by Peter May
Have I? I put my hand to my face and feel how wet it is.
Twenty-eight
The old priest’s house sat up on the hill overlooking Charlie’s beach, just before the curve of the road, where the single track led off to Parks and Acarsaid Mhor. He was a shrunken man, the priest, stooped and wizened by the years and the weather, though he had a fine head of white hair on him, and sharp blue eyes that betrayed a keen intelligence.
From the door of his old crofthouse you could see right along the length of Coilleag a’ Phrionnsa and down to the new breakwater almost immediately below, with a fine view out across the Sound of Barra.
Fin had arrived mid-morning and stood on the doorstep taking in the view while he waited for the old man to answer his knock, sunshine cascading in waves across the crystal turquoise of the bay, the wind yanking at his trousers and his jacket.
“I can’t imagine a better place on earth to pass your final years.” The priest’s voice had startled Fin, and he turned to find the old man gazing out over the Sound. “I watch the roll-on roll-off come and go from Barra every day, and I keep promising myself that one time I’ll get on it and make a wee trip across the water. Visit old friends before they die. It’s a beautiful island, Barra. Do you know it?”
Fin shook his head.
“Then you should pay a visit yourself, and not be a procrastinator like me. Come away in.”
He bent now over the dining table in the living room, where sketches and photographs lay strewn among open albums filled with cuttings and photocopies and handwritten lists. He had laid everything out immediately after the phone call from Fin. It was not often he got the chance to show off his collection. Beneath a buttoned-up green cardigan he wore a white shirt with a fine brown check, open at the neck. His grey flannel trousers gathered in folds over his brown slippers. Fin noticed that there was dirt beneath his fingernails, and that he had not shaved for perhaps two days, a fine silver stubble clinging to the loose flesh of his face.
“The Eriskay jersey is one of the rarest pieces of craftwork you’ll find in Scotland today,” he said.
Fin was surprised. “They are still made?”
“Aye. For the co-operative, the Co-Chomunn Eirisgeidh. There’s only a few women still producing them. In the old days they were single-coloured. Navy blue. But they make them in cream now, too. It’s a shame, but the single colour doesn’t really show off the intricacy of the patterns.”
He reached down into a carrier bag on the floor and drew out an example of the jersey to show to Fin. He flattened it out across the table, and Fin could see what the old priest meant. The pattern was incredibly fine, with row upon row of vertical, horizontal and angled ribs, some in diamond shapes, others in a zigzag motif. The old man ran his finger lightly over the ribbed blue wool.
“They use very fine needles and a tight stitch. As you can see, the jersey is seamless. Very warm and dry. It takes about two weeks to knit one.”
“And every family had its own distinct pattern?”
“Aye, they did. Passed down through the generations. Used to be practised all over the Hebrides at one time, but only in Eriskay now. And no doubt it’ll die out here, too, in the end. The young ones don’t show much interest in taking it on. Takes too long, you see. The girls now want everything today. Or even yesterday.” He smiled sadly and shook his head at Fin. “Which is why I thought it would be a shame for such a fine craft to pass into history unrecorded.”
“And you have examples of every family pattern on the island?”
“Pretty much so. For about the last seventy years anyway. Can I get you something to drink? A wee dram, maybe.”
Fin declined politely. “It’s a bit early for me.”
“Och, it’s never too early for a sip of whisky, Mr. Macleod. I didn’t get to be this age by waiting for a nip, or drinking milk.” He grinned and crossed to an old bureau with a drop-down door that opened to reveal a collection of bottles. He selected one and poured himself a small measure. “Sure I can’t tempt you?”
Fin smiled. “No thanks.”
The old priest returned to the table and took a tiny sip. “Do you have an example of what it is you’re looking for?”
“I do.” Fin took Gunn’s fax from his bag and smoothed it over the jersey on the table.
The old man peered at it. “Oh, aye. Definitely an Eriskay pattern,” he said. “Where did you get this?”
Fin hesitated. “It was drawn from an impression left by a blanket, or a rug. Something knitted anyway.”
The priest nodded. “Well, it’ll take me some time to compare it with all my samples. If I can’t tempt you to a wee dram, make yourself a cup of tea.” He nodded towards the stove. “And sit in by the fire. I’d offer you a Bible to read.” He smiled mischievously. “But it’s maybe a bit early in the day for stuff that strong.”
Fin sat by the fire, nursing a mug of dark, sweet tea, and gazed from the small, recessed window out across the beach below. All his instincts told him that he was looking down on the scene of the crime. That this was where the young man whose body had been taken from the peat bog in Lewis had actually been murdered. He still had no idea yet who that young man was, although if he held his breath and listened to the wind he could almost hear it whisper that he was within touching distance now.
“Mr. Macleod?”
Fin turned his head towards the table.
The old priest smiled. “I think I might have found who knitted this.”
Fin stood up and crossed the room to join the priest at the table, and found himself looking down at an old black-and-white photograph of an Eriskay jersey. It was pin-sharp, and placed next to Gunn’s fax of the artist’s sketch it was possible—eyes flickering back and forth from one to the other—to make a direct comparison between the patterns. The old man indicated all the points of correlation. There were too many to be in any doubt that they had been knitted by the same hand. They were, to all intents and purposes, identical.
Fin stabbed the fax with his finger. “But this wasn’t a jersey.”
“No.” The priest shook his head thoughtfully. “I think it was a bed cover of some kind. Knitted squares sewn together. It would have been wonderfully warm.” He traced the faint outline of the right-angled corner of one of the squares, and Fin thought that a dead man would have had no need of warmth. “You still haven’t told me where you got this.”
“I’m afraid,” Fin said, “that I’m not really at liberty to say just yet.”
The old man nodded with the fatalistic acceptance of someone whose life had been built on faith.
But Fin couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer. “Whose knitting pattern is it?”
The priest turned over the photograph, and written on the other side in a neat hand and faded ink was the name Mary-Ann Gillies. And the date 1949.
The ruin stood in an elevated position on the hillside, almost lost in long grass that bowed in the wind. The top half of the crofthouse had fallen down years before, the front door an opening between two crumbling walls. Small, deep-set windows on either side of it remained intact, although all wood and glass were long gone. Chimneys survived at each gable. One even had a tall, yellow ceramic pot still perched precariously on top of it. The foundations of other buildings around the house remained visible among the grasses: a shed where they no doubt kept the beasts; a barn for storing the hay for winter feed. The strip of land where it would have been grown extended down the hill to the road below. At the far side of the road, sunlight glistered all across the small bay and the Sound beyond it. Cloud fragments raced across the bluest of skies, chasing their own shadows across the hillside. In the tiny, wind-blasted garden of a white cottage at the roadside, tall spring flowers with vividly coloured red and yellow heads ducked and dived among the turbulent currents of air.
Clearly visible from here, on the hilltop opposite, stood the granite church built from the proceeds of a single night’s catch. It had dominated the life of the island for more t
han a century, and physically loomed over it still.
Fin picked his way carefully through the interior of the crofthouse, a jumble of fallen walls half-hidden by grasses and nettles. This was the Gillies croft that Morag McEwan had pointed out to him yesterday. The home of the boy called Donald John, who had been belted for disobeying his headmaster at Daliburgh school. The home of Mary-Anne Gillies, who had knitted the blanket whose pattern was blanched into the body of a young man taken from a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis four hours north of here. More, Fin reflected. For in the days when the body had been buried, the roads would have been much poorer, there would have been few if any causeways, and the ferry crossings would have taken longer. To the folk living on Eriskay back then, the Isle of Lewis would have been a whole world away.
The blast of a car’s horn was carried to him on the wind, and he stepped out of the ruin, knee-deep in spittle-grass and yellow flowers, to see Morag’s pink Mercedes drawn up beside his own car at the foot of the hill. The roof was down, and she waved up at him.
He started off down the hill, treading cautiously through the patches of bog where the land squelched beneath his feet, until he reached the car. Dino barked a greeting from his accustomed place on his mistress’s lap. “Good morning,” Fin said.
“What are you doing up there, a ghràidh?”
“You told me yesterday that was the Gillies croft.”
“Aye, that’s right.”
“And that a homer called Donald John Gillies lived there.”
“Yes. With old Donald Seamus and his sister, Mary-Anne.”
Fin nodded thoughtfully. “Just the three of them?”
“No, Donald John had a brother.” Morag sheltered a fresh cigarette from the wind as she lit it. “Just trying to remember his name . . .” She got her cigarette going and blew out a long stream of smoke that vanished at the same moment it left her lips. “Peter,” she said at last. “Donald Peter. That was his name.” She laughed. “Everyone here’s called Donald. It’s your middle name that counts.” Then she shook her head sadly. “Poor Peter. A lovely boy he was. But not all there, if you know what I mean.”
And Fin knew then that he had found the place that Marsaili’s father had come from, and whose body it was they had dug out of the bog at Siader.
Twenty-nine
A strange calm had settled across the northern half of the Isle of Lewis. In contrast to the confusion of chaotic thoughts which had filled Fin’s mind on the long drive north.
He had not stopped once, except for the half-hour spent in Stornoway briefing George Gunn on what he had discovered. Gunn had listened in silence in the incident room. He had stood staring out over the roofs of the houses opposite, towards Lews Castle and the trees on the hill, the final sunshine of the day slanting down among the branches and lying in long pink strips across the slope. And he had said, “So the dead boy is Marsaili’s father’s brother.”
“Donald Peter Gillies.”
“Except that neither of them is really called Gillies. That’s just their homer names.”
Fin nodded acknowledgement.
“And we have no idea where they came from, or what their real names might be.”
After leaving Stornoway, Fin had thought about that on the drive across the Barvas moor, and through all the villages of the west coast. Siader, Galson, Dell, Cross. A blur of churches, each one a different denomination. Of DAF 2s and 3s, whitehouses, blackhouses, modern harled bungalows, braced all along the coast for the next assault.
He had no idea what kind of record, if any, the Church might have kept of those poor children it had torn from homes on the mainland to transport to the islands. There was no guarantee that the local authorities would be any more forthcoming. It was all so long ago. And who had cared back then about the human detritus of failed families, or orphaned children without relatives to champion their rights? Fin’s overwhelming emotion was one of shame that such things should have been so recently perpetrated by his fellow countrymen.
The biggest problem in trying to identify who Donald John and Donald Peter Gillies actually were, was that no one had any idea where they came from. They would have arrived, anonymous passengers off the ferry at Lochboisdale, with cards around their necks and their past erased. And now, with Peter dead and his brother John lost in a fog of dementia, who was there to remember? Who was there to testify as to who they had really been? Those boys were lost for ever, and the likelihood was that neither he, nor the police, would ever know who had killed Peter, or why.
The lights of Ness sparkled all across the headland in the gloom, like a reflection of the stars emerging in the clear, settled sky above. The wind that had buffeted his car on the unprotected drive up through the Uists had died to an unnatural stillness. In his rearview mirror he could still see the clouds brooding in their habitual gathering place around the peaks of Harris, and away to the west on an ocean like glass, the reflected last light of the day was fading into night.
There were three cars parked on the gravel above Marsaili’s bungalow. Fionnlagh’s Mini, Marsaili’s old Astra and Donald Murray’s SUV.
Donald and Marsaili were sitting together at the kitchen table when Fin knocked and walked in. For a moment he felt a strangely unpleasant pang of jealousy. After all, it had been Donald Murray who had taken Marsaili’s virginity all those years before. But that had been in another life, when they had all been very different people.
Donald nodded. “Fin.”
Marsaili said quickly, almost as if she wanted Fin to know straight away that there was no cause for jealousy, “Donald came with a proposition about Fionnlagh and Donna.”
Fin turned to Donald. “Has Fionnlagh been to see you?”
“He came this morning.”
“And?”
Donald’s smile was wry, and laden with history. “He’s his father’s son.” Fin couldn’t resist a smile.
Marsaili said, “They’ve moved in here permanently, the two of them. And the baby. They’re upstairs.” She flicked an uncertain glance Donald’s way. “Donald has suggested that he and I share the cost and responsibility of the baby to let Fionnlagh and Donna finish their studies. Even if it means one, or both of them, leaving the island to go to university. I mean, we all know how important it is not to throw away the opportunities life offers when you are young. You spend the rest of your life regretting it.”
There was more than just a hint of bitterness in her voice. And Fin wondered if there was recrimination in it, too.
“Sounds like a plan.”
Marsaili lowered her eyes to the table. “I’m just not sure I can afford it. Fionnlagh going to university, I mean. And the cost of the baby. I’ve been surviving on Artair’s life policy, and was hoping it would see me through university, if I get in. I guess I’ll have to postpone my degree and get a job in the meantime.”
“That would be a shame,” Fin said.
She shrugged. “Not much alternative.”
“There could be.”
She turned inquisitive eyes on him. “Like what?”
“Like you and I share the burden of your half.” He smiled. “I am Eilidh’s grandfather, after all. Maybe we can’t stop our children making the same mistakes we did, but at least we can be around to pick up the pieces.”
Donald’s gaze alternated between them, discerning and interpreting everything that remained unspoken. He stood up then. “Well, I’ll leave you two to talk about it.” He hesitated before offering Fin his hand. Then, at length, held it out and they shook. He left without another word.
The kitchen was oddly silent in the wake of his departure, burned out, almost unreal in the flickering glare of the overhead fluorescent. Somewhere deep in the house they could hear the thump, thump of Fionnlagh’s music.
Finally Marsaili said, “How can you afford it?”
Fin shrugged. “I have a bit put by. And it’s not my intention to remain unemployed for ever.”
More silence hung heavy between them. A silence
born of regret. Of all their failures, individually and together.
Fin said, “How did your exams go?”
“Don’t ask.”
He nodded. “I guess you weren’t exactly best prepared.”
“No.”
He drew a deep breath. “Marsaili, I have some news for you. About your dad.” Blue eyes fixed him in their gaze, filled with naked curiosity. “Why don’t we get out of here, get some fresh air. It’s a beautiful night out there, and there won’t be a soul on the beach.”
The night was filled with the whispering sound of the sea. It sighed, as if relieved by the removal of its obligation to maintain an angry demeanour. A three-quarters moon rose into the blackness above it and cast its light upon the water and the sand, a light that threw shadows and obscured truths in half-lit faces. The air was soft, and pregnant with the prospect of coming summer, a poetry in the night, carried in the shallow waves that burst like bubbling Hippocrene all along the beach.
Fin and Marsaili walked close enough to feel each other’s warmth, leaving tracks in virgin sand.
“There was a time,” Fin said, “when I would have held your hand when we walked along a beach like this.”
Marsaili turned a look of surprise towards him. “Can you read minds now?”
And Fin thought how completely natural it would have been, and how immediately embarrassing. He laughed. “Remember how I dropped that sack of crabs off the cliff on top of you girls sunbathing down here?”
“I remember slapping you so hard I hurt my hand.”
Fin grinned ruefully. “I remember that, too. I also remember you were topless at the time.”
“Damned peeping Tom!”
He smiled. “And I recall making love to you among the rocks back there, and skinny-dipping in the ocean afterwards to cool down.” When she didn’t react he turned to look at her and saw a distant look in her eyes, thoughts transporting her to some far-off place and time.
They were almost at the boat shed now. It loomed out of the darkness like a portent of past and future pain, and he put his hand lightly on her shoulder to turn her back the way they had come. Already the sea was washing up over their footprints, erasing any history of their ever having passed this way. He left his arm around her shoulder and felt her lean in to him as he steered her a little further up the beach, away from the water.
