Peter May - The Chessmen

Fin saw the shadowed shape of their helicopter sweeping across the land beneath them, vanishing among the cloud shadows that chased and overtook it. The roar of its rotors in his ears was deafening. Ahead lay the golden sands of Uig beach, and the shimmering turquoise of the incoming tide, deceptive in its allure. For even after a long hot summer the waters of the North Atlantic retained their chill.

To the south, the mountains rose up, dark and ominous, casting their shadows on the land, dominating the horizon even from the air.

Fin and Gunn sat squeezed together in the back, while Professor Wilson sat up front wearing headphones and chatting to the pilot. As they swept across the beach he removed them and handed them back to Fin, shouting, ‘He wants to know where to go!’

Fin guided the pilot the only way he knew, by following the road below. They overflew Ardroil and the gravel pits, banking left to pass above the huddled buildings of the Red River Distillery, and picked up the track that led south towards Cracabhal Lodge. They saw a convoy of three vehicles bumping its way among the potholes between the rise of the mountains. A police Land Rover, a white van, an ambulance. The recovery team making its way as close as it could get to the last resting place of Roddy’s aircraft. They would have a long trek on foot up the valley.

Everything looked so different from the air. Fin saw Loch Raonasgail in the shadow of Tathabhal and Tarain, and identified Mealaisbhal to the west of it. He pointed, then, leaning forward. ‘Up there, through the valley.’

The pilot banked steeply to the right and dropped height, and they saw the sprawl of house-sized rock that littered the valley floor, the spoil of primeval ice explosions sitting in water now where the inferior loch had burst its banks and flooded the lower reaches. Above that, beyond the giant slug trail through the peat, lay the simmering black hole left by the empty loch. It looked even more unnatural from the air, like the cavity left by a dental extraction.

The plane at the bottom of it, starkly visible in its final resting place among the rocks, seemed unreasonably small.

The pilot circled the valley looking for a place to set the chopper down, before finally deciding on the relatively flat and stable shelf above the loch where Whistler and Fin had sheltered from the storm. It was a soft landing among the high grasses, the broken mounds of ancient beehive dwellings all around, and when the rotors finally came to a stop, they all jumped down to look out over the gaping hollow of the valley below.

It was late afternoon by now. The sun was well up in the sky and tipping gently to the west, creating a subtle change in the angle and direction of the shadows in the valley. They had come equipped with boots and waders and stout sticks, and Fin led them down the same way that he and Whistler had gone that morning, carefully picking their way over rocks that had dried in the warmth of the sun, the surface of the peat at the bottom of the loch already starting to crust and crack.

There was not a breath of wind down here, and the midges clustered around them, getting into their hair and their clothes, biting, biting, biting, like myriad needles piercing their skin, not painful exactly, but irritating almost beyond endurance.

‘For Christ’s sake, did no one think to bring any bloody repellent?’ Professor Wilson glared at Gunn as if it were his fault. His face was red with irritation and exertion, his unruly copper beard exploding from it like wire bursting through its cable sheathing. A frizzy halo of ginger grew around a head that was otherwise bald across the top, white and splattered with big brown freckles. He slapped at it with open hands. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’

But by the time Fin had given him a hand up on to the nearside wing, he had forgotten about the midge clouds, and was absorbed by the scene that confronted them. His eyes darted about, taking in every visible detail of the plane, before slipping on a pair of latex gloves and pulling open the door to the cockpit. Even he, used as he was to the multifarious perfumes of post-mortem, recoiled from the smell that struck them almost like a physical blow. In the enclosed space of the cockpit, baking as it had been for hours now in the sun, the rate of decomposition had accelerated, catching up on seventeen lost years. The smell was much worse than when Fin and Whistler had opened it up that morning.

‘We’re going to need to get him back to Stornoway double quick, or we’re going to lose what’s left of him,’ the professor said. ‘Let’s make this as fast as we can.’ He clambered carefully over the roof of the cockpit to the far wing and tried to open the door at the pilot’s side. It was stuck fast. Fin and Gunn scrambled over after him, and between them managed to prise it open. They moved back, then, to give the pathologist access to the corpse.

It was a grim sight, the mostly decayed body still fully dressed, the natural fibres of the clothes having survived better in the cold water than the flesh of the dead man.

Professor Wilson opened up the jacket to reveal a white T-shirt beneath it bearing a Grateful Dead logo. ‘Dead he certainly is, but I doubt if he’s very grateful.’ He pulled up the T-shirt to expose the cheesy white tissue still clinging to the fatty areas of the torso. He explored the mush with fingers that simply disappeared into it. ‘Adipocere,’ he said, apparently undisturbed. ‘There’ll be more of that around his thighs and buttocks, but the internal organs’ll be long gone I think.’

He moved the head very carefully to one side, revealing the bones of the spinal column at the neck. Just a few remnants of grey-white tissue were left holding the skeleton together. The pathologist removed a long, pointed instrument from his breast pocket and gently poked about among the bones. ‘Pretty porous and brittle. These are going to break very easily, and the remaining tissue’s not going to hold them when we start moving him. Best leave him in these clothes for transporting him. They’re about the only thing that’s keeping him in one piece. If this water had been any warmer, all we’d have found here would be a pile of bones.’

He turned his attention, then, to the skull.

‘Massive trauma,’ he said. ‘Half his jaw’s gone. His brain on this side would have been pulverized.’

‘Is that what killed him?’ Fin asked.

‘Impossible to say, Fin. The injury could have been inflicted after death for all we know. All the same, it might be a good guess.’

‘Any idea what could have done it?’

‘Something blunt. Big. The size of a baseball bat, though flatter I’d say. But the force that was used to inflict an injury like this. .’ He shook his head.

‘Not the result of a plane crash then,’ Gunn said.

The professor threw him a look. ‘Does this plane look to you like it’s crashed, Detective Sergeant?’

Gunn glanced at Fin. ‘No, sir, it doesn’t.’

‘No, it fucking does not! I’m no expert, but I’d say this plane didn’t crash into the loch. It landed on it and sank. And one thing’s for sure, this fella wasn’t flying it.’ He eased open the jaw with his metal probe. ‘And all this damage to the jaw and the teeth means we’ll not be able to make a positive ID from any dental records that might exist.’

‘What about DNA?’ Fin said.

‘We can extract some from the bones, for sure. And there is a little hair left. But what do we have to compare it to?’

Gunn said, ‘His parents are dead. No brothers or sisters.’

‘So no immediate familial match possible. And I don’t suppose he’ll be in the database. What about personal items? Comb, hairbrush, shaver? Anything that might have remnants of his DNA.’