Coffin Road

Chapter twenty-five

If anything, it feels even stranger to be chauffeur-driven home by a uniformed police officer than it did being taken away the other morning under suspicion of murder. But there is no more clarity now than there was then. The fact that they have let me go does not mean they think I didn’t do it. They just can’t prove it. That much is clear to me, at least. But I am none the wiser. About anything. About who I am, why I am here, or whether or not I am a murderer.

They have warned me not to leave the island, and since I am forbidden to drive my car, I am effectively under house arrest in a cottage whose owner wants rid of me as soon as possible.

Still, there is a comfort in seeing the beach laid out ahead of me beyond the dunes, beach grass blowing in the wind. That white Highland pony is still grazing there, silhouetted against the startling blue of the sea behind it, and a sky glowing red and grey beyond that. Long strips of dark cloud almost obscuring the sun as it dips towards the horizon.

I think Mrs Macdonald has some kind of radar installed in her house, or a long-range listening device. Because there she is at the window as we turn down over the cattle grid on to the metalled parking area behind Dune Cottage. Watching. I see the net curtain fall to obscure her as I get out of the car and glance across the road in her direction.

My car sits where I left it, and the constable gets out of the driver’s side of his own and says, ‘Detective Sergeant Gunn has asked me to take your car keys, sir.’

I go into the house, which is not locked, and find my keys hanging on the hook just inside the door. I remove my car key from the ring and step out again to hand it to the policeman. He nods and gets into his car to drive off without another word.

I go back inside to close the door and lean my back against it, eyes closed. The nightmare goes on.

The house is a mess as I wander through it, the detritus of the police search lying about the place like so much debris washed ashore by the same sea that dumped me, semiconscious and without memory, on the beach.

I feel compelled to tidy up, to reintroduce at least some order to a life in chaos. And I wonder if perhaps the psychiatrist is right, and that I do suffer to a greater or lesser degree from some kind of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. If I knew myself better, I might have been able to confirm that diagnosis.

In the back bedroom, I come across the wrecked remains of the coffee table whose glass was smashed the night I was attacked by an intruder. And I wonder why I didn’t tell the police about what happened that night. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I suppose I knew that, since there was no way of proving it, my whole story might only have been made to sound even more ridiculous. How often it is that an awkward truth is easier to dismiss than a comforting lie.

It is dark by the time I go outside with a stout screwdriver to prise off the strip of wood the police have used to seal the garden shed shut. I don’t want Mrs Macdonald’s radar to alert her to what I am doing, so I pull the door closed behind me before turning on the light.

Looking again, with fresh eyes, I see how ordered it all is. How I have arranged shelves and hooks to accommodate different, though associated, items. My first impression of seeing it the other day was of something quite random, almost chaotic, but I realise now that there is a logic at work. Even if I am not quite sure what it is. I look at the neat row of microtweezers and scissors lined up beside a standing microscope with twin eyepieces and a stage plate. Next to it, a cardboard box filled with tiny, tapering plastic tubes, sealable at one end with flip-over tops.

What was I looking at through this microscope, and why would I require such tiny tweezers? I bend over the microscope and put my eyes to the lenses, and suddenly I see it. A bee in sharp focus on the stage plate, brightly lit. With the scissors and tweezers, I am carefully opening up its head to tease out the brain and drop it into one of those tiny plastic tubes.

That fleeting flash of recollection is like an electric shock, and I step back, recoiling in surprise. I am both scared and energised. It is the first real fragment of returning memory. No matter how perplexing, it is a step towards discovering who I really am. But also a step into that dark cloud of obscurity that hides the truth of what happened to me, and what I might have done, that night out on Eilean Mòr.

I hear my name called from somewhere outside and I am startled out of the moment. I recognise Sally’s voice and then the sound of the door opening into the cottage. I quickly turn out the light in the shed and step out into the dark, closing the door behind me and fixing it shut as best I can.

As I hurry up the steps and into the house, Bran barks excitedly and rushes to greet me, paws up on my chest, very nearly knocking me over. I am almost as glad to see him as he is to see me. The one living creature in my life who trusts me unreservedly. I make a great fuss of him, then look up to see Sally standing framed in the arch that leads to the sitting room.

She is watching us with a curiously neutral expression on her face. How often in these last days I have wanted to hold her. To feel the comfort and warmth of another human being. To feel loved and wanted, and not just by a dog. But something, even in the way she is standing, places a barrier between us, and I know instinctively that she will not be that source of warmth and comfort tonight.

I gaze at her in the half-light of the living-room lamp that she has turned on, and feel pangs of both lust and regret, and I remember running my hands through her silken, cropped hair, her naked skin next to mine. In the bedroom along the hall. In the tiny, cold chamber at the top of the tower in St Clement’s Church.

‘The police were asking about us,’ she says.

‘You and Jon?’

‘You and me.’

I nod. ‘Gunn said you denied we were having a relationship.’

‘Did you tell him about us?’

‘No. He already knew. Didn’t seem any point in lying about it. He said he asked you in front of Jon.’

‘Yes.’ She gazes at the floor for a moment, then back at me. ‘He’s been behaving pretty strangely ever since.’

‘You mean he didn’t believe you?’

‘I don’t know. We never spoke about it after the cop went. But he’s being cold and distant.’ She pauses. ‘I think we should stop seeing each other.’

I am not sure why, but I am devastated by this. Sally is the one person I trust. The one person I have felt able to tell everything. Without her, I know I will be utterly, overwhelmingly alone. ‘Why, Sally? Why? You said it was as good as over between you and Jon.’

‘It is.’

‘Then why would we stop seeing each other?’

She takes a deep breath. ‘Because I have no idea who you are, Neal.’ She almost laughs. ‘Neal. I don’t even know if that’s your name.’

‘It’s not.’

A slight frown creases her eyes.

‘Neal Maclean is dead.’

And now they open wide. ‘Then who the hell are you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Hopelessly alone in my ignorance, as I knew I would be.

Her jaw seems to set, a hint of defiance in it. ‘And that man they found on the Flannan Isles... Did you kill him?’

I close my eyes and hold them shut for what seems like an inordinate length of time, before opening them again to see that she has not moved a muscle. ‘It is almost impossible for me to think that somehow I have it in me to take the life of another human being. But I think I probably did.’

The dark of the night outside seems profound. Tangible, enveloping, as if it had simply wrapped itself around me. In my bedroom, the only light comes from the luminous hands of the bedside clock. I have left the side window on the latch, and I can hear the wind and the ocean. And, in the room, the sound of Bran’s heavy breathing. He is happy to be back with me, oblivious of my misery, and has fallen easily into a deep sleep. I feel his legs kicking from time to time as he dreams, perhaps of chasing rabbits across the dunes.

It is hours since Sally left, and I can’t sleep. For fear that I share this body I inhabit with a killer.