"Covering the story," I tell him, and grin. "See you soon."

I make Inverness Airport in ninety minutes, through showers of hail towed under tall, grey clouds. Sound track by Count Basic and Islam's answer to Pavarotti in the even more enormous shape of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; voice like a tripped-out angel in a dream even though I have no idea what he's singing about and always sneakingly suspect it's something on the lines of "Hey, let's string up Salman Rushdie, yeah-yeah'.

The ticket's waiting for me at the desk. I'm still officially on holiday so I force myself not to read any newspapers. I think about buying some fags but the headache's still there behind my eyes and I have the feeling smoking a cigarette would make me want to throw up. Of course what I really need is something chemical and crystalline but I don't have any and wouldn't know where to start looking for it in Inverness. I feel the need to do something so I buy a dumb little hand-held game and sit playing it while I wait. The flight's delayed but only slightly; I change at Gatwick in breezy sunshine and the 146 touches down on Jersey in relatively balmy conditions. I even manage to hire a car with the credit card, which seems like a blessing.

The Nova comes with a map; I drive through the neat little lanes and some straighter, faster roads, feeling even in those few miles that the place is too damn clean and twee and crowded after the West Highlands. Gorey is easy to find, out on the east coast, looking out over the sands and round to the point where the castle I always thought was in St Helier actually is. Hill Street takes a little longer, but Aspen is conspicuous; a long white villa set just below the crest of a low, wooded ridge, surrounded by white walls with ornamental black railings and little ball-head shrubs standing in wooden tubs. Terracotta tiled roof. It looks cool. I imagine its value is probably pretty cool too.

There are tall black iron gates but they're hooked open so I just drive through and up a drive of pink bricks to the door.

I ring the bell and wait. There are no other cars in the drive but there's a garage block attached to the house with two double doors. The sun's dipping down over the trees and a breeze gets up, rustling the leaves on the ornamental shrubs and blowing some grit into my left eye, making it water again. I ring the bell once more. I look through the letter-box but I can't see anything; I reach in and feel a box on the far side of the thick door.

After a few minutes I take a look round the place, stepping under Moorish archways and over low white walls, past an astroturf tennis court and a swimming pool about the same size, uncovered and still. I kneel and test the water with one hand. Warm.

I try to look in the windows of the house but they're either covered with those plastic roll-down external shutters you usually see in France or closed off inside by Venetian blinds.

I go back to the car, thinking maybe Mr Azul's only out for a short while. Of course, maybe I've missed him entirely and he's already set off on whatever trip Mr Archer seemed to know about. I'll give it half an hour, maybe an hour or so, then I'll call the local paper and ask for Frank's contact. I consider playing the hand-held I bought in Inverness but I'm either not hooked on it yet or my jaded palate has produced game-boredom already.

I'm thinking there might be something wrong with my plan to wait as I close my eyes (only to rest them), but even as I yawn and put my hands into my armpits I think a spot of rest isn't such a bad idea so long as I don't fall asleep.

Andy runs out across the ice. I am five years old and he is seven. Strathspeld is everywhere white; the sky is still and shining, hiding the sun in a dazzling, brilliant haze, its light somehow distanced by the intervening layer of high cloud overlooking a chill wilderness of snow. The mountaintops are smothered, black crags violent spattered marks against that blankness; the hills and forests are blanketed too, the trees are frosted and the loch is hard and soft together, iced over then snowed upon. Here, beyond the gardens of the lodge and the woods and ornamental ponds, the loch narrows and becomes a river again, bending and funnelling and quickening as it heads towards the rocks and falls and the shallow gorge beyond. Usually from here you can hear the thunder of the falls in the distance but today there is only silence.

I watch Andy run out. I shout after him but I don't follow him. The bank on this side is low, only half a metre above the white plain of the snow-covered river. The grass and reeds around me are flattened under the sudden, overnight fall of snow. On the far side, where Andy is heading, the bank is tall and steep where the water has cut into the hill, removing sand and gravel and stones and leaving an overhang of earth and exposed, dangling tree-roots; the dark gravel space under that ragged overhang is the only place I can see where there is no snow.

Andy is yelling as he runs, coat-tails flapping out behind him, gloved hands outspread, his head thrown back, the ear flaps on his hat snapping and clapping like wings. He's almost halfway across and suddenly I go from being terrified and annoyed to being exhilarated, intoxicated; overjoyed. We were told not to do this, told not to come here, told to sledge and throw snowballs and make snowmen all we wanted, but not even to come near the loch and the river, in case we fell through the ice; and yet Andy came here after we'd sledged for a while on the slope near the farm, walked down here through the woods despite my protests, and then when we got here to the river bank I said well, as long as we only looked, but then Andy just whooped and jumped down onto the boulder-lumped white slope of shore and sprinted out across the pure flat snow towards the far bank. At first I was angry at him, frightened for him, but now suddenly I get this rush of joy, watching him race out there into the cold level space of the stilled river, free and warm and vivacious in that smoothed and frozen silence.

I think he's done it, I think he's across the river and safe and there's a buzzy glow of vicarious accomplishment starting to well up within me, but then there's a cracking noise and he falls; I think he's tripped and fallen forward but he isn't lying flat on the snow, he's sunk up to his waist in it and there's a pool of darkness spreading on the whiteness around him as he struggles, trying to lever himself out and I can't believe this is happening, can't believe Andy isn't going to jump free; I'm yelling in fear now, shouting his name, screaming out to him.

He struggles, turning round as he sinks deeper, chunks and edges of ice rearing into the air and making little puffs and fountains of snow as he tries to find purchase and push himself out. He's calling out to me now but I can hardly hear him because I'm screaming so hard, wetting my pants as I squeeze the screams out. He's holding his hand out to me, yelling at me, but I'm stuck there, terrified, screaming, and I don't know what to do, can't think what to do, even while he's yelling at me to help him, come out to him, get a branch, but I'm petrified at the thought of setting foot on that white, treacherous surface and I can't imagine finding a branch, can't think what to do as I look one way towards the tall trees above the hidden gorge and the other along the shore of the loch towards the boat-house but there are no branches, there's only snow everywhere, and then Andy stops struggling and slips under the whiteness.

I stand still, quietened and numbed. I wait for him to come back up but he doesn't. I step back, then turn and run, the clinging wetness round my thighs going from warm to cold as I race beneath the snow-shrouded trees towards the house.