Peter May - The Chessmen

He woke up in a panic, sweating. The dream was still horribly vivid in his mind. It was burned on his retinas as if he had been watching a movie and the images had remained even although the light was gone. He fought to remember exactly what had happened. It was fading already, but the sense of his betrayal and Marsaili’s hurt stayed with him like a stone in his heart. For a moment he thought it was Mairead she had found him with. Perhaps in the dream. But then he remembered, with a sickening sense of his own cruelty, the reality of what had actually happened nearly twenty years before. That day, in their shared student lodgings, when she had returned to find him in bed with the girl across the hall. Their bed. Snow falling on the wet-streaked tenements outside. The end, finally, of everything they might have been.

He lay in the dark, breathing heavily, staring at the ceiling. The only light in the room came from the digital bedside clock. He could hear the slow, steady beat of Marsaili’s breath. She was still asleep.

But something elusive remained, just out of reach. Something in his dream that he couldn’t quite recall. He had been in Mairead’s room, he knew. Had he actually kissed her in the dream? Is that what he had wanted, really? Is that what had triggered the awful memory of the fold-down bed in the student flat? Partly, perhaps. But there was something else. He closed his eyes and saw the photo album lying on the bed in Mairead’s hotel room, the whole gang of them standing on the Bridge to Nowhere grinning at the camera, and suddenly he knew what it was. He sat bolt upright and wondered why in God’s name it had never occurred to him before.

Fin drew his Suzuki into the gravel parking area just above Garry Beach and turned off the engine. He sat listening to the tick of it as it cooled, looking out over the short stretch of machair towards the curve of the beach itself. It was the first time he had been back here since the day of the bike race. From where he was parked he could see the concrete span of the Bridge to Nowhere, and the road looping off around the line of the cliffs that pushed up out of the Minch.

He gripped the steering wheel in front of him with both hands and leaned his head forward to rest on his forearms, eyes closed. He thought about the way that Whistler had behaved when they found the plane, the way he had looked at Mairead at the cemetery, the anger in his voice at the Cabarfeidh. And he thought about Mairead, and how she had played to the gallery with her singing at the church, and at the grave by breaking with convention. Her protestations of grief, when there was nothing in her demeanour to show it. How she had wanted Fin to make love to her while the sand was still, almost literally, being shovelled over her lover’s coffin. The twin demons of fear and confusion stalked his thoughts.

He heard a car on the road and looked back towards Tolastadh, across a scrap of a loch choked by reeds and lilies, and saw Gunn’s car as it rounded the headland and began the gentle descent to the car park. It pulled in beside the jeep, and Gunn switched off the ignition. He glanced across towards Fin, but neither man acknowledged the other. Fin looked back towards the beach and gripped the wheel more tightly, before opening his hands to release it and reach for the door handle. He stepped down on to the chippings and slammed his door shut before opening the passenger door of Gunn’s vehicle and slipping into the seat beside him. He pulled it closed and wound down the window and both men sat in silence for some minutes.

Finally Gunn said, ‘You never did come to the house, sir, for that taste of wild salmon.’

‘Don’t call me sir, George. You make me feel like I’m back in the force.’

‘Sorry, Mr Macleod. Slip of the tongue.’

‘It’s Fin, George.’

Gunn nodded. ‘She got some in last night. A nice bit of fish.’

‘Poached?’

‘Definitely not, Mr Macleod. She prefers it grilled.’ He grinned. ‘You could bring Marsaili.’

Fin said, ‘She’d probably like that.’ There was more silence, then. Awkward now. Before finally Fin said, ‘Did you bring it?’

Gunn’s face darkened. ‘I could lose my job.’

‘I appreciate that, George.’

‘Do you? I wonder if you do, Mr Macleod. It seems you’re always calling in favours, and I’m not sure what I ever get in return.’

Fin had no answer to that.

‘What do you want with the postmortem report anyway? I mean, what could it possibly tell you that we don’t already know?’

‘I won’t know that until I see it.’

‘I can’t give it to you, Mr Macleod. It would be more than my job’s worth.’ He clenched his jaw and looked out over the beach. ‘But I suppose. . if I left it lying on the back seat, and you were to look at it without my permission. . well, that might provide me with, what do they call it, plausible deniability?’ He flicked a glance at Fin. ‘I need some air.’

He climbed out of the driver’s seat with a swish of quilted nylon, and Fin watched him pick his way across the machair in his black anorak towards the sand. The wind whipped his dark hair up into a cockscomb. Over his shoulder Fin saw a buff A4 envelope lying on the back seat. He reached behind him to get it, and drew out the photocopied postmortem report from inside.

It took only a few minutes to flip through it. The passage he was looking for was in the preamble. Professor Wilson’s detailed description of the body. What he read sent a chill through him so profound that he shuddered quite involuntarily.

By the time Gunn got back to his car, the report was in its envelope on the rear seat where he had left it. But it was clear from Fin’s expression that he had looked at it, and that something he had seen had caused the blood to drain from his face.

‘What did you find, Mr Macleod? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

Fin swung his head around to meet Gunn’s eyes. ‘I think I just have, George.’ He pushed the door open to step out.

‘Wait a minute, Mr Macleod. I deserve to know.’

Fin hesitated. ‘You do, George. And I promise, you’ll be the first. But not yet.’ He slammed the door shut, and as he climbed into his jeep he heard the unusual sound of Gunn swearing inside his car.

The sky over the sands of Traigh Uige was painted on. Great fat brushstrokes of pale grey and cream. The wind was brisk and cool and blew through the last of the coastal tormentil, shrivelling its yellow petals like the first breath of winter. Fin turned off the metalled road and up the track to the level stony area in front of the blackhouse. He didn’t have any real hope of finding Whistler here, but it was the obvious place to start.

When he stepped out of the jeep he smelled peat smoke in the air, like toasted oat bread left a little too long under the grill. So perhaps he was at home after all. The front door was not fully closed, and Fin pushed it into the gloom.

‘Whistler, you there? Whistler? We have to talk.’

Silence. He stepped inside, and caught his breath at the sight that greeted him. It was pandemonium. Furniture overturned, shards of broken crockery strewn across the floor among the wood shavings. Whistler’s line of chessmen had been breached, several lying tipped over on their backs. He took a further step in, and by the light that fell obliquely through the narrow window in the rear wall, he saw the big prostrate form of Whistler lying face down on the floor. There was blood oozing through his hair and pooling on the floorboards.

‘Jesus, Whistler!’ Fin crossed the room in three strides and knelt by his side to feel for a pulse in his neck. His lip was split and blood oozed from his mouth. Fin saw the bruising and blood on the knuckles of his big, outstretched hand. But he was still alive. The scrape of a footstep coming from behind startled Fin. He half-turned and a light flashed in his head. The pain of it shot through his body. And darkness followed in an instant.