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<h1>7</h1>

<p>From the Kirkland Herald.</p>

<p>Double Shooting Death</p>

<p>Mother and Son Killed</p>

<p>A mother and son died in a gun horror in an Arden farmhouse last night.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>Farm worker 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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>Mr Henson had been rushed to Glasgow's Western Infirmary for emergency surgery after his hands were badly damaged by a cattle-feed mixer.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>Police inquiries into the double tragedy are continuing, a spokesman told the Herald.</p>

<hr/>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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 shells, 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</p>

<p>in the mouth, stretching down to get her thumb hooked over the trigger. It spread the crown of her head and all its contents on the ceiling plaster.</p>

<p>Her reasons were not too hard to figure out either. She was in a state of shock and grief over the tragedy that was all set to ruin her son's life.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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 truly terrific job on his hands. The fact that he still had something resembling hands was a tribute to the miracles of modern microsurgery.</p>

<p>But they weren't hands that were ever going to work a farm, and his mother knew it.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>For in 1981, the summer of 1981, 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.</p>

<p>But everybody knew about his hands.</p>

<p>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 round, he picked himself up and walked home, dangling his hands in front of him.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>Hugh Henson's young wife had given him a baby boy at the 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 farm pay.</p>

<p>If ever a mother was proud of her son, it was Maggie Henson, the careworn and callous-handed old woman of forty five, bent before her time.</p>

<p>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, forcing him to hold them out like a mildly boastful angler, she saw it all coming again, and nobody could expect her to take it.</p>

<p>Maggie Henson had watched her young husband become an old man, a shadow of himself. A victim of the bad summer of 1981. She was faced with the kind of decision no woman should have to make. At least not twice.</p>

<p>There was no way she was prepared to watch her big, smiling, willing son get like that.</p>

<p>She gave him the easy way out.</p>

<hr/>

<p>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.'</p>

<p>'I'm not with you,' I said, taking a 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.</p>

<p>'The big opening's set for June seven. The next week, and from then on I'll lose the passing trade. All the traffic from Kirkland and the south will just go zooming past, missing Arden altogether. '</p>

<p>'But you'll still get plenty of people coming through.'</p>

<p>'Maybe in the summer, but they won't be wanting petrol. At least not enough to keep my forecourt going. And nobody is going to bother using the coast road when they've got three lanes each way and only twenty minutes to Glasgow.'</p>

<p>He paused and looked out of the window. The meal had been large and satisfying. Alan was on his fourth Scotch after several glasses of wine.</p>

<p>
    'It's these Ministry of Defence bastards,' he said, and Janet, his wife, a pretty brown-haired and slightly built woman, frowned at him but said nothing.</p>

<p>'Yes, they call it the Trident Road, don't they?'</p>

<p>'Not just content with killing us all with the bloody A-bomb,' Alan said, '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?'</p>

<p>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?</p>

<p>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 firestorm would burn everything up. Pictures of gloom and doom.</p>

<p>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 into the estuary, would go the way of Krakatoa. Straight down.</p>

<p>Oh, there had been local and national protests. The local Council had declared themselves a nuclear-free zone, and that did a whole pile of good. They wore badges at meetings and joined marches.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>OK, enough of the political lecture. But 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.</p>

<p>The new by-pass was going to hurt Alan Scott. Arden was going to do him 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 firth 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.</p>

<p>'What do you plan to do?' I asked.</p>

<p>'I'm thinking about moving. Just when I've got it going right.'</p>

<p>'What, closer to Glasgow'?'</p>

<p>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.'</p>

<p>'And still live here'?'</p>

<p>'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.'</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>'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.'</p>

<p>The look he got then told me Janet didn't like blasphemy either, but Alan didn't notice it, or chose to ignore it.</p>

<p>'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.</p>

<p>
    '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.'</p>

<p>'Yes, dear,' Janet said, more soothingly. 'But I'm sure it will be</p>

<p>all right. And if not, I don't mind moving. I really don't. The children are young enough to fit in anywhere.'</p>

<p>'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.'</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>'Terrible thing down at the farm,' Alan said, changing the subject.</p>

<p>'Which one?'</p>

<p>'The shooting. Damned tragedy. That young Henson was a nice boy. 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.'</p>

<p>'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.</p>

<p>'Poor woman,' she said. 'Imagine that happening twice. Father and son. No wonder she went crazy.'</p>

<p>'The other one was pretty gruesome, I understand.' Alan said.</p>

<p>'Yes, it was. I was there.</p>

<p>'I heard that. Must have been rough.'</p>

<p>'Frankly it was terrible. I had a hard time getting to sleep afterwards.'</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>'The tree jumped. <em>Jumped</em>.'</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>'It must have been awful. That poor woman, seeing him crushed like that.'</p>

<p>'Damned strange thing to happen,' Alan said. 'Weird.'</p>

<p>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 astride it.</p>

<p>The bike'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. The children had stopped playing catch and were racing towards the black figure on the bike. The sun glinted on the smooth dome of his helmet.</p>

<p>'Who the hell's that?' I asked.</p>

<p>Alan chuckled. 'Gospel Rock.'</p>

<p>
    'Huh?'</p>

<p>'The piston-driven priest. He's one of the lecturers up at the seminary. He's bike mad. Thinks he's a caped crusader or something. Always getting me to fix new bits on to that bloody bike of his. Nice enough, though. You'll like him.'</p>

<p>Father Gerald O'Connor was a tall, slim young man with dark 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.</p>

<p>'Meet heaven's angel,' was how Alan introduced him to me. 'Father, meet my old school friend, Nick Ryan.'</p>

<p>The young priest flashed an easy grin as he leaned forward to shake my hand.</p>

<p>'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.</p>

<p>'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?</p>

<p>'And illegal,' Alan said.</p>

<p>'Only when it's open to traffic.'</p>

<p>'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.'</p>

<p>'I know the problems, Alan,' Father Gerald said. 'But my quick 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.'</p>

<p>Janet giggled, and even Alan had to smile at the young priest's quick-fire.</p>

<p>
    'You'd make a terrific car salesman, Gerry, honest to God. Here, what'll you have'?' Alan asked, indicating his well-stocked bar.</p>

<p>'Never touch a drop before morning prayers. A whisky'll be fine. Not too much water in it either.'</p>

<p>Alan poured and the priest accepted the glass and sipped.</p>

<p>'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.'</p>

<p>'I don't think anybody knows what side you're on, Gerry,' Janet Said. 'You go about looking like a rocker on that bike, and you spend all your time with those drug addicts. Old father Maguire would turn in his grave.'</p>

<p>'Just as well he's in the dear arms o' Jasus,' the priest said putting on the blarney. Janet shot him a mock frown of disapproval.</p>

<p>
    '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.'</p>

<p>'Gerry works up at the drug rehabilitation place in Kirkland,' Alan said.</p>

<p>'I didn't even know there was one. I never thought there was a drug problem here.'</p>

<p>'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.'</p>

<p>'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.</p>

<p>'I'm not as bad as I'm painted,' the priest said with a smile that was supposed to make you think that he really was. 'Just 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, so they've decided to make me work for my money.'</p>

<p>He finished off the small whisky and smacked his lips appreciatively, as he set the glass down on a small table by the window.</p>

<p>
    '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.'</p>

<p>'No problem,' Alan told him. 'I'll get the truck cleaned up like last year.'</p>

<p>
    'I'll need a driver too.'</p>

<p>'What day is it?'</p>

<p>'The thirteenth'</p>

<p>'OK, I'll have to drive it myself.'</p>

<p>While they were talking, my thoughts flew 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.</p>

<p>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 sheep flocks.</p>

<p>But in Arden we've had the big day for centuries, maybe even millennia.</p>

<p>Oh, I don't doubt that the format has changed a bit since they sacrificed blood and corn in the ringstones up on Cardross 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 down the centuries.</p>

<p>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 most 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. 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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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 sometime. Outside, he ruffled the kids' hair and reached into a pocket of his leathers and brought out a bag of sweets. He 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.</p>

<p>'Decent chap,' Alan ventured.</p>

<p>'Works on his image,' I said.</p>

<p>
    '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 bars in Glasgow, but despite that he's really pretty down to earth. He does a lot of work for the kids here.'</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>I 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.</p>

<p>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 afloat and going under.</p>

<p>At dinner, though, we talked about the old days, school and such-like. It was nice and easy. 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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>Back at the house I tried to write a few ideas, but my mind still couldn't focus.</p>

<p>I gave up in disgust and went to bed early. I needn't have bothered. In the early hours I woke up drenched with sweat and hauling for breath.</p>

<p>I'd been in the cave where things crawled out of the stone and where dead men were still alive and their screams echoed through my mind.</p>

<p>I was propelled by some invisible and malignant force towards the pit in the middle of the cave where something waited for me, its hunger boiling out of the hole like a festering disease. I saw it rise a pit that went down into darkness and felt its mind probing for mine and I knew that if it locked to me and I would be swallowed up and become one of those screaming dead men.</p>

<p>The thing turned, and I saw its eyes, pale yellow in the dark. They had no pupils but I could sense them focus on me, pinning me down. I couldn't stop myself from being dragged on unwilling feet towards it.</p>

<p>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 fitful slumber before the dawn.</p>

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