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clicked on it, a box came up on the screen advising me that it was read only and that I would not be able to copy or edit it. ‘Fine,’ I muttered, and clicked the button to proceed.
    There was no foreword, only the title, author’s name and a copyright declaration. I turned to the first page and started to read.
    ‘My wee brother?’ she began, then paused, as if she was framing every word in her eventual reply.
    ‘He was like a loch on a fine summer’s day. Not a mark, not a ripple on his surface. You looked at him and you thought, he’s one of the fairest things I’ve ever seen. And he was, the boy I grew up with.
    ‘But then life took a hold of him and the water was disturbed, choppy at first, and then rougher, till it was storm-tossed, white-crested. He was still beautiful, but in a different way, darker, ominous, and you knew that not far below that surface there was another man, someone different, someone dangerous, like the monsters of legend given form.’
    As she spoke, Lady Doreen March’s plain but strong face seemed to change, to weaken, to crumple, and her voice began to crack. And as she finished, there were tears running down her cheeks, cutting ravines in her make-up.

    I sat bolt upright in my chair. ‘What the fuck is this?’ I shouted, loud enough for Charlie to bark, his fur rippling, readying himself to defend me from attack, even though he couldn’t see the threat.
    ‘Doreen March?’ I said, more quietly. ‘Ellie?’
    He’d changed a name, but only by a couple of months. ‘My wee brother’ was always how Lady Ellen January referred to Oz. Lady January, wife of a Scottish Supreme Court judge, formerly Ellen Sinclair, born Ellen Blackstone, is my Tom’s aunt, and she remains my good friend.
    That surname surely had to be an alias for her, but as for the rest, Ellie is the most down-to-earth woman I’ve ever met. She’s never spoken like that in all the time I’ve known her; moreover, she never wears any make-up to speak of, and the Stone of Destiny is more likely to shed a tear than she is.
    I realised that I was shaking, and that my heart and respiration rates were way above normal. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and waited until I had restored myself to a state of calm. When I opened them again, I saw Charlie, looking up at me. If a dog can frown and show concern, that’s what he was doing.
    I had slammed the MacBook closed, as if I was running away from its contents, putting it to sleep in the process. I waited for it to come back to life, then read the second chapter.
    ‘My son?’ Frail old Michael Greystock sighed. ‘He broke my fucking heart. All I ever wanted was for him to be a teacher like me, but no, not him.’

    If Doreen was Ellie, then Michael Greystock had to equal Macintosh Blackstone, a dentist, not a teacher, who had threatened both his kids with fire and brimstone if they ever entertained the idea of following him into his profession. As for frail, the guy’s had a heart-valve replacement but he’s still capable of two rounds of golf a day.
    ‘No, he had to go off to be something he never really was. First to Edinburgh, with his silly country notions of fame and fortune on gold-paved streets, then to bloody Spain, then to Glasgow, chasing that stupid dream. And him being him, eventually he caught up with it. He did have a gold star set in some fucking pavement in Los Angeles. As far as I know it’s still there, but he isn’t. It turned out to be a shooting star and, like they all do, it burned itself out.’

    I laughed out loud. This was supposed to be Mac, Tom’s rock-solid Grandpa Mac coming out with all this fanciful shite?
    ‘But it wasn’t his fault,’
I read on, aloud.
‘It was that woman. She came into his life and she beguiled him. She cast her spell on him, like a witch, and the poor guy hadn’t a fucking chance after that. It was that Phyllis woman; the first time he ever brought her to my house, I had a premonition not just that she