The Blackhouse

NINETEEN

Marsaili was out at the peat stack filling a bucket. She wore jeans, and wellingtons and a thick woollen jumper. For once her hair was unclasped and was blowing all around her face. With the wind driving down from the north she did not hear Fin’s car pulling in at the top of the drive. A tiny Daewoo, the colour of vomit, which he had rented in town on a cheap oneday hire. All along the line of the coast below her, the sea broke in angry white wreaths, winding itself up for the storm gathering in the north-west like an invading army.

‘Marsaili.’

She stood up, startled by his voice at her shoulder, and she wheeled around, surprised to see him, and then alarmed by what she saw in his face. ‘Fin, what is it?’

‘You must have known that he was beating the boy.’ And she closed her eyes and let the bucket drop to the ground, spilling its peats all over the turf.

‘I tried to stop it, Fin. I did.’

‘Not hard enough.’ His tone was harsh, accusing.

She opened her eyes and he saw the tears collecting there, preparing themselves to spill. ‘You can’t imagine what he’s like. At first, when Fionnlagh was wee, and I saw the bruising, I couldn’t believe it. I thought it must have been an accident. But there’s a limit to the number of accidents you can have.’

‘Why didn’t you take him and leave?’

‘I tried, believe me, I did. I wanted to. But he told me if I ever left, he would come after us. Wherever we went he would find us, he said. And he would kill Fionnlagh.’ Her eyes desperately sought Fin’s understanding. But he was like stone.

‘You could have done something!’

‘I did. I stayed. And I did everything I could to stop the beatings. He would never do it if I was around. So I tried always to be there. To protect him, to keep him safe. But it wasn’t always possible. Poor Fionnlagh. He was wonderful.’ The tears ran freely down her face now. ‘He took it all like it was something to be expected. He never cried. He never complained. He just took it.’

Fin found himself shaking. With rage and pain. ‘Jesus, Marsaili, why?’

‘I don’t know!’ She almost shouted it at him. ‘It’s like he was doing it to get at me for some reason. Whatever it is that happened out on that bloody rock, whatever it is you’re not telling me, either of you, it changed him beyond recognition.’

‘You know what happened, Marsaili!’ Fin lifted his arms in a hopeless gesture, and then let them fall again in frustration.

She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t.’ And she looked at him long and hard, baffled by his obduracy. ‘It changed all of us, you know that, Fin. But Artair was the worst. I wasn’t aware of it at first. I think he was hiding it from me. But then, after Fionnlagh was born, it just started coming out of him, like poison.’

Fin’s mobile started ringing in his pocket. Scotland the Brave. Cheerful and jaunty. Ludicrously inappropriate in the circumstance. They stood staring at each other, the ridiculous ringtone fibrillating in the wind. ‘Well, aren’t you going to answer the stupid thing?’

No one on the island knew his number. So it had to be someone from the mainland. ‘No.’ He waited for the answering service to pick it up, and was relieved when the ringing stopped.

‘So what now?’ She wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand, and left a dirty, peaty smudge across her cheek.

‘I don’t know.’ He saw the weariness in her eyes, the life ground out of her by all the years with Artair, and the guilt for all the beatings her son had been forced to endure, beatings that she had been unable to prevent. His phone started ringing again. ‘Jesus!’ He snatched it from his pocket, punched the phone symbol and slapped it to his ear. It was his answering service calling him back to let him know that he had one new message. He listened impatiently and heard a familiar voice, but so out of context that it took him several moments to identify it.

‘Too busy to answer your bloody phone, eh? Out catching our killer, I hope.’ It was the pathologist. Professor Angus Wilson. ‘If not, I’ve got a little something for you that might help. It’ll be in my report, but I thought I might give you a little advance notice. That wee ghost pill that we found in the killer’s vomitus? It contains an oral form of the steroid cortisone, known as prednisone. Commonly used to treat painful skin allergies. But also very effective in reducing inflammation in the airways, so it’s frequently prescribed for asthma sufferers. I suggest, therefore, that you keep your eyes peeled either for someone with a nasty rash, or an habitual asthmatic. Happy hunting, amigo.’ The answering service told him there were no more messages.

Fin wondered why the ground had not swallowed him up. Everything else about his world had just fallen apart. So why should the earth still support him? He disengaged the phone and slipped it back in his pocket.

‘Fin?’ Marsaili was scared. He could hear it in her voice. ‘Fin, what is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

He looked at her without seeing her. He was in the boatshed at Port of Ness. It was Saturday night, and it was dark. There were two men there. One of them was Angel Macritchie. The other one moved into the moonlight. It was Artair. Fin had no idea why they were there, but when Macritchie turned away, he saw something like a metal tube or a wooden pole flash through the light of the small open window and crash down on Angel’s head. The big man dropped to his knees before falling forward on to his face. Artair was excited, breathing rapidly. He got down on his knees to pull the big man over on to his back. The dead weight was heavier to move than he had expected. He heard something, sounds from the village. Was it voices? Maybe it was just the wind. He began to panic, and with the panic he felt his airways start to close. His stomach reacted by heaving its contents out through his mouth. A reflex response. All over the unconscious Macritchie. Artair fumbled in his pocket for his pills and swallowed one and sucked on his puffer while he waited for it to work, still on his knees, breath rasping in the dark. Slowly his breathing became easier again, and he listened for the sound which had sparked his attack. But he heard nothing, and returned then to his task, slipping thick fingers around the big man’s throat. And pressing. An urgency now about everything he would do.

Fin closed his eyes tight to try to squeeze the images out of them, and then opened them again to see Marsaili’s consternation. ‘Fin, for God’s sake talk to me!’

His voice, when he found it, sounded small and caught phlegm in his throat. ‘Tell me about Artair’s asthma.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean, tell you about his asthma?’

‘Just tell me.’ He was finding strength in his voice. ‘Is it worse than it used to be?’

She shook her head in frustration, wondering why he was asking her such stupid questions. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was becoming a nightmare. The attacks were getting worse and worse, until they put him on new medication.’

‘Prednisone?’

Her head tilted in surprise, and something darkened the blue of her eyes. Premonition, perhaps. ‘How did you know that?’

He took her arm and started pulling her towards the house. ‘Show me.’

‘Fin, what’s this all about?’

‘Just show me, Marsaili.’

They went into the bathroom, and she opened a mirrored cabinet on the wall above the washbasin. The bottle was on the top shelf. Fin lifted it down and opened it. It was nearly full.

‘Why doesn’t he have these with him?’

Marsaili was at a loss. ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe there’s another bottle.’

Fin did not even want to think about it. ‘Is there somewhere he keeps his private papers? Stuff he never lets you see?’

‘I don’t know.’ She thought about it, distracted, finding concentration difficult. ‘There’s a drawer in his father’s old desk that he always keeps locked.’

‘Show me.’

The desk was pushed up under the window in Mr Macinnes’s former study, buried beneath an avalanche of papers and magazines, and wire trays overflowing with paid and unpaid bills. Fin had slept in here the other night, but not even noticed it. The captain’s chair that originally went with the desk was nowhere in evidence. An old dining chair was tucked between the pedestals. Fin pulled it out and sat down. He tried the lefthand drawer. It slid open to reveal a concertina folder full of household papers. Fin flicked quickly through it, but there was nothing to interest him. He tried the right-hand drawer and it was locked.

‘Do you have a key?’

‘No.’

‘A heavy screwdriver, then. Or a chisel.’

She turned without a word and left the room, returning a few moments later with a large, heavy-duty screwdriver. Fin took it, driving it between the top of the drawer and the pedestal, levering it upwards until the wood splintered and the lock broke. The drawer slid open. Suspension folders hung from a built-in rack. Yellow, blue, pink. He went through them one by one. Bills, investments, letters. Newspaper articles, downloaded from the internet. Fin stopped and heard himself breathing. Short, shallow breaths. He tipped the articles out on to the desktop. The Herald, the Scotsman, the Daily Record, the Edinburgh Evening News, the Glasgow Evening Times. All dated late May or early June. Disembowelled Corpse Found in Leith. The Edinburgh Ripper. Strangled and Mutilated. Death in the Shadow of the Cross. Police Issue Appeal over Leith Walk Murder. More than two dozen of them over a three-week period, when reporting of the murder was at its most frenzied, and before news of an impending increase in council tax took over the front pages.

Fin slammed his fist down on the desk, and a pile of magazines slid on to the floor.

‘For Christ’s sake, Fin, tell me what’s going on!’ A hint of hysteria was creeping into Marsaili’s voice.

Fin dropped his head into his hands and screwed his eyes tight shut. ‘Artair killed Angel Macritchie.’

There was a hush in the room so thick that Fin could almost feel it. Marsaili’s voice, small and frightened, forced its way through it. ‘Why?’

‘It was the only way he could be sure of getting me back to the island.’ He scuffed his hand through the printouts of the articles, sending several of them fluttering through still air. ‘The papers were full of the murder in Edinburgh. All the gory details. The fact that I was in charge of the investigation. So if another body turned up here on Lewis, same weird MO, what was the betting I’d get involved at some stage? Especially when the victim was someone I was at school with. A gamble, maybe. But it paid off. Here I am.’

‘But why? Oh, Fin, I can’t believe I’m even hearing you say these things. Why would he want you here?’

‘To tell me about Fionnlagh. So that I would know he was my son.’ He thought about what Donna Murray had said. Like he was taking out the sins of the father on the son.

Marsaili sat heavily on the edge of the bed and put her hands to her face. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You said you thought he beat Fionnlagh to get at you. It wasn’t you he was getting at. It was me. All those years, beating that poor kid, and all the time it was me he was punching, me he was kicking. And it was important to him that I knew that before …’ And he broke off, frightened even to give voice to the thought.

‘Before what?’

Fin turned slowly to look at her. ‘He wasn’t bothered about giving a DNA sample to the police. He knew he’d be on the rock by the time we figured out it was him. Too late to stop him.’

Marsaili stood up abruptly, as suddenly it occurred to her where all this was leading. ‘Stop it, Fin! Stop it!’

He shook his head. ‘That’s why he didn’t bother taking his pills with him. After all, why would he need them if he wasn’t coming back?’

He checked his watch and stood up, scooping the newspaper articles back into their folder. Outside the wind was picking up. He could see all the way down to the shore, waves smashing across the rocks, retreating in foam. He turned towards the door, and Marsaili caught his arm.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to try and stop him killing our son.’

She bit down hard on her lip and tried to stop the sobs that threatened to choke her. Tears coursed down her cheeks. ‘Why, Fin? Why would he do that?’

‘Because for some reason he wants to hurt me, Marsaili. To inflict more pain on me than I can bear. He must know I’ve already lost one son.’ And he saw a look in her eyes that told him she had not known. ‘What better way to turn the screw than to kill the other?’ He pulled himself free of her grasp, but she followed him to the door and grabbed him again.

‘Fin, look at me.’ There was something compelling in her voice. He turned to meet her intensity. ‘Before you go … there’s something you need to know.’

Rain battered against the window of the incident room, obliterating the view over harbour rooftops to the semi-derelict Lews Castle across the bay. There were nearly two dozen officers at desks around the room. All of them were turned towards Fin. Except for George Gunn and a couple of others who were still speaking on the phone. DCI Smith was flushed and exasperated. He had showered, and changed. His hair was smoothly Brylcreemed back from his face, and he smelled of Brut again. He might hold centre stage in the incident room, but he had been upstaged in his investigation by Fin. He was not a happy man, but he was being squeezed into a corner.

He said, ‘Okay, so I accept that this Artair Macinnes probably is our killer.’

‘His DNA’ll confirm it,’ Fin said.

Smith glanced irritably at the newspaper articles spread across the nearest desk. ‘And you think he copied the Leith Walk murder to lure you back to the island.’

‘Yes.’

‘To tell you that his son is really your son.’

‘Yes.’

‘And then kill him.’ Fin nodded. Smith let the moment hang. Then, ‘Why?’

‘I told you what happened on An Sgeir.’

‘His father died rescuing you on the cliffs eighteen years ago. Do you really think that’s sufficient motivation for him to commit two murders all these years later?’

‘I can’t explain it.’ Fin’s frustration bubbled into anger. ‘I just know he’s beaten that boy black and blue all his life, and now that he’s told me I’m his father he’s going to kill him. He’s killed once to get me here. On the evidence, I don’t think anyone can deny that.’

Smith sighed and shook his head. ‘I’m not going to risk the lives of my officers by sending them off to a rock fifty miles out in the Atlantic in the middle of a storm.’

Gunn hung up and swivelled around in his chair. ‘Latest weather report from the coastguard, sir. Storm-force winds in the vicinity of An Sgeir, and getting worse.’ He glanced almost apologetically at Fin. ‘They say there’s no way they can land the chopper on the rock in these conditions.’

‘There you are, then.’ Smith sounded relieved. ‘We’ll have to wait until the storm passes.’

Gunn said, ‘The harbourmaster’s confirmed that the Purple Isle is back from An Sgeir. She docked about an hour ago.’

‘I’m not asking a boat to go out in these conditions either!’

A uniformed sergeant came into the room. ‘Sir.’ His face was chiselled from grim, flinted rock. ‘We can’t raise the guga people on the CB.’

Fin said, ‘Then there’s something far wrong. Gigs always keeps a channel of communication open. Always.’

Smith looked to the sergeant for confirmation, and he nodded. The CIO sighed and shrugged. ‘There’s still nothing we can do about it before tomorrow.’

‘The boy could be dead by tomorrow!’ Fin raised his voice and felt an immediate hush fall across the room.

Smith raised a finger and touched it to the end of his nose. A strange, threatening gesture. His voice was a low growl. ‘You’re in serious danger of crossing a line here, Macleod. You are no longer involved in this case, remember?’

‘Of course I’m involved. I’m at the very fucking centre of it.’ And he turned and pushed through the swing doors out into the corridor.

By the time he reached the foot of Church Street and turned left into Cromwell Street, Fin was soaked. His parka and hood had protected his upper body, but his trousers were plastered to his legs, and his face had stiffened and set under the assault of the freezing rain that drove in off the moor. He turned into the doorway of a green-painted gift shop for some respite, and found foot-high replicas of the Lewis Chessmen staring at him with curious expressions from beyond the glass, almost as if they empathized. He fumbled for his mobile phone and dialled the number of the incident room two hundred yards up the road. One of the uniforms answered.

‘I want to speak to George Gunn.’

‘Can I tell him who’s calling?’

‘No.’

A brief pause. ‘One moment, sir.’

And then Gunn’s voice. ‘DS Gunn.’

‘George, it’s me. Can you talk?’

A moment’s silence. ‘Not really.’

‘Okay, just listen. George, I need you to do me a favour. A big favour.’

The trawler rose and fell with the swell in the inner harbour, creaking and straining at its ropes. A red plastic bucket rolled back and forth across the forward deck. Heavy chains swung and rattled and chafed, and every piece of rigging on the boat’s superstructure vibrated and whined in the wind. Rain hammered the windows of the wheelhouse, and Padraig MacBean sat up on a pilot’s seat that had been worn and torn by years of use, duct tape fighting to contain thick wads of stuffing that seemed determined to escape it. He had one foot up on the wheel, and was puffing thoughtfully on the stump of a hand-rolled cigarette. He was young for a skipper, not much more than thirty. The Purple Isle had been his father’s boat, and it was his father who had taken Fin out to the rock eighteen years ago, when Padraig could only have been twelve. Old MacBean had carried the guga hunters on their annual pilgrimage to An Sgeir for thirty years. After his death his sons had taken up the tradition. Padraig’s younger brother, Duncan, was the first mate. There was only one other member of crew, a young lad called Archie. He had been unemployed, and joined them on a six-month work experience attachment two years ago. He was still attached.

‘That’s a helluva story you’re telling me, Mr Macleod,’ Padraig was saying, in the long slow Niseach drawl of a native of Ness. ‘I have to tell you, I never much liked that Artair Macinnes. And his lad’s a quiet boy.’ He took another pull at the remains of his cigarette. ‘But I can’t say I noticed anything untoward on the trip out.’

‘Will you take me?’ Fin asked him patiently. He knew it was a big ask.

Padraig lowered his head and peered out from beneath the roof of the wheelhouse. ‘It’s a hoor of a storm out there, sir.’

‘You’ve been out in worse.’

‘Aye, I have that. But never by choice.’

‘We’re talking about a boy’s life, Padraig.’

‘And I’m thinking about my boat, and the lives I’d be putting at risk by taking her out.’

Fin said nothing. He knew that the decision was in the balance. He had asked. He could do no more. Padraig sucked on the last half-inch of his cigarette, but it had gone out. He looked at Fin.

‘I can’t ask the boys to go.’ Fin felt hope leaking out of every pore. ‘But I’ll put it to them. It’ll be their decision. And if they say yes, then I’ll take you.’ Hope gathered itself again in Fin’s heart.

He followed the young skipper out through the galley. Oilskins hung from hooks along one wall, above a row of yellow wellies. Dirty dishes slopped about in cloudy water in the sink, a skin of grease reflecting the harsh electric light. There was a kettle on the gas hob, beneath a row of chipped porcelain mugs hanging on pegs.

Rungs set into a riveted metal shaft took them down to cramped living quarters in the rear of the trawler. Six berths were set into the hull around the stern of the boat, and a triangular table with benches along each side took up most of the available space. Duncan and Archie were sitting with mugs of tea and cigarettes watching a snowy picture on a tiny TV set mounted on the wall high up in one corner. Anne Robinson was being rude to some miserable contestant and insisting that they were the weakest link. A middle-aged woman with a face like fizz stormed towards the camera on her walk of shame. Padraig turned off the television and quelled the protestations of his crew with a look. He had something about him for a young man, a quiet, powerful presence that made itself felt.

In a low voice, in the insipid yellow electric light in the hold of the rusted old trawler, he told them what Fin was asking of them. And why. The two young men sat in their ragged pullovers and torn jeans, broken nails ingrained with oil and dirt, pale, mean faces born of generations of island poverty, listening to Padraig’s story. Glancing occasionally at Fin. They barely made a living, these boys. And it was not much of a life, eating, sleeping, shitting aboard this old, painted whore of a trawler twenty-four hours a day, five, sometimes six days a week. Day after day they risked their lives, in order that they might live like this. When Padraig had finished, they sat in silence for a moment. Then Archie said, ‘Well, it’s cheaper than going to the pub, I suppose.’

It was after seven when they left port, tipping past Cuddy Point into the outer harbour and facing into the rising swell that drove in off the Minch. By the time they had cleared Goat Island and motored out into deeper water, the sea was rising and breaking about them as they ploughed their way through the advance regiments of the storm. Padraig stood at the wheel, his face furrowed in concentration, green in the reflected phosphor of the battered radar screens that flashed and beeped all around the console. There was a little light left in the sky, but it was impossible to see anything. Padraig was guiding them by instruments and instinct. ‘Aye, she’s wild, right enough. Not so bad here in the lee of Lewis. It’ll be a lot worse when we round the Butt.’

Fin could not imagine anything much worse. He had thrown up twice by the time they passed the Tiumpan Head Lighthouse, and he declined Archie’s offer of fried egg and sausage that the boy was somehow managing to conjure in a galley that no longer had any fixed point of reference.

‘How long’s it going to take?’ he asked Padraig.

The skipper shrugged. ‘Took us just under eight hours last night. Could be nine or more tonight. We’ll be heading right into the teeth of the storm. It’ll be well into the early hours before we get to An Sgeir.’

Fin remembered how it had felt eighteen years before when they had rounded the Butt of Lewis, and the beam of the lighthouse had finally faded into darkness. The security of the island behind them, they had set out into the vast wilderness of the North Atlantic, kept safe and dry only by a few tons of rusting trawler and the skills of her skipper. He had felt scared then, lonely, incredibly vulnerable. But none of that prepared him for the fury with which the ocean would fling itself upon them this time as they rounded the northern tip of Lewis. Diesel engines hammering in the dark, they fought against seemingly impossible odds, water rising sheer all around them, like black, snow-capped mountains, crashing over the bow and hammering into the wheelhouse. He hung on to whatever he could, wondering how Padraig could remain so calm, and tried to imagine how it might be possible to survive, sanity intact, another seven or eight hours of this.

‘Before my father died,’ Padraig had to shout above the roar of the engines and the anger of the storm, ‘he bought another boat to replace the Purple Isle.‘ He nodded and smiled to himself, keeping his eyes fixed on the screens in front of him and the blackness through the glass. ‘Aye, she was a right beauty, too. The Iron Lady he called her. He spent a lot of time and money making her just the way he wanted her.’ He flicked a glance at Fin. ‘There are times you wish it was that easy with a woman.’ He turned and grinned back into the darkness, and then his smile faded. ‘He was going to sell this old dear when he got the chance. Only he never did. Cancer of the liver. He was gone in a matter of weeks. And I had to step into his shoes.’ He took a crumpled-looking cigarette one-handed from a Virginia tobacco tin and lit it. ‘Lost the Iron Lady first time I took her out. A ruptured pipe in the engine room. By the time we got to it, there was more water coming in than we could pump out. I told the rest of them to get the dinghy out, and I tried everything I could to save her. I was up to my neck in the engine room before I finally baled out. Just made it, too.’ Smoke swirled from his mouth in the turbulent air of the wheelhouse. ‘We were lucky, though. The weather was good, and there was another trawler within sight. I watched her go down. Everything that my father had put into her. All his hopes, all his dreams. And all I could think was, how was I going to tell my uncles I’d lost my father’s boat? But I needn’t have worried. They were just glad that we were safe. One of them said, “A boat’s just a bunch of wood and metal, son. The only heart it has is in those who sail her.”’ He took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘Still, I get goosebumps every time I go over the spot where she went down, and I know she’s just lying there on the seabed, right beneath where we last saw her. All my father’s dreams, gone for ever, just like him.’

Fin felt the young skipper’s intensity like a third presence in the wheelhouse. He looked at him. ‘We just went over that spot, didn’t we?’

‘Aye, Mr Macleod, we did that.’ He snatched a quick look at the policeman. ‘You should go and lie down in one of the berths for a while. You never know, you might get a bit of sleep. It’s going to be a long haul.’

Duncan took his place in the wheelhouse as Fin went below and pulled himself up into the same berth he had occupied the only other time he had made the journey. He had no expectation of sleep, just the knowledge that in the long, slow hours ahead of them he would have plenty of time in which to turn over, again and again in his mind, all the unanswered questions that plagued him. Questions he knew would not be answered until they got to An Sgeir. And even then, there was no guarantee. Artair and Fionnlagh might already be dead, and he would never know. And never forgive himself for not having had at least some inkling of what was to come.

He was surprised, then, when Archie shook him awake. ‘Nearly there, Mr Macleod.’

Fin slid out from his berth, startled, disorientated, and sat rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. The steady, rhythmic pounding of the engines seemed to have become a part of him, thudding inside his head, jarring his soul. The trawler was tipping and pitching wildly, and it was all he could do to climb back up into the galley without falling. Duncan was at the wheel, his face a study of concentration. Padraig sat beside him staring bleakly into the darkness. He was a bad colour. He saw Fin’s reflection in the glass and turned. ‘I’ve been trying to get them on the radio for the last hour, but all I’m getting is white noise and static. I don’t like it, Mr Macleod. It’s not like Gigs.’

‘How long?’ Fin said.

‘Ten minutes, maybe less.’

Fin peered into the black but could see nothing. Padraig, too, was straining to see in the dark. ‘Where’s the fucking lighthouse?’ He flicked a switch, and all the Purple Isle’s lights blazed into the night. The three hundred feet of cliff on which Fin had so nearly perished rose out of the sea almost immediately ahead of them, black and glistening and slathered in streaks of white guano. He was startled by how close they were.

‘Jesus!’ he said involuntarily, taking a step back and clutching the door frame to steady himself.

‘Fuck sake, pull her round!’ Padraig screamed at Duncan. His brother swung the wheel hard left, and the Purple Isle yawed dangerously, careening side-on through the waves that pounded and broke all around them. ‘There’s no light!’ he bellowed. ‘No bloody light!’

‘Was she working last night?’ Fin shouted.

‘Aye. You could see her for miles.’

Duncan had control of the trawler again, setting her into the wind once more, and they ploughed around the southern tip of the rock, circumventing Lighthouse Promontory and cruising finally into the comparative shelter of Gleann an Uisge Dubh. Here there was a noticeable respite from the wind. But the rise and fall was still ten feet or more, and they could see the swell breaking white at the point where usually they would land supplies, smashing and splintering all around the entrance to the caves that cut deep into the underbelly of An Sgeir.

Padraig shook his head. ‘There’s no way you’re going to get the dinghy in there tonight, Mr Macleod.’

‘I didn’t come all the way out here,’ Fin shouted above the thud of the engines, ‘to sit in a bloody boat while that man murders my son.’

‘If I take the Isle in close enough to put you down in a dinghy, there’s every chance we’ll all get smashed to pieces on those rocks.’

‘I saw your father back a trawler up to the quay at Port of Ness in a storm one year,’ Fin said. ‘In the days when they brought the guga back to Ness.’

‘You remember that?’ Padraig’s eyes were shining.

‘Everyone remembers that, Padraig. I was just a boy then. But folk talked about it for years.’

‘He had no fear, my father. If he thought he could do something, then he just did it. Folk said he must have nerves of steel. But that wasn’t true. He didn’t have any nerves at all.’

‘How did he do it?’

‘He dropped the anchor first, and then reversed in. He figured if he got into trouble he would just slip gear and haul anchor, and it would pull him straight out to safety.’

‘So, how much of your father do you have in you, Padraig?’

Padraig gave Fin a long, hard stare. ‘Once you’re in that dinghy, Mr Macleod, you’re on your own. There’s not a damned thing I can do for you.’

Fin wondered if he had ever been more frightened. Out here, with a monstrous sea smashing itself over the rocks all around them, he had never felt less in control. It was a raw confrontation with nature at its most powerful, and he seemed tiny and insignificant by comparison. And yet they had got themselves there in one piece, across fifty miles of storm-lashed ocean, and now there were only a few hundred feet still to cover. Duncan attached a line to the inflatable and kept her pulled tight to the stern as Padraig inched the Purple Isle backwards into the creek, keeping her anchor chain taut. The cliffs on the two promontories closed in around them, dangerously close now, and the trawler bucked and slid on the swell, one way, then the other. They could hear the sea snapping and slurping at the rock, as if it were trying to devour it.

Padraig signalled that he had taken her in as far as he dared, and Duncan nodded to Fin. Time to go. The rain was coming at him horizontally as he slid down the rungs of the ladder, wet fingers stiff in the freezing cold. Somehow he was still dry beneath his oilskins, but he knew that would not last long. His lifejacket seemed ludicrously flimsy. If he fell in the water, it would probably keep him afloat just long enough for the sea to tear him apart on the rock. The inflatable dinghy was swinging wildly, rising and falling beneath him, impossible to step into. He took a deep breath, as if about to duck below water, and let go of the Purple Isle, allowing himself to drop into the dinghy. As it gave way beneath his weight, his hands searched desperately for the rope that ran around the inflated perimeter. They found nothing but smooth, wet fabric. He felt himself slipping away, falling through space, the dinghy vanishing below him, and he braced himself for impact with the water. But at the last moment, the abrasive plastic of the rope burned the palm of his right hand, and he closed his fingers around it. The dinghy was there beneath him once more, and this time, clutching the rope, he rose and fell with it, securing himself by grabbing the line on the left-hand side.

He glanced up and saw Duncan’s white face a long way above him. He seemed to be shouting something, but Fin couldn’t hear what. He pulled himself towards the back of the dinghy and tipped the outboard over the stern. He opened the choke and pulled the starter cord. One, two, three, four times. Nothing. On the fifth, it coughed and spluttered and caught, and he gunned it furiously to stop it stalling. It was the moment of truth. Attached only by the umbilical of the rope, he was about to leave the safety of the mother ship.

The rope played out behind him as he swung the dinghy around, and her nose rose up through the swell towards the landing point. He twisted the accelerator, and the tiny orange vessel ploughed at a surprising speed towards the rocks. By the lights of the trawler, he saw the great black mouth of the cave opening up above him, and he could hear the cathedral roar and rush of the sea from deep within the belly of the island. A creamy-white frenzy of foam boiled all around him, and he felt the dinghy lifted by the swell and propelled towards the rocks. He yanked at the rudder and cranked up the motor to maximum power, pulling himself out of a collision at the last second, and the sea sucked him back out into the bay. The roar in his ears was deafening. He did not even dare to look back at the trawler.

He swung the dinghy around and faced the rocks again. They dipped up and down below the level of the swell, as if sizing him up, and then hiding in preparation for ambush. He hung there on the rise and fall for a full minute, gathering together all the broken pieces of his courage. He realized that timing was everything. He could not afford to run in with the swell as he had the first time. It was much more powerful than his tiny outboard and would dash him on to the rocks in a moment. He had to motor in as the swell receded, using his forward momentum against its retreat, to prevent a collision. Easy! He almost laughed at his ludicrous attempts to intellectualize his way through this. The truth was, if God existed, then Fin’s life was well and truly in His hands now. He took deep breaths, waiting for the sea to break again on the rocks, and then accelerated hard into the retreating rush of white water. Again the mouth of the cave closed around him, and it seemed as if he were making no progress at all, just holding his own in the mist of froth and spume, before suddenly he was propelled forward at a speed he could not control. He tried to pull the rudder around, but the propeller was out of the water, blades screaming through air that offered no resistance. The whole of An Sgeir seemed to be throwing itself at him. He shouted his defiance, as the sea held him in its palm and lifted him clear out of the dinghy and up on to the rocks with a force that knocked all the breath from his body. He could taste blood in his mouth, and felt the jagged edges of the gneiss tearing at his flesh. The boat was gone, and he was pinned to the rock by the force of the water. And then almost immediately the pressure that held him there dissipated, and the sea started sucking him back. He felt himself sliding down the glistening black surface of rock worn smooth by millions of years. He scrabbled for a handhold, but the green collar of algae all around An Sgeir squeezed through his fingers like slime, and he was aware of the power of the sea drawing him down into a cold, dark place where he knew that sleep was for ever.

And then he felt it. The cold bite of iron, the movement of the ring as his fingers closed desperately around it, and held. And held. Almost dislocating his shoulder as the sea pulled and jerked, before finally, reluctantly letting go. For a moment he lay still, clutching the mooring ring, washed up on the rock like a beached sea creature. And then he scrambled for a foothold, and then a handhold, and the strength to propel himself upwards before the sea returned to reclaim him. He could sense it snapping at his heels as he found the ledge of rock on which Angel had built a fire of peats and made them tea on the day they landed there eighteen years before. He’d made it. He was on the rock, safe from the sea. And all that it could do now was spit its anger in his face.

He became aware for the first time that the rain had stopped, and huge tears in a black sky overhead released sudden and unexpected shards of moonlight to strike down across the island. He saw the Purple Isle in a pool of dazzling silver light motoring back out into the safety of the bay, still dipping and yawing on a sea furious at her complicity in Fin’s escape.

Fin fumbled for the torch clipped to his belt, hoping that it would still work. Its light flashed into his face, and he waved it in the dark to let the crew know that he was safe. Then he pulled his knees up to his chest, his back to the cliff, and huddled there for a full five minutes, trying to regain his breath and his composure, and his will to tackle the climb to the top. He flashed the torch at his watch. It was after 4 a.m. In under two hours, dawn would break in the east. He was almost afraid to contemplate what daylight might bring.

The rain stayed off, fragments of moon flitting in and out between scraps of breaking sky. Fin wondered if he was imagining that the wind had dropped just a little. He got unsteadily to his feet and shone his torch up the incline. There, caught in its beam, smooth and glistening in the light, was the chute the guga hunters used to haul their supplies up to the top of he rock. Still in use after all these years. Fin raised his torch and followed its angled progress up the steepest sections of the slope, and he saw the rope that they used snaking down across the jumble of rock and boulders. He climbed up until he was able to grab the end of it, and he pulled hard. It held fast. He tied it around his waist, and began the long climb to the top, using the rope to guide him in the dark, to pull himself up the steepest gradients, stopping frequently to wind it around his waist, a safety measure against the possibility of a fall.

It took him a full twenty minutes to haul himself up to the roof of the island and unravel himself from the rope. He looked back, gasping for breath, battered and buffeted by the wind that swept unimpeded across the chaos of rock and stone, and saw the lights of the Purple Isle winking out in the bay. As he turned, an almost full moon emerged from the ragged remnants of the storm cloud overhead, and spilled its light all over An Sgeir. He saw the squat silhouette of the lighthouse, bracing itself in darkness at the highest point of the island, and a hundred yards away across the shambles of boulders and nests, the dark, huddled shape of the old blackhouse. There was no light, no sign of life. But the smell of peat smoke carried to him on the edge of the wind, and he knew that there must be someone inside.

Petrel chicks puked and vomited on his feet as he stumbled across the rocks by the light of his torch, overturning nests and sending birds squawking off into the night. The tarpaulin hanging across the entrance to the blackhouse had been weighted down with heavy boulders. He yanked it free and pushed his way inside.

He could see the embers of the peat fire in the centre of the room glowing still in the dark, and he could smell the sour perfume of human sweat, a pitch above the pervasive smell of peat smoke. He flashed his torch around the walls, cutting through blue, smoky air, and saw the shapes of men lying hunched on mattresses all along the stone shelf. Several of them were already stirring, and his torchlight caught a pale, sleepy face full in its beam. It was Gigs. He raised a hand to shade the light from his eyes. ‘Artair? Is that you? What the hell’s going on?’

‘It’s not Artair.’ Fin let the tarpaulin drop again behind him. ‘It’s Fin Macleod.’

‘Jesus,’ he heard someone say. ‘How in God’s name did you get here?’

They were all awake now. Several men sat up and swung their legs around and slid down to the floor. Fin made a quick head count. There were ten of them. ‘Where’s Artair and Fionnlagh?’ Someone lit a tilley lamp, and by its spectral light, Fin could see all their faces through the smoke, staring back at him as if he were a ghost.

‘We don’t know,’ Gigs said. Another lamp was lit, and someone stooped to rake the fire and pile on fresh peats. ‘We were working almost until dusk setting up the pulleys. Artair and Fionnlagh left our group, and we all thought they’d come back to the blackhouse. But when we got here, there was no sign of them. Their kit was gone, and the radio smashed.’

‘And you don’t know where they went?’ Fin was incredulous. ‘There aren’t exactly many places to hide on An Sgeir. And they wouldn’t have lasted long out there in this weather.’

One of the other men said, ‘We think they must be somewhere down in the caves.’

‘But we’ve no idea why.’ Gigs fixed his eyes on Fin. ‘Maybe you can tell us.’

‘How in the name of the wee man did you get here, Fin?’ It was Asterix. ‘I didn’t see any wings on you yesterday.’

‘Padraig brought me.’

‘In this weather?’ Pluto peered at Fin through the gloom. He had been with the hunt the year that Fin was with them. ‘Are you insane?’

Fin’s sense of urgency grew to something approaching panic. ‘I think Artair is going to kill Fionnlagh. I’ve got to find them.’ He pulled aside the tarpaulin to head back out into the storm. Gigs crossed the blackhouse in three strides and grabbed his arm.

‘Don’t be a bloody fool, man! It’s pitch out there. You’ll kill yourself before you’ll find them.’ He pulled him back inside and dragged the tarpaulin across the doorway. ‘There’s no one going out there looking for anyone until we’ve got light to see by. So why don’t we all sit down and brew ourselves some tea, and we’ll hear you out?’

Flames were licking up around the dry slabs of peat as the guga hunters gathered around the fire and Asterix lowered a pot of water over the heat. Some of the men had blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Others pulled on flat caps or baseball caps. Several lit cigarettes to breathe more smoke into air already thick with it. And they sat in a strange, tense silence, waiting for the water to boil, and for Asterix to fill the pots. Fin found an odd reassurance in their quiet patience, and he tried to let a little of the tension drain out of muscles screwed taut by the events of the last hour. It seemed barely possible to him that he was here at all.

When the tea had masked, Asterix filled their mugs, and the tins of dried milk and sugar were passed around. Fin made his tea sweet, and took big gulps of the syrupy, milky liquid. It did not taste much like tea, but the heat of it was comforting, and he felt a kick as the sugar hit his bloodstream. He looked up and found them all watching him, and he had the strangest sense of déjà vu. He had sat around the fire in this shelter on the rock every night that he had been on the island eighteen years ago, but this was different. This had the quality of a dream. Of something not quite real. And the dark spectre of apprehension began clouding his thoughts. He had been here before, but not in any way that he remembered.

‘So …’ Gigs broke the silence. ‘Why is Artair going to kill his son?’

‘Two nights ago he told me that Fionnlagh was my son.’ The wind outside seemed like a distant cry. The air in the blackhouse was as still as death, and smoke was suspended in it almost without movement. ‘And for some reason—’ Fin shook his head, ‘—I don’t know why, he seems to hate me beyond reason.’ He breathed deeply. ‘It was Artair who murdered Angel. He did it by copying a murder in Edinburgh that I had been investigating, to try and draw me back to the island. I’m pretty sure he wanted me to know that Fionnlagh was my son, so that by killing him he could make me suffer.’

There was a stirring of unrest around the fire. Fin saw several of the men glancing at each other, dark looks laden with meaning. Gigs said, ‘And you can’t think of a single reason why Artair might hate you so much?’

‘I can only think that somehow he must blame me for the death of his father.’ Fin had a sudden sense that perhaps there were others around the fire who might also think that. ‘But it wasn’t my fault, Gigs. You know that. It was an accident.’

And still Gigs stared at him intently, a look of incomprehension in his eyes. ‘You really don’t remember, do you?’

Fin was aware of his breath coming fast and shallow now, fear beginning to wrap itself around him with long, cold fingers. ‘What do you mean?’

Gigs said, ‘I was never sure if it was the knock on the head. You know, the concussion. Or if it was something deeper. Something in your mind. Something psychological that was making you blank out the memory.’ Fear flooded every locker in Fin’s mind. He had a sense of some long-forgotten wound being opened up to recover a piece of hidden shrapnel, and he could hardly bear it. He wanted to scream for Gigs to stop. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to know. Gigs rubbed his unshaven jaw. ‘At first, when I came to see you at the hospital, I thought you must be faking it. But I’m pretty sure now that you weren’t. That you genuinely don’t remember. Maybe that was a good thing, maybe not. Only you’ll know that in the end.’

‘For God’s sake, Gigs, what are you talking about?’ The mug was trembling in Fin’s hand. Something unspeakable hung above them in the smoke.

‘Do you remember that night I found you drunk at the side of the road? Babbling about not wanting to go to the rock?’ Fin nodded mutely. ‘You don’t remember why?’

‘I was scared, that’s all.’

‘Scared, yes. But not of the rock. When I got you back to the croft, you told me something that night that caused you pain that I can’t imagine. You sat in the chair in front of my fire and cried like a baby. Tears like I’ve never seen a grown man cry. Tears of fear and humiliation.’

Fin sat wide-eyed. It was someone else Gigs was talking about. Not him. He was there that night. There were no tears. He was drunk, that was all.

Gigs let his gaze drift darkly around all the faces circling the fire. ‘Some of you were out on the rock that year, so you know what I’m talking about. Some of you weren’t. And to them, I’ll say now what I said then. Whatever happens on this rock, whatever passes between us, stays here. On the island. It’ll be in our heads, but it’ll never pass our lips. And if any man here breathes a word of it to another living soul, then he’ll answer to me before he answers to his maker.’ And there was not a single man around the fire who did not believe that to be true.

As the flames devoured the peats, so the shadows of the men assembled there danced on the walls like silent witnesses to an oath of silence, and the dark beyond the light seemed to draw the blackhouse tight in around them. Eyes turned back towards Fin, and they saw a man lost in a trance, trembling in the dark, all blood drained from a face as white as bleached bone.

Gigs said, ‘He was the devil himself, that man.’

Fin frowned. ‘Who?’

‘Macinnes. Artair’s father. He did unimaginable things to you boys. In his study. All those years of tutoring, shut away behind a locked door. First Artair, and then you. Abuse the like of which no child should ever have to suffer.’ He stopped to pull in a breath, almost suffocated by the silence. ‘That’s what you told me that night, Fin. You never talked about it, you and Artair. Never acknowledged it. But each of you knew what was going on, what the other was suffering. There was a bond of silence between you. And that’s why you were so happy that summer. Because it was over. You were leaving the island. You never had any reason to see Macinnes ever again. It was an end to it once and for all. You’d never told a soul. How could you have faced the shame of what it was he’d done to you? The humiliation. But now you would never have to. You could put it behind you. Forget it for ever.’

‘And then he told us we were going to the rock.’ Fin’s voice was the merest whisper.

Gigs’s face was set grim in deeply etched shadow. ‘Suddenly, after the relief, you were faced by two weeks with him here on An Sgeir. Living cheek by jowl with the man who had ruined your young life. And God knows, we’re in one another’s pockets here. There’s no escape. Even if he couldn’t lay a finger on you, you would have had to suffer the man nearly twenty-four hours a day. For you it was unthinkable. I didn’t blame you then, and I don’t blame you now, for how you felt.’

Although Fin’s eyes were closed, they were open wide for the first time in eighteen years. The sense that he had had all his adult life, of something that he could not see, something just beyond the periphery of his vision, was gone. Like removing blinkers from a horse. The shock of it was physically painful. He was rigid with tension. How could he not have remembered? And yet all his conscious thoughts were awash now with memories, like the vivid recollection of scenes from a nightmare in the moments of waking. He felt bile filling the emptiness inside him, as images flickered across his retinas, like a faded family video out of sync with its playhead. He could smell the dust off the books in Mr Macinnes’s study, the stink of stale tobacco and alcohol on his breath as it burst hot on his face. His could feel the touch of his cold, dry hands, and recoiled from them even now. And he saw again the image of the funny man with the impossibly long legs who had haunted his dreams ever since Robbie’s death, like the harbinger of his returning memory. That figure who stood silently in the corner of his study, head bowed by the ceiling, arms dangling from the sleeves of his anorak. And he recognized him now for the first time. He was Mr Macinnes. With his long, grey hair straggling over his ears, and his dead, hunted eyes. Why had he not seen it before?

He opened his eyes now to find tears streaming from them, burning his cheeks like acid. He scrambled to his feet and staggered to the door, pulling the tarpaulin aside and emptying his stomach into the storm. He dropped to his knees then, retching and retching until his stomach muscles seized and he could not draw a breath.

Hands lifted him gently to his feet and steered him back into the warmth. A blanket was placed around his shoulders, and he was guided again to sit sobbing at his place by the fire. His trembling was uncontrollable, as if he were in a fever. A sheen of fine sweat glistened on his brow.

He heard Gigs’s voice. ‘I don’t know how much you remember of it now, Fin, but that night, when you told me, I was so angry I wanted to kill him. To think that a man could do something like that to children! To his own son!’ He drew in a deep, scratching breath. ‘And then I wanted to go to the police. To have charges brought. But you begged me not to. You didn’t want anyone to know. Ever. Which was when I realized that the only way to deal with it was here on the rock. Among ourselves. So that no one else would ever know.’

Fin nodded. He didn’t need Gigs to tell him the rest. He remembered now as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, a film of obfuscation peeled away from every year which had passed since. He remembered the men gathered around the fire on that first night, and Gigs laying his bible down after the reading and shocking them all by confronting Artair’s father with his crimes. A ghastly silence, a denial. And Gigs badgering and threatening like an advocate in the High Court, physically menacing, evoking God’s wrath, facing him with everything Fin had told him, until finally the older man cracked. And it all poured out of him like poison. Prompted by fear and by shame. He couldn’t explain why he had done it. He had never meant it to happen. He was so, so sorry. It would never happen again. He would make it up to the boys, both of them. Mr Macinnes had simply disintegrated in front them.

Fin remembered, too, the look that Artair had given him across the fire, the sense of hurt and betrayal in his eyes. Fin had broken their bond of silence. He had shattered the only thing which had allowed the Macinnes family still to function. Denial. If you denied it, it never happened. And Fin realized now, perhaps for the first time, that Artair’s mother must have known, and that she too had been in denial. But Fin’s confession to Gigs had meant that denial would no longer be an option. And every other alternative was unthinkable.

Gigs let his gaze wander around the faces at the fire, flames reflecting the horror in their eyes. He said, ‘We sat in judgement on him that night. A jury of his peers. And we found him guilty. And we banished him from the blackhouse. His punishment was to live rough on the rock for the two weeks that we were here. We would leave him food out by the cairns, and we would take him back with us when we were finished. But he would never return to the rock. And he would never, ever, lay a hand on either of those boys again.’

Fin realized why Mr Macinnes had never reckoned in his memory of their two weeks on the rock. But now he saw again the fleeting glimpses of the ghostlike figure of Artair’s father climbing up from the caves below to collect the food left for him up by the cairns. A shambling figure stooped by shame. Although he had never said anything, Gigs must have sensed Artair’s hostility towards Fin after his confession, and kept them always on separate work gangs.

Fin looked across the peats at the flames throwing their light in Gigs’s face. ‘The day I had the accident on the cliffs. After Mr Macinnes had tied me to the rope. He didn’t fall, did he?’

Gigs shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know, Fin. I really don’t. We didn’t know how we were going to get down to you. And then someone spotted him climbing up from below. He must have heard the commotion from the caves down there. I guess he was trying to redeem himself somehow. And in a way he did. He probably saved your life. But whether he fell, or whether he jumped, well that’s anyone’s guess.’

‘He wasn’t pushed?’

Gigs canted his head just a little to one side and stared back at Fin. ‘By who?’

‘By me.’ He had to know.

Outside, the storm was blowing itself out. But the wind still whistled and screamed in every crack and crevice in the rock, through all the gullies and caves, among all the cairns left by the generations of guga hunters who had gone before. Gigs said, ‘We’d hauled you up fifty feet by the time he went, Fin. No one pushed him, except maybe the hand of God.’