The HQ for the Salmon Farming part of Calum’s empire was something of a disappointment to Jak. The Kennacraig ‘HQ’ turned out to be nothing more than two ‘Portacabins’ located near the Ferry Terminal.

The real business of raising salmon and sea trout was in the sea lochs close to the various islands on the southern part of the Inner Hebrides. Sarah had been there before with Calum but had wanted to see Jak’s reaction to the place. This place was the complete opposite of a big city or even a small city like Edinburgh.

Sarah had met the Manager, Neil Sinclair, once before when he’d travelled to Edinburgh for a meeting with Calum. She introduced Jak to Neil and the three other staff and left Neil to go over the business with him.

Jak listened and asked a few decent questions. At the end of the briefing, he said,

“Neil, it is clear to me that Calum trusted you to run this end of the business. I don’t intend to rock the boat, at least until I can properly understand it. The last thing I want is to rush in and make a complete fool of myself… or beyond the one that I’m doing right now.”

It took a second for Neil to react.
“Jak, I think that we are going to get along fine. Calum was much the same. He knew about fish farming in general, but almost nothing about how it works and the problems it faces. If you take your time to learn the business like he did, then we will get along fine.”

“I hope so, Neil. I’m just starting to understand what sort of man Calum was. I know that I can’t even begin to fill his shoes. In time, there will probably be some changes. What they are, I simply don’t know.”

“Are you going to sell up? Calum told us that a new owner would probably do that,” said Neil.

Jak smiled.
“I don’t know. Far too early to say. For that to happen, a lot of other things are going to have to happen first. As to what they are? I have no idea.”

He paused for a second before saying,
“What I’m trying to say is that selling the business is not at the top or the bottom of my list of things to do.”

He looked at Sarah and back at the team before saying,
“Let me make you guys a promise. If I do decide to sell up, I’ll come and tell you face-to-face and give you guys first refusal. How does that sound? Ok?”

Neil smiled and shook Jak’s hand.

“Good. In the meantime, just carry on running the show. Calum would not want it any other way.”

“You did well back there,” said Sarah after they’d said their goodbyes to the people at Kennacraig.

“I was winging it.”

“You still did a good job.”

“Thanks, Sarah.”

“I’ve booked us a hotel for tonight. Tomorrow, we can check out Calum’s cottage. I don’t know how Calum left it the last time he visited. That was right before he set out on his quest. Besides, there won’t be any food in the house unless there is anything in the freezer.”

Jak looked over at Sarah. Every time he did that, he could not believe what he was seeing. She was the most perfect specimen of womanhood he’d ever met.

“Good move, as long as the hotel serves food?”

Sarah grinned.
“If they don’t, I’ll treat you to a ‘fish supper’.

Jak had no idea what that was, but he didn’t really care. As long as he was with Sarah, his life was complete.

[Boston, USA]

“Sir,” said the Private Eye, who was standing outside where Jak used to live. He was on the phone to Jak’s father.
“According to his neighbours, he’s sold everything for pennies on the dollar and gone. He left a few days ago.”

“No, Sir… Well, not quite. One of them saw an Uber pick him up at around 11:00 pm.”

“No, Sir, he had no idea where it was going. All he said was that Jak had one suitcase and a backpack with him.”

“Yes, Sir. I think that he’s gone for good.”

“Sir, he could be almost anywhere in the world by now. He could have caught a flight to the West Coast and gone on from there. Who knows?”

“Yes, Sir, I have the details of the lockup. That is my next port of call.”

“I will report in when I have visited it.”

The P.I. looked at his watch.
“Sir, I should be in NYC in four to five hours. It all depends on traffic on I-95.”

He ended the call and sighed. He’d worked for Jak’s father off and on for ten years, and he always wanted everything done yesterday, even if it didn’t matter to the result. He’d nearly decided to drop him as a client, but he paid well and on time, which he soon learned was most certainly not his standard practice. This time, he could end up in the back of beyond on a wild goose chase, and there was little he could do about it.

[Six hours later]
“Fuck!” said the P.I.

He was in Yonkers and had just discovered an unlocked lockup. It was empty apart from a cardboard container that had once contained a car battery. It looked brand new. A single scrap of paper was lying on the floor. All it contained was a phone number. He quickly fed it into his computer. The address associated with the number was on Long Island. A picture of Jak’s movements began to form in his mind.

He paused for a moment and wondered if he should call his client. Instead, he decided to head off to Islip first and risk the wrath of Mr McGee, but in his mind, it was better to have run down all possible leads before reporting in. That way, there was less chance of his client mouthing off at him.

The P.I., Joe Younger, breathed a sigh of relief when he drove past the address. There on the front drive was the missing Camaro. It still had the NY plates on it from the time that Jak had owned it. He turned around and stopped outside the house. He could see a woman unloading groceries from an SUV that was parked next to the Camaro.

He kept his distance and said,
“Excuse me?”

The woman stopped and turned around. She looked suspicious. She didn’t say anything, so it was up to him to speak next.

“I’m trying to track down the former owner of the Camaro?”

“Sorry, I can’t help you there. My husband bought it last week. I never met the owner. All I know is that my husband gave him a lift to the LIRR station after the deal was done. The car was advertised on Craigslist at a very good price.”

“Thank you, and sorry to bother you.”

Several missing pieces of that picture had just been filled in. He got back into his car and headed for the LIRR Station. He soon learned that there were fairly frequent trains going into the city. The destination of the next train caught his eye. ‘Jamaica’. He smiled.

While it was a guess, he felt happy to suggest to Mr McGee that Jak was heading for JFK airport and to him, that meant one thing: Jak was going overseas. The proceeds from the sale of the Camaro could have easily funded a trip to Europe if he had got anywhere near its true market value.

He called Mr McGee from the car park at the station. It was not a long call, but as far as he was concerned, the job was complete, and he could send in his bill when he got back to Memphis.

[Jak’s Father’s home]
Jak’s father was not pleased with the suggestions that Joe Younger had made, but they made sense. As soon as the word ‘overseas’ was mentioned, he had a good idea where Jak had gone. He managed to quell his anger long enough to make a call to an assistant.

“Get the G-5 ready.”

“Fill her up. We are going to Scotland.”

“I am fucking well aware of the time difference. I don’t fucking well care if we arrive in the middle of the night or whenever. Do it! File the frigging flight plan. What’s that airport near that moron, Trump’s Golf Course? I pay that grifter over $500K a year to belong to Mar-a-Largo, I think that I should qualify as a temporary member.”

“Prestwick. That’s the place. Right in the middle of nowhere. Then make sure that there is a car… preferably a Suburban, waiting for us.”

He ended the call by ignoring the assistants’ complaints that it was Halloween. Such frivolities did not register with him. All he could think about was revenge. His older brother was going to pay for this.

He called his housekeeper.

“Daisy, prepare my clothes for a trip to Scotland.”

“No! I’m not going to play golf. I’m not a slacker like Trump. I have serious family business to attend to.”

“One week. Pack for a week.”

“And Daisy, please make sure that Jak’s room is ready.”

“Yes, I plan to bring him home where he belongs.”

He was fuming. The credit report that his P.I. had sent him showed that his student debt was still outstanding, but his credit card, which had been near its limit, had been paid off in full. All he could think of was ‘Calum’! He’d give his brother a good tongue-lashing when he saw him. Brother or no brother, he was not going to divert his son from his rightful destiny as boss of his coal mining company.

Three hours later, a Gulfstream G-5 took off from a local airport in rural Tennessee and headed northeast. After a brief refuelling stop at Bangor, Maine, it headed out across the Atlantic.

“Mr McGee, this is your pilot speaking.”

Jak’s father woke from the light sleep that had come only an hour or so earlier.

“What the fuck is it?”

“Sir, we have been refused permission to land at Prestwick. Due to noise controls, the runway is closed until zero five hundred.”

“What the hell is that in real-time?”

“Five AM local. Midnight Eastern Standard Time.”

“What do they expect us to do until then? Flap our arms in the hope of staying airborne?”

“Sir, Prestwick Tower have suggested that we divert to Shannon. They have 24-hour customs and immigration.”

“And where the hell is Shannon?”

“Sir, it is in the Irish Republic. We can land, clear immigration, refuel and fly on to Prestwick without having to clear customs or immigration again in Scotland. By the time we do that, they will be open for business.”

He cursed.
“Do it. I need to get some sleep.”

“Sir… I have to inform you that when we get to Scotland, both of us on the flight deck will be unable to fly for 24 hours at least.”

Jak’s father was about to sound off to the flight crew, but thought better of it. He remembered a horrible commercial flight that he’d taken to China as part of President Trump’s trade mission that was delayed by a typhoon, and the crew ran out of hours.

“Ok. Find a hotel once the plane is refuelled and be ready to fly home. I’ll call you when we need to leave… And don’t forget to restock the galley.”

Instead of getting some much-needed sleep, he was messaging his transport manager even if it was late at night in Tennessee. He wanted to check up on Jak’s credit card usage.

[Prestwick Airport, 09:30 am]
“I wanted a Suburban, and all you can get is this?” said Jak’s father.
He and his assistant were looking at a tiny Ford Focus, a 2-door version.

“Sir, the only Suburbans for rent here are in London, and the rental company could not deliver them here in time. That is over 400 miles away. This is all I could get locally, as there is a big expo in Glasgow. All the big cars are already rented, which includes Range Rovers and BMW X6S. Cars here are a lot smaller than back home.”

“And where am I going to sit? There is no for a miniature poodle in the back.”

“Sir? You can sit in the front with me.”

“Fuck that. I’m driving.”
Then he proceeded to go to the left-hand side of the car.

“Bloody Neanderthals. Can’t they even drive on the right side of the road in this miserable hellhole?”
A squall had moved in from the sea, making everything a uniform shade of grey.

It was a typical early winter’s morning with low clouds, drizzle and a stiff wind from the North West.

“Sir? Have you ever driven in the UK?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Sir, I have. Perhaps it might be more prudent for me to drive. The locals here are… are not the same as back home. The rules of the road are very different.”

“Nothing that waving a piece won’t solve…”

“Sir, we didn’t bring any guns.”

“Why the fuck not? This place is part of the civilised world, isn’t it?”

“Sir, people here do not feel the need to carry. There is no 2nd Amendment. There is no written constitution. They make it up as they go and have been doing so for hundreds of years. Anyone found carrying even a blade can get five years.”

“And that’s why we whipped their ass in the revolution. Neanderthals, the lot of them.”

Then he said…
“Drive.”
“We need to go to Edinboro’”.

Joel shook his head and got into the driving seat.

Two and a half rather fraught hours later, the car pulled up outside Sarah’s home in Edinburgh.

“Stay here. This won’t take long.”

Joel wisely said nothing but was on the lookout for traffic wardens. He’d parked on a double yellow line. Wisely, he’d not tried to explain to his boss about parking regulations in the city.

A banging on the front door of the house brought a smile to Joel’s face. There was no sign that anyone was home. Mainly, this was due to the lack of a car in the drive.

After a fruitless ten minutes, he returned to the car.
“Where to now, boss?”

“His fucking lawyers. They’ll know where the bastard is.”

“Are you sure about that, Boss? Client Confidentiality and all that stuff?”

“I’ll just threaten to buy their business. They’ll tell me soon enough.”

“Sir? Perhaps, just perhaps, these people can’t be bought?”

“Everyone can be bought if the price is high enough.”

Joel shook his head.
“If you don’t like it, then you can get out now!”

“Sir, this is not the USA. They do things differently here.”
Then he got out of the car and retrieved his bag from the back seat.

“You will regret this!”

“No, Sir, I will not. Money is not everything in life.”

“It fucking well it. The world runs on money, money that is powered by the US Dollar.”

He walked off, shaking his head. Thanks to an exchange visit to Oxford, the assistant knew at least how to start getting home. His first task was to get into the city centre. He’d heard about the tram opening when he was in Oxford, and he’d seen the tracks on their drive past the airport. After ten months of working for ‘him’, he suddenly felt free.

That didn’t last long. Deep down, he knew that his now-former employer would not let him leave quietly. Thankfully, he knew somewhere that he could drop out of sight. His company phone was in the rental car, along with the company laptop. That was a start. His now former boss could not stiff him for the cost of those items. Like the former POTUS, John McGee had a reputation for not paying his bills.

John McGee sat in the passenger seat of the tiny car and cursed long and loud. Two people walking by shook their heads as they passed him. He was stuck. The experience of driving over from Prestwick had disturbed him. It seemed that every driver had a death wish. There was no way that he was going to risk his life, so he abandoned the car, and thanks to some quirk of fate, a taxi with a ‘For Hire’ sign lit came along the road.

“Take me to a City Centre Hotel,” he commanded.

The cabbie looked at him in the mirror and mentally sighed.
“How much do you want to pay?”

“Does it matter that much?”

“Yes, it does. There is the Holiday Inn, The Caledonian, or if you want to push the boat out, there is the Balmoral, but that isna cheap if you get my meaning.”

He didn’t quite fully understand what he said, but said in response,
“The Balmoral sounds about right.”

“Ok, the Balmoral it is.”

[Tarbert, Argyle]
“Can you remember how to find the cottage?” asked Jak as they left the hotel where they’d stayed the night.

“I think so. I looked at the map last night and even Google Street View, but that ran out a mile out of town, but I know the general direction to go.”

Jak didn’t want to say anything, but the lack of roads made the choice of which way to go pretty easy unless you wanted to run into the sea.

Ten minutes later, Sarah suddenly let out a scream.
“There it is. That’s Calum’s car!”
She was pointing towards a small building off to the right. Sarah drove on and made a ‘U’ turn. At the right point, she turned off the road and went slowly up a drive that was full of potholes.
“This is the place all right. I remember the potholes.”

Jak didn’t reply.

“Here we are,” said Sarah proudly.

“Do you know how to get in? You know, like a key?”

“We don’t need a key. He never locked the back door.”

Jak shook his head as he followed Sarah around to the rear of the property.

Sure enough, a good shove on the door and it opened. Sarah smiled and went inside. Jak followed her.
“What’s that smell?” he asked.

“Probably some food that has gone off in the fridge,” said Sarah with some confidence.

The interior was pretty dark. The small windows didn’t let in much light. Jak tried the light switch. Nothing happened.

“The power is off,” he volunteered.

“That’s Calum. He would always switch everything off when he left a room. I lost count of the times he left me in the dark when I was growing up.”

Jak shook his head as Sarah went outside for something. Suddenly, the light that he’d tried came on. Sarah returned smiling.
“He turned off the supply. Remind me to check with Mr Mackay that the bill has been paid. The last thing you need is for the power to be cut off when you least expect it.”

As they’d expected, there was a load of decomposing food in the fridge. They bagged it up, along with some other items like bread and cake, and put it in the back of the car. Sarah said that she’d seen a community waste disposal site a few miles outside of Tarbert.

With that done, Jak began to see how Calum lived while he was in this part of the world. There was only one word for it: simply. There was no phone connection or even a TV. A small radio was all the technology in the cottage. Outside, there was a small, overgrown lawn and not much else.

“I slept on the couch when I first came here… I think I was about fourteen or fifteen,” said Sarah.

“It does not look that comfortable?”

“It wasn’t, but when compared to some of the floors that I was made to sleep on in Somalia, then it is the height of luxury. My problem was with the cold.”

The mention of Somalia caused Jak to ask,
“I seem to remember hearing of people who returned to the US with children in tow, and those adults ended up being charged with child trafficking. How come Calum didn’t?”

Sarah smiled back at Jak.
“Calum bought me from the warlord and took me back to Kenya. There, he engaged a lawyer and an investigator to look for anyone from my village. I think I said that there was nothing left. They found only two survivors from the village. They only escaped because they’d travelled to another village for a family wedding. They identified where everyone was buried, including all of my family. It looked like I was going to be put into the Kenyan care system, but Calum worked some magic and obtained the right permits, and he brought me here. Thanks to having the right bits of paper from Kenya, Calum was granted custody of me and a year later, he formally adopted me. I know now that Calum paid off a lot of officials, but that was years ago. There were a few people here who thought that Calum was up to no good, but he never did anything wrong to me. He loved me, and I know that with all my heart. Loved me as a parent would do. He taught me proper English and came along to all the events I did, like any normal parent would.”

Then she sighed and wiped a tear from her eyes.
“More than once, Calum told me that I saved him from an early death. Before me, he’d been a workaholic. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had to step back or delegate to be there for me.”

“Thanks for telling me that. I would have loved to have met Calum. From what you have said, he was so different to my father.”

Sarah smiled and took Jak’s hand.
“If you meet Calum's challenge, then you will never have to see him again. From what you have said, he’d probably explode on the spot if he saw you in a dress.”

“True,” said Jak, smiling.

“On that subject,” said a grinning Sarah.

Jak’s heart always went racing when she looked at him like that.
“Shall we head back east? I have the perfect outfit for you to wear for your first trip out.”

“Eh?”

She grinned again.
“Yes, Jak, it is time to think seriously about starting the challenge, and don’t you dare give me that look!”

He didn’t say a thing.
“Don’t worry, where I plan to go with you for this first outing is very LGBT-friendly.”

Jak looked worried.
“I’ll be right at your side. You will be fine.”

[to be continued]