‘Where, though, Dad? You don’t usually listen to me, but you know what? I think I’ve got ALL your attention right now. So let’s get on with it. My mum gave you a second chance, God alone knows why, and you’re throwing it back in her face. She thinks you’re seeing that cow from the papers again. Are you?’
‘Kath… Kath, for Pete’s sake. This is my office…’ Eric Manson begged.
‘So, are you?’ She was relentless.
The Detective Inspector suddenly stood up, but seeing that his daughter remained seated where she was, he sank slowly down again, looking at her, pleading silently with her for the conversation to end, but she returned his looks, stony-faced.
‘Well?’
‘Yes-no… I’m not sleeping with her…’ he sounded desperate and then, anger mounting, his voice changed. ‘It’s my bloody business. Not yours!’
Kathryn Manson, however, was not easily intimidated. She had a mission, and was determined to accomplish it. He had raised the volume of their argument, so she would simply do the same.
‘It is my business, Dad. Because it hurts my mum. She only came back because you promised to lay off that woman,’ she shouted.
‘And I have… I am, for fuck’s sake!’ Eric Manson raged in return.
At that very second DCI Robin Bruce walked into the murder suite with the Assistant Chief Constable, Laurence Body, in tow. Body, quick to sense the tension in the room, instantly marched over to the time-line to inspect it, leaving his Chief Inspector glaring at the antagonists. Kathryn Manson, dignity intact, rose to leave, but as she did so she bent towards her father’s ear and hissed, sotto voce but still audible to all, ‘You’d better have, Dad. Or I’ll be back. Back here, I mean.’
Alice knew as soon as they arrived at the Astra that the journey à deux to the Scowling Crags site would be an ordeal. Manson, fury still bubbling, slammed the driver’s door so hard that the wing mirror came loose. They then exited the pound, tyres burning as if in hot pursuit of a gang of international thieves, before rattling over the cobbles, heedless of comfort or safety. Every red light was treated as a personal slight, obeyed with ill-grace, accelerator depressed, roaring, for a racing start. On finding himself unexpectedly ensnared in a queue at Blackhall, he thumped the steering wheel loudly with both hands before, on impulse, screeching into the bus lane in an attempt to evade the jam. Discovering that he was now trapped between two stationary double-deckers he swore, while jinking out straight into the path of an on-coming heavy goods vehicle. Alice, eyes tight shut, cursed Kathryn Manson and her domestic concerns. Thanks to continuing discord within that dysfunctional household she would soon be deprived of her life, or limbs at the very least. With the Forth Road Bridge in sight, the Detective Inspector swivelled his neck from left to right, attempting to work out which stream of cars was moving fastest through the booths. A rapid swerve to the left and they were in the chosen lane, having missed, by inches, a collision with a red Mercedes and a motor cycle. Rigid with fear and flattening imaginary brakes with her feet, Alice smiled weakly at the motor cyclist, fist now raised at her, snarling, and signalling her responsibility for his near-death encounter.
As they bumped rhythmically over the bridge, Alice looked westwards, up the Forth estuary, seeking any distraction from this unpleasant situation. Between black clouds, shafts of sunlight were falling on the water, casting a silvery sheen on the vast expanse of tranquil, grey sea. In seconds the sun itself began to emerge from behind the dark clouds shadowing it, drifts of a borage blue sky exposed in its wake, and, as the car crossed the border into Fife, Alice became aware that her chauffeur had, finally, begun to relax. The car was no longer hurtling along at breakneck speed, and other vehicles were even being permitted to overtake them. Eric Manson lowered his shoulders and leant back into the driver’s seat, letting out, as he did so, a deep sigh.
‘Families, eh? Who’d have them!’ he said ruefully.
‘Sometimes more pain than pleasure, but not usually.’
‘You travel light, though, Alice. No commitments anywhere.’
‘I’m not an orphan, Sir.’
‘You’ve no man yet?’ Him and Mrs McLaren. Great minds, she thought, determined to side-step the question, certain that it was yet another volley in his little war of attrition. On the other hand, this time her interrogator was, himself, bruised and battered, unlikely to intend to commence hostilities on such a loaded subject. So instead, she smiled at him indulgently and shook her head. No reason for him to know. After all, he had met Ian Melville and their mutual antipathy had produced combustion on first encounter. His views on her lover’s suitability were all too predictable and unwelcome, and his dislike had been, as far as she was concerned, a positive endorsement of Ian.
Like the weighted, spherical toy clowns once favoured by little children and impossible to knock over, Eric Manson’s spirits soon bobbed back up, and by the time the Dunfermline turn-off was reached he was busy ripping the wrapping of a packet of cigars with his teeth, ready to smoke his companion out of the vehicle. Hands free of the wheel, he struck a match, sucked hard, and began to exhale acrid fumes into the enclosed space. His reluctant passenger wound down her window, aware that any complaint, or reminder that the car was her workplace, would be met with derision, the man’s delight in annoying her having been re-awakened with the resurgence of his normal, bumptious mood.
They turned right off the Carnbo road up a track marked ‘Blackstone Mains’ and began to climb into the Ochils. Within minutes the wheels of the Astra had sunk deep into its rutted surface and a strange swishing noise came from the car as its undercarriage compressed the undergrowth. After about quarter of a mile they arrived at the Mains, an austere farmhouse surrounded by a quadrangle of steadings, and saw a handmade wooden sign directing them further up the hill to ‘The Cottage’. The gradient of the final slope was steeper yet, their route resembling a dried-up river bed, little more than pebbles and shale with occasional boulders washed up here and there. Where the road ended they parked their motor, glad to stretch their stiff limbs, and both feeling as if they had travelled into some more remote past, a sanctuary untouched by the new century.
They looked around themselves in all directions, and saw laid out before them the glory of the place, a one hundred and eighty degree view of undeveloped countryside. Somehow they had reached paradise. Not the gaudy sort promised in every travel agent’s brochure, but something altogether finer and rarer, the true abode of the blessed. In the foreground were low undulating hills, scattered clumps of whin still yellow in bloom, and, sparkling in the bright sunlight, a series of burns bordered with flag irises and meadowsweet, culminating in marshland, larks and curlews calling high above. Beyond, in the distance, was a vast area of flat, fertile ground dotted with woodlands, the whole scene dominated by the great, shining expanse of Loch Leven. Looking on such a sight, the meanest spirit would have felt elated, a poet’s soul inspired.
In its condition as a moss-clad ruin, the cottage in the shade of the huge sycamore tree had once enhanced the rural idyll, but it was being restored, and its appearance now jarred, reminding the onlooker that, somewhere within the garden, the snake would be coiled. New PVC windows had replaced worn, wooden ones, and grey, cement tiles were edging out old, red pantiles. Even its sandstone facade had been marred by a patch of harling; metal gutters had been removed, plastic imposters taking their place. And all around lay the detritus of the DIY man: half-filled syringes of mastic, broken slates, soggy plasterboard and sheets of torn polythene. An unsightly yellow Portakabin had been dumped in the lee of the building, and the sound of drumbeats began to come from it. A whey-faced, teenage girl emerged. She saw the two strangers, but showed no alarm at their unexpected appearance.