Stonemouth

I admire the view through the canted windows and try to look appreciatively at all the bewildering variety of screens and monitors and glitzy-looking clusters of what I’m guessing is comms gear. One screen looks like a sat-nav the size of a plasma screen. Another, square but with a circular display, is radar. On it I can see the shape of the town, the echoes of the tower blocks, church towers and steeples, and the road-bridge towers. Another pair of screens look like they’re linked into the ship’s engines. More screens show nothing much. They’ve got measurement scales that imply they’re sonar or depth gauges or whatever.

The door is open to the outside at the far end of the bridge, so I step over the high sill and into the clear air. A young guy is squatting, touching up the paint on the white railings. He glances up. ‘Aye.’

‘Afternoon.’

He looks up at me again, frowning. He has what you might most kindly term the nose of a pugilist. ‘You wi Customs and Excise?’ he asks, borderline aggressive.

‘No. Do I look like I am?’

He shrugs and goes back to his painting. ‘Canny tell these days.’

‘Cheers,’ I say after a moment or two, and retreat back into the bridge. He just grunts.

Mike Mac bustles me away five minutes later, down the various ladders and steps to the quayside and his Bentley. Ten minutes later we’re at the MacAvett house, a Scots Baronial stone pile at the far end of Marine Terrace with a commanding view of the Esplanade, the beach and sea. Technically it’s late Victorian but it’s been much fucked-about with. A crenellated wing in mismatched pale-sandstone houses a big pool a little larger than the Murstons’.

As we move through the hall to the sweepingly grand conservatory we’re greeted by a couple of grey wolfhounds. Mike greets both dogs like he’s rubbing his hands dry on their snouts. I used to keep track of the MacAvett family wolfhounds and remember their names, but they’re short-lived animals and I don’t think I’ve met this pair before. Still, they sniff my hand appreciatively and get a sort of perfunctory pat each.

We’re barely sat down — Mike is still running through the list of drinks we might have, though I’ve already said I’m fine — when his phone goes and then he’s frowning and saying, ‘Fuck. What do they want? Aye. Hold the fortress. Be right there.’ Then he’s bouncing up out of his La-Z-Boy again. ‘What a bastard, eh? Fucking officialdom. Got to get back to the boat. You just make yourself at home. Door wasn’t locked so somebody must be home. Try the kitchen; Sue might be around. Back soon.’

I hear the front door close. I stand, looking out at the haze over the sea for a while, going back over the near-rumble at Regal Tables.

Not good. Too close a thing.

I’m guessing somebody at reception called Powell, perhaps as soon as they saw the other guys heading for the table beside ours. Maybe they called him as soon as they saw me; maybe they hadn’t heard Mr M was cool with me being back in town and so they were as surprised as D-Cup was with the way things went when Powell turned up. Anyway, too random a route to escape getting a kicking. I may already have used up my supply of luck for the weekend. I mean, I know it doesn’t really work that way, but all the same.

‘Stewart? Oh my God, is that you?’

I turn round. Probably because hers was the last name Mike mentioned, and my brain can be a bit literal sometimes, I’m half expecting to see Sue, Mike’s wife, in the doorway, but instead it’s their daughter, Anjelica, in a long pink-towelling robe.

‘It is you! Hey, how are you, stranger?’

Jel comes running up and pretty much throws herself at me, the robe flying open as she tears across the parquet and revealing a tiny pink bikini and lots of tanned skin. She’s small, plumply busty and her hair is sort of bubbly blonde, though it’s water-darkened now and plastered to her head and face. Jel’s a couple of years younger than me; told me she loved me when she was about ten and she was going to be my wife when we grew up. It became something of a running joke, though it ended up being not so funny.

Jel pulls back, though still holding both my hands in hers. She looks me down, then up. ‘Lookin good, man,’ she tells me. ‘Keeping like you’re looking?’

‘Sure am. Looking pretty … pretty yourself.’

She lets go of my hands, twirls this way and that, flapping the opened gown out. ‘Still like what you see, hah?’ She raises one eyebrow.

I sit back on the window ledge, arms folded. ‘How are you, Jel?’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she says, throwing herself onto a couch. ‘Nice of you to come back. Old man Murston’s funeral?’

‘Yeah, just here for a few days. Back to London on Tuesday.’

‘So, you seeing anyone, in London?’

‘On and off. Mostly off. Feels like I only rarely touch ground some months.’

‘You seen herself yet?’

‘Ellie?’

‘Ellie.’ Jel looks quite serious now. She pulls her robe closed a little, then changes her mind, kicks it open again.

‘No. Not so far. Don’t know if I will.’

‘How about Ryan? You seen Ryan?’