Peter May - The Blackhouse

‘Did you manage to get through all the files?’ Gunn said.

‘Most of them.’ The beer was cold and refreshing, and Fin took a long pull at his pint.

‘Find anything interesting?’

‘Actually, yes. The witness who said he’d seen Angel Macritchie heading off in the opposite direction from Donna Murray the night she claimed he raped her …’

Gunn frowned. ‘Eachan Stewart. What about him?’

‘You weren’t directly involved in the Adams assault case, then?’

‘No, I wasn’t. That was DS Fraser.’

‘Well, I guess we can’t expect HOLMES to make all the connections. Do you know Eachan Stewart?’

‘Aye, he’s an eccentric old dopehead. Got a pottery just outside of Crobost. Been there for years. Selling his pots to the summer tourists ever since I can remember.’

‘Since I was a kid,’ Fin said. ‘It was outside Eachan Stewart’s pottery that Chris Adams got beaten up by Macritchie. Stewart was talking to him a minute before the attack, and picked him off the road a minute after it. Yet he claims to have seen nothing. Very convenient for Macritchie to have the same cast-iron witness in his favour at both events. Was there some connection between these two?’

Gunn thought about it. ‘It’s possible, I suppose, that Macritchie was supplying Stewart with dope. We’d suspected him of dealing for some time, but never caught him at it.’

‘I think maybe I’ll have a word with our Mr Stewart tomorrow.’ Fin took another long draught of his beer. ‘George, you said this afternoon that there were other people who bore Macritchie a grudge, other than those he’d bullied as a kid.’

‘Aye, according to his brother. But it’s just hearsay.’

‘Murdo Ruadh?’ Gunn nodded. ‘What’s he been hearsaying?’

‘I don’t know how much credence to give it, Mr Macleod, but Murdo seems to think there was some kind of feud between his brother and a boy he was at school with. A fella called Calum Macdonald. Apparently he was crippled in an accident years ago and works a loom in a shed behind his house. I’ve no idea what it was that happened between them.’

Fin laid his pint carefully on the bar. He felt sick just remembering. ‘I do.’ And Gunn waited for an explanation which never came. Eventually Fin seemed to snap out of his trance. ‘Even if he wasn’t crippled …’ Fin remembered the look on the boy’s face as he fell, ‘… I doubt if Calum Macdonald would have been capable of inflicting that kind of damage on anyone.’

‘Murdo thinks this Calum Macdonald could have put someone else up to it.’

Fin flashed him a look, wondering if that was possible, if Calum would have been capable even of the thought. But why, after all this time? ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, finally.

Again, Gunn waited for an explanation, but it quickly became clear to him that Fin did not intend to elucidate. He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better be going.’ He drained his glass and pulled on his jacket. ‘By the way, how did you get on with Adams?’

Fin paused for a moment, conjuring in his mind a vivid image of the tall, languid animal rights campaigner. ‘It’s interesting, I’d kind of figured a man with two broken ribs wouldn’t have been up to dealing with Macritchie. But, then, it occurred to me there was a connection I was missing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Adams is gay.’

Gunn shrugged. ‘Well, that hardly comes as a surprise, Mr Macleod.’ Then he was struck by a thought that drew a frown. ‘You’re not telling me Macritchie was gay?’

‘No, but the Edinburgh victim, John Sievewright, was.’

Fin drifted through the bar in a trance. The music was pulsating here, competing with the babble of voices and drink-induced laughter. He was aware of the lights of a gaming machine flashing somewhere in his peripheral vision, the pips and beeps and whirrs of an electronic age. He ordered a pint and leaned on the bar waiting for the barmaid to pull it. He felt as if he were hermetically sealed inside an invisible bubble. As if he simply did not exist in this place. He had decided on a drink, a fish supper and an early night, but unable to face the solitude of the lounge bar he had come downstairs to the public bar in the hope of being distracted from his own thoughts. Now he was learning again how easy it was to be lonely in a crowd. Whoever these people were, he did not know them, and he was no longer one of them.

His pint arrived, thumped down in a beer puddle on the bar. He dropped his money in the same puddle and caught the look the barmaid threw him. She swept the money into her hand and returned a moment later with a beer towel to wipe the counter dry. Fin gave her a winning smile and she replied with a sullen scowl.

This was depressing. He raised the glass to his lips and stopped before he could take a drink. A group of workmen, some of them still in their overalls, was gathered around a table in the window, empty glasses accumulating in large numbers. The banter was in Gaelic, and there was loud, raucous laughter. It was the voice, really, which had drawn his attention, like a familiar tune caught in snatches that you can’t quite place. Then he saw the face, and the shock of it was like a fist in the solar plexus.

Artair had changed. He looked ten years older than Fin. He had put on more weight than even his big frame could carry comfortably. Fine childhood features were lost in a round red face, and hair that once had been thick and black was now a fine grey stubble. Broken veins on his cheeks betrayed an over-fondness for the drink, but his eyes were clear and sharp and the same rich, warm brown.

Artair was throwing back the remains of a whisky when he caught Fin’s eye. He lowered the glass slowly from his lips and looked across the bar with something like disbelief.

‘Hey, Wheezy,’ one of the men at the table said. ‘What’s wrong? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

‘I just have.’ Artair stood up, and the two men looked at one another across the heads of the drinkers for a very long moment. The others at his table turned and looked at Fin. ‘Jesus wept and shrank His waistcoat,’ Artair muttered. ‘Fin-fucking-Macleod.’ He squeezed out from the table and pushed through the bodies between them, and to Fin’s embarrassment threw his arms around him in a huge hug. Fin spilled half his beer on the floor. Then Artair stood back and gazed into his face. ‘Hell, man. Where the fuck have you been all these years?’

‘Here and there,’ Fin said uncomfortably.

‘There, maybe.’ Artair’s voice carried a tone. ‘Certainly not here.’ He looked at the remnants of Fin’s pint. ‘Let me fill that up for you.’

‘No, I’m fine, honest.’

Artair caught the barmaid’s eye. ‘Gimme another dram, Mairead.’ He turned back to Fin. ‘So what have you been up to?’

Fin could never have imagined how awkward this would be. He shrugged. What do you say? How do you fill in eighteen years in a sentence? ‘This and that,’ he said.

Artair smiled, but it was forced friendly, and he still couldn’t keep the tone out of his voice. ‘That must have kept you fully occupied.’ He snatched his whisky from the bar. ‘I hear you joined the polis.’ Fin nodded. ‘Hell, you could have done that here, man. We could still have been rock’n’rollin’ all these years, you and me. What happened to the big degree?’

‘I flunked out of university in second year.’

‘Shit. All that time my old man put in, getting you through your exams, and you blew it?’

Fin nodded. ‘Big time.’

‘Well, at least you’ve got the good grace to admit it.’ Artair coughed and found himself short of breath. He took an inhaler from his pocket and sucked on it twice. Phlegm rattled in his throat as he drew oxygen deeply through widening airways. ‘That’s better. Nothing changes, eh?’