Flood by Ian Rankin Page A

and smile at his foolishness. Just as he was smiling now, sitting with a cup of coffee in one hand while the other curved against Mary's back. The radio playing old songs. The newly kindled fire sparking its way into life.

    'I had a letter from my brother this morning,' Mary said.
    'He's very interested in you. He likes to take an interest in what's going on.'

    'He's never been back here, has he?' asked Andy, pushing gently at the tight contours of her spine.

    'Not for a long time,' she said.

3

    Weeds sprouted regally through the growing mesh of lawn around the mansion. They crept, too, along and up the cracked and flaking walls. Silent, insidious, they coloured the air with an aroma of rank and abundant decay, and tinted the house with the hue of disuse.

    The mansion was silent beneath their onslaught, like an exhausted and dying elephant, once majestic. Its large ground-floor windows were securely covered by sections of wood which had dried and moistened through recurring seasons, twisting and knotting their sinews like those of a living thing. The upper floor, with its slightly smaller windows, had shutters too, but parts of these had slipped and fallen, allowing areas of glass to appear as targets for an evening's energetic and restless children. These jagged edges of glass caught the red of the early evening sun and seemed to run rust-coloured streaks to the wood beneath them.

    People usually averted their eyes from this building whenever they passed, for they felt chilled by the boarded up windows, by the complacent and public display of what was, after all, a slow death. The grand illusion of ownership.

    The mansion, built in the late nineteenth century at the request of, it was said, a close friend of the Earl of Wemyss, was best known for the role it had played of hospital. No local knew its complete history, but it was known that it had once been Fife's first hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis, and many patients had entered through its doors for the promised revolutionary treatments. Its wards had quickly filled with those admitted by the local doctor and those from further away who hid in small private rooms and were visited daily by well-dressed people burdened with flowers and boxes of delicate chocolates. Curiously, the patients themselves all looked the same: the same pallid faces and heavy chests, the same defeated eyes. They would sit all day in front of the large windows and soak up what sunshine there was. This was in the early 1900s. Later, with tuberculosis a menace of the past, the hospital became a home for shell-shocked war veterans. Cries could be heard over the growing hamlet, the cries of men for whom war was still a raging demand on their nightmares. Later still, the local doctor moved into the sprawling house, but, finding it ghost-ridden and difficult to heat, soon moved out and into a smaller house which had once belonged to one of the local pit managers. People knew even then, in the 1960s, that the town was in some way preparing for its last stand, and the mansion became a symbol of incipient decay and neglect. No one, it seemed, wanted a ghostly house, a large damp house, a rambling hospital which had once been splashed with blood and bile and the echoing groans of madness and death.
    So it was that, after countless raids by gangs of children, the edifice was nailed shut. A local solicitor still held details of its owner and value, should any offer be forthcoming, but that was just so much dust and fawn-edged paper in some long-forgotten file. Much of the lead now gone from the roof, tarpaulin and polythene having taken its place, the mansion was a soiled relic, a fitting beast to be overlooking the smoky town from its slight and now anachronistic prominence, its quarter-mile of distance.

    But home still to some.

    Home almost to Sandy, who kicked at the pale yellow heads of the weeds as he crossed the raging lawn, scraping mud from his shoes on to the grass, hacking out