The Chessmen

III

Detective Sergeant George Gunn parked his car at the foot of the track that led to Whistler’s blackhouse. He looked up and saw Fin sitting among the tall grasses, knees pulled up below his chin, a soft westerly blowing through his hair. The sound of distant bagpipes floated up from the beach on the wind. He began a weary trek up the hill.

Fin watched him all the way, and heard the swish, swish of his black nylon anorak before he heard his breath coming hard and fast from the effort of the climb. He had a green folder tucked under one arm, and he stopped and glowered down at Fin. Fin noticed the shine on his shoes, and the crease in his trousers. An extra-generous application of oil was helping keep his black hair in place despite the wind.

‘You’ve gone way above and beyond the call of friendship this time, Mr Macleod. I’ve had to go delving into an inquiry I’m not a part of to get the things you wanted. It has been noticed and questions are being asked.’

‘But you got everything?’

Gunn glared at him. ‘The social work report is redundant now as far as the courts are concerned. Mr Macaskill is dead, so the case disputing custody has fallen by default. It was, however, considered relevant to the murder inquiry, and so is still part of the evidence.’

‘And you got a look at it?’

‘I have a copy of it right here.’ He patted the green folder.

‘And?’

‘The social worker was recommending that the Sheriff grant custody of his daughter to John Angus Macaskill, on the basis of the girl’s own wishes.’

Fin let his head drop and closed his eyes. And he wondered if his own intervention had maybe led to all of this. He took a deep breath and raised himself to his feet. ‘And the crimescene pics?’

‘I have them, too.’

Fin took Gunn by the arm. ‘Come inside and show me.’

He cleared a space on Whistler’s table, and Gun spread out half a dozen eight-by-ten colour prints over a surface scarred and stained by decades of use. It was shocking to see Whistler lying there among the debris. His blood was lurid and unnaturally red in the glare of the police photographer’s lights, his face brutally pale by comparison, the blood around his mouth and nose almost black. Such a big man reduced to nothing. All that intelligence lost in the halt of a heartbeat. The mosaic of memories that comprised his life gone for ever, as if they had never existed. Fin found himself wishing that he had Donald’s faith. That there was some purpose to all this, and that it wouldn’t all be lost like so many tears in rain.

He examined all the photographs carefully before picking out the third of them. ‘Look George. You can see clearly in this one. The outstretched hand is almost touching the fallen chessman.’

Gunn frowned. ‘Why would he have been trying to reach a wooden chessman, Mr Macleod? He was dying for Christ’s sake!’

‘And probably knew it. He was trying to tell us who killed him, George.’

Gunn turned a look of consternation on the younger man. ‘By pointing to a chess piece?’

Fin felt sick. ‘No ordinary chess piece.’ He stabbed a finger at the fallen carving. ‘This one here is what they call a Berserker. The fiercest of all the Viking warriors. They whipped themselves up into a trancelike state, it seems, so they felt no fear or pain. Whistler faithfully replicated all the others, but he did his own version of the Berserker.’ He paused. ‘In the likeness of Kenny John Maclean. His own small revenge for Kenny stealing his wife and his daughter.’

Gunn’s mouth hung half open as he absorbed this. ‘Are you saying Kenny John killed Whistler Macaskill?’

Fin nodded. ‘I am, George.’

‘Why?’

Fin sucked in a long, slow breath and tried to make sense of it himself. ‘I’m guessing, but I figure Big Kenny must have found out what was in the social work report.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe Anna said something. Maybe she told him what she’d told the social worker.’

‘And you think Kenny John killed Whistler to stop him getting his daughter back?’

But Fin shook his head. ‘No, not as a simple as that. But I think that when we found that body in the plane it gave Kenny a leverage he never dreamed he had. Something that would ruin Whistler’s chances of ever getting custody of Anna. My guess is he must have confronted Whistler with it. I can’t believe he ever meant to kill him. But I know Whistler. And I can only imagine how he must have reacted.’ He closed his eyes and had a picture of it in his mind. Two giant men, friends since childhood, crashing about this very room, locked in desperate conflict. Furniture flying. Plates and cups and glasses smashing around them.

Gunn’s voice crashed into his imagination. ‘There’s no proof of any of this.’

Fin opened his eyes, almost startled. ‘It’s only a few days since Whistler was killed, George. There must have been a terrible bloody fight in here. Kenny’s still going to bear the scars and bruises of that. And there’s bound to be forensic evidence in whatever the Scenes of Crime boys pulled out of here. If only your boss would stop trying to pin it on me and start looking in the right places.’

There was a long silence, then, in the still of the blackhouse. ‘What leverage, Mr Macleod?’

Fin’s gaze flickered towards Gunn.

‘You said the discovery of the body in the plane gave Kenny John a leverage he didn’t know he had.’

And Fin knew that there was no way he could keep Roddy’s secret.