‘Your friend didn’t happen to say what was on television at the time?’
Ellie’s reaction wasn’t much more reassuring than Dave Lyons’ had been.
‘Do you think that matters?’
‘It might.’
‘No. She wasn’t actually in the room at the time. She just said some people had been watching a video.’
‘A video?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Try to be exact about this, Ellie. Your friend said it was a video. It wasn’t just a television programme?’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘There’s a big difference.’
Ellie considered it. ‘She said “video”. What she actually said, she said, “one of Dave’s videos”. I took her to mean something he had taped himself. Why?’
‘Dave Lyons says he doesn’t know what was on television when Scott had his brainstorm. But if it was a video, that seems less likely. Especially if it was something he had taped himself. It was maybe something he wanted his guests to see. It was at least something he would have to take out of the machine later. So he would know what they had been watching.’
‘So what does that prove?’
‘It proves he was lying. Why would you lie about something as trivial as that? Unless you had something to hide.’
‘He’s not the only one,’ Ellie said.
‘What?’
‘With something to hide.’
I thought at first she meant herself. She seemed hesitant.
‘Anna,’ she said.
‘What about Anna?’
‘I didn’t mention it to you yesterday. But there was something that was troubling Scott. Anna had someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not even sure that he knew who it was.’
‘It wasn’t just a fantasy of his?’
‘I don’t know. But his conviction was real enough.’
Mary Walters reappeared at the end of the lounge. Perhaps she knew more than Ellie thought. She had taken her time in the toilet, possibly to give us a chance to talk.
‘How long are you staying here?’ Ellie asked.
‘Maybe not after tonight.’
‘Give me your home number then. In case I need to get in touch.’
As Mary Walters came towards us, I wrote my number on a beermat. As Mary Walters sat down, Ellie slipped the beermat into her handbag. We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes more and they finished their drinks and left.
The friendly Dane was at the bar with some others. He waved to me. But I didn’t want one of those Bushfield nights that wander on into the morning. I had some more travelling to do tomorrow. Thornbank was one place on my itinerary. Troon was another. If Fast Frankie White wasn’t in Thornbank, there must be people there who knew him. It was worth trying. If Frankie did happen to be there, I fancied my chances of getting him to tell me what I wanted to know. Dave Lyons was a harder proposition.
I recalled that image of him walking away from me in Cranston Castle House. I didn’t know too much more about the smaller versions of himself that were hiding behind the veneered exterior. But I had some ideas. If I hadn’t worked out yet how to unscrew the outermost Russian doll, I could maybe break it. I knew he was lying. I could prove it on the triviality about the television. I had the basis for one very strong suspicion: he was more than Anna’s landlord. Let’s see if the polish at least cracked. He had said he would be at home this week. That was the best place to see him. Liars are at their most vulnerable in their own house, because it’s where the truth can hurt them most.
I finished my soda and lime, feeling such a clean-living man, and handed it in at the bar. The earliness of my departure evinced a chorus of disbelief and the suggestion that Katie should get my Horlicks ready. I promised I would bring them in some tracts on teetotalism tomorrow. Before going upstairs, I went across to the pay-phone in the hall.
I rang Kentish Town. Nobody answered. I rang the restaurant. I wished nobody had answered. It was Betsy, pleased to elocute precisely that Jan wasn’t there. I rang Jan’s flat. Standing lonely in a busy place, I thought how much I could have used a night with my friends. Where was Tom Docherty anyway? There are few sounds more forlorn than the phone of someone you love ringing out with no one to answer.
FOUR
21
Someone’s death can be like a flare illumining where you are. You realise with a shock how far you have wandered from where you were intending to go, how strangely the terrain differs from where you had hoped to be. Driving to Thornbank, I was still held in the livid brightness of Scott’s dying. The landscape was more than a landscape. It was also a private ordnance map of questions and messages to me. The countryside and the villages I passed through seemed to make an innocent statement about the coexistence of people and nature but the subtext for me was the strangeness of what I had become.
Outside of Graithnock, I drove past familiar fields where three of us had wandered a lot one summer. We would be fifteen, Davy, Jim and me. Jim’s father had greyhounds and we sometimes took them with us. I remembered the private club of our laughter and the grandiose folly of our expectations. Jim died at nineteen on a motorbike. I had met Davy by accident a few years ago. He was an architect who appeared to be drinking what was left of his dreams to death. I was a middle-aged detective who liked to try and read philosophy, like someone studying holiday brochures in the poorhouse.
In the village of Holmford I passed a shabby council house I had known before they finished building it. I had been there with one of the first girls I took home from the dancing. I was seventeen and so was she. We missed her last bus and walked the few miles to Holmford. Seeing the doorless and windowless shell of the building, I carried her over the threshold. It wasn’t a long marriage. We stayed there maybe a couple of hours, away from the eyes of others. We could have done anything without being observed. What we did was kiss and touch each other in many places with endless gentleness and sing songs. We must have sung about twenty duets. No doubt my performance would have earned me disbarment from the mobile stag party that was male adolescence in Graithnock at that time. But I didn’t care. I acquired with my first interest in girls a conviction that whatever good things happen between two people looking for love are their own sweet secret and nobody else’s business. And, anyway, I enjoyed what we did. I think the songs were a kind of making love, a shared dreaming, a faith in what would be, even if it didn’t happen between us. Thinking of black-haired Mary and wondering how she was now, I wished her well. I wished her a good duet with someone kind. The house then, it seemed to me, was where I had been. The house now, I was afraid, was maybe where I was.
It’s not just you that moves on. Places move too. You go back and you find that they are not where they were. The streets and buildings may remain, with modifications, but they aren’t any longer the place you knew. The looker makes the looked at and what I was seeing perhaps was a kind of absence, a self no longer there. I had come into what I took for manhood among these parts of Ayrshire and they had meant much to me, not just as a geography but as a landscape of the heart, a quintessential Scotland where good people were my landmarks and the common currency was a mutual caring. Why did it feel so different to me today, a little seedy and withdrawn? Had I dreamed a place? Going through Blackbrae towards Thornbank, I recalled that big Pete Wells was dead. He had come from here, the father of a friend of mine at Graithnock Academy. I had enjoyed listening to him talking many times. He had been one of the strongest believers in the worth of people I had ever met and in the social justice that was coming. Thinking of him, I wondered what he would think of me and of what I had become. Stopping in Thornbank to ask the way to Fast Frankie White’s mother’s house, I felt as if I was asking directions to the faith Pete Wells had had. Was it still there and could I share it?