The Chessmen (29 page)

Fin lifted his eyes to meet Gunn’s and raised one eyebrow. ‘I think you know me better than that, George.’

‘I hope so, Mr Macleod. I really hope I do.’

He opened the door a little wider and squeezed back out into the corridor, pulling it shut behind him. Fin heard the key turning again in the lock.

It was almost half an hour before he heard the rasp of hard leather on concrete and the rattle of a key in the lock once again. This time it was a uniformed sergeant who stood in the doorway regarding Fin with thoughtful curiosity. ‘The DI’s ready for you now, Mr Macleod.’

Fin nodded and got slowly to his feet.

There was a single window in the interview room, looking out on some kind of courtyard or car park. DI Mackay and DS Wilson stood behind a wooden table, two chairs behind them, a single chair on the opposite side of the table. The uniformed sergeant closed the door and positioned himself with his back to it, arms folded. Mackay waved Fin into the single seat opposite.

The DI was a tall, thin-faced weasel of a man, the remains of his hair grown too long, gelled and scraped back over a narrow skull in an attempt to disguise its baldness. Fin always had an instant distrust of anyone with such a capacity for self-deception. He was clean-shaven, with the faintly purple raised skin of someone sensitive to the blade. His long neck was punctuated by an oversized Adam’s apple, and vanished into a collar a size too big. As he sat down, he used a long bony finger to press the record button on the digital recorder that sat in front of him on the table next to a beige folder.

Detective Sergeant Wilson was an altogether smaller man, reduced by the rank of his superior officer to the role of observer. He was almost invisible. Neither Fin nor Mackay paid him any attention.

Mackay spoke with a strong Invernesian accent as he voiced the date and time for the record along with the names of those present. He interlaced his skeletal fingers on the table in front of him. ‘Perhaps you would like to tell us, Mr Macleod, why you murdered John Angus Macaskill?’

Fin returned Mackay’s stare until the Detective Inspector started to become uncomfortable. He would have known that Fin had attained the rank of detective inspector himself before leaving the force, and so there was an element of something like rivalry between them. Almost open hostility.

Fin said, ‘Let me make it clear from the outset, Detective Inspector, that I did not kill John Angus Macaskill.’ Even as he spoke the words he felt again the pain of Whistler’s death. Each and every time he gave it voice made it all the more real.

‘I’m listening.’

‘John Angus has been a good and close friend since we were at the Nicolson Institute together here in Stornoway more than twenty years ago.’

‘Not so friendly according to witnesses we’ve spoken to.’ Mackay regarded him thoughtfully. ‘Apparently the two of you were involved in a brawl in the bar at Suaineabhal Lodge just over a week ago, when the deceased struck you, and threats were issued.’ He opened his beige folder. ‘And again, just the other day. Outside the Sheriff Court. You were seen
to be arguing, and the deceased knocked you off your feet.’

‘Perhaps,’ Fin said, ‘if you stopped looking at motive for five minutes and just examined the facts . . .’ Fin saw Mackay’s Adam’s apple slide up and down his neck as he swallowed his anger.

‘Go on.’

‘I went to visit John Angus at his croft in Uig yesterday morning, and found him lying unconscious on the floor. It seemed clear to me that there had been some kind of a disturbance. Furniture was overturned, there was broken glass and crockery all over the floor. I knelt beside him to feel for a pulse in his neck, and at that point he was still alive. I was aware, then, of someone approaching me from behind, and can remember nothing further until I regained consciousness and found the postman crouching beside me on the floor.’

He paused, keeping the detective inspector steadily in his gaze.

‘Whistler was bleeding from the back of his skull. There was a pool of blood on the floor beside him. His face was bruised. His lip was split and bleeding. The knuckles of his right hand were swollen and grazed. I am quite sure that these, and other injuries, will have been described in the postmortem report by the pathologist. I am equally sure he will have concluded that the man had been in one hell of a fight.’

Mackay conceded, ‘The evidence would certainly support that.’

Fin stood up. And the uniformed sergeant was suddenly alert, pushing himself away from his leaning position against the door.

‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ Mackay demanded.

‘I’m not going anywhere, Detective Inspector.’ Fin unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off, draping it over the back of his chair, while the two detectives looked on in amazement. ‘You can get a doctor in to examine me if you like.’ He held out his arms in front of him and spread his hands to display his knuckles. ‘But I don’t think you’ll find a single bruise, cut or graze on my upper body, arms or hands that could possibly have been the result of being involved in such a fight. Whistler Macaskill was a big man. He will have inflicted a great deal of damage on whoever it was that killed him. And whoever that might have been, it clearly wasn’t me.’

He watched as the interrogating officer ran his eyes over Fin’s torso and hands, and he saw doubt creeping into them. He lifted his shirt from the chair to drag it back on.

‘Now, I’m happy to help you in any way that I can. But I don’t think you have any grounds for detaining me, even for the hours that the law allows. So I would suggest that you either charge me or let me go. And unless you want to make complete fools of yourselves I would strongly advise you to do the latter.’

Mackay glared at him. He reached across the table to turn off the recording device. ‘You fucking ex-cops think you know it all.’ He stood up and jabbed one of his bony fingers
in Fin’s direction. ‘But I’m willing to bet, Macleod, that you know a damned sight more than you’re telling us. And when I find out what that is, trust me, I’ll have you back in here so fucking fast . . .’

‘My feet won’t touch the ground? Is that what you were going to say, Mr Mackay?’ Fin paused. ‘Very original.’

For the first time Fin’s eyes wandered momentarily towards the detective sergeant, and he thought he saw just the hint of a smile playing around the junior officer’s lips.

The duty sergeant directed him to the parking area at the side of the police station, informing him that his jeep had been parked there after being brought back from Uig by a uniformed officer.

Fin stepped from the police station out into Church Street and the fitful sunshine of a blustery October day. What amazed him was that life went on as if nothing had happened. A young mother, her hair spiralling around her head, wheeled a toddler by in a pushchair. Two old men stood talking outside the Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Cars cruised down towards the harbour where clouds of seagulls wheeled in endless circles around incoming trawlers, their eternally plaintive cries carried on the wind along with the rumble of traffic from Bayhead.

Whistler was gone, but the world kept turning. It had felt like that, too, when Robbie died. Toys scattered on the
bedroom floor where he had left them. A crayon drawing he had made of Fin, still lying on the kitchen table beside the open pack of crayons.
My Dadby
, he had scrawled underneath it. Even at eight years old he was still managing to confuse his
d
’s with his
b
’s. And every time Fin had walked along the upstairs hall, it had pained him to realize that Robbie would never again come running from his bedroom to jump up into his daddy’s arms.

He had the clearest recollection of sitting on the edge of his bed the Sunday morning after the accident and hearing a neighbour mowing his lawn. So banal. Life just didn’t stop, even although Robbie was no longer a part of it. It was that sense of a world that hadn’t even noticed which affected him the most. Then as now.

His legs were leaden as he walked around into the semienclosed parking area next to the station. His key was barely in the door of the Suzuki when he heard the scrape of a shoe on gravel behind him. He turned, startled, to stagger back against the jeep under a hail of blows, fists hammering into his chest and his face, screams in his ears, hot breath on his skin. He had the fleeting impression of being under attack by a flock of demented birds, his vision filled with flailing arms, his ears with shrill shrieks of anger. Now feet kicked at his legs, well-aimed painful blows to his shins. It almost came as a surprise to realize it was all the fury of one small girl.

He fought to stop fists like pistons punching him in rapid succession. He saw her father in her eyes, in her anger, in the temper he had never been able to control himself. And
after what felt like an eternity, he managed to grab and hold both her wrists, turning her around, pinning her arms across her chest and pulling her back hard against him to stop the assault.

‘Stop it! Stop!’ he shouted at her.

But she continued to struggle and he almost lost her again. ‘You killed my dad! You killed him!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Anna, I didn’t kill your dad. Would the police have let me go if I’d killed him?’ He felt the effect of his words almost immediately, as the struggling began to subside. ‘I loved that man.’

Her body went limp, and the uncontrollable sobbing that racked it shook him to the core, bringing tears to his own eyes. He had never before given voice to his feelings for Whistler. Had no reason to provide them with shape or form. Whistler was just his friend, the boy and man who had twice saved his life. Connected by history, and all the hours they had shared as teenagers, the hopes and the dreams, the fights and the friendship. Whistler had been unpredictable, bad-tempered, sometimes cruel. But he had always been there when Fin needed him, a commitment he had made that day so many years before at the
Iolaire
monument. And now he was gone, and all that remained of him was in Fin’s arms.

He let go of her wrists and turned her to face him. Her black cropped hair with its slash of pink, the rings and studs that punctuated her face, seemed like a grotesque caricature in grief. Black eye make-up ran down her cheeks. Her purple-painted lips trembled like a child’s. Her nose ran and she could barely breathe for sobbing.

‘I . . . I never told him,’ she said.

Fin frowned. ‘Told him what?’

‘That I loved him.’

He closed his eyes and felt the tears hot on his skin, and put his arms around her, enveloping her, drawing her close.

‘And now it’s too late.’ Her voice came muffled from his chest. ‘For everything.’

Fin took her by the shoulders then and made her take a step back, forcing her to look at him. ‘Anna, listen to me.’

‘What?’ she glared at him defiantly, as if he were trying to force her to listen to something she wouldn’t want to hear.

‘Men don’t often talk to one another about love.’ He drew a deep, trembling breath. ‘But we did, your dad and me. The other day, outside the Sheriff Court. And I told him what you told me at the house.’ In spite of everything, he smiled through his tears. ‘Of course, I left out the profanity. Though he wouldn’t have minded that. Just don’t think he died not knowing that his wee girl loved him.’ It took him a moment or two to control his voice again. ‘And I know the only regret he’d have right now, is that he never had the chance to tell you the same.’

She stood staring back at him with her father’s eyes, her face a mess, her breathing still irregular, and he could feel her pain and confusion.

‘Let me take you home.’

She raised an arm in sudden anger and broke his grip on her. ‘No,’ she shouted. ‘Just stay away from me. You, Kenny, everyone. I hate you. I hate you all.’ And she turned and
ran away down Church Street, giving free vent to her tears as she ran. She was gone from view and hearing in seconds.

Fin stood for a long time, leaning back against the jeep before turning wearily and climbing up into the driver’s seat. There he sat for even longer until finally he succumbed to his own grief. For Whistler and his little lost girl.

The drive down to Uig passed in a painful blur. Great fat raindrops spat on his windscreen like tears spilled for the dead. They fell from a sky so dark and so low, bumping and scraping across each rise of the land, that Fin felt he could almost reach up and touch it. The mountains of the southwest were lost in the mist of its all-enveloping cloud.

Fin’s thoughts were focused and fixated on just one man. The only man capable of inflicting enough damage on Whistler to kill him.

Minto’s Land Rover sat on the compacted hard core outside his cottage. The rain blew horizontally across the acres of sand that stretched across the bay towards Baile na Cille, flattening the tall grasses that grew like reeds around the house.

If Fin had stopped for one moment to consider his actions, he might have paused to rethink, but he was blinded by the pall of red mist which had descended on him. He pushed open the cottage door with such force that it smashed against the wall of the interior hallway, its handle gouging a deep
hole in the plaster. ‘Minto!’ He heard his own voice roar back at him from the house. He barged into the sitting room and felt the faintest residue of heat from the embers of an almost dead peat fire. There was no one there. The door to the kitchen was half open. He blundered into it, but it was empty. Then he spun around at the sound of a creaking floorboard behind him.

Minto stood in a singlet and boxer shorts, a shotgun raised and supported by his left arm, and held fast against his left shoulder by his left hand. It was shaking slightly, but pointed directly at Fin. His right arm was strapped across his chest.

‘What the fuck do you want?’

He glared at Fin with a mixture of anger and confusion. But Fin couldn’t tear his gaze away from the sling that held Minto’s arm tight to his chest. He raised his eyes to meet Minto’s. He had forgotten that Whistler had dislocated the man’s shoulder during their encounter at Tathabhal. ‘Someone murdered Whistler Macaskill.’