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"The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog"
"The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog"
"The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog"
Arial
"The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog"
"The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog"
"The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog"
The phrase above uses all letters from the alphabet.

CHAPTER SEVEN
From the Kirkland Herald.
Double Shooting Death
Mother and Son Killed
A mother and son died in a gun horror in an Arden farmhouse last
night.
Mrs Margaret Henson and her 24-year—old son Edward, of
Kilmalid Farm, were found dead in their living-room after a series
of gunshots.
Farmworker James McGrath raised the alarm after finding the
bodies in a pool of blood. Mrs Henson suffered shotgun wounds to
the head. Her son had been shot in the chest.
The tragedy comes only a week after an accident at Kilmalid Farm
when Mr Henson, who took over the running of the homestead five
years ago, was badly injured by farm machinery.
Mr Henson had been rushed to Glasgow’s Western Injirmary for
emergency surgery after his hands were badly damaged by a cattle-
feed mixer.
The young man had been allowed home on Friday morning to
recuperate, while doctors waited for a series of tests to ascertain
whether he would have the use of his hands again.
Police inquiries into the double tragedy are continuing, a
spokesman told the Herald.
It didn’t take a great deal of effort on anybody’s part to read
between the lines of the report on the front page of the local
newspaper. The story even made the dailies, but just as another
shooting. Here in Arden it was a story as big as, even bigger than,
the shocking death of Andrew Gillon who farmed the
neighbouring acres. As the subsequent police and forensic
examination showed, Mrs Henson, the farmer’s widow, had got
the old double-barrel twelve bore down from the rack, loaded in
two hy-max, and given one of them to her son as he sat defenceless
on an overstuffed armchair in their living room. One barrel for
him, which blew out his chest and embroidered it into the chintz,
and another for her, which she took in the mouth, stretching down
80

to get her thumb hooked over the trigger. It spread the crown of
her head and all its contents on the ceiling plaster.
Her reasons were not too hard to figure out either. She was mad
with grief over the tragedy that was all set to ruin her son’s life.
History was repeating itself for Mrs Henson, and she’d decided to
get in there quick and take the needle out of the groove. Maybe it
was for the best.
The microsurgeons at the Western had done a wonderful job of
getting Eddie Henson’s hands firmly fixed on to the end of his
arms. They’d hooked up blood vessels and muscle and ligament,
but those hands were never going to do anything much more than
lift a forkful of food to his mouth on a good day, even if the fingers
could move enough to twist themselves around the handle.
Nobody knows how Eddie Henson managed to get his hands
stuck in the feed mixer. It wasn’t even a mixer. It was an old
Seagull outboard motor that he’d hooked on to a fifty—gallon oil
drum in the byre. It worked just as well for mixing feed as it did in
shoving his fourteen footer around the west bay fishing for dabs
and cod. It did a good job on both, and it did a terrific job on his
hands. The fact that he still had something resembling hands was a
tribute to the miracles of modern microsurgery. But they weren’t
hands that were going to work a farm, and his mother knew it.
Her sure knowledge was easy to understand too. For twenty
three years she’d worked that farm by the sweat of her brow,
scrimping and scraping and breaking her back and doing a man’s
work, while her husband sat at home, helpless to do otherwise.
For in 1961, the summer of 1961, Hugh Henson had tumbled off
the back of his tractor when he was ploughing in the shaws of his
early potatoes. Some said he’d fainted, nobody, not even him,
knew exactly what had happened.
But everybody knew about his hands. For whatever reason,
Hugh Henson was lying on the field and the tractor was trundling
on and the ploughshare went over his wrists and nearly cut his
hands right off. The bones were smashed and the muscles torn to
shreds. When Hugh Henson came to, he picked himself up and
walked home, dangling his hands in front of him.
No miracles of microsurgery then. The doctors saved what they
could which left him with twisted talons that had no feeling in
them, and Hugh Henson was helpless for the rest of his life, which
he chose to end five years before his wife ended hers, except he
pressed the starter button with his elbow, and let the carbon
monoxide build up. Up until then he was a broken, bitter, shell of a
man. Hugh Henson’s young wife had given him a baby boy at the
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start of that year and she lived through it all, taking care of her son
and doing everything for her husband until the boy was old enough
to take some of the strain. She worked that farm as good as any
man, everybody said, and it was a struggle. Then her husband had
taken the easy way out after doing it the hard way for all those
years and Maggie Henson had mourned her grief and was pleased
for him that he’d gone and done it, and by this time her son was a
strapping lad and an able farmer, well taught by his mother, who
could work like a horse and make Kilmalid pay.
If ever a mother was proud of her son, it was Maggie Henson —
the care—worn and callous-handed old woman of forty five, bent
before her time.
And when her boy had come back from the Western Infirmary,
with his hands encased in two big plaster of Paris sleeves that were
supported on metal stalks on his hips, and forced him to hold them
out like a mildly boastful angler, she saw it all coming again, and
nobody could expect her to take it.
Maggie Henson had watched her young husband become an old
man, a shadow of himself, indrawn and withdrawn. A victim of the
bad summer of 1961. She was faced with the kind of decision no
woman should have to make. At least not twice.
There was no way she was prepared to watch her big, smiling,
willing son get like that.
She gave him the easy way out.
‘That bloody by—pass is going to kill me,’ Alan Scott said,
swilling his drink around in a stubby tumbler, ‘just when I was
getting it all together?
‘I’m not with you,’ I said, taking a light sip of cool lager. Out on
the lawn, through the bay window, Alan’s three kids, two girls and
a boy, were playing a game of catch.
‘The big opening’s set for June seven. Next week, and from then
on I’ll lose the passing trade. All the traffic from Kirkland and up
the Gareloch will just go zooming past, missing Arden altogether. ’
‘But you’ll still get plenty of people coming through.’
‘Maybe in the summer, but they won’t be wanting petrol. At
least not enough to keep my forecourt going. And nobody from the
west is going to bother using that coast road when they’ve got three
lanes each way and only twenty minutes to Glasgow.’
He paused and looked miserably out of the window. The meal
had been large and satisfying. Alan was on his fourth Scotch after
several glasses of wine.
‘It’s these Ministry of Defence bastards,’ he said, and Janet, his
82

wife, a pretty brown—haired and slightly built woman, frowned at
him but said nothing.
‘Yes, they call it the Trident Road, don’t they?’
‘Not just content with killing us all with the bloody A-bomb,’
Alan complained, ‘but they’re strangling us in Arden too. And for
what? Huh? Just so the Yanks can feel a bit safer knowing we’re
going to get hit first?’
Feeling was running high all through Arden, and indeed the
whole district, about the Trident base which was being built into
the solid granite of the Kilcreggan peninsula at a cost which would
have bought a couple of British colonies back, or settled the
national debt with a handshake. Billions of pounds sterling were
being poured into the area which was set to become the major
ballistic missile centre in Western Europe. So guess who was going
to get struck first in a first strike? The local and daily papers had
shown graphic artists’ impressions of where the fall-out would go,
and where the footprint of a ground strike would be, and at what
radius the flash would kill unprotected humans, and where the
iirestorm would burn everything up. Pictures of gloom and doom.
In the event, you could forget Kirkland, and Arden and
Levenford, and even Glasgow. And the Kilcreggan peninsula, a
long narrow neck of land that poked down from Garelochhead to
Cove and Clynder would go the way of Krakatoa. Straight down.
Oh, there had been local and national protests. The District
Council had declared themselves a nuclear-free zone, and that did
a whole pile of good. They wore badges at meetings and joined
marches, and gave hippies rent—free caravans to picket the site.
But in this neck of the woods, nobody beats the Ministry of
Defence. Naturally they don’t want the first strike to be anywhere
near them. That’s why all the silos and dumps are way out in the
backwoods, rolling hills and blue lochs, little realising that there
are enough highly unstable transuranic elements stored under
them thar hills to wipe the breathtaking scenery off the face of the
map. Think about it. Even the power stations are nowhere near the
places where most people live. The big power lobbies and the
nuclear lobbies say they’re safe as houses. Except their houses are
nowhere near them, are they?
OK, enough of the political lecture. But you’ve got to
understand, at least I hope you do, that I’m an Arden man, going
back dozens of generations — at least on my mother’s side — and no
matter how far I’ve wandered, there’s no place like home, even if
there are some pretty strange things going on at the time I’m
talking about.
83

The new by—pass was going to hurt Alan Scott. Arden was going
to do him a lot of damage. There he was, having pulled his old
dad’s business out of the dirt and oil puddles and into the black in a
big way for a small place like this, and it looked like hard times
were on the way. He was right. Nobody was going to bother with
the Kilcreggan Road that wound along the iirth shore when they
had a fast smooth dual carriageway to zip them past. Everybody
knew the road was needed for the vast construction job that would
be going on over the next seven years, and then it would be ideal
for getting those big ominous trailers with the big ominous pointy
things covered in tarpaulin, and even sheet steel, sitting on their
backs, into the new base. But it was a road, and the quickest way
between two points was a straight line and the quickest way was not
through Arden.
‘What do you plan to do?’ I asked.
‘I’m thinking about moving. Just when I’ve got it going right}
‘What, closer to Glasgow‘?’
He nodded. ‘Harry Watkinson’s place in Levenford would be
just right. I’m told he’ll be retiring in a couple of years, so maybe I
can buy him out.’
‘And still live here‘?’
‘If I can. I love this place. I’ve always wanted to stay up on this
hill ever since we were boys. It meant everything to me, and now
I’ve got here, I don’t want to move.’
He took a swig of his drink, and I saw his wife look at him again,
one of those quick woman’s looks which let you know you’re doing
something she’d rather you didn’t, which, in Alan’s case, was
doing any more drinking. But he wasn’t drunk.
‘The problem is, if it’s going to get as bad as I think it might, then
there might be no option. The mortgage I’ve got on this place
would buckle your knees, I swear to God. And there’s the bloody
rates and everything else. The sooner they bring in this community
tax the better. I’m out about a hundred and twenty a month. A
month for Christsakef
The look he got then told me Janet didn’t like blasphemy either,
but Alan didn’t notice it, or chose to ignore it.
‘I’m sure it won’t get as bad as that. You’ve got all the summer
sailors, plus the people in town, and you’ve got the franchises as
well,’ Janet said, obviously in a bid to shake his gloom.
‘We’re luckier than most, I’ll grant you, dear,’ Alan said. ‘But
we need everything that’s going, especially the petrol, and I’ve got
to hold on to the car sales too.’
‘Yes, dear,’ Janet said, more soothingly. ‘But I’m sure it will be
84

all right. And if not, I don’t mind moving. I really don’t. The
children are young enough to fit in anywhere.’
‘I just hope it won’t come to that, love,’ he said, and smiled
across at her. She was an artful woman who knew her man. ‘I’m
sure you’re right.’
But I knew he wasn’t sure, and he knew it too. And if I’m any
judge of character, Janet Scott was also aware.
‘Terrible thing down at the farm,’ Alan said, changing the
subject.
‘Which one?’
‘ ‘The shooting. Damned tragedy. That young Henson was a nice
bloke. His mother was a bit of a battleaxe though. Dad and I used
to fix her machinery for her and she knew just about as much as we
did, down to the last nut and bolt. I swear she could tell to the
penny exactly what any job was going to cost, right down to the ten
per cent cash discount}
‘She must have been some woman,’ I said. ‘Ran the farm on her
own after her husband got mangled} From the corner of my eye, I
could see Janet give a brief shudder.
‘Poor woman,’ she said. ‘Imagine that happening twice. Father
and son. No wonder she went crazy}
‘The other one was pretty gruesome, I understand.’
‘Yes, it was. I was there.
‘I heard that. Must have been rough.’
‘Frankly it was terrible. I had a hard time getting to sleep for
nights afterwards}
In fact, getting to sleep was almost impossible for the first couple
of nights after Andy Gillon got squashed. I kept seeing his face in
those patterns on the wallpaper, and in the small hours of the
night, when I’d be tossing and turning and trying to get below the
consciousness threshold, I’d hear his voice.
‘The tree jumped. Jumped.’
I kept seeing those eyes staring at me out of the walls. Pleading
with me to do something to get him out of there. As I said, it was
hard to sleep with that.
‘It must have been awful. That poor woman, seeing him crushed
like that.’
‘Damned strange thing to happen,’ Alan said. ‘Weird.’
I nodded. I didn’t really want to talk about it, but I didn’t have
to, for the short pause of silence was broken by the roar of a
motorbike outside. Alan stood up and looked out of the window,
and I joined him. Up the gravel path at a fast clip came a big shiny
silver Honda, roaring up the gravel bend, with a black figure
85

astride it.
The Honda’s engine revved and I could see the rider twisting the
handle, feeding more juice into the four big cylinders. The
machine came to an abrupt sideways halt, spraying the smooth
stones in a shower into the air. The children had stopped playing
catch and were gleefully racing towards the black figure on the
bike. The sun glinted on the smooth dome of his visored helmet.
‘Who the hell’s that?’ I asked.
Alan chuckled. ‘Gospel Rock.’
‘Huh?’
‘The”piston—driven priest. He’s one of the lecturers up at the
seminary. He’s mad keen on bikes. Thinks he’s a caped crusader or
something and he’s always getting me to fix new bits on to that
bloody bike of his. Nice enough, though. You’ll like him.’
Father Gerald O’Connor was a tall, slim young man with black
eyes and black Irish hair that went down a treat with his all-black
leathers, and, as I discovered, his priestly clothes as well. He had a
ready smile and a fund of jokes that would shock the sailors down
at the Chandler’s bar, but he had an Irish charm that he used like a
spanner to screw funds out of every women’s group in the area.
‘Meet heaven’s angel,’ was how Alan introduced him to me.
‘Father, meet my old school friend, Nick Ryan.’
The young priest flashed an easy grin as he leaned forward to
give my hand a firm shake.
‘Nice to meet you, Nick,’ he said as he started to unzip the tight
leather jacket. Street priest, I thought, taking in his longish hair
and the open—necked shirt. Probably a medallion down there,
rather than a medal.
‘So you were in school with the mechanical wizard? He’s worked
miracles with my machine,’ he said. Outside, Alan’s brood were all
sitting astraddle the parked Honda. ‘It’s running like a dream. I
had it at a hundred and twenty up on the new road. Terrific?
‘And illegal,’ Alan said.
‘Only when it’s open to traffic}
‘And it’s the traffic that’s on it which bothers us all,’ Alan said
sourly. ‘Megatons of instant death back and forth, and meanwhile
a slow death for anybody with a business in Arden}
‘I know the problems, Alan,’ Father Gerald said. ‘But my little
run on my bike isn’t going to make it any worse. Anyway, there’s
little we can do about it now except pray. It’s a pity you’re not one
of my bunch, you know. We could do a quick service right here and
now. Father Gerry’s fast faith service. Spiels on wheels.’
Janet giggled, and even Alan had to smile at the young priest’s
86

quick-fire.
‘You’d make a terrific car salesman, Gerry, honest to God.
Here, what’ll you have‘?’ Alan asked, indicating his well-stocked
bar.
‘Never touch a drop before morning prayers. A whisky’ll be fine.
Not too much water in it either.’
Alan poured and the priest accepted the glass and sipped.
‘Nice stuff. There must be something to the car trade if you can
afford this kind of thing. Either that or I’m on the wrong side.’
‘I don’t think anybody knows what side you’re on, Gerry,’ Janet
said;
‘You go about looking like a rocker on that bike of yours, and
you spend all your time with those drug addicts. Old father
Maguire would turn in his grave.’
‘Just as well he’s in the dear arms o’ J asus,’ the priest said in a
thick Ulster accent. Janet shot him a mock frown of disapproval.
‘He’d never have understood progress. I’ve been mad about
bikes since I was knee high, and I’ve been ordered to work with our
mainlining brethren, which in any case is fascinating work. When I
start shooting up myself, old father Maguire can start spinning.’
‘Gerry works up at the drug rehabilitation place in Kirkland,’
Alan said.
‘I didn’t even know there was one. I never thought there was a
drug problem here.’
‘There isn’t,’ the priest came in. ‘At least not yet. The people at
Shandon House are from all over, but mostly from Glasgow.
They’re brought down here to get away from their normal
environment. We’ve done some good.’
‘In between times he breaks all the women’s hearts in town, tries
to break his neck on that machine, and must have broken every
rule in the book at the seminary,’ Alan said.
‘I’m not as bad as I’m painted,’ the priest said with a smile that
was supposed to make you think that he was. ‘J ust because I wear
the collar doesn’t mean I can’t have any fun. Anyway, they’ve
decided I’m not Satan in disguise. They think I’m just a hyperactive
kid with more energy than sense, so they’ve decided to make me
work for my money.’
He finished off the small whisky and smacked his lips
appreciatively, as he set the glass down on a small table by the
window.
‘That’s what I’ve come to see you about,’ he said. ‘They’ve put
me in charge of the parade for the harvest festival. I’m hoping
you’ll give me a hand with the transport}
87

‘No problem,’ Alan told him. ‘I’ll get the truck cleaned up like
last year.’
‘I’ll need a driver too.’
‘What day is it?’
‘The thirteenth}
‘OK, I’ll have to drive it myself.’
While they were talking, my thoughts fiew back to the harvest
festivals we’d had in Arden years ago. I hadn’t really thought about
them in years, but they were great fun, and no matter how I tried, I
couldn’t remember one when the sun hadn’t been splitting the sky.
·It was the one day in the year when the whole town was together,
the folk from Milligs rubbing shoulders with the rich of Upper
Arden. The priests and the ministers getting together, no doubt
over glasses of altar wine. A harvest festival isn’t common in
Scotland, mainly because the harvest isn’t much to speak of in most
places unless you count the annual increase in sheep flocks. But in
Arden we’ve had the big day for centuries, maybe even
millenniums. Oh, I don’t doubt that the format has changed a bit
since they sacrificed blood and corn in the ringstones up on
Carman Hill, but it’s always been a day for fun and games and
feasting. In recent times, and when I say that I mean as far as
written records go back (and that’s just a blink of the eye by
comparison with real history), the festival has been organised by
the seminary, the priory, whichever name it had in all the
centuries.
As I said, the seminary held its unique place in the harvest
festival. In times gone by no doubt the self-sufficient monks, who
owned vast stretches of the land around here, supplied the produce
and kept that loyalty they couldn’t gain from the fear of God
through the barter system. Today, the seminary is still self-
sufficient and was when I was small. They’ve got fields of corn and
potato, a watermill for grinding corn, sheep, pigs, bees and
whatever, plus an orchard where they grow just about every fruit,
as every kid in town knows.
At the harvest festival, most of the food is supplied by the
seminary and padded out by donations from the shopkeepers and
smallholders and the farmers who still get their corn ground at the
mill. Everybody is supposed to give something, then they all try to
get it back again in one afternoon’s binge. It’s tradition.
Alan agreed to give over his truck and drive it himself and the
priest seemed delighted to have that off his hands. He shook hands
all round before he went and insisted I must come up and see him
and have a blether. Outside, he ruffled the kids’ hair and reached
88

into a pocket of his leathers and brought out a bag of sweets and
dished them around before swinging a leg over his big machine and
taking off with a roar and a crunch of gravel on the bend.
‘Decent chap,’ Alan ventured.
‘Works on his image,’ I said.
‘Don’t let that fool you. He might be young, but they rate him at
the seminary. He’s got about half a dozen degrees in things I’ve
never even heard of and he speaks a handful of languages. And
he’s as rich as sin too. His father owns a string of pubs in Glasgow,
but despite that he’s really pretty down to earth. He does a lot of
work for the kids here.’
Dinner at Alan’s place was hearty and as noisy as the kids could
make it. Janet laid on a fine roast with new potatoes in their jackets
and a stack of greens fresh from their garden. Alan didn’t say any
more about the by—pass and he didn’t drink any more either. l
reckoned he’d just been on a downer, and from the way Janet had
looked at him I thought that might be a regular occurrence. He’d
worked himself hard to get out of the poor side of town and up here
on the hill, and that ten-mile stretch of shiny new blacktop was
getting set to shove him back down again. When they finished the
road that would sweep past Arden, the town would become yet
another sleepy hollow, sacrificed in the name of progress and
megaton capability. Oh it would be great for the summer tourists
and the yachting set, but for a thriving business like Alan’s it meant
the difference between staying afioat and going under.
At dinner, though, we talked about the old days, school and
such-like. It was nice and easy and Janet was an excellent hostess
and the kids were well mannered and boisterous. I had a good time
and when it came to the bit when I had to go back down the hill
again I meant it when I pecked Janet on the cheek under the proud
gaze of her husband and promised I’d be back again for more of the
same.
The walk of half a mile or so down to Westbay helped ease the
strain on my belt that the dinner had caused. It was a mild evening
at the end of July and the sun was throwing pink off the edges of the
high clouds giving the promise of mellow days to come. I sauntered
down the tree-shaded roads listening to the evening chatter of
chaffinches and starlings in the branches overhead and the
screeching of swifts as they tumbled through the evening air in
squadrons on the hunt.
Back at the house I tried to write a few ideas, and while the big
Silver Reed hummed eagerly my mind couldn’t fit things together.
I gave up in disgust, had a can of beer and went to bed early. I
89

needn’t have bothered. In the early hours I woke up drenched with
sweat and hauling for breath.
I’d been in the cave where things crawled out of the stone and
where dead men were still alive and their hoarse screams echoed
through my mind. I was propelled by some invisible and malignant
force towards the pit in the middle of the cave where the thing
waited for me, its hate boiling out of the hole like a festering
disease. I saw it rise from that pit that went beyond the centre of - k
the earth and felt its mind probing for mine and I knew that it ‘
would lock itself on to me and I would be swallowed up and
become one of those screaming dead men.
The thing turned, and I saw its eyes, pallid and loathsome. They
had no pupils but I could sense them focus on me, pinning me down
with the hate. I couldn’t stop myself from being dragged on
unwilling feet across the cave and into the sick light that pulsed out
of those eyes, and I knew my soul would be torn apart.
The dream broke up in fragments when I was thrown out of sleep
again. It took me hours before I could relax enough to get some
iitful slumber before the dawn.
90

needn’t have bothered. In the early hours I woke up drenched with
sweat and hauling for breath.
I’d been in the cave where things crawled out of the stone and
where dead men were still alive and their hoarse screams echoed
through my mind. I was propelled by some invisible and malignant
force towards the pit in the middle of the cave where the thing
waited for me, its hate boiling out of the hole like a festering
disease. I saw it rise from that pit that went beyond the centre of - k
the earth and felt its mind probing for mine and I knew that it ‘
would lock itself on to me and I would be swallowed up and
become one of those screaming dead men.
The thing turned, and I saw its eyes, pallid and loathsome. They
had no pupils but I could sense them focus on me, pinning me down
with the hate. I couldn’t stop myself from being dragged on
unwilling feet across the cave and into the sick light that pulsed out
of those eyes, and I knew my soul would be torn apart.
The dream broke up in fragments when I was thrown out of sleep
again. It took me hours before I could relax enough to get some
iitful slumber before the dawn.
90