Peter May - The Lewis Man

‘Yes,’ Marsaili said. ‘At the bottom of the pile.’ She turned to Fin. ‘I want to go in.’

They followed the drive to the portico at the entrance, where steps led up between pillars to a rust-red door. A stone stairway to their left descended to an open green space that might once have been gardens. Fin watched Marsaili’s face as they crossed a tiled vestibule into the main hallway that ran the length of the building. Impressively grand rooms led off either side of it, galleries hung with paintings, or filled with sculptures, a shop, a cafeteria. Light cascaded down at either end of it from windows in the stairwells of each wing. You could very nearly hear the distant echo of lost children.

The emotion in Marsaili’s face was almost painful to watch as she reassessed everything about herself. Who she was, where she had come from, what dreadful kind of a life her father had endured as a boy. Something he had never shared with any of them. His lonely secret.

A uniformed security guard asked if he could help them.

Fin said, ‘This place used to be an orphanage.’

‘Yeah. Hard to believe.’ The guard tipped his head towards one end of the corridor. ‘The boys used to be in that wing, apparently. The girls in the other. The exhibition room along there on the left used to be the headmaster’s office. Or whatever he was called.’

‘I want to go,’ Marsaili said suddenly, and Fin saw that there were silent tears reflecting light on her cheeks. He slipped his arm through hers and led her back out through the entrance, watched by a bemused guard wondering what it was he had said. She stood breathing deeply at the top of the steps for almost a minute. ‘We can find out from the records, can’t we? Who he really was, I mean. Where his family came from.’

Fin shook his head. ‘I checked online last night. The records are kept locked up for a hundred years. Only the children themselves have a right of access to them.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess it’s designed to protect them. Though I suppose the courts could grant the police a warrant to gain access. This is a murder investigation, after all.’

She turned teary eyes in his direction, wiping her cheeks dry with the backs of her hands. He saw in her face the same question he had been unable to answer on the beach the night before. Had her father killed his brother? Fin thought it unlikely they would ever know, unless by some miracle they were able to find the girl called Ceit, who had boarded at the O’Henley croft.

They walked in silence back down the cobbled path to Belford Road, the Dean Cemetery brooding in shaded tranquillity behind a high stone wall. As they arrived at the gate Fin’s mobile phone alerted him to an incoming email. He scrolled through its menu with his finger and tapped to open it. When he took some time to read it, frowning thoughtfully, Marsaili said, ‘Something important?’

He waited until he had tapped in a response before replying. ‘When I was looking for references to the Dean Orphanage on the internet last night I came across a forum of former Dean orphans exchanging photographs and reminiscences. I suppose there must be some kind of bond between them all that they still feel, even if they didn’t know one another at The Dean.’

‘Like family.’

He looked at her. ‘Yes. Like the family they never had. You still feel a greater affinity to a second cousin you’ve never met than to some complete stranger.’ He pushed his hands deep into his pockets. ‘A lot of them seem to have emigrated. Australia the most popular destination.’

‘As far away from The Dean as they could get.’

‘A fresh start, I suppose. Putting a whole world between you and your childhood. Erasing the past.’ Every word he uttered had such resonance for Fin that he found himself almost too choked to speak. It was, after all, only what he had done himself. He felt Marsaili’s hand on his arm. The merest touch that said more than anything she could have put into words. ‘Anyway, there was one of them still living here in Edinburgh. A man called Tommy Jack. He might well have been at The Dean around the same time as your dad. There was an email address. I wrote to him.’ He shrugged. ‘I very nearly didn’t. It was a real afterthought.’

‘That was him replying?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘He sent his address and said he would be happy to talk to us this evening at his home.’

Afternoon sunlight leaked in all around drawn curtains that breathed in and out in the breeze from the open window beyond them. The noise of passing traffic came with it, distant and unreal, along with the sound of falling water from the weir in the Water of Leith below.

Their room was up in the roof, with views across the river and the Dean Village. But Fin had drawn the curtain on it as soon as they entered the room. They needed the dark to find themselves.

There had been no discussion, no plan. The hotel was directly across the road from the gallery, and they required a place for the night. Fin was not quite sure why neither of them had corrected the receptionist’s mistaken notion that they were a couple looking for a double room. There had been ample opportunity.

They had ascended to the top floor in a tiny elevator without a word passing between them, Fin’s stomach alive with butterflies in collision. Neither had met the other’s eye.

It had been easier, somehow, to undress in the dark, although there was a time when they had known each other’s bodies intimately. Every curve, every surface, every softness.

And now, with the cool of the sheets on their skin, they rediscovered that intimacy. How bizarrely comfortable it was suddenly, and familiar, as if no time had passed at all since the last time. Fin found the same passion deep inside as she had aroused in him that very first time. Fierce, trembling, all-consuming desire. He found her face with his hands, all its well-known contours. Her neck, her shoulders, the gentle swell of her breasts, the curve of her buttocks.

Their lips were like old friends rediscovering each other after so many years, searching, exploring, as if not quite believing that nothing had really changed.

Their bodies rose and fell as one, breath coming in gasps, involuntary vocal punctuation. No words. No control. Lust, passion, hunger, greed. Generating heat, sweat, total immersion. Fin felt the blood of his island heritage pulsing in every stroke. The endless windswept moors, the fury of the ocean as it smashed itself upon the shore. The Gaelic voices of his ancestors raised in tribal chant.

And suddenly it was over. Like the first time. Sluice gates opened, water released, after years of constraint behind emotional dams built from anger and misunderstanding. All of it gone, in a moment, washing away every last wasted minute of their lives.

They lay afterwards, wrapped in each other, lost in their thoughts. And in a while Fin became aware that Marsaili’s breathing had slowed, grown shallow, her head heavier on his chest, and he wondered where in God’s name they went from here.

Tommy Jack lived in a two-bedroomed tenement flat above a wine shop and a newsagent’s in Broughton Street. The taxi dropped Fin and Marsaili in York Place and they walked slowly down the hill in the soft evening light, breathing in the strange smells of the city. Exhaust fumes, malt bins, curry. Nothing could have been further from the island experience. Fin had spent fifteen years of his life in this town, but just a matter of days back among the islands and already it seemed alien, impossibly claustrophobic. And dirty. Discarded chewing gum blackening the pavements, litter blowing in the gutters.

The entrance to the close was in Albany Street Lane, and as they turned into it Fin saw a van driving past up the hill. It was a vehicle belonging to Barnardo’s, the children’s charity, and carried the logo, Giving children back their future . And he wondered how you could give back what had already been destroyed.