by Peter May
Fin nodded towards the chessboard. ‘Still playing your old commanding officer by phone?’
‘By email now. Times move on.’ He headed for the kitchen. ‘Cup of tea, mate?’
‘Thanks.’ Fin sank into the settee and found himself looking at a wall lined with framed photographs of Minto with various groups of men, sometimes in uniform, sometimes casual. On parade, or in jungle camouflage in some lush tropical forest on the other side of the world. And he wondered at the solitary existence the man led now after years of comradeship and teamwork. But whatever he had lost in fellowship he had retained in the fastidious attention to detail and organization that the army had dinned into him. Everything had a place and had to be in it. A reason for going to bed at night and getting up in the morning. Except that with Minto, it was the other way around.
Fin glanced from the window across the acres of beach exposed by the outgoing tide, Baile na Cille on the far shore, the church, the burial ground, the wild, untamed beauty of this place. Did Minto have any real sense of it, or was this just somewhere to hide away from a life in civvies he had found hard to cope with? A misfit living on the fringes.
Unlike his last visit, Fin was served his tea in a mug, but the tray it came on contained a little china dish of sugar lumps and milk in a porcelain jug. Minto lifted the mug carefully on to one of half a dozen neatly placed coasters on the coffee table. He chose to drink his own tea standing in front of the fireplace, as if warming himself from the glow of non-existent peats. ‘You’ll be after these poachers, I suppose.’
Fin nodded and sipped at his mug. ‘Do you know Whistler Macaskill?’
‘Who doesn’t?’ Minto nodded towards a two-foot carving of a Lewis chessman on a small wooden table in the far corner of the room. Fin turned to look at it. ‘That’s one of his. Beautiful piece of work it is, too.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘Bought it off him. In fact, it was seeing that what gave old Sir John the idea for the gala day.’
Fin cocked his head and looked at him closely. ‘What idea was that?’
‘To have a full set of them made and placed on a giant chessboard on the beach. You know, for when they bring the originals here in October. They’ll be up in the old church over there in glass cases.’ He nodded towards the window. ‘Interesting, it is. The geezer what found them way back didn’t know what to do with them. So he took them to the minister of the church at Baile na Cille. One Reverend Macleod. So it’s a nice touch, the chessmen going back to that church. It’s in private hands now, right enough, but seems the new owners are happy to let them use it for the day.’ He took a thoughtful gulp of his tea. ‘Apparently they’re going to have a couple of real chess masters playing a game with the originals. And each move’s going to be relayed to a guy with a walkie-talkie down there on the beach. Then they’ll move the men on the big board to mirror the game in the church. That was Sir John’s idea anyway.’
‘How do you know all this?’
Minto seemed surprised. ‘Well, the old boy told me, didn’t he? It’s no big secret.’
‘His son doesn’t seem to know.’
‘Prat!’ Minto muttered it almost under his breath, as if uncertain how Fin might react to his disrespect.
‘It might be an idea if you mentioned it to him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Sir John is still in recovery from his stroke somewhere in England, and Jamie’s claiming no knowledge of it. So Whistler hasn’t been paid.’
Minto grunted. ‘Typical!’
‘You know he’s been poaching?’
Minto frowned. ‘Who? Whistler?’ Fin nodded. ‘Course I do. But it’s one for the pot every once in a while. Don’t do no one no harm. So I leave him alone.’
‘Jamie wants me to put a stop to it.’
Minto’s mug paused halfway to his mouth. He regarded Fin speculatively. ‘Why?’
‘They don’t see eye to eye.’
‘Well, that’s hardly a surprise.’ He paused. ‘So what are you planning to do about it?’
Fin sighed. ‘I think there’s bigger fish to fry than Whistler, Minto. But there’s real enmity between those two, and if we can’t persuade Whistler to back off, Wooldridge junior might just bring in some heavies. And that would be bad news for Whistler, and maybe do you out of a job.’
Minto was thoughtful for a moment. Then, ‘We?’ he asked.
‘I can’t do it on my own. He’s a big guy. Well, you know that. He’d probably be a handful even for you.’
‘Oh, I could bring him down, Mr Macleod. No problem. But I’d have to hurt him.’
Fin shook his head. ‘I don’t want that. I don’t want to hurt him. Just stop him. Just so he gets the message.’
Minto looked doubtful. ‘How?’
‘He’s going to be up at Loch Tathabhal tonight.’
‘How d’you know that?’
Almost subconsciously Fin ran a hand over his jaw. It still hurt. ‘Because he wanted me to know. A stupid challenge.’
Minto shook his head. ‘Don’t like the sound of it, Mr Macleod.’
Fin set his mug down on its coaster and stood up. ‘I’m going to go up to his place now, to try and talk some sense into him. But if I can’t, I’ll meet you up there tonight, at the old bridge, where the river runs out of the loch.’
‘Okay, mate.’ Minto shrugged. ‘But I’ll still have to hurt him to bring him down.’
*
The summer sun had been turning slowly, irrevocably towards the equator, drawing a veil of darkness over the Hebrides a little earlier each night. Those long daylight nights, when it was possible on occasion to see the sun both rise and set at the same time, were gone. Official sunset was now 20.45, but although it was after 21.30 there was still light in the sky. An unusually clear sky, even over the mountains that loomed darkly to the south. And the wind of earlier in the day had dropped to an almost eerie stillness. Fin had been unable to find Whistler, and so he was going to keep the rendezvous which had been issued as a challenge the night before.
He saw pale swathes cut into the dark hills ahead as he came over the hilltop at Ardroil, scars left on the landscape by excavations at the gravel pits below, and early moonlight shimmered silver on the road that wound up above the Abhainn Dearg distillery towards Mangurstadh.
A couple of giant red chessmen carved in wood stood guard at the entrance to the island’s first and only distillery in nearly one hundred and seventy years. Abhainn Dearg was Gaelic for Red River, the same name as the estate, and the distillery was so called because it was sited close to where the Red River itself debouched into the Atlantic. The river, according to legend, had got its name following a bloody clan battle which had turned its waters red.
The last distillery on the Isle of Lewis had been closed down in 1844, when the abstainer and prohibitionist Sir James Matheson purchased the island. The irony, perhaps not apparent to the islanders at the time, was that Matheson had made the fortune that allowed him to buy the island by selling opium to the Chinese. But it was an irony not lost on Fin, and it brought the briefest flicker of a smile to his face as the shallow-pitched red and green roofs of the disparate collection of tin and breeze-block buildings that made up Abhainn Dearg passed below him on the road.
But the smile faded as he remembered why he was here. If Whistler had been trying to avoid him all day, then he had succeeded. And Fin was heading up to Loch Tathabhal for a rendezvous he’d rather not have kept.
Half a mile further on he left the road, and his progress up into the mountains slowed to little more than walking speed on a rough, potholed track that twisted its way laboriously up through wide, boulder-strewn valleys. Moonlight lay in silver ribbons on tiny streams, and reflected light from every scrap of water that lay in the dips and hollows of this primeval landscape.
But the moon was still low in the sky, and as the mountains rose up on either side, the track fell into shadow and all light was concentrated in the sky overhead. It skirt
ed the black waters of Loch Raonasgail, the dark peaks of Mealaisbhal and Tathabhal looming ominously over opposite banks. By the time he got to the head of the loch and climbed several hundred feet more, he could see straight down the line of the valley ahead of him to the distant glittering waters of Loch Tamnabhaigh, and the twinkling lights of Cracabhal Lodge on its northern shore.
Here he turned east, tyres kicking up peat and stone in his wake as he left the track and followed the faintest outline of an ancient pathway. It rose steeply, taking him up to the still waters of Loch Tathabhal, tucked away in the shadows of sharply rising slopes of scree. Tongues of water in the river that ran out of it flickered and licked over an almost dry stone bed, tumbling in a succession of tiny falls to Loch Raonasgail below.
At the head of the loch, where the river left it, a wooden bridge straddled its banks, raised on drystone columns, a single shoogly handrail on the loch side. Here, an area of ground had been levelled to allow fishermen to park their vehicles. Minto’s Land Rover was drawn in close to the water’s edge, and when Fin parked up and stepped out of his Suzuki he heard the engine of Minto’s vehicle ticking in the dark as it cooled down. So he had not been here long. But there was no sign of him. And no sign, either, of John Angus Whistler Macaskill. Fin was aware immediately of the clouds of midges that clustered around him in the dark, and hoped that the repellent he had smeared liberally on his face and neck would afford him some protection.
Looking west from his elevated position, Fin had a view straight through the valley between the peaks of Mealaisbhal and Cracabhal, and although he couldn’t see it, he knew that the sea lay somewhere in the distance beyond them. What he could see were the clouds gathering there, black and ominous on the horizon. And the far-off crackle of lightning still too distant to be heard. He felt the first chill draught of the coming storm, the break in the weather so long anticipated, and turned to see Whistler’s full moon rising in a clear sky to the east. He hoped that this would not take long, and that he would be back home in his bed before the storm broke.
A sound, like a pebble landing in the water, drew his attention, and he could see silvered rings emanating from a point not far from the opposite bank. A fish, perhaps, jumping to catch insects. There was no sign of life. No further sound.
Fin stepped up on to the wooden bridge and scanned the loch. He felt the wind rising now, clouds that had been so distant starting to gather overhead, the advance guard of the coming storm. Even as he stood on the bridge, looking back down the length of the stream which had so nearly taken his life all those years before, he felt the temperature falling. The midges were gone already, and Whistler’s moon appeared and disappeared with increasing frequency, a bizarre, flitting, colourless light show.
As Fin turned back towards the loch he saw a movement on the far shore. A shadow drifting against the rise of the scree slope behind it.
‘Minto!’ he called out into the dark, feeling his voice whipped away from his mouth on the edge of the wind.
All that came back to him was a laugh that he knew only too well. And in a sudden blink of moonlight he saw Whistler standing there looking at him across the water. He raised his right arm, and Fin saw a huge wild salmon dangling from his hand, strong thick fingers hooked through the gills. ‘We could just go back to the croft, Fin. Roast her in tinfoil over the peat. Share a glass and a memory or two. What do you say?’
Fin was very nearly tempted. ‘Oh, come on, Whistler, cut it out. We need to chat, you and me.’
‘Is that what you brought your muscle man for? A chat? I’m disappointed in you, Fin. Thought better of you than that.’ And Fin realized then the mistake he had made by involving Minto.
Almost in the same moment, the moon vanished behind a cloud and Whistler was swallowed again by the dark. Fin heard a loud banging coming from the direction of Minto’s Land Rover. He jumped down off the bridge and ran across the parking area to throw open the back door.
Minto was lying curled up on the floor, securely bound by his own tow rope, trussed up like a chicken, an oily rag shoved into his mouth. He had manoeuvred himself on to his back so that he could kick the side of the vehicle with the flat of his feet.
‘Jesus, Minto!’ Fin climbed in the back and untied him, pulling the rag from his mouth. Minto gasped for several seconds until he had caught his breath, saliva foaming around his lips.
‘I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking kill him!’
Fin gazed at him in disbelief. ‘What the hell happened?’
‘He jumped me, that’s what fucking happened.’
Fin almost found himself laughing. ‘He jumped you?’
‘Strong as a bloody ox that geezer is, Macleod.’
‘I thought you were going to take him down, Minto?’
Minto glowered at him, his pride seriously dented. No one man should have been capable of doing something like this to him. ‘I would’ve. Given half a chance.’ He sat up and winced, his left hand crossing to his right shoulder. ‘I think he’s dislocated my bloody shoulder.’
Fin sat cross-legged on the floor and looked at him. ‘Well, you’re not going to be much damn use to me now, are you?’
Minto cast him a surly look. ‘You’ll never take him on your own, mate. A skinny little runt like you.’
Fin got to his knees, and crouching made his way to the back. He jumped down. ‘Go home, Minto.’
He stood and watched as Minto struggled into the driver’s seat and started the motor. His headlights were devoured by the dark, making almost no impression on it as the vehicle turned and bumped back down the track to the loch below. Fin felt the first drops of rain in his face.
Now it was just him and Whistler.
He turned and scanned Loch Tathabhal, the surface of it dimpled and ridged by the rising wind, floods of fleeting moonlight caught in brief spangled moments of illumination. And there was the shadow of his friend moving along the far shore, his laughter lifting itself above the wind. ‘Come on, Fin, catch me if you can.’ The voice distant, somehow, and carried off into the night.
To Whistler it was all a game. Not to be taken seriously. And yet to cross Jamie the way he had was to court disaster. If he lost his home it was likely he would lose the court case for custody of his daughter. And if he lost both, God only knew what might become of him.
For several long moments Fin contemplated getting back into his Suzuki and going home. What good would it do to play Whistler’s game? And yet to walk away would be like turning his back on the man who had saved his life. Whistler would never have done that to Fin. At the very least he needed to make him understand the trouble he was in.
‘Whistler, wait!’ But his voice was consumed by the night, and he saw Whistler outlined against the sky in the moment before he began slithering down the scree to the lower valley.
Fin sighed and hesitated briefly before opening up the back of his four-by-four and taking out his waterproof jacket and a small rucksack. He slipped into the jacket, slung the rucksack across his shoulders and grasped the non-slip grip of his telescopic walker’s stick firmly in his right hand.
Coming, ready or not.
At first it was easy to keep Whistler in his sights. Amazingly there was still some daylight in the sky, and plenty of moonlight washing across the slopes between clouds. He saw Whistler’s shadow moving nimbly among the rocks as he scrambled down the incline. The wind was increasing in strength, temperature falling further as the black storm clouds began to roll in. But the rain, as yet, was still only a spit in his face.
Loch Raonasgail was no more than a big black hole scoured out between Tathabhal and Mealaisbhal by shifting glaciers in some long-ago ice age, filled now with the millions of gallons of rainwater which the mountains that heaved up around it shed from their slopes. Fin saw Whistler circumvent its south-west shoreline, crossing the track, and heading off through the boulder-strewn valley in the shadow of Cracabhal.
The lightning came before the rain. Great jagged flashes of it that lit
up the mountains and plunged their valleys into deeper darkness. His glimpses of Whistler now were few and far between as blackness settled over them like dust.
The heather and bracken beneath his feet were dry, and crackled in the dark. Normally sodden peat was hard and unyielding underfoot. Fin gritted his teeth and forced himself on. For forty minutes or more he followed the phantom that was Whistler. He found his leg muscles aching, joints hammered by the hardness of the ground, breath sucked with increasing rapidity into lungs that heaved and strained to pump sufficient oxygen to already tiring muscles.
No matter how hard he went at it, he never seemed to get any closer to him. And it became apparent that if Whistler wanted to, he could lose Fin in a heartbeat. But still he kept appearing, just when Fin thought he’d lost him. A glimpse here, leaping from one rock to another like a mountain goat. A glimpse there, as he turned to gaze back through the darkness. He was playing with Fin. Having fun. Making absolutely certain that he didn’t lose him, showing himself in tantalizing moments, like the lure of a fly drawing a fish on to the hook.
Lightning crashed so close to him that Fin instinctively ducked, and dropped to his knees, an image of the valley ahead of him left burned on his retinas. A bizarre and brutal landscape littered with the spoil of ice explosions millions of years old. For a moment he could barely hear, and his nostrils were filled with the ozone that suffused the air in the aftermath of the storm’s electrical discharges.
Whistler was there, too, in that image burned into his consciousness by the lightning, about three or four hundred yards ahead of him. Clambering over giant clusters of rocks. Then consumed again by darkness.
Absurdly, Fin found thoughts creeping into his mind of the bogeyman who had haunted the childhood imaginations of generations of island children. The outlaw Mac an t-Stronaich. A man credited with more brutal murders and assaults than any living soul might be capable of committing. And yet he had existed in reality, in some more minor incarnation no doubt, and on the run had escaped into these very mountains to avoid capture. Before being brought to justice, finally, and hanged in 1836. Whistler moved among the rocks like his ghost.
