'What about my class?'

'We've spoken to your boss, it's been cleared.'

'Is someone coming down?'

'Yeah. Come on.'

'So did you find something? A witness?'

'We'd best wait till the station to talk, Mr Ash.'

They walked very briskly out of the school, that no- nonsense cop-stride that exuded self-importance with every pace. Thorpe diverted at the front exit 'to bring the Head up to speed', while Boyle led Ray out to a grey Rover and ushered him into the back seat before taking the wheel himself. Thorpe emerged from the building a couple of minutes later and climbed into the rear next to Ray, upon which Boyle turned around and stuck a silencer-fitted automatic into Ray's chest.

'Fuck me.'

'Give him your car keys or I will,' he ordered.

Thorpe - presumably now not his real name - was already patting Ray down, removing his keys and mobile phone from his inside jacket pocket.

'What is it you want from me, for fuck's sake?'

'These'll do for just now, mate,' probably-not-Thorpe replied, a hint of Scouse revealed in his accent. 'Which motor is it? And don't fuck us about unless you really want to know what a bullet in the nuts feels like.'

'Black Polo,' Ray said, trying to sound swiftly cooperative.

'Which one?'

"The fucked one.'

Thorpe exited, then there was a clunk as Boyle engaged the central locking. He withdrew the pistol and put the car into gear.

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"The bullet in the nuts offer stands until further notice, okay?'

'While stocks last,' Ray mumbled.

The car turned left out of the car park and promptly pulled up behind a massive lorry, parked about a hundred yards from the school gates, a ramp leading to its rear.

'No tantrums, please, Mr Ash,' Boyle said, taking the keys out of the ignition. 'Best to conserve your energy.'

'What fucking energy?' Ray said, watching Boyle head up the ramp.

He hauled open the roller-shuttered door then returned to drive the car up into the container. Once inside the truck, Boyle got out of the Rover again, locked the vehicle and walked away.

Ray tried the doorhandle but it merely bent back and forth with no effect. He tried walloping the side window with his elbow a few times, but it was clear which one would break first, and anyway, if he climbed out, where the hell was he going to go? He looked out of the rear windscreen, expecting to see Boyle close the shutter. Instead he saw his own car rolling up behind the Rover, Thorpe at the wheel.

'Pricks.'

What did they want with his car? And what the bloody hell did they want with him? They weren't cops, yet they knew about last night, so they had to be connected, but last night they were trying to kill him and today they were abducting him; disappearing him, even.

The roller-shutter was pulled down at the rear, leaving him also in literal darkness. He knew he should have been more fearful for his life, but the sense of threat was clouded by his having no idea where or who the threat was coming from. Inexplicable as it was, however, he could forget all 179.

that mince about subconscious projection and stress-related hallucinations. The events of last night may have passed in a panic-fuelled blur of action, emotion and instinct, easily confused and jumbled in the memory, but right now he was conscious, composed and alert, and he was quite definitely locked in a car, quite definitely locked in a lorry, having quite definitely been abducted at gunpoint.

It occurred to him to keep track of the turns and attempt to picture the route from memory, but the Rover's suspension did too good a job of cushioning the lorry's movements. He checked his watch so that he'd at least have some idea of how far he was travelling. After that, there was nothing to do but sit in the dark and ponder his situation, though even baffled contemplation needed information to fuel it, and he was fresh out.

Ray searched the most tender recesses of his conscience for traces of what he might have done to bring this upon himself, but was coming up well short. He didn't have any enemies; certainly none that he was aware of, and it was difficult to imagine generating this level of animosity without noticing. The only people he had even argued with in recent times had been online opponents, and even among the less stable of them, their idea of retribution extended to spamming poorly spelled insults in IRC chat- rooms or bombing your mailbox with bazillions of auto- generated messages. So what did that leave? Some Angel Heart alter ego leading an unconscious life of crime? Hard to see where he would have fitted that in around the nappy changes and floor-pacing. Had he witnessed something he wasn't supposed to? Exhaustion and self-absorption could take their toll, but he still reckoned he would notice if an incident of mortal consequence happened in his line of vision.

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Shit, of course! That had to be it: he'd forgotten to check his mail this morning for mistakenly addressed microfilms. There were probably nuclear launch codes lying on the doormat at that very moment, just waiting for Martin to spew all over them. Fuck, it was as likely as everything else that was going on at the moment.

He hadn't crossed any drug-dealers, hadn't racked up debts to some bloke with more scar tissue than Cher, hadn't joined any subversive underground movements and hadn't slept with anybody's wife (seldom even his own these days, Mastitis Fetish magazine and Sex for the Sleep-Deprived not being on the household subscription list). He hadn't even raised his voice in anger to another human being since . . .

Fuck. No. Don't go there, m8.

So yes, owning-up time: he had slept with . . . well, she wasn't the guy's wife, just his girlfriend, but this was more than ten years ago. The statutory limitation would have been well exceeded even if the injured party hadn't died in the meantime. And anyway, given the circumstances under which it happened, it wasn't something that had exactly plagued Ray with guilt. If it had, it might have provided another explanation for what he'd imagined he saw at the airport, but it still wouldn't explain this carryon. Manifestations of conscience could reputedly be powerful things, but he didn't remember Banquo's ghost toting an automatic or kidnapping Macbeth in the back of a truck.

Nonetheless, the chronology demanded a connection. Since seeing/not seeing/imagining/astrally projecting Simon Darcourt at the airport last night, Ray's world had ceased to obey its normal rules: somebody had hacked the Real Life(tm) engine and left the server utterly borked. Was 181.

it entirely coincidental that the last time his life had gone anything like this crazy was the last time he and Simon's paths had crossed?

Surely. But if anyone could possibly fuck you over from beyond the grave, it would be that vindictive bastard. Simon kept score of every slight, every dispute, every 'disappointment', to use his spine-curling term; never mind full-scale betrayal.

He hadn't always been like that though. Well, maybe he had, but at least there had been a time when Ray was not so acutely aware of it.

Simon was the hero of the alsatian incident; you had to chalk that one up to him (though there had still been a casualty). Hillhead, nineteen-eighty-cannae-remember. First year. Ray had grasped the opportunity of broadening his horizons through higher education the way most good Scots lads did, by staying home at his mammy's and commuting to the nearest uni on a daily basis. You could pick out the West-of-Scotland home-dwellers at ten paces, even without hearing their accents: they didn't look malnourished, their eyes were bright from occasionally going to bed at a sensible hour and their clothes were always clean and ironed. The downside was that spontaneous, uncontrolled socialising - the quick pint following the last lecture that turned into a flat-party via two more pubs, a takeaway and the union disco, for some the entire purpose of university - was often curtailed by the logistical concerns of getting home to towns not particularly well-served by public transport during daylight hours, never mind three in the morning. The standard solution, when available, was to crash on somebody's floor, an option particularly welcome on what used to be known as school nights.

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On this particular occasion, Ray had enjoyed the hospitality of the late Mr Darcourt and his housemate Ross, after a quick pint following the last lecture etcetera etcetera. He'd spoken to Simon a few times before that, and sat next to him in a couple of classes, silently entertaining each other by scribbling oh-so-hilarious remarks and doodles about the lecturer on their notepads. However, this had been the first time they'd really got talking, and they'd enjoyed one of those youthful, beer-fuelled meetings-of-the-minds that gave the impression university was bung-full of fellow visionaries. Sitting in the Queen Margaret Union bar, named at the time after the statutory dead black South African, their conversation covered every aspect of life: music, books and films. (Ray made a judicious rule of never bringing up the subject of computer games in Arts faculty company. Might as well turn up in an Anthrax T-shirt with a copy of The Foundation Trilogy under your arm.) They seemed to agree on a lot of things, though as tended to be the case with such conversations, each participant probably switched off during the bits when his counterpart was enthusing over something he didn't like or hadn't heard of, impatient for his own turn. Memory subsequently retained only edited highlights. Ray, for instance, didn't remember Simon eulogising about This Mortal Coil, but he must have held forth on the subject that night because he would later play It'll End In Tears repeatedly until Ray wanted to track Liz Frazer down and force her at knifepoint to sing in a proper fucking language, he didn't care which one.

Arguably more important than what you liked was agreeing on what you hated, and nothing forged a bond quite as strong as a shared detestation of a prevalent orthodoxy. In this case, their unifying sacrilege was that they 183.

both despised The Smiths, a heresy that distinguished them as being terribly individualistic and raised them above what Simon described as 'all the bequiffed, designer-miserablist twats poncin' around the QM hopin' someone notices the volume of Oscar Wilde stickin' out their jacket pocket'. In the mid-1980s, The Smiths were the student equivalent of stadium rock. Saying you hated them was, in that context, about as daringly iconoclastic as saying you hated the Spice Girls, but it still felt good to unload about it. Listening to Simon unload was even better.

Scorn was Simon's true idiom. Nobody did withering derision quite like him, and it was a treat to hear him train the heavy armoury on what they both regarded as legitimate targets. On form, he was like Jerry Sadowitz without the warm sentimental streak, and the bigger the audience, the better the performance. Ray had a quiverful of barbs of his own, eliciting delighted approval from Simon when unsheathed, but he was limited in his dislikes. The scope of Simon's contempt was boundless.

"There's nothin' more depressin' than wakin' up next to a lassie and spottin' Meat Is Murder lyin' next to the turntable. My own fault for not askin' I suppose, but they should really have the decency to tell you. I mean, they'd tell you if they'd any other disease. No, actually, there is somethin' worse: pickin' up Meat Is Murder and findin' an Everything But The Girl album underneath. You're fuckin' doomed at that point. Before you get out of that flat, you're gaunny hear all about her parents' fuckin' divorce and two hours of how nobody understands her, and all for the sake of one shag. Not fuckin' worth it.'

Simon had had sex. The contemporary significance of this could not be overstated. Not only had he had sex and talked about it matter-of-factly (assuming, which Ray loved, that 184.

Ray had had some too), but he'd even had bad sex. As far as Ray was concerned, while this was not unthinkable, it hinted at a degree of experience and maturity which at that stage he couldn't even aspire to. The idea of actually getting to do it seemed purely conceptual to a fairly shy seventeen- year-old who was only in the QM bar because (like every other seventeen-year-old in the place) he'd lied about his date of birth when he registered for his membership diary. This didn't mean he couldn't identify with what Simon was saying, mind you. He'd only been a student for a term and a half, but it had been time enough to teach him that possession of an EBTG album, badge, T-shirt or Tracy Thorne bowl- cut was nature's way of telling you not to strike up a conversation with that particular girl unless you feared you were feeling just too damn positive for your own good.

Still, Simon moved in a world where student girls lived in flats and had casual sex, even the scowling depressive ones, and that world was a lot further from Ray's than Houston was from Hillhead. For that reason, it thrilled him to be in Simon's company, speaking, drinking, laughing, on terms. He knew it didn't mean he was now one step from having sex that he could complain about with female Smiths fans, but it meant that he no longer had to worry about feeling like a sixth-year schoolboy out of uniform. It constituted a validation of proper student status.

Unfortunately, he feared it would be immediately revoked again when some more of Simon's friends turned up and it was suggested that they 'hit the disco and really make a night of it'. Ray could imagine his Clash T-shirt metamorphosing into a school tie and blazer as he pondered how best to phrase the admission that he had to get home to Mummy and Daddy's house for hot cocoa and a biccie before night-night.

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He settled for 'I don't think I can make it but I'll hang around for one more pint/ neglecting to further elaborate. Simon, however, was insistent.

'Come on, man, you've got to. We're just gettin' started here.' That was in between making enthusiastic introductions, depicting Ray to his intimidatingly grown-up- looking pals (greatcoats, stubble and roll-ups) as a soulmate of exquisite taste, intellect and wit. Ray was therefore now even more fearful of being 'found out' as a wee, Ayrshire- dwelling virgin who'd merely cracked a couple of well- timed gags about Morrissey and been bluffing when he made out he'd heard of Pere Ubu and Frazier Chorus.

'I've nowhere to crash,' he said, which deftly avoided the issue of where he'd normally be crashing: viz, a semi in the sticks.

'It's cool, you can crash at ours, can't he, Ross?'

'Aye, nae bother.'

And so Raymond's Big Adventure in the Land of Vicarious Cool continued.

'Ours' turned out to be a terraced townhouse converted into six student bedsits. 'If you get here the right time of day, you can hear the same Smiths album being' simultaneously played on four different shitey tape decks,' Simon claimed. 'At least I think it's the same album. Every track sounds the fuckin' same to me.'

The three of them ate endless rounds of toast relayed in turns from the communal kitchen, washed down with black and watery tea (no milk, natch; one last tea bag heroically giving its all for six cups). Music was played, of course, a handful of shared favourites punctuating an eclectic plethora of obscure selections Simon insisted Ray would love. As it turned out, his strike rate was pretty high. It was an education for Ray, not only in terms of being 186.

introduced to a number of new bands, but in realising that while he thought he knew about music, to Simon it was a scholastic discipline. He provided a running commentary on every track, like the Shakespeare annotations that often took up more space on each page than the text itself. Innovation was everything: if it had been done before, it was worthless, pointless. In other company, Ray might have been able to make a case for the ain't-broke-don't-fix- it ethic of the finely crafted song, or the sheer visceral impact of a well-timed power chord, but on this occasion it would have been like suddenly announcing he was a Jehovah's Witness and trying to flog Simon The Watchtower.

Pere Ubu, as it turned out, were not bad, but Frazier Chorus were absolute steg.

Ross retired to his room when the tea and toast ran out, which was long before Simon's enthusiasm for furthering Ray's musical horizons. Eventually Simon did decide to go to bed, a spontaneous decision taken while Ray was down in one of the bathrooms having a pee. When Ray returned to the room, Simon was fast asleep in the only bed, and utterly unrousable. The only reaction Ray found it possible to elicit, via nudging, was a low, threatening growl. Asking whether he had any spare bedding seemed overoptimistic.

Ray was consulting his watch and trying to remember how early the buses started when he heard a toilet flush, and was able to intercept Ross on his way back from syphoning off the beer. Fortunately, it turned out he had a spare sleeping bag. 'I keep it in case Simon has guests,' he said archly.

He woke up around nine, after about five hours' fitful kip. The bedsit's curtains didn't reach the bottom of the window, so the wintery sunshine had beamed directly on to his face where he lay on the floor. If that hadn't done it, 187.

his bladder would have probably roused him soon anyway, after five pints and then all that tea. When he looked at Simon's bed, he was surprised to find it empty. Simon hadn't struck Ray as the type to clap his hands and jump up when the alarm went off, but he vaguely remembered him saying something about meeting a guy to buy an amp.

Simon barrelled into the room, buttoning his shirt, his face still damp from washing.

'I'm gaunny be late for this guy if I don't head now. You needin' to go too?'

I've missed my first lecture. Next one's not until eleven.'

'Lucky bastard. Just let yourself out, yeah?'

'Sure. Where's the bog again?' Better be sure before his host departed; last night was still very hazy, and he didn't want to walk into somebody's bedroom by mistake.

'There's two. One on the first-floor landing, and another off the downstairs hall.'

'Cheers. Burstin'.'

Ray sat up and extricated himself from the sleeping bag.

Woof.

'Did you hear that?'

'What?'

'Sounded like a dog.'

Woof.

'I heard that. Fuck, that was inside.'

'Does one of your flatmates have a dog?'

'Do they fuck. Are you kiddin'? It would need a housin' benefit book before the landlord would let it in.'

Woof.

"That's definitely inside,' they both said.

Simon headed for the door, Ray hurriedly pulling on his jeans to follow. Just the movement of walking made it feel like someone was squeezing his bladder. When he emerged 188.

on to the landing, Ross was already out of his room and looking over the banister. Below them, they could see two females on the lower landing, also staring down towards the bottom hall. One was in a dressing gown, clutching a towel, the other dressed in jeans and a Bunnymen T-shirt.

Woof.

'There's a dog in the flat,' announced Bunnygirl, looking up, an English lassie Ray recognised from his literature-in- translation class.

'And there's me thinkin' it was an antelope,' Simon replied. 'How did it get in?'

'Somebody must've left the door open,' suggested Ross.

'Fuckin' Yasser Arafat probably. He never shuts it. Still thinks he's livin' in a fuckin' tent in the desert.'

'Don't be so racist,' the English girl countered. 'You're always on at Ali.'

'I'm not being' racist. Unless it's a custom in Morocco to leave fuckin' doors lyin' open.'

'He's from Tunisia.'

'Whatever. He's the only one not here. His first lecture's at nine, every day. Serves him right for daein' medicine.'

'It could've been the postman.'

'Does it matter?' Ross enquired. 'What kind of dog is it? Has anybody seen?'

Woof woof woof woof growl.

'Oh fuck.'

Attracted by the raised voices, the dog had emerged into view to investigate the source, then began bounding up the stairs when it saw all the staring faces. Both girls immediately retreated into the nearest room and closed the door with a slam. The alsatian (it had to be an alsatian, in accordance with the rule that decreed every uncontrolled, ownerless dog running wild in a public place must be one 189.

of those sabre-toothed and over-aggressive bastards) stopped outside it, standing up on two legs and scratching the paintwork.