No drug-packed cylinders were ever found, but on the second day one of the boats snagged something heavy. A diver went down to free the line from what was expected to be a water-logged tree.
He surfaced to report that the line had hooked onto the rear wheel of a motor-bike which had, tied to it, the remains of a body.
The bike and the body were brought to the surface that evening. The corpse had decomposed and been eaten by fish, to the point of being a skeleton held together more by the clothes it still wore than by the few pieces of connective tissue left. The clothes suggested the deceased had been a male, but the police weren’t sure of the skeleton’s sex until the body was examined in Glasgow the following day.
What they did know was that the bike - a Suzuki 185 GT registered in 1977 - had been reported stolen by its owner in Glasgow in 1981, after it had been loaned to a friend and never returned. Probably that alone would have led to the police coming to Lochgair to see us, but one of the local policemen with a long memory had already put two and two together when he’d heard the make and model of the bike.
The corpse carried no identifying papers, but dental records matched. We knew then it was Rory.
The skeleton had been found wearing a crash-helmet, but it must have been put back on after Rory had been murdered; according to the pathologist’s report, he’d been killed by a series of blows to the back of the head with a smooth, hard, spherical or nearly spherical object, approximately nine centimetres in diameter. He was probably unconscious after the first blow.
And so, after the coroner had released the remains following the inquest in late February, Uncle Rory’s bones came back to Lochgair at last, and were laid to rest at the back of the garden, under the larches, between the rhododendrons and the wild roses, at the side of his brother. The stone-mason added Rory’s name and dates to the black marble obelisk, and we held a small ceremony just for the immediate family and Janice Rae. It fell to me to read out the words Rory had, apparently, intended to close Crow Road with, by way of a funeral oration.
The passage came from Rory’s nameless play, and began: ‘And all your nonsenses and truths ...’
Janice cried.
I remarked to Lewis that the way things were going in our family it might work out cheaper in the long run if we bought our own hearse.
I do believe he was shocked. Or maybe he just wished he’d said it.
Technically the case remained open and Rory’s murderer was still being sought, but beyond briefly interviewing mum, Janice and Rory’s old flat-mate Andy Nichol, the police took no further action. I never did find out just how good at adding-up that policeman was.
The firm Ashley Watt was working for in London went into receivership in the last week of January. She was made redundant, but remained in the city looking for another job.
The war ended, in a famous victory. Only their young men died like cattle, and there was even talk of the US making a modest profit on the operation.
Verity’s baby was born - bang on time - on March the 2nd, in London, in a warm birthing pool in a big hospital. The boy was registered as Kenneth Walker McHoan; he weighed three and a half kilos and looked like his father.
Lewis, Verity and young Kenneth travelled up to Lochgair two weeks later.
The lawyer Blawke read Fergus Urvill’s will in Gaineamh Castle on the 8th of March. I had been asked to be present, and travelled down by train - the Golf was in for a service - with feelings of bitterness and dread.
Helen and Diana, solemnly beautiful in black, both looking tanned - Helen from Switzerland, Diana from Hawaii - sat together in the tall-ceilinged Solar and heard that they were to inherit the estate, with the exception of various pieces of glass held in the castle, which - as the twins had already known - were to be donated to the Glass Museum attached to the factory. Mrs McSpadden - sitting hunched and crying with what was, in retrospect, a quite baffling quietness - received the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds, and the right either to live on in the castle, or receive a similar amount if the property was sold or if she was asked to vacate her apartments by the twins or their heirs. Fergus had asked to be buried in the old castle garden, but as they never did recover the body a monument was decided on instead. A memorial service would he held in Gallanach at a later date.
The Range Rover was part of the estate, but the Bentley Eight had been willed to my father. Fergus had changed his will after dad’s death - following promptings by the good lawyer Blawke - and so the car and its contents passed to me instead, which came as something of a surprise.
There were various other bits and pieces - bequests to charities and so on - but that was the gist of it.
The lawyer Blawke handed me the keys to the Bentley after the reading, while we were standing around awkwardly drinking small sherries dispensed by a quietly tearful Mrs McSpadden and I was still in a slight daze, thinking, What? Why? Why did he give me the car?
I talked to the twins. Helen just wanted to get away, but Diana had decided to stay on for a while; I agreed to come and help her pack stuff away in a few days time. Fergus’s personal effects were going to be stored in the cellar, and of course the glass had to be packed up to be taken to the museum. The twins said they still hadn’t decided what to do with the castle long-term, and I got the impression it depended on what Mrs McSpadden chose to do.
I said my good-byes as soon as I decently could. I had intended to take mum’s Metro straight back to Lochgair; I’d told Helen and Diana that I’d probably come back that afternoon with mum, to take the Bentley away. But for some reason, when I got out of the castle doors, I didn’t go crunching over the gravel to the little hatchback but turned and went back into the Solar and asked if I could take the Bentley to Lochgair instead, and come back for the Metro later.
Diana told me the garage was open, so I walked round to the rear of the castle where the garage and outhouses were. The Bentley sat inside the opened double garage, burgundy bodywork gleaming like frozen wine. I opened the car, wondering why the will had mentioned the contents of the Eight as well as the vehicle itself.
I got in and sat in that high armchair of a driver’s seat, smiling at the walnut and the chrome and breathing in the smell of Connelly hide. The car looked showroom-clean; un-lived in. Nothing in the door pockets, on the back seats or the rear shelf; not even maps. I hesitated before opening the glove box. I was just paranoid enough to think maybe there was a bomb wired to that or the ignition, but, well, that didn’t seem very Fergus-like, despite it all. So I opened the glove box.
It contained the car’s manual - I’d never seen one bound in leather before - the registration documents, and a cardboard presentation box I recognised as coming from the factory gift shop.
I took it out and opened it. There was a paperweight inside, which was what the box was meant to contain, but the big lump of multi-coloured glass was a little too large for the cardboard insert that went with the box. When I looked at the base it was an old limited edition Perthshire weight, not a Gallanach Glass Works product at all.
I left the paperweight lying on the seat and got out, checked the car’s boot — carefully, thinking of the end of Charley Varrick — but that was in concourse condition too.
I went back to the driver’s seat and sat there for a while, holding the paperweight and gazing into its convexly complicated depths, wondering why Fergus had left this lump of glass - not even from his own factory - in the car.
Then I weighed the glassy mass in my hand, and clutched it as you might a weapon, and took another, evaluating look at it, and realised. It was spherical, or nearly spherical, and probably pretty well exactly nine centimetres in diameter.
I almost dropped it.
I shivered, and put the paperweight back in the presentation case, put that in the glove-box, and - after the car did not blow up when I turned the ignition - drove its quietly ponderous bulk back to Lochgair.
Fergus’s memorial service was held a week later, at the Church of Scotland, on Sh
ore Street in Gallanach, mid-Argyll. Kind of a traumatic location for the McHoans, and I wouldn’t have gone myself - it would have felt too much like either hypocrisy or gloating - but mum wanted to attend, and I could hardly not offer to escort her.
We put some flowers on the McDobbies’ grave, where dad had died, then went in to the church, each kissing the sombrely beautiful twins.
I stood listening to the pious words, the ill-sung hymns and the plodding reminiscences of the good lawyer Blawke - who must be becoming Gallanach’s most sought-after after-death speaker - and felt a furious anger build up in me.
It was all I could do to stand there, moving my mouth when people sang, and looking down at my feet when they prayed, and not shout out some profanity, some blasphemy, or, even worse, the truth. I actually gathered the breath in my lungs at one point, hardly able to bear the pressure of fury inside me any longer. I tensed my belly for the shout: Killer! Fucking MURDERER!
I felt dizzy. I could almost hear the echoes of my scream reflecting back off the high walls and arched ceiling of the church ... but the singing went on undisturbed. I relaxed after that, and looked around at the trappings of religion and the gathered suits and worthies of Gallanach and beyond, and - if I felt anything - felt only sorrow for us all.
I looked up towards the tower. All the gods are false, I thought to myself, and smiled without pleasure.
I talked to a red-eyed Mrs McSpadden after the service, walking down through the gravestones towards the road and sea, under a sky of scudding cloud; the wind tasted of salt. ‘Aye,’ Mrs McSpadden said, in what was for her almost a whisper. ‘You never think it’s going to happen, do you? We all have our little aches and pains, but when I think about it, if I’d just said something when he mentioned a sore chest that night to go to the doctor ...’
‘Everybody hurts, Mrs McSpadden,’ I said. ‘And he had broken those ribs, in the crash. Anybody would have assumed it was just those.’
‘Aye, maybe.’
I hesitated. ‘Mum said he’d had a phone call from abroad, the night before?’
‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Yes, he did. I thought I ... Well, yes.’
‘You don’t know who it was?’
‘No,’ she said slowly, though I saw her frown.
‘It’s just that a friend of mine from university who’s abroad at the moment had been going to call Fergus, to ask permission to visit the factory - he’s writing a dissertation on the history of glass making - and I haven’t heard from him for a while; I wondered if it might have been him, that’s all.’ (All lies of course, but I’d tried to ring Lachy Watt in Sydney and found that the phone had been disconnected. Ashley’s mum didn’t know where he was now, and I did still want to know what had finally driven Fergus to do what he had.)
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mrs McSpadden said, shaking her large, florid head. A big black bead of glass glittered at the end of her hatpin; a stray strand of white hair blew in the gusting wind.
‘You didn’t hear anything that was said,’ I prompted.
‘Och, just something about putting somebody up. I was on my way out the door.’
‘Putting somebody up?’
‘Aye. He said he hadn’t put anybody up, and that was all I heard. I suppose he must have been talking about people who’d stayed at the castle, or hadn’t stayed; whatever.’
‘Yes,’ I said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘I suppose so.’ I shrugged. ‘Ah well. Perhaps it wasn’t who I was thinking of after all.’
Or maybe it was. Maybe if Mrs McS had heard one more word before she’d closed that door, it would have been the word ‘to’.
‘Come to think of it,’ Mrs McSpadden said, ‘I’d just been talking about you, Prentice, when the phone went.’
‘Had you?’
‘Aye; just mentioning to Mr Urvill what you’d said about remembering more details of when your house was burgled.’
‘Really?’ I nodded, putting my gloved hands behind my back and smiling faintly at the grey and restless sea beyond the low church wall.
‘Canada?’ I said, aghast.
‘I’ve got an uncle there. He knows somebody working in a firm installing a system I know a bit about; they swung the work permit.’
‘My God, when do you go?’
‘Next Monday.’
‘Next Monday?’
‘I’ll be going up to Gallanach tomorrow, to say goodbye to mum.’
‘Flying?’
‘Driving. Leaving the car there. Dean can use it.’
‘Jesus. How long are you going to Canada for?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll like it.’
‘You mean you might stay?’
‘I don’t know, Prentice. I’m not making any plans beyond getting there and seeing what the job’s like and what the people are like.’
‘Shee-it. Well, can I see you? I mean; I’d like to say goodbye.’
‘Well, you going to Gallanach this weekend?’
‘Umm ... Would you believe that this weekend I was intending to drive a Bentley to Ullapool, get a ferry to the island of Lewis, drive to the most north-westerly point on the island I could find and throw a paperweight into the sea? But ...’
‘Well, don’t let me stop you. I’ve got plenty of family to see, goodness knows.’
‘But-’
‘But I’m flying out from Glasgow on the Monday morning. You can put me up in this palace you’re living in, if you like.’
‘Sunday? Yeah. Let me think; can’t get a ferry on a Sunday, but I can get to Ullapool on Friday, travel over; back Saturday. Yeah. Sunday’s fine. What time do you think you’ll get here?’
‘Six all right?’
‘Six is perfect. My turn to take you for a curry.’
‘No it isn’t, but I accept anyway. I promise not to throw brandy all over you.’
‘Okay. I promise not to act like an asshole.’
‘You have to act?’
‘Gosh, you know how to hurt a chap.’
‘Years of practice. See you Sunday, Prentice.’
‘Yeah. Then. Drive carefully.’
‘You too. Bye.’
I put the phone down, looked up at the ceiling, and didn’t know whether to whoop with joy because I was going to see her, or scream in despair because she was going to Canada. Caught between these two extremes, I experienced an odd calmness, and settled for a low moan.
I was starting to think that maybe the Bentley wasn’t really me. People gave me funny looks when I drove it, and I had already been stopped by some traffic cops on Great Western Road the day I drove the beast back from Lochgair to Glasgow. Is this your car, sir? they’d asked.
With hindsight, perhaps saying, Gosh, I thought you only did this to black people! wasn’t the most politic reply to have made, but they only kept me waiting for an hour while they checked up on me and scrutinised the car. I spent the time sitting in the back of the police car thinking of all the worthy causes I could give the proceeds of the Bentley’s sale to (I certainly wasn’t going to keep Fergus’s blood-money). The African National Congress and the League Against Cruel Sports were two names that suggested themselves as fit to spin Ferg’s remains up to near turbo-charger speeds in his watery grave. Thankfully the Bentley’s tyres were nearly new and the lights, like everything else, were all in perfect working order, so the boys in blue had to let me go.
Anyway, it felt right that it was the monstrous burgundy-coloured Eight I took to the Hebrides rather than the Golf.
I started out on the Friday morning and took the A82 to Inverness, then crossed to the west coast and Ullapool. The drive confirmed that the Bentley would have to go. It hadn’t been as unwieldy as I’d imagined it might be, but I just felt embarrassed in the thing. There hadn’t been anything in Fergus’s will to say I couldn’t do what I wanted with the car, so what the hell, I’d sell it.
I caught the afternoon ferry to Stornoway. I stayed in the Royal Hotel that night, read history books about ancient wars and long-gone empires,
and dipped into our currently interesting times via the television. I stationed the paperweight on the bedside table, as though to guard me through the night.
At ten o’clock the next morning I stood in a strong wind and light drizzle, wrapped in my dad’s old coat, near the lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis - trying to think of a good joke about that to tell my brother - and wishing I’d brought a brolly. I hadn’t been able to decide whether this really was the most north-westerly point of the island - there was a place with the appropriate name of Gallan Head that might have done as well - but in the end I thought maybe it didn’t really matter that much, and anyway this headland was easier to get to.
There were some cliffs, not especially high. I had the paperweight in my pocket, and I took it out, feeling suddenly self-conscious and foolish even though there was nobody else around. The wind tugged at the coat and threw light, soaking spray into my eyes. The sea was tarnished rolling silver and seemed to go on forever into the light grey watery expanse of spray and air and cloud.
I hefted the glass ball, then threw it with all my might out to sea. I don’t think it would have mattered especially to me if it had hit the rocks and shattered, but it didn’t; it just disappeared into the greyness, heading towards the piling, restless waves. I think I saw it splash, but I’m not sure.
I had been thinking about saying something, when I threw the paperweight into the sea; ‘You forgot something,’ had been the line I’d been toying with on the drive up, through the peat-smoke smell. But it seemed trite; in the end I didn’t say anything.
Instead I stood there for a while, getting wet and cold, and looking out at the waves and thinking of that wreckage, lying out there on the floor of the Atlantic, a few hundred kilometres to the northwest, far beneath the surface of that grey receiving sea.
Was Fergus Urvill anywhere, still? Apart from the body - whatever was left of him physically, down there in that dark, cold pressure - was there anything else? Was his personality intact somehow, somewhere?
The Crow Road Page 44
