Peter May - The Lewis Man

The rain is hammering against the window. It’s making some din! When you were out on the moor you never heard it, of course. You heard nothing above the wind. But you felt it all right. Stinging your face when a force ten drove it at you. Horizontal sometimes. I loved that feeling. Out there in the wild, just me and that great big sky, and the rain burning my face.

But they keep me cooped up inside these days. Not to be trusted outdoors, bad Mary says.

Like now, sitting here in this big empty lounge, chairs drawn up. Everyone looking at me. I don’t know what they expect. Have they come to take me home? I recognize Marsaili, of course. And the young man with the fair curly hair looks familiar. The name’ll come to me. It usually does.

But the other gille . I don’t know him at all, with his round red face and his shiny black hair.

Marsaili leans towards me and says, ‘Dad, what happened to your folks? Did you have any uncles or cousins that you never told us about?’

I don’t know what she means. They’re all dead. Surely everyone knows that?

Fin! That’s it. The young man with the curls. I remember him now. Used to come round the farm winching my wee Marsaili before either of them was even old enough to count. I wonder how his folks are. I liked his old man. He was a good, solid sort.

I never knew my dad. Only heard tell of him. He was a sailor, of course. Any man worth his salt was a sailor back then. The day my mum gathered us in the front room to break the news was a pretty black one. It wasn’t that long before Christmas, and she’d put in some effort to make the house seem festive. All we cared about were the presents we would get. Not that we expected much. It was just the surprise of it.

There was snow in the street. There hadn’t been much of it, and it had turned to slush pretty quickly. But there was that grey-green gloom in the air that comes with snow, and there wasn’t much light came down between the tenements anyway.

She was a lovely woman, my mum, from what I remember of her. Which isn’t much. Just the softness of her when she held me, and the smell of her perfume, or her eau de cologne or whatever it was. And that blue print apron she always wore.

Anyway, she sat us down on the settee, side by side, and knelt on the floor in front of us. She put her hand on my shoulder. She was a terrible colour. So white her face would have been lost in the snow. And she’d been crying, I knew that much.

I could only have been four years old, then. And Peter a year younger. Must have been conceived on a home leave before my father was finally sent off to sea.

She said, ‘Your dad won’t be coming home, boys.’ And there was a catch in her voice. The rest of the day was lost to me. And Christmas was no fun that year. Everything is sepia-brown in my mind, like a light-exposed black-and-white print. Dull and depressing. It was only later, when I was a bit older, that I learned his ship had been sunk by a German U-boat. One of those convoys they were always attacking in the Atlantic between Britain and America. And I had the strangest sense of sinking with him, endlessly through the water into darkness.

‘Do you have any relatives left at all down in Harris, Mr Macdonald?’ The voice startles me. Fin is looking at me very earnestly. He has lovely green eyes, that lad. I don’t know why Marsaili never married him instead of that wastrel Artair Macinnes. Never did like that man.

Fin’s still looking at me, and I’m trying to remember what it is he asked. Something about my family.

‘I was with my mother the night she died,’ I tell him. And suddenly I can feel tears in my eyes. Why did she have to die? It was so dark in that room. It was hot, and smelled of sickness and death. There was a lamp on the bedside table. An electric lamp that shed a dreadful pale light on her face in the bed.

What age would I have been then? It’s not clear to me now. Early teens, maybe. Old enough to understand, that’s for sure. But not old enough for the responsibility. And not ready, if you ever can be, to get cast adrift alone in the world. A world I could never have dreamt of. Not then, not when the only thing I had ever known was the warmth and safety of my own home and a mother who loved me.

I don’t know where Peter was that night. Already asleep, probably. Poor Peter. Never the same after that fall from the roundabout at the fairground. Stupid! One careless moment, stepping from the damned thing before it had fully stopped. And your life is changed for ever.

My mother had the darkest eyes, and the lamp on the bedside table was reflected in them. But I could see the light fading. She turned her head towards me. There was such sadness in them, and I knew the sadness was for me, not for herself. She reached her right hand over to her left above the covers, and drew the ring off her wedding finger. I’ve never seen a wedding ring like it. Silver, with two serpents intertwined. Some uncle of my father’s had brought it back from overseas somewhere and it had been passed down through the family. My father had no money when they got married, so he gave it to my mum as her wedding ring.

She took my hand and placed it in my palm and folded my fingers over it. ‘I want you to look after Peter,’ she said to me. ‘He’ll not survive this world on his own. I want you to promise me, Johnny. That you’ll always take care of him.’

Of course, I had no idea then what a responsibility that would be. But it was the last thing she asked of me, so I nodded solemnly and said I would. And she smiled then, and gave my hand a little squeeze.

I watched the light die in her eyes before they closed, and her hand relaxed and let go of mine. And the priest didn’t arrive for another fifteen minutes.

What’s that ringing sound? Dammit!

Marsaili fumbled in her handbag for her mobile phone. ‘Sorry,’ she said, flustered and embarrassed by the interruption. Not that her father had told them much, or was making any sense. But after revealing he had been with his mother when she died, big silent tears had run down his face, some highly charged emotional turmoil behind them. Which the ringing of her phone had interrupted.

‘What the hell’s that?’ he was saying, clearly disturbed. ‘Can a man not get any peace in his own home?’

Fin leaned forward and put a hand on his arm. ‘It’s all right, Mr Macdonald. It’s just Marsaili’s mobile.’

‘One moment, please,’ Marsaili was saying into her phone. She put her hand over it and said, ‘I’ll take this in the hall.’ And she rose and hurried away out of the big empty lounge. Most of the daycare patients had left in the minibus for a day out, so they had the place more or less to themselves.

Gunn nodded towards the door, and he and Fin stood up and moved away from Tormod, speaking in low voices. Gunn was perhaps six or seven years older than Fin, but there was not a grey hair on his head, and Fin wondered if he dyed it. He didn’t seem the sort, though. There was barely a line on his face. Except for the frown of concern that creased it now. He said, ‘It’s certain that they’ll send someone over from the mainland, Mr Macleod. They’ll not entrust a murder investigation like this to an island cop. You know how it is.’

Fin nodded.

‘And whoever they send is likely to be a lot less sensitive in the handling of it than me. The only clue we have to the identity of the young man in the bog is that he is related in some way to Tormod Macdonald.’ He paused to purse his lips in what seemed to Fin to be something like an apology. ‘Which puts Tormod himself right in the frame for the murder.’

Marsaili came back in from the hall, slipping her phone into her bag. ‘That was the social services,’ she said. ‘Apparently there’s a bed available, at least temporarily, in the Alzheimer’s unit right next door at Dun Eisdean.’