Poacher’s Moon

encouragement.

Prologue

He saw them watching him, these robed figures lurking behind their long shadows as they hid in the tower’s dry moat. The same robed figures pursued him as he roamed the market places of Kirkcaldy, interrogating the superstitious folk that haunted the luckenbooths. They stalked him across the moors when he hunted rabbits and deer, certain he would lead them to the hiding place, the spot where what the knowledge they craved was buried.

In the weeks gone by they had first tried to flatter him into parting with it then bribed and threatened him. One by one the tight web of alchemists, spun from Paris to Milan was tracked down and tortured. When they found it they would kill him. He knew how he would die and by whose hand, but not the actual day he would meet his maker.

He devised a cerebrerium, an intricately fashioned helmet to fend off the inevitability of his death, if only for a short while. It protected his head now as he edged his way towards the cave gorged out of the Bel Crag, aware that they were following him, their eyes boring into his back. These men of the cloth, they would be disappointed, he only intended filling up his jug of ‘Aqua Ardens’ to sample its quality. The King was impatient for delivery of the new alchemic drink, calling it Usquabae, ‘The Water of Life’. Soon, Alexander III’s court would be intoxicated by this fashionable new potion. It was not the water of life these robed figures sought, it was the power and wealth that his formula for preserving life could bring. The Prelates, their masters would never own it while he lived. It would be his legacy to the people.

The blast reverberated through the fields and villages as far away as Pittenweem. Every bird and animal scurried into the cover of the undergrowth to escape the toxic emissions from the explosion.

Reaching her stone and mud cottage a mile away, the tall red-haired woman could smell disaster on the rising wind before she saw the crag erupt into a thousand, heaven bound, pieces. Placing her basket of fresh herbs by the door, she let her fingers roam over the package sown into the lining of her plaid, seeking the reassurance its presence brought. Finding the thin book still wrapped in the rough wool, she breathed deeply, inhaling the fumes from the dispersing alchemic concoctions, filling her nostrils with the fragrance of second sight. For a brief moment the scene of destruction played out in front of her. She saw the cerebrerium spinning through the air and disintegrated before the small sharp piece of rock struck his head, extinguishing life.

Once more she sought the comforting presence of the grimoire. When she turned, she found the coal black steed waiting behind her, his saddlebags bulging with gold and provisions. The alchemist’s soul had departed his mortal body and it would not be long before his persecutors realised that she possessed the book of secrets.

As soon as she mounted, the stallion stamped his foot three times on the rock, leaving his print on its solid surface. The sound of his pounding hoof went unheard in the Kingdom of Fife. In Paris the bells of Notre Dame rang out three times and the death knell sounded across Europe.

Horse and rider passed across the stream no fiend, human or supernatural could cross. Once over the burn she relieved the horse of some of his burden, leading him through Dunniker Den. Crows lined up along bowed branches, harvested of their fruit now and laden with grief. The blackbirds ceased their chattering as she passed and cast down their heads in acknowledgement of her sorrow.

Once more the woman raised her head to the breeze picking up the scent of the sun worshippers who once toiled the den’s fertile earth. With mid summer’s eve now long past she had but a short time before winter solstice to find the small surviving community, the inheritors of the formula. It was imperative they decipher the codes before the festival of The Unvanquished Sun on 25th December, the day the child she carried within her would be born. Remounting, she traced their trail through the silent glen. The pallor of shock fading as the breath of the rising tempest brushed her cheeks.

As the late afternoon glow petered out into shades of night, the clouds hung low in the sky and bent the tips of the skeletal trees. A poacher’s moon, shrouded in ribbons of straggling cloud rose in the sky only to burst into a blood red orb that imploded upon itself and fell to earth. The path to the glen’s narrow exit was lit in an eerie and unnatural light. Lightening split the sky followed by the thunder of horses hooves over the muirs. Unbidden, the loyal black steed broke into a trot.

1

The Volkswagen camper was slewed across both sides of the bridge, the bald off side tyre hanging from the front wheel like a limp balloon. Drivers desperate to escape the clawing heat of Stirling’s town centre sweated behind the steering wheels, and sighed in exasperation. Saturday night, they were desperate to get home to check their pools coupons against the latest football scores. Out of sheer boredom, some gawped at the hand painted cannabis plants splattered around the van’s bodywork and wondered if this exotic plant would look good blooming beside their council issue garden shed.

Mickey Moon, was on his way home from Callander, the San Francisco of the Trossachs, his summer of love fizzling out in early July due to the need to head home and sign on the bru. Now he was sitting in the middle of the road examining the tyre and trying to line up the holes to the bolts of the wheel. No matter which way he turned the wheel it just would not fit. It belonged to another vehicle altogether.

The last joint had been strong stuff and he found his vision slightly blurred. Misjudging the closeness of the van, he pushed the wheel a little too hard causing the jack to slip and the camper to nosedive. Scrambling to his knees, Mickey peered through the driver’s door at the young woman in the passenger seat. Jolted awake by the thump of the crashing van, she was coming round to a very bad humour indeed. Pinkie Flowers was one of his two current girlfriends. The other, Poppy Summers, Mickey had left in the public toilets in Callander, thinking she’d staggered back on board the love wagon.

‘Cosmic man’, he said.

‘Aye cosmic.’ Pinkie spat.

‘Oh for goodness sake’ Bridie O’Day, Stirlingshire Police’s newest recruit was filled with frustration as she watched the scene from the facing Hillman Imp.

P.C. Harry Bluett leaned back in the driver’s seat and blew his Bazooka gum into his biggest bubble yet. He was entered for the Bazooka bubble blowing championships at the Golden Lion Hotel the following Tuesday and was at the moment the odds on favourite or so he said.

The pair were on their way to a 999 at the Raploch housing scheme, Bridie having just sorted out a brawl at Corrieri’s café in Causewayhead. After waving the teenage offenders off in the Black Maria, Harry felt he had done quite enough to earn his night's pay. He turned the bubble towards the passenger seat as his partner threw open the door and stepped out, slamming it behind her.

‘Feisty wee besom’. Harry muttered after the gush of air burst his record- breaking bubble.

Starting at the end of the six car line-up, Bridie ordered every driver to reverse, receiving several oaths and one request to go sexually assault herself. One by one the cars backed away, leaving enough room for the Imp to reverse and take the road onto Stirling’s second bridge over the Forth.

‘What did ye dae that for?’ Harry asked her as she climbed back in beside him.

‘We can get tae the Raploch over the old bridge’ The Raploch, the housing scheme Stirling Council modelled on Dante's inferno. She knew every official way in and way out and some that weren’t on any map. Having an escape route was a necessary part of Raploch life.

‘We could just have radioed in for somebody else to attend, we’re nearly finished oor shift.’ Harry reached for the gear stick fumbled with it, then double-checked it was in reverse.

‘Dodging my duties are hardly going tae get me a quick move into CID.’

Harry stared at her as if assessing her for the first time.

'There's nae point you trying tae get intae CID. You'll no find a man there. Both the senior officers are already married.' He lifted his foot off the clutch.

The car lurched backwards and jerked to a halt half an inch from denting the bumper of a Sunbeam Rapier. The Rapier’s driver gave him a one and a half blast salute on the exhausted old horn. Harry ground the gears as he tried to whack the stick into first.

‘I think the synchromesh has gone on this.’

‘When do you take your advanced driving test?’

'Dinnae ken. They’re saying noo, I might not be ready for the fancy stuff jist yet.’

Harry hit third gear instead of first and the car stalled. He restarted the engine and the little car bucked and reared along the approach to the old single track hump back bridge.

Harry's stop, start style of driving was getting on her nerves and she sat staring out of the window and drifted back to her childhood days. It calmed her down.

The grass around Stirling Castle was turning brown from the constant pounding the sun was inflicting on the playing fields below the rock. These were the fields where the young queen Mary Stuart, watched archery competitions, the hunt and other medieval sports. The fields she herself, ran shoeless and wild as a child of the Raploch.

A faint smile passed over her lips as she recalled the days when she was the young Mary Queen of Scots, or at least she was in her own imagination. Sinead, her sister a year younger and shy in those days was easily bossed around as the maid, Mary Hamilton. Her mother Jacqui, the Regent, Mary of Guise, wasn't quite as pliable and often threatened to take off her head if she didn't come in for her tea.

Idyllic, worry free, childhood days or were they? She played with Sinead for there was no one else to play with. Parents in the housing scheme barred their children from associating with the O'Days. The O'Day's weren't a family you wanted your children to mix with.

The engine died and the lack of sound jolted her back to reality. Behind then, an impatient driver sat on his horn as the car cruised to a halt.

'Ah'm gonnae lift that boy behind us for harassing the polis.' Harry's hand was on the door handle. She pulled his arm back.

'Leave him for another day. Lets just get this so-called riot sorted out.'

With several starts and stalls Harry was eventually able to continue his way up the A84. It was the same road Mickey Moon had drifted down half an hour before. Harry reached for the switches to turn on the blue light and bells but she caught his hand, the sweat in his palm transferring to hers.

‘Give them advance warning and they’ll all go tae ground and believe me, nobody will have seen a thing.’ She wiped her hand on the cloth of the seat and hoped Harry wouldn’t notice.

‘I’ve been in the job a wee bit longer than you hen. What is it, a week oot of Tulliallan training college? Nah, show the buggers authority.’ The car struggled to reach twenty miles an hour as Harry rummaged in his breast pocket for his last packet of Bazooka.

‘She leaned back in the passenger seat. ‘Aye. A week out of Tulliallan and a lifetime living in the Raploch.’

Harry’s foot slid off the accelerator and the Imp’s engine began to labour. ‘You lived in the Raploch and got the job?’ He was staring at her, his pale blue eyes wide and disbelieving.

‘Aye, the sins of the fathers and all that. Watch where you’re going will you?’ The car veered off towards the middle of the road and received a blast on the horn from a green Zephyr coming the other way.

‘Your dad was on the force?

‘No, all my family have been in and out of Barlinnie and Perth. All except my sister of course, Sinead’s in Gateside Prison in Greenock. When I applied for the job, the force decided it was cheaper to give me a uniform than feed and cloth me at Her Majesty’s expense.’

'Ye mean, the Chief Constable thought it would be guid tae have somebody wi' insider knowledge o' the Raploch on the Force.'

She stared at Harry's slack face, his vacant eyes were stuck to the windscreen as he struggled to concentrate on his gear changing. He might be more perceptive than he looked. It hadn't passed her by that the Police might only have taken her to find out what she knew about certain crimes and individuals that inhabited Stirling's most notorious housing scheme. Joining the Police force had been her only option, if she was to escape the stigma of belonging to one of the most infamous of all the families with criminal records that lived on the scheme. Other opportunities were hardly queuing up to knock at her splintered and paint cracked door.

As the light faded over the housing scheme, a steady drumbeat contrasted with the wandering tones of a solitary flute. A procession of ten to twelve year-old boys was goose-stepping in time to the rhythm outside St. Mary’s Catholic School. A few runny nosed and barefoot toddlers ran behind them chanting nursery rhymes, the out-of -time offering adding to the tension. As each boy passed he flung a stone or a broken brick at the school gates. The followers raised blazing branches or beat metal dustbin lids with a poker. The onlookers, silhouetted against the grey slabs of the buildings, were mesmerised by the eerie halo of flickering torchlight illuminating the old vans, tyres and coalbunkers that decorated the gardens. As the flames reached up to the darkening orange sky, old rags hanging on bare trees faded into nothingness. The moon was rising but dimmed by strands of cloud, a poacher’s moon.

‘It was the twelfth of July on Wednesday’, she whispered to Harry. Bridie grabbed her cap from the back seat punching out a dent.

Harry was trying to disentangle his legs from the steering column.

‘Aye, so it was.’

She tried to perch the oversized cap on her head and leaned back into the car. ‘These bairns are re-enacting the orange walk.’

Harry poked at the packet of Bazooka with a biro. It was lodged behind his notebook and the rough serge cloth of his pocket.

‘I’m a Glesga Rangers supporter, mysel’.’

She was running towards the impenetrable line of big bosomed women forming a barricade along the edge of the pavement.

‘Well, bully for you.’ She threw back over her shoulder at her partner.

‘Ys must be a Paddy then.’ He shouted after her. It was only a matter of time before her perceived religion was hurled in her face.

‘I'm neither Paddy nor Proddy. I don’t believe in all that shite.’

Harry sighed and swung his legs out of the car. It was typical of The Bogeyman to saddle him with this daft recruit when he only had another twenty- five years to go to retirement.

She picked the biggest woman in the line up, Rena McGuire, uncrowned Queen of the Loch. ‘Get your bairns off the street, Rena.’

Rena wiped her hands down her floral, crossover overall and took a step towards her, glaring at her but not saying a word.

Bridie turned towards the queen’s lady in waiting Eyna Miller and tried to avoid staring at the blue tattoos covering every inch of the woman’s undernourished body. There was one self-inflicted, artistic atrocity to celebrate every conviction.

‘Do you want your bairns locked up?’

The woman glared at her, hockled and spat a globule of Navy Cut speckled phlegm onto her newly pressed skirt.

‘Since ye joined the Polis, oor business is nane o’ yours.’

‘Yer a disgrace to yer family, so ye are’, joined in Mary Mulligan, a sparrow of a woman with two convictions for GBH.

The procession was turning to make another circuit past the school but three boys with bottles in their hands were branching off in the opposite direction. Each bottle spouted a soaked rag. They were taking the path up to the old farm labourers’ cottages. The old stone built houses had somehow removed themselves from the demolition list when the first phase of the scheme was built in 1919.

She stopped and turned back to look for Harry. He was strolling past the line of defiant women with a smile and a joke for each and they were smiling back at him. They knew this was one polis that posed no threat to them.

‘Holy shite’ she spat and broke into a run. As she rounded the bend, half a dozen chickens and an angry cockerel were scattering across the old cart track in front of three cottages. The boys were marching in single file towards the last house in the row. The tallest lit the fuse on his bottle, raised his arm and took aim at the oak door.

‘Dinnae throw the Irn Bru bottle, it’s got a penny deposit on it.’ Yelled the smallest, an undersized ten-year-old dressed in grubby yellow shorts and odd sized black gym shoes. The valuable missile was launched anyway, found its mark on the door and bounced off into a pile of paper rubbish stacked by the wall. The handmade grenade ignited and the three took to their heels, scattering in opposite directions. She reached for her radio and after struggling to make herself clear over the static, summoned the fire brigade. Her knock went unanswered

‘Hello, anybody in there?’ She wrapped her hand around the handle and pushed. The door eased back under pressure and something white and warm rushed past her making her jump backwards. The obese white rabbit bounded out onto the track causing the harem of clucking and bickering hens to flap their wings in panic. The cockerel puffed out his chest ready to defend his territory, or hide behind his ladies depending on which way the wind blew. The rabbit veered right and loped off into a cluster of trees on the far side of the cottages.

She shouldered the stiff door further inwards and the odour filling her nostrils reminded her of the days when her granny was baking and forgot to light the gas. The patch of light spilling out the doorway to the right of the dark hallway was pale orange. Somewhere in the house something was hissing. Mindful of the huge white rabbit, she took out her torch and shone it over the floor looking for further signs of wildlife. Nothing but logs stacked up against the outside wall. A spider scurried out from under the woodpile and disappeared under a threadbare blue rug. She stepped sideways along the corridor her back to the right wall, never once taking her eyes off the woodpile. When she reached the lit doorway, she froze before turning and poking her head into the open space.

The room was equipped in much the same way as her school chemistry lab had been. The benches clinging to every wall held crucibles, bottles, Bunsen burners, pestle and mortars. On a shelf high above one bench, sat row upon row of dusty chemical bottles with names she never bothered to learn at school. Her eyes dropped down to the boxes of plants littering the floor then scanned the bare boards beyond, before coming to rest on a heap of clothes in the corner. She picked up the scrap of paper that lay face down on the floor, next to the lifeless hand, fingers still outstretched in their attempt to creep out from under a tartan shawl. All that was on it was the letters ENL written in what looked like coal dust. Her hand went up to cover her mouth as she felt the bile rise to her throat. Gas mantles flickered and spat as she retched and skidded on rabbit droppings in her retreat towards the hallway.

Leaning against the jamb of the outside door she risked taking her hand away from her mouth just long enough to gulp in a mouthful of smoky air. The bile was rising again as she listened to the bells of the fire engines clanging with self importance and urgency as they raced towards the small, smoldering pile of rubbish outside the cottage.

Harry was sauntering up the lane towards the cottage trying for his biggest bubble yet, a mass of pink, gluey gum growing from his fat, puckered lips.

She swallowed hard and shouted to him.

‘Can you watch the cottage and radio in a suspicious death, Harry.’ I need tae find these wee toerags that threw the petrol bomb'. The boys were probably well away but her forehead felt clammy, her legs shaky and she didn’t want Harry Bluett telling the whole canteen about how she threw up over her new Doc Martens.

The bubble burst and splattered all over Harry’s disbelieving face. There hadn't been one single death natural or otherwise on his shift, not ever. Harry prided himself in avoiding situations that bred paperwork.

The bottle spluttered and burst outside the cottage as fresh flames spread across the entrance, the petrol having spread to more rubbish stacked under the window. She broke into a run just as her eye caught a patch of yellow and two odd gym shoes sticking out from behind the concrete coal bunker. She changed direction and picked her way through the weeds and nettles towards the back of the overgrown garden. Ten yards from the bunker and she felt her feet sink into something warm, soft and sticky. She smelt it before she saw it. She was ankle deep in the hen’s midden.

The boy still clutching a Hogg’s limeade bottle broke cover and made for the gate.

‘Get him Harry.’ She yelled as she saw her partner strolling towards her. Bridie’s hopes of a collar faded as her eyes wandered down from Harry’s double chin, well developed from chewing gum and sooking hard boiled sweeties, to his tunic buttons straining under the force of an exploding beer belly. Harry wasn’t built for speed.

The white excrement had managed to seep into her shoes, bogging her down.

One foot dragged on in front of the other as the hen’s droppings weighed her down and caused her feet to squeak and squelch as she made her way towards the coal bunker, cursing under her breath.

Harry lumbered towards the young fire raiser as he doubled back on himself and leapt onto the bunker. The boy hauled himself up onto the wall behind only noticing the barbed wire when it shredded his shorts. When Harry reached him, he was dangling over the opposite side, his pasty backside exposed to the elements. One fierce tug and the constable had the boy on the ground but not before the petrol from the lemonade bottle spilt all down his uniform trousers.

‘Why did you lot fling that petrol bomb at the cottage?’ Bridie yelled at him as soon as she was able to plod over to where the pair stood.

‘Why no?’ The cornered youngster retaliated. ‘Ma da says she’s the Pope’s wife.’

‘Give me strength.’ It was the sort of reply, she’d heard over and over again when she was growing up but it still surprised her that such misinformation could pass as religious education in the scheme.

‘Right’ said Harry, we’ll gie him a caution and then get off for oor supper.

‘We’ll no just give him a caution.’ She took hold of the boy's ear and pulled him in the direction of the parked car. ‘He’s a wee arsonist and we’re going tae lock him up. I’ll tell you what else we’re going tae do. We’re going to pick up the other two as well. I know who they are. ‘

‘Aw no, Bridie. I need to get hame and get my mum tae wash my trousers fur tomorrow.’

In fact, the pair arrested no one else that night for when they marched their prisoner towards the Imp, it was swaying backward and forwards in the gentle night breeze, its three remaining wheels struggling to cope with the weight.

On Stirling Bridge, Mickey Moon was overheard saying to Pinkie Flowers, ‘Hey, cosmic man, imagine that wee laddie having just the right wheel and aw for the price o’ a poke o’chips.’

2

A chattering crow with a tendency to repeat itself was his only company in the tree house. It was a rough hideout thrown together from fallen branches, disguised by leaves and held together with interwoven twigs and string. From its high vantage point in the wizened old oak, he’d watched the young policewoman through his new Lizars. The sharp lenses of the binoculars picked up her stunned expression as she’d stumbled out of the cottage. When the fresh air hit her, the sheer horror of discovering the body sent her into shock. Her face became paler and her shoulders shook. It was then he saw her training at Tulliallan take over. She said something to the chubby, bubblegum blowing constable who’d arrived just as she’d taken off after the young hooligans A sadness passed over him as he watched. It was never meant to be a girl who’d found the body. It should have been the old bitch in the cottage next door.

The ambulance and Stirling’s finest arrived at the same time. A sweaty red haired individual seemed to be in charge of the plainclothes detectives. The shirt he was wearing, he’d worn for three days. The precision lens of the Lizars picked up three sweat rings under his arms. He hadn’t bothered to put his jacket on as he knocked on the old bitch’s door and he wasn’t inside more than ten minutes. With few murder cases to deal with on their patch, Stirling CID didn’t have the skills or techniques of forces like Lothian or Strathclyde when it came to getting the most out of witnesses and suspects. She’d managed to keep the dead woman's secrets, clutching them to her chest like the bottle of malt whisky she enjoyed just a little too much in the evenings. That was fine by him. She would part with those secrets all in good time and her story would acquit him of the responsibility of what he’d already done and what he would go on to do .

He couldn't recall ever having met the dead woman but he knew the story of her life, every minute detail of it and it was those intricate details that led him to discover her Pagan ancestry.

The Miner’s Gala of 1953 was when he’d first heard her name. It had come up in throw away remarks made by one of his parent’s friends. Not until much later would it mean anything to him.

The pitmen and their families piled onto buses that brought them from the north side of Glasgow and the Howe of Fife. The fourth of May, Labour Day that year was unusually hot with the sun high in an azure sky. The convoys of buses hired for the occasion crawled into the town from the east side and the west and merged as each turned into the approach to the park.

Men, unused to wearing a suit, struggled to re-do the knots of their ties, quiet now that they’d spent their all political opinions on the journey over. Now, they pushed their Sunday best bunnets, not worn since last month’s christening, back onto receding hairlines to wipe away with a clean handkerchief, the sweat leaking down onto brows furrowed from peering through the bottomless black hole that was the pit.

Women prepared themselves for disembarking by taking out compacts from their well-worn handbags. They checked the jaunty angle of their new hats in the mirror, before reaching over and ramming a dummy into the mouths of their youngest weans, fractious in the combined heat of the bus and the draught from the open windows.

The buses swung through the park gates and into the car park, a few disgorging vapour from under rattling bonnets. More than one woman recalled fond memories of the Glasgow steamie as she came down the steps.

Every passenger except those still suckling their mother’s milk was given a bag o’ buns by the shop steward’s wife waiting at the bottom of the steps. In this socialist society, all the bags contained the same, spam sandwiches, a triangle of shortbread and a Paris Bun, the chrystalised sugar on the top hard enough to crack a set of national health false teeth.

Once everyone was settled on the grass, more than a few well-kent faces in the trade union movement got up and gave a rehearsed speech from the crude podium balanced on a shaky platform of beer crates. He’d listened with little interest. When the pit bands marched around the arena he’d started to feel restless. He’d watched women tie brown cardboard luggage labels to their infants wrists before leaving them with the nurse and hitching up their skirts to take part in the mother’s hundred yards sprint. It was all just the same as last year and he was bored.

There was nobody his own age in his circle, just the same old faces as always, no girls. His hormones, driven on by the heat were rampaging through his veins in search some young female company. His mother would want him to stay in the park, so while she was busy exchanging a new recipe for Empire biscuits with her cousin from Greenock, he’d slipped away and headed for the café he knew existed just a hundred yards from the park.

The previous year he’d met a couple of local boys in there with a few girls in tow. He wasn’t so lucky this time. Middle-aged women sat around the old scarred, wooden tables. They used the heat as an excuse to sneak off and enjoy a fish supper. After all, they’d heard the entire repertoire of the men’s political rhetoric before, every drunken Saturday since their wedding night.

Shop doors stood wide open, proprietors trying their best to entice customers in, but the street was deserted. He’d walked almost the length of it ,before he came upon two men standing outside the bookies. They stood smoking, not talking, their heads hung low, each mourning his individual loss and dreading the grief that would follow when he wandered home to his long suffering wife minus his pay packet.

A few steps further on he’d found himself on a bridge over a burn and beyond it nothing but facing rows of mainly grey granite houses. He’d been about to turn around and go back to the park when there, staring at him was the signpost for the glen.

The gardens at the bottom of the glen were a kaleidoscope of reds purples and yellows and on the air he’d smelt the ghost of the fading wild bluebells that made way for the council planted sweet peas, marigolds and petunias. A young couple sat kissing in the shelter the boys hand up the front of the girls’ jumper, how he envied them.

An iron gate was almost hidden in the long grass at the side of the gardens and he’d decided to explore. The lumpy pathway beyond meandered along the side of the slow following burn, up into the heart of the hillside. Rocks on one side overshadowed the path, sheltering it from the mid afternoon sun and he’d been glad of the cooler air.

He turned a corner and suddenly, he’d found himself approaching a clearing. The burn was wider here and slower running as it navigated its way around a handful of fallen rocks and he’d discovered he was not alone.

A barefooted girl sat on a boulder her slim body picked out by a single sunbeam. Her head was bowed and her arms wrapped round her knees. As he’d approached from behind, she stood up and stepped into the foam where water met rock. He’d drawn back into the shadows feeling that it would for some reason be wrong to intrude upon her enjoyment.

The girl’s small dainty steps fascinated him as she lifted her feet just clear of the water and she maneuvered through the gentle current. She shivered slightly as she took each step but disturbed the water no more than the silver backed trout that swam by her on their journey downstream. For the first time he’d noticed the waterfall as she picked her way through the swirling water towards it. As spray clung to her slender calves, she hoisted up her flowing skirt, threw back her mane of ash blonde hair and danced to the tune of the falling water.

He’d stood hidden in the shade of the rock, a different more urgent current flowing through his veins. That was when he knew he’d found Ayeesha and she was going to be his future. What he hadn’t known then was that someone else’s past was going to rob him of that future.

3

‘Aw shut-up and jist git yer knickers off.’

The rosy-cheeked girl on the settee giggled behind her hand until her mother caught hold of her wrist and hauled her to her feet.

‘I would never have brought Elisabeth here if I’d known you entertained such coarse men.’

Charlie Fleck sighed and rose out of her nineteen twenties chintz armchair, undoing a loose spring from the seat of her jeans. As much as she loved him, she was fed-up making excuses for the foul-mouthed bird.

‘It’s The Bosun, he’s a parrot. An African Grey to be exact. I inherited him from my granda’ He was on the boats.'

‘Did your gran dad bring him all the way from Africa? Elisabeth was impressed.

‘No. Granda was on the Clyde paddle steamers and he bought The Bosun cheap at the Barras market.

‘I can see why he was cheap’, Mrs. Leigh let go of her daughter’s wrist and sat down again on the wobbly piano stool. The piano was long gone, swapped for a two stringed guitar in 1948.

Charlie went through to the kitchen behind the sitting room, grabbed the cloth off the table and threw it over the parrot’s cage.

‘Night night Sweetheart.’ said the indomitable bird in a parody of a stage whisper. ‘How was it for you?’

His new owner reached the empty sitting room just in time to hear the front door slam. She dropped into the armchair and picked up her cup and saucer from an occasional table made from a piece of red formica and an elephant’s foot. The monstrosity was another bargain from the Barras.

This was the second client to walk out since she moved into her granda's house three weeks before. There probably wouldn’t have been anything to link the family to Vivian Leigh anyway. Mrs. Leigh wanted Charlie as a genealogist, to establish some family link to the actress. She thought it would give her daughter a helping hand when she applied for drama school. The trouble was Elizabeth was far too self obsessed to envisage how another person might behave and her voice made a banshee with piles sound like a BBC broadcaster.

The sound of the phone ringing cut across Charlie’s thoughts and she went out of the front door to the red box on the other side of the garden wall to answer it. She listened as Bridie explained down the earpiece that she would try to beg a lift over to Alva but there had been a suspicious death and she couldn’t go off shift without filling in the paperwork. Charlie was given no time to say anything for as soon as the probationary policewoman said her piece the pips demanded the caller put in another fourpence and they were cut off. With the prospect of a couple of hours to fill before her friend's arrival, Charlie decided to get on with some work. Going into the spare bedroom at the top of the stairs, recently converted into a study, she sat down at her granda’s big mahogany desk. Taking three manilla files from the top drawer, she placed the first aside on the floor. She was proud of her work on Bridie’s family history and now it was complete she would give it to