She shook her head, frowning. “He’s never said a word about it, even when he’s drunk. Not that he’s drunk often! He can hold his drink, that one.”
“So how do you know that’s where he works?”
“Ah, I don’t know,” she said, as though impatient to be off the subject. “It’s just—you know—what people say.”
I was about to try to get more than that out of her when another voice joined our conversation.
“Is this you back on the pull, Clovis, so soon after the quarrel with your last lassie?” My workmate Druin sounded amused. I turned and grinned back at him as the barmaid poured him a half-litre. Druin was a local man, married and in his thirties, his wes-kit showing bare brown arms still oil-stained from his day’s work, and scarred from years of work before it too.
That’s not it at all,” I said. “I thought better of it, as who wouldn’t? But she’s not to be seen. So I’m trying to find out more about the tinkers.”
He laughed. “You’re a character. The reading makes you funny in the head.” He said this not as an insult but as a charitable explanation. “Mind you,” he added, “that’s a girl I wouldn’t walk out on myself.”
I asked Jeanna for another half-litre and, noticing a temptingly cheap bottle, said, “Oh, and a couple of shots of the Talisker, please.”
Druin raised his glass. “Thanks, mate.” He took a sip of the Talisker and asked, “What’s this about you getting the sack?”
“Some trouble with the University,” I said. “I borrowed some papers, and found I had little choice but to let Fergal take them. The ISS seems to have taken it as a sign I’m not to be trusted. I take that as an insult.”
“As well you might.” He looked at me curiously. “You don’t seem too bothered about it, though.”
I made a twist of my lips, turned my hand over. “Aye, I’m bothered, but there’s no sense letting something like that get to you. I’ll appeal it, Jondo’s going to take it up. It’ll get sorted out. I’m more worried about why Menial isn’t at work.”
“Ah,” he said. “She isna taking the day off, or suspended or anything like that. She’s finished her contract.”
“How d’you know that?”
He tapped the side of his nose. “Jondo told me, because naturally he asked Admin if she’d been chucked out as well.”
I sighed. “I suppose that’s a relief, in a way. But she said nothing about it to me, even before.”
Druin nodded. “Aye, they’re a close-mouthed lot, the tinkers. So, what is it you wanted to know about them?”
“Well, we sort of take them for granted, right? Some people do one kind of work, and nobody else knows much about it. How did that start? Why can’t just anybody follow the path of light? How do people become tinkers in the first place?”
Druin looked at Jeanna, and then at his drinks. He scratched his chin. Jeanna unaccountably blushed a little, and held her hand over a giggle.
“That’s a lot of questions,” Druin said. “To answer your last one first, most people who become tinkers are born into it. They’re tinkers because their parents were tinkers.”
“Aye,” I said, “but look at the tinkers. They’re not an inbred people, whatever else they may be. So they must get new recruits, so to speak, but I’ve never heard of such.”
Jeanna’s giggle broke through. She turned away and moved down to the other end of the bar. Druin glanced after her and back at me, smirking.
“Well,” he said carefully, “it is rumoured that those of the settled people who become tinkers do so through sexual intercourse.” He laughed at the look on my face. You might have been well on the way to becoming one yourself, I gather.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”
Druin shook his head. “It’s no ridiculous,” he said firmly. “You think about it. A tinker won’t settle down without ceasing to be a tinker, and damn few do that. So if you want to be with a tinker, you have to become a tinker yourself. And wander off, and never be seen again, often as not. The tinkers don’t stay in the one place more than one or two year, if that.”
“All right,” I said, “I can see there might be something in that.”
My mind was turning over a lot of possible implications, none of which I was in any mood to share with Druin. “What about the other questions?”
He shrugged. “As to why they and only they do what they do? I’ve given that some thought myself, and the only thing I can say is, it goes back to the Deliverance, and it works fine. What more can you say?”
“Oh, plenty,” I said. “Like whether it’s the best way of doing things.”
“Aye, well, like I said. It works.” He leaned closer. “Here’s a bit of tinker cant I picked up: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Sound advice, wherever it comes from.”
He drained his mug and knocked back the whisky, then grinned and clapped my shoulder. “I can see I’ve given you a lot to think about, but I haven’t the time to talk any more. I’m off. Home to the wife and the tea, then out on the hills with the rifle.”
As he slid off the stool and stood up he gave me a canny look and asked, “You happen to fancy coming along, Clovis?”
“Deer hunting?” Suddenly it felt like something I desperately needed to do to get my head clear. My first inquiries had already given me far too much new information to assimilate. “Sure,” I said. Thanks.”
“Great, well, come along for your tea as well.”
“Oh, I couldn’t, your wife’s not expecting any—”
“Ach, man, if you saw how much she tries to make me eat, you’d come along out of sheer sympathy.”
“Nah, you’ll be welcome.”
“Thanks a lot. See you, Jeanna.”
Druin’s wife’s name was Arrianne. A calm, solid, dark woman who took my arrival entirely in her stride. We sat around a heavy table in the living-room, under a loud-ticking ancient clock, with the two children: a boy of about fourteen called Hamish, already working at the fish-farm, and a girl of six called Ailey, who unfussily helped her mother to serve the dinner.
The dinner—or “tea” as they called it—consisted of fresh mackerel, limpets boiled in salt water, new potatoes and carrots and fresh-picked peas. I had to stop at the third helping, but Druin and Hamish went right on through it. This kind of feeding didn’t seem to have put an ounce of fat on either of them; Arrianne insisted that I looked undernourished, and she may have been right.
After the woman and the girl had cleared away the plates Druin stood up and reverently lifted two rifles down from a rack on the wall. He pushed one across the table to me.
“You know how to handle this?”
Single-shot, bolt-action, scope. I demonstrated my familiarity and safety to Druin’s satisfaction.
“Has a hell of a kick,” he warned, passing me a half-dozen shells. “Still, you’ll no get more than one shot in even if we’re lucky.”
He said goodbye, and I said thanks to his family, and then he led me out the back and to the side of the house where his pick-up truck was parked. We racked the rifles on the back and climbed into the cab. The seats were leather, the dashboard hardwood and stainless steel, all lovingly polished.
Tusion engine,” he said proudly as he turned the key and got an instant low thrum in response. “Eighty years old, and not a thing wrong with it. Been in the family that long. None of your wood-alcohol or methane stinks for us.”
The vehicle purred into the main street and on to the road past New Kelso. Druin caught me craning my neck to look over at the tinker estate, and laughed.
“Ach, you’ll find her,” he said.
He turned right at the junction, up the glen. The evening traffic surge had eased off and we made good progress at about forty kilometres an hour.
“Where are we heading?” I asked, as he slowed for the main street of Achnashellach. A small herd of Highland cattle were being walked through the town, for God knows what reason.