Peter May - The Lewis Man

The pothole-pitted tarmac wound up over a grassy rise, to open out on a panorama across the machair towards the beach. Spring flowers bowed in the wind, and clouds hovered around the distant mountains that ringed the sands. No matter how often Fin had seen it, this was always a sight that took his breath away.

The school sat out on its own, a tiny collection of grey and yellow buildings and a football field a stone’s throw from the beach. It would be hard to imagine a more idyllic setting for a childhood education.

As Fin drew his car into the little car park in front of the main building, half a dozen kids in crash helmets were receiving road-safety lessons on their bikes, weaving in and out of red traffic cones laid along the road by their teacher.

Gunn called to her as he stepped from the car. ‘We’re looking for the headmaster.’

‘Headmistress,’ she called back. ‘The building to your right.’ The building to their right was yellow-painted roughcast, with a mural of an underwater seascape painted on the gable end. Inside it smelled of chalk dust and sour milk, and took Fin tumbling back through time to his own childhood.

The headmistress left her class trying to solve an arithmetic puzzle and took the two men into the staffroom. She was delighted to be able to tell them that her predecessors had taken great pride in preserving an archive of the school, a tradition that she herself was anxious to perpetuate, and that they had a record of school registers going back to before the Second World War.

An attractive woman in her middle thirties, she fussed over her appearance, constantly sweeping a stray strand of chestnut hair behind her ear where the rest of it was drawn back in a bun. She wore jeans and tennis shoes, and an open cardigan over a T-shirt. A marked contrast with the severe middle-aged ladies who had taught Fin at that age. It didn’t take her long, searching through boxes of old registers, to retrieve those spanning the time when Tormod would have been there.

She flipped back and forth across a period covering the mid forties to early fifties. ‘Yes,’ she said at last, stabbing a finger at the yellowed pages of the old school records. ‘Here he is. Tormod Macdonald. He was a pupil at Seilebost Primary from 1944 to 1951.’ She ran a pink-painted nail down the faded entries that recorded daily attendance. ‘A good attender, too.’

‘Might he have had any brothers or cousins at the school?’ Gunn asked, and she laughed.

‘He may well have done, Detective Sergeant, but there have been so many Macdonalds here over the years it would be almost impossible to tell.’

‘And what school would he have gone to from here?’ Fin wondered.

‘Most likely it would have been the secondary at Tarbert.’ She smiled and gave him strong eye contact, and he remembered Marsaili once telling him how all the girls had had a crush on him at school. He’d never even been aware of it.

‘Do you have an address for him?’

‘I can find out.’ She smiled again and disappeared into another room.

Gunn turned to Fin, a half-smile playing about his lips. Envy maybe, or regret. ‘Never works like that for me,’ he said.

The Macdonald croft sat about half a mile back from the shore, in an elevated position with views across the sands of Luskentyre and Scarista. A long, narrow strip of land ran all the way down from the crofthouse to the roadside, delineated now only by the stumped remains of decayed fenceposts, and the barely discernible texture of the land, altered by years of cultivation and grazing.

But there was no cultivation or grazing any more. The land had gone to seed, long abandoned and reclaimed by nature. The crofthouse itself was a shell. The roof had collapsed years before, the chimney at the north gable reduced to a pile of blackened rubble. Long grasses and thistles grew where once the floor had been. A floor of beaten earth, covered with sand that would have been changed daily by Tormod’s mother.

Gunn thrust his hands deep in his pockets, gazing out across the expanse of golden sand below, to the streaks of turquoise and emerald that marked out the distant shallows. ‘It’s a dead end.’

But Fin was looking across the hillside towards the figure of a man stacking peats beside a freshly whitewashed cottage. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what the neighbour knows.’ And he set off, striding through the long grasses, fresh green pushing up through winter dead, flowers of purple and yellow reaching for the sky to herald the start of the spring season. The grass moved like water in the wind, ebbing and flowing in waves and eddies, and Gunn waded through it almost at a run in an effort to keep up with the younger man.

Everything about the neighbouring croft seemed to have been renewed. The paint, the roof, the fencing. Doors and windows were double-glazed. A shiny red SUV sat parked in the drive, and a man with a thatch of thick greying hair turned from his task at the peats as they arrived. He had the weathered face of someone who spent time out of doors, but his wasn’t an island accent. He replied to Fin’s Gaelic greeting in English. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak the Gaelic myself.’

Fin reached out to shake his hand. ‘No problem. Fin Macleod,’ he said, turning as the breathless Gunn finally caught up. ‘And Detective Sergeant George Gunn.’

The man seemed a little more wary now as he shook their hands in turn. ‘What does the polis want up here?’

‘We’re looking for information about the family who used to live next door.’

‘Oh.’ The man relaxed a little. ‘The Macdonalds.’

‘Yes. Did you know them?’

He laughed. ‘I’m afraid not. I’m Glasgow born and bred. This is my folks’ place. They moved to the mainland in the late fifties and had me just after they got there. I might even have been conceived in this house, though I couldn’t swear to it.’

‘They would have known the neighbours, though,’ Fin said.

‘Oh, aye, of course. They knew everyone around here. I heard a lot of stories when I was a boy, and we used to come up for the summer holidays. But we stopped in the late sixties after my dad died. My mum passed away five years ago, and I only decided to come back and restore the place last year after I got made redundant. To see if I could make a go of it as a crofter.’

Fin looked around and nodded approvingly. ‘You’re doing a good job so far.’

The man laughed again. ‘A little redundancy money goes a long way.’

Gunn asked, ‘Do you know anything at all about the Macdonalds?’

The man sucked in a long breath through clenched teeth. ‘Not first-hand, no. Though they were still here the first year or two we came on holiday. There was a family tragedy of some sort, I don’t know what. One year we came back and they’d upped sticks and gone.’

Gunn scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘You don’t know where?’

‘Who knows? A lot of folk followed their ancestors from the days of the Clearances, over to Canada.’

Fin felt a chill now on the edge of the wind, and zipped up his jacket. ‘They wouldn’t have been Catholics, would they? The Macdonalds.’

This time the man roared his mirth above the howl of the wind. ‘Catholics? Here? You must be kidding, man. This is Presbyterian country.’

Fin nodded. It had seemed an unlikely scenario. ‘Where’s the nearest church?’

‘That would be the Church of Scotland at Scarista.’ He turned and pointed south. ‘Just five minutes away.’

‘What are we doing here, Mr Macleod?’ Gunn stood disconsolately in the metalled parking area at the top of the hill, huddled in his quilted jacket, nose red from the cold. Although the sun rode in patches like untamed horses across the hill and the beach below, there was little warmth in it. The wind had turned around to the north, breathing unpitying arctic air into their frozen faces.