by Peter May
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 when 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 a
cross 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.’
She turned towards Fin and Marsaili.
‘That’s why he was going to do what they said. They’d told him to get rid of the body himself and never breathe a word of it to another living soul. Or they would kill me.’ She opened her palms in front of her in pure frustration. ‘Right then I couldn’t have cared less. I just wanted him to go to the police. But he point-blank refused. He said he would bury Peter himself where no one would ever find him, and then there was something he had to do. He wouldn’t say what. Just that he owed it to his mother for letting her down.’
Fin looked across the ruin to where old Tormod had gone and sat on the remains of the front wall, staring vacantly out across Charlie’s beach as the sun slipped, finally, from view, and the first stars began to emerge in a dusk-blue sky. He wondered if Ceit’s words, so vividly recreating the events of that night, had penetrated his consciousness in any way. Or whether simply being here, all these years later, would in itself stir some distant memory. But he realized it was something they would almost certainly never know.
THIRTY-EIGHT
It is so hard to remember things. I know they are there. And sometimes I can feel them, but I can’t see them or reach them. I’m so tired. Tired of all this travelling, and all this talk that I can’t follow. I thought they were taking me home.
This is a nice beach, though. Not like those beaches on Harris. But nice. A gentle crescent of silver.
Oh. Is that the moon now? See how the sand almost glows by its light, as if lit from beneath. I think I was here once. I’m sure I was, wherever the hell we are. It seems familiar somehow. With Ceit. And Peter. Poor Peter. I can see him still. That look in his eyes when he knew he was dying. Like the sheep in the shed that time, when Donald Seamus slit its throat.
I still dream, sometimes, about anger. Anger turned cold. Anger born of grief and guilt. I remember that anger. How it ate me up inside, devoured every shred of the human being I had once been. And I watch myself in my dream. Like watching some flickering old movie, black-and-white or sepia-brown. Waiting. Waiting.
The air was warm on my skin that night, though I couldn’t stop shivering. The sounds of the city are so different. I had got used to the islands. It was almost a shock to be back among tall buildings and motor cars and people. So many people. But not there, not that night. It was quiet, and the sound of traffic was far away.
I had waited maybe an hour by that time. Concealed in the bushes, crouched down on stiffening legs. But anger gives you patience, like lust delaying the moment of orgasm to make it all the sweeter. It makes you blind, too. To possibilities, and consequences. It dulls the imagination, reduces your focus to one single point, and obliterates all else.
A light came on, then, in the porch, and all my senses were on heightened awareness. I heard the latch scrape in the lock, and the squeal of the hinges before I saw them stepping out into the light. Both of them. One behind the other. Danny stopped to light a cigarette, and Tam was about to lean back to close the door.
And that’s when I moved out on to the path. Into the light. I wanted to be sure they saw me. To know who I was, and what I was going to do. I didn’t care who else might see me, as long as they knew.