by Peter May
There is a considerable traffic of bees, seduced to leave their hives by the good weather with its promise of pollen and nectar among the late-season heather.
All of the hives have sugar bags below the crown boards and I know, without even thinking, that the season is over and I have prepared them for winter. I know, too, that in the spring my bees will have flown down on to the machair, where they will have feasted upon the abundance of wild flowers there, and that it is during the summer lull, when the flowers have passed and before the heather is in bloom, that I will have fed them their first sugar syrup.
I can almost taste the sweetly perfumed heather honey that my bees produce, but then that moment of elation is followed by the shadow of depression descending suddenly upon me, like sunshine slipping behind a cloud. Something is wrong. The bees are dying. Not just here. Everywhere. I realise with shock, like a sudden slap on the face, how disastrous this is. Not just for me.
Bran’s barking brings me back to the present, and I turn, startled, to see him dancing around the legs of a man standing at the top of the hollow. He is silhouetted against the sky and it is not until he climbs down among the hives that I realise it is the man with the binoculars from the caravan across the bay.
His hair, like lengths of frayed rope, blows out behind him in the wind. His face is deeply tanned and unshaven, and he examines me carefully with dark-ringed eyes. When he speaks, his voice seems familiar. ‘Local gossip has it that you’ve lost your memory, Tom.’ I return his gaze with an odd sense of apprehension. ‘Maybe it’s about time that someone told you who you are.’
But a moment of revelation causes me to shake my head, and I stare at him with new eyes. ‘No,’ I say. ‘No. There’s no need, Alex.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Bran is running around the cottage like a daftie, chasing imaginary rabbits, or something else unseen. He seems infected by my excitement. Although, in truth, excitement does not do justice to how I feel. I am both elated and devastated. I know who I am, and I know what happened on Eilean Mòr. And I remember only too vividly what occurred that same night when the storm finally capsized my damaged boat. Although nothing of what followed, until I was washed up on Luskentyre beach. I know that I am extraordinarily fortunate to be alive.
But it is all, simply, too much. I cannot process everything at once. My brain is suffering from information overload and telling me, ‘Enough!’ Like too much light, returning memory is blinding me. I can see the big picture in silhouette, but most of the detail is still burned out.
My name is Tom Fleming. I am a neuroscientist, and I used to work at the Geddes Institute of Environmental Sciences, until I was kicked out for conducting experiments that didn’t please their sponsors, the giant Swiss agrochem company, Ergo. My wife is suing me for divorce. Or was. Now, presumably, she is treading water until I am declared legally dead after disappearing off my yacht in the Firth of Forth.
And Karen. I close my eyes. My little girl. I can see her now. That shining, happy face gazing up at me with unglazed affection. Love. Dependency. How I adored her. And still do. Despite the sulky, sullen teenager she became. I recall her final words to me before I faked my suicide. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. And I wish I could just rewind time, and do it all again. This time differently.
I open my eyes and remember the message she left for my brother Michael, not realising it was me who had friended her on Facebook. The only way I could maintain even the most tenuous of contacts without her knowing. Watching over her from an anonymous distance. Uncle Michael, I think dad might still be alive. Please get in touch. Somehow she knows I am not dead. I left that note with Chris, but he is not due to give it to her until she turns eighteen, when all of this is over.
But there are more pressing things. Sam is dead, and his killer is on the loose, almost certainly the same person who tried to stab me to death that night in the cottage. Impossible to express the relief I feel in knowing it was not me who murdered Sam. But equally impossible to shut out the guilt. Because I am responsible for his death as surely as if it were I who had killed him. In spite of the breach of security, I know that I must contact Deloit and tell him what has happened.
I sit at the kitchen table and draw the laptop towards me. My hands are shaking as I swipe the touch pad and waken it from sleep to open up the mailer.
To my surprise, there is an email waiting for me in the inbox. I frown and click to open it. In the moments that follow, I genuinely believe my heart has stopped. Before suddenly it kick-starts back to life and begins hammering against my ribs like someone with a sledgehammer trying to break out.
The email contains a single photograph. It is Karen. She is in the back of a vehicle of some kind, legs pulled up to her chest, and I can see bindings around her ankles. Her arms are behind her, and there is a broad slash of grey duct tape across her mouth. Tears have streaked black mascara down her cheeks, and her eyes are wide, staring at the camera, filled with fear. The message below it reads, A fair exchange. Eilean Mòr, tonight.
It is unsigned, but even before I look at the address of the sender, I know who it came from. And a chill of utter disabling despair forks through me.
‘Hello? Anyone home?’ Jon’s voice startles me, and I look up as the door from the boot room opens to reveal Jon and Sally crammed into the small space among the waterproofs and wellingtons. Bran goes barking excitedly to greet them.
Sally looks at me, concerned, and I cannot imagine how I must look to prompt her question. ‘What’s happened?’
But I turn my eyes towards her husband. ‘Jon, do you still have a boat at Rodel?’
He nods. ‘Only just. We were planning to take her south next week. Our time here is up.’
But I barely absorb what he says, just the affirmative nod of his head. I stand up. ‘I need you to take me out to the Flannan Isles.’
He is startled. ‘When?’
‘Now.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
DS George Gunn sat at his desk, leaning back in his chair and staring at the cursor blinking on a blank document on his computer screen. Progress on the case seemed to have ground to a standstill, and he had no idea what to write in his daily report to the CIO.
Circulating the photograph of the dead man in the media had produced nothing more than the usual crank calls, wasting a lot of man-hours in chasing them down. There was nothing back from the lab yet regarding the scrapings taken by the pathologist from beneath the victim’s nails. Gunn was beginning to think they would have to ask the suspect’s permission to circulate his photograph, in the hope that they could at least establish who he was.
He could feel the CIO’s impatience reaching along the corridor to the open door of his office. Chisholm did not want to be here any longer than necessary, and would not be pleased to have Gunn’s failure to close the case reflect on him. As it surely would, back in Inverness.
Gunn sighed and looked at the time. His shift would come to an end soon, when he would escape back to real life. His wife, he knew, would right now be poaching the salmon he had acquired for her yesterday, and in a few short hours Fin and Marsaili would arrive, finally, to have that long-awaited dinner with them. Gunn licked his lips. He could almost taste the rich firm flesh of the fish, and the subtly flavoured garlic potatoes that his wife would serve with it. He sighed again, and swivelled in his chair as a shadow fell across the doorway. DC Smith stood, almost stooping to avoid the lintel, clutching a note in his hand.
‘This might just be the one, sir.’
Gunn cocked an eyebrow. ‘Tell me.’
‘Boat owner at Callanish. Says the man in our photo hired him to take him out to the Flannan Isles a week or so ago. And his vehicle’s still parked where he left it. A Land Rover.’
Gunn knew immediately that he would have to drive down to Callanish. And the chances were he wouldn’t make it back in time for dinner.
*
He saw the standing stones from a long way off, clustered together on
the rise, with their commanding view over the coast of south-west Lewis. Fingers of gneiss pointed at a darkening sky, contours sculpted by weather and geology and time. There was something primordial about them. Older than Stonehenge, and raised by Man for who knew what purpose. Although they were cruciform in shape, they pre-dated Christ by thousands of years, and Gunn had been fascinated by them from childhood. He remembered his father bringing him here for the first time. A day out, a family picnic, but something about the stones had spooked the young George, and nightmares had kept him awake most of that night, and for several more thereafter. He had never lost the sense of awe that they inspired in him.
These days, they were a tourist attraction more than anything else, and coaches rumbled daily to the visitor centre along the single-track road that Gunn now took to the tiny jetty that nestled at the foot of the peninsula, well beyond the stones.
The machair was relatively flat here, dipping down to the seaweed-strewn rocks along the loch side, and Loch Ròg An Ear itself was slate-grey and contoured by the rising wind. As it stretched west, out into the ocean, the waters of the loch were broken only by the low-lying islands of Chearstaidh and Ceabhaigh and the much larger mass of Great Bernera.
Iain Maciver was waiting for Gunn at the old stone jetty, standing at the end of it, leaning against the railing, smoking a cigarette and looking out across the water to a landscape dotted by sheep and the occasional croft. He looked round as Gunn drove up, and, because there was no place to turn here, Gunn realised he was going to have to reverse all the way back to the parking area at the top of the hill, where he had passed a beaten-up old Land Rover sitting back from the tarmac.
He got out and met Maciver halfway along the jetty. The two men shook hands. The fisherman had a leathery, weathered face very nearly the colour of tar, and big-knuckled hands that crushed the one of Gunn’s that he shook. There were a couple of small boats tied up along the right-hand side of the quay, and a narrow slipway on the left below a rusted old railing.
‘Which boat’s yours?’ Gunn asked him, and Maciver nodded towards a garishly painted old hoor of a fishing boat anchored in the bay. ‘Bloody hell!’ Gunn said. ‘You take that out to the Flannans?’
Maciver shrugged and grinned. ‘She’s game for anything, that old girl.’
Gunn looked at her, and couldn’t imagine a trip he would less like to make. He took out the original photograph of the murdered man from Eilean Mòr and held it out.
Maciver looked at it and nodded. ‘Aye, that’s him alright. Sam Waltman, he said his name was. Don’t know why that stuck. Except I remember thinking Waltman, Walt Disney.’ He grinned to reveal a mouthful of bad teeth. ‘And Sam’s not a name you hear much around here.’
‘How did he contact you?’
‘He didn’t. I got a call from a fella down in Harris. Neal something. Asked if I would take his friend out. A one-way trip. I wouldn’t need to bring him back, he said, because he would be meeting him out there, and would give him a lift back himself.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette, then let the wind whip it away from his open mouth. ‘Dunno what happened, but he parked his Land Rover up the road yonder, and it’s still there.’
Maciver followed him slowly up the road on foot as Gunn reversed back to the parking area. He swung into it and got out, to feel the wind picking up as it whipped in off the water. The Land Rover was parked on the grass just beyond the square of tarmac. It was an old beast, an off-road warrior, scraped and dented by the years, wheels caked with mud. The windscreen was opaque except where it had been smeared by the wipers in two blurred arcs. Gunn tried the doors and tailgate. All locked. He shaded the driver’s window from reflection and peered inside. It was littered with cigarette packs and chocolate wrappers. A well-thumbed road atlas of Scotland lay on the passenger seat next to what looked like the return half of a ferry ticket.
He walked around to the front of it and took a note of the registration number, then turned to Maciver. ‘I’m obliged to you, Mr Maciver. We’ll need to take a statement. Tomorrow’ll be fine. If you can’t come to Stornoway, I’ll send someone to the house. Excuse me.’
He turned away then and checked the signal on his mobile before calling the office, the phone pressed to one ear, a finger in the other.
‘Hector, it’s George. I’m pretty sure he’s our man. Sam Waltman’s his name. I’ve got the registration number of his Land Rover. Let’s run it through the DVLA and see who owns it.’ He reeled off the number from his notebook. ‘And we’ll need a tow-truck down here to get it back to Stornoway, and a mechanic to open her up for us.’
The signal was breaking up and DC Smith’s response was inaudible.
‘Sorry, Hector, I’m on one bar here. Say again?’
After a couple of crackles, Smith’s voice came through loud and clear. ‘We just got feedback from the Manchester police on the Harrisons, sir,’ he said. ‘I suppose it shouldn’t be any surprise to us that the man’s not in concrete at all.’ And Gunn kissed goodbye to even the remotest possibility of making it back in time for dinner.
*
On the single-track heading west towards Luskentyre beach, Gunn could see the storm gathering itself out at sea. Gone was the blue overhead, to be replaced by low grey skeins of cloud that cast their shadow over the bay. Two, maybe three miles offshore, the rain was already falling in intermittent patches of darker grey, curiously backlit in fleeting moments of dazzling sunlight that broke through the cloud bubbling along the horizon.
As he drove past the cemetery, he reflected that its permanent residents must have seen many a storm come and go. The white Highland pony that habitually fed on the beach grasses that grew among the dunes would have seen a few, too. He was grazing near the fence below Dune Cottage, and Gunn noted with a grim sense of premonition that the suspect’s car was gone. At the top of the hill, Sergeant Morrison from Tarbert was leaning against his car, which he had parked across the gate of the Harrisons’ house. Gunn drew up in front of him and got out to shake his hand.
‘Donnie.’
‘George.’
‘Well?’
‘Nobody here. Car’s gone.’
Gunn nodded down the hill towards Dune Cottage. ‘And our man?’
‘Not there either, and no sign of a vehicle.’
‘Shit.’ Gunn’s involuntary curse, barely whispered, was lost in the wind. It was Gunn who had told the CIO that they had no reason to detain the suspect, but now they knew that it was Mr No Memory who had arranged for Sam Waltman to be taken out to Eilean Mòr, where the two men had a rendezvous. A one-way trip was what he had ordered, as if he knew that Waltman wouldn’t be coming back. And now he was gone. He looked up at the glass front of the Harrison house wondering what, if any, connection the Harrisons had with this. In his experience innocent people did not usually lie. So why had Jon Harrison lied to him about what he did for a living? ‘Let’s talk to Mrs Macdonald,’ he said.
They walked down the road to her house, and Mrs Macdonald opened the door to a cacophony of barking dogs. Her yappy little dog growled and snapped at them from behind the safety of her legs, while Bran greeted Gunn like a long-lost friend, paws up on his chest, almost knocking him over.
‘Bran!’ Her reprimand brought the Labrador back down to all fours, and she stood glaring at the policemen. ‘I don’t pretend to know what’s going on here, officers, but I think we’ve all had just about enough of it.’
‘I couldn’t agree with you more, Mrs Macdonald,’ Gunn said. ‘I’m surprised to see that you have –’ he hesitated only momentarily – ‘Mr Maclean’s dog.’
She tutted and raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Well, I wouldn’t normally take him, but it’s hardly the dog’s fault that his owner’s a crook and a liar.’ Gunn wondered what exactly it was she had heard about him. ‘And they were off together, all three of them. In both cars.’
‘Mr Maclean and the Harrisons?’
‘That’s right. It was Mrs Harrison that came to the door with
Bran. He wouldn’t dare! Normally, she would take Bran. But since they were all going off together, she begged me to keep him. Just for a few hours, she said.’
‘And did she say where they were going?’
‘Rodel, apparently. Looking for a boat.’ She glanced beyond the two policemen at the darkening sky blowing in across the bay. ‘But I can’t imagine they’d be going out anywhere in that.’
‘How long ago did they leave?’
‘About half an hour.’ She tipped her head towards the tall sergeant. ‘Mr Morrison could only have missed them by ten minutes or so.’
*
The light was fading fast as Gunn drove down into the shadow of St Clement’s Church and the shelter of the tiny harbour at Rodel. Sergeant Morrison, in his too small police car, drew in behind him and jackknifed himself out into the first spits of rain. He walked stiffly over to where the Detective Sergeant was standing on the quayside gazing helplessly out over the boats that rose and fell in the incoming swell, complaining and straining against the restraint of their ropes. There was nobody here, just a red SUV parked on the far quay.
‘That looks like their cars over there,’ Morrison said, and Gunn swivelled his head to see two vehicles parked up on the grass below the Rodel Hotel. Lights from the hotel itself shone into the dusk, casting feeble shadows towards the harbour.
‘Maybe they’re in the hotel. Or someone there might have seen them.’ He turned to look at the cloud and rain blowing in through the Sound. ‘Nobody in their right mind would take a boat out in this.’ He started off towards the hotel, but Sergeant Morrison grabbed his arm.
‘What was that, George?’
Gunn turned. ‘What was what?’
‘Something banging.’
‘The wind, probably.’
‘No, there it is again.’
And this time Gunn heard it too. It seemed to be coming from the nearest of the boats. The two men walked along the quay and stood listening intently. There were three sharp bangs from inside the white motor launch tied up below them. A blue canvas awning was stretched tightly over the driver’s console, and the banging came from beneath it.
