here's one thing we haven't factored in," Karen said, passing Phil the result of the Mint's searches. "It looks like Matthias the puppeteer might actually be a friend of Cat's from art college. Toby Inglis has a description that you could stretch to cover Matthias, the leader of the motley crew. Where does he fit in the picture?"

Phil looked at the paper. "Interesting. If he was involved in the kidnap, it might be more than embarrassment at his less-thanglittering career that's making him keep a low profile." He finished his glass of wine and tipped it towards Karen. "Any more where that came from?"

She fetched the bottle and refilled his glass. "Any bright ideas?"

Phil took a slow mouthful. "Well, if this Toby is Matthias, he was an old pal of Cat's. Could be that's how he met Mick. It didn't have to be planned, he could just have turned up out of the blue when Mick was there. You know what artists are like."

"I don't, actually. I don't think I've ever met anyone who was at art college."

"My brother's girlfriend was. The one who's doing the makeover at my place."

"And is she prone to being unreliable?" Karen asked.

"No," Phil admitted. "Unpredictable, though. I never know what she's going to inflict on me next. Maybe I should have got you to do the job instead. This is definitely more easy on the eye."

"What I live for," Karen said. "Easy on the eye." There was a charged moment of silence between them, then she hastily cleared her throat and said, "But here's the thing, Phil. If they'd met when Mick was with Cat, then ran into each other by chance in Italy, how the holy fuck did Mick explain what had happened to Cat and how he'd ended up with the kid?"

"So you're saying he must have been involved in the kidnap too? "

She shrugged. "I don't know. I really don't know. What I do know is that we need to get the Italian police to find the person whose blood isn't on the floor of that villa so we can ask them some pertinent questions."

"Another tall order for the woman who put Jimmy Lawson behind bars." He raised his glass to her.

"I'm never going to live that down, am I?"

"Why would you want to?"

Karen looked away. "Sometimes it feels like a millstone round my neck. Like the man who shot Liberty Valance."

"It's not like that," Phil said. "You nailed Lawson fair and square."

"After somebody else did all the work. Just like this time, with Bel doing the legwork."

"You did the work that mattered, both times. We'd still be back at square one if you hadn't had the cave excavated and the Nottingham guys properly questioned. If you're going to quote the movies, remember how it goes. 'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.' You are a legend, Karen. And you deserve to be."

"Shut up, you're embarrassing me."

Phil leaned back in his chair and grinned at her. "Do they deliver pizza round here?"

"Why? Are you buying?"

"I'm buying. We deserve a wee celebration, don't you think? We've come a long way towards solving two cold cases. Even if we're landed with Andy Kerr's murder as a sick kind of bonus. You order the pizza, I'll check out your DVDs."

"I should speak to the Italians," Karen said half-heartedly.

"With the time difference, it's nearly eight o'clock there. Do you really think there's going to be anyone with any seniority around? You might as well wait till morning and talk to the guy you've been dealing with. Relax for once. Switch off. We'll finish the wine, knock off a pizza, and watch a movie. What do you say?"

Yes, yes, yes! "Sounds like a plan," Karen said. "I'll get the menus."

Celadoria, near Greve in Chianti

The sun was heading for the hills, a scarlet ball in her rear-view mirror as Bel drove east out of Greve. Grazia had met her in a bar in the main piazza and handed over the paper directing her to the simple cottage where Gabriel Porteous was living. Just over three kilometres out of town, she found the right turn indicated on the scrawled map. She drove up slowly, keeping an eye out for a pair of stone gateposts on the left. Immediately after them, there was supposed to be a dirt road on the left.

And there it was. A narrow track weaving between rows of vines that followed the contour of the hill; you'd pass it without a second glance if you weren't looking for it. But Bel was looking, and she didn't hesitate. The map had a cross on the left side of the track, but it clearly wasn't drawn to scale. Anxiety began to creep upon her as the distance from the main road grew. Then suddenly, tinted pink by the setting sun, a low stone building appeared in her sights. It looked one step above complete dilapidation. But that wasn't unusual, even somewhere as fashionable as the Chiantishire area of Tuscany.

Bel pulled over and got out, stretching her back after hours of sitting. Before she'd taken a couple of steps, the plank door creaked open and the young man in the photographs appeared in the doorway dressed in a pair of cut-off jeans and a black muscle vest that emphasized evenly bronzed skin. His stance was casual; a hand on the door, the other on the jamb, a look of polite enquiry on his face. In the flesh, the resemblance to Brodie Grant was striking enough to seem eerie. Only the colouring was different. Where the young Brodie's hair had been as black as Cat's, Gabriel's was caramel coloured, highlighted with sun-streaks of gold. Other than that, they could have been brothers.

"You must be Gabriel," Bel said in English.

He cocked his head to one side, his brows lowering, shading his deep-set eyes even further. "I don't think we've met," he said. He spoke English with the music of Italian underpinning it.

She drew closer and extended a hand. "I'm Bel Richmond. Didn't Andrea from the gallery in San Gimi mention I'd be stopping by? "

"No," he said, folding his hands over his chest. "I don't have any of my father's work for sale. You've wasted your time coming out here."

Bel laughed. It was a light, pretty laugh, one she'd worked on over the years for doorstep moments like this. "You've got me wrong. I'm not trying to rip off you or Andrea. I'm a journalist. I'd heard about your father's work and I wanted to write a feature about him. And then I discovered I was too late." Her face softened and she gave him a small, sympathetic smile. "I am so sorry. To have painted those paintings, he must have been a remarkable man."

"He was," Gabriel said. It sounded as if he begrudged her both syllables. His face remained inscrutable.

"I thought it might still be possible to write something?"

"There's no point, is there? He's gone."

Bel gave him a shrewd look. Reputation or money, that was the question now. She didn't know this lad well enough to know what would get her across the door. And she wanted to be across the door before she dropped the bombshell of what she really knew about him and his father. "It would enhance his reputation," she said. "Make sure his name was established. And that would obviously increase the value of his work too."

"I'm not interested in publicity." He moved backwards, the door starting to inch closed.

Time to throw the dice. "I can see why that might be, Adam." She'd hit home, judging by the swift spasm of shock that passed across his features. "You see, I know a lot more than I told Andrea. Enough to write a story, that's for sure. Do you want to talk about it? Or shall I just go away and write what I know without you having any say in how the world sees you and your dad?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.

Bel had seen enough bluster in her time to recognize it for what it was. "Oh, please," she said. "Don't waste my time." She turned and started to walk back to the car.

"Wait," he shouted after her. "Look, I think you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick. But come in and have a glass of wine anyway." Bel swung round without a second's hesitation and headed back towards him. He shrugged and gave her a puppy-dog grin. "It's the least I can do, seeing as you've come all the way out here."

She followed him into the classic dim Tuscan room that served as living room, dining room, and kitchen. There was even a bed recess beyond the fireplace, but instead of a narrow mattress, it housed a plasma-screen TV and a sound system that Bel would have been happy to have installed in her own home.

A scarred and scrubbed pine table sat off to one side near the cooking range. A pack of Marlboro Lights and a disposable lighter sat next to an overflowing ashtray. Gabriel pulled out a chair for Bel on the far side, then brought over a couple of glasses and an unlabelled bottle of red wine. While his back was turned, she lifted a cigarette butt from the ashtray and slipped it into her pocket. She could leave any time now and she would have what she needed to prove whether this young man really was Adam Maclennan Grant. Gabriel settled down at the head of the table, poured the wine, and raised his glass to her. "Cheers."

Bel clinked her glass against his. "Nice to meet you at last, Adam," she said.

"Why do you keep calling me Adam?" he said, apparently bewildered. He was good, she had to admit. A better dissembler than Harry, who'd never been able to stop his cheeks pinking whenever he lied. "My name's Gabriel." He took a cigarette from the pack and lit it.

"It is now," Bel conceded. "But it's not your real name, any more than Daniel Porteous was your father's real name."

He gave a half-laugh, flipping one hand in the air in a gesture of incomprehension. "See, this is very bizarre to me. You turn up at my house, I've never seen you before, and you start coming out with all this... I don't mean to sound rude, but really, there's no other word for it but bullshit. Like I don't know my own name."

"I think you do know your own name. I think you know exactly what I'm talking about. Whoever your father was, Daniel Porteous wasn't his name. And you're not Gabriel Porteous. You're Adam Maclennan Grant." Bel picked up her bag and pulled out a folder. "This is your mother." She extracted a photo of Cat Grant on her father's yacht, head back and laughing. "And this is your grandfather." She added a publicity head shot of Brodie Grant in his early forties. She looked up and saw Gabriel's chest rising and falling in time with his rapid and shallow breathing. "The resemblance is striking, wouldn't you say?"

"So you found a couple of people who look a bit like me. What does that prove?" He drew hard on his cigarette, squinting through the smoke.

"Nothing, in itself. But you turned up in Italy with a man using the identity of a boy who'd died years before. The pair of you showed up not long after Adam Maclennan Grant and his mother were kidnapped. Adam's mother died when the ransom handover went sour, but Adam vanished without trace."

"That's pretty thin," Gabriel said. He wasn't meeting her eyes now. He drained his glass and refilled it. "I don't see any real connection to me and my father."

"The ransom demand was made in a very distinctive format. A poster of a puppeteer. The same poster turned up in a villa near Siena that was being squatted by a puppet troupe led by a guy called Matthias."

"You've lost me." His eyes might be focused over her shoulder, but his smile was charm itself. Just like his grandfather's.

Bel placed a photo of Gabriel at the Boscolata party on the table. "Wrong answer, Adam. This is you at a party where you and your father were guests of Matthias. It ties the pair of you to a ransom demand that was made for you and your mother twenty-two years ago. Which is more than suggestive, don't you think?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said. She recognized the stubborn line of the jaw from her encounters with Brodie Grant. Really, she could leave now and rely on the DNA to do all that was necessary. But she couldn't help herself. The journalist's instinct for running the game and gaining the scoop was too strong.

"Of course you do. This is a great story, Adam. And I am going to write it with or without your help. But there's more, isn't there?"

There was nothing friendly in the look Gabriel gave her. "This is bullshit. You've taken a couple of coincidences and built this fantasy out of them. What are you hoping to get out of it? Money from this Grant guy? Some crappy magazine story? If you've got any reputation at all, you're going to destroy it if you write this."

Bel smiled. His feeble threats told her she had him on the run. Time to go for the throat. "Like I said, there's more. You might think you're safe, Adam, but you're not. There's a witness, you see... " She left the sentence dangling.

He crushed out his cigarette and immediately began fiddling with another. "A witness to what?" There was an edge to his voice that made Bel feel she was on the right track.

"You and Matthias were seen together the day before the BurEst troupe disappeared from the Villa Totti. You were at the villa with him that night. The next day, they'd all gone. And so had you."

"So what?" He sounded angry now. "Even if that's true, so what? I meet up with a friend of my father. My father, who's just died. Next day, he leaves town with his crew. So fucking what?"

Bel let his words hang in the air. She reached for his cigarettes and helped herself to one. "So there's a bloodstain the size of a couple of litres on the kitchen floor. OK, you already know that bit." She sparked the lighter, the flame's brightness revealing how much darker it had become in the short time since she'd arrived. The cigarette lit, she drew smoke into her mouth and let it trickle out of one corner. "What you probably don't know is that the Italian police have launched a murder hunt." She tapped the cigarette pointlessly against the edge of the ashtray. "I think it's time you came clean about what happened back in April."

Thursday, 26th April 2007; Villa Totti, Tuscany

Until the last few days of his father's life, Gabriel Porteous hadn't understood his closeness to the man who had brought him up single-handed. The bond between father and son had never been something he'd thought much about. If he'd been pressed, polite rather than passionate was how he'd have characterized their relationship, especially when he contrasted it with the dynamic rapport that most of his mates shared with their fathers. He put it down to Daniel's Britishness. After all, the Brits were supposed to be uptight and reserved, weren't they? Plus, all his mates had vast extended families, ranging vertically and horizontally through time and space. In an environment like that, you had to stake your claim or sink without trace. But Gabriel and Daniel had only each other. They didn't have to compete for attention. So being undemonstrative was OK. Or so he told himself. Pointless to acknowledge a longing for the sort of family he could never have. Grandparents dead, the only child of only children, he was never going to be part of a clan like his mates. He'd be stoic, like his dad, accepting what couldn't be changed. Over the years, he'd shut the door on his desire for something different, learning to bow to the inevitable and reminding himself to count the blessings that came with his solitary status.

So when Daniel had told him about the prognosis of his cancer, Gabriel had gone into denial. He couldn't get his head round the thought of life without Daniel. This horrible information didn't make sense in his vision of the world, so he simply went on with his life as if the news hadn't been delivered. No need to come home more often. No need to snatch at every possible opportunity to spend time with Daniel. No need to talk about a future that didn't contain his father. Because it wasn't going to happen. Gabriel wasn't going to be abandoned by the only family he had.

But finally it had been impossible to ignore a reality that was bigger than his capacity for defiance. When Daniel had phoned him from the Policlinico Le Scotte and said in a voice weaker than a whisper that he needed Gabriel to be there, the truth had hit him with the force of a sandbag to the back of the neck. Those final days at his father's bedside had been excruciating for Gabriel, not least because he hadn't allowed himself to prepare for them.

It was too late for the conversation Gabriel finally craved, but in one of his lucid moments, Daniel had told him that Matthias was keeping a letter for him. He could give Gabriel no sense of what the letter contained, only that it was important. It was, Gabriel thought, typical of his father the artist to communicate on paper rather than face to face. He'd given his instructions for his funeral previously in an e-mail. A private service prearranged and paid for in advance in a small but perfect Renaissance church in Florence, Gabriel alone to see him to his grave in an undistinguished cemetery on the western fringes of the city. Daniel had attached an MP3 file of Gesualdo's Tenebrae Responsories for his son to upload to his iPod and listen to on the day of his burial. The choice of music puzzled Gabriel; his father always listened to music while he painted, but never anything like this. But there was no explanation for the choice of music. Just another mystery, like the letter left with Matthias.

Gabriel had planned to visit Matthias at the dilapidated villa near Siena once the first acerbity of his grief had passed. But when he emerged from the graveyard, the puppeteer was waiting for him. Matthias and his partner Ursula had been the nearest to an uncle and aunt that Gabriel had known. They'd always been part of his life, even if they'd never stayed in one place long enough for him to grow familiar with it. They hadn't exactly been emotionally accessible either; Matthias was too wrapped up in himself and Ursula too wrapped up in Matthias. But he'd spent childhood holidays with them while his father went off for a couple of weeks on his own. Gabriel would end the holidays with suntanned skin, wild hair, and skinned knees; Daniel would return with a satchel bursting with new work from further afield: Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, North Africa. Gabriel was always pleased to see his father, but his delight was tempered by having to say goodbye to the light touch of Ursula and Matthias's childcare.

Now the two men fell into a wordless embrace at the cemetery gates, clinging to each other like the shipwrecked to driftwood, not caring how unstable. At last, they parted, Matthias patting him gently on the shoulder. "Come back with me," he said.

"You've got a letter for me," Gabriel said, falling into step beside him.

"It's at the villa."

A bus to the station, a train to Siena, then Matthias's van back to the Villa Totti, and hardly a word exchanged. Sorrow blanketed them, bowing their heads and slumping their shoulders. By the time they reached the villa, drink was the only solution either of them could face. Thankfully, the rest of the BurEst troupe had set off earlier for a gig in Grossetto, leaving Gabriel and Matthias to bury their dead alone.

Matthias poured the wine and placed a fat envelope in front of Gabriel. "That's the letter," he said, sitting down and rolling a spliff.

Gabriel picked it up and set it down again. He drank most of his glass of wine, then ran a finger round the edge of the envelope. He drank some more, shared the spliff, and continued drinking.

He couldn't imagine anything Daniel had to tell him that would need so much paper. It hinted at revelation, and Gabriel wasn't sure he wanted revelation right now. It was painful enough holding on to the memory of what he had lost.

At some point, Matthias got up and put a CD in a portable player. Gabriel was surprised by the same music he'd listened to earlier, recognizing the strange dissonances. "Dad sent that to me," he said. "He told me to play it today."

Matthias nodded. "Gesualdo. He murdered his wife and her lover, you know. Some say he killed his second son because he wasn't sure if he was really the father. And his father-in-law too, supposedly, because the old man was out for revenge and Gesualdo got his retaliation in first. Then he repented and spent the rest of his life writing church music. It just goes to show. You can do terrible things and still find redemption."

"I don't get it," Gabriel said, uneasy. "Why would he want me to listen to that?" They were already on the second bottle of wine and the third joint. He felt a little fuzzy round the edges, but nothing too serious.

"You really should read the letter," Matthias said.

"You know what's in it," Gabriel said.

"Kind of." Matthias stood up and made for the door. "I'm going out on the loggia for some fresh air. Read the letter, Gabe."

It was hard not to feel there was something portentous about a letter delivered in such circumstances. Hard to avoid the fear that the world would be changed for ever. Gabriel wished he could pass; leave it unopened and let his life move on, unaltered. But he couldn't ignore his father's final message. Hastily, he grabbed it and ripped it open. His eyes watered at the sight of the familiar hand, but he forced himself to read on.

Dear Gabriel, I always meant to tell you the truth about yourself but it never felt like the right time. Now I'm dying, and you deserve the truth but I'm too scared to tell you in case you walk away and leave me to face the end by myself. So I'm writing this letter that you'll get from Matthias after I'm away. Try not to be too hard on me. I've done some stupid things but I did them out of love.

The first thing I am going to say is that although I've told you a lot of lies, the one thing that is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is that I am your father and I love you more than any other living soul. Hang on to that when you wish I was alive so that you could kill me.

It's hard to know where to start this story. But here goes. My name is not Daniel Porteous and I'm not from Glasgow.

My first name is Michael, but everybody called me Mick.

Mick Prentice, that's who I used to be. I was a coal miner, born and raised in Newton of Wemyss in Fife. I had a wife and a daughter, Misha. She was four years old when you were born. But I'm getting ahead of myself here because the two of you have different mothers and I need to explain that.

The one thing I was any good at, apart from digging coal, was painting. I was good at art at school but there was no way somebody like me could do anything about that. I was headed for the pit and that was that. Then the Miners' Welfare ran a class in painting and I got the chance to learn something from a proper artist. It turned out I had a knack for watercolours. People liked what I painted and I could sell them for a couple of quid now and again. At least, I could before the miners' strike in 1984, when folk still had money for luxuries.

One afternoon in September 1983, I came off the day shift and the light was amazing, so I took my paints up on the cliffs on the far side of the village. I was painting a view of the sea through the tree trunks. The water looked luminous, I can still remember how it looked too beautiful to be real. Anyway, I was totally into what I was doing, not paying attention to anything else. And suddenly this voice said, "You're really good."

And the thing that got me right away was that she didn't sound surprised. I was used to folk being amazed that a miner could paint a beautiful landscape. Like it was a monkey doing it or something. But not her. Not Catriona. Right from that first moment, she spoke to me like I was on an equal footing to her.

I just about shat myself, mind. I thought I was all alone, and suddenly somebody right next to me was speaking to me. She saw how freaked out I was and she laughed and said she was sorry to disturb me. By then, I'd noticed she was bloody gorgeous. Hair black as a jackdaw's wing, bone structure like it had been carved with a flawless chisel. Eyes set deep so you'd have to get right up close to be sure of the colour (blue like denim, by the way) and a big smile that could wipe out the sun. You look so like her sometimes it catches my heart and makes me want to cry like a bairn.

So there I am in the woods, face to face with this amazing creature and I can't find a word to say. She stuck her hand out and said, "I'm Catriona Grant." I practically choked myself clearing my throat so I could tell her my name. She said she was an artist too, a sculptor in glass. I was even more amazed then. The only other artist I'd ever met was the woman who took the painting classes, and she was no great shakes. But I just knew Catriona would live up to the job description. She walked about with this ring of confidence, the sort of thing you only have when you're the real thing. But I'm running ahead of myself again.

Anyway, we talked a bit about the kind of work we were interested in making, and we got along pretty well. Me, I was just grateful to have anybody to talk to about art. I'd not seen much art in the flesh, so to speak, just what they had at Kirkcaldy Art Gallery. But it turns out they had some pretty good stuff there, which maybe helped me a bit in the early days.

Catriona told me she had a studio and a cottage on the main road and told me to come round and see her set-up. Then she went on her way and I felt like the light had gone out of the day.

It took me a couple of weeks to build up to going to see her studio. It wasn't hard to get to-only a couple of miles through the woods-but I wasn't sure if she really meant me to come or if she was just being polite. Shows how little I knew her back then! Catriona never said anything she didn't mean. And by the same token, she never held back when she had something to say.

I went across to see her one day when it was raining and I couldn't get painting. Her cottage was an old gatehouse on the Wemyss estate. It was no bigger than the house I was living in with my wife and kid, but she'd painted it in vibrant colours that made the rooms feel big and sunny even on a miserable grey day. But best of all was the studio and gallery she had out the back. A big glass kiln and plenty of working space, and at the other end, display shelves where people could come and buy. Her work was beautiful. Smooth, rounded lines. Very sensual shapes. And amazing colours. I'd never seen glass like it and even here in Italy you'd be hard pressed to find colours so rich and intense. The glass seemed to be on fire with different colours. You wanted to pick it up and hold it close to you. I wish I had a piece of hers but I never thought I'd need part of her until it was too late. Maybe one day you'll be able to track down something she made and then you'll understand the power of her work.

It was a good afternoon. She made me coffee, proper coffee like you didn't find much in Scotland back then. I had to put extra sugar in, it tasted funny to me at first. And we talked. I couldn't believe the way we talked. Everything under the sun, or so it seemed. It was obvious from the first time she opened her mouth that day in the woods that she was a different class from me, but that afternoon it didn't seem to make a lot of difference.

We arranged to meet again at the studio a few days later. I don't think either of us had any notion that there might be risks in what we were doing. But we were playing with fire. Neither of us had anybody else in our lives that we could talk to the way we could talk to each other. We were young-I was 28 and she was 24, but back then we were a lot more innocent than you and your friends at the same age. And from the very first moment we met, there was electricity between us.

I know you don't want to think about your mum and dad being in love and all that goes with it, so I won't trouble you with the details. All I will say is we became lovers soon enough and I think for both of us it was like coming out into bright sunlight after you've been used to electric lights. We were daft about each other.

And of course it was impossible. I learned soon enough the truth about your mother. She wasn't just any nice middle-class lassie. She wasn't just plain Catriona Grant. She was the daughter of a man called Sir Broderick Maclennan Grant. It's a name that everybody in Scotland knows, like everybody in Italy knows Silvio Berlusconi. Grant is a builder and developer. Everywhere you go in Scotland, you see his company's name on cranes and hoardings. Plus he owns chunks of things like radio stations and a football club and a whisky distillery and a haulage company and a chain of leisure centres. He's a bully as well. He tried to stop Catriona becoming a sculptor. Everything she did, she did in spite of him. He would never have stood for her having a relationship with someone as common as a miner. Never mind a miner who was married to somebody else.

And yes, I was married to somebody else. I'm not trying to excuse myself. I never meant to be a cheating bastard, but Catriona swept me off my feet. I never felt that way about anybody before or since. You might have noticed I've never been one for girlfriends. The thing is that nobody could ever match up to Catriona. The way she made me feel, I don't think anybody else could do that.

And then she fell pregnant with you. You see, son, you're not Gabriel Porteous. You're really Adam Maclennan Grant. Or Adam Prentice, if you prefer that.

When that happened, I would have left my wife for Catriona, no question. I wanted to and I told her so. But she wasn't long out of a relationship that had been going for years, on and off. She wasn't ready to live with me and she wasn't ready for another fight with her father. I don't think anybody even suspected we knew each other. We were careful. I always came and went through the woods, and everybody knew I was a painter, so nobody paid any attention to me wandering about.

So we agreed to keep things as they were. Most days we saw each other, even if it was only for twenty minutes or so. And once you were born, I spent as much time with the two of you as I could. By then, I was on strike so I didn't have work to keep me from you.

I'm not going to do your head in by telling you all about the year-long miners' strike that broke the union and the spirits of the men. There's plenty of books about it. Go and read David Peace's GB84 if you want an idea of what it was like. Or get the DVD of Billy Elliot. All you need to know is that every week that passed made me long for something different, some life where the three of us could be together.

By the time you were a few months old, Catriona had changed her mind too. She wanted us to be together. A fresh start somewhere nobody knew us. The big problem was that we had no money. Catriona was making a pretty bare living from her glass work and I wasn't working at all because of the strike. She could only afford her cottage and studio because her mother paid the rent. That was a kind of bribe, to get Catriona to stay near at hand. So we knew her mum wouldn't be paying for us to set up home anyplace else. We couldn't stay put either. Me walking out on my wife and daughter at the height of the strike to go and live with somebody from the bosses' class would have been seen as worse than being a scab. They'd have put bricks through our windows. So without a bit of money to get us started, we were screwed.

Then Catriona had this idea. The first time she mentioned it, I thought she'd lost her mind. But the more she talked about it, the more she convinced me it would work. The idea was that we'd fake a kidnap. I'd walk out on my family, make it look like I'd gone scabbing, and hide at Catriona's. A few weeks later, you and Catriona would disappear and her father would get a ransom note. Everybody would think you'd been kidnapped. We knew her father would pay the ransom, if not for her then for you. I would take the money, you and Catriona would go back, then a few weeks later, Catriona would take you away, saying she was too upset by the kidnapping to carry on living there. And we'd all meet up and start our life together.

It sounds simple when you say it fast. But it got complicated, and things went to shit. As it turns out, your mother couldn't have had a worse idea if she'd spent her whole life working on it.

The first thing we realized when we started making the detailed plans was that we couldn't do it with just two of us. We needed an extra pair of hands. Can you imagine trying to find somebody we could trust to join in with a plan like that? I didn't know anybody who would be mad enough to join us, but Catriona did. One of her old pals from the College of Art in Edinburgh, a guy called Toby Inglis. One of those upper-class mad bastards who are up for anything. You've always known him as Matthias, the puppeteer. The man who will have given you this letter. And he's still a mad bastard, by the way.

He had the bright idea of making the kidnapping look like a political act. He came up with these posters of a sinister puppeteer with his marionettes and used them to deliver the ransom notes as if they were from some anarchist group. It was a good idea. It would have been a better idea if he'd destroyed the screen he used to print them, but Toby's always thought he was one degree smarter than everybody else. So he kept the screen and he still uses that same poster sometimes for special performances. Every time I see it, my bowels turn to water. All it would take is one person to recognize where it comes from and we'd have found ourselves up to our necks in it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself again. I really wasn't sure whether I should tell you all of this, and Toby thought maybe it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie, especially since you'll be having to cope with me not being around any more. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that you have a right to know the whole truth, even if it's hard for you to deal with. Just remember the years we've had together.

Remember the good stuff, it's what redeems all the crap I did. At least, I hope that's how it works.

A very bad thing happened the night I left my wife and daughter. I walked out in the morning without saying anything about leaving. I'd heard there was a bunch of scabs going down to Nottingham that night and I figured everybody would think I'd gone with them. I went straight round to Catriona's and I spent the day looking after you while she was working. It was bloody cold that day, and we were going through a lot of wood. After dark, I went out to chop some more logs.

This is hard for me. I haven't talked about this for twenty-two years and still it haunts me. When I was growing up, I had two pals. Like you and Enzo and Sandro. One of them, Andy Kerr, had become a union official. The strike was hard on him and he was off work with depression. He lived in a cottage in the woods about three miles west of Catriona's place. He loved natural history, and he used to walk the woods at night so he could watch badgers and owls and that kind of thing. I loved him like a brother.

I was chopping the wood when he came round the end of the workshop. I don't know who got the bigger shock. He asked what the hell I was doing, chopping wood for Catriona Maclennan Grant. Then he twigged. And he lost it. He came at me like a madman. I dropped the axe and we fought like stupid wee boys.

The fight's all a bit of a blur to me. The next thing I remember is Andy just stopping. Collapsing into me so I had to put my arms round him to stop him falling. I just stared at him. I couldn't make sense of it. Then I saw Catriona standing behind him holding the axe. She'd hit him with the blunt end, but she was strong for a woman and she'd hit him so hard she'd smashed his skull.

I couldn't believe it. A few hours before, we'd been on top of the world. And now I was in hell, holding the dead body of my best pal.

I don't know how I got through the next few hours. My brain seemed to work independent of the rest of me. I knew I had to sort things, to protect Catriona. Andy had a motorbike and sidecar combination. I walked back through the woods to his place and drove the bike back to Catriona's. We put him in the sidecar and I drove down to the Thane's Cave at East Wemyss. There's a set of caves down there that have been used by humans for 5,000 years, and I was involved in the preservation society so I knew what I was doing. I could get the bike right up to the entrance to the Thane's Cave. I carried Andy in the rest of the way and buried him in a shallow grave in the back part of the cave.

I went back a couple of days later and brought the roof down so nobody would find Andy. I knew where to get my hands on some pit explosives-my wife's pal had been married to a pit deputy and I remembered him boasting about having a couple of shots of dynamite in his garden shed.

But back to that night. I wasn't finished. I drove the bike back through East Wemyss and along to the pit bing. I jammed the throttle open and let it pile into the side of the bing. The slag covered it while I stood there.

I walked home in a total daze. Ironically, I ran into the scabs as they were setting off. I've no idea what I said to them, I was deranged.

When I got to Catriona's, she was in a hell of a state. I don't think either of us slept that night. But by the time morning came, we knew we had to go through with her idea. As well as wanting to start a new life, we needed to put some distance between Andy and us. So we started to make our plans.