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.
"How's your wizard?" I asked her.
"Eh?" Ash looked confused for a moment. "Oh; Doctor Gonzo? Still working on the files. They weren't just weird shit, they were corrupted weird shit; where did your dad keep those things; inside a TV? But anyway; he's still hopeful."
"Doctor Gonzo?" I said, tartly.
"Don't look like that, Prentice," Ash chided. "This guy's knocking his pan in for you for nothing. And he has got a doctorate."
I smiled. "Sorry."
"Oh, and supposing the good Doctor can decipher all that corrupted crap you presented him with, what format do you want these files in eventually anyway, you ungrateful wretch?"
"How d'you mean?"
"I mean what program do you use on the Compaq?"
"Oh, Wordstar," I nodded knowledgeably.
"Version? Number?"
"Ah… I'll have to come back to you on that one. Look; just ask him to print it out and send it to me. Would that be okay?"
She shrugged. "If you want. Or you could get a modem; E-mail's about a zillion times faster."
"Look, I'm still not all that comfortable around computers that don't come with a joystick and a 'fire' button; just… just ordinary airmail and real paper will be fine."
Ash grinned, shook her head. "As you wish." She stood up. "Same again?" she asked, clinking my glass.
"No," I said. "I'll have a half."
"Any particular sort?"
"Na, anything."
I was alternating pints and whiskies on principle; they keep giving you your old glass back down here.
I watched Ash weave her way to the bar.
I still felt nervous about meeting this guy Paxton-Marr, but all-in-all, I told myself, things weren't so bad. Those of us most affected by dad's death were — with the possible exception of Uncle Hamish — bearing up pretty well, I might yet find out what Uncle Rory had written, I didn't have to worry about money, I had no criminal record, and I was being a good young(ish) adult again, attending diligently to my studies. Mostly I stayed in Glasgow during the week, and went back to Lochgair at weekends, unless mum — sometimes accompanied by James — came to stay with me. I had got filthy drunk just once since dad had died, and then with good reason; it had been the day Thatcher resigned. Bliss was it, etc., even if the Tapeworm Party was still in power.
The lawyer Blawke had found me a place to rent for the year I needed to be in Glasgow. It was part of the property of a Mrs Ippot, who'd died rich but intestate at a sourly ripe old age, having throughout her life promised part, or all, of her sizeable fortune to various individual relations and combinations of relations within her extensively and antagonistically divided family, in a blizzard of contradictory letters, and with what appeared to be a profound lack of consideration for the litigious chaos that was bound to ensue. Mrs Ippot, in short, had been the sort of client probate lawyers have wet dreams about.
My own theory was that Mrs I had actually thoroughly detested every single one of her relatives, and had hit on a nicely appropriate way of confounding all of them. By Jarndyce out of Petard, Mrs Ippot's lawyer-infested legacy had ensured that her rebarbatively consistent family would suffer years if not decades of self-inflicted hatred and frustration as the increasing legal fees gradually corroded the monies she had left; a tortuously slow method of telling your relatives from beyond the grave exactly what you thought of them that makes giving all the loot to a cats" home look positively benign in comparison.
And so I stayed in the late Mrs Ippot's enormous town house in Park Terrace, overlooking Kelvingrove Park and the River Kelvin running through it. The museum and art gallery sat red, huge and stately to the left, its sandstone bulk crammed with the silt of time and human effort, while on the hill to its right, skirted by the black outlines of trees, the university soared with self-impressed Victorian fussiness into the grey autumnal skies, positively exuding half a millennium's experience in the collation and dissemination of knowledge.
The high ceilings and vast windows of Mrs Ippot's former home appeared to have been the work of an architect anticipating the design of aircraft hangars; the interior was cluttered with paintings, rugs, chandeliers, life-sized ceramics of the smaller big cats, small statues, large statues and objets d'art of every imaginable description, all interspersed with heavy, dark, intricately gnarled wooden furniture that gave the appearance of being volcanic in origin. The house's inventory — drawn grimly to my attention by a spotty clerk who obviously resented the fact I was younger than he was — came in three volumes.