The Chessmen l-3

by Peter May

  Fin watched from a distance as she spoke rapidly to someone at the other end. For a moment he wondered if it might even be Strings, or Skins or Rambo as they boarded the plane. She seemed to be arguing. Gesturing into space with her free hand, and briefly he heard her voice raised in protest. And then she hung up. She stood for several seconds, as if replaying the conversation in her head, then turned back towards Fin and thrust her phone in her pocket as she approached.

  There was something hard now in her eyes. Emotionless. She said, ‘You want the truth?’ She paused for what was clearly a long, painful moment. ‘Meet me the day after tomorrow. In Malaga.’

  II

  ‘I don’t want you to go.’ She repeated the refrain.

  Fin looked up over the top of his laptop. Marsaili was framed in the open door of the study. The room which had once been Artair’s dad’s den, where he had tutored Fin and Artair in maths and English, history and geography, through long winter nights. Fin could have sworn the smell of Mr Macinnes’s pipe smoke still lingered in that room, even after all these years.

  A desk lamp spilled its light all over his keyboard as he entered dates and times, and pulled up onscreen prices.

  ‘I mean it, Fin. I don’t want you to go.’ It was the same refrain that Mona had used when they first sent him back to the island to find Angel Macritchie’s killer.

  ‘I need to know, Marsaili.’

  ‘You need to go to the police and tell them what you know already. They think you have something to do with Whistler’s murder, for God’s sake. It’s madness.’

  ‘I’ll go to them when I know the truth. The whole truth.’

  ‘And you think you’ll get that from Mairead?’ The way she said Mairead positively dripped with sarcasm.

  Fin looked up at her again, his hackles rising. ‘That’s what this is all about, really, isn’t it? Me meeting Mairead in Spain.’

  ‘I saw the way she looked at you, Fin. And I saw the look in your eyes too. It’s a look I know. We were old lovers once, too, remember?’

  Fin met her eyes very directly. ‘I have no interest in Mairead, Marsaili. I didn’t like her then, and I don’t like her now.’

  There was a momentary hiatus as Marsaili digested this, testing it for truth, but coming up with the uncertain results of a mind clouded by jealousy.

  ‘I don’t understand why you have to go there. Everyone knows Amran have a place in the south of Spain where they write and record. If Mairead has something to tell you, why couldn’t she tell you here?’

  Fin was losing patience. ‘I don’t know! But if I have to go to Spain and back to find out why Whistler died then I’ll go. Jesus, Marsaili. He saved my life. Twice. And the one time he needed me I wasn’t there.’ He very nearly choked on the thought, and quickly refocused on his computer screen.

  His search had come up with a return flight from Glasgow to Malaga in two days’ time, departing just after 9 a.m., returning the following day. He would have to fly to Glasgow tomorrow and stay overnight. He hit the return key to purchase the flight and proceed to checkout.

  When he looked up again over the top of his screen, Marsaili had gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The arrivals hall was very nearly deserted by the time Fin passed through customs and immigration. The tour groups had all vanished in the direction of waiting coaches, and only a handful of independent travellers ventured through the barriers into the big, dark, empty hall. The midday sun was high, and very little light from it fell directly through the tall glass walls that stretched all along one side. Outside it was very bright, overexposed, fierce sunlight bleaching colour out of cars and buildings.

  Mairead stood, a solitary figure, in the middle of a large floor that darkly reflected overhead lights. Fin slung his bag on to one shoulder and walked across the concourse to meet her. There was no smile of greeting, no warmth in her eyes. ‘I’m parked on the roof,’ she said, and turned on her heels towards the door.

  Outside, the heat came as something of a shock after the Hebridean autumn, and Fin quickly discarded his jacket, wishing he had brought lighter clothing.

  Mairead was driving an automatic dusty-blue Nissan X-Trail. It wasn’t a rental, and Fin wondered if it were hers, or whether it belonged to the band, a runaround for when they were down recording their latest set of songs.

  It was a fine day. The palest of blue skies, devoid of clouds, stretched as far as the eye could see. They turned from the A7 on to the coastal toll road, and Fin saw the Mediterranean sparkling below them on their left, a simmering blue only slightly darker than the sky, lines of fast-moving cars in front of them heading south and west, windscreens reflecting sunlight in intermittent flashes.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Fin glanced across at Mairead, who sat tight-lipped behind the wheel, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  ‘The villa,’ is all she said.

  Fin contained his curiosity, and took advantage of their elevated position on the road to look across the parched Spanish coastal plain through which the six lanes of motorway cut a swathe. Away to their right, the purple slopes of the Sierra Bermeja rose up to rugged heights, sharply delineated against the sky like paper cut-outs. Clusters of white buildings nestled in valleys and hilltops, ancient villages that had survived since the time of the Moors. All in stark contrast with the thousands of unfinished apartments in high-rise developments that lined the highway on either side, long since abandoned by contractors whose money had dried up in the recession. Cranes had been removed when construction had stopped, and trees and shrubs were already starting to reclaim the building sites. Those apartments which had been finished lay empty.

  Mairead glanced at him and followed his gaze. ‘They can’t give these away,’ she said. ‘No one wants to be the sole owner in an empty block. Too spooky.’

  They passed under road signs for places Fin had only ever seen in holiday brochures. Marbella. Algeciras. Cadiz. Through two garitas de peaje, where Mairead pulled in to pay their tolls. It was nearly an hour before she turned off the motorway at Estepona, following signs for a place called Casares. The road then swept them up through a huge area of municipal parkland known as Los Pedregales, past a vast electricity-generating power station, and a sprawling recycling plant that pumped its perfume out into the fibrillating heat of the early afternoon.

  They drove by small country restaurants gearing up for the late Spanish lunch — Venta Victoria, Arroyo Hondo — before turning off into a narrow, pitted roadway that began a steep ascent up into the mountains through forests of pine trees and cork oaks.

  Dust billowed out behind them as they pitched and bumped their tortuous way up through the trees, passing occasional gates beyond which driveways wound off to hidden houses caught only in occasional glimpses. It was twenty minutes before the road finally levelled off and the land fell steeply away on their right, tree-lined slopes sweeping down into dry river valleys that snaked their way through the mountains. The sun shone in dazzling silver glitter on the distant ocean, the faint outline of the coast only just discernible through the haze.

  White villas tucked themselves away among the foliage, each isolated in a sea of green and parched brown, forest rising all around. And Fin wondered what would become of them if ever fire were to sweep through these tinder-dry trees.

  ‘That’s our place.’ Mairead pointed down into a ravine, and Fin saw a jumble of roman-tiled red roofs and white walls assembled around a terrace halfway up it, buzzards riding thermals in the sky overhead. Even from here you could tell that it must command the most extraordinary views. And almost as if she read his mind, Mairead said, ‘On a clear day you can see all the way across the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa and the Atlas Mountains.’ Anything further from the featureless peat bogs and storm-lashed coastline of the Isle of Lewis would have been hard to imagine. It seemed extraordinary to Fin that it was here in the heat, and the wild mountain forests of southern Spain, that the Celtic music spawned by his homeland was written and record
ed, and sung in Mairead’s clear, beautiful Gaelic.

  At the top of a rise in the road, Mairead suddenly turned right, and the X-Trail tipped nose-first down into a steep concrete drive between high, white-painted gateposts, the name of the villa cemented on one of them in blue and white tiles. Finca Solas.

  They descended into a flat, walled parking area, and Mairead turned the vehicle to point back up the drive before switching off the ignition. When he stepped down on to the concrete, Fin felt a blast of heat that was almost shocking after the chill of the air conditioning.

  Below the wall to their right, beyond a screen of trees, a turquoise-blue swimming pool lay shimmering invitingly in the afternoon sun. Fin followed Mairead down steps and through a garden of prickly pear cactus and wild aloe vera. They passed beneath an archway that led to a cool, covered passageway which opened out at its far end on to a terracotta-tiled terrace of fountains and fish-ponds.

  At the far end of the terrace, beneath the shade of a fleshy-leaved fig tree, a man sat at a table, his back to them, looking out over the view towards the sea. There was a tall glass of something red at his right hand, ice not yet melted, condensation gathering on the table beneath it. A MacBook laptop was open in front of him, and he was tapping at the keyboard.

  He turned as he heard the gate opening on to the terrace, a man in his middle years, quite bald on the top of his head, but with hair growing in thick, luxuriant curls all around the sides and back. Once fair, perhaps, it was already turning grey. He carried more weight than was good for him, nutbrown legs in three-quarter-length shorts and open sandals, a white shirt hanging open over the bulge of a large, tanned, beer gut. His brown face cracked into an all-too-familiar smile, and he extended a still-slender hand. He looked to be in rude health for a man they had buried twice.

  ‘Hello Fin,’ Roddy said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  They left Mairead sitting in the dappled shade provided by rush matting stretched across a frame above the table. She had been subdued, with clouded eyes, and said very little. Perhaps she had realized that this first crack in their seventeen-year silence could only mark the beginning of the end.

  Roddy, by contrast, was larger than life, animated in the extreme. Fin followed the ghost of his one-time friend up steps to another level, and they crossed an east-facing terrace towards a large outbuilding at the back of the villa.

  ‘We have six bedrooms in the house,’ Roddy said. ‘Enough to accommodate the whole band when they come to rehearse and record. Of course, Strings is here more often than the others. We still write together.’ He pushed open a heavy soundproofed door and flicked a switch to flood the studio control room with light, rows of knobs and switches, faders and dials, peppering the shallow angle of an enormous mixing desk. Through a window that ran the length of one wall, shadows reached back into the studio itself, which was littered with sound baffles and hanging mikes. A drum kit was permanently mounted in its own soundproofed booth, the carpet-tiled floor around it a Sargasso Sea of twisted cables.

  ‘We’re on our twelfth CD now. Most of it’s already recorded. I’m just working on the mix.’ He leaned across the desk and pressed a switch. The room filled with the beautiful sound of Amran. Synthesizer, violin, the haunting swoop of a Celtic flute, all overlaying the repetitive beat of rock drums and bass, and the sad, pure voice of Mairead singing so painfully of Hebridean longing for a lost past. Roddy switched it off abruptly, and the room resounded with the resultant silence. His eyes were moist. ‘It’s the only way I can go home,’ he said. ‘In my music.’ And then the moment passed and he smiled his genuine affection. ‘It’s great to see you again, Fin, it really is.’

  But Fin was ambivalent. From the moment he had seen the post-mortem report he had suspected that Roddy might still be alive. But to be confronted with him in this way, in the flesh, after mourning him twice, and believing him dead for seventeen years, was more than faintly surreal. He said, ‘I don’t know how I feel, Roddy, about seeing you again. Confused, that’s for sure. And right now pretty angry.’

  Roddy laughed and took his arm to steer him back out into the sunshine. ‘Don’t be angry with me, Fin. None of this is my fault. Not really.’ They crossed the terrace and looked out over the view. Fin was aware of Mairead’s upturned face watching them from the terrace below. ‘The band will go off on a US tour next year to promote the new CD. But, of course, I won’t be with them. Even though I still write the songs with Strings, and it’s me you hear on the recordings, I’ve never once been able to play live with Amran since that awful night seventeen years ago. You have no idea how frustrating that is.’

  He turned to look Fin in the eye, and waved a hand vaguely towards the villa.

  ‘Look around you, Fin. It’s paradise, this place. Sunshine all year round. A view to die for. Africa just across the water. They come every seven years to strip the cork off the trees. They’ve done it twice since I’ve been here. You might think I’d be happy. But it feels like a fucking prison.’

  He turned and gazed sightlessly towards the Strait of Gibraltar, gripping the railing in front of him. Fin saw the white-knuckled tension in his hands. ‘You have no idea what I’d give to be standing right now on Traigh Uige, looking across the mountains to Harris. Feeling the wind in my face. Aye, and the rain. I’d trade all this for just five minutes of home any day.’

  He released his tension, and the railing, and relaxed again into a smile.

  ‘But what am I thinking about? Terrible host, I am. Never even offered you a drink.’

  Fin stared out over the tops of trees in the valley below. To his left, where the forest had been cut back, the shaved peaks of the Sierra Bermeja scraped the sky. Steps led down into a steeply sloped garden of gnarled trees and dusty shrubs, fig and olive, cactus and oleander. All the grasses and wild flowers, this late in the season, were parched and burned brown. He turned, leaning against the rail, to look back at the house with its roofs sloping at odd angles, a covered balcony high up behind a row of arches, bedrooms opening off it through French windows. A Buddha sat crosslegged below a covered fish-pond, and Mairead perched on the edge of a chair at the table, smoking. She had not addressed a word to Fin since their arrival.

  Roddy emerged through an arched doorway from the kitchen carrying a tray of drinks, tall glasses of red, fizzing liquid and chattering ice cubes. ‘Come and get it.’

  Fin pushed himself off the railing and crossed the terrace to climb the two steps to the eating area. He drew up a chair and sat opposite Mairead in the shade as Roddy distributed their drinks and a wooden dish of macadamia nuts.

  ‘I’ll make us something to eat in a while,’ he said. ‘Paella okay?’ He grinned. ‘Very Spanish, but they probably ship the prawns down from Stornoway.’ He raised his glass. ‘Slainte.’

  It was odd to hear Gaelic spoken in this place, so many miles from home, in a climate and culture so alien to its origins.

  Roddy took a long pull at his drink. ‘Refreshing, eh? Tinto de verano, the Spanish call it. Literally, wine of summer. Red wine mixed with a sweet fizzy lemon drink. I love it.’ He took another sip. ‘They tell me there’s a distillery at Uig now. Abhainn Dearg. Red River whisky. Any good?’

  Fin nodded. ‘It’s a fine whisky.’ He took a small sip of his tinto de verano and fixed Roddy in his gaze. ‘Who killed Whistler, Roddy?’

  It was as if someone had thrown a switch, and a light went out somewhere behind Roddy’s eyes. His face darkened. ‘I don’t know, Fin. But I’d like to meet him, because he wouldn’t be breathing for long.’

  Fin said, ‘Seems to me there was never any love lost between you and Whistler.’ He glanced at Mairead who sat staring sullenly into her drink. ‘Over the affections of a certain young woman.’ She threw him a dark glance.

  But Roddy just shook his head. ‘Sure. We had our differences over the years, me and Whistler.’ He chuckled sadly. ‘Whistler fell out with everyone at one time or another.’ He raised
his eyes to meet Fin’s. ‘But I always considered him to be one of my best and oldest friends. He was like a big fucking dog, Fin. He might bite you from time to time, but he never stopped loving you.’ And Fin thought he had never heard Whistler so well summed up in so few words. Roddy laid his glass on the table and turned it around with his fingertips, gazing thoughtfully into its fizzing redness. ‘I owed him more than most people will ever know.’

  ‘In relation to. . your “death”?’ Fin said.

  Roddy nodded without looking up.

  ‘Tell me.’

  Roddy glanced at Mairead, absorbing but ignoring her disapproval. He drew a long breath. ‘I suppose I should start at the beginning.’

  ‘Well, since we already know how it ends,’ Fin said, ‘maybe that would be a good idea.’

  Roddy leaned back in his chair and reached into his shirt pocket for a pack of cigars. He drew one out and lit it, and puffed on it reflectively for some moments. Blue smoke rose around his head in gently curling strands in the still heat of the afternoon. ‘You probably remember a girlfriend I had during our second year in Glasgow. Caitlin. She was the one whose parents had the big fuck-off house with the swimming pool in Pollokshields.’

  Fin nodded. He remembered her well. The blonde girl who had been skinny-dipping with Roddy in the swimming pool the night Fin and Mairead first got together.

  ‘And her big fucking brother, Jimbo.’ Roddy almost spat out his name. ‘Smug bastard with a face you’d never get tired of kicking.’

  Fin was taken aback by Roddy’s ferocity. He remembered Jimbo, strutting about his parents’ house as if he owned it. A spoiled little rich kid.

  It was almost as if Roddy had to force himself to relax to continue his story. He tipped his head back and blew smoke towards the rush matting above them, chinks of sunlight falling through it to sprinkle light like fairy dust across the table. ‘My own fault, really, I suppose. I was head over heels in love with Caitlin. Obsessed.’ He glanced at Mairead, embarrassed it seemed to confess it in her presence. ‘And I thought she felt the same way about me.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘Though maybe I always knew there was an element of the star-fucker about her.’ He added, unnecessarily, ‘We were just starting to make it big, then.’