Peter May - The Chessmen

Roddy, by contrast, was larger than life, animated in the extreme. Fin followed the ghost of his one-time friend up steps to another level, and they crossed an east-facing terrace towards a large outbuilding at the back of the villa.

‘We have six bedrooms in the house,’ Roddy said. ‘Enough to accommodate the whole band when they come to rehearse and record. Of course, Strings is here more often than the others. We still write together.’ He pushed open a heavy soundproofed door and flicked a switch to flood the studio control room with light, rows of knobs and switches, faders and dials, peppering the shallow angle of an enormous mixing desk. Through a window that ran the length of one wall, shadows reached back into the studio itself, which was littered with sound baffles and hanging mikes. A drum kit was permanently mounted in its own soundproofed booth, the carpet-tiled floor around it a Sargasso Sea of twisted cables.

‘We’re on our twelfth CD now. Most of it’s already recorded. I’m just working on the mix.’ He leaned across the desk and pressed a switch. The room filled with the beautiful sound of Amran. Synthesizer, violin, the haunting swoop of a Celtic flute, all overlaying the repetitive beat of rock drums and bass, and the sad, pure voice of Mairead singing so painfully of Hebridean longing for a lost past. Roddy switched it off abruptly, and the room resounded with the resultant silence. His eyes were moist. ‘It’s the only way I can go home,’ he said. ‘In my music.’ And then the moment passed and he smiled his genuine affection. ‘It’s great to see you again, Fin, it really is.’

But Fin was ambivalent. From the moment he had seen the post-mortem report he had suspected that Roddy might still be alive. But to be confronted with him in this way, in the flesh, after mourning him twice, and believing him dead for seventeen years, was more than faintly surreal. He said, ‘I don’t know how I feel, Roddy, about seeing you again. Confused, that’s for sure. And right now pretty angry.’

Roddy laughed and took his arm to steer him back out into the sunshine. ‘Don’t be angry with me, Fin. None of this is my fault. Not really.’ They crossed the terrace and looked out over the view. Fin was aware of Mairead’s upturned face watching them from the terrace below. ‘The band will go off on a US tour next year to promote the new CD. But, of course, I won’t be with them. Even though I still write the songs with Strings, and it’s me you hear on the recordings, I’ve never once been able to play live with Amran since that awful night seventeen years ago. You have no idea how frustrating that is.’

He turned to look Fin in the eye, and waved a hand vaguely towards the villa.

‘Look around you, Fin. It’s paradise, this place. Sunshine all year round. A view to die for. Africa just across the water. They come every seven years to strip the cork off the trees. They’ve done it twice since I’ve been here. You might think I’d be happy. But it feels like a fucking prison.’

He turned and gazed sightlessly towards the Strait of Gibraltar, gripping the railing in front of him. Fin saw the white-knuckled tension in his hands. ‘You have no idea what I’d give to be standing right now on Traigh Uige, looking across the mountains to Harris. Feeling the wind in my face. Aye, and the rain. I’d trade all this for just five minutes of home any day.’

He released his tension, and the railing, and relaxed again into a smile.

‘But what am I thinking about? Terrible host, I am. Never even offered you a drink.’

Fin stared out over the tops of trees in the valley below. To his left, where the forest had been cut back, the shaved peaks of the Sierra Bermeja scraped the sky. Steps led down into a steeply sloped garden of gnarled trees and dusty shrubs, fig and olive, cactus and oleander. All the grasses and wild flowers, this late in the season, were parched and burned brown. He turned, leaning against the rail, to look back at the house with its roofs sloping at odd angles, a covered balcony high up behind a row of arches, bedrooms opening off it through French windows. A Buddha sat crosslegged below a covered fish-pond, and Mairead perched on the edge of a chair at the table, smoking. She had not addressed a word to Fin since their arrival.

Roddy emerged through an arched doorway from the kitchen carrying a tray of drinks, tall glasses of red, fizzing liquid and chattering ice cubes. ‘Come and get it.’

Fin pushed himself off the railing and crossed the terrace to climb the two steps to the eating area. He drew up a chair and sat opposite Mairead in the shade as Roddy distributed their drinks and a wooden dish of macadamia nuts.

‘I’ll make us something to eat in a while,’ he said. ‘Paella okay?’ He grinned. ‘Very Spanish, but they probably ship the prawns down from Stornoway.’ He raised his glass. ‘ Slainte .’

It was odd to hear Gaelic spoken in this place, so many miles from home, in a climate and culture so alien to its origins.

Roddy took a long pull at his drink. ‘Refreshing, eh? Tinto de verano , the Spanish call it. Literally, wine of summer. Red wine mixed with a sweet fizzy lemon drink. I love it.’ He took another sip. ‘They tell me there’s a distillery at Uig now. Abhainn Dearg. Red River whisky. Any good?’

Fin nodded. ‘It’s a fine whisky.’ He took a small sip of his tinto de verano and fixed Roddy in his gaze. ‘Who killed Whistler, Roddy?’

It was as if someone had thrown a switch, and a light went out somewhere behind Roddy’s eyes. His face darkened. ‘I don’t know, Fin. But I’d like to meet him, because he wouldn’t be breathing for long.’

Fin said, ‘Seems to me there was never any love lost between you and Whistler.’ He glanced at Mairead who sat staring sullenly into her drink. ‘Over the affections of a certain young woman.’ She threw him a dark glance.

But Roddy just shook his head. ‘Sure. We had our differences over the years, me and Whistler.’ He chuckled sadly. ‘Whistler fell out with everyone at one time or another.’ He raised his eyes to meet Fin’s. ‘But I always considered him to be one of my best and oldest friends. He was like a big fucking dog, Fin. He might bite you from time to time, but he never stopped loving you.’ And Fin thought he had never heard Whistler so well summed up in so few words. Roddy laid his glass on the table and turned it around with his fingertips, gazing thoughtfully into its fizzing redness. ‘I owed him more than most people will ever know.’

‘In relation to. . your “death”?’ Fin said.

Roddy nodded without looking up.

‘Tell me.’

Roddy glanced at Mairead, absorbing but ignoring her disapproval. He drew a long breath. ‘I suppose I should start at the beginning.’

‘Well, since we already know how it ends,’ Fin said, ‘maybe that would be a good idea.’

Roddy leaned back in his chair and reached into his shirt pocket for a pack of cigars. He drew one out and lit it, and puffed on it reflectively for some moments. Blue smoke rose around his head in gently curling strands in the still heat of the afternoon. ‘You probably remember a girlfriend I had during our second year in Glasgow. Caitlin. She was the one whose parents had the big fuck-off house with the swimming pool in Pollokshields.’

Fin nodded. He remembered her well. The blonde girl who had been skinny-dipping with Roddy in the swimming pool the night Fin and Mairead first got together.

‘And her big fucking brother, Jimbo.’ Roddy almost spat out his name. ‘Smug bastard with a face you’d never get tired of kicking.’

Fin was taken aback by Roddy’s ferocity. He remembered Jimbo, strutting about his parents’ house as if he owned it. A spoiled little rich kid.