Footsteps in the Dark

by Josh Lanyon

  The fire in the lounge was banked as usual, a black, smoldering slope of coal slack, because even in summer, the weather rarely got warm.

  Calum headed straight for his iMac by the window. He wasn’t sure he wanted to admit to himself how eager he was to get online, to get a window back into the world outside.

  He sat down at the computer table, pulling his phone from his tracksuit trousers, and he thought about what Chrissie had said. Cianalas. That was why most people came home to the islands after experiencing other things. It was a word that meant more than homesickness. It was a kind of…implacable longing. But the stone weight in Calum’s belly was telling him he’d come back for less positive reasons.

  He stared out the picture window at the view: moorland scarred by old peat banks; the grey strip of road cutting through it; houses scattered around like little Monopoly buildings, an estate of them on the horizon; Broad Bay to the right, and over it all like a lid, the heavy pewter sky.

  It was the view he’d seen every day for eighteen years before he left, and it would be the view he’d most likely see until the day he died.

  Panic skittered in his belly—trapped—and he clicked his mail icon to distract himself. Desperate for it.

  He sped through the usual spam, deleting as he went without opening, but there were also personal emails—one from Julia with an attachment about an Arts Centre exhibition in Stornoway. A couple from friends and ex-colleagues in Glasgow. Some from work. And one with two small, grey exclamation marks. High Priority. “For Calum.”

  He pulled it up cautiously in a side window without opening it, but there wasn’t an attachment, just an empty space and then some text at the very bottom in a different font, apparently copied and pasted in.

  He raised his eyebrows at the email address: còthaseo@gmail.com.

  Cò tha seo? ‘Who is this?’

  Someone who knew how to use the accent keys, for a start. Someone, presumably, familiar with Gaelic, and computer literate.

  He looked more closely at the text.

  The first line was: “Translated from the Gàidhlig.”

  “I can’t believe it’s over, because isn’t Hell…”

  He clicked it open.

  I can’t believe it’s over because isn’t Hell meant to last forever? Though I don’t think Reverend John Gillies had a clue Hell was in France. Or on the Atlantic.

  I keep telling everyone I’m fine, but they treat me like one of those bone-china cups my mother keeps for the Communions and Worships. Of course I have nightmares, but we all do. It makes me shiver to think that soon, soon, I’ll know yours.

  I saw someone has published a poem about the battle that sent me home. Arras. It’s one of those English public schoolboy efforts, bitter like we all are. But what’s the point? You’re right. We should try to forget, think of what we’ve won and what we have ahead.

  I just realized today, it’s been thirteen months since I was shipped back to Blighty, as they jolly well call it. Three months in a hospital, then ten in Kent, and finally home.

  I thought being here would make it better. But it hasn’t, because I see you everywhere I turn, and I’ve spent every day frightened the Lord might take you from me.

  But we survived, my darling. Both of us. That’s not tempting fate anymore. John Gillies’s God is angry and vengeful, but my God is merciful and loving, and He has proved it by bringing you home to me.

  It’s been so long since I’ve heard your voice, or looked into your sea-grey eyes, or tasted your skin. I remember every heartbeat of that first night, after the minister told us we had to report for duty, that there was a war now. The hotel in London, that first leave, and the times after. And when you came to see me at the hospital in Kent. I remember every touch. Every word you said.

  I’m writing this because I just saw your mother, and she told me you may have squeezed a place on the Iolaire, to get you home for New Year’s Day. And I thought, if you get a berth, you’ll be lying in my arms when you read this. If not, well, we can wait a week more.

  I signed the lease on the croft yesterday, so we’ll have land to work. No one will care about two bachelors, two friends forgetting the horrors of war. Even my mother says she understands we want to be left in peace. The truth won’t trouble them, because to them, our truth doesn’t exist. But if there were justice, I’d be singing from the hilltops how beautiful you are, the miracle of finding you beside me and having you love me in return.

  Darling of my heart, I didn’t know it was possible to feel such excitement and joy. The Lord has seen that we’ve suffered, and granted us His mercy.

  I will shake your hand at the pier when I greet you, like a proper gentleman. Until we can be alone, my one true love.

  Calum pushed violently away from the table as if he’d touched a bare, live wire, the wheels of his chair shooting back on the carpet to jam against an unnecessary rug. His wide eyes locked on the computer screen as though the words on there would melt away if he willed it hard enough, like a bad dream.

  An old letter? Some sort of…historical fiction? Who the fuck knew? Who cared? The email was addressed to him by name.

  “No one’s going to care about two bachelors…”

  Maybe the writer meant two friends, he thought desperately. But not even he could make himself believe that.

  A gay relationship. And someone had sent him…that…anonymously.

  Blackmail? A warning? You’re being watched?

  His heart pounded like a trip-hammer in his chest, though he tried to reason himself down. This was just…gut fear. Irrational, preprogrammed guilt. He had nothing to hide.

  But someone who knew Gaelic had sent him that email.

  Someone who’d known him at university? Who’d been there when he and…and Adam were? But…how had they known? And why wait till now, all these years on?

  Because he’d come home. Because they were disgusted that a man in his position could have once…

  But it wasn’t who he was.

  Nothing wrong with it—he truly believed that—but for other people. People who lived in—who’d been formed by—another world. Not for him. Not coming from this island. This family. This father and mother.

  The sound of the back doorbell nearly sent him through the roof.

  Immediately Shep began to bark with joyous indignation, and the sheer volume, mixed with more impatient bell ringing, was enough of a cacophony to douse Calum’s stupid panic in the mundanity of the moment.

  He hushed the dog and headed through the kitchen to the back door, still in his stockinged feet.

  An old man—a bodach—stood on the doorstep, clad in the crofter’s uniform of blue boilersuit tucked into gumboots, with a tweed flat cap on his head. It took Calum a second to recognize him, because he looked so generic. But then he realized it was Angus Goirt—and he was panting. And the expression on his face was all wrong.

  Calum had seen it too often in Glasgow. But it didn’t belong here.

  “Angus?” Sharply.

  “Please,” the old man’s voice quavered. His watery eyes focused somewhere behind Calum, seeing something else. But he’d remembered to speak English because Calum’s Gaelic wasn’t very good. “Please come. Please come. Please come.”

  “Angus? What’s wrong?”

  But Calum didn’t wait for a reply. He was already jamming his trainers on his feet, heart racketing hard again, adrenaline surging. Fight or flight, twice in a few minutes.

  He darted into the lounge for his phone, then back to the kitchen, out to the porch, urging Shep back inside, snatching his car keys from the small table near the back door. He could easily run the few hundred yards to Angus’s house, but Angus appeared to be on his last legs.

  “Please come,” Angus said, a clockwork man, almost run down.

  Calum hurried him to the car, helped him into the front seat, then shot off along the lane to the main road, seat-belt warning beeping, ignored. He barely stopped to check for oncoming traffic, and the
n the car was across, and racing up the side road to Angus’s old croft house. Calum didn’t wait for Angus to get out too; he ran through the gate, up the concrete path, and around to the faded, peeling back door.

  The door was ajar and opened directly into the kitchen.

  The first thing Calum saw was red. Red all over the worn, yellow linoleum floor. All over Chrissie as she sat collapsed on it, eyes blank, glasses askew, rocking her son.

  And Calum flashed stupidly on a line from his Standard Grade Shakespeare: “Who would have thought the old man would have so much blood in him.”

  Red all over him. Drenching dark on his blue boilersuit, on his chest, trickling from the gaping slash in his neck.

  But Tormod’s face was white, and his wide, dead eyes were afraid.

  Chapter Two

  Violence was Calum’s job.

  Had been his job.

  It shouldn’t have paralyzed him.

  Yet he stood in the open doorway, his knees weakened, his vision glaring, buzzing…as stunned and horrified as if he were some naive civilian who’d never seen blood and death before. As if he were just Chrissie and Angus’s innocent neighbor.

  But this was home. Where things like this didn’t happen.

  A long, ululating moan of grief sounded behind him, at his shoulder.

  Angus—who’d forced himself back up the path to reenter his own personal hell.

  Fuck! Get a fucking grip, man!

  “Angus!” Calum had to raise his voice to be heard. “Don’t. We have to…” He forced himself on. “We don’t know if this is a crime scene yet.”

  What would be worse for the old man? That someone had done this to Tormod, or that Tormod had done it to himself? And left it for his mother to find.

  Angus’s eyes had fixed on his wife and son, and Calum didn’t think he’d understood a word. But he stopped wailing as if a switch had been pulled, and stood obediently still in the open doorway, waiting to be told what to do to make things better.

  Calum purposely slowed his breathing, making himself take in the details of the scene in front of him. Making himself strategize.

  This isn’t Kansas anymore, Toto.

  Not Glasgow either.

  Calum was a Detective Inspector in the Western Isles Police Force now, and that was a totally different ballgame.

  There had been a total of two murders on Lewis in the course of the previous fifty years. There was no murder squad. There wasn’t a specialist forensic unit. It was Friday lunchtime, and before anyone could begin the process of requesting the services of a CSI team, or a murder team, or a forensic pathologist from Inverness or Glasgow, they’d have to try to establish if Tormod’s death was more likely murder or suicide.

  Calum blew out a steadying breath, lifted his phone, and called the station in Stornoway.

  To their credit, it took less than twenty-five minutes for an ambulance and two police cars to arrive, in a frenzy of flashing blue lights. Calum was well aware everyone in Shulibost would be at their windows. But there was no playing this down.

  Still dressed in his running gear, he began to bark orders the moment his officers emerged. To don the forensic suits and overshoes he’d told them to bring, still sealed in their polythene bags. To string up scene-of-crime tape. To take scene-of-crime photographs but keep to the very edges of the room. To find and seize any electronic devices…phones, computers. To contact the next of kin… Shit! Julia! To keep everyone away if they tried to come near.

  And then, when the police surgeon—a local GP—arrived, he and Calum pulled on forensic suits and overshoes, and together began the process of trying to extract Chrissie without destroying the scene.

  At first, they feared they’d have to lift her out, but as they began to pull her upright, she seemed to break out of her fugue state, take in the men hovering over her, clad to the top of their heads in alien white suits, and she clutched Tormod still tighter and began to scream.

  The doctor, an unfamiliar balding middle-aged man with a strong Stornoway accent, managed to administer a sedative, and eventually they got her out and into the waiting ambulance. The same ambulance that was also going to have to take Tormod to the hospital morgue.

  Calum watched her being laid onto a narrow ambulance bed as if she were dead herself. Then he went back to the house, to the doctor examining the body with grim focus, though Calum knew he’d hardly have much experience analyzing suspicious deaths.

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea of time of—”

  “He hasn’t been dead long,” the doctor said briskly. “Less than an hour.” He looked up. “Graham Tavistock. English father.” As if the surname paired with the accent required automatic explanation. His eyes were very blue.

  Calum tried a smile. “Inspector Calum—”

  “I know,” Tavistock said. “You were a hotshot detective in the murder squad in Glasgow, but you came home to catch drunk drivers and small-time drug runners instead.” He took in Calum’s surprise. “It was in the Stornoway Gazette,” he said. “Along with your inside leg measurement and your auntie’s postcode.” They exchanged a wry glance; then they both looked down at Tormod’s dead face as if they’d agreed it. “He was my patient.”

  Calum glanced up and caught a spasm of emotion crossing the doctor’s weathered features before it vanished into professional calm.

  “So…” Calum began, tone carefully delicate. “Would you say…?”

  “That he was suicidal?” Tavistock’s tone was dry as dust. “You know better than that, Inspector. I can’t tell you anything without the approval of his next of kin.” Calum grimaced. It had been worth a try. “But,” Tavistock went on as he gently tipped back Tormod’s head, “at this point I suspect the angle of the wound might show that he was sitting there”—he pointed behind him to a wooden chair with a worn cushion on its seat, pulled away from the table—“and someone cut his throat from behind and above. He fell forward onto the floor as he fought for…the final moments of his life.”

  “Right,” Calum said. His tone was as neutral as he could make it. But he’d been used to infuriating caution about causes of death from Scenes of Crime pathologists. They never wanted to commit themselves to anything until the postmortem. And this guy was a GP, not an expert. Tavistock probably watched too much TV, with too many sexy, involved pathologists.

  Tavistock read his mind again. “The weapon.” He pointed to a large kitchen knife lying about twelve inches from Tormod’s right hand, its wooden handle and blade stained with blood, as if it had dropped from Tormod’s fingertips when Chrissie embraced him. Calum had spotted it from the door, after the first wave of shock passed. “If he’d cut his own throat,” Tavistock went on, “it’d be more likely to be…over there. Beside the chair. That’s where the blood splatter suggests the wound was inflicted. Even if a cut throat is self-administered, the reflex is to drop the weapon as the victim fights for air.” He met Calum’s surprised stare with a thin smile. “I took extra training before accepting a role as a police surgeon.”

  Calum opened his mouth, then closed it again. He’d done what too many officers from bigger forces tended to do when they came in to work with smaller ones. Assumed the locals were out of their depth.

  But Calum came from here. He had no excuse.

  He cleared his throat and picked up the knife with blue-gloved fingers, then dropped it into an evidence bag. But as he did, something else caught his eye.

  “What’s that?”

  Tavistock glanced at the crumpled plastic bag lying near Tormod’s legs. “I’d say it was beside, or caught underneath the body when it fell.”

  It was a Tesco carrier bag, its familiar white, red, and blue stained with drying blood. Calum had an officer take a photo of it in situ before he picked it up. He could feel something relatively bulky under the rustling, prickly plastic—a lump, light and solid. Carefully, he eased it out and put the Tesco carrier into one evidence bag, and the newspaper-covered object inside, into another.


  “O a’ Thighearna!” A wail of primitive agony. A cry to God. “Mo bhalach! Mo bhalach!” ‘My boy!’

  Somehow, Calum had forgotten about Angus, who’d walked away from the young female PC who’d been trying to talk to him outside, and stood again now in the doorway, viewing the ruins of his life.

  There was nowhere nearby to take him, to try to get the details a policeman should get. Nowhere humane.

  But this wasn’t the city, Calum thought with sudden purpose. And procedure could fuck itself. Not to mention he was currently the senior officer on the island.

  “My parents’ house is a couple of hundred yards away,” he told the doctor as he levered himself to his feet. “I’m going to take him there.”

  Tavistock nodded with approval. “I’ll get this finished and get the body to the hospital. I’ll send you my report.”

  They both took it for granted that it was Calum’s case for as long as he could hold on to it. Until the big boys arrived.

  Angus was docile as Calum led him past the ambulance, where Chrissie now slept, back to the car. And he was just as biddable as he followed Calum into his house, ignoring Shep’s joy, through the kitchen, and into the lounge, where Calum sat him down on the overstuffed sofa in front of the fire.

  Angus’s Wellington boots left bloody footprints on the pristine kitchen floor and echoes on the lounge carpet, but Calum was not going to ask him to take them off.

  “Angus?” Calum dropped the three evidence bags he’d filled onto the low wooden coffee table in front of the sofa, and went to his desk for a notebook and pen. “Can you tell me what you remember?” Angus stared at the slope of barely smoking coal in the fire. “Angus? Please. Try.”

  Perhaps it was ingrained politeness that made Angus obey. He made a visible effort to force his attention to Calum, but his eyes caught and held on the evidence bags.

  “We were at the bottom of the field,” he said, slow and dazed. “Replacing the fence. We’d been working on it…for a couple of days. Tormod…” His breathing shook. His face twisted. “He always has a strupag at half past twelve.” A fly cup. A quick cup of tea. “Where did you get that?” he asked. His traumatized gaze remained fixed on the bags lying on the table; the knife that had killed his son.