No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (the best electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

‘That must have been really frightening,’ said Amy, Scott’s wife. She was beautiful, of course, with lots of wavy blonde hair and a model’s figure.

‘Yeah, it–’

‘Hey, doc!’ said Finn Taylor, grabbing a handful of crisps from the bowl Bram was holding. He looked Amy up and down appreciatively as he munched. ‘Max has got this, uh, embarrassing problem?’

‘Is it called Finn Taylor?’ Amy came back at him, quick as a flash. She was a doctor who worked in A&E at the local hospital, and Bram could imagine her dealing with all the Saturday night drunks with just this sort of brisk no-nonsense attitude.

Finn flushed.

‘Could you do me a favour and hand round some of these nibbles, Finn?’ Bram said to cover his embarrassment – not that the boy deserved it.

Finn looked at the array of snacks as if Bram had asked him to handle nuclear waste, but reluctantly picked up a bowl of pretzels.

As Bram walked about topping up wine glasses, he was conscious of many pairs of eyes tracking his every move. Was that the silent family from the Inverluie Hotel, the ones who sat staring at the blank TV? Who the hell had invited them? And there were Isla and Mhairi and the rest of ‘the gang’, already well on the way to inebriation.

He couldn’t help thinking: was one of these people the intruder who had left the heart and the threatening message? Kirsty was talking to a man whose name, Bram thought, was Craig – another old school friend. He was speaking to her earnestly, standing just a little too close. As Bram watched, he put a hand on Kirsty’s shoulder, leaning in to make his point.

He had an intense look to him. Disturbingly intense?

Had Craig been obsessed with Kirsty at school? Had he and Owen maybe clashed? Was Craig a bit of a loner, a bit of a weirdo, the type who followed women around supermarkets and had to be ejected by security? He looked as if he might be. He looked as if he cut his own hair. Not that there was anything wrong with that, per se.

And there was bloody Scott, moving through the crowd, stopping to talk to people, working the room. He’d gone out with Kirsty at school, when they were young teenagers. Had it just been one of those early, experimental romances that was more like friendship, that had never really been going anywhere, or had Scott been serious about her?

Scott had been very quick to dismiss Bram’s worries about an Owen connection. Suspiciously quick?

But all this speculation was pointless, and probably paranoid.

‘Okay, folks, time for a song or two!’ Bram called out. ‘Who’s up for a bit of X Factor? I’ll be the first lamb to the slaughter!’

‘Yessss!’ exclaimed Phoebe, dancing up to him with the three Miller sisters in tow, all four girls flushed and overexcited. ‘X Factor! We can be the judges!’

‘It’s a no from me!’ giggled Rhona Miller, the cheekiest of the three sisters and Phoebe’s particular friend.

People started moving through to the Room with a View to find seats and places to stand, and Bram turned one of the leather library chairs to face outwards and sat down with his guitar. ‘This is a bothy ballad.’ He stroked the strings of the guitar. ‘It’s called The Plooman Laddies – about a kitchie deem’s devotion to her man, a humble ploughman.’ And he began to sing:

‘Doon yonder den there’s a plooman lad,

Some simmer’s day he’ll be aa my ain.

And sing laddie-aye, and sing laddie-o,

The plooman laddies are aa the go.’

He saw David, sitting on one of the sofas, shoot a horrified look at Fraser, who lowered his head to his hands. Finn Taylor was openly laughing, as were the other teenage boys standing with Max by the door. Max’s face was slowly turning bright red.

Kirsty was perched on the arm of a chair, nodding along, a fixed smile on her face. A few of the other faces turned towards him were politely attentive, but most were stony or downright contemptuous. Only Phoebe and the three Miller sisters were grinning happily. The family from the Inverluie Hotel bar were clumped together by the sliding doors, silently staring. Willie was shaking his head, and as he met Bram’s gaze, he swiped a hand across his neck to mime cut.

Linda’s expression said it all:

Bloody Nora.

He fumbled his way through the verses about the merchant and the miller, tripping on the word ‘stour’ in the line ‘The smell o’ the stour wad hae done me ill’ – was it pronounced sto-ur or stoor? – he went for sto-ur but that was evidently the wrong choice. He saw Kirsty and a few other people wince.

Finally he was through it, ending with a defiant flourish on ‘The plooman laddies are aa the go’, and there was a horrible, horrible silence before Linda and Kirsty started to clap, and others joined in politely but very briefly, Max, he noted, not among them; he was studying the carpet.

‘Oh my God,’ he heard Mhairi say in a low voice.

‘Great, Bram, great!’ Kirsty enthused, jumping up. ‘Now, I think it’s time to fire up the barbecue, eh Dad, and get some meat burnt for all you carnivores?’

Bram slunk out of the room and up the stairs to their bedroom, clutching the guitar to his chest, as if to comfort it. He slumped down with it on the bed.

This bloody housewarming had been a terrible idea.

And now Kirsty was coming in and sitting down next to him, hugging his arm. ‘Never mind.’

‘It was terrible, wasn’t it?’

‘It was pretty bad. But you tried, and that’s the main thing.’

‘Really?’ He sighed. ‘It was like they were… I don’t know. Offended?’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Her tone was too bright.

‘There was nothing dodgy in the song, was there?’ He had a sudden, terrible thought. ‘I know some of the bothy ballads are a bit… close to the bone. But I looked up the Scots words in The Plooman