The Chessmen (2 page)

G-RUAI.

Fin felt every hair on the back of his neck stand up. RUAI, short for Ruairidh, the Gaelic for Roderick. A call-sign which had been in every newspaper for weeks seventeen years before, when the plane went missing, and Roddy Mackenzie with it.

Mist lifted off the mountains like smoke, tinted by the dawn. It was perfectly still. Not a sound broke the silence. Not even a birdcall. Fin lowered Whistler’s binoculars. ‘You know whose plane that is?’

Whistler nodded.

‘What the hell’s it doing here, Whistler? They said he filed a flight plan for Mull and disappeared somewhere out at sea.’

Whistler shrugged, but made no comment.

Fin said, ‘I’m going down to take a look.’

Whistler caught his arm. There was an odd look in his eyes. If Fin hadn’t known better he would have said it was fear. ‘We shouldn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s none of our business, Fin.’ He sighed. A long, grim breath of resignation. ‘I suppose we’ll have to report it, but we shouldn’t get involved.’

Fin looked at him hard and long, but decided not to ask. He pulled his arm free of Whistler’s grasp and said again, ‘I’m going down to take a look. You can come with me or not.’ He thrust the binoculars back into Whistler’s hands and started off down the hill towards the empty basin.

The descent was steep and difficult, over broken rock and hardened peat made slick by grasses washed flat by the rain. Boulders lined the banks of what had once been the loch, and Fin slithered over them, struggling to keep his feet and his balance, using his arms to stop himself falling. Down, down into the bowels of the one-time loch, wading through mud and slime, up to his knees at times, between rocks he used like stepping stones to cross the vast depression.

He had almost reached the plane before he turned to look back and see Whistler following just a few yards behind. Whistler stopped, breathing heavily, and the two men stood looking at each other for almost a full minute. Then Fin glanced beyond him, up through layers of peat and stone like the contour lines on an ordnance survey map, towards what just twelve hours before had been the shoreline. Had the loch still been there, the two men would have been fifty
feet underwater by now. He turned to cover the remaining yards to the plane.

It was canted at the slightest of angles amid the shambles of rock and stone at the bottom of the loch, almost as if it had been placed there by the delicate hand of God. Fin was aware of Whistler’s breathing at his side. He said, ‘You know what’s weird?’

‘What?’ Whistler didn’t really sound as if he wanted to know.

‘I can’t see any damage.’

‘So?’

‘Well, if the plane had crashed into the loch it would be pretty smashed up, right?’

Whistler made no comment.

‘I mean look at it. There’s barely a dent on it. All the windows are intact. The windscreen’s not even broken.’

Fin clambered over the last few rocks and pulled himself, slithering, up on to the nearest wing. ‘Not much rust in evidence either. I guess it must be mostly aluminium.’ He didn’t trust himself to stand on the treacherously slippery surface of the wing, and crawled on his hands and knees towards the nearside cockpit door. The window was thick with green slime and it was impossible to see inside. He grasped the handle and tried to pull it open. It wouldn’t budge.

‘Leave it, Fin,’ Whistler called to him from down below.

But Fin was determined. ‘Come up here and give me a hand.’

Whistler didn’t move.

‘For Christ’s sake, man, it’s Roddy in there!’

‘I don’t want to see him, Fin. It would be like desecrating a grave.’

Fin shook his head and turned back to the door, bracing his feet against the fuselage on either side and pulling with all his strength. Suddenly it gave, with a loud rending like the sound of tearing metal, and Fin fell backwards on to the wing. Daylight flooded the interior of the cockpit for the first time in seventeen years. Fin scrambled back to his knees and grabbed the frame of the door to pull himself up to see inside. He heard Whistler hoisting himself on to the wing behind him, but didn’t turn. The sight that greeted him was shocking, his olfactory senses assailed by a stink like rotting fish.

The fascia below the windscreen arched across the cockpit, a mass of gauges and dials, glass smeared and muddied, interior faces discoloured by water and algae. The passenger or co-pilot’s seat, at the nearside, was empty. The red, black and blue knobs of the throttle controls between the seats were still visible, drawn back to their idle position. The remains of a man were strapped into the pilot’s seat at the far side. Time and water and bacteria had eaten away all the flesh, and the only thing holding the skeleton together were the blanched remains of tendons and tough ligaments that had not decayed in the cold-water temperatures. His leather jacket was more or less intact. His jeans, though bleached of colour, had also survived. His trainers, too, although Fin could see that the rubber was swollen, distending the shoes around what was left of the feet.

The larynx, ears and nose had all lost their structure, and the skull was plainly visible, a few strands of hair clinging to the remnants of soft tissue.

All of which was shocking enough to the two old friends who remembered the young, talented, restless Roddy with his shock of fair curly hair. But what disturbed them most was the terrible damage inflicted to the right side of the face and rear of the skull. Half the jaw appeared to be missing, exposing a row of yellowed broken teeth. The cheekbone and upper part of the skull were smashed beyond recognition.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Whistler’s voice came to Fin in a blasphemous breath.

It had only taken a moment to absorb the scene exposed by the opening of the door, and Fin recoiled involuntarily almost at once, banging the back of his head against Whistler’s shoulder. He slammed the door shut and turned around to slide down into a sitting position against it. Whistler crouched on his hunkers looking at him with wide eyes.

‘You’re right,’ Fin said. ‘We shouldn’t have opened it.’ He looked at Whistler’s face, so pale that pockmarks Fin had never before noticed were visible now, the result perhaps of some bout of childhood chickenpox. ‘But not because we’re desecrating a grave, Whistler.’

Whistler frowned. ‘Why then?’

‘Because we’re disturbing a crime scene.’

Whistler gazed at him for several long moments, dark eyes obscured by confusion, before he turned to slither down
off the wing and make his way back towards the shoreline, climbing steadily out of the crater and back up towards the beehives.

‘Whistler!’ Fin called after him, but the big man didn’t even break stride and never looked back.

Fin sat in Gunn’s office, looking at the shambles of paperwork gathered like drifting snow on the detective sergeant’s desk. The occasional car rumbled past outside in Church Street, and even from this distance he could hear the gulls circling the trawlers in the harbour. Bleak, harled houses with steeply pitched roofs filled the view from the window, and he stood up and crossed to it to widen his field of vision. Macleod & Macleod the butcher, no relative. The Blythswood Care charity shop on the corner, with its handwritten notice in the window,
We do not accept any left over goods from sales of work
. The Bangla Spice Indian restaurant, and the Thai Café. Folk a long way from home.

Life went on for others as if nothing had happened. And yet for Fin, the discovery of Roddy’s remains in the aeroplane at the bottom of the loch had turned all of his memories on their head, altering for ever his recollection of history, and the way things had been.

‘A bog burst seems about right. Your friend Whistler knows his stuff.’

Fin turned as Gunn walked in clutching a sheaf of papers. His round face was shaven to a shine below a dark widow’s
peak, pink skin splashed with an astringent and powerfully perfumed aftershave. Fin said, ‘There’s not much that Whistler doesn’t know.’ And he wondered what it was Whistler knew that he wasn’t telling.

‘There’s the disappearing loch down at Morsgail right enough. And apparently there were a couple of large bog bursts in the early nineties on steep north-facing slopes on Barra and Vatersay. So it’s not unknown.’ He dropped his papers on to his desk, like a further snowfall, and sighed. ‘Not much luck with the deceased’s family, though.’

Fin wasn’t quite sure why, but the reference to Roddy as
the deceased
was almost painful. And yet he had been dead for seventeen years. The most talented and successful Celtic rock star of his generation, cut down in his prime.

‘Father died five years ago, his mother last year in a geriatric unit in Inverness. No brothers or sisters. I suppose there must be distant relatives somewhere, because it seems the house at Uig was sold off by the estate. Might take a while to track them down.’ Gunn ran a hand back through his darkly oiled hair, then unconsciously wiped it on the leg of his trousers. ‘Your pal Professor Wilson is boarding a flight from Edinburgh as we speak.’

‘Angus?’

Gunn nodded. He had unhappy memories of his one encounter with the acerbic pathologist. ‘He’s going to want to examine the body
in situ
, and we’ll get the whole scene photographed.’ He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘It’s going to be in all the papers, Mr Macleod. Bloody press’ll be flying in like vultures. Aye, and the brass, too. From Inverness. Wouldn’t
surprise me if it was the high heid yins themselves. They just love to stand in front of the cameras and see their wellfed faces on the telly.’ He paused, then, before turning to push the door shut. ‘Tell me, Mr Macleod. What makes you think that Roddy Mackenzie was murdered?’

‘I’d rather not say, George. I don’t want to prejudice your interpretation of the scene. I think it’s an assessment you should make for yourself.’

‘Fair enough.’ Gunn dropped into his chair and swivelled around so that he was facing Fin. ‘What the hell were you and Whistler Macaskill doing up in the mountains in a storm anyway, Mr Macleod?’

‘It’s a long story, George.’

Gun raised his arms to interlock his fingers behind his head. ‘Well, we’ve got time to kill before the pathologist’s plane arrives . . .’ He let his sentence hang. Fin’s cue. And Fin realized it was only a couple of days since he and Whistler had been reunited for the first time in half a lifetime. Already it seemed like an eternity.

It had been an Indian summer, the long, hot dry spell stretching well into September, a rare phenomenon on this most northerly island of the Outer Hebrides. The furthest north and west you could go in Europe, the Isle of Lewis was burned brown by months of summer sun and unaccustomed weeks without rain. And still the weather was holding.

It had taken Fin nearly two hours to drive from Ness down the west coast to Uig that day. From as far north as Siadar, Fin had seen the mountains rising out of the south-west towards Harris, a dark brooding purple cut against the palest of blue skies. It was the only point on any horizon where the clouds still lingered. Not threatening but just there, drifting among the peaks. The yellow bloom of wild tormentil grew among the bracken, lending a hint of gold to a landscape in which even the heather was bleached of colour. The tiny petals dipped and bowed in the stiffening breeze that blew in off the ocean, carrying with it the smell of the sea and a distant whiff of winter.

On this first day of his new life, Fin reflected on just how much it had changed in little more than eighteen months. Back then he had been married, with a son, a life in Edinburgh, a job as a detective in ‘A’ Division CID. Now he had none of those things. He had come back to the womb, the island of his birth, but he wasn’t sure why. In search of who he had once been, perhaps. The only thing he knew for certain was that the change was irrevocable, and had begun the day a driver took the life of his little boy in an Edinburgh street and failed to stop.

As he rounded the head of Loch Ròg Beag, Fin turned his mud-spattered Suzuki four-by-four off the single-track road on to a broken metalled path without passing places. Past a clutch of Highland cattle with their long, curling horns and shaggy brown coats, to follow the river upstream towards a puddle of a loch where, unusually, trees grew in the shelter of a fold of hills, and Suaineabhal Lodge stood in the shadow of their protection.

It was a long while since Fin had seen Kenny John Maclean. Big Kenny had left the island with the rest of them. But his life had taken an altogether different course. He lived now in an old crofthouse that had been extended and modernized, and sat on the far side of the path opposite the lodge. A rabble of dogs came barking out of a tin-roofed barn as Fin pulled up in the parking area. The lodge itself was based upon an old farmhouse, and when Sir John Wooldridge had first bought the Red River Estate he had built out side and back, and appended a conservatory at the front that looked out over the loch. Unlike Cracabhal Lodge at the head of
Loch Tamnabhaigh, which could accommodate more than twenty during the shooting and fishing seasons, Suaineabhal had only a handful of bedrooms and was reserved exclusively for fishermen. But it had a public bar, and at this time of year was filled every night with fishermen and ghillies, and locals out for a pint and a dram.

This morning there was not a soul around, until Kenny came striding up to the gate from the loch side and shouted the dogs to silent obedience. Cowed by the reprimand of their pack leader, they contented themselves with snuffling about Fin in quiet curiosity, breathing in his strange scents, sunlight falling around them in dappled patches like rain. Kenny wore green Hunter wellies over khaki breeks, and a multi-pocketed waistcoat over a military green woollen jumper with shoulder and elbow patches. As he approached, he whipped off his flat cap to reveal a cropped fuzz of ginger hair that was losing its colour, and held out a big callused hand to shake Fin’s warmly.

‘It’s been a helluva long time, Fin.’ Although most of his day would be conducted in English, with Fin he reverted to Gaelic without thinking. It was the language of their childhood, the first language that would spring naturally to both their tongues.