The Blackhouse

THREE

Fin had barely lifted his bag from the luggage carousel when a large hand grabbed the handle and took it from him. He turned, surprised, to find a big friendly face grinning at him. It was a round face, unlined, beneath thickly oiled black hair that grew into a widow’s peak. It belonged to a man in his early forties, broad built, but a little shorter than Fin’s six feet. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and blue tie, beneath a heavy, quilted, black anorak. He thrust another large hand into Fin’s. ‘DS George Gunn.’ He had an unmistakable Lewis accent. ‘Welcome to Stornoway, Mr Macleod.’

‘It’s Fin, George. How the hell did you know who I was?’

‘I can spot a cop at a hundred paces, Mr Macleod.’ He grinned, and as they stepped out to the car park said, ‘You’ll probably see a few changes.’ He leaned into the strong westerly and grinned again. ‘One thing that never changes, though. The wind. Never gets tired of blowing.’

But today it was a benign wind with a soft edge to it, warmed by an August sun that burst periodically through broken cloud. Gunn turned his Volkswagen on to the roundabout at the gate to the airfield, and they drove up over the hill that took them down again to Oliver’s Brae. They took a right towards the town, and the conversation turned towards the murder.

‘First of the new millennium,’ Gunn said. ‘And we only had one in the whole of the twentieth century.’

‘Well, let’s hope this is the last of the twenty-first. Where are post-mortems usually held?’

‘Aberdeen. We have three police surgeons here on the island. All doctors from the group practice in town. Two of them are locum pathologists. They’ll examine the bodies of any sudden death, even carry out a post-mortem. But anything contentious goes straight off to Aberdeen. Forrester Hills.’

‘Wouldn’t Inverness be nearer?’

‘Aye, but the pathologist there doesn’t approve of our locums. He won’t do any post-mortems unless he does them all.’ Gunn flicked Fin a mischievous look. ‘But you didn’t hear that from me.’

‘Hear what?’

Gunn’s face split into a smile that told Fin they had connected.

As they headed down the long straight road towards Stornoway, Fin saw the town laid out before them, built around the shelter of the harbour and the tree-covered hill behind it. The glass and steel ferry terminal at the head of the new breakwater which had been built in the nineties looked to Fin like a flying saucer. Beyond it, the old pier seemed neglected. It gave him an odd jolt seeing the place again. From a distance it appeared almost exactly as he remembered it. Only the flying saucer was new. And no doubt it had brought a few aliens with it.

They passed the yellow-painted former mills of Kenneth Mackenzie Limited, where millions of metres of homespun Harris tweed had once been stored on thousands of shelves awaiting export. An unfamiliar terrace of new houses led down to a big metal shed where government money financed the production of television programmes in Gaelic. Although it had been unfashionable in Fin’s day, the Gaelic language was now a multi-million-pound business. The schools even taught maths and history and other subjects through the medium of Gaelic. And these days it was hip to speak it.

‘They rebuilt Engebret’s a year or two ago,’ Gunn said as they passed a filling station and minimarket at a roundabout that Fin did not remember. ‘It’s even open on a Sunday. And you can get a drink or a meal most anywhere in town now on the Sabbath.’

Fin shook his head in amazement.

‘And two flights from Edinburgh every Sunday. You can even get the ferry from Ullapool.’

In Fin’s day the whole island shut down on a Sunday. It was impossible to eat out, or go for a drink, or buy cigarettes or petrol. He could remember tourists wandering the streets on the Sabbath, thirsty and hungry and unable to leave until the first ferry on Monday. Of course, it was well known that after the churches of Stornoway had emptied, the pubs and hotels filled up with secret Sunday revellers who slipped in by the back door. It was not illegal, after all, to drink on the Sabbath, just unthinkable. At least, to be seen doing it.

‘Do they still chain up the swings?’ Fin remembered the sad sight of children’s swings chained and padlocked on the Sabbath.

‘No, they stopped that a few years ago.’ Gunn chuckled ‘The Sabbatarians said it was the thin end of the wedge. And maybe they were right.’

Fundamentalist Protestant churches had dominated island life for centuries. It was said that a publican or a restaurateur who defied the Church would be quietly put out of business. Bank loans called in, licences withdrawn. The power of the Church had seemed medieval to those looking on from the mainland. But it was real enough on the island, where some sects condemned any kind of entertainment as sinful, and any attempt to undermine their authority as the work of the devil.

Gunn said, ‘Mind you, even though they don’t chain the swings up any more, you’ll never see a kid using one on a Sunday. Just like you’ll still not see anyone hanging out their washing. Not outside of the town, anyway.’

A new sports centre hid Fin’s old school from view. They passed the Comhairle nan Eilean island council offices, and the former Seaforth Hotel opposite a terrace of traditional step-gabled sandstone houses. A mix of new ugly and old ugly. Stornoway had never been the prettiest of towns, and it hadn’t improved. Gunn turned right into Lewis Street, traditional harbour homes cheek by jowl with pubs and dark little shops, then left into Church Street and the police station halfway down. Fin noticed that all the street names were in Gaelic.

‘Who’s running the investigation?’

‘A crew from Inverness,’ Gunn said. ‘They were helicoptered in in the early hours of Sunday morning. A DCI, a DS and seven DCs. Plus a forensics team. They didn’t hang around once the balloon went up.’

The police station was a collection of pink, harled buildings on the corner of Church Street and Kenneth Street, next door to the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Peking Cuisine Chinese Takeaway. Gunn drove through a gate and parked beside a large white police van.

‘How long have you been based at Stornoway, George?’

‘Three years. I was born and brought up in Stornoway. But I’ve spent most of my time in the force at other stations around the islands. And then at Inverness.’ Gunn slipped out of the car with a quilted nylon swish.

Fin got out of the passenger side. ‘So how do you feel about all these incomers taking over the investigation?’

Gunn’s smile was rueful. ‘It’s no more than I’d expect. We don’t have the experience here.’

‘What’s the CIO like?’

‘Oh, you’ll like him.’ A smile crinkled Gunn’s eyes. ‘He’s a real bastard.’

The real bastard was a short, stocky man with thick, sandy hair Brylcreemed back from a low brow. He had an old-fashioned face and an old-fashioned smell (was it Brut?), and Fin could have guessed he was a Glaswegian even before he opened his mouth. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Tom Smith.’ The chief investigating officer rose from behind his desk and held out a hand. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Macleod.’ Fin wondered if they all knew, and thought that they had probably been warned. Smith’s handshake was firm and brief. He sat down again, the sleeves of his pressed white shirt neatly folded up to the elbows, his fawn suit jacket carefully arranged over the back of the seat behind him. His desk was covered in paperwork, but there was a sense of order about it. Fin noticed that his thick-fingered hands were scrubbed clean, and that his nails were immaculately manicured.

‘Thank you.’ Fin’s response was mechanical.

‘Sit down.’ Smith spent more time looking at his papers than at Fin as he spoke. ‘I’ve got thirteen CID, including the local boys, and twenty-seven uniforms working on this. There’s more than forty officers on the island I can count on.’ He looked up. ‘I’m not sure why I need you.’

‘I didn’t exactly volunteer, sir.’

‘No, you were volunteered by HOLMES. It certainly wasn’t my idea.’ He paused. ‘This murder in Edinburgh. Do you have any suspects?’

‘No, sir.’

‘After three months?’

‘I’ve been on leave for the last four weeks.’

‘Aye. Right.’ He appeared to lose interest, and returned again to his paperwork. ‘So what grand illumination is it you think you’ll be able to cast on our little investigation here?’

‘I’ve no idea, sir, until I’ve been briefed.’

‘It’s all in the computer.’

‘I have a suggestion, though.’

‘Oh, do you?’ Smith looked up sceptically. ‘And what might that be?’

‘If the post-mortem hasn’t been carried out yet, it might be an idea to bring in the pathologist who did the PM on the Edinburgh murder. So we’ll have a first-hand comparison.’

‘Great idea, Macleod. Which is probably why I already had it.’ Smith leaned back in his chair, his self-satisfaction almost as overpowering as his aftershave. ‘Professor Wilson arrived on the last flight yesterday.’ He checked his watch. ‘PM should be starting in about half an hour.’

‘You’re not flying the body to Aberdeen, then?’

‘The facilities are good enough here. So we brought the mountain to Mohammed.’

‘What would you like me to do?’

‘Frankly, DI Macleod, nothing. I’ve got a perfectly good team here that’s quite capable of running this inquiry without your help.’ He sighed in deep frustration. ‘But HOLMES seems to think you might be able to say whether or not there’s a connection with the Leith Walk murder. And God forbid we shouldn’t do what HOLMES tells us. So why don’t you sit in on the postmortem, take a look at the parallel evidence, and if you come up with anything we’ll give it a gander. Okay?’

‘I wouldn’t mind casting an eye over the crime scene.’

‘Feel free. Detective Sergeant Gunn can give you the tour. The local boys aren’t really equipped to be of much use to us anyway. Except as dogsbodies.’ His contempt for everyone outside of his own team, including Fin, was clear.

‘And I’ll want to take a look at the files.’ Fin was pushing his luck. ‘Maybe talk to some of the witnesses. Suspects, if there are any.’

Smith pursed his lips and gave Fin a long, hard look. ‘I can’t stop you doing that, Macleod. But you might as well know that I expect to have this whole thing wrapped up in a matter of days. And just so you’re not under any illusion, I don’t believe there is an Edinburgh connection.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Call it instinct. People here aren’t very sophisticated.’ He smirked. ‘Well, you’d know that.’ He was tapping his pencil on his desk now, irritated by having to explain himself to a junior officer from another force. ‘I think this is a crude copycat killing. There were plenty of details published in the papers at the time. I think the killer’s a local man with a grudge trying to cover his tracks, trying to make us look somewhere else. So I’m going to shortcut the whole process.’ Fin resisted the temptation to smile. He knew all about shortcuts. He’d learned very early in life that they could lead you off on tangents. But DCI Smith was not privy to such wisdom. He said, ‘Unless the PM throws up something unexpected, I’m going to take DNA samples from every adult male in Crobost, as well as any additional suspects we might come up with. I figure a couple of hundred at the most. Economy of scale. A whole hell of a lot cheaper than a long-running investigation tying up officers in the field for weeks on end.’ Smith was one of the new breed of senior cops whose primary concern was the bottom line.

Still, Fin was surprised. ‘You have a DNA sample of the killer?’

Smith beamed. ‘We think so. Despite local sensibilities, we put out teams of uniforms to search the locus on Sunday. We found the victim’s clothes in a plastic binbag dropped in a ditch about half a mile away. The clothes are covered in vomit. And since the police surgeon is pretty sure the victim wasn’t sick, we have to assume the murderer was. If the forensic pathologist can confirm that, we should have a perfect sample of the killer’s DNA.’

In Church Street, and all the way down to the inner harbour, little hanging baskets of flowers swung in the wind, a brave effort to bring colour into grey lives. Pink- and white- and green-painted shops lined the street, and at the bottom of it Fin could see a cluster of fishing boats tied up at the quay, moving with the rise and fall of the ocean. A blink of sunlight caught the white boatshed on the opposite shore, and swept across the tops of trees in the Lews Castle grounds.

‘What did you make of the CIO, then?’ Gunn said.

‘I’d pretty much concur with your assessment.’ Fin and Gunn shared a grin.

Gunn unlocked the car and they got in. ‘Thinks he’s a superstar, that one. My old boss in Inverness used to say of the brass, they’re no different from you and me. They still have to get their legs out of their breeks one at a time.’

Fin laughed. He liked the image of DCI Smith struggling to get his stocky little legs out of his trousers.

‘Listen,’ Gunn said, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the inside line on the pathologist. I didn’t even know he was on the island. Shows you how much they’re keeping me in the loop.’

‘That’s okay.’ Fin brushed the apology aside. ‘Actually, I know Angus pretty well. He’s a good guy. And at least he’ll be on our side.’ They backed out into the street. ‘Why do you think Smith’s not attending the PM himself?’

‘Maybe he’s squeamish.’

‘I don’t know. A man who uses that much aftershave can’t be too sensitive.’

‘Aye, right enough. Most corpses smell better than he does.’

They slipped out of Kenneth Street on to Bayhead, heading north out of town. Fin looked from the passenger window at the children’s playpark, the tennis courts, the bowling green, the sports ground beyond and the golf course on the hill behind it. On the other side of the street, tiny shops were crammed together beneath the dormer windows of flats above. It almost felt as if he had never been away. He said, ‘Friday, Saturday nights in the eighties, the kids used to cruise up and down here in their old bangers.’

‘They still do. Regular as clockwork, every weekend. Whole processions of them.’

Fin reflected on what a sad existence it was for these kids. Little or nothing to do, strangled by a society still in the grips of a joyless religion. An economy on the slide, unemployment high. Alcoholism rife, a suicide rate well above the national average. The motivation to leave was as compelling now as it had been eighteen years ago.

The Western Isles Hospital was new since Fin’s day, replacing the old cottage hospital on the hill below the war memorial. It was a fully equipped, modern facility, better than many of those serving urban populations on the mainland. They turned in off Macaulay Road, and Fin saw the low, two-storey structure built in shallow angles around a sprawling car park. Gunn drove to the foot of the hill and turned right into a small, private parking area.

Professor Angus Wilson was waiting in the mortuary room. His goggles were pushed up over his shower cap, his mask pulled down below his chin, pushing out a thick beard of fusewire copper shot through with silver. He wore a plastic apron over green surgical pyjamas covered by a long-sleeved cotton gown. On the stainless steel table in front of him he had laid out plastic sleeve covers to protect his forearms, a pair of cotton gloves, a pair of latex gloves, and the characteristic steel-mesh glove he wore on his non-cutting hand to guard against an accidental slip of the blade. He was impatient to begin.

‘About bloody time!’ A twinkle in his green eyes betrayed the outward appearance he liked to give of bad-tempered eccentricity. It was an image he cultivated as an excuse for the rudeness that was almost expected of him now. ‘How the hell are you?’ He held out a hand to shake Fin’s. ‘Same killer, is it?’

‘That’s what you’re here to tell us.’

‘Godforsaken bloody place! You’d think if there was anywhere in the world you could get fresh fish this would be it. I ordered plaice in the hotel last night. Aye, and it was fresh alright. Fresh out the fucking freezer and into the deep-fat fryer. Christ, I can get that in my own house!’ He looked at Gunn and leaned over the table to pull the folder from under his arm. ‘Is that the report and the photographs?’

‘Aye.’ Gunn held out his hand. ‘DS George Gunn.’ But the professor had already turned away to look at the report and lay out the photographs. Gunn withdrew his hand self-consciously.

‘You’ll find head covers, shoe covers, goggles, masks and gowns in the pathologist’s room across the hall.’

‘You want us to put them on?’ Gunn said. Perhaps, Fin thought, he hadn’t been at a post-mortem in a while.

‘No.’ Professor Wilson wheeled around. ‘I want you to gather them into a little pile and set them on fire.’ He glared. ‘Of course I want you to put the fucking things on. Unless you want to catch AIDS or whatever viral particles might be lurking in the bone dust that’ll fill the air when we take the oscillating saw around the victim’s skull. Alternatively, you can stand out there.’ He waved a hand towards the large window that opened on to the corridor beyond. ‘But you’ll not be able to hear a fucking thing I say.’

‘Jesus,’ Gunn said, as they pulled on their protective clothing in the pathologist’s room. ‘And I thought the CIO was bad.’

Fin laughed, and almost stopped dead at the sound of it. It was the second time he had laughed today, and he hadn’t laughed in such a long time. Becoming aware of it, whatever he had thought amusing was quickly choked off by a tidal wave of returning emotion. He took a moment to recover himself. ‘Angus is okay. His bark’s worse than his bite.’

‘I’d be frightened I caught rabies if he bit me.’ Gunn was still reeling from the sharp edge of the pathologist’s tongue.

When they went back into the mortuary room, the professor had spread photographs across almost every available space. He was examining the victim’s clothes on the table. The stainless steel was covered by a large sheet of white butcher’s paper to collect any stray fibres or dried particles of vomit that detached themselves from the material. The victim had been wearing a zip-up fleece over a white cotton shirt and blue denim jeans. Big, dirty-white misshapen running shoes sat on the end of the table. The pathologist had slipped on his protective gloves and was holding a square magnifying glass in his left hand and picking delicately at the dried vomit on the dark blue fleece with a pair of tweezers. ‘You didn’t tell me the victim was my namesake.’

‘They never called him Angus,’ Fin said. ‘Everyone knew him as Angel. You could send him a letter addressed to Angel, Ness, Isle of Lewis, from anywhere in the world and it would get to him.’

DS Gunn was shocked. ‘I didn’t know you knew him, Mr Macleod.’

‘I was at school with him. His younger brother was in my class.’

‘Angel …’ Professor Wilson was still focusing on his tweezers. ‘Does he have wings?’

‘The nickname was ironic.’

‘Ah. Maybe that explains why someone wanted to kill him.’

‘Maybe it does.’

‘Gotcha, you little bugger!’ The professor straightened up and held his tweezers up to the light, with what looked like a small white bead pinched delicately between its prongs.

‘What is it?’ Gunn said.

‘It’s a ghost.’ He looked at them, grinning. ‘Of a pill. One of these extended-release pills. The shell is full of micropores that let the medicine leak out slowly. This one’s empty. But these pill casings can sometimes survive in the stomach for hours after they’ve served their purpose. We see them all the time.’

‘Is there any significance in it for us?’ Fin said.

‘Maybe. Maybe not. But if this really is the killer’s vomit, then it could tell us something about him that we wouldn’t otherwise have known. Whatever medicine this contained may or may not show up on a tox screen, but we’ll still know what it was he was taking.’

‘How?’

The professor held up his magnifying glass to the tiny shell. ‘You can’t really see it with this, but stick it under a dissecting scope and we’ll almost certainly find numbers or letters etched on the surface, even a drug company symbol. We can check the markings against those listed in drug books to identify the medication. It might take a little time, but we’ll get there.’ He dropped the ghost pill carefully into a plastic evidence bag and sealed it. ‘You see, we’re clever bastards these days.’

‘What about DNA?’ Fin looked at the dried lumps of undigested food stuck to the fabric of the fleece, and could not begin to guess what they were. It seemed that no matter what you ate, it nearly always came back up looking like diced carrots in porridge. ‘Will you be able to get any out of that lot?’

‘Oh, I imagine so. We’re sure to find mouth mucosa cells in the saliva. We’ll get DNA from the nuclei of any of the cells lining the mouth, or the oesophagus, or the stomach itself. They slough off all the time, and will certainly be part of the vomitus.’

‘Will it take long?’ Gunn said.

‘If we get the specimen to the DNA lab some time this afternoon. Extraction, amplification … we should have a result by late tomorrow morning.’ The professor put a finger to his lips. ‘But don’t tell anyone, otherwise everyone’ll want their results that fast.’

Fin said, ‘The CIO says he’s going to take anything up to two hundred DNA samples to run past whatever you extract from this lot.’

‘Ah.’ Professor Wilson smiled, and his beard bristled. ‘That’ll take a little longer. And, besides, we have not yet established that this isn’t the victim’s own vomitus.’

Two white-coated assistants wearing large yellow rubber gloves wheeled the body in from the six-shelved refrigerator across the hall and transferred it to the autopsy table. Angel Macritchie was a big man. Bigger than Fin remembered him, and probably fifty pounds heavier than when he had last seen him. He would not have disgraced the front row of a rugby scrum. The thick black hair he had inherited from his father was a good deal thinner now, more silver than black. His skin was a pale putty grey in death. The lips that taunted, and the fists that damaged, were slack and powerless now to inflict the emotional and physical pain that they had dispensed with such ease through all those childhood years.

Fin looked at him, trying to remain dispassionate, but even Angel’s dead presence made him tense, and knotted his stomach so that he felt physically sick. He let his eyes wander to the dreadful opening across his abdomen. Inflated loops of shiny small intestine, pink tan in colour, had burst through the opening in the abdominal wall, held by a sheet of fat that Fin knew, from the Edinburgh post-mortem, was called the mesentery. There also seemed to be a balloon of large bowel pushing through. Dried blood and body fluid streaked his thighs. His tiny, flaccid penis looked like a dried fig. Fin turned to see DI Gunn standing towards the back of the room, almost pressed against the window. He was very pale.

Professor Wilson drew blood from the femoral veins at the top of the legs, and vitreous fluid from the eyes. Fin always found it hard to watch a needle entering an eyeball. There was something peculiarly vulnerable about the eyes.

Muttering almost inaudibly into a hand-held recorder, the professor examined first the feet and then the legs, noting reddish-purple bruising on the knees, before coming to the opening in the abdomen. ‘Hmmm. The wound starts higher up on the left side of the abdomen, with the terminus lower on the right, tapering away almost to a skin scratch at the very tip.’

‘Is that significant?’ Fin said.

The professor straightened up. ‘Well, it means that the blade used to inflict the wound was slashed across the abdomen right to left, from the killer’s perspective.’

Fin suddenly saw his point. ‘It was left to right in Edinburgh. Does that mean one was right-handed, the other left?’

‘We can’t tell handedness, Fin. You should bloody well know that by now! You can slash either way with the same hand. All it means is, they were different.’ He ran a latexed finger along the upper edge of the wound, where the skin had darkened as it dried. ‘The wound inflicted on the Edinburgh victim was deeper, too, more violent, severing the mesentery from the retroperitoneum. You’ll remember, there were about three feet of small intestine hanging between the legs in loops that had been partially severed and drained.’ Fin recalled the smell of it at the scene, streaks of pale green and yellow marbling the blood on the pavement. And at the post-mortem the small bowel, emptied of its juices, had been a dull, dark gold in appearance, quite unlike Angel’s. ‘There’s just a wedge of omentum which has pushed out here, and a bulb of the transverse colon.’ The professor worked his way around the wound and its protrusions. He measured it. ‘Twenty-five and a half centimetres. Shorter, I think, than in Edinburgh, but I’ll need to check that. And this man’s much heavier. He would have presented a bigger target area.’

The external examination moved on to the hands and arms. The professor noted bruising around both elbows. There were old scars on hands ingrained with oil, and he scraped some of the black accumulation of it from beneath bitten fingernails. ‘Interesting. These certainly do not look like the hands of a man who put up a desperate struggle to ward off his attacker. There is no sign of trauma, no skin beneath the fingernails.’

Careful scrutiny of the chest showed no trauma there either. But there was clear bruising on the neck, the same reddish-purple as the knees and the elbows. A row of four round bruises on the left side of the neck, two of them close to half an inch in diameter, one larger oval on the right side. ‘Consistent with having been caused by fingertips. And you can see the little crescent-shaped abrasions associated with them. Made by the killer’s fingernails. There are tiny flakes of skin heaped up at the concave side.’ The professor glanced up at Fin. ‘It’s interesting, you know, how little pressure it takes to strangle someone. You don’t have to stop them breathing, just prevent the blood draining from the head. The jugular veins that carry blood away from the head only require about four and a half pounds of pressure to cut them off. Whereas the carotid arteries carrying blood to the head require about eleven pounds to put them out of action. You’d have to apply about sixty-six pounds of pressure to cut off the vertebral arteries, and thirty-three pounds to choke off the trachea. In this case you can see the florid petechial haemorrhaging around the face.’ He peeled back the eyelids, beneath a large purple bruise on the right temple. ‘Yes, and also here around the conjunctivae. Which would suggest that death might have been caused by cutting off the venous drainage.’

He moved back to the neck. ‘Interesting, though, that again there is no indication that our angel put up any kind of a fight. Someone defending themselves might be likely to scratch their own neck as they tried to prise away their attacker’s hands. Which is another reason one would have expected to find skin beneath the fingernails. Interesting, too, that the trauma around the neck here, inflicted by the rope, the colour of the bruising, would indicate that he was almost certainly dead by the time he was strung up.’ He moved towards the bench where he had laid out the photographs. ‘And if you look at the photography, the pooling of the blood on the ground, and compare it with the way the blood and fluid has streaked down the body, one could only be drawn to conclude that the disembowelling took place once our angel had been suspended from the roof, and after he was dead. The blood was not under pressure when the wound was inflicted, otherwise there would have been tell-tale spatter patterns on the floor. It simply drained from the body through the wound.’

Gunn said, ‘So you’re saying that the order of things was that he was strangled to death, then hung from the rafters and disembowelled?’

‘No, I’m not saying anything of the sort.’ The professor was short on patience. ‘I’m thinking aloud. Jesus Christ, we’ve only just started the fucking examination.’

The assistants carefully turned the body over, and loose flesh fell away from folds of fat around the midriff and settled on cold steel. Great flabby white buttocks were dimpled and streaked with wiry black hair. The same pubic body hair that grew in tight curls around the neck and shoulders. There was no visible sign of trauma except, once more, at the neck.

‘Ahhh …’ The professor shook his head, disappointed. ‘I had half hoped to find the roots of wings beneath his shoulder blades.’ He moved on up to the scalp and started working carefully through the hair, parting and reparting it as if he were looking for fleas.

‘Think you might find horns instead?’ Fin said.

‘Would you be surprised if I did?’

‘No.’

‘Ahhh …’ This time the professor had found something that did not disappoint him. He crossed to his toolkit, removed a scalpel and then returned to the body to start paring away an area of hair high up on the back of the scalp, revealing a purple-red patch a little bigger than the size of a walnut, and an oval indentation that was soft beneath the fingers. The skin was broken, and there was evidence of dried blood. ‘A nasty little crack on the skull.’

‘Someone took him out from behind,’ Fin said.

‘It would appear that way. Bruising his knees and arms and forehead as he went down, pretty heavily by the looks of it. The shape of the indentation in the skull would indicate that he was hit with a metal tube, a baseball bat, something round like that. We’ll get a better idea when we open up the skull.’

With the body turned face-up, and the head supported on a shaped metal block, Professor Wilson began peeling back the layers of Angel’s hidden secrets. He made a ‘Y’ incision, cutting in from each shoulder to a point at the breastbone, and then drawing the blade down through the centre of the chest, stomach and abdomen to the pubes so that he could lay back the flesh on either side to reveal the ribcage. He used a pair of heavy shears to cut through the ribs before dislocating them at the clavicle, removing the breast bone and both halves of the shield that the human body has evolved to protect the delicate internal organs. One by one those organs were removed — heart, lungs, liver, kidneys — and taken to the workbench at the far end of the room to be weighed. Each measurement was chalked up on a blackboard, before the organs were sectioned into wedges, like slices of bread, for examination.

Angel had been in average condition for a man of his age and weight, lungs darkened from years of smoking, arteries hardened, but not in imminent danger of shutting down completely. His liver showed the ravages of too much alcohol consumed over too many years, the pale grey-brown colour of mild cirrhosis, nodular and scarred. The professor had to dig through thick layers of retroperitoneal fat to retrieve the kidneys.

The slimy, fluid-filled purse of the stomach was drained into a stainless steel bowl. Fin recoiled from the smell, but Professor Wilson seemed to savour it. He sniffed several times, like a dog, his eyes closed. ‘Curry,’ he said. ‘Could be lamb bhuna.’ His eyes twinkled as he caught Fin’s revulsion.

DI Gunn said in a small voice, ‘He had a curry at the Balti House in Stornoway about eight o’clock on Saturday night.’

‘Hmmm,’ said the professor. ‘I wish I’d tried it last night.’

Fin exhaled deeply with distaste. ‘Smells like alcohol, too.’

‘According to witnesses he had a fair few pints at the Crobost Social after he got back from town,’ Gunn told them.

‘Well,’ the professor said, ‘I’d say the contents of his stomach are pretty much intact. Partially digested. No medication residue grossly identified. Ethanol odour is noted. Whatever cretinous cocktail of curry and alcohol he threw down there, he didn’t throw it up again. So I think we might begin to lean towards the thought that the vomitus found on his clothing was, indeed, that of his killer.’

The pathologist began, then, to cut the guts free of their layers of fat, unlooping them and slicing them open along their length with a pair of scissors. The smell of excrement was almost unbearable. It was all Fin could do to stop himself from gagging. He heard Gunn gasping, and turned to see him with a hand placed firmly across his mouth and nose. But he clearly intended to stick it out.

Finally, the discarded intestine was dropped into a lined bucket and removed. ‘Grossly unremarkable,’ Professor Wilson said, apparently unaffected. He turned to the neck, pulling the flap of skin from the ‘Y’-shaped incision up over the face to reveal the damage caused to the bony and cartilaginous structures by the act of strangulation, and the subsequent hanging, although he quickly established that the neck itself was not broken.

An incision was made to the back of the head, running from one ear to the other, and the pathologist peeled the scalp down over the face to reveal the skull. He moved Fin back from the table as one of the assistants took an oscillating saw around the skull cap before removing it and allowing the brain to plop out into another stainless steel bowl. The professor examined the skull and nodded his satisfaction. ‘As I thought. There’s an area of subgaleal haemorrhage over the left parietal bone, two and a half to three and a half centimetres, roughly the same dimensions as the scalp contusion. And a small amount of deep subdural haemorrhage. The parietal bone shows a matching fracture, pretty much consistent with what I suspected. A metal tube, a baseball bat, something of that nature, used to club him down from behind. If he wasn’t completely unconscious, he’d have been in no condition to resist.’

Fin wandered over to the bench where the pathologist had laid out the photographs taken at the crime scene. It looked as if the boatshed had been lit by an overzealous theatrical lighting director. The colours were lurid and startling, blood already dried to a rust brown. Angel’s dead weight seemed impossibly large, layered folds of blue-white flesh. The intestine looping from his grinning abdomen appeared unreal. It all had the cheap and nasty veneer of a bad sixties B-movie. But Fin was beginning to get a picture of Angel’s last hours.

He had gone into Stornoway for a curry, returning afterwards to Ness, where he had consumed several pints at the Crobost Social Club. He had either accompanied his killer to the boatshed at Port of Ness or met him there. For what reason, it was unclear. But in any event, he must either have known his killer, or been sufficiently unsuspecting to turn his back on him, allowing the opportunity to attack him from behind. Knocked unconscious by a blow to the back of the head, he had been turned over and strangled. The murderer must have been in a state of high nervous tension, excitable, adrenaline pumping. He had vomited all over his victim.

Undaunted, apparently, he had proceeded to strip Angel of his clothes. That would have taken some time, and been a far from simple task, given the dead weight of a man of around two hundred and fifty pounds. Even more incredibly, he had proceeded to tie a rope around his neck, thread it through a beam in the roof and hoist him upright so that he was eventually hanging with his feet more than six inches clear of the ground. Which told them something about the murderer. This was a powerful man. And in spite of the act of murder making him physically sick, very determined. The longer it took, the greater the risk of being caught. He must have known that the boatshed was a Saturday night haunt for young lovers, and that he might be discovered at any moment. Murder interrupted instead of the more usual coitus interruptus. And yet not content simply with killing him, he had undressed him, hanged him and disembowelled him. Time-consuming and messy. Something in all these thoughts made Fin uneasy.

He turned back towards Professor Wilson. ‘How do you think it compares with the Leith Walk murder? Are we talking about the same killer here?’

The professor pushed his goggles up on his forehead and pulled his mask down below his beard. ‘You know how it is, Fin. Pathologists never give you a straight answer. And I’m not about to break with tradition.’ He sighed. ‘On the face of it, the MO is very similar. Both men attacked from behind, struck on the head, rendered unconscious and strangled. Both men stripped of their clothes and found hanging by the neck. Both men disembowelled. Yes, there are differences in the angle and depth of the wound. And our Angel’s killer was agitated to the point of throwing up over his victim. We don’t know if that happened in Edinburgh. There were no traces of vomitus on the body, and we never found the clothes. What we did find on that body, you’ll recall, were carpet fibres, suggesting that perhaps the victim had been murdered elsewhere and brought to Leith to be strung up for exhibition. There was certainly less blood in Edinburgh, which probably meant that some time had elapsed between the victim’s death and the disembowelling.’

The professor began the process of reassembling the carcass on the table in front of him. ‘The thing is, Fin, the circumstances and the setting are so very different, the detail is bound to be different, too. So the truth is, that without definitive evidence pointing one way or the other, it is impossible to say whether these killings were carried out by the same individual or not. Perhaps the ritualistic nature of the murders might lead you to think that they were, but on the other hand salient features of the Leith Walk murder were carried in some detail by several of the tabloids. So if someone had wanted to replicate the murder they could do so fairly easily.’

‘But why would somebody want to do that?’ Gunn said. He looked a little less green around the gills now.

‘I’m a pathologist, not a psychiatrist.’ The professor cast Gunn a withering look, before turning back to Fin. ‘I’ll take skin swabs, and we’ll see what, if anything, toxicology turns up. But don’t expect much in the way of further illumination.’

The Barvas road wound up out of Stornoway, leaving behind spectacular views towards Coll and Loch a Tuath and Point, sunlight coruscating across the bay, torn clouds chasing their own shadows over the deep, blue water. Ahead lay twelve miles of bleak moorland as the road straightened out and took them north-west towards the tiny settlement of Barvas on the west coast. It was a brooding landscape that in a moment of sunlight could be unexpectedly transformed. Fin knew the road well, in all seasons, and had never ceased to marvel at how the inter-minable acres of featureless peatbog could change by the month, the day, or even the minute. The dead straw colour of winter, the carpets of tiny white spring flowers, the dazzling purples of summer. To their right the sky had blackened, and rain was falling somewhere in the hinterland. To their left the sky was almost clear, summer sunlight falling across the land, and they could see in the distance the pale outline of the mountains of Harris. Fin had forgotten how big the sky was here.

Fin and Gunn drove in silence, thoughts filled by the images of clinical post-mortem carnage they had witnessed at the mortuary. There was no greater reminder of your own mortality than to witness another human being laid bare on a cold mortuary table.

At just about the halfway point, the road took a dip before rising again to a peak from which the Atlantic was distantly visible, venting its relentless anger on a crumbling coastline. In the hollow of the dip, about a hundred yards from the north side of the road, stood a small stone house with a brightly painted green tin roof. A shieling, once used by coastal crofters as a home during the summer, when they would move their beasts inland for better grazing. They were everywhere on the island. Most of them, like this one, had long since fallen into desuetude. Fin had seen the green-roofed shieling on the Barvas moor every Monday on his way to the school hostel in Stornoway. And again on the way back on the Friday. He had seen it in all weathers. And he had seen it often, as it was today, lit by the sun from the south, standing in vivid outline against the blackest of skies in the north. It was a landmark that almost every man, woman and child on the island would recognize. For Fin, however, it had a special significance, and the sight of it now filled him with a pain he had long since forgotten, or at least buried in a dark place he had no wish to revisit. But for as long as he was on the island, he knew that there were memories from his past he could not avoid. Memories which, like childish things, he had put away when he became a man nearly twenty years before.

The drive up the west coast was a trip that took him deeper into that past, and Fin sat silently in the passenger seat while Gunn drove. Long stretches of empty road linked bleak and exposed settlements huddled around churches of various denominations. The Church of Scotland. The United Free Church of Scotland. The Free Church of Scotland. The Free Church of Scotland Continuing — the Wee Frees, as the free churches were universally known. Each one was a division of the one before. Each one a testimony to the inability of man to agree with man. Each one a rallying point for hatred and distrust of the other. He watched the villages drift by, like moving images in an old family album, every building, every fencepost and blade of glass picked out in painfully sharp relief by the sun behind them. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere. Just an occasional car on the road, or at the odd village store, or filling station. The tiny village primary schools, too, were empty, still shut for the summer holidays. Fin wondered where all the children were. To their right, the peatbog drifted into a hazy infinity, punctuated only by stoic sheep standing firm against the Atlantic gales. To their left, the ocean itself swept in timeless cycles on to beaches and into rocky inlets, creamy white foam crashing over darkly obdurate gneiss, the oldest rock on earth. The outline of a tanker, like a distant mirage, was just discernible on the horizon.

At Cross, Fin saw that the tree which had once grown tall in the shelter of the Cross Inn had been cut down. A landmark gone. The only tree on the west coast. The village seemed naked without it. The Cross Free Church still dominated the skyline, dark granite towering over the harled and double-glazed homes of stubborn islanders determined to see off the elements. And occasionally their prayers were answered. For sometimes, on days like today, the wind took pity and the sky let the sun through to soften its razor edge. Hard lives rewarded with fleeting moments of pleasure.

Not far beyond the church the road peaked, and they had a view down towards the northernmost tip of the island. The gable ends of white-painted cottages caught the sunlight all along the eastern horizon, in between the ruins of old black-houses, textured stone in random patterns pushing up out of the turf. And Fin saw the familiar curve of the land dipping away to the village of Crobost on the cliff road, and the distinctive silhouette of a church built to show the people of Cross that the people of Crobost were just as devout.

The road took them down through Swainbost and Lionel to the tiny village of Port of Ness, past the single-track roads that turned off towards Crobost and Mealanais. There the road ended, and the cliffs formed a natural harbour at the the north-west end of half a mile of empty golden beach. Man had enhanced nature by building a breakwater and harbour wall. At one time trawlers and fishing boats had plied their trade in and out of the harbour. But nature had struck back, smashing down the breakwater at one end, where great chunks of semi-submerged rock and concrete had fought and failed to stand firm against the irresistible assault of the sea. The harbour was all but deserted now, used as a haven only by small fishing boats, crabbers and dinghies.

Gunn parked outside Ocean Villa opposite the harbour road. A black and yellow crime-scene tape whipped and snapped in the wind, stretched across the road to prevent public access. A uniformed officer, leaning against the wall of the Harbour View Gallery, hastily ditched his cigarette as he recognized Gunn getting out of the driver’s side. Some comedian had obliterated the s from the To the Shore sign pointing towards the harbour. Fin wondered if it was a comment on the succession of teenage girls who had lost their virginity over the years in the boatshed where, on Saturday, a fallen angel had died.

They stepped over the tape and followed the winding road down to the shelter of the quay. The tide was in, green water over yellow sand. A crabber and a group of dinghies were tied together at the inner wall, creels piled on the quay above them beside a tangle of green netting, and pink and yellow marker buoys. A larger boat, dragged up out of the water, was tilting at a dangerous angle in the sand.

The boatshed was much as Fin remembered it. Green corrugated-iron roof, white-painted walls. The right-hand side of it was open and exposed to the elements. Two window slits in the back wall opening out to the beach beyond. There were two large wooden doors on the left-hand side. One was shut, the other half-open, revealing a boat on a trailer inside. There was more crime-scene tape here. They stepped into the semi-dark of the closed-off half of the building. Angel’s blood still stained the floor, and the smell of death lingered with the diesel fumes and the salt water. The wooden cross-beam overhead revealed a deep groove cut by the rope where Angel’s murderer had hauled him up to hang there. The sounds of the sea and the wind were muted in here, but still a presence. Through the narrow window openings, Fin could see that the tide was just turning, seawater starting to recede over smooth wet sand.

Apart from the staining, the concrete floor was unnaturally clean, every scrap of debris carefully collected by men in Tyvek suits for scrupulous forensic examination. The walls were scarred with the graffiti of a generation. Murdo’s a poof; Anna loves Donald; and that old classic, Fuck the Pope. Fin found it almost unbearably depressing. He stepped outside and into the open half of the shed and took a deep breath. A crudely fashioned swing hung from the rafters, two strips of wood bound together with plastic orange rope to create the seat. The same orange rope which had been used to suspend Angel from the rafters next door. Fin became aware of Gunn at his shoulder. He said, without turning, ‘So have we any idea why someone might have wanted to kill him?’

‘He wasn’t short of enemies, Mr Macleod. You should know that. There’s a whole generation of men from Crobost who suffered at one time or another at the hands of Angel Macritchie or his brother.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Fin spat on the floor as if the memory brought a bitter taste to his mouth. ‘I was one of them.’ He turned and smiled. ‘Maybe you should be asking me where I was on Saturday night.’

Gunn cocked an eyebrow. ‘Maybe I should, Mr Macleod.’

‘Do you mind if we walk along the beach, George? It’s been a long time.’

The beach was bordered on the landward side by low, crumbling cliffs no more than thirty feet high, and at the far end the sand gave way to rocky outcrops that reached tentatively into the water, as if testing it for temperature. Odd groups of rock, clustered together at points in the bay, were always just visible above the breaking waves. Fin had spent hours on this beach as a boy, beachcombing, catching crabs in the rock pools, climbing the cliffs. Now he and Gunn left virgin tracks in the sand. ‘The thing is,’ Fin said, ‘being bullied at school twenty-five years ago is hardly a motive for murder.’

‘There were more people it seems, Mr Macleod, who bore him a grudge, than just those he bullied.’

‘What people, George?’

‘Well, for a start, we had two outstanding complaints against him on the books at Stornoway. One of assault, one of sexual assault. Both, in theory, still subject to ongoing inquiry.’

Fin was surprised only by the complaint of assault. ‘Unless he’d changed since I knew him, Angel Macritchie was always fighting. But these things were aye settled one way or another, with fists in the car park, or a pint in the bar. No one ever went to the police.’

‘Oh, this wasn’t a local. Not even an islander. And there’s no doubt that Angel gave him a doing. We just couldn’t get anyone to admit they saw it.’

‘What happened?’

‘Och, it was some bloody animal rights campaigner from Edinburgh. Chris Adams is his name. Campaigns Director of a group called Allies for Animals.’

Fin snorted. ‘What was he doing here? Protecting sheep from being molested after closing time on a Friday night?’

Gunn laughed. ‘It would take more than an animal rights campaigner to put an end to that, Mr Macleod.’ His smile faded. ‘No, he was here — still is — trying to put a stop to this year’s guga harvest.’

Fin whistled softly. ‘Jesus.’ It was something he hadn’t thought about in years. Guga was the Gaelic word for a young gannet, a bird that the men of Crobost harvested during a two-week trip every August to a rock fifty miles north-north-east of the tip of Lewis. An Sgeir, they called it. Simply, The Rock. Three hundred feet of storm-lashed cliffs rising out of the northern ocean. Encrusted every year at this time by nesting gannets and their chicks. It was one of the most important gannet colonies in the world, and men from Ness had been making an annual pilgrimage to it for more than four hundred years, crossing mountainous seas in open boats to bring back their catch. These days they went by trawler. Twelve men from the village of Crobost, the only remaining village in Ness to carry on the tradition. They lived rough on the rock for fourteen days, clambering over the cliffs in all weathers, risking life and limb to snare and kill the young birds in their nests. Originally, the trip was made out of necessity, to feed the villagers back home. Nowadays the guga was a delicacy, in great demand all over the island. But the catch was limited by Act of Parliament to only two thousand, a special dispensation written into the Protection of Birds Act, passed in the House of Commons in London in 1954. And so it was only by good luck, or good connections, that a family would get a taste of the guga now.

Fin could still recall with mouth-watering clarity the oily flavour of the flesh on his tongue. Pickled in salt, and then boiled, it had the texture of duck and the taste of fish. Some said it was an acquired taste, but Fin had grown up with it. It had been a seasonal treat. Two months before the men left for the rock, he would begin to anticipate the taste of it, just as he relished each year the rich flavour of the wild salmon during the poaching season. His father always managed to acquire a bird or two and the family would feast on them in the first week. There were those who would store them in kegs of salt water and ration them through the year. But stored like that, they became too gamey for Fin’s taste, and the salt would burn his mouth. He liked them fresh from the rock, served with potatoes and washed down with milk.

‘You ever tasted the guga?’ he said to Gunn.

‘Aye. My mother had Ness connections, and we usually managed to get a bird every year.’

‘So these Allies for Animals are trying to stop the trip?’

‘Aye, they are.’

‘Angel was a regular on the rock, wasn’t he?’ Fin remembered that the only time he had been among the twelve men of Crobost, it was already Angel’s second time there. The memory was like a shadow passing over him.

‘Regular as clockwork. He was the cook.’

‘So he wouldn’t take too kindly to someone trying to sabotage it.’

‘He didn’t.’ Gunn shook his head. ‘And neither did anyone else. Which is why we couldn’t find anyone who saw what happened.’

‘Did he do much damage?’

‘A lot of bruising about the body and face. A couple of broken ribs. Nothing too serious. But the boy’ll remember it for a while.’

‘So why’s he still here?’

‘Because he’s still hoping to stop the trawler from taking the men out to the rock. Mad bloody fool! There’s a bunch of activists arriving on the ferry tomorrow.’

‘When are they due to leave for An Sgeir?’ Just forming the words in his mouth sent a slight shiver through Fin’s body.

‘Sometime in the next day or two. Depending on the weather.’

They had reached the far end of the beach, and Fin started climbing up over the rock.

‘I’m not really wearing the right footwear for this, Mr Macleod.’ Gunn slid dangerously on slick black rock.

‘I know a way up to the top of the cliff from here,’ Fin said. ‘Come on, it’s easy.’

Gunn scrambled after him, almost on his hands and knees as they struggled up a narrow scree path that cut back on itself before leading to a series of natural, if uneven, steps that took them finally to the top. From here they could see across the machair to where the houses of Crobost nestled in the dip of the cliff road, gathered around the grim, dominating presence of the Free Church where Fin had spent so many cold and miserable childhood Sundays. The sky behind it was blackening for rain, and Fin could smell it on the wind, just as he had done as a child. He was exhilarated by the climb, and enjoyed the soft pummelling of the stiffening breeze, all thoughts of An Sgeir banished. Gunn was breathless, and concerned by the scuffs on his shiny black shoes. ‘Haven’t done that in a long time,’ Fin said.

‘I’m a townie, Mr Macleod.’ Gunn was gasping. ‘I’ve never done that.’

Fin smiled. ‘It’s good for you, George.’ He was feeling better than he had done in quite a while. ‘So, do you think your animal rights man murdered Angel Macritchie in revenge for his beating?’

‘No, I don’t. He’s not the type. He’s a bit …’ He searched for the right word. ‘Fey. You know what I mean?’ Fin nodded thoughtfully. ‘But I’ve been around long enough, Mr Macleod, to know that the most unlikely people sometimes commit the most terrible crimes.’

‘And he comes from Edinburgh.’ Fin was thoughtful. ‘Has anyone checked to see if he has an alibi for the Leith Walk murder?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Might be an idea. DNA evidence will rule him in or out of the Macritchie killing, but that’ll take a day or two. Maybe I should have a word with him.’

‘He’s at the Park Guest House in town, Mr Macleod. I don’t think Allies for Animals has the biggest of budgets. And DCI Smith has told him not to leave the island.’

They started walking across the machair towards the road, sheep scattering before them as they went. Fin raised his voice over the wind. ‘And sexual assault, you said. What was all that about?’

‘A sixteen-year-old girl accused him of rape.’

‘And did he rape her?’

Gunn shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s very difficult to get the proof you need to bring a charge in a lot of these cases.’

‘Well, it’s probably not an issue. Not in this case, anyway. I’d have said it was virtually impossible for a sixteen-year-old girl to have done to Macritchie what his killer did.’

‘Maybe so, Mr Macleod. But her father would have been more than capable.’

Fin stopped mid-stride. ‘Who’s her father?’

Gunn nodded towards the church in the distance. ‘The Reverend Donald Murray.’