‘Where in the woods?’ I said.
Moffat laughed. ‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Nowhere. Because there never was a stone. He imagined the whole thing. Nobody else ever saw it because it was never there.’
‘Where in the woods did he say it was?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ Moffat said. ‘He was always going to show us, but he never did. For obvious reasons.’
‘I know where it is,’ Elsie said. ‘I mean, where he said it was.’
He looked at her suspiciously. ‘You? How do you know?’
‘Well, there isn’t a precise spot, but I know the path he was talking about. There’s a clearing. I know where he meant.’
‘Can we go there?’ I asked.
They looked at each other.
‘What’s the point?’ Moffat said.
‘I’d like to see it,’ I said.
Elsie said, ‘I can show you.’
‘No,’ Moffat said.
‘We could all go,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ Moffat said, ‘but I’m not wandering about in the woods looking for a non-existent stone.’
‘Let me go,’ Elsie said. ‘What are you afraid of?’
‘I’m not afraid of anything,’ he said. ‘Or anyone. I just don’t see the point.’
‘We need to make this be over, John,’ she said. ‘Let me close this bit of it. I’ll show Mr Caithness where Gideon thought he saw his stone, and that’ll be it. Over.’
‘Until his fucking book comes out.’
‘We’ll deal with that later,’ she said.
I realised that she was the strong one in the relationship. He was floundering, sinking. She was the one that would get them through it, if they got through it. But also, she wanted to tell me something.
‘Okay,’ Moffat said. ‘I’ll stay here with the kids. You show him. And then it’s over, right?’
‘Right,’ she said.
He looked at me. ‘I don’t want to see that manuscript, typescript, whatever the hell it is,’ he said. Elsie interrupted, ‘John…’ but he carried on. ‘I can’t be arsed with this any more. Send it to Elsie if she wants to look at it. I don’t. It can’t say anything that isn’t already out there. It’s all fucking lies anyway.’
‘That’s up to you,’ I said.
‘See when you go for your walk in the woods just now,’ he said. ‘Take your car, and don’t come back. You’ve already ruined my weekend. Just don’t come back, all right?’
I drank up my coffee. ‘I’ll wait outside,’ I said. I thought I should give them a chance to talk on their own, but Elsie Moffat followed almost immediately.
The entrance to Keldo Woods is only a few hundred yards from their house. We could have walked, but I took Moffat’s advice and drove Elsie along to the parking area. It was dry underfoot. She’d put on trainers, I just had my ordinary shoes. We headed off along the main track. The sun, as they say, was splitting the trees.
We didn’t say anything much at first. We just walked. She was a lot fitter than me and gave me a disapproving look when I lit up a cigarette and smoked as we went. I admit, I was peching a bit until I got into my stride. I’d meant to pay attention, get my bearings for future reference, but it wasn’t easy, there are that many wee paths criss-crossing through the trees. For a while we seemed to be going in a big circle, then I thought we were doubling back on ourselves. We turned on to another path that went up a slight slope. We climbed for a bit, then things levelled out. I threw away the cigarette-end and stamped it out.
I said, ‘It was all lies, was it? What Gideon said about him and you?’
‘Of course it was,’ she said, in a flash. She’d been waiting for the question all that time. I knew then that Gideon had been telling the truth, at least about her, at least in part.
The path divided in two. We went left, then a little further on we went left again. The trees crowd in very thick at this point. It was pretty oppressive even on a sunny day: I didn’t fancy it much on a wet, dark night. And then quite suddenly we hit an open area of thick, coarse grass and mossy tummocks, just the way Gideon describes it. He wasn’t making that bit up either.
‘This is it,’ she said.
I looked around. ‘Where?’
She pointed across the clearing. ‘Over there.’
‘But there’s nothing there,’ I said.
She said, ‘Did you expect there would be?’
We left the path and made our way across the open ground. It was a bit squelchy in places, once I put a foot wrong and the mud oozed up over my shoe. I swore but she didn’t seem to hear. After thirty or forty yards she stopped.
‘Here,’ she said.
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how do you know?’ I said. ‘According to what he wrote down, he was the only one who ever saw it. How do you know it was here?’
‘Because I saw it,’ she said.
I didn’t say anything. What could I say? She looked at me. ‘I don’t know what’s in this for you,’ she said. ‘I really don’t, but I guess at one level it’s the story. That’s what you journalists are really interested in, isn’t it, the story? Meanwhile John and I are trying to get our marriage back together, but you want the story that will make that impossible. Well, you can publish Gideon’s book and maybe that will finish us off and maybe it won’t, I don’t know. But I need to tell you this, and you can put it in the damned book or you can leave it out, it doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s the truth.
‘I followed Gideon up here one night, just over a year ago. It was after the trouble at the funeral, after he’d been suspended and everything. Gideon was going downhill fast. We hadn’t seen anything of him. I couldn’t bear it, it was too painful because I really did love him, as a friend I mean, and John just didn’t want to have anything to do with him. And then he turned up at the house one afternoon early in the New Year. He wanted to speak to us. He wanted to apologise. He wanted to try to get back to where we’d been. We’d been such close friends, all of us, him, me, John, Jenny. He came to say sorry, and John threw him out. No, he wouldn’t even let him in. It was pouring with rain. When John told me who it was at the door and that he’d told him to fuck off we had a huge row, and I stormed out of the house. I just had to get away from him and I walked up the road to the car park and then I saw Gideon’s car.’
I said, ‘You wanted to let Gideon in after all he’d said and done?’
‘We had to start somewhere if we were going to save him. Save ourselves. But John was so angry. And one of the reasons he was so angry was because he knew it was true, what Gideon had said at the funeral, that we’d had an affair. That doesn’t surprise you, does it, Mr Caithness? I can see that it doesn’t. It wasn’t Gideon that was lying, it was me.’
I said, ‘It was hardly an affair. He says you only had sex once, when you were helping him to sort out his wife’s clothes.’
She shook her head. ‘Is that what he’s written? I don’t understand that.’
‘That’s what he says.’
‘But it didn’t just happen once. That was the first time, but we made love all that summer. And for years afterwards I used to go to the manse at different times of the day and we’d make love. So it was an affair all right, it was passionate and intense and secret, it was like stealing fruit from a beautiful garden, but I think right from the start I knew it was doomed, that it would never be anything other than stealing.’
‘Why did you think that?’ I asked.
‘Because Gideon was weak, Mr Caithness. He was a weak man. His upbringing, his character, the whole religion thing – not being able to reject it and not being able to embrace it – it was all weakness. When he first said he was going to be a minister I thought it showed he had strength and courage but I was wrong. He was never going to really love me, whatever he said. I don’t think he ever loved Jenny either. He wasn’t capable of loving her or me or anybody, including himself. He’d had that terrible upbringing that strangled lo
ve at every turn. So our affair dwindled to nothing. Our secret meetings happened less and less and finally, when I was pregnant with Katie, they stopped altogether.’
‘Mrs Moffat,’ I said. ‘Elsie. Is Katie Gideon’s daughter?’
She didn’t seem surprised by the question. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe. Yes, actually, I think so. But both of the girls look like me so I’ll never be certain. But yes, I think Katie is Gideon’s.’
‘Does your husband know that?’
‘He suspects,’ she said. ‘Why do you think things are so difficult? Long before Gideon said it in public he suspected there’d been something between us. The children came along, and it ended, but something like that never quite ends, does it? It’s blighted our marriage. And then, when maybe it had faded away enough for us almost to ignore it, I began to suspect John. I thought he was having an affair with somebody else. But of course I couldn’t say anything.’
‘Nancy Croy,’ I said.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said. ‘How do you know that?’
‘You told Gideon,’ I said. ‘He wrote it down.’
She started hitting her forehead with the palm of her hand. I thought she was crying but she was laughing. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘What fucking idiots we all are.’
She was silent for a minute. We stood in the clearing, on the site where the stone had supposedly been, and birds were singing somewhere at a distance and it all felt very unreal.
‘I don’t know if there was anything between John and Nancy,’ she said. ‘In the scheme of things, what does it matter? It doesn’t matter at all, not any more. Anyway. I saw Gideon’s car and I followed him into the woods. At first I was trying to catch him up, just to apologise for what John had done, and he can’t have been that far ahead of me because I could hear him, his pace was much slower with the limp. But then I thought, no, wait a minute, he’s come here for a reason, so I hung back, just kept him in sight, and followed him. And he came up here. I was getting nervous, it was so wet and there wasn’t much light left, but I stayed back and I watched him. He came over here and I saw him at the stone.’
‘You saw the stone?’ I said.
‘He was leaning on it. Shouting and weeping and cursing. I was frightened. But yes, I could see it in the half-light. A bloody great stone, right here where we are.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, I’m telling you.’ Then she shook her head. ‘No, not now. I was sure then, I was positive. I could definitely see it. But now, look – nothing. So how could I have?’
I remembered something. ‘Did you see anybody else?’
‘I might have. It was getting very dark. He’d been shouting as if he was really shouting at someone – “Wait, speak to me,” that kind of thing. Over there in the trees. So I was looking, and I think maybe I did see someone, but I can’t swear to it.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Why?’
‘Gideon says there was someone. He thinks the Devil was here that night.’
She shook her head. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there was anyone. I was scared. I was imagining things.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Gideon started howling and screaming, and I wanted to go and help him but I was too afraid, I really thought he might be dangerous, and I ran back down the track and got to the road and ran all the way home. And when I got in John was giving the girls their tea, and we looked at each other and he knew where I’d been and… Well, that’s where we are now, really, a year later. It’s like John said, it keeps coming back. It won’t leave us alone.’
I looked at the ground around our feet. Grass. Moss. Bog. That was it.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I said. ‘No stone, nothing.’
‘No Gideon either,’ she said. ‘That’s what I think more and more. There’s nothing. No God, no Devil, nothing. No damnation, no redemption. There’s just us and what we do. The things we achieve or the mess we make.’
‘And yet you say you saw the stone,’ I said.
‘I think I saw it,’ she said. ‘That’s all I have from that night – a maybe. I might have seen it. That’s not enough. It’s not real.’
‘So what’s real?’ I said.
‘My children,’ she said without hesitation. ‘John and me. We’ll either sort ourselves out or we won’t but we both want the best for our children. That’s the only reality that counts.’
We went back to the path and began to retrace our steps through the woods. I realised that she’d said everything she wanted to say, but I couldn’t help asking one last question.
‘Do you think any of what Gideon said was true? About the Devil, I mean?’
She said, ‘Well, he didn’t lie about us, did he? But then from what you’re telling me it turns out that he did. But why would he make up a story like that about the Devil? Why would he lie about that? He had nothing to gain by it.’
I waited for her to answer my question, and she knew I was waiting. She shook her head and carried on walking. After that the only words she said to me were when we got back to the car and I offered her a lift home. ‘No thanks,’ she said, ‘I’ll walk. Goodbye, Mr Caithness.’
So ends Harry’s report. And so ends this strange narrative. As you can see, I did decide to publish, and I repeat what I said at the beginning, that this is the complete and – almost – unedited testament of Gideon Mack. The only thing that may frustrate the sleuths among you is that, following the advice of my lawyer, I have been obliged to alter some of the names of the people and places involved in these affairs. I regret this, but it was deemed to be not merely prudent but essential. I had received a communication from the Montrose solicitor, Finlay Stewart, acting not only on behalf of the trustees of the Monimaskit Care Home but also as the late Gideon Mack’s executor, suggesting that we come to some suitable financial arrangement with regard to the publication of his memoir and that some discretion regarding its contents would also be appropriate. Mr Stewart was the one remaining participant in all this business that I wished Harry had interviewed, but that interview never took place. I myself have spoken by telephone to Mr Stewart on several occasions, but he has always refused to enter into any discussion of Gideon Mack and his affairs that does not pertain directly and exclusively to the contents of his will or the publication of his testament. I regret, therefore, that no further light is to be shed on this story from that quarter, but you may rest assured that every copy sold of The Testament of Gideon Mack will in a small but not insignificant way benefit the residents of the Monimaskit Care Home.
I spoke to Harry Caithness on the telephone the day after receiving his report. We talked it over, and then he told me what he had done after parting from Elsie Moffat. He deemed it to be strictly outwith the bounds of his remit, but he wanted to tell me about it anyway. He got in his car and drove the few miles inland to the Black Jaws.
‘I thought you’d have wanted me to do it, Patrick,’ he said, ‘and if you ever go to Monimaskit yourself you’ll have to go and look at the place. It’s incredible. You wander along this muddy path, and it all seems very unexciting, and then you start to hear this roaring noise. And the closer you get, the louder the roaring gets, until finally there’s this wooden walkway and a bridge over the ravine, and you can stand on it and look down.’
‘And what can you see?’ I asked.
He didn’t say anything. I thought for a moment we’d been cut off.
‘Harry?’ I said. ‘What did you see?’
It was almost not Harry’s voice at the other end of the phone. It was as if he were talking in his sleep, or as if it were an actor playing the part of Harry. He said, ‘There’s this permanent mist of water droplets in the air, like an almost invisible veil or a film between you and the bottom of the chasm. And “film” is the right word because the light plays on it, there are these fragments of rainbow everywhere, and through them you see shapes and images shifting among the projecting trees and in the shadows of the cliffs. If you look for a while you becom
e mesmerised, you start to see a whole world of things. God, I saw such a lot of stuff down there. But of all the things I saw the only ones I can remember are these. I saw a dog scrabbling, trying to get to safety, and not knowing what it was escaping from except noise and water and cliff. And then I saw a man falling into that horrible place, and it was like it was me falling out of myself. I’d gone there for a purpose, or he’d gone there for a purpose, but there was no purpose left, and then he’d slipped and fallen. And I watched him fall, and it was as if I’d fallen, I felt like I’d lost a part of myself. I tell you, it was the strangest feeling. It was as if I’d watched myself go to my own death.’
Thanks to Natasha Fairweather and Judy Moir for their support and advice
* I should point out that three independent witnesses, identified in the epilogue, have verified that the manuscript is indeed in the handwriting of Gideon Mack.
* For those unfamiliar with the term, it is perhaps necessary to explain that a Munro is a mountain in Scotland over 3,000 feet in height. There are 284 of them, and the activity of climbing or ‘bagging’ them all has become hugely popular in recent years. They were first listed by Sir Hugh Munro in 1891. – P.W.
* 121 George Street, Edinburgh: the administrative headquarters of the Church of Scotland, ‘the repository of a byzantine bureaucracy’ according to one commentator. – P.W.
* Published at Stirling in 1933 by Eneas Mackay. Originally written around 1691 by Robert Kirk, it is doubtful if a printed version of this peculiar work existed before 1815, when an edition of 100 copies, based on a manuscript in the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh, apparently a transcription of the original by the author’s son, was produced by Longman & Co. – P.W.
* Despite extensive research, I have been unable to find any record of this fund, nor indeed any reference to or information on its founder. – P.W.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 43