I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Niamh and Uilleam drove in silence along Bayhead, past the inner harbour, slowing over the speed bump and then accelerating up towards the roundabout. Trees in the golf course to their left were already taking on their autumn colours.

The rain clouds that Braque and Gunn had seen earlier gathering out at sea off the west coast were now sweeping their way across the island, rain falling in dark, fast-moving patches that Niamh could see in the distance across the Barvas Moor. For the moment it was just spitting at their windscreen.

‘Nothing changes, does it?’ Uilleam said.

‘That’s what I love about this place,’ Niamh told him. ‘The world changes around us like a silent movie on speed, but the islands never do. They’re the one constant in my life.’ She glanced at him across the Jeep. ‘Must be a while since you were last here.’

She thought he looked fleetingly uncomfortable, but she had to turn away to focus on the road. ‘I was back seeing the folks earlier this month.’

‘Really? She turned her head again in surprise. ‘They never mentioned it.’

‘Probably thought you wouldn’t be interested.’ He could never resist the barb.

She said, ‘Maybe they know me too well.’ And she could tell from the colour that rose on his cheeks that her reciprocal retort had not missed its mark. Then immediately she regretted it. He was her brother, for God’s sake! Why did it always have to be like this?

They drove on into the rain as it swept west across the moor, past the shieling with the green roof that sat away off to their right. Then up over the rise, and a misted view through the cloud and rain to the distant ocean washing up at Rubh’ a’ Bhiogair beyond Barvas itself.

As they turned off towards Bru, Uilleam said, ‘I’m only here for you, you know.’

‘Mum told me.’ Niamh paused. ‘I’m to be grateful, I suppose?’

He bristled. ‘I’m not going to the funeral.’

‘Then you’re not here for me. If you were, you would.’

‘Mum and Dad aren’t going either.’

She turned her head towards him sharply. ‘Really? They told you that?’

He nodded.

‘Well, it’s more than they’ve told me.’

‘You can’t be surprised.’

‘Surprised isn’t the word I would use, Uilleam. Hurt, maybe. Betrayed.’ She tried to control her voice. ‘I’m their daughter. Your sister. I just lost the man I loved and you’re all still so eaten up by your misplaced hatred of him that you won’t even stand by my side when we put him in the ground.’

‘He killed our brother.’ His voice was screwed tight by sanctimonious certainty.

‘No!’ Niamh almost shouted. ‘You killed Anndra. You!’

‘For God’s sake, Niamh!’

‘Oh, don’t give me all that self-righteous innocence!’ She almost spat it in his face, then had to swerve to stay on the road. ‘You know it was your fault. It’s the elephant that’s always been in the room. The thing that none of us ever wanted to say out loud, because who could deal with the thought that it was your stupidity that caused the death of your own brother.’

‘That’s not true,’ he barked back at her.

‘Yes it is. Yes. It. Is. If you hadn’t gone and kicked that ball into the sea like some spoilt thirteen-year-old adolescent, then challenged Ruairidh to go get it, none of it would have happened. None of it. “Any decent swimmer could go and get it.” Remember that? You can’t tell me that you haven’t spent every minute of every day since regretting it. Somewhere deep inside you that you won’t admit. Because I wouldn’t believe you. Ruairidh was just the scapegoat for your guilt. Someone else to blame. Mum and Dad did it, too. I mean, how in God’s name could they ever have dealt with the thought that one of their own children was responsible for the death of another? Much easier to turn grief into hatred and direct it all at Ruairidh.’

There. She had said it, and it could never be taken back. All the things she had kept pent up inside her for all these years. Perhaps it had always been understood. Felt. Perceived. But it had never been given voice. And now that it was out, it didn’t make her feel any better, as she had always thought it might. The overwhelming feeling was one of emptiness. She had drained the boil, but the pain remained.

There was no comeback from Uilleam. No denial, no justification, not even an expression of the hurt he must have felt. Just silence. A silence that stretched out like the road ahead of them.

A road that took them past Arnol, with its ruined blackhouse village. Past Bragar, the jaws of an eighty-foot whale mounted in an arch above a gate. Past the mill and the school at Shawbost. Past the turn-off to Dalmore Beach where the innocence of childhood had come to an end, and the deceptions, jealousies and hatreds of adulthood had taken root.

Not a word passed between them during all that long drive down the west coast. Nothing more to be said.

As they turned down towards the bridge at Balanish the Free Church tower rose high above the village rooftops, and all the memories of what had been a happy childhood up until that fateful day on Dalmore Beach came flooding back. Niamh felt silent tears rolling down her cheeks.

Past the war monument, where Anndra and Uilleam had once tied her to the railings and left her there until their father passed in the car on his way home from work. Past the road that led down to the pier, from which the three of them had often set out in the family dinghy to catch fish, or simply lie bobbing and basking in the sun of a warm summer’s day. Past the community hall where Niamh had first danced with Ruairidh. Past the croft where a tup had broken free of the sheep fank and knocked Anndra over, breaking his arm, as he tried to herd it back in.

All those memories, both sweet and sour, invested in one place and time. A place which had once been home and felt alien now, unwelcoming.

Niamh drew the Jeep to a halt at the road end above the Murray croft and Uilleam got out to retrieve his case from the back. He hesitated before walking down to the house. ‘Are you coming in?’

Niamh shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, in what was little more than a whisper. She wound up the window and turned the car in the road, before heading back the way they had come, without so much as a glance in the rearview mirror.

It was a long, lonely drive north to Ness in the rain. A road with many faces revealed in different weathers and seasons. This face set now in stone, gloomy and hard, its lack of light reflected in the darkness of Niamh’s heart.

She drove fast, breaking the speed limit through all the deserted villages that streamed past her window. Shadar, Borve, Mealabost. Galson. She saw not one single person, and passed only a handful of other vehicles on the road. The landmark that was the Free Church at Cross emerged, wraithlike, from the rain and mist, and she swung off on to the Skigersta Road. Past the Cross Stores where Ruairidh used to buy their marag dhubh. The best black pudding on Lewis, he used to say, an assertion frequently disputed over a dram at MacNeill’s in Stornoway, where Charley Barley was the preferred maker of the famous blood sausage.

Her blackest moment came after crossing the northern tip of the island to Skigersta and turning south on the track to Taigh ’an Fiosaich. The rain blew almost horizontally across the moor and the road ahead became as fogged and obscure as her own future. A future that, suddenly, she could no longer face. A future that seemed pointless without the man she loved. A future estranged from her own family, at odds with her oldest friend. A future that, simply, did not seem worth living. She had never felt as low in her whole life.

Then something strangely magical happened. Those rainclouds driven in from the west by strong autumn winds began to lift and break, and the sunshine that slanted low across the land from behind them formed a rainbow almost directly ahead of her, straddling the road. An archway to a future perhaps less bleak than her heart in its darkness had foreseen. The tiniest chink of light bringing hope to the blackest of places. And quite unaccountably, she felt her spirits lift.

Her Jeep bumped and lurched its way past the shielings at Cuishader, up and over the hill to the long vista that would lead her down eventually to the safety of what, for all its emptiness, was still her home. And as she rounded the bend at Bilascleiter, she was startled to see a vehicle parked at the back of the house. The curve of its roof caught and flashed in the sunlight that crept all across the land now in the wake of the rain.

As she got closer she saw that it was a big Mitsubishi four-wheel-drive Shogun, and a figure in a long black coat and homburg hat stood leaning against the driver’s door smoking a large cigar. He pushed himself away from the vehicle, turning as he heard her Jeep approach. A small man, dwarfed by the size of the Shogun he was driving. Niamh’s humour improved immediately as she saw who it was.

She had barely pulled on the handbrake before she jumped out of the car and threw her arms around him. He laughed and clutched his hat to stop her from knocking it off, then held her close as she laid her head on his shoulder. When, finally, she stood back to look at him, his hand shot to his hat again, this time to stop it from blowing away. His smile faded, then, and she saw sadness in his dark eyes.

‘I’m so sorry, Niamh. So, so sorry. I arranged flights as soon as I got your email.’ He looked around with mock despair. ‘Not the easiest place in the world to get to from New York.’

Jacob Steiner was probably in his late sixties or early seventies by now, although he looked no older to Niamh than when she had first met him the better part of ten years before. And she had thought him old then.

He had a long, lugubrious face, with a large, bulbous nose veined from too much good living. The remains of his hair beneath the hat were shorn to a silver stubble. A goatee grew in salt-and-pepper profusion, providing definition to a collapsed jawline. Born of Jewish Holocaust survivors who had found their way to America after the Second World War, his corpulence bore testimony to their success in the aftermath of horror. He was one of the nicest and most genuine people Niamh had ever met.

‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you came,’ she said.

He took her hand with one of his and raised his other to his mouth to take a pull on his cigar. Smoke whipped away in the wind. ‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘there ain’t nothing in this world that could have kept me away.’ Then he turned a wry smile on the track that wound down to the house from the ruins of Bilascleiter. ‘Except maybe this goddamned road. If you could call it that.’ Another puff of his cigar. ‘You know, I had a rental car all lined up at the airport till I asked them directions to this place. Goddamn! The young guy nearly snatches the keys out of my hand. “Sorry sir,” he says. “Can’t let you take that car up there, you’d rip the underside out of her.”’ To Niamh’s amusement, he managed a passable Stornoway accent. ‘They drove me into Stornoway to another rental place which gave me this.’ He jerked his thumb towards the Shogun. ‘Couldn’t understand why I would need a brute like that till I actually got here. Damn, Niamh! What possessed you and Ruairidh to build a home away out here in this godforsaken place?’

‘I’ll show you,’ she said. And still holding his hand she led him into the house. He tossed his cigar into the wind as he passed through the open door.

‘Jees,’ he said. ‘If I’d known it wasn’t locked I’d have been inside like a shot, instead of hanging about out there in the cold. Did you forget?’

Niamh laughed, and realized how good it felt to be doing just that. Only half an hour ago she couldn’t have imagined ever laughing again. ‘No. No one locks their doors here.’

‘You’re kidding?’

She shook her head. ‘No need.’

‘Hell, I gotta come and live here. In New York City you need deadlocks and bolts and chains, state-of-the-art security systems and God knows what else. Every other schmuck wants to break into your house and steal what you got.’

He stopped and whistled softly as they stepped into the living area, eyes scanning the panorama from the windows. ‘Take it back. I see exactly what possessed you to come and live out here. If only I could take a view like that back to Manhattan.’ Then he turned to hold her other hand. There could have been little more comfort than the refuge she saw in the soft sympathy of his dark eyes. ‘How you doing, honey?’

She dipped her head a little. ‘Not great, Mr Steiner.’

‘Jake,’ he corrected her. She pulled a face and he laughed. ‘I know, I know. Must be a generational thing.’ His smile faded again. ‘Helluva thing, Niamh. Helluva thing.’

She nodded and chewed her lower lip.

‘At least you have friends to rally round. Lee tells me he saw you in Paris, just after it.’

She was surprised. ‘You’ve been speaking to Lee?’

‘Bumped into him at the airport. His private charter landed just after my scheduled flight. You know, anyone who’s anyone in the world of fashion was on Lee’s plane. Some big-name models. It’s gonna be quite a send-off. Lot of folks thought a lot of Ruairidh.’ But not her own family, Niamh thought. Steiner said, ‘The Press are arriving in force, too, from what I could see.’ And Niamh felt a wave of despair wash over her. What she had hoped might be a quiet, sombre farewell seemed to be turning into a two-ring circus.

‘You’ll have a drink,’ she said, dropping his hands and crossing to the kitchen.

‘I will,’ he said. ‘Scotch on the rocks. Splash of soda if you’ve got it.’

As Niamh prepared his drink, he took off his coat and hat, and slipped on to a stool at the breakfast bar. ‘I’m staying at a hotel in town. The Cabarfeidh. Any good?’

She shrugged. ‘As good as you’ll get in Stornoway, I guess. You should have tried Lews Castle. They do rooms and suites there now. Very luxurious.’

He smiled sadly. ‘Next time. Other circumstances.’ She had prepared two drinks the same, except that only one had whisky. She pushed it across the counter to him. They chinked glasses. ‘To Ruairidh,’ he said. ‘One of the good guys.’

Niamh couldn’t bring herself to speak.

‘And speaking of castles, Lee tells me his party has taken a whole castle to themselves on the Isle of Harris.’ He raised his hands in confusion. ‘Which I’m told is the same goddamned island as the Isle of Lewis. Who knew?’

‘What castle?’

‘Oh some unpronounceable place. Avan... Avin... something.’

‘Amhuinnsuidhe?’

‘Yep. What you said.’

She nodded thoughtfully as he sipped on his whisky soda.

‘You know,’ he said, almost lowering his voice, ‘Ruairidh should never have mentioned the Tony Capaldi shooting in that interview he did for the New York Times.’

Niamh raised her eyebrows in surprise. The paper had carried the interview earlier that summer in an article on the success of Ranish Tweed. They had described it as a cloth derived from a weaver’s hut on a remote Scottish island, rising to become one of the world’s most sought-after fashion fabrics. Ruairidh’s story of the shooting in New York had been a throwaway line in passing. ‘What do you mean? Why not?’

‘Jees, Niamh. You don’t fuck about with these people. I gotta tell you, I’ve been keeping my own head pretty low ever since it came out.’