had mentioned the contents of the Eight as well as the vehicle itself.
I got in and sat in that high armchair of a driver’s seat, smiling at the walnut and the chrome and breathing in the smell of Connelly hide. The car looked showroom-clean; un-lived in. Nothing in the door pockets, on the back seats or the rear shelf; not even maps. I hesitated before opening the glove box. I was just paranoid enough to think maybe there was a bomb wired to that or the ignition, but, well, that didn’t seem very Fergus-like, despite it all. So I opened the glove box.
It contained the car’s manual - I’d never seen one bound in leather before - the registration documents, and a cardboard presentation box I recognised as coming from the factory gift shop.
I took it out and opened it. There was a paperweight inside, which was what the box was meant to contain, but the big lump of multi-coloured glass was a little too large for the cardboard insert that went with the box. When I looked at the base it was an old limited edition Perthshire weight, not a Gallanach Glass Works product at all.
I left the paperweight lying on the seat and got out, checked the car’s boot — carefully, thinking of the end of Charley Varrick — but that was in concourse condition too.
I went back to the driver’s seat and sat there for a while, holding the paperweight and gazing into its convexly complicated depths, wondering why Fergus had left this lump of glass - not even from his own factory - in the car.
Then I weighed the glassy mass in my hand, and clutched it as you might a weapon, and took another, evaluating look at it, and realised. It was spherical, or nearly spherical, and probably pretty well exactly nine centimetres in diameter.
I almost dropped it.
I shivered, and put the paperweight back in the presentation case, put that in the glove-box, and - after the car did not blow up when I turned the ignition - drove its quietly ponderous bulk back to Lochgair.
Fergus’s memorial service was held a week later, at the Church of Scotland, on Shore Street in Gallanach, mid-Argyll. Kind of a traumatic location for the McHoans, and I wouldn’t have gone myself - it would have felt too much like either hypocrisy or gloating - but mum wanted to attend, and I could hardly not offer to escort her.
We put some flowers on the McDobbies’ grave, where dad had died, then went in to the church, each kissing the sombrely beautiful twins.
I stood listening to the pious words, the ill-sung hymns and the plodding reminiscences of the good lawyer Blawke - who must be becoming Gallanach’s most sought-after after-death speaker - and felt a furious anger build up in me.
It was all I could do to stand there, moving my mouth when people sang, and looking down at my feet when they prayed, and not shout out some profanity, some blasphemy, or, even worse, the truth. I actually gathered the breath in my lungs at one point, hardly able to bear the pressure of fury inside me any longer. I tensed my belly for the shout: Killer! Fucking MURDERER!
I felt dizzy. I could almost hear the echoes of my scream reflecting back off the high walls and arched ceiling of the church ... but the singing went on undisturbed. I relaxed after that, and looked around at the trappings of religion and the gathered suits and worthies of Gallanach and beyond, and - if I felt anything - felt only sorrow for us all.
I looked up towards the tower. All the gods are false, I thought to myself, and smiled without pleasure.
I talked to a red-eyed Mrs McSpadden after the service, walking down through the gravestones towards the road and sea, under a sky of scudding cloud; the wind tasted of salt. ‘Aye,’ Mrs McSpadden said, in what was for her almost a whisper. ‘You never think it’s going to happen, do you? We all have our little aches and pains, but when I think about it, if I’d just said something when he mentioned a sore chest that night to go to the doctor ...’
‘Everybody hurts, Mrs McSpadden,’ I said. ‘And he had broken those ribs, in the crash. Anybody would have assumed it was just those.’
‘Aye, maybe.’
I hesitated. ‘Mum said he’d had a phone call from abroad, the night before?’