"Anything interesting in there?" Lewis asked. The plane was in a shallow dive, angling towards us a few hundred metres away.

"Just pipes and tanks," Helen shrugged. There was a loft door into mum and dad's room." She smiled. "When we started getting interested in sex, we used to pretend we'd get up there one night and see if we could catch them at it, but we were too frightened." Helen laughed lightly. "Had us giggling ourselves to sleep a few nights, though. And anyway, Ferg had put a bolt on it."

The little white Cessna roared overhead, waggling its wings. Lewis and Verity and Helen all waved. I stared up, seeing the single tiny figure waving in the cockpit. The plane banked, circled round the hill the castle stood on and came back over, lower, engine loud and echoing in the woods beneath.

I made myself wave.

Oh dear fucking holy shit, I thought.

The plane waggled its wings again, then straightened out over Dunadd as Fergus took the Cessna — his Christmas present to himself — back north to its home at Connel.

That it?" said Verity.

"Yup," Helen said.

"What did you expect?" Lewis asked. "A crash?"

«Oh…» said Verity, heading for the door to the stairs. "Let's get back in the warm."

Blam! Remember, remember. Amman Hilton. Look —! JUST USE IT! Kiss the sky, you idiot…

"Prentice?" Lewis said, from the little door. I looked over at him. "Prentice?" he said again. "Wake up, Prentice."

I'd been staring after the departing plane.

"Oh," I said. "Yeah." On still shaky legs, I followed the others down from the wind-blown battlements and into the warm bulk of the great stone building.

"So the televisions weren't going wonky at all," I said, still struggling to understand.

That's right," Rory said. "It just looked like it, to me only." He plucked a long piece of grass from beside one of the standing stones and sucked on the yellow stalk.

I followed suit. "So it was in your head; not real?"

«Well…» Rory frowned, turning away a little and leaning back on the great stone. He folded his arms and looked out towards the steep little hill that was Dunadd. I stood to one side, watching him. His eyes looked old.

"Things in your head can be real," he said, not looking at me. "And even when they aren't, sometimes they… " he looked down at me, and I thought he looked troubled. "Somebody told me something once," he said. "And it sounded like it had really hurt him; he'd seen something that made him feel betrayed and hurt by somebody he was very close to, and I felt really sorry for this person, and I'm sure it's affected them ever since… but when I thought about it, he'd been asleep before this thing had happened, and asleep again afterwards, and it occurred to me that maybe he'd dreamed it all, and I still wonder."

"Why don't you tell him that?"

Rory looked at me for a while, his eyes searching mine, making me feel awkward. He spat the blade of grass out. "Maybe I should," he said. He nodded, looking out across the fields. "Maybe. I don't know." He shrugged.

I stood there, back at the same stone my Uncle Rory had rested against, a decade earlier. I'd left the castle and driven here to the stone circle shortly after we'd come down from the battlements. There was still plenty of time to get back to Lochgair for dinner before I had to set off for Glasgow, and Ash.

I leant against the great stone, the way Rory had when he'd talked about the man betrayed, the man who'd seen — or thought he'd seen — something that had hurt him. I looked ahead, out over the walls and fields and stands of trees. I shivered, though it wasn't especially cold.

"See?" I said, quietly, to myself.

Maybe Rory had been looking at Dunadd that day, as I'd assumed at the time. But beyond Dunadd, just a little to the right on this line of sight, I could see the hill where Gaineamh castle stood, its walls showing blunt and steel grey through the naked trees.

"Prentice!"

"… Yeah?"

"Food! Come on, it's getting cold!"

Mum had been calling from the bottom of the stairs. I was sitting at the desk in the study, curtains open to the darkness, just the little desk light on, its brass stalk gleaming, its green shade glowing. I looked back down from my reflection in the dark computer screen, first to my watch — still half an hour before I had to leave to pick up Ashley — and then to the thin, battered-looking pocket diary lying opened on the desk.

Fri F @ Cas, L.Rvr, trak, hills. Bothy;

fire, fd, dnk, js. (F stnd) rt in clng!

guns. F nsg. trs & scrts. F barfd

WELCOME TO ARGYLL!

I saw her hair first, shining tight-tied in a spotlight somewhere down the domestic arrivals concourse. I hadn't seen Ashley Watt for about six weeks, after that night in London when I'd seen but not talked to Rupert Paxton-Marr. Ashley was dressed in the same business-like suit she'd worn that night, and carried a big shoulder bag. Her smile was broad.

"Ash. Great to see you." I hugged her, lifting her off her feet.

"Woo!" she laughed throatily. "How ya doin, Presley?"

I winced, dramatically, but still offered to carry her bag.

"Prentice; you read a couple of things your uncle wrote and suddenly you're accusing people of murder? Come on."

"Haven't you looked at the files Doctor Gonzo sent over?"

"Of course not; not my business, Prentice." Ashley sounded indignant. "Oh; before I forget," she said, reaching for her jacket on the back seat and digging into a pocket. She took out a little three-inch Sony disk and handed it to me. "Present from Colorado. Yours to tinker with."

Thanks," I said, putting the disk in my shirt pocket. "I might, too; the spelling mistakes have been annoying me." I moved my head. "The stuff's in that envelope on the back seat."

"You don't want me to read it now, do you?"

"There's a torch."

"Am I allowed to finish building the spliff first?"

"Okay, but then read."

I'd waited till we were out of Glasgow before I'd told Ashley about the horrible ideas concerning Fergus that I just couldn't get out of my head.

Most of the journey from Lochgair up to Glasgow I'd spent thinking, trying to work out what might be true and what false in the fragments of writing that Rory had left on disk. The rat in the ceiling and the confession of something over-seen; that was what had taken me back to stand amongst the standing stones that afternoon, after I'd left the castle.

And remembering what Rory had said to me there had taken me back to that 1976 diary entry.

rt in clng! F nsg.

trs & scrts

And the 1980 diary with the words JUST USE IT! and the L that had been changed to a C; the L must stand for Lachlan Watt and the F for Fiona. That was the secret Fergus had told Rory, that mght in the bothy; the story of Fergus waking up after being brought home from Hamish and Tone's party and crawling through the castle roof-space to see his wife in bed with Lachy Watt. That was the party that Fiona and Lachlan had left together.

Of course, all I had was Rory's fictionalised word for any of it.

So I'd asked my mum, over dinner.

"Did Fiona… leave a party with somebody else?" she repeated, looking mystified.

"It's just something in one of Rory's poems," I said."… Not earth-shakingly important or anything, but there's an odd sort of note that… well, I just wondered if you knew, or had heard… " I shrugged, sipping my glass of water.

Mum shook her head, helping herself to some more peas. "The only time I ever saw Fiona leave a party with somebody else, Fergus was there too. In body, at least."

"Uh-huh?" I said.

… scrts…

I owed the last, absurdly simple part of the theory to a stag that had suddenly run onto the road while I was zapping down Glen Croe, between the Rest-and-be-Thankful and Ardgartan. One moment the road ahead was clear in the headlights, next second Wha! Something dark brown looking big as a horse with huge antlers like some twisted aerial array came belting out of the forest across the road and leapt the downhill crash barrier. I slammed the brakes on, nearly locking the wheels. The beast disappeared into the darkness and the car swept through the single cloud of steamy breath it had left behind.