The Blackhouse l-1

by Peter May

  When he had finished, we both sat breathing hard, trying not to look down, and trying harder not to anticipate the moment when he would release me from his grasp and swing me free of the ledge. For then I would be suspended on the end of this length of frayed green plastic, my life dependent upon his knot and the strength of those above to pull me to safety. In some ways, I think I might have settled then for the fall, the few seconds the drop would take, a swift death on the rocks below putting an end to my pain.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ he said. And even as he spoke I felt the blood running warm down my neck from a head wound somewhere above my ear. He searched for a handkerchief and wiped fresh blood from my face. ‘I’m so sorry, Fin,’ he said. And I wondered why. It was not his fault I had fallen.

  He tipped his head back and shouted up to the others that he was ready, giving three sharp tugs on the rope. There was a responding pull, and all the slack was taken up.

  ‘Good luck,’ Mr Macinnes said. The rope jerked me up and I screamed again from the pain. He let go of me, then, and I swung free of the rock, spinning crazily in the wind, rising in a series of short, painful bursts. Twice I smacked against the cliff face before swinging out again into the updraught from the sea. And all the while, the gannets flew around my head, shrieking their fury, willing me to fall. Die, die, die, they seemed to be calling.

  I was barely conscious by the time they got me on to the ledge I had fallen from, concerned faces crowding around me. And Gigs’s voice. ‘Hell, son, I thought you were a goner.’

  And then someone shouted, and the alarm in his voice was chilling, commanding. I turned my head in time to see Mr Macinnes sailing through the air, arms stretched out like wings, as if he thought he could fly. It seemed to take for ever for him to reach the rocks below, where his flight ended abruptly. For a moment, he lay face down, his arms pushed out to either side, one leg bent at the knee, like a parody of Christ on the cross. And then a huge wave washed over him and dragged him off, white foam turning pink as he vanished for ever into its bottomless green depths.

  There was the strangest hush then, as if all the birds had answered some call for a moment’s silence. Only the wind continued with its mournful whine until rising, even above that, I heard Artair’s howl of anguish.

  TWELVE

  I

  The mountains of Harris rose up before them, piercing low black cloud, and tearing great holes in it to reveal startling shreds of blue, and ragged scraps of white. Fragments of sunshine fell upon the spangling waters of a loch that cut deep into the hills. At the bend, on the curve of the hill, they flashed past an old, abandoned shieling with a view as timeless as the island itself.

  ‘And some people choose to sit in traffic on the M25 for two hours every day,’ George Gunn said. ‘More bloody fool them, eh?’

  Fin nodded his agreement and supposed that he was one of those fools. How many hours of his life had he wasted sitting in traffic jams in Edinburgh? The road to Uig, winding through some of the bleakest, most beautiful country anywhere on earth, was a reminder that life did not have to be like that. But as the mountains approached, wreathed in cloud and mist, blue and purple and darkest green, their brooding quality was infectious, and in the shadow of their sullen splendour Fin found himself sinking back into the depression with which he had awakened.

  On his return to Stornoway he had stood under hot water in the shower in his hotel room for a long time, trying to wash away the memories of the night before. But stubbornly they had stayed with him, and he was haunted by the image of the young Fionnlagh, like the young Fin, troubled and unhappy at the prospect of his trip to An Sgeir. Shocked, too, by the change in his oldest friend. The fresh-faced Artair, once so full of life and mischief, overweight now, foul-mouthed and hard-drinking, trapped in a loveless marriage, with a crippled mother and a son who was not his. And Marsaili. Poor Marsaili, ground down by life and the years, weary and washed out.

  Yet, in those few moments across the kitchen table, he had seen again in her the young Marsaili, still there in the flash of her eyes, in her smile, the touch of her fingers on his face. And that old, sarcastic wit that he had once adored.

  Gunn was aware of his distraction, glancing across the car at his passenger. ‘Penny for them, Mr Macleod.’

  Fin shook himself out of his reverie and forced a smile. ‘I wouldn’t waste my money if I was you, George.’

  They turned into a long gully, cut through solid rock by the relentless force of water over millions of years. A once huge river reduced now to a trickle amongst the boulders. And as they emerged from the shadows, they caught their first glimpse of Uig beach through a cleft in the land. Acres of white sands. They could not even see the ocean.

  Gunn swung away from the shore, following a single-track road over a cattle grid and up into the hills, running alongside a broad, swift-moving shallow river, which tumbled and smashed itself over jagged chunks of stone that rose in steps and clusters from the river bed.

  ‘Do you get much wild salmon in Edinburgh, Mr Macleod?’

  ‘No, we don’t. All we seem to get these days is the farmed stuff.’

  ‘Aye, hellish, isn’t it? All those bloody chemicals and antibiotics, and them making the poor wee things swim in circles. The flesh is that soft you can just poke your fingers right through it.’ He glanced across at the river rushing past them. ‘I suppose that’s why some folk’ll pay so much money to come and catch the real thing.’

  ‘And why others’ll risk so much to poach it.’ Fin avoided looking at Gunn. ‘You had much of the real thing recently, George?’

  Gunn shrugged. ‘Och, you know, a wee taste of it now and then, Mr Macleod. My wife knows someone who can get us the odd bit of it from time to time.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘Aye.’ Gunn sneaked a glance across the car. ‘I never ask, Mr Macleod. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.’

  ‘Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law.’

  ‘Aye, and sometimes the law’s an ass. God didn’t put the world’s finest salmon in our rivers, Mr Macleod, so that some Englishman could come here and charge other Englishman a bloody fortune to take them away.’

  ‘And if you knew someone was poaching them?’

  ‘Oh, I’d arrest them,’ Gunn said without hesitation. ‘That’s my job.’ He kept his eyes on the road ahead. ‘Maybe you’d like to eat with me and my wife tonight, Mr Macleod. I daresay she might be able to dig up a piece of the real thing from somewhere.’

  ‘A tempting offer, George. I might take you up on it. But let’s see how the day pans out first. You never know, they might be putting me on a plane home this afternoon.’

  They came up over a rise in the road, and there below them, nestling on the shore of a tiny scribble of grey loch, was Suainaval Lodge, a cluster of Scots pines growing around it, carefully cultivated in the shelter of the surrounding hills. The lodge was based upon what must once have been an old farmhouse, extended and built out and up. It was an impressive property, freshly painted, a brilliant white that stood out in the gloom of this tenebrous place. A metalled road ran down to a parking area at the side of the house and a landing stage where a cluster of small boats bobbed on the ruffled surface of the loch. There was only one vehicle parked there, a battered-looking Land-Rover. Gunn pulled in beside it and they stepped out on to the tarmac. A big man in blue overalls and a tweed jacket, a matching peaked cap pulled down over his ruddy, round face, came hurrying out of the lodge.

  ‘Can I help you folks?’ To Fin he appeared to be in his forties, but it was hard to tell. His face was weathered and broken-veined. What hair could be seen beneath his cap was gingery, flecked with white.

  ‘Police,’ Gunn said. ‘From Stornoway.’

  The man breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Well, I’m right glad to hear it. I thought you were from the ministry come a day early.’

  ‘What ministry is that?’ Fin asked.

  ‘Agriculture. They come and count the sheep to calculat
e the subsidy. They were at Coinneach Iain’s place yesterday, and I haven’t had a chance to move his beasts over to my place yet.’ He nodded towards a small crofthouse on the opposite shore, a strip of land marked off on the hill above it, white sheep dotted amongst the heather.

  Fin frowned. ‘There are sheep there already.’

  ‘Oh, aye, they’re mine.’

  ‘So why would you want to bring Coinneach Iain’s sheep here?’

  ‘So the man from the ministry’ll think I’ve twice as many as I have, and give me twice the subsidy.’

  ‘You mean the same sheep get counted twice?’

  ‘Aye.’ The man seemed surprised by Fin’s slowness.

  ‘Should you be telling us this?’

  ‘Och, it’s no secret.’ The man was dismissive. ‘Even the fella from the ministry knows. If the sheep are here when he arrives, he’ll count them. It’s the only way any of us gets to make a living. That’s how I’ve had to take this job at the lodge.‘

  ‘What job’s that?’ Gunn asked.

  ‘Caretaker. I look after the place while Sir John’s not here.’

  ‘Sir John who?’ Fin said.

  ‘Wooldridge.’ The caretaker chuckled. ‘He tells me just to call him Johnny. But I don’t like to, him being a Sir and all.’ He thrust out a big hand. ‘I’m Kenny, by the way.’ He grinned. ‘Another Coinneach, so folk just call me Kenny. Big Kenny.’

  Fin withdrew his crushed hand from the iron grip of Kenny’s monstrous paw. ‘Well, Big Kenny,’ he said, flexing his fingers, ‘is Johnny around?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Big Kenny said. ‘Sir John’s never here in the summer. He always brings a party in September. The autumn’s best for the hunting.’

  Gunn drew a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and opened it up. ‘What about a James Minto?’

  Big Kenny’s face clouded, the broken veins around his nose turning a dark purple. ‘Oh, him. Aye, he’s around. He’s always around.’

  ‘You don’t sound particularly pleased about that,’ Fin said.

  ‘I’ve no beef with the man myself, sir. But no one likes him very much. Someone’s got to put a stop to the poaching, and he’s done a good enough job of it, I suppose. But there’s ways of doing things, and ways of doing things. If you get my meaning.’

  ‘And you don’t like his way of doing things,’ Gunn said.

  ‘No, sir, I do not.’

  ‘Where can we find him?’ Fin asked.

  ‘He’s in an old crofthouse among the doons on the south side of Uig beach.’ He stopped, mid-flow, as if suddenly remembering who he was talking to. He frowned. ‘What’s he done? Killed someone?’

  ‘Would it surprise you if he had?’ Fin said.

  ‘No, sir, it would not. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.’

  Minto’s crofthouse was a former holiday let set amongst the dunes at the end of the shore road. It looked out over the whole expanse of Uig beach, from the distant ocean in the west to Uig Lodge in the east, an impressive hunting lodge that stood in splendid isolation on a bluff overlooking the sands, mountains rising behind it in layer upon undulating layer of pastel purple and blue, like paper cut-outs laid one behind the other. Immediately opposite, on the far side of the beach, was a collection of white-painted buildings at Baile-na-Cille, the birthplace of the Scottish prophet Kenneth Mackenzie.

  ‘Of course,’ Fin’s father had told him, ‘we know him in the Gaelic as Coinneach Odhar, and the world knows him as the Brahan Seer.’ Fin remembered as clear as day sitting on the edge of the machair as his father assembled their kite, hearing the story of how a ghost, returning to her grave at Baile-na-Cille one night, had told Coinneach’s mother to look for a small, round, blue stone in a nearby loch. ‘She was told that if she gave this stone to her son and he held it to his eye he would be able to see the future.’

  ‘And did she?’ a wide-eyed Fin had asked his father.

  ‘Aye, son, she did.’

  ‘And could he really see the future?’

  ‘He predicted many things, Fionnlagh, that have come true,’ his father told him, and he reeled off a whole list of prophecies that meant nothing to the young Fin. But as the adult Fin stood now and gazed off towards the gravestones on the far machair he recalled one prophecy that his father had never lived to see fulfilled. The Brahan Seer had written, When men in horseless carriages go under the sea to France, then shall Scotia arise anew, free from all oppression. The Channel Tunnel had been the merest twinkle in Margaret Thatcher’s eye when he and his father were flying kites on the beach, and not even the most ardent nationalist could have predicted then that a Scottish parliament would be sitting again in Edinburgh before the end of the century. Coinneach Odhar had been burned to death for witchcraft nearly three hundred years before any of it.

  ‘It’s a kind of magical place, this,’ George Gunn said, raising his voice to be heard over a wind that rippled like water in undulating waves through the long machair grasses.

  ‘Aye, it is.’ And Fin thought about the crofter who had discovered, buried in the sands of Uig, the Lewis Chessmen, carved from walrus tusks by twelfth-century Norsemen. And he could imagine how it was possible, as legend had it, for that crofter to think that they were really elves and gnomes, the pygmy sprites of Celtic folklore, and to turn on his heels and flee for his life.

  A man came out from the front door of the crofthouse as they slammed the car doors shut. He wore moleskin trousers tucked into knee-high black boots, and a thick woollen jumper under a jacket with leather patches at the shoulders and elbows. He had a shotgun broken over one arm, and a canvas satchel hanging from his shoulder. His black hair was cropped short and his face lean. But even a deep summer tan could not hide the yellow remains of bruising around it, and there were several healing scars on badly split lips. He had striking pale green eyes, and Fin decided that he was about the same age as himself. The man paused for a moment, then closed the door behind him and sauntered towards them with the hint of a limp in his gait. ‘Can I be of any assistance to you gentlemen?’ He was softspoken, his gentle cockney cadences barely audible above the racket of the wind. But his voice did not reflect the wariness in his strange green eyes, or the tension Fin could see in the way he held his body, something of the cat about him, all wound up and ready to spring.

  ‘James Minto?’ Fin said.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Finlay Macleod.’ Fin nodded towards Gunn. ‘And Detective Constable George Gunn.’

  ‘Identification?’ Minto was still eyeing them cautiously. They both showed him their warrant cards, which he examined, and then nodded. ‘Okay, you’ve found him. What do you want?’

  Fin cocked his head towards the shotgun. ‘I take it you’ve got a licence for that?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Wariness was turning towards hostility.

  ‘I think I asked you a question which you haven’t answered.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got a licence.’

  ‘What are you thinking of shooting?’

  ‘Rabbits, if it’s any of your business, Detective Sergeant.’ He bore all the hallmarks of a soldier in the ranks displaying his contempt for a senior officer.

  ‘Not poachers.’

  ‘I don’t shoot poachers. I catch them and I hand them over to you people.’

  ‘Where were you on Saturday night between eight and midnight?’

  For the first time Minto’s confidence wavered. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m asking the questions.’

  ‘And I’m not answering unless I know why.’

  ‘If you don’t answer I’ll put you in handcuffs in the back of that car and take you to Stornoway where you’ll be charged with obstructing a police officer in the course of his duties.’

  ‘Fucking try it, mate, and you’ll end up with two broken arms.’

  Fin had read Gunn’s printout on Minto. Ex-SAS, serving in the Gulf and Afghanistan. And something in Minto’s tone told him that he meant what he said. Fin kep
t his voice level. ‘Threatening a police officer is also an offence, Mr Minto.’

  ‘So handcuff me and throw me in the back of your car.’

  Fin was surprised by the quiet menace in Gunn’s voice at his side. ‘I think you’d better answer Mr Macleod’s questions, Mr Minto, or it’s you who’ll have the broken arms, and it’s me who’ll break them while I’m putting them in cuffs.’

  Minto flicked him a look of quick appraisal. Hitherto, he had paid little attention to Gunn. If he had dismissed him as a junior officer of no consequence, he was now clearly rethinking. He reached a decision. ‘I was at home Saturday night. Watching the telly. Not that you get a very good picture down here.’ He dragged his eyes away from Gunn and back to Fin.

  ‘Can anyone verify that?’ Fin said.

  ‘Yeh, like I’ve got a lot of mates round Uig. They’re always dropping by for a beer and a chat.’

  ‘You were on your own, then?’

  ‘You’re quick for a copper.’

  ‘What programmes did you watch?’ Gunn asked with the authority of someone who had probably been watching TV himself on Saturday night.

  Minto threw him another wary glance. ‘How the fuck should I know? Bloody telly’s the same every night. Crap.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Look, the sooner you ask me what it is you want to know, the sooner I’ll tell you, and we can put an end to this little game, okay?’

  ‘Maybe we should do this indoors,’ Fin said. ‘And you could make us a cup of tea.’ It seemed like a good way of defusing hostilities.

  Minto thought about it for a few moment. ‘Yeh, okay. Why don’t we do that?’