2

The quickest road from the bridge to the Murston house doesn’t go through the centre of town. I almost take the slower route anyway, just to see what’s changed over the last five years, but the traffic’s heavy enough coming off the bridge and on all sides of the big roundabout beyond, so I take the Erscliff road and end up going past the old High School. It’s still there: three tall stone storeys and a Community College now; fewer outbuildings and huts than in our time, plus a bit sprucer, and grass where the tarmac playground used to be. We were there for only a year before we were moved to the achingly modern new school at Qualcults, on the other side of town.

I first saw the Murston house from a couple of the higher classrooms in the old school. It nestled in a little hollow between the two curved tops of a small hill a couple of kilometres away, just on the outskirts of town towards the sea. What fascinated me about it then was that it was only from those two or three classrooms on the top floor of the school that you could see the place; from the other classrooms, the playground and all the various routes to school it was effectively invisible. The house sort of peeped out through the greenery crowding around it, half hidden by tall round trees bunched on either side like green eruptions of water. The trees were so dense that even when they unleafed in the autumn you hardly saw any more of the house hiding amongst them.

Sometimes in winter there was snow up there for days before any appeared on the ground in the town and the house seemed like some sort of half-mythical mountain palace. I thought it looked very grand, remote and mysterious; romantic even. A view that met with some incomprehension and even derision amongst my school pals.

‘You sure you’re no gay, Stu?’ and ‘That’s old man Murston’s crib, fuckwit,’ were two of the more informative and useful comments. And of course you could see the house from various other places too: the top deck of the number 42 bus for a start, as it passed along Steindrum Drive, as a couple of people pointed out to me, and from Justin Cutcheon’s mum’s attic window if you stood on a crate.

Callum Murston denying it was his mum and dad’s house when I pointed it out to him from Art Room Two didn’t help demystify it either.

‘Hey, Callum,’ I said, ‘isn’t that your house up there, on the hill?’

Callum squinted, already frowning aggressively, and finally saw where I was pointing. ‘Naw it’s naw,’ he said, sounding angry and looking like he was going to hit me.

Callum was never far from throwing a punch when he thought people were taking the piss. Which, to be fair, we were all prone to do, though not quite as often as Callum assumed we were. Almost any other kid in school would long since have been kicked into a less hair-trigger attitude, but Callum was a Murston (a fact we’d known since primary school meant something serious in Stonemouth), his elder brother Murdo was the biggest kid in sixth year – even if he rarely resorted to blows – and Powell Imrie – Stonemouth High School’s very own Weapon of Mass Destruction – had already sort of aligned himself with the Murston clan. That made Callum pretty much untouchable, even when he was in the wrong. Unless a teacher got involved, of course; Callum had already been suspended once for violent behaviour and was on verbal warnings almost constantly. And he really did look like he was winding up to belt me.

So I backed off immediately, smiling and holding up both hands. ‘Sorry, Cal. Chill.’

He still looked angry but he let me walk away.

Just another Callum Murston WTF? moment.

By that time I’d come to accept that the place was the Murston family gaff and I just assumed he was denying it to fuck with me or because he was oddly embarrassed at coming from what was obviously a very large house, but it turned out later he honestly didn’t recognise it from that angle, and his in-head sat-nav couldn’t do the maths required to work it out. Callum never was the sharpest chiv in the amnesty box.

All the same, it was largely because of the house glimpsed through the trees that I persevered in getting to know Callum and becoming one of his friends, and it was largely through Callum – and the just-deceased Joe – that I got to know the rest of the family: Mr M himself (a bit), Mrs M (a slighter bit), Murdo (a bit more), Fraser and Norrie, the twins from the year below (fairly well) and, of course, Ellie. And Grier, her kid sister; I got to know her too and we even became sort of friends. But Ellie, mostly. Ellie more than all the rest, Ellie more than anybody ever, until I fucked it all up.

The cloud is clearing a little as I swing the Ka between the tall, ornate gateposts of the Murston house, high on the hill. It’s called Hill House, so no prizes for imagination there. A still-clinging haze to the east obscures the North Sea, and to the west the clouds glow yellow-orange and hide the north-eastern tip of the Cairngorms. The wrought-iron gates stay open these days, though they are electric and there is an intercom. The driveway snakes down through a broad slope of striped lawn studded with ornamental bushes and life-size statues of stags. I park between a sleekly silver four-door AMG Merc and a spanking-new green Range Rover.

The triple garage I remember has been joined by an added-on-looking fourth. There’s a wee boxy Japanese van parked outside it. The van’s filled with equipment and a compressor of some sort, hoses snaking into the open garage doorway. There’s a big foamy wet patch on the forecourt and inside there’s a monstrous pick-up truck. Its bonnet – hood – is as high as my shoulders. The badge says it’s a Dodge. The machine is truly vast; the new garage is wider and taller than the other three, as if built to contain the thing. The truck is gleaming: all massive chrome bull bars and deep, sparkling, flaked crimson paint with a rack of extra lights on a bar across the roof. Inside the four-door cab I can just see a Confederate flag stretched across the back. A guy in blue overalls appears from behind the truck and comes out, holding a duster. He frowns, then grins when he sees me. It’s Stevie Ross, from the year above me at school.

‘Hiya, stranger,’ he says, and comes up and shakes my hand. There’s some fast catching up – yes, me doing okay, thanks, him with this cleaning business, still playing in the band at weekends – and then I ask if the mega pick-up is Donald’s new toy or one of the boys’.

‘Nah, this was Callum’s,’ Stevie says, crossing his arms and staring at the thing. The registration plate reads RE8E1. Stevie looks proud and sort of reverent at the same time. ‘Hasnae moved for two years, apart from me pulling it out to clean it every few months and then rolling it back in again.’ He frowns at me. ‘You know about Callum, eh?’

‘Off the bridge,’ I say, nodding.

‘Aye,’ he says, voice a little quieter. ‘Well, this was his. This is what he left sitting on the bridge, night he jumped. Mr M had it brought up here, built this new garage for it. Keeps it nice.’ He nods approvingly. He glances back at the house, looks at me. ‘You okay to be here, aye?’

‘Yeah. Yeah; come to pay my respects.’

He looks at his watch. ‘Aye, well. Time to go. Got a stretch limo to clean for Party Wagons.’ He shakes his head. ‘Ye wouldnae believe the mess a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls can leave one of those things in.’

‘Don’t envy you.’

‘Aye, well, still; it’s dependable work. Every other fucker’s economising. Never mind. Good to see you, Stewart.’

‘You too.’ I leave him packing up and go to the front door.

A young Asian woman I don’t recognise answers the bell and shows me into the remaining conservatory. There used to be two; the other one was knocked down to make room for the new wing, sometime around the Millennium. Mr Murston will be with me shortly.

The conservatory is big, full of cane furniture with Burberry cushions. Two gleaming, life-size ceramic cheetahs stand guard at the double doors from the house. The conservatory looks out southwest across a terrace with a giant trampoline to one side and some wrought-iron furniture. The trampoline has lots of brown leaves on it. The table holds a collapsed giant parasol, green and white. The trees surrounding the house are mostly turning yellow, orange and red. Beyond, down in the haze, I can just make out a sliver of the town. I stand looking at it for a while. I can hear a radio or iPod playing pop somewhere in the house. I listen for some sounds from the erratic population of wee yappy dogs Mrs M has always favoured, but I can’t hear them.

After a few minutes I start to suspect I’m being put in my place by being made to wait, so I sit down, and wait. I pull out the iPhone. Normally I’d play a game or check emails, but all I do is Tweet where I am and put the phone away. Even that’s just a sort of residual paranoia; despite an initial burst of enthusiasm about a year or two ago, I never really got into Tweeting. I’ve taken it up again this weekend only as a security measure because I reckon there’s a chance, however slim, that convincing some bad guys who might wish to do you harm that, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, people know exactly where you are/where you were last seen alive (you always assume the extreme when you’re gaming these things in your head) will somehow put them off. Seems a bit ridiculous now, but there you go.

I sit, trying to identify the song playing frustratingly quietly in some other part of the house. It’s something really old; KLF possibly. The coffee table in front of me has copies of Vogue, Angling and Game, Fore! and Scottish Country Life, though they all look unread. I open a couple and they still have the insert flyers inside. A hefty pair of binoculars sits on a windowsill.

Before I ever got to know the Murstons or got invited to their house, a gang of us set off on an expedition to check the place out one sunny Sunday afternoon. There was me, Dom Lennot, Al Dunn, Wee Malky and Bodie Ferguson. We were almost but not quite past the age of playing soldiers, and we might have been indulging in an outdoor version of Laser Quest (the town’s own indoor arena, in an old bingo hall that had once been a cinema, had opened and closed within a year), or Paintball Frenzy (we were too young to use the real thing, on a farm near Finlassen) or possibly we were re-enacting some combat game. I wasn’t allowed any computer games at home at the time so I got to play only on other kids’ machines, but maybe it was Call of Duty, if that existed at the time, so perhaps we were US Special Forces moving stealthily in on a Taliban leader’s compound. Though, equally likely, we were mujahedin sneaking up on a US Marine base – we were kind of promiscuous that way.

Around the house were the sheltering trees, themselves surrounded by broad clumps of gorse and broom and, a little further down, tilted meadows where sometimes horses and sheep grazed. Lower down the hillside, beyond a straggled line of trees, lay the long, wavily manicured fairways of Jamphside Golf Club. We argued about whether to avoid the course altogether – it was only the second-most exclusive club in the area, but it was the most forbidding, surrounded by fences and great thickets of jaggy whin and bramble, fiercely patrolled by some very humourless and proprietorial ground staff. Having the effrontery to cross its sculpted, obsessively tended greens was not like louping across the scruffier municipal course down by the firth or even braving the dunes, gorse and sands of Olness, the older links course on the coast, cheerily pretending obliviousness to any distant yells from annoyed golfers. Still, we decided to go for it, crossing at what we were assured by Wee Malky was the narrowest part of the course – his granda had been a green-keeper so he claimed local knowledge.

We found a way over a fence using a handy tree, used a sort of tunnel through the whin that was probably a deer route and got to the edge of the twelfth fairway to find there was only one group of golfers within sight, heading away from us. We’d probably have been fine except that Dom, who always had been one of the class bampots, suddenly decided it’d be the height of wit to deposit what he described as ‘a big steamin tolley’ down the nearest hole (which happened to be the eleventh). The rest of us, in our twelve-to-thirteen-year-old wisdom, had thought Dom had grown out of this sort of frankly childish nonsense, but obviously not. Dom spent most of his time indoors playing computer games so maybe all the fresh air had gone to his head.

‘Aw, Dom, for fuck’s sake!’

‘Dinnae be fucking daft, man!’

‘I am not staying to witness this!’

‘You’ll get the jail!’

‘Fuck this.’

‘Naw, ah am. Ah’m drappin one in that hole, so ah am. An youse are comin wi me.’

That would be, in order: me, Al, Ferg, Wee Malky, me again and then Dom talking there.

Dom was the biggest, bravest and most fighty of us, and so when he said we were coming with him we would naturally tend to do as we were told. However, I’d put on a significant growth spurt that summer and I’d beaten Dom in an impromptu wrestling match in his garden the day before, and while wrestling never had counted as a definitive skill when it came to settling seniority in a bunch of Stonemouth kids – not the way a proper fight did – it still meant something.

It was a fluid kind of time around then anyway; fights – whether in the playground or in parks or waste ground after school – were starting to go out of fashion, as some of us decided it was a rough and uncivilised way to decide who was top dog. A few radicals even suggested that the defining trait ought to be who had the best exam results, but that was obviously taking things too far so we’d sort of opted for whoever was most cool, and fighting was just starting to look a bit uncool. Anyway, I was the only one who didn’t go with the main squad towards the eleventh green, up on a slight rise to our left. I just jogged off for the shelter of the long rough and whin on the far side of the fairway, shaking my head. Dom looked like he was about to run after me and tackle me, but we already knew I was a faster runner than he was, so he stayed where he was. The rest stayed too.

‘You’re fuckin dead, Gilmour!’ Dom shouted after me.

‘Aw, Stu, dinnae. Come on.’ That was Al.

‘You’re such an only child, Stewart!’ Ferg yelled.

‘You’ll get the jail!’ (Wee Malky, confusingly.)

And so I was able to watch from the perfect cover of a little whin-covered hillock as the next group of golfers appeared over the rise just as Dom got his trousers down and started squatting over the hole. Al was holding the pin.

The four golfers stood open-mouthed for a moment, then yelled, abandoned their bags and charged. Worse, there was a pair of green keepers in a sort of wee, fat-tyred flatbed truck just behind and to one side of the group of golfers. The wee truck overtook the golfers before they made the green.

Dom was no problem; he was still trying to get his trousers back up, and fell on his face when he tried to run. The greenkeepers shot past him and raced after the rest of the gang. They’d made the elementary mistake of keeping together and running back the way we’d come, rather than splitting up, so while they made it as far as the gap in the whin and piled into it with the sort of alacrity rats up drainpipes could only dream of, the greenkeepers were right behind them. They caught Wee Malky by the ankles and dragged him straight back out again. The fastest of the pursuing golfers held the now howling Wee Malky while the two greenkeepers disappeared into the deer run; you could watch their progress by the line of shaking whin bushes. Two of the other golfers were sitting on a raging and shouting Dom, just off the green. One of them was skelping him across his still-naked bum with a golf glove. Tad fruitily, I thought. I saw Ferg and Al make it as far as the fence; the greenkeepers caught them while they were frantically trying to climb it.

Wee Malky wriggled free and made a dash for the same gap in the whins he’d already been pulled out of, but fast – and desperate – though he was, his wee legs couldn’t outrun the long adult strides of the golfer who’d caught him; he was scooped off the grass and held firmly, wriggling and wailing, against the guy’s chest. I’ve thought back on that final, minor detail of the whole sorry adventure many times since then, and seem to remember that there was something in equal parts heroic and hopeless in Wee Malky’s stubborn refusal to accept he’d been caught, and in his attempt to get away a second time; something somehow life-affirming but ultimately tragic about his struggle to escape his fate.

But that’s probably just a kind of morbid sentimentality, the effect of knowing what would happen on the overgrown fringes of the Ancraime estate, in the sweaty height of high summer, a few years later. At the time, no matter what I like to think I remember, it probably meant nothing special at all.

I slipped away through the bracken, heading uphill for the trees and the meadow, careful to move with as little disturbance as possible, but I was never in any real danger. I heard distant yelling, adult and kid, but it was faint. There could be some blowback because of this – Dom in particular might want to exact some retribution for my abandoning ship – but I thought I’d been sensible and they’d been stupid and, what with my new-found semi-parity in the pecking order, it didn’t bother me too much. I’d got away, it was a fucking lovely day, and I might finally even get to see something more of the fabled Murston house.

Beyond the line of trees, the steep meadow led up into the fields and then the gardens of the house, though the building itself was still unseen, hidden by the undulations of the hill.

I saw the girl riding the horse then; a brief, lithe vision on a blond horse at a half-trot, moving daintily across the sunlit higher field. The girl gave a little kick, the horse picked up speed and they jumped a small hedge, disappearing.

I’d caught only a glimpse of her, but she’d been beautiful: graceful, long legs and a serene face on a slender neck, her hair either short or gathered up under her riding hat.

It was Ellie, I think. When I mentioned this to her years later she wasn’t so sure, and said sometimes her friends came and rode her ponies – not horses, at the time – so she couldn’t be certain. But I’m sure it was her. Probably. I guess I’d heard of her by this time but I don’t think I’d seen her, even around town. Both the Murston girls were sent to the Stonemouth Girls’ Academy rather than have to rough it with their brothers in the High School, so this was quite possible. Anyway, seeing her there only added to the mystique of the half-hidden house on the hill and made me all the more determined finally to cop a glimpse of it close up.

So I climbed up a steep grass slope at the side of the meadow, crossed the field and a barbed-wire fence, then worked my way up through the tangle of whin, broom and bramble to the trees. I kept looking for the girl on the horse but I didn’t see her again.

I saw the house, at last, from halfway up a tree.

It was a little disappointing, frankly, after all the build-up I’d given it: just a big house with lots of garages and outhouses, not especially old, maybe sixties vintage, possibly originally a bungalow but with lots of big dormers and Veluxes and various bits added on: two conservatories and a substantial structure along one side of the house, which was all windows and blinds and white columns. Some of the blinds were raised to show there was a swimming pool inside. A couple of cars were parked outside a triple garage; a winding slope of drive led through a front garden of lawn and trimmed shrubs to two tall, ornate gateposts on the skyline, the black wrought-iron gates forming the only gap in a high stone wall.

I looked back to the house, and saw that a man in an upstairs room was watching me through a big pair of binoculars. I froze, then grinned, waved and got down out of the tree as smartly as I could. I ran down the hill, expecting to hear dogs yowling after me. I skirted the perimeter of the golf course, not daring to cross it, and got wet up to my knees crossing the Kinnis Burn before achieving the relative safety of the play park by the Meriston Road Recycling Centre. I took a long route home to help everything dry off and was back in time for tea.

At school the following morning the whole thing had been spun into a daring raid on a repressive bastion of adult privilege and Dom had merely been exposing his naked behind to the dozen or so men – who’d finally caught them after a long chase – to express his contempt for a prescriptive society and its piffling rules. The real story had leaked, of course, and was already being sniggered over throughout the school, but such was the public line.

The guys got off with a caution eventually, though Dom was singled out for the evil eye by the cop delivering the finger-wagging and told We’re On To You, Laddie.

‘Mr Murston says to see you now,’ a female voice says, and I follow the Asian girl through the house.

‘I’m Stewart,’ I tell her as the pop music gets gradually louder (Now Playing: Prince & the New Power Generation – more early nineties stuff). ‘And you are …?’ I ask her. (I’m opposed to all this nameless servant shit.)

‘Maria,’ the girl says, opening the door to the pool/fitness suite annexe with all the windows and blinds and white Greco-Roman columns. She’s gone before I can say Nice to meet you, and I’m confronted with Donnie Murston, the not yet greying head of the Murston clan, dressed in baggy shorts and a torn-sleeveless Massive Attack T-shirt. He’s stomping around on a giant mat with flashing coloured splodges all over it like some demented version of Twister, working out to what looks like some weird knock-off version of Dance Challenge, facing the biggest plasma screen I’ve ever seen and trying to follow the steps of a dancing pink dragon. The tiny wee man from Paisley Park is crooning something about how money don’t matter tonight while Mr M tries to synch his shapes. This must just be coincidence; I never had the Don down as an ironicist.

He glances at me. ‘Aye. It’s yourself, Stewart.’

Hard to argue with that. I nod, though he isn’t looking at me. ‘Evening, Mr M.’

‘Too feart to call me Donald these days, eh, Stewart?’

Five years ago I’d have been all defensive or denying after a remark like that, talking away and saying Certainly not, just been a while, not wanting to take anything for granted, you know … or gone the other way and said Hell, yeah, utterly terrified; you’d be able to hear my knees knocking if the music wasn’t so loud. Now I’m the wrong side of twenty-five – if only just – so I’m practically grizzled. Anyway I know when to shut up and say nothing. So that’s what I do. Mustn’t forget I’m here on sufferance, to bend the knee, kiss the ring, whatever. All the same, I smile a little, just to show I’m not that intimidated, if he looks at me.

After a little while, though, when he still doesn’t look at me or say anything, I say, ‘So how are you, Donald?’

He holds up one hand to me, wordlessly concentrating on his steps as the song comes to its end. When it stops he taps a small black circle in the corner of the mat, freezing the screen and pausing the next song before it can start. He turns to me, grabs a fluffy white towel from the back of a white leather recliner. ‘Bearing up, Stewart. We’ll all miss the old guy.’

‘Aye, well, I was sorry to hear. He had a—’

‘Still, we all have our time, don’t we?’ he says.

‘I suppose,’ I say.

Mr M nods, and inspects me, taking his time to look me down and up as he towels off round his face and neck. Mr M is fifty or so but in reasonable shape for a man of his age; I’m guessing he still swims in the pool and uses all the gym gear cluttering this end of the pool complex. He’s got the dark-sand hair of most of the Murstons, a pale complexion and big dark brown eyes (though not as big and brown as Ellie’s). Stubby nose, broken from his days as a boxer in the Youth Club. Full lips (though not as full as – well, you get the idea). Bit of a barrel chest: long back, short legs. He doesn’t look that menacing, but there you go; doesn’t wear a black hat, either.

The Murstons were poor farmers just two generations ago, then some arguably (depends who you talk to) shady deals with other farmers in the area made them not-so-poor farmers. Their real fortune came from timber first, then peat. Now they have a thriving road haulage business and an extensive regional property portfolio. The machine harvesting of peat in the great bogs that start twenty kilometres to the north-west still represent the family’s main business. In theory.

He nods, inspection finished. ‘Done all right for yourself, Stewart?’

‘I—’ I begin.

‘Or just putting on an act, eh, dressing up?’

The breath I was going to use to speak sort of collapses out of me, but I smile as tolerantly as I can. ‘I’m doing okay.’

‘What is it you do, anyway?’

‘Lighting.’

‘Lighting?’ He frowns. At this point, people usually ask whether I mean stage lighting, or selling table lamps in B&Q. Donald, however, just keeps frowning.

‘Buildings,’ I tell him. ‘Commercial, public; some industrial. Occasional private commission. Exteriors, mostly.’

‘Lighting,’ he says. He does not look especially impressed.

‘Aye, lighting.’ The look he’s giving me, I’m starting to get unimpressed with it myself.

His eyes narrow a little. ‘How’d art school lead to that?’

‘Pretty much directly,’ I tell him. ‘I was sort of headhunted, after my degree show.’

‘Uh-huh. Where you based?’

‘London. Well, in theory. I’m rarely there. It’s an international consultancy.’ He’s still just staring at me. I don’t know if that’s contempt in his eyes or indifference. Always found it difficult to read Donald. ‘Just been made a partner,’ I tell him. ‘The youngest.’ Still no reaction. ‘Youngest ever,’ I add. Not that the firm’s really old; it only goes back to the seventies.

‘Aye, very nice,’ he says, in that manner that implies that what he really means is, Well done getting away with it so far, ya chancer.

I grin. Partner. This happened just last week and it’s still sinking in. The only people I’ve told here in Stonemouth are my mum and dad, by phone the evening I heard, and I’ve sworn them to secrecy. Fucking partner. I thought I’d be ancient by the time that happened. Fucking cool for me. I grin again. ‘Keeps the wolf from the door, Donald.’

He nods again, sucking his lips in. ‘I think I prefer “Mr M”,’ he tells me. I want to say that he smiles, but really he’s just revealing his teeth. He’s had his Hollywoodised, too. Only slightly frightening. ‘If that’s all right with you,’ he continues, throwing the towel back onto the recliner and crossing his arms. ‘Let’s not pretend everything’s hunky fuckin dory, eh? Or you’re still always welcome in this house, eh, Stewart? Not after what you did,’ he says.

Shit. That turned nasty bewilderingly quickly. I take a deep breath. ‘For whatever it’s worth, Mr M, I’m sorry,’ I tell him.

‘Uh-huh. Well, I’ll tell you straight, son: if it was up to me you still wouldn’t be back here. Be another five years, maybe more, before I’d be happy you showing your face around here.’

What would it be worth to tell him Fuck You; this is my home town too and I’ll come back any time I fucking want?

I’d be lucky to make it out of town alive. Well, a slight exaggeration, I suppose; I’d be lucky to make it out of town with a working pair of kneecaps, or hands that would ever play the violin again (not that I can now, but you know what I mean). Anyway, the sad thing is that he does have a point.

I don’t say anything, just look down a little, staring at the giant beetle on his T-shirt, and nod thoughtfully. I could say I’m sorry again, but I’ve already said it once. Wouldn’t want to devalue the sentiment.

‘You’ve Mrs M to thank for bein here,’ he tells me. ‘Put in a good word for you. Think yourself lucky I listen to her and no the boys.’

The tiniest frisson of hope – excitement, even – runs through me. Mrs Murston never really gave a damn about me either way, but she’s butter in her eldest daughter’s hands, so more likely the appeal for clemency came from Ellie, not Mrs M herself. It’s worth hoping so, anyway.

‘How is Ellie?’

Donald puts his head back, his expression cold. ‘How is Ellie?’ he repeats. I’ve got a quite different feeling running through my guts now. That repeating-what-the-other-person’s-just-said thing is not a good sign with Mr M. Fuck, why did I ask that?

‘She’s none of your fucking business, that’s how she is,’ he says. His voice is a grinding monotone, like two heavy plates of glass sliding over each other. He glances at the double doors leading back into the rest of the house. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

I look down at the floor, nod. Even less point saying any further Sorries, now. ‘Thanks for seeing me, Mr M,’ I mumble, and turn, walk.

As I draw level with the glazed ceramic cheetahs, he says, ‘Just here for the weekend.’ He says it like that; if there’s a question mark in there, I’m not hearing it.

‘Due to leave Tuesday morning,’ I tell him.

His eyes narrow just a fraction more. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Good.’ He turns and stamps on the corner of the dancing mat like he’s squashing an insect the size of a locust. The paused dragon on the plasma jerks into life.

I leave to the strains of early Take That. I don’t see Maria. By the side of the front door there’s a big photo of the late Callum, framed in black. I didn’t notice it on the way in. Callum – big-boned, prominent jaw and brow, with a shaved-sides haircut uncomfortably close to a mullet and wearing a padded check shirt that looks like it’s been ironed – stares out at me with a sort of leery scowl.

I let myself out.

Somewhere in the house, a tiny-sounding dog is barking hysterically.