9

The Deep Blue IV is a mega-trawler; its white superstructure seems to sit floating above the buildings and cranes of the inner harbour, dwarfing everything around it. Even before I climb as high as the bridge I can see the windows of my dad’s office in the Old Custom House on the other side of the harbour, but it’s the unaccustomed view of the building’s green, copper-sheathed roof that attracts the eye.

The Deep Blue IV is only just able to fit into the old harbour; another half-metre across the beam, or drawing another twenty centimetres, and it’d have to share the New Docks with the rig supply boats and the Orkney-Shetland-Stavanger ferry. Deep Blue IV is due to head out in an hour or two, at the top of the tide, on another month-long mission to hoover untold tonnes of fish out of the North Atlantic and into its hangar-sized freezer holds.

Mike MacAvett could probably just sit at home with a cigar in his hand and his feet up and watch the ship depart into the haze from the comfort of his armchair, but he obviously feels the need to be here on the bridge, to check everything’s going smoothly and to content himself all the supplies are on board, and the captain and crew are all happy and motivated men.

The trawler crews are Mike’s main supply of muscle, his forces in reserve. Neither of his sons showed any interest in the family business, legal or otherwise, so he has one of my old school pals as – supposedly – chauffeur and home handyman, a couple of grizzled, ageing though still useful-looking guys in the docks office of the MacAvett Fishing Company, and he can call upon pretty much any of the trawlermen not actually at sea. Boats like the Deep Blue IV have two crews to let them fish almost continually, so there’s never a shortage of Mike’s guys in the Toun. It’s a looser structure than Don and his four – now three – bampot sons, and Mike worries more about informers and infiltration by SOCA or the SCDEA than Don does, but, even there, the local cops have proved useful.

Things are running a little late so Mike phoned me to say come to the docks rather than the house. Partly, though, I think he still feels the need to impress people with the sheer scale of the new boat – the Deep Blue IV’s only a couple of years old, and I haven’t seen it before – and remind them that this is where the money came from, this is what made him well off: fishing. He’s not just some number-two player on the shady side of life in Stonemouth; he’s a legitimate and highly successful businessman who came up the hard way, setting out to sea in tiny, deck-heaving, wave-pounded trawlers for the first twenty years of his working life, risking death and mutilation in one of the most dangerous working environments in the world.

Anyway, it’s no sweat for me; always a nostalgic pleasure to visit the docks. My dad’s worked here since school and I always liked coming to soak up the smells and sounds and sights of the harbour. The walk from the centre of town – BB and I had our quiet pint in the Old Station Tavern – took less than ten minutes.

‘Stewart, Stewart, good to see you,’ Mike says when I finally climb to the vessel’s bridge. It’s bright and sunny up here, certainly sunnier than down on the quayside; you’re above most of the remaining mist, which is still settled over the town, the nearby industrial and housing estates and the more distant fields and low hills like a sort of glowing grey membrane. Perched above everything, blinking in the bright sunlight, the moodily lit darkness of Regal Tables already feels a long way away.

Mike shakes my hand and I try not to wince; these guys all seem to have super-firm, ultra-manly handshakes and my hand is still feeling a bit bruised after Powell Imrie’s parting grasp.

Mike MacAvett is a fairly short, stocky guy with a big bald head and very dark eyebrows. Early fifties. Always bustling, always very bright-eyed and overflowing with enthusiasms.

‘You’re looking great, looking great,’ he tells me. ‘Just let me get things sorted here and I’ll be with you asap. Make yourself at home. Have a look at some of the gizmos; or head down to the galley and get Jimmy to rustle you up something – you hungry?’

‘Good to see you, Mike. No, thanks; I’m good.’

‘Right, right. With you in a sec,’ he tells me and he’s off, across half the width of the very wide, gizmo-crammed bridge to talk to the captain. By common consent ‘It’s like the Starship Enterprise’ in here. That’s what everybody says, anyway. Actually, the bridge of the spaceship I’ve seen, stumbling over ancient episodes on obscure channels, has far fewer buttons and keyboards and screens, but there you are. Different series, maybe; I wouldn’t know.

I wander along the bridge, trying to keep out of the way. Besides the captain there are a couple of other officer-class guys in neat blue fleeces with the Deep Blue IV’s logo embroidered on them, taking notes: one on a clipboard, one on an iPad, plus there are a couple of guys in yellow hi-vis jackets and pants stamping about talking into radios.

I admire the view through the canted windows and try to look appreciatively at all the bewildering variety of screens and monitors and glitzy-looking clusters of what I’m guessing is comms gear. One screen looks like a sat-nav the size of a plasma screen. Another, square but with a circular display, is radar. On it I can see the shape of the town, the echoes of the tower blocks, church towers and steeples, and the road-bridge towers. Another pair of screens look like they’re linked into the ship’s engines. More screens show nothing much. They’ve got measurement scales that imply they’re sonar or depth gauges or whatever.

The door is open to the outside at the far end of the bridge, so I step over the high sill and into the clear air. A young guy is squatting, touching up the paint on the white railings. He glances up. ‘Aye.’

‘Afternoon.’

He looks up at me again, frowning. He has what you might most kindly term the nose of a pugilist. ‘You wi Customs and Excise?’ he asks, borderline aggressive.

‘No. Do I look like I am?’

He shrugs and goes back to his painting. ‘Canny tell these days.’

‘Cheers,’ I say after a moment or two, and retreat back into the bridge. He just grunts.

Mike Mac bustles me away five minutes later, down the various ladders and steps to the quayside and his Bentley. Ten minutes later we’re at the MacAvett house, a Scots Baronial stone pile at the far end of Marine Terrace with a commanding view of the Esplanade, the beach and sea. Technically it’s late Victorian but it’s been much fucked-about with. A crenellated wing in mismatched pale-sandstone houses a big pool a little larger than the Murstons’.

As we move through the hall to the sweepingly grand conservatory we’re greeted by a couple of grey wolfhounds. Mike greets both dogs like he’s rubbing his hands dry on their snouts. I used to keep track of the MacAvett family wolfhounds and remember their names, but they’re short-lived animals and I don’t think I’ve met this pair before. Still, they sniff my hand appreciatively and get a sort of perfunctory pat each.

We’re barely sat down – Mike is still running through the list of drinks we might have, though I’ve already said I’m fine – when his phone goes and then he’s frowning and saying, ‘Fuck. What do they want? Aye. Hold the fortress. Be right there.’ Then he’s bouncing up out of his La-Z-Boy again. ‘What a bastard, eh? Fucking officialdom. Got to get back to the boat. You just make yourself at home. Door wasn’t locked so somebody must be home. Try the kitchen; Sue might be around. Back soon.’

I hear the front door close. I stand, looking out at the haze over the sea for a while, going back over the near-rumble at Regal Tables.

Not good. Too close a thing.

I’m guessing somebody at reception called Powell, perhaps as soon as they saw the other guys heading for the table beside ours. Maybe they called him as soon as they saw me; maybe they hadn’t heard Mr M was cool with me being back in town and so they were as surprised as D-Cup was with the way things went when Powell turned up. Anyway, too random a route to escape getting a kicking. I may already have used up my supply of luck for the weekend. I mean, I know it doesn’t really work that way, but all the same.

‘Stewart? Oh my God, is that you?’

I turn round. Probably because hers was the last name Mike mentioned, and my brain can be a bit literal sometimes, I’m half expecting to see Sue, Mike’s wife, in the doorway, but instead it’s their daughter, Anjelica, in a long pink-towelling robe.

‘It is you! Hey, how are you, stranger?’

Jel comes running up and pretty much throws herself at me, the robe flying open as she tears across the parquet and revealing a tiny pink bikini and lots of tanned skin. She’s small, plumply busty and her hair is sort of bubbly blonde, though it’s water-darkened now and plastered to her head and face. Jel’s a couple of years younger than me; told me she loved me when she was about ten and she was going to be my wife when we grew up. It became something of a running joke, though it ended up being not so funny.

Jel pulls back, though still holding both my hands in hers. She looks me down, then up. ‘Lookin good, man,’ she tells me. ‘Keeping like you’re looking?’

‘Sure am. Looking pretty … pretty yourself.’

She lets go of my hands, twirls this way and that, flapping the opened gown out. ‘Still like what you see, hah?’ She raises one eyebrow.

I sit back on the window ledge, arms folded. ‘How are you, Jel?’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she says, throwing herself onto a couch. ‘Nice of you to come back. Old man Murston’s funeral?’

‘Yeah, just here for a few days. Back to London on Tuesday.’

‘So, you seeing anyone, in London?’

‘On and off. Mostly off. Feels like I only rarely touch ground some months.’

‘You seen herself yet?’

‘Ellie?’

‘Ellie.’ Jel looks quite serious now. She pulls her robe closed a little, then changes her mind, kicks it open again.

‘No. Not so far. Don’t know if I will.’

‘How about Ryan? You seen Ryan?’

‘No.’ I frown as I say this, trying to hint at Why the hell would I want to see Ryan? without actually saying so.

‘She really hurt him, you know.’

Ellie and Ryan had been one of those obvious rebound relationships that everybody else pretty much knows is kind of doomed. Ellie’s whole thing with Ryan seemed to come out of nowhere, for everybody. It was almost like she’d designed it that way just to annoy people. When I heard, I had to think quite hard just to remember what Ryan even looked like, and I knew the MacAvetts fairly well. Ryan was only a year younger than Josh and me, but he’d been just one more boring younger brother of a pal, usually encountered staring slack-jawed at the TV or sitting tensed and muttering at the screen while cabled up to a PlayStation and slugging Red Bull.

You might have thought this whole ludicrous dynastic-alliance-through-marriage thing would have been discredited by now, with Josh being Mr Gay Pride in London and me fucking his sister (in my defence, just the once, though admittedly I’ve yet to meet anybody who thinks that makes the slightest difference), but Ellie apparently thought Ryan was just the right chappie to make everything well, and presumably couldn’t wait to have Jel as a sister-in-law, too, so – over the raging objections of her father and the serious doubts of Mike and Mrs Mac, not to mention anybody and everybody else she might have consulted on the matter but didn’t – she and Ryan skipped off to Mauritius and got married on the beach outside their luxurious, five-star, villa-style hotel with a few distant friends and the sun going down.

Lasted less than a year. The miscarriage may not have helped, though you never know; with some couples stuff like that draws them closer together. Either way, they never celebrated their first anniversary, which to people of my dad’s and Mr M’s and Mike Mac’s generation just feels like lack of application.

I don’t know if anybody actually said, ‘I told you so,’ to Ellie, but even if it was never quite articulated, the air must have been thick with it.

She took off, tried living in Boulder, Colorado, for a while, then San Francisco because she missed the sea, then came back to Stonemouth, homesick, within the year. Last I heard, she was working part-time for a charity with centres in Aberdeen, Stonemouth and Peterhead, for rehabilitating drug users. So at least the girl hasn’t lost her sense of humour.

Hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder how Ryan might have been affected by all this. A mean part of me probably thought, Look, he got to have the best part of a year with my girl, the woman I’d always thought of as my soulmate, not to mention the prettiest girl in town; he’d already had a lot more than he probably deserved.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say.

‘She really messes people up, that girl,’ Jel says.

I look at her for a moment or two. ‘Yeah. Whereas you and I …’ But the only things I can think to say are hurtful and sort of pointlessly petty. I’ve learned, belatedly, not to say stuff like that just because I feel I need to say something, anything.

I’ve never blamed Jel; I don’t think she meant to break me and Ellie up, that night; it was my choice, my stupidity, my fault. But Ellie was messed up first, before she did any messing up of her own. Ryan was just collateral damage from my idiocy. If he feels hurt he should blame me, not her. Jesus, I should probably add him to the already long list of people I might want to avoid over the rest of the weekend.

‘Yeah, you and me,’ Jel says, looking at me like she’s evaluating. ‘I suppose that’s about as short-term as it gets.’

‘I suppose.’

‘You didn’t have to run away, you know.’ Jel sounds like she’s wanted to say this for a while.

‘Oh, I think you’ll find I did.’

I still have nightmares about being trapped in a car at night while men armed with baseball bats prowl around outside, shaking the car as they stumble around, searching for me. In my dream the men are always blind, but they can smell me, know I’m there somewhere.

‘You could have stayed here,’ Jel says. Shades of petulance, unless I’m being oversensitive. ‘Dad would have protected you.’

I’d have caused a fucking gang war, you maniac is what I want to say. ‘Didn’t feel that way at the time,’ I tell her. I shrug. ‘All in the past now anyway, Jel.’

She stares at me for quite a few seconds, then says, ‘Yeah, except it isn’t, is it? Not if you have to fuck off back to London before Don lets his boys off the leash. Anyway.’ She lunges forward, stands, gathers her robe about her. ‘I’d better get dressed.’ She hurries to the door, then turns. ‘Sorry. How rude. Can I get you anything?’

‘No thanks.’ I smile. ‘I’m fine.’

She nods slowly. ‘Yes. And no,’ she says, then she’s gone.

Mike comes back. We chat. All is well, business is good, things are calm, he’s sorry my stay in Stonemouth can’t be longer, but, well, that’s just the way things are. Strong feelings involved. Unfortunate, but understandable. I saw Anjelica? (Yes; lovely as ever. Nice kid. Hmm, but only a 2.2 in Media Studies at Sheffield. Still, an internship with Sky.) Have I got a girl? (Not really – no time. He nods wisely.) Have I seen Josh lately? (No. That’s a shame, living in the same city. Yes but it’s a big city; more people than the whole of Scotland, and, anyway. But we leave it at that.) Oh, look, there she goes! (And I follow his nod and gaze and, fool that I am, I half expect to see Ellie walking along the beach outside, but it’s the Deep Blue IV of course, blue hull and white superstructure heading, shining, out to sea above a curled wake of grey, just starting to fade into the haze.)

The front door has only just closed and I’m halfway up the garden path, heading back to the street, when I hear the door open again. It’s Jel, dressed now, in tight jeans and a scoop-necked T. She’s holding a translucent box.

‘Here,’ she says, thrusting a Lock-n-Lock container into my hands. ‘Mum baked this morning,’ she explains. ‘Scones.’

‘Thanks.’ The box feels heavy.

‘There’s a jar of home-made jam in there too. Strawberry.’

‘Ah.’

‘Enjoy.’

‘Thanks again.’ I hold the box up, shake it gently. ‘I’ll share with Mum and Dad.’

‘Should think so.’ She takes a quick breath, sticks her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans. ‘Think you will see Ellie?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe not. Or maybe just see her, at the funeral? But not get to talk to her.’

‘Right, yeah. I see.’ She looks down at the path, looks up again. ‘It wasn’t just my idea, Stu,’ she says. And I know that she’s talking about our disastrous fling five years back, the fuck that fucked everything up.

I nod. ‘I know.’

Of course I know. Mine as much as hers. She did kind of throw herself at me, but I was very happy to be the thrown-at, and accepted enthusiastically. I might even have been giving off signals myself, signals that I really needed one last quick fling before I got hitched. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

But maybe I agreed a bit too quickly there, appeared too glib with that ‘I know’, because a frown tugs at Jel’s smooth, tanned brow and she looks about to say something else, but then seems to think the better of it, and just sighs and says, ‘Well, good to see you anyway.’ She takes a step backwards, towards the house. ‘Maybe see you later?’

‘You never know.’ I hold the box up. ‘Thanks again.’

‘Welcome.’ Then she turns and goes.

I walk down the street. I open one end of the container and stick my nose in, smelling flour both baked and not, and a faint hint of strawberries, a scent that always takes me back to the Ancraime estate just beyond the furthest reaches of the town, and a succession of summer days, half my life ago.

Malcolm Hendrey – Wee Malky – was just one of those kids. That’s what we felt at the time, what we’ve told ourselves since. He was the class numpty, the slow kid who got jokes last or not at all and who always needed help with answers. He was sort of stupid brave; if there was a frisbee, a stunt kite or an RC helicopter stuck up a tree, Wee Malky would happily shin up to the highest, thinnest, most delicate-looking branch to get it: places even I wouldn’t go, and I was always a good and pretty much fearless climber. I was proud of this and the guys tore me up about Wee Malky taking greater risks. I tried to save face by pointing out he was smaller and lighter than me, but, even so, they were right: he did go places I wouldn’t.

He’d also do pretty much anything you suggested – like shouting something out to a teacher or going up to an older kid and kicking them or letting down a car’s tyres – and then just grin stupidly when he was given detention or belted round the ear or chased down the street by some irate motorist, as though this wasn’t just hilariously funny for the kids who’d suggested the jape in the first place, but quietly amusing for him too.

Wee Malky really was small, always looking like he was in the wrong class, mixing with kids a year older than him, and he sort of carried himself smaller still, too, walking stooped and with his head down. He had dark-brown curly hair and swarthy skin; he’d been called various nicknames like Tinker or Gyppo throughout his school life but none had really stuck because they didn’t annoy him sufficiently; Wee Malky thought these were quite exotic terms, positively cool.

He was one of the poorer kids in our class, from the – to us at least – notorious Urbank Road on the Riggans estate, Stonemouth’s least salubrious address, the sink locale where the council put all the problem families. Wee Malky came from one of those families you needed a diagram and some draughting skills to describe properly; he lived with his mum and three half-brothers and two half-sisters, and, while the children didn’t quite all have different fathers, the details got fearsomely complicated after that, especially if you included all the children in other households with shared parentage.

The men in his mum’s life were subject to a high degree of churn, some staying a night, some a few weeks and some a few months, usually just long enough to get her pregnant before leaving. Though the way Wee Malky described it, it was more sort of drifting off again – just like they’d drifted in in the first place – rather than anything as directed and deliberate as actually ‘leaving’. Wee Malky loved his mum and thought all this stuff was just sort of romantically bohemian, rather than, as we did, pure skanky.

There was a husband – Wee Malky’s dad – but he was in Peterhead prison, where he’d been since shortly after Wee Malky was born. He sounded like a very angry man; he’d been on a road-repair crew with the council and killed a guy who was supposedly his best friend by knocking him half unconscious and stuffing him head-first into a big tub of molten tar on the back of the lorry.

He usually got about halfway through his sentence before he did something in prison that got him another two or three years added on. Wee Malky had a complicated relationship with his dad, even though he’d never met him outside of prison, and then only a half-dozen times; it was like he blamed him for abandoning his mum, but wanted to love him, too.

The only way to get Wee Malky really upset was to diss his dad. Callum Murston once asked Wee Malky if his mum had moved to Stonemouth to be handy for Peterhead and the prison and Wee Malky just went berserk; he flew at Callum like something out of a catapult and had to be prised off him. Callum was bigger and stronger but he’d been taken by surprise and just overwhelmed. Wee Malky was sobbing, gasping, quivering. I was one of the four kids it had taken to pull him off Callum and I’d never seen anybody so upset.

Callum was left bruised and with a badly bitten ear. He clearly wasn’t happy about getting attacked like that and, a couple of playtimes later, Wee Malky got marched round the back of the bike sheds and given a good kicking by Callum and his older brother Murdo. Some twisted form of honour appeared to have been satisfied with this, and nobody ever referred to the incident again, not in public anyway.

The Ancraime family were at the opposite end of the Stonemouth class spectrum: toffs with a big house and an estate that started on the outskirts of town – with a gatehouse and high stone walls and everything – and disappeared over the horizon, taking in woods, hills, lochs, forests, moors and mountains.

The original Ancraime fortune had come from now-exhausted coal mines that riddled the land and eventually ran out under the sea. A series of catastrophic mine floodings in the 1890s led to something close to ruin just as the Ancraimes were embarking on the most extravagant part of the house remodelling and estate landscaping. They sold off a lot of land; what they have now seems vast but it’s only a third of what they used to own. What the families of the drowned miners did to survive seems not to have been recorded.

Death duties nearly ruined the Ancraimes a second time but they’re rich again now; income from gas and oil pipelines crossing their estate, and from the deep-water terminal at Afness, keeps the coffers filled, and all that barren-looking, unproductive land climbing into the Cairngorms west of the house, which until now had only been good for stalking stags and shooting grouse, turns out to be ripe for wind farms. The studies have been done, the wind speeds measured and the land surveyed; there are a few local objectors, but really it’s just a matter of waiting for the planning proposals to go through the relevant council committees and getting the nod from the Secretary of State.

The family is understood to be quietly confident in this regard.

The Ancraimes had children within our age range – we were all about thirteen or fourteen at the time – but they went to private schools. The rest of us had any contact with the family only because Ancraime Senior had some sort of business dealings with the Murstons and the MacAvetts, and had invited both men to shoot and fish on his estate. Josh MacAvett had become friendly with Hugo Ancraime when Hugo was back from school one Easter, and when Hugo was home for the summer holidays that year a bunch of us hung out together, usually cycling out along the Loanstoun road to the Ancraime estate and exploring it.

Some of us had prior knowledge of the place, built up covertly over the years by climbing walls and sneaking around, trying to avoid gamekeepers and estate workers. At least one of the keepers was, allegedly, not above firing his shotgun at kids, so long as they weren’t so close he might actually kill them, and most of us who’d ventured onto the estate had been chased at some time, or at least yelled at and run off.

Nobody could prove they’d ever been fired at – nobody ever produced any shotgun pellets they’d had to dig out of their backside or anything – but we definitely knew people who’d been shot at and the whole Ancraime estate was basically forbidden territory. So it was quite cool to be there with permission and explore the place at our leisure.

Hugo Ancraime was a lanky boy with fair hair, blue eyes, fine features and an English accent. That was how to wind Hugo up: accuse him of being English because he talked the way upper-class Scots who’ve been to private schools tend to, i.e. with no real trace of any Scottish accent, never mind a regional North-East or Stonemouth accent.

‘Fack off; my family’s been here for fourteen generations, you sods, and I can prove it. Bet none of you bastards can say that.’

‘Go on, Hu, call us oiks.’

‘Fack off.’

‘Say “fark orft” again.’

‘Fack off.’

And so on. It was mostly pretty good-natured; we were all deeply impressed that Hugo had this whole estate to play in, was allowed to fire a shotgun during shoots and had a dirt bike of his own and a quad bike he was allowed to use. We were never going to push somebody like that too far – he was too great an asset.

So there wasn’t too much talk about Hugo’s brother George, who was known to be a loony. He was the older brother, nearly twenty at this point but with a mental age stuck at about five. He stayed at home some of the time, though he had ‘episodes’ that meant he had to be carted off to some secure unit in Aberdeen and put on extra drugs before being allowed back home.

We saw him once at the start of that summer, being taken off somewhere for a day out, staring out of a window in the family’s old Bristol as it crunched down the gravel. He had a big, round, open-looking face under a mop of sandy hair; he smiled, waved, and some of us waved back.

Hugo had been given a load of paintball gear for his birthday that year: a dozen guns, sets of body armour and face masks and so on. More to the point, he had a whole estate to play with this stuff on, and people to play with. If we’d thought about it, we might have been flattered that he’d asked for such a communal present, one that made sense only now that he had all these new pals to play with, but we didn’t think about it.

There was some rule-changing imposed from above after a particularly messy game ended with the boathouse, the old stable block and even a few windows of the main house getting spattered with paintball dye, but that didn’t restrict us much. The estate manager – who might or might not have been the guy who’d been partial to firing at the retreating backs of trespassing children – was known to be displeased with the whole idea, but apparently he’d been overruled by Mr and Mrs Ancraime, who were tickled pink that their golden boy had new chums to have larks and scrapes with.

‘Now look,’ Hugo said one day after we’d all rocked up on our bikes, dumped them in the courtyard by the old smithy and congregated in the echoing, white-tiled back kitchen for home-made scones and fizzy drinks, ‘my brother’s supposed to be tagging along today. If anybody’s got a problem with that, well, tough.’

We all looked at each other, jaws working, lips covered in flour and fists round cans of Irn Bru, Coke and lemonade. None of us had any problem with this. At that point we were probably all still intent on getting as much fizz down our necks as possible so as to give ourselves a fighting chance in the pre-going-out-to-play burping competition, a rapidly established tradition as important to the day as making sure you had extra ammo with you if you were going paintbailling.

‘Whatever, Hu,’ Ferg said, shrugging.

‘No probs,’ Josh MacAvett agreed.

‘Aye,’ Callum Murston said.

Hugo looked relieved. ‘Good.’

The big house was an ancient Z-plan castle bundled in multiple later layers of stonework falling away from the almost hidden central tower like ranges of foothills. Local kid-lore had it that from above it looked like a swastika, though this wasn’t true; Bash and Balbir, the Shipik twins, went up with their dad in a helicopter as part of their birthday present and they’d said it didn’t look anything like a swastika. We were all quite disappointed.

The whole place was painted pale pink; we’d have been more impressed if we’d known the original recipe for the colour had involved copious amounts of pig’s blood.

We weren’t generally invited into the rest of the house, though I’d been a bit further in after cutting my knee and having Mrs Ancraime herself clean and dress it for me in the main hall. She was a sturdily well-built woman with unkempt brown hair and a quiet voice with soft traces of her native Skye in her accent. A pair of glossy-coated red setters came snuffling, noses high, briefly inquisitive, then skittered off again. The house was dark and gloomy, contrasting with the bright high-summer sunlight blasting down outside. I’d been impressed by the ancient shields, pikes, swords and maces decorating the walls between the stag heads and age-brown family portraits, but still; getting outside again with a bandaged knee had felt like escape.

Later, thinking about all that wall-mounted weaponry, I’d suggested to Hugo we could try taking some of the swords and pikes and stuff and use them to restage battles or something. Hugo had looked pained and said maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea. Anyway, they were almost all too well secured to the walls; you’d need a hacksaw.

The paintball gear was kept in an outhouse cluttered with all the rusting farm equipment of yesteryear. We were introduced to George, who proved to be big and heavy-looking, with a shy smile.

‘Now, boys, this is George,’ his mother told us, leading him by the hand. Mrs Ancraime was dressed up very posh. ‘I hope you’ll take good care of him and play nicely. Do you promise?’

We all agreed that we did. ‘Don’t you worry, missus,’ Wee Malky said.

‘You can depend upon us, ma’am,’ Ferg told her.

‘How-ja do?’ George asked us each in turn, seemingly not really expecting an answer. He was probably small for his age but he still towered over each of us, especially Wee Malky, obviously. His voice was adult-deep, booming in his big chest. He shook our hands. His hands were massive but his grip was gentle. He wore comedically wide khaki shorts and a worn brown tweed jacket over a farmer’s shirt.

‘Thank you, boys,’ Mrs A said. ‘Have fun.’ Then she wafted out.

‘Right,’ Hugo said, rubbing his hands. ‘Teams.’

‘But I would like a gun,’ George said sadly to Hugo when he was told he could tag along with Hugo’s team but only to carry extra ammunition.

‘Sorry, George,’ Hugo told him.

‘Oh,’ George said, and sounded like he was about to burst into tears.

‘But you can carry all this stuff!’ Hugo told him, loading him up with mesh bags full of paintballs.

‘Ah-ha,’ George said quietly, lifting them like they weren’t there and looking better pleased.

‘He’s like Mongo,’ Phelpie said. Our team was hunkered down in a hollow on the side of a wee overgrown glen, waiting for Hugo and his lot to show on a path below. ‘Ah’m callin him Mongo.’

‘Well, just don’t,’ Ferg told him.

‘Naw, dinnae,’ Wee Malky agreed.

‘Who the fuck’s Mongo anyway?’ Fraser Murston asked.

‘From Blazin Saddles?’ Phelpie said. Ryan Phelps was another slightly daft, borderline nutter kid in the Dom Lennot style.

‘What the fuck’s Blazin fuckin Saddles?’ Fraser Murston said; at the time Fraser was the acceptable face of the Murston clan, being more outgoing than his shy twin, Norrie, and a little less aggressive – or at least younger and less sure of himself – than his year-older brother Callum, who was on Hugo’s side in this afternoon’s first skirmish. The brothers’ respective placings on the aggressiveness ladder were, it is fair to say, set to change in the future.

‘It’s a fillum!’

‘Zit in black an fuckin white, aye?’

‘Naw!’

‘Do not call him Mongo,’ Ferg said.

‘Stu, you callin the big guy Mongo?’ Wee Malky asked.

‘No. I agree with Ferg.’ I looked at Phelpie. ‘Don’t call him Mongo.’

‘But he needs a name an he’s a fuckin monster. That boy is pure Mongo.’

‘Yes, but you might upset him,’ Ferg explained, obviously exasperated. ‘Worse than that, you might upset Hugo.’

‘Ah, fuck him,’ Phelpie said.

Ferg and I exchanged looks. Of the dozen or so kids involved, we two seemed to be the most aware that this new venue for fun was entirely at Hugo’s disposal. Not letting nutters come along who’d spoil it for everybody had already been talked about.

‘Hugo’s allowed to use a shotgun,’ Wee Malky said, looking solemnly at Phelpie, who might have said something more, but then Fraser spotted the enemy force, sneakily using the hillside rather than the road, and we had to redeploy quickly.

The sun was still high over the hills as the afternoon started to draw to a close and we set up for the last game of the day. A complicated arrangement of scoring across the various skirmishes and the different team combinations had resulted in Wee Malky coming out last, so he had to be the prey.

Basically he got a two-minute start and then we all chased him. If he lasted for half an hour or got back to his bike without getting splatted again, he’d won. If he managed to splat any of us, we started the next day’s play a point down, but he had only one paintball for each of us, and we were allowed Noisy Death, meaning we could yell out when we were shot, which meant everybody else would know where we were, so if you were the prey, just slinging your gun over your back and running like fuck was generally agreed to be the best course and never mind trying to splat anybody back. There were more rules about not being able to cross the great lawn or the herb garden to keep it all interesting, but that was the gist of it.

We were quite far into the depths of the garden by this point, up near the arboretum (whatever that was – we had no idea at the time, though there were a lot of funny-looking trees around) with acres of parkland, the overgrown glen, the ornamental lake and the old walled garden between us and the house and the courtyard with our bikes in it. Opinion was divided whether this favoured us or Wee Malky.

Wee Malky disappeared into the darkness of an overgrown path, going mostly in the wrong direction, and Ferg and I counted down on my phone and his watch.

‘That’s a weird fu—’ Callum Murston began, then remembered you weren’t supposed to swear in front of George, in case he parroted the same language. ‘What sort of weird fu— what way’s that to go?’ he asked, pointing at where Malky had taken off into the undergrowth.

‘Could be quite a good choice, actually,’ Hugo said thoughtfully.

‘Aw, could it, ectually,’ Callum said.

George’s deep voice rumbled into action. ‘May I have a gun too, this time, please?’ He was the least paint-spattered of us, though even he’d taken a couple of stray hits – partly due to his sheer size, you had to suspect.

‘No, George!’ Hugo told him.

‘Oh.’

‘Zat no two minutes yet?’ Callum asked, annoyed.

‘Still fifty seconds to go,’ Ferg said.

I made a mm-hmm noise in agreement.

‘Aw, come oan!’ Callum said, slapping his gun. ‘That must be two minutes now!’

‘Forty-five seconds to go,’ Ferg said crisply.

‘Fu—’ Callum began, then just roared, ‘Ahm off!’

‘Ah wondered what the funny smell was!’ Phelpie yelled, as Callum stormed off, ducking under the hanging leaves and disappearing into the darkness of the path.

‘The rest of us might actually choose to adhere to the rules,’ Ferg said tightly, taking Phelpie by the collar. Phelpie shrugged him off but he stayed with the rest of us until the two minutes was up.

‘Right,’ Hugo said, when there was under half a minute to go, ‘there are at least half a dozen different ways young Malcolm can take back to the house, starting from that path.’ Hugo was in the officer cadet force at school and naturally tended to assume command. I think he regarded Ferg and me as his trusty yeoman lieutenants, though frankly we thought of ourselves more as ascetic commissars keeping a steely eye on the efficient but politically suspect toff. ‘He could even go as high as the top reservoir and still get back round to the house.’ Hugo clapped his brother on the shoulder. ‘I propose that George and I take the least demanding, lower route, to cut off his approach via the north side of the lake.’

‘Loch,’ Phelpie said.

‘Whatever,’ Hugo replied.

Ferg concentrated on his watch, lifting one finger.

‘Go,’ I said, and pocketed my phone.

Callum lost Wee Malky and blundered off into a bog, getting very annoyed. Most of the rest of us set off up the same path, taking different trails and tracks off it as it progressed, while Hugo and George and Phelpie took the most direct route back to the house. There was an offside rule about just lying in wait for the prey, but – appropriately – nobody entirely understood it. This party of three was halfway back to the house when they heard a lot of shouting uphill and assumed that Wee Malky had been spotted. Hugo left George in Phelpie’s charge and climbed a handy tree to take a look. When he got back down George had gone.

‘You were supposed to look after him!’ Hugo roared at Phelpie.

‘Aye, so? I told him no to go! What else could I dae, man? He’s a fuckin monster!’

At this, Hugo stepped forward and raised a hand and Phelpie thought a proper fight was about to kick off, but Hugo seemed to get a grip and just asked which way George had gone.

The stories diverge at this point. Later we reckoned Hugo was telling the truth and Phelpie sent him in the wrong direction deliberately, just to fuck with him, though Phelpie’s never admitted this.

All the shouting they’d heard involved a false alarm; some of us had spotted the mud-smeared Callum and mistaken him for Wee Malky. When we did see him, finally, it was a good quarter of an hour later, and there had been some mobile phoning to coordinate the hunt – supposedly banned, and not easy with the patchy reception on the estate, but sort of tolerated when somebody was proving particularly elusive, and also technically more effective where we were by now, high up on the wooded hillside that looked down on the main gardens.

‘There he is!’ Josh yelled.

About half the chasing pack had got together at the north side of the upper reservoir, near the furthest western extent of the house gardens before they gave out on to the rest of the estate and the grouse moors and plantation forests beyond. The upper reservoir was there to feed the ornamental lake and other water features below; it was a simple, slim, delta shape, a dammed miniature glen surrounded by woods with a grass-covered dam wall forming its eastern limit and a long, steeply sloped, stone-lined overflow at the far, south edge.

Josh had spotted Wee Malky running along the top of the dam wall, sprinting like a hare for the far side, where the overflow was.

A few of us had been up here already, before we’d been allowed in legally. The overflow had no bridge over it; if you wanted to cross it you’d have to walk along the submerged top lip of the thing: about seven metres of round-topped, weed-slicked stone under an amount of overflowing water that varied according to season and recent weather. There was deep, brown-black peaty water to one side – and reputedly some sort of undertow that meant you’d never surface again if you fell in – and that steep, twenty-metre-long slope of slimy-surfaced overflow on the other, pitched at about thirty-five or forty degrees and with stumpy stone pillars at the foot you wouldn’t want to encounter at the sort of speeds implied if you started sliding down from the top.

Callum claimed he had made this perilous crossing, as did a few older boys, but nobody we trusted had witnessed anybody doing it. Wee Malky was making straight for this scary, bravery-testing obstacle and the track on the far side, ignoring the steep grass slope of the dam wall dropping away to his left. There was a track at its foot that led back to the house, but that one constituted good going; he’d be overtaken by a faster runner. The way up the far side of the shallow stream that ran from the bottom of the overflow was covered with brambles and nettles, and looked almost impassable. If he crossed the overflow and we didn’t follow him, we’d lose him.

We were twenty-five minutes into the chase by this point, even not allowing for Callum’s early start, plus we were out of paintball range – a high, lucky shot might just hit Wee Malky, but it wouldn’t splat – so Malky crossing the overflow without pursuit would mean he’d win, we’d lose.

We all started yelling, and raced along the shore track after him, hoping to put him off just with the sheer amount of noise we were making. Hugo appeared, running from the other direction, joining us at the top of the dam summit.

‘Anybody seen George?’ he asked breathlessly. I don’t think many of us heard him; nobody answered, just streamed past him, turning along the top of the dam. Hugo jogged after us. ‘Look, have any of you seen—’

Wee Malky was at the overflow. We saw him step down carefully onto the round-topped, water-covered stones. The waves spilling over the top came up to his ankles. He started walking along, arms outstretched, the flowing water splashing out around his trainers. He wasn’t taking it slowly, either; he knew he needed to get to the other side fast and be in cover to get back out of paintball range.

He was halfway across and our sprint after him was starting to tell on our legs when somebody at the front of the pack suddenly pulled up, coming to a stop and causing somebody else behind to slam into him, making them both stumble and producing a mini pile-up behind them. They were looking down at the foot of the overflow.

‘Look,’ Hugo said, jogging up from behind, ‘have any of you guys seen …’

‘… George?’ somebody said.

Wee Malky had stopped in the centre of the overflow. We were coming to a straggled halt on the top of the dam.

Down at the bottom of the grassy slope, stepping down the half-metre into the concrete channel and then wading upstream to the foot of the overflow slope, was George, holding, in both hands, a sword almost as big as he was.

‘Where’d that fucking come from?’ Phelpie breathed beside me.

My throat didn’t seem to be working properly. ‘House,’ I managed to say, gulping, remembering the circles and fans of weapons arrayed across its walls.

The blade glittered in the sunlight and looked sharp as a newly broken bottle. Wee Malky was stock-still and staring down at George. George looked up at Wee Malky, making a threatening gesture with the big sword. George was still smiling, but that didn’t feel like it meant much beside the naked reality of that shining metal edge. George looked up towards us, held the heavy sword one-handed, and gave us a thumbs-up sign.

We had all come to a near-complete stop now, strung out in a line across the top of the dam, a few of us still stepping forward a little, to see properly. Hugo was shouting, ‘George! George! Just stay there; put the sword down, old son! Look, I’m coming down!’

George held up one hand to his ear. He was right at the foot of the overflow now, where the water zipped down and sprayed up against the stone stumps and – now – against George’s feet and bare calves, also darkening his khaki shorts. Maybe the water splashing all around him and fountaining up past his waist meant he couldn’t hear.

I looked at Wee Malky as Hugo started gingerly down the steep grass slope of the dam. Wee Malky looked petrified. He’d been running hard with all the desperation of having been pursued by a baying pack for nearly half an hour on a hot summer day, so he was drenched in sweat, his shirt sticking to him, his curly hair darkened to black and plastered against his skin. His eyes were wide as he looked at me. His head turned and he stared back down at George. He wobbled as he did this, arms waving wildly before he steadied again.

Nobody followed Hugo down the grassy dam. I suppose that sword – suddenly so adult compared to our play guns – had sent a chill through all of us. Everything felt very still, as though the air had coagulated around us.

I held one hand flat up to Wee Malky, patting the air, mouthing him to remain motionless, but he was still staring at George, who was continuing to waggle the sword. If it had just been a stick he was holding, it would have looked comical. Callum Murston came up and stood beside me, covered in drying mud, breathing hard and wiping snot from his nose.

Hugo was moving slowly down the dam wall. He had one hand on the grassy surface, helping him descend without going arse over tit, and the other held out to his brother, as though petting him, stroking him from a distance while he kept talking to him, telling him to put the sword down, that it was okay, that the game was over and it was time to go back to the house for drinks and cakes, and to put the sword back.

While we were all watching this, Callum raised his gun and fired, hitting Wee Malky in the head with a yellow splash of paint.

Wee Malky yelped and fell, splashing into the water on the overflow side, one arm reaching out to try to grasp the round stones at the summit, but failing. He started sliding down the slipway, arms flailing as he tried to stop or slow himself.

‘Aw, fuck,’ Callum said quietly.

‘What the—’ I started to say to Callum.

‘You fucking—’ Ferg began.

‘Ah, fuck youse,’ Callum breathed. He took a lungful of air and bent towards the distant figure of George, who was watching Wee Malky slide helplessly towards him and waving his sword enthusiastically. George was still smiling, though not so much. He shifted his feet, widened his stance. Wee Malky started screaming, high and faint and ragged, like he couldn’t get his breath.

‘It’s over!’ Callum roared down at George. ‘That’s the boy deid! Ah shot him! Put the fuckin blade down, ya big Mongo cunt, ye!’

Halfway down the steep grass slope and giving the tricky descent his full attention, Hugo hadn’t seen Wee Malky fall and start to slide down the slipway, but he must have realised what had happened. He gave up on his tentative, safety-first, no-sudden-movements approach and stood up to start running down the grass, taking only a couple of steps before one of his feet went out from under him and he started falling, limbs flailing even more wildly than Wee Malky’s.

‘Hi! Ahm talkin to you! You fuckin listening, ya moron?’ Callum was yelling at George, who just smiled back and waved the sword.

In some ways, the worst thing – the thing that plagued my nightmares for years – was watching Wee Malky trying everything to save himself. It hadn’t been his fault he’d fallen in the first place and now he did all he could to stop himself falling further; within a second or two you could see him trying to use his hands and fingernails as claws to scrape through the layer of weed into the stone beneath, then, when that did almost nothing to slow him, he tried to grab at the lengths of weeds, to use them like ropes he could hold on to. He even wrestled for a moment with his paintball gun, attempting to use it like an ice axe, but there was nothing on it the right shape and sharpness to bite through the weed, and hold.

Usually with something like this – though in the past, of course, it had always been something less than this, something sickening only at the time, like the rope on a tree swing breaking or somebody going over a bike’s handlebars – you could comfort yourself that, had it been you, you’d have tried something else, been more resourceful or just quicker-thinking, so that what had hurt your friend wouldn’t have happened to you.

Even at the time, though, and for all those years of nightmares afterwards, nightmares that still resurface for me about once or twice a year, I knew I’d have been just as helpless as Wee Malky, my fate as hopelessly out of my hands.

Hugo landed heavily at the foot of the grass slope, but bounced back up, only to fall over again immediately as his broken ankle flopped out from under him. It looked horrible, like his foot was held on to his leg only by his sock. Phelpie, a couple of metres away from me, went white. Hugo shouted in pain, then yelled at George as he got back up and started hopping towards his brother.

I looked at Ferg. ‘We should—’ I said, and started forward towards the top of the slope. Ferg didn’t say anything, just grabbed me by the upper arm with a strength I wouldn’t have known he had. So we stood, in that terrible frozen moment, the air grown thick around us, the edge of the sword like a crease down all our lives, a flickering hinge that would divide our histories into the times before and after this instant.

Wee Malky sounded hoarse with fear as he raced down towards the slipway foot. George stood there, the sword raised above his head. In the last moments, Wee Malky gave up trying to stop his slide and brought his gun up, aiming at George and trying to fire, but the gun wouldn’t work.

‘George!’ Hugo screamed.

‘Give it up ya—’ Callum screamed too, and started firing at George. A couple of us joined in and landed a couple of shots; none burst, just bouncing off George and plopping into the water.

Wee Malky was the last one to scream as he came careening down the slipway and slammed into one of the stone stumps with a thudding noise we could hear from the top of the dam, an impact worse than the one we’d all felt when Hugo had landed at the bottom of the slope. Wee Malky’s voice cut off and he sort of draped round the stone pillar, a step away from George, who turned and brought the sword down from high above his head, whacking into Wee Malky’s body, making it jerk. George paused, straightened, raised the sword high again.

About half of us looked away at this point. Phelpie fainted, crumpling onto the grass, and another two or three of us had to sit down. Hugo had fallen again and was forced to drag himself the last metre to the side of the overflow channel. He looked on despairingly as his brother landed the final couple of blows; they fell with dull thuds we all saw and felt rather than heard.

The water around George and heading away downstream was flooding with red now. What was left of Wee Malky looked like a pile of sodden rags wrapped round the base of the little stone pillar, his body shaken and pummelled by the tearing, scooping water, but otherwise unmoving.

George laid the sword down carefully on top of the pillar, smiled a great beaming smile – first at Hugo, then round at all the rest of us – and raised both his clenched fists high above his head in triumph.

The pathologist’s report said Wee Malky had been knocked unconscious by the blow against the stone pillar at the foot of the overflow channel. He had been killed by multiple blows to the body and head by a long, sharp-bladed instrument, and died of either blood loss or major head trauma; both had occurred within such a short interval it was impossible to say and, anyway, made no practical difference.

We never saw George again; he went back into a secure unit and stayed there until he died a couple of years back. We barely saw Hugo again, either; he spent his time at school, on holidays abroad and behind the once again closed-to-us walls of the estate. The ankle healed fine; he’s run marathons since. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and as of last year he’s a cosmetic surgeon in Los Angeles. They love that accent. Trust it, too. Though of course everybody thinks he’s English. Apparently he’s given up trying to persuade them otherwise.

One day, of course, the whole Ancraime estate – and the family’s various properties elsewhere – will be his, but his dad’s just twenty years older than he is and in robust good health, so in the meantime Hugo thought he’d get independently independently wealthy, if you see what I mean.

People blamed Callum, partly, though he always swore he had been trying to think ahead and had shot Wee Malky purely so that George would accept that the game was over, and put down the sword. Those of us who knew Callum well thought this was plausible but unlikely. He’d never shown that sort of psychological acuity before and only arguably did afterwards. Still, Callum made it very clear he deeply resented any hint of an accusation that he’d done anything other than try to help, and try to help quite ingeniously, too, and over the ensuing years, if you listened to the way Callum told it, you might have thought the principal victim of the whole episode had been him.

Only Ferg and I really blamed Phelpie too, a bit. He must have seen George head off in the direction of the house but then told Hugo he’d gone in the opposite direction, uphill. He even changed his story; at first he claimed he’d sent Hugo in the right direction and Hugo must have got lost, then, after a week, when he must have worked out how preposterous that idea was, he said, no, actually he’d pointed towards the house but Hugo had raced off in the other direction because he must have assumed Phelpie was trying to trick him.

Anyway. This was all too much blame, too much detail, for most people, and in the end none of it would bring Wee Malky back or, for that matter, make George more or less culpable for a crime he still didn’t really understand he’d committed.

Phelpie works for Mike MacAvett now; he’s the chauffeur and home handyman, officially, but more Mike’s bagman and bodyguard, where needed.

We all got counselling. We pretty much all scorned it at the time, but it certainly seemed to help. I hate to think how bad my nightmares might have stayed without it.

Though, between us, Ferg and I did think of a way Wee Malky might have escaped, after all: as you were sliding down the slipway you’d have to give up on spreadeagling and trying to stop or slow yourself, and instead make yourself as narrow as possible and somehow steer yourself so that you sped between two of the stumpy stone pillars at the bottom. Take your chances that George would have missed you with his sword as you shot past him and that you’d get far enough away down the channel beyond on sheer momentum, so that by the time you got to your feet and started running, you’d have a chance of escaping.

Unlikely as it sounded even to us, we found this thought consoling, though somehow it never got incorporated into the nightmares. Their substance never really changed; they just became slowly less real, more faded, further away and less frequent.

Sue MacAvett’s scones, as donated by Jel, were gently reheated, and judged very good by Mum, Dad and myself. The jam, too.

I spent the evening with my parents; they wanted to congratulate me properly for joining the partnership. Mum drove us out to the Turrie Inn, near Roadside of Durrens on the Loanstoun road. Fine meal, fine wine. Place was busy on the strength of the chef’s word-of-mouth reputation, some magazine features and rumours of a Michelin star next year, maybe. Mum and Dad seemed happy and relaxed and glad to see me, and I had an almost surprisingly good time.

Quietly pissed, but feeling like a child again, I watched through the side window of the Audi as a waning moon like a paring from God’s big toenail flickered between the black trunks of sentry trees ridging lines of distant hills.