The Chessmen (30 page)

‘I know. The bastard beat me to it.’ Minto kept the barrel of his shotgun trained on Fin. He managed a half-smile and a snort of contempt. ‘You thought it was me?’

Fin shook his head. Not even Minto could take on Whistler with one arm. But if it wasn’t Minto, then the only other possibility led him into the realms of the unthinkable.

There were only a handful of cars in the parking area at the Cabarfeidh. As he turned his jeep nose-first into a slot in front of the main entrance, Fin cast a glance over the other vehicles. There was no sign of Mairead’s rental car. He hurried into the lobby and crossed to reception. The girl behind the desk gave him a practised smile, but in spite of the Americanized greeting, there was no disguising her Stornoway accent. ‘Good morning. How may I help you?’ He saw her eyes flicker towards his bandaged head.

‘Is Mairead Morrison in or out?’

The girl looked surprised. ‘Miss Morrison checked out this morning, sir. Lewis Car Rental just picked up her car. She took a taxi to the airport.’

Fin glanced at his watch. ‘What time’s her flight?’

‘The Glasgow flight leaves at 12.20.’

It was 11.45.

Fin reached the airport in just over ten minutes. As he drove up the road from Oliver’s Brae towards the roundabout, he
could see the small, prop-engined aircraft sitting out on the tarmac, the luggage trailer being towed out to the hold.

Rain still spat on his windscreen, smeared across the glass by well-worn wipers. There was no time to find a parking place, and he bypassed the car park to pull up in front of the sliding doors that opened into the tiny terminal building. He abandoned his Suzuki, engine idling, and ran inside. There was just a handful of people sitting around in the waiting area, silhouettes against panoramic windows looking out on to the airfield. The final stragglers in the queue to pass through security and into the departure lounge were patiently awaiting their turn.

He saw Mairead in her distinctive long black coat. She was showing her ticket to the security officer.

‘Mairead!’ His voice reverberated around the little airport, and heads turned from every direction. Mairead’s was one of them. He was almost shocked by the whiteness of her face. So marked in contrast to her favourite black, and the dark auburn of her cropped hair.

The security officer stood holding her ticket, waiting to return it. But she was like a rabbit caught in the headlights, staring at Fin with saucer eyes. He started across the concourse towards her, his voice still raised. ‘I need to talk to you.’

Finally she found hers. ‘There’s no time. My flight’s just about to leave.’ She turned to retrieve her ticket.

‘Get the next one.’

The remaining faces in the queue glanced from Mairead to Fin and back again, fascinated by the unfolding drama.
Not only was the singer Mairead Morrison on their flight, but she was engaged in some kind of row with a wild-eyed man whose head was bandaged and bloody.

‘I can’t.’

‘If you get on that plane I’m going straight back to the police station in Stornoway to tell the cops what I know.’ He could see the anxiety and uncertainty in her eyes, not knowing what it was he knew.

‘Have to hurry you, madam,’ the security officer said.

Fin stopped and held her gaze for a long moment before he saw her resistance crumbling, surrendering to the inevitable. She took a deep breath and pushed back through the remaining passengers to walk boldly up to Fin, clutching her ticket, her demeanour unmistakably hostile. She lowered her voice to little more than a hiss, her face just six inches from his. ‘Tell me.’

‘I know it wasn’t Roddy in that plane.’

Her blue eyes grew cold, and there was a moment when he could almost see the calculation behind them. She made a decision, took his arm and steered him quickly away towards the seating area in front of the windows. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about the operation Roddy had to repair his shattered femur after the accident on the Road to Nowhere. They put in plates and screws to hold it together. Strangely missing from the body we found in the cockpit.’ She couldn’t hold his eye, and looked away through the glass towards the plane, silent and thoughtful. Wishing perhaps that she was already on it. ‘Who did we bury the other day, Mairead?’

Her eyes darted towards him and then quickly away again.

‘Whistler knew that wasn’t Roddy. I don’t know how, but he did. He was never the same from the moment we found that plane. What did he know, Mairead?’ And when she said nothing, he gripped her arm above the elbow, fingers sinking into soft flesh, and saw her wince from the pain of it. ‘Come on! Someone killed Whistler to shut him up, didn’t they?’

Her head whipped round, eyes filled with a strange mix of anger and hurt. ‘No!’ She was breathing hard. ‘I have no idea who killed Whistler. Or why.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ He glared at her. ‘There was something going on between you two. You both knew that wasn’t Roddy.’ He was almost shocked to see her eyes fill up.

‘Poor Whistler.’ And tears spilled down the porcelain white of her cheeks.

Fin was unmoved. ‘If I didn’t know you, Mairead, I might almost believe they were real.’ And he saw genuine hurt in the look she turned on him. ‘Tell me about Roddy. Is he alive, is he dead? The truth, Mairead.’ Hesitation was evident in her eyes, in her face, in her whole body language. ‘I’m not letting this go. You can either tell me or you can tell the police. It’s up to you.’

She turned away, gazing through the window again as if looking for help, or maybe divine intervention. And Fin saw passengers, heads bowed against the wind and rain, making their way hurriedly across the tarmac to the steps of the plane. Among them, staring into the light that shone out from the terminal building, the pale faces of Strings, Skins
and Rambo. It was clear that they had seen Fin with Mairead. There was an exchange of words among them. But it was too late to turn back.

Mairead said suddenly, ‘I need to make a phone call.’ She pulled her arm free of Fin’s grasp and walked off across the concourse, fishing her mobile phone from her coat pocket. She selected a number from its memory then put it to her ear.

Fin watched from a distance as she spoke rapidly to someone at the other end. For a moment he wondered if it might even be Strings, or Skins or Rambo as they boarded the plane. She seemed to be arguing. Gesturing into space with her free hand, and briefly he heard her voice raised in protest. And then she hung up. She stood for several seconds, as if replaying the conversation in her head, then turned back towards Fin and thrust her phone in her pocket as she approached.

There was something hard now in her eyes. Emotionless. She said, ‘You want the truth?’ She paused for what was clearly a long, painful moment. ‘Meet me the day after tomorrow. In Malaga.’

‘I don’t want you to go.’ She repeated the refrain.

Fin looked up over the top of his laptop. Marsaili was framed in the open door of the study. The room which had once been Artair’s dad’s den, where he had tutored Fin and
Artair in maths and English, history and geography, through long winter nights. Fin could have sworn the smell of Mr Macinnes’s pipe smoke still lingered in that room, even after all these years.

A desk lamp spilled its light all over his keyboard as he entered dates and times, and pulled up onscreen prices.

‘I mean it, Fin. I don’t want you to go.’ It was the same refrain that Mona had used when they first sent him back to the island to find Angel Macritchie’s killer.

‘I need to know, Marsaili.’

‘You need to go to the police and tell them what you know already. They think you have something to do with Whistler’s murder, for God’s sake. It’s madness.’

‘I’ll go to them when I know the truth. The whole truth.’

‘And you think you’ll get that from Mairead?’ The way she said
Mairead
positively dripped with sarcasm.

Fin looked up at her again, his hackles rising. ‘That’s what this is all about, really, isn’t it? Me meeting Mairead in Spain.’

‘I saw the way she looked at you, Fin. And I saw the look in your eyes too. It’s a look I know. We were old lovers once, too, remember?’

Fin met her eyes very directly. ‘I have no interest in Mairead, Marsaili. I didn’t like her then, and I don’t like her now.’

There was a momentary hiatus as Marsaili digested this, testing it for truth, but coming up with the uncertain results of a mind clouded by jealousy.

‘I don’t understand why you have to go there. Everyone knows Amran have a place in the south of Spain where they
write and record. If Mairead has something to tell you, why couldn’t she tell you here?’

Fin was losing patience. ‘I don’t know! But if I have to go to Spain and back to find out why Whistler died then I’ll go. Jesus, Marsaili. He saved my life. Twice. And the one time he needed me I wasn’t there.’ He very nearly choked on the thought, and quickly refocused on his computer screen.

His search had come up with a return flight from Glasgow to Malaga in two days’ time, departing just after 9 a.m., returning the following day. He would have to fly to Glasgow tomorrow and stay overnight. He hit the return key to purchase the flight and proceed to checkout.

When he looked up again over the top of his screen, Marsaili had gone.

The arrivals hall was very nearly deserted by the time Fin passed through customs and immigration. The tour groups had all vanished in the direction of waiting coaches, and only a handful of independent travellers ventured through the barriers into the big, dark, empty hall. The midday sun was high, and very little light from it fell directly through the tall glass walls that stretched all along one side. Outside it was very bright, overexposed, fierce sunlight bleaching colour out of cars and buildings.

Mairead stood, a solitary figure, in the middle of a large floor that darkly reflected overhead lights. Fin slung his bag on to one shoulder and walked across the concourse to meet her. There was no smile of greeting, no warmth in her eyes. ‘I’m parked on the roof,’ she said, and turned on her heels towards the door.

Outside, the heat came as something of a shock after the Hebridean autumn, and Fin quickly discarded his jacket, wishing he had brought lighter clothing.

Mairead was driving an automatic dusty-blue Nissan X-Trail. It wasn’t a rental, and Fin wondered if it were hers,
or whether it belonged to the band, a runaround for when they were down recording their latest set of songs.

It was a fine day. The palest of blue skies, devoid of clouds, stretched as far as the eye could see. They turned from the A7 on to the coastal toll road, and Fin saw the Mediterranean sparkling below them on their left, a simmering blue only slightly darker than the sky, lines of fast-moving cars in front of them heading south and west, windscreens reflecting sunlight in intermittent flashes.

‘Where are we going?’ Fin glanced across at Mairead, who sat tight-lipped behind the wheel, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

‘The villa,’ is all she said.

Fin contained his curiosity, and took advantage of their elevated position on the road to look across the parched Spanish coastal plain through which the six lanes of motorway cut a swathe. Away to their right, the purple slopes of the Sierra Bermeja rose up to rugged heights, sharply delineated against the sky like paper cut-outs. Clusters of white buildings nestled in valleys and hilltops, ancient villages that had survived since the time of the Moors. All in stark contrast with the thousands of unfinished apartments in high-rise developments that lined the highway on either side, long since abandoned by contractors whose money had dried up in the recession. Cranes had been removed when construction had stopped, and trees and shrubs were already starting to reclaim the building sites. Those apartments which had been finished lay empty.

Mairead glanced at him and followed his gaze. ‘They can’t give these away,’ she said. ‘No one wants to be the sole owner in an empty block. Too spooky.’

They passed under road signs for places Fin had only ever seen in holiday brochures. Marbella. Algeciras. Cadiz. Through two
garitas de peaje
, where Mairead pulled in to pay their tolls. It was nearly an hour before she turned off the motorway at Estepona, following signs for a place called Casares. The road then swept them up through a huge area of municipal parkland known as Los Pedregales, past a vast electricity-generating power station, and a sprawling recycling plant that pumped its perfume out into the fibrillating heat of the early afternoon.

They drove by small country restaurants gearing up for the late Spanish lunch – Venta Victoria, Arroyo Hondo – before turning off into a narrow, pitted roadway that began a steep ascent up into the mountains through forests of pine trees and cork oaks.

Dust billowed out behind them as they pitched and bumped their tortuous way up through the trees, passing occasional gates beyond which driveways wound off to hidden houses caught only in occasional glimpses. It was twenty minutes before the road finally levelled off and the land fell steeply away on their right, tree-lined slopes sweeping down into dry river valleys that snaked their way through the mountains. The sun shone in dazzling silver glitter on the distant ocean, the faint outline of the coast only just discernible through the haze.

White villas tucked themselves away among the foliage, each isolated in a sea of green and parched brown, forest rising all around. And Fin wondered what would become of them if ever fire were to sweep through these tinder-dry trees.

‘That’s our place.’ Mairead pointed down into a ravine, and Fin saw a jumble of roman-tiled red roofs and white walls assembled around a terrace halfway up it, buzzards riding thermals in the sky overhead. Even from here you could tell that it must command the most extraordinary views. And almost as if she read his mind, Mairead said, ‘On a clear day you can see all the way across the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa and the Atlas Mountains.’ Anything further from the featureless peat bogs and storm-lashed coastline of the Isle of Lewis would have been hard to imagine. It seemed extraordinary to Fin that it was here in the heat, and the wild mountain forests of southern Spain, that the Celtic music spawned by his homeland was written and recorded, and sung in Mairead’s clear, beautiful Gaelic.