Peter May - The Chessmen

‘I’ll shake your hand, son.’ For a moment I couldn’t bring my arm to move, before suddenly it reached up, almost involuntarily, for my hand to be gripped by his. A warm, firm handshake, that he held for what seemed like an eternity. When finally he returned it to me he said, ‘You’ve got some fucking nerve, boy, I’ll give you that.’ He paused to draw a long breath. ‘Your story had better be good.’

So I told him. He stood and listened in silence, his slow, stertorous breathing pulsing out clouds of misted breath to swirl around his head. When I had finished he nodded and drew in his lips. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, son. And here’s the thing.’ He nodded towards his car. ‘Mr Tuckfield there has friends in high places. And I’m just doing what I’m told, no questions asked. So whatever the rights or wrongs of what’s gone down here tonight, you’ll be going home without your money, and damned lucky not to be spending the night in a police cell.’ I could have sworn then that there was a smile in his eyes that he was doing his best to conceal. ‘In all my years in the force,’ he said, ‘I have never been chased in a police car. And I’m damned sure it’ll never happen again.’ He flicked his head back down the hill towards the seafront. ‘On your way.’ He leaned down, then, smiling past me at Mairead, and tapped his breast pocket. ‘Thanks for the autographs.’

We sat in silence and watched as he got back behind the wheel of his car and drove off into the night. I could see Tuckfield’s smug face grinning back at us. I wound up the window and Roddy said, ‘Donald’s fucking dead!’

I never was party to exactly what transpired between Roddy and Donald, but within the week the band had fired him and signed up with an established London agency. And while Donald’s career and life then went into free fall, Amran’s fortunes soared. They made several television appearances, and Roddy and Strings were commissioned to write a song for a Hollywood movie being shot in Scotland. The producers liked it so much they asked the band to write and record all the incidental music, which then became the basis of their next album. The subsequent success of the film led to even greater success for Amran. The song was released as a single and shot straight into the charts at No. 1, where it stayed for almost five weeks. By the time their next CD was in the music stores, they were riding high on what appeared to be an unstoppable track to the top.

Except that Roddy, for all his talent and all his ambition, never lived to see it.

I remember that it was the following summer, June or July, when I heard. I had got drunk the previous night, on the rebound from a relationship of several months, and ended up in the bed of a girl I’d met at a party. She was a student, living in a bedsit in Partick, on the downmarket edge of Glasgow’s west end. I didn’t wake up till ten or eleven, pretty hungover and with very little recollection of what had passed between us the previous night. She didn’t even seem familiar to me as she leaned over the bed and shook me gently awake.

‘You told me last night you roadied for Amran,’ she said.

I could hardly open my mouth, it was so dry. ‘So?’

‘Roddy Mackenzie’s the keyboard player, right?’

‘Jesus Christ, what about it?’ I screwed up my eyes against the light.

‘It’s all over the morning news. Apparently his plane went missing somewhere up the west coast yesterday evening. Search and rescue have been out all night. They’ve given up hope of finding him alive. They’re just looking for wreckage out at sea now.’

The wind buffeted and bullied Donald and Fin as they walked down through the dying light towards Port of Ness, and Fin told Donald about the discovery that he and Whistler had made that morning. The street lamps were already on, all the way along to the big white house at the end of the road. They turned off before then, opposite Ocean Villa, and followed the winding band of tarmac down to the harbour. Lobster creels were piled up against the inner wall of the jetty. There had been some repair work done where the weather had wreaked its damage. But the far wall, standing against the furious assaults of the north-easterlies, was smashed beyond any redemption. Fin had seen waves fifty feet high breaking over it when he was a boy, white spume rising twice that height, to be whipped away by force-ten gales and carried off across the cliffs.

Tonight, with the wind blowing from the south-west, the harbour was relatively sheltered, although the few crabbers tied up within its walls were rising and falling on the swell, and tugging determinedly at their ropes. When they reached the end of the jetty wall, Donald cupped his hands around a cigarette and made several attempts to light it. When finally he did so, the smoke was whipped away from his mouth. ‘I still find it hard to believe that he’s dead. Even after all these years.’ He shook his head. ‘Everything about Roddy was larger than life. His talent, his ego, his ambition. Talk about blind ambition! That was Roddy. It consumed him to the point where nothing else mattered. Where he couldn’t see the hurt he was inflicting on the people around him.’

‘People like you?’

Donald flicked him a look. ‘I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

Fin laughed out loud. ‘Donald, I never thought for a minute that you did. Whoever killed him could fly an aeroplane and land it on water. Even if you could fly, in those days you were in no state to ride as much as a bicycle.’

Donald looked away, clenching his jaw. It was not something in which he took pleasure of being reminded. ‘He cut me loose without a word, Fin. There was no contract with the band, then. Just trust. And he betrayed that trust. The first I knew about it was when I read in the NME that Amran had signed with the Copeland Agency in London. They had some tie-in with CAA in Los Angeles, and that’s what brought Amran the film deal.’

‘Maybe you hadn’t been doing a whole hell of a lot to earn their trust, Donald. Or advance their career.’

Donald pulled on his cigarette and shook his head sadly. ‘Oh, I know. I was an ass, Fin. In almost every possible way. I did things, said things in those days that. . well, that I still can’t forgive myself for. It fills me with shame every time I look back on how I was.’

‘I’m sure God knows it was just a passing phase.’

Donald’s head snapped around, anger blazing in his eyes. But all he said was, ‘Don’t be so cynical, Fin. It’s ugly.’

Fin said, ‘So you never actually had it out with him face to face?’

Donald sucked more smoke into his lungs. ‘Never. I probably deserved his anger, though he never had the guts to face me with it. But it was me who got them that first recording deal, Fin. They would just have been another university band otherwise, all going their separate ways when they got their degrees.’ He flicked his cigarette away into the wind. ‘When they signed for Copeland it was the beginning of the end for me. I got the boot from the Joey Cuthbertson Agency not long after that. Went down to London. But that was just tipping myself out of the wee frying pan into the big fire.’ He snorted his self-contempt. ‘Addictive personality, you see. Never could resist a temptation.’ The same addictive personality, Fin thought, which made him cling now to his religion. And then Fin heard the irony in his chuckle. ‘Strange that it was Catriona who proved to be my salvation. Or, at least, a drunken night of unbridled passion and unprotected sex that got her pregnant. There’s nothing like having responsibility for another life to make you start caring about your own.’