The Chessmen

CHAPTER TEN

Evening was wearing on by the time Fin got back to Ness. Having failed to find Whistler, the worry of his disappearance was starting to gnaw at him.

The lull in the wake of the storm was over. The sunshine respite of this single day was already spent, and legions of dark clouds were assembling out on the western horizon, where the last dazzle of the dying sun spilled its gold on distant waters. A gale was getting up, blowing through the heather like wind on water.

He turned his Suzuki off the main road at the Crobost Stores, and climbed the hill towards the bend in the road. The land fell away to his left, to the cliffs that dropped to the crescent of beach below. The Crobost Free Church rose darkly against the sky to his right, stark and unadorned. As he reached the turn-off to it, he could see Marsaili’s car on the road ahead, parked on the gravel above the bungalow. He had called her to let her know that he was all right, but she knew nothing of the discovery of the plane. That could wait.

He took the turn up towards the church instead, and rattled over the cattle grid into a parking area where neatly painted white lines guided the faithful into orderly rows like so many drive-in pews. There was a solitary car parked at the foot of the steps leading up to the manse, and he saw Donald’s wife making her way down towards it bumping a large case from step to step.

She wore jeans and a knitted jumper, her coat hanging open, a satchel dangling from her shoulder. She reached the foot of the steps as Fin drew in beside her car. Her glance towards him was fleeting, a flick of auburn hair to get it out of her face, and she turned to open up the boot. By the time Fin got around to the back of her car she already had the suitcase inside it. Her face was flushed from the exertion, and perhaps embarrassment. She was reluctant to meet Fin’s eye.

‘Going somewhere, Catriona?’

She brushed past him and walked around to the driver’s door. She opened it, and turned to face him with something like defiance in her stance. ‘I’m moving in with my parents.’ And then added, like an afterthought that might bring mitigation, ‘Until all this gets sorted out.’

Fin frowned disingenuously. ‘All what?’

‘Oh, come on! You know perfectly well.’

‘Maybe you should tell me.’ He was playing quite deliberately on her guilt.

‘You have no idea how humiliating this is.’

Fin said, ‘You’re humiliated because your husband’s in trouble for saving your daughter’s life?’

She gave him a look so filled with pain and anger that he almost recoiled from it. ‘There is another minister preaching in our church. They let us stay in the manse, but we’re like lepers. No one comes near. No one wants to be seen talking to us. There are those who want Donald gone. And those who don’t are too frightened to stand up and say so.’

‘All the more reason, then, for you to stand by him. For better or worse. Isn’t that the vow you made when you married him?’

Her lip curled with contempt. ‘You hypocrite! You stand there and judge me? A man who walked out on his wife a month after his son died in a hit-and-run. The very time she probably needed him most. What about your vows?’

Fin felt the colour rise on his face, just as if she had slapped him on both cheeks. He saw, perhaps, regret in her eyes at hurtful words spoken in anger. But it was too late to take them back. She slipped into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut.

The engine coughed into the fading evening light, and Catriona’s car clattered away across the cattle grid. Fin watched it go, and depression descended on him like the night.

He stood for a long time, then, before climbing the steps wearily to the manse. There was no response to his knocking on the door. He opened it and called Donald’s name, but the house was in darkness. He looked down across the car park and saw in the twilight that one half of the church doors stood open.

It was very nearly dark inside, but he saw Donald sitting at the end of the front pew, staring at the pulpit from which he had so often preached to the converted, exhorting them to greater faith and sacrifice. From the outside, Fin could hear how the wind was whipping up its anger, but here, in the body of the kirk, it was unnaturally still, haunted by the ghosts of guilt and despair.

He sat down beside Donald without a word, and the minister cast him a silent glance before returning to contemplate the emptiness in his heart. Finally Donald said, ‘She’s moving out.’

‘I know.’

Donald turned towards him, surprised.

‘I saw her in the car park.’

Disappointment settled on Donald like snow. Perhaps he had hoped she might have a change of heart. ‘She’s gone, then?’

Fin nodded. And they sat without a word passing between them for five minutes or more. Then Fin broke their silence. ‘What happened to us, Donald?’ He thought about his own question. ‘I mean, all that hope and expectation. When we were just kids and life was nothing but potential. Everything we wanted to be, everything we could have been.’ And he added quickly, before Donald could speak, ‘And don’t talk to me about God’s grand plan. It’ll only make me more pissed off with Him than I already am.’

He was aware of Donald’s head dropping a little.

‘Remember that beach party we had the summer before we left for university? On that wee island somewhere off the coast of Great Bearnaraigh.’ It had seemed idyllic. Camp-fires and barbecues on the beach, drinking beer and smoking dope beneath a firmament filled with bright stars shining like the hopes they’d all had for themselves. ‘Our whole lives ahead of us, and nothing to lose but our virginity.’

Donald turned a wry smile in his direction. ‘Some of us had already lost that, Fin.’

And Fin smiled, remembering how gauche he had been that night, making love for the first time to Marsaili, only to discover that Donald had already taken her virginity. His smile faded. ‘And look at us now. Trapped in this narrow corner of the world. Nursing our pain and our guilt. We look back with disappointment, and forward with fear.’ He turned towards Donald. ‘Does none of this test your faith, Donald?’

Donald shrugged. ‘It is the nature of faith that it is constantly being tested. Complacency means taking it for granted. And if you do that, you lose touch with God.’

Fin blew contempt through pursed lips. ‘Too easy.’

Donald leaned forward, his arms folded across his thighs and swung his head slowly towards him. ‘Nothing easy about it, Fin. Believe me, there is nothing simple or easy about faith when your life is turning to shit.’

‘So why do you bother?’

Donald thought about it for a long time. Then he said, ‘Maybe it’s the feeling that you’re never alone.’ He met Fin’s eye. ‘But you won’t know what that’s like, Fin. Being always alone with your grief and your hatred.’

And for the second time that night Fin felt a knowing mind reach into his soul to touch the rawness there. He said, ‘Have you heard about the plane?’

‘What plane?’

‘Roddy’s plane. The Piper Comanche. You remember? Call-sign G-RUAI.’

Donald sat up, then, frowning. ‘It’s been found?’

‘It has.’

‘How? Where?’

‘At the bottom of a loch in Uig.’

Wrinkles creased around Donald’s eyes in incredulity. ‘How in the name of God did it get there?’

Fin shrugged.

‘Bloody hell!’ It sounded just like the old Donald. And then he smiled suddenly. ‘I always thought that Roddy would come waltzing through the door one day, grinning all over his stupid face and telling us it had all been an elaborate joke.’

‘It’s no joke, Donald. Roddy was murdered.’

The smile vanished. Shock was writ large all over Donald’s face. He sat bolt upright, staring at Fin in disbelief. ‘Tell me.’ Then he thought better of it, as if remembering suddenly where they were. ‘No, not here.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s get some air.’

And as they stepped out into the blustery night, Fin remembered how it was Donald who had set Solas on the road to success, until his spectacular fall-out with Roddy.