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that was left for me. It’s a painting Scott did.’
    He was waiting for me to let him see it. He had a big chance.
    â€˜Well,’ he said. He was giving the issue his lofty consideration. He seemed to imagine I cared. Why does a little piece of property make some people act as if they were on stilts? ‘Well. I suppose everything’s above board.’
    â€˜Do you?’ I said and locked the boot and got in the car.
    Driving, I was annoyed at myself for becoming angry. Muzzle the dog. My anger wasn’t for him. But it was for somebody. I could feel it in me, sealed and ready, just waiting for an address.

6
    I remembered John Strachan as soon as I saw him, just after ten past seven. I had been hoping to come later but this was as long as I could hold off. I had looked at the new town centre Scott hated. I had taken a meal in a café. I had left the car in a parking lot and walked. But impatience still outmanoeuvred me.
    â€˜Jack, isn’t it?’ he said.
    We shook hands.
    â€˜I’m John. Come in.’
    â€˜This is good of you.’
    â€˜No.’ He shook his head. ‘I feel like talking about it myself.’
    He was a tall man with glasses. He couldn’t have been more than early thirties but he had a troubled, abstracted air that suggested the sum he was trying to do in his head wasn’t working out. He was wearing jeans and a baggy sweater.
    He led me through to the living-room and introduced me to Mhairi. Mhairi was small and overweight and she had a shiny, round face, like a dumpling in which you know there won’t be any bad bits. She was wearing jeans and a loose, floral top. John introduced me to the children as well, Catriona and Elspeth, or rather he identified them for me as they dervished round us.
    The children were doing what children so often do, transforming the banality of the moment into a game. As is usual with such games, nobody knew the rules but them. This one appeared to consist of Catriona, who would be about eight, making the ugliest face she could contrive up against Elspeth’s nose, accompanied by a klaxon-like noise. Then she would run in and out of the furniture and stop in the most inaccessible place she could find. Elspeth, maybe five, would pursue her, make her face, her noise, and run away as well. Like so many children’s games nobody seemed to have devised a rule yet for deciding when it was over.
    The three adults were momentarily transfixed, perhaps by such effortless dissipation of enough energy to light up a small town.
    â€˜I hope I haven’t come too early,’ I said.
    â€˜Oh no,’ Mhairi said.
    She said it with surprise, looking into the strangeness of my remark. The rigid sense of time I had implied seemed alien to her. I had an insight, part observation, part memory, into where they were. Mhairi was standing by the door to the kitchen with a slightly dazed resignation, like someone waiting for a bus she had begun to think might not travel on this route after all. I could imagine the promised places it was supposed to have on its destination board: ‘When The Children Are Older’, ‘More Time To Myself’ and ‘Some Of The Things I’ve Always Wanted To Do’.
    â€˜I think we should take Jack through to the lounge for a minute,’ Mhairi said.
    The three of us went through there. Catriona and Elspeth threatened concentration distantly, like gunfire in the hills around a fort.
    Moving into the lounge was moving nearer to John and Mhairi themselves, I thought, closer to the control room of what they were up to. It was furnished with a kind of vulnerable eclecticism. The floor was varnished, with an Indian rug on it. The chairs didn’t match but were old and handsome, chosen presumably for comfort. Someone had taken macramé. On the walls were an African mask and one of Scott’s paintings I hadn’t seen before. While I studied it, they didn’t speak. Books were