Stonemouth

She shrugs, looks like she’s about to lift her camera again but then doesn’t. She smiles. God, that’s a pretty face. Then the smile’s gone again. She purses her lips, fiddles with the camera once more. She’s still walking backwards. ‘You want me to fix up a meeting between you and Ellie?’ she asks.

‘What are we? Mafia crime lords?’

She laughs. ‘Yeah, but do you?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t know about that,’ I tell her. Of course I want to see Ellie, but involving Grier doesn’t seem like so great an idea.

‘I could,’ she tells me. ‘If you want me to.’

I nod, indicating behind her. ‘You’re really confident you’re not just about to fall over a tree trunk, or’ — I lean out to one side, looking around her — ‘a big orange buoy sitting in its own little pool of water?’

Grier is not fooled. ‘Yuss,’ she says, eyelids fluttering, ‘I am, amn’t I?’

I scrunch my face up slowly, knitting my brows, narrowing my eyes and stretching my mouth out tight to either side, as though afraid to watch what is about to happen, but she still doesn’t turn round.

We walk like this for a few more moments. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve memorised every bit of wrecked tree on this beach,’ I tell her.

She shrugs, grins, keeps walking backwards.

‘Seriously,’ I say, glancing round behind her again and using one hand to indicate she should head slightly to the right. ‘You could really hurt yourself if you fell over one of these big ones with the branches or the roots sticking out all over the place.’

She still looks unperturbed, but after a few more paces turns the camera on, takes off the lens cap, rests the lens on her shoulder, pointing behind, and clicks.

‘That’s cheating,’ I tell her as she brings the camera forward to look at the photo she’s just taken.

‘Yup,’ she says. She turns, swings forward, takes my arm again.

‘How is Ellie anyway?’

‘She is okay anyway,’ Grier tells me as we reach the forest car park. She walks up to a BMW X5 and plips it open.

‘This thing your dad’s?’ I ask. It’s a bit bling.

Grier shrugs. ‘Dunno. Family fleet car, kinda.’

Her camera goes into a custom bag with various other lenses and photo paraphernalia. My phone vibrated a minute ago to let me know it’s back online and has texts and missed calls. A text from Dad says ARRANGED YOU CAN GO SEE MIKE MAC THIS AFT. He isn’t really shouting; his texts always come like that. I suppose I’d better go; visiting Don without seeing Mike Mac probably breaks some protocols or something.

Grier takes off her hat, flings it into the back seat and ruffles her hair, which is short and fair and looks natural. I wonder when that happened. This is the first time in a decade I’ve seen her when her hair hasn’t been dyed, or styled to look like Ellie’s. She looks sort of boyish, but good.

Then she looks at me with one of those sudden pause-looks Grier’s been using since she was about thirteen. It’s the sort of look that makes you think, Did I say something wrong? or, Has she just thought of something really disturbing?

‘I’m going to see Grandpa,’ she tells me, ‘want to come?’

‘Um, where is he?’

‘Geddon’s,’ she says. ‘Lying in state.’

Geddon’s is the oldest funeral company in town. If I’d really thought about it, I’d have guessed his body would be there.

‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘Yeah, I’d — okay.’

We bounce and wobble over tree roots to the strip of tarmac through the forest that leads to the main road.

I met Joe when I was walking in the hills, before I got to know the rest of the adult Murstons, before I ever talked to Ellie beyond the odd, grunted, embarrassed hi when our paths crossed, infrequently.

Joe must have been in his seventies then; he was one of those thick-bodied men who’s obviously been fit and hard all his life, and who still has a sort of dense-looking frame even in old age. He was stiff with arthritis and he carried his barrel chest and sizeable belly before him like a backpack worn the wrong way round. He always had an old-fashioned wooden walking stick with him; mostly he used it to poke at interesting things he found lying on the ground, and to thrash at nettles. He said he’d fallen into a load of nettles when he’d been a bairn, and still held a grudge. I don’t know; he might have been joking.

Anyway, he liked to walk his pair of fat, slow, elderly Border collies up in the same hills and forest I tended to wander around in, though the collies kind of just plodded along behind him and never ran about or chased after things. Generally they looked as though they’d much rather be curled up on a rug in front of a fire or in a patch of sunlight in the house.