The Blackhouse (42 page)

Fin slammed his fist down on the desk, and a pile of magazines slid on to the floor.

‘For Christ’s sake, Fin, tell me what’s going on!’ A hint of hysteria was creeping into Marsaili’s voice.

Fin dropped his head into his hands and screwed his eyes tight shut. ‘Artair killed Angel Macritchie.’

There was a hush in the room so thick that Fin could almost feel it. Marsaili’s voice, small and frightened, forced its way through it. ‘Why?’

‘It was the only way he could be sure of getting me back to the island.’ He scuffed his hand through the printouts of the articles, sending several of them fluttering through still air. ‘The papers were full of the murder in Edinburgh. All the gory details. The fact that I was in charge of the investigation. So if another body turned up here on Lewis, same weird MO, what was the betting I’d get involved at some stage? Especially when the victim was someone I was at school with. A gamble, maybe. But it paid off. Here I am.’

‘But why? Oh, Fin, I can’t believe I’m even hearing you say these things. Why would he want you here?’

‘To tell me about Fionnlagh. So that I would know he was my son.’ He thought about what Donna Murray had said.
Like he was taking out the sins of the father on the son.

Marsaili sat heavily on the edge of the bed and put her hands to her face. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You said you thought he beat Fionnlagh to get at you. It wasn’t you he was getting at. It was me. All those years, beating that poor kid, and all the time it was me he was punching, me he was kicking. And it was important to him that I knew that before …’ And he broke off, frightened even to give voice to the thought.

‘Before what?’

Fin turned slowly to look at her. ‘He wasn’t bothered about giving a DNA sample to the police. He knew he’d be on the rock by the time we figured out it was him. Too late to stop him.’

Marsaili stood up abruptly, as suddenly it occurred to her where all this was leading. ‘Stop it, Fin! Stop it!’

He shook his head. ‘That’s why he didn’t bother taking his pills with him. After all, why would he need them if he wasn’t coming back?’

He checked his watch and stood up, scooping the newspaper articles back into their folder. Outside the wind was picking up. He could see all the way down to the shore, waves smashing across the rocks, retreating in foam. He turned towards the door, and Marsaili caught his arm.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to try and stop him killing our son.’

She bit down hard on her lip and tried to stop the sobs that threatened to choke her. Tears coursed down her cheeks. ‘Why, Fin? Why would he do that?’

‘Because for some reason he wants to hurt me, Marsaili. To inflict more pain on me than I can bear. He must know I’ve already lost one son.’ And he saw a look in her eyes that told him she had not known. ‘What better way to turn the screw than to kill the other?’ He pulled himself free of her grasp, but she followed him to the door and grabbed him again.

‘Fin, look at me.’ There was something compelling in her voice. He turned to meet her intensity. ‘Before you go … there’s something you need to know.’

II

Rain battered against the window of the incident room, obliterating the view over harbour rooftops to the semi-derelict Lews Castle across the bay. There were nearly two dozen officers at desks around the room. All of them were turned towards Fin. Except for George Gunn and a couple of others who were still speaking on the phone. DCI Smith was flushed and exasperated. He had showered, and changed. His hair was smoothly Brylcreemed back from his face, and he smelled of Brut again. He might hold centre stage in the incident room, but he had been upstaged in his investigation by Fin. He was not a happy man, but he was being squeezed into a corner.

He said, ‘Okay, so I accept that this Artair Macinnes probably is our killer.’

‘His DNA’ll confirm it,’ Fin said.

Smith glanced irritably at the newspaper articles spread across the nearest desk. ‘And you think he copied the Leith Walk murder to lure you back to the island.’

‘Yes.’

‘To tell you that his son is really your son.’

‘Yes.’

‘And then kill him.’ Fin nodded. Smith let the moment hang. Then, ‘Why?’

‘I told you what happened on An Sgeir.’

‘His father died rescuing you on the cliffs eighteen years ago. Do you really think that’s sufficient motivation for him to commit two murders all these years later?’

‘I can’t explain it.’ Fin’s frustration bubbled into anger. ‘I just know he’s beaten that boy black and blue all his life, and now that he’s told me I’m his father he’s going to kill him. He’s killed once to get me here. On the evidence, I don’t think anyone can deny that.’

Smith sighed and shook his head. ‘I’m not going to risk the lives of my officers by sending them off to a rock fifty miles out in the Atlantic in the middle of a storm.’

Gunn hung up and swivelled around in his chair. ‘Latest weather report from the coastguard, sir. Storm-force winds in the vicinity of An Sgeir, and getting worse.’ He glanced almost apologetically at Fin. ‘They say there’s no way they can land the chopper on the rock in these conditions.’

‘There you are, then.’ Smith sounded relieved. ‘We’ll have to wait until the storm passes.’

Gunn said, ‘The harbourmaster’s confirmed that the
Purple Isle
is back from An Sgeir. She docked about an hour ago.’

‘I’m not asking a boat to go out in these conditions either!’

A uniformed sergeant came into the room. ‘Sir.’ His face was chiselled from grim, flinted rock. ‘We can’t raise the guga people on the CB.’

Fin said, ‘Then there’s something far wrong. Gigs always keeps a channel of communication open. Always.’

Smith looked to the sergeant for confirmation, and he nodded. The CIO sighed and shrugged. ‘There’s still nothing we can do about it before tomorrow.’

‘The boy could be dead by tomorrow!’ Fin raised his voice and felt an immediate hush fall across the room.

Smith raised a finger and touched it to the end of his nose. A strange, threatening gesture. His voice was a low growl. ‘You’re in serious danger of crossing a line here, Macleod. You are no longer involved in this case, remember?’

‘Of course I’m involved. I’m at the very fucking centre of it.’ And he turned and pushed through the swing doors out into the corridor.

By the time he reached the foot of Church Street and turned left into Cromwell Street, Fin was soaked. His parka and hood had protected his upper body, but his trousers were plastered to his legs, and his face had stiffened and set under the assault of the freezing rain that drove in off the moor. He turned into the doorway of a green-painted gift shop for some respite, and found foot-high replicas of the Lewis Chessmen staring at him with curious expressions from beyond the glass, almost as if they empathized. He fumbled for his mobile phone and dialled the number of the incident room two hundred yards up the road. One of the uniforms answered.

‘I want to speak to George Gunn.’

‘Can I tell him who’s calling?’

‘No.’

A brief pause. ‘One moment, sir.’

And then Gunn’s voice. ‘DS Gunn.’

‘George, it’s me. Can you talk?’

A moment’s silence. ‘Not really.’

‘Okay, just listen. George, I need you to do me a favour. A big favour.’

III

The trawler rose and fell with the swell in the inner harbour, creaking and straining at its ropes. A red plastic bucket rolled back and forth across the forward deck. Heavy chains swung and rattled and chafed, and every piece of rigging on the boat’s superstructure vibrated and whined in the wind. Rain hammered the windows of the wheelhouse, and Padraig MacBean sat up on a pilot’s seat that had been worn and torn by years of use, duct tape fighting to contain thick wads of stuffing that seemed determined to escape it. He had one foot up on the wheel, and was puffing thoughtfully on the stump of a hand-rolled cigarette. He was young for a skipper, not much more than thirty. The
Purple Isle
had been his father’s boat, and it was his father who had taken Fin out to the rock eighteen years ago, when Padraig could only have been twelve. Old MacBean had carried the guga hunters on their annual pilgrimage to An Sgeir for thirty years. After his death his sons had taken up the tradition. Padraig’s younger brother, Duncan, was the first mate. There was only one other member of crew, a young lad called Archie. He had been unemployed, and joined them on a six-month work experience attachment two years ago. He was still attached.

‘That’s a helluva story you’re telling me, Mr Macleod,’ Padraig was saying, in the long slow Niseach drawl of a native of Ness. ‘I have to tell you, I never much liked that Artair Macinnes. And his lad’s a quiet boy.’ He took another pull at the remains of his cigarette. ‘But I can’t say I noticed anything untoward on the trip out.’

‘Will you take me?’ Fin asked him patiently. He knew it was a big ask.

Padraig lowered his head and peered out from beneath the roof of the wheelhouse. ‘It’s a hoor of a storm out there, sir.’

‘You’ve been out in worse.’

‘Aye, I have that. But never by choice.’

‘We’re talking about a boy’s life, Padraig.’

‘And I’m thinking about my boat, and the lives I’d be putting at risk by taking her out.’

Fin said nothing. He knew that the decision was in the balance. He had asked. He could do no more. Padraig sucked on the last half-inch of his cigarette, but it had gone out. He looked at Fin.

‘I can’t ask the boys to go.’ Fin felt hope leaking out of every pore. ‘But I’ll put it to them. It’ll be their decision. And if they say yes, then I’ll take you.’ Hope gathered itself again in Fin’s heart.

He followed the young skipper out through the galley. Oilskins hung from hooks along one wall, above a row of yellow wellies. Dirty dishes slopped about in cloudy water in the sink, a skin of grease reflecting the harsh electric light. There was a kettle on the gas hob, beneath a row of chipped porcelain mugs hanging on pegs.

Rungs set into a riveted metal shaft took them down to cramped living quarters in the rear of the trawler. Six berths were set into the hull around the stern of the boat, and a triangular table with benches along each side took up most of the available space. Duncan and Archie were sitting with mugs of tea and cigarettes watching a snowy picture on a tiny TV set mounted on the wall high up in one corner. Anne Robinson was being rude to some miserable contestant and insisting that they
were
the weakest link. A middle-aged woman with a face like fizz stormed towards the camera on her walk of shame. Padraig turned off the television and quelled the protestations of his crew with a look. He had something about him for a young man, a quiet, powerful presence that made itself felt.

In a low voice, in the insipid yellow electric light in the hold of the rusted old trawler, he told them what Fin was asking of them. And why. The two young men sat in their ragged pullovers and torn jeans, broken nails ingrained with oil and dirt, pale, mean faces born of generations of island poverty, listening to Padraig’s story. Glancing occasionally at Fin. They barely made a living, these boys. And it was not much of a life, eating, sleeping, shitting aboard this old, painted whore of a trawler twenty-four hours a day, five, sometimes six days a week. Day after day they risked their lives, in order that they might live like this. When Padraig had finished, they sat in silence for a moment. Then Archie said, ‘Well, it’s cheaper than going to the pub, I suppose.’

IV

It was after seven when they left port, tipping past Cuddy Point into the outer harbour and facing into the rising swell that drove in off the Minch. By the time they had cleared Goat Island and motored out into deeper water, the sea was rising and breaking about them as they ploughed their way through the advance regiments of the storm. Padraig stood at the wheel, his face furrowed in concentration, green in the reflected phosphor of the battered radar screens that flashed and beeped all around the console. There was a little light left in the sky, but it was impossible to see anything. Padraig was guiding them by instruments and instinct. ‘Aye, she’s wild, right enough. Not so bad here in the lee of Lewis. It’ll be a lot worse when we round the Butt.’

Fin could not imagine anything much worse. He had thrown up twice by the time they passed the Tiumpan Head Lighthouse, and he declined Archie’s offer of fried egg and sausage that the boy was somehow managing to conjure in a galley that no longer had any fixed point of reference.

‘How long’s it going to take?’ he asked Padraig.

The skipper shrugged. ‘Took us just under eight hours last night. Could be nine or more tonight. We’ll be heading right into the teeth of the storm. It’ll be well into the early hours before we get to An Sgeir.’

Fin remembered how it had felt eighteen years before when they had rounded the Butt of Lewis, and the beam of the lighthouse had finally faded into darkness. The security of the island behind them, they had set out into the vast wilderness of the North Atlantic, kept safe and dry only by a few tons of rusting trawler and the skills of her skipper. He had felt scared then, lonely, incredibly vulnerable. But none of that prepared him for the fury with which the ocean would fling itself upon them this time as they rounded the northern tip of Lewis. Diesel engines hammering in the dark, they fought against seemingly impossible odds, water rising sheer all around them, like black, snow-capped mountains, crashing over the bow and hammering into the wheelhouse. He hung on to whatever he could, wondering how Padraig could remain so calm, and tried to imagine how it might be possible to survive, sanity intact, another seven or eight hours of this.

‘Before my father died,’ Padraig had to shout above the roar of the engines and the anger of the storm, ‘he bought another boat to replace the
Purple Isle.
‘ He nodded and smiled to himself, keeping his eyes fixed on the screens in front of him and the blackness through the glass. ‘Aye, she was a right beauty, too. The
Iron Lady
he called her. He spent a lot of time and money making her just the way he wanted her.’ He flicked a glance at Fin. ‘There are times you wish it was that easy with a woman.’ He turned and grinned back into the darkness, and then his smile faded. ‘He was going to sell this old dear when he got the chance. Only he never did. Cancer of the liver. He was gone in a matter of weeks. And I had to step into his shoes.’ He took a crumpled-looking cigarette one-handed from a Virginia tobacco tin and lit it. ‘Lost the
Iron Lady
first time I took her out. A ruptured pipe in the engine room. By the time we got to it, there was more water coming in than we could pump out. I told the rest of them to get the dinghy out, and I tried everything I could to save her. I was up to my neck in the engine room before I finally baled out. Just made it, too.’ Smoke swirled from his mouth in the turbulent air of the wheelhouse. ‘We were lucky, though. The weather was good, and there was another trawler within sight. I watched her go down. Everything that my father had put into her. All his hopes, all his dreams. And all I could think was, how was I going to tell my uncles I’d lost my father’s boat? But I needn’t have worried. They were just glad that we were safe. One of them said, “A boat’s just a bunch of wood and metal, son. The only heart it has is in those who sail her.”’ He took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘Still, I get goosebumps every time I go over the spot where she went down, and I know she’s just lying there on the seabed, right beneath where we last saw her. All my father’s dreams, gone for ever, just like him.’