Peter May - The Chessmen

Fin wondered if feeling responsibility for Fin’s life had made Whistler care any more about his. Somehow he didn’t think so. But he didn’t share the thought with Donald.

‘Pure chance, too, that I met her down there,’ Donald said. ‘You must remember her from school. She was a couple of years behind us at the Nicolson.’

Fin nodded.

‘I used to think that God had sent her to rescue me.’ He paused. ‘But maybe I was wrong about that.’

‘Did you ever go flying with Roddy, Donald?’

‘Hell, no! I’ve got no head for heights, Fin. I hate flying at the best of times.’ He scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘As I recall, after he and Mairead split up he had his own circle of friends. Whether he went flying with them or not, I wouldn’t know. I remember he got involved with some Glasgow girl. No idea what her name was. But she was quite classy. A real looker. And not short of a few quid.’

‘Yes, I remember her.’ Fin had a picture of her in his mind’s eye at a party in a large sandstone villa on the south side of Glasgow. A beautiful, willowy, blonde girl.

‘That was just before I left for London.’ Donald smiled. ‘Roddy never did have any trouble finding himself a woman.’

‘Neither did you, Donald.’

There was a flicker of his old self in Donald’s eyes before he forced the focus back on Roddy. ‘It’s strange, though.’

‘What is?’

‘How the band went from strength to strength without Roddy. Just goes to show that for all his high opinion of himself, it was Strings who was the bigger musical influence.’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t listened to them once in all these years. God teaches us to forgive, but it’s very hard to forget. And I know that just the sound of Mairead’s voice would bring it all back. And I don’t need that pain as well.’

He tried to light another cigarette, but the wind was too ferocious now and he gave up. They felt the first spots of rain whipping into their faces.

‘Roddy wasn’t universally popular, Fin. I know that. God knows, I had reason enough to hate him myself. But who would have wanted to murder him? And why?’

Fin shook his head. ‘I haven’t the first idea, Donald.’

The rain turned into a deluge then, and the two men ran from the jetty towards the boat shed at the end of the beach. Donald slid one of the doors open and they slipped inside, soaked already. It smelled of diesel and fish in here, and the shadows of small boats were canted at odd angles between windows that gave out on to the beach and the sound of the sea. There was almost no light left before Donald’s lighter suddenly illuminated his face, painting it orange by its flickering light, then red in the glow of the lit tobacco, before fading back into darkness.

Neither spoke for a moment, gripped unexpectedly by a sense of being in the presence of the dead. For it was here that Angel Macritchie had met his death. The murder that had brought Fin back to the island of his birth after an absence of eighteen years. In the dark, with their memories, the ghost of Macritchie made its presence felt, the chill wind whipping through ill-fitting doors and open windows, wrapping itself around them.

Fin stamped his feet, more to exorcize the ghost than to warm himself. His voice sounded abnormally loud. ‘I don’t suppose the Presbytery have fixed a date for your hearing yet?’

‘It’ll be within the fortnight. In the Free Church hall in Kenneth Street in Stornoway.’ As Donald pulled on his cigarette his face again reflected its glow. ‘They’ve engaged legal counsel, I’m told. I’ve read up on the Acts of Assembly that set out the conditions for establishing a judicial commission. It seems that the hearing will pretty much follow the same course it would in a court of law.’

‘Then presumably you can appoint counsel yourself?’

Donald’s laugh came like a gunshot out of the dark. ‘Aye. If I could afford it.’

‘They’ll be calling Fionnlagh and Donna to give evidence, too, I suppose.’

‘I’ve asked them not to.’

Fin was astonished. ‘Why not? There’s nobody closer to what happened that day than the two of them.’

‘They’ve suffered enough,’ Donald said. ‘I’ll not put them through it all again.’

Fin thought about raising an argument, but realized even before he opened his mouth that there would be no point. Donald had sacrificed everything to save them once. Why would he subject them to a repeat performance? He would rather they threw him out of the Church.

‘Anyway, hopefully George Gunn will testify. He took statements from them both, and has to be seen as a reliable and unbiased witness.’

‘He is, Donald. But that very lack of bias could work against you.’

Donald nodded solemnly. ‘I know.’

More silence in the dark. Fin could smell Donald’s cigarette smoke. He said, ‘How do you think it will go?’

‘I think,’ said Donald, ‘that before the month is over I’ll be out of a job, and out of my house.’

‘And Catriona?’

Donald’s face gave away nothing in the light of his cigarette. ‘You’d have to ask her that, Fin.’

It never failed to affect him, seeing his aunt’s house lying derelict and forgotten. Peeling whitewash, broken slates, windows smashed or boarded up, like missing teeth in a neglected mouth.

Oddly, he never thought of it as anything other than his aunt’s house. Never his home. And yet he had spent the greater part of his childhood here, in a cold, damp bedroom with its rusty-framed dormer window looking out over the rocky bay below. He remembered the first time she had brought him here to live. Just days after the death of his parents. A handful of possessions in a small brown case that she had placed on the bed, telling him to pack them away while she went and made something for their tea. And he had sat on his own, feeling the cold damp of the mattress beneath him seeping into his very soul, and wept.

He stood now on the pitted tarmac in front of the house, looking up at the window of that room, a window that gave on to a past he had no wish to revisit. And yet somehow it was always there. In good memories and bad. Of a life long gone, populated by people long dead. And there was no escaping it.

As he frequently did, he wondered what point there was in it all. Were we really just here to procreate and pass on, leaving our seed upon the earth to do as we had done, as our fathers had done before us, and theirs before them? A meaningless cycle of birth, life, death?

He walked to the edge of the path that led down to the shore, a shingle beach in a boulder-strewn cove where he had often played among the ruins of the old salting house. He almost expected to see himself down there: a lonely boy seeking solace in the world of his imagination.

It was a long, sleepless night which had sparked his mood. Images of Roddy’s broken, decayed body in the plane. The look on Whistler’s face. The big man walking away, climbing back up to the ridge only to disappear. And Fin had woken from shallow dreams in a sweat, with the certainty in his heart that Whistler knew something he wasn’t telling. And yet his shock at the discovery of the body had been as great, if not greater, than Fin’s.

He had risen early, leaving Marsaili sleeping, and set off along the cliffs above Crobost, until he reached the sheltered inlet where generations earlier his ancestors had built the small harbour. A steep ramp down to a short jetty and a deep pool among the rocks where they kept live crabs in cages until they could be shipped out to foreign markets. It seemed that everything good about this island left it. Its resources. Its people. And all their ambitions.

The wind blew strong in the sunshine, cumulus bubbling up and tracking across a vast, ever-changing sky. And still it was not cold, even though October was just an exhalation away. Fin sat himself down among the dry grasses, pulling his knees up to his chest to hug them, gazing out over choppy green water that rose and fell in gently coruscating swells across the bay.