I stopped at the house to give my condolences to Mr and Mrs Gould. Mrs Gould was covered in flour and smelled faintly of gin. She was a tall, nervous woman who'd gone grey early; she always wore large bifocals and usually dressed in tweeds. I'd never seen her without a single string of pearls, which she fingered constantly. She apologised for the mess, wiping her hands on her apron and then shaking my hand while I said how sorry I'd been to hear. She looked around the hall distractedly, as if wondering what to do next, then the door to the library opened and Mr Gould peeked out.

He was about the same height as his wife but he looked stooped now, and he was wearing a dressing-gown; normally he was the epitome of tweedy country-squiredom, an archetypal laird in three-piece suit, clumpy shoes, checked shirt and cap; he resorted to a beaten-up, much reproofed Barbour when the weather turned particularly foul. I'd never seen him in anything as soft-looking, as human as the pair of scruffy trousers, open-necked shirt and dressing-gown he wore then. His strong, square face looked drawn and his thinning brown hair hadn't been combed. He came out of the library when he saw it was me, shook my hand and said "Terrible thing, terrible thing" a few times, while Beethoven sounded loudly from the opened library door and his wife tutted and tried to smooth his errant hair. His eyes kept looking away over one of my shoulders or the other, never meeting my gaze, and I got the impression that like his wife he was constantly waiting for something important to happen, expecting someone to arrive at any moment, as though they both couldn't believe what had happened and it was all a dream or a ghastly joke and they were just waiting for Clare to come gangling through the front door, kicking off muddy green wellies and loudly demanding tea.

Andy was out shooting. I could hear the shotgun barking as I walked through the dim, dripping woods from the house, staying off the muddy path as much as possible and walking on the flattened, exhausted-looking grass at its side to keep my shoes from clogging up.

The field was surrounded by trees and looked out towards the river upstream from the loch. The river wasn't visible, but there had been a lot of rain over that week and one corner of the field had flooded, leaving a shallow temporary loch reflecting the tarnished dark silver of the clouds; its waters were still and flat.

There was a stretch of curved gravel, edged with planks, near this end of the field; six posts stood along the front edge of the gravel stand, and on top of each post there was a little flat piece of wood like a tray. Twenty yards in front of the gravel pathway was a low mound where the launcher mechanism for the clays sat. There were two other mounds about the same distance away to either side. I could hear the little generator puttering away inside the central mound as I got closer, clearing the trees and looking across and down at where Andy stood. I watched for a moment.

Andy wore cords, shirt and jumper and body-warmer; a cap hung from the top of one of the nearby posts. He was very tanned. A big box of shells sat opened on top of the post in front of him; a foot switch at the end of a long, snaking flex operated the catapult in the pit. He slotted six cartridges into the long-barrelled pump-action gun and turned to aim.

His foot tapped once, and the clay shot out of the hide, spinning away into the greyness in a day-glo orange blur. The gun roared and the clay disintegrated somewhere out over the field. When I looked carefully I could see lots of orange fragments scattered over the sodden grass and glistening brown earth of the field.

The generator revved up and down, providing power to the automatic launcher; it had some sort of randomly set variation built into where it was aiming because the clays came out at a different angle and heading each time. Andy got them all with his first shot except for the last one. He even tried to reload fast enough to have another crack at it, but it thumped into the wet heather near the river before he could get the shell into the gun. He shrugged, put the cartridge back into the box, checked the gun and turned to look at me. "Hi, Cameron," he said, and I knew then he'd been aware of me all the time. He put the pump-action down carefully on an oiled gun bag lying on the gravel.

"Hi," I said, walking up to him. He looked tired. We shook hands a little awkwardly, then hugged. He smelled of smoke.

"Fucking squaddie culture, yeah; adoration of the fucking Maggie and pit bulls and getting some scoff down your neck and let's get pissed on lager and all moon together from the bus and camouflage jackets in the high street and yeah-well-I'm-inarestid-in-martial-arts-in't-I? I'm not a fucking Nazi I just collect militaria I'm not a fucking racist I just hate blacks and gun magazines instead of magazines for guns wanking over the glossy photos of chromed Lugers I'll bet; half of them think Elvis is still alive, buncha fucking stupid little cunts! The dip-shit little bastards deserve the fucking Micks turning them into mince; saw the inside of an armoured car once; been blown to buggery; thrown a hundred feet into the air and then rolled all the way down a hill; we took turns looking inside just to prove we were real men; looked like the inside of a fucking slaughter-house…"

I sat with Andy while he ranted on. We were drinking whisky. He had a big room on the second floor of the house at Strathspeld; we'd played here as kids, making models, fighting wars with toy soldiers and the train set and Airfix tanks and forts made from Lego; we'd conducted experiments with our chemistry sets, raced our Scalextric cars, flown gliders out the window down to the lawn and shot at targets in the gardens with our air rifles and killed a couple of birds and smoked a few packets of illicit fags from the same window. We'd smoked untold spliffs here, too, listening to records with pals from the village, and with Clare.

"Why are people so fucking incompetent?" Andy screamed suddenly, and threw his whisky glass across the room. It hit the wall near the window and smashed. I remembered the disintegrating pile of champagne glasses in the Science Museum, only four years earlier. The whisky left in the glass he'd thrown made a pale brown stain on the wall. I focused on the liquid as it slowly dribbled down.

"Sorry," Andy muttered, not sounding sorry at all, getting unsteadily out of his seat and going to where the bits of glass lay broken on the carpet. He squatted and started to pick them up, then let them drop back to the floor and just crouched there and put his hands over his face and started to cry.

I let him cry for a bit and then went over to him and squatted down beside him and put my hand over his shoulders.

"Why are people so fucking useless?" he sobbed. "Fucking let you down, fucking can't do their fucking job! Fucking Halziel; Captain fucking Michael fucking Lingary DSO — cunts!"

He pushed away from me and stood up and stumbled over to a wooden chest, tearing one of its drawers right out so that it crashed to the carpeted floor and a load of jumpers fell out. He got down on his knees behind the drawer and I heard tape rip.

He stood up holding an automatic pistol and started trying to slot a magazine into the grip. "Fucking brain-ectomy coming up, Doctor fucking Halziel," he said, still crying and still trying to get the magazine to fit into the gun.

Halziel, I thought. Halziel. I recognised Lingary's name from the times Andy had talked about the Falklands; he'd been Andy's CO, the one Andy blamed for the deaths of some of his men. But Halziel… Oh yeah, of course: the name of the locum who'd let Clare die. The guy the locals thought was more interested in fishing than doctoring.