Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

In the gully below, on a rocky shelf cut by nature into the face of the cliff, Fiosaich had built his first home, balanced somewhere between life and death, a precarious if spectacular place to live. But he had abandoned it soon enough, and when Ruairidh and Niamh arrived to build their own home, all that remained of it were the scattered stones of the walls and foundations. Over time, and on countless sabbaths beyond the disapproving glare of the Church, they had built a tiny stone bothy in its place, a refuge for the walkers and hikers who made the pilgrimage out to see the house that Fiosaich had built.

From where she stood Niamh could just see it, with its roof of stone slabs in overlapping layers set upon the wooden structure below, walls of stone hewn from the cliffs, like camouflage, making it difficult to spot if you didn’t know it was there.

It was here that she and Ruairidh had opened the urn containing Róisín’s ashes, to let the wind take them where it would. Nearly eight years ago now.

When she had fallen pregnant, Ranish was in its first flush of success, and her initial thoughts had turned to abortion. How, she had wondered, could a baby possibly fit into the lives they were making for themselves? Working ten or twelve hours a day. Frequent trips abroad or to the mainland. Ruairidh would have carried on as before. Seonag, and no doubt Ruairidh’s mother, would have taken greater control of the company. Leaving Niamh with a primary role as mother and babysitter, and a back seat in the forward progress of Ranish Tweed.

Ruairidh had been opposed to the very idea of termination. Not for any religious or philosophical reasons, but because he wanted a child. And when his mother got wind of Niamh’s thinking she had accused her of trying to murder her grandchild.

It had been a fraught time, filled with argument and aggravation. Ironically it was Seonag who had finally settled Niamh’s mind on the matter. A throwaway conversation, even before she knew that Niamh was pregnant. Already with two children of her own, Seonag had said simply that they were the greatest gift that God had given her. It had crossed her mind, she said, when first pregnant, that she was too young for children and that abortion would have allowed for future planning. Niamh remembered how her childhood friend had gazed off into the middle distance, and with a slight shake of her head said, ‘I’m so glad I didn’t do that. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think I could ever have forgiven myself.’

Niamh knew she could never have lived with that kind of regret, and so she took the bold decision to let her pregnancy run its course, determined that their baby would have to fit in with their lives, rather than the other way around.

She had relaxed into her decision, then, and begun to relish the prospect of becoming a mother. A scan had revealed that their child was a girl, and she and Ruairidh had chosen the Irish Gaelic name of Róisín for their daughter.

But then two months before the baby was due, Niamh had begun to bleed. Unaccountably. She’d been rushed to hospital in Stornoway, then airlifted to Inverness, where the baby was stillborn. As if it had not been devastating enough to lose their child, the doctors told Niamh that due to internal damage she was unlikely to have more children.

Ruairidh had been stoic and supportive, despite his disappointment. But his mother, though never saying it in so many words, had implied that somehow it was Niamh herself who had contrived the miscarriage. That dark cloud of suspicion and mistrust had cast a shadow on their relationship ever since.

Róisín had been cremated in Inverness. A ceremony attended by just Niamh and Ruairidh. They had returned to release her ashes here on the cliffs, as if releasing her spirit to rest with her parents in this place for eternity.

Niamh had regretted it immediately. With Róisín’s ashes dispersed instantly by the wind, it was as if she had lost her all over again. Vanished without trace. And in all the years since, she had lamented not burying her child. A grave to visit, a place for flowers. A piece of this earth forever Róisín’s.

Niamh sat on a cluster of stones and gazed at the rock face below. A complex pattern of molten rock which had cooled in layers to form these cliffs untold millions of years before. If only she could be absorbed by them, subsumed to become a part of the whole. Instead of remaining this wretched speck in the universe, this tiny repository of grief and sorrow, so filled with regret at the loss of her man, and her child.

Never in her life had she felt so small and alone.

The flight north from Glasgow was a bumpy one, in and out of cloud with only occasional glimpses of the ground below. Lochs and green valleys, and now mountain ranges that seemed unnaturally close.

Braque had read that the ferry crossing from Ullapool to Stornoway took three hours on a good day, but the flight across the Minch took only a matter of minutes. It was difficult to tell when the plane was over water, because it was the same colour as the cloud. Dull, grey, featureless.

Only now, as she saw fingers of white-ringed black rock reach out into pewtery water, did the island announce itself to her, appearing slowly out of the haze like some lost, mythical land.

As the plane dipped beneath the cloud, she saw peat-scarred purple bog stretching off into a misted distance, tiny clusters of houses clinging to the very edges of the island itself. And her heart sank at the prospect of the days that lay ahead of her, alone in this strange and foreign place.

Detective Sergeant George Gunn was waiting for her by the luggage carousel. She knew at once who he was. He looked like a policeman. Big feet in shiny black leather shoes, sharply pressed dark grey trousers, a quilted black anorak, and a face shaven to within an inch of its life. Pink and shiny and crowned by oiled black hair that divided his forehead in a widow’s peak.

It seemed he knew her, too. Perhaps police officers everywhere recognized fellow travellers of the same species. He stepped forward to shake her hand as she put out her own, and said hesitantly, ‘ Bonjour madame. Detective Sergeant George Gunn . Je suis enchanté. C’est quelle, votre valise? ’ He blushed and smiled and said, ‘School French.’

Braque forced a smile in return. ‘Perhaps we should stick to English.’

His smile vanished immediately. ‘Of course. Your French is much better than mine.’

‘I should hope so.’

He laughed awkwardly. ‘Oh. Haha. Sorry, I meant...’

‘It’s alright,’ she said, lifting a small suitcase from the conveyer belt. ‘And I can manage my bag myself, thank you.’

‘Of course.’

At the car-rental desk he said, ‘You really didn’t need to hire a car. I could have driven you wherever you wanted to go.’

She signed the rental and insurance documents. ‘I prefer to have my own wheels.’

He nodded and watched as she presented her French driver’s licence, wondering if Britain’s exit from the European Union would make this process more complex in the future. He said, ‘How did you recognize me?’

‘The same way you recognized me.’

He frowned. ‘They sent you my photograph?’

She turned, surprised. ‘No. They sent you mine?’

‘Some kind of faxed personnel document. Not a very good likeness.’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘So how...?’ But he decided to let it drop.

The wind that battered them as they stepped outside had an icy edge to it, feeling to Braque more like winter than autumn. She decided that she was distinctly underdressed in her short denim jacket and T-shirt.

‘I’m in the black Ford,’ he said. ‘If you want to just follow me into town...’