Tommy turned away from the window. He didn’t want Ronnie to know that he had been watching him from the moment he came into sight. He was impressed by the energy that had gone into the running and the stamina involved in running so far, particularly as Ronnie’s growth seemed to be at the gangly, awkward youth stage.

It reminded him of his own days in training before he crashed to the bottom of the pit. Those days were long since over, and although it was painful to think of the fall from grace, the times before had been good times. “Move on”, he thought – something he hadn’t really done, despite now living on the edge of Murran instead of Glasgow. “On the edge” was how he described it because that was how it felt. He knew the villagers only tolerated him because he had chosen to live down by the beach. If he had tried to set-up house within the village boundaries, that would have been a different matter. He knew of the rumours. The ones he hadn’t known about had been told to him by Ronnie. At first he had been shocked by what the villagers believed, and he had wanted to refute the rumours, but then he realised that it helped to maintain the distance that he was entirely happy with. After all, they still served him in the shops and let him borrow books from the library. What else was needed? Anyway, maybe the rumours weren’t too far from the truth.

He poked at the fire and was rewarded with a shower of sparks flying out at him. His solution was to brush-off the ones that landed on his clothes and stamp-out those which had landed on the floor. A real fire inside a self-built log cabin probably wasn’t the best of ideas he had ever had, he decided, but it was certainly the cheapest form of heat for a house on the beach.

He could hear Ronnie approach the cabin now and he put the kettle on. He still hadn’t decided on whether to involve Ronnie in his plan or not. After all, he was only a child at the end of the day, but even as he thought this, he knew that it could only be Ronnie. No-one else would be likely to take part, and child or not, he seemed to be more genuine and more trustworthy than anyone else he knew. Besides, the strength and stamina he had just seen would be needed if he was right. He wouldn’t be able to do it on his own.

“The kettle is on”, he said, as Ronnie came through the open door.