Page 36 of Hang on St. Christopher

I shook my head. “There won’t be any door knocks in the middle of the night. Ask around, son. I’m fucking unkillable.”

Crabbie opened the passenger’s-side door of the BMW. McArthur was sitting nervously in the back, no doubt vowing never to visit another crime scene with the CID.

I got in the car, and Crabbie drove us out of the subdivision, in the direction of the North Road.

“That was absolutely horrifying,” McArthur said. “Is that always how you conduct your investigations, Inspector Duffy?”

“I forget. I haven’t been on an investigation in a couple of years. Is that how it usually goes down, John?”

“With you, yes, it’s usually something like that,” he said with the merest fractional hint of a grin on his face.

“I thought those men were going to kill you,” he said.

“They weren’t men. Just wee slabbers who talked the talk,” I told him.

“Well, that’s enough excitement for me. It’s very late now,” he said.

“What time is it?” I asked him.

He looked at his watch and sighed. “It’s after one,” he said.

“Aye, long night. Let’s call it.”

“Now I remember why I stay behind a desk all day,” he murmured.

We drove back to the station. McArthur went home and Crabbie went home, and I typed the full report and filed the paperwork.

A long night indeed.

I finally got back to the house on Coronation Road as the sun was coming up over Scotland.

I went in through the front door and took a can of Bass from the fridge, stripped off all my clothes, and had a very quick shower.

I sipped at the Bass and caught my reflection in the steamy bathroom mirror.

“You missed all this, didn’t you, you stupid bastard?”

The Duffy in the mirror did not reply, but you could tell.

He was a forty-year-old man with a wife and child. He ought to be past this nonsense. But yeah, he did bloody miss it.

We were, after all, only thinking reeds, base creatures driven by our base instincts. And one of those instincts was to follow the chase across the savanna. A million years of evolution had ingrained that in us. It was going to take another million to get rid of it.

I went downstairs to the living room and threw kindling, an old newspaper, and a peat log into the fireplace. When it was going strong, I tossed the SS flag in and watched it burn.

I got my sleeping bag and a pillow from the linen closet.

I poured myself a glass of Jura whisky.

I looked through the records and found the one I wanted: “Spiegel im Spiegel,” by Arvo Part. The version I liked, with piano and viola rather than piano and cello.

I lay down on the Persian rug in front of the fireplace.

The music and the smell of the turf and the taste of fourteen-year-old single malt Jura.

I got into the sleeping bag.

In Scotland I was safe. I was a different man. A postmodern man with the postmodern sickness:la chair est triste et j'ai lu tous les livres. Anomie. Weltschmertz. Entzauberung. Call it what you will. In that world of garden centers and hardware barns, that world of order and safety, the fate of men was to grow fat, old, complacent, and reactionary and eventually to die.