Perhaps I clung to her as the only reality left to me, so that my mood of depression was overlaid by a sense of urgency. What had happened to me in Hull had made me realize I was dealing with people who did not make idle threats. It was dawn when we arrived in Musselburgh. I got a bus into Edinburgh, had breakfast in the station buffet and caught the first train to Aberdeen. The Star-Trion offices were in one of the solid residences near Mansfield Road, not far from the River Dee Dock. Some attempt had been made to modernize the place, but the effect was makeshift, as though the company were on a temporary lease and might move out at any moment. There was a telex machine in the outer office and a big fair girl at a typewriter. I told her who I was and asked her to book me a cabin on the night boat to Lerwick. ‘Don’t you have a return ticket by air?’ she asked. ‘You can’t just walk on to a flight,’ I said. But it was the closer check at Dyce that worried me, the isolation of the Sumburgh terminal.
