‘Yes, those English letters.’

‘But he was a native of Marseilles.’

‘He could have been educated in England, couldn’t he?’

‘In two shakes you’ll be telling me that he wasn’t a Frenchman at all.’

‘In two shakes I will.’

But that, of course, was to enter the realm of fantasy. There was no mystery about B Seven. He had an identity, a home and people, a girl who was waiting for him. He was demonstrably a Frenchman, and the fact that he wrote English verse in English handwriting was entirely by the way.

‘He probably went to school in Clapham,’ he said nastily to the voice; and fell instantly asleep.

5

In the morning he woke with rheumatism in his right shoulder. He lay considering this in slow amusement. There was no end to what your subconscious and your body could achieve between them. They would provide you with any alibi you wanted. A perfectly good honest alibi. He had known husbands who developed high temperatures and the symptoms of ‘flu each time their wives were on the point of departure to visit relations. He had known women who were so tough that they could watch a razor fight unmoved and yet would pass out in the deadest of dead faints when asked an awkward question. (‘Was the accused so persecuted by police cross-examination that she was unconscious for fifteen minutes?’ ‘She fainted, certainly.’ ‘There was no question of a simulated faint, was there? The doctor says that he saw her at the material time and there was great difficulty in reviving her. And that collapse was a direct result of the police cross-examination to which she was being—’ etc.) Oh, yes. There was no limit to what your subconscious and your body could cook up together. And today they had cooked up something that would keep him off the river. His subconscious had wanted to go in to Scoone today and talk to the librarian at the Public Library. His subconscious had remembered, moreover, that it was market day and Tommy would be taking the car into Scoone. So his subconscious had set to work on the eternally sycophantic body and between them they had made a tired shoulder muscle into an unworkable joint.

Very neat.

He got up and dressed, wincing each time he lifted an arm, and went down to cadge a lift from Tommy. Tommy was heart-broken at his disablement but delighted by his company, and they were so gay together, this warm spring morning, and Grant was so filled with the pleasure that ferreting out information always provided for him, that they were running through the outer suburbs of Scoone before he remembered that he was in a car. That he was shut into a car.

He was enormously gratified.

He promised to meet Tommy for lunch at the Caledonian, and went away to find the Public Library. But before he had gone far a new idea struck him. The Flying Highlander would have come clicking over the points at Scoone only a few hours ago. Every twenty-four hours from year’s end to year’s end the Flying Highlander made that night journey and came into Scoone in the morning. And since the train crews habitually stuck to the same run, alternating time on and time off, there was just the chance that one of the staff who had come into Scoone on the Flying Highlander this morning was Murdo Gallacher.

So he changed direction and went to the station instead.

‘Were you on duty when the London mail arrived this morning?’ he asked a porter.

‘No, but Lachie was,’ said the porter. He stretched his mouth into a line, let out a whistle that would have done credit to an engine, tilted his head back an inch to summon a distant colleague, and went back to reading the racing page of the Clarion.

Grant went to meet the slowly advancing Lachie and asked him the same question.

Yes, Lachie had been on duty.

‘Can you tell me if Murdo Gallacher was one of the sleeping-car attendants?’

Lachie said that yes, Old Sourpuss was on her.

Could Lachie say where Old Sourpuss could be found now?

Lachie glanced up at the station clock. It was after eleven.

Yes, Lachie could say where he would be. He would be in the Eagle Bar waiting for someone to stand him a drink.

So to the Eagle Bar at the back of Scoone Station Grant went, and found that Lachie had been, in the main, right. Yughourt was indeed there, mooning over a half pint. Grant ordered a whisky for himself and saw Yughourt’s ears prick.

‘Good-morning,’ he said amiably to Yughourt. ‘I’ve had some very good fishing since I saw you last.’ And was pleased to notice the hope grow on Yughourt’s face.

‘I’m glad of that, sir, very glad,’ he said, pretending to remember Grant. ‘The Tay, is it?’

‘No, the Turlie. By the way, what did your dead young man die of? The one I left you trying to waken.’ Antagonism began to wither the eagerness on Yughourt’s face. ‘Won’t you join me?’ Grant added. ‘A whisky?’ Yughourt relaxed.

After that it was easy. Yughourt was still prickled with resentment at the inconvenience that he had been caused. He had even had to attend the inquest in his spare time. It was, Grant thought, as easy as dealing with a toddler who has just learned to run. It needed only a touch to steer him in any required direction.

Yughourt had not only hated having to attend the inquest, he had hated the inquest and he had hated every single soul connected with the inquest. Between his hatred and two double whiskies he provided Grant with the most detailed account of everyone and everything. He was the best value for money that Grant had ever had. He had been ‘on’ in the affair from first to last; from the first appearance of B Seven at Euston to the coroner’s verdict. As a source of information he was pure horse’s-mouth, and he ‘gave’ like a beer tap.

‘Had he travelled with you before?’ Grant asked.

No, Yughourt had never seen him before and was glad that he was never going to again.

This was where Grant’s satisfaction suddenly changed to satiation. One more half-minute of Yughourt and he would be sick. He pushed himself off the counter of the Eagle bar and went to look for the Public Library.

The library was frightful beyond description: a monstrosity in liver-coloured stone; but after Yughourt it seemed the fine flower of civilisation. The assistants were charming and the librarian was a thin little piece of faded elegance with a tie no broader than the black silk ribbon of his eyeglasses. As an antidote to too much Murdo Gallacher it could not have been better.

Little Mr Tallisker was a Scot from Orkney—which, he pointed out, was not being a Scot at all—and he was both interested in and knowledgeable about the Islands. He knew all about the singing sands on Cladda. There were other alleged singing sands, too (every Island wanted to have what its neighbours had as soon as they heard about any new possession, whether it was a pier or a legend), but the Cladda ones were the original. They lay, like most of the Island sands, on the Atlantic side, facing the unbroken ocean. Looking out to Tir nan Og. Which, as Mr Grant might know, was the Gaelic heaven. The land of the eternally young. It was interesting, wasn’t it, how each people evolved their own idea of Heaven? One as a feast of lovely women, one as forgetfulness, one as continuous music and no work, one as good hunting grounds. The Gaels, Mr Tallisker thought, had had the loveliest idea. The land of youth.

What sang? Grant asked, interrupting the dissection of comparative bliss.

It was a moot point, Mr Tallisker said. Indeed, you could have it either way. He had walked them himself. Endless miles of pure white sand by a brilliant sea. They did ‘sing’ as one trod on them, but he himself held that ‘squeak’ would be a better description. On the other hand on any day that provided a steady wind—and such days were of no unusual occurrence in the Islands—the fine, almost invisible, surface sand was swept along the wide beaches so that they did in fact ‘sing’.