A Book of Death and Fish

by Ian Stephen

  The olman had been staying in a B&B from hell. He was talking more than usual. And much faster. The Morris had a new engine and was running sweet, on the long straight road from Glasgow to Stirling. We’d been over the Forth Road Bridge, last trip to the mainland. The olman said it had cost six lives. A lot less than the railway bridge. Now the one over the Tay was open. I don’t know how many lives that one cost.

  We’d have to go a wee trip. Clock that one as well. And the house? There were some beauties on the scheme but all out of our reach. This was a neat small one but the attic had been lined and there was space for another room.

  Then I was being led into a class in a sandstone school and introduced as the new boy. Was I another Wee Willie? What? Football?

  But I couldn’t conceal the fact that I wasn’t great at football.

  When they asked me what Stornoway was like, thinking that was the Island, not the town and the whole place was up near Iceland anyhow, I talked too much about the great fishing and the woods and the pier. But they had plenty of woods, a pier at Gartmorn Dam and as much fishing as you wanted. What about the sea? Aye, if that’s what yer wantin there’s flounders in the Forth. Doon at the docks.

  That was the year when I escaped the 11-plus, the big exam at the end of Primary, the one that decided your future. They’d already done away with it, down south in the Central Belt. That was also the year when the Island was in the news. When the Caledonian Hotel burned down. We’d had a high tea there, maybe the last Saturday night before the olman left to start his new job. A lassie was trapped in the building.

  Then the murder took place, the first on the Island since the days of Mac an t-Sronaich. Maybe even longer – some people said that there was no evidence our Island fugitive ever killed anyone. There was no doubt that a person was killed, this time. She was Mary Mackenzie, aged eighty years. She lived on her own and had a small amount of money. A young neighbour, a weaver, would visit her. He was aged twenty-one years at the time. Some say his visits happened when he was short of cash.

  In the village they say, she would sub him, from time to time, glad of the company. In the court, the defending QC introduced a story about a stranger seen that night at a petrol station. I remembered the episodes of The Fugitive, seen in The Broch, but I don’t think there was a suggestion that this stranger only had one arm.

  In the papers and in court, there was no disputing the evidence that Mrs Mackenzie’s death was not an accident. She was beaten to death. It might have been an axe. It was certainly not a fall.

  In the court, the police claimed that the evidence linked that twenty-one-year-old neighbour to the murdered woman. The defending QC said there was no disputing the fact that this young man visited his elderly neighbour from time to time but that the police evidence had failed to show the proof required to link him to her killing.

  In the village, some say, a family closed ranks, helped by the failure of the local police. Some said they hadn’t made a proper job of screening off the area before the experts arrived from the mainland.

  Let’s go back to Brue. This is a couple of lines of croft-houses, following the road that leads down close to the shore. We’re just a bit south of Barvas. That’s the beach we were always told was dangerous. We were never allowed to swim there. You reached Brue, visiting the Westside cousins, by taking the bus till the end of the main road, then walking towards the sound of the surf. You went a mile down the single-track, over the cattle grid. Even with everyone selling their cows then, they were still not called sheep-grids.

  That history has another echo, for me, now. I recognised the story when I read a similar one about ten years later. It’s a different setting, more urban than rural and it’s fiction. There’s an elderly woman who has certainly more money than she can use for her needs, that stage of her life. A young man, a student with strong powers of reasoning, has more need of it than her. He will make better use of it. A police Inspector has his suspicions. He uses reason and pressure and the murderer confesses and is punished. It’s fiction but there’s a lot of history in it.

  No-one confessed to the Lewis murder. The young man from the village appeared in Inverness court, in his best suit, with a look of bewilderment caught by the flash-guns which popped as he arrived and left. Some questions were never answered.

  It was plastered all over the national headlines for weeks. If I claimed that the opening headline when the story appeared in the Stornoway Gazette was ‘Incident At Brue’, would you think I was winding you up? There were two key issues. A sum of money was missing from Mrs Mackenzie’s house. And there was much discussion of a pile of bloodstained clothing. The forensic evidence was confused.

  The verdict was unanimous and it did not take much more than an hour for the jury to report. There were cheers of celebration from the accused’s family in the public galleries, quelled by the judge. The charge against the weaver from the same village as the murdered woman was found ‘Not Proven’.

  The photographs were also on the front page of the nationals. Pints of beer being raised by the twenty-one-year-old and his family, to celebrate. He was a young man, they said. He would have plenty of time to rebuild his own life. He’s also dead now.

  A good day for the lawyers – that’s what the olman said.

  That verdict was the same finding as in the Madeleine Smith trial. She claimed to have bought arsenic for her own cosmetic treatment. There was no disputing the cause of death being arsenic poisoning or that Miss Smith had a clear motive. But there was still a need to prove that the arsenic bought by Miss Smith was administered. There was no evidence that the deceased and the accused had met in the period immediately before his death. A witness came forward but the trial had already started so this possible evidence was not admitted.

  But what kind of a place was that Island? They kept asking that, in class, in Sauchie. It sounded worse than Glasgow, my classmates said.

  Even the weather. I think it was that same year, hurricanes in the Approaches were in the news. The concrete beacon, set at the limits of the Arnish Reef, was toppled. You can see the surf break on it or just swell up on it close to High Water. The remains are in two parts now and the ruin is still listed in records of archaeological sites. Thomas Stevenson, the engineer, described the challenge and the technology which provided a successful solution. A small lighthouse was built on the Lewis mainland, west side of the bay and that small beacon, on the rock, reflected its light.

  But the Iolaire grounded at Holm on the eastern side of the Approaches. And so did the fishing vessel, Stella.

  I was beginning to spend a lot of time at library bookshelves. More than once, our teacher would ask if I didn’t want to take the book back to my seat. But I’d have read most of it already or found what I wanted. Then I started knowing that I was different. That’s because I talked different and some people thought I was English, some Welsh. Maybe that was why I began to hear my own voice, shouting above the rest, when the Catholic bus passed our school going to another. We went to the railings, swung and chanted. Our opposite numbers piled over to the windows on the kerb side of the upper deck. The Catholics cast out their reply in a net of sound, up louder than revving BMC diesels, up over our own wall.

  Ghillie

  The olman went alone to the funeral of his mother. She was my grannie with the Spangles. The one who knew all about fishing and dipping as well as scones. He wanted me to come with him, on the train, bus and ferry. The car was in the garage again.

  The olaid said we could just get the plane, Glasgow to Stornoway, and worry about it at the end of the month but the olman said he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t the money. It was when they shut that tin door and you were up there. At least on the ferry you could get out on deck. You could open the window of the train – it was all diesel or electric now, on the passenger lines. But a very few shunts of sooty smoke still went up behind our house as the coal-train went out along the valley of the Devon river. Further upstream, they called it Glendevon, b
ut not down here.

  The olaid tried to persuade me. My heels, in their new brogues, were digging at the vinyl-covered floor. They weren’t the leather-soled ones that were back in fashion again, expensive ones worn under expensive blue jeans. But the uppers were leather, over cheaper moulded soles. And we couldn’t afford to carpet our semi so my shoes made a noise on the new vinyl, as they kicked out resistance to all this duty of death.

  The olman let me off the hook. The olaid had already come back from the Co-op with the decent clothes I needed, bought on tick. That was a thing she was never going to do. The dark cord trousers had decent pockets, she said. Her own father always said, if times were tight you couldn’t afford not to buy trousers with decent pockets. If they bothered about the pockets, all the rest of the breeks would last longer.

  But she didn’t take the clothes back when my father said he’d go alone. Maybe the wee man had a point, he said. It would be fine at the bread-van and the fish-van, the right things would be said. But at the wake, in the house, all the borrowed seats filled with people in dark clothes, and in the church, no-one would be saying anything good about a woman that never harmed anyone. There was no mention of maybe my sister going up. She was in the middle of exams and it was a long way to go to make the tea and the soup. That’s what women did at Lewis funerals after the short service which never mentioned the person you were going to bury.

  I was hearing them talking, late on. Kirsty’s voice was there, too. The olman was saying his mother managed without a husband most of her life and she kept you laughing with it. Didn’t spend on herself but saved from what she had. A woman who could produce what was needed from behind the wally-dugs on the mantel-shelf, at the exact moment. She’d lost her own man when the First War was over for the rest of Great Britain. And she’d given a son to the convoys that kept the supply lines going and the alliance together.

  Hell, he knew the world was falling to bits and we were all sinners without having to be told it again. And all the nods in his direction as one who had left the fold and needed this lesson of the transient nature of our lives.

  Maybe there might even be a mention of this Gomorrah in the Central Belt. It was Alloa’s turn to be in the news. An interpretation of the law in Scotland allowed local councils the yea or nea on censorship, when it came to cinema. So cars were coming from other regions where other councils had taken a moral standpoint on Ulysses, the film. They came from far and wide, maybe to see what was behind the two-page inserts in the papers or maybe to express solidarity with Clackmannan, who refused the power of censorship. You couldn’t guess at the motives of the occupants of all these Anglias, all these Cambridges, Cortinas, Beetles. Triumphs.

  We tried to get a look at the boards, walking through the park to the town, to catch a later bus home. But the usual gallery of stills had been replaced with a discreet rough board, giving the times of the showings.

  The olman was subdued, on his return from Lewis. It could have been the travel or it could just have been sheer guilt from us not having returned to visit, as a family, since the removal van. But I heard them talking late. You could hear a lot from up the sliding ladder into the converted loft. Shares of the croft. Long before leaving the Island, he had forfeited all right to anything in Griomsiadair. He couldn’t argue with that. But something would have been handy enough to keep the Building Society at bay.

  Then my mother’s voice came stronger. That bloody car would have to come off the road. We could hardly afford to put petrol in it anyway. We wouldn’t get anything for it but at least we wouldn’t have to go taxing and insuring it. And the no-claims was gone since that knock on the way home from that damned football match.

  So we were green before our time, courtesy of the Abbey National. The Morris went into the garage and stayed. He had to catch the workers’ bus at the corner and she would just walk up and down Hungry Hill. I lost the contact with my father that came from him driving me out to Crook of Devon or Rumbling Bridge and collecting me at the end of the day. He’d make a token moan about it but once or twice he’d even shown some interest in this angling after small trout, under hazels, over brambles.

  He’d knock them on the head for me. Gut them with the small sharp smooth-handled knife that every crofter’s son carried in a pocket. He quite liked being my ghillie. At least it was out in the open. Nothing would get him into a small boat of any sort again. He could just about cope with the Loch Seaforth as long as he could get out on deck.

  But my corduroy trousers and pink nylon shirt and mock brogue shoes got put to use. The olaid got the word from The Broch. Grampa was failing fast – his lungs of course and Granma was jist broken-hertit. We ended up staying on after one funeral for the next. They were no more than three weeks apart, all in the summer holidays so I didn’t have to get time off school.

  People were quite cheery but I was sad about the pre-fab and the garden. There were still jars and jars of greenish onions in the cupboard and enough Tunnocks biscuits to stick to the teeth of half the population of Scotland. My granma could never believe there would ever be enough to feed the whole family. There were tins of ham and a fridge full of bacon. She was a hefty lady and maybe that had something to do with the massive strokes, one after the other. But everyone was saying it was a mercy really, she couldn’t have gone on long without Sandy.

  There was a brass band in full uniform at her funeral and the minister said what a good woman she was. They only carried the coffin the very last bit, here, just family. So a lot of men didn’t get a shot of carrying it on the black frame.

  The olman was not very long back from going to the Lewis funeral. Now he hired a car to drive up the east coast to join the family for The Broch ones. We all went back down together. It was a Fiat 500. We all fitted in and we came across the Tay Bridge.

  Pike

  Gartmorn Dam was sided by pines. They’d probably been planted in a post-war panic, anticipating the future demand for pit props and wood pulp. They kept most winds off the water.

  The pier had standing room for three anglers. It led out away from sloping walls to the flooded area. A rusty steel cylinder was linked to the concrete bank by an iron walkway. The whole construction must have been there to monitor the supply, or pump it, when the water, captured here, had served the area. You reached onto the pier by stepping round a locked gate and going out onto the lattice of metal.

  From there, you could catch the reflection of a real island, forested and about half a mile out. The picture in the water was something worth looking at, in the algae soup of insects, collected here. That’s probably why the shoals of small perch also gathered around the pier. The smaller fish would chase the sticklebacks and perch fry that chased the insects. In turn, bigger solo perch and long pike would come up from deep water to take their fill of the intermediate-sized fish.

  It was like looking into the diesel film in Stornoway harbour. You could catch the first dimples of disturbance. Could be just a breeze escaping through branches – until you saw fry break the surface. Maybe you’d catch the chrome glint of an accelerating fish below. I leaned over to watch all this and could have been looking at mackerel chasing sandeels.

  I took my first pike long before I took a salmon. I was well prepared. A big reader then. Everything from The Old Man and The Sea (because of the leaping fish on the cover) to all the comics. I had a paper-round – newspapers in the morning and magazines after school. I read all the comics before I delivered them. Some customers complained they were getting their papers late. I’d read anything but I liked fishing books best. Manuals and stories. Salmon weighed sixty-four pounds and were taken on long poles of greenheart by a Miss Ballantyne, in tweed, wielding gear over swollen water. Monks bore witness to pike, snapping at water-fowl.

  I would sit in the Public Library, between buses back from school, turning the pages of The Manchester Guardian till I came to the hot bits. The angling column was by Anthony somebody. He could be casting for sea bass, from storm beaches in Atl
antic Ireland. That was another fish with a spiny dorsal like a perch but a silver bar, foreign to me and so pure and strange.

  The paper-round money would get spent, between the blue-painted Sports Shop and the Co-op fish shop across the road. Wire traces with treble hooks didn’t come cheap, even if the white-haired lady knocked a penny or two off because of your ginger hair and soft voice. Herring fillets made bait that shone and sent a message of oil into the non-tidal water. That catch must have come from the Clyde or Canada. The boned bodies were so clean that they didn’t smell of fish. They might have been netted from the chlorine waters, inside the sandstone Public Baths, the other side of the junction.

  It must have been New Year’s Day because I had no papers to deliver. It could easily have been the first day of the Seventies. I was stocked up with gear, between Christmas and Hogmanay tips. These came from the first few parts of my territory, up from Main Street, before the railway line. These were all council houses.

  Further up the hill, there were too many people like us. Refugees from council schemes in other parts of Scotland and now saddled with mortgages they couldn’t afford, for a bungalow with at least one dormer window or porch to make it different from next door. Further up the hill again, was the real money. Some of them got The Times. There was a lot of Scotsmans for every Record.

  You didn’t expect anything, that far up, except for a polite directive to stop using the short cut between gardens and start going the long way round. Please. That was when there were semi’s which didn’t really want to be connected. My part of Hungry Hill was the place where people went into the Spar grocers for two ounces of cheese. Up the hill, they had the money because they hung on to it.

  I was beginning to realise that I now lived in a reservoir. Maybe we were all near enough the same species but there was a pattern of territories. If you walked all the way around the silver birch to find a quiet clearing, at The Dam, you could ledger a worm all day and hope that a survivor of the stock of brown trout would take it. These had been bred to be angled for with Greenwells’ Glories and Bloody Butchers. The survivors were forgotten about when the pike and perch took a hold. Rowing boats were removed.