The Blackhouse l-1

by Peter May

  ‘Do you remember that night I found you drunk at the side of the road? Babbling about not wanting to go to the rock?’ Fin nodded mutely. ‘You don’t remember why?’

  ‘I was scared, that’s all.’

  ‘Scared, yes. But not of the rock. When I got you back to the croft, you told me something that night that caused you pain that I can’t imagine. You sat in the chair in front of my fire and cried like a baby. Tears like I’ve never seen a grown man cry. Tears of fear and humiliation.’

  Fin sat wide-eyed. It was someone else Gigs was talking about. Not him. He was there that night. There were no tears. He was drunk, that was all.

  Gigs let his gaze drift darkly around all the faces circling the fire. ‘Some of you were out on the rock that year, so you know what I’m talking about. Some of you weren’t. And to them, I’ll say now what I said then. Whatever happens on this rock, whatever passes between us, stays here. On the island. It’ll be in our heads, but it’ll never pass our lips. And if any man here breathes a word of it to another living soul, then he’ll answer to me before he answers to his maker.’ And there was not a single man around the fire who did not believe that to be true.

  As the flames devoured the peats, so the shadows of the men assembled there danced on the walls like silent witnesses to an oath of silence, and the dark beyond the light seemed to draw the blackhouse tight in around them. Eyes turned back towards Fin, and they saw a man lost in a trance, trembling in the dark, all blood drained from a face as white as bleached bone.

  Gigs said, ‘He was the devil himself, that man.’

  Fin frowned. ‘Who?’

  ‘Macinnes. Artair’s father. He did unimaginable things to you boys. In his study. All those years of tutoring, shut away behind a locked door. First Artair, and then you. Abuse the like of which no child should ever have to suffer.’ He stopped to pull in a breath, almost suffocated by the silence. ‘That’s what you told me that night, Fin. You never talked about it, you and Artair. Never acknowledged it. But each of you knew what was going on, what the other was suffering. There was a bond of silence between you. And that’s why you were so happy that summer. Because it was over. You were leaving the island. You never had any reason to see Macinnes ever again. It was an end to it once and for all. You’d never told a soul. How could you have faced the shame of what it was he’d done to you? The humiliation. But now you would never have to. You could put it behind you. Forget it for ever.’

  ‘And then he told us we were going to the rock.’ Fin’s voice was the merest whisper.

  Gigs’s face was set grim in deeply etched shadow. ‘Suddenly, after the relief, you were faced by two weeks with him here on An Sgeir. Living cheek by jowl with the man who had ruined your young life. And God knows, we’re in one another’s pockets here. There’s no escape. Even if he couldn’t lay a finger on you, you would have had to suffer the man nearly twenty-four hours a day. For you it was unthinkable. I didn’t blame you then, and I don’t blame you now, for how you felt.’

  Although Fin’s eyes were closed, they were open wide for the first time in eighteen years. The sense that he had had all his adult life, of something that he could not see, something just beyond the periphery of his vision, was gone. Like removing blinkers from a horse. The shock of it was physically painful. He was rigid with tension. How could he not have remembered? And yet all his conscious thoughts were awash now with memories, like the vivid recollection of scenes from a nightmare in the moments of waking. He felt bile filling the emptiness inside him, as images flickered across his retinas, like a faded family video out of sync with its playhead. He could smell the dust off the books in Mr Macinnes’s study, the stink of stale tobacco and alcohol on his breath as it burst hot on his face. His could feel the touch of his cold, dry hands, and recoiled from them even now. And he saw again the image of the funny man with the impossibly long legs who had haunted his dreams ever since Robbie’s death, like the harbinger of his returning memory. That figure who stood silently in the corner of his study, head bowed by the ceiling, arms dangling from the sleeves of his anorak. And he recognized him now for the first time. He was Mr Macinnes. With his long, grey hair straggling over his ears, and his dead, hunted eyes. Why had he not seen it before?

  He opened his eyes now to find tears streaming from them, burning his cheeks like acid. He scrambled to his feet and staggered to the door, pulling the tarpaulin aside and emptying his stomach into the storm. He dropped to his knees then, retching and retching until his stomach muscles seized and he could not draw a breath.

  Hands lifted him gently to his feet and steered him back into the warmth. A blanket was placed around his shoulders, and he was guided again to sit sobbing at his place by the fire. His trembling was uncontrollable, as if he were in a fever. A sheen of fine sweat glistened on his brow.

  He heard Gigs’s voice. ‘I don’t know how much you remember of it now, Fin, but that night, when you told me, I was so angry I wanted to kill him. To think that a man could do something like that to children! To his own son!’ He drew in a deep, scratching breath. ‘And then I wanted to go to the police. To have charges brought. But you begged me not to. You didn’t want anyone to know. Ever. Which was when I realized that the only way to deal with it was here on the rock. Among ourselves. So that no one else would ever know.’

  Fin nodded. He didn’t need Gigs to tell him the rest. He remembered now as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, a film of obfuscation peeled away from every year which had passed since. He remembered the men gathered around the fire on that first night, and Gigs laying his bible down after the reading and shocking them all by confronting Artair’s father with his crimes. A ghastly silence, a denial. And Gigs badgering and threatening like an advocate in the High Court, physically menacing, evoking God’s wrath, facing him with everything Fin had told him, until finally the older man cracked. And it all poured out of him like poison. Prompted by fear and by shame. He couldn’t explain why he had done it. He had never meant it to happen. He was so, so sorry. It would never happen again. He would make it up to the boys, both of them. Mr Macinnes had simply disintegrated in front them.

  Fin remembered, too, the look that Artair had given him across the fire, the sense of hurt and betrayal in his eyes. Fin had broken their bond of silence. He had shattered the only thing which had allowed the Macinnes family still to function. Denial. If you denied it, it never happened. And Fin realized now, perhaps for the first time, that Artair’s mother must have known, and that she too had been in denial. But Fin’s confession to Gigs had meant that denial would no longer be an option. And every other alternative was unthinkable.

  Gigs let his gaze wander around the faces at the fire, flames reflecting the horror in their eyes. He said, ‘We sat in judgement on him that night. A jury of his peers. And we found him guilty. And we banished him from the blackhouse. His punishment was to live rough on the rock for the two weeks that we were here. We would leave him food out by the cairns, and we would take him back with us when we were finished. But he would never return to the rock. And he would never, ever, lay a hand on either of those boys again.’

  Fin realized why Mr Macinnes had never reckoned in his memory of their two weeks on the rock. But now he saw again the fleeting glimpses of the ghostlike figure of Artair’s father climbing up from the caves below to collect the food left for him up by the cairns. A shambling figure stooped by shame. Although he had never said anything, Gigs must have sensed Artair’s hostility towards Fin after his confession, and kept them always on separate work gangs.

  Fin looked across the peats at the flames throwing their light in Gigs’s face. ‘The day I had the accident on the cliffs. After Mr Macinnes had tied me to the rope. He didn’t fall, did he?’

  Gigs shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know, Fin. I really don’t. We didn’t know how we were going to get down to you. And then someone spotted him climbing up from below. He must have heard the commotion from the caves down there. I guess he was try
ing to redeem himself somehow. And in a way he did. He probably saved your life. But whether he fell, or whether he jumped, well that’s anyone’s guess.’

  ‘He wasn’t pushed?’

  Gigs canted his head just a little to one side and stared back at Fin. ‘By who?’

  ‘By me.’ He had to know.

  Outside, the storm was blowing itself out. But the wind still whistled and screamed in every crack and crevice in the rock, through all the gullies and caves, among all the cairns left by the generations of guga hunters who had gone before. Gigs said, ‘We’d hauled you up fifty feet by the time he went, Fin. No one pushed him, except maybe the hand of God.’

  TWENTY

  I

  He heard someone call his name. Bright, hard and clear. Fin. Fin Macleod. But distant. From somewhere beyond the fog. He rose swiftly, as if from the darkness of the seabed, and broke the surface of consciousness, startled and blinking in pain at the light that blinded him. Shapes and shadows were moving around him. Someone had pulled back the tarpaulin, flooding the blackhouse with the soft, yellow light of sunrise. Smoke from the smouldering fire swirled and eddied in the wind that sneaked in with it.

  When Gigs had said they should try to get some sleep before dawn, Fin had been unable to imagine how that might be possible. And yet now he could not even remember curling up on the stone shelf along the far wall. Some self-protective mechanism had simply shut him down. The same mechanism, perhaps, which had hidden all his troubled memories in a dark and inaccessible corner of his mind for eighteen years.

  ‘Fin Macleod!’ The voice called again, but this time Fin detected the wheeze in it. Artair. Fear slid through him like a frozen arrow. He jumped down from the shelf and staggered across to the door, pushing past bodies to reach it. Gigs and several others were already outside. Fin put a hand up to shade his eyes from a sun still low in the eastern sky and saw, out on the edge of the cliff beyond the lighthouse, two men silhouetted against the dawn. The sky was almost yellow, streaked with pink cloud, and ten thousand gannets filled it with their huge beating wings, screaming their contempt for the men below.

  Artair and Fionnlagh were a good two hundred yards away, but Fin could see the rope tied around Fionnlagh’s neck, looping into his father’s hands. The boy’s own hands were bound behind his back and he was teetering perilously close to the edge of the cliff, kept from tipping over the edge and dropping the three hundred feet to the rocks below only by the tension that Artair maintained on the rope.

  Fin stumbled and slid across the boulder-strewn soup of mud and seaweed that lay between him and the two figures on the clifftop. Artair watched him with a strange smile fixed on his face. ‘I knew it was you. When we saw the trawler come in last night. We watched you trying to land the dinghy. Fucking mad! But we were rooting for you, boy.’ He looked at Fionnlagh. ‘Weren’t we, young Fin? It’s better than I could ever have hoped for. A father’s first-hand fucking view of his boy going over the edge.’ He turned back towards Fin. ‘Come on, Macleod. Closer. You’ll get a grandstand view. I suppose the DNA results are through.’

  Fin was no more than fifty feet away now. He could almost smell the boy’s fear in the wind. He stopped, gasping for breath, and looked at his old schoolfriend with a mixture of hatred and disbelief. ‘No,’ he shouted back. ‘You threw up one of your pills, Artair. Prednisone. For asthmatics. It could only have been you.’

  Artair laughed. ‘Christ, I wish I’d thought of that. I’d have done it on purpose.’

  Fin began moving more cautiously towards them now, anxious to keep Artair talking for as long as he could. ‘You killed Angel Macritchie just to get me here.’

  ‘I knew it wouldn’t take you long to work that one out, Fin. You always were too fucking smart for your own good.’

  ‘Why Macritchie?’

  Artair laughed. ‘Why the fuck not? He was a piece of shit, Fin. You know that. Who’d fucking miss him?’

  And Fin thought about the tears in the eyes of the boy that Angel had crippled all those years before.

  ‘And anyway …’ Artair’s smile curdled on his lips, ‘he had it coming. He was here, remember, eighteen years ago. He knew what really happened that year. And there wasn’t a day went by that he didn’t remind me of it, that he didn’t hold out the prospect of public humiliation.’ His face was twisted by anger and hate. ‘Do you remember now, Fin? Did Gigs tell you?’

  Fin nodded.

  ‘Good. I’m glad you know. All that loss of memory shit. I thought for a long time you were putting it on. And then it came to me. Naw, it was real. And you’d fucking escaped. The memory, the island, everything. And here was me, stuck looking after a mother who needed fed through a straw, married to the only woman I ever loved — a Fin Macleod cast-off, pregnant with his son instead of mine. Stuck with the memory of everything my father did to us. Stuck with the humiliation of knowing that a whole lot of others knew it, too. Because of you. And you got off scot-fucking-free. Jesus!’ He tipped his head back and glared at the heavens. ‘Well, not any more, Fin. You’re going to get to watch your boy die, just as I watched my father die on these same cliffs. Because of you.’

  ‘I suppose you knew about my kid being killed in the hit and run.’

  Artair grinned. ‘Saw it in the paper, boy. Punched the fucking air when I read it. At last some shit was sticking to the teflon kid. It’s what crystallized the idea for me. The chance to ruin your life the way you ruined mine.’

  Fin was no more than ten feet away now. He saw the madness in Artair’s eyes. And the terror in Fionnlagh’s.

  ‘That’s close enough,’ Artair said sharply.

  Fin said, ‘If you’d wanted the pleasure of seeing me watch my own son die, you should have been at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary last month. He was just eight, that wee boy. I was there in intensive care when he flatlined.’ And he saw the merest hint of humanity flicker for the briefest moment in Artair’s eyes. ‘You could have seen my misery close-up, Artair. You could have known for yourself how my life was blighted for ever by the loss of my child. But you won’t see that today.’

  Artair frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It would make me sick to my stomach to see young Fionnlagh die here like this. But I wouldn’t be witnessing the death of my son.’

  Artair’s consternation was turning to anger. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Macleod?’

  ‘I’m talking about the fact that Fionnlagh’s not my son, Artair. Marsaili only told you that in a fit of anger. Some stupid revenge for having to settle for what she saw as second-best. For having to settle for you. Just so you wouldn’t think it had all come too easy.’ He took several more tentative steps towards them. ‘Fionnlagh is your boy, Artair. Always has been, always will be.’ He saw the look of shock on the boy’s face. But he pressed on relentlessly. ‘All those years of beating that poor kid. Taking out your revenge on the boy instead of the father. And all the time it was your own son you were abusing. Just like your father before you.’

  Fin could see from Artair’s face that every conviction he had ever held, every certainty he had ever known, had just been stripped away. Leaving him to face a truth that he could never live with.

  ‘That’s crap! You’re lying!’

  ‘Am I? Think about it, Artair. Remember how it was. Remember how many times she tried to take it back. How many times she told you she’d only said it to hurt you.’ Fin took two more steps.

  ‘No!’ Artair turned his head slowly to look at the boy he had punched and kicked and punished for seventeen hellish years, and his face contorted with pain and misery. ‘She told me the truth. Then realized it was a mistake.’ He turned wild eyes on Fin. ‘And you can never take back the truth, you know that, Fin.’

  ‘She lied to hurt you, Artair. You were the one who wanted it to be true. You were the one who wanted the boy to blame in my absence. To have a scapegoat. To have a punchbag for all the hate you had for me.’

  ‘No!’ Artair almost screamed i
t now. And he released a feral howl that raised all the hairs on Fin’s arms and legs and back. He dropped the rope and Fin stepped quickly forward to pull the boy away from the edge of the cliff. He immediately felt the shivering that racked the teenager’s fragile frame. Whether from fear or from cold, he couldn’t tell. Artair stood staring at them bleakly, his eyes burning with tearful fury.

  Fin reached out a hand towards him. ‘Come on, Artair. It doesn’t have to end like this.’

  But Artair was staring right through him now. ‘Too late. Can’t take it back.’ He looked at the boy hanging grimly on to Fin for support. And all the tragedy of his life was captured in his eyes, every nuance of every moment of pain, every twist of a knife he had ultimately turned on himself. ‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was barely a whisper carried on the wind, a distant echo of his own father’s apology to Fin eighteen years earlier. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He met Fin’s eye for the briefest of moments, before turning without another word and dropping into the void, gannets rising up around him like the fiery angels that would carry him to Hell.

  Fin untied Fionnlagh and led him back across the rock towards the blackhouse. Several men came to meet them and put blankets around the boy’s shoulders. He had not spoken, but his pain was clear for all to see. His face was a bloodless grey-white. Two hundred feet below, in the creek between the promontories, the crew of the Purple Isle stood watching on the deck, and from somewhere out of the wind in the south-west, they heard the sound of blades beating turbulent air.

  Fin turned as the Sikorsky dropped from the sky, scattering clouds of seabirds before it, a great red and white bird whose motors thrummed and filled the air with their roar. He saw the words H.M. Coastguard emblazoned black on white along one side beneath the rotors as it dipped and bucked in the air rising from beneath the cliffs, before settling finally with a gentle grace on the helipad beside the lighthouse. A door slid open, and uniformed and plain-clothes police officers streamed out on to the concrete.