She gave a soft whistle, and smiled. "They might enjoy it, but it would be a nightmare for me. Mark isn't exactly an outdoor boy; he's a mathematician and a computer buff, and he's happy anywhere with a telephone line. But James Andrew is action boy personified. As soon as I turned my back on him he'd be halfway up a tree. As for Seonaid, it's early days yet, but she's showing signs of turning out the same way. No,
I haven't decided what to do with it yet. I have been toying with an idea, though, of giving it, or at least making it available to, an outfit that works with deprived inner-city kids. What do you think?"
"I think that would be very noble." He looked at the heavy logs that formed the walls. "The structure would make it pretty difficult to spray-paint, and they'd probably take their knives away before they brought them up here, so you wouldn't have gang symbols carved anywhere."
"Cynic," she laughed. She stepped back from him, holding on to his left hand. "Speaking of getting back to Buffalo," she said, 'as we were, how long have we got here? When should we be thinking about heading back to the airfield? I know you've been flying for a few years now, but we don't want to take any chance of doing it after dark.
Your plane isn't that big."
His face creased into a broad grin. "You know what the private pilot's greatest enemy is? Fog, that's what. Why, you can have what looks like a perfect day, just like this, yet the temperature can change just a degree or two and great banks of the damn stuff can appear out of nowhere. And when they do, only the big aircraft can fly."
Without warning he gazed out over the lake then pointed, with his free hand. "Hey, over there; I'm sure I can see a fog bank, can't you?"
She looked out over the shining water. "No', she replied. "I don't believe I can."
"What the hell," he chuckled. "It was worth a try. The stuff is so damned unpredictable after all."
"Yes, I've heard that. And you know what? I can be pretty damned unpredictable too." She held his hand against her face, and kissed it.
"If we'd been somewhere else, and the moment had been right, I might just have seen that fog bank. But not here, Ron; not here."
Nine
Afternoon was turning into evening as Martin rang the doorbell, and waited. He was no longer in uniform, but dressed in jeans, a white tee-shirt and a black bomber jacket that he had owned for years. Its leather was creased and softened with wear, and it was the most comfortable garment he had ever known.
The day had gone from warm to hot, but the air conditioning in his new
Mondeo was efficient, and so he was comfortable despite the seventy-five-mile drive.
Rather than the few moments he had expected, his wait turned into minutes. He rang the bell again, frowning. Finally, the heavy front door opened.
The man who stood there was wearing only shorts and trainers, and was glistening with sweat. He was taller than Martin at around six feet two, and looked at least ten years older. His face was lined, with a deep scar above the nose, and his gun-grey hair was sticking to his temples and standing up in spikes on top. But his body was that of a much younger man, wide-shouldered, narrow-wasted, with long muscles on his arms and legs and a six-pack that looked rock hard.
He swung the door open wider and smiled, that warm, endearing grin that
Andy knew so well. "I'm sorry, son," he said, then stopped. "Listen to me, calling you son. I should probably call you "sir", since you're a serving deputy chief constable and they've got me destined for the scrap heap
"Come on in, anyway. I was working out in my gym upstairs. I thought
I'd have plenty of time before you got here. Either you've come down that road like a bat out of hell or I'm slowing up."
"Jesus, man," said Martin as he stepped into the house. "You were out running earlier when I called you on the mobile. You shouldn't be going at it this hard."
Bob Skinner's smile disappeared. "Too fucking right I should," he snapped. "I'm going to show a few people just how stupid they are."
"You are taking this too personally," his friend replied, allowing himself to be led into the kitchen. "They're just being cautious, that's all. Remember when Jimmy had his heart attack? It was a while before they'd let him back to work."
The bigger man sighed, as if he was making an effort to be patient.
"Listen, Andy, for the umpteenth time, I did not have a heart attack. I had an incident that turned out to be something called sick sinus syndrome, a condition in which your heart rate drops without warning and you pass out. They put me on a treadmill in hospital in the
States, once I'd recovered, with all sorts of monitors attached to me.
You're supposed to walk steadily on it; I ran nearly two miles in the ten minutes of the test.
"The bloody thing's hereditary; my mother had it when she was in middle age, and so did my Uncle George. It passed off with them as they grew older. They didn't know what caused it then and they still don't."
He reached up and touched his chest, about four inches above the left nipple. "If these things had been around then they'd probably have had them fitted as a precaution, just as the Americans insisted on doing with me."
Martin looked at the area where the pacemaker had been inserted. The scar was still fresh, but it had begun to fade and had been overgrown already by chest hair. The flat lump that he had seen before, where the device lay on top of the ribcage, had almost disappeared, enveloped by renewed muscle.
"I tell you, Andy," Skinner insisted, "I am as fit as I have ever been and, probably as a result of this thing, fitter than I've been for years. I went round Gullane One in seventy-three yesterday, and I've never hit the bloody ball as far."
"Doesn't the pacemaker affect you at all?"
"No. It's set to kick in if my pulse rate drops below fifty-five, or if it rises to one-seventy-five. Even when I'm running flat out it never gets that high."
"Nonetheless," said the other man, 'you have to ally a bit of patience to this physical work you're doing. Rules is rules, like they say, even for Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner. When are you due for your next medical?"
"Not for another month, on the present timetable… but I'm going to do something about that."
"Why, for fuck's sake? You haven't had a sabbatical in years. Play bloody golf, enjoy yourself, go back to Sarah in the States; stop doing your head in, and everyone else's."
"Don't mention Sarah to me, please. She actually wants me to chuck the police. Can you believe that? And why the hell should I go to her?
Okay, there's legal work to be done tidying up her parents' estate, but there is such a thing as airmail. Anything she has to sign could be sent over here and notarised here."
"It's a lot of money, Bob."
"So? It's her money. And how does that affect my career?"
"Significantly, if you choose to look at it that way."
"Which I do not!" Skinner opened the big larder fridge in a corner of his kitchen and took out two cans of Seven-Up. He popped them both and handed one to his friend. "You, at least, know how I feel about my job," he said, more quietly. "Sarah seems to have gone native back in
Buffalo; she's moved Trish, the nanny, over there, and she's settled herself and the kids comfortably into her parents' home. She's even sending Mark to school over there."
"But she says it's temporary, doesn't she?"
"She says so, but I don't think I believe her, Andy. She's turning back into a Yank and she wants me, and my kids, to become Yanks too. It may be her world over there, but it is not mine. There's no logic to her, anyway. Her parents died over there, tragically, and some stuff happened in the aftermath that I can't tell even you about. You'd have thought she couldn't wait to get back here, to our life, after all that."