‘What about Chae?’ I asked. ‘Did he know Miss Craigie had recommended him?’
‘I wouldn’t say “recommend”. He used to do odd jobs for her, gardening and suchlike, so she asked him herself. A bit of a lad, Chae. If Gideon was on anything, any drugs I mean, that’s who he could have been getting them from. But I don’t think they had anything to do with each other till Chae found him in the river.’
‘And then Chae drowned in the harbour,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Winnyford said. ‘I was quite shaken when I heard about it. He drank a lot, apparently. Mind you, so did Gideon.’
‘Really?’
‘He certainly poured enormous drams whenever I was at the manse,’ Winnyford said. ‘I’d hardly have started mine and he’d be knocking his back and topping us both up.’
‘Do you think he had a problem?’
‘I think he had all kinds of problems. An alcohol problem? I’m not going to say that about him now he’s dead, no. He was a decent man. I liked him.’
After this phone conversation I dropped in at the library to see if I could identify Elsie Moffat, but was told she wasn’t working. Would she be in at the weekend, I asked. No, she had Saturday off. Then I asked if Nancy Croy was still running her reading group. It seems that Nancy Croy successfully applied for a principal teacher of English post in Dumfries and Galloway. She left Monimaskit at Christmas.
At two o’clock I was back at Peter Macmurray’s office. Physically, and in terms of his personality, Macmurray is much as Gideon describes him in his manuscript. I explained who I was and that I was interested in the truth about Gideon Mack, and he invited me into his office. He could barely get back in his chair before the bile started to pour out.
Peter Macmurray: ‘I ought not to speak ill of the dead,’ he said, ‘but Gideon Mack was a deceiver and a hypocrite who brought shame on the Kirk and on this community. I always knew there was something not right about him, and events totally justified my suspicions.’ I asked what had aroused these suspicions, and he cited the fact that Mack had married one atheist and after her death had ‘taken up’ with another. I asked if he meant Catherine Craigie. Yes. Was he implying that there had been anything between them other than friendship? ‘Well, what do you think?’ he said. ‘She was an immoral woman and he visited her on a regular weekly basis. One doesn’t need to be Einstein to make two and two equal four.’ Did he have any particular reason for denigrating Miss Craigie, who was also, after all, dead? They must have been about the same age and had presumably grown up together in Monimaskit. Did he have any personal reason for disliking her? He went slightly pink and said he always tried to put personal issues aside. He simply stood up for the truth and for the Christian faith.
I showed him the handwriting sample, and he agreed that Mack had written the texts. He read them through and said of the third one that Herman Melville, whoever he was, might speak for himself and Gideon Mack but he, Peter Macmurray, was very far from being cracked about the head. Did he believe Mack’s story about meeting the Devil? ‘Not in so many words, no of course not.’ Then what could Mack have meant by it? ‘He was revealing the depths of his dabbling in the black arts.’ I asked him if he was serious. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘He made light of his involvement with that exhibition at the museum, but when I confronted him about it he refused to answer me. He was obviously burdened with guilt and eventually it dragged him down. Sin will out, Mr Caithness, and it did so spectacularly in his case.’ I asked him if he himself believed in the existence of the Devil. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do. The Devil exists, and I’m sorry to say that Gideon Mack was one of his servants.’
There was a great deal more in this vein and eventually it was I who terminated the interview. I felt quite depressed after my half-hour with Mr Macmurray, and needed some fresh air. I walked round the manse, which was all shut up, and then I walked round the kirkyard, reading the stones. I found Catherine Craigie’s family gravestone with her name and dates freshly cut in it. I saw no children flying kites and nobody speaking to the dead.
I decided to go and get a haircut. A couple of inquiries led me to Henry Leask’s barber shop.
Henry Leask: Mr Leask had a customer and told me to take a seat. I looked at the paper for five minutes, then when the other man had gone I took my place in the chair. After the preliminaries about how I wanted my hair cut, the weather and the football, I brought the conversation round to Gideon Mack. I said I was passing through and had remembered reading about him in the papers. Had he known the minister? Yes, he used to cut his hair in the very chair in which I was sitting. I said it must have been a shock to everybody when they heard about his death. Henry Leask: ‘I think we all knew it would come to that, when he’d been missing that length of time. He never recovered from falling in the river. I knew he wasn’t long for this world.’ I asked him what he thought about the stories Mack had told. Did he believe them? Henry Leask: ‘I’d believe Gideon Mack a thousand times before I believe a word of some of the people that didn’t like him. He was a decent man.’ ‘Then you believe that he met the Devil?’ ‘Well, that’s a question it’s hard to say yes to, isn’t it? But then you wouldn’t credit some of the nonsense I nod along to when I’m cutting folk’s hair. And half of them believe what they’re telling me, and half of what they tell me turns out to be true! So I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think he lied. He might not have been well by that stage, but he wasn’t a liar.’ ‘But he lied about being a Christian, about believing in God.’ ‘That’s different. Everybody lies about that.’
By now it was late afternoon. There were just three more people I wanted to see, and two of them would have to wait until the next day, Saturday. I went to the Monimaskit Care Home and asked if I could see Mrs Agnes Mack. Who was I, the woman who opened the door wanted to know. I was a friend of her son Gideon, I was in the area and wanted to say hello. I knew that Mrs Mack wouldn’t know who I was, but for Gideon’s sake I thought I should call on her. ‘You’d better come in,’ the woman said. ‘Did you know Mrs Mack personally?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘she passed away at Christmas, at the age of eighty-six.’
I said I was sorry to hear that, and would she mind if I asked a couple of questions? Ask away, she said. Had Mrs Mack been aware of her son’s death? No, the woman said, she very much doubted it. They’d tried to tell her the first time he’d died, but then of course he hadn’t died, he’d come back again, and that was too confusing for her, so although they’d explained about him going missing again and then his body being found, as far as Agnes was concerned they could have been talking about Scott of the Antarctic. Gideon had come in a few times before he went missing the second time, but he hadn’t looked well and he hadn’t stayed long with his mother. She hadn’t recognised him for some years, which was always upsetting for relatives.
I asked the woman if her name was Betty. It was. I said, ‘Gideon mentioned you once or twice. He knew you looked after his mother well. That was important to him.’ She seemed very pleased about that. ‘Well, he must have appreciated it,’ she said. ‘You know he left everything to the home, don’t you?’ I said I didn’t know that. ‘Every penny he had,’ she said. ‘He may have gone strange at the end, but when you think of all the money he raised for charity over the years, and then this, you have to think well of him, don’t you?’ ‘Did he go strange?’ I asked. ‘Oh, he couldn’t help himself,’ she said. ‘He was religious. It’s something I’ve noticed with the residents since I’ve been working here. The more religious they are, the more daft they go. I probably shouldn’t say such a thing, but there, I’ve said it. So it wasn’t a surprise to me the way Mr Mack went after he’d been three days in the river.’
John and Elsie Moffat: On Saturday morning, after breakfast, I drove down the coast road to the Moffats’ house. It was a bright, sunny day, with snow on the hills inland, but I wasn’t looking forward to the encounter. Neither of them, I guessed, would be pleased to have yet another journalist on
their doorstep asking questions about their former friend Gideon.
I found the house without difficulty, drove in through the open gate and parked, went to the back door and knocked. It was Elsie who answered. She looked tired and anxious, but I could see what Gideon had seen in her, she is a very attractive woman. I apologised for calling without notice, but their phone number was ex-directory (I’d checked this before: a lot of teachers keep their names out of the phone-book, with good reason). I’d been thinking for some time about how to persuade the Moffats to talk, and although you and I had agreed that we should keep the existence of Gideon’s manuscript confidential, I couldn’t see how I was going to engage them without telling them about it. They had undergone a lot of media attention back in the autumn, and one of the tabloids had run a particularly hurtful story portraying Elsie as a kind of Delilah of Monimaskit. I would have to approach them from a friendlier angle. So I said that I worked for a publisher, and that the publisher had come into possession of a document written by Gideon Mack shortly before he died. We were considering what to do with it and, since it mentioned them by name, thought it only right to come and talk to them about it.
Elsie’s face turned ashen. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said. She leaned past me as if looking for a phalanx of cameras setting up in the drive. ‘You’d better come in.’
She told me to wait in the kitchen and went through a door leading to the rest of the house. I could hear the noise of a television, children playing, a man’s voice. A couple of minutes passed, and then Elsie came back with her husband.
John Moffat looked as tired as she did, but a lot angrier. At first I thought, like Gideon the last time he saw him, that he was going to punch me. He said, ‘If it had been me that came to the door you’d never have got through it. I have nothing but contempt for you people. But you’re in now, so say what you’ve got to say and then go.’
I said, ‘Mr Moffat, I’m sorry that you’re angry. Believe me, I don’t want to upset you. The fact is, though, as I was saying to your wife, that we have this document. There’s no question that it was written by Gideon Mack. Now, I’m a journalist but I don’t work for any particular newspaper and this isn’t going to be in a newspaper, but it’s quite probable that the document may be published in book form. That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about.’
‘In book form?’ Moffat said. ‘How long is it, for fuck’s sake?’
‘It’s about three hundred pages of A4,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure exactly how many words that is.’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘It’s about a hundred thousand words, give or take a few thousand. Jesus, Elsie, how fucking ironic is that? The bastard’s written a book. Not content with trying to ruin our lives, he’s gone and written a book, and somebody wants to publish it.’
‘Take it easy, John,’ Elsie said, which wasn’t what he wanted to hear. I remember you telling me once, Patrick, that hell hath no fury like a jealous author, especially an unpublished one.
‘Take it easy? How am I supposed to take it easy? Every time this thing dies away, and we’re trying to get ourselves back to normal, it flares up again. It’s like he’s haunting us.’
‘Gideon?’ I said.
‘Well, who else are we talking about?’ he said. ‘Aye, Gideon. Gideon, Gideon, Gideon.’
He couldn’t stay still. He kept swaying and stepping towards me and then pulling back. Elsie put a hand on his arm but he shook it off. I was standing in the middle of the floor, trying to look relaxed but not relaxed at all inside, waiting for him to fly at me.
Elsie said, ‘What’s your name again?’
‘Harry Caithness,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you sit at the table, Mr Caithness, and I’ll make some coffee.’
‘What?’ Moffat said. ‘Are you insane? I don’t want this man sitting in my kitchen drinking my coffee. I don’t even want him in the house. I want him to fuck off and leave us alone.’
‘John,’ she said, ‘he’s here now. We can send him away and, like you said, this will go away for a while, then it’ll come back again. If Gideon’s written something that’s going to be published, then we need to know what it is. We need to know what he’s said about us. Let’s at least hear what Mr Caithness has to say.’
Moffat stood there fuming for a bit longer. Elsie filled the kettle. I said, ‘She’s right, Mr Moffat. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to deal with this sooner or later.’
‘Let’s see it, then,’ he said. ‘Gideon’s fucking masterpiece.’
I explained that I didn’t have a copy of it with me, but that I’d read it. I said that basically it was Gideon’s story of his life and his version of the events leading up to his disappearance. I said it accorded largely with what had been reported in the papers, but there was a lot more detail.
‘What kind of detail?’ John Moffat asked.
‘About everything,’ I said. ‘About how you all met as students, about his wife, about you two, about Monimaskit, about his falling into the Black Jaws…’
‘About meeting the Devil?’
‘Yes, a lot about that.’
‘So fundamentally it’s the diary of a madman. And you’re proposing to publish it?’
‘It tells his version of events,’ I repeated.
‘It tells a pack of lies in other words,’ he said. ‘What does it say about my wife? Does he tell the same lies he came out with before?’
‘He goes into more detail,’ I said.
His fist banged off the table. ‘Jesus Christ! We’ll sue you, you know, if you publish it. If you publish anything that’s not true, we’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got.’
‘Like you’ve sued the tabloids,’ I said, and before he could flare up again I went on, ‘I’m not being flippant, Mr Moffat, but if the book is published, it would be Gideon Mack’s story. It would be his word against yours.’
The kettle came to the boil and Elsie made the coffee.
‘Well, there you go, then,’ Moffat said. ‘His word’s worth nothing. He confessed he was a charlatan when it came to being a minister. He came out with all that crap about mysterious stones and speaking with the Devil. Obviously what he’s written is total fantasy.’
‘Then you have nothing to worry about,’ I said.
‘But a book’s a book,’ he said. ‘It’s different from a newspaper. The papers are here today, gone tomorrow. A book lasts for ever.’
Elsie said, ‘Why do you think he wrote it?’
Moffat gave her a look that was half wonder, half hatred. ‘Because he wanted to hurt us,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. Why did he write it, Mr Caithness?’
‘He says,’ I said, ‘he needed to tell the truth. He had to write it down because nobody would listen to him. He genuinely does seem to have believed that these things happened.’
‘What things?’ Moffat said fiercely.
‘All of them,’ I said.
‘But they were lies. Jesus, man, don’t you understand what he did to us? He was once my best friend. My best friend. But he went fucking nuts and then he made a pass at Elsie, and then, when she rejected him, he made up these lies about her. Don’t you see how horrible that is? To go to school and have these lies about your wife flying around? To walk down the street together and you know people are remembering what he said and thinking there might be something in it? Can you imagine what that’s like?’
He kept putting his head in his hands and letting out heavy sighs of exasperation. When he did this I glanced at Elsie. She was looking back at me. She shook her head quickly. There was an obvious question that she didn’t want me to ask.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘Nothing’s settled yet. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll speak to the publisher and tell him how hard this is for you. Maybe we can send you the manuscript and you can tell us what you think. I’m not promising anything. I’m not saying we’ll cut anything, nothing like that. But at least you could see what it is we’re talking about before an
ybody else does. At least you could decide what, if anything, you want to do about it.’
‘Great,’ Moffat said. ‘You’re offering to hold a gun to my head and say, “What does that feel like?” What can we do about it? There’s fuck all we can do about it, is there?’
‘Wait till you’ve seen it,’ I said. Elsie went through to check on her children. While she was away Moffat looked at me with what was almost a pleading look.
‘We used to take the piss out of miracles and God and all that,’ he said. ‘Gideon and me. He was great back then. A son of the manse and he rejected the whole fucking business. We used to rely on facts. That was all: nothing that wasn’t a fact counted, nothing you couldn’t experience. If it wasn’t real it was crap. And he was interested in real issues too, politics and stuff. We were grown-ups. But then I kept growing and he started regressing. It was bad enough when he went into the Church but he promised me he wouldn’t change, he didn’t believe any of it. But he did change, and he did start believing it. And then all this shite. It was like he was taken over by some fucking, I don’t know, some cult or something, but it was just him, he did it all by himself. It was like he wasn’t Gideon any more.’
‘So what happened that made him change?’ I asked.
‘How do I know? Is that why you’re here? Do you think we can give you some answers about what the fuck was going on in Gideon’s head? There are no answers, don’t you see? There are no answers. Gideon once understood that.’
Elsie came back in. ‘Are they okay?’ Moffat asked. ‘They’re fine,’ she said.
‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you,’ I said. ‘The place where he says he saw this standing stone, that’s somewhere near here, isn’t it?’
‘It’s up in the woods,’ Moffat said. ‘Fuck. That was two years ago, can you believe that, Elsie? That was the start of it. Two years ago he came here and told us about that stone. And now look where we are.’
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 42