Bacon proved to be the route by which culinary transformation could be achieved.
“I see you have lots of bacon, Lou,” James observed, as he surveyed the contents of the fridge in the coffee bar’s small kitchen.
“Aye,” said Lou. “We serve bacon rolls, you see, James. That’s why we have bacon.”
“I like a bacon roll,” said James, planning to continue with, “But there are other…”
Big Lou cut him short. “So do the customers. That’s why we serve them.”
The following morning, James was prepared.
“You know that bacon,” he began.
“Aye, bacon,” said Lou. “What of it?”
“A very versatile ingredient,” James said.
Big Lou thought for moment. Then she observed, “Versatile? I suppose it is. You can have it crisp or not-so-crisp. I suppose that’s versatile.”
James laughed. “You could say that,” he said. “But there’s more to bacon than meets the eye, Lou.”
James had brought a book with him, and he now showed it to Big Lou. “See this, Lou?” he began. “The Little Bacon Cookbook.”
Big Lou glanced at the book, the cover of which showed bacon rashers sizzling in a saucepan. “You don’t need a book to teach you how to cook bacon,” she said.
James smiled. “But you do need a book to teach you how to cook Bacon-Wrapped Sweet Potato with Avocado Wedges. Or Creamy Bacon Scalloped Potatoes. Or even Cinnamon-Spiced Bacon Monkey Bread.”
As he uttered the names of these exotic baconian constructions, James turned the pages to reveal pictures of the dishes in question. Big Lou glanced at the monkey bread, and hesitated. The sweet tooth, so firmly planted in the Scottish mouth, made its presence felt, and she took the book from James and studied the recipe for the sticky confection.
James pressed ahead. “We could start with one or two bacon-related things, Lou. Not too much. Just enough to give the menu some variety.”
Big Lou handed the book back. “You’ll cook?”
“With pleasure.”
“I suppose it can’t do any harm.”
The case was made, and accepted, although James was careful not to make this seem a victory. “You won’t regret having had the idea, Lou,” he said.
But Big Lou was not so easily flattered. “It was your idea, not mine,” she said.
“Of course,” said James hurriedly.
It was at this point that Matthew came in for his regular morning coffee. After Big Lou had prepared this for him, he beckoned James over to his table.
“Everything going all right?” he asked.
James nodded. “Fine. And I’m enjoying it. But there’s something worrying me, Matthew.”
Matthew waited.
“My uncle,” said James. “We have to do something, Matthew. I had an email from him yesterday. Would you like to read it?”
He handed Matthew his phone, and Matthew read the message displayed. Seamus, I just thought I’d let you know I’m all right. Uncle.”
Matthew frowned. “Odd,” he said. “You told me he never called you Seamus. And then…”
“And then why would he send a message to say that he was all right? Who sends that sort of thing – unless they’re not all right?”
“We must do something,” said James. “We have to. We can’t let things go on like this.”
They had been absorbed in the message and had not noticed a figure approaching their table. Now the figure was upon them. It was Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna, and she was carrying a small tray with a cup of coffee and a bacon roll on it.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” she said, and then sat down. “Can’t let what go on like this?” she asked. “Not that I’d wish to pry.”
There was silence, and then Matthew introduced James to the nun. She looked at the young man inquisitively.
“I’m worried about my uncle,” said James.
Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna reached for her cup of coffee. “Worry is like a monster,” she said, “that devours its children. We worry about that which we worry about, and then we worry about the fact that we worry. So does our poor world heave and buckle under an ever-increasing burden of worry.”
Matthew scratched his head. “Or whatever,” he muttered.
“We must do something,” said James.
“Doing something is often just the right thing to do,” said Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna. “Do nothing, and you’ll find that the nothing you do becomes the background for the things that you should do – were you to do something rather than nothing. Nothing becomes something – and something becomes nothing. I have seen that happen so many times before.”
She sighed, and Matthew sighed too. James pursed his lips.
“I want to go round there tonight,” he said. “I want to go round and help get him out.”
“We must indeed help one another,” said Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna. “None of us is a peninsula.”
Matthew grinned. “Island,” he said.
“That too,” said Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna.
“When all is said and Donne,” said Matthew, who wondered whether to explain the allusion, but decided not to. James belonged to a generation for whom such things must seem remote echoes of an ancient culture, and Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna had Petrarch and Dante to contend with.
But James surprised him. “That’s Clare enough,” he said, and fixed Matthew with a look that said, Don’t condescend, Matthew.
“Very amusing,” said Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna.
60
A Fine Tenor Voice
As an adult, Matthew rarely admitted that he was slightly afraid of the dark. This was precisely the opposite of what people advised: “Talking about a problem,” he had read, “deprives it of its power.” He understood why this should be the case, but he could still not bring himself to confess that if alone in the dark, he felt, at best, uncomfortable and, at worst, close to panic.
It was a fear that had been with him from early childhood, when he had been unable to sleep without a light being left on in the room. His parents had tried to wean him off this dependence, but the results had been too traumatic for them to persist with their programme of gradually lowering the brightness of his bedroom light. Although he might drop off to sleep with his bedside lamp dimmed, if he woke up in the middle of the night to a room in subdued lighting, his terrified sobbing would awaken the whole household. A clinical psychologist had diagnosed his nyctophobia when he was eight, and had embarked on treatment, but it was not until he was almost fourteen that he could face going to bed in anything approaching real darkness. He was ashamed of this, of course, and felt miserable too, just as a child will be made miserable by nocturnal enuresis, and his shame compounded the problem. By the age of sixteen, though, patient and gradual desensitisation had enabled him to turn out his light at night without the immediate onset of panic. That made life easier, but every so often the residue of the old phobia would manifest itself, and he would struggle to keep calm if he found himself in darkness, natural or otherwise.
Now, as he stood with James outside the house at Nine Mile Burn, underneath the high and empty night sky, Matthew shivered, and felt the touch of that old fear. They were about to get into the car and drive down to Single Malt House, six miles away, where James was convinced his uncle, the Duke of Johannesburg, was being held against his will by his Gaelic-speaking driver, Pàdruig. In daytime, under the rational light of a Lothian sun, Matthew had readily agreed to accompany James on his planned rescue mission; now, under this velvet emptiness, with the land spreading out around them, dark and mysterious, the hills’ black shapes crouching like malevolent shadows, Matthew was not so sure that this was what he wanted to be doing. But it was too late to withdraw and he would ha
ve to see the whole escapade through, no matter what misgivings he had about it.
James patted the pockets of his Barbour jacket. “I’ve got a torch,” he said. “And I have a sterile dressing. And a hip flask with some brandy. Brandy revives people, I believe.”
Matthew expressed surprise. “Nobody’s going to get hurt, I hope. Or need revival.”
“I hope so too,” said James. “But what if we find my uncle in need of first aid? What if Pàdruig has tied him up?”
Matthew laughed, although his laughter was hesitant and nervous. “I very much doubt if we’ll find that,” he said. “In fact, I suspect we’ll not discover anything untoward. We’ll probably find your uncle sitting in his chair, reading, and looking rather surprised to see us coming in the window.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said James. “I think he’s been kidnapped.”
Matthew shook his head in disbelief. “You’ve been watching too much Scandinavian noir. Those things make out that kidnapping happens every day – it doesn’t. Nobody I know has ever been kidnapped – not a single person.”
And yet, even as he spoke, Matthew gave an inward shiver at the thought. There was something amiss at Single Malt House, even if it was not a kidnapping. There was something about Pàdruig that made him feel uneasy – a hint of menace that Matthew could not quite put his finger on, but which he sensed just below the surface.
“We need to get going,” said Matthew, looking at his watch, but unable to read the dial in the darkness. When he was a boy, he had found an old luminous watch in a charity shop and had bought it. He was proud of its glowing dial, which cast a tiny green light over the skin if one held it to one’s palm, and had protested vigorously when his mother had taken the watch from him and disposed of it. He had been too young to understand her warning him of the dangers of radiation and was only silenced when she told him that the people who painted such watches in the factory eventually lost their fingers. “They also licked their paint brushes to make a suitably delicate point,” she said. “They lost their lips from that. The radium ate their lips away.”
James checked his pockets and then slipped a dark balaclava over his head. He had one for Matthew, and handed it to him now.
“I’m not putting that thing on,” said Matthew. “Or at least, not yet. What if people saw us driving along like that?”
James sheepishly took off the balaclava. “Later,” he said. “We can use them later.”
They got into the car and drove off in the night. In the middle distance, a slight glow in the sky told them where Penicuik was, Edinburgh’s orange light being hidden by the rising bulk of the Pentland Hills. They travelled in silence. Matthew was thinking of a film he had seen of resistance fighters in the mountains of Greece, and of how they lay in wait in the darkness to capture a German general. This was a bit like that, he thought, or the closest he was likely to come to that sort of thing. How would I have been if I had been there, he asked himself, in real danger, rather than merely taking part in this ludicrous schoolboy escapade? I would have been too cowardly, he told himself. I would never have done anything remotely brave.
As they approached the driveway of Single Malt House, Matthew switched off the headlights and drew the car to a halt. James now donned his balaclava, and Matthew followed suit. Then, together they crept through the shrubs that lay between them and the lumpy shape of the farmhouse. Light escaped from a window on the upper floor, and some, too, came from the kitchen. Otherwise the house was in darkness.
“We’ll go in the same way as last time,” whispered James. “I’ll go first.”
A few minutes later, they were in the scullery, having climbed through the window, and were listening for any sounds of occupation. There was music playing somewhere, the notes finding their way down the long corridor and through doors. Matthew cocked his head. “Kenneth McKellar,” he said.
“Who?” asked James.
“He had a wonderful tenor voice,” said Matthew.
He strained to make out the tune. I Love a Lassie.
“Yes, that’s him,” he said.
James signalled it was time to go. “We’ll try my uncle’s bedroom first,” he said.
I love a lassie, sang Kenneth McKellar. A bonnie Hielan’ lassie…
61
Brochan Lom
They made their way along the narrow, unlit corridor leading to the stairs at the back of Single Malt House. As the light of their torch fell upon walls lined with faded wallpaper and dusty picture frames, Matthew’s practised eye could not resist appraising the pictures within the frames – after all, he was, first and foremost, an art dealer, and only secondly a reluctant housebreaker. Even in these tense circumstances he found himself glancing at the pictures, trying to make out what was what in the dim and moving torchlight.
He reached out to touch James’s arm. “Look,” he whisper-ed. “Look at this painting.”
James shone the beam of the torch onto a small oil painting in an elaborate gilt frame. “We need to get on,” he said. “We can’t stand here and…”
Matthew cut him short. “Have you seen this one before?” he asked.
James bent forward to peer at the painting. He seemed uncertain. “Maybe. Maybe not.” And then, after a short pause, “Yes, I think so. I think my uncle showed it to me. I can’t remember what he said about it.”
Matthew took the torch from him and held it closer to the painting. There was something about the painting that made him feel uneasy. Was this a clue, in a sense, to the mystery that hung over the life of the man who lived in this house?
Matthew glanced at the picture next to the one he had just examined. It was a McIan print of a Highlander bedecked in tartan, standing beside an illicit still. Printed below was the title, Beyond the Reach of the Excise Man. That was more the sort of thing one would expect to see in a farmhouse of this sort, he thought – particularly one called Single Malt House.
They reached the backstairs and began to make their way up to the bedroom floor. The music became louder now, as it was emanating from a room on this floor. Kenneth McKellar had finished his paean to his Scots bluebell and had moved on to a rendition of Brochan Lom, a familiar nonsense song about thin porridge. Matthew smiled to hear it – he had learned the song as a child – but then he remembered where they were, and why, and his smile quickly faded.
Now, at the top of the stairs, James pointed at a door on the other side of the landing. “That’s his room,” he whispered.
Matthew moved past James. Reaching out, he put a hand on the door handle and twisted it slowly. As he did so, the memory came back to him of something he had just read. Elspeth had given him a copy of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, and he remembered Maugham’s chilling description of the woman watching the twisting of the handle of her locked bedroom door while she lay inside with her lover. It was something capable of generating a very particular dread: seeing the handle of a door turning while not knowing who is on the other side, and now here he was performing that very action. How did I let myself in for this? he asked himself. I should have said no. This is the second time I have come into this house uninvited. The second time…
“It’s locked,” said Matthew, his voice just above a whisper. Even so, he wondered whether whoever was inside would hear him, or whether, further away, Pàdruig, whom he supposed to be listening to Kenneth McKellar, might hear their whispers above the jaunty Scottish music.
James tried the door handle himself, more forcefully than had Matthew, who winced at the noise that this more energetic turning made. Again, the door did not move.
“I’m going to break it down,” said James, hardly bothering to lower his voice.
Matthew made a cancelling gesture. “No,” he hissed. “We can’t…”
But his objection was ignored and, taking a few steps back, James hurled himself at the locked door, his shoulder meeting
the central panel with a heavy thud.
The door withstood the onslaught. James stepped back, again ignoring Matthew’s protests, and charged. This time the collision produced results, and with a sharp, cracking sound the lock gave way and the door swung open. For a moment it seemed as if James might lose his footing and fall into the room, but he recovered his balance and was still standing when the door swung back in rebound and hit him painfully on his right arm. Involuntarily, he let out a yelp of pain.
Matthew expected Kenneth McKellar to come to an abrupt stop, but no, the mellifluous crooning continued, moderately seamlessly, into Mairi’s Wedding to the accompaniment of an accordion quartet. Now James was flashing the torch into the room, the beam revealing a large four-poster bed in which the Duke of Johannesburg, wearing a pair of striped flannel pyjamas, was sitting bolt upright, wide-eyed with shock at the sudden intrusion. Matthew’s eyes fell on the Duke, took in his entirely understandable astonishment, but then moved to the lock of the door they had just broken down. There was no key on the inside. And at that moment, Matthew knew that breaking in, risky though it had been, was the right thing to have done. The Duke had been locked into his room. He had not locked himself in; he had been detained by somebody else. And that person, of course, was Pàdruig.
Things now moved very quickly. James ran to his uncle’s side. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you hurt, Uncle?”
The Duke looked puzzled. “Hurt?” he asked.
James took his uncle’s hand and began to haul him out of bed. “Quick,” he said. “Get your dressing gown on.”
The Duke tried to resist, but his nephew was insistent, bundling him off the side of the bed and into the dressing gown that Matthew had taken off the back of a nearby chair.
A Promise of Ankles Page 24
