by Peter May
Tormod seemed surprised to see it. He stopped and took it from Fin, gazing at it lying in the palm of his hand before making a fist to close around it. Fin was shocked to see sudden tears following the tracks of their predecessors. ‘She gave it to me,’ he said, his voice almost inaudible above the din that crashed around them.
‘Who?’
‘Ceit.’
Fin thought for a moment. Was Ceit the cause of his unreasonable hatred of Catholics. ‘And she was a Catholic?’
Tormod looked at him as if he were insane. ‘Of course. We all were.’ He started walking briskly along the line of the outgoing tide, wading through the water as it rushed up the sand, oblivious to it splashing around his legs and soaking his rolled-up trousers. Fin was taken by surprise and it took him several moments to catch him up. This made no sense.
‘You were a Catholic?’
Tormod flicked him a dismissive look. ‘Mass every Sunday in the big church on the hill.’
‘At Seilebost?’
‘The church the fishermen built. The one with the boat inside it.’
‘There was a boat in the church?’
‘Beneath the altar.’ Tormod stopped as suddenly as he had started, standing ankle-deep in the water that broke against them, and gazed out at the horizon where the dark smudge of a distant tanker broke the line between sea and sky. ‘You could see Charlie’s beach from up there. Beyond the cemetery. Like a line of silver painted along the shore between the purple of the machair and the turquoise of the sea.’ He turned and looked at Fin. ‘And all the dead in between wanting you to stop on the way. Some human company in the world beyond the grave.’
He turned away again, and before Fin could stop him he had hurled the Saint Christopher medal into the rush of incoming water. It vanished into the swirl of sand and foam, to be sucked out by the undertow and laid to rest somewhere in the deep. Lost for ever.
‘No need for papish things now,’ he said. ‘The journey’s nearly over.’
EIGHTEEN
Fin took the call from Gunn on his mobile as he left the Dun Eisdean care home. Tormod had been strangely subdued on the drive back from Dalmore and went meekly to his room, where he allowed staff to take off his coat without a word of protest, and lead him to the dining room. Having eaten almost nothing the previous day he had now, it seemed, rediscovered his appetite. And as he wolfed into a plate of spring lamb and boiled potatoes, Fin slipped quietly out into the midday sunshine.
He parked his car now at the top of Church Street and walked down to where Gunn was waiting for him on the steps of the police station. The wind was blustery and cooler here on the east coast, rippling the water in the bay, rustling the first leaves in the trees on the far side of it below the dark decay of Lews Castle. The two men fell in step on the walk down to Bayhead, and saw the fishing boats at high tide towering above the quays. Nets and creels and empty fish boxes lay strewn across the cobbles, and the good people of Stornoway leaned into the wind as they made their way towards the centre of town.
As they passed a cafe with picture windows looking out on to the boats at dock, Gunn said, ‘Isn’t that young Fionnlagh?’
Fin turned, and through the shadow of his own reflection he saw Fionnlagh and Donna together at a table on the other side of the glass. A carrycot sat on the floor between them, and Fionnlagh held his baby daughter in his arms, gazing with unglazed love into her tiny, round blue eyes. She gazed back adoringly at her father, impossibly small fingers grasping his thumb. Just as Robbie had once held Fin’s.
Fin had only a moment to feel the regrets of a lifetime press down on him before Donna turned and saw him. Her face flushed with the first colour he had ever seen in it, and she turned away, speaking quickly to Fionnlagh. The boy looked up, startled. And Fin saw something strange in his eyes. Guilt? Fear? It was impossible to tell, evaporating in a moment to be replaced by a bashful smile. He nodded at Fin, who nodded back. An awkward moment, a silent exchange, the glass of the window a much easier barrier to breach than all the things left unsaid between them.
‘You want to go in?’ Gunn said.
Fin shook his head. ‘No.’ He gave the young couple a small half-wave, and turned away along Bayhead, making Gunn scurry to catch him up. He wondered only fleetingly why Fionnlagh wasn’t at school.
They found a dark corner in The Hebridean, and Gunn ordered them a couple of half-pints of heavy. When he sat down again with their glasses, he drew an A4 manila envelope from inside his anorak and slipped it across the table. ‘You never got this from me.’
Fin slid it into his bag. ‘Got what?’
Gunn grinned and they sipped in silence at their beers for a while. Then Gunn laid his glass carefully down on the beer mat in front of him and said, ‘I got a call about half an hour ago. The Northern Constabulary are sending a DCI from Inverness to open the murder investigation.’
Fin inclined his head. ‘As expected.’
‘He probably won’t be here for another week or so. It seems the powers that be don’t think there’s much urgency in the solving of a fifty-odd-year-old murder.’ He lifted his glass for another sip, then replaced it exactly on the ring it had left on the mat. ‘When he comes, I’ll not be able to confide in you any more, Mr Macleod. Which is a shame. Because I know you were a good cop. But the fact that you are no longer in the force is more likely to work against you than for you. I’ve no doubt you’ll be told to keep your nose out of things.’
Fin smiled. ‘No doubt.’ He took a sip from his own glass. ‘Where’s this leading, George?’
‘Well, Mr Macleod, it seems to me we have a wee period of grace. And maybe it would be an idea to make hay while the sun shines.’
‘What did you have in mind?’
‘Well, sir, it’s in my mind to go down to Harris in the morning, to Seilebost, to check up on old Tormod Macdonald’s family, and see if I can come up with any idea of who it was we took out of the peat. It would be nice to show these mainlanders that we’re not all hick cops out here in the islands.’
‘And?’
‘My motor’s been playing up something terrible this last wee while. At least, that’s the official story. I thought maybe you might like to give me a lift.’
‘Oh, did you?’
‘Aye.’ Gunn took a longer draught of beer this time. ‘What do you think?’
Fin shrugged. ‘I think Marsaili’s quite anxious for me to get to the bottom of all this.’
‘Aye, well, that would make sense. You being a former polis and all.’ He lifted his glass to his lips again, but hesitated. ‘Is there … a relationship between you two these days?’
Fin shook his head, avoiding Gunn’s eye. ‘A lot of history, George. But no relationship.’ He drained his glass. ‘What time would you like to leave?’
As he drove back up the west coast, from Barvas through Siader and Dell, he watched the dark legions of yet another weather front assembling out on the horizon. In his rearview mirror he could still see the sun slanting across the purplehued mountains of Harris to the south. The sky to the north remained clear, each successive village standing hard in silhouette against the light, old whitehouses, and the architecturally challenged standard homes issued in the twentieth century by the former Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. The DAF houses, as they were called, with their harled walls and steeply pitched slate roofs and tall dormers. Hopelessly inadequate, by modern standards, to withstand the ravages of the island climate.
Sun slanting across the bog to the east spun gold in the dead grass, and he saw huddled groups of villagers gathered among the trenches, wielding the long-handled tarasgeir to take advantage of the dry afternoon to cut and stack peat.
The dark shadow of the bleak and forbidding church at Cross signalled that he was nearly home.
Home? Was this really his home now, he wondered. This wind-ravaged corner of the earth where warring factions of an unforgiving Protestant religion dominated life. Where men and women struggled all their lives
to make a living from the land, or the sea, turning in times of unemployment to the industries that came, and went again when subsidies ran out, leaving the rusting detritus of failure in their wake.
It seemed, if anything, more depressed than it had in his youth, entering again a period of decline after a brief renaissance fuelled by politicians courting votes by the spending of millions on a dying language.
But if here wasn’t home, where was? Where else on God’s earth did he feel such an affinity with the land, the elements, the people? And he found himself regretting that he had never brought Robbie here, to the land of his forefathers.
There was no one at Marsaili’s bungalow when he stopped there, and he drove on up past his parents’ croft, over the ridge, and saw the whole northern coastline stretch out ahead of him. He took a left on the road that ran down to the old Crobost harbour, where a steep concrete slipway below the winch house led to a tiny quay in the shadow of the cliffs. Coiled rope and orange buoys lay draped over piles of rusted chain. Creels for crab and lobster stood piled up against the wall. Tiny fishing dinghies lay canted at odd angles, secured to loops of rusted iron. Among them, still, the peeling remains of the boat his father had once restored, and painted purple like the house, and named after his mother. All these years later, the traces of lost lives remained.
His own among them. Sad and bittersweet memories lingered still within the decaying walls of the old whitehouse that sat up on the hill overlooking the harbour. The house where he had done most of his growing up, tolerated by an aunt who had reluctantly taken on the responsibility of her dead sister’s orphan. A house empty of warmth or love.
There was still glass in the windows, and the doors were locked. But once-white walls ran black with damp, and door and window frames were rusted or rotten. Below it, on the stretch of grass along the clifftops, the deserted stone house where he had played forlornly at happy families as a boy still stood as it had then, two gable ends, two walls. No roof. No doors. No windows. Whoever had once called it home had built it for its view, but abandoned it long ago to the cruel arctic gales that assaulted this coast in winter. Long, hard winters that he remembered well.
A grassy path led down to a shingle beach. The black rocks around the cliffs had turned orange, crusted with the tiny shells of long-dead sea creatures, stained by the seaweed that rotted all along the shore. On the far headland stood three solitary cairns that had been there for as long as Fin could remember.
Nothing changed really, except for the people who came and went and left their evanescent traces.
He heard the rumbling of a car’s engine above the roar of the wind, and turned to see Marsaili pulling in at the side of the road in Artair’s old Astra. She got out and slammed the door, thrust hands deep into her jacket pockets, and walked slowly along the path to join him. They stood in a comfortable silence for some moments, looking at the DAF houses strung out along the cliffs on the west side of the bay, before she turned to look at the abandoned house above the harbour.
‘Why don’t you restore your aunt’s house? It’s in much better condition than your parents’ place.’
‘Because I don’t own it.’ Fin cast sad eyes over the neglected building. ‘She left it to some animal charity. Typical of her, really. They couldn’t sell it, so they just left it to rot.’ He turned his gaze back out over the ocean. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t set foot in it again, even if it was mine.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s haunted, Marsaili.’ He turned to see her frowning.
‘Haunted?’
‘By the young Fin, and all his unhappiness. The night before my aunt’s funeral was the last time I slept in the place. And I swore I never would again.’
She raised a hand to touch his cheek with feather-light fingertips. ‘The young Fin,’ she said. ‘I remember him. I loved him from the first moment I set eyes on him. And never forgave him for breaking my heart.’
He met her eye, Gunn’s question still ringing in his ears. The wind pulled her hair back from her face in long silken strands, flying out behind her like a flag of freedom. It coloured her skin pink, fine features hardened a little by time and pain, but still strong, attractive. The little girl of his childhood, the burgeoning woman of his adolescence, both still there in this cynical, funny, intelligent woman he had hurt so carelessly. But you could never go back.
‘I showed your dad a photograph of the man they took from the bog,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty certain he recognized him.’
She took her hand away, as if from an electric shock. ‘So it’s true.’
‘Seems like it.’
‘I kept hoping they had made a mistake. Mixed up the DNA samples or something. Your parents are the rock you build your life on. It’s a bit of a shock to find that rock is just an illusion.’
‘I showed him the Saint Christopher’s medal and he threw it in the sea.’ Her consternation was apparent in the creasing of her eyes. ‘He said someone called Ceit had given it to him, and that they were all Catholics.’
Now disbelief pushed her eyebrows up on her forehead. ‘He’s demented, Fin. Literally. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’
Fin shrugged, not so sure. But he kept his misgivings to himself. He said, ‘George Gunn is going down to Harris tomorrow to check out your dad’s family. He said I could go along. Should I?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’ Then added quickly, ‘But only if you want to, Fin. If you feel you can spare the time. I have to go back to Glasgow for a few days. Exams to sit. Although, God knows, I’m hardly in the right frame of mind for it.’ She hesitated. ‘I’d appreciate it if you would keep an eye on Fionnlagh for me.’
He nodded, and the wind filled the silence between them. It blew among the grasses, forced the sea against the rocks all along the northern cliffs, carried the cries of distant seagulls as they fought to master its gusts and currents. Fin and Marsaili were mercilessly battered by it as they stood on the clifftop, feeling it drag at their clothes, rushing into their mouths when they spoke, snatching their words away. Marsaili put an arm on his to steady herself, and he reached out to slip his fingers through her hair, feeling the soft, cool skin of her neck. She took an almost imperceptible step closer. He could very nearly feel her warmth. How easy it would be to kiss her.
A car horn sounded in the distance, and they turned to see a hand waving from the driver’s window. Marsaili waved back. ‘Mrs Macritchie,’ she said, and the moment was gone, carried off in the wind with their words.
NINETEEN
Although they are called the Isle of Lewis and the Isle of Harris, the two are in fact one island separated by a mountain range and a narrow neck of land.
The drive south, across the flat boglands of the northern half of the island, quickly becomes tortuous, a single-track road winding down among the lochs carved out of the rock by the last retreating ice sheets.
Fin and Gunn drove through the gloom of gathering storm clouds, wind and rain sweeping down off the ragged mountain slopes, and crossed into Harris just before Ardvourlie, where a solitary house stands out on the broken shores of Loch Seaforth.
From there the road rose steeply, carved out of the mountainside, a spectacular view opening out below them of the black, scattered waters of the loch. Snowpoles lined the road, and the mountains folded around them, swooping and soaring on all sides, peaks lost in cloud that tumbled down the scree slopes like lava.
The wipers on Fin’s car could barely handle the rain that blew across the windscreen obscuring the road ahead. Sheep huddled in silent groups at the roadside, picking desultorily at the thin patches of grass and heather that somehow survived among the rocks.
And then, suddenly, as they squeezed through a narrow mountain pass, a line of golden light somewhere far below dimpled the underside of the purple-black clouds that surrounded them. A tattered demarcation between one weather front and another. The grim gathering of cloud among the peaks fell away as the road descended south, and the southern uplands o
f Harris opened out ahead.
The road skirted the port of Tarbert, where the ferries came in from the Isle of Skye and Lochmaddy, and climbed again to crest the cliffs that overlooked Loch Tarbert and the tiny clutch of houses huddled around the harbour. Sheltered from the prevailing westerlies, the water here was like glass, darkly reflecting the masts of sailing boats at anchor in the bay. Further out, sunlight coruscated across silvered waters to the east, and it was impossible to say where the sky ended and the sea began.
As they reached the summit of Uabhal Beag, the landscape changed again. Granite rock broke up green-covered hills that swooped down in folds and gullies through a wash of pale spring sunlight to the fabulous golden sands and turquoise sea of Luskentyre. The storm-gripped, glowering mountain ranges of the north had receded out of sight and mind, and their spirits lifted.
The road circumnavigated the beach, curving around a length of causeway, towards the collection of houses and crofts that made up the tiny community of Seilebost. Fin turned right on to the narrow school road, past the decaying remains of a red truck that had once belonged to Wm Mackenzie (contrs) Ltd of Laxay. A flaking wooden sign propped between two decaying fenceposts warned that no dogs were allowed on the common grazing.
The pothole-pitted tarmac wound up over a grassy rise, to open out on a panorama across the machair towards the beach. Spring flowers bowed in the wind, and clouds hovered around the distant mountains that ringed the sands. No matter how often Fin had seen it, this was always a sight that took his breath away.
The school sat out on its own, a tiny collection of grey and yellow buildings and a football field a stone’s throw from the beach. It would be hard to imagine a more idyllic setting for a childhood education.
