by Peter May
He is smaller, lighter than me, and I feel his breath exploding in my face, sour from stale cigarette smoke, as he staggers backwards. I fumble desperately to hold on to his wrist as he struggles to free it, and then I push again, sending us both sprawling over the settee that backs on to the kitchen. I land on top, expelling all the air from his lungs, and we topple then on to the floor, his knife skidding away across the floorboards.
But as we roll over, my head strikes what must be the corner of the coffee table, and light and pain explode inside it. For several long moments I am quite disabled, all my strength dissipated, my limbs feeble and useless. I can hear Bran barking furiously in the dark, and am aware of my assailant scrambling across the floor to retrieve his knife. And there is not a thing I can do about it.
As I turn my head, I see his silhouette rising to its knees. The moon continues to sprinkle intermittent illumination across the beach beyond the French windows, and his face is mired in darkness. Not, it occurs to me in a moment of absurd lucidity, that I would recognise it even if I could see it. And along with this clarity comes the realisation that I am not going to be able to prevent him from plunging his knife into me as many times as he likes. It is one of those moments when your own mortality becomes, perhaps for the first time in your life, more than something to be locked away and dealt with in a distant future. It is here and now, and death is just a breath away.
I make one last attempt to roll over and get to my knees, and find myself knocked back down by a shape that seems comprised only of darkness. But it is a darkness both solid and human, and it flies at the man with the knife. Bran is barking incessantly and my confusion is crowded with the noise of his bark and the crashing of two men locked in physical struggle. Merged into a single entity as I try to make sense of what is happening.
My attacker, and his, fall together on to the coffee table, which shatters beneath them. I feel flying glass cut my cheek, and one of them is up on his feet and running. Through the kitchen and out into the boot room. The second man is slower to rise, winded, and I can hear him gasping for breath before he sets off in pursuit. Bran follows them, barking all the way to the door, and I lie for a moment, breathing heavily, letting my head clear before I try to stand up. I stagger into the kitchen, supporting myself on whatever I can reach, before stumbling into the boot room and out through the open door on to the steps.
The cold air is a physical assault, but it revives me sufficiently to enable me to step down on to the drive, from where I can see the shadow of a man sprinting away along the road in the direction of the cemetery. Just one, and I don’t know whether it is the first man or the second. I spin around, scanning the horizon, and then the beach, for any sign of the other. But as the clouds overhead blow across the moon in the stiffening breeze, the night settles again in a blanket of darkness that smothers the land.
A light comes on in the cottage opposite. The old lady with the yappy dog awakened from her sleep. I turn and shout at Bran to shut up, and he stops his barking. And beyond the wind, I can hear the distant yapping of the old lady’s dog, muffled by doors and windows.
I usher Bran back into the house and slam the door shut, turning the lock to secure it from the inside, and feel my way along the wall of the boot room to where I know the fuse box is set into a cavity above the boiler. Its plastic cover is down, and I fumble for the master switch. There is no light as I flick it up, but I hear the hum of the boiler as it springs back to life. Two steps to the door and I find the light switch, then stand blinking in the sudden painful glare of electric light.
I takes me some time, to come to terms with the fact that I am still alive, and that, apart from the mess in the other room and a gash in my head, nothing has changed. Except that it has. For someone has just tried to kill me. Some person, unknown, has come into my house in the dead of night and tried to put a knife between my ribs. Only by the grace of God, and the intervention of a second intruder, has my life been spared.
Nothing, absolutely nothing since I found myself washed up, semi-conscious, on the Tràigh Losgaintir, has made sense. My memory loss. My failure to find a single clue to my identity, beyond my name, even in my own home. My affair with Sally. The book on the Flannan Isles mystery that I am not writing. Beehives on the coffin road. My missing boat. Now someone trying to kill me. And someone else stepping in to save me. The weight of it all is very nearly crushing.
Bran is still excited and excitable, dancing around me, snuffling and snorting, still on the brink of barking. But I hold him in the boot room with my foot while I shut the door on him. He doesn’t understand, but there is shattered glass all over the floor of the sitting room and I know that I have to clear it up before I can let him back in. He barks his hurt through the door at me as I take a broom and shovel from the kitchen cupboard and start to sweep up. It takes me nearly fifteen minutes, searching out every reflecting speck of glass, and then vacuuming the floor just to be sure.
I right a small table that has been upended, replacing the lamp that stood on it, thankful that the bulb remains intact. Then move into the bedroom to pick up the pieces of broken bulb from the bedside lamp and run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet to suck up any shards I might have missed.
The very act of cleaning up after the attack has allowed me to calm down. My heart is beating almost normally again, and the focus on finding every skelf of glass has stopped me thinking too much about it. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about anything. I want to go back to the day before yesterday and be who I was then. With whatever secrets I might have had. At least I would have known what they were.
Finally I let Bran back through, and he runs around the house, sniffing in every corner. Strange, threatening scents. He is still on full alert, even if I have put it behind me. Well, not behind me, exactly. It’s more like I have slipped into denial.
Which is when I notice the blade of my attacker’s knife catching the light where it lies, almost obscured beneath the television cabinet. I drop to my knees and bend down to fish it out and hold it in my hand with a sense of awe. This is a hunting knife with a nine-inch blade, razor-sharp along its curved edge, serrated along the other. Its black haft has finger grips. My insides turn to water as I imagine how it would have felt to have this cold, deadly blade slice through my flesh and veins and organs. And I carry it with me through to the bedroom to slip below my pillow before climbing back into bed, Bran jumping up to stretch himself along my length for comfort. If anyone comes for me again, this time I will be ready.
*
Day two, AML. After memory loss. Morning greets me with dried blood on the pillow and a scab that has formed over my right temple where it struck the coffee table during last night’s struggle. I have a thumping headache, which might owe as much to oversleeping as to my injury. Of the last twenty-four hours, I count up that I have slept away as many as fifteen. I suppose I must have needed to, but it hasn’t improved either my physical or mental well-being.
It is just after six and Bran is already up, sitting patiently in the boot room, waiting for me to open the door and let him out. I oblige, and he scampers away across the dunes, watched by the Highland pony that grazes habitually among the beach grasses. I put out food and water for him and leave the door open for his return, then set the kettle to boil and spoon coffee into a mug.
As I wait, I go through to the sitting room. The only evidence of the life-or-death struggle that took place here at midnight last night is the buckled remains of the coffee table. I lift it up and carry it through to the spare room, and when I come back the sitting room seems bigger, empty somehow. I cross to the French windows and gaze out across the beach, watching sunlight chase shadows across turquoise and silver before they race each other over the purple-grey hills beyond. Buford’s caravan draws my attention, and I realise it is because his Land Rover is gone. And I wonder where he might be at this time of the morning. What does he do all day, every day? And what is his interest in me?
The kettle boils and I make my coffee, pouring in milk to cool it enough to drink, then sit at the table with the view of the beach spread out before me. I close my eyes as I let the warmth of the coffee slip back over my throat, and try to focus on what it is I need to do now. Where do I go from here? I can’t continue to live in this vacuum of ignorance. I have no purpose, no reason to get up in the morning without a past, or any future. Somehow I have to make sense of all this, figure out who I am and what I am doing here.
I incline my head to look at the map on the wall. If what I told Jon and Sally about an academic career in Edinburgh is true, why have I spent the last year and a half on the Isle of Harris pretending to write a book? My eyes come to rest on the cluster of dots on the map that are the Flannan Isles. I make regular visits to the islands, Sally says. But if I am not writing that book, then why? I must have had a reason. I cannot for the life of me think of anything that would connect the Seven Hunters with eighteen beehives hidden off the coffin road. But those islands seem like as good a place to start looking for answers as any.
I hear Bran returning, claws scraping on laminate floor, and his thirsty lapping of water before the rattle of food as he sticks his face in his bowl. I move around the table to sit in front of the laptop and open up my browser, searching for images of the Flannan Isles. There are plenty, it seems, on the internet, mostly amateur photographs taken by tourists, and not particularly useful. I spend nearly ten minutes searching through them before I stumble on the site of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, and a detailed map of the lighthouse island, Eilean Mòr.
Shaped a little like a turtle on its back, it reveals a ragged coastline, with cliffs rising all around it. Both landing stages are marked, east and west, on the south side of the island, along with the siting of the cranes which must have been used to lift heavy tackle and supplies ashore. Paths lead up from each to converge almost in the centre of the island, before heading on up to the lighthouse itself. A helicopter landing pad is marked to the right of the path, which leads me to assume that service engineers must be brought to and from the island by helicopter. I am surprised to see a ‘Chapel’ marked on the map, just below the lighthouse, and I wonder who must have lived here once, long enough to have built a place of worship.
Bran pads through to sit beside my chair and look up at me, then pushes my elbow with his snout, in search of my hand. I ruffle his head absently, and stroke behind his ears. My boat has gone, God knows where. And I wonder how I will get out there.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The harbour at Rodel is deserted as I drive down from the church and park in front of the hotel. There are a couple of other vehicles there, but not a soul in sight. I have no idea where Coinneach lives, and wander along the quay to the boat I saw him climb out of yesterday. It is a Sea Ray 250 Sundancer powerboat with a 454 Magnum Alpha One engine. I seem to know every little detail about it, although I am not sure how. It is a sleek beast, white with purple trim, and a plastic cowling that can be mounted to shelter the driver in bad weather. Though it would not, I know, last long in the winds it would encounter around these coasts. This is a fair-weather boat.
I am turning away when I hear my name called, and I swing back to see Coinneach emerging from below, climbing the couple of steps to the left of the driver’s seat, and straightening himself with palms pressed into his lower back. ‘On your own today?’ he says.
‘Aye.’
‘So what brings you back to Rodel when your boat’s up at Uig?’ And something about the way he says this makes me think that he didn’t believe a word of Sally’s story yesterday.
‘I was wondering if I could borrow yours.’
He laughs, and his amusement seems genuine enough. ‘I’m not in business for the good of your health, Neal. But I’ll rent you one. Where are you going?’
‘The Flannan Isles.’
He frowns and looks up at the sky. ‘Well . . . it’s fair enough now, alright, but the forecast’s for squalls moving up from the south-west. You’ll maybe not get landed.’
‘I’ll take my chances.’
‘You’ll not be taking any chances with my boat, man. If the swell’s too big, don’t even try it. You’d best take the inflatable with you.’
I nod.
He gives me a strange look. ‘What the hell is it you find to do out there on these trips, anyway?’
I wonder if he has asked me this before, and what I might have said if he has. All I say is, ‘I like the solitude.’
‘And what about your book?’
So I have told him that lie, too. ‘What about it?’
‘Well, you must have gathered enough material for it by now, surely?’
‘It’s almost finished, Coinneach. I just need a few more photographs.’
He cocks an eyebrow. ‘Not the best day for it today.’ Then shrugs. ‘But that’s your business, not mine. Come up to the hotel and we’ll get the paperwork sorted, and you can be on your way before the bad stuff comes in.’
*
I see the islands, and the lighthouse, from some way off, and glancing back I can see the dark silhouette of the Outer Hebrides stretched out along the eastern horizon. The sea has been kind to me thus far, with a medium swell and light winds. I have studied Coinneach’s charts, and although I have no recollection of having ever set eyes on them, they seem comfortingly familiar.
There is a sense, in all this water around me, of homecoming. I am fully at ease with it. And it instils in me a sense of confidence.
Approaching from the south-west, I throttle back and cruise slowly between Gealtaire Beag and the larger Eilean Tighe. Once round the headland, I bear west and see the extraordinary twin arches that rise out of the sea between the two Làmh a’ Sgeires, Bheag and Mhor. Natural black rock stacks sculpted by nature and capped white with gannets, the air above them thick with wheeling seabirds, guillemots and shags, whose plaintive cries fill the air.
For the last mile or so, dolphins have followed me, breaking the surface of the water in playful arcs, circling the boat again and again. But they have gone now, and stretched out ahead is Eilean Mòr itself, lying deceptively low in the water. From a high point at its west side it dips towards a flat central area, before rising once more to a small summit in the east. The lighthouse sits on a central peak, which is the highest point on the island, rising it seems out of nowhere. But even as I approach it, the illusion of the island lying low is dispelled. Cliffs lift sheer out of the swell, rock laid in layers, one upon the other, and shot through with seams of pink gneiss.
Since the swell is coming from the south-west, I head for the more sheltered eastern landing, anchoring as close to shore as I dare. I lower the inflatable I have strapped to the stern of the boat, clamber carefully into it and pull the starter cord to kick the outboard into life.
I ride the swell into the jetty and see immediately that it has not been maintained in years, eroded and broken by time and the constant assault of the ocean. Concrete steps, encrusted with shells, vanish into dark green water, white breaking all around them on the rising tide. I nudge the inflatable slowly towards them, before turning side-on and cutting the motor, then leaping, rope in hand, on to the lower steps, hoping that my feet will find a grip. With difficulty I drag the tender the ten feet up to the broken concrete pier and secure it to a rusted iron ring set into the rock.
A hundred and fifty feet or more above me is the platform where the crane once stood, lifting loads from countless supply boats through wind and spray, to swing them on to an upper platform where a cable-drawn tram would haul them the rest of the way to the lighthouse itself.
The steps on which I have landed climb steeply up the side of the cliff before doubling back, still rising, to the concrete landing block where the crane would deposit the incoming supplies. On the sea side are the rusted stumps of what must once have been safety rails, long since torn away by the destructive power and fury of the Atlantic. It is a hell of a cli
mb, puffins huddled in cracks and crevices, gannets and guillemots circling close to my head as if warning me to stay away, and as I near the top I feel the wind stiffening. Looking back across the water I have just covered, foaming in rings around the six other pinnacles of land that make up the Seven Hunters, I see the ocean rising and realise that I cannot stay too long.
I turn to find myself watched by a group of seabirds perched on a rock, huddled in hooded wariness. Large birds. Three of them, like the ghosts of the lost lighthouse men imagined in Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s poem.
We saw three queer, black, ugly birds—
Too big, by far, in my belief,
For guillemot or shag—
Like seamen sitting bold upright
Upon a half-tide reef:
But, as we near’d, they plunged from sight,
Without a sound, or spurt of white.
Spooked, I crouch to pick up a rock and hurl it at them. With huge wings outspread, flapping in slow motion against the wind, they rise, startled, into the air, wheeling away beyond the cliff and out of sight. I cannot explain why, but their presence creates in my mind a sense of foreboding, and I turn quickly to make the final ascent to the lighthouse.
The tram tracks are still visible in the concrete path, but the rails are long gone, and weeds and grass poke through the cracks. The climb leaves me breathless. Off to my right I see the helipad that was marked on the Historical Monuments map, and the chapel, such as it is. In fact little more than a crude stone bothy. A scaffolding erected along the south side of the complex supports thirty-six solar panels, answering the question I had in my mind of how the lighthouse was powered, if unmanned. The buildings are a freshly painted white, with doors and windows trimmed in ochre. The light room at the top of the tower is an impressive structure of steel, with glass prisms and a conical black roof. The whole is surrounded by a tall stone wall, cemented and topped with concrete copings.
