The Prisoner's Dilemma Read Online Free PDF Page A

the floor and curled up, gasping in his sobs. His mother sat with him, rocking backwards and forwards, still too stunned for grief. But although she was shocked there was disbelief in her thoughts too. She knew that Alistair was a gentle, easily led creature. James had always been the bolder, the more dominant of her two sons. And now this change in them both. How had that happened?
    She rose to her feet and picked up her shawl.
    â€˜Come out with me, Andrew,’ she said in a flat, distant voice to her husband ‘we must go down there and look for ourselves.’

Chapter 3
    Once he’d closed the castle’s great door Dunbeath strolled easily back to his study.
    For an hour or more he sat deep in thought, gazing out of the window at the growing light of the dawn. Eventually he appeared to reach a conclusion. Taking a clean sheet of paper from a drawer, he loaded a quill with ink and quickly wrote a few lines. He then folded the page inwards, scribbled a name and address on the front and sealed the ends with wax, stamped firmly with the crest of his ring.
    Leaving the room he went up a spiral staircase and along a corridor to a small door at the far end. He hammered hard on the wood.
    â€˜Annie! Annie woman, come down. I have something for you.’
    He returned to his study and continued to gaze out of the window, his face blank with concentration, as if turning over a puzzle in his mind.
    Annie McKay, his housekeeper, knocked timidly at the open oak door as she came in. She was in her sixties but looked far older. Stooped and beaten by life, her blotched face and half shut eyes showed only too well why she would have slept through the noisy turmoil that had taken place only a couple of hours earlier.
    â€˜There you are, Annie,’ said Dunbeath grimly, glancing up at her sodden face. ‘I want you to find someone in the village to take this letter to Edinburgh. A reliable man now. What about that cousin of yours? Tell him to walk to Wick and take the coach down. He’s to wait for an answer.’ He dug in a drawer for some gold coins. ‘Give him these and tell him I expect him back with all speed.’
    Annie nodded and began to collect some of Dunbeath’s discarded dinner plates, but he waved her away with an impatient waft of his hand.
    * * * 
    Four days later, Gordon McKay hurried through the wet streets of Edinburgh in the late afternoon, peering up at the houses with the baffled alarm of a country visitor. Lost yet again, he stopped and asked an elderly man the way. At last he found the house he was looking for. He checked the address against the letter, picked up the brass ring set in the lion’s head knocker and timidly brought it down.
    A young maid answered and McKay handed the letter over to her.
    â€˜It’s for Mr Hume,’ he said, ‘I’m to wait until he’s read it and then take an answer back.’
    The maid nodded and stepped aside to let him in.
    Ten minutes later David Hume stood at a window in his study holding the letter at an angle to catch the last of the afternoon light. He was tall, but his height was reduced by stooping, and his smooth skin and the babyish colouring of his cheeks were in odd contrast to the corpulence of his frame. He wore a small white wig and he pushed this back now as he read the letter for a second time, his kindly features composed in concentration as he absorbed its contents. Then he folded the paper and put it in the inside pocket of his frock coat. The coat was new that day and as he touched the cloth he realised with delight that there was a sliver of heavy silk that he hadn’t noticed before at the lip of the pocket. He ran his finger over it now with an appreciative smile.
    Today was his thirty fourth birthday and it was one of his great pleasures each year to mark the passage of time with a gift to his wardrobe. This year’s addition was a spectacular success. The tailor was an artist, of that