Quintin Jardine: Fallen Gods

Nobody could remember weather like it in June. "A side-effect of El Nino," the lovely weather woman on BBC Breakfast had described the phenomenon, on the third morning of the blizzards that swept the Scottish mountains, a savagely unprecedented sting in the tail of a winter which, after seeming for a while to be endless, had been interrupted by the wettest spring on record.

The hardy Highlanders had moaned their way through the dark months, counting at the same time the money as it flowed into the ski resorts, but even they found the summer snows too much to bear. On the second day, there was a report of a suicide on a remote farm, whose tenant had lost more than half of his sheep.

And then, on the fourth day, it was over, as dramatically as it had begun. The clouds disappeared, the temperatures rose overnight by as much as eighteen Celsius, and the snows melted in the course of half a day.

They poured into the mountain streams, which fed into the tributaries, which in their turn flowed into the River Tay, turning it into a sudden raging torrent.

The people on the North Inch of Perth knew what was coming; many of them had experienced it before, and had supposed that it could not happen again, even though in their heart of hearts they knew that it could.

A few piled sandbags in their doorways as high as they could, in the vain hope that they would prove an effective dam against the murky rushing water. The rest, those who had learned the hard lesson, moved as much of their furniture and as many of their valuables as they could into the upper floors of their terraced houses, and moved out to camp with relatives until the worst was over.

If they had stayed, they would have seen the river rise, little by little at first, then more swiftly, foot by foot, until finally it broke out, forming a new loch as it swept across the low-lying Inch, finding the streets and the waiting houses, making a mockery of the sandbags as it poured through them, finding the lower floors and cellars, and filling them to drowning depth.

Some had stayed, sitting safe upstairs, and even out on their roofs, in the blazing sunshine, watching the personal disasters unfold, and shaking their heads as they did. "This will never be allowed to happen again," the politicians had declared as the North Inch householders had cleared away the mud from the last inundation.

But all too often, the attention span of politicians lasts no longer than the next election, and so, inevitably, it had.

Meanwhile, three thousand miles to the west…

"It must have been a hell of a shock for you, with your husband just dropping in his tracks like that."

"Have you been playing football for long without your helmet?" Sarah

Grace Skinner asked, wryly, her voice suddenly brittle. "Of course it was a hell of a shock. All I could do was scream." Her mouth set tight for a few seconds. "Bob collapsing at my feet, I'm a damn doctor, and all I could do was stand there and scream."

Ron Neidholm's massive quarterback's hand enclosed hers. "Hey there," he murmured. His voice had always struck her as surprisingly gentle in such a big man; its contrast with the rest of his physical makeup had always amused her. Indeed it was that, rather than his rugged good looks, or the blueness of his eyes, which had caused the fluttering in her chest at their first meeting, thirteen years earlier. "Don't go taking the guilt on yourself," he told her, earnestly. "This is your husband we're talking about, and at your parents' burial into the bargain. Goddamn right you screamed. In your shoes I'd have done the same thing."

She glared at him across the small table, and then the moment passed, and her face creased into a smile. "Oh no you wouldn't," she retorted.

"You're a lawyer. First you'd have checked whether the ground was slippery, in case you could sue the funeral company, then you'd have gone straight home to look out the will."

He laughed out loud. "That's what you think of me, is it? I may have a law degree, but I've never practised, remember."

She took her hand from beneath his and reached out to touch his face, her fingers tracing its scars, gently, on his nose and above his left eye; then she slipped it inside his open-necked shirt, feeling the lump on his collarbone, the relic of an old fracture. "Maybe it's time you did," she whispered.

"Maybe it is," he admitted, with the awkward grin she remembered so well, 'but it's just I love football, Sarah. Even when I was at college, it was my whole life. Apart from you, that is," he added, quickly.

It was her turn to laugh. "I don't think so. That damn ball was always more important than me, when it came to the crunch. Pity help the woman who forced you to a choice."

"That's never happened: not even with you, if you remember. When I told you I was going to Texas to turn professional, you just said

"Fine. Good luck." You didn't give me any argument."

She leaned forward and looked him in the eye. "Would there have been any point?"

He shook his head. "No. To be honest I was glad when you took it so well. I had this idea that I'd come back from the season, whenever it ended, and you'd be there, waiting for me. Was I ever wrong, huh? Like

Babs Walker said, you got bored damn quick."

Her eyes narrowed, and her mouth tightened once more. "Yes, my dear friend Babs… devious little bitch that she is. I tell you, if she wasn't Ian Walker's wife I'd have knocked her head clean off her shoulders for what she did. I thought it was just going to be the three of us for supper, after Ian's evening church service. When I walked in there last night, and saw you…"

He grinned again. "I could tell, don't worry. When I caught the look on your face, I thought Oh shit! and tried to remember what I'd done to make you hate me."

"It wasn't you."

"I know that now, otherwise I wouldn't have dared suggest we have dinner tonight."

"In that case, I'm glad you understood: you never did a thing to make me hate you. No, it was Babs who got under my skin. I knew straight away it was all her idea; it's in her nature. She's supposed to be my best friend, yet she does things like that. She'll say she's only looking out for me, and I guess she thinks she is, but sometimes it's her motive I can't stand. She hated Bob from the start, you know."

"I'd guessed as much," he admitted. "She…" He was stopped in mid-sentence by a tap on the shoulder; he looked up, into the eager face of a middle-aged man.

"Mr. Neidholm," the intruder burst out. He had fine features, lank brown hair and wore a formal black suit. He was holding a white card, and a pen. Oddly he was wearing white gloves, but Sarah noticed blotches on his wrists and realised that he suffered from a skin disease. "I'm sorry to interrupt you and your companion, but I'm a shameless fan of yours," he gushed. "Would you be kind enough to sign this menu for me?"

The big, fair-haired foot baller smiled across at Sarah apologetically, then shrugged his wide shoulders. "Of course," he said. "Gimme it here." He took the card and the man's Mont Blanc ballpoint and scrawled a signature.

"Thank you so much," the man exclaimed. "You've made my summer." He turned to leave, then paused. "May I just say that I desperately hope you play at least one more season. Will you?"

Ron reached up and patted him on the shoulder. "We'll see," he said.

"In a couple of months I'll know for sure."

"That was really nice of you," she said, as the fan made his way back to his table.

"Comes with the territory; football's about guys like him, about little men with physical limitations to the point of handicap, even more than it's about the fat guys with dreams who dress up in the colours and make jackasses of themselves every Sunday in the season. I'm always available to someone like him. Besides," he added, with a grin, 'if I ever do practise law… not that I'll need to… he'll remember it, and so will everyone in this restaurant who saw us."