boys who became blood brothers. They cut their hands just there and they mixed their blood together. And that makes you a blood brother.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?” asked Bertie.
“No,” said Jock. “We could become blood brothers right now.
I’ve got my penknife.”
Bertie was astonished: he had never been allowed a knife, but now Jock took a bulky Swiss Army penknife out of his pocket and showed it in the palm of his hand. “See,” said Jock. “See that.”
Bertie gazed at the knife. There were numerous blades and devices on the knife; one could do anything with an implement like that.
“Here,” said Jock, prising out a blade. “I’ll cut myself first, if you like. You have to do it here, in this bit of skin between the thumb and this finger. Then you squeeze the blood out into the palm of your hand and you shake hands with your friend. That’s how it works.”
Bertie watched in fascination as Jock held the gleaming blade above the taut skin, and drew in his breath sharply as his new friend made a small incision. Small droplets of blood welled up, and were quickly smeared by Jock across his palm.
“Now your turn,” said Jock, wiping the blade on the leg of his jeans.
Bertie held out his right hand, the forefinger pulled back from the thumb, revealing the waiting stretch of skin. Jock steadied the blade and looked at Bertie.
“Are you ready?” he asked. “Do you want to close your eyes?”
“No,” said Bertie. “I don’t mind. It won’t hurt, will it?”
“No,” said Jock. “It won’t hurt.”
And at that moment the door opened and Irene came out. For a moment she stood quite still, slow to absorb the extraordinary sight before her. Then she screamed, and rushed forward to snatch the knife from Jock’s hand.
“What on earth are you doing?” she shouted.
Bertie looked down at the floor. He struggled against the tears, but in vain; he did not want Jock – brave Jock – to see him cry.
He had longed for a friend like Jock, and now he was being taken
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away from him, snatched away by his mother. It had been so close, that ceremony of blood brotherhood, and it would have made all the difference to have had a blood brother. But it was not to be.
Bertie felt a great sense of loss.
Sasha had been shopping in George Street. She had spent more than she intended – over two hundred pounds, when one totted it up – but she reminded herself that money was no longer an object. A few days earlier, she had received a letter from a firm of solicitors to the effect that the residue of her aunt’s estate, which had been left to her, amounted to over four hundred and eighty thousand pounds. When she had been first told that she was the residuary beneficiary, Todd had explained that the residue was what was left after everybody else had taken their share.
“It’s unlikely to be more than a couple of hundred pounds,”
he had said. “The legacies are bound to swallow most of it up, not that the old trout had very much, I suspect.”
The old trout, however, had been as astute an investor as her legacies had been mean. Five hundred pounds had been left to the Church of Scotland. Twenty-five pounds had been left to the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; a further twenty-five pounds to the Ghurka Trust, and ten pounds to St George’s School for Girls. The residue was to go to Sasha, and now that the estate had been ingathered by Messrs Turcan Connell it amounted to almost half a million pounds
It had taken some time for Sasha to accustom herself to the fact that she now had a considerable amount of money at her disposal.
They had been comfortable enough before on Todd’s drawings on the partnership of Macaulay Holmes Richardson Black, but having these uncommitted hundreds of thousands of pounds was material wealth on a scale which Sasha had previously not experienced. She 310
was not a spendthrift, though, and this minor shopping spree in George Street had made her feel vaguely uncomfortable. If she spent two hundred pounds a day, every day, she wondered, how long would it take her to get through her fortune? About eight years, she calculated, allowing for the accumulation of interest.
She thought for a moment of what eight years of profligacy might be like. She could buy a new pair of shoes every day, and have at the end of that eight-year period more than two thousand pairs of shoes. But what could one do with such a mountain of shoes? This was the problem; there was a limit to what one could do with money. And yet here I am, she thought, feeling guilty about spending two hundred pounds.
She was thinking of this when she wandered into Ottakars Bookshop. Sasha was not a particularly keen reader, but she belonged to a book group that met every other month and she needed to buy the choice for their next meeting: Ronald Frame.
At their last meeting they had discussed a novel by Ian Rankin, and one or two of the members had been
