The Crow Road

"A bit," I agreed. I sniffed, wiped my nose with a paper hanky.

"Sure you won't have that drink?" Fergus said, nodded, stuffed the hanky back into my jeans. "No thanks, I have to drive. Better be getting back."

"Right you are," Fergus said.

He saw me to the door. He patted me on the shoulder as I stood in the doorway. "Don't worry, Prentice, all right?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Oh, and I don't know if your mother's mentioned it —»

"Opera; Friday." I smiled.

Fergus smiled too, jowls wobbling. "Ah, she has."

"Yes. No problem," I said.

"Jolly good. Well, that's all right then." He offered me his hand.

We shook. "Thanks, uncle," I said. He nodded, and I walked down the steps and across the gravel to the Golf.

He waved goodbye from the steps, looking concerned but encouraging.

I let the Golf trundle down to the bottom of the hill, where the drive levelled out and joined the tarmac single-track which swept round the base of the hill towards the main road between Gallanach and Lochgilphead. At the junction I stopped. I just sat there for a while. I raised my right hand and looked at the palm for a while, then spat on it and rubbed it hard on the side of my thigh. I tore the knife and its sheath out from my jeans and threw them down into the passenger footwell. I looked in the rear-view mirror, where I could just see the reflection of the top of the castle — its battlements and silver observatory dome — through the limbs of the leafless trees.

"Guilty as charged, you bastard," I heard myself say. Then with a quick look either way, I revved up, slipped the clutch and sent the VW screaming along the road away from the castle.

The courtyard was empty and the house storm doors were shut when I got back to Lochgair. I parked the Golf in the yard and got out; my hands were shaking. I felt like getting furiously drunk. I stood there, breathing hard in the calm air, listening to gulls crying above the drive down towards the loch, while crows crackled in the trees around the house like some drunken chorus, scornful. My heart was thudding now and my trembling hands were slick with sweat. I had to rest back against the side of the car. I closed my eyes. The cries of the birds were replaced by a roaring noise in my ears.

Jesus, I thought, if this was how I felt, how must Fergus be reacting, if I was right, and he was guilty? Now would be the time to watch him, study him. But I could barely have walked just then, let alone drive back to the castle, even if I had been able to summon up the courage to return.

Eventually I felt better again, and instead of going into the house, went for a walk through the woods and the forest and up into the hills, and sat on an old ruined wall on the hill topped by the cairn where dad had told us about the mythosaurs, all those years ago. I looked down to the trees and the loch in the pastel light cast by the bright, gauzy overcast, while the mild wind freshened. I replayed that scene in the castle library time after time after time, imagining that I remembered every word, every movement, every nuance of tone and phrasing, every millimetric increment of body language, trying to work out whether I was being terribly sensitive and acute, or just insanely fanciful and paranoid.

Sometimes I thought it was perfectly obvious that Fergus was utterly genuine, and all my ideas, all my suspicions were demonstrably ludicrous. Of course the man was i

Other times it was as though his every inflection and gesture shrieked artifice, lies, deception. Very good deception, cu

He had reacted just as you would expect somebody to react. But was that the way somebody actually would react? I didn't know, and could not decide.

I got so angry and confused at it all I threw my head back and screamed at the grey sky, roaring full force, all noise and no meaning till my lungs emptied and my throat ached. I doubled up, coughing and spluttering, eyes watering, feeling marginally better but looking round guiltily, hoping nobody had heard or seen. Only a couple of crows answered, harsh voices calling from the trees beneath.

I'd chosen a vantage point from which I could watch the road and the house, and only went back down there when I saw mum's Metro turn off the loch road from Gallanach and flicker like a green ghost as it moved up the drive, half-obscured by the trunks and branches of the bare, grey oaks.

I suppose I was uncommunicative with James and my mother that evening; I spent most of the time in dad's study, reading and rereading the three pieces Rory had written about himself, Fergus, Aunt Fiona and Lachlan Watt. I looked through some of Rory's diaries, gritting my teeth at the impenetrable paucity of their desiccated information. I turned on the Compaq and looked at the letter I'd written that morning. Damn; found a spelling mistake that had got through the spell-checker; «saw» where I'd meant to type "was'.

I started drinking whisky after di

I woke up just after two with the whisky glass balanced on my chest and my eyes feeling gritty. I finished the whisky even though I didn't really feel like it, then went to bed. I drank some water before I fell asleep.

The clock said 4:14 when I woke up, my bladder just at that point where it might or might not be possible to fall asleep again without having to go for a pee (it didn't usually wake me with so poor an excuse). I lay there for a bit, listening to soft rain hitting the bedroom window. Maybe that was what had woken me. I turned over to go to sleep again, then suddenly started to wonder if I'd turned the computer off. I had the feeling that I had, but 1 couldn't actually remember doing so. Fuck it, I thought; it would be safe enough. I rolled over onto my other side.

But my bladder had woken up properly in the meantime and was demanding attention. I sighed, swung out of bed, not bothering with my dressing gown even though the house had grown a little chilly by now. There was an orange night-light plug in a socket in the corridor; I decided to save my eyes from the shock of putting on any more powerful illumination and navigated the anyway familiar route to the bathroom by the plug's pale orange glow.

I sat in the darkness, peeing. A sort of quarter-erection had made it advisable to sit down. I smiled, remembering Lewis's spiel about trying to pee when you had a full bladder and a full erection at the same time. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands and drank some water from the tap. Mum must have been varnishing some part of the harpsichord earlier, judging by the smell in the corridor. I padded along to the study.

could just make out the dim shape of the desk and computer on the far side of the room when I opened the study door. I couldn't hear the Compaq's fan ru