Footsteps in the Dark

by Josh Lanyon

  As Calum opened the back door to an ecstatic, wriggling greeting from Shep, he could hear his father’s strong voice precenting a line of a Gaelic psalm from beyond the closed lounge door. Then, when Donnie’s voice stopped, the sound of others in the room, men and women together, singing back the line in an eerie communal wail. The mournful power of it could still raise the hairs on the back of Calum’s neck.

  The empty kitchen bore signs of extensive preparations: plates with scones and pancakes covered with crowdie, the local soft cheese. Mountains of sandwiches and shop-bought cakes. Neighbors and visitors brought things to eat to help out at a Worship, and Calum’s mother had obviously been busy filling the gaps.

  Calum looked with longing at the second doorway from the kitchen into the hall, but he knew everyone would have heard his car arrive. There was no escape.

  He tucked his police hat under his arm, and opened the door into the lounge.

  The scene inside was as expected. People from the village and beyond, mainly older and dressed predominantly in black, were packed onto every seat that could be squeezed into the room. The minister sat in a place of honor by the fire; Angus, boilersuit removed, shrunken and far away, was beside him.

  A respectful hush fell as everyone looked at the new arrival, and Calum raised a smile in response to the room-wide murmur of greeting. The village very much approved of his profession. But as his mother rose to embrace him, he realized that everything wasn’t as expected, after all.

  Adam was sitting in the far corner of the room, on one of the old-fashioned beige velour armchairs that made up Ishbel’s three-piece suite. One of her best bone-china cups, balancing on a matching saucer, rested, with ludicrous fragility, in his hand. His expression, as he met Calum’s eyes over her head, was uninterested.

  In his suit and T-shirt, with his expensive haircut and tanned, chiselled face, he looked young and glossy and glamorous, somehow both comically out of place and perfectly at home in the middle of a Free Church wake. But Adam’s savoir faire had always been unmatched.

  Observing the customs of the native tribes, Calum thought savagely.

  “I’ll get you some tea, m’eudail,” his mother said as she pulled back with a final comforting squeeze. Her voice was hushed and solemn, in keeping with the room.

  Calum muttered, “Let me get changed first.” Though he hadn’t intended to. But he needed to regroup; to process the sight of Adam in his house again. To calm his anger that Adam would do this. Invade his life like this.

  When he reached the safety of his bedroom, he stripped off his uniform and donned a black Aran jumper and black trousers.

  He didn’t want to go back out there.

  He didn’t want to have to interact with Adam as Calum again, rather than Inspector Macleod. It had been a miscalculation to change out of his uniform, but it was too late now.

  He sat on the side of his bed, trying to prepare himself. But he found himself instead picking up his phone and going to his personal email, and he could even accept that he was using the threatening emails to stiffen his own backbone.

  Another one was waiting, as he’d expected. “For Calum 3.” He opened it with a mixture of determination and dread.

  It’s been a long time since I wrote to you, my darling. I’ve been trying to force myself to understand that this is all I will ever have. But it’s fitting it should be today. The Catholic priest at Arras used to say that guilt and shame require expiation. So here is my confession: I’m getting married today. Please, please don’t be disappointed in me. So many men died in the war… So few babies now. I have a responsibility, so I’m told. No choice but to betray you, since I must live on. And I must. John Gillies says self-murder is the ultimate sin. And I dare not sin again, or I won’t find you when this ordeal is finally over. All I have left is the hope of a shred of mercy from Gillies’s God. Gillies is conducting the ceremony, of course. It’s right that he gets to turn the key. The girl is Mairi a’ Bhragan, though I don’t suppose you’re interested. I’m not interested myself. But today I’ll promise to spend the rest of my life with her, on our croft. Yours and mine. She doesn’t see me. I know that. No one will ever see me clearly again.

  Calum rubbed his eyes and closed the email. He should be focusing on why he was getting these messages. On who was sending them and what the sender wanted him to do. It was pretty obvious what they wanted him not to do.

  But despite everything, Calum found himself reluctantly identifying with the writer’s unending isolation. Pitying the fate of the woman the man was about to marry, with no concept of the destruction inside him.

  The minister was talking in soft tones when Calum reentered the lounge, and the first thing he saw was the chair his mother had put out for him beside Adam, with a cup of tea and a plate of sandwich quarters on a small table in front of them. He could see why she’d thought it was a good idea—two old friends, both unequipped to do more than observe. But it felt like punishment. He didn’t look at Adam as he walked to the chair and sat down.

  He picked up his delicate cup and saucer. His stomach was too knotted to eat.

  The people in the room were talking in English, he noticed only then, presumably so Adam could understand, though Calum was almost in the same boat. They wouldn’t have made that allowance for him, but for a visitor…

  “Angus had a bit of a breakdown on the way here,” Adam murmured. Calum’s teacup stilled at his mouth. “Your mother asked me to stay after we calmed him down.”

  A spontaneous hush fell over the room before Calum could formulate a reply. It lasted for minutes, with the occasional muttered vocalization of a response to a private thought.

  “Aye, aye.”

  “It’s like that.”

  “It’s as the Lord wills.”

  Otherwise, an intense, introspective quiet, in keeping with a faith that reflected constantly on the impermanence of life, and its inevitable end. Calum wondered, with unwilling defensiveness, what Adam was making of it.

  Then the minister spoke, and the evening wore on in singing and talking and praying, until the first people stood to go, a few at a time, all moving to clasp Angus’s hands in silent support before they left.

  Adam waited until close to the end to stand—before the minister went, but not so soon that he seemed to be grabbing the first chance to escape. He didn’t speak to Calum, but went to Angus, hunkering down to say something to him; then he stood to talk to Ishbel, who listened to him with an innocent affection that hurt Calum’s heart. And when she glanced expectantly at Calum, he had no choice but to see his friend to the door.

  In the shadowy quiet of the kitchen, the only sound was the dull thump of Shep’s hopeful tail as he lay in his bed. Calum’s mouth tasted sour, his gut lumpen with nerves. But he was going to spend hours in a car with Adam the next day. He had to calm down. He had to normalize this.

  Except, he didn’t know how to handle it. How to be polite, but not encouraging.

  Just in case…Adam still felt anything for him.

  “Thanks for staying,” Calum said as they reached the back door. It sounded too stiff. “It was kind of you.”

  Adam looked up from his phone, which he’d switched on as he walked. “The kindness was your mother’s, for asking me.” There was something disdainful in his tone, but not for the Worship. “It was very moving. Spiritual belief’s so much a part of their everyday lives that it brings them genuine serenity.”

  Calum opened his mouth, but he realized he had no idea what to say.

  Adam had seen what he saw—the beauty of a community fuelled by spirituality. And yet, how could he, from his urbane, liberal, cosmopolitan background, understand the flip side of that? To Adam, Lewis must seem like a quaint anthropological expedition. It was easy to patronize from that position.

  Calum opened the back door, and as he did, Adam’s phone came online and began to ping, message after message notification in fast succession. Calum stared at it wide-eyed until finally it fell silent.r />
  When he looked up, Adam grimaced with chagrin, the least controlled expression he’d shown since Calum had first seen him in reception at the police station.

  “Museum emergency?” he asked.

  Adam huffed a reluctant laugh, then seemed to regret it. “My partner. I didn’t get the chance to explain my phone would be off.”

  Partner. Well, of course he’d have someone. Someone clingy and paranoid. Or just, in love.

  The confirmation brought a gush of feeling. Relief. Safety. Some stab of wild panic he stamped down.

  He didn’t know what made him ask, “Do they…work at the museum?” He sounded as tentative and naive as a little boy, he thought with disgust.

  Adam’s eyes were brilliant in the dim light, taking in everything about him and finding him wanting.

  “He’s an actor,” Adam said.

  Challenge and condemnation in one uncompromising little pronoun.

  Calum raised his chin. Well. He could deal with Adam’s contempt better than his love.

  “Is an eight forty-five pickup okay?” he asked. “Where are you staying?”

  “The Suilven,” Adam said. One of the less modern hotels in town. “I’ll be outside at a quarter to nine.”

  He stepped onto the path and disappeared into the pitch darkness. A few seconds later Calum heard a car engine start at the front of the house. And he stood there, listening, until it faded into the stillness of the night.

  Chapter Five

  Calum slept poorly, his mind buzzing with too many worries, too many images.

  Chrissie cheerful; Chrissie destroyed.

  Tormod’s blood and his open eyes; Tormod’s unknown inner life.

  Adam. How he looked through Calum as if he were nothing to him. How Calum wanted it that way.

  The gorgeous, grown-up Adam in Calum’s twee lounge. In the kitchen. Watching his parents’ pure faith. Adam, who’d reinserted himself into Calum’s new life as he’d once unknowingly haunted the old.

  Everything seemed to be conspiring in some sort of perfect storm. The murder, forcing Adam into Calum’s orbit. His parents’ unsuspecting lionising of him. Those bloody emails, showing Calum a full Technicolor imagining of the misery of a man from Lewis, who’d fallen in love with a man. Blackmail, or a well-meant reminder of where sin could lead?

  He finally slept at around three and was up at seven thirty, showering before donning a fresh uniform.

  He checked his email on his phone as he stood by the closed door of his bedroom, and as he’d expected, it was there.

  “For Calum 4.”

  He stared at it for long seconds, telling himself to file it unread and wait for the bastard to show his hand.

  But he opened it.

  We’ve had a son. I should care, but I can’t. It’s a duty done. Except, if they’d let me name him after you…perhaps. But that isn’t tradition. He must be called after me, and my father before me, and what does it matter anyway? It never gets better. Three years and it never gets better. I get so angry, and afraid, knowing that for the rest of my life, every day, I must be this pretense of a man. Never happy or honest again, as long as I live. I rage at God, and I rage at myself for enduring this punishment. But I have to swallow all that rage. And at least, I suppose, it’s a feeling. I might as well feel something, to remind me I’m still above ground.

  Angus, who’d stayed the night in Calum’s parents’ spare room, was sitting at the table when Calum came into the kitchen, for all he still appeared on the brink of collapse. He looked unfamiliar in a thick grey sweater and grey trousers, oddly naked without the ubiquitous flat cap. His mother had, of course, risen even earlier to cook a full breakfast before they left. Calum had rarely felt less like eating, but he did, to please her.

  They picked up Adam outside his hotel, exactly on time. He’d dressed in blue jeans, a tweed jacket, and a collared shirt with a thin jumper, what Calum would call a university-lecturer look, as if Adam had calculated that an older man might respond to more formal clothing. Except, he looked as sexy as all hell in it.

  Calum thought maybe he should text Donna, the girl Chrissie had teased him about the day before. Though it felt like months. Years. His mother had been thrilled by Donna.

  They all exchanged a terse good morning, Adam climbed into the back seat, and then Calum pulled the car onto Bayhead, heading out of town onto the Barvas road. Uig was on the west coast, and the drive would take an hour from Stornoway, which, on the island, was a long journey.

  The road was flanked by flat, bleak, relentless moorland dotted with the scars of peat banks, the odd shabby wooden hut, wandering blackface sheep, and every so often, a small village to break the scenic monotony, before more empty moor under the huge sky. But as they headed west, the landscape became prettier, with the mountains of Harris in the distance, and multiple small lochs scattered around the moor, gleaming like burnished metal in the ever-changing patterns of light. The weather was brisk again, sweeping unimpeded across the island from the Atlantic, and Calum barely noticed anymore how the sky turned from grey to blue, rain to sunshine, in a matter of seconds.

  Every so often, though, they passed evidence that some things were changing—attempts at growing fields of trees as a crop, in defiance of that tyrannical wind. Calum still remembered his gaping astonishment at the size of sycamores on the mainland. The only one he’d ever known until then, in a village farther down Point, had been barely ten feet tall, though it was over a hundred years old. The wind wouldn’t permit anything more.

  It took close to thirty minutes, but eventually, on edge as Calum was, the absence of interaction in the car and the hypnotic purr of the engine became so oppressive that he blurted, “What kind of state’s the old man in, Angus?”

  He felt as if he’d rudely jolted the others from a trance.

  Angus’s eyes fixed on him. “State? He’s ninety-six.”

  Adam gave a snort of amusement in the back seat.

  “I know, but is he…um…?”

  “Gaga?” Angus finished with typical island bluntness. “No. But he has a care assistant going in to get him up and put him to bed. He should be in Dun Eisdean.” Dun Eisdean was one of Lewis’s four care homes, the one where Julia worked, viewed by independent old people around the island less as a chance of an easier life, than an admission of senility and surrender. “He says he’ll be carried out feet first, though. He was cutting and stacking peats just last summer. Shooting geese. But he went downhill.”

  “Shooting?” Calum repeated incredulously. “At ninety-six?”

  “He was ninety-five,” Angus said, unperturbed. “He did game-keeping for the estate.” The west coast of Lewis was dotted with sporting estates, owned mainly by rich absentees. And vigorous physical activity into the nineties wasn’t that unusual on the islands. But possession of a firearm was.

  “I don’t know very much about the chessmen,” Angus volunteered suddenly. “Just that they were found at Ardroil. On the beach.”

  “Actually, we don’t even know that for sure,” Adam said. Calum’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Those are just local stories. But we are sure the pieces are of Viking origin and they were carved in the twelfth century. At that time Lewis was actually part of the kingdom of Norway, not Scotland, and we think there may have been some important settlements along the west coast of the island. They’d be on the route between Norway and Ireland.”

  “But there’s nothing important in Uig,” Angus protested.

  “Not now,” Adam replied. “Now we rely on roads. But then, the sea was the easy way to travel long distances, so…that made the west coast important. Anyway, there are two theories about where the chessmen came from, but the main one’s Trondheim in Norway, commissioned by the archbishop.”

  “So…” Angus pursed his mouth. “Why were they in Lewis?”

  “Well, most investigators believe they were buried on the beach because of some crisis mid-journey. But a few think there may have been a major settlement a bi
t farther south of Ardroil, at Mealista, and they might have belonged to someone important there. That they were really found at Mealista, not on Uig beach.”

  “What a stupid thing to care so much about,” Angus said tiredly.

  “It’s great art,” Adam said. “Art and culture. And history. People’ll pay any amount for that.”

  “People will pay for all sorts of things,” Angus returned. “And they’ll kill for them. But in the end, they’ll have to stand before their Maker and explain what they did on earth, for things.”

  ***

  The bodach’s house stood alone, an inhabited version of the Old House Calum saw every day. By the look of it, it had also been built at the turn of the twentieth century to replace a black house—the thatched stone dwellings that had once made up Mealista.

  All that was left was the village’s footprint—a floor plan laid out in rows of stone. If it had once been an important medieval settlement, it was a ghost now, looking out to sea. It had been cleared of people like many others in Uig in the nineteenth century, to make way for the landlord’s sheep and shepherds, but the symmetrical lines of feannagan—lazy beds for crops—were still visible on the slopes around the ruins, hacked out by villagers over the years in the endless struggle to survive. A visual memory, an eternal reproach.

  The old man’s house, though, stood defiant, isolated in the bleak landscape a few hundred yards from the old village, yet with the trappings of modern life attached. A satellite dish on the smoking chimney. PVC windows. A dusty, black Ford Fiesta outside. And as they walked around to the back door in the sharp, blousy wind, something more timeless: a peat stack, expertly built. Now central heating was the thing, fewer people cut and dried peat, even as free fuel. Calum missed the smell, one of the most evocative he could think of.

  And this was the bodach’s last stack; his last, long-held independence.