Peter May - The Lewis Man

‘No need for papish things now,’ he said. ‘The journey’s nearly over.’

Fin took the call from Gunn on his mobile as he left the Dun Eisdean care home. Tormod had been strangely subdued on the drive back from Dalmore and went meekly to his room, where he allowed staff to take off his coat without a word of protest, and lead him to the dining room. Having eaten almost nothing the previous day he had now, it seemed, rediscovered his appetite. And as he wolfed into a plate of spring lamb and boiled potatoes, Fin slipped quietly out into the midday sunshine.

He parked his car now at the top of Church Street and walked down to where Gunn was waiting for him on the steps of the police station. The wind was blustery and cooler here on the east coast, rippling the water in the bay, rustling the first leaves in the trees on the far side of it below the dark decay of Lews Castle. The two men fell in step on the walk down to Bayhead, and saw the fishing boats at high tide towering above the quays. Nets and creels and empty fish boxes lay strewn across the cobbles, and the good people of Stornoway leaned into the wind as they made their way towards the centre of town.

As they passed a cafe with picture windows looking out on to the boats at dock, Gunn said, ‘Isn’t that young Fionnlagh?’

Fin turned, and through the shadow of his own reflection he saw Fionnlagh and Donna together at a table on the other side of the glass. A carrycot sat on the floor between them, and Fionnlagh held his baby daughter in his arms, gazing with unglazed love into her tiny, round blue eyes. She gazed back adoringly at her father, impossibly small fingers grasping his thumb. Just as Robbie had once held Fin’s.

Fin had only a moment to feel the regrets of a lifetime press down on him before Donna turned and saw him. Her face flushed with the first colour he had ever seen in it, and she turned away, speaking quickly to Fionnlagh. The boy looked up, startled. And Fin saw something strange in his eyes. Guilt? Fear? It was impossible to tell, evaporating in a moment to be replaced by a bashful smile. He nodded at Fin, who nodded back. An awkward moment, a silent exchange, the glass of the window a much easier barrier to breach than all the things left unsaid between them.

‘You want to go in?’ Gunn said.

Fin shook his head. ‘No.’ He gave the young couple a small half-wave, and turned away along Bayhead, making Gunn scurry to catch him up. He wondered only fleetingly why Fionnlagh wasn’t at school.

They found a dark corner in The Hebridean, and Gunn ordered them a couple of half-pints of heavy. When he sat down again with their glasses, he drew an A4 manila envelope from inside his anorak and slipped it across the table. ‘You never got this from me.’

Fin slid it into his bag. ‘Got what?’

Gunn grinned and they sipped in silence at their beers for a while. Then Gunn laid his glass carefully down on the beer mat in front of him and said, ‘I got a call about half an hour ago. The Northern Constabulary are sending a DCI from Inverness to open the murder investigation.’

Fin inclined his head. ‘As expected.’

‘He probably won’t be here for another week or so. It seems the powers that be don’t think there’s much urgency in the solving of a fifty-odd-year-old murder.’ He lifted his glass for another sip, then replaced it exactly on the ring it had left on the mat. ‘When he comes, I’ll not be able to confide in you any more, Mr Macleod. Which is a shame. Because I know you were a good cop. But the fact that you are no longer in the force is more likely to work against you than for you. I’ve no doubt you’ll be told to keep your nose out of things.’

Fin smiled. ‘No doubt.’ He took a sip from his own glass. ‘Where’s this leading, George?’

‘Well, Mr Macleod, it seems to me we have a wee period of grace. And maybe it would be an idea to make hay while the sun shines.’

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘Well, sir, it’s in my mind to go down to Harris in the morning, to Seilebost, to check up on old Tormod Macdonald’s family, and see if I can come up with any idea of who it was we took out of the peat. It would be nice to show these mainlanders that we’re not all hick cops out here in the islands.’

‘And?’

‘My motor’s been playing up something terrible this last wee while. At least, that’s the official story. I thought maybe you might like to give me a lift.’

‘Oh, did you?’

‘Aye.’ Gunn took a longer draught of beer this time. ‘What do you think?’

Fin shrugged. ‘I think Marsaili’s quite anxious for me to get to the bottom of all this.’

‘Aye, well, that would make sense. You being a former polis and all.’ He lifted his glass to his lips again, but hesitated. ‘Is there … a relationship between you two these days?’

Fin shook his head, avoiding Gunn’s eye. ‘A lot of history, George. But no relationship.’ He drained his glass. ‘What time would you like to leave?’

As he drove back up the west coast, from Barvas through Siader and Dell, he watched the dark legions of yet another weather front assembling out on the horizon. In his rearview mirror he could still see the sun slanting across the purplehued mountains of Harris to the south. The sky to the north remained clear, each successive village standing hard in silhouette against the light, old whitehouses, and the architecturally challenged standard homes issued in the twentieth century by the former Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. The DAF houses, as they were called, with their harled walls and steeply pitched slate roofs and tall dormers. Hopelessly inadequate, by modern standards, to withstand the ravages of the island climate.

Sun slanting across the bog to the east spun gold in the dead grass, and he saw huddled groups of villagers gathered among the trenches, wielding the long-handled tarasgeir to take advantage of the dry afternoon to cut and stack peat.

The dark shadow of the bleak and forbidding church at Cross signalled that he was nearly home.

Home? Was this really his home now, he wondered. This wind-ravaged corner of the earth where warring factions of an unforgiving Protestant religion dominated life. Where men and women struggled all their lives to make a living from the land, or the sea, turning in times of unemployment to the industries that came, and went again when subsidies ran out, leaving the rusting detritus of failure in their wake.

It seemed, if anything, more depressed than it had in his youth, entering again a period of decline after a brief renaissance fuelled by politicians courting votes by the spending of millions on a dying language.

But if here wasn’t home, where was? Where else on God’s earth did he feel such an affinity with the land, the elements, the people? And he found himself regretting that he had never brought Robbie here, to the land of his forefathers.

There was no one at Marsaili’s bungalow when he stopped there, and he drove on up past his parents’ croft, over the ridge, and saw the whole northern coastline stretch out ahead of him. He took a left on the road that ran down to the old Crobost harbour, where a steep concrete slipway below the winch house led to a tiny quay in the shadow of the cliffs. Coiled rope and orange buoys lay draped over piles of rusted chain. Creels for crab and lobster stood piled up against the wall. Tiny fishing dinghies lay canted at odd angles, secured to loops of rusted iron. Among them, still, the peeling remains of the boat his father had once restored, and painted purple like the house, and named after his mother. All these years later, the traces of lost lives remained.

His own among them. Sad and bittersweet memories lingered still within the decaying walls of the old whitehouse that sat up on the hill overlooking the harbour. The house where he had done most of his growing up, tolerated by an aunt who had reluctantly taken on the responsibility of her dead sister’s orphan. A house empty of warmth or love.