If A Body Meet A Body

Airdlaggan House was in Glasgow, just. I discovered that fact to my surprise and discomfort when the bus dropped me off on what looked to me like a Discover Scotland advert, all drystane dykes and bewildered sheep.

The surprise came as I walked back down the winding lane towards the roadside nameplate I’d seen from the bus, the house title scrolled across its width in Copperplate Gothic Bold. Thirty yards before I reached that sign, I came upon another, embedded in the verge, which whispered rather than shouted a quasi-welcome that read “City of Glasgow”. Still? Out here, in damp tartan fields populated by Harry Lauders and scrawny trees whose branches grew bannocks?

Apparently, yes. Airdlaggan House itself nestled in an unlikely crook of the seemingly far-distant city, even if its fields and livestock were located across an invisible border, enjoying the rustic scenery of Inver-aber-bala-strath-sneckie or whatever lay in the great beyond.

The discomfort was more a function of realising that – city address or not – the path from the road wound (uphill, naturally) a long way before it reached Airdlaggan House itself, half-visible on a tree-bound hilltop. The electronic vehicle access was closed and locked but a kissing gate let me onto the property and up the gravel roadway that split a sprawling treeless field. I climbed the hill in an artless slalom, swaying this way, that, and more, to avoid the generous dollops of sheep shit that speckled the gravel, while the perpetrators glared idly at me.

The house, as I gradually began to see, was as faux-grand as I’d hoped. A manor where a farmhouse should be, Queen Anne, neo-classical and mock-Tudor styles collided and disputed, an architectural train wreck from another country that – carpers, take note – would still cost any buyer an even number of millions. Three cars sat outside on the terminal sweep of the drive that led to the porticoed front entrance, all of them late-model with vanity plates. I became so idly preoccupied with attempting to decipher the meaning of HI2 DLD that I almost missed it.

The body.

It was the sound that caught me short, a sharp creak of rope straining in the wind, clutching against a middle branch of the mountain ash by the side of the drive. Twisting in the fatal clutch of a noose hidden now, biting into his purpling flesh, a man dangled, limbs a-droop, bobbing in a marionette dance of indecision, head turning like he was saying no to a question nobody had asked him.