by Peter May
Stornoway was like a ghost town, streetlamps casting feeble pools of light in dark, empty streets. The God-fearing people of the town were locked up cosy in their homes behind drawn curtains, watching TV and supping cups of hot cocoa before heading for bed. In the inner harbour, the rattle and creak of trawlers tied up at the quayside fought to be heard above the wind. The icy black waters were choppy, slapping against the concrete stanchions of the quay and breaking white on the shores of the Castle Green on the other side of the bay. We hurried along the deserted Bayhead, turning off at the Bridge Community Centre and scampering quickly over the bridge into the trees beyond. Up the hill, then, in a fearful sleety squall, and on to the road above the golf club. As we reached the road, the sky opened up, and the most extraordinary silver moonlight spilled down across the manicured expanse of golf course, so bright you might almost have expected to see golfers pitching up the hill to the fifth hole.
Lews Castle was built in the 1870s as a mansion house for Sir James Matheson. He bought the Isle of Lewis in 1844 with the proceeds from the opium he and his partner William Jardine had imported into China, turning six million Chinese into hopeless addicts in the process. It’s strange to think that the misery of millions led to the transformation of a tiny Hebridean island thousands of miles away on the other side of the world, or that people and their land can just be bought and sold. Matheson built a new harbour, and gas and waterworks in Stornoway, as well as a brickworks at Garrabost. He created a chemical factory to extract tar from peat, and a yard to build and repair ships. He transformed the forty-five miles of dirt tracks across the island into two hundred miles of coach-bearing roads. And, of course, he razed the old Seaforth Lodge on the hill overlooking the town, to build his mock-Tudor castle.
It is an extraordinary building of pink granite, with turrets and towers and crenellated battlements. It dominates the hill above the harbour, and is probably the most unlikely thing you will see on any of the islands that make up the Hebridean archipelago.
Of course, in those days, I didn’t know the full history. Lews Castle was just there, as if it had always been there. You accepted it, the same way you accepted the cliffs that ringed the Butt, or the fabulous beaches at Scarasta and Luskentyre.
It loomed dark that night amongst the trees at the top of the hill, lights showing in just a few of its windows. Calum and I skirted the main entrance, a huge vaulted porch leading to enormous double doors, and made our way around the back to where Angel had told Calum they would meet him, next to the single-storey annexe that housed the boiler room. Right enough, as we arrived in the long, narrow courtyard between the boiler room and the laundry, a figure moved in the shadows and an arm waved us forward.
‘Come on, hurry up!’ I was taken aback to find that it was Artair. He was surprised to see me, too. ‘What are you doing here?’ he hissed in my ear.
‘Looking out for Calum,’ I whispered back.
But he just shook his head. ‘You daft bastard!’ And my sense of foreboding deepened.
Artair opened a red door into a short, gloomy corridor. It smelled of old cabbage. I soon realized why, as Artair put a finger to his lips and led us through the kitchens in the semidark and then out into what they called the Long Hall. It ran almost the full length of the front of the castle, night lights glowing faintly all along it. As we slipped past what had originally been the library, and then the ballroom, I realized that if we were going to be caught, it would most likely be here. There was nowhere to hide in the nearly two hundred feet of hallway. Any one of the doors along either side, or at either end, might open at any minute, trapping us in full view.
So it was with some relief that we reached the main staircase at the far end of the hall, and followed Artair up the wide stone steps two at a time to the first floor. A narrow spiral stairway took us up to the second floor. Artair led us through further dark halls and doorways into a corridor leading to a tall window at the north end of the castle. There, in the shadows, a group of boys stood waiting in impatient anticipation. More than half a dozen of them. Torches flashed in our faces and I caught a glimpse of theirs. Some I knew, some I didn’t. Murdo Ruadh and Angel were among them.
‘What are you doing here, orphan boy?’ Angel growled in a low whisper, an echo of Artair.
‘Just making sure Calum doesn’t come to any harm.’
‘Why would he?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Listen, smart boy.’ Angel grabbed the lapels of my jacket. ‘That wee bitch’ll be getting into her bath in less than five minutes. So you’ve not got much time.’
‘I’m not going up on the roof with him.’ I pulled myself free of his grasp.
‘Aye, you fucking are,’ Murdo breathed in my face. ‘Or it might just come to the attention of the janitor that there’s an intruder in the castle. Know what I’m saying?’
‘So call the janitor,’ I said. ‘Then whatever it is you’ve got planned will be well and truly screwed.’
Murdo glared at me, but I’d called his bluff and he had no comeback.
Angel slid the window open and stepped out on to the fire escape. ‘Come on, Calum. Get out here.’
‘Don’t, Calum,’ I said. ‘They’re setting you up.’
‘Fuck off, orphan boy!’ There was murder in Angel’s eyes as he peered back at me through the window. Then his frown relaxed into a smile and he turned it on the wavering Calum. ‘Come on, son. We’re not setting you up for anything. Except an eyeful. If you don’t hurry up you’ll miss her.’ Calum turned away from my disapproval and climbed on to the fire escape. It rattled noisily as I climbed out after him. There was still a chance of persuading him not to do it.
From the second-floor platform of the fire escape, steps ran down to a half-landing, and doubled back to the first-floor platform immediately below. From there steps led up and on to the roof of the entrance porch, and in the other direction down and around the wall to the front of the castle. An extending ladder leaned against the wall outside the window. Angel unhooked the extension and slid it up, almost to its full length, re-hooked it and leaned it against the wall again, adjusting the angle to make it easier to climb.
‘There you go.’
Calum looked up. The ladder reached just beyond a ledge nearly three feet below the crenellations around the roof. I saw the panic in his eyes. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Course you can.’ Angel’s voice was almost soothing.
Calum gave me a frightened rabbit look. ‘Come with me, Fin. I’m not good with heights.’
‘You should have fucking thought of that before you came,’ Murdo whispered through the window.
‘You really don’t have to do this, Calum,’ I said. ‘Let’s just go home.’
I wasn’t prepared for the violence with which Angel slammed me up against the wall. ‘You go up there with him, orphan boy. Make sure he doesn’t come to any harm.’ I felt his spittle in my face. ‘That’s what you came for, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not going up on the roof!’
Angel leaned in close and whispered, almost intimately, ‘Either you go up, orphan boy, or you go down. The hard way.’
‘Please, Fin,’ Calum said. ‘I’m too scared to do it on my own.’
I didn’t see that I had any choice. I pulled myself free of Angel’s grip. ‘Alright.’ I looked up towards the roof wishing I had never agreed to come. In fact it looked a fairly simple matter to climb the ladder and then swing yourself up through one of the crenellations on to the roof. It had to be flat up there, and once you were up there was no danger of falling, with the battlements creating a retaining wall.
‘We’re running out of time,’ Angel said. ‘And the longer we’re out here the more chance we have of getting caught.’
‘Go on, Calum,’ I said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
‘You are coming with me?’
‘I’m right behind you.’ I glanced back through the window at Artair, and he just shrugged, as if to say that it wasn’t
his fault that I had chosen to come with Calum.
Angel said, ‘Once you’re up, you’ll see the pitched roof of the attic. It’s a skylight window into the bathroom. You’ll know which one when the light comes on.’
And all the time I kept wondering what the trick would be. What we were really going to find up there. But there was no way of backing out now. At least the rain was off for the moment, and the moonlight made it easy to see where we were going.
Calum set off up the ladder, making it tremble beneath him, the rattle of it transferring to the fire escape. ‘For Christ’s sake keep the noise down,’ Angel called after him in a stage whisper, grabbing the ladder to hold it steady. Then he turned to me. ‘Right, orphan boy, on you go.’ He grinned, and I just knew this was all going to end in tears.
As I had thought, it was relatively easy getting on to the roof from the ladders. Even for Calum. I joined him, crouching on the flat, tarred surface, and we could see, through the crenellations, all the way down to the harbour below. The trawlers looked unreal, toy boats lined up against the quay, the town spreading itself up over the hill behind, necklaces of light tracing the lines of the streets as they criss-crossed each other in a traditional grid pattern. Somewhere, away out in the Minch, we saw the lights of a tanker making its way steadily north through a heavy swell.
In the moonlight I could see the pitch of the attic roof quite clearly. There were a couple of skylights, but no light in either of them.
‘Where now?’ Calum whispered.
‘Let’s just sit tight and wait to see if a light comes on.’
We crouched down with our backs to the battlements, knees pulled up to our chests to try to keep warm, and waited. I checked my watch. It was nearly five past ten. I heard some rattling and giggling from the fire escape below, and was tempted to give up right there and then and climb back down. But the thought of Angel waiting for us at the foot of the ladders was enough to make me decide to give it another few minutes.
Suddenly a light went on in the nearer of the two skylights, and an elongated square of yellow fell out across the roof. Calum’s eyes positively gleamed with anticipation. ‘That must be her.’ He was suddenly emboldened. ‘Come on.’ And he scuttled across the roof to the skylight. Since I was there, I thought, I might as well have a look, too. So I followed him, and we crouched for a minute or more below the level of the window, plucking up the courage to raise our heads into the light and peer in. We could hear the sound of water running, and someone moving about below the window.
‘You go first,’ I said. ‘Better hurry up, before the window gets all steamed up and we can’t see anything.’
A look of worry flitted across Calum’s face. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Slowly he eased himself up the pitch of the roof until he was pushing up on his tiptoes, and I could see him peering in the window. I heard a loud hiss, and then he was crouching down beside me again, a face like thunder. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so angry. ‘Bastards! Fucking bastards!’ I hadn’t heard him swear like that either.
‘What is it?’
‘See for yourself.’ He drew another deep indignant breath. ‘Bastards!’
So I pushed myself up the angle of the roof until my face was level with the window. Just as someone on the other side took it off the latch and pushed it out. I found myself face to face with a big, round, white-faced woman wearing a pink bath cap and nothing else. The startled look on her face could only have been a reflection of my own. I’m not sure if it was my scream or hers that I heard, but we both screamed, of that I am certain, and she went staggering backwards and fell into her bath, great mountains of juddering white flesh displacing gallons of hot water all across the floor. For a moment I was paralysed, staring in shock at the fat, naked woman floundering in the bath. She was sixty if she was a day. My face must have been clearly visible in the bathroom light, because she was staring back at me, her legs still in the air. I had no wish to see what they revealed, but found my eyes drawn in horrified fascination. She took a deep tremulous breath that sent her mountainous pink breasts quivering, and she screamed the scream of the dead. I thought she was going to burst my eardrums. I slithered back down the roof and almost landed on top of Calum.
His eyes were like headlamps. ‘What happened?’
I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get the hell out of here!’
I could hear her screaming, ‘Help!’ And, ‘Rape!’ And thought that now she was just indulging in wishful thinking. Lights were going on all across the roof. I ran back over to where we had climbed up from the ladder, and I could hear Calum pattering along behind me. I squeezed between the crenellations, turning and dropping a leg down to find the top rung, before I realized it wasn’t there.
‘Shit!’
‘What is it?’ Calum looked terrified.
‘The bastards have taken the ladder away.’ So that had been their plan. To trap us up on the roof. They must have known Anna would not be taking a bath that night. She might even have been in league with them. What none of them could have foreseen, however, was that we would be spotted by the fat lady who was. Now the ladder was gone, we were stuck on the roof, and the whole castle had been alerted. It could only be a matter of time before they found us, and then there would be hell to pay. I climbed back on to the roof, anger fighting with anticipation of the humiliation to come.
‘Well, we can’t just stay here.’ Calum was panicking. ‘They’ll find us.’
‘We’ve got no choice. There’s no way down unless you’ve suddenly grown wings.’
‘We can’t be caught! We can’t!’ He was becoming hysterical. ‘What’ll my mother say?’
‘I think that’s the least of our worries, Calum.’
‘Oh God, oh God,’ he said again and again. ‘We’ve got to do something.’ He started climbing through the crenellations.
I grabbed him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘If we get on to the ledge, we can jump down on to the fire escape from there. It’s only about ten feet.’ This from the boy who only ten minutes earlier had been claiming a fear of heights.
‘Are you mad? Calum, it’s too dangerous.’
‘No, we can do it, we can.’
‘Jesus, Calum, don’t!’ But there was nothing I could do to stop him. He braced himself with a hand on either side of the gap, and slid down until his feet found the ledge. There were lights coming on now in the north tower. The woman was still screaming, but her voice had become distant. I had a mental image of her running naked along a corridor somewhere, and I shuddered.
I saw Calum glance down, and when he turned back again his face was sheet-white in the moonlight. There was an odd look in his eyes, and I felt my stomach lurch. I just knew something bad was going to happen. ‘Fin, I was wrong. I can’t do it’ His voice was quivering and breathless.
‘Give me your hand.’
‘I can’t move. Fin, I can’t move.’
‘Yes, you can. Just give me your hand and we’ll get you back on the roof.’
But he was shaking his head. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t. I can’t.’ And I watched in disbelief as he just let go and slipped backwards out of view. I could not move. It was as if I had been turned to stone. There was a yawning silence, and then a dreadful clatter on the fire escape below. Calum never made a sound.
It must have been a full half-minute before I could bring myself to look. He had missed the second-floor platform completely, falling another whole floor to land on his back on the handrail and slide down on to the metal grille. His body was twisted at an unnatural angle, and he was not moving.
Right then felt like the worst moment of my life. I closed my eyes and prayed fervently that I would wake up.
‘Macleod!’ My name came up to me from below, and I heard a clatter on the fire escape. I opened my eyes and saw Angel on the platform. He had the ladder out there again, and was fumbling to slide the extension up the rungs. The top of the ladder scraped across the wall just be
neath the crenellations. ‘Macleod! For fuck sake, get down here now!’
I was still stone, the same granite as the walls, a part of them, locked there for eternity. I couldn’t drag my eyes away from the prone, twisted form of poor Calum thirty feet below.
‘Macleod!’ Angel almost bellowed my name. Blood rushed back through my frozen veins and I began shaking almost uncontrollably. But, still, I could move again. And with jelly legs, I clambered like an automaton through the crenellations and on to the ladder, going down it faster than was safe, my hands burning on the cold metal. I had barely reached the platform when Angel grabbed my jacket. His face was inches from mine. I could smell the stale tobacco on his breath and for the second time that night felt his spittle in my face. ‘You don’t say a word. Not a fucking word. You were never here, right?’ And when I said nothing, he pushed his face even closer. ‘Right?’ I nodded. ‘Okay, go. Down the fire escape. Don’t even look back.’
He let go of me and starting climbing back through the window, leaving the ladder where it was, leaning up against the wall. I could see washed-out frightened faces in the darkness beyond. Still I didn’t move. Angel glared back at me from inside. And for the first time in my life I saw fear in his face. Real fear.
‘Go!’ He slid the window shut.
I turned then and ran down the rattling steps of the fire escape until I reached the first-floor platform. There I stopped. I would have to step over Calum’s body to reach the next flight of stairs. I could see his face now. Pale and passive, just as if he were sleeping. And then I saw the blood seeping slowly across the metal from behind his head, thick and dark, like molasses. There were voices coming from somewhere in the grounds below, and outside lights came on at the front door. I knelt down and touched his face. It was still warm, and I saw the rise and fall of his chest. He was breathing. But there was nothing I could do for him. It could only be a matter of minutes before they would find him. And me, too, if I didn’t go. I stepped carefully over him and ran down the final flight of steps as fast as I could, jumping the last half-dozen and then sprinting for the cover of the trees. I heard someone shout, and footsteps running on gravel. But I didn’t look back. And I didn’t stop running until I reached the bridge at the Community Centre. In the distance I heard the wail of a siren and saw the blue light of an ambulance flashing up through the trees towards the castle. I leaned over the rail, holding on to it to stop my legs from buckling, and threw up into the Bayhead River. The tears were streaming down my face in the freezing February wind, and I turned and hurried across the main road to begin the long, slow jog up Mackenzie Street to Matheson Road. The lights were out in most of the windows now, and I felt like I was the only person still alive in the whole of Stornoway.