“Well, maybe not as such, but that was definitely the root of it,” the driver said. “Call a child ‘Pete Hill’ and you’re painting a bloody target on their backs, aren’t you? That’s why I joined the army, so I could learn to kick shit out of the little fuckers.” He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Course, they were brutal there, an’ all.”

“Eh, aye, I can imagine,” Hamza said. “Couldn’t you have gone with ‘Peter?’”

It was Pete’s turn to miss a beat. “What?”

“Couldn’t you have used ‘Peter’ instead of ‘Pete?’”

The driver turned and faced forward again. For several seconds, he just stared ahead at the bus station that stood tucked in at the side of the supermarket.

“Fuck,” he mumbled, after some thought. Then, he gave himself a shake and went back to addressing Hamza via the mirror. “Anyway, your man sure saw the funny side. Cracked him up it did. Pete Hill. He was firing them out, the jokes. Jokes about holding twenty times my own body weight in water, about capturing and storing carbon dioxide, about drying me out and throwing me on a fire! I tell you this much, he knew a lot about the uses for peat. More than most, anyway. More than me, even, and I thought I’d heard them all over the years. He was relentless, though. Relentless.”

Hamza had a nagging feeling that this interview was starting to slip away from him, so he shunted it back on track with a question.

“This is the car you took them in, yes?”

“It is. They needed something roomy. Had quite a bit of luggage with them, so this was ideal,” Pete said. “This’ll carry pretty much anything. I can get my bike in. Fishing rods. Furniture. You name it. I’ve had a fridge freezer in here once. One of them big American ones. With the ice dispenser on the front. It wasn’t turned on at the time, obviously—I mean, where would you plug it in? But still, it fit in with the seats down. The back ones fold right into the floor. Flat, so you wouldn’t know they were there. Makes a difference.”

Hamza grasped at the thread of the conversation and clung tightly to it. “You took them from here to the house in Glen Coe? Any stops along the way?”