Mo Hayder: Pig Island

'You're right about that,' said the landlord. He came to the table and sat down, setting the crisps in front of him. 'Do their fair bit to piss us all off. They're not well liked — not since they fenced off that nice bit o' beach on the south-east of the island and stopped the young folk from Arduaine going out with their boats. They'd only be wanting a wee game of footy or shinty in the sand, the weans, Godsake, no need to be so stern about it, is my opinion.'

'Not your perfect neighbours.'

'No,' he said. 'They're not.'

'Where I come from, you behave like that you're asking for a hiding.'

'So you're starting to see my point.'

'If it was me I'd be trying to think of how to make their lives difficult.'

'We've been tempted!' The landlord laughed. He licked his fingers carefully, then put them to his eyes, like tears of mirth had gathered there. 'I don't mind telling you. Been tempted. Put some paraffin in their bottles of bevvy, maybe.'

'You know, if it was me, I'd — I'd — I don't know.' I shook my head and looked at the ceiling, like I was searching for inspiration. 'I'd probably try and set up some kind of… dodgy rumour. Yeah.' I nodded. 'I'd set up a hoax — spread a couple of rumours around.'

The landlord stopped laughing and rubbed his nose. 'Are you saying we're making it all up?'

'Aye. Takin' the piss, are ye?' The lobsterman sat forward, suddenly flushed. 'You takin' the piss? Is that what your message to us is?'

'I'm just saying,' I met his eyes seriously, looking from him to the landlord and back, 'it's got a smell about it, hasn't it? I mean, devil-worshippers? Satan walking the beaches of Pig Island?'

The colour in the lobsterman's face paled very slightly. He crushed the rollie in the ashtray and stood, drawing himself up to his full height. He took a few deep, fighting breaths, and looked unsteadily down at me. 'Laddie, tell me. Are you a man who is easily shocked? You're a big man, but I reckon you're one who'd shock easy. What do ye think?' he said to the landlord. 'Is he? Is he a man who'd go in a funk if he saw something peculiar? Because that's how it looks from where I stand.'

'Why?' I said, putting the glass down slowly. 'Why? What are you going to show me?'

'If you're so clever you don't believe what we're saying, then come with me. We'll see what kind of a hoax is gaun on.'

Pig Island, or as it's called in Gaelic Cuagach Eilean, lies in the small cup of sea at the edge of the Firth of Lorn, caught like a precious stone in a setting between Luing, Jura and Craignish Peninsula — like it's been placed to block the entry to the Sound of Jura. It's a weird shape: like a peanut from above, covered in grassland and dense trees, a wide rocky gorge running down the middle. Once, before the pig farm and the chemical dumping, there'd been a slate mine operating in the south of the island, with a community of miners and a regular ferry. But by the time I got there Pig Island was almost totally cut off. Once a week the Psychogenic Healing Ministries sent a small boat to collect supplies. It was their only contact with the world.

I knew a bit about that part of Scotland — wrote bits and pieces about it from time to time. But my bread and butter was debunking work. One of the things that comes as birthright to a Scouser is knowing the stripe of bullshit when you see it and I'm a natural sceptic, a full-blown non-believer: a Scully, a James Randi, an out-and-out hoax-buster. I've flown round the world chasing zombies and chupacabras, Filipino faith-healers and beasts in Bodmin; I've used glass vials to collect dripping milk from the breasts of Mexican virgin statues — and in that time I've worked up a hard skin. But even I had to admit there was something odd-looking about the Psychogenic Healing Ministries' island. If you were going to believe in devil-worship you'd picture it happening somewhere remote and sea-wreathed like Pig Island. That night, as we jolted and bumped along a dark path that led to the end of the peninsula, I stared out of the window at its dark, desolate shape and for a moment or two there I had to tell myself not to be an old tart about it.

The landlord had crammed me into the back seat of the lobsterman's beat-up rust-bucket of a car. We left the dog in the pub: 'Because he's a mad rocket when he comes out here,' said the landlord, as the car pulled off the road on to a thin, muddy beach. 'Makes him crazy and I'm not putting him in a paddy just because you won't take my word for something.'

We got out of the car and I paused. I hadn't been out on the lash or anything, but I'd sunk a fair old few in the pub and it felt good for a moment to fill my lungs with the night air. The beach was silent, and there was already a breath of autumn in the air. It was gone eleven but Craignish was so far north the sky was still edged with blue. You'd almost think that if you stood on tiptoe and squinted you'd see the land of the midnight sun peeping at you from over the horizon, maybe a reindeer or a polar bear on a giant mint.

'See the pipe?' The lobsterman walked away to the south, totally steady in spite of the whisky, his old shoes leaving dull prints in the mud, his moon-shadow long beside him. 'The wee stank over there?' He was pointing to the long, low shape of a sewage pipe straddling the beach ahead. 'You get the conditions right — a nice westerly, an ebb and a spring tide — then everything from out at Pig Island gets washed up, not in the loch or even on Luing, where you'd expect it, but here, on this side of the peninsula. Most of it gets caught on the other side of that pipe.'

The landlord hung back, giving me a dubious look. His face was a little pinched seeming in the moonlight. He turned up his collar like it was suddenly dead cold out there. 'Sure you're ready for this?'

'Yeah. Why not?'

'It's not for the faint-hearted, what's caught up under that pipe.'

'I'm not faint-hearted,' I said, looking down the beach at the lobsterman. 'I've seen everything there is to see.'

We walked for a while in silence, only the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, and the tinkle of a halyard on a boat moored somewhere out in the sea. The smell hit me first. Even before I saw the lobsterman hesitate at the pipe, looking down on the other side, before I saw him shaking his head and leaning over to spit out something in the sand, I knew it was going to be one of those stomach-turners. One of those times I'd regret the last pint. I took a breath and swallowed, tapping my pockets as I got nearer, hoping I'd find a stray bit of chewy or something to take the taste away.

'Worse is it?' said the landlord, approaching the lobsterman. 'Got worse?'

'Aye — there's more. More than there was last week.'

I held my T-shirt up to my nose and peered down on the other side of the pipe. Dark shapes bobbed and buffeted in a yellowish foam. Meat. Decaying chunks of flesh — impossible to tell in the slime where one piece ended and the next began. The breaking waves forced them into the crevice under the pipe, tangled them in ribbons of tasselweed. Decomposition gas fizzed from under the raised flaps of skin, sending bubbles to the surface.

'What the fuck's this?'

'Pig meat,' said the lobsterman. 'Dead pigs. Killt in one of them rituals on Pig Island and been washed off the island.'

'Police have seen it,' the landlord said, 'and they've not cared to do anything about it — can't prove where it's coming from and, anyway, a few dead pigs aren't hurting anyone, is their manner of thinking.'

'Dead pigs?' I looked up at the mouth of the Firth. The moon picked out the silvery tips of waves as far as the eye could see — to where Pig Island peeped round the end of Luing, silent and hunched, like a dozing beast. 'All of this is dead pigs?'

'Aye. That's what they say.' The landlord puffed out a series of short, dry laughs — like the world never ceased to amaze him. 'That's what the police say — everything here is just pig meat. But you know what I think?'