The Blackhouse

TEN

The clacking of the keyboard filled the silence in the darkened bedroom. The screen reflected its light on Fin’s pale face, concentration gathered in the frown around his eyes and across the bridge of his nose. These exams were so important. Everything depended on them. The rest of his life. Focus, focus. Concentrate. A movement in his peripheral vision made him turn, and he felt goosebumps raising themselves across his arms and shoulders. He was there again. That impossibly tall man in the hooded anorak, greasy hair dragged down over his ears. Just standing in the doorway, like before, head bowed against the ceiling, big hands hanging loosely at his sides. This time his lips were moving, as if he were trying to say something. Fin strained to hear, but there were no words coming from his mouth, just the rank, bitter smell of stale tobacco on a breath whose foulness seemed to fill the room.

Fin woke, startled, with the stink of stale alcohol breath in his face. Daylight was streaming through thin curtains, seeping in around all their edges. Artair’s weary, bloated face hovered over him, a hand shaking his shoulder. ‘Fin, for fuck’s sake, wake up, Fin.’

Fin sat bolt upright, breathing hard, disorientated, still afraid. Where the hell was he? Then his eye fell on the card table folded against the wall and the Cyprus coffee stain. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and saw the gannet in flight. ‘Jesus.’ He was still gasping for breath.

Artair stood back, looking at him curiously. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Yeh. Fine. I’m fine. Just a nightmare.’ Fin drew in a deep lungful of warm, sour air. ‘What time is it?’

‘Six.’

He had barely slept, turning frequently to look at the digital display on the bedside table. Two. Two forty-five. Three fifteen. Three fifty. The last time he had looked it was almost five o’clock. He could only have been dozing for an hour or so.

‘We have to go right now,’ Artair said.

Fin was confused. ‘At this time?’

‘Fionnlagh and me have to get down to Port of Ness before I leave for work. We’re helping the boys load the lorry with supplies for An Sgeir.’

Fin pushed the quilt aside and swung his legs out of the bed. He rubbed tired eyes. ‘Give me a minute to get dressed.’

But Artair made no move to go. Fin glanced up to find his old schoolfriend watching him intently, an odd expression in his eyes. ‘Listen, Fin. What I said last night … I was drunk, okay? Just forget it.’

Fin returned his gaze. ‘Was it true?’

‘I was drunk.’

‘In vino veritas.’

Artair lost patience. ‘Look, I was fucking pissed, alright? It hasn’t mattered for seventeen years, why the fuck should it matter now?’ Fin heard the phlegm crackling in his throat as he turned away and abruptly left the room. And he heard him sucking twice on his puffer out in the hall before his footsteps receded angrily towards the living room.

Fin got dressed, and in the bathroom slunged his face with cold water, and found bloodshot eyes staring back at him from the mirror. He looked terrible. He squeezed some toothpaste on to his finger and rubbed it around his teeth and his gums, swilling out his mouth to try to get rid of the bad taste from the night before. He wondered how he was going to be able to face Fionnlagh in the cold light of day, knowing what he knew now. He glanced at himself in the mirror and looked quickly away again. He hardly knew how to face himself.

The Astra was idling on the road above the house. The growl of the engine through the exhaust sounded as rough as Fin felt. Artair was sitting sullenly behind the wheel, Fionnlagh in the back in his hooded sweatshirt, clasped hands resting on the seat between his legs, his face puffy from lack of sleep. Yet, still, he seemed to have found time to gel his hair into spikes. Fin slipped into the passenger seat and glanced in the back. ‘Hi,’ was all he said, turning in his seat to face front, and feeling hopelessly inadequate as he snapped the seatbelt into its clasp.

Artair crunched into first gear and released the handbrake, and they lurched off down the road. Fin was quite sure that if he was stopped, Artair would not pass a breathalyser.

The sky was leaden, but it did not look like rain. Somewhere away on the ocean, sun slanted through a break in the cloud that you couldn’t see, like an invisible spotlight casting a circle of illumination on the water. A strong wind tugged at the summer grasses. As they passed the church, they could see all the way across to the Port, and the Astra bumped its way down the single-track towards the main road.

Fin found the silence in the car almost unbearable. Without turning he said to Fionnlagh, ‘So how did you get on with the computer?’

‘Great.’ Fin waited for him to go on. But that was it.

Artair said, ‘He’s not looking forward to going to An Sgeir.’

Fin craned round to look at the boy. ‘Why?’

‘Not my scene. I’m not much into killing things.’

‘The boy’s soft,’ Artair said scornfully. ‘It’ll be good for him, make a man of him.’

‘Like it did us?’

Artair cast Fin a look of disdain, then fixed his eyes again on the road. ‘Rite of passage, that’s what it’s all about. Boys becoming men. No one said it had to be easy.’

There was no policeman on duty in Port of Ness. Maybe they thought it was no longer necessary, or perhaps they did not believe that anyone would be up this early. The crime-scene tape at the shore road had been drawn aside and wrapped around an orange traffic cone. The narrow road twisted down to the harbour, and they saw a lorry drawn up on the quay, and seven or eight vehicles pulled up alongside the boatshed. The shed was still marked off by black and yellow tape fluttering in the wind, and as they parked and walked past it, they each glanced in. A man had been murdered here. A man they knew. And each of them was touched by the sense that somehow Angel Macritchie still lingered there in the shadows, like a ghost unable to rest until his killer had been found.

His presence was there, too, among the ten men gathered around the lorry, if only through his absence. He had been one of them for eighteen years, and should have been among them today, helping to load the supplies stacked up along the quayside: bags of peat to fuel the fires, drinking water in metal casks, mattresses, tarpaulins, boxes of food, tools, a car battery to power the radio link, more than forty sacks of curing salt piled a metre high against the harbour wall.

Fin found that he knew many of the faces of the men on the quay. Some of them were in their fifties, veterans from the year when Fin and Artair had gone out to the rock, still making the annual pilgrimage. There were one or two of Fin’s contemporaries from school, and younger men in their twenties whom Fin did not know. But there was an unspoken bond between them all. It was a very exclusive club whose membership extended to a mere handful of men going back over five hundred years. You only had to have been out to An Sgeir one time to qualify for membership, proving your courage and strength, and your ability to endure against the elements. Their predecessors had made the journey in open boats on mountainous seas because they had to, to survive, to feed hungry villagers. Now they went out in a trawler to bring back a delicacy much sought after by well-fed islanders. But their stay on the rock was no less hazardous, no less demanding than it had been for all those who had gone before.

Fin said his hellos and solemnly shook all their hands. The last of them took Fin’s in both of his. A thickset man of medium height, heavy black eyebrows beneath a head of dense black hair touched only here and there by grey. Physically he was not a big man, but he was a huge presence. Gigs MacAulay was in his early fifties. He had been out to the rock more often than anyone else on the team. He had already made some fourteen or fifteen trips to An Sgeir by the time Fin and Artair were initiated into the ancient rite. He was recognized then as the unspoken team leader. And he was still. There was an additional firmness and warmth in his handshake, and he fixed Fin with sharp, deeply blue Celtic eyes. ‘Good to see you, Fin. You’ve done well, I hear.’

Fin shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

‘If we do our best, God can’t ask that we do any more.’ His eyes flickered away towards Artair and then back to Fin. ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘It has.’

‘Must be, what? Seventeen, eighteen years?’

‘Must be.’

‘Artair’s boy’s coming with us for the first time.’

‘Aye, I know.’

Gigs looked at the boy and grinned. ‘Though he’ll not be needing his hair gel out on the rock, will you, son?’ The others laughed, and Fionnlagh blushed, turning his head away to stare mutely out across the ocean. Gigs clapped his hands together. ‘Right, we’d better get this lot on the lorry.’ He looked at Fin. ‘Are you going to give us a hand?’

‘Sure,’ Fin said, and he took off his parka and his jacket, tossing them on to a stack of empty creels, and rolled up his sleeves.

They worked methodically, in a chain, like any good team, passing the sacks and the boxes one to the other, and up to the men stacking them on the lorry. Fin found himself watching Fionnlagh, looking for something of himself in the boy, some sign that this was, indeed, his flesh and blood. They had similar colouring, but then Marsaili was fair, too. And they were his mother’s pale blue eyes that he had. Fin’s were green. If he had anything of Fin in him, perhaps it wasn’t physical. More like something in his demeanour, in his quiet reticence.

Fionnlagh caught Fin watching him, and Fin immediately turned away, embarrassed. Gigs heaved a bag of salt into his arms. It was heavy, and Fin grunted. ‘It was easier in my day,’ he said, ‘when you just had to load straight on to the trawler here at the Port.’

‘It was that.’ Gigs shook his head gravely. ‘But with the damage to the harbour the trawlers can’t get in any more, so we’ve got to haul it all to Stornoway now.’

‘But you guys still leave from here?’

‘Most of us do, aye. In the small boat.’ Gigs nodded towards an open boat tied up at the quay, her outboard motor tipped clear of the water. ‘We motor out to meet the trawler there in the bay and haul the wee boat aboard. We still need her to ferry everything on to the rock at the other end.’

‘So, are you any nearer to catching Angel’s killer?’ one of the younger men suddenly asked Fin, his curiosity getting the better of him.

‘I’m not leading the investigation,’ Fin said. ‘I don’t really know how things are going.’

‘Aye, well, they seem to think this DNA test’s going to get him,’ one of the others said.

Fin was surprised. ‘You know about that already?’

‘Sure do,’ said Gigs. ‘I think every man in Crobost got a call yesterday from the incident room. Got to go into the police station in Stornoway, or the doctor’s surgery up at Crobost sometime today to give a sample.’

‘It’s voluntary, though,’ Fin said.

Artair said, ‘Aye, but do you really think anyone’s not going to do it? I mean, it would look fucking suspicious, wouldn’t it?’

‘I’m not doing it,’ Fionnlagh said, and they all stopped and looked at him.

‘Why not?’ Artair demanded.

‘Because it’s the thin end of the wedge.’ Fionnlagh’s face flushed with a strange passion. ‘The beginnings of a police state. We’re all going to end up on a database somewhere, identified by a DNA barcode, and we’re not going to be able to do anything or go anywhere without someone knowing why, or where we’ve come from, or where we’re going to. You’ll end up getting turned down for a mortgage, or life insurance, because the insurance company thinks you’re a bad risk. It’ll all be there on the DNA database. Your grampa died of cancer, or maybe there’s a history of heart disease on your mother’s side. You’ll get knocked back for a job because your prospective employer’s discovered that your great grandmother spent time in a mental institution, and your barcode looks a hell of a lot like hers.’

Artair looked at the faces gathered around listening open-mouthed. The loading of the lorry had ground to a halt. ‘Will you hark at him. He sounds like one of these left-wing radicals. Karl fucking Marx. I don’t know where the hell he gets it from.’ His eyes darted momentarily towards Fin, then he turned to Fionnlagh. ‘You’ll take the test and lump it.’

Fionnlagh shook his head. ‘No,’ he said with a quiet resolution.

‘Look …’ Artair took a more conciliatory tone. ‘We’re all going to do it, right?’ He looked around for support. Everyone nodded and murmured their agreement. ‘So it’s going to look pretty fucking suspicious if you don’t. Is that what you want? Is it? You want them to think it was you?’

A look of sullen resignation fell across Fionnlagh’s face. ‘Well, whoever did it should get a medal.’ Fin did not miss the echo of Artair’s words. Fionnlagh took in all the faces turned in his direction. ‘The man was a brute and a bully, and I’ll bet there’s not a single one of you standing on this jetty who doesn’t think he got everything he deserved.’

No one said a word. And a few moments’ silence stretched into half a minute, tempered only by the sound of the wind rushing through the grasses on the cliff. Finally, as if just to break it, one of the men said, ‘So does it hurt? This DNA test.’

Fin smiled and shook his head. ‘No. They take a thing like a big cotton bud and scrape it down the inside of your cheek.’

‘Not your bum cheek, I hope,’ a thin man with ginger hair and a cloth cap said, and they all laughed, glad to be able to release the tension. ‘’Cos nobody’s sticking a big cotton bud up my arse!’

The laughter was a cue to begin loading again, and they restarted the passing of salt sacks along the chain to the lorry.

‘How long before they get the results of the DNA tests?’ Artair asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Fin said. ‘Two or three days, maybe. Depending on how many samples they take. When are you hoping to leave for the rock?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Gigs said. ‘Maybe even tonight. Depends on the weather.’

Fin blew air through clenched teeth as he took another sack, and felt the sweat breaking out across his forehead. He was going to have to shower and change when he got back to Stornoway. ‘You know, what I don’t understand is why you kept taking him.’

‘Angel?’ Gigs asked.

Fin nodded. ‘I mean, you all hated him, didn’t you? I haven’t come across a single person since I got here who’s had one good word to say for him.’

The comedian with the ginger hair said, ‘Angel was the cook. He was good at it.’ And there was a mumble of accord.

‘So who have you asked to stand in for him?’ Fin said.

‘Asterix.’ Gigs nodded towards a wee man with a big, whiskery moustache. ‘But we didn’t ask him. We never ask anyone, Fin. We let it be known that there’s a place available, and if someone wants to go, then they come and ask us.’ He paused, a sack of salt weighing heavily in his arms. But he didn’t seem to notice. ‘That way no one can lay the blame at our door if anything goes wrong.’

When they had finished loading the lorry, they took a break for a smoke, a quiet moment together before this unlikely assembly of weavers and crofters, electricians, joiners and builders, headed off to crofts and work places. Fin wandered away along the jetty, past rusting capstans and tangles of green fishing net. There was fresh concrete around the walkway and the wall where work had recently been carried out to repair the damage caused by ferocious seas. A great grassy rock rose from the water in the inner harbour. As a boy, Fin had gone out to it at low tide and climbed up to the top, sitting there to survey all around him. King of the harbour. Until the tide came in and trapped him there. He’d had to wait until the tide went out again before he could get off the rock. For like most island boys of his generation, he had never learned to swim. There had been hell to pay when eventually he got home.

‘You know, we’ve never spoken properly about what happened that year.’ Gigs’s voice close at his shoulder startled him. Fin turned and saw that the others were still gathered around the lorry at the far end of the jetty, smoking and talking. ‘When we got back, you were in no condition to talk. Didn’t remember much, anyway. And then you left for the university and never came back.’

‘I don’t know that there was anything much for us to say,’ Fin said.

Gigs leaned against the lifebelt hanging from the harbour wall and gazed across at the breakwater quay, smashed now by the sea, where the trawler used to berth to land the harvest from An Sgeir. ‘In the old days, hundreds of people gathered on the quay there, queuing up the road to the village, just to be sure of at least one guga.’ The wind whipped the smoke of his cigarette from his mouth.

‘I remember it,’ Fin said, ‘from when I was a boy.’

Gigs tilted his head and cast him a searching look. ‘What else do you remember, Fin — from the year you came with us?’

‘I remember that I nearly died. It’s not something I’m likely to forget.’ He felt Gigs’s eyes piercing him, like searchlights seeking illumination in some dark place deep inside, and he was discomfited by it.

‘A man did die.’

‘I’m hardly likely to forget that either.’ Emotion welled up in Fin like water in a spring. ‘There’s hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about it.’

Gigs held his eye for a moment then looked away again towards the shattered quay. ‘I’ve been out to the rock more than thirty times, Fin. And I remember every single trip. Like songs in a hymn book, they’re all different.’

‘I suppose they are.’

‘You’d think maybe one year would begin to seem like all the others after thirty-odd years, but I can recall every detail of every one like it was the last.’ His pause was laden. ‘I remember the year you came with us as if it was yesterday.’ He hesitated, seeming to consider his words carefully. ‘But outside of those of us who were there, it’s never been discussed.’

Fin shuffled uncomfortably. ‘It was hardly a secret, Gigs.’

Gigs’s head swivelled again in his direction, the same look in his eyes. Searching. And then he said, ‘Just so you know, Fin. It’s an unwritten rule. Whatever happens on the rock stays on the rock. Always did, always will.’