when we moved to France he took it.
Everyone's got a shotgun there. When we came back, it was packed with our stuff by mistake, in its wrapper, and the shells in their box. I took it in my light golf bag, over my shoulder, on my bike.'
I threw my head back, banging it against the seat's restraint. My daft sister. Keeping an unregistered firearm in the house. 'Mum was going to give it back to him the first time he came to St. Andrews; but he never has.'
No, he hadn't, had he. Allan Sinclair, would-be country sportsman and father of the year.
'I only took it to frighten them, Uncle Oz, honest.' Jonathan was wide-eyed; he is also incapable of lying. 'They turned up all right, when I said. I was hiding in the sheds, and when they got near I stepped out and I pointed the gun at them. I remember shouting, 'You leave my Granddad alone, do you understand, or else.' The man just laughed at me. She wasn't so sure, but he just laughed and he came to take the gun away from me. He grabbed the barrel and tried to pull it out of my hand… and it went off!'
As he spoke, his voice had risen, and risen. I put a hand on his shoulder, to calm his hysteria.
'It was awful, Uncle Oz.' Jonny was crying again. 'There was a huge bang, and he fell down. He rolled about for a bit, but then he was still. Honest, Uncle Oz, I didn't even know the gun was loaded.'
'Fuck me,' I whispered. Allan Sinclair, would-be country sportsman who was so incredibly stupid as to leave a loaded shotgun in a house with kids in it.
'She started screaming then,' Allan's son, my nephew, continued, 'and so did I. The gun had a sort of a pump thing on it; I was frightened so I pulled it, and then the gun just went off again. She was further away and it hit her in the chest and face. Ahh!' The boy screamed again, at the memory. 'It was awful. And then she was dead, they were both dead.'
I waited for his sobs to subside; it took a while. 'So you hid them in the pig troughs?' I asked him, quietly, once I thought he was ready.
He nodded a silent 'yes'. 'It was hard, but I did. I was scared stiff, Uncle Oz. I still am. I'll go to prison, won't I?' he asked, his child's eyes big in his young man's face. It appalled me that in a few minutes our conversation had come from the sexual confusion of the average adolescent, to this dark place.
I reached out an arm and hugged him, awkwardly in the confines of the car. 'No, son,' I told him. 'You won't go anywhere. If you'd only spoken to me, though.'
He looked at me, sideways. 'I was afraid that if I did you might have killed them, and then you'd have got into trouble.'
I felt tears well in my own eyes. 'Aw, Jonny, love. So you wound up killing them yourself instead.' It was a while before I could speak again.
When I could, I told him that I had sent Jay up to get rid of them. I told him that he had found a note in the cottage about the meeting, and I told him that he had made everything all right. I even told him that Jay thought I had done it, and that I wasn't about to advise him otherwise.
'You don't have to worry, son,' I promised him. 'Ever. That doesn't mean that you forget, though. You will never speak of what happened at that farm again, as long as you live. But you'll remember it always.
It's your own private burden to carry for ever. You've got the strength for it; you may doubt it now, but believe me, you have. Never forget this either, though. Those people were as bad as you could ever imagine, but they were not worth risking your life over.'
'But I did it for Granddad,' he protested.
'He's not worth it either, nor am I. You are more precious than the two of us put together, and don't you ever forget it. Remember this too.
Don't you ever go tackling trouble alone, not as long as I'm alive.'
I let him think about that for a while as I looked at him. Be it by accident, terror-stricken panic or whatever, he'd killed two people, this lad, this gawky boy. And yet he'd been brought to it by the purest motivator of all: love.
I don't care how anybody else might look at him. As far as I'm concerned he's a bloody hero.
'Now,' I demanded, forcing myself into action and starting the car once more, 'about this gun. Where is it?'
'Back at St. Andrews. I didn't want my Mum to know it was missing, so I put it back.'
I drove there as fast as I could, and I made him give it to me. 'What about Mum?' he asked. 'She'll notice it's gone, eventually.'
'When she does, you'll tell her that you told me by accident that she had it, and that I went bananas and made you give it to me. That's the truth, more or less.'
I took it and the ammo, put it in what passes for the trunk of the Lotus and drove the two of us back to Anstruther, for the weirdest family dinner I ever had. I couldn't take my eyes off Jonathan as we sat across the table from each other in the Craw's Nest dining room. He was paler than usual, and he didn't say much, but there was a quiet dignity about him.
And as I studied him, I thought of my own big problem, and I knew there was only one way for me to deal with it. I'd have come to that conclusion eventually anyway, but the example of the boy's unshakeable courage in defence of what he had thought was his grandfather's honour, left me, as I see it to this day, without any choice.
Forty-three.
I swung the BMW into the empty parking space. Saturday had come and gone, a day of golf in the morning, lazing in the afternoon and dinner in swank and splendour in the evening. Susie was still in St. Andrews, happily; she and Ellie have become almost as close as my sister was to my first, dead, wife, and that pleases me very much. I had told her I had left something at home that I needed, and she hadn't questioned me at all.
I was pleased that the parking spaces were empty. Almost certainly, it meant that he was alone, apart from the man mountain that is, if he counted as company.
Manolito answered my pressing of the buzzer. 'Yesss?' he hissed. It was the first time I'd heard him speak, I realised.
'You know who this is,' I said. 'Put him on.'
I didn't have to wait more than a second or two. 'Yes, son,' said Jack, metallically. 'What can you do for me?'
'Deal,' I told him.
'Sensible boy. Come on up.'
'No bloody way am I stupid enough to come up there and be alone with you two. You come down and we go for a drive. Besides, I want it on my turf; I've got a reason.'
I caught a moment's hesitation. 'You realise Manolito will be coming with us?'
'Fine, as long as he doesn't overpower us with the intellectual purity of his discourse.'
Jack cackled at that. 'Don't worry, he won't say a word. Pull your car as close to the door as you can.'
I did as he asked. There was nobody around when they emerged; that made me happy. Jack climbed in beside me and Manolito got in the back, blocking out most of the view in the mirror. I put the complex machine in Drive, and moved off.
Jack said nothing for a while. Instead he just looked out of the window, first to one side of the motorway, then to the other, gazing at the city, some of which he had helped to build, and over which he had presided, officially or unofficially, for years.
'Glasgow,' I heard him whisper, as we passed under the sign for the airport turn-off.
'You're wise, boy,' he said, finally, as we crossed the Erskine Bridge, deserted as always. 'We both know you'd have been gubbed in court.'
'That's my legal advice too,' I admitted, seeing no reason to bullshit.
'How's Natalie?' I asked him. 'Seen her since Mr. Perry met his end?'
'No. She called me when she heard about it. She was a bit upset, and more than a bit scared; she seemed to think I had something to do with it. Not that I had, of course.' Hint then denial, I had learned that that was his way. It struck me also that he might suspect that the car was bugged.
