Six

Calum Wick looked around the big living room with an unexpected feeling of … fondness? Love? Well, maybe he wouldn’t go quite that far, but he had been so many times to the big stone farmhouse owned by Jack Scott that simply walking in through the front door and across the porch’s quarry-tiled floor was like slipping his arms into an old, shabby, very snug overcoat.

Shabby? Well, no, hardly that either. Completing the fantasy of wrapping that imaginary overcoat around him came when he passed the stairs where glossy toy soldiers stood in stone niches, and entered Bryn Aur’s living-room. It had been built in the late nineteenth century, had improved with age and was now stamped with the character of the ex-soldier who created exquisite military miniatures and helped the police solve intriguing mysteries. Twenty-five feet long and half that broad, the room had a floor of massive slate slabs scattered with rich Indian rugs beneath a low-beamed ceiling. Wall lights with tasselled red shades warmly illuminated white stone walls lined with bookcases. The door leading through to the kitchen and office had black iron hinges. There was a cavernous inglenook with iron dog grate, a basket of cut logs shedding dry bark, an Ercol coffee table and, well… .

Thoughts drifting, feeling a sudden and most unexpected warm glow, Wick kicked off his shoes, lifted his long legs onto the leather Chesterfield and stretched out luxuriously.

‘You all right there?’ Stan Jones said.

‘And why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right. This must be dead luxurious to a Scot used to livin’ in a stone bothy with a few scraps of peat smoulderin’ in a rusty iron basket and the smoke goin’ out through a black hole in the roof.’

‘My dear old friend, you are labouring under an awful misapprehension.’

Jones, an incorrigible Liverpool scally who was balding, whipcord thin and could have been fifty or ninety, scratched at the white stubble that he designed by the occasional trim with nail scissors, and grinned.

‘I was wonderin’, that’s all. I mean, what is it with you and Jack Scott? He makes toy soldiers; you paint them, but how did that come about? Did you come together with a bump, like, accidentally, and get stuck in a fuckin’ time warp?’

‘Fortuitously, not accidentally,’ Wick said. ‘And your suggestion of a bump is close to the truth, but much milder than the reality. To explain, I’ll need to go back a bit. Are you up for it?’

‘Sure, take your time,’ Jones said. ‘As long as there’s brandy in the bottle.’

Behind his paint-stained, wire-framed glasses, the bearded Scot’s eyes became thoughtful.

‘Scott was in the army,’ he said. ‘Royal Engineers, Paras, doing very well indeed. But something went wrong for him in Beirut. I don’t know the full story, but he killed an innocent man, decided enough was enough and at thirty he walked away and spent the next five years wandering aimlessly downhill in a hot climate.’

‘Cornwall?’

It was Wick’s turn to grin. ‘Actually, it was Australia. Jack Scott did everything from painting fences in the outback to conducting coach loads of tourists around Alice Springs and selling accident insurance on the streets of Sydney. Luckily for me, it didn’t work out. One rain-swept night soon after he returned to the UK he strolled into a spit-and-sawdust pub on the glistening streets of Brixton and saved me from a savage beating by three huge Yardies.’