14

Still staring at my half-reflection in the inside door, in the semi-darkness of the front porch, still outside the house. This is my place, my folks’ place. But that might be Ellie’s car there at the kerbside and if it is, then she might be in there and if she is in there, then … What was it her brothers were saying? Oh yes: Don’t fucking talk to her. And if she approaches you to talk to you, walk away. Or else.

But this is my territory. This is Al and Morven’s home. Mike Mac wouldn’t let anything happen here, would he? The time that Donald, Callum and Fraser broke in, looking for me, five years ago, words were exchanged regarding this breakdown in protocol, and – according to Dad and Mike Mac – Donald apologised. Even then they didn’t trash the place or take anything; they just wanted to find me if I was there and left immediately when they realised I wasn’t.

And, gathered round the wee hole in the middle of the bridge today, Murdo and Norrie only mentioned tomorrow, at the funeral and the hotel afterwards; that was when they were talking about, that was when I was supposed to keep well away from their sister, not now, not here in what is still sort of my own home. Only this is a kind of lawyerly point, the sort of detail or loophole that, in school, always appealed to the smart kids like me and Ferg, and meant – you rapidly discovered – nothing at all to the kids who thought with their fists. So I doubt the distinction would mean much to the Murston brothers if they found out.

Maybe I should just turn around, head back into town. Phone somebody. Drag Ferg out of his resumed snooze: whoever, whatever. Bar or café, or just go for a drive or a walk by myself; maybe phone Mum and Dad, and if El’s there tell them I don’t want to meet her – call me when she’s gone.

I stare at my reflection. All this has gone through my mind in a couple of seconds at most.

Listen to yourself, Gilmour. And look at yourself. This is the family home. This is still where you belong. Maybe more so than that pleasant but soulless designer apartment in Stepney. If she chooses to come here, that’s her business, not Murdo’s or Norrie’s or Donald’s or anybody else’s. You really going to let the Murston boys frighten you away from your own crib, your own people?

I shake my head at my reflection. Do I want to see Ellie? Part of me dreads this because I’ve realised, just over the last couple of days, how much I need to see her again.

All these years, this half a decade that I’ve spent making a new life for myself, trying to forget about Ellie and my idiocy with Jel, forgetting about the wedding that never was and trying to push out of my head everything I ever knew about my friends and Stonemouth and my life here, purposefully turning my back on it all to draw a line under it, to make starting again easier and so forge a Stewart Gilmour: 2.0, a newer, better me who’d never behave like a fool again … and in the end the simple act of coming back has made that decision itself look like my greatest, most prolonged act of stupidity.

Of course I want to see her again. She may still hate me, she may just want to slap me in the face and tell me I should never have come back, but – even if it’s that – I need to know.

I let myself in. As usual, when the storm-doors are open, that means people are home and the inner doors aren’t locked.

I pull in a breath to shout hi or hello or whatever, and I remember something about That Night that I’d half forgotten, a little detail that suddenly seems germane now. It was from when Anjelica and I were just starting to get serious, in that over-lit ladies’ toilet on the fifth floor of the Mearnside, at the point when either of us could have changed our minds and it not have been awkward, even hurtful.

I remember thinking: We could get caught, somebody could walk in, Jel might tell somebody – she might tell Ellie – or Jel might even be doing this not because the chance suddenly presented itself and we both just sort of got carried away in the heat of the moment, but because she wanted this to happen, even set it up to happen this way, so she could tell Ellie, or so she could have something over me, something to make me feel guilty about, even if outright blackmail was unlikely.

Again, all of this had flitted through my mind in a couple of seconds or less, and I remember thinking, as a result of all this simming and mulling over and thinking through: Don’t care. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then let it be; bring it on. Sometimes you just have to abandon yourself to the immediate and even to somebody else’s superior karma or ability to manoeuvre, to plan.

I suspect we all sort of secretly think our lives are like these very long movies, with ourselves as the principal characters, obviously. Only very occasionally does it occur to any one of us that all these supporting actors, cameo turns, bit players and extras around us might actually be in some sense real, just as real as we are, and that they might think that the Big Movie is really all about them, not us; that each one of them has their own film unreeling inside their own head and we are just part of the supporting cast in their story.

Maybe that’s what we feel when we meet somebody we have to acknowledge is more famous or more charismatic or more important than we are ourselves. The trick is to know when to go with the other player’s plot line, when to abandon your own script – or your thoughts for what to improvise next – and adopt that of the cast member who seems to have the ear or the pen or the keyboard of the writer/director.

The other trick is to know what sort of person you are. I know what I’m like; I tend to over-analyse things, but I know this and I have a sort of executive function that overrides all the earnest deliberation once it’s gone past a certain point. I see it as like a committee that sits in constant session, and sometimes you – as the one who’s going to have to make the final decision and live with the results – just have to go up to the meeting room where all the debating is going on and, from the outside, just quietly pull the door to, shutting away all the feverish talking while you get back to the controls and get calmly on with the actual doing. I control this so well I’ve even been accused of being a bit too impulsive on occasion, which is ironic if nothing else.

At the other end of this particular spectrum are the people who are wild, wilful and instinctive and just do whatever feels right at the time. Jails and cemeteries are full of them. The smart ones like that have the opposite of what I have; they have a sensible, Now-wait-a-minute, Have-you-thought-this-through? committee that can veto their more reckless urges. (For what it’s worth, I suspect Mike Mac is like me and Donald M is the opposite.)

Either way, some sort of balance makes the whole thing work, and evolution – both in the raw sense and in the way that society changes – gradually weeds out the behaviours that work least well.

Voices from the kitchen.

I walk in and Ellie’s there, sitting at the table with Mum and Dad, tea and biscuits all round.

Ellie smiles at me. It’s not a big smile, but it’s a smile.

‘Here he is!’ Mum says.

‘Aye-aye. Your phone off?’ Dad asks.

‘Lost it. Got a new one,’ I tell him, nodding at Mum. I look at Ellie. Five years older. Face a little paler, maybe. Still beautiful, still … serene. A touch careworn now, perhaps, or just sad, but then that’s probably just me, seeing what I expect to see. Her hair’s a lot shorter, worn down but only to her shoulders; still thick, lustrous, the colour of sand. ‘Hi, Ellie.’

‘Hello, Stewart. You’re looking well.’

Am I? Fuck. ‘Not as good as you.’

‘You are too kind,’ she says, dipping her head to one side. That smile again.

Mum clears her throat. ‘Well, we should maybe leave you two to talk.’ She looks at Dad, and they stand up. Ellie jumps up too. She’s wearing jeans and a thin grey fleece over a white tee.

‘That’s okay,’ she says to them. Then she looks at me. ‘Thought you might … want to come for a drive?’

‘You okay?’ Ellie asks as she turns the Mini out of Dabroch Drive.

‘Fine,’ I tell her. ‘You?’

‘Didn’t really mean generally, Stewart,’ she says. ‘I meant after Murdo and Norrie “had a wee word”, as they put it, earlier.’

‘Ah.’

‘They got drunk afterwards. Came back to the house. I’d just popped in to see Mum and Dad, and the boys were kind enough to tell me they’d been protecting my honour or something, and I needn’t worry about you “bothering” me tomorrow, at the funeral?’ She glances at me. ‘Didn’t dare say any of this in front of Don, mind you, but they seemed keen to tell me, or at least Norrie did, and they certainly looked pleased with themselves. Did they hurt you?’

‘Hurt at the time. No bruises. More annoyed they dropped my phone into the Stoun.’

As I’m talking, I’m feeling this annoying, humiliating need to cringe, to sink as low as I can in my seat as we drive through the streets of the town, to avoid being seen by any errantly roaming Murston brothers or their sidekicks, minions, vassals or whatever the fuck they are. Last time I was in this car, of course, I really was ducked right down, chest on my knees with Ellie’s coat on top to hide me, en route to the station and the relative safety of a big yellow pipe on a freight train. How shamefully Pavlovian. I force myself to sit up straight instead. This would be the Fuck-it, or Sheep-as-a-lamb response. Still, I can’t help watching the people on the pavements and in other cars, looking for stares or double-takes. We pull up right beside the station shuttle bus at some traffic lights and I don’t look at it, just keep staring ahead.

‘Uh-huh,’ Ellie says. ‘Well, I apologise on behalf of my insane family. Obviously, it wasn’t done … you know, at my instigation.’

‘I’d guessed.’

She shakes her head, and I can see her frowning at the road ahead. ‘It’s like watching wolves or lion cubs grow up. They’re boisterous, play fighting, nearly cute, then one day,’ She shrugs. ‘They just turn and bite your throat out.’

That sends a slight chill through me. ‘Your brothers getting—’

‘Getting to be bigger arseholes than they were,’ she says. ‘Dad’s just about keeping them on the leash.’ She slings the car into gear as the lights change. ‘Oh, come on,’ she mutters at the car in front as it fails to move off promptly. Then it jerks, shifts.

There’s a pause. Eventually I take a breath and say, ‘I’m sorry too.’

‘You’re sorry?’ I can see that small frown again, creasing the skin above and between her eyes.

‘For cheating on you, Ellie.’

‘Oh, that. Ah.’

She concentrates on driving, eyes flicking about, taking her gaze from the view ahead to her mirrors, to the oversized instrument pod in the middle of the fascia and back to the street again as we negotiate the old main road out of Nisk.

‘El, I wrote you about a dozen letters saying how sorry I was and what a fool I’d been and how I was the biggest fucking idiot on the planet and how I wished you well and hoped you got over what I’d done and … well, a million other things, but I never sent any of them. A short letter seemed like I was … just fobbing you off with something, you know; formal? Like a kid forced to write a thank-you letter to an aunt or something? But the longer letters … the longer any of them went on, the more whiney they got, the more they sounded like I was trying to make excuses for myself, like I was the one who deserved … sympathy, or … Not that … Anyway … anyway, I never did get the tone right, the words right. And in the end I thought you probably didn’t want to hear from me at all, so I stopped trying. And … well, it’s still, it’s become even more pointless … Well, not pointless, but …’ I take a big deep breath like I’m about to swim a long way underwater. ‘Well, I still need to say it even if you don’t need to hear it. I am sorry.’

Half a decade I’ve been thinking about and working on that speech, but it still comes out wrong: awkward, badly expressed, unbalanced somehow and not really what I intended to say at all. Like I was making it up as I went along.

Maybe the last two sentences aren’t too bad – all I needed to say, really.

Except, thinking about it, the first of the two sounds like I’m making it all about me, again, and it’s all about my needs.

I look out the side window, shaking my head at my own distorted reflection and mouthing the word fuckwit.

We’ve cleared the town, heading west between the industrial and retail estates, the hills and mountains ahead.

Ellie doesn’t say anything for a bit, then nods and says, ‘Okay.’ She nods again. ‘Okay.’

‘Doesn’t mean I expect you to forgive me, either,’ I tell her, suddenly remembering another part of what I’ve been meaning to say to her for the last five years.

‘Hmm,’ Ellie says. ‘Well, there you are.’

Which is about as non-committal as you can get, I guess, and probably still more than I deserve.

‘Anyway, it’s good to see you again,’ I tell her.

‘And you,’ she says. She glances at me. ‘I wasn’t sure it would be, but it is. Not hurting as much as I thought it might. Barely at all, in fact. I suppose that means I’m over it. Over you.’

I don’t know what to say for a while, then I say, ‘Your dad said something about your mum putting in a good word for me, about letting me come back for the funeral.’

‘Did he? Did she?’ Ellie sounds surprised.

‘Yeah, I wondered if maybe you’d been behind that somehow?’

‘Huh,’ Ellie says, and is obviously thinking. ‘I think I said to both of them that it seemed wrong to keep you away if you wanted to come back, you know, to pay your last respects to Grandpa.’

‘Didn’t think it was your mum.’

‘Hmm.’

‘How’s she these days?’

‘Ha. As ever. Got a carpenter in the house at the moment, putting up extra shelves in her cuttings room.’

‘Her cuttings room?’

‘Where she keeps all the stuff she cuts out of House and Home and Posh Decorator or whatever they’re called. Got this whole room lined with volumes of tips, ideas, recipes, colour schemes and all that malarkey. Then when anything’s getting done to the house she ignores all of it and calls in an interior designer to do everything. Same with big meals. She collects all these cookbooks and cut-out recipes and goes on all these cooking tutorial weekends and week-long courses, and then when there’s a big do at the house she has it all done by outside caterers. You’d swear she’s the busiest woman in the world but she rarely actually does anything. We’ve got a maid now.’

‘Maria. Met her briefly.’

‘She does all the cleaning and the laundry.’ Ellie shakes her head. ‘But, yeah, the cuttings room, where all the cuttings live. Well, go to die, really. Dad buys her a new pair of scissors as a joke every Christmas. Meanwhile she’s started lobbying for a sort of mini-extension to house a walk-in wardrobe – a walk-in chilled wardrobe – to keep her furs in tip-top condition. Dad’s telling her she doesn’t need it in this climate but I give it to the end of the year and he’ll cave. She’ll have it by next spring.’ Ellie blows what sounds like an exasperated breath.

‘What about you?’ I ask as we cross over the bypass, heading for a patch of light above the hills where the dipping sun is filtering through the thinning streams of cloud. ‘I heard you’re … helping people with addictions these days.’

‘Yeah, well, strictly speaking it’s the rest of my family that helps people with their addictions; I help them try to break them,’ she says, with a quick, entirely mirth-free grin. ‘And nobody knows where next year’s funding’s going to come from.’ She jerks her head back in an equally humourless laugh. ‘Suppose I could ask Don. Might even take it on; it’d be cover, good PR.’ She glances at me. ‘What about you? Still with the building lighting and all?’

‘Yep. Still based in London, though you’d struggle to tell that from my credit card receipts.’

‘Trotting that globe, huh?’

‘Fraid so. The company offsets, but we still take the flights in the first place.’

‘How’s business?’

‘It’s held up. Thank fuck for China and India, and all that oil money has to go somewhere: largely into the sky, as concrete, steel and light.’ I glance at her. I feel oddly nervous, almost fake, right at this instant. ‘They … made me a partner.’

She looks at me, smiling broadly. ‘They did? Congratulations! Well done, you!’ She looks back to the road, still smiling.

‘Well, just junior,’ I tell her. ‘Not equity. The responsibility without the access to the serious money.’

She nods. ‘Not a made man quite yet.’

This makes me laugh. ‘Well, yeah.’

‘Seeing anyone special?’

‘Hardly got the time. You?’

‘Mmm … Not really. Not since Ryan. Well, there was one guy, but that … So, no.’

We drive into the hills as the evening sky begins to clear and the clouds break up. We go via some of the ‘of places. There are – Ellie and I spotted long ago, when we first started going out – a lot of ‘of’ places round here: Brae of Burns, New Mains of Fitrie, Lyne of Glenskirrit, Hill of Par. I guess round here we just like our place names definite, pinned down.

Ellie drives much like she always did, with the same easy grace she brings to most tasks: braking seldom and gently, swinging the car quickly, neatly, into curves on a single stuck-to line she rarely needs to amend, carrying plenty of speed through the open bends and feeding the power back in progressively. Actually maybe her driving’s a little more erratic than it used to be, though that could be the road surfaces; they look more beaten up than I recall. Still, Ellie avoids the holes, factors those in, keeps everything smooth. We overtake a couple of tractors but then get stuck behind a slow driver in an old Kia, and stay there too long. This was always Ellie’s weakness as a driver: not quite aggressive enough. Naturally, she always thought that I was – to the same degree – not quite patient enough. I’m starting to think the truth lies somewhere in between, which definitely means I’m getting old.

Seven or so years ago Ellie and I drove down the coast to Pyvie, on a whim at the end of the season. The weather had cooled after a hot summer and the leaves were scattering off the trees to lie like litter on the brown earth. It was another snatched weekend, both of us back from our respective universities, like a forty-eight-hour leave. We’d taken one of the Murston dogs with us, an old golden Lab called Tumsh, heavy with age but still up for a run along a beach or a rabbit chase into the undergrowth.

We held hands, walked through drifts of leaves while Tumsh investigated interesting smells. We found the deserted tea room looking out over the beach with massed trees at either end, watching through the salt-streaked windows as the dog ran up and down the beach outside, barking at seagulls.

The tea room was closing for the winter later that afternoon. The staff – already mostly taken up with cleaning everything and packing everything away – served us with a sort of cheery brusqueness, from a much reduced menu. Tea and yesterday’s baking, to the sound of catering clattering and voices impatient to be home.

Later, near one end of the beach, along from the pitted tarmac expanse of the car park, we discovered the remains of a little narrow-gauge railway system that must have given rides to kids. The track was only about as wide as my hand, outstretched, and there were some bits just lying around, scattered and loose. Where the tracks were still anchored to the ground, they snaked along between bushes and miniature hills, and in one place there was a dip and a mound where something like a cross between a bridge and a tunnel let a little twisty path arch over the railway. A wooden shed at one end of the complex might once have held the trains and engines that had run here, but they were long gone and the shed was wrecked, doors missing, wooden roof bowed with rot or age or maybe from kids jumping up and down on it.

I picked up one length of track, about as long as I was tall. It was very light, probably aluminium. I held it easily with one hand and could have broken it, it felt, using two. Tumsh tensed near by, front legs splayed, thinking the length of track was a stick I was about to throw.

On the beach we found a thick length of rope, just three metres long but as thick as my arm, sturdy enough, it looked, to moor supertankers with. She and I made jokes about enormous plugs, about giant bits of soap. The wind whipped the water, uncombing my hair, and sending hers flying and lashing about her head and face until she tamed it with a woollen hat.

We walked with hands in pockets, but arm in arm, uncoupling only to pick up a stick and throw it for the dog. Tumsh tore across the tarnished beach, sending sand arcing with each turn, stopping at the water if a stick went into the waves, when he’d stand there, panting, staring at the stick, then looking back at us, tongue lolling.

Later we walked along a path by the side of the sea, near the abandoned miniature railway network, and, suddenly, there was a train: real, full size, charging down the coastline from Stonemouth, heading for Aberdeen and Edinburgh and then to who knew where – London probably, Penzance perhaps – roaring through the trees just above us, close enough for us to smell its diesel smoke and see the people – their faces pale, like ghosts’ faces – looking down at us.

‘Let’s wave,’ she said, and raised her hand, waving.

I waved too. I think we both felt like children, then we felt foolish, because there was nobody waving back, and it is a sad thing to wave at a train and not have anybody bother to wave back at you, but then, in the last carriage before the rear engine unit and another blattering roar, there was a flurry of movement, and a wee face pressed up against the murky glass beneath a blur of childish arm and hand, waving.

We went back to the tea room. It was closed, all the tables, seats and signs taken inside behind rolled-down shutters, the staff car park deserted.

Not long before we left, on the way back to the car, Ellie hid behind a tree while Tumsh was off chasing a squirrel. When the dog came back he could tell she ought to be there, but he couldn’t see her. He barked, looked all about, jumped with his front legs only, barked again. Ellie cried out, ‘Tumsh! Oh, Tumsh boy!’ from behind the tree, making the dog bark more wildly, then she came strolling round, and the dog ran to her. She went down on her haunches, took its big face in her hands, shaking him side to side, telling him what a fine and silly dog he was.

The light started to go as great grey fleets of cloud rolled in off the sea, filling the sky, erasing any trace of sun and dragging, curled underneath them, light grey veils of rain, curved like tails.

In the car on the way back we had to keep the windows down because Tumsh must have rolled in something horrible; the rain started, and the smell coming off Tumsh and the rain slanting in through the cracked windows and the grey-brown landscape outside made the journey seem long and not much fun.

We were in a long queue of traffic stopped at some temporary traffic lights on the main road back north when Ellie said, ‘We should get away, somewhere.’ She looked at me. ‘You and me, Stewart. When we’ve both finished our courses. If we’re going to stay together. Will we stay together, do you think?’

‘Eh? Course we will. We’ll be together for ever. That’s the general idea, isn’t it? You and me? Together?’

‘Yes. Until we’re old.’

‘Only until we’re old?’ I said, pretending shock. ‘Like, we should split up when we’re sixty or ninety or something?’

She smiled. ‘For ever.’ She held my arm. ‘But we should get away somewhere, don’t you think?’

‘Where to? What sort of place? How far away?’

‘I don’t know. Just somewhere else. Somewhere sunny, yeah? Sunny and hot. Just not here.’ She rested her head on my shoulder as I watched the lights far in the distance turn from red to green, probably too far ahead for us to make it through in this pulse of traffic. ‘Just … away,’ she said.

We started to edge forward.

So I’m sitting in Ellie’s Mini as we potter along behind the in-nohurry Kia, remembering that day seven years ago, and how low I felt then for some reason. Maybe just the weather, maybe some combination of that and other trivial but still dispiriting details, like the dog stinking of decay, but maybe due to some premonition – through some brief internal glint of self-knowledge rather than anything superstitious – that what she and I had wasn’t going to last for ever after all: wouldn’t last sixty years or even six.

I watch Ellie’s face as we drive in procession behind the slower car. I have missed such moments. I would always do this: just watch her in profile as she drove. I was always waiting for a moment when she looked less than beautiful, when she looked ordinary. Never found one.

Grier, I noticed the other day as we walked from the blinged X5 to Bessel’s Café, can do stealth. On the street, she walked differently, held herself differently – her head down, her expression frowning a little, her gait sort of efficient but gauche, untidy – and basically attracted no attention. In the café she seemed to shake off this magic cloak of semi-invisibility and suddenly she was there, as obvious as a beautiful-actress-playing-plain in an ancient Hollywood movie taking off her glasses and shaking down her hair. Why, Miss Murston … That was when the majority of male eyes started turning in her direction.

I’ve a friend – a close friend by London standards, just an acquaintance given the way I came to think of friends when I grew up here – who’s a fashion photographer and he says you can have a genuine supermodel turn up at the studio and you think she’s the cleaner at first, until she’s turned on whatever it is she has to turn on, the camera is pointing at her and she’s dressed in whatever she’s supposed to be dressed in, however barely. Then she looks no more like a cleaning lady than she does a laser printer. Kapow; lights on, burning.

I guess Grier is like that; whatever beauty she has is dynamic, animated; a function, not a state.

With Ellie, it’s not something she can turn off. I remember her being almost as beautiful when she’s asleep as she is fully awake; it’s there in the depth of her, in her bones, in her skin and hair.

Eye of the beholder and all that. One of the truer clichés, I guess. I’m biased, but I think El’s only got more beautiful over the last five years. There’s a sort of substance to her looks now, maybe even a leavening of sadness or world-weary wisdom informing them; making her beauty seem earned at last, rather than just something she fell so casually heir to.

Or not; I know I’m bringing my own knowledge and prejudices to this evaluation. Would I still think she looks so pensively exquisite if I didn’t know about the failed marriage, the miscarriage, the many things left undone, unfinished? Never mind the hurt I caused her.

And – because I still know which one of the two I’d rather spend the rest of my days with – shouldn’t any rational comparison between El and Grier favour the one who has to work at being attractive, rather than the one who can’t help it?

We finally whistle past the Kia on a long, dipping straight. It’s a simple, safe, even elegant bit of overtaking, but the wee old guy driving – hunched down, staring forward with an expression of pinched, peering concentration and gripping the steering wheel like a lifebelt in a storm – still flashes his lights at us.

‘And you, sir,’ I murmur, looking in the side mirror.

‘Oh, now,’ Ellie says. ‘Probably just trying to wash his windscreen.’ Then I hear her take a breath. ‘Listen,’ she says.

Here we go. ‘Listening,’ I say, turning in my seat and crossing my arms.

‘I don’t want you to—’ Ellie starts. She sighs. ‘I don’t want you to …’ Her voice trails off. She shakes her head, puffs her cheeks and blows air out, making the kind of noise I associate with exasperated Parisian taxi drivers. She looks at me. I’m looking at her. ‘It is … over,’ she says, turning her attention back to the road. She spares me only occasional glances after this.

‘You mean you and me?’ I ask.

‘Yeah. I’m not … It’s all in the past now, yeah? All done with. Water under the bridge, soap under the wedding ring and all that. That’s how you feel? I mean, it is, isn’t it?’

Fuck. ‘What sort of idiot would I be to feel any other way?’

She’s silent for a while, then she says, ‘Okay, but I need a real answer.’

Fuck and double fuck. ‘Okay. I still … In some ways my feelings haven’t changed. Towards you, I mean. I … I mean I – sorry’ I say, having to clear my throat. ‘Do you have any water in …?’

‘Here.’ She passes me an opened half-litre bottle of mineral water without looking at me. ‘Not what it says on the label, mind; best Toun watter fra tha tap back hame.’

‘Thanks.’ I drink, taking my time.

‘You were saying,’ she says.

I hand her the bottle back. ‘I don’t expect anything from you, Ellie. I mean, not even forgiveness. I’m certainly not back … I’m not here expecting you to, you know, umm, fall into my arms or anything. Ahm … Too much has happened, we’ve been apart too long, and in the end … well, I did what I did. But I’m still, as our American cousins would say … I still have feelings for you.’ My mouth has gone dry again and I have to clear my throat once more. Tor whatever that’s worth.’ I take a deep breath. ‘And if it’s worth nothing, then that’s fair enough. I accept that. But I … I just don’t want to lie to you.’

She nods thoughtfully, drives calmly.

‘You asked, so I’m telling you,’ I tell her. But by this point I start to realise I’m talking just to fill the silence, and so I shut up.

‘Okay,’ she says. There’s a pause. ‘Okay.’

There’s a long silence after this, but it is – I think – companionable.

‘So,’ I find myself saying eventually, ‘did you come to find me at Al and Morven’s … because the boys roughed me up?’

She looks thoughtful, still concentrating on the road ahead. ‘I suppose I did. They’d made me angry, made me want to get back at them. Told them I was coming over to your mum and dad’s, just to talk to you. Or I’d make a point of seeing you at the funeral tomorrow, and Donald would know all about it if they even thought of threatening you again. So … stupid.’ She shakes her head. ‘And then bragging to me about it.’

‘Unintended consequences.’

She snorts. ‘At least with Murdo and Norrie you know it is unintended. Nothing as sophisticated as reverse psychology ever clouded their motivations. If Grier did something like that, the first thing you’d think would be, What’s she really up to?’

‘Seriously? She’s that Machiavellian?’

‘Oh, you’ve no idea.’ Ellie sucks in a breath. ‘Remember that thing about Grier creeping into Callum’s bed when she was just a kid?’

‘Umm,’ I say. ‘… Yeah.’

The ‘umm’ was a kind of lie, and so was the pause before ‘yeah’: artificial hesitations while I pretended to delve down into my memory. In reality, of course, I remembered instantly because I was talking about this just an hour or two ago, with Ferg. I feel like a complete shit for even this tiny deception.

‘Well, we all kind of accepted nothing happened,’ Ellie says. ‘But a few years later Grier actually talked about having something over Callum, about having power over him. It was the first time – and last time – we ever got drunk together, left alone in the house when she was still under age. She talked about changing her story and claiming that she’d repressed the memory of Callum raping her or sexually assaulting her that night; telling Callum that she’d pull this stunt if he didn’t do something she wanted him to do.’

‘Fuck me.’ I’m staring at Ellie. ‘What? What did she want him to do?’

‘Nothing. She didn’t have anything she wanted him to do. It was just a … a plan. Something to be held in reserve.’ Ellie shakes her head. ‘And she actually ran this past me, to check this was cool. And to show me how clever she was, of course. Little bitch.’

‘You didn’t think it was cool.’

‘I thought it was fucking obscene. I told her if she ever tried anything like that I’d tell Mum, Dad, everybody about what she’d just said.’ Ellie shakes her head again. ‘She was drunk as a skunk and slurring her words, and she’d never been drunk in her life before, far as I know, anyway – threw up spectacularly later – but you could see her change tack almost instantly, even that far gone. Just flicked into this other mode, all jokey and faking laughter and saying, Jeez, I hadn’t been taking her seriously there, had I? Surely not! Oh, what a laugh.’ Ellie looks at me with a basilisk face. ‘But, trust me, she’d meant every fucking word.’ She looks back at the road. ‘Next day, post-hangover? Claimed she couldn’t remember a thing. And never made that mistake again; I’ve never seen her that drunk or anything like it, and she’s never shared a confidence with me since, either.’ Ellie does that sort of single side-nod thing and makes a clicking noise with her mouth. ‘Kid learns her lessons fast. I’ll give her that.’

I shake my head. ‘Your family never ceases to amaze.’

‘But can you see why I hope Dad never retires?’ Ellie says. ‘Never gives up the business? The illegal part, anyway; the haulage, property and building side runs itself: just hire decent managers. The illegal stuff … it doesn’t work that way. Can you imagine the boys running it, seriously? Even Murdo. He’s the smartest of the three, but … by God, that’s a relative compliment.’ She smiles. ‘In more senses, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

She takes a breath like she’s about to say something, then doesn’t, but digs her mobile out of her fleece pocket, switches it off with some deliberation and puts it back.

‘Mind switching your phone off?’ she asks.

‘I really am not having much luck with phones around you guys, am I?’ I say, shaking my head but taking the rubbish temporary phone out.

‘Fully off,’ she tells me. ‘Actually, battery out is best.’

‘Don’t know why I bother,’ I say, taking the battery out.

Meanwhile Ellie’s fiddling with the Mini’s information screen, menuing down to the comms set-up and turning Bluetooth off. I want to ask her whether she might be acting a bit paranoid and we’re going a little overboard here, but I can’t think how to put it without it sounding snide or hurtful.

And – and this kind of astounds me too – there’s just a trace of fear jangling inside me. Because how do I know Ellie isn’t somehow back in the familial fold, despite everything? Could I be getting set up here? Could she have changed that much over the last five years? She wouldn’t be going to deliver me into the hands of her insane brothers, would she? I can’t believe she’d do that – and anyway, even if she did wish me harm she surely wouldn’t have picked me up from under the noses of my mum and dad, would she? No, I’m being crazy. She’s Ellie. She wouldn’t, couldn’t. Still, there’s that tiny, nagging sense of danger tingling in my guts.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Also, I kind of need your word on this, Stewart. I mean seriously, properly.’

‘It’ll go no further, if that’s what you—’

‘Well, it can’t. That’s why—’

‘It’s yours.’

‘Word?’

‘Yup. My word on it.’

She shoots me a frowning look, like she’s really having to think about this. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘You never were a blabber, were you?’

No I wasn’t. Still not. Good with secrets, me. ‘My tongue I could control,’ I agree wearily. ‘My cock, it turned out—’

‘Oh, just … just stop now, okay?’ she says. ‘Honestly. We’re through all that.’

‘I’m sorry, I guess—’

‘Doesn’t lessen what you—’

‘Yeah, sounds like I’m trivialising … Anyway.’

‘Yeah. Anyway.’ She shakes her head. ‘Okay, here it is: Dad – Don – has actually suggested maybe I should take over.’ She looks at me long enough for a mid-straight correction to be required. She shakes her head again. ‘Seriously. The whole business. Everything. In fact, particularly the illegal side.’

‘Fuck.’

Ellie nods. ‘My first thought too.’

‘Jeez, you’re not even thinking of—’

‘Stewart, are you remembering what I do these days?’

‘Oh, yeah: drug counselling, rehab, whatever. Hmm. Some people would think that’d be great … cover.’

‘Yeah, I guess some people would,’ she agrees, eyes narrowing briefly. ‘So, no, not really. I mean, for about an hour after I got over the initial shock, I thought about how I could take over, run the business down, wean everybody off the hard stuff, blah-blah-blah, but … That’s never going to happen. For one thing, I don’t know that Murdo, Fraser and Norrie would have it: taking orders from me, I mean. And even if they did and you tried the whole runningdown-the-illegal-side idea – and got them to agree to that, which is probably the least likely … proposition in any of this – and you got Mike Mac onside to do the same thing at the same time – which is probably less unlikely – you’d find demand being met by somebody else, somebody more ruthless, more profit driven. It’d be seen as a sign of weakness, too; you’d be taken over, sidelined at best, more likely found in a ditch one morning with a couple of bullets in your head.’

‘Fucking hell, El.’

‘Like I say: Murdo and the boys would want to keep going anyway, so it’d be kind of academic. What could I do? Murder my three remaining brothers so I have a clear run at a scheme that isn’t going to work anyway? Kill Mum first to spare her the grief? So of course I’m saying no. But Don’s even more unreconstructed than the boys are; can you imagine how little faith he must have in them as the heirs to the family firm if he’s seriously contemplating turning everything over to me?’ She blows her breath out again. Thing is, I think Dad’s worried Murdo’s getting impatient, wanting him to stand aside, take a back seat; leave him, Fraser and Norrie to run things.’ She shakes her head. ‘Stewart, my family has as good as run this town for nearly a quarter of a century and in a bizarre kind of way we can be proud of how we’ve done, but in the end … it’s still based on nothing more than the threat of violence and the market for drugs. For all his faults it’s been Dad who’s held it all together and exercised the restraint required, but there’s no … no rightful authority, no democratic control, no oversight or checks and balances, no … It’s all … There’s no legitimacy. Violence and a market just mean … nothing. And I can’t see Murdo or the twins acting with any restraint at all, not once it’s all theirs. They think they’re ambitious and they talk about expansion and they use phrases like “grow the market”, but …’ She shakes her head again, lapses into silence.

Shit, what the hell am I supposed to say?

‘Maybe the law’ll change before it comes to any of that,’ I suggest. ‘Maybe it’ll all get legalised and you can turn legit, or just go back to running the property and transport businesses.’

Ellie shakes her head. ‘Maybe. Who knows. Maybe it’ll turn out our politicians aren’t all cowards or on the take.’

‘Aye, well, put like that, I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

She shrugs. ‘Things change, though. People are taking fewer drugs. Dad makes as much money through fake fags these days as he does from the properly banned stuff. Not sure any of us saw that coming, though we should have.’

‘Really?’

‘Ha! A packet of fags costs a pound fifty to make and six-fifty to buy, legit. You could charge half-price and still coin it in, not that Dad or Mike Mac are that generous, or stupid; it’d be like opening a discount warehouse for crims across Scotland.’

‘I had no idea.’

She nods. ‘Half the fags in the Toun – even more of the loose tobacco – never trouble Customs and Excise with the bother of collecting the revenue. It’d be a hundred per cent if the cops could live with it, but at that level even the doziest journo’s going to scratch their heads and think, Wait a minute …’

I do the cheeks-full, breath-blowing-out thing too.

After a while I say, ‘Course, there’s always Grier.’ I look for a reaction but El’s just staring ahead. ‘She might be up for it.’

‘Careful,’ El says, ‘for you tread upon my nightmares.’

I can’t help laughing. ‘She wouldn’t.’ I think about it. ‘Would she?’

El smiles. ‘No, she wouldn’t. And the boys certainly wouldn’t take orders from her. Plus, knowing Grier, this would be too small beer for her anyway. Too local, too limited, too … legacy-ridden. Mostly, though, too not all her own work.’

‘Do you two not get on at all, then?’

‘We get on fine,’ El says, almost indignant. ‘When we meet up.’ She shrugs. ‘We just take some care to make sure we don’t meet up too often.’

A hare darts across the road five metres in front of us and we do the first part of an emergency stop, tyres chirping, then the hare’s gone, missed by a half-metre or so – I catch a glimpse of it in the side mirror, leaping into the heather – and we’re accelerating smartly away again.

‘Fairly easy these days anyway,’ El says. ‘She’s never home. Posing naked on some tropical beach, as a rule. Which is what she’s supposed to be doing at the moment, of course. We did miss that hare, didn’t we?’

‘We did.’

‘Yeah. Good. Didn’t feel a bump.’

‘“Supposed to be”?’

‘Aye, left some shoot in Montserrat or somewhere, just walked out and flew home on no notice, left them short-handed or shorttitted or whatever the phrase is. We’ve had the agency on the phone at the house – much to parental consternation – and something called a Creative Director, and even a lawyer, issuing threats. Very unprofessional of the girl.’

‘You mean, like, just to be here this weekend?’

‘Yup. Never thought she and old Joe were even that close.’ Ellie clicks her mouth again. ‘Grier Shows Familial Emotion shock. Who knew?’ She flicks a glance at me. ‘Assuming that really is her reason. Like I say, with Grier, given it’s the stated one, almost certainly not. Made off with one of their cameras, too, and some incredibly expensive lens, apparently.’

‘Yeah, I bumped into her on the beach at Vatton forest yesterday. She had a camera with a big lens there. Went to see Joe, lying in Geddon’s, then had a coffee.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Ellie sounds like even this chance meeting might have been deeply suspicious, though I can’t see how.

‘So, what?’ I ask her. ‘Grier just upped and left as soon as she heard Joe was dead?’

‘Nope. Day or so after.’

‘Aha.’

‘Yeah. Ah-fucking-ha, as you might say, Stewart.’

*   *   *  

When Grier was fourteen she really wanted a horse but her dad wouldn’t buy her one. Ponies had been good enough for Ellie but then she’d kind of outgrown that phase and, besides, Grier wasn’t good with pets. She’d had various animals over the years and each time she’d doted on them for the first few weeks or months and then slowly lost interest.

Dogs especially; she’d play with them and take them for walks when they were still puppies and the weather was good, but then as they aged and the year turned wetter she’d find excuses, and other people in the family, usually Ellie, would have to take them for walks, or they’d just be left free to run around the garden. One Dalmatian, given the freedom of the Hill House grounds after Grier had found the animal too clingy and a bit stupid, had jumped over the wall into the path of a refuse truck and died messily. Grier had been less than distraught and suggested that the way was now clear to get a Samoyed, or maybe a Newfoundland. That kind of solidified Don’s attitude towards the subject of Grier and pets.

Still, she really wanted a horse; perhaps – Ellie reckoned when she told me this story – just because Ellie had only ever had ponies. Don usually indulged Grier in pretty much everything, but there was a feeling that, gradually, over the years, she’d made him look a bit more foolish each time she cajoled and convinced him that this time would be different and she could be trusted with a new pet, and now Don had finally decided enough was enough. There would be no horse.

Grier sulked mightily. There was some heroic door slamming. Don retaliated by having all the house doors fitted with those overhead hydraulic closing gizmos that close doors automatically and softly.

Grier took up golf, which, if it was a reaction to not being allowed a horse, probably wasn’t one that anybody would have anticipated. As was the case with most sports and hobbies that Grier could be bothered to pursue beyond any initially frustrating phase, she proved to be a natural, and got really good at it, about as good as it’s possible to get in the course of a year. She was quickly invited to join the regional youth team but turned them down. She abandoned the game completely and gave away the expensive set of clubs Don had bought her. She’d learned all she needed to know and she’d take the game up again when she was old and couldn’t do proper exercise. Don had taken the game up himself some years earlier and was struggling to get his handicap below twenty-five. How he felt about this casual, cavalier mastering – jeez, she learned so fast it was more like downloading – and abrupt dismissal was not recorded.

Anyway, the following spring, the main lawn of Hill House – the one visible from the lounge and the conservatory, the one that visitors to the house could see as soon as they came down the drive – suddenly erupted into flower, from bulbs somebody had dug into the grass the year before. The flowers made up a picture of a severed horse’s head, maybe five or six metres from the tip of its nose to the ragged bloody neck; red tulips stood in for the blood.

It wasn’t a particularly good portrait of a severed horse’s head, and it never really got a chance to bloom fully, but it was shocking enough. Mrs M nearly had a fit. The whole lawn was razed, ploughed and re-sown within a couple of days.

Don took Grier aside. At first she denied everything and suggested it might be some sort of underworld message from a business associate of Donald’s. Ellie heard that the resulting explosion of rage from her dad made Grier wet her pants; Donald didn’t hit her – he’d always skelped the children’s bums but stopped hitting the girls after they passed the age of about nine or ten – but Grier seemingly thought he was about to. She admitted it had been her.

Donald took the money for the re-laying of the lawn out of her allowance and told her she was getting away lightly. If she ever did anything that upset her mother like that again, she’d find her inheritance so reduced she’d struggle to buy a rocking horse.

‘Aye, she’s some kid,’ I said when Ellie first told me all this.

‘She’s frightening,’ Ellie said. ‘Fourteen-year-olds just don’t usually think that far ahead.’

‘Or use a combination of a Godfather reference and guerrilla horticulture in an elaborate and basically pointless form of revenge,’ I said. ‘I bet she’d make a great conceptual artist.’

‘We should be so lucky,’ Ellie told me. ‘Just pray she doesn’t go into politics.’

‘Grier said something weird the other day,’ I tell Ellie. ‘In the café, after we met on the beach?’

‘What?’

I tell her about Grier hinting Callum might have been pushed, rather than have jumped.

Ellie is silent for a disturbingly long time. I can’t read her expression at all. Eventually, in a flat voice, she says, ‘Well … there have been … Stuff’s been talked about. About Callum.’

‘Uh-huh?’

She shakes her head. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

‘Okay.’

Only neither of us seems to be able to think of anything else to talk about, so we drive on in silence for some minutes.

Ellie turns the Mini onto a little single track road that leads up through some trees to – according to a sign – Tunleet Reservoir. I vaguely remember this, from when I was exploring on my moped. The Mini works its way up the twisting, deteriorating road, crosses a cattle grid, then crunches its way over the gravel of an otherwise deserted car park in front of a boarded-up stone waterworks building at the foot of a grassy reservoir wall, just sliding into shadow.

Ellie makes a little noise of approval. ‘Looks like we’ve got the place to ourselves.’

We have indeed. It feels almost disloyal to Ellie, but I experience a tiny frisson of relief. I was – despite everything – part expecting to find a collection of Rangies and oversize pick-ups parked here, and the Murston boys standing looking mean and tap-tapping the thick end of baseball bats into their meaty palms.

Ellie and I walk up the grassy slope back into the sunlight and along the stone summit of the dam wall to a metal bridge over the overflow at the eastern edge. Beyond, the reservoir stretches out to the south-west. The whole place can’t help reminding me of the smaller dam and reservoir on the Ancraime estate where Wee Malky died, though this loch’s much bigger and in higher, more open country, like something exposed, peeled back and offered to an evening sky of ragged clouds and glimpses of a watery-looking sun.

We walk along a path to a small promontory about the size of two tennis courts laid end to end, jutting out into the sun-bright, chopping water. At the end, on a slight rise, there’s a wooden bird hide: seven-eighths of an octagon with slits roughly at eye height cut into the undressed wooden logs. Low platforms underneath are probably for kids to stand on so they can see out too.

There are a couple of sturdy backless benches in the middle of the space. We spend a little while looking through the slits at a few ducks and coots and a family of six swans cruising by, white feathers ruffled like the water, then we sit on the benches, under a sky still clearing of cloud.

A skein of geese flies overhead. The birds start swapping position as they fly above us and the faint sound of honking – half comic, half plaintive – sinks down through the breeze to us. Ellie sits back, feet up on the chunky beams of the bench. She hugs her knees.

‘Do you ever feel like you’re just waiting to die?’ she asks, not looking at me.

‘Umm … not really, no,’ I tell her. But I’m thinking, Fuck me, this is a bit heavy.

‘No? Sometimes I feel like that,’ she says, ‘Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen it all before, been everywhere, done everything, experienced everything, and you start to think, What else is there except more of the same, only maybe worse?’ She looks at me. ‘Yes? No? Anything like that? Or just me?’

‘Well, something like that, so not just you. Not so sure about the wanting to die bit. Though I suppose some people—’

‘Not wanting to die,’ she says. ‘Just … waiting for it to happen, when it does. Like you’re already anticipating the end.’ Her face scrunches up. ‘Do you know how long we’re expected to live? I mean, our generation? We could live to a hundred, easy. A hundred!’ She shakes her head, hair flung about her, then settling deftly. ‘I feel I’ve lived a whole life already, Stewart, at twenty-five. I look at kids half my age, or even just ten years younger and I just feel so … so distant from them. Was I that annoying, that precocious, that stupidly sure of myself, that shallow when I was their age?’ She shakes her head. ‘But that life expectancy means another three lives on top of this one. More, in a way, because you don’t have to go through half of each one being a kid.’ A shrug. ‘Except more decrepit in the last one or two, towards the end. Incontinence, dementia, deafness, arthritis. Back to being as helpless as a child.’

I nod. ‘Always good to have something to look forward to. Though we might have really good replacement stuff by then. And robots, to look after us, if our – if people won’t.’

‘Yeah, but something’ll get us in the end.’

‘Probably cancer. Unless the robots turn on us, obviously. Personally I’m hoping to die in my eighties, relatively young and still vigorous, when the father of the sixteen-year-old twins I’m in bed with bursts in and puts a laser bolt through my head.’

‘But do you see what I mean? Sometimes I feel like I just want to keep my head down, never get beaten up or raped, never become a refugee or a war widow, never starve or have to bury my own children … If I ever … But, just get out of this life without being hurt any more … And that’ll feel like victory, like getting away with it? Do you understand? I mean, not that I’ve been badly hurt, not really—’

‘Yeah, well. Not for the want of me—’

‘No. I mean not compared to women who have been raped or tortured or watched their loved ones shot in front of them. Not compared to somebody who’s been beaten up every night or been burned with acid or had their ears and nose cut off for leaving a violent husband. Compared to that, what you did to me was nothing.’ She looks at me. It’s a challenging look more than a forgiving one, so I choose not to say anything. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she says. ‘It was still stupid, selfish, petty, unbearably insulting at the time, but …’

‘But you still took me to the station.’

She snorts. ‘Ha! You could say that was just me being selfish, as ever. I didn’t want to see them kill you or maim you, or even know that they had. Didn’t want that on my conscience. I wanted to prove I was bigger than you.’

‘Well, I’m still grateful,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll never know how—’

‘Oh, it didn’t end there,’ she tells me. ‘I had to fight – I mean, shout and scream and threaten all sorts of grisly stuff, things I never thought I’d hear myself say … All to stop them sending somebody to London to do something horrible to you, or getting one of their underworld pals down there to take the job on, for a price or just as a favour.’

‘Jesus. I had no idea.’

And I really didn’t. Sure, when I moved down to London I kept my door locked and used the security camera when the bell went, and I didn’t walk down any dark alleys if I could avoid it, just in case a Murston brother came calling to administer a well-deserved beating, but apparently almost everybody in London does this risk-limitation stuff as a matter of course anyway.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m glad you had no idea.’

I leave it a few moments, then ask, ‘Why did you do it?’

‘What, spirit you away? Protect you?’

‘Yeah. There must have been part of you wanted the boys to give me a good kicking, right then.’

She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, there wasn’t. Not right then. I was in shock for all of about five seconds, then I just had this sudden, very … very cold, in a way, very adult feeling that, Well, that was that all over, there’d be no wedding, you and I were finished, I was on my own again, but, like, what could I do to keep the damage to a minimum? What was the best course of action? For me and everybody else? And getting you away as fast as possible seemed really obvious, just what needed to be done, for everybody’s good, not just yours. Even arranging a false trail, getting somebody – Ferg as it turned out – to order a taxi to the airport in your name just popped right into my head, right there. So that’s what I did.’

She looks at me with a strange expression, one I’m not sure I can read at all.

‘You want to know the truth?’ she says, her voice very languid, cool and poised. ‘I’ve rarely – maybe never – felt so alive, so in control, so good about myself, as I did that night.’

She looks away, sighs.

‘Didn’t last, of course. Cried myself to sleep for a week, raged and screamed at you, wished I had been more … vengeful. Used to fantasise, used to obsess about us meeting again and me walking up to you and slapping you so hard your teeth rattled. Put my reaction on the night down to shock, some misguided sense of loyalty to you or a residual need to protect you because I still loved you, or … Found an old shirt of yours, in my wardrobe,’ she says. ‘Still smelled of you.’ Another shake of the head. ‘Tore it, ripped it until it was practically confetti, until it looked like it had been through a shredder – and been out in the rain, because I was crying, howling so much – and while I was doing that, I really did wish you’d still been inside it, really did want you to have been the thing, the one that got torn to scraps and ribbons.’

She doesn’t look at me, just shakes her head, staring at the timber of the hide’s walls.

‘But I got through it. Things sorted themselves out. Things always do. We de-organised the wedding, I got on with my life, started going out again, meeting people. In the Toun and Aberdeen, and just chose not to hear the whispers and the murmurs, sympathetic or otherwise.’ She looks down, runs her hand along the worn smoothness of the bench. ‘Met Ryan. Well; started to see him as a man, not a boy? And so began another exciting adventure.’ She smiles at me. Ellie wears a watch. She checks it now. ‘Thought my stomach was trying to tell me something.’ She looks at me. ‘You hungry?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Want to come to mine for something to eat? It’ll just be pasta or stir-fry or something. You picked up any special dietary requirements while you’ve been in London?’

‘Thanks, I’d love to. And no; still omnivorous.’

At the same moment, though, I lose any appetite I had, as my belly contorts itself with another little tremor of fear. Or anticipation. I honestly don’t know myself.

We stand up. ‘This isn’t, you know, “coffee”,’ she tells me with a small smile. ‘You know that old thing?’

I manage a smile too. ‘From more innocent days.’

‘Just a meal, then I’ll take you back to your folks’.’

‘I know. Appreciated.’

‘Come on then.’

Going down the dark, grass slope, under skies turning orange and pink with the start of sunset, she slides her arm through mine. ‘Want to drive?’

‘Okay.’

‘No heroics? Nothing lairy?’

‘Promise.’

‘Deal.’ She hands me the Mini’s key.

So I drive us back to the converted mansion called Karndine Castle. I take it slow. It’s still not the smoothest of drives but that’s not my fault; the roads really are much more worn, rutted and potholed than I remember and there’s a lot of little jinks and sudden steering adjustments required. Respect to the girl; I hadn’t realised, earlier, how good a job Ellie was doing avoiding all this shit. I’m glad I’m not sixteen right now; this stuff’s bad enough in a car but potentially lethal if you’re riding a motorbike.

At the castle we climb a couple of grand, creaking old staircases – largely ruined by the fire doors and walls required for multiple occupation – and go on up a further curving flight to her apartment in a big, square, airy tower with three-sixty views over parkland, fields, forests and hills. No lurking Murston brothers leap from the shadows and pull me screaming down to some torture cellar. My insides relax a little and suddenly I’m hungry again.

She goes to the loo. I’m told to put some music on, make myself at home. What to choose? Be too trite to select something we both loved.

She was always a bit more into old Motown and R&B in general than I was. I go for R&B just as a genre and set it to play from the top, then quickly have to skip as the first track up is Amy Winehouse and ‘Rehab’. Given El’s day job that might sound contrived. Not to mention morbid. Next album. Angie Stone; nope, don’t know. Next: 75 Soul Classics; that’ll do. Archie Bell and the Drells with ‘Tighten Up’. Never heard of it. Also, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck a drell is meant to be.

Skip, skip. Aretha Franklin and ‘Think’. Finally.

I take a look about as the music starts to play. The furnishings are tasteful but sparse and there’s a careless, almost slapdash feel about the place, like she still hasn’t settled in yet or even entirely unpacked, though she’s been here over a year.

El reappears, minus fleece, with an open shirt, light blue, worn loose over her tee. ‘You can help if you like,’ she says.

‘Love to.’

The kitchen’s big; double-aspect to the south and the east. I sit at the breakfast bar as she sets a pan boiling for noodles and heats a wok for a stir-fry. I help her chop the veg, to be topped up by pre-prepared stuff from the freezer. We drink chilled green tea.

We eat in the kitchen, just nattering about old times and old friends, laughing now and again, as the monstrous shadow of the building is thrown longer and longer across the sheep-dotted parkland to the south-east. We clear up together and I am able to display my newly, London-acquired ability to stack a dishwasher. Mum would be so proud.

She puts the lights on later, and the kitchen glitters.

‘I better take you back,’ she says, after some very good espresso from a neat little machine. I have a much more impressive device back at the flat in Stepney – all gleamy red and chrome, with confusing dials, and more handles and levers than a person can operate at one time – which does no better.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Thanks for all this.’

That’s okay,’ she tells me. She shrugs. ‘Sorry there’s no invitation to stay.’

‘Don’t be sorry. And don’t be daft. Are you crazy? Just all this has been more than I deserve. You’ve been very … forgiving.’

‘Yeah, well. If only that was the worst of my faults.’

‘Oh, just stop it.’

She looks at me through narrowed eyes. ‘You would if I did, though, wouldn’t you?’

‘What, invite me to stay the night?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘Course I would,’ I tell her. I don’t think she’s actually going to, so I don’t bother telling her my nuts are quite possibly out of action – if I’ve any sense – for a day or two. ‘If that’s what you really wanted.’

‘I’m still not,’ she says, eyes flashing. ‘But, well …’

We’re both standing, maybe a metre apart, by the work surface. She looks down, picks with a thumbnail at something non-existent there, shakes her head. ‘I don’t know whether to feel flattered or just think, Men …’ She looks up at me. ‘I mean, I’m still not, but …’ She balls her hand into a fist on the work surface, and looks me in the eye. ‘That time Grier came to stay at your place, in London.’

‘Uh-huh?’

Ellie’s eyes narrow. ‘Anything happen?’

‘It was like the first night you and I slept together.’

She turns her head a fraction. ‘On the beach?’

‘Just sleep.’

‘She told me your hands were all over her.’

‘Is that what she told you?’

‘True, or not?’

‘Like you said, I’m not a blabber.’

‘Oh, yes, your famous policy: no kissing and telling.’

‘Yeah. Though I’m starting to think it’s just contrarianism on my part, not morality, because it’s what all the other guys do.’

‘And girls, as a rule.’

‘And girls. So, I just want to be different. And retain an air of mystery, obviously.’

She smiles slowly. ‘I’d still like to know. And you do sort of owe me, Stewart.’

‘Yeah,’ I breathe. ‘Guess I do.’ I spread my hands. ‘Anyway, I’ve already told Ferg. The loophole being, there wasn’t any kissing to tell about.’ El’s eyebrows go up at this point like she wants to protest at my double standards or something, but I talk on quickly. ‘It was the other way round: Grier was all over me. I mean not, nastily … Just, like, Oh, come on, and then, Okay, suit yourself … But … Well, there you go. We parted … a little awkwardly. I mean, still friends, or whatever we’d been to start with … but awkwardly. Didn’t see her again until this weekend.’

‘Huh,’ Ellie says. ‘Thought you’d want the complete set of Murston girls.’

I just suck in breath through pursed lips and frown at her.

Ellie picks up her jacket from the back of the bar stool. ‘Oh well. Thought so.’ She nods at my jacket, draped over another seat back. ‘Get your coat, love; you’ve pushed.’

I just smile, pick the jacket up, and we tramp creakingly back down through the wood-panelled excesses of the castle that never was.

She drives me back through a starry night, the Mini’s headlights piercing the fragrant late-summer darkness of the parkland around the old building, pulling us through to the stuttering streams of red and white lights marking the main road back into town.

Ferg rings my new phone just before we get to Dabroch Drive, wondering if I fancy a pint later, but I say no: long day, bit tired.

‘Bit fucking old, lightweight,’ Ferg tells me.

‘Whatever.’

‘See you at the funeral.’

‘See you then.’

We pull up outside Mum and Dad’s. Ellie leans over quickly and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow.’

I watch the Mini’s lights disappear round the corner, and touch my cheek where she kissed me.

‘Still more than you deserve,’ I murmur to myself.

I take a look round, checking for lurking Murston brothers or their vehicles, and keek through the hedge to check there’s nobody lying in wait there, then safely negotiate the path to the door, a cup of tea, some pleasant, inconsequential talk with Al and Morven, and bed.