Peter May - The Blackhouse

‘Was it Artair?’ Somehow it seemed very important to me that it shouldn’t have been Artair.

She sighed. ‘No, it wasn’t Artair. If you must know, it was Donald.’

Somehow I was both startled and relieved. Also confused. I suppose the beer and the dope, and everything else that was happening to me that night, had combined to rob me of my reason. Even my jealousy. And I submitted to Marsaili’s greater experience. I don’t really remember very much about that first time. Only that it seemed to be over very quickly. But, as it turned out, there were many more opportunities for us that summer to practise and perfect our technique.

As we struggled back into our clothes afterwards, the door suddenly burst open, and Donald was standing there grinning, a girl on each arm. ‘For Christ’s sake, have you two not finished yet? There’s a bloody queue out here.’

The clacking of the keyboard filled the silence in the darkened bedroom. The screen reflected its light on Fin’s pale face, concentration gathered in the frown around his eyes and across the bridge of his nose. These exams were so important. Everything depended on them. The rest of his life. Focus, focus. Concentrate. A movement in his peripheral vision made him turn, and he felt goosebumps raising themselves across his arms and shoulders. He was there again. That impossibly tall man in the hooded anorak, greasy hair dragged down over his ears. Just standing in the doorway, like before, head bowed against the ceiling, big hands hanging loosely at his sides. This time his lips were moving, as if he were trying to say something. Fin strained to hear, but there were no words coming from his mouth, just the rank, bitter smell of stale tobacco on a breath whose foulness seemed to fill the room.

Fin woke, startled, with the stink of stale alcohol breath in his face. Daylight was streaming through thin curtains, seeping in around all their edges. Artair’s weary, bloated face hovered over him, a hand shaking his shoulder. ‘Fin, for fuck’s sake, wake up, Fin.’

Fin sat bolt upright, breathing hard, disorientated, still afraid. Where the hell was he? Then his eye fell on the card table folded against the wall and the Cyprus coffee stain. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and saw the gannet in flight. ‘Jesus.’ He was still gasping for breath.

Artair stood back, looking at him curiously. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Yeh. Fine. I’m fine. Just a nightmare.’ Fin drew in a deep lungful of warm, sour air. ‘What time is it?’

‘Six.’

He had barely slept, turning frequently to look at the digital display on the bedside table. Two. Two forty-five. Three fifteen. Three fifty. The last time he had looked it was almost five o’clock. He could only have been dozing for an hour or so.

‘We have to go right now,’ Artair said.

Fin was confused. ‘At this time?’

‘Fionnlagh and me have to get down to Port of Ness before I leave for work. We’re helping the boys load the lorry with supplies for An Sgeir.’

Fin pushed the quilt aside and swung his legs out of the bed. He rubbed tired eyes. ‘Give me a minute to get dressed.’

But Artair made no move to go. Fin glanced up to find his old schoolfriend watching him intently, an odd expression in his eyes. ‘Listen, Fin. What I said last night … I was drunk, okay? Just forget it.’

Fin returned his gaze. ‘Was it true?’

‘I was drunk.’

‘ In vino veritas .’

Artair lost patience. ‘Look, I was fucking pissed, alright? It hasn’t mattered for seventeen years, why the fuck should it matter now?’ Fin heard the phlegm crackling in his throat as he turned away and abruptly left the room. And he heard him sucking twice on his puffer out in the hall before his footsteps receded angrily towards the living room.

Fin got dressed, and in the bathroom slunged his face with cold water, and found bloodshot eyes staring back at him from the mirror. He looked terrible. He squeezed some toothpaste on to his finger and rubbed it around his teeth and his gums, swilling out his mouth to try to get rid of the bad taste from the night before. He wondered how he was going to be able to face Fionnlagh in the cold light of day, knowing what he knew now. He glanced at himself in the mirror and looked quickly away again. He hardly knew how to face himself.

The Astra was idling on the road above the house. The growl of the engine through the exhaust sounded as rough as Fin felt. Artair was sitting sullenly behind the wheel, Fionnlagh in the back in his hooded sweatshirt, clasped hands resting on the seat between his legs, his face puffy from lack of sleep. Yet, still, he seemed to have found time to gel his hair into spikes. Fin slipped into the passenger seat and glanced in the back. ‘Hi,’ was all he said, turning in his seat to face front, and feeling hopelessly inadequate as he snapped the seatbelt into its clasp.

Artair crunched into first gear and released the handbrake, and they lurched off down the road. Fin was quite sure that if he was stopped, Artair would not pass a breathalyser.

The sky was leaden, but it did not look like rain. Somewhere away on the ocean, sun slanted through a break in the cloud that you couldn’t see, like an invisible spotlight casting a circle of illumination on the water. A strong wind tugged at the summer grasses. As they passed the church, they could see all the way across to the Port, and the Astra bumped its way down the single-track towards the main road.

Fin found the silence in the car almost unbearable. Without turning he said to Fionnlagh, ‘So how did you get on with the computer?’

‘Great.’ Fin waited for him to go on. But that was it.

Artair said, ‘He’s not looking forward to going to An Sgeir.’

Fin craned round to look at the boy. ‘Why?’

‘Not my scene. I’m not much into killing things.’

‘The boy’s soft,’ Artair said scornfully. ‘It’ll be good for him, make a man of him.’

‘Like it did us?’

Artair cast Fin a look of disdain, then fixed his eyes again on the road. ‘Rite of passage, that’s what it’s all about. Boys becoming men. No one said it had to be easy.’

There was no policeman on duty in Port of Ness. Maybe they thought it was no longer necessary, or perhaps they did not believe that anyone would be up this early. The crime-scene tape at the shore road had been drawn aside and wrapped around an orange traffic cone. The narrow road twisted down to the harbour, and they saw a lorry drawn up on the quay, and seven or eight vehicles pulled up alongside the boatshed. The shed was still marked off by black and yellow tape fluttering in the wind, and as they parked and walked past it, they each glanced in. A man had been murdered here. A man they knew. And each of them was touched by the sense that somehow Angel Macritchie still lingered there in the shadows, like a ghost unable to rest until his killer had been found.

His presence was there, too, among the ten men gathered around the lorry, if only through his absence. He had been one of them for eighteen years, and should have been among them today, helping to load the supplies stacked up along the quayside: bags of peat to fuel the fires, drinking water in metal casks, mattresses, tarpaulins, boxes of food, tools, a car battery to power the radio link, more than forty sacks of curing salt piled a metre high against the harbour wall.

Fin found that he knew many of the faces of the men on the quay. Some of them were in their fifties, veterans from the year when Fin and Artair had gone out to the rock, still making the annual pilgrimage. There were one or two of Fin’s contemporaries from school, and younger men in their twenties whom Fin did not know. But there was an unspoken bond between them all. It was a very exclusive club whose membership extended to a mere handful of men going back over five hundred years. You only had to have been out to An Sgeir one time to qualify for membership, proving your courage and strength, and your ability to endure against the elements. Their predecessors had made the journey in open boats on mountainous seas because they had to, to survive, to feed hungry villagers. Now they went out in a trawler to bring back a delicacy much sought after by well-fed islanders. But their stay on the rock was no less hazardous, no less demanding than it had been for all those who had gone before.