by Peter May
But where were they? Where in God’s name had these people taken them?
He ran back to the kitchen and looked around in a frenzy. There were knives in a block on the worktop, but he didn’t see how he could access them to cut the wrist bindings behind his back. He had to get help.
With difficulty, he managed to open the kitchen door, his back to it, fingers fumbling for the latch. And then he was out. Into the rain. Running through the long grass up the slope towards the road. As he reached the tarmac he stumbled and fell, landing heavily, and grazing his cheek on the metalled surface. The rain slapped his face as he staggered back to his feet and ran through it, into the teeth of the wind, down the road to where the turn-off led up to the church and the manse.
There was not a soul around anywhere. No one in their right mind would venture out in this unless they absolutely had to.
He felt his strength ebbing as he ran up the hill to the car park, picking his precarious way across the cattle grid rather than trying to negotiate the gate, then sprinting towards the steps leading to the manse. He took them two at a time. When he reached the front door he realized he could neither ring the bell nor knock on it. So he started kicking at it and shouting, tears and blood almost blinding him.
Until the door flew open, and Donald Murray stood there, staring at him in utter consternation. It took only a moment for that consternation to turn to fear, and Fionnlagh saw the colour drain from his face.
Thirty-seven
They had left the bad weather far behind, wind and rain driving down with them from the north-west, foundering finally on the mountains of North Uist. The further south they had come then, the more it had softened, rain retreating, the wind sinking into the ocean, the yellow sunlight of the late afternoon sending long shadows across the land.
Only when they stopped at a tea-room in Benbecula did Fin realize that his mobile phone was dead. Nights spent in hotel rooms and his tent had meant that it was several days since he had last charged it. When they got back to the car, he plugged it into the cigarette lighter and dropped it in the cup holder between the seats. An hour later, as they rounded the headland at East Kilbride, they saw the little jetty at Ludagh, and the island of Eriskay drenched in sunlight across the water.
It was a light wind that ruffled the clear blue surface of the Sound as they drove across the straight stretch of causeway to where it curved around and climbed gently between rising slopes. At the road end, Fin turned down towards the tiny bay and harbour at Haunn.
He watched Tormod in the rearview mirror as the old man gazed from the window, no sign of recognition in dull eyes. It had been a tiring drive down the spine of the long island. With the ferry crossing and stops for lunch and coffee, it had taken nearly five hours. The old man was weary and drowsy-eyed.
Where the single-track road curled around the head of the bay, Fin turned off on the gravelled drive that led up to the big white house on the hill. His car rattled over the cattle grid, and he drew it in beside the pink Mercedes. He and Marsaili helped Tormod out of the back seat. He had stiffened up during the long journey, and found it hard to move until he was out on the path and had straightened up to look around, feeling the cool breeze in his face, and breathing in the salt air. He seemed brighter now. His eyes clearer, but still without recognition as he gazed around the hillside and down towards the harbour.
“Where are we?” he said.
“Back where it all began, Mr. Macdonald.” Fin glanced at Marsaili. But her eyes were fixed anxiously on her father. “Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
They climbed the steps to the deck and the front door, and as Fin pressed the bell they heard the chimes of “Scotland the Brave” sound somewhere deep inside the house. After a short wait, the door opened wide, and Morag stood there, a gin and a cigarette in one hand, Dino barking around her ankles. She took in the three visitors standing on her doorstep, before a look of resignation crossed her face like a shadow. She said to Fin, “I had a funny feeling you’d be back.”
“Hello, Ceit,” he said.
A strange intensity burned for a moment in her dark eyes. “Long time since anyone’s called me that, a ghràidh.”
“John McBride might have been one of the last.” Fin turned his head towards Tormod, and Ceit’s mouth fell open as she looked at him.
“Oh, my God.” She caught her breath. “Johnny?”
He looked at her blankly.
Fin said, “He has dementia, Ceit. And very little awareness of anything around him.”
Ceit reached across more than half a century to touch a love lost irrevocably on a stormy spring night in another life, and her fingers lightly brushed his cheek. He looked at her curiously, as if to ask, Why are you touching me? But there was no recognition. She withdrew her hand and looked at Marsaili.
“I’m his daughter,” Marsaili said.
Ceit laid her drink and her cigarette on the hall table and took Marsaili’s hand in both of hers. “Oh, a ghràidh, you might have been mine, too, if things had turned out just a little different.” She looked back towards Tormod. “I’ve spent a lifetime wondering what happened to poor Johnny.”
Fin said, “Or Tormod Macdonald, as you would have known him last.” He paused. “Did you steal the birth certificate?”
She flashed him a look. “You’d better come in.” She let go of Marsaili’s hand and lifted her gin and her cigarette, and they followed her and Dino through to the sitting room with its panoramic views across the hillside and the bay. “How did you know I was Ceit?”
Fin reached into his bag and drew out Tormod’s book of cuttings. He opened it up on the table for her to take a look. He heard her sharp intake of breath as she realized that they were all media stories about her. Torn or cut from newspapers or magazines over more than twenty years, ever since she had achieved celebrity status through her part in The Street. Dozens of photographs, thousands of words. “You might not have known what became of Tormod, Ceit. But he certainly knew what had become of you.”
Tormod took a step towards the table and looked down at them.
Fin said, “Do you remember these, Mr. Macdonald? Do you remember cutting them out and sticking them into this book? Cuttings about the actress Morag McEwan.”
The old man stared at them for a long time. A word seemed to form several times on his lips before finally he spoke. “Ceit,” he said. And he looked up at Morag. “Are you Ceit?”
It was clear that she couldn’t find her voice, and simply nodded.
Tormod smiled. “Hello, Ceit. I haven’t seen you for a long time.”
Silent tears ran down her face. “No, Johnny, you haven’t.” She seemed on the verge of losing control and took a quick gulp of gin before moving quickly behind the bar. “Can I get anyone something to drink?”
“No thanks,” Marsaili said.
Fin said, “You haven’t told us about the birth certificate yet.”
She refilled her own glass with a trembling hand and lit another cigarette. She took a stiff drink and a long pull on her cigarette before finding her words. “Johnny and I were in love,” she said, and she looked at the old man standing now in her living room. “We used to meet at night down by the old jetty, then go over the hill to Charlie’s beach. There was an old ruin there, with a view over the sea. It’s where we used to make love.” She glanced self-consciously at Marsaili. “Anyway, we talked often about running off together. Of course, he would never have gone without Peter. He would never go anywhere without Peter. He’d promised their mother, you see, on her deathbed, that he would look after his little brother. He’d had some kind of accident. A head injury. Wasn’t all there.”
She put her glass down on the bar and held on to it, as if she thought she might fall over if she let go. Then she looked again at Tormod.
“I’d have gone to the ends of the earth with you, Johnny,” she said. When Tormod returned a blank stare she looked back to Fin. “The widow O’Henley used to take me with her wh
en she went up to stay with her cousin Peggy on Harris during the holidays. Easter, summer, Christmas. And she took me to the funeral there when Peggy’s boy was drowned in the bay. I’d met him a few times. He was a nice lad. Anyway, the house was full of relatives, and I slept on the floor of his room. Couldn’t sleep at all that night. And someone, maybe his parents, had laid out his birth certificate on the dresser. I decided that with all the business of the funeral no one would miss it immediately. And when they did, they would never connect it with me.”
“But why did you take it?” Marsaili asked.
“If we were going to run away together, me and Johnny, I thought maybe he would need a new identity. There’s not much you can do without a birth certificate.” She took a long reflective draw on her cigarette. “I never knew, when I took it, the circumstances in which it would be needed. Certainly not in the way I’d intended.” She smiled then. A tiny smile tinged with bitterness and irony. “As it turned out, it was far easier for me to change my own name. Just register a new one with Equity and I was no longer Ceit anything. I was Morag McEwan, actress. And I could play any part I wanted, on or off the stage. No one would ever know I was just some poor abandoned orphan girl, shipped out to the islands to be a widow’s slave.”
A silence laden with unasked questions and unspoken answers settled on the room. It was Tormod who broke it. “Can we go home now?” he said.
“In a while, Dad.”
Fin looked at Ceit. “Peter was murdered on Charlie’s beach, wasn’t he?”
Ceit pulled in her lower lip and bit on it as she nodded.
“Then I think it’s time we all knew the truth about what happened.”
“He made me promise never to tell a soul. And I never have.”
“It was a long time ago now, Ceit. If he could tell us himself, I’m sure he would. But Peter’s been found. Dug out of a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis. There’s going to be a murder investigation. So it’s important we know.” He hesitated. “It wasn’t Johnny was it?”
“Oh God, no!” Ceit seemed startled by the idea. “He would have died himself before touching a hair on that boy’s head.”
“Then who did?”
Ceit took several long moments to think about it, then stubbed out her cigarette. “Better if I take you over to Charlie’s beach and tell you there. Easier for you to picture it.”
Marsaili pulled her father’s cap back on his head, and they followed Morag out into the hall, where she lifted a jacket from the coat stand. She stooped to scoop Dino up into her arms. “We can all go in the Merc.”
Fin ducked quickly into his car to retrieve his mobile. It seemed to have stopped charging, and he turned it on. His screen showed that there were four messages. But he could listen to them later. He slammed the door shut and ran across the gravel to the waiting pink Mercedes.
The hood was down as Ceit accelerated up over the hill, Dino draped across her right arm, the soft air of this Hebridean spring evening blowing warm all around them. Tormod laughed with the exhilaration of it, holding his hat firmly on his head, and Dino barked by way of reply. Fin wondered if the church on the hill, or the primary school, or the old cemetery, would stir any memories somewhere in the mist that was Tormod’s mind, but he seemed oblivious to his surroundings.
Ceit pulled up on a stretch of road overlooking Charlie’s beach, immediately above an old ruined crofthouse set on the bank below.
“Here we are,” she said. They all got out of the car and the little group picked its way carefully down through the grass to the ruin. The wind had stiffened a little, but was still soft. The sun was dipping towards the western horizon, spilling liquid copper across a simmering sea.
“It was just like this that night,” Ceit said. “Or, at least, it had been earlier. By the time I got here it was almost dark, and there were storm clouds gathering out there beyond Lingeigh and Fuideigh. I knew it was just a matter of time before it would sweep in across the bay. But it was still douce, then, like the calm before the storm.”
She leaned against the remaining wall at the gable end to steady herself and watch as Dino went scampering crazily across the beach, kicking up sand behind him.
“Like I said, at first we used to meet at the jetty at Haunn before crossing the hill together. But it was risky, and after a couple of times of nearly being caught we decided to meet up here instead, making our separate ways over the hill.”
Dino was running in and out of the foam washing in with the tide, barking at the sunset.
“I was late that night. The widow O’Henley hadn’t been well, and took much longer than usual to get off to sleep. So I was in a rush, and breathless when I got here. And disappointed when there was no sign of Johnny.” She paused, lost in momentary reflection. “That’s when I heard the voices coming from down below on the beach. I could hear them even above the beat of the sea, and the wind in the grass. And something in those voices put me on my guard straight away. I crouched down here behind the wall and looked across the sand.”
Fin watched her face carefully. He could see from her eyes that she was there, crouched among the stone and the grass, looking down on the scene unfolding below her on the beach.
“I could see four figures. At first I didn’t know who they were, and couldn’t make any sense of what was going on. And then there was a parting of the sky, and moonlight washed over the beach, and it was all I could do not to cry out.”
She took out a cigarette with fumbling fingers, and cupped her hand around its end to light it. Fin heard the tremor in her breath as she inhaled the smoke. Then his concentration was broken by the sound of his mobile ringing in his pocket. He searched for and found it, and saw that it was a call from Fionnlagh. Whatever it was it could wait. He didn’t want to interrupt the telling of the story. He turned it off and slipped it back in his pocket.
“They were right at the water’s edge,” Ceit said. “Peter was naked. His hands tied behind him, his feet bound at the ankles. Two young men were dragging him along the sand by a length of rope tied around his neck. They stopped every couple of yards, kicking him till he got to his feet again, then pulling him till he fell. Johnny was there, too. And at first I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t doing something about it. Then I saw that his hands were tied in front of him, eighteen inches of rope strung between his ankles to limit his movement. He was limping along after them, imploring them to stop. I could hear his voice rising above the others.”
Fin glanced at Marsaili. Her face was etched with concentration and horror. This was her father that Ceit was describing on the beach below them. Helpless and distressed, and pleading for his brother’s life. And he realized that you can never tell, even when you think you know someone well, what they might have been through in their lives.
Ceit’s voice was low and husky with emotion, and they could barely hear it now above the sea and the wind. “They had gone about thirty or forty yards, laughing and whooping, when suddenly they stopped and made poor Peter kneel there in the wet sand, the incoming tide washing around his legs. And I saw blades flashing in the moonlight.” She turned to look at them, reliving every awful moment of what she had witnessed that night. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I kept thinking that maybe Johnny and me had met up after all, and made love, and that I was lying sleeping in the grass, and that this was all some dreadful nightmare. I saw Johnny trying to stop them, but one of them hit him, and he fell into the water. And then that man started stabbing Peter. From the front, while the other held him from behind. I saw that blade rise and fall, blood dripping from it each time, and I wanted to scream out loud. I had to stuff my hand in my mouth to stop myself.”
She turned away again to look across the sand towards the water, the moment replaying itself in gut-wrenching detail.
“Then the one behind drew his blade right across Peter’s throat. A single slashing movement, and I saw the blood spurt out of him. Johnny was on his knees in the water screaming. And Peter just knelt there,
his head tipped back, until the life had drained out of him. It didn’t take long. And they let him fall, face-first, into the water. Even from here, I could see the froth of the waves turn crimson as they broke. His killers just turned and walked away as if nothing had happened.”
Fin said, “You recognized them?”
Ceit nodded. “The two surviving Kelly brothers from that terrible night on the Dean Bridge in Edinburgh.” She looked at Fin. “You know about it?”
Fin tilted his head. “Not the whole story.”
“The eldest brother fell to his death. Patrick. Danny and Tam blamed Peter. Thought he had pushed him.” She shook her head in despair. “God knows how they found out where we were. But find out, they did. And came looking to avenge their dead brother.” She gazed out across the beach.
Almost as if mirroring the moment, nature turned the sea the colour of blood as the sun sank on the horizon.
“When they had gone, I ran down the beach to where Johnny was kneeling over Peter’s body. The tide was breaking all around them. Blood on the sand, foam still pink. And I knew then what an animal sounds like when it mourns for the dead. Johnny was inconsolable. I have never seen a grown man so distressed. Wouldn’t even let me touch him. I told him I would go for help, and he was on his feet in a moment, grabbing me by the shoulders. I was scared.” She glanced at Tormod. “It wasn’t Johnny’s face I saw looking into mine. He was possessed. Almost unrecognisable. He wanted me to swear on my soul that I would never breathe a word of this to anyone. I couldn’t understand. These boys had just murdered his brother. I was almost hysterical. But he shook me hard, and slapped my face and said they’d made it clear that if he ever told what happened here they would come back for me.”