A Large Measure of Snow

by Denzil Meyrick

  Praise for Denzil Meyrick:

  ‘Absorbing . . . no run-of-the-mill tartan noir’

  The Times

  ‘Spellbinding . . . one of the UK’s most loved crime writers’

  Sunday Post

  ‘Universal truths . . . an unbuttoned sense of humour . . . engaging and eventful’

  Wall Street Journal

  ‘Satisfyingly twisted plot’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘Touches of dark humour, multi-layered and compelling’

  Daily Record

  ‘Striking characters and shifting plots vibrate with energy’

  Library Journal

  ‘Compelling Scottish crime’

  Strand Magazine

  ‘If you like Rankin, MacBride and Oswald, you’ll love Meyrick’

  Sunday Mail

  ‘The right amount of authenticity . . . gritty writing . . . most memorable’

  The Herald

  ‘Denzil Meyrick’s [books] . . . certainly enriched my world’ Richard Bath, Editor, Scottish Field Magazine

  ‘Meyrick has the ability to give even the least important person in the plot character and the skill to tell a good tale’

  Scots Magazine

  ‘If you favour the authentic and credible, you are in safe hands’

  Lovereading

  A note on the author

  Denzil Meyrick was born in Glasgow and brought up in Campbeltown. After studying politics, he pursued a varied career including time spent as a police officer, freelance journalist and director of several companies in the leisure, engineering and marketing sectors. The bestselling DCI Daley thriller series includes: Whisky from Small Glasses (Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year, 2015), The Last Witness, Dark Suits and Sad Songs, The Rat Stone Serenade, Well of the Winds, The Relentless Tide, A Breath on Dying Embers and Jeremiah’s Bell. Denzil lives on Loch Lomond side with his wife, Fiona.

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

  Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  1

  Copyright © Denzil Meyrick 2020

  The right of Denzil Meyrick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978 1 84697 557 8

  eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 346 0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  Typeset by 3btype.com

  To the memory of Robert Black

  Was he an animal, that music could move him so?

  – Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

  PROLOGUE

  The gull was making for home through thick flurries of snow. It battled across the wind-tossed sound, before soaring high above the island at the head of the loch and out over the broad expanse of water that stretched before the small town.

  Anyone staring up from the car on the east road to Firdale would have seen it. So would those cold, weary mariners on the ship battling through the grey waves seeking the safety of port, or the hill walker making her faltering way down the slippery slopes of Ben Saarnie. Even the curious seal, who popped her head out of the water just as it flew overhead, might have spied the creature and longed to take to the skies. To them and all who came before, there seemed nothing unusual about the bird, nothing unusual at all.

  But this bird was the soul of the place.

  Long it had watched over those who huddled around the shore of the sheltering loch. It had seen the first folk arrive, clad in skins and carrying spears. Then the ships with horsehead prows came. At first the people were scared of these strangers with tanned faces. But soon they marvelled at their possessions and the things they could do. Before long the wooden head of the horse became their totem.

  It watched over them as they hunted and fished, and made their first attempts to tame the land. It looked on in the time called the Bronze Age, as these busy folk laboured to erect their concentric rings and dig their ditches, fortified by shaven-spiked tree trunks at their hilltop strongholds. This was their defence against the others who lived beyond the gull’s care. Some came from the sea, others the land. This was where his people climbed, seeking refuge from those who would do them harm.

  The gull had seen the man in his fine shimmering breastplate and crimson plumed helmet as he gazed out across the short sea and dreamed of Hibernia. It watched as the men with the red hair arrived with their axes and swords. It flew over the dragon ships, their crews laying waste to all before them. Eventually, all of them settled, mixed and wed, melting away and becoming part of the community.

  Over the years, it heard the tongue of its charges change. They gathered around blazing fires set to banish darkness and cold, their sweet songs of longing lilting on the night air. They sang first to the accompaniment of the shrill notes of reed whistles and then to the skirl of their pipes. It heard their words and stories, their poems of love, war and deep, desolate longing.

  The gull had watched as small boats hollowed from logs and pitch became great ships of billowing sales, as hurdles became wheels on carriages drawn by shaggy ponies. These carriages soon propelled themselves, and before long the people could soar higher than the gull itself, horses almost forgotten.

  It eyed the men in the dead of night, as they pushed casks with hoops, silenced by whispering wool, to boats on the shadowed quayside. It saw them slink back to their homes under the dull light of a waning moon, or the shaded flame of lamplight, only to emerge bold and tall under the sparkling sun of the new day.

  The gull saw men go to war – many times they went to war. At first they donned the plaid woven in rough cloth, as had their ancestors. They battled men clad in steel; they battled men clad only in the paint that covered their bodies. But still they survived through the ages.

  Then men in crimson coats with their sticks of fire and flashing swords came. The bird lowered its head as souls marched off in the dun suits of destruction, heading for battlefields far, far away, of which it knew nothing. It wondered why they fought as, in time, it had to turn its head away, too sad to see the women and children weep their tears of desperation for lost loves and dead fathers. It, too, mourned those destined never to return to the loch that was their home, or back into its care.

  When the iron bird flew over the town and brought death and terror, the gull watched as the people huddled in the hills that had always been their strength. It looked down as great grey warships, the descendants of the dragon boats of long ago, filled the loch.

  It swooped over the ring-net fishing fleet as they took on the great waves, in tiny boats of ancient line. There were the women on the pier packing salted silver herrings into wooden barrels. It caught the scent of peat, malt and burning coal before the sweet tang of raw spirit flowed like clear, clear water from keen copper stills.

  When men came to the hill where once had stood the fort of rings and sharpened logs, to remove the black jet necklace from the ground and encase it in a glass box, out of time and place, the gull could remember the day the king who had worn it so proudly was put to rest in the dark earth, and how the folk had wept. But those tears, like many before and those yet to come, had been and would be forgotten.

  And now,
from his vantage point high on the hill, the seagull watched over a busy little place of homes, streets, shops and chimneys. Boats still set off to sea, men mined for coal, whisky still flowed, farmers tilled the soil as the seasons turned, and the horseless cars meandered like tireless ants. Women still wept for lost loves and ruined lives, and children still cried, bewildered by absences they could not yet fathom.

  The bird tucked his head under one wing against the snow. Perched on one yellow leg, he wondered what would come next for the people he had watched over, seen but unseen, for so long.

  1

  Kinloch, December 1967

  The group of old men huddled in the shelter of the Mission to Seamen that stood sentinel before the harbour at Kinloch. For most of them, having plied their trade at the fishing for a lifetime, inclement weather was no obstacle to standing in the elements having a yarn. But today was different.

  As they looked on from under screwed-down bunnets, Breton caps or the odd sou’wester, the scene before them could best be described as being unusual, in terms of the prevailing weather of the south Kintyre peninsula. Snow was falling, and it was falling hard. Not only that, it had the impertinence to have already coated just about everything in sight with a white blanket. The palm trees that sprouted along the pier road, testaments to the mighty Atlantic Drift that normally cosseted the inhabitants of Kinloch in an unnaturally benign climate, had been defiled. Now they stood like exotic Christmas trees, frosted by the adorning flakes.

  Along the esplanade, all but one bollard wore a white peak like a witch’s hat, the only exception being the one near the roundabout, where Isa McKechnie had taken a tumble and landed on it only a few minutes before, flattening the snow like a pan scone. She had been helped to her feet by the passing Reverend McNee, who declared that he had prayed the snow would stop before he took the long and winding road to Glasgow later that day.

  At the head of the quay, a light blue Hillman Minx now wore a white roof. Beside it, Michael Kerr the Baker’s van bore the legend ‘YOUR CAKES ARE SHITE’ in the accumulated snow on its windscreen. The culprit, young Derek Paterson, sacked as a Saturday boy at the bakery for clandestinely eating four Danish pastries and some meringues, had been unable to resist the temptation as he passed by on the way to school.

  The snowflakes were even fatter and more numerous now than they had been in the previous hour, and the rigging of boats hung heavy white, as did the roof of the harbour master’s office, the weigh house, fuel tanks and the fish buyer’s new Rover 2000. The latter had been denounced as flash by the maritime fraternity and, in any case, would soon be tainted by that particular scent peculiar to the fruits of the sea.

  Being a practical man, Sandy Hoynes had squeezed his bulky frame into oilskins that would have been a perfect fit a decade ago. Now, he looked like a purposeful lemon as he trod gingerly from the Girl Maggie moored at the pier and headed towards the gathering by the Mission. However, their collective attention was not fixed on his progress, but on a seagull that was leaving marks with its webbed feet in the snow on the pavement before them. Donald McKirdy swore blind they were spelling out ‘The end is nigh’, though none of his companions could discern this. The gull eyed them all with disdain before taking off into the pearlescent sky with a loud squawk of derision, ejecting a watery deposit that landed on Hoynes’ left wellington boot. Fortunately, the silencing quality of snow disguised the profanity that issued from Hoynes’ mouth as he took to the road.

  ‘Aye, I’m sure yous have only one date in mind,’ he said, as he approached the group of men he knew so well.

  ‘Nineteen forty-seven,’ came back in ragged unison. For that year had seen the worst snow in living memory, sending the town into isolation and its citizens into a flurry of activity. The west road had been blocked at Muirloan for three whole weeks, and it was even longer before the bus could make its way back to Firdale up the twists and turns of the treacherous eastern way.

  But the good folk of Kinloch and the villages thereabouts knew that they could weather any storm that blocked roads, because they had an ancient highway on their doorstep: the sea. Boats of all descriptions were despatched hither and thon to collect the necessities of life. They had plenty coal from the mine at Machrie to keep them warm and an elegant sufficiency of food to fill their bellies. So life continued much as normal. This general contentment prevailed despite the inevitable loss of electricity that rendered modern contraptions like electric light useless. It also caused a rush on Rory McQuinn’s store in Main Street as those in search of the replenishment of accumulators harried the shopkeeper. And even now, all these years later, the same shop was doing a rare trade in batteries. For the people of Kinloch loved the wireless, and some could barely imagine how life had been without it. Television – well, that was something else altogether – and despite missing The Andy Stewart Show, in their opinion, there was little else to bother about.

  Peeny, for that was his nickname, scratched the end of his sharp nose. ‘Aye, it’s the same all over again. Man, I’m fair glad I’ve no’ to make sail for the Ayrshire coast in this. It’s a blessing that my days in the wheelhouse are done.’ Then, in a more reflective tone: ‘But mind you, I’ve tae listen to my dear Elspeth all day now, and that’s a task any decent man would find daunting.’

  His companions nodded in silent agreement, for most of them had been at the wrong end of the said Elspeth’s tongue at one time or another. But, on a positive note, she was well known for her skills as a cook. They’d all sampled her mince and tatties, undoubtedly the best around. Though none would dare admit it to their own wives lest they be accused of something much more damning than marital infidelity.

  ‘It’s set for the day, and no mistake,’ said Hoynes. ‘You wait, the cry will be out for those of us that are left to take to the sea and feed the toon.’ He stared mournfully at the loch before him. He’d not long been skipper of the Girl Maggie the last time such a calamity had hit. In those days fishing boats sat in rows, filling in the gap between the twin piers with no room to spare. Now, these vessels populated only half of the harbour. A sad reflection on the times, he thought.

  As though picking up on these thoughts, Malcolm Connelly sighed. ‘Aye, you youngsters will be fair inundated by errands of mercy if this is as bad as it was back then. And precious little thanks you’ll get for your endeavours, neither.’

  Sandy Hoynes liked to be called a youngster, even though, now in his early sixties, he was the second oldest skipper in the fleet. ‘Och, we’ll just have to manage. But it will need to be better arranged this time round, that’s for sure. Though here’s hoping this is just a wee minding. Hamish says it will be fair melted away by the afternoon. And as yous all know, he has the sight.’

  This statement was greeted by a general murmur of what could best be described as scepticism, as white clouds of breath billowed out from the little crowd only to be punctured numerously by flurries of snow.

  ‘Come on, Sandy,’ said McKirdy. ‘Does it look to you as though this will stop any time soon? Take a gander at the sky, man. It’s fair heavy – fit to burst, no less. By this afternoon, it’s mair likely to be a blizzard.’

  This suggestion seemed to meet with greater approval than Hamish’s meteorological prophecies, so Hoynes decided to say no more on the subject. ‘There’s little point in us all loitering here, gathering the white stuff. Look at Peeny; he’s damn near a snowman as it is. We’ll head up to the County and see if the auld fella will serve us a dram a wee bit before time – for medicinal use against the cold, you understand. I’m sure it’s lawful for a fisherman to seek refreshment at any moment in weather like this.’

  ‘And even if it’s not, that bugger won’t turn doon twelve good men and true wae a few shillings in their pockets,’ Peeny remarked, as he brushed snow from his shoulders.

  Like a murmuration of starlings, as one, the little band of men turned and set off up the hill to the warmth and solace of the County Hotel. For today was a day for drams and ya
rns beside a roaring fire, not al fresco weather-watching.

  If they had been birds, they could have soared high enough to take in a scene more akin to an alpine village than a small fishing town on the west coast of Scotland. And though it bore its own beauty, it brought danger.

  And still the snow fell.

  2

  That Hamish was out to impress was obvious to all who knew the man. For a start, the quiff of dark hair that sprung from an increasingly large expanse of forehead was oiled back to perfection. Those in the know would have instantly noted that stray ear hairs – an unfortunate family trait – had been pared back so that they couldn’t be viewed when looking at his face front on.

  The best indication as to his intention to impress was what he wore. He was dressed in the suit his late father had bought in 1951 for a wedding. Though it fitted him passably well – both father and son were by nature lean – his mother had taken the best part of the morning to convince him that it was still in style.

  ‘Och, Hamish, I never took you for a gentleman o’ vanity,’ she chided. ‘Ask Jimmy Bryson the tailor – good clothes never go out of fashion.’

  But as he stared at himself in the wardrobe mirror, he saw the elderly insurance man who came to collect his mother’s contributions every week, rather than the trendy man-about-town image he’d hoped to project.

  ‘And anyway,’ his mother continued, ‘it’s no’ as though you’re in the first flush of youth. If it’s a wife you’re trying to snag, well, you better make it quick before what hair you have is left on the pillow. Your father was the same, as was his before him. Your grandda was a right thrawn old bugger intae the bargain. Sat in the County telling his tales, waiting for someone to buy him a dram. Promise me you won’t end your days like him, Hamish. It’s no credit to a man.’