CHAPTER ELEVEN

We stopped running after a bend a hundred or so yards up the lane; when we lost sight of him, the young man was standing on the road outside the opened gate, holding the howling, bellowing Tyson by the collar with some difficulty and still shouting and waving the bat.

We slowed to a trot as we entered the small village of Gittering itself; a quiet-looking place with a village green and a single public house.  Boz chuckled. 'Hoo-ee!' he said. 'That was some big mean muthafucka of a dog!'

'Shit,' Zeb gasped, 'less.' He looked pale and sweaty.

'Sorry about that, chaps,' I said.

'Hey, you're an athlete, I-sis,' Boz said admiringly.

'Thank you.'

'But you're crazy; what the hell you doin' stayin' back when that hound of the fuckin' Baskervilles come at us like that?'

'I told you,' I told him, 'I have a way with animals.'

'You're crazy,' Boz laughed.

'According to my maternal grandmother Yolanda,' I told him, setting my hat straight upon my head again and trying not to let my heart swell too much with pride and vanity, 'I am a tough cookie.'

'Yeah,' he said, 'sounds like your maternal grandmother Yolanda ain't no fool neither.' He nodded at a telephone box on the far side of the village green. 'Let's call a taxi.'

Zeb and I watched for pursuit while Boz rang a number on a card inside the telephone box, but neither Tyson nor his blond handler appeared.  Boz came out of the telephone box. 'It's the same guy; he's on his way; says he'll bring the book for you.'

'How kind,' I said. 'Excuse me, would you?' I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth and stepped into the telephone box.  I studied the instructions, then stuck my head and one arm out. 'Zeb; some change, please.'

Zeb gave me his long-suffering look but coughed up a half-pound piece. 'God, forgive me,' I whispered as I inserted the coin and buttoned the number that had been on the pad by the telephone in La Mancha.  Boz and Zeb looked quizzically in through the glass.

'Good morning,' said a pleasant female voice.  I was startled, even though I was prepared to be spoken to; after years spent using telephones as telegraphs, it was slightly shocking to hear a human voice rather than the ringing tone. 'Clissold's Health Farm and Country Club,' the warm, welcoming voice said. 'How may I help you?'

Bothering her, I thought, and reluctantly restrained myself from asking to speak to Morag. 'I'm sorry?' I said.

'This is Clissold's Health Farm and Country Club.  May I help you?' the lady said again, with a little less warmth.  Her accent was definitely English, though I couldn't place it more accurately.

'Oh; I was trying to reach, ah, Scotland,' I said, sounding flustered.

'I think you have the wrong number,' the lady said, sounding amused. 'Wrong code, really.  This is Somerset.'

'Oh,' I said, brightly. 'What part?  I know Somerset quite well,' I lied.

'Dudgeon Magna; we're near Wells.'

'Oooh, heavens, yes,' I said, with such shamelessly specious conviction I almost had myself persuaded. 'Know it well.  I - oh, bother; there goes my money.' I clicked the handset back onto its rest.

Zeb looked suspicious.  He glared at the telephone in the box. 'I thought you weren't-' he began.

'Somerset,' I announced to him and Boz as the same taxi that had brought us here swung into sight on the far side of the green.

Perversely enough, it was probably the burning down of the old seaweed factory that ensured our Faith became more than just an eccentricity shared by a handful of people.  My Grandfather just wanted to forget about the whole incident, but the lawyers who had charge of the disputed estate to which the old factory had belonged were not so understanding.  Several of the men responsible for the conflagration were apprehended and charged, and when the matter came to trial in Stornoway, Salvador, Aasni and Zhobelia had no choice but to appear as witnesses.

My Grandfather had taken to dressing entirely in black by then and whenever he left the farm at Luskentyre he wore a black, wide-brimmed hat.  With him dressed so, and boasting long (and now entirely white) hair and bushy white beard, and the two sisters clad in their best, most colourful saris, they must have presented a singular sight as they attended the court.  There was some press interest; our Founder abhorred such attention, but there was little he could do about it, and of course the fact that he refused to talk to people on the Stornoway Gazette or a journalist sent from Glasgow from the Daily Dispatch only piqued their interest (and given the rumours about our Founder and his two dusky consorts, they were already pretty piqued).

My Grandfather managed to avoid most of the publicity and discovered that a wide-brimmed hat was particularly effective at shielding him from photographs - especially as the cameras of the time were bulky, awkward items which are hard to handle while trying to take a snap of somebody striding purposefully down a narrow street, usually in the rain.  Nevertheless, while he managed to avoid claiming to be married to the two sisters, and succeeded in side-stepping insinuations about the exact nature of his relationship with the women, he was less reluctant to express himself when it came to his new-found faith, and some of the things he said - helpfully enhanced by the mysterious process of metamorphosis that tends to occur between reality and newsprint - must have struck a chord with a couple in Edinburgh called Cecil and Gertrude Fossil, though of course my Grandfather didn't know this at the time.

Aasni and Zhobelia were called as witnesses but were unable (unwilling, actually) to provide any help; their English and Gaelic - both of which they were reasonably at home in - seemed to deteriorate to the point of almost total incomprehensibility the instant they crossed the threshold of the Court.  When an interpreter was called for, the only people capable of helping proved to be other members of the Asis family, which might or might not have been acceptable to the defence, but in the end didn't matter because the family simply refused to speak or listen to the two brazenly shameless, marriage-wrecking hussies who had once been their daughters, and no threat of being charged with contempt of court was going to change their minds.

Faced with such intransigence in a case which was, in the end, only concerned with the destruction of a factory nobody who mattered had really cared about, the exasperated sheriff thought the better of pressing the point; Aasni and Zhobelia were excused from providing evidence.

Salvador, who had never met the rest of the Asis family, took its rejection of its daughters more personally than they did themselves, and swore never to enter the store they had opened in Stornoway or, later, the branch in Tarbert.  Somehow this ban became an article of faith and extended - as the Asis family's commercial interests expanded and shops opened in Portree, Oban and Inverness - to all retail premises, presumably just to be on the safe side.

The trial ended; the cowed, murmuring, Sunday-best-dressed men accused of the dastardly drunken factory incendiarism were found neither guilty nor innocent but were told that the charges against them had been found Not Proven, a uniquely Scottish verdict that has exactly the same legal force as Not Guilty but is often popularly taken to mean, We think you did it but we're not certain, and which has the twin merits both of introducing into the usually monochrome guilty/innocent, decent folk/criminal classes, good/bad world of the law the concept of quantum uncertainty, and leaving a lingering cloud of public dubiety and suspicion over the accused just so they didn't get too cocky in future.