Peter May - The Lewis Man

Marsaili turned twenty years of resentment on her son. ‘Yes, well, maybe you’d like to change the bed every time he soils it, and go looking for him every time he wanders off. Maybe you’d like to feed him at every meal, and be there every time he’s lost or forgotten something.’

Fionnlagh didn’t respond, except with the merest of shrugs, and kept forking chilli into his face.

Fin said, ‘There’s a complication, Fionnlagh.’

‘Yes?’ Fionnlagh barely glanced at him.

‘They dug a body out of the peat bog near Siader a few days ago. A young man, about your age. As far as they can tell, he’s been there since the late fifties.’

Fionnlagh’s fork paused midway between his plate and his mouth. ‘And?’

‘He was murdered.’

The fork went back down to the plate. ‘What’s that got to do with us?’

‘It seems he was related somehow to your grandfather. Which means he was also related to you and Marsaili.’

Fionnlagh frowned. ‘How can they tell that?’

‘DNA,’ Marsaili said.

He looked at her blankly for a moment, then realisation dawned. ‘The samples we gave last year.’

She nodded.

‘I fucking knew it! That should have been destroyed. I signed a form refusing to let them keep mine on the database.’

‘So did everyone else,’ Fin said. ‘Except, apparently, for your grandfather. He probably didn’t understand.’

‘So they just put him on the computer, like some criminal?’

Marsaili said, ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?’

‘It’s an invasion of privacy, Mum. Who knows who’ll get access to that information, and what they might do with it?’

‘It’s a perfectly reasonable argument,’ Fin said. ‘But right now, that’s not really the point.’

‘Well, what is?’

‘Who the murdered man was, and how he was related to your grandfather.’

Fionnlagh looked at his mother. ‘Well, he must have been a cousin or something.’

She shook her head. ‘There’s no one that we know of, Fionnlagh.’

‘Then there must be someone that you don’t know of.’

She shrugged. ‘Apparently.’

‘So, anyway, this guy was related to Grampa: so what?’

Fin said, ‘Well, from a police perspective it makes Tormod the most likely person to have killed him.’

There was a shocked silence around the table. Marsaili looked at Fin. It was the first she had heard this. ‘Does it?’

Fin nodded slowly. ‘When the CIO arrives from the mainland to open the investigation, your father’s going to be the prime suspect on a list of one.’ He took a pull at his beer. ‘So we’d better start trying to figure out who the dead man is.’

Fionnlagh cleared the last of the chilli from his plate. ‘Well, you can do that. I’ve got other things to think about.’ He crossed the kitchen to retrieve his anorak and start pulling on boots that shed flakes of drying mud across the tiles.

‘Where are you going?’ Marsaili’s forehead creased with concern.

‘I’m meeting Donna at the Crobost Social.’

‘Oh, so her father’s actually letting her out for the night?’ Marsaili’s tone was heavily sardonic.

‘Don’t start, Mum.’

‘If that girl had half an ounce of gumption in her, she’d tell her father where to go. I’ve told you a hundred times you can stay here. You, Donna and the baby.’

‘You don’t know what her father’s like.’ Fionnlagh almost spat the words at her.

‘Oh, I think I do, Fionnlagh. We grew up together, remember?’ Marsaili glanced quickly at Fin and then away again.

‘Aye, but he didn’t have God in those days, did he? You know what they’re like, Mum, when they get the curam , these born-agains. There’s no reasoning with them. Why would they listen to you or me when God has already spoken to them?’

Fin felt the strangest chill run through him. It was like hearing himself speaking. Since the death of his parents all those years before, his life had been a constant battle between belief and anger. If he believed, then he could only feel anger at the God who had been responsible for the accident. So it was easier not to believe, and he had little patience for those who did.

‘It’s time you stood up to him.’ There was a weariness in Marsaili’s voice, a lack of conviction that told Fin she didn’t believe that Fionnlagh was ever likely to pit himself against Donald Murray.

Fionnlagh heard it too, and was defensive in return. ‘And tell him what? What great prospects I have? What a wonderful future I can offer his daughter and his granddaughter?’ He turned away towards the door, and his last words were almost lost in the wind. ‘Gimme a fucking break!’ He slammed the door shut behind him.

Marsaili flushed with embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. He’s just a boy facing up too early to a responsibility he shouldn’t have had. He needs to finish school and go to university. Then maybe he really could offer them a future.’

Marsaili shook her head. ‘He won’t do that. He’s frightened he’ll lose them. He wants to quit school at the end of term and get a job. Show Donald Murray that he takes his responsibilities seriously.’

‘By throwing away his only chance in life? Surely to God he doesn’t want to end up like Artair.’

The fire of resentment burned briefly in Marsaili’s eyes, but she said nothing.

Fin said quickly, ‘And one thing’s for sure. Donald Murray would never respect him if he did.’

Marsaili lifted their plates away from the table. ‘Nice of you to come back after all this time and tell us how we should be running our lives.’ The plates clattered on to the counter top, and she laid her hands flat upon it, leaning forward to take her weight on them and letting her head fall. ‘I’m sick of it, Fin. Sick of everything. Sick of Donald Murray and his sanctimonious bullying. Sick of Fionnlagh’s lack of backbone. I’m sick of fooling myself into studying for a future I’ll probably never have.’ She drew a deep tremulous breath and forced herself to stand upright again. ‘And now this.’ She turned back to face Fin, and he saw that she was hanging on to control by a gossamer thread. ‘What am I going to do about my dad?’

It would have been easy for him to stand up and take her in his arms, and tell her everything was going to be all right. But it wasn’t. And there was no point in pretending it was. He said, ‘Come and sit down and tell me what you know about him.’

She pushed herself, laden with weariness, away from the counter and sat heavily in her chair. Her face was strained by tension and fatigue, pale and pinched in the harsh electric light. But he saw in it still the little girl who had first drawn him to her all those years before. The little girl with the blond pigtails who had sat next to him that first day at school and offered to translate for him, because for some reason inexplicable to the young Fin his parents had sent him to school speaking only Gaelic. He reached across the table and brushed the hair from her blue eyes, and for a moment she lifted a hand to touch his, a fleeting moment of recollection, of how it had once been long ago. She dropped her hand to the table again.

‘Dad came up from Harris when he was still in his teens. About eighteen or nineteen, I think. He got a job as a labourer at Mealanais farm.’ She got up to take a half-empty bottle of red wine from the worktop and pour herself a glass. She held the bottle out towards Fin, but he shook his head. ‘It was sometime after that he met my mum. Her father was still the lighthouse keeper then, at the Butt, and that’s where they lived. Apparently Dad used to walk to the lighthouse every night after work to see her, even just for a few minutes, and then back again. In all weathers. Four and a half miles each way.’ She took a large sip of her wine. ‘It must have been love.’