The Blackhouse l-1

by Peter May

  ‘Exactly. Gravity’s going to increase the weight of that thing and we’re going to have a job keeping it from running away from us. We’ll need the biggest, strongest boys at the front to keep it under control.’

  And so the Macritchie brothers, Acne Boy and his pal were delegated to control the tyre from the front, walking backwards down the hill. Me and Artair were at one side, Iain and Seonaidh at the other. And Donald and Calum took a rim each at the rear.

  We had just wheeled it out into the main road, when car headlights appeared suddenly over a blind bend at the top of the hill. None of us had even heard it coming. There was panic. There wasn’t time to get the tyre back into the shadow of the building, and so Donald put his shoulder to it and pushed it over into the ditch. It took Murdo Ruadh with it. We heard the crack of thin ice breaking and, as we dived for cover, the muted cursing of the younger Macritchie. ‘Ya fucking bastard!’

  The car flew past and its lights receded towards the distant turnoff to Fivepenny and the Butt of Lewis. A dripping Murdo Ruadh, his face streaked with mud and God knew what else, staggered out of the ditch, spluttering in the cold and still cursing. Of course, the rest of us were in stitches, until Murdo strode angrily across the metalled road and smacked me on the side of the head, making my ears ring. He’d never liked me much, Murdo Ruadh. ‘Think that’s fucking funny, ya wee shite?’ He glared around the other faces, their owners trying desperately to keep them straight. ‘Anyone else think it’s funny?’ No one else was willing to admit that they did.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ Donald Murray said.

  It took us a full five minutes to get the tyre out of the ditch and upright again, my face stinging all the while. I was going to have a big bruise on my cheek tomorrow, I knew. We took up our positions again, and began slowly and carefully rolling the tyre down the hill towards the Crobost road end. At first it seemed easier than it had pushing it up the slope. Then, gradually, as the angle of descent increased, the tyre began to get heavier and gain a momentum of its own.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Donald hissed, ‘slow it down!’

  ‘What d’you think we’re fucking trying to do?’ You could hear the beginnings of panic in Angel’s voice.

  The tyre got heavier and faster, our hands burning on the rubber as we tried to hold it, trotting now alongside it as it gathered pace all the time. The Macritchie gang couldn’t hold it back any longer. Acne Boy fell and the tyre bumped over his leg. Calum tripped over Acne Boy and went sprawling in the road.

  ‘We can’t hold it, we can’t hold it!’ Murdo Ruadh was almost shouting.

  ‘For Christ’s sake keep the volume down,’ Donald hissed. There were houses on either side of the road. But, in truth, volume was the least of our problems. The tyre was already out of our control. Angel and Murdo leapt out of the way, and it finally ripped itself free of Donald’s last desperate attempts to stop it.

  Off it went, with a life and direction of its own. We, all of us, went chasing after it, helter-skelter down the hill. But it just got faster and faster, and further and further away. ‘Oh, God …’ I heard Donald groan, and I realized what he realized. The tyre was heading straight for the Crobost Stores, which stood face-on at the bend in the main road at the bottom of the hill. What with its weight and speed, it was going to do a lot of damage. And there was not a single thing we could do about it.

  The sound of breaking glass sent shards of shockwaves through the night air. The tyre had gone straight into the window to the left of the door. I swear the whole building shook. And then nothing. The tyre remained standing upright, wedged solidly in the window opening like some bizarre modern sculpture. We arrived, gasping for air and shocked to silence, about thirty seconds after impact, and just stood there looking at it in abject horror. Lights went on in the nearest houses, about a hundred and fifty yards away.

  Donald was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he kept saying. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Got to get the fuck out of here,’ Murdo Ruadh gasped.

  ‘Naw.’ Angel put a hand on his brother’s chest to stop him going anywhere. ‘We just run off, they’re never going to give up till they find out who it was.’

  ‘What’re you talking about?’ Murdo looked as if he thought his big brother had lost his mind.

  ‘I’m talking about a scapegoat. Someone to take the fall and not rat on the rest of us. They’ll be happy as long as they’ve got someone to blame.’

  Donald shook his head. ‘That’s crazy. Let’s just go.’ We could hear voices now in the distance. Voices raised in query, wondering what on earth had happened.

  But Angel stood his ground. ‘Naw. I’m right on this. Trust me. We need a volunteer.’ His gaze fell on each of us in turn. And then stopped on me. ‘You, orphan boy. You’ve got least to lose.’ I didn’t even have time to object before a big fist hit me full in the face and my legs folded under me. I hit the ground with such force it knocked all the wind out of me. Then his boot in my stomach curled me up into a helpless foetal position and I vomited on the gravel.

  I heard Donald shouting, ‘Stop it! Fucking stop it!’

  And then Angel’s low, threatening tone. ‘You gonna make me, God boy? Two’s better than one. It could be you next.’

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Calum wailing, ‘We gotta go!’

  I heard footsteps running off into the distance, and then an odd peace settled on the night along with the frost. I couldn’t move, did not even have the strength to roll over. I was vaguely aware of more lights coming on in nearby houses. I heard someone shouting, ‘The store! There’s a break-in at the store!’ The beams of torches pricked the night air. Then hands pulled me roughly to my feet. I could barely stand. I felt a shoulder support me under each oxter, then Donald’s voice.

  ‘You got him, Artair?’

  And Artair’s familiar wheeze. ‘Aye.’

  And they dragged me, running, across the road and into the ditch.

  I’m not sure how long we lay there in the ice and mud, hidden by the long grass, but it seemed like an eternity. We saw the locals arriving in their dressing gowns and wellies, beams of light flashing around the road and the shopfront. And we heard their consternation. A six-foot tractor tyre embedded in the shop window and not a soul around. They decided that no one had actually broken into the shop, but that they had better call the police, and as they headed back towards their houses, Donald and Artair got me to my feet and we staggered off across the frozen peatbog. At a gate in the shadow of the hill, Donald waited with me while Artair went off to retrieve my bike. I felt like hell, and worse. But I knew that Donald and Artair had risked being caught by coming back to get me.

  ‘Why’d you come back?’

  ‘Och, it was my stupid idea in the first place,’ Donald sighed. ‘I wasn’t going to let you take the blame for it.’ And then he paused. I couldn’t see his face, but I heard the anger and frustration in his voice. ‘One day I’m going to rip that fucking Angel Macritchie’s wings off.’

  They never did find out who had run the Swainbost tyre through the window of Crobost Stores. But they weren’t about to give it back to the Swainbost boys. The police impounded it, and Crobost had the best bonfire in Ness that year.

  FIVE

  I

  Fin walked up the single-track road towards the village with the wind blowing soft in his face. He glanced down the hill and saw the distant figure of Gunn heading back to Port of Ness to retrieve the car. He felt the first spots of rain, but the black sky overhead was breaking up already, and he thought that perhaps it wouldn’t come to anything.

  It might have been August, but someone had a fire lit in their hearth. That rich, toasty, unmistakable smell of peat smoke carried to him on the breeze. It took him back twenty, thirty years. It was extraordinary, he thought, how much he had changed in that time, and how little things had changed in this place where he had grown up. He felt like a ghost haunting his own past, walking the s
treets of his childhood. He half expected to see himself and Artair coming around the bend in the road at the church, heading on their bikes for the store at the foot of the hill to spend their Saturday pennies. The cry of a child made him turn his head, and he saw two small boys playing on a makeshift swing next to a house on the rise above him. Clothes flapped on a drying line and, as he watched, a young woman came hurrying out of the house to gather them in before the rain came.

  The church sat proud on the bend, looking out over the village below, and the land that fell away to the sea. The large metalled car park was new since Fin had last been here. In and Out gates were protected from sheep and their shit by cattle grids, and the tarmac was marked out with freshly painted white lines, worshippers guided to park their cars in orderly Christian rows. In Fin’s day, people had walked to church. Some of them from miles around, black coats blowing about their legs, free hands holding on to hats, the others clutching bibles.

  Steps led up from the car park to the manse, a large two-storey house built in the days when the Church had expected its ministers to require three public rooms and five bedrooms, three for family, one for any visiting minister and one for use as a study. The manse had stunning views over the north end of the island, all the way across to the distant skyward-pointing finger of the lighthouse. It was also exposed to the wrath of God in the form of whatever weather might descend on it from the Heavens. Even the minister was not spared the Lewis weather.

  Beyond the curve of the hill, the road rose higher again with the land, along the clifftops, and the rest of Crobost was strung out along it for nearly half a mile. Although he couldn’t see them from here, Fin knew that the bungalow where Artair used to live, and his parents’ croft, were only a few hundred yards away. But he was not sure that he was ready yet for that. He pushed open the gate beside the cattle grid and crossed the car park to the steps leading to the manse.

  He knocked on the door several times and rang the bell, but there was no reply. He tried the door and it opened into a gloomy hallway. ‘Hello! Anyone home?’ He was greeted by silence. He closed the door again and looked across towards the church. It was still massively impressive, built of great blocks of stone hewn out of local rock. Flanked by two small turrets, a bell tower rose high above the arched doorway. There was no bell in it. Fin had never known there to be. Bells were frivolous. Perhaps they smacked of Catholicism. All the windows were arched, two above the main door, one on either side of it, and four down each of the flanks. Tall, plain windows. No colourful stained glass in this austere Calvinistic culture. No imagery. No crosses. No joy.

  One half of the double doors was lying open and Fin walked into the hallway where the minister would greet the congregation coming in, and shake their hands on the way out. A cheerless place, with worn floorboards and dark, varnished wood. It smelled of dust and damp clothes and time. A smell, it seemed, that had not changed in thirty years. Evocative of those long Sabbath days when Fin’s parents had made him sit through an hour and a half of Gaelic psalm-singing and a fiery midday sermon, followed by another dose at six o’clock. In the afternoon he’d had to endure two hours of Sunday school in the hall at the back of the church. When he wasn’t at church, or at Sunday school, he would have to stay in the house while his father read from the Gaelic Bible.

  Fin traced his childhood footsteps through the left-hand door and into the church itself, rows of unforgiving wooden pews flanking two aisles leading to the raised and railed area at the far end, from which sombre elders would lead the psalm-singing. The pulpit rose high above, an elaborately carved dais set into the wall and reached by curving staircases on either side. Its position of elevation placed the minister in his dominant position of authority over the mere mortals whom he berated each Sunday with threats of eternal damnation. Salvation was in their own hands, he would tell them week in and week out, if only they would put themselves in the hands of the Lord.

  In his head, Fin could almost hear the singing of the Gaelic psalms. A strange, unaccompanied tribal chanting which could seem chaotic to the untrained ear. But there was something wonderfully affecting about it. Something of the land and the landscape, of the struggle for existence against overwhelming odds. Something of the people amongst whom he had grown up. Good people, most of them, finding something unique in themselves, in the way they sang their praise to the Lord, an expression of gratitude for hard lives in which they had found meaning. Just the memory of it brought him out in goose-pimples.

  He heard a knocking sound that seemed to fill the church, rattling around the balconies that ringed three sides of it. Metal on metal. He looked about, puzzled, before realizing that it was coming from the radiators along each wall. The central heating was new. As was the double glazing in the tall windows. Perhaps the Sabbath was a little warmer today than it had been thirty years ago. Fin went back out to the entrance hall, and saw a door open at the far end. The banging was coming from somewhere beyond it.

  The door gave on to what turned out to be the boiler room. A large oil-fired boiler stood with its door open, a protective cover removed to reveal its byzantine interior workings. Bits and pieces harvested from the interior were scattered around the concrete apron on which it stood. A toolbox lay open, and a man in blue overalls lay on his back trying to loosen the joint on an exiting pipe by banging on it with a large spanner.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Fin said. ‘I’m looking for the Reverend Donald Murray.’

  The man in the overalls sat up, startled, and banged his head on the boiler door. ‘Shit!’ And Fin saw the dog collar underneath the overalls where they were open at the neck. He recognized the angular face below a mop of untidy sandy hair. There was grey in that hair now, and it was a little thinner. As was the face, which had somehow shed its boyish good looks and become mean, pinched in lines around the mouth and the eyes. ‘You’ve found him.’ The man squinted up at Fin, unable to see his face because of the light behind it. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘You could shake my hand for a start,’ Fin said. ‘That’s what old friends usually do, isn’t it?’

  The Reverend Murray frowned and got to his feet, peering into the face of the stranger who knew him. And then the light of recognition dawned in his eyes. ‘Good God. Fin Macleod.’ And he grabbed Fin’s hand and shook it firmly, a smile splitting his face. And Fin saw in him again the boy he had known all those years before. ‘Man, it’s good to see you. Good to see you.’ And he meant it, but only for as long as it took other thoughts to crowd his mind and cloud his smile. And as the smile faded, he said, ‘It’s been a long time.’

  Fin had found it hard to believe, when Gunn told him, that Donald Murray had succeeded his father as minister of Crobost Free Church. But he could not deny the evidence of his own eyes. Although that still did not make it any easier to believe. ‘About seventeen years. But even if it had been seventy I’d never have thought I’d see you in a dog collar, except maybe at a vicars and tarts party.’

  Donald inclined his head a little. ‘God showed me the error of my ways.’

  Ways, Fin recalled, which had taken him on a long diversion off the straight and narrow. Donald had gone to Glasgow at the same time as Fin. But while Fin had gone to university, Donald had got into the music promotion business, managing and promoting some of the most successful Glasgow bands of the eighties. But then things had started going wrong. Drink had become more important than work. The agency went to the wall. He got involved with drugs. Fin had met him at a party one night and Donald offered him cocaine. And a woman. Of course, he’d been smashed, and there was something dead in eyes that had once been so full of life. Fin heard later that after being arrested and fined for possession, Donald had left Scotland and headed south to London.

  ‘Caught the curam then?’ Fin asked.

  Donald wiped his oily hands on a rag, assiduously avoiding Fin’s eyes. ‘That’s not a term I care for.’

  It was a condition so prevalent on the island that the Gaelic language had subverted a wor
d to describe it. Curam literally meant anxiety. But in the context of those who had been born again, it was used in the sense of something you might catch. Like a virus. And in a way, it was. A virus of the mind. ‘I’ve always thought it was very apposite,’ Fin said. ‘All that brainwashing as a kid, followed by violent rejection and a dissolute life. Drink. Drugs. Wild women.’ He paused. ‘Sound familiar? And then, I suppose, the fear and the guilt kick in, like belated indigestion, after all that early diet of hellfire and damnation.‘ Donald eyed him sullenly, refusing to be drawn. ‘That’s when they say that God talks to you, and you become very special to all those people who wish that God would talk to them, too. Is that how it was with you, Donald?’

  ‘I used to like you, Fin.’

  ‘I always liked you, Donald. From that first day you stopped Murdo Ruadh from punching my lights out.’ He wanted to ask him why he was throwing his life away like this. And yet he knew that Donald had already been engaged in the act of flushing it down the toilet with drink and drugs. Maybe this really was some kind of redemption. After all, not everyone harboured the same bitterness towards God as Fin. He relented. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Are you here for a reason?’ Donald was clearly not as ready to forgive as Fin was to apologize.

  Fin smiled ruefully. ‘All those hours of study to get myself a place at university, and I threw it away.’ He gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘Ended up a cop. Now, that’s a turn-up for the book, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’d heard.’ Donald was guarded now. ‘And you still haven’t told me why you’re here.’

  ‘I’m investigating the murder of Angel Macritchie, Donald. They brought me in because he was killed in exactly the same way as a murder I’m investigating in Edinburgh.’

  A smile flitted briefly across Donald’s face. A glimpse of his old self. ‘And you want to know if I did it.’

  ‘Did you?’

  Donald laughed. ‘No.’