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into a tangy, grainy paste. He would have to tread carefully here. It happened to all men sooner or later: one of your friends will decide to spend the rest of their lives with someone who is patently the Antichrist.
    When Gary had started going out with Pauline, Stevie had thought soothingly, it’ll never last . She was way out of his league. All the sixteen-year-old Pauline saw in the eighteen-year-old Gary was the fact that he had a job, a car and some money in his pocket. As opposed to the other boys around her, with their school books, their acne and their wanking.
    What did Gary see in Pauline? Beyond her face, breasts, belly and much-worshipped bum? (And Stevie, despite his unwavering commitment to socialist principles, was no prude or killjoy. He enjoyed a quality bum as much as the next Marxist and he could see that Pauline’s bum was unquestionably A Good Thing. But you don’t decide to spend the rest of your life with a pair of cheeks, do you?) Stevie could overlook the fact that she was obsessive about status and possessions. That when she met someone you could see her taking in their shoes, their watch, the type of credit card they produced, like she was feeding all this into a computer program: WindowsNetWorthCalculator 10.9. That she had no interest in much of anything beyond celebrity and fashion. Ultimately, what doomed Pauline for Stevie was this: she had no sense of humour. None. Nothing. Not. A. Flicker. She was the kind of person who, when confronted with something genuinely funny would actually utter the words, ‘That’s funny.’
    Stevie looked at Gary, staring into the inch or so left in his glass. He had, Stevie thought, the kind of life that was great if you were happy, terrible if you weren’t. Hence distractions like improving your golf handicap. How do you address this? What do you say when your best friend tremblingly confides their darkest fears?
    ‘Same again?’ Stevie said.
    ‘Aye, cheers, wee boy.’
     
    As Stevie shouldered his way in at the bar the grey van’s orange indicator began winking as it left the bypass via the Stone Cairn roundabout, taking the third exit towards Ayr, towards Oklahoma Dan’s Discount Golf World, its final destination.

10
    T HE K RAKEN RISING .
    Alec Campbell pulled into the car park of a small industrial estate on the northern edge of Ardgirvan–a cluster of a dozen nondescript breeze-block units. Only four were occupied; a garage, a company called Ayrshire Ceramics that made fancy tiles, a double-glazing company and the unit owned by Ranta and used primarily for storing certain things he wouldn’t want in the house. There was only one other car in the car park, a big grey Audi, parked in front of Ranta’s unit. They pulled up beside it and Alec turned the ignition off, the loss of the air conditioning immediately noticeable. ‘Some day, eh?’ Ranta said, popping his seat belt. He was sweating.
    As always when he found himself in a confined space with his father Alec was aware of the sheer bulk of the man–eighteen stone plus and a little over six feet tall, he’d turned fifty last year but his hair was still the same thick, gypsy black as Alec’s, although here and there Ranta’s was showing fine strands of silver. Just visible at the neck of his polo shirt wasthe faint pink welt of a scar, some bam’s bladework from back in the day, when the old boy still had to get involved in the more run-of-the-mill violence that kept the business on the rails.
    ‘Are yer clubs in the boot?’ Ranta asked.
    ‘Aye, Da.’
    ‘Bring us yer driver and some baws.’
    Out of the warm spring sunshine and into the cool darkness of the unit, into the smell of engine oil on cement, where, under the fizzing glare of three fluorescent strip lights, a man was tied to a chair. He had a bag, a cloth sack, over his head and he was making strange noises.
    The Beast and two other men were playing cards at a table against the wall, seemingly oblivious to the tethered,