by Peter May
‘I know, of course, that not all of you will have been involved, and so I appeal to those of you who were not to speak up now, unless you want to share in the punishment of the others.’
The janitor appeared at his shoulder, still in his dressing gown and slippers, hair tousled. Of all the staff, he was the one who treated the kids the best. But tonight his face was sickly pale, trepidation in darting brown eyes. Mr Anderson leaned towards him as he whispered words too fast and soft for us to hear.
Mr Anderson nodded, and as the janitor retreated said, ‘Food and alcohol on the roof. You stupid boys! An absolute recipe for disaster. Come on! Hands up those of you who weren’t there.’ He folded his arms and waited. After just a few moments, hesitant hands lifted themselves into the air, identifying by omission those of us who were guilty. Mr Anderson shook his head grimly. ‘And who was responsible for providing the alcohol?’
Dead silence this time.
‘Come on!’ His voice boomed now into the night. ‘If you don’t all wish to suffer the same punishment, the innocent had better give up the guilty.’
A lad called Tommy Jack, who must have been one of the youngest at The Dean, said, ‘Please, sir, it was Alex Curry.’ You could have heard a pin drop in England.
Mr Anderson’s eyes flickered towards the defiant Alex Curry, who was sitting up now in his bed, leaning his forearms on his knees. ‘So what are you going to do, Anderson? Belt me? Just fucking try it.’
A mean little smile crept across Mr Anderson’s lips. ‘You’ll see,’ was all he said. And he turned towards little Tommy, with the acid of contempt in his voice. ‘I don’t admire boys who clype on their friends. I’m sure that’s a lesson you will have learned before this night is out.’
He flicked out the lights and pulled the doors shut, and there was a long silence before Tommy’s frightened voice trembled in the dark. ‘I didn’t mean it, honest.’
And Alex Curry’s growled response. ‘Ya wee fucker!’
Mr Anderson was right. Wee Tommy learned that night, the hardest way possible, that telling tales on your peers was not acceptable behaviour. And most, if not all, of those who had raised their hands were taught similar lessons.
As for the rest of us, we could only await with trepidation whatever retribution Mr Anderson had planned for us in the morning.
To our surprise nothing happened. The tension in The Dean was palpable over breakfast, a strange muted dining room with inmates and staff alike afraid, it seemed, to speak. By the time we left for school, marching in pairs down the hill to the village, a little of the anxiety had lifted. By the end of the day we had almost forgotten about it.
We returned as usual, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except that Alex Curry was gone. Left The Dean for good. And then we got to the dorms. Which is when we realized that the sacks of belongings which sat at the end of each bed were gone. All of them. I panicked. My mother’s ring was in my sack. I ran down the stairs full of fire and indignation, only to bump into the janitor in the corridor below.
‘Where’s our stuff?’ I shouted at him. ‘What’s he done with it?’
His face was the colour of ashes, almost green around the eyes. Eyes that were filled with anxiety and guilt. ‘I’ve never seen him like that, Johnny,’ he said. ‘He came out of his apartment like a man possessed after you’d all left for school. He went around the dorms and collected all the sacks, making me and some of the others help him.’ His words tumbled out of his mouth like apples spilling from a barrel. ‘He gathered them all together down in the basement, and got me to hold open the door of the central heating furnace while he threw them all in. One at a time. Every last one of them.’
I felt anger blinding me. All that I had left of my mother was gone. Her ring with the intertwining serpents. Lost for ever. And Peter’s album of cigarette packets. All ties to the past severed for eternity. Burned in petty revenge by Mr Anderson.
Had I been able, I would have killed that man and never had a moment’s regret.
TWELVE
Fin was a little uncomfortable. It felt strange to be back in this house, filled as it was with so many childhood memories. The house where he and Artair had been tutored by Mr Macinnes. The house where they had played as children, best friends since the time they could first walk. A house filled with dark secrets that both had kept by unspoken assent.
To Marsaili it was just the house where she lived. Where she had spent twenty thankless years married to a man she didn’t love, caring for his invalid mother, bringing up their son.
On their return from Stornoway she had invited Fin to eat with her and Fionnlagh, and he had accepted gratefully, spared from the can of soup he had planned to heat on his tiny gas camping stove.
Although it was still light outside, low black cloud had brought a premature end to the day. A fierce wind whistled around doors and windows, driving rain against the glass in unrelenting waves, blowing smoke down the chimney in the sitting room and filling the house with the stinging, toasted scent of peat.
Marsaili had prepared the meal in silence, and Fin had guessed that her whole conscious being was filled with something like guilt for having abandoned her father to a strange bed in a strange place where he knew no one.
‘You’re good with him,’ she said suddenly, without turning. She kept her focus on the pot on the hob.
Fin sat at the table with a glass of beer. ‘What do you mean?’
‘With my dad. Like you were experienced in dealing with dementia.’
Fin sipped at his beer. ‘Mona’s mother suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s, Marsaili. A slow deterioration. Not too bad at first. But then she had a fall and broke her hip, and they hospitalized her at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow, and put her in a geriatric ward.’
Marsaili wrinkled her nose. ‘Bet that wasn’t much fun for her.’
‘It was disgusting.’ The depth of feeling in his voice made her turn. ‘It was like something out of Dickens. The place stank of shit and urine, people crying out in the night. Staff who sat on her bed, blocking her view of the TV that she was paying for, watching soap operas while colostomy bags overflowed.’
‘Oh my God!’ The horror was painted on Marsaili’s face.
‘There was no way we could leave her there. So we went with a bag one night, packed up her stuff and took her back to our place. I paid for a private nurse and she stayed with us for six months.’ He took another mouthful of beer, lost in the memory. ‘I got to know how to deal with her. To ignore the contradictions and never argue. To understand that it was frustration that caused her anger, and forgetfulness that made her cussed.’ He shook his head. ‘Her short-term memory was almost non-existent. But she could remember things from childhood with pin-sharp clarity, and we would spend hours talking about the past. I liked Mona’s mum.’
Marsaili was lost in silent thought for a while. Then, ‘Why did you and Mona split up?’ And no sooner had she asked it, than she qualified her question. In case, perhaps, it was too direct. ‘Was it only because of the accident?’
Fin shook his head. ‘That was the breaking point … after years of living a comfortable lie. If it hadn’t been for Robbie we’d probably have gone our separate ways a long time ago. We were friends, and I can’t say I was unhappy, but I never really loved her.’
‘Why did you marry her, then?’
He met her eye and thought about it, forcing himself to confront the truth, perhaps for the very first time. ‘Probably because you married Artair.’
She returned his gaze, and in the few feet that separated them lay all the wasted years they had let slip by. She turned back again to her pot, unable to face the thought. ‘You can’t blame me for that. You were the one who drove me away.’
The outside door flew open, and the wind and the rain blew in briefly with Fionnlagh. He shut it quickly behind him and stood pink-faced and dripping, his anorak soaked, his wellies caked with mud. He seemed surprised to see Fin sitting at the table.
> ‘Get those things off you,’ Marsaili said, ‘and sit in. We’re almost ready to eat.’
The boy kicked off his boots and hung up his waterproofs, and brought a bottle of beer from the fridge to the table. ‘So what happened with Grampa?’
Marsaili swept back the hair from her face and served up three plates of chilli con carne scooped on to beds of rice. ‘Your gran won’t have him at home any more. So he’s in the care home at Dun Eisdean until I can figure out what to do about him.’
Fionnlagh shovelled food into his mouth. ‘Why didn’t you bring him here?’
Marsaili’s eyes darted towards Fin and then away again, and he caught the guilt in them. He said, ‘Because he needs professional care now, Fionnlagh. Physically and mentally.’
But Fionnlagh kept his focus on his mother. ‘You looked after Artair’s mother for long enough. And she wasn’t even your own flesh and blood.’
Marsaili turned twenty years of resentment on her son. ‘Yes, well, maybe you’d like to change the bed every time he soils it, and go looking for him every time he wanders off. Maybe you’d like to feed him at every meal, and be there every time he’s lost or forgotten something.’
Fionnlagh didn’t respond, except with the merest of shrugs, and kept forking chilli into his face.
Fin said, ‘There’s a complication, Fionnlagh.’
‘Yes?’ Fionnlagh barely glanced at him.
‘They dug a body out of the peat bog near Siader a few days ago. A young man, about your age. As far as they can tell, he’s been there since the late fifties.’
Fionnlagh’s fork paused midway between his plate and his mouth. ‘And?’
‘He was murdered.’
The fork went back down to the plate. ‘What’s that got to do with us?’
‘It seems he was related somehow to your grandfather. Which means he was also related to you and Marsaili.’
Fionnlagh frowned. ‘How can they tell that?’
‘DNA,’ Marsaili said.
He looked at her blankly for a moment, then realisation dawned. ‘The samples we gave last year.’
She nodded.
‘I fucking knew it! That should have been destroyed. I signed a form refusing to let them keep mine on the database.’
‘So did everyone else,’ Fin said. ‘Except, apparently, for your grandfather. He probably didn’t understand.’
‘So they just put him on the computer, like some criminal?’
Marsaili said, ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?’
‘It’s an invasion of privacy, Mum. Who knows who’ll get access to that information, and what they might do with it?’
‘It’s a perfectly reasonable argument,’ Fin said. ‘But right now, that’s not really the point.’
‘Well, what is?’
‘Who the murdered man was, and how he was related to your grandfather.’
Fionnlagh looked at his mother. ‘Well, he must have been a cousin or something.’
She shook her head. ‘There’s no one that we know of, Fionnlagh.’
‘Then there must be someone that you don’t know of.’
She shrugged. ‘Apparently.’
‘So, anyway, this guy was related to Grampa: so what?’
Fin said, ‘Well, from a police perspective it makes Tormod the most likely person to have killed him.’
There was a shocked silence around the table. Marsaili looked at Fin. It was the first she had heard this. ‘Does it?’
Fin nodded slowly. ‘When the CIO arrives from the mainland to open the investigation, your father’s going to be the prime suspect on a list of one.’ He took a pull at his beer. ‘So we’d better start trying to figure out who the dead man is.’
Fionnlagh cleared the last of the chilli from his plate. ‘Well, you can do that. I’ve got other things to think about.’ He crossed the kitchen to retrieve his anorak and start pulling on boots that shed flakes of drying mud across the tiles.
‘Where are you going?’ Marsaili’s forehead creased with concern.
‘I’m meeting Donna at the Crobost Social.’
‘Oh, so her father’s actually letting her out for the night?’ Marsaili’s tone was heavily sardonic.
‘Don’t start, Mum.’
‘If that girl had half an ounce of gumption in her, she’d tell her father where to go. I’ve told you a hundred times you can stay here. You, Donna and the baby.’
‘You don’t know what her father’s like.’ Fionnlagh almost spat the words at her.
‘Oh, I think I do, Fionnlagh. We grew up together, remember?’ Marsaili glanced quickly at Fin and then away again.
‘Aye, but he didn’t have God in those days, did he? You know what they’re like, Mum, when they get the curam, these born-agains. There’s no reasoning with them. Why would they listen to you or me when God has already spoken to them?’
Fin felt the strangest chill run through him. It was like hearing himself speaking. Since the death of his parents all those years before, his life had been a constant battle between belief and anger. If he believed, then he could only feel anger at the God who had been responsible for the accident. So it was easier not to believe, and he had little patience for those who did.
‘It’s time you stood up to him.’ There was a weariness in Marsaili’s voice, a lack of conviction that told Fin she didn’t believe that Fionnlagh was ever likely to pit himself against Donald Murray.
Fionnlagh heard it too, and was defensive in return. ‘And tell him what? What great prospects I have? What a wonderful future I can offer his daughter and his granddaughter?’ He turned away towards the door, and his last words were almost lost in the wind. ‘Gimme a fucking break!’ He slammed the door shut behind him.
Marsaili flushed with embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. He’s just a boy facing up too early to a responsibility he shouldn’t have had. He needs to finish school and go to university. Then maybe he really could offer them a future.’
Marsaili shook her head. ‘He won’t do that. He’s frightened he’ll lose them. He wants to quit school at the end of term and get a job. Show Donald Murray that he takes his responsibilities seriously.’
‘By throwing away his only chance in life? Surely to God he doesn’t want to end up like Artair.’
The fire of resentment burned briefly in Marsaili’s eyes, but she said nothing.
Fin said quickly, ‘And one thing’s for sure. Donald Murray would never respect him if he did.’
Marsaili lifted their plates away from the table. ‘Nice of you to come back after all this time and tell us how we should be running our lives.’ The plates clattered on to the counter top, and she laid her hands flat upon it, leaning forward to take her weight on them and letting her head fall. ‘I’m sick of it, Fin. Sick of everything. Sick of Donald Murray and his sanctimonious bullying. Sick of Fionnlagh’s lack of backbone. I’m sick of fooling myself into studying for a future I’ll probably never have.’ She drew a deep tremulous breath and forced herself to stand upright again. ‘And now this.’ She turned back to face Fin, and he saw that she was hanging on to control by a gossamer thread. ‘What am I going to do about my dad?’
It would have been easy for him to stand up and take her in his arms, and tell her everything was going to be all right. But it wasn’t. And there was no point in pretending it was. He said, ‘Come and sit down and tell me what you know about him.’
She pushed herself, laden with weariness, away from the counter and sat heavily in her chair. Her face was strained by tension and fatigue, pale and pinched in the harsh electric light. But he saw in it still the little girl who had first drawn him to her all those years before. The little girl with the blond pigtails who had sat next to him that first day at school and offered to translate for him, because for some reason inexplicable to the young Fin his parents had sent him to school speaking only Gaelic. He reached across the table and brushed the hair from her blue eyes, and for a
moment she lifted a hand to touch his, a fleeting moment of recollection, of how it had once been long ago. She dropped her hand to the table again.
‘Dad came up from Harris when he was still in his teens. About eighteen or nineteen, I think. He got a job as a labourer at Mealanais farm.’ She got up to take a half-empty bottle of red wine from the worktop and pour herself a glass. She held the bottle out towards Fin, but he shook his head. ‘It was sometime after that he met my mum. Her father was still the lighthouse keeper then, at the Butt, and that’s where they lived. Apparently Dad used to walk to the lighthouse every night after work to see her, even just for a few minutes, and then back again. In all weathers. Four and a half miles each way.’ She took a large sip of her wine. ‘It must have been love.’
Fin smiled. ‘It must have been.’
‘They went to all the dances at the social. And all the crofters’ do’s. They must have been going out steady for about four years when the farmer at Mealanais died, and the place came up for lease. Dad applied for it, and they said yes. On condition that he got himself married.’
‘That must have made for a romantic proposal.’
Marsaili smiled in spite of herself. ‘I think my mum was just pleased that something had finally prompted him to ask. They were married in Crobost Church by Donald Murray’s father, and spent the next God knows how many years eking a living off the land and raising me and my sister. In all my conscious life I can’t remember my dad once having left this island. And that’s all I know, really.’
Fin finished the last of his beer. ‘Tomorrow we’ll go and talk to your mum. She’s bound to have a lot more information than you do.’
Marsaili topped up her wine. ‘I wouldn’t want to keep you from your work.’
‘What work?’
‘Restoring your parents’ croft.’
His smile was touched by sadness. ‘It’s lain derelict for thirty years, Marsaili. It can wait a little longer.’
THIRTEEN
I can see a thin line of yellow light beneath the door. From time to time someone passes in the corridor and their shadow follows the light from one side to the other. I notice that I can’t hear any footsteps. Maybe they wear rubber shoes so you won’t know when they’re coming. Not like Mr Anderson with his tick-tock crocodile shoes. He wants you to know. He wants you to be afraid. And we were.
