Iain Banks - The Crow Road

I sat back, shivering, legs out straight in front, arms behind, hands splayed on the rough concrete. I thought about them all. Dad, falling; Grandma Margot, falling. Darren, broken against the tomb-white concrete of a council litter bin; Aunt Fiona, through the windscreen of the Aston Martin, neck snapped, into the young trees by the roadside… and who knew what had happened to Rory? Well, in a day or two I was going to start trying to find out.

So far mum and I — with Ashley's help — had only dealt with the papers and files we had to, to deal with the legal formalities. But there was a lot more stuff to go through, and somewhere in all that bumf there might be something that would tell us about Uncle Rory, and why dad had always been so sure his brother was still alive.

But for all we knew he'd died a roadside death, too.

Uncle Hamish turned to me. "Swear he was still alive." He nodded, frowning at me. I raised my eyebrows, feeling very cold inside. Hamish nodded again. "Still alive; he said something to me. I swear Kenneth said, 'See? " Hamish shook his head. "Said that to me; said, 'See? without opening his eyes." He looked down at his rotating thumbs. His frown seemed to stop them. "That was what he said; and it was so… wrong; such a silly, silly thing to say, that I thought I must have only thought I heard it, but I'm sure, that's what he said. 'See? " Uncle Hamish shook his head. "'See? " He kept shaking his head. "'See? " He turned to me. "Can you credit that, Prentice?"

He looked away again before I could think of what to say. "'See? " he repeated to the tray with the ruined puzzle, and shook his head again. 'See? .

"Excuse me." Mum got up and left the room, crying.

Hamish stared at the cardboard puzzle. Aunt Antonia sat at the end of the bed, staring hollow-eyed at her silent husband. The tray over Uncle Hamish's legs started to vibrate. I could see the duvet over Uncle Hamish's thighs shaking. The bed began to squeak. My uncle stared, appalled, at the tray on his lap, as the little grey pieces of the up-turned puzzle migrated across the vibrating surface of the tray, gradually collecting against one edge.

The spasms in Uncle Hamish's legs seemed to grow more severe; the cup of tea I'd put on the bedside table near my right elbow snowed a concentric pattern ot standing ripples. I suddenly thought of the scene in The Unbelievable Prevalence of Bonking, when the tanks enter Prague. Uncle Hamish made a strange keening noise; Aunt Tone patted his feet under the duvet and rose from the end of the bed.

"I'll get your pills, dear."

She left the room. Hamish turned to me, his whole body shaking now, the puzzle on the tray starting to break up as the tray bounced up and down beneath it. "Jealous," Hamish croaked through clenched teeth. "Jealous, Prentice; jealous! Jealous! Jealous God! Jealous!"

I got up slowly, patted his trembling hands and smiled.

I've always had this fantasy that, after Uncle Rory borrowed his flat-mate Andy's motorbike and headed off into the sunset, he crashed somewhere, maybe coming down to Gallanach; came off the road and fell down some gully nobody's looked in for the last ten years, or — rather more likely, I suppose — crashed into the water, and there's a Suzuki 185 GT lying just under the waves of Loch Lomond, or Loch Long, or Loch Fyne, its rider somehow entangled in it, reduced by now to a skeleton in borrowed leathers, somewhere underwater, perhaps between here and Glasgow; and we all pass it every time we make the journey, maybe only a few tens of metres away from him, and very possibly will never know.

I know that dad — who had indeed assumed that Rory had been on his way here — drove the Glasgow road a few times, immediately after Andy and then Janice raised the alarm, looking for some sign of an accident, a skid mark, a damaged fence or wall, always wondering if maybe his brother was lying unconscious or paralysed in a field or a ditch somewhere, invisible from the road… But all he ever found were road cones, assorted litter and the occasional dead sheep or deer.

Whatever; neither dad nor the police ever found any trace of Rory or the bike. No unidentified bodies turned up that could have been his, and no hospitals received any unknown coma victims fitting his description.

I don't think any of us ever mentioned suicide, but I at least considered the possibility that he had killed himself. Rory had been depressed, after all; his one success had been a travel book written a decade earlier, and everything else he'd tried since had failed to live up to that; he had recently failed to become a TV presenter — a job he'd thought beneath him but which he needed for the money (and so had been all the more galled when he hadn't been chosen) — and maybe, too, he'd finally admitted to himself he was never going to write his magnum opus…

Hell, his life just wasn't going anywhere special; people kill themselves for poorer reasons.

I reckoned the chances of him being under the waves somewhere improved significantly if he had committed suicide; he could have picked his spot to drive straight at a wall or a crash barrier, maybe on top of a cliff. Could be anywhere. I could think of a few places, further north in the Highlands, which would be perfect. If he'd tied himself to the bike somehow…

But why go to the effort of doing that in the first place? It wasn't as though there was some big insurance sum involved, or any funny business with wills or family money. Rory had inherited some capital when grandad died, held in trust until he was eighteen; he'd used that up travelling round India the first time, then lived off the success of Traps and — later — the declining advances and journalistic commissions he'd received after that. When he'd disappeared he'd had a small overdraft.

Maybe he'd been murdered. I'd thought of that years ago, even on the evening we'd heard he was missing. I had been playing down on the shore of Loch Gair with Helen and Diana Urvill, and when we came back for our tea there was a police car in the courtyard of the house.

A police car! I recall thinking, getting all excited.

Of course, in my fantasy I was the one who discovered Rory's evil murderer and brought him to justice, or fought with him and watched him fall off a cliff or into a combine harvester or under a steam-roller or whatever.

Only I couldn't see that anybody had had much of a motive. It had crossed my mind that it might have something to do with Crow Road; somebody wanted to steal the idea and keep Rory out of the way, but it wasn't even as though there was much to steal. Notes and poems; wow.

I stood up on the silent concrete block and dusted my hands off. The disappearing clouds were the colour of dried blood in a sky gone close to purple. More stars were coming out. A contrail blazed pink overhead, as a plane headed for America. I looked at my watch; I had to go. I'd told mum I'd be back for supper in an hour or so. We were expecting Lewis and Verity that evening; they were flying up from London, where Lewis had been working, and they would hire a car at Glasgow. They might be back when I returned.

"Shouldn't have mentioned you," Uncle Hamish said, as I walked to the door of the dim bedroom. I turned back. He was still trembling. It hurt me to look at him, the way it hurts to hear nails scraped down a blackboard. "Shouldn't have said anything about you, Prentice," he said, the words whistling out between his clenched teeth. I could hear Aunt Tone's footsteps coming up the stairs in the hall outside. "Shouldn't have said, Prentice; shouldn't have said."

"Said what, uncle?" I said, hand on the door knob.

"That you were closer to me; that I'd won you, saved you from his heathen faith!" Uncle Hamish's eyes stared at me from a shaking, ash-grey face.