Introducing Willie Souter...

Chapter 19, page 71

In her haste to see Donnie Ross, Eleanor had not noticed that one customer remained. Willie Souter was in the gents’ toilet as Eleanor locked up the bar. When Willie came out of the gents he found he had the bar to himself.
When the bar was locked and isolated from the rest of the building, residents would use a separate entrance at the side of the inn to gain access to their rooms. This arrangement was designed to protect the bar stock when no staff were present. It was not designed to lock the likes of Willie Souter in. For a few brief minutes Willie tried, rather half-heartedly, to find a way out. Then he resigned himself to being locked in and helped himself to a large Balblair, his favourite whisky.

Introducing John McGribben...

Chapter 26, page94

John McGribben was a senior elder of the kirk and influential in the local community. Children were told by their parents to show him respect. Respected or not, he was hardly liked. He was a tall, gaunt man with long, lined facial features. His eyes were pale and strangely emotionless and the veins on the end of his bulbous nose were inflamed from years of managing without too much heating in his damp house. Mrs McGribben had passed away many years previously and with no children McGribben now lived on his own. Whether this solitude had turned him sour it was hard to say. The sad fact was that McGribben was not an attractive personality.

Chapter 14, page 60

John McGribben’s version of Christianity inhabited the darker recesses of fundamentalism. Not for him the world and life-affirming theology of David MacLeod. To McGribben the world was a fallen place where Satan and his demons went abroad tempting souls to partake of pleasures that would surely see them damned for all eternity. Sex, in particular, was almost always sinful – only permitted, and only just, within the context of a legitimate marriage.
McGribben believed he was one of the elect, those pre-destined to eternal salvation, and he felt duty bound to teach righteous living to those less fortunate than himself. He took this duty very seriously, especially with his Sunday School pupils, and when it came to the evils of fornication and sexual pleasure, McGribben was prone to using practical demonstrations, in private, for those of his young pupils he thought most likely to stray.