Dead Man's Lie

By Marten Claridge

Brother Lox Lennox puts it another way:

"Not all our righteous paths are paved with the bodies of those who stand in our way."

But then Lennox is no ordinary monk. Ex SAS and with a bullet still lodged in his skull, his convoluted past is a minefield of contradictions best avoided in the sanctuary of the cloisters. He fought subversive wars in the Middle East the papers never got to hear about. In the 80s he infiltrated the Scottish Revolutionary Army and on behalf of his shadowy masters raised the spectre of Tartan Terrorism to a whole new lethal level. But good times never last, and when the betrayer became the betrayed he returned to his native Borders and like many a reiver before him went into hiding.

But mad dogs don't retire, they just tread more lightly and learn to hunt at night.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marten Claridge
• Release date: Apr 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9780956606501

Marten Claridge

Author of four published thrillers — Nobody's Fool, The Midnight Chill, Slow Burn, and Dead Man's Lie. Nobody's Fool — "A terrific find-the-psychopath..." The Times Nobody's Fool — "Vibrates with tension and holds you fast to the page throughout." Scotland on Sunday Slow Burn — “Provocatively fresh... the dialogue is solid, the plot effective, and the search for a psychotic killer exciting.” The New York Sun The Midnight Chill — "A tightly woven tale of revenge... a disturbing study of remorseless violence." The Sunday Times

Book preview

1

Deep in the Scottish Borders , Lox Lennox stood frozen in the darkness of the conservation site, one eye on the man at his feet, the other focused to infinity as he concentrated on his immediate surroundings.

Don’t ask questions, Malkin had said, just get him off my land.

Ears and nostrils twitching like finely-tuned guages, Lox registered the sounds and smells around him, filed them away. The smell of the Tweed and its decaying summer carcass, rank with silt and weed, down beyond the palisade of silver birch. A melange of scents borne on the warm night breeze. Herbacious borders, manure from the stables, fresh creosote from the fishing howff down by the river.

Blood.

Five minutes stretched to ten. Still Lox remained motionless, a shadow amongst shadows, primary senses on red alert. Merging with his environment the way he'd been trained, recalling his instructor's maxim that to move is to die.

Snapshot:

Oman '73. High on the jebel massif above Mirbat, the adoo guerrillas on the move three days before the attack, Lennox and a host of scorpions hunkered in his makeshift trench watching the guerrillas file silently along the track against a moonless black sky. So close he could smell the garlic on their breath, almost reach out and touch their dusty boots. Lox lying there for almost an hour before it was safe to move, having to prise his teeth from the stock of his Armalite after cramp set in.

A lifetime ago.

After twenty minutes with no extraneous sound disturbing the night, Lox gave it the green light. He knelt and once again examined the intruder in the light of his torch.

Euan Ker was still bleeding, though not so heavily, from the wound in his head. Breathing steady, if a little stilted. Soon he would be coming round. Lox shook his head and sighed. What was the world coming to? The laird of Craikmuir breaking into the Institute in the middle of the night like a common criminal?

Don’t ask questions, just get him off my land.

Lox rubbed the scar at his temple. The bullet contracting as it cooled, firing sparks behind his eyes. It had been one of those days. Out on the river, noon till dusk, hunting Fin with shotgun and stun-grenades, the sun blazing down, not even a glimpse of the finless freak to make it all worthwhile. And now it looked like an even longer night ahead, cleaning up Malkin’s personal debris field.

There had to be more to life than this.

He hefted the unconscious laird over his shoulder and continued on his way down to the river.

2

Sunday afternoon and Duncan Ker stood at the observation window in the consultant’s office, looking in on the CRU and all the blinking lights on the sophisticated machinery there. Patients in only three of the five beds, Euan closest to the window—his brother, yes, but not the brother he knew. A shrunken replica, lifeless but for the loveless labour of slaving machines. Ranal, their grandfather, parked bedside, one bony claw clutching Euan’s wrist as the other manouevered the wheel of his chair. He looked up and caught Duncan watching. Duncan turned away.

Let’s put it another way, he said, tired of the doctor’s prevarication. What are his chances?

Chances? Dr Joel E Warner came away from the window overlooking slick hospital grounds and the misted flanks of the Eildons now barely discernible through the torrential rain. Apart from maintaining your brother’s general status, direct treatment of anoxic coma is limited. Only when he becomes medically stable can we start thinking about his chances and capacity to recover.

Tell me something positive, Duncan said.

Warner melted into the swivel chair behind his desk, leant back and sighed. Fatigue circled his eyes like savages on horseback, his diction bowed beneath words he could barely lift above the monotone. He said, The fact that your brother does not seem to have suffered a prolonged submersion, nor delayed resuscitation, and the fact that we detected minor electrical activity of his heart when he was admitted, all could be interpreted as positive. However we don’t know how long he spent in his condition before help arrived.

You mean he’ll be a vegetable if he ever comes out of the coma?

The term Persistent Vegetative State was coined to describe a patient’s condition in which vegetative or anatomic functions such as breathing and digestion could persist indefinitely in the absence of awareness. Unfortunately ‘vegetative’ has been misconstrued to mean ‘vegetable’, and ‘persistent’ to mean hopeless and untreatable. Neither of which apply to your brother.

So he’s not brain dead?

Consider brain death as the irreversible cessation of all brain activity. Euan’s EEG scan this morning showed cortical activity, prognostically a positive sign that we can progress with his recovery therapy.

But he’ll never be the man he was?

A moment’s silence stretched so thin that Duncan could hear the rain rattle through thirsty summer leaves on bushes outside the window.

Unfortunately brain tissue cells are the most susceptible to hypoxia, and in Euan’s case, I would expect some major neurological impairment.

Such as?

Short-term memory loss. Difficulty finding words. Disturbed vision. Incoordination. Spasticity. Abnormal movements. Partial or total paralysis. Impairment of executive functions such as reasoning and judgement, impulsivity, the ability to initiate and persevere.

Perseverance, Duncan thought, turning again to the observation window. It was a quality Ranal once told him he possessed in abundance. Duncan, he’d said, trying to talk him out of joining the Marines, you’re the stubbornest wee tyke I’ve ever known.

In the CRU only the hands of the clock, it seemed, had moved. He could’ve been looking at a photograph of all the family he had left. A wheelchair-bound octogenarian with Alzheimers and a comatose brother he didn’t dare imagine how he could ever live without.

Tell me, Doctor, Duncan said without turning from the window, is there anything you could say I could possibly misconstrue as good news?

3

By any standards , Craikmuir was a poor man's castle: not just because of its diminuitive size but due to years of neglect which had left it with a shoddy air of disrepair, if not quite dereliction. Although on days like today its bleak and gloomy facade, labouring under centuries of soot and grime, was perfect camouflage against the dark and crowding sky, the overall effect seemed to suggest that while time had moved on Craikmuir had determined to remain steadfastedly in the Middle Ages.

A true reflection, perhaps, of the Craikmuir Kers current mindset.

And how times had changed, Lox thought: 500 years ago he'd've had to lay siege to the castle for months, maybe throw it down stone by bloody stone to gain admittance. Today, all he needed was the latchkey and he was inside the West Tower, closing the heavy iron-studded door behind him.

He climbed the left-handed staircase—ignoring the murals depicting Kers down the ages kicking all kinds of shit out of anyone and everyone—to the first floor, where double-doors on the landing opened into what they fancifully liked to call the Grand Apartment. A room almost the length of the castle taken straight out of the Dark Ages with its high Baroque ceiling and elaborate figurines scowling down from each corner. Add the sparkling chandeliers, the huge ancestral portraits framing a central fireplace deep enough to park a car in, the oakwood panelling, the crossed Jethart axes, the mounted stag's head, the tapestries, the claymores, broadswords and shortswords, the long velvet drapes... and what you had was little more than a film-set. People didn't really live here, Lox thought, they just acted out their shallow lives here. Delivered their corny lines and then exited stage right. As Euan Ker had done several weeks ago when Lox attended one of the weekly guided tours, Euan recounting days of yore when the Grand Apartment had been the great banqueting hall and ill-fated venue of a massacre that had all but extinguished their ancestral flame. Euan getting all excited that day, playing up to the Yanks on the tour, describing the scene as though he'd actually been there, and then acting all enigmatic when someone mentioned the Craikmuir Seer and the family's reputed tradition of second sight.

He turned away from the hall and instead of continuing up the newel-stair to the second floor—which he knew to be a building site of a recently postponed renovation—he ducked behind a red velvet drape that concealed another left-handed spiral staircase. This the stone turret-stair to the brothers' apartments, barely illuminated by gun-holes and narrowing to shoulder width as it climbed.

The first door he came to opened on Euan's apartment, the word perhaps a misnomer, as both apartments were no more than large circular stonewalled bedrooms, each with a turreted ensuite dressing and shower-room: what Homes & Gardens might describe as 'functionally bijou'. Twats. He spent little time going through Euan's apartment—not his prime objective—just enough to satisfy his need to know. Not looking for anything in particular, seeing what came to hand, all pieces in a jigsaw he'd all but destroyed and would never get to finish. After ten minutes searching he'd found only one item of interest: a photograph of Euan and a St Bernard.

Lox felt his hackles rise. Did Euan or Ranal own a dog no one had bothered to tell him about? Lord Malkin certainly hadn't mentioned one, and he himself had seen no sign at all of canine presence on his last uninvited visit. Did that mean anything? He hadn't been looking for dog-sign, so hadn't searched the downstairs kitchens for dogfood or a chewed plastic bowl with TIGER on the side. Neither had his acute sense of smell alerted him: not then, not now.

Onward and upward.

He entered Duncan's apartment, stage left. He stood just inside the doorway, in darkness diluted only by the muddy wash of light seeping through north and south windows framed by drapes, colour indeterminate. He could, however, determine bracketed lamps set against oak-panelled walls, a suitcase lying packed on a king-size bed, a roll-top desk in the corner with a chair nestled between its legs and shelves stepped above it: a portable TV there, a few dozen books, a midi sound system, a rack of CDs and cassettes.

No dog.

He switched on the light and began searching the room, first tapping all the wall-panels the way a doctor might tap a bronchial chest. Satisfied he hadn't overlooked a safe or secret passage he then checked under the bed and mattress, behind the pictures on the wall, even prising up the corners of the carpet. In the small turret-room he checked the toilet-cistern, the shower-stall, the built in wardrobe—noting the wetsuit, mask and bottle-harness there, the depth and pressure guages, all gathering dust—then returned to the bedroom. Noticing now the hand-carved African mask on the wall, the jade statue of a meditating Buddha. Then by the south window, plaques from HMS Brinton and HMS Illustrious, a Green Beret, two framed photographs depicting Duncan in his mid-twenties with a squad of Marines on some kind of nautical training exercise, all camoed up and hunkered down in an inflatable, what looked like an oil rig in the hazy distance. Duncan obviously a right wee action man in his youth, it was etched in his expression, that wild and reckless bravado Lox had witnessed during his own military exploits. What they used to call the 'death mask'. Try explaining what it meant to Malkin and all you'd get would be a blank look. Put it in words he could understand, then; tell him, Duncan Ker is not a philosopher, he does not care whether he lives or dies.

Suitcase.

He was approaching the bed when somewhere in the castle a door slammed, stopping him in his tracks. But could hear nothing through the barrage of wind and rain gusting against the windows. He crossed to the window, snatched a glimpse of the courtyard and his BMW through the gauze of rain but saw no new arrivals. He then padded silently to the top of the stairwell where a cool draught rose to meet him. A castle without its ghostly sounds is no true castle at all. Was that all it was, the wind creeping along corridors, sucking at doors? With more urgency now he returned to inspect the suitcase on the bed.

He noted the Air France tags looped around the handle, Flight 311 from Bangkok. The faded stickers like visa stamps: Thailand, Egypt, Macao, Spain, France, Norway, Hong Kong. Inside, a couple of paperback Westerns, and a hardback entitled Coping With Coma & Traumatic Brain Injury. Two pairs of jeans, half a dozen silk T-shirts, a cream lightweight suit, one pair of socks. The man travelled light, or he wasn't planning to stay very long.

Lox now glancing around the turret-suite, mentally going over his progress, following up, checking he'd returned everything to its place when suddenly he heard behind him a sound that was neither wind nor rain nor a product of either.

It was a low rumbling growl.

4

Where there’s life , there’s hope. That was the good news. Euan had been taken off the barbiturates used to slow down activity in his brain and decrease its demand for oxygen. That was also good news. What else? They’d managed to stabilise the damage fresh water had done to his lungs, extracting most of the toxins and contaminants, and tomorrow they’d take him off the ventilator, turn off his arterial oxygen, see if they could induce spontaneous breathing and other brainstem reflexes.

Which, Dr Joel E Warner said, was also good news.

Outside, the storm continued its onslaught, rain still rattling the windows in a frenzied tattoo. Four of them around Euan’s bed, Duncan and Ranal trying to keep out of the way as Dr Warner and the nurse—Angelina said her nametag and County Cork her accent—monitored the monitors, checking heart and respiratory rates, oxygen flow and blood pressure, all the while Warner giving them soundbite philosophies on the subject of arousal therapy.

We believe—and I’m quoting our mission statement here—we believe that if vigorous medical treatment of the early phases of coma is combined with a course of intense multisensory stimulation and physical activity over a period of months, then the majority of individuals surviving the first week will recover and few will progress into PVS.

Across the way, a nurse was showing a relative of her comatose patient how to exercise the boy’s muscles, starting with the feet and working their way up. The boy’s head almost lost inside a huge pair of headphones, the tss tss tss of the driving techno beat audible even above the mechanical sighing of Euan’s ventilator and the fury of the storm.

Ranal now saying, I’m sure she said three o’clock, and Dr Warner said, Mm, but look at the weather. Then the double doors at the end of the ward slapped open and they all turned to watch the tall woman in the dripping green waterproof stride purposefully towards them.

Duncan watching as she shook her long tousled hair free of the hood, finger-combed it into place. She greeted Dr Joel with a brisk nod, planted a kiss on Ranal’s head then asked how the patient was.

Duncan said, His name’s Euan.

She glanced back along her shoulder, as though noticing him for the first time. Then did a swift double-take. So, she said, eyebrow arched. The younger brother.

Duncan, he told her.

I know, she said, ignoring his proffered hand. The one who ran away.

And I’m pleased to meet you too.

You here for the duration, she asked, shrugging off the waterproof, or is this just another flying visit? Her Borders’ accent an ice-cold current beneath her cool educated drift. Looking him over before switching him off with a flick of her eyes. She glanced around for somewhere to hang her waterproof. Dr Joel was that coat-rack.

So, she asked him, how’s our patient?

5

When Duncan conducted the weekly tour of the castle on his rare visits home, he would lead the party up this left-handed staircase and give them a minute or two to study the frieze depicting scenes from the early history of the Craikmuir Kers. He would then point out a few attention-grabbers—the 1313 massacre, the sacking of the castle by the English, the siege of 1649—before conducting them into the Grand Apartment.

Today he ushered the two detectives ahead of him. Over there, he said.

Tracker lay on the varnished floor, gums drawn back in a snarling rictus, milky glazed eyes fixed on eternity, neck at an impossible angle.

Who found him?

Ranal.

Poor old sod. First Euan, now this. Former Melrose prop-forward, Detective Inspector Drew Armstrong was sixteen stone of lumbering flesh and bone driven by a keen and intuitive mind behind a long lugubrious face that bore the scars of one ruck too many. Where is he now?

Took to his bed, Duncan said. The way a mountain-top boulder takes to a riverbed.

Did either of you touch him? Armstrong knelt to run a hand over Tracker’s fur. Move him at all?

Duncan told him no. The second detective, DS Lonie, squatted by Armstrong’s side. What d’you reckon?

Armstrong studied the dog’s teeth, then lifted its head. Reckon? he said, rising to his feet in a fluidity that belied his stature. I reckon someone broke its neck. Take a look around, check all the windows and look out for footprints—if someone broke in, then they broke in wet.

Lonie headed for the stairs. Armstrong tossed a baleful look towards windows brighter now the storm had passed.

How was the journey?

Hectic. Duncan thinking, was it only yesterday he’d stopped off at the Happy Smile to say his goodbyes to Bam and the girls? Pradit then driving him fifty klicks to Hat Yai where he caught the shuttle to Bangkok with only seconds to spare. Then the long haul into Heathrow and this morning’s shuttle north. And long.

Not much of a welcome home. Drew a friend from distant schooldays, a regular guest at the castle through those long hot summers. Have you seen Euan yet?

Duncan told him about his visit to the Coma Recovery Unit, his conversation with Dr Warner. He told me in near-drowning cases like Euan’s there’s bound to be some brain damage.

You can thank your ghillie for reviving him. If he hadn’t been patrolling for poachers...

Wattie Cromb?

Hard to believe, I know. But he was sober and had his cellphone and the presence of mind to try resuscitating Euan before the medics arrived.

Talking about a man whose breath, it was said, could revive the Black Douglas. Tomorrow Duncan would pay Wattie a visit, buy him the largest bottle of single malt he could find. In the meantime his mind bristled with questions.

You want to tell me what’s going on here, Drew?

I was hoping you could tell me.

Man, I’ve only just arrived.

DS Lonie returned through the south turret door and joined them by the open fireplace.

Find anything, sergeant?

Not a thing. DS Lonie a mere chip off Armstrong’s block, his thin drawn face broken from a mould of suspicion. Dark leery eyes patrolled the high ledge of his cheekbones while a skeptical mouth framed every word he spoke. He said, All windows on this floor and upstairs securely fastened, I doubt they’ve been opened in three hundred years. No sign of forced entry or footprints. What I was wondering, though, was if there are any secret passages we’ve not been told about.

Secret passages? Armstrong raised a quizzical brow.

"You know, pull out a book in the library—and there is a library through there—and a panel slides back to reveal stairs leading out, I don’t know, to somewhere beyond the line of siege. Or am I being fanciful?"

Definitely fanciful, Duncan said.

The three of them standing less than five feet from the priest-hole and a hundred from the secret passage.

6

W allet ? Lox chewing the word, extracting all its flavours as he stood by the window overlooking the gorge, trying to clear his head with some cool evening air. But this was the Deaf Heights keep and against the the roar of the river below he could barely hear himself think. What wallet?

The one you removed from Euan Ker’s pocket.

Ah, Lox said, that one.

He closed the window on the slanting rain and returned to face Gregor Malkin across the scarred and pitted table—fashioned, so legend told, from the same mighty oak beneath which Merlin was run to ground. A relief map of banquets held and blood spilled, it now dominated the narrow Consil Chamber that comprised the keep’s first floor.

Once upon a time there’d been thirteen chairs around the table; now there were only twelve.

You've lost it, Malkin said.

Lost would suggest I don't know where it is. I know exactly where it is.

I want that wallet, Lennox.

Malkin not in a favourable mood this evening. Sitting there now, tapping keys on his laptop, every now and then glancing at his watch.

What else was in his pockets?

The usual. A bunch of house keys, small change, a pack of flavoured condoms. I kept the keys and offered the rest to Tweed.

I phoned the hospital this afternoon, said I was a friend of the family but they wouldn’t tell me anything.

Really? I asked one of the nurses at the hospital and she said starved of oxygen the brain'll die in five minutes.

You went to the bloody hospital? Malkin’s eyes narrowed. Are you fucking stupid?

I am a man of many habits, as well you know. I went as a friend of the family to offer spiritual guidance, if not sustenance.

You were reconnoitering.

We have lift off.

Sister Angelina, Lox said, was most helpful. She would not pronounce on Euan's chances of survival, but she did admit there might be some pretty serious brain damage if he ever comes out of it.

Amnesia?

And plenty of it. She said in most cases of traumatic brain injury, patients have absolutely no recollection of the accident or what occurred hours, sometimes even days, before it.

Well, that’s something. Malkin rose from the table and began pacing the floor. Like all men of power, he seemed to dominate the space he inhabited. He was a natural-born predator.

Nevertheless, Euan Ker alive...

Is still an obstacle?

Legally, we might be tied up for years. And time is pressing. The Consil's getting nervous, talking about a postponement, saying that without Craikmuir we can't offer a complete package.

They're stalling.

Of course they're stalling. What do you expect from a bunch of doddery old farts who want all the rewards without dirtying their hands?

Wind howling through the battlements, rain tapping at the windows, the ancient gibbet cage squeaking on its rusty chains.

Lox said, Maybe it's the prophecy they're worried about. The one about the Kers regaining their seat on the Consil.

Events in the Consil obviously coming to a head, exemplified at the last Gathering when according to Malkin one of the Wardens proposed a motion to invite the Craikmuir Kers back to the table for the first time since the massacre.

Malkin said, If Euan were to die though...

7

W e’re wasting our time . DS Lonie folded a fresh piece of gum into his mouth, discarded the wrapper in an ornamental bowl, then let his disdainful gaze roam the Grand Apartment again. Found nothing he hadn’t already sneered at.

So what you’re saying, Drew, is that Euan was mugged?

At this stage of the investigation, we’re keeping all our options open.

So you haven’t even got a suspect.

The Fin seems our best—

Armstrong silenced his sergeant with a venemous look. As I said, we’re keeping our options open.

Fin who? If you’ve got a suspect, tell me.

Armstrong visibly squirming now, a fish on a hook. The Fin is—how can I put this?—a kind of green activist.

Lonie wasn’t so reticent. Any man who thinks he’s a fish fighting for fishes’ rights has to be a few flounders short of a school.

We think he may be involved with one of the radical angler groups. The worst he’s done so far is cut syndicate fishing lines.

Only now he’s stepping up a gear.

That may or may not be. But we do know that the sydicates are reporting a downturn in bookings since his exploits began.

As if the local economy wasn’t already suffering enough.

So you think this Fin might’ve attacked Euan?

He’s been targetting all the beats along this stretch of Tweed, why not Craikmuir?

We don’t sell syndicated rights.

And it would be out of character. Fin’s been careful in his courtship with the media, resorting to violence now would only turn them against him.

Lonie agreed. I can see that. But if Euan saw Fin emerge from the river and recognised him?

Duncan standing there in the Grand Apartment, a watery sunlight now leaking through the south-facing windows, what might be a normal everyday scene except for Tracker lying dead at his feet, a couple of plainclothes cops telling him his brother was in a coma because of a man who thought he was a fish. Just at that moment the West Turret door banged open and Ranal shuffled in.

Ah there you are, Euan, he called. Have you seen Tracker? Damn hound’s gone AWOL again. Ranal in his dressing gown and slippers, leaning on his stick as he approached. Appearing to notice the two plainclothes cops for the first time. Ah, good, that was quick. Difficult to find a reliable plumber these days. Too damn busy talking in their portable telephones. Has Euan shown you where the boiler is? No? Well, ma boy, don’t keep the gentlemen waiting. Time is money, eh, isn’t that what they say?

---

---

Lox sitting at the console, flicking switches, using the shuttle to flip from one CCTV view to the next. Now he was looking down from the battlements at the retractable footbridge spanning the gorge. What was I supposed to bloody do? he said. Let the dog devour me?

Better that than break its neck and let the police know someone was there.

Which shows how much you know about dogs. I heard of a St Bernard that broke its neck trying to lick its bollocks. They find Cujo lying dead on the floor, that’s what they’re going to think.

For your sake, pray they do. Malkin shuffling through papers on the table in front of him, not finding the one he was looking for. What about Euan’s car? he said absently. You disposed of it yet?

Lox shook his head. Still down at the conservation site. Out of sight. Covered by an old tarpaulin behind the earthmovers.

I want it off my land. Now.

And it will be. Soon enough.

Malkin found the Rubicon file he was looking for in his briefcase, scanned it briefly to reacquaint himself with the facts. Duncan Ker very much on his mind.

Ever heard of the Commachio?

Part of the Special Forces, aren't they? Something to do with the Special Boat Service.

Malkin frowned at the page in front of him. Uniformed support for the SBS, trained in the black arts of CQB. You worried yet?

By an ex-marine? Lox snorted his disgust. Next you’ll be telling me they’re some kind of anti-terrorist unit based near Faslane.

Malkin’s smile was a microscopic tightening of his lips. Arbroath, he said. Three detachments, three primary roles: the protection of Faslane, as a rapid response to nuclear security threats, and maritime counter terrorism.

Back in the days we had oil to protect.

Back in the days Lox had his own subversive war to fight.

Then after he resigned his commission he spent the next three years working as a freelance diver in the North Sea, drifting from one service company to another. Aberdeen to Cairo, Cairo to China, China to Thailand. Where he now has his own rig-security company on the Thai peninsula.

Status?

Single. Never been married, no kids.

I meant financial.

As I understand it, solvent. His company, Craigmore, employs about 10 staff and has two contracts up for renewal.

Will he give all that up to return here, take over the running of the estate?

Good question. Duncan is definitely not his brother.

Who refused your approach.

We still have no idea how he might react.

Lox said, He's no philosopher, I can tell you that. You go in his turret-room, first thing you notice is all his Marine memorablia, pride of place, his green beret. Talk about a man worshipping his past.

That's all very well, but what does it tell us?

Christ, you had to feed it to him with a silver spoon. That resigning his commission was not his own idea?

Mm, Malkin said, scrawling another indecipherable note on the document before him. Interesting.

Something else you may want to scribble in your margin... he waited until he had Malkin's undiluted attention. Duncan Ker does not care whether he lives or dies.

Malkin popping the top of his pen to some rational beat in his head as he thought this over. Wheels within wheels working overtime in there. But obviously with more on his mind than just the shady past of a dark horse.

Any news on Fin? he asked.

I was out on the river yesterday, Lox said, and not a sign. That must be almost a week now without a single sighting.

Malkin said, I try to get it through to the Consil that with the Craikmuir beats we'd be able to consolidate our position with the international syndicates and wipe our competitors off the map, all they're concerned about is that damn Fin and what a nuisance he is. I tell them how we can turn his nuisance-value—and the free advertising his media coverage affords us—to our advantage, and they don't want to know. I say think of the challenge we could promote—the only private beat in the world with its own aquatic eco-terrorist—and they say people come here to fish for salmon, not to have their lines cut by a madman. As though they have a clue. I know the people I'm talking about, I have to listen to their stories every week, and I tell you they're fed up fishing beats where all they have to do is cast to get a bite. They want sport for the vast sums they're paying, they want a challenge. And Fin could be that challenge. Promote him properly, then auction exclusive rights to his favourite beats. Sit back and watch the syndicates scramble for their cheque-books.

Don't tell me, Lox said. The Consil aren't interested.

They will be. Malkin leant back and stretched his legs. They will be.

You have a plan?

We need to raise Fin's profile, Malkin said. Cutting lines is good for a few paragraphs now and again, but soon the media will tire of him. We need to accelerate his campaign a little, beef it up.

Lox smiled. How about Thursday evening, BAPA’s public meeting?

BAPA?

You know, the Borderers Against Private Angling lot. The radical anglers who keep fishing your beats and getting beaten up by the Wardens.

Oh, that meeting. As though he’d forgotten he’d be up there on the platform, one of the main speakers. Yes, you could be right. Let me think on it, get back to you.

As ever, the nothing he’d said had been well understood.

Your wish is my command.

Good. Malkin closed his laptop with finality, tidied his papers into his briefcase then rose to his feet. Tomorrow go and see Primo as planned, explain the situation. Tell him we're still interested, but it might take longer now we have to deal with the brother.

Lox tapped out a fag, flipped it into his mouth, cupping the flame as he lit it. I forgot to mention, he said, holding in the smoke for a three-count before sending it spiralling toward the ceiling. You know who I saw at the hospital just as I was leaving?

Enlighten me.

Your wife, as I live and breathe. Paying Euan Ker a visit in all her freckled loveliness. Lox gleeful inside as he watched Malkin's face harden and darken.

8

Fin liked overhangs best , where the deeper currents moving more swiftly around Tweed’s many loops and bends had worn away the red sandstone, creating natural cover from sun and predators for exhausted salmon fighting their way upstream to the spawning grounds. Fin liked overhangs because of the shade they offered on days like this, the sun scorching down through the water, blinding. Also, down here in the relative dark Fin could see better, lie back and watch the infrequent boats drift by overhead, marvel at the grotesquely contorted images they cast.

Days like this with the sun reflecting sharply off the water, fishermen could see very little below the surface. Which meant Fin could use the cover of the overhangs to stalk them unseen, wait downstream until their lines drifted down, then dart out like a pike and snip, one more trophy for the Wall of Flies.

That was the hard part, regulating breath for the strike, timing it right so the bubbles didn’t leave a warning trail on the surface. Best sport of course was when Fin actually witnessed a strike, saw the salmon take the fly. Easiest were the men in waders, stuck out there midstream, only thing they can do is let the fish run, try and make the bank for a surefooted race. Then Fin could either kick in with the fins and follow the chase downstream, or be really boring and remain doggo, ready for a bushwack.

This afternoon, though, Fin wasn’t too hopeful. The boat up there hugging the bank, not much action, just the one trailing line, the