The Lewis Man

FIFTEEN

It was cold in here. A place suitable for the dead. The white-coated assistant slid open the drawer of the chill cabinet, and Fin found himself looking down on the remarkably well-preserved peat-stained face of a young man with boyish features who could not have been much older than Fionnlagh.

Gunn nodded to the assistant, who discreetly slipped away. He said, ‘This is between you and me, Mr Macleod. Anyone finds out about this, I’m dead meat.’ And he flushed slightly. ‘If you’ll pardon the pun.’

Fin looked at him. ‘Don’t think I underestimate the size of the favour, George.’

‘I know you don’t. But it didn’t stop you asking.’

‘You could have said no.’

Gunn tilted his head in acknowledgement. ‘I could.’ Then, ‘Better be quick, Mr Macleod. I’m led to believe that decomposition will progress rapidly.’

Fin slipped a small digital camera from his pocket, and lined himself up to take a photograph of the young man’s face. The flash reflected back off all the tiles around them. He took three or four, from different angles, then slipped the camera back in his pocket. ‘Anything else that might be useful for me to know?’

‘He lay in a blanket of some sort, for several hours after death. It’s left its pattern on his back, buttocks, his calves and the backs of his thighs. I’m waiting for the photographs from the pathologist, and we’ll get an artist to make a sketch of it.’

‘But you’ve nothing to compare it with?’

‘No. There was nothing found with the body. No blanket, no clothes …’

Gunn knocked on the door, and the assistant returned to slide the drawer shut, consigning the unknown young man they had pulled from the bog to an eternity of darkness.

Outside, the wind tugged at their jackets and trousers, spitting rain, but without serious intent. The sun was still breaking through in transient moments of illumination, quickly extinguished by an ever-changing sky. At the top of the hill they were building an extension to the hospital, the sound of drills and jackhammers carried on the wind, fluorescent orange vests and white hard hats catching fleeting fragments of sunshine.

There is always a moment of internal silence after being in the presence of death. A reminder of your own fragile mortality. The two men got back into Gunn’s car without a word and sat for nearly a minute before finally Fin said, ‘Any chance you could slip me a copy of the post-mortem report, George?’

He heard Gunn’s explosion of breath. ‘Jesus, Mr Macleod!’

Fin turned his face towards him. ‘If you can’t, just say no.’

Gunn glared back at him, breathing through clenched teeth. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He paused and then, in a voice laden with irony, ‘Anything else I can do for you?’

Fin smiled and held up his camera. ‘You can tell me where I can get prints made of these.’

Malcolm J. Macleod’s photography shop was in a whitewashed roughcast building in Point Street, or what they called The Narrows, where generations of island kids had gathered on Friday and Saturday nights to drink and fight, smoke dope and indulge teenage hormones. The smell of fat and fried fish carried on the breeze from the fish and chip shop two doors along.

When the photographs of the dead man had downloaded from Fin’s camera and appeared on the computer screen, the shop assistant cast curious looks in their direction. But George Gunn’s was a well-known face in the town, and so whatever questions there might have been remained unasked.

Fin looked carefully at the images. The flash of his camera had flattened the features a little, but the face was still perfectly recognisable to anyone who might have known him. He picked the best of them and tapped it with his finger. ‘That one, please.’

‘How many copies?’

‘Just the one.’ *

Fin was intercepted in the hallway as he entered the Dun Eisdean care home. An anxious young woman with dark hair drawn back in a ponytail. She ushered him into her office.

‘You were with Tormod Macdonald’s daughter when she brought him in yesterday, weren’t you, Mr er …’

‘Macleod. Yes. I’m a friend of the family.’

She nodded nervously. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of her all morning, without any luck. There’s been a bit of trouble.’

Fin frowned. ‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Mr Macdonald … how can I put it … tried to escape.’

Fin’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘Escape? This isn’t a prison, is it?’

‘No, of course not. Residents are free to come and go as they please. But this happened in the middle of the night. And, naturally, the doors were locked for reasons of security. It seems that Mr Macdonald spent yesterday evening spreading discontent among some of the other residents, and there were four of them trying to get out.’

Fin couldn’t resist a smile. ‘A one-man escape committee?’

‘It’s no laughing matter, Mr Macleod. Mr Macdonald got up into the sink and smashed the kitchen window with his bare hands. He was quite badly cut.’

Fin’s amusement evaporated. ‘Is he all right?’

‘We had to take him up to the emergency room at the hospital. They put stitches in one of his hands. He’s back now, all bandaged up, and in his room. But he’s been really quite aggressive, shouting at the staff, refusing to take off his hat and coat. He says he’s waiting for his daughter to come and take him home.’ She sighed and moved away to her desk, opening up a beige folder. ‘We’d like to discuss medication with Miss Macdonald.’

‘What kind of medication?’

‘I’m afraid I can only discuss that with the family.’

‘You want to drug him.’

‘It’s not a question of drugging him, Mr Macleod. He is in a very agitated state. We need to calm him down in case he does any more damage to himself. Or anyone else for that matter.’

Fin ran the probable consequences of such medication through his mind. A memory already fragile and fragmented, dulled by tranquillisers. It could only inhibit their attempts to stimulate his recollection of past events and establish his relationship to the dead man. But they couldn’t risk him doing further injury to himself. He said, ‘You’d better try calling Marsaili again and talk to her about it. But let me see what I can do to calm him down. I was going to take him out for a run in the car anyway, if that’s all right?’

‘Oh, I think that would be a good idea, Mr Macleod. Anything to reinforce the idea in his mind that this is not a prison, and he is not a prisoner.’