The Blackhouse (15 page)

When, finally, Artair regained his composure he looked at his watch. ‘Aw shit, gotta go.’

‘To Ness?’ Artair nodded. ‘How are you getting back?’

‘Car’s parked at the quay.’

‘You’re not driving?’

‘Well, the fucking thing doesn’t drive itself.’

‘You’re in no state to drive. You’ll kill yourself. Or somebody else.’

‘Oh,’ Artair wagged a finger at him. ‘Forgot. You’re a polis now. What’re you gonna do? Arrest me?’

‘Give me your keys and I’ll drive you.’

Artair’s smile faded. ‘Serious?’

‘Serious.’

Artair shrugged and fished the car keys from his pocket and dropped them on the table. ‘My lucky day, eh? Get a police escort all the way home.’

The sky was a dusky blue, the sun disappearing behind pewtery clouds bubbling up on the western horizon. From mid-August the nights start shortening very quickly, and yet it was still lighter than it would ever get in London, even at the height of summer. The tide had begun to recede, and the boats at the quayside stood lower in the water now. In an hour or two you would need ladders to get down to them.

Artair’s car was a badly resprayed Vauxhall Astra that smelled inside like old trainers which had been left out in the rain. An ancient air freshener in the shape of a pine tree swung ineffectively from the rearview mirror, having long since given up the unequal struggle of trying to sweeten rank air. The upholstery was tashed and torn, and the speedometer was about to reset itself for a second go round. It struck Fin as ironic how their fortunes had reversed themselves. Artair’s father had been the teacher, middle-class, good income, driving the shiny new Hillman Avenger, while Fin’s folks had struggled between unemployment and the croft and driven a battered old Ford Anglia. Now Artair worked in a Stornoway construction yard and drove a car that would probably fail its next MOT, and Fin was a ranking CID officer who drove a Mitsubishi Shogun. He made a mental note never to tell Artair what kind of vehicle he owned.

He slipped into the driver’s seat, snapped on the seatbelt and turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed, spluttered and died.

‘Christ,’ Artair said. ‘It could do with my puffer. There’s a wee trick. Clutch and accelerator to the floor. Soon as she kicks in, feet off the pedals. She’ll run sweet as a nut. What are you driving these days, Fin?’

Fin concentrated on the
wee trick
, and as the engine exploded into life, he said casually, ‘Ford Escort. Not much call for a motor in the city.’ And telling the lie left a bad taste in his mouth.

He pulled out on to Cromwell Street, and there was virtually no traffic as he headed north on to Bayhead. The headlights made little impact in the twilight, and he almost failed to notice the hump in the road at the crossing to the children’s play-park. They bumped over it too quickly, and the car juddered.

‘Hey, take it easy,’ Artair said. ‘I’ve got to get a few more miles out of this old lady yet.’ Fin could smell the whisky on his breath as Artair exhaled deeply. ‘So, you still haven’t told me why you’re here.’

‘You never asked.’

Artair turned his head and delivered a look that Fin assiduously avoided. ‘Well, I’m asking now.’

‘I’ve been attached to the inquiry into the death of Angel Macritchie.’ He felt Artair’s sudden interest, aware of him turning physically in the passenger seat to look at him.

‘No shit! I thought you were based in Glasgow.’

‘Edinburgh.’

‘So why’d they bring you in? Because you knew him?’

Fin shook his head. ‘I’ve been involved in a case in Edinburgh which was … well, very similar. Same MO. That’s
modus
—’

‘—
operandi
. Yeh, I know. I read fucking detective stories, too, you know.’ Artair chortled. ‘That’s funny, that. You ending up back here to investigate the murder of the guy who beat us all up when we were kids.’ He was struck by a sudden thought. ‘Did you see him? I mean, were you at the autopsy, or whatever they call it?’

‘Post-mortem. Yes.’

‘Well …?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Maybe I do. There was never any love lost between me and Angel Macritchie.’ He thought about it for a moment before issuing his considered opinion. ‘Bastard! Whoever did it deserves a fucking medal.’

As they crossed the moor road towards Barvas, the sky was still light in the west, streaks of dark purple-grey and fading pink. Clouds, like billowing black smoke, were gathering out at sea, The sky in the east was dark. By the time they passed the green-roofed shieling, it was barely visible, and Fin became aware of Artair snoring gently in the seat beside him. The streetlights were on in Barvas, Fin swung the car north and they headed towards Ness.

He had nearly twenty minutes to think, undisturbed by Artair’s drunken ramblings. Nearly twenty minutes to anticipate the moment when he would find himself face to face with Marsaili for the first time since his aunt’s funeral. Close to eighteen years. He had no idea what to expect. After all, Artair had changed so much. Would he even recognize the girl with the pigtails and the blue ribbons after all this time?

They drifted through deserted villages, yellow lights in cottage windows the only sign of habitation. A dog came barking out of nowhere and Fin had to swerve to avoid it. The smell of peat smoke seeped in through the car’s ventilation system, and Fin remembered those long weekly bus journeys he and Artair had shared to their respective school hostels in Stornoway. He glanced across and saw, in the flash of the streetlights, Artair’s jaw slack, hanging open, a tiny dribble of saliva running from one corner of his mouth. Dead to the world. A drink-induced escape. Fin’s escape from the island had been physical. Artair had found other means.

By the time they reached Cross, Fin realized that he had no idea where Artair lived. He reached over and shook him by the shoulder. Artair grunted and opened an eye and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was disorientated for several moments, staring unseeing through the windscreen, before pulling himself upright in the seat. ‘That was quick.’

‘I don’t know where you live.’

Artair turned to look at him, face distorted by disbelief. ‘You what? You can’t have forgotten where I live! I’ve lived there all my fucking life!.’

‘Oh.’ It had never occurred to Fin that Artair and Marsaili would have made their home in the Macinnes bungalow.

‘Yeh, I know, sad isn’t it? Still living in the same house I was fucking born in.’ The bitterness was back in his voice. ‘Unlike you, I had responsibilities.’

‘Your mother?’

‘Aye, my mother.’

‘She’s still alive?’

‘Naw, I took her to the taxidermist and had her stuffed so she could sit in the chair by the fire and keep us company at night. Of course she’s still alive! Do you think I’d have stayed here all these years if she wasn’t?’ He gasped his frustration, and the smell of stale alcohol filled the car. ‘Jesus. Eighteen years of spoon-feeding the old bitch morning noon and night. Lifting her to the toilet, changing her fucking nappies – sorry,
incontinence
pads. And d’you know what really fucks me off? She maybe can’t do much else, but she can talk nearly as good as you and me, and there’s a big part of her brain as sharp as ever it was. I think she just revels in making my life a misery.’

Fin didn’t know what to say. He wondered who fed her and changed her when Artair was working. And almost as though he’d read his mind, Artair said, ‘Of course, Marsaili’s good with her. She likes Marsaili.’ And Fin had a sudden picture of what their lives must have been like for all these years, trapped in the same house, chained by family responsibility to the needs of an old woman robbed of most of her physical and mental faculties by a stroke she’d suffered when Artair was still in his teens. Again, as if he was inside Fin’s head, Artair said, ‘You’d think after all this time she’d at least have had the good fucking grace to die and give us our lives back.’

Fin turned off on the single-track that took them up the hill to the streetlights of Crobost strung out for half a mile along the cliff road. They passed beneath the shadow of the church, and Fin saw lights on at the manse. Around the curve of the hill, the road rose steeply towards the Macinnes bungalow built into the slope of the land as it fell away towards the clifftops. Light spilled out from its windows, falling on to the peat stack, illuminating its carefully constructed herringbone pattern, built just as if Artair’s father had done it himself. A couple of hundred yards further on, Fin saw the dark silhouette of his parents’ crofthouse smudged against the night sky. No lights, no life there.

He slowed and turned down on to the Macinnes drive and stopped the car in front of the garage doors. A blink of moonlight splashed a pool of broken silver on the ocean beyond. There was a light on in the kitchen, and through the window Fin could see a figure at the sink. He realized, with a start, that it was Marsaili, long fair hair, darker now, drawn back severely from her face and tied in a pony tail at the nape of her neck. She wore no make-up and looked weary somehow, pale, with shadows beneath blue eyes that had lost their lustre. She looked up as she heard the car, and Fin killed the headlights so that all she could see would be a reflection of herself in the window. She looked away quickly, as if disappointed by what she‘d seen, and in that moment he glimpsed again the little girl who had so bewitched him from the first moment he set eyes on her.

SEVEN

It was a whole year before I plucked up the courage to defy my parents and go to Marsaili’s farm on a Saturday.

Telling lies was something I didn’t do very often. But when I did, I made sure they were plausible. I’d heard other kids spinning yarns to their parents, or their teachers, things that even I could tell weren’t true. And you could see immediately in the faces of the grown-ups that they knew it, too. It was important that you made the lie believable. And if you didn’t get found out, then you had a useful tool to keep in your locker for when the right, or wrong, moment arose. Which was why my parents had no reason to doubt me when I told them I was going down the road to play at Artair’s that Saturday morning. After all, what possible reason could a six-year-old have for lying about something like that?

Of course, I told them in English, since we never spoke Gaelic in the house any more. I had found it much easier to learn than I could have imagined. My father had bought a television. Reluctantly. And I spent hours glued to it. At that age, I was like a sponge, soaking up everything around me. It was simple enough, there were just two words now for everything, where before there had only been one.

My father was disappointed that I was going to Artair’s. He had spent all summer restoring an old wooden dinghy which had washed up on the beach. There was no name on her. All the paintwork had been bleached off by the salt water. All the same, he had put a notice in the
Stornoway Gazette
, describing her, and offering to restore her to her rightful owner should that person come forward to claim her. He was scrupulously honest, my father. But I think he was quite glad when no one did, and he was able to begin the rebuilding with a clear conscience.

I spent long hours with him that summer rubbing the wooden hull down to the bone, holding the worktable steady while he sawed new lengths of cross-planking from yet more timber which had been washed up on the shore. He got rowlocks very cheaply at an auction in Stornoway and fashioned new oars for her himself. He said he wanted to put a mast in her and make a sail out of some canvas we had found on one of our beachcombing adventures. And he had an old outboard motor in the shed that he wanted to try to make serviceable. Then we could propel her by oars, wind or petrol. But all that could wait. Right now he just wanted to get her into the water on the first good day, and row her around the bay from Port of Ness to Crobost harbour.

He had painted her inside and out to protect her from the salt. Purple, of course, like everything else in our lives. And on either side of the bow, in flamboyant white lettering, he had painted her name,
Eilidh
, which to the non-Gaelic ear sounds like
Ay-lay
. It was the Gaelic for Helen. My mother’s name.

It was a perfect day for it, really. A fine September Saturday before the equinoctial gales kicked in. The sun was bright and strong, and still warm, and there was just a light breeze ruffling a tranquil sea. Today, my father said, was the day, and I was sorely torn. But I said I had told Artair I’d be there and didn’t want to disappoint him. My father said we couldn’t wait until next Saturday, because it was probable that the weather would have broken by then, and that the
Eilidh
would have to stay under her tarpaulin in our garden until the spring. If I didn’t want to go with him, he was just going to have to take her out on his own. I think he was hoping that would make me change my mind, and that the two of us would take the
Eilidh
on her maiden voyage together. He couldn’t understand why I would pass up the chance just so that I could go and play with Artair. I could play with Artair any time. But I had promised Marsaili, in spite of being strictly forbidden by my mother, that I would come to the farm that Saturday. And though it broke my heart, and probably my father’s, I wasn’t about to break my promise.

So it was with mixed feelings that I said goodbye and headed off down the road towards Artair’s bungalow, the lie weighing heavily on my conscience. I had told Artair I was busy that Saturday, and not to expect me. And as soon as I was out of view of my house, I took off across country on a peat track, running until I was certain I could no longer be seen from the Crobost road. It took me about ten minutes from there, cutting back across the moor, to get on to the Cross–Skigersta road and turn west towards Mealanais. It was a route I knew well by now, having spent the last year walking Marsaili home after school with Artair. But this was the first time I had dared to go on a Saturday. A rendezvous arranged in secret during a snatched conversation in the playground. Artair was to know nothing about it. My stipulation. I wanted Marsaili to myself for once. But as I scrambled down the slope to the track that led to Mealanais farm, I felt the guilt of my deception like the sick feeling you get when you have eaten more than you should.