The Blackhouse l-1

by Peter May

  For a man who lived alone, Minto kept his house in perfect order. The tiny sitting room was spartan and clean, devoid of pictures or ornaments, except for a chessboard on a table by the window, opposing chessmen in various stages of conflict across the black and cream ivory squares. Fin could see into the kitchen as they sat waiting for Minto to come through with the tea. There wasn’t a dirty dish in sight. Cutlery hung in neat racks on the wall, and dish towels hung drying, carefully folded above a heater. Minto carried in a tray with a pot of tea and three cups and saucers, a small jug of milk and a crock of sugar cubes. Fin had been expecting mugs. There was something faintly manic in Minto’s fastidiousness, a tidiness and discipline dinned into him perhaps by years in the army. Fin wondered what motivated a man to come to a place like this to live on his own. His job, by its nature, would not lead him to make many friends. But he seemed to go out of his way to make enemies. Nobody liked him much, Big Kenny had said. And Fin could see why.

  As Minto poured, Fin said, ‘Not easy to play chess with yourself.’

  Minto glanced across the room towards his chessboard. ‘I play by telephone. My old commanding officer.’

  ‘You have the Lewis Chessmen, I see.’

  Minto grinned. ‘Yeh, not the originals, unfortunately. Ain’t figured out how to break into the British Museum yet.’ He paused. ‘Beautiful things, aren’t they?’

  Beautiful was not a word Fin had expected to hear passing Minto’s lips. If he had suspected for a moment that Minto might have been aware of life’s aesthetics, he would not have thought him likely to appreciate them. But the one thing Fin had learned from his years in the police was that however much you believed you had them figured out, people invariably surprised you. ‘Have you ever seen the originals? They keep a few of them at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Never been to Edinburgh,’ Minto said. ‘In fact, I haven’t been anywhere in Scotland except here. And I haven’t been off the island since I arrived fifteen months ago.’ Fin nodded. If that was true, it would rule Minto out of any connection with the Leith Walk murder. ‘I thought at first maybe you’d come to tell me you’d got the bastards who did this to my face.’

  ‘Afraid not,’ Gunn said.

  ‘Nah,’ Minto drawled. ‘Don’t know what I was thinking. Like every other bugger round here, you’re more interested in looking after your own. Right?’ He sat down and dropped two lumps of sugar in his tea and stirred in some milk.

  ‘A lot of your poachers turn up pretty badly marked themselves,’ said Gunn.

  ‘A lot of my poachers don’t like getting caught.’

  Fin said, ‘Do you work alone?’

  ‘Nah. There’s a couple of other guys on Sir John’s payroll. Locals, you know, probably out poaching themselves when they’re not out with me.’

  ‘Sir John’s payroll must be quite hefty then,’ Fin said. ‘Three of you on a salary just to catch poachers.’

  Minto laughed. ‘A drop in the bloody ocean, mate. You know, there’s consortiums of fishermen come up here, stay in the lodge, and pay ten grand a week just for one beat. Over a season that’s a lot of dosh, know what I mean? And these guys ain’t too happy paying that kind of money if there ain’t no fish in the river. A hundred years ago, over on Grimersta Estate, they was catching more than two thousand salmon a year. Back then, they say the guy who owned the place caught fifty-seven of the buggers off the same rod in one day. These days we’re lucky if we pull a few hundred in a season. The wild salmon’s a dying breed, Detective Sergeant. It’s my job to see they don’t become extinct.’

  ‘By beating the living daylights out of anyone you catch taking them illegally?’

  ‘You said that, I didn’t.’

  Fin sipped reflectively on his tea, momentarily startled by the unexpected perfume of Earl Grey. He glanced at Gunn and saw that the detective constable had put his cup back on the table, the tea undrunk. Fin refocused on Minto. ‘Do you recall a man called Macritchie? You caught him poaching on the estate here about six months ago. Handed him over to the police, in a bit of a state apparently.’

  Minto shrugged. ‘I’ve caught a few poachers in the last six months, mate. And every one of them’s been a Mac-something-or-other. Give me a clue.’

  ‘He was murdered in Port of Ness on Saturday night.’

  For a moment, Minto’s natural cockiness deserted him. A frown gathered itself around his eyes. ‘That’s the guy that was in the paper the other day.’ Fin nodded. ‘Jesus Christ, and you think I had something to do with that?’

  ‘You got beaten up pretty badly a few weeks ago. By an assailant or assailants unknown.’

  ‘Yeh, unknown because you bloody people haven’t caught them yet.’

  ‘So they weren’t just poachers that you stumbled on?’

  ‘Nah, they was out to give me a doing. Lying waiting for me they were.’

  ‘And you couldn’t identify them, why?’ Gunn asked.

  ‘Because they was wearing bloody masks, wasn’t they? Didn’t want me to see their faces.’

  ‘Which means they were probably faces you knew,’ Fin said.

  ‘Well, knock me down with a feather. I’d never have thought of that.’ Minto took a large gulp of tea as if to wash away the bad taste of his sarcasm.

  ‘Must be a lot of folk around here who’re not too fond of you, then,’ Fin said.

  And finally Minto saw the light. His green eyes opened wide. ‘You think it was this guy Macritchie. You think I knew it was him and killed him for it.’

  ‘Did you?’

  Minto’s laugh was mirthless. ‘Let me tell you something, mate. If I’d known who did this to me,’ he pointed to his face, ‘I’d have dealt with it quickly and quietly. And I wouldn’t have left any marks.’

  Outside, the wind was still bending the long grasses. The shadows of clouds raced across miles of compacted sand, and they saw that the tide had turned and was rushing across the flats with indecent haste. At the car they stopped and Fin said, ‘I‘d like to go up to Ness, George, and talk to a few folk.’

  ‘I’ll need to go back to Stornoway, sir. DCI Smith keeps us on a tight leash.’

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to ask him for a car.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Mr Macleod. He’d probably just say no.’ Gunn hesitated. ‘Why don’t you drop me off at the station and take my car. Better to be forgiven than forbidden, eh?’

  Fin smiled. ‘Thanks, George.’ He opened the car door.

  Gunn said, ‘So what do you think?’ He nodded towards the crofthouse. ‘About Minto.’

  ‘I think if it wasn’t for the drive down and back, we’d have been wasting our time.’ Gunn nodded. But Fin had the impression it was a nod of acknowledgement rather than of agreement. ‘You don’t agree?’

  ‘No, I think you’re probably right, Mr Macleod. But I didn’t like the fella much. Gave me the willies. With his kind of training he’d know how to use a knife alright, and I don’t believe he’d think twice about using it.’

  Fin ran a hand back through the fine, tight curls of his hair. ‘They’re pretty highly trained, these SAS types.’

  ‘Aye, they are.’

  ‘And you think you could have broken his arms?’

  Gunn shot him a look and blushed, a tiny smile stretching his lips. ‘I think he could have probably broken every bone in my body before I even got near him, Mr Macleod.’ He inclined his head slightly. ‘But he wasn’t to know that.’

  II

  The Pottery had been there at the foot of the hill for as long as Fin could remember. When he had first taken over the old croft, Eachan Stewart had been a long-haired, wild-eyed man of about thirty who had seemed very old to all the children of Crobost. Fin and the other boys in the village had thought him a wizard, and for once had obeyed parental advice and stayed away from the Pottery, fearing that he might cast an evil spell on them. He did not belong to the island, although his grandfather was said to have come from Carloway, which was the
Lewis equivalent of the Wild West. Born somewhere in the north of England, he had been christened Hector, but returning to his roots had called himself Eachan, its Gaelic equivalent.

  As he pulled Gunn’s car on to the grass verge opposite, Fin saw Eachan sitting outside the front door of his cottage. He was well into his sixties now. The hair was just as long, but pure white, and the eyes a little less wild, dulled like his brain by years of smoking dope. On the peeling white gable of the house, the red-painted legend, The Pottery, was still visible where he had daubed it across the wall thirty years before. A shambolic garden, filled with the accumulated detritus of decades of beachcombing, was festooned with green fishing nets draped between rotting fenceposts. Stakes of bleached driftwood flanked a rickety wooden gate. A cross-beam was tied to them by lengths of frayed rope and hung with buoys and floats and markers — orange, pink, yellow, white — blowing and rattling in the wind. Stunted and wind-blasted shrubs clung stubbornly to the thin, peaty soil where Eachan had planted them when Fin was still a boy.

  A great attraction, then, for the kids on their way to school, had been the mysterious earthworks which Eachan Stewart had begun shortly after his arrival. Over a period of nearly two years, he had laboured in amongst the reedy and unproductive bog that surrounded his house, digging, and wheeling barrows of soil across the moor to pile in great heaps, like giant molehills, thirty or forty feet apart. Six of them altogether. The kids would sit up on the hill and watch him at work from a safe distance as he levelled them off and seeded them with grass, only realizing belatedly that he had built himself a mini, three-hole golf course, with tees, and greens with flagpoles stuck in the holes. They had gawped in amazement the first day he appeared with his chequered pullover and cloth cap, a golf bag slung across his shoulder, to tee up on the first hole and christen the course by playing his first round of golf. It took him only fifteen minutes, but from then on it became a routine that he followed with religious fervour every morning, rain or shine. After a while, the novelty of it wore off for the kids, and they found other things to engage their interest. Eachan Stewart, eccentric potter, had stitched himself into the fabric of life there and become, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

  Fin saw that the golf course the mad potter had laboured so hard to create all those years before was drowning now amongst a sea of long grasses, neglected and left to grow wild. Eachan glanced up when his gate scraped across an overgrown path. His eyes narrowed quizzically as Fin approached. He was threading pottery windchimes to hang amongst the two dozen or more already lined up along the front of the cottage. The dull pitch of colourfully glazed terracotta pipes rattling in the wind filled the air around him. He looked Fin up and down. ‘Well, from the look of those shoes you’re wearing, lad, I’d say you were a policeman. Am I right?’

  ‘You’re not wrong, Eachan.’

  Eachan cocked his head. ‘Do I know you?’ His Lancashire accent had never left him, even after all these years.

  ‘You did once. Whether you’ll remember me is another matter.’

  Eachan looked hard into his face, and Fin imagined he could almost hear the wheels of his memory creaking and grinding. But he shook his head. ‘You’ll need to give me a hint.’

  ‘My aunt used to buy, shall we say, some of your more unusual pieces.’

  Lights appeared in the old man’s eyes. ‘Iseabal Marr,’ he said. ‘Lived in the old whitehouse up by the harbour. Got me to make her those big pots in primary colours for her dried flowers, and she was the only local ever to buy one of my pairs of fucking pigs. An eccentric creature she was, right enough. God rest her soul.’ Fin thought it was rich, Eachan calling his aunt eccentric. ‘And you must be Fin Macleod. Jesus, lad, the last time I saw you was when I helped carry you from the Purple Isle the year old man Macinnes died on the rock.’

  Fin felt his face redden, stinging as if from a slap. He’d had no idea that Eachan was one of the men who’d carried him from the boat that year. He had no recollection at all of the journey back from An Sgeir, or the ambulance dash across the moor to Stornoway. The first things he recalled were the starched white sheets of his hospital bed, and the concerned face of a young nurse hovering over him like an angel. He remembered thinking for a moment that he had died and gone to Heaven.

  Eachan stood up and pumped his hand. ‘Good to see you, lad. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, Eachan.’

  ‘And what brings you back to Crobost?’

  ‘The murder of Angel Macritchie.’

  Eachan’s bonhomie dropped quickly away, and he became suddenly wary. ‘I’ve already told the coppers everything I know about Macritchie.’ He turned abruptly and went into his cottage, a shambling figure in denim dungarees and a grubby-looking long-sleeved grampa shirt. Fin followed him inside. The cottage was one big room that served as workshop, showroom, living room, kitchen and dining room. Eachan lived, worked and sold his wares here. Every available space on every table and shelf was crowded with his pots and goblets and plates and figurines. Where there was no pottery, there were piles of dirty dishes and laundry. Hundreds of windchimes hung from the rafters. The kiln was in a lean-to out back, and he had an outside toilet in a broken-down shed in the garden. A dog slept on a settee that looked as if it doubled as Eachan’s bed, and smoke leaked from a small cast-iron stove where he burned his peats, misting the light that fell through crowded windows into the room.

  ‘I’m not here officially,’ Fin said. ‘And there’s only me and you to know what passes between us. All I’m interested in is the truth.’

  Eachan lifted an almost empty whisky bottle from a shelf above the sink, swilled the tea leaves out of a dirty cup and poured himself a measure. ‘Very subjective thing, the truth. You want one?’ Fin shook his head and Eachan emptied the cup in a single draught. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Macritchie was supplying you with dope, right?’

  Eachan’s eyes opened wide in amazement. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘The Stornoway police suspected for some time that Macritchie was dealing dope. And everyone in the world, Eachan, knows that you enjoy the odd spliff or three.’

  Eachan’s eyes opened wider. ‘They do? I mean, even the police?’

  ‘Even the police.’

  ‘So how come I never got arrested?’

  ‘Because there are bigger fish to fry than you, Eachan.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Eachan sat down abruptly on a stool, as if the knowledge that everyone knew, and had always known, that he smoked dope took away all the illicit fun of it. Then he looked up at Fin, suddenly alarmed. ‘You think that gives me a motive for killing him?’

  Fin almost laughed. ‘No, Eachan, I think it gives you a motive for lying for him.’

  The old man frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Donna Murray rape. The animal rights activist that he beat up right on your doorstep.’

  ‘Aw, now, wait a minute.’ Eachan’s voice rose in pitch. ‘Right. Okay. I admit it. Big Angel kicked the living shit out of that lad. I saw him do it, right on my doorstep, just like you said. But a lot of other people saw it, too. And I might have felt sorry for the boy, but he was asking for it. There was nobody in Crobost who’d have grassed on Angel for that.’ He poured the dregs of the whisky bottle into his cup with a shaking hand. ‘But that wee Donna Murray, she was just telling lies.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I went up to the Social that night for a pint before closing time, and I saw her coming out into the car park and then heading up the road.’ He knocked back his whisky.

  ‘Did she see you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think she did. She seemed right preoccupied. I was on the other side of the road, and that street light up there’s been out for months.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And then I saw Angel coming out. Or should I say staggering out. Man, he was pissed. Even if he’d had the inclination he’d never have had the wherewithal. The cold air hit him like a blo
ody sledgehammer and he threw up all over the pavement. I gave him a wide berth, I can tell you. I didn’t want him to see me. He could be bloody aggressive when he’d had a drink in him. So I stood in the pool of darkness by the street light that doesn’t work and watched him for a couple of minutes. He leaned against the wall, getting his breath back, and then he wobbled off down the road towards his house. The opposite direction from Donna Murray. And I went and had my pint.’

  ‘You didn’t see anyone else out there?’

  ‘Nope. Not a soul.’

  Fin was thoughtful. ‘So why do you think she accused him of raping her?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? Does it matter? He’s dead now. Doesn’t make any difference.’

  But somehow Fin thought that it might. ‘Thanks, Eachan. I appreciate your frankness.’ He moved away towards the door.

  ‘So what really happened out on the rock that year, then?’ Eachan had lowered his voice again, but it couldn’t have had more impact if he had shouted.

  Fin stopped and turned in the doorway. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, everyone said it was an accident. But nobody ever talked about it. Not in all the years since. Not even Angel, and he couldn’t keep a secret for five minutes.’

  ‘That’s because there was no secret to keep. I fell on the cliff. Mr Macinnes saved my life and lost his own in the process.’

  But Eachan just shook his head. ‘No. I was there, remember, when the boat came in. There was more to it than that. I’ve never known so many men say so little about so much in my life.’ He squinted through the gloom at Fin and took a few unsteady steps towards him. ‘Go on, you can tell me. There’s only me and you here to know what passes between us.’ There was something unpleasant in his smile.

  Fin said, ‘You any idea where Calum Macdonald lives?’

  Eachan frowned, disconcerted by the sudden change of subject. ‘Calum Macdonald?’

  ‘He’s about my age. We were at school together. I think he works a loom these days.’

  ‘The cripple?’