Roderick Grant - The Stalking Of Adrian Lawford

Darroch Falls in the Scottish Highlands. Colonel Sir James Willoughby Cunningham climbed up into the mountains and blew his brains out, and son Mark, now eighteen has always blamed his mother, a once famous fashion model known to have a series of flings during the marriage. Lady Cunningham in now forty, no longer quite the beauty she was due to her heavy drinking, and intent on marrying her present lover, Adrian Lawford.

Mark, needless to say, detests Adrian Lawford - "Everything about the man was pink; he was a small, fat, pink, obscene hulk of humanity, who sweated profusely" - and now, having conducted the relationship away from home, mother has invited Mr. Blobby to spend a holiday on the Cunningham Estate. Worse, she insists Mark picks him up at Inverness and drives him over. 'That's it', resolves the the young heir, 'Lawford is history'.

Another new arrival at the estate is the feisty young maid, Fiona MacLeod. Three weeks in the job and she's bored to distraction and resolves to seduce Mark who, she discovers to her delight, is a virgin, at least as far as girls are concerned. Public school has taught him to equate sex with inflicting punishment and, she's soon painfully aware of the cane he keeps in his bottom drawer. 'I can have fun and games with that', thinks Fiona, and does.

Mark reluctantly picks up Lawford in the Land-rover and brings him home via the scenic route. As they peer into the depths of Loch Ness, the passenger chooses a bad moment to confess he suffers from vertigo ....



Mark's first attempt to murder Adrian Lawford by accidentally sending the car over the mountain with his passenger locked inside ends in failure thanks to the untimely intervention of a pesky Scandinavian hiker, but he's not overly disappointed. At least Lawford sustains a broken leg in the episode and the hiker is easily bribed to keep his mouth shut about what really happened up there. Besides, the youth much preferred his original plan - to stalk his terrified prey across the glen and make him suffer - and settles on "The Glorious Twelfth" of August, the opening day of the grouse shooting season, for his re-enactment of The Most Dangerous Game. It ought to be a cinch but, of course, we wouldn't have much of a novel it it was ....

A brisk 122 page read, at least half of which is given over to the chase, and a tasty ending I didn't see coming. You could get a decent film out of this one.