Iain Banks - Complicity

William scratches his head. "Not really." He secures the painter to one of the iron rings. "Funeral party turned up one day while one lot were having a barbie; bit of a fracas."

"You mean this place is still used ? Yvonne says, accepting William's hand and being pulled up onto the slipway. She tuts and looks away, shaking her head.

"Oh, hell, yeah," William says as Andy and I get out too; a little unsteadily, it has to be said, as we weren't totally sober when we woke up — around noon — in William's parents" house at the top of the loch, and we've been getting stuck into the whisky in first my hip-flask then his on the twenty-kilometre journey down the loch. "I mean," William says, flapping his arms. "That's why I wanted you guys to see this place; this is where I want to be buried." He smiles beatifically at his wife. "You too, blue-eyes, if you want."

Yvonne stares at him.

"We could be buried together," William says, sounding happy.

Yvonne frowns severely and walks past us, heading towards the island. "You'd only want to go on top as usual."

William laughs uproariously, then looks briefly crestfallen as we follow Yvonne onto the grass and head up to the ruined chapel. "I meant side-by-side," he says plaintively.

Andy chuckles and screws down the cap of the hip-flask. He looks thin and kind of hunched. This visit to the west coast was my idea. I invited myself and Andy here for a long weekend with William and Yvonne at William's parents" place on the shores of the loch, not so much for my own enjoyment — I get jealous around William and Yvonne when they're in their weekend-horseplay mode — but because it was the first idea I'd had for a break that Andy didn't reject immediately. Clare died six months ago and, apart from a month of night-clubbing in London which seemed to leave him more depressed than ever and certainly less wealthy and healthy, Andy hasn't left Strathspeld since; I've tried a dozen different ways of getting him away from the estate for a while but this was the only one that sparked any interest.

I think Andy just plain likes Yvonne and is sort of morbidly fascinated with William, who spent a large part of the journey down the loch telling us about his non-ethical investment policy: deliberately putting money into arms businesses, tobacco companies, exploitative mining industries, rain-forest timber concerns; that sort of thing. His theory is that if the smart but ethical money is getting out, the dividends have to get bigger for the smart but unscrupulous money that takes its place. I assumed he was joking, Yvonne pretended not to listen, but Andy was taking him quite seriously, and from William's appreciative reaction I suspect the guy wasn't kidding at all.

We walk up between gravestones of various ages; some are only a year or two old, many date back to the last century, and some are dated in the seventeen and sixteen hundreds; others have been worn smooth by the elements, their text levelled and obliterated back into the grainy nap of the rock. Some of the stones are just flat, irregular slabs, and you get the impression that if the poor people who erected these — and could not afford a stonemason — could write, and did carve the names and dates of their loved ones on such slabs, the letters and numerals must only have been scratched onto the surface of the stone.

I stand looking at some long, flat gravestones set into the ground with crude depictions of skeletons chiselled into them; other carvings are of skulls and scythes and hourglasses and crossed bones. Most of the horizontal stones are covered in grey, black and light green lichens and mosses.

There are a couple of family plots, where more affluent locals have walled off bits of the little island, and grander gravestones of marble and granite stand proud, if they're not covered by brambles. Some of the more recent graves still have wee cellophane parcels of flowers lying on them; many have small granite flowerpots, covered by perforated metal caps that make them look like giant pepperpots, and a couple of these have dead, faded flowers in them.

The walls of the ruined chapel barely come up to shoulder-height. At one end, beneath a gable wall with an aperture like a small window at the apex where a bell might have hung once, there is a stone altar; just three heavy slabs. On the altar there's a metal bell, green-black with age and chained to the wall behind. It looks rather like a very old Swiss cow-bell.

"Apparently some people nicked the old bell, back in the "sixties," William told us last night, in the drawing room of his parents" house, while we were playing cards and drinking whisky and talking about heading down the loch in the speedboat to the dark isle. "Oxford students, or something; anyway, according to the locals the guys couldn't sleep at night because they kept hearing the sound of bells, and eventually they couldn't stand it and came back and replaced the bell in the chapel and they were all right again."

"What a load of old nonsense," Yvonne said. "Two."

"Two," William said. "Yes, probably."

"Oh, I don't know," Andy said, shaking his head. "Sounds pretty spooky to me. One, please. Thanks."

"Sounds like fucking tinnitus to me," I said. "Three. Ta."

"Dealer takes two," William said. He whistled. "Oh, baby; look at these cards…"

I take the old bell up and let it ring once; a flat, hollow, appropriately funereal sound. I set it carefully back down on the stone altar and look round the walled oblong of hill, mountain, loch and cloud.

Silence: no birds, no wind in the trees, nobody talking. I turn slowly, right round, watching the clouds. I think this is the most peaceful place I have ever been.

I walk out, among the cold, carved little stones, to find Yvonne standing glaring at a tall gravestone. Euphemia McTeish, born 18 03, died 1822, and her five children. Died in childbirth. Her husband died twenty years later.

Andy strolls up, drinking from his flask, grinning and shaking his head. He nods up to where William is standing on the wall of the chapel, looking down the loch with a pair of small binoculars. "Wanted to build a house here," Andy says. He shakes his head.

" What ?" Yvonne says.

"Here?" I say. "On a graveyard ? Is he mad? Hasn't he read Stephen King?"

Yvonne looks coldly at her distant husband. "He was talking about building a house up here, but I didn't know it was… here ." She looks away.

"Tried to persuade the local authority with a really good deal on a bunch of computers," Andy says, chuckling. "But they wouldn't play. For the moment he's had to settle for being allowed to get buried here."

Yvonne draws herself up. "Which might happen sooner than he's expecting," she says, and marches off towards the chapel, where William is staring down into the building's interior and shaking his head.

Hard rain on a soft day; it falls from the leaden overcast, continual and drenching, creating a huge rustling in all the grass, bushes and trees around us.

William's body is laid to rest in the thick peaty soil of the dark isle. According to the pathologist's report, he was clubbed unconscious and then suffocated.

Yvonne, beautiful and pale in slim black, her face veiled, nods to the mourners and their few soft words, and murmurs something of her own. The rain drums on my umbrella. She glances at me, catching my gaze for the first time since I got here. I barely made it in time; I had a hospital appointment for this morning — yet more tests — and had to drive hard across country, towards Rannoch and the west. But I got here, got to the Sorrells" home, met William's father and brother, and saw Yvonne briefly but did not get a chance to talk to her before it was time for us all to set off for the circuitous drive round the mountains and down to the far end of the loch, and the hotel there, and the drive up the track to the slipway facing Eilean Dubh and the two little boats that shuttled us across, the last one bringing the coffin.