blanket over my shoulders and made me drink heavily sugared tea, and I remember thinking, Sugared tea; dad must have died again, and mumbling something about having a flag in my foot when mum washed them and put bandages on them, and wondering why she was looking so upset and James so frightened; then police came. They seemed very large and official and asked me lots of questions. Later, Doctor Fyfe appeared looking slightly dishevelled, and I recall asking him what he was doing up at this time in the morning, and how he was these days. Old ticker holding out all right, was it?
CHAPTER 18
We were on the battlements; I faced into the cool north wind. I waited to feel the dizziness of déjà-vu, but didn’t. Maybe too much had happened, or not enough time had passed.
‘Well, whatever the heathen equivalent is,’ Lewis said. ‘Will you?’
‘Of course,’ I said. I looked down into the small pink face bundled inside the old family shawl; Kenneth McHoan had his eyes tightly closed and wore an expression of concentration on his features that implied sleep was a business of some deliberation. One of his hands - the thumb so small it could have fitted on just the nail of one of my own thumbs - was held up near his chin; the tiny fingers made a slow waving motion, like a sea anemone in a stray current, and I jiggled up and down a little, cradling the sleeping child and going, ‘Shh, shh.’
I glanced at Verity, sitting beside Lewis, her arm round his waist. She looked up from her son’s face for a moment.
‘Uncle Prentice, the Godfather.’ She smiled.
‘An offer only a churl could refuse.’
‘People have their own absorption spectra, Prentice,’ said Diana Urvill, as she took a Corning turn-of-the-century cut glass plate out of the display case in the castle Solar and - after wiping the plate with a lint-free cloth - handed it carefully to me. We both wore white gloves. I took the plate - like an immense ice crystal with too many angles of symmetry - and placed it on the table, on the topmost sheet of foam. I folded the translucent padding over - thinking how much it looked like prawn crackers - secured it with tape, then found a suitably sized box and placed the plate in the centre, on a bed of small white expanded-polystyrene wafers that looked like flattened infinity symbols.
I lifted one of the giant sacks of the wafers and filled the box to the brim with them, covering the wrapped-up plate, then closed the box and took the little card Diana had left on the table and taped it to the side of the box where it could be read. Then I put the box on a five-high pile near the door; the stacking limit was six, so it completed that column.
‘Absorption spectra?’ I said sceptically, as we started to repeat the whole process with a Fritsche rock crystal ewer.
Diana, dressed in baseball boots, black tracksuit bottoms and a UCLA sweatshirt, her black hair tied in a pony tail, nodded, and breathed on the ewer before polishing it. ‘Things they get absorbed in. Interests, that sort of thing. If you could take a sort of life-spectrum for everybody, of all the things they believed in and took an interest in and became involved in - all that sort of stuff - then they’d look like stellar spectra; a smooth band of colour from violet to red, with black lines where the things that meant something to those people had been absorbed.’
‘What an astronomical imagination you have, Diana,’ I said. ‘Getting enough oxygen up on Mauna Kea, yeah?’ I grinned.
‘Just a pet theory, Prentice.’ She finished polishing the ewer. ‘Better than believing in,’ she said, and handed me the elaborately carved jug, ‘crystals.’
‘Well, that’s true, in a very un-Californian way, isn’t it?’ I filled the inside of the ewer up with little polystyrene beads from another giant sack, a broad smile on my face as I remembered.
She cried out and the crystal sang in reply.
Later, we exchanged signals.
‘Help me fold these sheets, will you?’
The day after all the excitement at Lochgair, I sat at the dining table with what looked like a turban on my head. It was a towel wrapped round one of those sealed liquid containers you freeze and put in cool boxes.
I signed the statement.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Davey, stop calling me “sir”, for God’s sake,’ I breathed. Constable David McChrom had