Chapters (43)
- Pronunciation
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Acknowledgments
It must be the double glazing. We never had that at the farm. You knew you were alive there, with the wind whistling through the window frames and blowing peat smoke down the chimney. There was room to breathe there, room to live. Here the rooms are so small, sealed off from the world. Like living in a bubble.
That old man is looking at me from the mirror again. I smile and he smiles back. Of course, I knew it was me all along. And I wonder how Peter is doing these days.
Three
Three
It was dark when finally Fin turned out the light. But the words were still there, burned on to his retinas. There was no escape in darkness.
Apart from Mona’s, there were two other witness statements. Neither of them had possessed the presence of mind to note the registration number of the car. That Mona hadn’t seen it was hardly surprising. The car had thrown her in the air, to come down on the bonnet and windscreen with sickening force before being flung aside and rolling several times over the unyielding metalled surface of the road. That she hadn’t been more seriously injured was miraculous.
Robbie, with his lower centre of gravity, had gone down and under the wheels.
Each time he read the words he imagined himself to have been there, to have seen it, and each time he felt the nausea rising from his stomach. It was as vivid in his mind as if it were a real memory. As was Mona’s description of the face she had seen behind the wheel, imprinted so clearly in her recollection, although it could only have been the merest of glimpses. A middle-aged man with longish, mousy-brown hair. Two or three days’ growth on his face. How could she have seen that? And yet there was no doubt in her mind. He’d even had a police artist do a sketch from her description. A face that remained in the file, a face that haunted his dreams, even after nine months.
He turned over and closed his eyes in a vain search for sleep. The windows of his hotel room lay ajar behind the curtain, opened for air but also letting in the roar of traffic along Princes Street. He drew his knees up to his chest, tucking his elbows in at his sides, hands clasped together at his breastbone, like a praying foetus.
Tomorrow would be the end of everything he had known for most of his adult life. Everything he had been and become, and was likely to be. Like the day so many years before that his aunt had told him his parents were dead, and he had felt, for the first time in his short life, utterly and completely alone.