The Blackhouse

FIVE

Fin walked up the single-track road towards the village with the wind blowing soft in his face. He glanced down the hill and saw the distant figure of Gunn heading back to Port of Ness to retrieve the car. He felt the first spots of rain, but the black sky overhead was breaking up already, and he thought that perhaps it wouldn’t come to anything.

It might have been August, but someone had a fire lit in their hearth. That rich, toasty, unmistakable smell of peat smoke carried to him on the breeze. It took him back twenty, thirty years. It was extraordinary, he thought, how much he had changed in that time, and how little things had changed in this place where he had grown up. He felt like a ghost haunting his own past, walking the streets of his childhood. He half expected to see himself and Artair coming around the bend in the road at the church, heading on their bikes for the store at the foot of the hill to spend their Saturday pennies. The cry of a child made him turn his head, and he saw two small boys playing on a makeshift swing next to a house on the rise above him. Clothes flapped on a drying line and, as he watched, a young woman came hurrying out of the house to gather them in before the rain came.

The church sat proud on the bend, looking out over the village below, and the land that fell away to the sea. The large metalled car park was new since Fin had last been here. In and Out gates were protected from sheep and their shit by cattle grids, and the tarmac was marked out with freshly painted white lines, worshippers guided to park their cars in orderly Christian rows. In Fin’s day, people had walked to church. Some of them from miles around, black coats blowing about their legs, free hands holding on to hats, the others clutching bibles.

Steps led up from the car park to the manse, a large two-storey house built in the days when the Church had expected its ministers to require three public rooms and five bedrooms, three for family, one for any visiting minister and one for use as a study. The manse had stunning views over the north end of the island, all the way across to the distant skyward-pointing finger of the lighthouse. It was also exposed to the wrath of God in the form of whatever weather might descend on it from the Heavens. Even the minister was not spared the Lewis weather.

Beyond the curve of the hill, the road rose higher again with the land, along the clifftops, and the rest of Crobost was strung out along it for nearly half a mile. Although he couldn’t see them from here, Fin knew that the bungalow where Artair used to live, and his parents’ croft, were only a few hundred yards away. But he was not sure that he was ready yet for that. He pushed open the gate beside the cattle grid and crossed the car park to the steps leading to the manse.

He knocked on the door several times and rang the bell, but there was no reply. He tried the door and it opened into a gloomy hallway. ‘Hello! Anyone home?’ He was greeted by silence. He closed the door again and looked across towards the church. It was still massively impressive, built of great blocks of stone hewn out of local rock. Flanked by two small turrets, a bell tower rose high above the arched doorway. There was no bell in it. Fin had never known there to be. Bells were frivolous. Perhaps they smacked of Catholicism. All the windows were arched, two above the main door, one on either side of it, and four down each of the flanks. Tall, plain windows. No colourful stained glass in this austere Calvinistic culture. No imagery. No crosses. No joy.

One half of the double doors was lying open and Fin walked into the hallway where the minister would greet the congregation coming in, and shake their hands on the way out. A cheerless place, with worn floorboards and dark, varnished wood. It smelled of dust and damp clothes and time. A smell, it seemed, that had not changed in thirty years. Evocative of those long Sabbath days when Fin’s parents had made him sit through an hour and a half of Gaelic psalm-singing and a fiery midday sermon, followed by another dose at six o’clock. In the afternoon he’d had to endure two hours of Sunday school in the hall at the back of the church. When he wasn’t at church, or at Sunday school, he would have to stay in the house while his father read from the Gaelic Bible.

Fin traced his childhood footsteps through the left-hand door and into the church itself, rows of unforgiving wooden pews flanking two aisles leading to the raised and railed area at the far end, from which sombre elders would lead the psalm-singing. The pulpit rose high above, an elaborately carved dais set into the wall and reached by curving staircases on either side. Its position of elevation placed the minister in his dominant position of authority over the mere mortals whom he berated each Sunday with threats of eternal damnation. Salvation was in their own hands, he would tell them week in and week out, if only they would put themselves in the hands of the Lord.

In his head, Fin could almost hear the singing of the Gaelic psalms. A strange, unaccompanied tribal chanting which could seem chaotic to the untrained ear. But there was something wonderfully affecting about it. Something of the land and the landscape, of the struggle for existence against overwhelming odds. Something of the people amongst whom he had grown up. Good people, most of them, finding something unique in themselves, in the way they sang their praise to the Lord, an expression of gratitude for hard lives in which they had found meaning. Just the memory of it brought him out in goose-pimples.

He heard a knocking sound that seemed to fill the church, rattling around the balconies that ringed three sides of it. Metal on metal. He looked about, puzzled, before realizing that it was coming from the radiators along each wall. The central heating was new. As was the double glazing in the tall windows. Perhaps the Sabbath was a little warmer today than it had been thirty years ago. Fin went back out to the entrance hall, and saw a door open at the far end. The banging was coming from somewhere beyond it.

The door gave on to what turned out to be the boiler room. A large oil-fired boiler stood with its door open, a protective cover removed to reveal its byzantine interior workings. Bits and pieces harvested from the interior were scattered around the concrete apron on which it stood. A toolbox lay open, and a man in blue overalls lay on his back trying to loosen the joint on an exiting pipe by banging on it with a large spanner.

‘Excuse me,’ Fin said. ‘I’m looking for the Reverend Donald Murray.’

The man in the overalls sat up, startled, and banged his head on the boiler door. ‘Shit!’ And Fin saw the dog collar underneath the overalls where they were open at the neck. He recognized the angular face below a mop of untidy sandy hair. There was grey in that hair now, and it was a little thinner. As was the face, which had somehow shed its boyish good looks and become mean, pinched in lines around the mouth and the eyes. ‘You’ve found him.’ The man squinted up at Fin, unable to see his face because of the light behind it. ‘Can I help?’

‘You could shake my hand for a start,’ Fin said. ‘That’s what old friends usually do, isn’t it?’

The Reverend Murray frowned and got to his feet, peering into the face of the stranger who knew him. And then the light of recognition dawned in his eyes. ‘Good God. Fin Macleod.’ And he grabbed Fin’s hand and shook it firmly, a smile splitting his face. And Fin saw in him again the boy he had known all those years before. ‘Man, it’s good to see you. Good to see you.’ And he meant it, but only for as long as it took other thoughts to crowd his mind and cloud his smile. And as the smile faded, he said, ‘It’s been a long time.’

Fin had found it hard to believe, when Gunn told him, that Donald Murray had succeeded his father as minister of Crobost Free Church. But he could not deny the evidence of his own eyes. Although that still did not make it any easier to believe. ‘About seventeen years. But even if it had been seventy I’d never have thought I’d see you in a dog collar, except maybe at a vicars and tarts party.’

Donald inclined his head a little. ‘God showed me the error of my ways.’

Ways, Fin recalled, which had taken him on a long diversion off the straight and narrow. Donald had gone to Glasgow at the same time as Fin. But while Fin had gone to university, Donald had got into the music promotion business, managing and promoting some of the most successful Glasgow bands of the eighties. But then things had started going wrong. Drink had become more important than work. The agency went to the wall. He got involved with drugs. Fin had met him at a party one night and Donald offered him cocaine. And a woman. Of course, he’d been smashed, and there was something dead in eyes that had once been so full of life. Fin heard later that after being arrested and fined for possession, Donald had left Scotland and headed south to London.

‘Caught the curàm then?’ Fin asked.

Donald wiped his oily hands on a rag, assiduously avoiding Fin’s eyes. ‘That’s not a term I care for.’

It was a condition so prevalent on the island that the Gaelic language had subverted a word to describe it. Curàm literally meant anxiety. But in the context of those who had been born again, it was used in the sense of something you might catch. Like a virus. And in a way, it was. A virus of the mind. ‘I’ve always thought it was very apposite,’ Fin said. ‘All that brainwashing as a kid, followed by violent rejection and a dissolute life. Drink. Drugs. Wild women.’ He paused. ‘Sound familiar? And then, I suppose, the fear and the guilt kick in, like belated indigestion, after all that early diet of hellfire and damnation.‘ Donald eyed him sullenly, refusing to be drawn. ‘That’s when they say that God talks to you, and you become very special to all those people who wish that God would talk to them, too. Is that how it was with you, Donald?’

‘I used to like you, Fin.’

‘I always liked you, Donald. From that first day you stopped Murdo Ruadh from punching my lights out.’ He wanted to ask him why he was throwing his life away like this. And yet he knew that Donald had already been engaged in the act of flushing it down the toilet with drink and drugs. Maybe this really was some kind of redemption. After all, not everyone harboured the same bitterness towards God as Fin. He relented. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Are you here for a reason?’ Donald was clearly not as ready to forgive as Fin was to apologize.

Fin smiled ruefully. ‘All those hours of study to get myself a place at university, and I threw it away.’ He gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘Ended up a cop. Now, that’s a turn-up for the book, isn’t it?’

‘I’d heard.’ Donald was guarded now. ‘And you still haven’t told me why you’re here.’

‘I’m investigating the murder of Angel Macritchie, Donald. They brought me in because he was killed in exactly the same way as a murder I’m investigating in Edinburgh.’

A smile flitted briefly across Donald’s face. A glimpse of his old self. ‘And you want to know if I did it.’

‘Did you?’

Donald laughed. ‘No.’

‘You once told me you were going to rip the fucking wings off Angel Macritchie.’

Donald’s smile vanished. ‘We’re in the house of God, Fin.’

‘And that should bother me, why?’

Donald looked at him for a moment, then turned away and crouched to start putting tools back in his box. ‘It was that atheist aunt of yours who turned you against the Lord, wasn’t it?’

Fin shook his head. ‘No. She’d have been pleased to have me be a happy heathen like her. But she got me too late. The damage was done. I was already infected. Once you’ve believed, it’s very hard to stop believing. I just stopped believing God was good, that’s all. And the only one responsible for that was God Himself.’ Donald swivelled to look at Fin, incomprehension in his frown. ‘The night he took my parents on the Barvas moor.’ Fin forced a smile. ‘Of course, I was just a kid then. These days, in my more rational moments, I know it’s all just crap, and that such things happen in life.’ And he added bitterly, ‘More than once.’ One more reason for resentment. ‘It’s only when I can’t shake off the feeling that maybe there really is a God, that I start getting angry again.’

Donald turned back to his tools. ‘You didn’t really come here to ask me if I killed Angel Macritchie, did you?’

‘You didn’t like him much.’

‘A lot of people didn’t like him much. That doesn’t mean they would kill him.’ He paused, balancing a hammer in his hand, feeling its weight. ‘But if you want to know how I feel about it, I don’t think he was any great loss to the world.’

‘That’s not very Christian of you,’ Fin said, and Donald dropped the hammer into the box. ‘Is it because of all the shit we took off him as kids, or because your daughter claimed that he raped her?’

Donald stood up. ‘He raped her alright.’ He was defensive, challenging Fin to contradict him.

‘That wouldn’t surprise me at all. Which is why I’d like to know what happened.’

Donald pushed past him and out into the hallway. ‘I imagine you’ll find everything you need to know in the police report.’

Fin turned after him. ‘I’d rather hear it from the horse’s mouth.’

Donald stopped in his tracks. He wheeled around and took a step back towards his old classmate. He was still a good three inches taller than Fin. Well over six feet, and well capable, Fin thought, of hoisting Macritchie’s eighteen stone on a length of rope to hang him by the neck from the rafters of the boatshed in Port of Ness. ‘I don’t want you, or anyone else, talking to her about it again. That man raped her, and the police treated her like she was a liar. As if rape isn’t humiliating enough.’

‘Donald, I’m not going to humiliate her, or accuse her of lying. I just want to hear her story.’

‘No.’

‘Look, I don’t want to force the issue, but this is a murder inquiry, and if I want to talk to her, I’ll talk to her.’

Fin saw a father’s anger in Donald’s eyes. It flared briefly, then some inner control dulled its flame. ‘She’s not here just now. She’s in town with her mother.’

‘I’ll come back, then. Maybe tomorrow.’

‘It might have been better, Fin, if you hadn’t come back at all.’

Fin felt the chill of a threat in Donald’s words, and in his tone, and found it hard to remember that this was the same boy who had stood up for him against bullies, and risked his own hide to come back and rescue him the night that Angel Macritchie had felled him outside Crobost Stores. ‘Why’s that? Because I might find out the truth? What’s anyone got to fear from the truth, Donald?’ Donald just glared at him. ‘You know, if Macritchie had raped my daughter, I’d probably have been tempted to take matters into my own hands myself.’

Donald shook his head. ‘I can’t believe you’d think me capable of something like that, Fin.’

‘All the same, I’d be interested to know where you were on Saturday night.’

‘Since your colleagues have already asked me that, I think you’ll probably find it’s a matter of record.’

‘I can’t tell when the record’s lying. With people, usually I can.’

‘I was where I always am on a Saturday night. At home writing my sermon for the Sabbath. My wife will vouch for me if you care to ask her.’ Donald walked to the door and held it open for Fin, signalling that their exchange was over. ‘In any case, it is not for me to deliver retribution to sinners. The Lord will deal with Angel Macritchie in his own way.’

‘Maybe he already has.’ Fin stepped out into the blustery afternoon as the rain began falling in earnest. Horizontally.

By the time Fin reached Gunn’s car idling in the car park, he was soaked. He dropped into the passenger seat with the rain clinging to his curls and running down his face and neck, and slammed the door shut. Gunn turned on the blower and glanced over at Fin. ‘Well?’

‘Tell me what happened the night the girl claimed Macritchie raped her.’

The cloud was shredded all across the sky as they drove back to Stornoway, ragged strips of blue and black and purple-grey. The road stretched straight ahead of them, rising to the horizon and a strip of light beneath the bruising where you could see the rain falling in sheets.

‘It happened about two months ago,’ Gunn said. ‘Donna Murray and a bunch of her pals were drinking at the Crobost Social.’

‘I thought you said she was only sixteen.’

Gunn sneaked him a look to see if he was joking. ‘You have been away a long time, Mr Macleod.’

‘It’s illegal, George.’

‘It was a Friday night, sir. The place would have been jumping. Some of the girls would have been over eighteen. And nobody’s paying that much attention anyway.’

Sunlight unexpectedly split the gloom, wipers smearing light with rain across the windscreen, a rainbow springing up out of the moor away to their left.

‘There was all the usual stuff going on between boys and girls. You know how it is when you mix alcohol with teenage hormones. Anyway, Macritchie was at his habitual place at the bar, sitting up on a stool, leaning in his elbow groove and casting a lascivious eye over all the young girls. Hard to believe he still had any hormones after the amount of beer he’d flushed through his system over the years.’ Gunn chuckled. ‘You saw the state of his liver.’ Fin nodded. Angel had been a big drinker, even as a teenager. ‘Anyway, for some reason young Donna seems to have caught his eye that night. And inexplicably, he seems to have thought she might find him attractive. So he offered to buy her a drink. I guess when she turned him down that might have been the end of it. But, then, apparently someone told him that she was Donald Murray’s girl, and that seemed to encourage him.’

Fin could imagine how putting his hands all over Donald Murray’s daughter might tickle Macritchie’s sick sense of irony, particularly if her father got to hear about it.

‘He spent the rest of the night badgering her, buying drinks that she wouldn’t touch, trying to put his arm around her, making lewd suggestions. Her friends all thought it was a great laugh. Nobody saw Macritchie as a real threat. Just some drunken old fart in the bar. But Donna got really pissed off. He was ruining her night out, so she decided she was going home. Flounced out in a right tid, according to her pals. Most people didn’t notice it, but about a minute later the barmaid saw Macritchie slipping off his stool and heading out after her. This is where different accounts start to conflict.’

Their car passed a bunch of teenage girls huddled in a concrete bus shelter at South Dell. They were peculiar to Lewis, these constructions, flat-roofed, with four open compartments that would provide shelter regardless of the direction of the wind. Fin remembered that they used to call them giants’ picnic tables. The youngsters looked about Donna’s age, waiting for a bus to take them into Stornoway for a night out. Alcohol and teenage hormones. Fin felt certain that these girls had no idea just how dangerous a cocktail that could be. Smiles on pale faces that flew past rain-streaked windows. Lives headed on a course that none of them could predict but which were, at the same time, utterly predictable.

‘It was about thirty-five minutes from the time Donna left the Social till the time she got home,’ Gunn said.

Fin exhaled through pursed lips. ‘It would take about ten minutes at the most.’

‘Seven. We got a policewoman to time it.’

‘So what happened during the missing half-hour?’

‘Well, according to Donna, Macritchie sexually assaulted her. Her words. She was dishevelled when she got back to the house. Which was the word her father used. Red-faced, make-up all smeared, blubbing like a baby. He called the police, and she was taken to Stornoway for questioning and examination by the police surgeon. That was when she used the word rape for the first time. So between Ness and Stornoway it had changed from sexual assault to rape. Of course, as we always do, we had to establish the exact nature of the assault. When we started getting into detail, the girl got hysterical. But, yes, she confirmed, Macritchie forced her to the ground and put his penis inside her vagina. No, she had not consented. Yes, she was a virgin. Or had been.’ Gun glanced uneasily at Fin. ‘But I have to be honest with you, Mr Macleod, there was no blood on her, or her clothes, and there was no outward indication that she had been forced to the ground on a wet night. There was no bruising visible on her arms, her clothes did not appear to be wet or dirty.’

Fin was puzzled. ‘What did the medical examination show?’

‘Well, that’s just it, Mr Macleod, she wouldn’t submit to a medical examination. Point-blank refused. Said it would be too humiliating. We told her that it was unlikely that charges could be brought against Macritchie unless we had physical, or witness, evidence. As it turned out, the only witness we could find outside the Social said that Macritchie had headed off in the opposite direction from Donna. And since she refused a medical examination …’

‘What did her father say?’

‘Oh, he backed her all the way. Said that if she didn’t want to be examined by a doctor then that was her right. We explained the position to him, but there was no way he was going to try to persuade her to do it if she didn’t want to.’

‘What was his demeanour through all this?’

‘I’d say he was angry, Mr Macleod. Kind of tight, balled-fist angry, you know, pent up inside. He seemed calm enough on the exterior. Too calm. Like water in a dam before they open the sluice gates.’ Gunn sighed. ‘In any event, the investigating officers questioned just about everybody who was at the Social Club that night, but there was no one who could corroborate Donna’s story. In theory, the case remains open, but in fact the investigation was shelved.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course, shit sticks. There was rumour, and gossip, and a lot of people were convinced that Macritchie raped the girl.’

‘Do you think he did?’

Scraps of water, tiny lochan lying in fragmented pools across the moor, glinted a cold blue in the sunlight. The rain had blown over, clearing the sky to the south. Siadar lay behind them, and the white cottages of Barvas as they approached it caught the western sun slanting across the land, lighting the gentle slopes of the southern mountains in the far distance.

‘I’d like to say I did, Mr Macleod. From everything I know about the man he seems to have been a bad bastard. But, you know, there was no evidence.’

‘I didn’t ask you about the evidence, George. I asked you what you thought.’

Gunn held the wheel firmly in both hands. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I think, Mr Macleod, as long as you don’t quote me on it.’ He hesitated just for a moment. ‘I think that girl was lying through her teeth.’

The Park Guest House stood in a terrace of sandstone houses opposite what was now the Caladh Inn — dark, rain-streaked stone brooding behind black-painted wrought-iron fencing. It was home to one of the better restaurants in town, a conservatory built on to the dining room to make the most of the summer light. Around the solstice, it was possible to eat at midnight with the sun still streaking the sky pink.

Reluctantly, Chris Adams led Fin up to his small single-bedded room on the first floor, after Fin told him that the guest sitting room on the ground floor was not an appropriate place for them to talk. The floorboards creaked like wet snow underfoot. Fin noticed that Adams held himself stiffly, and appeared to be in some discomfort as he climbed the stairs. He was English, which Fin had not expected, betrayed by a creamy Home Counties accent. He was around thirty years old, tall and thin, with very blond hair. And for someone who apparently spent much of his time outdoors in the pursuit of animal welfare, he had an unhealthily pale complexion. The ivory skin was marred, however, by yellowing bruising around the left eye and cheekbone. He wore baggy corduroy trousers and a sweatshirt with a slogan about not being able to eat money. His fingers were unusually long, almost feminine.

He held the door open for Fin to enter his room, and then cleared a fold-up chair of clothes and paperwork to allow him to sit. The bedroom appeared to have been at the centre of a paper explosion in which a thousand bits of paper and Blu-Tack had stuck to the walls. Maps, memos, newspaper cuttings, Postits. Fin was not certain how pleased the proprietor would be. The bed was strewn with books and ring-binder folders and notebooks. A laptop computer on the chest of drawers in the window shared its space with more paperwork, empty plastic cups, and the remains of a Chinese carry-out. Adams’s outlook was across James Street to the grim glass and concrete edifice that used to be the Seaforth.

‘I’ve already given you people more time than you deserve,’ he complained. ‘You do nothing to apprehend the man who beat me up, then accuse me of murdering him when he turns up dead.’ His mobile phone rang. ‘Excuse me.’ He answered it and told his caller that he was busy right now and would call back. Then he looked expectantly at Fin. ‘Well? What do you want to know now?’

‘I want to know where you were on Friday, May the twenty-fifth this year.’

Which caught Adams completely off-balance. ‘Why?’

‘Just tell me where you were, Mr Adams, please.’

‘Well, I have no idea. I’d need to check my diary.’

‘Then do it.’

Adams looked at Fin with a clear mixture of consternation and irritation. He tutted audibly, and sat on the end of his bed, making his long fingers dance flamboyantly across the keyboard of his laptop. The screen flickered to life and flashed up a diary page. It jumped from a daily to a monthly layout, and Adams scrolled back from August to May. ‘May twenty-fifth I was in Edinburgh. We had a meeting at the office that afternoon with the local representative of the RSPCA.’

‘Where were you that night?’

‘I don’t know. At home probably. I don’t keep a social diary.’

‘I’ll need you to confirm that for me. Is there anyone who can corroborate?’

A deep sigh. ‘I suppose Roger might know. He’s my flatmate.’

‘Then I suggest you ask him and get back to me.’

‘What on earth is all this about, Mr Macleod?’

Fin ignored the question. ‘Does the name John Sievewright mean anything to you?’

Adams did not even stop to think about it. ‘No, it does not. Are you going to tell me what this is about?’

‘In the early hours of May twenty-sixth this year, a thirty-three-year-old Edinburgh conveyancing lawyer called John Sievewright was found hanging from a tree in a street near the foot of Leith Walk. He had been strangled, stripped and disembowelled. As you know, just three days ago, one Angus John Macritchie suffered almost exactly the same fate right here on the Isle of Lewis.’

A tiny explosion of air escaped from the back of Adams’s throat. ‘And you want to know if I’m going around Scotland disembowelling people? Me? That’s laughable, Mr Macleod. Laughable.’

‘Do you see me laughing, Mr Adams?’

Adams gazed at Fin in studied disbelief. ‘I’ll ask Roger what we were doing that night. He’ll know. He’s better organized than I am. Is there anything else?’

‘Yes, I want you to tell me why Angel Macritchie beat you up.’

‘Angel? Is that what you call him? I imagine he’ll have flown off to Hell by now rather than Heaven.’ He frowned. ‘I’ve already made an official statement.’

‘Not to me you haven’t.’

‘Well, there’s not much point in investigating the assault now, since the perpetrator is beyond even your reach.’

‘Just tell me what happened.’ Fin controlled his impatience, but something in his tone clearly communicated itself to Adams, who sighed again, this time even more theatrically.

‘One of your local newspapers, The Hebridean, carried a story about how I was on the island to organize a demonstration to try to prevent the annual guga cull on An Sgeir. They kill two thousand birds a year, you know. Just slaughter them. Clambering about the cliffs strangling the poor little things while the adults are flying frantically overhead crying for their dead chicks. It’s brutal. Inhumane. It may be a tradition, but it just isn’t right in a civilized country in the twenty-first century.’

‘If we could skip the lecture and just stick to the facts …’

‘I suppose, like everyone else in this Godforsaken place, you’re in favour of it. You know, that’s one thing I hadn’t expected. Not a single person on the island has offered me one word of support. And I had hoped to rally local opposition to swell our numbers.’

‘People enjoy their taste of the guga. And it may seem barbaric to you, but the method they use to kill the birds is almost instantaneous.’

‘Sticks with nooses on the end, and clubs?’ Adams curled his lips in distaste.

‘They’re very effective.’

‘And you would know.’

‘Actually, I would. I’ve done it.’

Adams looked at him as if there were a foul taste in his mouth. ‘Then there’s no point even discussing it with you.’

‘Good. So could we get back to the assault, please?’

Adams’s mobile rang again. He answered. ‘Adams … Oh, it’s you.’ He lowered his voice to something like intimacy. ‘You’re in Ullapool? Good. What time does the ferry get in …? Okay I’ll meet you at the ferry terminal.’ He glanced self-consciously at Fin. ‘Look, I’ll call you back a little later. I’ve got the police here … Yes, again.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Alright. Ciao.’ He dropped the phone on the bed. ‘Sorry about that.’ But he wasn’t.

‘Is that your protesters arriving?’

‘Yes, if you must know. It’s not a secret.’

‘How many?’

‘There’ll be twelve of us. One for each member of the killing crew.’

‘What are you going to do? Lie down in front of the trawler?’

‘That’s very amusing, Mr Macleod.’ He curled his lips in mock amusement. ‘I know we can’t stop them. Not this year, anyway. But we can influence public opinion. There’ll be press and television on hand. We’ll get nationwide coverage. And if we can persuade the Scottish Executive to withdraw their licence, then it’ll become illegal. And people like you simply won’t be allowed to go out there and kill those poor birds.’

‘And you said all this in the piece in The Hebridean?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘That’ll have made you popular.’

‘My mistake was in allowing them to carry a photograph of me. It meant I lost my anonymity.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I went out to Ness on a recce. Apparently the trawler leaves from Stornoway, but the Crobost men go out to meet her in a small boat from the Port of Ness. I wanted to get some photographs of the area, for reference as much as anything else. I suppose I might have been a little indiscreet. I had lunch at the Cross Inn and someone recognized me from the piece in the paper. I’m not used to language like that, Mr Macleod.’

Fin restrained the urge to smile. ‘Did you talk to anyone up there?’

‘Well, I got lost a couple of times and had to ask the way. The last person I spoke to before I was attacked was at a small pottery just outside Crobost. A strange, hairy sort of man. I’m not sure he was entirely sober. I asked him where I could find the road to the harbour. And he told me. I went back out to my car, which was only about twenty yards away down the road. That’s when it happened.’

‘What, exactly?’

Adams shifted slightly on the bed and winced. Whether from the memory or from the pain, Fin could not tell. ‘A white van overtook me. A Transit van. Something like that. Funnily enough, I’d noticed it a couple of times earlier in the day. I suppose he must have been following me, awaiting his moment. Anyway, the van pulled over in front of me, and a large man whom I later identified as Angus Macritchie jumped out from the driver’s side. The odd thing was, I had the impression there were others in the van. But I never saw anybody else.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘Not a word. Not then, anyway. He just started punching me. I was so surprised I didn’t even have time to try to get out of the way. I think it was after the second punch that my knees just sort of gave way under me, and I went down like a house of cards. And then he started kicking me in the ribs and the stomach. I curled up to try to protect myself, and he got me a couple of times on my forearms.’ He pulled up his sleeves to show the bruising. ‘Nice people your bird killers.’

Fin knew how it felt to be on the receiving end of a beating from Angel Macritchie. It wasn’t something he would wish on anyone, even someone as naive as Chris Adams. ‘Macritchie wasn’t typical of the men of Crobost. And it might surprise you to know that he didn’t go out to the rock to kill birds. He was the cook.’

‘Oh, well, that’s a comfort to me, I’m sure.’ Adams’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

Fin ignored it. ‘What happened then?’

‘He bent down and whispered in my ear that if I didn’t pack up my bags and go he was going to stuff a whole guga down my throat. Then he got back into his van and drove off.’

‘And you got the number?’

‘Amazingly, I did. I don’t know how I had the presence of mind, but yes, I made certain I committed that number to memory.’

‘What about witnesses?’

‘Well, there were several houses around. How people can claim they didn’t see anything, I don’t know. I saw curtains twitching in the windows. And then there was the chap from the pottery. He came down and got me to my feet and took me into his house to give me a drink of water. He said he didn’t see a thing, but I don’t believe him. I insisted he call the police, and he did. But very reluctantly, I have to tell you.’

‘So if Macritchie threatened to stuff a guga down your throat, Mr Adams, why were you still here on Saturday night?’

‘Because I couldn’t get a booking on the ferry till Monday. Then, of course, someone with exquisitely good taste went and killed him, and now your people won’t let me leave.’

‘About which, I’m assuming, you have no complaints. Since you’re able to go ahead with your protest after all.’

‘With two broken ribs, Mr Macleod, I think I have plenty to complain about. And if the police had done their job a little better, your Mr Macritchie would probably have been alive today. Languishing in a police cell, rather than murdered in a boatshed.’

Which, Fin thought, was probably true. ‘Where were you on Saturday night, Mr Adams?’

‘Right here in my room, with a fish supper. And, no, unfortunately there isn’t anyone who can confirm that, as your people have gleefully reminded me more than once.’

Fin nodded thoughtfully. Perhaps Adams might, physically, have been capable of doing the deed. In normal circumstances. Just. But with two broken ribs? Fin thought not. ‘You like fish, Mr Adams?’

Adams seemed surprised by the question. ‘I don’t eat meat.’

Fin got to his feet. ‘Have you any idea how long it takes a fish to die, starved of oxygen, literally suffocating, when a trawler hauls its nets on board?’ But he wasn’t waiting for an answer. ‘A damned sight longer than a guga in a noose.’

The incident room had been established in a large conference room at the far end of the first-floor corridor of Stornoway police station. Two windows looked out over Kenneth Street and the roofs of houses stepping steeply down to the inner harbour below. Beyond the masts of trawlers tied up for the night, the towers of Lews Castle were just visible above the trees on the far side of the water. Desks and tables were pushed up against walls, carefully trunked cabling feeding telephones and computer terminals and chattering printers. Graphic crime-scene photographs were pinned to one wall, copious notes scribbled on a whiteboard with blue felt pen. A projector sat humming quietly on a small table.

There had been nearly a dozen officers at work, taking phone calls, tapping computer keyboards, when Fin sat down at one of the four HOLMES terminals to bring himself up to date. Not only on the Macritchie murder, but also on the rape and assault claims made against him. In addition he had been able to access all the files on the murder of John Sievewright, refreshing his memory on the dozens of statements which had been taken, and on the forensic and pathology reports. But he was tired now, uncertain how clearly he was thinking. The number of officers in the incident room had dwindled to three. It had been a long day, following a sleepless night. He thought for the first time about Mona. Her threat. Just don’t expect me to be here when you get back. And his response. Maybe that would be best. In those two brief exchanges, they had effectively brought their relationship to an end. Neither of them had planned it. And doubtless there would be regrets, most of them for the fourteen wasted years of their marriage. But there had also been an enormous sense of relief. A weight of silent unhappiness lifted from Fin’s shoulders, even though it had been replaced almost immediately by the uncertainty of an unpredictable future. A future he did not want to contemplate right now.

‘How’s it going, sir?’ Gunn wheeled up alongside him on a typist’s chair.

Fin leaned back in his seat and rubbed his eyes. ‘Downhill at a rapid rate of knots, George. I think I’m going to call it a day.’

‘I’ll walk you over to your hotel, then. Your bag’s still in the boot of my car.’

They walked together past the armoury and the area admin office, pale yellow walls, pastel purple carpet. On the stairs they bumped into DCI Smith. ‘Good of you to report back after the autopsy,’ he said.

‘Nothing to report.’ Fin paused, and then added, ‘Sir.’ He had long ago discovered that dumb insolence was the only way to deal with sarcasm from senior officers.

‘I had a verbal from the pathologist. Seems there are quite a few parallels with Edinburgh.’ He had moved past them on the stairs so that he could make up for his lack of height by being on the step above.

‘Inconclusive,’ Fin said.

Smith looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Well, you’d better have some conclusions for me by close of play tomorrow, Macleod. Because I don’t want you here any longer than necessary. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Fin turned away. But Smith wasn’t finished. ‘HOLMES has come up with another possible connection. I want you to go with DS Gunn first thing tomorrow to check it out. Gunn’ll fill you in.’ And he turned and took the stairs two at a time to the top landing without looking back. Fin and Gunn carried on down to the ground floor.

Fin said, ‘So if he’s sending us two, I guess that means he doesn’t attach too much importance to it.’

Gunn smiled wryly. ‘Your words, Mr Macleod, not mine.’

‘Is there an Edinburgh link?’

‘Not that I can see.’

‘So what’s the story?’

Gunn held the door open for Fin, and they headed up steps past the charge bar to the rear entrance. Early evening sunlight cast long shadows across the car park. ‘Macritchie got done for poaching about six months ago. On a big estate down in the south-west of the island. Owned by an Englishman. They charge a bloody fortune down there for the salmon fishing, so the owner’s keen to protect the river from poachers. Just over a year ago he brought in some heavyweight from London. Ex-army. You know the type. A thug, really. Knows bugger all about the fishing, but if he catches you at it, boy you’ll know all about it.’

They retrieved Fin’s bag from the boot. ‘And he caught Macritchie at it?’

Gunn slammed the boot shut, and they headed down the road towards the harbour. ‘He did that, Mr Macleod. And a few things besides. Macritchie was a bit the worse for wear by the time he ended up in our hands. But he wasn’t going to complain about it. Loss of face, you know, to admit that somebody gave him a doing. Macritchie might have been a big lad, but this London boy was a pro. And it doesn’t matter how big you are, you don’t stand much chance against those fellas.’

‘So what’s the connection here?’ Fin liked the idea of someone giving Macritchie a doing, but he couldn’t see where Gunn’s story was leading.

‘About three weeks ago, the boy from London got jumped one night on the estate. There was a bunch of them, masks, the lot. He took a hell of a beating.’

They passed the charity shop on the corner of Kenneth Street and Church Street. A notice in the window read, World Fair Trade — Trade not Aid. ‘So the computer, in its wisdom, thinks Macritchie might have been getting in a wee bit of revenge. And, what? That this ex-army boy finds out and goes and murders him?’

‘I guess that’s about the size of it, Mr Macleod.’

‘So Smith saw that as a good excuse for getting you and me out of his hair for a while.’

‘It’s a nice run down to the south-west. Do you know Uig, Mr Macleod?’

‘I know it well, George. We picnicked down there often in the summer. My father and I used to fly a kite on Uig beach.’ He remembered the miles of dead flat sand that stretched away between tendrils of rock to the distant breakers. And the wind that took their home-made box kite soaring into the blue, whipping the hair back from their faces, tugging at their clothes. And the smile that creased his father’s face, blue eyes shining in startling contrast to his deep summer tan. And he remembered, too, his disappointment if the tide was in, so that all those acres of sand lay under two feet of turquoise sea and they had to sit among the doons eating sandwiches.

High tide had pushed into the inner harbour, and the boats tied up along Cromwell Street Quay towered over them as Fin and Gunn headed south towards North Beach Quay, past a forest of masts and radar grilles and satellite pods. Stornoway extended along a spit of land that separated the inner harbour from the deep-water piers of the outer harbour where the ferry and the oil tankers docked. The Crown Hotel, where Fin had been booked a room, occupied a prime site on the spit, between Point Street and North Beach, overlooking the inner harbour and Lews Castle. Not much, to Fin’s eye, appeared to have changed. A few commercial premises under new ownership, some freshly painted shop fronts. The hat shop was still there, its window full of bizarre creations that women pinned to their heads on the Sabbath. Hats, like the burka, were obligatory headwear on Lewis for churchgoing women. The clock tower on the town hall could be seen above the steeply pitched slate roofs and dormer windows. The two men skirted piles of lobster creels, and great heaps of tangled green fishing net. Skippers and crew were offloading supplies from vans and four-by-fours on to trawlers and small fishing boats, today not yet over before preparations were being made for tomorrow. And overhead the gulls wheeled endlessly, scraps of white against a clear blue sky, catching the last flashes of sunlight and calling plaintively to the gods.

On Point Street they stopped outside the entrance to the Crown. Fin looked along the length of this pedestrianized street with its ornamental flowerbeds and wrought-iron benches. Known to the locals as The Narrows, Point Street on a Friday and Saturday night would be thick with teenagers gathering in groups and cliques, drinking beer from cans, smoking dope, feasting on fish suppers and burgers from the fish and chip shop. In the absence of any other form of entertainment, this was where the kids made their own. Fin had spent many a night here, squeezed in shop doorways with his schoolfriends sheltering from the rain, waiting for some of the older boys to show up with a carryout. It had seemed exciting then, full of possibilities. Girls, drink, perhaps a puff on someone’s joint. If you were still there at closing time, there was a good chance of seeing a fight. Or two. If you were lucky, you had heard about a party somewhere and were long gone. Each generation followed in the footsteps of the last, like the ghosts of their fathers. And mothers. Right now The Narrows were all but deserted.

Gunn handed Fin his bag. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Mr Macleod.’

‘Come on, I’ll buy you a drink, George.’

Gunn looked at his watch. ‘Just the one, then.’

Fin signed in and dropped his bag in his room. Gunn had two pints waiting for them on the bar when he came back down. The lounge bar was almost deserted at this hour, but they could hear the thump of music from the public bar below and the loud thrum of voices as thirsty fishermen and construction workers from the reopened yard at Arnish took their reward for a hard day’s work. There was a plaque here commemorating the scandal of an underage Prince of Wales ordering a cherry brandy on a stopover during a sailing tour of the Western Isles with his school. The fourteen-year-old Charles had subsequently been smuggled away by car, back to his school at Gordonstoun on the mainland. How times had changed.

‘Did you manage to get through all the files?’ Gunn said.

‘Most of them.’ The beer was cold and refreshing, and Fin took a long pull at his pint.

‘Find anything interesting?’

‘Actually, yes. The witness who said he’d seen Angel Macritchie heading off in the opposite direction from Donna Murray the night she claimed he raped her …’

Gunn frowned. ‘Eachan Stewart. What about him?’

‘You weren’t directly involved in the Adams assault case, then?’

‘No, I wasn’t. That was DS Fraser.’

‘Well, I guess we can’t expect HOLMES to make all the connections. Do you know Eachan Stewart?’

‘Aye, he’s an eccentric old dopehead. Got a pottery just outside of Crobost. Been there for years. Selling his pots to the summer tourists ever since I can remember.’

‘Since I was a kid,’ Fin said. ‘It was outside Eachan Stewart’s pottery that Chris Adams got beaten up by Macritchie. Stewart was talking to him a minute before the attack, and picked him off the road a minute after it. Yet he claims to have seen nothing. Very convenient for Macritchie to have the same cast-iron witness in his favour at both events. Was there some connection between these two?’

Gunn thought about it. ‘It’s possible, I suppose, that Macritchie was supplying Stewart with dope. We’d suspected him of dealing for some time, but never caught him at it.’

‘I think maybe I’ll have a word with our Mr Stewart tomorrow.’ Fin took another long draught of his beer. ‘George, you said this afternoon that there were other people who bore Macritchie a grudge, other than those he’d bullied as a kid.’

‘Aye, according to his brother. But it’s just hearsay.’

‘Murdo Ruadh?’ Gunn nodded. ‘What’s he been hearsaying?’

‘I don’t know how much credence to give it, Mr Macleod, but Murdo seems to think there was some kind of feud between his brother and a boy he was at school with. A fella called Calum Macdonald. Apparently he was crippled in an accident years ago and works a loom in a shed behind his house. I’ve no idea what it was that happened between them.’

Fin laid his pint carefully on the bar. He felt sick just remembering. ‘I do.’ And Gunn waited for an explanation which never came. Eventually Fin seemed to snap out of his trance. ‘Even if he wasn’t crippled …’ Fin remembered the look on the boy’s face as he fell, ‘… I doubt if Calum Macdonald would have been capable of inflicting that kind of damage on anyone.’

‘Murdo thinks this Calum Macdonald could have put someone else up to it.’

Fin flashed him a look, wondering if that was possible, if Calum would have been capable even of the thought. But why, after all this time? ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, finally.

Again, Gunn waited for an explanation, but it quickly became clear to him that Fin did not intend to elucidate. He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better be going.’ He drained his glass and pulled on his jacket. ‘By the way, how did you get on with Adams?’

Fin paused for a moment, conjuring in his mind a vivid image of the tall, languid animal rights campaigner. ‘It’s interesting, I’d kind of figured a man with two broken ribs wouldn’t have been up to dealing with Macritchie. But, then, it occurred to me there was a connection I was missing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Adams is gay.’

Gunn shrugged. ‘Well, that hardly comes as a surprise, Mr Macleod.’ Then he was struck by a thought that drew a frown. ‘You’re not telling me Macritchie was gay?’

‘No, but the Edinburgh victim, John Sievewright, was.’