Peter May - The Lewis Man

He glanced at her. Complexion pasty-white, eyes shadowed, windblown hair lacklustre and limp. She looked crushed and small, and although all his instincts led him to want to put his arms around her, he felt a barrier between them. Something had happened to them in Edinburgh. In one moment, it seemed, they had rediscovered everything they had once been. In the next it was all gone, like smoke in the wind.

The process of discovering who her father really was had changed her. And the Marsaili he had known was lost now somewhere in a confusion of history and identity. Fin feared there was a chance that neither of them would find her again. Or that if they did, the change would be irrevocable.

He also knew that discovering the identity of her father, and his brother, had still failed to establish the events which had led to the murder of Peter McBride on Eriskay all those years before.

After a very long time of simply sitting there with the engine running, battered by the wind, lashed by the rain, wipers juddering across the windscreen, Marsaili finally turned to him. ‘Take me home, Fin.’

But Fin made no move to shift into gear and reverse out of their space. Both hands gripped the wheel in front of him. Something had come into his head, out of nowhere it seemed. Something shockingly simple and blindingly obvious. He said, ‘I want to go to your mum’s.’

She sighed. ‘Why?’

‘I want to look through your dad’s stuff.’

‘For what?’

‘I won’t know for sure until I find it.’

‘What’s the point, Fin?’

‘The point is, Marsaili, that someone murdered Peter McBride. There is going to be an investigation. A senior officer will be arriving next week. And unless we have evidence to the contrary, your dad is still going to be the number one suspect.’

She shrugged wearily. ‘Should I care?’

‘Yes, you should. He’s still your dad. Nothing we’ve learned about him changes that. He’s still the same gentle giant who carried you on his shoulders out to the peat-cutting. The same man who kissed your forehead at night when he tucked you into bed. The same man who was there for you all of your life, from your first day at school to the day you got married. Now it’s you who needs to be there for him.’

She turned confusion-filled eyes towards him. ‘I don’t know what to feel about him any more, Fin.’

Fin nodded his understanding. ‘I’ll bet though, that if he could, he would want to tell you everything, Marsaili. All the things he’s kept inside all these years, all the things he’s shared with no one. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.’ He ran a hand back through tight blond curls in frustrated empathy. Who could ever have guessed the truth behind the facade? ‘We walk into that nursing home, and all we see are a lot of old people sitting around. Vacant eyes, sad smiles. And we just dismiss them as … well, old. Spent, hardly worth bothering about. And yet behind those eyes every one of them has had a life, a story they could tell you. Of pain, love, hope, despair. All the things we feel, too. Getting old doesn’t make them any less valid, or any less real. And it’ll be us one day. Sitting there watching the young ones dismiss us as … well, old. And what’s that going to feel like?’

Guilt burned hot in her eyes. ‘I’ve never stopped loving him.’

‘Then believe in him, too. And believe that whatever happened, whatever he did, he did it for a reason.’

Visibility over the north-west corner of Lewis was almost zero. The rain blew off the ocean in obscuring sheets so fine it was like a fog. Only the vaguest hint of white breakers smashing over black gneiss could be seen beyond the machair. Even the powerful beam of light sent out into the dark by the lighthouse at the Butt was barely discernible.

Marsaili’s mother was startled by their arrival, huddled together, sheltering under Fin’s coat, already soaked through on the short dash from the car to the kitchen door.

‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘Fionnlagh said you’d gone to Edinburgh.’

‘Then why are you asking?’

Mrs Macdonald tutted her irritation. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘It was personal business, Mum.’ Marsaili and Fin had agreed on the drive up to Ness that they would say nothing to her mother of what they had learned about her father. It would all, no doubt, come out one day. But for the moment they had decided it would serve no useful purpose.

Fin said, ‘We’d like to look through Tormod’s things if that’s possible, Mrs Macdonald.’

Colour rose on her cheeks. ‘Why?’

‘We just would, Mum.’ Marsaili headed off through the house to her father’s old study, her mother trailing in her wake.

‘There’s no purpose to be served in that, Marsaili. That stuff’s no more use to you or me than it is to him any more.’

Marsaili stopped in the doorway and looked around the empty room. Pictures had been taken off the walls, the desktop cleared. She went to open its drawers. Empty. The filing cabinet. Empty. Old boxes filled with his bric-a-brac were gone. The place was sterile, disinfected, as if her father had been a disease. All trace of him removed. She turned to face her mother in disbelief. ‘What have you done?’

‘He’s not here any more.’ Guilt fed her defensiveness. ‘I’ll not have my house cluttered with his old rubbish.’

But the accusation in Marsaili’s voice was unmistakable. ‘Mum, you were married to him for nearly fifty years, for God’s sake! You loved him. Didn’t you?’

‘He’s not the man I married.’

‘Which isn’t his fault. He has dementia, Mum. It’s an illness.’

Fin said, ‘You’ve thrown everything out?’

‘I wasn’t going to put it out till bin day. It’s all in boxes in the front hall.’

Marsaili was pink-faced with indignation. She raised a solitary finger in her mother’s face. ‘Don’t you dare throw that stuff out! Do you hear? These are my dad’s things. If you don’t want them in the house, I’ll take them.’

‘Take them then!’ Guilt fuelled anger now. ‘Take the damned stuff. I don’t want it! You can burn it for all I care!’ And, close to breaking, she pushed past Fin, hurrying away down the hall.

Marsaili stood breathing hard, staring at Fin with fire still in her eyes. And he thought that at least she had rediscovered her feeling for her father. He said, ‘I’ll put the back seat down and we’ll load up the car.’

Condensation steamed up the kitchen windows in Marsaili’s bungalow. The cardboard boxes had got wet in the transfer from the house to the car and then the car to the bungalow. But their contents had been protected by the bin bags that Fin had taped over the top of them. There had been nothing to save Fin and Marsaili from a soaking, though. Fin had stripped off his wet jacket immediately, and Marsaili was still rubbing her hair vigorously with a large towel.

Fionnlagh stood watching as Fin opened up the boxes one by one. Some contained photograph albums, others old accounts. There were boxes of junk, tools and tins of nails, a magnifying glass, boxes of unused pens whose ink had all dried up, a broken stapler, cartons of paperclips.

Fionnlagh said, ‘I’ve sort of made my peace with the Reverend Murray.’

Fin looked up. ‘He said you’d been to see him.’

‘Several times.’

Fin and Marsaili exchanged glances. ‘And?’

‘You know he’s agreed to let Donna and Eilidh stay here.’

Fin nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, I told him I was going to quit school and try to get a job at Arnish. To make sure I could feed and clothe us all.’

Marsaili was surprised. ‘What did he say?’

‘He just about took my head off.’ Fionnlagh smiled wryly. ‘Told me if I didn’t finish my studies and get a place at university he would personally beat the crap out of me.’