I’d never heard Ellie swear so much, never. I couldn’t remember hearing her voice with this strange, flat, determined tone before, either. My feet seemed to start moving by themselves. Ferg went to the hotel desk. Ellie forced me towards the main hotel doors, pulling the Mini’s key out of her purse with her teeth as we exited through the depleted crowd of smokers by the doors into the harshly floodlit car park and the warm summer evening beyond.
‘Are, are you fit to drive?’ I asked, some autopilot bit of my brain attempting to take over.
‘Be quiet, Stewart,’ she told me. She pushed me. ‘
We stopped at Mum and Dad’s so I could grab a bag. By this time my hands had started shaking and I could hardly hold onto anything I picked up. Two minutes after we left, according to what the neighbours were prepared to disclose to my mum and dad — if not the police — Donald, Callum and Fraser were hammering at the door. They broke in, took long enough to establish I wasn’t there and left again. About the same time, Murdo and Norrie had stopped their pick-up alongside El’s Mini in the middle of town, and very nearly found me.
A quarter of an hour after that I was lying, shivering — from delayed terror or sheer relief, I hadn’t yet sorted out my jangled feelings to tell — inside a big yellow oil pipe, one of three stacked on a long flatbed railway wagon, itself part of a train of twenty similar wagons all hauled by a distantly clattering diesel engine, picking up speed again as it headed on south through the waning warmth of the night.
They’d shown some of the photos the children had taken, on the big screen above the stage in the ballroom. Maybe about half the guests were still there and could be bothered to watch; there were a lot of shots of empty chairs, table legs, and — as predicted — corners, and Drew’s dad hadn’t really had time to weed out all the crap; he was just grabbing cameras at random and seeing what he could find.
A short sequence from one camera showed the inside of a toilet, taken from beneath the faded green cover hiding the plumbing under the sinks. They were photos showing one pair of dark-blue brogues and one pair of red high heels. From the colour balance and a certain lack of sharpness, you could tell no flash had been used, or maybe been available.
The last couple of shots were taken from outside a closed cubicle. The first showed, under the door, the man’s dark shoes on either side of the base of a pale toilet bowl, with his trousers fallen round them and a pair of white underpants stretched tightly across the bottom of his calves. A pair of red shoes were also visible — one on either side of the bowl, half obscured by the crumpled trousers, heels front to the camera — and, in the very last shot, a pair of red gloved hands could be seen, fisted, as though in triumph, and raised high enough into the air to appear above the cubicle itself.
Craig Jarvey drops me at my mum and dad’s, then the red Toyota splashes away through the puddles. The rain is slackening.
There’s no car in the driveway. Still, when I let myself in I try to walk normally, but the house is empty. My hand moves to where my phone should be, then drops. I head to my room, lie on my bed, but only for a few minutes. I get up and fetch my mum and dad’s cordless.
‘Hello?’
‘Jel, hi. It’s Stewart. You busy?’
‘… No. Getting ready to go out.’
‘Got a few minutes?’
‘To talk or meet up? Cos—’
‘Just to talk.’
‘Okay. What?’
‘Just … something you said, earlier. About not everything being your idea? I—’
‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that too and I, ah, I’m glad you phoned, actually, because I shouldn’t have said that? That sounded really, I mean, I wasn’t—’
I’d intended to ask her about that other odd remark, from the fateful night itself, about knowing how I felt about her, which has kind of only just resurfaced — certainly as flagged for any particular significance — maybe due to just thinking back properly to that night, finally, or because I’ve been puzzling over the thing she said earlier today about it not all being her idea or whatever, but she’s sounding really defensive now, like she’s trying to head off whatever it is I’m trying to find out about, and I just know there won’t be any point trying to take this further.
Making enquiries today, asking questions about stuff that just suddenly seemed intriguing, has already cost me my phone, a couple of extremely painful punches and a very scary trip to an open hatch in the middle of the bridge. I shouldn’t be too surprised with myself if I’m easily put off.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I tell Jel, gently talking over her. ‘It’s nothing. I just—’
‘Well, you know—’
‘It’s no problem. Really. Forget I asked.’
‘Where … where are you anyway? That’s a Stonemouth number, but—’
‘My folks’. I lost my phone.’
‘Oh my God; you didn’t
