Peter May - The Chessmen

He seemed suddenly to become aware of the two faces watching him in absorbed fascination as he recounted the events of that night. Mairead must have heard it all before. Perhaps many times. But she was as transfixed as Fin by the retelling of it under the stars on this hot Spanish evening. Roddy picked up the bottle and refilled all their glasses. He took out another cigar and lit it.

‘I took the drugs with me and dropped them out of the plane once we were over the ocean. The incoming tide, I knew, would erase any evidence of Jimbo’s death. Then I set a course, as I’d always planned, for the mountains of southwest Lewis.

‘It was the end of July. Official sunset was about 10 p.m. It was much later than that, but still light, and I knew exactly where I was going. Mealaisbhal was my marker as I flew low into the mountains. I’d already picked out a loch just to the north of it. Hidden away in a valley, miles from any habitation. So I knew nobody would see or hear me at that time of night. I just cruised right in, low and flat, wheels retracted, and landed her on her belly on the water. A scary moment. But to be honest, Fin, I was beyond scared at that point, and there was no turning back. I’d burned off virtually all my fuel, which was always the plan. Didn’t want tell-tale oil slicks on the surface of the loch.’

He sucked on his cigar, and through his smoke told them how he had climbed out of the cockpit and hauled Jimbo’s body across into the pilot’s seat and strapped him in.

‘The plane was floating, and would probably have taken a long time to go down. Too long for my purposes. But the good thing about the Comanche is that it takes on fuel from inlets on both wings, either side of the cockpit, and the wings were already just under water. So I climbed down on to the wings and opened them up. The tanks filled with water and down she went.’

Fin said, ‘That water must have been freezing, even in July.’

‘It was bloody cold, Fin. I can tell you that. But it was a good thing I was in it long enough to wash off Jimbo’s blood. Because there was someone waiting for me on the shore with dry clothes, and I didn’t want him to see blood, or know anything about the body in the plane.’

‘Whistler,’ Fin said.

Roddy nodded self-consciously. ‘I couldn’t have done it on my own. I needed clothes, transport out of the mountains. Whistler was the only one I trusted. I’d told him everything.’

‘Not everything, Roddy. You didn’t tell him about Jimbo. And that made him an accessory to murder, even if he didn’t know it.’

‘I didn’t murder Jimbo!’ Roddy raised his voice in protest. ‘It was an accident.’

‘I think you might have had difficulty convincing a jury of that.’

Roddy glared at him for a moment, then resigned himself to the interpretation that no doubt everyone would have made. His voice dropped again. ‘It was an accident.’

‘So Whistler met you on the shore,’ Fin prompted.

‘Yes. He was waiting for me as promised. I stripped off my wet clothes and we buried them in the peat. I got dressed, and we made our way down the valley in the moonlight to the track where Whistler had a four-by-four waiting for us. We drove to Harris then, and I got on the ferry from Tarbert to Skye first thing next morning. All togged up like a hiker. A woolly hat and my hood up so no one would recognize me.’

Mairead spoke for the first time, unexpectedly, and her voice almost startled them in the dark. ‘I met him off the ferry in Skye. I’d driven up there the night before, right after I left you at the Cul de Sac.’

‘I told her everything,’ Roddy said. ‘About Jimbo, I mean. And we flew together down here to Spain, to look for a place. Somewhere I could still be a part of the band, at least as far as writing and recording were concerned, but dead to the rest of the world. Lost with my plane somewhere in the sea among the Inner Hebrides.’

Fin said, ‘So obviously the rest of the band knew the full story.’

‘Oh, not about Jimbo,’ Roddy said. ‘We never told anyone about that.’

Fin looked at Mairead. ‘Must have made it awkward for you with the others when Jimbo’s body turned up in the plane.’

She lowered her eyes. ‘We’re still dealing with that.’

Roddy fixed Fin with a very direct look, an appeal in his gaze. ‘If it were ever to come out, Fin — you know, that I was alive. There are still people out there who would come looking for me.’

Fin sat staring into his wine for a long time before taking a small mouthful. ‘If I say nothing, knowing what I know now, that would make me an accessory after the fact to murder and fraud.’

‘I told you we shouldn’t have told him,’ Mairead said. Her voice was hard and edged by tension.

But Roddy’s eyes never left Fin’s. ‘He’s not going to tell anyone, are you Fin? I mean, who would benefit from it? None of us, that’s for sure. There’s nothing to be served by it. All it would do is put lives at risk.’

Fin returned his stare. ‘Yours.’

‘Yes, mine.’

Fin thought about it. There was, after all, no apparent connection between Whistler’s killing and the body in the plane. And yet the coincidence was troubling. Whistler had been shocked to find that body. And he must have realized that Roddy hadn’t told him the whole truth, maybe even suspected that he had duped him deliberately. And that Mairead was a part of it. Fin recalled the way Whistler had looked at her at the cemetery. His voice raised in anger outside the Cabarfeidh.

At the same time, Roddy’s plea for Fin’s silence was not without merit. He must have known the risks of telling him the truth, but was banking on an old friend not betraying him. Mairead, clearly, did not share his faith.

Fin sighed and pushed his plate away. He still had a sense of something missing. Something obvious that was eluding him, a connection he wasn’t making. ‘Who else knew?’ he said. ‘Not about Jimbo, but about you faking your death.’

‘Apart from the band?’

Fin nodded.

Roddy shook his head. ‘No one.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ But then he hesitated. ‘Well. . there was one other person. But someone we all trusted implicitly. And still do. I mean, he hasn’t said a word in all these years.’

Fin frowned. ‘Who?’

It was the same sun that had burned his skin in Spain, but two and a half thousand miles further north it had been reduced to a pale disc in a hazy sky and barely took the edge off a cold wind blowing down from the north-west.

The chill blast of that wind came in strong across the moor as Fin stepped off the plane at Stornoway. He hurried towards the terminal building. The Indian summer was long gone, but it was a dry, bright day, and for once rain seemed a long way off.

The journey home had passed in preoccupied thoughts about Roddy and Whistler and the body in the plane. And no matter how hard he tried to put the thought from his mind, Fin felt a powerful sense of guilt. He had known at once from Whistler’s reaction that there was more to the body they had found than first appeared. And yet he had allowed the issue to drift, failed to confront it until it was too late. If he had forced it earlier, maybe Whistler would still have been alive. And that thought, he knew, would haunt him for the rest of his life.

But when all other thoughts and emotions had been exhausted, Fin was still left with one. A single name. A name that had come from the lips of a dead man in Spain, leaving Fin troubled and uncertain of how to proceed.

His Suzuki was waiting in the car park where he had left it, still wet and glistening from the last shower. He climbed in and cleared the windscreen and drove out of the airport over the hill to Oliver’s Brae. Sunlight washed across Stornoway’s outer harbour in the distance, glinting off the glass of the new ferry terminal. The town itself would present him with a crossroads of choices. Which was not something he had dealt with well in his life. And it wasn’t until the very last moment that he made his decision, turning south out of town at the roundabout just beyond the Co-op, and setting a course for Uig.