The Turning Tide by Brooke Magnanti

London?’
    ‘Tomorrow, possibly the day after,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’ The Major wandered to the bar window. The inn overlooked the decaying town centre with its downtrodden hotels and muddy little square and clutches of visitors snapping photos of the grey waterfront. Tourist buses carried people in and out all times of year, dozens of Canadians and Americans disgorging to have a look around at the shortbread tin landscape, take a couple of photos with a bagpiper on the high street and then climb back aboard to be whisked away to Loch Ness.
    ‘We have a situation, Whitney,’ she said. ‘The . . . thing I had you take care of over the holidays? Three guesses what turned up on a beach in Scotland yesterday afternoon.’
    The Major sucked in his breath. Suddenly a pint of ale seemed entirely insufficient for the occasion. This called for a stiff whisky. ‘No,’ he protested.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you hear anything about it in the news up there? It was in the paper and on a couple of websites, though they haven’t identified the body yet.’
    ‘I never read the local news,’ he said. ‘Pointless waste of time.’
    ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Well, try not to say that too loudly or too often, if you can manage to do so. I can’t imagine your future constituents would be terribly pleased to hear it.’
    ‘Do we know anything about the . . . package?’ he asked.
    ‘Nothing yet,’ she said. ‘It’s in Cameron Bridge mortuary.’
    ‘How do you know it’s him? If it was only found yesterday. Don’t bodies usually take, I don’t know, months to identify?’ The Major really did not know, although his sinking stomach felt as if he probably did.
    ‘Maybe, maybe not. But the location. And the news is already reporting it was found in a bag,’ she said. ‘The body is with a pathologist, although from what I understand, she isn’t top-tier.’
    Whitney breathed out. ‘Good. Good. Even if it is our man, there may be wiggle room yet.’
    ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But I hope you understand it’s a situation that I would sooner not be in at all. And that if this is what I fear it is, then you need to be as far away from this as humanly possible.’
    ‘Goes without saying,’ the Major said. ‘But no plan survives first contact, as we say in—’
    ‘Yes, yes, as you say in the Corps,’ she finished for him. ‘You’ve mentioned it once or twice.’
    Major Whitney Abbott gritted his teeth but said nothing about her dismissive attitude. He needed her more than she needed him. The penny had dropped around the time he found himself giving an after-dinner speech at a banking conference last year. He was rehashing the Battle of Mount Harriet for the hundredth time and noticed the audience looking fidgety and bored where before they had been amused and engaged. When he described what it had been like in the middle of the night, dug into his own trench, eyes searching the dark – that was where he was accustomed to the audience falling silent, reverent, in awe. But it wasn’t happening. Instead of a thousand eyes on him, he looked across the room to see heads bent over the light of a hundred mobiles. The room clinked and jangled with glasses and the sound of cutlery on dessert plates, hummed with vibrating phones replying to texts and calls.
    They weren’t interested in war stories. They were there for the scandal, and as soon as he refused to talk about it, they switched off. He might as well have been talking to the bathroom mirror. He looked out over the crowd and saw more than just young people who had never known war glued to their mobiles. He saw the gulf between his generation and theirs. He had committed the cardinal sin of any entertainer – good or bad, you had to hold the room. They had to love you or hate you. Indifference was poison.
    Soon after that the slowdown in bookings hit. News shows stopped inviting him to be on panels. Papers sent fewer requests for interviews. He went