The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  The lights of Inveraray were off to our right, steady across the dark waters of Loch Shira as we rounded Strone Point, when Ash spoke again. ‘Bit of a risky way to top your wife, isn’t it?’

  ‘Convincing, though. And maybe ... Don’t laugh,’ I said, glancing over at her. ‘Maybe the perfect crime.’

  Ash looked at me dubiously. ‘Oh dear, Prentice. Really.’

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘He banged his head; he doesn’t remember the last few miles of the drive. He even asked to be hypnotised, though they never did. Short-term memory gone, see? Hell, if he did it just on the spur of the moment, maybe even he isn’t sure he meant it. He told me himself that he thought Fiona had been wearing a seat belt. I saw him just after the crash, while I was in hospital too, getting my appendix out. So nobody - maybe not even him - will ever know. It’s fucking perfect. Risky but perfect, if it does work.’

  We stopped at traffic lights by the ornate, hump-backed bridge that took the road over the Aray. I sat staring at the red light; Inveraray sat ahead, round the side of the little bay, white buildings glowing in the sodium twilight of the street lights.

  ‘But if he doesn’t know he did it,’ Ash said, putting the sun visor down again and checking her forehead in the mirror in the lights of the on-coming stream of traffic, ‘why would he kill Rory anyway?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe he does know he did it; but even if he doesn’t, he might guess that he did. Maybe he was afraid Rory would publish something too close to the truth, maybe Rory was threatening to tell people about his theory; the police, for a start. Maybe neither murder was premeditated; maybe Fergus just reacted, both times. I don’t know.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Ash said. She sat looking baffled for a bit, then shook her head. The lights changed and we crossed the bridge.

  ‘If I’m right,’ I said, ‘Fergus probably had thought about killing her before he did. Maybe he only actually decided then and there, on the road that night; but he must have thought about it. Like I say; even if he isn’t sure he did it himself, he knows he might have. I mean how hard do you have to think about something, how seriously, before it becomes something you could do, in the heat of the moment?’

  ‘I give in,’ said Ash. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Jeez,’ I said. ‘When I was feeling really bad last year I used to lie awake at night thinking that if there was some way of killing Lewis, quickly, painlessly, with no way of being found out, I might just do it, especially if I knew somehow that Verity would turn to me afterwards -’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Prentice,’ Ash said, turning her head to watch downtown Inveraray slide past. A minute later we were out, accelerating down the darkness of the loch side.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I was pretty fucked-up. I mean, I’m not saying it wasn’t my own fault, Ash; I know it was. I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m just trying to explain that some crazy stuff can go through your head sometimes through love, or jealousy, and maybe, if it’s triggered by something ... I mean if somebody had actually given me a method of killing Lewis like that I’d probably have been horrified. I hope I couldn’t even have thought about doing it any more once I knew it was possible. It was just a fantasy, a kind of warped internal therapy, something I day-dreamed about to make me feel better.’ I shrugged. ‘Anyway, that’s the case for the prosecution.’

  Ash sat, mulling, for a while.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Have you checked out whether Fergus was alone the night Rory may or may not have gone to see him? I mean this whole thing falls to pieces if your uncle -’

  ‘He was alone, Ash,’ I told her. ‘Mrs McSpadden had gone to visit relatives in Fife that weekend. Mum and dad had suggested the twins came and stayed with us. Fergus brought them over about tea time; I remember talking to him. He had a couple of drinks and then he left. So he was alone in the castle.’

  Ash looked at me. I just shrugged.

  ‘Okay,’ she said eventually. She rested her elbow on the door, and tapped at her teeth with one set of nails. Her skirt had ridden up a little, and I stole the occasional glance at her long, blackly shining legs.

  ‘So,’ she said later when we were in the forest, away from the loch side and a few kilometres out of Furnace. ‘What is to be done, Prentice?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘There’s no body ... Well, there is Aunt Fiona’s, but that’s neither here nor there. But Rory’s still missing, in theory. I suppose I could go to the boys in blue with what I’ve got, but Jeez, can you imagine? Right, sonny, so you think this wee story that ye’ve read means yer uncle wiz kilt ... Ah see. Would you mind just putting on this nice white jaikit? Aye, the sleeves are a wee bitty on the long side, but you won’t be needing yer hands much in this braw wee room we’ve got for you with the very soft wallpaper.’

  We curved down into Furnace, the road finding the loch shore again. I could sense Ash looking at me, and chose not to look back, concentrating on checking the mirrors and the instruments. Eventually she took a breath. ‘Okay. Supposing Fergus did kill Rory, what did he do with the body?’

  ‘Probably hid it,’ I said. ‘Not too near the castle ... He had plenty of time; all night. He had a Land Rover; he could have got the bike in the back. Bit of a struggle maybe, but Fergus is a biggish lad, and a 185 Suzi isn’t that heavy. It did occur to me he could have driven the bike himself with the body lashed to his back looking like a pillion. It’s a bit Mezentian, but possible. But then he’d have had to have walked back from wherever he left it ...’ I looked over at Ashley, who was staring at me with a worried, even frightened expression. I shrugged. ‘But I think he took it up to one of the lochs in the hills, in the Landy; used the forestry tracks and dumped body and bike together into the water. There are plenty of places. The forest to the south of the castle, on the other side of the canal ... It’s just full of little lochs up there, and there are tracks to most of them; it’s the obvious ... What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re right into all this, aren’t you?’

  ‘What do you expect?’ I laughed, a strange, tight feeling in my belly. ‘What if I’m right? Jeez, this guy might just have killed two of my close relations; wouldn’t you be kind of interested?’

  Ash breathed out. ‘Oh dear, Prentice,’ she sighed, shaking her head and staring out of the window at the night as we swept through the forest towards Lochgair. ‘Oh dear, oh dear ...’

  We pulled up outside the Watt house in Bruce Street before eleven. Ash looked in the visor mirror again. She frowned and held her hair away from her face, turning her head from side to side. ‘Can’t see a bruise,’ she said.

  I looked over. ‘No, I think you’re all right there.’ I spread my hands. ‘Look, I’m really sorry -’

  ‘Oh, shush,’ Ash said. She nodded at the house. ‘Coming in?’

  ‘Just for a minute. I’d like to ask a favour of your mum.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Ash said, reaching into the back for her flight bag. ‘Let me guess; you want to get in touch with Uncle Lachy.’

  I turned the engine off and killed the lights. ‘Aye; I wondered if she might let me have his phone number in Australia. I’d like a wee word with him.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet you would.’

  We got out of the car and walked up the path towards the door.

  I had a brief chat with Mrs Watt, gracefully refused a dram, and left after five minutes. A shower scattered raindrops in bright cones under the street lights as I drove away. I went up Bruce Street then took a couple of lefts onto the Oban road where it ran along the side of what had been the Slate Mine wharf.

  When I saw the building site, I pulled in and stopped the car.

  The site was lit with a sort of hollow orange dimness by the nearby sodium lamps. It was here I’d come with Ashley that night after Margot’s percussive cremation; we sat here on the Ballast Mound, the World Hill. It was the night she’d told me about Berlin, the Jacuzzi, and the man who’d hinted there was some trick being played on somebody in Gallanach. She’d given m
e that piece of the Berlin Wall, shortly after we’d sat together here. The developers had been going to level the mound the following day, preparatory to putting up some new houses.

  But it looked like they hadn’t got very far.

  The old wharf was derelict again; levelled all right, and with foundation trenches dug, but no more. Little wooden stakes were stuck into the ground near a few of the trenches; loose bits of wet string tied to them lay straggled across the ploughed-up ground. There were no earth movers or dumper trucks on the site any more, just a couple of loose piles of bricks, the bottom few layers already overgrown by weeds. A picket fence round the site had been knocked flat almost all the way round, and the developer’s signboard hung flapping in the breeze, secured at only one corner to a rickety, lop-sided framework.

  Gone bust, I supposed and, with a look at where the Ballast Mound had been, drove away.

  CHAPTER 17

  The line went dead. Twenty thousand kilometres away - and a lot more than that if you took the satellite route my words had - a man put the phone down on me. I listened to the electronic buzz for a while, then replaced the onyx handset in its gold cradle.

  I put my hands between my knees, looked out through my own reflection in the study windows to the darkness of the park and the string of orange lights along Kelvin Way, and felt a cold, sick feeling coiling in my belly. I was running out of excuses for doing nothing.

  If Lachlan Watt had said ’What?’ or ‘How dare you!’ or something like that; even if he’d just denied it - indignant or amused - and perhaps especially if he’d asked me to repeat what I’d just said, I’d have had some doubt. But to put the phone down ... Did that make sense? I mean, you’re living quietly in Australia, the phone goes, and somebody you last remember as a kid in Scotland has the nerve to ask if you ever slept with his aunt in her marital bed. Do you put the phone down without another word if the answer’s No?

  Maybe you do. Everybody’s different. Maybe I still didn’t know enough. I lowered my head to the green leather surface of the antique desk and banged my head softly a couple of times, my hands still clasped between my knees.

  I’d been putting this off for days. And anyway weeks had passed. First, Ashley’s mum hadn’t had Lachy’s number, then she got it off somebody else in the family, then it turned out it was an old number (I hadn’t tried it anyway) and he’d moved, then there was a delay getting the new number, and when Mrs Watt did phone up with it, I’d dithered. What was I supposed to say? How did I broach the subject? Come right out with it? Talk round it? Hint? Accuse? Make up some story about a just-discovered will, with a bequest to the one man she’d been unfaithful with? Or the one she’d most enjoyed being unfaithful with? Should I pretend to be a lawyer? A journalist? Offer money? I fretted for days and could have gone on doing so for months.

  I’d stayed in Glasgow that Thursday night, completing a paper on the effect of industrial growth on the drive towards the unification of Germany in the eighteenth century; it wasn’t actually due in until the following Friday, but I reckoned that slamming the blighter in a whole seven days early would keep the Prof. happy.

  I’d turned one of the late Mrs Ippot’s first-floor reception rooms into a study, moving a giant oak and leather desk over to the window with the help of Gav and Norris; I’d bought a PC similar to but faster than the machine at Lochgair and plonked it roughly in the middle of the mega-desk, where it looked a bit lost, but clashed nicely. For the essay on German unity, I’d surrounded the computer with a dozen delicately beautiful pieces of Meissen pottery. Whether they had any positive effect on the worth of the paper I don’t know, but they were a lot more soothing to look at while I was searching for inspiration than a blinking cursor.

  I’d finished the paper about 2am and printed it out. I thought about getting in the car there and then, dropping the paper through the letter-box of a pal who’d take it in to the department for me tomorrow, and then heading for Lochgair. But I was tired, and I’d already told mum I’d be down in the morning; I didn’t want to wake her by arriving in the middle of the night.

  So I’d had a whisky and gone to bed.

  The main bedroom in Mrs Ippot’s expansive town house contained a canopied four-poster about the size of a double garage, the sleeping surface of which was about the same height as a mini’s roof. The posts were telegraph-pole thick; highly polished mahogany carved into representations of fairies, elves and gnomes, all stacked like little caryatids. I liked to imagine they were the work of an Amerindian totem-pole maker who’d read too much Tolkien.

  The centre-piece of the bedroom was a vast chandelier cut from ruby-coloured Murano glass; it hung like a glistening spray of frozen blood from the centre of a gilt-smothered ceiling whose few flat patches were covered in paintings of cherubs and fawns cavorting in a sylvan landscape that appeared to be equal parts Rubens and Disney.

  The walls of the room, when not hidden from view by the bed’s luxurious (but Islamically abstract) brocade side curtains, were covered with huge Rococo canvases of Venus in various guises, settings and ages, though all shared the same state of deshabille and a rotundity of figure that must have required the painterly equivalent of soft-focus to appear so leniently attractive.

  Where the walls did not glow with acres of flesh, they reflected that golden voluptuousness with great gilt-frame mirrors which almost visibly strained the walls they hung on, and which, I couldn’t help but notice, also provided rather a good view from and of the silk-sheeted bed. I’d understood Mrs Ippot had been elderly and frail when she died, but I rather hoped she’d had more fun in the bed than just lying there contemplating the condign punishment I’d decided she had devised for her immediate family (certainly I had yet to share the space between those sheets with anybody, though the bedroom’s sheer scale and stateliness did lend masturbation an air of solemnity and arguable dignity the apprehension of which had previously quite passed me by). Even the bedside tables were Chippendale; one of them was topped with a large cut-crystal Venetian vase which I kept fruit in, when I remembered. Otherwise it played host to the little lump of concrete that had been part of the Berlin Wall, which Ashley had given to me over a year earlier.

  The bedroom also contained the greater part of Mrs I’s collection of camphor-wood chests; a few too many, perhaps. Despite the visual and tactile splendour, olfactorily it was like sleeping in a chemist’s.

  However, the sad truth is that being surrounded by art treasures designed to excite the eye, gladden the gland and animate the avarice does not guarantee a full night’s kip. I’d woken at about half-six, lain there restlessly for a bit, then given up trying to get back to sleep and got up to have some toast and a cup of tea.

  I’d put the TV on in the kitchen and found we were at war.

  I sat and watched it for a while; heard the CNN guys in Baghdad, saw the reporters report from Saudi airfields, listened to the studio pundits gibber about surgical strikes and pinpoint accuracy, and discovered that, these days, war is prosecuted, not waged. Actually, both words struck me as possessing greasily appropriate connotations in the circumstances.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I said to myself. What was telephoning somebody you hardly know on the other side of the planet and asking them impertinent questions about their sex life, compared to this gratuitous malfeasance? I strode up the stairs to the reception-room study, determined to make the phone call.

  I settled on the direct approach and the truth about myself.

  And Lachy Watt put the phone down on me.

  Maybe he just wanted to get back to the TV and watch our exciting Third World War for a bit.

  I’d stayed in the Lochgair house over Hogmanay itself. We had plenty of drink in, and mum and I had prepared loads of food, but not many people actually visited after the bells. Verity went to bed about ten past midnight after struggling to stay awake from about ten o’clock. She had a very small glass of whisky at the bells. Some people from the village came in about one, Aunt Tone and Uncle Hamish arriv
ed about two for half an hour of strained conversation, and some of James’s pals called in after four, but mostly it was just mum, Lewis, James and I together. James conked out about six, but Lewis and I were determined to see the dawn come up just on principle.

  We sat in the conservatory, talking and listening to CDs on the gateaux blaster, which I’d brought down with me from Glasgow because it sounded better than the Golfs own sound system (which anyway didn’t include a CD player). We were drinking whisky, chasing it with pints of mineral water; pacing ourselves. Lewis felt we were both starting to nod off at one point and so suggested a game of chess. I mooted for the River Game, but we’d have had to have dug the board and everything out and read through all the rules, so we decided chess would be simpler.

  ‘I’ve been too sensible,’ I told him, while pondering a pawn exchange.

  ‘Sensible?’ Lewis sounded surprised. ‘You?’

  I grinned. ‘Well ... Look at me; I’m studying, I’m living quietly, I’m coming home to mother each weekend ... I even bought a sensible, reasonably cheap car. All that money I got...’ I shook my head. ‘I’m twenty-two; I should have blown it all on floozies or dangerous drugs, or just took off round the world, or bought a Ferrari.’

  ‘You can’t buy a Ferrari for forty grand,’ Lewis said, chin in hands, studying the board.

  ‘I didn’t say it had to be a new one.’

  Lewis shrugged. ‘Well, you’ve still got most of the dosh. Go ahead; go do some of that stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, but I sort of promised mum I’d get this degree.’

  ‘Okay, so wait till the summer and then do it.’

  ‘But mum’ll just worry if I get a fast car.’

  ‘So take off round the world.’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe. I might.’

  Lewis looked up at me. ‘What are you intending to do, anyway, Prentice?’ He grimaced, stretched, rubbed his face. ‘I mean, are you still just going to wait and see who’s recruiting graduates and then take what sounds like the best job, or have you settled on something yet? Something you actually want to do?’