Peter May - The Blackhouse

Fin said his hellos and solemnly shook all their hands. The last of them took Fin’s in both of his. A thickset man of medium height, heavy black eyebrows beneath a head of dense black hair touched only here and there by grey. Physically he was not a big man, but he was a huge presence. Gigs MacAulay was in his early fifties. He had been out to the rock more often than anyone else on the team. He had already made some fourteen or fifteen trips to An Sgeir by the time Fin and Artair were initiated into the ancient rite. He was recognized then as the unspoken team leader. And he was still. There was an additional firmness and warmth in his handshake, and he fixed Fin with sharp, deeply blue Celtic eyes. ‘Good to see you, Fin. You’ve done well, I hear.’

Fin shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

‘If we do our best, God can’t ask that we do any more.’ His eyes flickered away towards Artair and then back to Fin. ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘It has.’

‘Must be, what? Seventeen, eighteen years?’

‘Must be.’

‘Artair’s boy’s coming with us for the first time.’

‘Aye, I know.’

Gigs looked at the boy and grinned. ‘Though he’ll not be needing his hair gel out on the rock, will you, son?’ The others laughed, and Fionnlagh blushed, turning his head away to stare mutely out across the ocean. Gigs clapped his hands together. ‘Right, we’d better get this lot on the lorry.’ He looked at Fin. ‘Are you going to give us a hand?’

‘Sure,’ Fin said, and he took off his parka and his jacket, tossing them on to a stack of empty creels, and rolled up his sleeves.

They worked methodically, in a chain, like any good team, passing the sacks and the boxes one to the other, and up to the men stacking them on the lorry. Fin found himself watching Fionnlagh, looking for something of himself in the boy, some sign that this was, indeed, his flesh and blood. They had similar colouring, but then Marsaili was fair, too. And they were his mother’s pale blue eyes that he had. Fin’s were green. If he had anything of Fin in him, perhaps it wasn’t physical. More like something in his demeanour, in his quiet reticence.

Fionnlagh caught Fin watching him, and Fin immediately turned away, embarrassed. Gigs heaved a bag of salt into his arms. It was heavy, and Fin grunted. ‘It was easier in my day,’ he said, ‘when you just had to load straight on to the trawler here at the Port.’

‘It was that.’ Gigs shook his head gravely. ‘But with the damage to the harbour the trawlers can’t get in any more, so we’ve got to haul it all to Stornoway now.’

‘But you guys still leave from here?’

‘Most of us do, aye. In the small boat.’ Gigs nodded towards an open boat tied up at the quay, her outboard motor tipped clear of the water. ‘We motor out to meet the trawler there in the bay and haul the wee boat aboard. We still need her to ferry everything on to the rock at the other end.’

‘So, are you any nearer to catching Angel’s killer?’ one of the younger men suddenly asked Fin, his curiosity getting the better of him.

‘I’m not leading the investigation,’ Fin said. ‘I don’t really know how things are going.’

‘Aye, well, they seem to think this DNA test’s going to get him,’ one of the others said.

Fin was surprised. ‘You know about that already?’

‘Sure do,’ said Gigs. ‘I think every man in Crobost got a call yesterday from the incident room. Got to go into the police station in Stornoway, or the doctor’s surgery up at Crobost sometime today to give a sample.’

‘It’s voluntary, though,’ Fin said.

Artair said, ‘Aye, but do you really think anyone’s not going to do it? I mean, it would look fucking suspicious, wouldn’t it?’

‘I’m not doing it,’ Fionnlagh said, and they all stopped and looked at him.

‘Why not?’ Artair demanded.

‘Because it’s the thin end of the wedge.’ Fionnlagh’s face flushed with a strange passion. ‘The beginnings of a police state. We’re all going to end up on a database somewhere, identified by a DNA barcode, and we’re not going to be able to do anything or go anywhere without someone knowing why, or where we’ve come from, or where we’re going to. You’ll end up getting turned down for a mortgage, or life insurance, because the insurance company thinks you’re a bad risk. It’ll all be there on the DNA database. Your grampa died of cancer, or maybe there’s a history of heart disease on your mother’s side. You’ll get knocked back for a job because your prospective employer’s discovered that your great grandmother spent time in a mental institution, and your barcode looks a hell of a lot like hers.’

Artair looked at the faces gathered around listening open-mouthed. The loading of the lorry had ground to a halt. ‘Will you hark at him. He sounds like one of these left-wing radicals. Karl fucking Marx. I don’t know where the hell he gets it from.’ His eyes darted momentarily towards Fin, then he turned to Fionnlagh. ‘You’ll take the test and lump it.’

Fionnlagh shook his head. ‘No,’ he said with a quiet resolution.

‘Look …’ Artair took a more conciliatory tone. ‘We’re all going to do it, right?’ He looked around for support. Everyone nodded and murmured their agreement. ‘So it’s going to look pretty fucking suspicious if you don’t. Is that what you want? Is it? You want them to think it was you?’

A look of sullen resignation fell across Fionnlagh’s face. ‘Well, whoever did it should get a medal.’ Fin did not miss the echo of Artair’s words. Fionnlagh took in all the faces turned in his direction. ‘The man was a brute and a bully, and I’ll bet there’s not a single one of you standing on this jetty who doesn’t think he got everything he deserved.’

No one said a word. And a few moments’ silence stretched into half a minute, tempered only by the sound of the wind rushing through the grasses on the cliff. Finally, as if just to break it, one of the men said, ‘So does it hurt? This DNA test.’

Fin smiled and shook his head. ‘No. They take a thing like a big cotton bud and scrape it down the inside of your cheek.’

‘Not your bum cheek, I hope,’ a thin man with ginger hair and a cloth cap said, and they all laughed, glad to be able to release the tension. ‘’Cos nobody’s sticking a big cotton bud up my arse!’

The laughter was a cue to begin loading again, and they restarted the passing of salt sacks along the chain to the lorry.

‘How long before they get the results of the DNA tests?’ Artair asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Fin said. ‘Two or three days, maybe. Depending on how many samples they take. When are you hoping to leave for the rock?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Gigs said. ‘Maybe even tonight. Depends on the weather.’

Fin blew air through clenched teeth as he took another sack, and felt the sweat breaking out across his forehead. He was going to have to shower and change when he got back to Stornoway. ‘You know, what I don’t understand is why you kept taking him.’

‘Angel?’ Gigs asked.

Fin nodded. ‘I mean, you all hated him, didn’t you? I haven’t come across a single person since I got here who’s had one good word to say for him.’

The comedian with the ginger hair said, ‘Angel was the cook. He was good at it.’ And there was a mumble of accord.

‘So who have you asked to stand in for him?’ Fin said.

‘Asterix.’ Gigs nodded towards a wee man with a big, whiskery moustache. ‘But we didn’t ask him. We never ask anyone, Fin. We let it be known that there’s a place available, and if someone wants to go, then they come and ask us.’ He paused, a sack of salt weighing heavily in his arms. But he didn’t seem to notice. ‘That way no one can lay the blame at our door if anything goes wrong.’