by Josh Lanyon
Kevin followed her lead, as he’d done, apparently, all the way. The knife dropped to the floor with a dull thump, and Adam was on it in a second.
“Tormod was a man of honor,” Uilleam said shakily behind them. “But you, girl…” He spat on the floor. “You should never have been born.”
Calum watched the words hit home. And incredibly, despite everything, after all Julia had done and planned to do, he saw something in her buckle. A part of her actually loved the old man, a part of her had wanted to be loved back.
Her face crumpled, and like a scolded child, she began to cry.
Chapter Eight
They sat and waited for the police for almost an hour, but Calum had two sets of handcuffs in his car, so he was able to keep Kevin and Julia contained, if not docile, while he called Chief Inspector Martin to explain. He thought by the end, that Martin would never go on holiday again.
When two police cars finally roared up, lights flashing, with an ambulance for good measure, it became a weird mix for Calum of taking charge and giving evidence. He wasn’t sure it was in the rulebook, but Willie John had gone along with it.
While they’d waited, Uilleam had listened, glowering, as Adam advised him to play as tough as Julia’d intended: to demand an agreement to keep the pieces on the island, if that was what was important to him; or to demand money, if that’s what he wanted. Or, Uilleam could say it had all been a hoax and never let the pieces be seen again.
When they all left for Stornoway, Uilleam hadn’t told them which he was going to choose.
Two officers drove Calum’s and Adam’s cars back to Stornoway, and they and Uilleam had to agree to get into Willie John’s car, because they were deemed unsafe to drive. The way Calum was shaking by then, Willie John was right.
They’d been driving for half an hour of exhausted silence when Adam said, “You’re covered in plaster dust.” Calum blinked at him stupidly. Adam’s expression softened. “Your hair. Maybe try ruffling it?”
Calum obeyed, watching pale dust fall onto his jeans and the pristine carpet of the car.
“Better,” Adam said solemnly. “Less Hamlet’s ghost.”
“I’m sorry,” Calum said. “For not believing you.” He kept his voice low, though in the front, Willie John was conversing with Uilleam in Gaelic.
Adam looked down at his hands. “Yeah. Well. She set it up that way.”
But Calum should have known instinctively that Adam wouldn’t break trust—whatever the evidence against him.
He blurted, “It’s just…we weren’t friends anymore, and I thought, why would you risk the biggest break of your career and maybe get into trouble, to indulge my stupidity?”
“Except I did,” Adam said.
Calum grimaced. “I’m sorry.”
“You really believed…last night…that I’d just…” Adam threw a frustrated glance at the front of the car. They were speaking more or less in whispers. But Calum understood without Adam spelling it out. He’d believed Adam had slept with him, knowing he’d already betrayed the secret.
“I suppose I thought it… That maybe it wasn’t that important anymore.” Calum cleared his throat. “To you.”
Adam shook his head. All of his body language conveyed amazement and disgust. “You’re a bloody moron, Cal.” His jaw tightened. “But.” He blew out a long breath. “You being such a badass in there sort of…serves in mitigation.”
Calum gave a startled snort. “I wasn’t. But you were great. You didn’t freeze.”
“You know what’s disappointing?” Adam asked. “I do Muay Thai—Thai kickboxing—every week. It’s supposed to be good against knives. But…it turns out you don’t necessarily understand someone’s going to attack you until the knife’s already at your throat.”
“You couldn’t have seen that coming,” Calum protested. “I’d just been planning how to apologize to Kevin for suspecting him.”
Adam’s eyes lit with amusement. “So what’s going to happen at the station?”
“Willie John’ll take formal statements from the three of us. Julia and Kevin go to the cells. The forensic postmortem on Tormod and the scene-of-crime examination still have to happen. I’d guess the Inverness SIO’ll want to do the interviews tomorrow too, if only to save face.”
Adam frowned. “Well, that’s not fair.”
“It’s politics, and…” Calum moved restlessly in the seat. “I don’t think I could do it anyway.” He met Adam’s eyes. “I’ve known her all my life. I thought we were friends.”
Adam moved as if to touch Calum’s hand in empathy, but he drew back at once.
Thank you, Calum thought, and wished he meant it.
Adam sighed. “You’ve been a murder detective, Cal. You’ve seen the underbelly before this. What people do when they’re desperate.”
Calum considered for a moment. How he’d felt when he realized how badly he’d failed as a policeman.
“But I expected it there,” he said. “Here…I let down my guard, because I thought here was different. That the people were different.”
“They are,” Adam said. “On the whole. And you did brilliantly. You found the killers, and you brought them in.”
Calum looked at him gravely. “I stumbled on the killers by accident, I almost got both of us shot, and we got saved by a ninety-six-year-old man.”
Adam nodded. “That too.”
They both began to snigger, high on the hysteria of relief.
The car was on the outskirts of Stornoway now. Only a few more minutes to the station.
“I have to catch a plane at twenty past five,” Adam remarked.
It felt a bit like Calum had expected the shotgun bullet to feel. He fixed his eyes on the back of Willie John’s head.
“Will you be back? For the chessmen?” He hoped it sounded equally casual.
“I don’t know. It’ll probably be my boss. Though…” Calum felt Adam’s eyes on him, studying his profile. “Would anything… Would anything be different?”
Calum swallowed miserably.
“I see,” Adam said.
“There was a pride march here this year.” Calum’s voice was barely audible. “The first one. My mother held one of the placards at the side: ‘Marriage is honorable. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife.’”
He heard Adam give a shaky sigh, but he said nothing else.
Calum laid his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes.
***
The house was empty when Calum arrived home that afternoon. Wherever his parents were, they’d be doing something church-related, because it was Sunday.
Calum stood looking out the big window at the too-familiar view, and he wanted to scream. To weep.
He and Adam had said a polite goodbye in reception at the station. A car had been organized to take Adam to his hotel and then to the airport. And it had felt final, as somehow the last, brutal ending hadn’t felt final. As if this time Adam too understood there could be no fairy-tale ending.
Calum slumped down at the iMac and clicked open his mail. He found he wasn’t surprised to see there had been a last manipulative message from Julia. “For Calum 8.”
…I think I have a friend…
Calum couldn’t stand it.
He jerked to his feet, hands on his head, clawing for calm. He closed his eyes and took a shuddering gulp of air. Held it. Let it out carefully.
He could do it the way he did it before. Breath by breath. Minute by minute. Let time eat away at the leaden weight of misery in his chest, pressing down on his glass heart.
He forced open his eyes again and, only then, he noticed a large, unfamiliar manila envelope lying on his desk beside his keyboard. The words “For Calum” were written across it.
His guts lurched sickeningly to his boots.
The top of the envelope was open, and there were papers poking out of it. No stamp. No address. It had to have been hand-delivered.
He picked
it up and pulled out the papers, flicking quickly through the whole big sheaf of them. He registered that some were yellowed and old, that the writing was in faded blue ink. Neat, old-school handwriting. Gaelic. Not like the script on the outside of the envelope.
His heart galloped, fast and hard.
Each letter had a typewritten text in English attached to it by a paper clip.
…I can’t believe it’s over because…
Julia hadn’t fabricated them?
Then…where had she found them?
The envelope had been delivered open, for anyone to read. Calum’s mum or dad must have put it on the desk, and of course they would respect his privacy, but…
Julia had wanted him to feel like this—panicked, threatened, afraid. Or…perhaps giving him the originals had been her idea of mercy, of telling him it was over, since she’d known the case would be taken from him. Once she’d neutralized him, she could afford to be generous.
Fuck! It didn’t matter what she’d bloody intended.
He needed it to go away now, for good.
He walked to the fire and pulled away the guard, using a poker to break through the crust of coal slack and stoke the flames he’d freed. Then he sank to his knees on the hearth rug and pulled out a first handful of letters and translations from the envelope, crumpling them up, ready to burn.
“Calum.”
Shock dropped the papers from Calum’s hand. He swung around toward the door, still on his knees, eyes huge with alarm.
Calum’s father hadn’t been out after all.
Calum gestured weakly at the hearth. “I was just getting the fire going.”
“Don’t destroy them.”
Calum’s breath stuttered. “You read them?” A few minutes before, he’d almost wanted it, but now… The most stable and loving structure in his life teetered on the brink of destruction. And he couldn’t bear it. “I don’t know why they were sent to me. Or…I mean, I know it was Julia, but…”
“Julia?” his father repeated. And of course, he wouldn’t have heard anything yet.
“Yes,” Calum said quickly. “She was the—”
“They belong to me,” Donnie said. “Not Julia.”
Calum sank back on his heels and stared up at his father as if he’d struck him. He thought it was as well he was already on his knees.
“To you?” he breathed. Then, “Why?”
“Because I needed you to see.”
To see? Calum wanted to howl his hurt, his abject humiliation.
His father. Of all people to play this game with him. His own father.
“I already see,” Calum spat. And it was as if Shep had turned on him and savaged him. Unnecessary proof of how conditional love really was.
He was used to his father’s silent presence backing up his mother, allowing her to speak for them both; always giving way when she challenged him. But he was also used to his father’s quiet affection.
Donnie worked the croft, and his loom, he was a church elder like his own father and grandfather had been, he had his Bible and his books and his computer, and his dry, unassuming sense of humor, and that was what he was. As uncomplicated as that.
But…he’d known? And he’d decided to teach Calum this…lesson.
“I’m back here because I see,” Calum said. His voice trembled with grief. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“The letters were written by your great-grandfather, Calum.”
Calum’s betrayed gaze froze on his father, then dropped, stupidly, to the envelope still in his hand.
That wasn’t possible.
But his father wouldn’t lie.
“Do you remember him?”
Calum nodded slowly at the envelope, dazed. The straight, shriveled old man in the chair, who’d once stroked his hair.
All that passion and devotion and misery…?
“Donnie Maiseach,” his father said. “That was the name they gave him because he was a beautiful man. Like you. My dad and I had that name too. But you were named for his lover.”
Calum hauled in a huge, stunned breath and looked up at his father again. Fragments of the letters were sliding back to his blithering mind. The son who wouldn’t call his son anything other than his own name.
“Donnie,” he breathed. His father’s birth had been wearily recorded in those pages and then…
“When I was a young man,” Donnie said, “he started to talk to me. I don’t know why. I’d always been afraid of him, and my grandmother. They were cold and strict and…bitter. And they never spoke to each other unless they had to. Perhaps…I said something that interested him—we both read a lot. But, bit by bit, as we came to know each other, he confided in me. And I…listened. I asked your mam if we could call you Calum, and the day I told him, he wept.”
Calum tried to comprehend it: the old man who’d once been beautiful, and Calum’s father who’d once been his lifeline.
…I think I have a friend…
“God, Dad,” he choked.
His father frowned. “I’m going to tell you a secret now that no one else alive knows. We planned something together, Seanair and me, and I think…he lived his last years with hope. He asked to be cremated when he died, and you know how it is here…no one was happy about that, but…he got his way, so long as they interred his casket beside his wife and put his name on her stone, even though we all knew she hated him. But…the night before that happened, I got up when everyone else was asleep, and I transferred his ashes into another box, with a last letter from him. And I crept out of the house and drove to Aignish cemetery, and I stumbled around in the dark with a little torch until I found it. Calum Matheson. Aged twenty-two. And I buried him there, as deep and close to his Calum as I could.”
Calum never took his eyes from his father as he spoke, but his vision had blurred with the tears coursing silently down his cheeks. It felt like catharsis. Like years of pain vomiting out of him.
“I see you, Calum. I see the mistake you’re making. I don’t want you to become that old man in a stiff chair, angry and bitter and hating. I don’t want some woman to end up poisoned with resentment like my grandmother. I thought maybe I’d been wrong when you came home. But since you’ve been here, I saw I wasn’t wrong. You’re ready to sacrifice yourself for us, and I don’t want it. I don’t believe the Lord wants it. But I’m not…good with things like this. I thought I should try to show you first, what you mustn’t become.”
Calum rose to his feet and stepped into his father’s open arms. He hugged him with all the love he felt, and he was hugged back the same way. He was a child again; secure, loved just for being himself.
Nothing like the man readying himself to take care of his parents; nothing like the hardened policeman he’d thought he’d become.
“But Mum won’t…” He stopped and gulped back tears.
“You know it’s not a fairy tale, Calum.” Donnie’s voice shook too. “Your mam will find it hard. But she loves you…very much, and she’ll come to see that you are as the Lord wills, and wonderful, as are all His creations. She’ll come around eventually. I’ll make sure of it.”
Calum hiccuped a wet laugh against his father’s neck. He felt weird. Light and free.
“Besides,” his father went on seriously, “I think she likes Adam better than she likes either of us.”
Calum hitched in a telling breath.
“You’re in love with him.” Donnie said.
Calum nodded against his neck like a little boy. He didn’t even have to think about it, though it was the first time he’d ever admitted it, even to himself.
“Did you know he was on Lewis?” Calum asked. “When you sent me the first email?”
“I had no idea,” Donnie said serenely. “But it seemed like God’s will.”
Calum sighed. “He’s leaving. His plane’ll be boarding now.”
Donnie thrust him back to arm’s length. “Leaving?”
“I told him I can’t be with him.”
; “Well then,” Donnie said. “Go and tell him you can.”
Calum looked at him with wonder, then down at the sheaf of letters he held, another man’s lifeline. He handed them to his father, then lunged forward and hugged him again with all his strength.
It was Donnie who disentangled them and hustled him out to the kitchen and then to the back door, pushing his car keys into his hand.
“Siuthad! Go on! You’re going to miss it!”
Calum was halfway down the path when a thought struck him. He turned. “Dad, why was Tormod called Lucky?”
“What has…?” His father blinked with perplexed impatience. “Because he followed me onto a roof when he was eight and fell off. He dropped seven feet without breaking a bone.”
Calum shook his head and turned front again. He’d only had to ask.
***
He broke the speed limit all the way. The airport was a fifteen-minute drive at normal speed; ten when driving like a maniac. The thought came that it was like one of those romantic last-minute dashes in the movies, but the hero in those always made it. He was almost certainly too late.
He tore past the Braighe, past the cemetery where Donnie Maiseach and his Calum were buried, finally together. In the distance he could see the Beasts of Holm, where the Iolaire, and that other Calum, had both met their end.
He was going to find the grave one day soon; find it and put flowers on it.
He still couldn’t reconcile his memories of that rigid, frightening old man with the man in the letters, eternally and wildly in love. But, he realized, the young stripped the old of passion.
He turned the steering wheel violently right, into the turning to Melbost village and the airport, and shot up the road with screeching tires until he had to ease over the speed bump at the airport gate. Then he accelerated toward the small one-story terminal, parked illegally on the tarmac outside the main door, and ran inside.
The startled woman behind the check-in desk told him that the Glasgow plane had already boarded and was closing its doors, but he flashed his warrant card and demanded one of the ground staff took him across the tarmac.
They reached the plane just as the steps were being taken away. So the staff dutifully rolled them back into position, allowing Calum to race up and inside the still-open door.