Checking the clock, she saw that it was now after ten. Her mind seemed to be accosted by vagrant thoughts, and she felt dislocated : from her children wandering in the unknown wilds; from the Castle that was no home to her; from Fraser because she had let him go.

Let him go, to be himself, as she must finally be herself... and yet, she would not let him run away from his responsibilities. She must confront him with those : starting with the postcard from their daughter.

The camper-van had pulled up on the drive-way in the early evening. The dogs had alerted her to its arrival as she sat with a pile of torn-up papers on the table beside her. A bespectacled man with a straggly beard was getting out as she crossed the gravel. Faces stared from the battered vehicle, its paintwork scratched, yet the whole van brightly festooned with stickers and children's pictures.

He was coming towards her, looking calm and relaxed in an open-necked shirt with rolled-up sleeves : he wore sandals and jeans.

'Are you Roberta's mummy?' Nudie began.

'My God. Has something happened?'

'No, no, my dear' he answered kindly. 'She asked us to give this card to her dad.'

A woman was coming to join them, wearing a cotton summer dress, billowy, cool. Children were running barefoot on the grass.

As Caroline read the note, her eyes welled up and glistened. Mrs Nudie drew close, spoke soft.

'So this is where Roberta lives. What a wonderful place. You're very lucky!'

'Perhaps.' She sniffed. 'Listen - is she alright?'

'Oh yes... just missing her dad a bit, I think. And her mum of course.'

'This is very kind of you. Are you on holiday?'

'We're touring around.' Scott was looking disdainfully through an upper window.

'Really. Where are you staying?'

'I'm not quite sure' laughed Nudie, joining in. 'I don't suppose you've got a patch where we could park the camper overnight, and pitch a tent?'

Caroline was going to apologise, but said, 'Why not?' Why not? There was space enough. Why ever not...

'Really?' He beamed. She felt his warmth and kindness touching her.

'Feel free. There's space at the back for them to play.'

But her mind was spinning. She was thinking again of her own children. Someone had to.

'By, that's good of you,' Nudie laughed, then shouted - 'Hoi! Kids! We're staying here at the Castle tonight!' They shouted back in carefree joy.

'Just wait 'til we tell our friends we stayed at a castle!' joked Mrs Nudie. Her husband put his arm around her and continued.

'You've got a lovely daughter, my dear. You must be proud.'

'I am,' said Caroline. And more absently, 'I am.'

She saw the children running about, free, happy; coming close, being cuddled, lifted up. They were all together : safe, secure, and so much loved. After a few more words, Caroline turned, and went inside to the darkening castle.

'See that they have what they need, Victor' she instructed. 'I shall be going out tonight.' Scott said nothing.

It was necessary to take some positive action now. Not a question of guilt or blame or expectation. Her head was spinning with enough of that. But in all that turmoil, she started to find a quiet conviction : like a calmer voice within. A quiet conviction that reached back to earliest childhood. An understanding dawning. And it cleared the path for reason and resolve. The time had come for self-determination.

It was Sunday evening - the quietest evening of the week - and as she reached MacFarlane's bungalow, she had seen his lorry backed up on the drive. She had not been there before, but some brief and necessary phone-calls, and she'd set off - against advice - to find him.

When Nick MacFarlane opened the door, in a string vest, wiping his face with a towel, he looked surprised. She recognised him at once. He was in his forties, with neat trimmed sideburns, and hair swept smoothly back on a balding head. Background country music drifted through the open door.

'Mrs Maclean? How can I help you?' he said, masking his vague unease in a habitual, crisp confidence.

'I need to talk to you.'

'To me? Then ye'd best come in...'

A girl, scarcely out of her teens, was slouching by the kitchen door.

'Catriona - will ye shut the music off?'

She complied, eyeing the visitor with suspicion.

'Now, how can I help?' he said, pulling on a shirt. 'You'll have tae excuse my undress. I was no expecting visitors, ye ken?'

Caroline looked hard in his face.

'I want to know where my husband is...'

A cuckoo-clock went off : it was eight o'clock.

'Your husband, Mrs Maclean! Come, come. Surely, ye'd know that better than me?'

'He's with Rona Malcolm. Have you any idea where they might be?'

He looked at the young lass behind him and tossed his head. She left the room and closed the door.

'To be quite honest, I dinnae understand. Why should I know where either of them are? I'm no concerned wi' other people's business.'

Caroline stiffened in her seat.

'Oh, but you are. You're very concerned with Rona Malcolm's business...'

His brow was darkening.

'Look, Mrs Maclean. It's Sunday evening an' I've a gie long week ahead. At seven tomorrow, I'll be on the road, and I dinnae understand what ye want to know.'

'Your consignments,' she articulated coldly and clearly. 'What do you transport in your lorry?' He shrugged tensely.

'Whisky, mostly.' He was looking pale. 'Quite frankly, I dinnae ken hwat ye're driving at?'

'Not only whisky, though.'

'What do you mean?' he asked aggressively.

She thought calmly of her children, then looked full in his face.

'Cocaine, MacFarlane. You carry cocaine.'

He let out a hollow laugh and looked aside.

'They said that you were out o' your mind.'

Caroline opened a black leather briefcase.

'I've been investigating my husband you see, and that woman of his. It would appear' - she handed him assorted photos and statements - 'that her dealings with you are... a little irregular?'

'Christ, fuck you whore!' He started to rise.

'I've asked my agent to phone the police if I don't get back to him tonight.' MacFarlane stood by the opposite door.

'Well am I shopped then? Is that hwat ye're saying?' He waited for her, sensing a twist.

'I'm not concerned with your sordid affairs. I only want to know where my husband might be.'

'But I don't know.' He threw up his arms.

'Then think, or so help me, I'll ruin you all. She's booked on a plane out of Prestwick tomorrow. Does she ever stay anywhere special down there?'

He looked furtive.

'If you tell me, you'll hear no more about this other business...'

'Well there's a hotel in Glasgow...'

As she drove, later, along the Loch Lomond road, strange imaginings besieged her unsettled mind : threatened to flood and overwhelm her, yet she heard as well the quieter voice of conviction. She tried to concentrate, and still her mind, with a determination to stay on the road.

'You realise what this will do to the children?' she heard herself say.

'What a wonderful place,' the woman had murmured softly. 'You're very lucky!'

Thoughts engaging and dis-engaging from below the surface, or beyond the wood-fringed darkness.

Now she and Fraser were rowing. She recollected the boy bursting into the lounge : Alasdair in his pyjamas, crying... 'Stop it, mummy! Stop it, daddy! Stop it! Stop it!' and Fraser shouting 'Get to bed! Stop snivelling, boy!'

Then her own father, her own childhood : a labyrinth of stern upbraidings and admonition. She could never satisfy his hopes. Even when she was older, he had never approved of Andrew at all. He had always been disappointed in her.

She thought of her lover all those years ago : and the beauty and release of their earlier love, when she had finally let go and dared to live... but then the memory drifted away...

'It's not as simple as that'... Andrew's floundering voice.

'What I realise now... is the cost of adultery.'

And where was he now? Surely he should, he could have phoned? Or perhaps it was only her own fault after all. She found herself, habitually, blaming herself.

But it had to stop. She couldn't be hanging on his phone-calls, depending on him. She must learn to be independent, find her own strength, regardless of what he wanted to do. And stop forever blaming herself.

All her life, she felt she had been pursued by guilt : the guilt of failing to live up to what was expected of her - by her parents, by so many friends, by her husband. She recognised now how for years and years they had subjected her to every form of emotional intimidation.

That's how it had been. The whole system trying to impress a false identity onto her; to assign her a rôle; and censoriously protesting in subtle ways whenever she happened to step out of line. It was social domination from a will to control.

And the sense of shame and inadequacy she felt, at never fully carrying out the rôle and other identity those people had framed for her : it had undermined her. It had been so sustained, so life-long, this process of conformation and disapproval, that she had come to distrust her feelings and repress all natural instincts : she had submitted out of lack of her own self-worth.

This was at the heart of it, at the heart of her weariness and empty despair. She had always allowed others to stifle and prevent her passionate longing to grow. But a conviction was stirring within her, that she had a right to determine for herself, at last, who she was and how she wanted to live : and with that quiet conviction, there came the feeling of liberation of her own best self for passionate human expression and love.

She heard its quiet voice in her mind - the voice of herself - as a nightmare world of images continued to flash, like the winding road before her, in and out of consciousness.

MacFarlane standing before her again. She imagined him raising a gun at her. She fired, instead, at him and saw his shocked face gaping back at hers.

Then Rona's open mouth and teeth, as she laughed, and Fraser dancing with her. 'Grow up, Caroline... Why don't you grow up...' - perhaps she was right.

She corrected her steering and wiped her eye.

'Well leave him' Ellie was saying to her. 'The Bastard! Leave him!'

And Roberta's words - 'Daddy, I love you... Daddy, I love you... Daddy, I love you.' My children, my dears.

An oncoming lorry sounded its horn. She would keep on driving. She would not abandon her resolve. He could do what he liked, but he would not shirk his duties to them. She would not let him.

Twenty miles to Glasgow, a roadsign declared. And though she did not long to get there at all, she knew she was being true to herself this time. The cool conviction calmed her feverous mind, like trickling water in a dried-up thirsty land. She must keep driving.

The hotel room was enclosed and warm, as Rona led Fraser back through the door, champagne and glasses in their hands. They had finished their protracted meal together, and the room smelt of perfume and a vase of flowers. It was perfectly comfortable, with well-covered chairs and a deep, soft carpet the colour of blood. New magazines were spread at one end of a table, at the other a large bowl of succulent fruit. Her choice of hotel was immaculate.

Fraser closed the curtains : to shut everything out. He felt far, far now from the outside world; from home, from children. The wheel of the stars, and the turning of seasons : he was cut off from it all in this hotel-room... out of touch, even with himself somehow... inhabiting the maddened world of his subconscious, of his own needs.

He just wanted to live for now, to forget, to be buried. To let go of the controlling mind, and go under - try to recover himself. He sat at a dressing table, fingering his glass, and looked at her in the mirror that he faced, as she slipped out of her fabulous clothes. He felt, in his body, her physical attraction : her soft skin and her health and youth. Tonight, at least, there was the compensation of some human warmth, instead of a lonely bed.

He heard her talking behind him, and she looked so confident and self-assured. Expectant. She seemed so pleased and emotionally given, as if anticipating pleasure and tasting triumph : the fulfilment of everything she had desired.

Her eyes met his in the mirror and she laughed, coming up behind him, in satin briefs. He felt her breasts press up against his back; he smelt her scent and her instant desire. There was an immediacy all about her now. She was physically driven by his dark moodiness and lingering presence, and by the sensuality of her feelings - as she traced the outline of his body along the tingling surface of her own experience : ran her fingers over his broad shoulders, felt his muscular firmness.

'I could devour you like an animal' she groaned.

'Oh, we're all animals,' Fraser replied, 'if only we go down deep enough.'

She went into the bathroom. He could hear the trickle of her piss in the toilet, and the running water as she washed herself. She was talking of Paris, and their future together.

'I can leave Ali and Dino in charge, to run the hotel for a couple of months.'

Fraser was getting undressed as well, finding himself aroused by her. She always caught him by surprise, somewhere below the level of control, as if confronting him in strange subconscious country.

She stretched a leg in play through the bathroom doorway, and slid it up and down the upright.

'God, you're going to get screwed tonight!' she squealed in pleasure. 'Come here, Fraser. Come here, and kiss!'

He advanced like a man in a trance, not kissing but feeling her leg instead, feeling its softness within his hands. She curled half-round the door, wearing a light transparent top. Her eyes, which caught his, fell away deep, to contorted urges and dark imagining.

'I'm Delilah,' she taunted, 'and you're my Samson.' She pressed her hand against his glistening chest. 'And see! How I shall tame you!' Her other hand slipped round the door, and she was dangling handcuffs : not metallic, but covered all over in cheap synthetic fur. 'Hee-hee!' she giggled, playfully.

Then she drew in closer, eye to eye, and her smile straightened to hard desire.

'I'm going to have you where I want you, shit.'

'Oh are you?' Fraser answered darkly.

'You bet your arse' she snarled at him. He could see her teeth, bared savagely. Once more he felt his order and control usurped, and almost suspected it was bizarre... but all such thoughts were soon blocked out by his deep compulsion and the gorgeous soft seduction of her lust.

She led him to the bed and gazed awhile at the great beauty of his body : his breast, his arms, his outstretched legs so firm...

'You beautiful man' she moaned at him.

'Are you going to finish that champagne first?' he asked.

'When I've sorted you out, darling. When I've sorted you out.'

Her eyes flashed at him, and he felt a surge of physical aggression and arousal. She felt it too.

'Oh, Charlie! Why, look at him now! Isn't he wonderful? Isn't he proud?' With child-like delight she knelt, and stroked him, kissed him, forcing response upon the man.

'What am I doing to you, my love?' she whispered fondly, triumphantly. Then looking up, her sharp eyes challenged his, and there was fire between them, in the still meeting of their violence. She breathed more quickly and drew his arm up, fumbled with the cuffs. He gave a hollow laugh and snatched them from her as she struggled, knowing again his easy strength.

With heartless laughter he clipped her arm above her, fixed it to the rail. She swore and slapped him, and he kissed her back : fed her champagne from the neck of the bottle, then reached to turn the light down low. Wanted to shut out everything now, and just go down, go under, deep.

He looked at her softly, face to face, but she would not allow his gentle advance and spat the champagne back into his eyes. He kissed her wildly, and she bit his lips. He struck her once, but she raised her knee, untamed and wild, as he roughly tore her delicate nightwear away and grabbed her buttock in his large clenched fist. Then finally felt her... soft, receptive. They paused and smiled and caught their breath.

Fraser licked her ear, and smelt her scent : buried his head in her hair, and wished that he could bury everything else. Just feel and touch - her hot sweat sliding on his, and the touch of her single hand. He felt her in the subdued light, her helplessness, her enticing charm : but his desire was not contentment. In his mind, he kept on drifting away from there : wanting to blot out everything else and give himself up, but he could not. His desire was not contentment at all.

He was still wrestling within himself, and feeling her recalcitrant pleasure dispassionately, when the knocking at the door began.

'Go away' he growled morosely to himself.

The knocking continued and he looked at Rona.

'Don't answer it,' she groaned at him.

But still it assailed the door, and knocked in his brain, where he could find no rest or peace of mind.

'Don't answer it,' she whined again, but he rose, wrapping a towel around himself.

As soon as he turned the latch, the door pushed open, and Caroline forced her way inside.

'What the...?'

'Read this.'

'Get out!' bellowed Fraser.

'Read this' she repeated, waving the card. 'It's from your daughter.'

'I don't believe this!' Rona protested, as he slumped on the bed and turned up the light. 'She's only trying to trap you again. You bitch!' she shouted. Caroline was quiet and cool.

He sat and stared, as he read to himself:

'I'm going with Wiggy to the Isle of Skye... He is really nice... We are going to climb the Pinnacle...'

'She's your responsibility too. She's with him in the mountains now. And you're buggering off and leaving her there?'

She glanced across at Rona.

It was not those lines that broke in Fraser's heart, but the last rushed words of a daughter's love.

'Oh Daddy, I love you so much' it said.

'Oh Daddy, I love you so much...'

He reeled.

'If anything happens to her...' he murmured.

'She's your daughter. She could be killed out there.'

'Don't listen. The police will sort it all out.' He was getting dressed. 'Fraser!' she whined. 'Trust me!'

Caroline was passing his trousers to him.

He looked at Rona, cuffed to the bed, and back at Caroline. He felt exposed. 'Roberta' he was muttering. 'My God. My God.' As he reached across for his shirt, she gripped his arm, and fixed him, with her piercing eyes.

'It can wait until morning...' He was pulling away. 'No! I won't let you go!' she screamed at the man. He was staggering towards the open door, his eyes staring blankly ahead of him now.

'I've got to go to her' was all he said.

'What about Paris?' she was crying. 'What about us?'

He was stalking out.

'Bastard!' she shouted. 'You Bastard! You Bitch!'

An elderly couple were passing the door, and smiled back in with a friendly wave. 'Good evening' the frail little woman exclaimed, but when they had gone, there was nobody there.

Caroline left Rona restrained on the bed, while she fetched Fraser's suitcase and packed up his things.

'How dare you do this!' Rona shouted. 'How dare you? He'll never be happy with you! He'll never!'

Caroline looked at her, bare on the bed, and felt a sad disgust. So she turned away.

'One thing I know,' she said coldly and crisply, pressing the lid of the case with her arms, 'is he loves his children and he always will.'

She turned and faced Rona.

'I just couldn't let him deny his own love.'

The young woman sneered. 'Deny his own love!'

'How the fuck did you know where to find us?' she added.

'Your friend, Nick MacFarlane...'

'MacFarlane?' She blanched.

'Didn't fancy ten years in Barlinnie, I guess...'

Rona's face tightened.

'Caroline? What do you mean?'

Caroline walked to the door and turned round.

'Come off it, Rona. I know all about it.'

'It was you fetched the polis?'

'Oh, you don't need to worry. They've not got the evidence : the photos, the papers. I've locked them away. I just want my family kept out of it all.'

Rona's quick mind, making sharp calculations, sifted the new information and threat to her interests, her freedom : and the mental deductions left her more sober as reason prevailed. Then her feelings swept back in a surge of dismay, as she considered how Fraser had treated her there. The bastard! she thought. He'd just walked out and left her. How could he? She was shaken and helpless and hurt.

As his wife turned to leave, she cried out to her feebly.

'Caroline!' she whined, raising up her cuffed arm, and looking at the key which was out of her reach.

Caroline crossed to the table in pity and threw the key to her. Then she walked straight out. The smell of scent and lust disgusted her. 'The Bastard!' she heard Rona calling down the darkened corridor. 'The Bastard! The Bastard!'

He was lost in the night.

Hours later, he arrived at Ardfinnan by taxi, to see in its headlights a little boy pissing, bare-bummed, in the flowerbeds. Shirts and pants were hanging on a line in the drive, between a tent and the old battered van.

Scott, who'd been watching a film in the lounge, with a bottle of wine and his feet on a table, came sheepishly out to the hallway to greet him.

'Victor, who the hell...'

'She said they could stay, sir. It's all rather awkward.'

Fraser entered the room, and witnessed the wine and the food spread around.

'I wasn't expecting to see you and I thought -'

'It's alright, Victor' Fraser replied. 'I'm going to the library. Just bring me a drink.'

He located a map of the Cuillin and a guidebook, and in the shadowy study in the deeps of the night, his unproclaimed love for his child all suddenly struck him, like the emptiest ache, and tears welled up in his eyes.

He bit his lip. 'Roberta... Roberta, my lass' and he felt so much waste and lost chances to love her. Yet now, now... if anything happened.

Something had broken. Something had snapped.

At breakfast, Caroline had still not returned. He had hardly slept. As he ate, on the radio a weatherman forecast an end to the heatwave that had lasted all week. Heavy rain spreading in from the west was predicted, and a risk of thunder. He reached for the phone.

'Put me through to the chief of police. It's urgent. Tell him it's a friend of his - Fraser Maclean.'

After a minute, a harassed policeman was speaking again on the end of the line. 'Er - I'm sorry to have to say this, sir. I've been asked to tell you not to waste police time. All our staff are deployed in the huge search in Knoydart...' Fraser slammed down the phone.

An hour or so later, as he watched Mr Nudie playing Frisbee with his children on the lawn at the back, a friend of his landed in a private helicopter. Fraser grabbed a small pack from the lounge, and told Scott to arrange a nice lunch for the Nudies. Leaving the room, he caught sight of his children, and snatched the framed photograph down from the shelf.

As they rose in the air, with the ground below turning, and falling away so it made his head spin, he glimpsed the small family, kept at a distance by Scott, and all of them waving in the soft morning sun.

Geddes signalled to Fraser that they'd swing down Loch Arkaig, and from there they rose over Glen Pean to Morar : in a few minutes covering days of quiet walking... the modern world overtaking and leaving behind another, an older lifestyle, and a few eccentrics; yes, alas, going past and missing all, all that might lie below, below...

The hillsides passed quickly, dun and grey round the summits, with ravines and eroded rills reaching down to green valleys. Along the length of Loch Morar they saw islands approaching, and the morning - though clear - felt quite humid and close. A few minutes later, and passing the headlands on the south side of Skye, they could see the calm waters reaching out to the west and more islands, glistening in the distance in the watery light. Swinging to the right, they turned across Talisker and then down Glenbrittle, to a field by the sea.

There was a sudden silence, as the motors stopped, and they jumped out into the long green grass : a stillness already there before their landing. A cuckoo sounded in the trees across the meadows. Above them the Cuillin Ridge reached toward the sky with its blackened rocks.

'My God! Is that it? Is that the Cuillin Ridge?'

'That's a bit of it, anyway' Geddes replied. They talked for a while, but Fraser seemed impatient to set off on his search, and hurriedly waved farewell to his friend. Yet the glen all around seemed so settled and silent - and much slower : everything seemed so gradual and calm. Reaching a single-track road in the valley, he saw up ahead someone going his way.

A tanned American with a tent on his back, stopped and smiled back.

'Where you heading?' he asked.

'I'm looking for these children' Fraser answered, with the photo. 'Have you seen them down here?'

The visitor paused and took in the day.

'Nah! I'm only just arriving. Takes me back, seeing the Cuillin. Name's Horstman and I came here - what - some thirty years ago. Had some wild days in the winter on the Cairngorms, but in the summer, I just recall long days on gabbro up there on the Cioch. So I thought I'd come back here once more while I could. You kind of ache for those carefree days.'

'And the Pinnacle? Did you do it?'

'Sure. It's quite straightforward really.'

'Do you reckon my kids could get up there?'

He knit his brows.

'I wouldn't recommend it. The Cuillin Ridge is not the place that I'd take kids as young as that. Anyway, I thought you'd lost them?'

'They're with some adults. I'm trying to find them.'

'Well try the camp-site at the road-end. Someone is sure to have seen them if they've passed.' Fraser hurriedly lengthened his stride and left the American crying 'So long, so long' and reminiscing fondly of the friends he'd known in youth.

The camp-site, crouched between the mountain's frown and breaking sea, was a strewn disorder of scattered tents, the sea-gulls swooping low for scraps, dogs barking, and a motley group of walkers, dreamers, on the fringe. He picked his way between guy-ropes and unwashed plates, showing the photograph of his children, his feelings unprotected and raw, exposed.

'Excuse me...'

'Oh hi!' Another American, young and pretty. 'How you doing?' He showed her the picture, urgently, but she seemed so vague and easy, it was almost as if she was listening to music, as he talked : to a far-off music and a distant rhythm, quiet and calm, along the western shore.

'My, they're lovely!' she crooned, then called a long-haired friend, who lay there reading "On the Road".

'You don't have to worry' he kept insisting. 'Children have guardian angels round them. I'm always seeing them. They'll be fine...'

Others were less relaxed and free. A woman in her middle-fifties, who'd cycled up from Leeds to Skye, was more abrupt.

'Well have you considered the bridge at Kyle? I mean, they'll probably cross over there. With respect, you should have thought of that. I mean, you're not thinking logically, are you?' She stared with crass self-confidence and started to talk about herself. Fraser walked off.

'You're pulling my pisser...' said a bilious Yorkshireman up on holiday. 'I come up here to get a rest, and you think I'll spend my bloody time looking for someone else's kids. You're pulling my fucking pisser, mate. I'm a principal fucking officer at fucking Gartree Prison and I come here for a break. Get off! Go and find the fuckers yourself...' Fraser dismissed him with his arm, and wandered on, through the makeshift site.

He had done with status and pretence, and simply needed human help. It didn't matter where that came from, if only they could help him now. He spied an accordion propped against a pole and as he approached, a handsome if aging man came out of the tent, with a bottle of whisky. From his boots and breeches he looked like a climber, though the boots were clean and his hair was neat. 'Belong to the Corriemulzie Club,' he smiled, tossing his head back and filling a couple of plastic mugs. 'My friends are up there on the ridge.'

'And why aren't you?' Fraser enquired. He liked the man : he seemed straightforward.

'Och! Doing a spot of festering, see. Turned my bloody ankle yesterday' - though he glanced aside at the Lochnagar - 'so I thought I'd rest my feet today.' Fraser explained his search to him.

'Hell man! Those tops are sodding dangerous, especially if the weather turns. But they'd probably start from the camp-site here. The other approach is Loch Cornisk, and it's so remote it could take them days.' Fraser got up. 'I'll keep an eye out,' he shouted after him. 'Christ! You left your whisky, man...'

From tent to tent he trawled the site. A sea-mist was pulling in around the coast, as the afternoon drew on.

'Excuse me...' he started, pulling back a flap.

'Get out of it!' a couple moaned.

'Have you seen these children?' he asked a Japanese man nearby.

'Yes. Very good camera' he answered cheerfully.

A milkman from Herts on a long-distance walk, took a look at the photo but shook his head. 'Wish my kids would come up. I says to the wife, I says let them come with me but she wouldn't have it...'

An elderly couple, who had staked out their tent with military attention to detail, looked up. He was friendly and helpful, she was knitting and listened, but neither had seen any sign of the children. 'Would like a cup of tea, lad?' the veteran enquired. 'We've always got a brew on, haven't we, love?'

Fraser declined. Music was drifting in his direction, and he spied a gaunt man in a foldaway chair. He was listening to 'Four Last Songs' by Strauss... a gentle man who seemed poorly but kind... looked culturally disparate - in his coloured shorts, thin legs, bizarre Hawaiian shirt, and glasses... arm wafting in time to the music. No, he'd not seen them, but he would look out... his eyes smiled feebly. Fraser left him, as the woman's voice echoed and soared. 'O weiter, stiller friede...' sang Della Casa... 'Wie sind wir wandermüde.'

'On the 'ead, on the 'ead' shouted a father to his son. 'Put it on the 'ead lad!' The ten-year-old boy with a crew-cut knocked the football wide and Fraser threw it back again. 'No, sorry mate!' they responded, when asked.

Two men, who were close, took the frame and checked the photo.

'Take a look at this, Guy.' His friend strolled up and put his arm around his partner's shoulder. 'I don't think we've seen them, have we?' Guy shook his head.

'But listen - where can we contact you if we do?' he suggested kindly : the first to ask that obvious question. Fraser said he'd be around, but he really didn't know, himself.

Rounding their tent, he tripped over a rope barrier, and found himself among a troop of scouts. A huge and bearded Scotsman in a well-pressed pair of shorts came bounding up. Even his bald head seemed to be polished and smart, and everything about him exuded fearful confidence and practicality. He barked loud orders to his boys, while he stopped to speak with the new recruit. 'Not up the ridge!' he boomed. 'No way! That's strictly for mountaineers my friend.' He looked askew when Wiggy was mentioned, but called his pack to inspect the photo. One of the boys thought he'd seen three children along the beach ten minutes ago. His leader had just got them singing to their visitor when they saw Fraser running for the sea-shore alone : 'ging-gang-goolie-goolie-goolie' as the mist drifted in.

But it was a forlorn quest. At the lonely further end of the beach he found three children aged about five, playing with their mothers on the desolate strand.

As he disconsolately retraced his steps, he noticed the top of a tent with a three-foot aerial, almost hidden among the sand and grasses that skirted the shore... and a pair of field-glasses pointed his way.

A skinny lad in his twenties stood up - when Fraser drew near - wearing army camouflage and a khaki sunhat on his head. But the boy seemed so gauche and gangly that he clearly posed no kind of military threat to the dark-haired stranger or anyone else. Half-length sideburns framed his face, and he drew wearily from a cigarette.

When Fraser showed him the photograph, he lifted his shades and inspected it, then consulted his S.A.S. Handbook which was lying by the open tent flaps. His links with this organisation were evidently extremely undercover and he appeared to be living out the mission with a friend, because he reached for a handset and started intoning 'Come in, Martin. Come in, Martin. This is Franky. Over.' 'Sheeze-fflerm-cnnnge-in you, Franky. Over - pgrurgh.' 'Three-3-zero-children reported missing on the Cuillin Ridge. Ages eleven and twelve-1-2-zero. Over.' 'Roger Franky. Crnnge-pweeep-look out. Over and - umbrrrm.'

'I tell you,' said Franky, tapping his cigarette a few moments later. 'If those kids have gone up the Pinnacle then they are dead, mister. Take it from me.'

Fraser asked if he'd been up there himself, but he explained that he was just on a training manoeuvre this year. Next year was the big one - they would attempt the entire Cuillin Ridge - but this was strictly a low-level exercise. They could get up there cheap because they worked on the railways.

'Of course' - he looked nervously over his shoulder - 'we're on standby at the moment, with the man gone missing. And if the terrorists come along our way' - he unsheathed a small knife and smirked - 'then I think they're in for a little surprise.' He nodded his head with satisfaction and spat on the blade.

Fraser saw the football advancing behind him, with the inevitability of an exocet; saw it loft and remorselessly home on its target; watched it strike Frank a blow on the back of his head.

'Oi, kid!' he protested. 'Keep that ball right away! There's expensive equipment in here...'

'Bog off, Rambo!'

Fraser trudged wearily back to the tents, and threw the ball over to the scowling young child. Feeling despondent he almost ignored an old man who was taking his Norton apart.

'By the gods!' he spluttered as Fraser explained. 'Let's have a dekko!' and he limped to his side. He had been, it turned out, a Prep teacher himself and had taught boys Latin for forty-five years. 'And a daughter as well, eh, going for the summit?' Spitting with enthusiasm, he admired their gumption, and praised their intentions, 'because it was there'.

'Nil mortalibus ardui est!' he choked and blustered with delight and glee. 'Go and find them, my friend! Go and find your young heroes. Fortis fortuna adiuvat' he wheezed, and wrapped his old arm round the stranger's stooped shoulders. 'You'll have to get up there and find them yourself. Nunc animis opus, Aenea, nunc pectore firmo!'

He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the drooling spit from his mouth; swept back his hair.

'By Jove!' he exulted with gusto. 'That's what I'd do if I was a few years younger. Oh to be young, eh? Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi... Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus. Ah youth! But I stick to the lower slopes, my old dear. It's my dicky leg, you see.' He laughed. 'Seven hundred and fifty feet I'll maybe ascend, but that's quite enough for me these days. I wander the sylvan paths in peace... Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis!'

His eyes twinkled and winked with youthly excitement as they talked.

'Searching for gold, eh? Looking for treasure? Aurum irrepertum et sic melius situm... But I bet they'll find it. I bet they'll find their treasure. Hoo-hoo! You get up there!' He pointed to the ridge. 'Do or die, old sport, do or die!' He sent Fraser in the general direction of the peaks, with a Mars Bar to help him on his way. 'Death or Glory!' he heard the old man's blood-and-thunder. 'Death or Glory!' as he wandered in a daze to the edge of the site.

Beyond, the wild.

But he was feeling unspeakably weary now. Emotional tiredness was catching him up, and he sat on a rock, and looked out round the desolate coast. The old man seemed invested with so much energy : shattered, incongruous couplets, the remains of the past... yet against all the odds... still alive, still alive...

Four climbers descended and passed where he sat.

'I hope Ledingham's got the tea going,' one said.

'Ledingham? That festerer? No chance, man. No chance. He just didn't fancy the Pinnacle today...'

'Never mind, I've an unopened bottle of Lochnagar that I hid in a bag...' and they wandered away.

He looked at the rag-taggle huddle of tents, and they seemed disentitled, so stranded and strange. And yet why despise them? He saw himself now : dishevelled, and empty, a middle-aged man; just clutching a photo, no more and no less - than any of them.

Roberta! was a void in the pit of his stomach, and he felt inconsolable loss and regret. And his boy. And his boy.

Perhaps, he considered, the lesson to learn was surrender of power - we who were born into privilege, who were trained for power, taught to expect power as a birthright might end... like an old man astray on a broken-down bike, casting loose couplets to the answerless sky.

Back in the campsite again, the mist loomed towards him, and a group of Italians were unpacking their cars. All the world, it seemed, had become a playground. While the place itself was forlorn, bereft of its real community. And the unwillingness to relinquish power was the emptying of glens and the exile of peoples.

He felt cut adrift himself from that power and standing, stripped of his status and social position. But what did it amount to, compared to a daughter's passionate love. Her words - in his heart - devalued his fortune... 'Daddy, I love you... I love you so much.'

Sleep.

He must sleep and shut out the knowledge of so many wasted and squandered years.

'Excuse me, sir. Are you a resident here?' The voice of authority wielding a mop, staring at him without welcome or charm. The campsite warden was moving him on, suggesting he might find a good room elsewhere : that cottage on the hillside he could see through the mist. It was a nice little B&B : ideal, he would say, for a honeymoon couple or someone like you.

The climb up the path seemed dire and bleak, as he walked heavy-footed to the open front-door. Sure enough, he was taken to 'our honeymoon suite... it costs ten pounds extra, but it's the only room left.'

It was small and enclosed, and the whole room felt damp. A one-bar electric fire in the corner wasn't working. When he opened the cupboard it smelt faintly of mothballs and he closed it again. He went to the dusty net-curtains and tried to peer out, but could only see mist. Paint was peeling off the windows and they rattled when touched. There was an empty bottle of blended whisky in the bin and tea-bags which somebody else had used. On the shelf, dried milk, and more tea-bags : but no kettle or sink - that was next door perhaps.

Sitting down on the bed, the terylene cover was cold to the touch - the headboard greasy and loose. He picked up a Reader's Digest from the 1980's with an article entitled 'Scotland's Ancient Splendour'. Then putting it down again, he resorted to the Mars Bar the old man had tossed him, and ate it half-heartedly, staring at a wall in front of him. A passionless Flamenco dancer gathered dust in a fading printed picture opposite.

His fingers reached for the photo once more, and he recalled again those words of his daughter... like a life-line to reason... like a plea to the heart.

He could hear the noise of a flushing toilet, someone coughing downstairs, and the muffled sound of a television.

It was all unremittingly ghastly to him. His heart : felt so weary. Felt as if he'd been riding the surface so long - his marriage to Caroline, his work and his friends - then blindly placating emotional need... all those women he turned to who distracted his needs... But never going down, to find his true self.

He looked at his watch, but it had stopped.

In fact, it was only about time for tea, but he closed both the curtains to shut out the day : his mind like a mist, neither darkness nor light. Only muffled nothingness and an empty ache. He just wanted to sleep and forget.

He climbed in the cold bed and covered his head.

* * *