He looked at us puzzled.

‘I knew him at once. Though he looked forty years older if the truth were known.’

‘Twenty years on the run will have rubbed off his charm,’ Brond said.

‘I’ve no doubt that’s true.’

After Briody we sat not talking. Brond seemed content to wait. Primo stood behind him – every so often he half turned to look out of the window. I was watching him when he leaned forward to check outside and then back so as not to be seen. I knew that someone must be at the back door. A minute later I thought I could hear voices and then that I was imagining them.

‘Was that what you wanted?’ Briody asked. His voice trembled, which upset me for he was a fine solid man, who had done nothing to have Brond set against him.

The noise of voices came loud, one dominant, a woman’s voice sharp and angry yet with that timbre so right it could be no one but Margaret. Next moment she was in the open door and looking at me as if I was alone in the room. Her face was full of hate.

‘Why aren’t you in prison? Oh, it’s not fair that you should be here.’

‘What’s he done?’ Briody asked, alarmed. What’s he done to you? was what he meant. And I almost shouted out, We only slept in the same bed. Nothing happened.

‘You killed him,’ she said, never taking her eyes from me. I had never seen such loathing. ‘Oh, I can’t understand or imagine it.’

But I was innocent of the death of the old politician. They had not needed to tell me it was his bony skull and noble skeleton that had been murdered in the hotel bed. Who else would cause such excitement? Even my father when he heard of it, though he would not be capable for any reason of tearing a human being to pieces, might manage a moment of hatred.

‘How could anybody do that?’ Margaret wondered. ‘To leave him out in the cold place to die.’

Then I knew she was talking about poor Kilpatrick and had been told that I had killed him.

FOURTEEN

When we came to Jackie’s house, Brond dealt brutally with her.

‘He has no right,’ I said, without believing it since Brond seemed to have the power to do whatever he wanted, ‘he has no right at all to go tramping round your house.’

Jackie huddled in a chair that seemed too large for her, and Primo gave less sign of having heard me than a rock in the Trow burn at home. He was not watching us but was simply there, while overhead Brond’s limping step passed from room to room.

She had been puzzled to see us on her doorstep. She started to ask me some question but Brond laid his hand on the door and with a steady pressure took it back out of her hand. Without haste he crowded her back and, Primo behind me, I had no choice but to follow him. It must have seemed to her like an assault of men. We filled the hall. Brond walked through into the front room and she followed him as if mesmerised.

‘Is your husband in the house?’

She shook her head.

‘He’s in serious trouble. Did you know that?’

‘Trouble?’

‘You know he’s done something. What’s the point of lying about it? Are you a political activist as well?’

‘Politics?’ She said it like a word in a foreign language and then stupidly, touchingly, said, ‘But he works for a bookmaker.’

‘Well, he’s miscalculated the odds this time,’ Brond said with the heavy humour of the dullest, most brutal of policemen, and Primo smiled.

Now, returned from searching upstairs, he began again, ‘Where is he? Out planting a bomb somewhere?’

She was astonished but behind that something else as well; as if, perhaps because she was Irish, only the mention of that word in this nightmare began a nightmarish possibility of sense.

‘Bomb,’ Brond repeated, making a thick pat with his lips, ‘poof! Pop! Like that,’ and he splayed his fingers, and then picked at the grey cloth tight over his thighs as if lifting off tiny seeds he had shaken from his finger tips: ‘and then a body here, a leg, a finger perhaps . . . what would this be?’ He lifted nothing between a careful thumb and forefinger. ‘Too pulped to tell.’

And he opened his fingers making us look down as if some horrible fragment would lie on the carpet she swept so clean each morning.

‘My husband?’ The absurdity of the idea released her. ‘My husband! He’s not fond of . . . I mean, he’s a Loyalist all right. But never to go further than a grumble over the papers. Oh, I mean if you knew him. If you only knew him.’

She looked at me for confirmation. That dull stick Kennedy – Oh, I should confirm it. But I had listened to Briody’s story.

I remembered as her smile faded, that strange thing she had told me: how he had got up from among the young men on a beach and done contemptuously what they had been afraid to do, being daring only in talk.

‘Not Loyalist,’ Brond said. ‘The other lot.’

Any doubts I had felt about her vanished. She showed no smallest sign of understanding; it was beyond anything she could have contemplated.

‘Your husband’s a terrorist,’ Brond said impatiently, ‘with a list of Protestant dead notched on his shillelagh.’ He looked at her sharply. ‘And you, what do you want to be taken for? A good Ulster girl of Loyalist stock . . . Yes. Well, if that’s so, some of those dead may be yours. Think about that.’

I had known her for a winter without seeing that she was admirable. When she spoke, it was with a firmness there would be no shaking.

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she said, ‘but there’s only one person I want to explain it to me.’

‘You want him, I want him. Our interests seem to be identical. Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’ She made a gesture to stop him from saying anything. ‘Not exactly. I really don’t know. He got a few days’ holiday and went away fishing. He went up north, but I don’t know where.’

‘Alone?’

‘Yes. He likes to be on his own.’

‘Well, he would,’ Brond said and gave her a sweet smile. ‘It must be a strain to live a lie every waking hour. Even with the one closest to you.’

She bent at that but would not break.

Outside the house, I was put into the car by Primo’s hand. Even in the interrogation room, I had not felt so entirely at someone else’s disposal. Brond said something to him and then got into the driver’s seat.

We drove off leaving him on the pavement.

‘What is he going to do?’ I asked. The sound of my own voice surprised me. I found in myself a feeling for Jackie which I did not want. There was no future for that feeling; not any real future of the kind my mother would understand. ‘Why have you left him behind? He won’t hurt her?’

We climbed the circling ramp that led to the bridge over the Clyde. Across pouring ranks of cars I saw dock cranes and a glitter of light from the big river.

‘If you went into that water,’ Brond said, ‘jumped, pushed or driven off the edge in a car, first requirement when they fished you out – if they fished you out – would be a stomach pump. Look there!’ I caught a glimpse of a racing boat, young men pulling back on the oars. ‘Jolly boating weather! When they lift it out the hull will be plastered with swabs of used toilet paper.’

We curled down and back on earth were held at traffic lights.

‘Primo won’t hurt her?’ I repeated stubbornly.

‘ “Primo”. That’s rather splendid.’

I had never thought of him as anything else, but it was only a joke, a malicious joke by the removal driver Andy.

‘Primo.’ He rolled the name between his lips like a cigar. ‘It’s not a bit like his real name, which is redolent of glens, swinging kilts and dawn trumpets at Kandahar. Hurt her? You’re a poor judge of human nature. Primo is a chivalrous man, another of the world’s idealists.’