Louise Welsh - Death is a Welcome Guest

‘It’s something that happens when someone sticks a pair of handcuffs on you.’ The priest’s voice was as dead as the corpse on the floor between them. ‘I’ll tell you something else. No one cuts their wrists in one clean slice. It takes a few goes before the natural instinct for self-preservation is completely overcome. Henry didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ Magnus whispered.

‘You and Jeb were the only ones who weren’t here when it happened. That means you’re the only ones I can vaguely trust.’ Jacob got to his feet.

Magnus followed him. ‘Raisha and Belle…’

‘Are as suspect as anyone.’ There was a sheet of plastic draped over some machinery in the corner of the barn. Jeb pulled it free and dragged it towards the body. ‘It’s comforting to think of women as a higher species, less inclined to violence than men, but they do occasionally kill.’ He put the plastic over Henry’s corpse, slipping its edges beneath the body, as if he were tucking him into bed. ‘We’ve been through an unprecedented trauma. Life is cheaper than it was before. Who knows what effect it will have on those of us who remain?’

‘What are you going to do?’

Jacob pushed the final edge of the plastic beneath Henry’s head.

‘What can I do? Maybe it was one of our group, maybe it was a stranger. I’ll keep my eyes open and try and make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.’

‘It could have been Jeb or me, we’re strangers.’

Jacob gave a weird grin. ‘Was it?’

‘No,’ Magnus said. ‘It wasn’t.’

Jacob nodded. He looked Magnus in the eye. ‘It wasn’t me either.’

The combine harvester they had found was bigger than the one his father had rented each year for the croft and Magnus guided it slowly through the ripe field of corn. Jacob sat in the cab beside him to ‘learn how it was done’, but Magnus was aware of the gun on the priest’s hip and his own lack of weapon. They were each wearing ear mufflers they had found on the driver’s seat, ready for a harvest that had come too soon for some now-dead farmer and his mate. It was too noisy to talk and neither of them had mentioned Henry’s body. Magnus was glad of the noise. Murder or not, there was nothing he could do about it. He liked the faint, familiar rumble of the combine’s engine, the smell of newly felled corn and the uneven jolt of the field beneath the machine. Sweat was beading his forehead and trickling down his back, but the task felt clean. There was something purifying in the labour and even with Jacob riding shotgun it gave him space to think. He would leave Tanqueray as soon as he had cut the three fields of corn they had agreed on.

Magnus had visited Jeb and told him about Henry. One of the puppies had been curled on the floor of the room, chewing at the bedside rug’s fringes. Jeb had stretched out a hand, caught hold of the dog by the scruff of its neck and pulled it to its feet. He rubbed the dog’s ears. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t Jacob who did it?’

It was a typical police response, Magnus decided, blame the nearest person, but he kept the thought to himself. ‘Why would you think that?’

The dog made a lunge for Jeb’s shirt sleeve and he batted it away. ‘You saw the way he shot the guy who attacked us. He blew his head off with no warning. Jacob’s a soldier. He knows how to handle a gun. Okay, the man had a machete, but Jacob could have taken him out with a hit to the leg, a hit to the body if he wasn’t sure of his aim.’ The puppy jumped at Jeb’s sleeve again. He cuffed it gently on the back of its head and it trotted out of the room. ‘Jacob went for the execution shot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, but if you’re looking for a killer I’d say Father-armed-and-dangerous is an obvious candidate.’

Magnus had wondered at the way Jacob had shot the Audi driver, but he had seen the grim set of the priest’s mouth as he looked at Henry’s wounds.

‘He took us to the body. Why would he do that if he had killed him?’

Jeb leaned forward, still stern, but more confident than Magnus had seen him since the accident.

‘What’s the point in putting on a display if there’s no one there to admire it? We were trained to look out for the neighbour who’s a little too nosy about the crime scene; the person who’s over-eager to offer an opinion to the news cameras; the man or woman who knows a little too much.’ Jeb opened the desk drawer and took out a pencil and a piece of paper. ‘Describe what you saw in as much detail as you can remember.’

Magnus looked out at the trees beyond the window. Jeb’s story about Cherry and Happy was harder to imagine by daylight. It seemed to belong to the night. He wondered about the truth of it; the woman jumping to her death with the child in her arms, the last terrified look at the world the girl had given before she was plunged into the sky beyond the balcony. Magnus’s trust in Jeb was wavering again, but he found that he wanted to tell him about Henry’s butchered body, the way the priest had touched the wounds gently with the nub of his gun. How he had tucked the dead man tight in plastic, as if preserving him for another day.

Jeb listened silently, jotting down the occasional note. He nodded when Magnus mentioned the lack of defence cuts and the red weals Jacob had said were caused by handcuffs. When Magnus finished Jeb said, ‘I’d like to talk to the priest about this. Do you think you can get him to visit me?’

Magnus had promised to see what he could do.

The corn toppled beneath the combine’s blades in rows that were less straight than his father would have approved of, but which gave Magnus a forgotten sense of pride. He would find a van somewhere, pick up his abandoned motorbike, replace its damaged tyre and press on for Scrabster. The van would speed his progress and the bike would ensure he was not stalled by some obstacle: a tangle of abandoned cars, a collapsed bridge or a barricade that a larger vehicle could not negotiate. When he got to Orkney, Magnus would be able to tell his mother and Rhona (please God let them be alive) that he had done something good.

Jacob was saying something to him. Magnus lifted his muffler, but the words were lost in the din of the engine. The priest pointed at the ignition. Magnus killed the engine and drew the combine to a halt.

Jacob said, ‘Ready for a break?’

‘I can keep going for another hour.’ Every moment he worked was a moment closer to leaving.

‘I’m ready for a break and I think you should have one too. These are dangerous machines. It doesn’t do to drive them for too long.’ Jacob slung the bag with their water and sandwiches in it around his body, opened the cab door and climbed down into the field.

Magnus said, ‘I’ve been driving these beasts since I was sixteen. I don’t need to be told when to have a break.’

His father had been working his neighbour Bobby Bird’s field since sun-up on the evening he died. Bobby supplemented the yield from his croft by working in a bank in Stromness. He paid for the combine’s rental and Magnus’s father cut Bobby’s crop, then used the machine to harvest his own fields.

‘I told him not to batter it,’ Bobby had said tearfully to Magnus at the funeral, ‘but you ken your faither, God bless his soul, he wouldn’t touch his ain fields till he had done mine and he was feart the rain was coming in.’

His father had been right. It had rained for three days after his death; torrential, biblical, sheets of rain. Bobby and the rest of their neighbours had worked in it, Magnus, Rhona and his cousin Hugh with them, to bring in his father’s crop. But it had not brought the man back.