The Man in the Moss

            Afterwards, looking up from the sweet trolley, she said, 'I suppose you'll be wanting your pound of flesh, then.'

            'Aw, come on, Fiona. I can buy a girl dinner without the question of flesh coming into it.'

            'I should be so lucky.' She smiled enticingly. 'I was referring to Moira. You'll want to know about Moira.'

            'Well,' he said, 'yeah. But only if this isn't gonna get you into any kind of, uh ...'

            'Shit?' said Fiona. 'I don't think so. I see all Mr Kaufmann's receipts, he never comes here. Anyway, it's nice to live dangerously for a change. I bet you live your whole life dangerously.'

            'Me?' For one and a half years after leaving college he'd been a trainee assistant director. The very next day he was an executive producer. Mom's company. 'Uh, well, not so's you'd notice.'

            'You do look kind of dangerous, Mungo.'

            'Looks can be deceptive.' Last thing he planned was to seduce this one.

            'Irish,' she said. 'You look Irish, somehow.'

            'So people keep telling me.'

            'Mungo,' she said. 'Aw, hey, that's really incredible. Mungo Macbeth.'

            'Of the Manhattan Macbeths. My Mom's real proud of that.' Giving her the condensed autobiography. 'From being a small kid, I learned how the actual King Macbeth was really a good guy whose name was unjustly blackened by this English hack playwright.'

            'That's true, actually,' Fiona said. 'He wisny a bad guy.'

            'I'm told they also used to play pipe-band records to me in my cradle,' Macbeth said, screwing up his nose. 'But that made me cry, so they hired this genuine Scottish nanny, used to sing me Gaelic lullabies. That part I remember. That was great. That was how I got into the music'

            'My dad used to sing me Tom Jones,' Fiona said glumly.' "The Green Green Grass of Home". Not so great.'

            'My dad never got to sing me anything,' Macbeth said. 'He didn't last that long. He was kind of jettisoned by my mother's family before I was born. They are the Macbeths. My dad's name was Smith. I mean, Smith? Forget it. So, anyhow, this trip came up, she said. Go ... go feel the true power of your Celtic heritage.'

            'You feeling it?'

            'I'm feeling a jerk is what I'm feeling. I won't say she was expecting a delegation from the clan Macbeth to turn out for me at the airport in full Highland costume, but you get the general picture.'

            'Out of interest, have you actually seen anybody in a kilt since you got here? Apart from at the Earl's do?'

            'Nope.'

            'So what'll you tell her when you get home? Hey, would it be OK for me to have the profiteroles?'

            'And just a coffee for me,' he said to the waiter. 'Make that two - I'll wait. What do I tell Mom? I'll say I had a peculiarly Celtic experience. I'll say it was too deep and personal to talk about.'

            'Oh, wow,' Fiona said, rolling her big eyes. Problem was that tonight she didn't look eighteen any more. She was in a tight red dress - well, some of her was in it. Macbeth thought hard about Moira Cairns to take his mind off this comparatively minor but far from discountable temptation.

            'I'll tell her I met a real witch,' he said. 'One of the weird sisters.'

            'Aw, she's no' a witch,' Fiona said scornfully.

            'No? What is she?'

            'She's what my granny used to call fey. OK, maybe a bit more than that. Like, one day she was very annoyed with Mr Kaufmann ... I mean she's usually quite annoyed with him but this was something ... Anyway, here they are, raging away at each other, and she's about to storm out the door and then she just turns round, like she's gonny say something else, only she canny find the words. And then ... one of the damn filing cabinets starts to shake and ... I'm no' kidd'n' here ... all four drawers come shoot'n' out at once. Really incredible. Awesome silence afterwards.'

            'Coulda been an earth tremor.'

            'That was what Mr Kaufmann said. But he still went all white, y'know? I mean, that filing cabinet was locked, I'm certain it was.'

            'I can sympathize.' Macbeth shuddered, his mind making a white skull out of the tureen on an adjacent table. 'Listen, Fiona, I'm a little shaky on Moira's early career. She was at college in Manchester which is where she joined this local band, right?'

            'Matt Castle's band. Matt Castle just died.'

            'Oh, shit, really?' Remembering something mindlessly insulting he'd said about Matt Castle just after they met. What a shithead. A wonder she spoke to him at all after that.

            The waiter brought Fiona's profiteroles. 'Hey, great,' Fiona said. 'So then she was approached about joining this rock band. Offered a lot of money, big money even for the time, to make two albums.'

            'The Philosopher's Stone,' Macbeth said. 'But they only made one album.'

            'Right. She split before they could get around to the second one. But, see, the word is that the reason they wanted her, apart from her voice, was that ... You remember Max Goff, who owned Epidemic Records?'

            'He was murdered, year or so ago. Some psychopath kid with a grudge.'

            'Right,' Fiona said.

            'I didn't know she was with his outfit. It was CBS put out the album in the States.'

            'Well, the word is, Mungo .. .' Fiona leaned conspiratorially across the table, '... that the real reason Max Goff wanted her in the band was he'd heard she was psychic. He was very into all that. Like, he already had a couple of guys signed to Epidemic who were also psychics and he wanted to put them all together in a band, see what happened. Of course Moira didny know this, she thought the guy just liked the way she sang, right?'

            'And what happened? I mean, that first album, that was terrific. I wore mine out.'

            'Aye, but it all got very heavy, with drugs and stuff, and Moira broke her contract, came back to Scotland, went solo. Signed up with Mr Kaufmann, who's... well, he's no' exactly part of the rock scene.'

            'I wondered about that.'

            'The other singers on Mr Kaufmann's books are, like, mostly, y'know, nightclub or operatic or kind of Jimmy Shand type of outfits.'

            'Who?'

            Fiona dug into a profiterole; cream spurted. 'See, Moira made it clear she wisny gonny have anything to do with the rock scene ever again. And that's how it's been. She just does traditional folk concerts and selected cabaret-type dates. Really boring. Hell of a waste.'

            'It's very intriguing. What do you think happened?'

            Fiona shrugged. 'Most likely she just got in with a bad crowd. I used to think, well, maybe she was doing drugs in a big way. Heroin or something. And realised it was, like, a one- way street, y'know?'