Coffin Road

by Peter May

  Murray sat up front, guiding the boat towards the dark profile of the Seven Hunters, strung along the distant horizon like so many oddly shaped beads. It was a trip he had made countless times, and Gunn envied him his easy way on the water. He was as much at home on it as on the land.

  To his annoyance, Professor Angus Wilson seemed actually to be enjoying himself. Gunn glanced across the cabin at the pathologist, and resented the way the man almost invariably made him feel like a rank novice. Who knew how many post-mortems the physician had carried out, how many murder victims he had dissected. How many mangled bodies he had vandalised with his knife, probing for cause of death, uncovering hidden trauma. While Gunn, serving most of his career at the police station in Church Street in Stornoway, had only rarely been exposed to violent death in all its bloody technicolour and ugly stench. And had never got used to it. He liked to think of himself as a student more of human nature than of human physiology.

  It was pure chance that the professor had even been on the island. A messy, suspicious death that had turned out, as Gunn expected, to be a suicide. A man who, for some unaccountable reason, had thrown himself from the cliffs in Ness. The pathologist was due to catch the late afternoon flight back to Edinburgh. And after getting the call from Murray, Gunn had only just caught him as he was checking out of his hotel.

  Neither of the two uniformed officers they had brought with them from Stornoway seemed afflicted by Gunn’s inability to keep the contents of his stomach in place, and they looked at him in surprise as he dashed suddenly out of the cabin to double up over the back of the boat and heave into its wake.

  There was no colour at all in his face as he ventured slowly back to resume his seat. He had grown more inclined to portliness in recent years, and the life jacket fastened tightly around his woollen jumper meant that he had to squeeze himself into it. He ran a hand back through dark hair that grew thickly from a widow’s peak on his forehead, greying now at the temples, and became aware of Professor Wilson looking at him across the aisle.

  ‘I’m not surprised you’re feeling nauseous, Detective Sergeant, given the pungency of the aftershave you seem to sprinkle so liberally on that shiny face of yours. I’m amazed you need to shave at all. I’ve seen more hair on a whore’s fanny.’

  Gunn heard the stifled laughter of the uniforms somewhere behind him.

  ‘Honestly, man. You get sick in the autopsy room, queasy in the car, bilious on the boat . . . You’d think, by your time in life, you might have mastered the vagaries of your stomach.’

  Gunn refrained from comment as he felt a second wave of nausea rising. He glared instead at the professor, diverting his thoughts from his stomach by focusing his hatred on this vulgar, bullying pathologist who never seemed to tire of baiting him. Everything about him was irritating to Gunn. From his smug smile to his tangle of ginger whiskers, as coarse as fusewire, and the wispy, greying fuzz that ringed a bald, shiny head spattered by large brown freckles. Thin as a whip, and tall, with long, bony fingers, he towered over Gunn, making him feel small in every sense.

  ‘About forty minutes from here,’ Murray called back to them, and Gunn groaned inwardly.

  *

  When finally they arrived at Eilean Mòr, there was a spit of rain in the air and the wind had risen out of the south-west. The east-side landing stage was relatively sheltered from the incoming swell by Làmh a’ Sgeire Mhor, and Murray anchored the Lochlann in the bay and moved aft to lower the inflatable tender into the rise and fall of deep green water. Gunn’s focus on not falling into the sea as he transferred from one to the other took his mind off the nausea. When they were all aboard, and Murray had fired up the fifteen-horsepower outboard, Gunn clung on to the sides with knuckles that glowed white with tension.

  The inflatable skimmed fast across the surface of the bay, sending spray up into their faces, then Murray throttled back to turn the boat side-on and nudge it gently in towards the steps. One of the constables jumped out with a rope to tether it to the rusted rung set in the wall, and one by one they made the jump from boat to landing stage, timing each leap with the highest point of the swell. Professor Wilson made it look easy, and it seemed to Gunn that the older man had the agility of a mountain goat. In stark contrast to Gunn himself, who almost fell, and was only saved from doing so by the steadying hand of the professor, who grabbed his arm. Gunn shrugged it free. ‘I’m fine,’ he said curtly.

  To the accompaniment of screaming seabirds circling overhead, the five men made the long, windswept climb up the steps, doubling back to the crane emplacement, then following the tracks of the old tramway up to the intersection, from where a single concrete path led up to the lighthouse itself.

  By the time they were on a level with the old ruined chapel, Gunn had to stop, leaning forward with his palms on his thighs, just to catch his breath. He felt the wind tugging at his clothes and filling his mouth as he sucked in oxygen.

  Wilson shook his head. What was left of his hair was standing almost on end in the wind. ‘Are you not required to maintain a certain level of fitness in the force these days, Detective Sergeant? Man, you wouldn’t be fit to chase a sloth up a tree!’

  Gunn straightened up in an attempt to recover a little of his dignity, but was certain that his face would be puce, and he avoided the eye of the uniforms, who he knew would be enjoying this ritual humiliation of their senior officer.

  Before setting out from Uig in the boat, Gunn had interviewed the tourists who found the corpse. And he turned now to Murray. ‘You weren’t with the group that discovered the body when they went to look inside the chapel?’

  Murray shook his head solemnly. ‘No, I usually stay with the tender. It wasn’t until they came and told me what they’d found that I went to take a look for myself. I wasn’t going to call you folks out on some wild goose chase.’

  ‘So it was just you and one other who actually went in?’

  ‘Aye, that’s right. The first fella in backed out before the others could follow, and threw up all over the grass.’ Murray nodded towards a discoloured area of ground near the entrance to the chapel. Most of the vomit had soaked away, but the evidence of the man’s breakfast was still visible.

  Gunn felt his stomach heave. He waved the uniforms towards the old stone ruin. ‘You’d better do your stuff, boys.’

  And as the two constables hammered in the metal stakes they had brought on the boat, linking them with fluttering crime-scene tape to cordon off an area in front of the entrance, Gunn and the professor pulled on latex gloves and plastic shoe covers in preparation for taking a look at the body for themselves.

  Gunn knew he was not going to enjoy this, and took a deep breath. He steeled himself, glancing out across the ocean, where sunlight played in burnished silver patches that fell through broken cloud, and wondered what on earth anyone would be doing out here to get himself murdered in the first place.

  He followed Professor Wilson under the tape and into the narrow entrance to the chapel. There was a smell of damp in the gloom, and something else. Something unpleasant, a little like rotten eggs. Light fell in daubs through the broken roof, and the dead man lay twisted at an unnatural angle, his head turned to one side in a pool of long-dried blood and pale grey matter.

  Professor Wilson dropped down to sit back on his heels and Gunn crouched beside him. There was very little room in here, and they were in very close proximity not only to each other, but to the body itself. Gunn gritted his teeth, determined to stay in control of his stomach, and watched as the pathologist began going carefully through the dead man’s pockets. First his dark blue anorak, which was unzipped. The outside pockets were empty, apart from a sweetie wrapper, and all he recovered from the inside pocket was a pen and a small spiral notebook whose virgin pages were quite blank. His trouser pockets yielded a car key on a tab. Very carefully, the pathologist half-rolled the body on to its side, and, with fingers like forceps, recovered a wallet from the back pocket.

  Supporting the corpse with
his free hand, he let it fall gently back to its resting place, then opened the wallet. He raised his eyebrows in surprise and turned his face towards Gunn. ‘Just cash. No credit cards, no driver’s licence –’ he slid two fingers into an opening just behind the empty card slots and drew them out empty – ‘or anything else, apparently, that might identify him.’ He handed Gunn the wallet, then turned his attention to the body itself, drawing a torch from his jacket pocket to play over the waxen features of the dead man. A slack face, lined by the years, fat accumulated in the jowls and folds of flesh beneath the jaw. Hair, thin and greying. Impossible now to say what colour it might once have been. The pathologist made a moue. ‘Very unscientific, but at a guess I’d say he was in his fifties. There will be better indicators once I get him on the table.’

  In spite of himself, Gunn said, ‘Can you tell how long he’s been dead?’

  The professor turned a withering look in his direction, then turned back to the body, lifting an arm and bending it at the elbow, before raising and lowering it at the shoulder joint. He spread fingers across the man’s jaw, which was quite slack, allowing him to open and close the mouth without resistance. The lips seemed vaguely swollen. Gunn watched as he unbuckled the trouser belt, unzipping the fly and pulling up the jumper, and the T-shirt beneath it, to expose the belly.

  ‘Greenish tinge to the abdomen,’ the pathologist said. ‘And slightly bloated, probably with gas. Though there’s fat there anyway, and the liver may well be distended. Help me roll him over.’

  Gunn lent him both hands to roll the man on to his side and hold him there as Wilson pulled the trousers down over the buttocks, revealing red-purple discoloration where they had been resting on the ground. He pressed a thumb deep into the discoloration, then removed it. There was no change of colour. ‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Livor mortis is well defined. And fixed. Can’t blanch it with my thumb.’

  Gunn knew better than to ask.

  The pathologist then spread his palm on the man’s back and moved it gently back and forth. ‘A little skin slippage, too. Okay, let’s lay him back where he was.’ And when the body was lying once more as they had found it, Professor Wilson leaned over the head to examine the wound with the beam of his torch. ‘He’d been struck several times, I’d say, before the skull was breached. Abraded lacerations, and contusions. Something rough, like a rock or a stone.’ And almost involuntarily, they both looked around the confined space of the old ruin for what might have been the murder weapon, the beam of the professor’s torch playing over several possible candidates. ‘We’ll need to go through this place with a fine-toothed comb.’ Then he returned the torch to the face of the victim and pulled back the eyelids in turn to shine its beam directly into the eyes. ‘Corneas are quite opaque.’ He snapped off his torch. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Gunn was only too pleased to be able to scramble out and straighten himself up to breathe cold, fresh air. Professor Wilson followed him out. Murray and the two constables stood some twenty feet or more away on the path, watching them. There was more rain in the wind now, although oddly it was brighter than before, great swathes of ocean around the foam-ringed islands of the Flannans reflecting dazzling sunlight from huge rents in low, bubbling raincloud.

  The professor lowered his voice as he turned his back on the onlookers and spoke directly to Gunn. ‘So Murray said it was two days ago that this fella Maclean was seen running from the chapel?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And nobody thought to take a look inside it then?’

  ‘They were driven back to the boat by the rain, apparently.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you this, DS Gunn, if it was Maclean that killed him, he didn’t do it two days ago.’ Something like a smile flitted across his lips. ‘In answer to your earlier question, I can’t tell you exactly how long this man has been dead, but it’s more than two days, that’s certain. And, at a guess, I’d say at least four. But that’s all it would be at this stage. A guess.’ He lifted his head, as if sniffing the air. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘there was no boat found, was there?’

  ‘No, there wasn’t, sir.’

  ‘So how did he get out here?’

  Gunn shrugged. This was more familiar territory for him. ‘Who knows? Perhaps brought out by the killer himself.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ The pathologist scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Funny thing to do, though, don’t you think? Bring a man away out here just to kill him, then leave him in the chapel where he’s bound to be found, sooner or later. I mean, if you were a man of murderous disposition, Detective Sergeant, though I’m not suggesting for a minute that you are, wouldn’t you push the body over the cliff? Let the sea take him? Chances are he would never be found.’

  Gunn nodded, and gazed up at the rows of dark solar panels along the front of the white-painted lighthouse. He knew the story of the vanishing lighthouse keepers, of course. The sea had claimed them. Or, at least, that was the theory. And it occurred to him that this man’s killer had either wanted his victim to be found, or what had taken place here had been unplanned, and that the killer had simply fled in a blind panic.

  He became aware of the pathologist speaking again. ‘We’d better call the coastguard and get the body helicoptered back to Stornoway. I’d like to get this fella on the table as soon as possible.’

  *

  Gunn put on his greens and face mask before entering the autopsy room, but nothing ever prepared him for the smell. The perfume of putrefaction, and the gut-wrenching stink released by the bowels during dissection. In his limited experience, pathologists never seemed to notice it.

  Outside, the light was fading fast and Gunn was hungry and anxious to get home for his tea. It had taken a considerable effort of will to force himself to attend this post-mortem, which he knew would rob him of his appetite, and he had been putting it off as long as he could. Unlike the professor, who had already expressed his delight at spending another night in the Royal at the Scottish government’s expense, and dining again at the Indian in Church Street, with its luridly coloured curries. He must, Gunn reflected, be a man blessed with a cast-iron constitution.

  Much of the post-mortem had been completed. The cadaver lay opened up on the table, the liquids released by the pathologist’s knife draining into a bucket beneath it. The organs had been weighed and breadloafed. And the damaged brain, removed from its fractured skull, was suspended now in fixative.

  The victim’s clothing was laid out on a separate table, along with the rock they had recovered from just outside the chapel. A jagged piece of gneiss, about twice the size of a fist, that a man could spread his fingers around. It had blood, hair and tissue still clinging to it, but they had been unable to secure any fingerprints.

  ‘Seems he put up quite a struggle,’ Professor Wilson said. ‘Forearms are covered in bruises and abrasions where he raised them to protect himself from the attack. Then his killer got through with the first blow to the head, and that, or maybe the second, might have dropped him to his knees, if he was on his feet. Considerable bruising there.’ He tapped both knees. ‘He was struck four times on the left side of the skull, any one of which might have been enough to incapacitate him. But his killer kept going anyway. The final blow was what killed him and did the worst of the damage. You’ll get all the measurements and gory details in my report.’

  ‘Can’t wait,’ Gunn said dryly, drawing a look from the pathologist. ‘You’re confirming for me, then, that he was murdered?’

  ‘That, Detective Sergeant, was never in doubt.’ The professor paused. ‘Have you found his car yet?’

  ‘No, we haven’t.’

  ‘Identification?’

  Gunn shook his head. ‘The picture taken by the police photographer will be released to the press tonight. We’ll see what that brings.’

  The professor grunted and lifted the dead man’s right hand. ‘Bruises and grazing on his hands as well. The chances are the poor sod got in a few strikes himself. His fingers are ingrained wi
th dirt, and maybe oil, and his fingernails are short and filthy, so it’s impossible to tell if there’s blood or skin from his attacker under any of them. I’ve taken scrapings from them all, and the lab will reveal in time if they captured any DNA from his killer.’ He ran his latexed palm lightly over the back of the hand he was holding. ‘Strange thing, though, and I only know about this because my wife used to keep bees. He has several bee stings on the back of his hands.’

  Gunn moved closer to take a look.

  ‘You see? These little red lumps with tiny scabs at their centre. Looks like he was stung quite recently, too.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gunn enjoyed the drive down to Harris. South-westerlies had blown great ragged clumps of black raincloud across the islands overnight, and everything looked shiny and new in the early morning sunlight, as if freshly painted.

  As he passed from Lewis into Harris, even the Clisham, whose peak was normally mired in cloud, stood sharp and clear against the deep blue of the autumn sky, casting its shadow west over the Abhainn Langadail, which ran north into Loch Langabhat itself, a continuation of the extended valley rift that transected the centre of the island from north to south.

  On the long descent towards Tarbert, the southern half of the Isle of Harris, he knew, stretched off in obscurity beyond the hills, but it wasn’t until he crested the rise past the town itself, after the turn-off to the Episcopalian Church, that he saw it laid out before him, shimmering in this startlingly luminous morning.