The Lewis Man (2 page)

She pulls me to my feet, almost roughly, and pushes me towards the door. ‘Get out of my sight!’

Why is she so angry?

I waddle through to the bathroom and slip out of my pyjamas. Where did she say I was to put them? I drop them on the floor and look in the mirror. An old man with a scribble of thin white hair and the palest of blue eyes stares back at me. I wonder for a moment who he is, then turn and look from the window out across the machair towards the shore. I can see the wind ruffling the heavy winter coats of the sheep grazing on the sweet, salty grass, but I can’t hear it. Neither can I hear the ocean where it breaks upon the shore. Lovely white foaming seawater full of sand and fury.

It must be the double glazing. We never had that at the farm. You knew you were alive there, with the wind whistling through the window frames and blowing peat smoke down the chimney. There was room to breathe there, room to live. Here the rooms are so small, sealed off from the world. Like living in a bubble.

That old man is looking at me from the mirror again. I smile and he smiles back. Of course, I knew it was me all along. And I wonder how Peter is doing these days.

It was dark when finally Fin turned out the light. But the words were still there, burned on to his retinas. There was no escape in darkness.

Apart from Mona’s, there were two other witness statements. Neither of them had possessed the presence of mind to note the registration number of the car. That Mona hadn’t seen it was hardly surprising. The car had thrown her in the air, to come down on the bonnet and windscreen with sickening force before being flung aside and rolling several times over the unyielding metalled surface of the road. That she hadn’t been more seriously injured was miraculous.

Robbie, with his lower centre of gravity, had gone down and under the wheels.

Each time he read the words he imagined himself to have been there, to have seen it, and each time he felt the nausea rising from his stomach. It was as vivid in his mind as if it were a real memory. As was Mona’s description of the face she had seen behind the wheel, imprinted so clearly in her recollection, although it could only have been the merest of glimpses. A middle-aged man with longish, mousy-brown hair. Two or three days’ growth on his face. How could she have seen that? And yet there was no doubt in her mind. He’d even had a police artist do a sketch from her description. A face that remained in the file, a face that haunted his dreams, even after nine months.

He turned over and closed his eyes in a vain search for sleep. The windows of his hotel room lay ajar behind the curtain, opened for air but also letting in the roar of traffic along Princes Street. He drew his knees up to his chest, tucking his elbows in at his sides, hands clasped together at his breastbone, like a praying foetus.

Tomorrow would be the end of everything he had known for most of his adult life. Everything he had been and become, and was likely to be. Like the day so many years before that his aunt had told him his parents were dead, and he had felt, for the first time in his short life, utterly and completely alone.

Daylight brought no relief, just a quiet determination to see this day through. A warm breeze blew across The Bridges, sunlight falling in shifting patterns across the gardens below the castle. Fin pushed his way determinedly through chattering crowds sporting light spring fashions. A generation who had forgotten the warnings of their elders to
ne’er cast a clout till May is oot
. It never seemed quite fair that other people’s lives should go on as before. And yet who would have guessed at the pain behind his mask of normality? So who knew what turmoil was hidden behind the facades of others?

He stopped at the photocopy shop in Nicolson Street, slipping copied pages into his leather bag before heading east to St Leonard’s Street and the ‘A’ Division police headquarters where he had spent most of the last ten years. His farewell party had been drinks with a handful of colleagues at a pub in Lothian Road two nights earlier. A sombre affair, marked mainly by recollection and regret, but also by some genuine affection.

Some people nodded to him in the corridor. Others shook his hand. At his desk, it took him only a few minutes to clear his personal belongings into a cardboard box. The sad, accumulated detritus of a restless working life.

‘I’ll take your warrant card off you, Fin.’

Fin turned around. DCI Black had something of the vulture about him. Hungry and watchful. Fin nodded and handed him his card.

‘I’m sorry to see you go,’ Black said. But he didn’t look sorry. He had never doubted Fin’s ability, just his commitment. And only now, after all these years, was Fin finally ready to acknowledge that Black was right. They both knew he was a good cop, it had just taken Fin longer to realize that it wasn’t his métier. It had taken Robbie’s death to do that.

‘Records tell me you pulled the file on your son’s hit-andrun three weeks ago.’ Black paused, waiting perhaps for an acknowledgement. When it didn’t come he added, ‘They’d like it back.’

‘Of course.’ Fin slid the file out of his bag and dropped it on to the desk. ‘Not that anyone’s ever likely to open it.’

Black nodded. ‘Probably not.’ He hesitated. ‘Time you closed it, too, Fin. It’ll just eat you up inside, and fuck with the rest of your life. Let it go, son.’

Fin couldn’t meet his eye. He lifted his box of belongings. ‘I can’t.’

Outside, he went around the back of the building and opened the lid of a large green recycling bin to empty the contents of his cardboard box, and then chuck it in after them. He had no use for any of it.

He stood for a moment, looking up at the window from which he had so often watched the sun and the rain and the snow sweep across the shadowed slopes of Salisbury Craggs. All the seasons of all the wasted years. And he slipped out into St Leonard’s to flag down a taxi.

His cab dropped him on the steep cobbled slope of the Royal Mile, just below St Giles’ Cathedral, and he found Mona waiting for him in Parliament Square. She was still in her drab winter greys, almost lost among the classical architecture of this Athens of the north, sandstone buildings blackened by time and smoke. He supposed it reflected her mood. But she was more than depressed. Her agitation was clear.

‘You’re late.’

‘Sorry.’ He took her arm and they hurried across the deserted square, through arches beneath towering columns. And he wondered if his lateness had been subliminally contrived. Not so much an unwillingness to let go of the past, as a fear of the unknown, of leaving the safety of a comfortable relationship to face a future alone.

He glanced at Mona as they entered the portals of what had once been the home of the Scottish Parliament, before the landowners and merchants who sat here had succumbed three hundred years before to the bribes of the English and sold out the people they were supposed to represent to a union they didn’t want. Fin and Mona’s, too, had been a union of convenience, a loveless friendship. It had been driven by occasional sex, and held together only by the shared love of their son. And now, without Robbie, it was ending here, in the Court of Session. A decree nisi absolute. A piece of paper bringing to a close a chapter of their lives which had taken sixteen years to write.

He saw the pain of it in her face, and all the regrets of a lifetime came back to haunt him.

In the end it took only a few minutes to consign all those years to the dustbin of history. The good times and bad. The struggles, the laughs, the fights. And they emerged into brilliant sunlight spilling down across the cobbles, the rumble of traffic out on the Royal Mile. Other people’s lives flowing past, while theirs had been shifted from pause to stop. They stood like still figures at the centre of a time-lapse film, the rest of the world eddying around them at high speed.

Sixteen years on and they were strangers again, unsure of what to say, except goodbye, and almost afraid to say that out loud, in spite of the pieces of paper they held in their hands. Because beyond goodbye, what else was there? Fin opened his leather bag to slip the paperwork inside, and his photocopied sheets in their beige folder slid out and scattered around his feet. He stooped quickly to gather them up, and Mona crouched down to help him.

He was aware of her head turning towards him as she took several of them in her hand. It must have been clear to her at a glance what they were. Her own statement was among them. A few hundred words that described a life taken and a relationship lost. The sketch of a face drawn from her own description. Fin’s obsession. But she said nothing. She stood up, handing them to him, and watched as he stuffed them back in his bag.

When they reached the street, and the moment of parting could no longer be avoided, she said, ‘Will we stay in touch?’

‘Is there any point?’

‘I suppose not.’

And in those few words, all the investment they had made in each other over all these years, the shared experiences, the pleasure and the pain, were lost for ever like snowflakes on a river.

He glanced at her. ‘What will you do when the house is sold?’

‘I’ll go back to Glasgow. Stay with my dad for a while.’ She met his eye. ‘What about you?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do.’ It was almost an accusation. ‘You’ll go back to the island.’

‘Mona, I’ve spent most of my adult life avoiding that.’

She shook her head. ‘But you will. You know it. You can never escape the island. It was there between us all those years, like an invisible shadow. It kept us apart. Something we could never share.’

Fin took a deep breath and felt the warmth of the sun on his face as he raised it for a moment to the sky. Then he looked at her. ‘There was a shadow, yes. But it wasn’t the island.’

Of course, she was right. There was nowhere else to go, except back to the womb. Back to the place that had nurtured him, alienated him, and in the end driven him away. It was the only place, he knew, that there was any chance of finding himself again. Among his own people, speaking his own tongue.

He stood on the foredeck of the
Isle of Lewis
and watched the gentle rise and fall of her bow as she ploughed through the unusually still waters of the Minch. The mountains of the mainland had vanished long ago, and the ship’s horn sounded forlornly now as they slipped into the dense spring haar that blanketed the eastern coast of the island.

Fin peered intently into swirling grey, feeling the wetness of it on his face, until finally the faintest shadow emerged from its gloom. The merest smudge on a lost horizon, eerie and eternal, like the ghost of his past come back to haunt him.

As the island took gradual shape in the mist he felt all the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, and was almost overwhelmed by a sense of homecoming.

Gunn sat at his desk squinting at the computer screen. Subliminally he registered the sound of a foghorn not far out in the Minch, and knew that the ferry would be docking shortly.

He shared his first-floor office with two other detectives, and had a fine view from his window of the Blythswood Care charity shop on the other side of Church Street.
Christian care for body and soul
. If he cared to crane his neck he could see as far up the road as the Bangla Spice Indian restaurant with its luridly coloured sauces and irresistible garlic fried rice. But right now the subject matter on his screen had banished all thoughts of food.

Bog bodies, also known as bog people, were preserved human bodies found in sphagnum bogs in northern Europe, Great Britain and Ireland, he read on the Wikipedia page on the subject. Acidic water, low temperatures and lack of oxygen combined to preserve the skin and organs, so much so that it was even possible in some cases to recover fingerprints.

He wondered about the body laid out in the cold cabinet in the autopsy room at the hospital. Now that it was out of the bog, how quickly might it start to deteriorate? He scrolled down the page and looked at the photograph of a head taken from a body recovered sixty years ago from a peat bog in Denmark. A chocolate-brown face remarkably well defined, one cheek squashed up against the nose where it had lain in repose, an orange stubble still clearly visible on the upper lip and jaw.

‘Ah, yes, Tollund Man.’

Gunn looked up to see a tall, willowy, lean-faced figure with a halo of dark, thinning hair leaning down to get a closer look at his screen.

‘Carbon dating of his hair placed him from around 400
BC
. The idiots who performed the autopsy cut off his head and threw the rest of him away. Except for his feet and one finger, which are still preserved in formalin.’ He grinned and held out a hand. ‘Professor Colin Mulgrew.’

Gunn was surprised by the strength of his handshake. He seemed so slight.

Almost as if he had read his mind, or detected his wince as they shook, Professor Mulgrew smiled and said, ‘Pathologists need good hands, Detective Sergeant. For cutting through bone and prising apart skeletal structures. You’d be surprised how much strength is required.’ There was just the hint of cultured Irish in his accent. He turned back to Tollund Man. ‘Amazing, isn’t it? After two thousand four hundred years, it was still possible to tell that he’d been hanged, and that his last meal had been a porridge of grain and seeds.’

‘Were you involved in that post-mortem, too?’

‘Bloody hell, no. Way before my time. Mine was Old Croghan Man, pulled out of an Irish bog in 2003. He was nearly as old though. Certainly more than two thousand years. Helluva big man for his day. Six foot six. Imagine. A bloody giant.’ He scratched his head and grinned. “So what’ll we call your man, then, eh? Lewis man?”

Gunn swivelled in his seat and waved the professor towards a free chair. But the pathologist shook his head.

‘Been sitting for bloody hours. And the flights up here don’t give you much leg room.’

Gunn nodded. Slightly smaller than average height himself, he had never found that a problem. ‘So how did your Old Croghan Man die?’