I tried again, putting a hypothetical question to her. If somebody fell into the Black Jaws, spent three days trapped in the river and survived, what mental condition would she expect them to be in? Not good, she said. She would expect such a person to be suffering from severe shock and trauma, leaving aside the effects of any head injuries, oxygen deprivation and so on. I had to be careful about revealing what I knew, but asked whether a poor diet would have an adverse effect on the person’s mind. She said it wouldn’t help if they weren’t getting the right mix of protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, etc. We talked about that in a general kind of way, and then I asked, ‘Would you say Gideon Mack experienced a nervous breakdown?’ She gave me a very sharp look. ‘I’ve already told you, I can’t answer such questions,’ she said. Her expression told me plainly that she thought he had. I mentioned all the stuff he’d come out with about the Devil in the cave. ‘Would you say he was mad?’ She said ‘mad’ was not a word she would use to describe any patient. It wasn’t a useful term. I asked if ‘mentally ill’ was a more useful term. She said it was. ‘Would you describe Gideon Mack as having been mentally ill?’ ‘No comment,’ she said, and then she stood up, saying she was already late and would have to leave at once. End of interview.
Andrew McAllister: This was the police sergeant who came to see Mack when he returned from hospital. I found him at the station. It turns out we have a couple of mutual acquaintances in the Highlands, so we found some common ground there. He seemed like a reasonable bloke who had grown bitter and frustrated, and who carries a chip on his shoulder because he hasn’t got further up the ranks. What did he think of Gideon Mack? ‘He was a decent man who never recovered from the death of his wife.’ I challenged him on this: that was eleven years before everything happened, I said. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I was there the night his wife was killed. In fact it was me that had to go and tell him.’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘so you see I know what I’m talking about. He poured all his energies into his work after she died, but it wasn’t enough. You wouldn’t believe what he did for charity, running marathons and all that. If you want my opinion, he exhausted himself, lost the plot and took himself off into the hills to end it all.’ I asked if that’s what he really thought, that Mack committed suicide. ‘No doubt in my mind,’ Sergeant McAllister said.
I asked him about Mack’s accident. Did he really think he’d been in the water three days? ‘No, he couldn’t possibly have been. He’d have drowned, or died of hypothermia.’ Well, where did McAllister think he had been, washed up on the river bank? ‘No, he still couldn’t have survived.’ Well, then, did he sit by a big fire with the Devil in a cave, like he’d been telling people? The sergeant looked at me and nodded. ‘Not the Devil, though,’ he said. ‘Chae Middleton. Something went on between them, but Mr Mack either couldn’t remember or didn’t want to tell. That was why he came away with all that other nonsense. He needed an explanation as to where he’d been.’ An alibi? I asked. But meeting the Devil wasn’t much of an alibi. It wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. What did McAllister think they’d been up to? The sergeant said that Middleton was a right dodgy character, a known poacher and light-fingered in other ways too. He bought and sold contraband booze and fags but had never been caught. He probably dealt drugs as well. McAllister’s theory was that Mack somehow survived going through the Black Jaws, came out downstream the first night, after the searchers had had to give up because of the dark, and was picked up by Chae Middleton. Chae and some mates were up the river that night because with all the police and mountain rescue folk combing the area they were nervous about a stash of illicit goods they had hidden somewhere and were moving it out. That sounded a bit boys’ own adventure-ish to me – I mean, do people hide smuggled goods in caves and woods these days? – but I let him run with it. Chae was a bad bugger, McAllister said, but even he couldn’t let another human being drown, so when he saw Mack floating by he hauled him out. Mack came to and realised what was going on, and Chae’s pals began to get agitated. Chae took him somewhere and kept him there for two days till the contraband was out of the vicinity and well through the distribution chain. Meanwhile he came back and helped in the hunt for the missing minister. They came to an arrangement that, in exchange for Chae saving Mack’s life, Mack would say nothing about Chae’s activities. Then they went back up the river and staged the rescue, and Mack came out with his story about the Devil. But then later all this got to Mack’s conscience and on top of losing his wife it finally sent him over the edge.
Well, it wasn’t credible, and I said so. McAllister started telling me that truth was stranger than fiction, I wouldn’t believe half the things he’d seen over the years, etc. Fantasy stuff. I said, well, there’s an easy way to find out and that’s to get Chae Middleton in for questioning. McAllister said he’d already done that back in the autumn, but Chae had either been too drunk or too canny and didn’t let anything slip. He interviewed Mack (as we know) but got stonewalled there too. Basically, he said, there was nothing else he could do.
I said I’d go down to the Luggie and see Chae myself. ‘No you won’t,’ McAllister said. ‘It’s a free country,’ I said. ‘It may be,’ McAllister said, ‘and you can go down to the Luggie if you want but you won’t find Chae there.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because he’s dead.’ Apparently he fell in the harbour last March after a long night in the pub. Pretty ironic, when you think about it. ‘Fell, pushed or jumped?’ I asked. McAllister said the Procurator Fiscal concluded that he fell, but nobody saw it happen. McAllister obviously wasn’t convinced. He hinted darkly that Chae was losing it because of the bevvy, his business associates were worried about him and they might have given him a helping hand. He’s quite into conspiracies of one kind or another, McAllister. Anyway, that scratched my proposed interview with Chae Middleton, so I drove off up into the glens to visit the Reverend Lorna Sprott.
Lorna Sprott: I’d phoned Ms Sprott a few days before and asked if she’d be prepared to talk to me. She was very reluctant at first, especially when she knew I was a journalist. She thought she might have to clear it with 121 George Street. I told her I didn’t work for any particular paper, I was just interested in finding out more about Gideon. I said I’d met him once (stretching the truth a little), at the Elgin marathon when he’d got a big cheque out of NessTrek. He’d seemed like a really nice guy, I was sorry to hear he’d died in such tragic circumstances. That helped. She agreed to see me, and I went up to her manse at Meldrick that evening. Beautiful spot, but a bit isolated for my liking.
Ms Sprott manages to get through quite a quantity of white wine of an evening. She offered me a glass as soon as I arrived and she knocked back the rest of the bottle in the hour and a half I was there. A homely, lonely kind of soul. The dog, Jasper, came and lay on my feet and kept wanting me to rub his belly. I think Ms Sprott would have told me anything once she saw that the dog liked me, but she didn’t actually have much to say that added to the picture.
‘What was Gideon to you?’ I asked. ‘He was a dear friend who went insane,’ she said, ‘and not all the prayers and care I could offer could do anything to prevent it.’ ‘It looks like he lost his faith,’ I said, and added, ‘if he ever had it.’ ‘I can’t believe that of him,’ she said. ‘He was an honest, righteous man and I can’t believe he entered the ministry under false pretences.’ I said, okay, but it did seem that he’d lost his faith towards the end, judging from what he said at Catherine Craigie’s funeral. ‘I wasn’t there,’ she said, ‘so I don’t know. I like to think that he lost his way rather than his faith.’ She thought he’d gone off into the hills at the end to try to find it again. Why you’d go looking for your faith in Dalwhinnie escaped me, but Ms Sprott started singing, very badly, a psalm, the one that starts, ‘I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid.’ I think she was hoping I’d join in. She stopped after one verse when I didn’t.
I said, so what about the Devil, had Gideon met h
im? No, of course he hadn’t. So where had he been those days he was missing? Unconscious. How had he survived? God protected him. Not the Devil? Absolutely not. Did she believe in the Devil? Yes, but not as a being the way Gideon described him. As what then? As a power for evil in the world, the antithesis of goodness, the opposite of God. And (I was chancing it here) did she believe in fairies? Of course not, she said. Yet she believed in God? She said that my line of questioning was mischievous, and insulting too. She was a minister, God was her entire life. I apologised but said it was surely part of a minister’s training to confront such questions and come up with some convincing answers. That was true, she said. Had the whole business with Gideon not shaken her own faith? Not a bit, her faith was what carried her through. ‘If I hadn’t had my faith I wouldn’t have been able to cope. And Jasper, of course.’ She looked pretty shaky to me. The dog was relaxed, though, coping a lot better than she was!
I had brought with me a photocopy of part of the first page of Gideon’s manuscript, the two texts he’d written out from the Bible and the one from Moby Dick. I showed her this and asked her if it was Gideon’s handwriting. She said it was and asked where I had got it. I said the police had required a sample of his writing when they were searching for him. She said it seemed a strange mixture of things to have written down on one sheet of paper. I didn’t have the heart to touch on what the rest of the manuscript said about Gideon’s relationship, or non-relationship, with Ms Sprott. There didn’t seem anything to be gained by it. She was a very sad woman. I left her to her wine and drove back to Monimaskit.
I had two or three pints in the public bar of the Keldo Arms and tried to engage the half dozen locals there in conversation about their ex-minister, but half of them didn’t know him at all and the others only knew what they’d read in the tabloids. A godless kind of establishment. Long before closing-time I called it a night.
John Gless: On Friday morning I called on John Gless, the Session Clerk. I located his home address from the phone book and went round unannounced, at ten o’clock. He is eighty years old and a tougher customer than many half his age. He wouldn’t even let me in. Having established that I was a journalist he told me he had nothing to say on the subject of Gideon Mack. I asked if that meant he disapproved of how he’d behaved. No, it meant that he had nothing to say. I showed him the sample of Gideon’s handwriting, and he confirmed that it was his. I asked him if he thought Gideon Mack had betrayed the Church of Scotland. He declined to comment on this and hoped that no other member of the Session would prolong the parish’s anguish by doing so. I said I had driven past the manse, and it seemed to be empty. Gless said that the parish had effectively been without a minister for fifteen months. What was the situation as far as a replacement for Mr Mack was concerned? Obviously, he said, things had been complicated by Mr Mack’s suspension and then his disappearance. Legally it had been very difficult to do anything until it was known what had happened to him. Since his body had been formally identified the vacancy procedure could begin, and this had already happened. It was hoped that the successful candidate would be in situ by the spring. I said that I understood that Mr Mack’s body had been buried at Inverness. He said that that was what he understood too. Was I mistaken in thinking that Presbytery was normally responsible for the funeral arrangements of a minister? He said that I was not mistaken, but Mr Mack’s will had unequivocally stated that in the event of his death he was to be interred without ceremony or service and without the intervention or involvement of the Church of Scotland. How did he know this, I asked. Because Mr Mack’s solicitor had informed him as soon as the body was identified. Who was Mr Mack’s solicitor? Mr Finlay Stewart of Montrose.
I asked John Gless if a memorial service or anything of that sort was to be held for Gideon at the Old Kirk. He knew of no such proposal. If I had no further questions then he wished me good morning. I had no further questions, and he closed the door in my face.
In spite of Mr Gless’s hopes that the rest of the Session would be as guarded as he in speaking to me, I thought I would try my luck with Peter Macmurray anyway. I went to the offices of the accountancy firm of which he is a partner, but he was in a meeting. When might he be available? That afternoon. I left my card and said I’d call back at two.
I went next to the museum, to see if I could interview the director, Alan Straiton. The woman on reception told me he was away in Edinburgh. Was it anything she could help me with? I said that among other things I was trying to track down an address or contact number for William Winnyford. It was a while since his exhibition, but I wanted to talk to him about his work. The woman was very helpful. She went into her files and found me his mobile number. She said she wasn’t allowed to give me his address for security reasons, but a mobile phone number couldn’t hurt, could it? I agreed that it couldn’t. Five minutes later I was talking to Bill Winnyford, or at least to someone at the number she’d given me who identified himself as such. I mention this only because the man I spoke to was slow and measured in his speech, not at all like the Bill Winnyford Gideon describes in his testament.
Bill Winnyford: His impressions of Gideon Mack fitted the pattern that was starting to emerge, viz. that he was a decent man who went out of his mind. I said that a transcript of an interview between them had been found by the police, which was more or less true. Did Mr Winnyford by any chance still have the tape of that interview? No, he didn’t even have a transcript. Gideon had promised to send him one but never had. As for the tape, Gideon had kept it. Why, Winnyford asked, did I want it? I said it would have been interesting to hear his voice, and he said I could hear that on the tape at the museum, the one of him reading the legend of the Black Jaws. I said I’d check that out later. (I never did, by the way. By the time I’d finished on the Saturday the museum was closed. You might want to follow that up yourself.)
‘What did you think after you did the second recording with him?’ I asked. ‘The one in which he described his three days underground?’
Bill Winnyford: ‘I didn’t know what to think. He was just out of hospital, he’d had a hugely traumatic experience. I don’t know what they were playing at, letting him out like that. He was very nervous, excited. When he asked me to go round to the manse I thought he just wanted some company. We’d got along pretty well before. But he said he had some big story that he wanted to get on record while it was clear in his head. So I went round with the equipment and then he started spouting this stuff about meeting the Devil.’
‘In that interview he asks you at one point if he strikes you as being a sane human being. And you say yes. Did you really mean that?’
‘If I said it, then yes, I meant it.’
‘But did you believe what he told you about the Devil?’
‘Of course I didn’t. I mean, my work explores myths and legends, but that’s what they are, myths and legends. Nobody actually meets the Devil in a cave, not unless they’re on a bad trip. But Gideon believed he had, he really did. I did wonder if he was doing drugs or on some kind of medication or something, but it wasn’t really like that. He was sane but he was saying insane things, does that make any kind of sense? He was deluded, but he was genuine. He wasn’t trying to wind me up. It was like he’d read a lot of stuff or seen a lot of stuff and on top of what he’d been through it all got mixed up in his head. The Devil healing his leg like that, for example, that’s straight out of E.T.’
I said I’d been informed by other people that it was certainly the case that he didn’t have a limp before the accident.
Bill Winnyford: ‘True, but he wasn’t nuts before the accident either. I know, I’m contradicting myself. He limped because he’d been through the Black Jaws, and to be honest coming out with a limp was the least thing that happened to him in there. Can you imagine what three days in that river must have done to his mind? It fucked it, basically.’
I asked if he really thought Mack could have spent three days in the river and survived. He said no, he probably got out
of the water for a while but didn’t remember doing so. People were capable of astonishing feats of survival but often they were left permanently scarred. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I liked the guy. I really liked him. He was a decent man who wanted to help other people. He helped me and he didn’t have to. The fact that he went off his head is a tragedy, just a tragedy.’
I thought there was nothing more to be had from Winnyford and was about to end the conversation when he said something else.
‘You know, sometimes I think there was a jinx around that whole project. I mean, of the people who helped me, three were dead within six months of the exhibition opening. First Catherine Craigie, then Chae Middleton, then Gideon. It was as if they were being picked off for getting mixed up in it or something.’
‘Did you say Catherine Craigie helped you?’ I said. ‘I understood that she would have nothing to do with you.’
‘I don’t know where you got that from,’ Winnyford said. ‘She was incredibly helpful. We didn’t agree on everything, but she was very approachable and gave me a huge amount of information about the town. It’s true she didn’t want our collaboration broadcast – that was one of her conditions, that I didn’t acknowledge her assistance – but I couldn’t have done it without her. And she put me in touch with some key people, too. It was Miss Craigie who suggested that I involve both Chae and Gideon.’
‘But Gideon Mack didn’t know that?’
‘No, I was sworn to secrecy as far as he was concerned. It doesn’t matter now, of course, but at the time I think it was important to her.’
‘Why do you think that was?’ I asked.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ he said. ‘Local politics of some sort, I expect.’
As you and I know, Gideon was quite unaware that Catherine Craigie had assisted Winnyford in this manner. She went out of her way to rubbish him in fact. This revelation raises some interesting questions about the reliability of other things which, according to Gideon, she told him – questions, however, which are unlikely now ever to be answered.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 41