Passed it too often. Drunk on an empty stomach, I ended up in Baxter’s room intent upon getting drunker. At some moment during what followed, he made the old silly jibe of calling me the Homicidal Pacifist and, when I objected as before, reminding him that he had been a conscientious objector during the war, he cried, ‘Not a bloody pacifist! Not then or now. Like Young, I held to the articles of the Treaty of Union. I would join no army but the army of an independent Scotland.’ That seemed so silly to me, I began to laugh, but then when I thought of what I had read about the Nazi horrors and remembered that poor devil of a farmer I had met in the morning, I grew angry and told him that he might not be a bloody pacifist but he was certainly either a bloody coward or a lunatic.

‘I understand why people get irritated when Scots go on about independence,’ Baxter said in a tone of disinterested kindliness. ‘I feel the same about Shetlanders – or about the Orkneys. Little piss-pot islands. Whining, “We’re Orcadians. We’re not Scotch.” Bugger them, I think. Let’s send a gunboat. A wee gunboat. A wee wee particularly wee gunboat,’ and collapsed laughing at his own joke.

Later we were bottle friends and comrades and I heard myself telling him about Brond; about Kilpatrick; about Muldoon being tortured; but not about how Kennedy died. In the still centre of my drunken brain, an ape congratulated itself upon being too cunning to tell him how Kennedy died.

‘That’s not real,’ he said, his great dish face pouring sweat. ‘That stuff you’re telling me. Don’t try to kid a kidder. That stuff doesn’t happen in never-never land. I don’t believe you. Nobody here would believe you. We know real things happen on television and always somewhere else. Not here. If you want to pretend something that matters is happening here, you’ll have to tell it in dreams and parables. Dreams and—’

That was when I punched him. Blood flew out from his mouth and he fell backwards on to the floor, looking up at me but keeping very still. His lips had burst on his teeth.

There wasn’t anywhere you could hide from history, even when that was what you had settled for.

In the morning, I wakened with a stiff neck. I had slept with my head on the table. The room was empty, but as I climbed up the steps from the basement to the street I heard a noise and, looking down, saw Donald Baxter swaying with a glass in his hand.

‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘Stories end in corruption. Everybody’s does. But you’re like me. One of the sad ones. The worm gets to us early.’

He wept a single tear of malice.

It wasn’t far to the Kennedy’s house. Even walking slowly, it didn’t take me long to get there. I let myself in and went through all the downstairs apartments. I opened the door of one room and had such a vivid memory of the night I was ill that I expected Jackie to be there and Kennedy at the end of a shaft of light watching us. On the carpet in the parlour there was an overturned Guinness bottle and a tumbler.

As I came back into the hall, a man rushed downstairs at me in a jiggle of gold glasses, plump waistcoat, a squeal of ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I live here.’

‘Not now, you don’t;’ a fat man settling, as he worked it out, into a merely professional wariness. ‘Were you one of the lodgers? Haven’t you heard? Mr Kennedy and his wife are selling up.’

‘You’ve seen him—’

He would say yes and Kennedy would be alive.

‘There’s no doubt the property is for sale. We have authorisation from their agent. They are going abroad.’

I did not have to ask for a description of that agent. I had seen those smooth young men of Brond’s. Perhaps it had been the one who took Jackie to Edinburgh, talking softly to her in the car.

‘I’d like to wash,’ I said.

‘I should really ask for some proof of identity.’

‘Just to wash. I’ll collect my stuff later.’

He looked at the blood on my outheld arm and stood back from the stairs.

Sometimes you need to wash more than to eat. I stripped to the waist and took my time, pouring cool water over the dirt and sweat. In my room I put on a clean shirt. Someone had piled my clothes and books in the middle of the floor.

When I came down, the man said, ‘I’m not sure that you should still have a key.’

He did not manage to sound like a man who would insist.

In the garden outside there was a ‘For Sale’ board. Perhaps it had been put up while I was inside.

‘I’d like a lift.’

‘A lift?’

‘I’ve no money. If you give me a lift, it would save me walking. I have a weak ankle and it’s too hot to walk.’

To my surprise, he let me into his car and when I told him where I wanted to go he had to pass it on the way to his next desirable property. Ten minutes brought us outside Margaret Briody’s house. As I opened her gate, she was coming out of the front door.

‘I didn’t kill Peter.’

Till I heard the words leaving my mouth, I had not known that was what I had come to tell her. She didn’t shut the door but waited as I came along the path. If she was grieving for Kilpatrick, grief wasn’t good for her. She was very pale and pimples at various stages cropped out round her mouth and on her left cheek. As I walked closer, instead of her beauty I saw the yellow sores of squeezed acne.

‘The police wouldn’t have let me go if I’d killed Peter.’ Because of those stupid unexpected pimples, I was quite calm. I coaxed her. ‘That stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

‘Can’t you see I’ve had enough?’

Her tone was dull and tired but in spite of herself the separate notes chimed like water over pebbles. She didn’t try to stop me as I went past her into the house. I thought she would follow me into the front room, but her steps crossed the hall. A door closed.

This was the room where I had surprised Muldoon the night he broke into Margaret’s house: a pair of burglars. I wondered where Muldoon was now. On the table where Margaret had left the note for her parents, a newspaper lay open in a patch of sunlight. I remembered pale fingers of torchlight probing the darkness. Margaret was speaking to someone. I looked at the picture on the front of the newspaper: crowds lining a street, soldiers on horseback, carriages. More than ever, murmuring in the distance her voice was like music.

‘You’d better not be here when Dada gets back,’ she said behind me.

‘Who were you talking to then? Somebody’s here. Your Uncle Liam?’

‘No – I mean yes. My uncle’s here – you’d better go.’

She was a bad liar. I realised there was no one except us in the house.

‘Of course, I’d forgotten the phone. You were using the phone in the bedroom.’

‘Please go away. There’s nothing for you here. I can only ask you.’

‘Do you know what I’d like? I’d like to wait here until your father comes back, and if he has anything to say to me that would be all right, too. You know what happened. He can ask me anything. And when he’s finished I’ll tell him I want to marry you. I’m a university student, I’ll say, and I want to marry your daughter.’

‘You frighten me.’

‘Is that a reason for not getting married?’

‘You’re trying to frighten me,’ she said.

I had not meant it as a threat or a joke. While I spoke I had seen two respectable young people walking up the aisle to get married.

‘I am a university student.’ I held out the idea like a talisman.

‘Have some pity. Don’t you know how I felt about Peter?’

‘I’m not a policeman.’ Kilpatrick had been a policeman, which after all was also one of the professions and respectable. ‘I’m just – My father works on a farm.’ Why did I never tell the whole truth about him? ‘He’s just a labourer. He’s a farm labourer. But you might like him. He’s a kind man. He’d be very impressed by you.’

But not as impressed as he would have been if I could have brought home my expensive whore in her Pringle sweater and soft wool skirt to patronise him in the voice of the gentry. From the beaches of the south and sunlight off ski slopes, the whore’s skin (and what did it matter if it had been a sunlamp in a stinking sauna and massage parlour?) had burnished brown and pure.