1. Under the clouds
I left home in Fife and went to live in Glasgow when I was eighteen. When I think of it now, the distance seems laughably small – forty miles, little more than an hour in the train – but the contrast between a village on the east coast and a city, Scotland’s largest, on the west coast was sharp and exciting. I had a bedsit in a dark street of better-class tenements, with a Polish delicatessen, a dance hall and a cinema just round the corner. Glasgow seemed an infinite place, never to be known completely no matter how many suburban bus terminals you reached or exploratory walks you made. It was 1963. The last trams had run the year before, but the city was still much its old self – smoke-blackened, run-down, Victorian, majestic, tipsy on beer and whisky on a Saturday night, hushed on a Sunday. More than a million people lived there then; forty years later, that figure had almost halved.
The Riddle
The rich want me.
Fools know me.
Heroes fear me.
Uncle Stephen had posed this riddle many times over the years. He was a practical joker.
His solicitor had just finished reading his will. The bulk of his estate would pass to the beneficiary who solved the riddle. I was a beneficiary with my cousin, Jake.
“Is that legal?” Jake spluttered.
Mr Carlton’s eyes glistened with amusement. He and Uncle Stephen had been friends for decades.
“It’s unusual, I must say. But a testator may impose any stipulation regarding the distribution of assets provided it doesn’t involve breaking the law.