Peter May: Coffin Road

Sally chides him. ‘You should know better than ask a writer a question like that.’

Jon laughs and says, ‘What, has inspiration vanished like those lighthouse keepers you’re writing about? Last time we spoke, you said you were almost finished.’

I try to avoid further traps. ‘I expect to wrap it up sometime this month.’ And suddenly I realise that I don’t even know what month it is. I glance around the room and see a Jolomo calendar hanging on the wall. A vividly coloured painting of cottages standing above an outcrop of rocks, and boats at anchor in a stormy bay. Below it, the month of September is laid out in thirty squares.

Sally won’t meet my eye. ‘I suppose that means you’ll be leaving soon.’

I nod, half-feigning regret. ‘I suppose it does.’

It feels like an eternity before they go. We sit and talk. Or, at least, Jon talks and I listen, trying hard not to get involved in a conversation that I can’t find my way out of. Concentration is difficult. In spite of sleeping earlier I am exhausted. My body feels battered. And I am aware of Sally watching me. Silent, appraising, as if she can read my mind, or the lack of it.

While he seems oblivious, Sally must sense my impatience to be rid of them, for it is she who stands, finally, and says they should go. ‘Neal’s tired,’ she tells him. ‘We can do this another time.’

Jon drains his glass and rises to his feet. ‘Maybe that bump in your car was a bit more than you’re letting on, eh?’

I just smile and follow them through the house to the door. ‘Sorry to be such bad company,’ I say, and from the doorstep I look around for their car. But there is no vehicle in sight.

Sally kisses me lightly on the cheek and Jon shakes my hand. ‘Get yourself a decent night’s sleep,’ he says. ‘You’ll feel better tomorrow.’ Evidently it has not gone unnoticed that I am not myself. I almost smile inwardly. How could I be, when I have no idea who I am?

I stand on the step, the wind tugging my hair, and watch as they walk up to the road and turn left. Above them on the far side of the single-track, a house stands overlooking mine, and the beach beyond. For the first time, I cast eyes over the exterior of my own place. A traditional design, but it can be no more than a year or two old. Well insulated, double glazed, warm and comfortable inside, offering the protection of modern engineering from the elements of this harsh environment. How did I end up here? Have I always lived on my own?

For a moment I am distracted by Bran racing among the dunes, barking and chasing rabbits, and when I look back I see Jon and Sally going up the drive of a house near the top of the hill. I realise they are neighbours. Sally turns and waves before they go inside. The house has a two-storey glass porch in the design of a gable end, built out from the front of it. I can only imagine how spectacular the views must be from the inside, though given that Jon and Sally are neighbours, and friends, I must have seen them often enough.

There is only a handful of houses strung out along the road as it curves up over the hill beneath a brooding sky and failing light. A rising horizon unbroken by a single tree, and delineated by drystone walls. Away to the west, beyond the beach and a sea that seems to glow with some inner light, the mountains of Taransay rise against the setting sun, the sky clearing beyond them in a freshening wind from the south-west.

I shout on Bran and he comes racing back.

Once inside, I hear him lapping water from his bowl in the boot room as I go into the kitchen and turn on the lights.

So I am writing a book.

I cross to the bookshelf and lift the booklet on the mystery of the Flannan Isles and sit down to flip it open. In it I read that the largest of the seven islands, Eilean Mòr, which is Gaelic for Big Island, rises 288 feet above sea level and was chosen at the end of the nineteenth century as the site for a lighthouse that would guide passing vessels safely around Cape Wrath and onward to the Pentland Firth. The island is less than 39 acres in size, and the lighthouse they built there is 74 feet high. Lit for the first time on 7 December 1899, it flashed twice high. Lit for the first time on 7 December 1899, it flashed twice candlepower beam 24 nautical miles out to sea.

It was almost exactly a year later, on 15 December 1900, that the captain of the steamer Archtor , headed for Leith on the east coast of Scotland, reported by wireless that the light was out. But whoever took that message at the headquarters of Cosmopolitan Line Steamers failed to report it to the Northern Lighthouse Board, and it wasn’t until the 26th of the month that relief keepers, delayed by bad weather, were finally landed on the island to discover that keepers James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur had vanished without trace.

As I read, I find myself being drawn into the mystery. Printed in full is a colourful poem written about the event twenty years after it, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. In it he imagines that the relief keepers, on landing, were watched by three huge birds that flew from the rock, startled by their arrival, to plunge into the sea. And when the men entered the lighthouse, the smell of limewash and tar that greeted them was as ‘familiar as our daily breath’, but reeked now of death. They found an untouched meal of meat and cheese and bread on the table, and an overturned chair on the floor. The men’s bunks had not been slept in, and there was no trace of them anywhere on the island.

This fanciful version of events is contradicted in the booklet I am reading by extracts from the actual account given by assistant keeper Joseph Moore, who was the first man to enter the lighthouse after the arrival of the relief vessel Hesperus . Making no mention of a meal on the table or an overturned chair, he wrote:

I went up, and on coming to the entrance gate I found it closed. I made for the entrance door leading to the kitchen and store room, found it also closed and the door inside that, but the kitchen door itself was open. On entering the kitchen I looked at the fireplace and saw that the fire was not lighted for some days. I then entered the rooms in succession, found the beds empty just as they left them in the early morning. I did not take time to search further, for I only too well knew something serious had occurred. I darted out and made for the landing. When I reached there I informed Mr McCormack that the place was deserted. He with some of the men came up a second time, so as to make sure, but unfortunately the first impression was only too true. Mr McCormack and myself proceeded to the lightroom where everything was in proper order. The lamp was cleaned. The fountain full. Blinds on the windows.

There are, it seems, two landing stages on the island. One on the east side and one on the west. Whilst everything was normal on the east side, at the west landing a box holding ropes and tackle had gone, the railings were buckled, a 20-hundredweight block of stone dislodged, and a lifebuoy ripped from its fastenings — all 110 feet above sea level. Below, ropes lay strewn over the rocks, and the only conclusion that investigators could come to was that a freak wave had broken over the cliffs and carried the men away.

The one inconsistency in this theory, according to my booklet, was the fact that regulations stated that one of the keepers should remain always within the lighthouse. And while the boots and oilskins of two of the keepers were gone, the waterproof coat worn by the third, Donald McArthur, still hung from its peg in the hall. So if he had broken regulations and gone out at all, he had done so in his shirtsleeves. No one could explain why.

I close the booklet and run my hand over my face, aware for the first time of the bristles that cover my cheeks and chin. How long, I wonder, since I last shaved? But I am more focused on the mystery of the vanishing keepers, and wonder what I have written about them. Quite a lot, I imagine, since apparently I am close to finishing.