by Peter May
“Yes, sir.”
Neither Peter nor Catherine had opened their mouths during the entire interview. Mr. Anderson looked at them now. “Does either of you have anything to add?”
“No, sir.”
It was half an hour after we had been ushered from the room that the police officers finally left, and Mr. Anderson’s voice could be heard booming along the corridor. “Damned Catholics! I want them out of here.”
And finally Catherine’s prediction came true. The priest arrived to take us away the very next morning.
Seventeen
Fin watched the old man carefully. Sunlight caught the silver bristles on his face and on the loose flesh of his neck, and they stood out sharp against his pale, leathery skin. His eyes, by contrast, were almost opaque, obscured by memories he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, share. He had been quiet for a long time, and the tears had dried in salty tracks on his cheeks. His knees were pulled up to his chest, and he sat hugging them, staring out to sea with eyes that saw things Fin could not.
Fin lifted the photograph from the travelling rug, where Tormod had let it fall, and slipped it back into his bag. He took Tormod by the elbow to try to encourage him gently to his feet.
“Come on, Mr. Macdonald, let’s take a walk along the water’s edge.”
His voice seemed to wake the old man from his reverie, and Tormod turned a look of surprise towards Fin, as if noticing him for the first time. “He didn’t do it,” he said, resisting Fin’s attempt to get him to stand.
“Who didn’t do what, Mr. Macdonald?”
But Tormod just shook his head. “Maybe he wasn’t the full shilling, but he learned the Gaelic a lot faster than I did.”
Fin frowned, his thoughts tossed around in a sea of confusion. On the islands, you grew up speaking Gaelic. In Tormod’s day, you wouldn’t have spoken English until you went to school. “You mean, he learned the English faster?” He had no idea who he was.
Tormod shook his head vigorously. “No, the Gaelic. Took to it like a native.”
“Charlie?”
Tormod grinned, shaking his head at Fin’s stupidity. “No, no, no. It would be the Italian he spoke.” He put out a hand for Fin to help him to his feet now and stood up into the wind. “Let’s get our feet wet, just like we always used to at Charlie’s beach.” He looked at Fin’s boots. “Come on, lad, get those off you.” He bent forward and began rolling up his trouser legs.
Fin kicked off his boots and pulled his socks from his feet, hoisting his trouser legs to his knees as he stood up, and the two men walked arm in arm across soft, deep sand, to where the outgoing tide had left it compacted and wet. The wind blew Tormod’s coat around his legs and filled Fin’s jacket. It was strong in their faces, and soft, laced with spray, blown uninterrupted across three thousand miles of Atlantic ocean.
The first foaming water broke over their feet, racing up across the slope of the sand, shockingly cold, and old Tormod laughed, exhilarated, lifting his feet quickly to step away as it receded. His cap blew off, and by some miracle Fin caught it, seeing it lift from his forehead in the moment before the wind whipped it away. Tormod laughed again, like a child, as if it were a game. He wanted to put it back on his head, but Fin folded it into his coat pocket so that they wouldn’t lose it.
Fin, too, enjoyed the feel of the icy water washing over his feet, and he led them back into the last tame surge of a once towering ocean as it splashed around their ankles and calves. Both of them laughed and cried out at the shock of it.
Tormod seemed invigorated, free, at least for these few moments, of the chains of dementia that shackled his mind, and diminished his life. Happy, as in childhood, to delight in the simplest of pleasures.
They walked in and out of the brine for four or five hundred yards, towards the cluster of shining black rocks at the far end of the beach where the water broke in frothing white fury. The sound of the wind and the sea filled their ears, drowning out everything else. Pain, memory, sadness. Until finally Fin stopped and turned them around for the walk back.
They had only gone a few feet when he slipped his hand in his pocket to bring out the Saint Christopher medal on its silver chain that Marsaili’s mother had given him a few hours earlier. He passed it to Tormod. “Do you remember this, Mr. Macdonald?” He had to shout above the elemental roar.
Tormod seemed surprised to see it. He stopped and took it from Fin, gazing at it lying in the palm of his hand before making a fist to close around it. Fin was shocked to see sudden tears following the tracks of their predecessors. “She gave it to me,” he said, his voice almost inaudible above the din that crashed around them.
“Who?”
“Ceit.”
Fin thought for a moment. Was Ceit the cause of his unreasonable hatred of Catholics. “And she was a Catholic?”
Tormod looked at him as if he were insane. “Of course. We all were.” He started walking briskly along the line of the outgoing tide, wading through the water as it rushed up the sand, oblivious to it splashing around his legs and soaking his rolled-up trousers. Fin was taken by surprise and it took him several moments to catch him up. This made no sense.
“You were a Catholic?”
Tormod flicked him a dismissive look. “Mass every Sunday in the big church on the hill.”
“At Seilebost?”
“The church the fishermen built. The one with the boat inside it.”
“There was a boat in the church?”
“Beneath the altar.” Tormod stopped as suddenly as he had started, standing ankle-deep in the water that broke against them, and gazed out at the horizon where the dark smudge of a distant tanker broke the line between sea and sky. “You could see Charlie’s beach from up there. Beyond the cemetery. Like a line of silver painted along the shore between the purple of the machair and the turquoise of the sea.” He turned and looked at Fin. “And all the dead in between wanting you to stop on the way. Some human company in the world beyond the grave.”
He turned away again, and before Fin could stop him he had hurled the Saint Christopher medal into the rush of incoming water. It vanished into the swirl of sand and foam, to be sucked out by the undertow and laid to rest somewhere in the deep. Lost for ever.
“No need for papish things now,” he said. “The journey’s nearly over.”
Eighteen
Fin took the call from Gunn on his mobile as he left the Dun Eisdean care home. Tormod had been strangely subdued on the drive back from Dalmore and went meekly to his room, where he allowed staff to take off his coat without a word of protest, and lead him to the dining room. Having eaten almost nothing the previous day he had now, it seemed, rediscovered his appetite. And as he wolfed into a plate of spring lamb and boiled potatoes, Fin slipped quietly out into the midday sunshine.
He parked his car now at the top of Church Street and walked down to where Gunn was waiting for him on the steps of the police station. The wind was blustery and cooler here on the east coast, rippling the water in the bay, rustling the first leaves in the trees on the far side of it below the dark decay of Lews Castle. The two men fell in step on the walk down to Bayhead, and saw the fishing boats at high tide towering above the quays. Nets and creels and empty fish boxes lay strewn across the cobbles, and the good people of Stornoway leaned into the wind as they made their way towards the centre of town.
As they passed a cafe with picture windows looking out on to the boats at dock, Gunn said, “Isn’t that young Fionnlagh?”
Fin turned, and through the shadow of his own reflection he saw Fionnlagh and Donna together at a table on the other side of the glass. A carrycot sat on the floor between them, and Fionnlagh held his baby daughter in his arms, gazing with unglazed love into her tiny, round blue eyes. She gazed back adoringly at her father, impossibly small fingers grasping his thumb. Just as Robbie had once held Fin’s.
Fin had only a moment to feel the regrets of a lifetime press down on him before Donna turned and saw him. Her face flushed with
the first colour he had ever seen in it, and she turned away, speaking quickly to Fionnlagh. The boy looked up, startled. And Fin saw something strange in his eyes. Guilt? Fear? It was impossible to tell, evaporating in a moment to be replaced by a bashful smile. He nodded at Fin, who nodded back. An awkward moment, a silent exchange, the glass of the window a much easier barrier to breach than all the things left unsaid between them.
“You want to go in?” Gunn said.
Fin shook his head. “No.” He gave the young couple a small half-wave, and turned away along Bayhead, making Gunn scurry to catch him up. He wondered only fleetingly why Fionnlagh wasn’t at school.
They found a dark corner in The Hebridean, and Gunn ordered them a couple of half-pints of heavy. When he sat down again with their glasses, he drew an A4 manila envelope from inside his anorak and slipped it across the table. “You never got this from me.”
Fin slid it into his bag. “Got what?”
Gunn grinned and they sipped in silence at their beers for a while. Then Gunn laid his glass carefully down on the beer mat in front of him and said, “I got a call about half an hour ago. The Northern Constabulary are sending a DCI from Inverness to open the murder investigation.”
Fin inclined his head. “As expected.”
“He probably won’t be here for another week or so. It seems the powers that be don’t think there’s much urgency in the solving of a fifty-odd-year-old murder.” He lifted his glass for another sip, then replaced it exactly on the ring it had left on the mat. “When he comes, I’ll not be able to confide in you any more, Mr. Macleod. Which is a shame. Because I know you were a good cop. But the fact that you are no longer in the force is more likely to work against you than for you. I’ve no doubt you’ll be told to keep your nose out of things.”
Fin smiled. “No doubt.” He took a sip from his own glass. “Where’s this leading, George?”
“Well, Mr. Macleod, it seems to me we have a wee period of grace. And maybe it would be an idea to make hay while the sun shines.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Well, sir, it’s in my mind to go down to Harris in the morning, to Seilebost, to check up on old Tormod Macdonald’s family, and see if I can come up with any idea of who it was we took out of the peat. It would be nice to show these mainlanders that we’re not all hick cops out here in the islands.”
“And?”
“My motor’s been playing up something terrible this last wee while. At least, that’s the official story. I thought maybe you might like to give me a lift.”
“Oh, did you?”
“Aye.” Gunn took a longer draught of beer this time. “What do you think?”
Fin shrugged. “I think Marsaili’s quite anxious for me to get to the bottom of all this.”
“Aye, well, that would make sense. You being a former polis and all.” He lifted his glass to his lips again, but hesitated. “Is there . . . a relationship between you two these days?”
Fin shook his head, avoiding Gunn’s eye. “A lot of history, George. But no relationship.” He drained his glass. “What time would you like to leave?”
As he drove back up the west coast, from Barvas through Siader and Dell, he watched the dark legions of yet another weather front assembling out on the horizon. In his rearview mirror he could still see the sun slanting across the purple-hued mountains of Harris to the south. The sky to the north remained clear, each successive village standing hard in silhouette against the light, old whitehouses, and the architecturally challenged standard homes issued in the twentieth century by the former Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. The DAF houses, as they were called, with their harled walls and steeply pitched slate roofs and tall dormers. Hopelessly inadequate, by modern standards, to withstand the ravages of the island climate.
Sun slanting across the bog to the east spun gold in the dead grass, and he saw huddled groups of villagers gathered among the trenches, wielding the long-handled tarasgeir to take advantage of the dry afternoon to cut and stack peat.
The dark shadow of the bleak and forbidding church at Cross signalled that he was nearly home.
Home? Was this really his home now, he wondered. This wind-ravaged corner of the earth where warring factions of an unforgiving Protestant religion dominated life. Where men and women struggled all their lives to make a living from the land, or the sea, turning in times of unemployment to the industries that came, and went again when subsidies ran out, leaving the rusting detritus of failure in their wake.
It seemed, if anything, more depressed than it had in his youth, entering again a period of decline after a brief renaissance fuelled by politicians courting votes by the spending of millions on a dying language.
But if here wasn’t home, where was? Where else on God’s earth did he feel such an affinity with the land, the elements, the people? And he found himself regretting that he had never brought Robbie here, to the land of his forefathers.
There was no one at Marsaili’s bungalow when he stopped there, and he drove on up past his parents’ croft, over the ridge, and saw the whole northern coastline stretch out ahead of him. He took a left on the road that ran down to the old Crobost harbour, where a steep concrete slipway below the winch house led to a tiny quay in the shadow of the cliffs. Coiled rope and orange buoys lay draped over piles of rusted chain. Creels for crab and lobster stood piled up against the wall. Tiny fishing dinghies lay canted at odd angles, secured to loops of rusted iron. Among them, still, the peeling remains of the boat his father had once restored, and painted purple like the house, and named after his mother. All these years later, the traces of lost lives remained.
His own among them. Sad and bittersweet memories lingered still within the decaying walls of the old whitehouse that sat up on the hill overlooking the harbour. The house where he had done most of his growing up, tolerated by an aunt who had reluctantly taken on the responsibility of her dead sister’s orphan. A house empty of warmth or love.
There was still glass in the windows, and the doors were locked. But once-white walls ran black with damp, and door and window frames were rusted or rotten. Below it, on the stretch of grass along the clifftops, the deserted stone house where he had played forlornly at happy families as a boy still stood as it had then, two gable ends, two walls. No roof. No doors. No windows. Whoever had once called it home had built it for its view, but abandoned it long ago to the cruel arctic gales that assaulted this coast in winter. Long, hard winters that he remembered well.
A grassy path led down to a shingle beach. The black rocks around the cliffs had turned orange, crusted with the tiny shells of long-dead sea creatures, stained by the seaweed that rotted all along the shore. On the far headland stood three solitary cairns that had been there for as long as Fin could remember.
Nothing changed really, except for the people who came and went and left their evanescent traces.
He heard the rumbling of a car’s engine above the roar of the wind, and turned to see Marsaili pulling in at the side of the road in Artair’s old Astra. She got out and slammed the door, thrust hands deep into her jacket pockets, and walked slowly along the path to join him. They stood in a comfortable silence for some moments, looking at the DAF houses strung out along the cliffs on the west side of the bay, before she turned to look at the abandoned house above the harbour.
“Why don’t you restore your aunt’s house? It’s in much better condition than your parents’ place.”
“Because I don’t own it.” Fin cast sad eyes over the neglected building. “She left it to some animal charity. Typical of her, really. They couldn’t sell it, so they just left it to rot.” He turned his gaze back out over the ocean. “Anyway, I wouldn’t set foot in it again, even if it was mine.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s haunted, Marsaili.” He turned to see her frowning.
“Haunted?”
“By the young Fin, and all his unhappiness. The night before my aunt’s funeral was the las
t time I slept in the place. And I swore I never would again.”
She raised a hand to touch his cheek with feather-light fingertips. “The young Fin,” she said. “I remember him. I loved him from the first moment I set eyes on him. And never forgave him for breaking my heart.”
He met her eye, Gunn’s question still ringing in his ears. The wind pulled her hair back from her face in long silken strands, flying out behind her like a flag of freedom. It coloured her skin pink, fine features hardened a little by time and pain, but still strong, attractive. The little girl of his childhood, the burgeoning woman of his adolescence, both still there in this cynical, funny, intelligent woman he had hurt so carelessly. But you could never go back.
“I showed your dad a photograph of the man they took from the bog,” he said. “I’m pretty certain he recognized him.”
She took her hand away, as if from an electric shock. “So it’s true.”
“Seems like it.”
“I kept hoping they had made a mistake. Mixed up the DNA samples or something. Your parents are the rock you build your life on. It’s a bit of a shock to find that rock is just an illusion.”
“I showed him the Saint Christopher’s medal and he threw it in the sea.” Her consternation was apparent in the creasing of her eyes. “He said someone called Ceit had given it to him, and that they were all Catholics.”
Now disbelief pushed her eyebrows up on her forehead. “He’s demented, Fin. Literally. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
Fin shrugged, not so sure. But he kept his misgivings to himself. He said, “George Gunn is going down to Harris tomorrow to check out your dad’s family. He said I could go along. Should I?”
She nodded. “Yes.” Then added quickly, “But only if you want to, Fin. If you feel you can spare the time. I have to go back to Glasgow for a few days. Exams to sit. Although, God knows, I’m hardly in the right frame of mind for it.” She hesitated. “I’d appreciate it if you would keep an eye on Fionnlagh for me.”