Peter May - The Chessmen

It was a small, single-engined aircraft, cradled among a cluster of boulders, and lying at a slight angle. It appeared to be pretty much intact. The windows of the cockpit were opaque with mud and slime, but the red and white of the fuselage was clearly visible. As were the black-painted letters of its call-sign.

G-RUAI.

Fin felt every hair on the back of his neck stand up. RUAI, short for Ruairidh, the Gaelic for Roderick. A call-sign which had been in every newspaper for weeks seventeen years before, when the plane went missing, and Roddy Mackenzie with it.

Mist lifted off the mountains like smoke, tinted by the dawn. It was perfectly still. Not a sound broke the silence. Not even a birdcall. Fin lowered Whistler’s binoculars. ‘You know whose plane that is?’

Whistler nodded.

‘What the hell’s it doing here, Whistler? They said he filed a flight plan for Mull and disappeared somewhere out at sea.’

Whistler shrugged, but made no comment.

Fin said, ‘I’m going down to take a look.’

Whistler caught his arm. There was an odd look in his eyes. If Fin hadn’t known better he would have said it was fear. ‘We shouldn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s none of our business, Fin.’ He sighed. A long, grim breath of resignation. ‘I suppose we’ll have to report it, but we shouldn’t get involved.’

Fin looked at him hard and long, but decided not to ask. He pulled his arm free of Whistler’s grasp and said again, ‘I’m going down to take a look. You can come with me or not.’ He thrust the binoculars back into Whistler’s hands and started off down the hill towards the empty basin.

The descent was steep and difficult, over broken rock and hardened peat made slick by grasses washed flat by the rain. Boulders lined the banks of what had once been the loch, and Fin slithered over them, struggling to keep his feet and his balance, using his arms to stop himself falling. Down, down into the bowels of the one-time loch, wading through mud and slime, up to his knees at times, between rocks he used like stepping stones to cross the vast depression.

He had almost reached the plane before he turned to look back and see Whistler following just a few yards behind. Whistler stopped, breathing heavily, and the two men stood looking at each other for almost a full minute. Then Fin glanced beyond him, up through layers of peat and stone like the contour lines on an ordnance survey map, towards what just twelve hours before had been the shoreline. Had the loch still been there, the two men would have been fifty feet underwater by now. He turned to cover the remaining yards to the plane.

It was canted at the slightest of angles amid the shambles of rock and stone at the bottom of the loch, almost as if it had been placed there by the delicate hand of God. Fin was aware of Whistler’s breathing at his side. He said, ‘You know what’s weird?’

‘What?’ Whistler didn’t really sound as if he wanted to know.

‘I can’t see any damage.’

‘So?’

‘Well, if the plane had crashed into the loch it would be pretty smashed up, right?’

Whistler made no comment.

‘I mean look at it. There’s barely a dent on it. All the windows are intact. The windscreen’s not even broken.’

Fin clambered over the last few rocks and pulled himself, slithering, up on to the nearest wing. ‘Not much rust in evidence either. I guess it must be mostly aluminium.’ He didn’t trust himself to stand on the treacherously slippery surface of the wing, and crawled on his hands and knees towards the nearside cockpit door. The window was thick with green slime and it was impossible to see inside. He grasped the handle and tried to pull it open. It wouldn’t budge.

‘Leave it, Fin,’ Whistler called to him from down below.

But Fin was determined. ‘Come up here and give me a hand.’

Whistler didn’t move.

‘For Christ’s sake, man, it’s Roddy in there!’

‘I don’t want to see him, Fin. It would be like desecrating a grave.’

Fin shook his head and turned back to the door, bracing his feet against the fuselage on either side and pulling with all his strength. Suddenly it gave, with a loud rending like the sound of tearing metal, and Fin fell backwards on to the wing. Daylight flooded the interior of the cockpit for the first time in seventeen years. Fin scrambled back to his knees and grabbed the frame of the door to pull himself up to see inside. He heard Whistler hoisting himself on to the wing behind him, but didn’t turn. The sight that greeted him was shocking, his olfactory senses assailed by a stink like rotting fish.

The fascia below the windscreen arched across the cockpit, a mass of gauges and dials, glass smeared and muddied, interior faces discoloured by water and algae. The passenger or co-pilot’s seat, at the nearside, was empty. The red, black and blue knobs of the throttle controls between the seats were still visible, drawn back to their idle position. The remains of a man were strapped into the pilot’s seat at the far side. Time and water and bacteria had eaten away all the flesh, and the only thing holding the skeleton together were the blanched remains of tendons and tough ligaments that had not decayed in the cold-water temperatures. His leather jacket was more or less intact. His jeans, though bleached of colour, had also survived. His trainers, too, although Fin could see that the rubber was swollen, distending the shoes around what was left of the feet.

The larynx, ears and nose had all lost their structure, and the skull was plainly visible, a few strands of hair clinging to the remnants of soft tissue.

All of which was shocking enough to the two old friends who remembered the young, talented, restless Roddy with his shock of fair curly hair. But what disturbed them most was the terrible damage inflicted to the right side of the face and rear of the skull. Half the jaw appeared to be missing, exposing a row of yellowed broken teeth. The cheekbone and upper part of the skull were smashed beyond recognition.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Whistler’s voice came to Fin in a blasphemous breath.

It had only taken a moment to absorb the scene exposed by the opening of the door, and Fin recoiled involuntarily almost at once, banging the back of his head against Whistler’s shoulder. He slammed the door shut and turned around to slide down into a sitting position against it. Whistler crouched on his hunkers looking at him with wide eyes.

‘You’re right,’ Fin said. ‘We shouldn’t have opened it.’ He looked at Whistler’s face, so pale that pockmarks Fin had never before noticed were visible now, the result perhaps of some bout of childhood chickenpox. ‘But not because we’re desecrating a grave, Whistler.’

Whistler frowned. ‘Why then?’

‘Because we’re disturbing a crime scene.’

Whistler gazed at him for several long moments, dark eyes obscured by confusion, before he turned to slither down off the wing and make his way back towards the shoreline, climbing steadily out of the crater and back up towards the beehives.

‘Whistler!’ Fin called after him, but the big man didn’t even break stride and never looked back.

Fin sat in Gunn’s office, looking at the shambles of paperwork gathered like drifting snow on the detective sergeant’s desk. The occasional car rumbled past outside in Church Street, and even from this distance he could hear the gulls circling the trawlers in the harbour. Bleak, harled houses with steeply pitched roofs filled the view from the window, and he stood up and crossed to it to widen his field of vision. Macleod amp; Macleod the butcher, no relative. The Blythswood Care charity shop on the corner, with its handwritten notice in the window, We do not accept any left over goods from sales of work . The Bangla Spice Indian restaurant, and the Thai Cafe. Folk a long way from home.