Peter May - The Chessmen

Fin ignored her and focused everything on Kenny. He called out to him from the dark behind the light. ‘This is madness, Kenny. Give it up.’

Kenny stared back like a startled deer caught in the headlights of a car. ‘I can’t, Fin. I can’t.’

Fin saw spittle accumulating at the corners of his mouth. ‘Roddy told me what happened the night he ditched the plane, Kenny. That you stumbled on them up in the mountains. What were you doing up there?’

Kenny was breathing hard. He shook his head. ‘I was still at agricultural college that year. I spent my summers working for the estate as a watcher.’

‘You thought they were poachers?’

‘I had no idea. I was coming up the valley when I heard the plane. And then saw it coming in, far too low, before it disappeared from sight, and I thought it must have crashed. By the time I got over the shoulder of the hill and into the next valley, it was in the middle of the loch and sinking fast. But still in one piece. That’s when I saw Roddy and Whistler on the far shore.’

‘How in God’s name did you and Whistler keep that secret for all these years, Kenny?’

‘It’s what bound us, Fin. A bond stronger than marriage break-ups or custody battles.’

‘But in the end it was a bond you broke. They swore you to secrecy, Kenny.’ It came like a bullet out of the dark. An accusation of betrayal.

Kenny retaliated. ‘They lied. They never told me there was a body in the plane.’

Fin shook his head. ‘Whistler never knew. That was Roddy’s dark secret. Whistler didn’t know anything about it until he and I found the plane the other day. He was shocked, Kenny. Shocked to the core.’

Kenny appeared agitated by this. But whatever thoughts were going through his mind, no words came to his lips.

Fin said, ‘What happened the morning you went to see him, Kenny? What did you do? Threaten to shop him unless he dropped his claim on Anna?’

A strange feral sound, like an animal in pain, issued from Kenny’s mouth. He closed his eyes then opened them wide, raising them to the darkness above, before lowering them once more to gaze back at Fin. ‘I love that girl with my life, Fin. I see her mother in her every time I look at her.’ Just as Fin saw only Whistler. ‘I thought if I threatened to tell the police what I knew about the plane Whistler would give up on the court case. I mean, it wasn’t Roddy in that cockpit, and I knew it. So if Whistler really had been involved in the death of the guy you found he’d have lost Anna for ever.’ He paused, still breathing hard. ‘But I never would have told, Fin. I wouldn’t. I thought the threat of it would be enough. But he went berserk.’ The use of the word was not lost on Fin. If anyone fitted the role of Berserker, then it was Whistler. A man who had lived his life on a short fuse, with a temper that took him over the edge, time and again, negating any intelligent thought he had ever formed. ‘He came at me like a maniac, Fin. I never expected that. Jesus Christ, I never meant to kill him. It was all I could do to stop him from killing me.’

‘For God’s sake, Kenny. You were threatening to take his daughter away from him. Couldn’t you imagine how he would take it?’ Fin felt sick. It was clear to him now that in a strange and unforgiving twist of fate, Whistler had sown the seeds of his own destruction by agreeing to help Roddy with his subterfuge seventeen years before. And it was Kenny’s threat to break the bond of silence the three old friends had kept all that time which had killed him.

Kenny raised his hands helplessly and shook his head, the tears on his face glistening in the spotlight. And he said again, ‘I never meant to kill him.’ As if somehow by repeating it he could change what had happened.

The scream that reverberated around the cave turned Fin’s blood to ice. He had no time even to open his mouth to shout ‘No!’, before he saw the light glinting off the curve of the boathook, as wee Anna swung it two-handed in an arc of fury, to bury it deep in Kenny John’s chest.

The Free Church of Scotland in Kenneth Street in Stornoway, was a large, joyless, pink-harled edifice, its bell tower crowned by four miniature spires, each with its own weather vane. The weather as a topic on the Isle of Lewis was always high on the agenda.

A notice at the gate announced English services on the Sabbath at 11 a.m. and 6.30 p.m., with services in Gaelic being held at the same times at the seminary in Francis Street. Services in rural churches on the island would normally be held in Gaelic, but in Stornoway Gaelic speakers were in the minority.

The church hall ran along the right-hand side of the church itself, a building of recent vintage, with windows set high up in the walls to cast as much of God’s light as possible into its gloomy interior.

It was here that a quorum of twelve members of the Judicial Committee appointed by the Church’s general assembly gathered on a bleak wet Wednesday in October to hear the evidence against the Reverend Donald Murray. A large chestnut tree in front of the hall had shed most of its leaves on the lawn, as if announcing once and for all the end of summer. The portent was not good.

Every inch of the car park was taken up by wet, shining vehicles, and cars were parked on solid single and double yellow lines up either side of Kenneth Street, a special dispensation for the day, with traffic wardens controlling entry at each end of the street. This was theatre of a kind never before seen on the island, the playing out of a human drama that the Church itself would have frowned upon had it come from the pen of a playwright and been performed by actors.

But there was nothing pretend about these proceedings. A man’s future was at stake. Despite the procurator fiscal’s decision not to pursue a criminal prosecution, a private libel had been lodged with the Presbytery by a group of Donald Murray’s own elders. They had accused him in a minuted and signed statement of committing an offence contrary to the Word of God and the laws of the Church. Following an investigation of the complaint, the Presbytery had passed it to the Judicial Committee for a trial of the evidence, with the recommendation that if the Reverend Murray be found guilty, he be summarily dismissed from his post as minister of the Crobost Free Church.

Fin had decided to park at South Beach and walk up, even though it was raining. He was anxious to get away as quickly as possible at the finish of proceedings, and that would be achieved faster on foot. He and Marsaili shared an umbrella on the walk up past the gallery and theatre at An Lanntair, and saw the crowds standing below a shiny assembly of multicoloured umbrellas on the pavement outside the church at the top of the hill. Residents leaned on open windows above the barber’s shop and the religious bookshop opposite, to get a view of the circus. The Church court had been receiving much coverage in both local and national press, and the media had set up camp outside the church, satellite vans in the car park, photographers and camera operators and reporters milling among the crowd.

Although Marsaili held Fin’s arm, there was a distance between them. His trip to Spain and subsequent events had opened up a fissure in their relationship, acknowledged for the first time after months of papering it over. Neither, perhaps, had been willing to admit that for all their shared past, their future remained an unknown quantity in which the possible admission of failure cast the biggest shadow. As they walked up the street, two souls a world apart, Fin wished he could just raise a hand and call a halt. And start all over again. From the beginning. From that first day at school when the little girl with the pigtails and blue ribbons had smiled at him and told the teacher that she would translate for the boy who could only speak Gaelic.