Peter May - The Blackhouse

He heard a knocking sound that seemed to fill the church, rattling around the balconies that ringed three sides of it. Metal on metal. He looked about, puzzled, before realizing that it was coming from the radiators along each wall. The central heating was new. As was the double glazing in the tall windows. Perhaps the Sabbath was a little warmer today than it had been thirty years ago. Fin went back out to the entrance hall, and saw a door open at the far end. The banging was coming from somewhere beyond it.

The door gave on to what turned out to be the boiler room. A large oil-fired boiler stood with its door open, a protective cover removed to reveal its byzantine interior workings. Bits and pieces harvested from the interior were scattered around the concrete apron on which it stood. A toolbox lay open, and a man in blue overalls lay on his back trying to loosen the joint on an exiting pipe by banging on it with a large spanner.

‘Excuse me,’ Fin said. ‘I’m looking for the Reverend Donald Murray.’

The man in the overalls sat up, startled, and banged his head on the boiler door. ‘Shit!’ And Fin saw the dog collar underneath the overalls where they were open at the neck. He recognized the angular face below a mop of untidy sandy hair. There was grey in that hair now, and it was a little thinner. As was the face, which had somehow shed its boyish good looks and become mean, pinched in lines around the mouth and the eyes. ‘You’ve found him.’ The man squinted up at Fin, unable to see his face because of the light behind it. ‘Can I help?’

‘You could shake my hand for a start,’ Fin said. ‘That’s what old friends usually do, isn’t it?’

The Reverend Murray frowned and got to his feet, peering into the face of the stranger who knew him. And then the light of recognition dawned in his eyes. ‘Good God. Fin Macleod.’ And he grabbed Fin’s hand and shook it firmly, a smile splitting his face. And Fin saw in him again the boy he had known all those years before. ‘Man, it’s good to see you. Good to see you.’ And he meant it, but only for as long as it took other thoughts to crowd his mind and cloud his smile. And as the smile faded, he said, ‘It’s been a long time.’

Fin had found it hard to believe, when Gunn told him, that Donald Murray had succeeded his father as minister of Crobost Free Church. But he could not deny the evidence of his own eyes. Although that still did not make it any easier to believe. ‘About seventeen years. But even if it had been seventy I’d never have thought I’d see you in a dog collar, except maybe at a vicars and tarts party.’

Donald inclined his head a little. ‘God showed me the error of my ways.’

Ways, Fin recalled, which had taken him on a long diversion off the straight and narrow. Donald had gone to Glasgow at the same time as Fin. But while Fin had gone to university, Donald had got into the music promotion business, managing and promoting some of the most successful Glasgow bands of the eighties. But then things had started going wrong. Drink had become more important than work. The agency went to the wall. He got involved with drugs. Fin had met him at a party one night and Donald offered him cocaine. And a woman. Of course, he’d been smashed, and there was something dead in eyes that had once been so full of life. Fin heard later that after being arrested and fined for possession, Donald had left Scotland and headed south to London.

‘Caught the curam then?’ Fin asked.

Donald wiped his oily hands on a rag, assiduously avoiding Fin’s eyes. ‘That’s not a term I care for.’

It was a condition so prevalent on the island that the Gaelic language had subverted a word to describe it. Curam literally meant anxiety . But in the context of those who had been born again, it was used in the sense of something you might catch. Like a virus. And in a way, it was. A virus of the mind. ‘I’ve always thought it was very apposite,’ Fin said. ‘All that brainwashing as a kid, followed by violent rejection and a dissolute life. Drink. Drugs. Wild women.’ He paused. ‘Sound familiar? And then, I suppose, the fear and the guilt kick in, like belated indigestion, after all that early diet of hellfire and damnation.‘ Donald eyed him sullenly, refusing to be drawn. ‘That’s when they say that God talks to you, and you become very special to all those people who wish that God would talk to them, too. Is that how it was with you, Donald?’

‘I used to like you, Fin.’

‘I always liked you, Donald. From that first day you stopped Murdo Ruadh from punching my lights out.’ He wanted to ask him why he was throwing his life away like this. And yet he knew that Donald had already been engaged in the act of flushing it down the toilet with drink and drugs. Maybe this really was some kind of redemption. After all, not everyone harboured the same bitterness towards God as Fin. He relented. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Are you here for a reason?’ Donald was clearly not as ready to forgive as Fin was to apologize.

Fin smiled ruefully. ‘All those hours of study to get myself a place at university, and I threw it away.’ He gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘Ended up a cop. Now, that’s a turn-up for the book, isn’t it?’

‘I’d heard.’ Donald was guarded now. ‘And you still haven’t told me why you’re here.’

‘I’m investigating the murder of Angel Macritchie, Donald. They brought me in because he was killed in exactly the same way as a murder I’m investigating in Edinburgh.’

A smile flitted briefly across Donald’s face. A glimpse of his old self. ‘And you want to know if I did it.’

‘Did you?’

Donald laughed. ‘No.’

‘You once told me you were going to rip the fucking wings off Angel Macritchie.’

Donald’s smile vanished. ‘We’re in the house of God, Fin.’

‘And that should bother me, why?’

Donald looked at him for a moment, then turned away and crouched to start putting tools back in his box. ‘It was that atheist aunt of yours who turned you against the Lord, wasn’t it?’

Fin shook his head. ‘No. She’d have been pleased to have me be a happy heathen like her. But she got me too late. The damage was done. I was already infected. Once you’ve believed, it’s very hard to stop believing. I just stopped believing God was good, that’s all. And the only one responsible for that was God Himself.’ Donald swivelled to look at Fin, incomprehension in his frown. ‘The night he took my parents on the Barvas moor.’ Fin forced a smile. ‘Of course, I was just a kid then. These days, in my more rational moments, I know it’s all just crap, and that such things happen in life.’ And he added bitterly, ‘More than once.’ One more reason for resentment. ‘It’s only when I can’t shake off the feeling that maybe there really is a God, that I start getting angry again.’

Donald turned back to his tools. ‘You didn’t really come here to ask me if I killed Angel Macritchie, did you?’

‘You didn’t like him much.’

‘A lot of people didn’t like him much. That doesn’t mean they would kill him.’ He paused, balancing a hammer in his hand, feeling its weight. ‘But if you want to know how I feel about it, I don’t think he was any great loss to the world.’

‘That’s not very Christian of you,’ Fin said, and Donald dropped the hammer into the box. ‘Is it because of all the shit we took off him as kids, or because your daughter claimed that he raped her?’

Donald stood up. ‘He raped her alright.’ He was defensive, challenging Fin to contradict him.

‘That wouldn’t surprise me at all. Which is why I’d like to know what happened.’

Donald pushed past him and out into the hallway. ‘I imagine you’ll find everything you need to know in the police report.’