The Chessmen l-3

by Peter May

  Suddenly the brake-lights of the car in front filled our windscreen, blurred and dragged across it by the wipers. I stood on my brakes, feeling the car drifting beneath me, swinging left, and then right as I pumped the brake for grip and swung the wheel one way then the other to right the skid. We stopped, I think, within six inches of the rear bumper of the police car.

  There was an almost collective exhalation of relief from Roddy, Strings and Mairead, and I sat clutching the wheel, breathing hard. For what felt like an inordinate length of time nothing happened. Both cars sat there, one behind the other, engines idling.

  I could see Tuckfield’s frightened face, half turned to peer back at us through the dark. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

  Then the driver’s door of the police car swung slowly open. A goliath of a uniformed police sergeant stepped out on to the street, pulling on his cap and tugging its shiny peak down over his eyes. He stood for a moment glaring at us, then walked slowly towards my side of the car, one hand on his hip, the other touching the handle of the baton that hung from his belt.

  I wound down the window as he leaned in to peer at me. His face was impassive, and his dark eyes flickered first towards Mairead, and then Roddy and Strings in the back, before returning to me. I could see a shaving of ginger hair around his head beneath his cap. ‘Are you in the band?’

  ‘I’m the roadie.’

  He nodded and took a black notebook and pen from his breast pocket. He reached past me and handed it to Mairead. ‘My daughter’s got your CD. I figure she’d love to have your autograph.’

  Mairead gave him one of her smiles. ‘Of course.’ She took his notebook, found a blank page and signed it. She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Do you want the others?’

  ‘Are they in the group?’

  ‘They are.’

  He nodded, and Mairead handed his notebook back for Roddy and Strings to sign. Roddy reached over my shoulder to give it to me, and I handed it back. He returned it to his breast pocket, then focused his glare on me once more. To my surprise he thrust his big hand through my window.

  ‘I’ll shake your hand, son.’ For a moment I couldn’t bring my arm to move, before suddenly it reached up, almost involuntarily, for my hand to be gripped by his. A warm, firm handshake, that he held for what seemed like an eternity. When finally he returned it to me he said, ‘You’ve got some fucking nerve, boy, I’ll give you that.’ He paused to draw a long breath. ‘Your story had better be good.’

  So I told him. He stood and listened in silence, his slow, stertorous breathing pulsing out clouds of misted breath to swirl around his head. When I had finished he nodded and drew in his lips. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, son. And here’s the thing.’ He nodded towards his car. ‘Mr Tuckfield there has friends in high places. And I’m just doing what I’m told, no questions asked. So whatever the rights or wrongs of what’s gone down here tonight, you’ll be going home without your money, and damned lucky not to be spending the night in a police cell.’ I could have sworn then that there was a smile in his eyes that he was doing his best to conceal. ‘In all my years in the force,’ he said, ‘I have never been chased in a police car. And I’m damned sure it’ll never happen again.’ He flicked his head back down the hill towards the seafront. ‘On your way.’ He leaned down, then, smiling past me at Mairead, and tapped his breast pocket. ‘Thanks for the autographs.’

  We sat in silence and watched as he got back behind the wheel of his car and drove off into the night. I could see Tuckfield’s smug face grinning back at us. I wound up the window and Roddy said, ‘Donald’s fucking dead!’

  I never was party to exactly what transpired between Roddy and Donald, but within the week the band had fired him and signed up with an established London agency. And while Donald’s career and life then went into free fall, Amran’s fortunes soared. They made several television appearances, and Roddy and Strings were commissioned to write a song for a Hollywood movie being shot in Scotland. The producers liked it so much they asked the band to write and record all the incidental music, which then became the basis of their next album. The subsequent success of the film led to even greater success for Amran. The song was released as a single and shot straight into the charts at No. 1, where it stayed for almost five weeks. By the time their next CD was in the music stores, they were riding high on what appeared to be an unstoppable track to the top.

  Except that Roddy, for all his talent and all his ambition, never lived to see it.

  I remember that it was the following summer, June or July, when I heard. I had got drunk the previous night, on the rebound from a relationship of several months, and ended up in the bed of a girl I’d met at a party. She was a student, living in a bedsit in Partick, on the downmarket edge of Glasgow’s west end. I didn’t wake up till ten or eleven, pretty hungover and with very little recollection of what had passed between us the previous night. She didn’t even seem familiar to me as she leaned over the bed and shook me gently awake.

  ‘You told me last night you roadied for Amran,’ she said.

  I could hardly open my mouth, it was so dry. ‘So?’

  ‘Roddy Mackenzie’s the keyboard player, right?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, what about it?’ I screwed up my eyes against the light.

  ‘It’s all over the morning news. Apparently his plane went missing somewhere up the west coast yesterday evening. Search and rescue have been out all night. They’ve given up hope of finding him alive. They’re just looking for wreckage out at sea now.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The wind buffeted and bullied Donald and Fin as they walked down through the dying light towards Port of Ness, and Fin told Donald about the discovery that he and Whistler had made that morning. The street lamps were already on, all the way along to the big white house at the end of the road. They turned off before then, opposite Ocean Villa, and followed the winding band of tarmac down to the harbour. Lobster creels were piled up against the inner wall of the jetty. There had been some repair work done where the weather had wreaked its damage. But the far wall, standing against the furious assaults of the north-easterlies, was smashed beyond any redemption. Fin had seen waves fifty feet high breaking over it when he was a boy, white spume rising twice that height, to be whipped away by force-ten gales and carried off across the cliffs.

  Tonight, with the wind blowing from the south-west, the harbour was relatively sheltered, although the few crabbers tied up within its walls were rising and falling on the swell, and tugging determinedly at their ropes. When they reached the end of the jetty wall, Donald cupped his hands around a cigarette and made several attempts to light it. When finally he did so, the smoke was whipped away from his mouth. ‘I still find it hard to believe that he’s dead. Even after all these years.’ He shook his head. ‘Everything about Roddy was larger than life. His talent, his ego, his ambition. Talk about blind ambition! That was Roddy. It consumed him to the point where nothing else mattered. Where he couldn’t see the hurt he was inflicting on the people around him.’

  ‘People like you?’

  Donald flicked him a look. ‘I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  Fin laughed out loud. ‘Donald, I never thought for a minute that you did. Whoever killed him could fly an aeroplane and land it on water. Even if you could fly, in those days you were in no state to ride as much as a bicycle.’

  Donald looked away, clenching his jaw. It was not something in which he took pleasure of being reminded. ‘He cut me loose without a word, Fin. There was no contract with the band, then. Just trust. And he betrayed that trust. The first I knew about it was when I read in the NME that Amran had signed with the Copeland Agency in London. They had some tie-in with CAA in Los Angeles, and that’s what brought Amran the film deal.’

  ‘Maybe you hadn’t been doing a whole hell of a lot to earn their trust, Donald. Or advance their career.’

  Donald pulled on his cigarette and shook his head sadly. ‘Oh, I know. I was an ass, Fin. I
n almost every possible way. I did things, said things in those days that. . well, that I still can’t forgive myself for. It fills me with shame every time I look back on how I was.’

  ‘I’m sure God knows it was just a passing phase.’

  Donald’s head snapped around, anger blazing in his eyes. But all he said was, ‘Don’t be so cynical, Fin. It’s ugly.’

  Fin said, ‘So you never actually had it out with him face to face?’

  Donald sucked more smoke into his lungs. ‘Never. I probably deserved his anger, though he never had the guts to face me with it. But it was me who got them that first recording deal, Fin. They would just have been another university band otherwise, all going their separate ways when they got their degrees.’ He flicked his cigarette away into the wind. ‘When they signed for Copeland it was the beginning of the end for me. I got the boot from the Joey Cuthbertson Agency not long after that. Went down to London. But that was just tipping myself out of the wee frying pan into the big fire.’ He snorted his self-contempt. ‘Addictive personality, you see. Never could resist a temptation.’ The same addictive personality, Fin thought, which made him cling now to his religion. And then Fin heard the irony in his chuckle. ‘Strange that it was Catriona who proved to be my salvation. Or, at least, a drunken night of unbridled passion and unprotected sex that got her pregnant. There’s nothing like having responsibility for another life to make you start caring about your own.’

  Fin wondered if feeling responsibility for Fin’s life had made Whistler care any more about his. Somehow he didn’t think so. But he didn’t share the thought with Donald.

  ‘Pure chance, too, that I met her down there,’ Donald said. ‘You must remember her from school. She was a couple of years behind us at the Nicolson.’

  Fin nodded.

  ‘I used to think that God had sent her to rescue me.’ He paused. ‘But maybe I was wrong about that.’

  ‘Did you ever go flying with Roddy, Donald?’

  ‘Hell, no! I’ve got no head for heights, Fin. I hate flying at the best of times.’ He scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘As I recall, after he and Mairead split up he had his own circle of friends. Whether he went flying with them or not, I wouldn’t know. I remember he got involved with some Glasgow girl. No idea what her name was. But she was quite classy. A real looker. And not short of a few quid.’

  ‘Yes, I remember her.’ Fin had a picture of her in his mind’s eye at a party in a large sandstone villa on the south side of Glasgow. A beautiful, willowy, blonde girl.

  ‘That was just before I left for London.’ Donald smiled. ‘Roddy never did have any trouble finding himself a woman.’

  ‘Neither did you, Donald.’

  There was a flicker of his old self in Donald’s eyes before he forced the focus back on Roddy. ‘It’s strange, though.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘How the band went from strength to strength without Roddy. Just goes to show that for all his high opinion of himself, it was Strings who was the bigger musical influence.’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t listened to them once in all these years. God teaches us to forgive, but it’s very hard to forget. And I know that just the sound of Mairead’s voice would bring it all back. And I don’t need that pain as well.’

  He tried to light another cigarette, but the wind was too ferocious now and he gave up. They felt the first spots of rain whipping into their faces.

  ‘Roddy wasn’t universally popular, Fin. I know that. God knows, I had reason enough to hate him myself. But who would have wanted to murder him? And why?’

  Fin shook his head. ‘I haven’t the first idea, Donald.’

  The rain turned into a deluge then, and the two men ran from the jetty towards the boat shed at the end of the beach. Donald slid one of the doors open and they slipped inside, soaked already. It smelled of diesel and fish in here, and the shadows of small boats were canted at odd angles between windows that gave out on to the beach and the sound of the sea. There was almost no light left before Donald’s lighter suddenly illuminated his face, painting it orange by its flickering light, then red in the glow of the lit tobacco, before fading back into darkness.

  Neither spoke for a moment, gripped unexpectedly by a sense of being in the presence of the dead. For it was here that Angel Macritchie had met his death. The murder that had brought Fin back to the island of his birth after an absence of eighteen years. In the dark, with their memories, the ghost of Macritchie made its presence felt, the chill wind whipping through ill-fitting doors and open windows, wrapping itself around them.

  Fin stamped his feet, more to exorcize the ghost than to warm himself. His voice sounded abnormally loud. ‘I don’t suppose the Presbytery have fixed a date for your hearing yet?’

  ‘It’ll be within the fortnight. In the Free Church hall in Kenneth Street in Stornoway.’ As Donald pulled on his cigarette his face again reflected its glow. ‘They’ve engaged legal counsel, I’m told. I’ve read up on the Acts of Assembly that set out the conditions for establishing a judicial commission. It seems that the hearing will pretty much follow the same course it would in a court of law.’

  ‘Then presumably you can appoint counsel yourself?’

  Donald’s laugh came like a gunshot out of the dark. ‘Aye. If I could afford it.’

  ‘They’ll be calling Fionnlagh and Donna to give evidence, too, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ve asked them not to.’

  Fin was astonished. ‘Why not? There’s nobody closer to what happened that day than the two of them.’

  ‘They’ve suffered enough,’ Donald said. ‘I’ll not put them through it all again.’

  Fin thought about raising an argument, but realized even before he opened his mouth that there would be no point. Donald had sacrificed everything to save them once. Why would he subject them to a repeat performance? He would rather they threw him out of the Church.

  ‘Anyway, hopefully George Gunn will testify. He took statements from them both, and has to be seen as a reliable and unbiased witness.’

  ‘He is, Donald. But that very lack of bias could work against you.’

  Donald nodded solemnly. ‘I know.’

  More silence in the dark. Fin could smell Donald’s cigarette smoke. He said, ‘How do you think it will go?’

  ‘I think,’ said Donald, ‘that before the month is over I’ll be out of a job, and out of my house.’

  ‘And Catriona?’

  Donald’s face gave away nothing in the light of his cigarette. ‘You’d have to ask her that, Fin.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It never failed to affect him, seeing his aunt’s house lying derelict and forgotten. Peeling whitewash, broken slates, windows smashed or boarded up, like missing teeth in a neglected mouth.

  Oddly, he never thought of it as anything other than his aunt’s house. Never his home. And yet he had spent the greater part of his childhood here, in a cold, damp bedroom with its rusty-framed dormer window looking out over the rocky bay below. He remembered the first time she had brought him here to live. Just days after the death of his parents. A handful of possessions in a small brown case that she had placed on the bed, telling him to pack them away while she went and made something for their tea. And he had sat on his own, feeling the cold damp of the mattress beneath him seeping into his very soul, and wept.

  He stood now on the pitted tarmac in front of the house, looking up at the window of that room, a window that gave on to a past he had no wish to revisit. And yet somehow it was always there. In good memories and bad. Of a life long gone, populated by people long dead. And there was no escaping it.

  As he frequently did, he wondered what point there was in it all. Were we really just here to procreate and pass on, leaving our seed upon the earth to do as we had done, as our fathers had done before us, and theirs before them? A meaningless cycle of birth, life, death?

  He walked to the edge of the path that led down to the shore, a shingle beach in a boulder-strewn cove where he
had often played among the ruins of the old salting house. He almost expected to see himself down there: a lonely boy seeking solace in the world of his imagination.

  It was a long, sleepless night which had sparked his mood. Images of Roddy’s broken, decayed body in the plane. The look on Whistler’s face. The big man walking away, climbing back up to the ridge only to disappear. And Fin had woken from shallow dreams in a sweat, with the certainty in his heart that Whistler knew something he wasn’t telling. And yet his shock at the discovery of the body had been as great, if not greater, than Fin’s.

  He had risen early, leaving Marsaili sleeping, and set off along the cliffs above Crobost, until he reached the sheltered inlet where generations earlier his ancestors had built the small harbour. A steep ramp down to a short jetty and a deep pool among the rocks where they kept live crabs in cages until they could be shipped out to foreign markets. It seemed that everything good about this island left it. Its resources. Its people. And all their ambitions.

  The wind blew strong in the sunshine, cumulus bubbling up and tracking across a vast, ever-changing sky. And still it was not cold, even though October was just an exhalation away. Fin sat himself down among the dry grasses, pulling his knees up to his chest to hug them, gazing out over choppy green water that rose and fell in gently coruscating swells across the bay.

  And he remembered the day that Whistler had first come to spend the night here with him and his aunt.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It’s strange that history should have affected us the way it did. But the discovery that our antecedents had survived the Iolaire together, one because of the other, formed a bond between me and Whistler that no one else could really understand. We were very different animals, he and I. I was quite a self-contained boy as a teenager, I think. I didn’t make friends easily. And perhaps that’s the only thing that Whistler and I really had in common. I was a cool, even-tempered lad, not much prone to depression, although there was plenty I could have got depressed about when I think back on it. Whistler, on the other hand, could fall into a black funk in the blink of an eye if things didn’t go just the way he planned. Other times he would be irresistibly funny, the life and soul of any party.