The Chessmen

II

Mairead’s voice rang around the rafters of the church, clear and pure and unaccompanied. The doors were open so that those outside could hear her, and in the still of this sad grey morning, her voice drifted out across Loch Rog, a plaintive lament for a lost friend and lover.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I fear no evil,

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff,

they comfort me.

Somehow, in the Gaelic, both the words and the melody were more powerful, more tribal, of the land and the place and the people. And Fin found the hairs rising up on the back of his neck. He had missed the original funeral, but the others were all here to bury Roddy again, just as they had done seventeen years before. Only then, the coffin they had carried was empty, save for some rocks and a few personal items from childhood. His parents had wanted it that way. To give a sense of closure. A chance to say goodbye.

Now the coffin with his body in it awaited them outside his old home overlooking Uig sands from the north shore. His parents had been returned to the earth now themselves, but the new owners of the house his father had built had given permission for the funeral procession to start from there.

As the mourners streamed out of the little church at Miabhaig, Fin reflected that it was more like a circus than a funeral. The Scottish media had descended en masse, along with stringers for most of the English press. Cameras flashed and pencils scribbled in notebooks, and digital video recorded all for posterity — and the six o’clock news. The discovery of Roddy’s body had been occupying pride of place on the news schedules for days. Archive footage from seventeen years earlier had been unearthed and hastily cut together with the latest video to feed the public’s voracious appetite for celebrity news. Celebrity death appealed even more to popular prurience. Throw in a little murder and mystery, and ratings were guaranteed. Sales of Amran’s CD backlist had soared.

Fin had expected Whistler to show up. He had disappeared again following their encounter outside the Sheriff Court, but there was no sign of him at the church. And it wasn’t until Fin stepped outside that he set eyes on Strings and Skins and Rambo for the first time.

He was shocked by how both Skins and Rambo had aged. Rambo was almost completely bald, and looked twenty years older than the others. Skins’ hair was streaked steel-grey, and swept back from a face devoid of its once boyish charm. Strings, too, had slipped quietly into middle age, perhaps hoping that shoulder-length dyed hair tied in a ponytail would create the illusion of a younger man. But he was thinner, meaner somehow, the fingers that spidered over his fretboard longer and bonier now than Fin remembered. Only Mairead seemed to have the Peter Pan touch. She looked as radiant and beautiful as she had as a teenager. She had never lost that certain something which had bewitched so many boys, and no doubt so many men in later life. She was the sole identifiable image of Amran. It was always her face that featured on the covers of their CDs, on their website, on their concert posters. No one but the most ardent of fans would have recognized Skins or Rambo, or even Strings. They were background. Wallpaper. Just musicians. Mairead was Amran.

Many of the mourners drove straight to the cemetery at Ardroil. Those who intended to make up the procession gathered outside the former Mackenzie home on the road above the beach, along with the media circus.

Fin was astonished to see Donald there, come out of his self-imposed exile in Ness to expose himself to public scrutiny for the first time since the shooting in Eriskay. And he was as much a source of interest and curiosity to the crowd as the presence of the celebrities of Amran. He was, it transpired, to be one of the primary coffin-bearers, at Mairead’s request, along with Fin, Strings, Skins, Rambo and Big Kenny. All of them together again for the first time since fifth year at the Nicolson.

But since it was a two-mile walk to Ardroil, there were another six men standing by to provide periodic relief in relays. The coffin itself weighed much more than the remains of the man inside it, solid oak resting heavily on the broad shoulders that raised it from the chairbacks on which it had been resting in the road. A helicopter hired by one of the news networks flew overhead.

It took the procession of well over fifty people more than an hour to reach the turn-off to the cemetery. There was a hand-painted sign with a white arrow pointing past a tubular agricultural gate, and a rough track wound up over the machair to the walls of the cemetery itself beyond the rise. Shoulders were aching, hands numb, by the time they got there.

The mountains where Roddy’s plane had come down all those years before loured over them, dominating the skyline to the south. The cemetery itself sloped down to the west, and the rain began as the procession made its way among the headstones to the small walled extension which had been built on to it at the bottom end. Its original planners, apparently, had not taken account of the relentless nature of death.

It was a fine rain, a smirr, little more than a mist. But it almost obliterated the view beyond the wall towards the beach, and made the last few yards treacherous underfoot. The lowering of the coffin on wet ropes by hands and arms which had all but seized up was made perilous by the rain, and it bumped and scraped the side of the grave on its way down. The grave itself had been excavated the day before, and the remains of the coffin they had placed there seventeen years earlier exhumed. Beneath the grass the soil was pure sand, without rocks or pebbles, and was already crumbling as the coffin settled at the bottom of the hole. The original headstone lay to one side, to be replaced once the grave had been refilled.

Although the tradition of men only at the graveside was still universally observed, nobody was surprised when Mairead ignored it. She stood among the men, pale and unflinching, a sombre figure dressed all in black, Roddy’s intermittent sweetheart and lover.

It was then that Fin glanced up and saw, with a shock, Whistler standing at the top end of the cemetery, detached from the mourners. Gone was the suit, to be replaced by his waterproof jacket and jeans, and his hair hung loose, tumbling to his shoulders. He had stopped shaving again and had penumbrous shadows beneath his eyes. His usually healthy outdoor complexion was muted by an underlying pallor.

For a moment Fin thought that Whistler was simply gazing into space, somewhere above and beyond the little clutch of mourners, before he realized that his eyes were fixed on Mairead. Was it possible, after all these years, that he still loved her? And yet there was something in his expression that spoke more of hate than of love. Of contempt rather than affection. And Fin was startled by it.

His attention returned to the grave as Donald read a text from the Gaelic Bible. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ A handful of sand rattled across the lid of the coffin. And when Fin looked up again, Whistler was gone.