The Blackhouse (11 page)

One half of the double doors was lying open and Fin walked into the hallway where the minister would greet the congregation coming in, and shake their hands on the way out. A cheerless place, with worn floorboards and dark, varnished wood. It smelled of dust and damp clothes and time. A smell, it seemed, that had not changed in thirty years. Evocative of those long Sabbath days when Fin’s parents had made him sit through an hour and a half of Gaelic psalm-singing and a fiery midday sermon, followed by another dose at six o’clock. In the afternoon he’d had to endure two hours of Sunday school in the hall at the back of the church. When he wasn’t at church, or at Sunday school, he would have to stay in the house while his father read from the Gaelic Bible.

Fin traced his childhood footsteps through the left-hand door and into the church itself, rows of unforgiving wooden pews flanking two aisles leading to the raised and railed area at the far end, from which sombre elders would lead the psalm-singing. The pulpit rose high above, an elaborately carved dais set into the wall and reached by curving staircases on either side. Its position of elevation placed the minister in his dominant position of authority over the mere mortals whom he berated each Sunday with threats of eternal damnation. Salvation was in their own hands, he would tell them week in and week out, if only they would put themselves in the hands of the Lord.

In his head, Fin could almost hear the singing of the Gaelic psalms. A strange, unaccompanied tribal chanting which could seem chaotic to the untrained ear. But there was something wonderfully affecting about it. Something of the land and the landscape, of the struggle for existence against overwhelming odds. Something of the people amongst whom he had grown up. Good people, most of them, finding something unique in themselves, in the way they sang their praise to the Lord, an expression of gratitude for hard lives in which they had found meaning. Just the memory of it brought him out in goose-pimples.

He heard a knocking sound that seemed to fill the church, rattling around the balconies that ringed three sides of it. Metal on metal. He looked about, puzzled, before realizing that it was coming from the radiators along each wall. The central heating was new. As was the double glazing in the tall windows. Perhaps the Sabbath was a little warmer today than it had been thirty years ago. Fin went back out to the entrance hall, and saw a door open at the far end. The banging was coming from somewhere beyond it.

The door gave on to what turned out to be the boiler room. A large oil-fired boiler stood with its door open, a protective cover removed to reveal its byzantine interior workings. Bits and pieces harvested from the interior were scattered around the concrete apron on which it stood. A toolbox lay open, and a man in blue overalls lay on his back trying to loosen the joint on an exiting pipe by banging on it with a large spanner.

‘Excuse me,’ Fin said. ‘I’m looking for the Reverend Donald Murray.’

The man in the overalls sat up, startled, and banged his head on the boiler door. ‘Shit!’ And Fin saw the dog collar underneath the overalls where they were open at the neck. He recognized the angular face below a mop of untidy sandy hair. There was grey in that hair now, and it was a little thinner. As was the face, which had somehow shed its boyish good looks and become mean, pinched in lines around the mouth and the eyes. ‘You’ve found him.’ The man squinted up at Fin, unable to see his face because of the light behind it. ‘Can I help?’

‘You could shake my hand for a start,’ Fin said. ‘That’s what old friends usually do, isn’t it?’

The Reverend Murray frowned and got to his feet, peering into the face of the stranger who knew him. And then the light of recognition dawned in his eyes. ‘Good God. Fin Macleod.’ And he grabbed Fin’s hand and shook it firmly, a smile splitting his face. And Fin saw in him again the boy he had known all those years before. ‘Man, it’s good to see you. Good to see you.’ And he meant it, but only for as long as it took other thoughts to crowd his mind and cloud his smile. And as the smile faded, he said, ‘It’s been a long time.’

Fin had found it hard to believe, when Gunn told him, that Donald Murray had succeeded his father as minister of Crobost Free Church. But he could not deny the evidence of his own eyes. Although that still did not make it any easier to believe. ‘About seventeen years. But even if it had been seventy I’d never have thought I’d see you in a dog collar, except maybe at a vicars and tarts party.’

Donald inclined his head a little. ‘God showed me the error of my ways.’

Ways, Fin recalled, which had taken him on a long diversion off the straight and narrow. Donald had gone to Glasgow at the same time as Fin. But while Fin had gone to university, Donald had got into the music promotion business, managing and promoting some of the most successful Glasgow bands of the eighties. But then things had started going wrong. Drink had become more important than work. The agency went to the wall. He got involved with drugs. Fin had met him at a party one night and Donald offered him cocaine. And a woman. Of course, he’d been smashed, and there was something dead in eyes that had once been so full of life. Fin heard later that after being arrested and fined for possession, Donald had left Scotland and headed south to London.

‘Caught the
curàm
then?’ Fin asked.

Donald wiped his oily hands on a rag, assiduously avoiding Fin’s eyes. ‘That’s not a term I care for.’

It was a condition so prevalent on the island that the Gaelic language had subverted a word to describe it.
Curàm
literally meant
anxiety
. But in the context of those who had been born again, it was used in the sense of something you might catch. Like a virus. And in a way, it was. A virus of the mind. ‘I’ve always thought it was very apposite,’ Fin said. ‘All that brainwashing as a kid, followed by violent rejection and a dissolute life. Drink. Drugs. Wild women.’ He paused. ‘Sound familiar? And then, I suppose, the fear and the guilt kick in, like belated indigestion, after all that early diet of hellfire and damnation.‘ Donald eyed him sullenly, refusing to be drawn. ‘That’s when they say that God talks to you, and you become very special to all those people who wish that God would talk to them, too. Is that how it was with you, Donald?’

‘I used to like you, Fin.’

‘I
always
liked you, Donald. From that first day you stopped Murdo Ruadh from punching my lights out.’ He wanted to ask him why he was throwing his life away like this. And yet he knew that Donald had already been engaged in the act of flushing it down the toilet with drink and drugs. Maybe this really was some kind of redemption. After all, not everyone harboured the same bitterness towards God as Fin. He relented. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Are you here for a reason?’ Donald was clearly not as ready to forgive as Fin was to apologize.

Fin smiled ruefully. ‘All those hours of study to get myself a place at university, and I threw it away.’ He gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘Ended up a cop. Now, that’s a turn-up for the book, isn’t it?’

‘I’d heard.’ Donald was guarded now. ‘And you still haven’t told me why you’re here.’

‘I’m investigating the murder of Angel Macritchie, Donald. They brought me in because he was killed in exactly the same way as a murder I’m investigating in Edinburgh.’

A smile flitted briefly across Donald’s face. A glimpse of his old self. ‘And you want to know if I did it.’

‘Did you?’

Donald laughed. ‘No.’

‘You once told me you were going to rip the fucking wings off Angel Macritchie.’

Donald’s smile vanished. ‘We’re in the house of God, Fin.’

‘And that should bother me, why?’

Donald looked at him for a moment, then turned away and crouched to start putting tools back in his box. ‘It was that atheist aunt of yours who turned you against the Lord, wasn’t it?’

Fin shook his head. ‘No. She’d have been pleased to have me be a happy heathen like her. But she got me too late. The damage was done. I was already infected. Once you’ve believed, it’s very hard to stop believing. I just stopped believing God was good, that’s all. And the only one responsible for that was God Himself.’ Donald swivelled to look at Fin, incomprehension in his frown. ‘The night he took my parents on the Barvas moor.’ Fin forced a smile. ‘Of course, I was just a kid then. These days, in my more rational moments, I know it’s all just crap, and that such things happen in life.’ And he added bitterly, ‘More than once.’ One more reason for resentment. ‘It’s only when I can’t shake off the feeling that maybe there really is a God, that I start getting angry again.’

Donald turned back to his tools. ‘You didn’t
really
come here to ask me if I killed Angel Macritchie, did you?’

‘You didn’t like him much.’

‘A lot of people didn’t like him much. That doesn’t mean they would kill him.’ He paused, balancing a hammer in his hand, feeling its weight. ‘But if you want to know how I feel about it, I don’t think he was any great loss to the world.’

‘That’s not very Christian of you,’ Fin said, and Donald dropped the hammer into the box. ‘Is it because of all the shit we took off him as kids, or because your daughter claimed that he raped her?’

Donald stood up. ‘He raped her alright.’ He was defensive, challenging Fin to contradict him.

‘That wouldn’t surprise me at all. Which is why I’d like to know what happened.’

Donald pushed past him and out into the hallway. ‘I imagine you’ll find everything you need to know in the police report.’

Fin turned after him. ‘I’d rather hear it from the horse’s mouth.’

Donald stopped in his tracks. He wheeled around and took a step back towards his old classmate. He was still a good three inches taller than Fin. Well over six feet, and well capable, Fin thought, of hoisting Macritchie’s eighteen stone on a length of rope to hang him by the neck from the rafters of the boatshed in Port of Ness. ‘I don’t want you, or anyone else, talking to her about it again. That man raped her, and the police treated her like she was a liar. As if rape isn’t humiliating enough.’

‘Donald, I’m not going to humiliate her, or accuse her of lying. I just want to hear her story.’

‘No.’

‘Look, I don’t want to force the issue, but this is a murder inquiry, and if I want to talk to her, I’ll talk to her.’

Fin saw a father’s anger in Donald’s eyes. It flared briefly, then some inner control dulled its flame. ‘She’s not here just now. She’s in town with her mother.’

‘I’ll come back, then. Maybe tomorrow.’

‘It might have been better, Fin, if you hadn’t come back at all.’

Fin felt the chill of a threat in Donald’s words, and in his tone, and found it hard to remember that this was the same boy who had stood up for him against bullies, and risked his own hide to come back and rescue him the night that Angel Macritchie had felled him outside Crobost Stores. ‘Why’s that? Because I might find out the truth? What’s anyone got to fear from the truth, Donald?’ Donald just glared at him. ‘You know, if Macritchie had raped
my
daughter, I’d probably have been tempted to take matters into my own hands myself.’

Donald shook his head. ‘I can’t believe you’d think me capable of something like that, Fin.’

‘All the same, I’d be interested to know where you were on Saturday night.’

‘Since your colleagues have already asked me that, I think you’ll probably find it’s a matter of record.’

‘I can’t tell when the record’s lying. With people, usually I can.’

‘I was where I always am on a Saturday night. At home writing my sermon for the Sabbath. My wife will vouch for me if you care to ask her.’ Donald walked to the door and held it open for Fin, signalling that their exchange was over. ‘In any case, it is not for me to deliver retribution to sinners. The Lord will deal with Angel Macritchie in his own way.’

‘Maybe he already has.’ Fin stepped out into the blustery afternoon as the rain began falling in earnest. Horizontally.

By the time Fin reached Gunn’s car idling in the car park, he was soaked. He dropped into the passenger seat with the rain clinging to his curls and running down his face and neck, and slammed the door shut. Gunn turned on the blower and glanced over at Fin. ‘Well?’

‘Tell me what happened the night the girl claimed Macritchie raped her.’

II

The cloud was shredded all across the sky as they drove back to Stornoway, ragged strips of blue and black and purple-grey. The road stretched straight ahead of them, rising to the horizon and a strip of light beneath the bruising where you could see the rain falling in sheets.

‘It happened about two months ago,’ Gunn said. ‘Donna Murray and a bunch of her pals were drinking at the Crobost Social.’

‘I thought you said she was only sixteen.’

Gunn sneaked him a look to see if he was joking. ‘You have been away a long time, Mr Macleod.’

‘It’s illegal, George.’

‘It was a Friday night, sir. The place would have been jumping. Some of the girls would have been over eighteen. And nobody’s paying that much attention anyway.’

Sunlight unexpectedly split the gloom, wipers smearing light with rain across the windscreen, a rainbow springing up out of the moor away to their left.

‘There was all the usual stuff going on between boys and girls. You know how it is when you mix alcohol with teenage hormones. Anyway, Macritchie was at his habitual place at the bar, sitting up on a stool, leaning in his elbow groove and casting a lascivious eye over all the young girls. Hard to believe he still had any hormones after the amount of beer he’d flushed through his system over the years.’ Gunn chuckled. ‘You saw the state of his liver.’ Fin nodded. Angel had been a big drinker, even as a teenager. ‘Anyway, for some reason young Donna seems to have caught his eye that night. And inexplicably, he seems to have thought she might find him attractive. So he offered to buy her a drink. I guess when she turned him down that might have been the end of it. But, then, apparently someone told him that she was Donald Murray’s girl, and that seemed to encourage him.’