of the dining-room window to where a couple of policemen were searching the bushes near the kitchen door.

My, we were being well looked after. I doubted a roughly equivalent fracas in one of the poorer council estates would have attracted quite such diligent and comprehensive investigation. But maybe that was just me being cynical.

My head hurt, my feet hurt, my fingers hurt. All the extremities. Well, save one, thankfully. Most of the damage came from the central light fixture in the study ceiling. It was part of that - a large, heavy, brass part of it - which had hit me on the head, and it was the shattered glass of its shades which had cut my feet as I’d stumbled around the study. My fingers hurt from the impact of computer keyboard and steel tyre-iron.

The desk drawers had been levered open. The back of the desk’s matching chair had taken the full force of a blow with the tyre-iron, the light fixture had been hit accidentally by the same implement and the ceiling rose damaged, the Compaq’s keyboard was wrecked and the kitchen door needed a new lock. I felt I could use a new head.

Nothing had been stolen, though I’d noticed that all the papers I’d been looking at earlier that night - and which I’d left scattered round the couch - had been neatly gathered together and piled on one end of the desk, under a paperweight. The envelope I’d left in the desk’s top right drawer that morning was still here. The police didn’t open it. Apart from the damage, and that one contrary act of tidiness, it looked like our attacker had taken nothing, and left behind him only the petrol and the tyre-iron.

I wanted to phone Fergus; ask him how he was. Good night’s sleep? Any aches and pains? But mum had been fussing over me after Doctor Fyfe had said I’d need watching for a day or two and I wasn’t being allowed to do very much. Somehow I lacked the will, anyway.

They’d asked me if I had any idea who it might have been, and I’d said No. I didn’t say anything to my mother, or anybody else, either.

What could I say?

I was certain it had been Fergus - his build had been right, and even though I’d been dazed, I swear he did hesitate when I spoke his name - but how was I supposed to convince anybody else? I shook my head, then grimaced, because it hurt. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid, not even thinking that he might try and steal or destroy whatever evidence he thought I had. ‘Is this something you’ve read?’ I whispered to myself, remembering what Fergus had asked me. ‘In your father’s papers, after his death?’

Jeez. I felt myself blush at my naïvety.

Mum continued to fuss, but I got better through the day.

After the CID boys finished in the study, I photocopied all Rory’s papers - though I had to drag a chair over to the photocopier and sit down to do it - then, before the police left, and after much pleading, got mum to drive into Gallanach and deposit the parcelled originals in the bank. She came back with a new lock for the kitchen door. I hadn’t been able to persuade her that a little holiday - in Glasgow, maybe - would be a good idea, so while she was away I rang Dean Watt and asked if he and Tank Thomas fancied coming to stay at Lochgair for a few days. Tank was a quiet and normally docile friend of the Watts’, two metres tall and one across; I’d once seen him carry a couple of railway sleepers, one over each shoulder, without even breaking sweat.

James - who’d earlier been appalled that he’d only missed the first two periods of school while the police interviewed him - arrived back at four, glowing with glory. Apparently his part in the night’s events - which I’d thought consisted largely of sticking his head round his bedroom door and being told to get back in again (and doing as he was told, for once) - had gained something in the translation at school; I suspected the gains involved the single-handed beating-off an attack by an entire gang of ninja assassins while mum and I slept.

I told mum about Dean and Tank, but she wasn’t having it, and rang Dean up to cancel the protection I’d arranged. The police had promised to keep an eye on the house over the next few nights, after all; a patrol car would check up the drive. This didn’t sound like much good to me, but mum seemed reassured.

Old Mr Docherty, a leathery-faced octogenarian with wispy white hair who was one of our neighbours in the village, arrived at tea-time and offered to come over with his shot-gun and sit up all night. ‘Ah’ve nuthin tae steal maself, Mrs McHoan, and Ah’d rather make sure you and the bairns were all right. Canny have this sort aw thing going on in Lochgair, ye know. Be Glasgow people, Ah tell ye. Be Glasgow boys.’

Mum thanked him, but refused. He seemed happy when we asked him to help us fit the new lock on the kitchen door. Lewis was all set to come up from London when we told him what had happened, but mum persuaded him we were fine, really.

Fretting for something else to do, I rang up Mrs McSpadden at the castle and related all that had happened, and twice told her how I suspected the raider had been after Rory’s papers, which I’d copied and deposited in the bank. ‘In the bank, Prentice,’ she repeated, and I could hear her voice echoing. ‘Good idea.’

I asked after Fergus and Mrs McSpadden said he was fine. He and his friends had been out fishing that day.

To my own amazement, I slept soundly that night. James said lights came up to the drive twice. I had to go and see Doctor Fyfe that day, and mum insisted on driving me into Gallanach, despite the fact I felt fine. Doctor Fyfe gave me permission to go back to Glasgow that evening, providing I took the train and stayed with friends.

I stayed the extra night instead, and left by car in the early hours, taking Rory’s diaries and the copies of his papers with me. I phoned Mrs McSpadden from Glasgow and told her that, too, and discovered that Fergus had gone to Edinburgh for a couple of days. On impulse, I told her I’d remembered something more from the attack, and I’d be going to the police in a day or two, once I’d checked on something.

 
 
 
Back at university, I attended lectures - hobbling a little on my cut feet - and I studied, though I had headaches on the Monday and the Tuesday night. I made sure Mrs Ippot’s house was securely locked each night, and closed all the shutters. I rang mum three or four times each day. Mum said Fergus had sent a huge bouquet of flowers to the house, when he’d heard what had happened. He’d phoned from Edinburgh and advised getting an alarm system fitted, and knew a firm in Glasgow who’d do it cost price, as a favour to him. Wasn’t that sweet of him? Oh, and I hadn’t forgotten she and Fergus would be coming to Glasgow for the opera at the end of the week, had I?

I said of course not.

I put the phone down, numb, my thoughts racing in a kind of aimless short-circuit as I wondered what on earth I was going to do.

And, naturally, I followed the war like a good little media-consumer.

The clichés were starting to come out. It was hardly possible to open a newspaper, turn on a television or listen to a radio programme without having rammed down the relevant orifice some witless variation on the facile adage concerning truth being the first casualty of war; a truism that is arguably a neat piece of propaganda itself, implying as it does that the majority of the military, politicians and media have any interest in, respect for or experience with disseminating the truth even in times of profoundest peace.

I started inventing reasons for not putting mum and Fergus up on the Friday. I would be ill. I would have a bad cold. I would discover that the tenancy agreement specified I couldn’t have anybody else to stay over-night at the Ippot house. The electricity had been cut off due to a computer error. A gas leak. Serious structural deficiencies caused by the weight of mirrors and chandeliers. Anything.

I stopped watching the war at Tuesday lunch-time because if I’d carried on the way I had been, the history we were living through was going to stop me getting my degree for the history that had been and gone.

Ash rang on the Tuesday evening. I told her everything that had happened, at the castle and Lochgair. She didn’t seem to know what to make of it all; she said maybe I ought to go to the police. She sounded low, and said things weren’t too good at work, though she wouldn’t be more specific.

Meanwhile, the sound of her voice was pulling me apart; it filled me with elation at the same time as it plunged me into despair. I wanted to shout Look, woman, I think I’m falling in love with you! I am! I do! I love you! Honest! I’m sure! Well, almost certain! ... but you couldn’t; I couldn’t. It wasn’t the sort of equivocal thing to shout at any time, and even if I had been completely sure how I felt, I probably couldn’t have told her, not just then. I got the impression it wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted to hear anyway. She sounded like she just wanted to keep her head down for the moment; keep things quiet, uncomplicated; just cool out. Recently banged-on-the-head nutters raving down the phone at her suddenly declaring undying passionate love for no apparent reason was probably the last thing she needed. I was sure about that. Well, fairly certain.

So it was a desultory kind of phone call. I felt pretty depressed myself at the end of it. I didn’t ask her about her love-life.

I put the phone down feeling the same way I had a year earlier, the day I’d been travelling from Gallanach to Glasgow after Hogmanay, and I’d pretended to be asleep when the train stopped at Lochgair. Remembering that cowardice and that shame, I almost picked the phone up again to call Ash back, and my hand reached out a couple of times, and I debated with myself, muttering, my face contorting with silly expressions, and I told myself I was acting like a madman, and I really wanted to make that call and I really ought to, but I was terrified to do it as well, even though I knew that I should ... shouldn’t I? Yes; yes I should; yes I definitely ought to, it was obvious, clear definite. I should.

But in the end I didn’t.

At least there was always work to be done. I’d submerged myself in my studies with a feeling of almost orgasmic relief. The very fact the past can be taken or left made me want to accept it; the sheer demanding immediacy of the present made it repulsive.

And so everything returned to a sort of normality, which didn’t last, of course.

 
 
 
On Wednesday, the 23rd of January 1991, shortly after noon, Fergus Walter Cruden Urvill left Gaineamh Castle in his Range Rover and travelled north through the town of Gallanach and the village of Kilmartin, passing Carnasserie Castle and the cairn and standing stone at Kintraw, crossed the thin flood plain of the Barbreck River above Loch Craignish, travelled inland again to rejoin the shore at the cut-off for the Craobh Haven marina development, and then curved past the village of Arduaine, skirting Loch Melfort before passing through Kilmelford and entering the forest that led to Glen Gallain and then down to the shore of Loch Feochan and the twisting road heading for Oban. The Range Rover passed through the town a little before one o’clock and continued north to Connel, waited for the traffic lights to change at the old bridge over the Falls of Lora, then crossed, negotiated some road-works and finally turned left off the road a little further on, entering the thin strip of level coastal ground that was the Connel airstrip.

Fergus Urvill parked the Range Rover in the airfield car park. He talked to one Michael Kerr, from the village of Benderloch a couple of kilometres up the road from the field. Kerr was repairing the car-park fence; Mr Urvill said he wanted to use the telephone in the Portakabin that served as the airfield office. Michael Kerr said that Mr Urvill seemed in a good mood, and told him that he would be flying out to one of the Outer Hebrides (‘the Utter HeBrides,’ were his exact words), where an old school friend lived. He was going to surprise this friend and take him a bottle of whisky for a belated Hogmanay. He showed Michael Kerr the bottle of Bowmore whisky he was taking with him, in a small leather suitcase which also contained some clothes and toiletries. The only thing Kerr noticed that was out of the ordinary was that Mr Urvill grimaced a couple of times, and flexed his shoulders oddly. Kerr asked the older man if he was all right, and Fergus said yes, but it felt like a couple of ribs were acting up a little. An old injury; nothing to worry about.