Mum sat down on the bed, put a hand on my head and ran my curls through her rubber-clad fingers.

"What's that you've got in your hair?" she said.

My brain cells? I wondered. Certainly it felt like they'd been squeezed out of my ears. Damn rim-shots. Not that I could share this insight with my mother, for the simple reason that I couldn't talk.

"What is it?" mum said. "This black stuff?" She rubbed her fingers together in my hair, the rubber gloves squeaking horribly. "Oh, stop moaning, Prentice. Drink your water." She sniffed at her fingers. "Hmm," she said, rising and heading for the door. "Mascara, eh?"

I looked up, monocular, at the closing door, grimacing.

Massacre?

CHAPTER 15

I sipped my Bloody Mary, looking down at huge, white, piled-up clouds so bright in the mid-day sunshine they looked yellow. The plane had just levelled out and there was a smell of food; they were serving lunch further forward in the cabin. I watched the clouds for a moment, then looked at my magazine. I was on my way to London, a couple of torn-off match-book covers m my pocket, hoping to confront Mr Rupert Paxton-Marr.

"Thanks mum… Ash?"

"Yo, Prentice. How's it hanging?"

"Oh, plum."

"Still wearing the kilt, eh? Look, I've had some word from —»

"How about you?"

"Eh?"

"How are you?"

"Oh, rude health. Verging on the obscene. Listen; my computer wizard's been in touch."

"What? About the disks?"

"Cor-rect."

"What's on them? What do they day? Is there anyth —»

"Hey… hold your horses. Had to get the stuff to him first."

"Oh. Where is he?"

"Denver."

"Denver?"

"Yup."

"Denver Colorado?"

"… Yes."

"What, in America?"

"Yeah, Northern Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System…»

"Okay, okay, so he's… hey, is this your Texan programmer? Has he moved states?"

"Systems Analyst, for the last fucking time, Prentice, and no, it isn't him; just a guy I exchange E-mail with sometimes."

"Right. And he's got the disks?"

"No, of course he hasn't got the disks."

"What? Then —»

"He has the information that was held on them. Well, on the one that held anything. Seven were blank; not even formatted."

"Ah, right. I see… so what does it say? What is on it? Was it all Rory's —»

"It's a little more complicated than that, Prentice."

"Oh."

"I've got a message on my screen here from him. Thought you might be interested in it."

"Oh; you're at work. Hey, have you seen the time? You're working late, aren't you?"

"Yes…, Prentice. Do you want to hear the message?"

"Will I understand it?"

"You'll get the gist of it."

"Okay."

"Right. I quote: 'I thought your man up there in the misty glens might like to know —»

"'Misty glens'? That's sounds a bit patronising."

"Prentice; shut up."

"Sorry."

"… might like to know what our game plan is with respect to your word-processed file(s). As we don't yet know what geek program this mutant No-namo-brand clone was running, we have had to resort to extreme measures to access the data. Dr Claire Simmons of London University, who picked up the disks, will use a vintage Hewlett Packard TouchScreen (which has compatible eight-inch drives) in the establishment's Museum of Computing to extract the raw binaries, sector by sector, praying all the while that somebody has posted an ediger to Usenet that she can use to strip off the physical addressing; she will then attack the content one word at a time, swapping bytes as needed and inverting bits if none of it looks like ASCII, stripping the eighth bits if they're in the way or un-encoding the lot if we can't do without them, and unload the result to a Prime mini-computer (another indestructible antique) somewhere on the campus network. She moves all this to her Iris, double-encrypts it and E-mails it via Internet (off JANUS or BITNET to nsfnet-relay.ac.uk, probably) via Cornell to an account I'm not supposed to have on the Minnesota Supercomputer Center's Cray-2 (currently the biggest and quickest compute-server short of a Connection Machine at the high end, so I might as well use it to do the decryptions and perhaps take my own first whack at demangling before moving the data along). From there I download via a dedicated T3 line to an SGI 380SX–VGX at one of AT&T's Bell Labs (the one in Boulder, I think — another unofficial account) from where I can further download — and filter out certain offending control characters — to a Mac II at my office. Then I dump the results onto a floppy and bike them home to tinker with in my basement, which is where the hard work starts… Get all that, Prentice?"

"Yeah. Basically what he's saying is, it's a piece of piss."

"Absolutely. A doddle."

"Great. So when can we expect to see some results?"

"No idea. Don't forget the guy's doing it for fun, and he's a busy man. No promises, but he sounds confident. I'll call him in a week if he doesn't get in touch first."

Tell him I'll fax him a crate of champagne or something."

"Certainly. So, when…? Ah shit. Fucking decollator's jammed again. Gotta go attend the print, Prent."

"Okay. Bye. Oh, and thanks."

"…»

I now had a better idea of what Rory had been doing in the days before his disappearance. It looked like he had been working on Crow Road between the time he'd come back from London after seeing his friends and the evening he disappeared, on the motor bike he'd borrowed from his flat-mate. That was what he'd been doing, stuck in his room in the flat in Glasgow; finally actually writing something on his bizarre contraption of a computer.

He'd done it, he'd stopped writing notes and started on the work itself.

I'd talked to a retired policeman who at the time had looked — briefly — into what had happened to Rory. The police hadn't come up with anything; they'd interviewed Janice Rae, and Rory's flatmate Andy Nichol, and looked at the papers Rory had left with Janice. There was no suicide note, so they'd decided the papers weren't relevant. Apart from checking the hospitals and eventually listing Rory as a Missing Person, that had been that.

The only useful information I'd got from the police was that Rory's flat-mate had left local government and joined the civil service a few months after Rory had disappeared. I'd tracked Andy Nichol down at a tax office in Plymouth and called him there, but apart from saying he'd heard a lot of keyboard-clattering noises coming from Rory's room during the days before Rory had borrowed his bike and disappeared, he'd only been able to confirm what I already knew. He did say he'd tried working Rory's Neanderthal computer after dad had said he could have it, but he couldn't make the beast work; he'd sold the machine and the two blank disks that had come with it to a friend in Strathclyde University. It had been chucked out years ago.

… Whatever; after those few days work, Rory had suddenly upped and offed, and never came back. Maybe the stuff on the disks would give me a clue why he'd suddenly done that. If there was anything useful there; that clattering noise didn't prove anything… I'd seen The Shining.

The cloud cover started to break up over the midlands; I chomped through my lunch. The starter was smoked salmon. I thought of Verity and Lewis, on honeymoon in the Bahamas, and — with just a tinge of sadness — silently wished them well.

I saw Ashley come into the pub. She stood near the door, looking round, that strong-boned head swivelling, those grey eyes scanning. She didn't see me on the first sweep; I was mostly hidden by other people. I watched her take a couple of steps forward, look round again. She was dressed in a dark, skirted suit, under the old but still good-looking jacket I remembered her wearing at Grandma Margot's funeral. Her hair was gathered up and tied; she wasn't wearing her glasses. Her face looked tense and forbidding. She seemed harder, more capable and more self-contained than I recalled her being in Scotland.