Iain Banks - The Crow Road

"Oh for God's sake, Prentice," Ash said, turning her head to watch downtown Inveraray slide past. A minute later we were out, accelerating down the darkness of the loch side.

"Look," I said. "I was pretty fucked-up. I mean, I'm not saying it wasn't my own fault, Ash; I know it was. I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm just trying to explain that some crazy stuff can go through your head sometimes through love, or jealousy, and maybe, if it's triggered by something… I mean if somebody had actually given me a method of killing Lewis like that I'd probably have been horrified. I hope I couldn't even have thought about doing it any more once I knew it was possible. It was just a fantasy, a kind of warped internal therapy, something I day-dreamed about to make me feel better." I shrugged. "Anyway, that's the case for the prosecution."

Ash sat, mulling, for a while.

So," she said. "Have you checked out whether Fergus was alone the night Rory may or may not have gone to see him? I mean this whole thing falls to pieces if your uncle —»

"He was alone, Ash," I told her. "Mrs McSpadden had gone to visit relatives in Fife that weekend. Mum and dad had suggested the twins came and stayed with us. Fergus brought them over about tea time; I remember talking to him. He had a couple of drinks and then he left. So he was alone in the castle."

Ash looked at me. I just shrugged.

"Okay," she said eventually. She rested her elbow on the door, and tapped at her teeth with one set of nails. Her skirt had ridden up a little, and I stole the occasional glance at her long, blackly shining legs.

"So," she said later when we were in the forest, away from the loch side and a few kilometres out of Furnace. "What is to be done, Prentice?"

"I don't know," I confessed. "There's no body… Well, there is Aunt Fiona's, but that's neither here nor there. But Rory's still missing, in theory. I suppose I could go to the boys in blue with what I've got, but Jeez, can you imagine? Right, sonny, so you think this wee story that ye've read means yer uncle wiz kilt… Ah see. Would you mind just putting on this nice white jaikit? Aye, the sleeves are a wee bitty on the long side, but you won't be needing yer hands much in this braw wee room we've got for you with the very soft wallpaper."

We curved down into Furnace, the road finding the loch shore again. I could sense Ash looking at me, and chose not to look back, concentrating on checking the mirrors and the instruments. Eventually she took a breath. "Okay. Supposing Fergus did kill Rory, what did he do with the body?"

"Probably hid it," I said. "Not too near the castle… He had plenty of time; all night. He had a Land Rover; he could have got the bike in the back. Bit of a struggle maybe, but Fergus is a biggish lad, and a 185 Suzi isn't that heavy. It did occur to me he could have driven the bike himself with the body lashed to his back looking like a pillion. It's a bit Mezentian, but possible. But then he'd have had to have walked back from wherever he left it… " I looked over at Ashley, who was staring at me with a worried, even frightened expression. I shrugged. "But I think he took it up to one of the lochs in the hills, in the Landy; used the forestry tracks and dumped body and bike together into the water. There are plenty or places. The forest to the south of the castle, on the other side of the canal It's just full of little lochs up there, and there are tracks to most of them; it's the obvious… What's the matter?" I asked.

"You're right into all this, aren't you?"

"What do you expect?" I laughed, a strange, tight feeling in my belly. "What if I'm right? Jeez, this guy might just have killed two of my close relations; wouldn't you be kind of interested?"

Ash breathed out. "Oh dear, Prentice," she sighed, shaking her head and staring out of the window at the night as we swept through the forest towards Lochgair. "Oh dear, oh dear…»

We pulled up outside the Watt house in Bruce Street before eleven. Ash looked in the visor mirror again. She frowned and held her hair away from her face, turning her head from side to side. "Can't see a bruise," she said.

I looked over. "No, I think you're all right there." I spread my hands. "Look, I'm really sorry —»

"Oh, shush," Ash said. She nodded at the house. "Coming in?"

"Just for a minute. I'd like to ask a favour of your mum."

"Yeah?" Ash said, reaching into the back for her flight bag. "Let me guess; you want to get in touch with Uncle Lachy."

I turned the engine off and killed the lights. "Aye; I wondered if she might let me have his phone number in Australia. I'd like a wee word with him."

"Yeah, I bet you would."

We got out of the car and walked up the path towards the door.

I had a brief chat with Mrs Watt, gracefully refused a dram, and left after five minutes. A shower scattered raindrops in bright cones under the street lights as I drove away. I went up Bruce Street then took a couple of lefts onto the Oban road where it ran along the side of what had been the Slate Mine wharf.

When I saw the building site, I pulled in and stopped the car.

The site was lit with a sort of hollow orange dimness by the nearby sodium lamps. It was here I'd come with Ashley that night after Margot's percussive cremation; we sat here on the Ballast Mound, the World Hill. It was the night she'd told me about Berlin, the Jacuzzi, and the man who'd hinted there was some trick being played on somebody in Gallanach. She'd given me that piece of the Berlin Wall, shortly after we'd sat together here. The developers had been going to level the mound the following day, preparatory to putting up some new houses.

But it looked like they hadn't got very far.

The old wharf was derelict again; levelled all right, and with foundation trenches dug, but no more. Little wooden stakes were stuck into the ground near a few of the trenches; loose bits of wet string tied to them lay straggled across the ploughed-up ground. There were no earth movers or dumper trucks on the site any more, just a couple of loose piles of bricks, the bottom few layers already overgrown by weeds. A picket fence round the site had been knocked flat almost all the way round, and the developer's signboard hung flapping in the breeze, secured at only one corner to a rickety, lop-sided framework.

Gone bust, I supposed and, with a look at where the Ballast Mound had been, drove away.

The line went dead. Twenty thousand kilometres away — and a lot more than that if you took the satellite route my words had — a man put the phone down on me. I listened to the electronic buzz for a while, then replaced the onyx handset in its gold cradle.

I put my hands between my knees, looked out through my own reflection in the study windows to the darkness of the park and the string of orange lights along Kelvin Way, and felt a cold, sick feeling coiling in my belly. I was running out of excuses for doing nothing.

If Lachlan Watt had said "What?" or "How dare you! or something like that; even if he'd just denied it — indignant or amused — and perhaps especially if he asked me to repeat what I'd just said, I'd have had some doubt. But to put the phone down… Did that make sense? I mean, you're living quietly in Australia, the phone goes, and somebody you last remember as a kid in Scotland has the nerve to ask if you ever slept with his aunt in her marital bed. Do you put the phone down without another word it the answer's No?

Maybe you do. Everybody's different. Maybe I still didn't know enough. I lowered my head to the green leather surface of the antique desk and banged my head softly a couple of times, my hands still clasped between my knees.

I'd been putting this off for days. And anyway weeks had passed. First, Ashley's mum hadn't had Lachy's number, then she got it off somebody else in the family, then it turned out it was an old number (I hadn't tried it anyway) and he'd moved, then there was a delay getting the new number, and when Mrs Watt did phone up with it, I'd dithered. What was I supposed to say? How did I broach the subject? Come right out with it? Talk round it? Hint? Accuse? Make up some story about a just-discovered will, with a bequest to the one man she'd been unfaithful with? Or the one she'd most enjoyed being unfaithful with? Should I pretend to be a lawyer? A journalist? Offer money? I fretted for days and could have gone on doing so for months.