I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Twenty-Three

Braque sat at a table in the window, looking out over the inner harbour. Most of the fishing boats appeared to have gone, leaving only the pleasure boats and a few rusting hulks lined up along the quayside and the pontoons. The sky was broken, white clouds scudding across areas of blue, as if competing with each other to hide the sun, chasing their own shadows across the water.

She had not slept well, and was worried because she had still been unable to raise her ex on the phone. He had changed his mobile number after the split and all she had was his home number. Someone should have been there, even if it was only Lise. But, then, she probably wouldn’t have wanted to lift the phone when she saw who was calling. All the same, Gilles should have responded by now. She had left several messages. All she could think was that he had taken the girls somewhere for a treat. Maybe stayed overnight. But there was school this morning... She breathed in deeply and pressed her palms flat on the pristine white linen tablecloth. She did not want to let any other thoughts in. As Gilles had always been in the habit of telling her, she had a vivid imagination.

‘Bonjour, Ma’am. Penny for them.’

She turned to find George Gunn standing by her table. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Penny for your thoughts. It’s an English idiom,’ he said, before realizing she might not understand what an idiom was. ‘A saying. It just means I was wondering what you were thinking.’

She forced a smile. ‘Dark thoughts.’ And waved to the chair opposite. ‘Join me?’

Gunn grinned. ‘Don’t mind if I do, Ma’am.’

‘Sylvie,’ she corrected him again.

‘Yes, Ma’am,’ he said, and it was clear he had no intention of ever calling her by her name.

An elderly waitress in a black skirt and blouse and white apron asked if he would like toast.

‘Yes, please.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘And a coffee.’

They indulged in polite conversation about how well each had slept. She lied, and wondered if he had, too. Then they talked about the weather, and he elevated what she had taken to be an unpromising start to the day, to being ‘grand’. His toast arrived and she watched as he spread it with slabs of quickly melting butter, before slathering it with thick-cut marmalade, and wolfing it down between large gulps of coffee sweetened with two spoons of sugar.

She smiled and said, ‘Does your wife not feed you?’

The toast paused halfway between his plate and his mouth and he glanced at her over it, suddenly self-conscious. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘she doesn’t.’

She cocked an eyebrow, surprised. ‘And why is that?’

He laid the toast down again, reluctantly. ‘The doctor gave her a strict diet for me. I’m not long returned to work after a heart attack a few months back. Damn near killed me, too. I’ve lost quite a bit of weight.’

Braque glanced at the white cotton of his shirt stretched taut across his belly. Not quite enough, she thought.

‘And I’ve been working out at the gym.’

‘You shouldn’t be eating that toast, and all that butter, then.’

He looked at it, shamefaced, on his plate. ‘No. I shouldn’t.’ A pause. ‘Shouldn’t be drinking coffee either.’ He looked at his watch and stood up suddenly. ‘We should go.’

Braque rose from the table and wiped a napkin across her lips. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘You said you wanted to talk to Niamh Macfarlane. So that’ll be our first port of call. I managed to secure a four-wheel-drive vehicle.’

For someone who had grown up in Paris, a city of stone and trees and traffic, the west coast of the Isle of Lewis was a shock to Braque’s system. Miles of barren peat bog as far as the eye could see. Occasional villages strung out along a ribbon of road laid precariously across the undulating contours of the land. Not a tree in sight. Flowers and bushes planted by optimistic Leòdhasachs in barren gardens, stunted by the wind and salt that arrived with the relentless onslaught of the Atlantic Ocean. A coastline at once beautiful and dangerous. Towering cliffs and rocky outcrops punctuated by unexpected scraps of beach with the purest gold or silver sand.

It was both breathtaking and bleak, and Braque wondered how people survived in this place without the shops and restaurants she took for granted, the sun-dappled apartments that looked out on leafy boulevards, the cinemas and theatres, the roar of traffic replaced here by the howling of the wind.

Gunn swerved to avoid a handful of sheep that had wandered on to the road. They seemed entirely unconcerned by the vehicle that had so nearly ploughed into them. ‘It’s worse when the wind drops and the midges come out,’ he said.

‘Midges?’

‘Aye, wee flies. They breed in all that water out there on the moor, and emerge in bloody black clouds when it’s dull and windless. People think it’s just them the wee bastards go after. But it’s sheep, too. When the poor beasts start congregating on the road, you know the midges are out in force on the moor.’

Braque nodded. But in spite of Gunn’s colourful description had no clear idea of exactly what a midge was.

She sat in the passenger seat and watched the villages spool past, each one indistinguishable from the next. ‘There are a lot of churches,’ she said. She had counted five so far, and not seen a single soul. She found herself speculating about where it was that all the people came from to fill so many churches.

‘Aye,’ Gunn said. ‘Folk here have divided God up into different pieces and shared Him around.’

Braque glanced at him across the car and wondered if he were making some kind of joke. If he was, she didn’t get it, and he wasn’t smiling.

Several times spits of rain had caused automatic wipers to smear them across the windscreen then stop. Gunn said, ‘It’s always trying to rain here. And usually succeeds.’

But today it didn’t, and by the time the silhouette of the Cross Free Church stood stark on the horizon, sunshine washed itself across the land in waves, like pure gold water. And everything caught, however fleetingly, in its light came suddenly to life.

Gunn turned on to the Skigersta road, and by the time they reached the east coast at Skigersta itself, the sky had cleared and the Minch sparkled all the way across to the mainland. The road came to an end, and Gunn slipped the vehicle into four-wheel drive as they began their potholed journey south across the moor to Taigh ’an Fiosaich. On either side of the track, peat banks curved away across the moor, scraps of water catching sunlight, the peat itself blacker, somehow, in comparison.

‘They actually live out here?’ Braque was incredulous.

‘Oh, a good bit further on yet,’ Gunn said. ‘They built their house at a place known as Taigh ’an Fiosaich. Nicholson’s house. Named after the man who built it. Iain Nicholson, from Ness. He went to New York sometime around the end of the nineteenth century and found himself a wealthy woman to marry. Brought her back here and built a house and church out on the cliffs. No doubt with her money. Apparently all the sand for the cement was taken there by boat and carried up the cliffs a pailful at a time. The cement itself was brought out on the backs of men from Ness.’

Braque had trouble imagining it. ‘Who else lives there?’

‘No one, except for the Macfarlanes.’ He corrected himself. ‘Or, rather, just her now.’

Braque fell silent then, until she saw the profiles of the ruined house and church standing out against the dazzle of sunlight on the water beyond. To the left of them, no more than two hundred metres away, stood the Macfarlane house, shining white and incongruous in the sunshine. The blades of two wind turbines turned at speed in the stiffening breeze. There was something inestimably sad about the young couple who had built their perfect home out here on the edge of the cliffs, on the very edge of Europe, meeting tragedy and death on the streets of Paris. A shattering of dreams in a far-off land. Even to Braque, or perhaps especially to the policewoman, her home city seemed very distant now.

As what passed for a road swept around the ruined settlement of Bilascleiter towards the house, they saw two vehicles parked outside it. A white Jeep Cherokee and a Red Mitsubishi SUV. ‘Looks like she has visitors,’ Gunn said. He drew their 4×4 into one side as the door of the house opened, and a woman with the whitest skin Braque had ever seen stepped out on to the gravel. She carried a holdall in one hand, her flame-red hair whipped immediately back from her face by the wind, and Braque that saw in spite of her advancing years this was still a very beautiful woman.

She barely glanced in their direction before throwing her bag on to the passenger seat and slipping behind the wheel. She started the engine almost before her door was closed, then backed out at speed, sending chippings flying up behind her, before turning sharply and accelerating off into the distance.

Braque said, ‘I thought that islanders were renowned for their friendliness. Who was that?’

Gunn watched thoughtfully in the rearview mirror as the red Mitsubishi vanished over the near horizon. ‘That was Seonag Morrison,’ he said. ‘I don’t know her personally, but I do know that she works for Ranish Tweed. I think she might be an office manager, something like that.’

‘A good-looking woman.’

‘Oh, aye, a real beauty.’