Iain Banks - The Crow Road

"Yeah. Basically what he's saying is, it's a piece of piss."

"Absolutely. A doddle."

"Great. So when can we expect to see some results?"

"No idea. Don't forget the guy's doing it for fun, and he's a busy man. No promises, but he sounds confident. I'll call him in a week if he doesn't get in touch first."

Tell him I'll fax him a crate of champagne or something."

"Certainly. So, when…? Ah shit. Fucking decollator's jammed again. Gotta go attend the print, Prent."

"Okay. Bye. Oh, and thanks."

"…»

I now had a better idea of what Rory had been doing in the days before his disappearance. It looked like he had been working on Crow Road between the time he'd come back from London after seeing his friends and the evening he disappeared, on the motor bike he'd borrowed from his flat-mate. That was what he'd been doing, stuck in his room in the flat in Glasgow; finally actually writing something on his bizarre contraption of a computer.

He'd done it, he'd stopped writing notes and started on the work itself.

I'd talked to a retired policeman who at the time had looked — briefly — into what had happened to Rory. The police hadn't come up with anything; they'd interviewed Janice Rae, and Rory's flatmate Andy Nichol, and looked at the papers Rory had left with Janice. There was no suicide note, so they'd decided the papers weren't relevant. Apart from checking the hospitals and eventually listing Rory as a Missing Person, that had been that.

The only useful information I'd got from the police was that Rory's flat-mate had left local government and joined the civil service a few months after Rory had disappeared. I'd tracked Andy Nichol down at a tax office in Plymouth and called him there, but apart from saying he'd heard a lot of keyboard-clattering noises coming from Rory's room during the days before Rory had borrowed his bike and disappeared, he'd only been able to confirm what I already knew. He did say he'd tried working Rory's Neanderthal computer after dad had said he could have it, but he couldn't make the beast work; he'd sold the machine and the two blank disks that had come with it to a friend in Strathclyde University. It had been chucked out years ago.

… Whatever; after those few days work, Rory had suddenly upped and offed, and never came back. Maybe the stuff on the disks would give me a clue why he'd suddenly done that. If there was anything useful there; that clattering noise didn't prove anything… I'd seen The Shining.

The cloud cover started to break up over the midlands; I chomped through my lunch. The starter was smoked salmon. I thought of Verity and Lewis, on honeymoon in the Bahamas, and — with just a tinge of sadness — silently wished them well.

I saw Ashley come into the pub. She stood near the door, looking round, that strong-boned head swivelling, those grey eyes scanning. She didn't see me on the first sweep; I was mostly hidden by other people. I watched her take a couple of steps forward, look round again. She was dressed in a dark, skirted suit, under the old but still good-looking jacket I remembered her wearing at Grandma Margot's funeral. Her hair was gathered up and tied; she wasn't wearing her glasses. Her face looked tense and forbidding. She seemed harder, more capable and more self-contained than I recalled her being in Scotland.

In those few moments, in the noise and smoke of a pub by the river, a quarter mile from the Tower, in the great, cruel, headless monster that was London after a decade of Hyaena rule, I wondered again at my own feelings for Ashley Watt. I knew I didn't love her; she didn't make me feel anything like the way I had about Verity, and yet I'd been — I realised — looking forward to seeing her, and now that I had seen her, just felt, well… happier, I guess. It was all puzzlingly simple. Maybe — to lapse into the humdrum continuum for a moment — she was the sister I'd never had. I remembered the mascara mum had discovered in my hair after the wedding, and wondered if the position of honorary sibling was one Ashley would entirely welcome.

I tried to remember Ashley's tone when I'd rung her, a couple of days ago, to say that I was coming down (this about a week after I'd had my own personal info-dump on the workings of the world computer network). I had already called Aunt Ilsa and arranged to stay with her and Kentledge Man, and I'd wondered at the time if I'd detected the merest hint of reproach in Ashley's voice when I'd told her I would be staying in deepest Kensington. At any rate, she'd told me there was a sofa-bed and a spare duvet of indeterminate tog value at the flat she shared in Clapham, in case Aunt Ilsa went on some sudden expedition to Antarctica and forgot to tell her Filipino maid, or whatever. She'd added that the two girls she shared with really wanted to meet me (I felt pretty sure the person they really wanted to meet was Lewis).

I raised my hand as Ashley's gaze passed again over where I stood; she caught the movement, and that city-hard expression changed instantly, relaxing and softening as she smiled broadly and walked over.

"Hiya, babe." She punched my shoulder, then gave me a big hug. I hugged right back. She smelled of Poison.

"How are you?" I asked her.

She put one fist on her hip and held her other hand up in front of my face, fingers spread. "Drinkless," she grinned.

"You got off?"

"Yeah," I said, swirling the remains of my pint round in my glass.

Ash shook her head. "I thought you were going to plead guilty."

"I was," I confessed. I shrugged, looked down. "I got a smart lawyer. She said it was worth fighting. Ended up in a jury trial, eventually."

Ash laughed. "Well done," she said. She lowered her head until she could look into my eyes. "Hey, what's the matter?"

"Well," I said, trying not to smile. "I did do it after all; it seems wrong I got off because I dressed in a suit and I could afford an expensive advocate and people in the jury had heard of dad and felt sorry for me because he'd died. I mean if I'd come from Maryhill and I wasn't reasonably articulate and didn't have any money, even if I had just forgotten I hadn't paid for the book, I bet everybody would have told me to plead guilty. Instead, thanks to the money, I had an advocate who'd probably make God look just a little lacking in gravitas, and discovered a talent for lying through my teeth that promises a glittering career as a Sun journalist."

Ash leaned conspiratorially forward over the small table we were crouched round, and quietly said, "Easy, boy, you're on their turf."

"Yeah," I sighed. "And don't drink the tap water." I looked around the place, all crowds and smoke. The English accents still sounded oddly foreign. "No sign?" I asked.

Ash looked round too, then shook her head. "No sign."

"You sure he drinks here?"

"Positive."

"Maybe he's been sent away, back to the Gulf." Ash shook her head. "I spoke to his secretary. He's having some root canal work done; he's here till the end of next week."

"Maybe I should have just arranged to see him." I sighed. "My new-found talent as a con-man might have come in useful. I could have said I had pictures of Saddam Hussein torturing a donkey, or something."

"Maybe," Ash said.

We had discussed this sort of thing. Ash's first idea was simply that she should ring him up, tell him she'd seen him on television and heard he worked in London; she was here too, now, and did he fancy a drink sometime? But I wasn't sure about this. If he'd been reluctant to give Ash his name in Berlin, and thought even there that he'd already said too much, he might be suspicious when she rang up. So I felt; so my — by now rather paranoid — feelings suggested. A chance meeting seemed more plausible, or at least it had when I'd been talking to Ash from dad's study in Lochgair. Now I wasn't so sure.