Peter May - The Blackhouse

‘How’s it going, sir?’ Gunn wheeled up alongside him on a typist’s chair.

Fin leaned back in his seat and rubbed his eyes. ‘Downhill at a rapid rate of knots, George. I think I’m going to call it a day.’

‘I’ll walk you over to your hotel, then. Your bag’s still in the boot of my car.’

They walked together past the armoury and the area admin office, pale yellow walls, pastel purple carpet. On the stairs they bumped into DCI Smith. ‘Good of you to report back after the autopsy,’ he said.

‘Nothing to report.’ Fin paused, and then added, ‘Sir.’ He had long ago discovered that dumb insolence was the only way to deal with sarcasm from senior officers.

‘I had a verbal from the pathologist. Seems there are quite a few parallels with Edinburgh.’ He had moved past them on the stairs so that he could make up for his lack of height by being on the step above.

‘Inconclusive,’ Fin said.

Smith looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Well, you’d better have some conclusions for me by close of play tomorrow, Macleod. Because I don’t want you here any longer than necessary. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Fin turned away. But Smith wasn’t finished. ‘HOLMES has come up with another possible connection. I want you to go with DS Gunn first thing tomorrow to check it out. Gunn’ll fill you in.’ And he turned and took the stairs two at a time to the top landing without looking back. Fin and Gunn carried on down to the ground floor.

Fin said, ‘So if he’s sending us two, I guess that means he doesn’t attach too much importance to it.’

Gunn smiled wryly. ‘Your words, Mr Macleod, not mine.’

‘Is there an Edinburgh link?’

‘Not that I can see.’

‘So what’s the story?’

Gunn held the door open for Fin, and they headed up steps past the charge bar to the rear entrance. Early evening sunlight cast long shadows across the car park. ‘Macritchie got done for poaching about six months ago. On a big estate down in the south-west of the island. Owned by an Englishman. They charge a bloody fortune down there for the salmon fishing, so the owner’s keen to protect the river from poachers. Just over a year ago he brought in some heavyweight from London. Ex-army. You know the type. A thug, really. Knows bugger all about the fishing, but if he catches you at it, boy you’ll know all about it.’

They retrieved Fin’s bag from the boot. ‘And he caught Macritchie at it?’

Gunn slammed the boot shut, and they headed down the road towards the harbour. ‘He did that, Mr Macleod. And a few things besides. Macritchie was a bit the worse for wear by the time he ended up in our hands. But he wasn’t going to complain about it. Loss of face, you know, to admit that somebody gave him a doing. Macritchie might have been a big lad, but this London boy was a pro. And it doesn’t matter how big you are, you don’t stand much chance against those fellas.’

‘So what’s the connection here?’ Fin liked the idea of someone giving Macritchie a doing, but he couldn’t see where Gunn’s story was leading.

‘About three weeks ago, the boy from London got jumped one night on the estate. There was a bunch of them, masks, the lot. He took a hell of a beating.’

They passed the charity shop on the corner of Kenneth Street and Church Street. A notice in the window read, World Fair Trade — Trade not Aid . ‘So the computer, in its wisdom, thinks Macritchie might have been getting in a wee bit of revenge. And, what? That this ex-army boy finds out and goes and murders him?’

‘I guess that’s about the size of it, Mr Macleod.’

‘So Smith saw that as a good excuse for getting you and me out of his hair for a while.’

‘It’s a nice run down to the south-west. Do you know Uig, Mr Macleod?’

‘I know it well, George. We picnicked down there often in the summer. My father and I used to fly a kite on Uig beach.’ He remembered the miles of dead flat sand that stretched away between tendrils of rock to the distant breakers. And the wind that took their home-made box kite soaring into the blue, whipping the hair back from their faces, tugging at their clothes. And the smile that creased his father’s face, blue eyes shining in startling contrast to his deep summer tan. And he remembered, too, his disappointment if the tide was in, so that all those acres of sand lay under two feet of turquoise sea and they had to sit among the doons eating sandwiches.

High tide had pushed into the inner harbour, and the boats tied up along Cromwell Street Quay towered over them as Fin and Gunn headed south towards North Beach Quay, past a forest of masts and radar grilles and satellite pods. Stornoway extended along a spit of land that separated the inner harbour from the deep-water piers of the outer harbour where the ferry and the oil tankers docked. The Crown Hotel, where Fin had been booked a room, occupied a prime site on the spit, between Point Street and North Beach, overlooking the inner harbour and Lews Castle. Not much, to Fin’s eye, appeared to have changed. A few commercial premises under new ownership, some freshly painted shop fronts. The hat shop was still there, its window full of bizarre creations that women pinned to their heads on the Sabbath. Hats, like the burka, were obligatory headwear on Lewis for churchgoing women. The clock tower on the town hall could be seen above the steeply pitched slate roofs and dormer windows. The two men skirted piles of lobster creels, and great heaps of tangled green fishing net. Skippers and crew were offloading supplies from vans and four-by-fours on to trawlers and small fishing boats, today not yet over before preparations were being made for tomorrow. And overhead the gulls wheeled endlessly, scraps of white against a clear blue sky, catching the last flashes of sunlight and calling plaintively to the gods.

On Point Street they stopped outside the entrance to the Crown. Fin looked along the length of this pedestrianized street with its ornamental flowerbeds and wrought-iron benches. Known to the locals as The Narrows, Point Street on a Friday and Saturday night would be thick with teenagers gathering in groups and cliques, drinking beer from cans, smoking dope, feasting on fish suppers and burgers from the fish and chip shop. In the absence of any other form of entertainment, this was where the kids made their own. Fin had spent many a night here, squeezed in shop doorways with his schoolfriends sheltering from the rain, waiting for some of the older boys to show up with a carryout. It had seemed exciting then, full of possibilities. Girls, drink, perhaps a puff on someone’s joint. If you were still there at closing time, there was a good chance of seeing a fight. Or two. If you were lucky, you had heard about a party somewhere and were long gone. Each generation followed in the footsteps of the last, like the ghosts of their fathers. And mothers. Right now The Narrows were all but deserted.

Gunn handed Fin his bag. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Mr Macleod.’

‘Come on, I’ll buy you a drink, George.’

Gunn looked at his watch. ‘Just the one, then.’

Fin signed in and dropped his bag in his room. Gunn had two pints waiting for them on the bar when he came back down. The lounge bar was almost deserted at this hour, but they could hear the thump of music from the public bar below and the loud thrum of voices as thirsty fishermen and construction workers from the reopened yard at Arnish took their reward for a hard day’s work. There was a plaque here commemorating the scandal of an underage Prince of Wales ordering a cherry brandy on a stopover during a sailing tour of the Western Isles with his school. The fourteen-year-old Charles had subsequently been smuggled away by car, back to his school at Gordonstoun on the mainland. How times had changed.