Peter May: Coffin Road

I shift seats to sit in front of my laptop and waken it from sleep, to be greeted, as before, by an almost empty screen. This time I search it more thoroughly. I open my browser to comb through its history. But there is none. It has been set to private browsing. Both the cookie and download folders are empty. A glance at the top of the screen tells me I am connected to the internet. And even as I look, I become aware of just how familiar I am with this laptop and its software. Computers are not some technology foreign to me. I know my way around. I check Recent Items , and find it, too, empty, apart from the mailer and browser that I have opened only in these last hours. And I realise that I must have been covering my tracks. Whatever use to which I was putting my computer, I did not want someone else knowing. All of which is very frustrating, when I am trying to learn what I clearly went to great lengths to prevent anyone else from finding out.

I breathe frustration through my teeth and am just about to shut down when I notice a folder sitting innocently between Downloads and Music . It is labelled, simply, Flannans . I doubleclick and it opens to reveal a long list of files. Chapter One, Chapter Two ... all the way through to Chapter Twenty . Again I double-click, this time on Chapter One , which triggers the opening of my Pages word-processing software. The document opens. There are headers and footers and a chapter heading, but not a single word of text. I look at it, startled by its emptiness, before opening Chapter Two . Exactly the same. With an increasing sense of disorientation, I open every single document, and find every one of them empty.

Now I sit back and gaze at my blank screen, feeling more and more bewildered. Whatever I might have told Jon and Sally, or anyone else, I am not writing a book about the Flannan Isles mystery. I am a fraud.

I can feel the sense of frustration building inside me, bubbling up like molten lava to erupt as an explosion of anger. My chair falls to the floor as I stand up suddenly, just as in Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s poem. There must be, in this house, something that will reveal to me more about who I am. There has to be! I live here, after all. I’m not a ghost. I must leave traces.

And I spend the next half hour going through every drawer and every cupboard, pulling stuff out of them in a frenzy, searching for something, anything, I don’t know what. I pull every book from the shelves of the bookcase, shaking each in turn by the spine, in case there should be something concealed among their pages. By the time I head for the bedroom, the floor is littered with debris, the detritus of my desperation.

But I stop in the doorway, my attention caught by a map lying on the coffee table, next to the bottle of whisky. An Ordnance Survey map, all neatly folded up within its shiny, cracked covers. I step over to the table and lift it up. A South Harris Explorer Map. It is well thumbed and torn along some of its folds. It is large and unwieldy as I open it up to reveal the myriad contour lines that delineate the shape and form of this lower half of the Isle of Harris. A landscape pitted by countless lochs, ragged scraps of water reflecting stormy skies. Red denotes the A859 main road, such as it is, with minor roads in broken black lines and yellow. Tràigh Losgaintir, where I washed up only hours ago, is a vast triangle of yellow. I find the cemetery, and my house next to it. Then my eye is drawn to a thick line of luminous orange, tracking part of a broken line from the south end of the beach, that heads almost straight up and over the hills towards a cluster of lochs on the east coast. It is a line I must have drawn on the map myself, with a marker pen. But not recently. It is quite faded, and I wonder how long I must have been here for the ink to lose its colour.

Holding it under the light, and squinting to read tiny print, I see that the track my marker pen follows is called Bealach Eòrabhat . Gaelic. But I have no idea what it means. I cannot imagine why I might have marked this track in orange, but if nothing else it gives me somewhere else to look. A starting point tomorrow. For there is nothing I can do about it now, in the dark.

I drop the map, still open, on the table and go through to the bedroom to continue my search. Here there is nothing but clean clothes and laundry. The spare bedroom at the other end of the hall is in use, it seems, as a dressing room. There are more clothes. A suitcase on top of the wardrobe, but it is empty. Only when I turn to go back out do I see the shoulder bag hanging from a hook on the back of the door. A canvas satchel. I grab it and sit on the bed to open it. Finally, something personal. My fingers are shaking as I undo the clasps and delve inside to find a blank notebook and a wallet. To my intense disappointment, verging almost on anger, I find only money in the wallet. Notes and some coins. No credit or business cards, no family photographs. Nothing. I throw the damn thing at the wall and drop my face into my hands, fingers curling into brittle claws to drag at my skin. And my voice rips through the silence of the house as I raise my head to the heavens. ‘For God’s sake! Who the hell am I?’

Of course, no one replies, and I am left sitting here in the desperate silence, bereft. Perhaps I am a ghost after all. Perhaps I died somewhere out there at sea. Yesterday was a stinker , according to Jon. And I had cancelled my trip out to the Flannan Isles. Or so I said. But what if I had gone? How did I get there, and what was the purpose of my visit? Certainly not to research a book. But something happened. I know it, I feel it. Something dreadful. Maybe I drowned. Maybe it was just my body that washed ashore on the beach. And it was only my spirit that rose from the sand to haunt this place. Perhaps that’s why I can find no trace of myself.

I clench my fists and dig fingernails into my palms and know from the pain I feel that I am no ghost. I look up as Bran lopes along the hall to stand in the doorway and look at me. ‘Tell me, Bran,’ I say to him. ‘Tell me who I am. What am I doing here?’ And he cocks his head to one side, ears lifted. He knows that it is him I am speaking to, and maybe he detects the question in my voice. But he has no answers for me.

Emotionally and physically spent, I rise stiffly and he follows me along to the bedroom. I do not even have the energy to go through and turn out the lights in the kitchen. Instead, I slip out of my jeans and T-shirt and flop on to the bed. If I could, I would weep. But there are no tears in my eyes, just a dry, burning sensation. My mouth is parched. I should drink water. I should eat. But I am too tired. I lie on my back, reflected light spilling from the hall into the darkness of the bedroom, and close my eyes, only vaguely aware of Bran jumping up on to the bed and curling up at my feet.

I am awakened for the second time by a noise I don’t hear, but which is somehow transmitted from my subconscious to send me spiralling up from the deepest of sleeps to break the surface of consciousness, blood pulsing in my head. I blink in the dark, pupils shrinking to bring focus to the light that falls in a skewed rectangle across the floor and far wall of the hall. And I see a shadow step through it.

‘Who’s there?’ I know it is my voice, but it seems disconnected. I feel I should be scared, and yet I am not. I hear Bran issue a strange throaty sound and turn to see him lift his head into the darkness, sniffing furiously. But he has not been moved to rouse himself from the bed.

A silhouette steps into the hall from the sitting room, and I know immediately that it is Sally.

‘Jesus!’ I am not sure why I am whispering. ‘You scared the hell out of me.’