Stonemouth

‘You too.’ I leave him packing up and go to the front door.

A young Asian woman I don’t recognise answers the bell and shows me into the remaining conservatory. There used to be two; the other one was knocked down to make room for the new wing, sometime around the Millennium. Mr Murston will be with me shortly.

The conservatory is big, full of cane furniture with Burberry cushions. Two gleaming, life-size ceramic cheetahs stand guard at the double doors from the house. The conservatory looks out southwest across a terrace with a giant trampoline to one side and some wrought-iron furniture. The trampoline has lots of brown leaves on it. The table holds a collapsed giant parasol, green and white. The trees surrounding the house are mostly turning yellow, orange and red. Beyond, down in the haze, I can just make out a sliver of the town. I stand looking at it for a while. I can hear a radio or iPod playing pop somewhere in the house. I listen for some sounds from the erratic population of wee yappy dogs Mrs M has always favoured, but I can’t hear them.

After a few minutes I start to suspect I’m being put in my place by being made to wait, so I sit down, and wait. I pull out the iPhone. Normally I’d play a game or check emails, but all I do is Tweet where I am and put the phone away. Even that’s just a sort of residual paranoia; despite an initial burst of enthusiasm about a year or two ago, I never really got into Tweeting. I’ve taken it up again this weekend only as a security measure because I reckon there’s a chance, however slim, that convincing some bad guys who might wish to do you harm that, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, people know exactly where you are/where you were last seen alive (you always assume the extreme when you’re gaming these things in your head) will somehow put them off. Seems a bit ridiculous now, but there you go.

I sit, trying to identify the song playing frustratingly quietly in some other part of the house. It’s something really old; KLF possibly. The coffee table in front of me has copies of Vogue, Angling and Game, Fore! and Scottish Country Life, though they all look unread. I open a couple and they still have the insert flyers inside. A hefty pair of binoculars sits on a windowsill.

Before I ever got to know the Murstons or got invited to their house, a gang of us set off on an expedition to check the place out one sunny Sunday afternoon. There was me, Dom Lennot, Al Dunn, Wee Malky and Bodie Ferguson. We were almost but not quite past the age of playing soldiers, and we might have been indulging in an outdoor version of Laser Quest (the town’s own indoor arena, in an old bingo hall that had once been a cinema, had opened and closed within a year), or Paintball Frenzy (we were too young to use the real thing, on a farm near Finlassen) or possibly we were re-enacting some combat game. I wasn’t allowed any computer games at home at the time so I got to play only on other kids’ machines, but maybe it was Call of Duty, if that existed at the time, so perhaps we were US Special Forces moving stealthily in on a Taliban leader’s compound. Though, equally likely, we were mujahedin sneaking up on a US Marine base — we were kind of promiscuous that way.

Around the house were the sheltering trees, themselves surrounded by broad clumps of gorse and broom and, a little further down, tilted meadows where sometimes horses and sheep grazed. Lower down the hillside, beyond a straggled line of trees, lay the long, wavily manicured fairways of Jamphside Golf Club. We argued about whether to avoid the course altogether — it was only the second-most exclusive club in the area, but it was the most forbidding, surrounded by fences and great thickets of jaggy whin and bramble, fiercely patrolled by some very humourless and proprietorial ground staff. Having the effrontery to cross its sculpted, obsessively tended greens was not like louping across the scruffier municipal course down by the firth or even braving the dunes, gorse and sands of Olness, the older links course on the coast, cheerily pretending obliviousness to any distant yells from annoyed golfers. Still, we decided to go for it, crossing at what we were assured by Wee Malky was the narrowest part of the course — his granda had been a green-keeper so he claimed local knowledge.