Adverse Report, page 20
part #12 of Keith Calder Series
She squeezed my hand. ‘I’ll try to explain,’ she said. ‘We Scots are like a family. And getting at each other can be forgiven inside the family. When outsiders try it, the family closes ranks. Well, the Scots have had enough of seeing their earnings milked away over the Border by absentee landlords and financiers. And of being patronised by supercilious Englishmen who don’t try to understand them but treat them as a race of Harry Lauders put on the earth for their entertainment. I wouldn’t want to be married to a man that was for ever putting folk’s backs up. You’ll never be a Scot; but when you can live among Scots without seeming alien, then I’ll marry you.
‘And now,’ she said, ‘wipe away that frown. If you don’t change your mind . . .’
‘I won’t,’ I said, and I knew that it was true.
She smiled her special smile. ‘Then it’ll be all right in the end. Now forget all about it and come along up to bed.’
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NOTE
TO THE TECHNICALLY MINDED OR TO POTENTIAL MURDERERS
In preparing this book I consulted my usual sources, an ammunition manufacturer and an explosives company among them. Neither was able to advise me whether the yellow stain of picric acid would (or would not) have survived the explosion as described, or whether a shotgun primer would reliably detonate that explosive in powder form. Nor was I prepared to destroy a favourite shotgun in finding out.
The murder method described, therefore, comes to you without the customary guarantee.
*
G.H., January 1987
Gerald Hammond, Adverse Report
