Keogh’s grandfather had been Irish, moving from Dublin to Scotland in 1918 at the end of the war and working in Glasgow as a builder. His grandmother had been a Russian lady of some note, who fled the Revolution in 1920 and took up residence in an Edinburgh house close to the sea. There Sean Keogh met her, and in 1926 they’d been married. Three years later Harry’s uncle Michael was born, and in 1931 his mother, Mary.
Sean Keogh had been hard on his son, apparently, bringing him into the building business (which he’d hated) and working him hard from the age of fourteen; but by comparison he had seemed literally to dote on his daughter, for whom nothing had ever been good enough. This had caused some jealousy between brother and sister, which came to an end when Michael was nineteen and ran off south to set himself up in a business of his own. Michael was the uncle Harry Keogh now lived with.
By the time Mary Keogh was twenty-one, however, her father’s doting had turned to a fierce possessiveness which totally shut her off from any sort of social life, so that she stayed mainly at home and helped with the housework, or assisted her aristocratic Russian mother in the small psychic circle she had built up, when she would attend and regularly take part in those stances for which Natasha Keogh had become something of a local celebrity.
Then, in the summer of ’53, Scan Keogh had been killed when an unsafe wall he was working on fell on him. His wife, who for all that she was not yet fifty was already ailing, had sold the business and gone into semi-retirement, holding the occasional seance to eke out her living, which now mainly derived from the interest on banked money. For Mary, on the other hand, the death of her father had heralded a hitherto undreamed-of freedom; quite literally, a ‘coming out’.
For the next two years she enjoyed a social life limited only by her tiny allowance, until by the winter of ’55 she had met and married an Edinburgh man twenty-five years her senior, a banker in the city. He was Gerald Snaith, and he and Mary had been very happy for all the gap in their age groups, living in a large house in its own private grounds not far from Bonnyrigg. Unfortunately, by then Mary’s mother was rapidly sickening and her doctors had diagnosed cancer; so that Mary lived half of her time at Bonnyrigg, and the rest of it looking after her mother, Natasha, at the seaside house in Edinburgh.
Harry ‘Keogh’ was therefore born Harry Snaith just nine months after his grandmother died in 1957 – and just a year before his banker father would follow her, dying from a stroke in his office at the bank.
Mary Keogh was a strong girl and still very young. She had already sold the old family house by the sea and now found herself sole beneficiary of her husband’s not inconsiderable estate. Deciding to get away from Edinburgh for a little while, in the spring of ’59 she had come down to Harden and hired a house until the end of July, spending a lot of time in becoming reconciled with her brother and in getting to know his new wife. During that time she saw how his business was declining and helped out with sufficient hard cash to tide him over.
It was then, too, that Michael first detected an aura of sadness or hopelessness about his sister. When he asked what was bothering her (other, of course, than the recent death of her husband, which still weighed heavily) she reminded him of their mother’s ‘sixth sense’, her psychic sensitivity. She believed she had inherited something of it; it ‘told’ her that she would not have a long life. That didn’t worry her unduly – what would be would be – but she did worry about little Harry. What would become of him, if anything should happen to her while he was still a child?
It was unlikely that Michael Keogh and his wife, Jenny, would be able to have children of their own. They had known this when they married, but mutually agreed that it was not a matter of overriding importance; their feelings for each other came first. Later, when their small business was better established, there would be time enough to consider adoption. In these circumstances, however, and