Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

'You win,' he said to the sheep. He climbed back in the car, turned on the CD player and put on Enya. When he woke up there were no sheep anywhere.

He was definitely off the map now. The sky was leaden, threatening snow. Higher and higher, heading for the top and some mysterious summit. The celestial city. It was a gated road and it was laborious having to get out of the car and open and close the gates each time. He supposed it was a way of corralling the sheep. Were there shepherds still? Jackson's idea of a shepherd was a rough-bearded man, wearing a home-made sheepskin jerkin, seated on a grassy hillside on a starlit night, a ram's-horn crook in hand as he watched for the wolves creeping on their bellies towards his flock. Jackson surprised himself with how poetically detailed and completely inaccurate his image of a shepherd was. In reality it would be all tractors and hormones and chemical dips. And the wolves were long gone, or, at any rate, the ones in wolves' clothing were. Jackson was a shepherd, he couldn't rest until the flock was accounted for, all gathered safely in. It was his calling and his curse. Protect and serve. Snow poles at the side of the road measured up to three metres.

He cast a wary eye at the sky, he wouldn't like to get stuck in a drift up here, no one would ever find you. He would have to dig in until spring, fleece a couple of sheep for blankets. No one knew he was here, he hadn't told anyone he was leaving London. If he was lost, if something happened to him, there was no one who would know where to come and look. If someone he loved was lost he would stalk the world for ever looking for them but he wasn't entirely sure that there was anyone who would do the same for him. (J love YOli, she said, but he wasn't sure how tenacious an emotion that was for her.)

He passed a fence post that had a bird of prey, a hawk or falcon, perched on top ofit like a finial. Jackson was no good at the naming of birds. He knew buzzards though, there was a pair above him, circling idly in a holding pattern above the moorland, like black paper silhouettes. TY=hen thou from hence away art past, every nighte and aile, to TY=hinnymuir thou com'st at last, and Christe receive thy saule. Jesus, where had that come from? School, that was where. Rote-learning, still in fashion when Jackson was a boy. 'The Lyke Wake Dirge'. His first year at secondary school, before his life went off the rails. He suddenly saw himself, standing in front of the coal fire in their little house, reciting the poem one evening for a test the next day. His sister Niamh listening and correcting as if she was catechizing him. He could smell the coal, feel the heat on his legs, bare in the grey woollen shorts of his uniform. From the kitchen came the scents of the peasant food their mother was cooking for tea. Niamh slapped him on his leg with a ruler when he forgot the words. Looking back, he was astonished at the amount of casual brutality in his family (his sister almost as bad as his brother and father), the punches and slaps, the hair-tweaking, ear-pulling, Chinese burns -a whole vocabulary of violence. It was the nearest they could get to expressing love for each other. Maybe it was something to do with the bad mix ofScots and Irish genes that their parents had brought to the union. Maybe it was lack of money or the harsh life of a mining community. Or maybe they just liked it. Jackson had never hit a woman or a child, he restricted himself entirely to dulling up his own sex. if hos'nand shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane, every nighte and aile, the whinnes shall prick thee to the bare bane; and Christe receive thy saule.

A whinny was a thorn, he remembered that. Trust his school to set a dirge for its first-year pupils to learn, for God's sake. What did that say about the Yorkshire character? And not just a dirge, but the journey of a corpse. A testing. As you sow so shall you reap. Do as you would be done by. Give away your shoes in this life and you'll be shod for your hike across the thorny moor in the next life. This ae nighte, this ae nighte, every nighte and alleJire and fleet and candle-lighte, and Christe receive thy saule. Jackson shivered and turned the heater up.

*

It seemed he was not alone on the road to nowhere after all. There was someone else ahead, on foot, walking towards him. It was so unexpected that for a moment he wondered if it was a kind of mirage, brought on by staring for too long at the road, but no, it wasn't a phantom, it was definitely a human being, a woman even. He slowed down as he approached her. Not a walker or a tourist, she was dressed in a longish cardigan, blouse and skirt, moccasin-type shoes. Her only concession to the weather was a hand-knitted scarf twined casually round her neck. Fortyish, he guessed, brown-to-grey hair in a bob, something of the librarian about her. Did librarians live up to their cliche? Or were they indulging in uninhibited sex behind every stack and carrel? Jackson had not set foot inside a library for some years now.

The walking woman had no distinguishing marks. No dog either. Her hands were thrust into her cardigan pockets. She wasn't walking, she was strolling. From nowhere to nowhere. It felt all wrong. He came to a stop and rolled down the window.

As the woman neared the car she gave him a smile and a nod. 'Can I give you a lift?' he asked. (,Don't ever take lifts from strangers, not even if you 'ye lost in the middle ofnowhere, not ifthey say they know your mother, that they have a puppy in the back, that they're a policeman. ')

The woman laughed in a pleasant way -no fear or suspicion -and shook her head. 'You're going the wrong way,' she said. Local accent. She gestured with her arm in the direction he had just come from and said, 'I've not got far to go.'

'It looks like snow,' Jackson said. Why wasn't she wearing a coat, did they breed them to be more hardy up here? She contemplated the sky for a moment and then said to him, 'Oh, no, I don't think so. Don't worry about it,' before giving him a kind of half-wave and carrying on with her unseasonable saunter. He could hardly pursue her, either on foot or in the car, she would think he was a psycho. She must be heading for a farmhouse that he had missed. Perhaps it was in a dip, or over the brow of a hill. Or invisible. 'As we say in this part of the world,' he said to the Discovery, 'there's nowt so queer as folk.'

The day was dimming down and he wondered how dark it would be when the winter sun finally gave up the struggle. Country dark, he supposed. He switched on his lights.

In his rear-view mirror, he watched the woman growing smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the gathering dusk. She never looked back. In her shoes, in her librarian moccasins, he would definitely have looked back.

He was a man on the road, a man trying to get home. It was about the destination, not the journey. Everyone was trying to get home. Everyone, everywhere, all the time.

It was dark now. He drove on,just a poor wayfaring stranger. Was he progressing from this world to that which was to come? You're going the wrong way, she had said. She had meant he was going the wrong way for her. Hadn't she? Or was there a message in her words? A sign? Was he going the wrong way, the wrong way for what? The road had to end up somewhere, even ifit was where it began. 'Don't,' he said out loud to himself. 'Don't get into that existential crap.' Yea, though I walk through the valley ifthe shadow of death.

Just when he had decided that they were lost for ever in the Twilight Zone, they drove over the brow of a hill and he saw the glittering lights ofvehicles on the A1 down below, the lost highway, a great grey artery of logic, helping to speed cars from one known destination to another. Alleluia.

She Would Get the Flowers Herself SHE WOULD DRIVE INTO TOWN AND GO TO MAXWELL'S IN CASTLE Street and get the florist to put something together for her, something elegant. Blue, for the living room -a flat-backed basket arrangement for the fireplace -would he have delphiniums? Was it too late for delphiniums? Of course, it didn't matter what the season was, florists didn't get their flowers from gardens, they got them from glasshouses in Holland. And Kenya. They grew flowers in Kenya where there probably wasn't enough drinking water for the people who lived there, let alone for irrigating flowers, and then they flew the flowers over in planes that dumped tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It was wrong but she needed flowers.

Could you need a flower? When they went shopping for her engagement ring in Alistir Tait's in Rose Street, Patrick said to the jeweller, 'This beautiful woman needs a big diamond.' It sounded corny in retrospect but it had been charming at the time. Sort of. Patrick chose an old diamond in a new setting and Louise wondered what poor bugger had dug that out of the heart of darkness a long time ago. Blood on her hands.

Patrick was an orthopaedic surgeon and was used to being in charge. 'Orthopaedics is just hammers and chisels really, a superior form ofjoinery,' he joked when he first met her but he was at the top of his field and could probably have been making a fortune in private practice but instead he spent his time sticking NHS patients back together with pins. ('That's where a boyhood playing with a Meccano set gets you.')

Louise had never liked doctors, nobody who'd been at university with medical students would ever trust a doctor. (Was Joanna Hunter the exception to the rule?) And how did they choose doctors? They took middle-class kids who were good at science subjects and then spent six years teaching them more science and then they let them loose on people. People weren't science, people were a mess. 'Well, it's one way of looking at it,' Patrick laughed.

They had met over an accident, of course, how else did the police meet people? Two years ago, Louise had been on the M8, driving to Glasgow for a meeting with Strathclyde Police, when she saw the crash happen on the opposite carriageway.

She was first on the scene, arriving before the emergency services, but there was nothing she could do. A sixteen-wheeler had smashed into the back of a little three-door saloon, two baby seats crammed in the back, the mother driving, her teenage sister in the passenger seat. The car had been stationary in a queue at temporary traffic lights at some roadworks. The driver hadn't seen the signs for the roadworks, hadn't seen the queue of traffic, and only caught the briefest glimpse of the little three-door saloon before he rammed into it at sixty miles an hour. The truck driver was texting. A classic. Louise arrested him at the scene. She would have liked to kill him at the scene. Or preferably run him over slowly with his own truck. She was beginning to notice that she was more bloodthirsty than she used to be (and that was saying something).

The car and everyone in it was completely crushed. Because she was the smallest, slimmest person at the scene, Louise ('Can you try, boss?') had squeezed a hand through what had once been a window, trying to search for pulses, trying to count bodies, find some ID. They hadn't even known there were babies in the back until Louise's ~ngers had brushed against a tiny limp hand. Grown men wept, mcludmg the traffic cop who was the family liaison officer, and good old L' -har -'1 d' vlllegar -put an arm round him and OUlse d b 01 e III . said, 'Well, Jesus, we're only human: and volunteered to be the one to tell the next of kin, which was, without doubt, the worst job in the world. She seemed to be more faint-hearted than she used to be. Bloodthirsty yet faint-hearted.

A week later she had attended the funeral. All four of them at once. It had been unbearable but it had to be borne because that's what people did, they went on. One foot after another, slogging it out day by day. If her own child died, Louise wouldn't keep on going, she would take herself out, something nice and neat, nothing messy for the emergency services to deal with afterwards.

Archie wanted driving lessons for his seventeenth birthday and Patrick said, 'Good idea, Archie. If you pass your test we'll get you a decent second-hand car.' Louise, meanwhile, was trying to think of ways of preventing Archie from ever sitting in the driving seat of a vehicle. She wondered if it was possible to gain access to the DVLA computer and put some kind of stop on his provisional licence. She was a chief inspector, it shouldn't be beyond her, being police was just the obverse of being criminal, after all.

The driver of the car in front had been badly injured as well and it had been Patrick who had spent hours in the operating theatre putting the man's leg back together. The truck driver, who didn't even have a bruise, was sentenced to three years in jail and was probably out by now. Louise would have removed his organs without anaesthetic and given them to more worthy people. Or so she told Patrick afterwards over a nasty cup of coffee in the hospital staff canteen. 'Life's random,' he said. 'The best you can do is pick up the pieces.' He wasn't police but it wasn't like marrying out. He understood.

He was Irish, which always helped. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't. But Patrick was all of those things. 'Between wives at the moment,' he said and she had laughed. She hadn't wanted a diamond, big or otherwise, but she'd ended up with one anyway. 'You can cash it in when you divorce me,' he said. She liked the way he took over in that authoritative way, didn't stand for any of her shit yet was always amiable about it, as if she was precious and yet flawed and the flaws could be fixed. Of course, he was a surgeon, he thought everything could be fixed. Flaws could never be fixed. She was the golden bowl, sooner or later the crack would show. And who would pick up the pieces then?

For the first time in her life she had relinquished control. And what did that do to you? It sent you completely off-balance, that's what it did.

Or a centrepiece for the dining-room table. Something smallish, something red. For the red figure in the carpet. Not roses. Red roses said the wrong thing. Louise wasn't sure what they said but whatever it was, it was wrong.

'Don't try so hard,' Patrick laughed.

But she was no good at this stuff and if she didn't try she would fail. 'I can't do relationships,' she said, the first morning they woke up in bed together.

'Can't or won't?' he said.

He had broken her in as if she was a high-strung, untamed horse.

(But what ifhe had just broken her?) One step at a time, softly, softly, until she was caught. The taming of the shrew. Shrews were small harmless furry things, they didn't deserve their bad reputation.

He knew how to do it. He had been happily married for fifteen years before a carload of teenage joyriders overtaking on a bit of single carriageway on the A9 had smashed head-on into his wife's Polo, ten years ago. Whoever invented the wheel had a lot to answer for. Samantha. Patrick and Samantha. He hadn't been able to fix her, had he? She still had enough time, time to buy the flowers, time to shop in Waitrose in Morningside, time to cook dinner. Sea bass on a bed of Puy lentils, twice-baked Roquefort souffles to start, a lemon tart to finish. Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman so, technically speaking, she could do anything. The Roquefort souffles were a Delia Smith recipe. The rise and fall of the bourgeoisie. Ha, ha. Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person. She was buzzing with tiredness, that was what was wrong with her. (Why? Why was she so tired?) In a former life, before her beauty was measured in the size ofa diamond, she would have wound down with a (very large) drink, ordered in a pizza, taken out her contacts, put her feet up and watched some rubbish on television but now here she was running around like a blue-arsed fly worrying about delphiniums and cooking Delia recipes. Was there any way back from here?

'We can cancel,' Patrick said on the phone. 'It's no big deal, you're tired.' No big deal to him maybe, huge deal to her. Patrick's sister and her husband, up from Bournemouth or Eastbourne, somewhere like that. Irish diaspora. They were everywhere, like the Scots.

'They'll be happy with cheese on toast, or we'll get a takeaway,' Patrick said. He was so damned relaxed about everything. And what would they think if she didn't make an effort? They had missed the wedding but then everyone missed the wedding. The sister (Bridget) was obviously already put out by the whole wedding thing. 'Just the two ofus, in a registry office,' Louise said to Patrick, when she finally gave in and said yes.

'What about Archie?' Patrick said.

'Does he have to come?'

'Yes, he's your son, Louise.' Actually Archie had behaved well, looking after the ring, cheering in a mumed, self-conscious way when Louise said, 'I do.' Patrick's own son, Jamie, didn't come to the wedding. He was a post-grad on an archaeology dig in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere. He was one of those outdoor types -skiing, surfing, scuba-diving -'a real boy', Patrick said. In contrast to her own boy, her little Pinocchio.

They had brought in two people from the next wedding to be witnesses and gave them each a good bottle of malt as a thank you. Louise had worn a dress in raw silk, in what the personal shopper in Harvey Nichols had referred to as 'oyster' although to Louise it just looked grey. But it was pretty without being fussy and it showed off her good legs. Patrick had arranged flowers or she wouldn't have bothered -an old-fashioned posy of pink roses for her and pink rosebuds for the buttonholes for himself and Archie.

A couple of years ago, not long after she met Patrick and when Archie's behaviour was at its most worrying, she had gone for therapy, something she had always sworn she would never do. Never say never. She did it for Archie, thinking that his problems must be a result of hers, that if she could be a better mother his life would improve. And she did it for Patrick too because he seemed to represent a chance for change, to become like other people.

It was cognitive behavioural stuff that didn't delve too deeply into the murk of her psychopathology, thank God. The basic principle was that she should learn to avoid negative thinking, freeing her to have a more positive attitude to life. The therapist, a hippyish, wellintentioned woman called Jenny who looked as if she'd knitted herself, told Louise to visualize a place where she could put all her negative thoughts and Louise had chosen a chest at the bottom of the sea, the kind that was beloved ofpirates in storybooks -hooped and banded with metal, padlocked and hasped to keep safe, not treasure, but Louise's unhelpful thoughts.

The more detailed the better,Jenny said, and so Louise added coral and shells to the gritty sand, barnacles clinging to the sides of the chest, curious fishes and sharks nosing it, lobsters and crabs crawling all over it, fronds ofseaweed waving in the tidal currents. She became an adept with the locks and the keys, could visit her underwater world at the flick ofa mental switch. The problem was that when she had safely locked up all the negative thoughts at the bottom of the sea there was nothing else left, no positive thoughts at all. 'Guess I'm just not a positive person,' she said to Jenny. She thoughtJenny would protest, pull her to her maternal, knitted bosom and tell her it was just a matter of time (and money) before she was fixed. But Jenny agreed with her and said, 'I guess not.'

She stopped going to Jenny and not long after she accepted Patrick's proposal.

Archie went to Fettes now. Two years ago at the age of fourteen he had been on the edge of something bad, it had only been some petty thieving, some bunking off school, trouble with the police (oh, the irony) but she could tell, because she'd seen it enough times in other teenagers, that ifit wasn't nipped in the bud it wouldn't just be a phase, it would be a way of life. He was ready for a change or it wouldn't have worked. She used her mother's life insurance to pay his exorbitant school fees, 'So the drunken old cow's good for something at last,' Louise said. The school was the kind ofplace that Louise had spent her red-flagged life railing against -privilege, the perpetuation of the ruling hegemony, yada, yada, yada. And now she was subscribing to it because the greater good wasn't an argument she was going to deploy when it came to her own flesh and blood. 'What about your principles?' someone said to her and she said, 'Archie is my principles.'

The gamble had paid off. Two years later and he had gone from Gothic to geek (his true metier all along) in one relatively easy move and now hung about with his geek confreres in the astronomy club, the chess club, the computer club and God knew what other activities that seemed entirely alien to Louise. Louise had an MA in literature and she was sure that if she'd had a daughter they would have had great chats about the Brontes and George Eliot. (While what? They baked cakes and did each other's make-up? Get real, Louise.)

'It's not too late,' Patrick said.

'For what?'

'A baby.'

A chill went through her. Someone had opened a door in her heart and let in the north wind. Did he want a baby? She couldn't ask him in case he said yes. Was he going to seduce her into it, like he'd seduced her into marriage? She already had a child, a child who was wrapped around her heart and she couldn't walk on that wild shore again.

All her life she had been fighting. 'Time to stop,' Patrick said, massaging her shoulders after a particularly gruelling day at work. 'Lay down your arms and surrender, take things how they come.'

'You should have been a Zen master,' she said.

'I am.'

She hadn't expected ever to hit forty and suddenly find herself in a two-car family, to be living in an expensive flat, to be wearing a rock the size of Gibraltar. Most people would see this as a goal or an improvement but Louise felt as if she might have taken the wrong road without even noticing the turning. Sometimes, in her more paranoid moments, she wondered if Patrick had somehow managed to hypnotize her.

She had changed their insurance policy when they moved and the woman on the other end of the phone went through all the standard questions -age of the building, how many rooms, is there an alarm system in place -before asking, 'Do you keep any jewels, furs or shotguns on the premises?' and for a moment Louise felt an unexpected thrill at the idea of a life containing those elements. (She'd made a start -she had the jewel.) She had clearly missed her way, parcelled everything up, nice and neat, settled down, when the real Louise wanted to be out there somewhere living the outlaw life, wearing jewels and furs, toting a gun. Even the idea of furs didn't worry her that much. She could shoot something and skin it and eat it, better than the unfeeling distance between the abattoir and the soft, pale packages at the Waitrose meat counter.

'No,' she said to the woman at the insurance company, returning to sobriety, 'only my engagement ring.' Twenty thousand pounds' worth ofsecond-hand bling. Sell it and run, Louise. Run fast. Joanna Hunter had been a runner (was she still?) , a university athletics champion. She had run once and it had saved her life, perhaps she had made sure that no one was ever going to catch her. Louise had read the noticeboard hanging in the Hunters' kitchen, the little everyday trophies and mementoes of a life -postcards, certificates, photographs, messages. Nothing of course about the event that must have shaped her entire existence, murder wasn't something you tended to pin up on your kitchen corkboard. Alison Needler, on the other hand, didn't run. She hid.

Louise hardly saw Archie now. He had elected to board during the week because he would rather live in a school than with his mother. At weekends he sought out the same boys he spent all week at school with.

'Stop fretting,' Patrick said. 'He's sixteen, he's spreading his wings.'

Louise thought of Icarus.

'And learning to fly.'

Louise thought of the dead bird she had found outside the flat at the weekend. A bad omen. Little cock sparrow shot by a boy with a bow and arrow.

'He has to grow up.'

'I don't see why.'

'Louise,' Patrick said gently, 'Archie's happy.'

'Happy?' Happy wasn't a word she had employed in the context of Archie since he was a little boy. How wonderfully, joyously untrammelled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, didn't realize that childhood happiness dissolves away, because she herself had never known happiness as a child. If she had realized that Archie wasn't going to be that sunny innocent for ever she would have laid up every moment as treasure. Now she could have it again if she wanted. The north wind howled. She shut the door.

She was on her way back from a meeting with the Amethyst team out at the Gyle. That was how Louise first came across Alison Needler, six months before the murders, when she was seconded for a few months to Amethyst, the Family Protection Unit. David Needler, defYing the court injunction against him, had taken up a position on the family lawn in Trinity where he was threatening to set himself alight with his kids and ex-wife watching from an upstairs window. When Louise arrived, hot on the heels of the Instant Response Vehicle, he was being berated by Alison's sister Debbie, standing on the front doorstep. ('Lippy, our Debs,' according to Alison. Well, she paid the price for that, didn't she?) Taunted, perhaps, rather than berated (' Go on then, you bastard, let's see you torch yourself.).

In court the next day David Needler had been cautioned and told to obey the injunction and stay away from his family, which he did, until he came back six months later with a shotgun.

Louise pulled into the car park at Howdenhall. Check in at the station, pick up her own car, back on the road in five minutes. She had plenty of time.

'Final report's back from forensics, boss,' her baby DC, Marcus McLellen, said to her, handing her a folder. 'As was anticipated, the amusement arcade fire was definitely wilful fire-raising.'

Twenty-six years old, Marcus had a BA in Media Studies from Stirling (who didn't?) and a head of hair that would have given Shirley Temple a run for her money if he had allowed it to grow instead of sensibly shearing it into astrakhan. He was a rugby player and Louise had once shivered in a freezing cold stand on a Saturday morning shouting herself hoarse in support of him (a great outlet for aggression, she discovered), which was something she had never been able to do for weedy, sportsphobic Archie.

Marcus's baptism of fire after coming from uniform had been the Needler case and he'd handled it even better than she'd expected. He was a sweet boy, downright cherubic, straight as a Roman road, tougher than he looked and always cheerful. Like Patrick. Where did it come from, this cheerfulness, did they imbibe it with their mother's milk? (Poor Archie, then.)

She had taken Marcus under her wing, a mother hen. Louise had never felt maternal towards anyone she had worked with before, it was an unsettling experience. It must be age, she concluded. But'Marcus?' -a strangely Latinate name for someone born in Sighthill. (,Aspirational mother, boss,' he said. 'Better than Titus. Or Sextus.') He had been razor-keen on the Needler case but she had taken him off it and put him on something else. 'So you can get more experience,' she told him but really she just didn't want him to end up as obsessed with Alison Needler as she was. So now he was working on an amusement arcade in Bread Street that had mysteriously gone up in flames a couple of weeks ago.

'Insurance?' Louise speculated. 'Or malicious? Or just neds messing about with matches?' 'Wilful fire-raising', a baroque Scottish term for arson, the chief suspect for which, in Louise's book, was always going to be the Owner of the property. Insurance money was just too tempting a prospect when you were needing money. Twenty thousand for a d'lamond, how much for an amusement arcade? An amusement arcade owned by none other than the lovely Dr Joanna Hunter's husband, Neil. ('And what does Mr Hunter do?' she had said conversationally to Joanna Hunter when she visited her yesterday. 'Oh, this and that,' Joanna Hunter said lightly. 'Neil's always looking for the next big opportunity, he's a natural-born entrepreneur.') Just what the lovely Dr Hunter was doing being married to someone with business interests in the pubic triangle (as it was known) of Bread Street with its strip joints, dodgy pubs and show bars was anyone's guess. Shouldn't she be married to somebody more respectable -an orthopaedic surgeon, for example?

According to his wife, Neil Hunter was in 'the leisure industry', a term that seemed to cover a lot of possibilities. In his case it seemed to be two or three amusement arcades, a couple of health clubs (not particularly upmarket) and a small fleet ofprivate hire vehicles (tiredlooking four-door saloons, masquerading as 'executive cars') and a couple of beauticians, one in Leith, one in Sighthill, that looked like health hazards -Louise was pretty sure that Joanna Hunter had never had a facial in one of them, the Sheraton One Spa they weren't.

'Fill me in on our Mr Hunter.'

'Well, when he first came to Edinburgh,' Marcus said, 'he started with a burger van parked in Bristo Square, that way he caught the students as well as the pubs coming out.'

'Burger van. Classy.'

'Which burned to the ground in the wee small hours when it was unattended.'

'Well, there's a coincidence.'

'Moved on to a wine bar, a cafe, a food delivery service, anything he could try his hand at really.'