The Chessmen

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The boats seemed to be a long way off as Fin and Gunn walked across the sand. It was firm and dry underfoot, and only faintly ridged by the underlying currents of the outgoing tide. The gala day was in full flow by now, and the crowds on the beach had swelled in number. The bouncy castle swarmed with youngsters, their shouts of excitement rising above the drone of the pipes that drifted across Traigh Uige in the wind. There was accordion music belting out from speakers at one of the stalls, and as they passed the giant chessboard, from somewhere they heard the plaintive purity of Mairead’s voice rising above the throng, the wail of a violin, the moan of a Celtic flute. A Roddy Mackenzie song playing on some stall owner’s sound system. His music, finally, come home.

Fin paused for a moment by the chessboard, and Gunn had taken several more strides before he noticed and stopped to look back. He followed Fin’s gaze to the three-foot carved figure of the Berserker being moved from one square to another by two volunteers on instructions from the girl with the walkie-talkie. There was no mistaking the thick-lipped features of Kenny John Maclean, and the characteristic scar that followed the line of the cheekbone. Protruding teeth bit down hard on the top of his shield.

The two men exchanged glances, and something about the Berserker seemed to instil a greater sense of urgency in them. Gunn turned and lengthened his stride towards the distant shore. Fin hurried to catch him up.

A framework of stout wooden stakes had been hammered into the sand to provide an anchor for pontoons which had been lashed together to create a floating jetty for the boats. A long ramp with rope rails fed back to the sands, rising and falling with the jetty. A wooden hut on a low-loader was a dispensary for life jackets and waterproofs for the long lines of people awaiting their turn for the ride out into the bay.

Both boats were at the jetty as Gunn and Fin approached. The on-loan Delta Deep One rigid inflatables were orange and black, with powerful 150-horsepower four-stroke engines. Pairs of seats fore and aft of the Delta’s open cockpit carried up to twelve passengers. One of them had just finished disembarking, and patiently waiting day-trippers were making their way cautiously along the ramp to climb aboard the other.

Fin scanned the faces at the jetty for some sign of Kenny John. Then suddenly the big man stood up in the cockpit of the inflatable which had just shed its passengers. He turned almost at the same moment, and saw Fin and Gunn heading purposefully in his direction. For a moment his face was a blank, hiding a multitude of confused thoughts. But as his thoughts cleared, so his face took on expression, and Fin saw the panic in his eyes.

He turned in an instant and gunned his idling motor, sending the Deep One surging away from the jetty, nose up. A small waterproof-clad figure who had been standing in the bow coiling a tethering rope fell backwards into the boat with a scream. Fin caught just a flash of her pale, startled face.

‘Jesus, George! Anna Bheag’s in that boat!’ He ran along the ramp, pushing passengers aside, shouting at them to get out of his way. Those already aboard the second boat turned, alarmed by the raised voices. ‘Get out! Get out of the boat!’ Fin bawled at them.

Gunn was right behind him, waving his warrant card above his head. ‘Police. Please evacuate the boat immediately.’

Frightened faces jostled in the crush to scramble back on to the jetty, and the inflatable rocked dangerously. The driver turned towards Fin as he jumped aboard. He was a man Fin knew. An older man, a worker on the estate known as Donnie Dubh. Fin saw the consternation in his eyes, his face drained suddenly of colour. ‘What the hell’s going on, Fin?’

‘Donnie, we need you to go after Big Kenny. We think he killed Whistler Macaskill.’

‘Jesus!’

‘And he’s got wee Anna on that boat with him.’

Gunn jumped down beside him. ‘Just go, for Christ’s sake!’

Donnie scrambled across the boat to untie the tethering ropes, then swung himself back into the cockpit to rev the Yamaha engine and accelerate out into the bay after Kenny.

The wind threw salt spray back in their faces as the bow of the inflatable smacked up and down on the unforgiving surface of the incoming swell. Gunn crouched down behind the shelter of the tiny windscreen, one finger in his ear, as he shouted into his mobile phone. Fin couldn’t make out what he was saying, but he could only be calling for help. He glanced back towards the shore, and saw the vast expanse of beach stretching away towards Uig Lodge on the rise, the excited shout of distant gala day revellers lost above the roar of the engine as they abandoned stalls and train rides and chessmen to come running towards the water’s edge.

He stood beside Donnie, holding on to the black tubular superstructure above the cockpit, and tried to see through the spray and mist in the direction that Kenny had taken his boat. He caught only flashes of orange through the spume and surge of the waves. The wind whipped at his hair and his clothes, the noise of it deafening him, seawater soaking him. And he suddenly felt vulnerable without a life jacket, clutching black tubing with quickly numbing fingers as the boat pitched and rolled with increasingly violent frequency.

George Gunn still squatted on the floor, his back to the engine cowling now, his phone returned to his pocket and his face the colour of ash. He glanced up at Fin with troubled dark eyes that he quickly closed, taking long, deep gulps of air, and Fin wondered how long he was going to last without throwing up.

The shore lifted up in black jagged layers on either side as they sped out across Uig bay, the tiny islands of Tom and Tolm and Triassamol passing in a dark-grey blur. Once out of the shelter of the bay itself the swell increased, an almost translucent emerald green lifting them out of deep troughs through breaking, bubbling foam, to drop them just as suddenly into the next. It felt as if they were being swallowed whole by the sea, then spat out again. Fin wondered how much of this the Delta could take as they swung north, Kenny’s boat a good five hundred yards ahead of them and barely visible.

They hugged a coastline that rose sheer out of the water now. The tide had turned and was breaking angrily over black gneiss in a frothing fury, driven in by wind increasing in strength and chill. Fin felt the cold seeping into his bones, and began to wonder if there was any point in this. If it had been Kenny on his own, perhaps not. He would have come ashore somewhere and was bound to have been picked up. But he had Anna with him, and in his present state of mind it was impossible to predict what he might do.

‘We’re not getting any closer,’ Fin shouted above the roar of the motor.

‘I can’t go any faster than he is,’ Donnie shouted back. It was a constant battle for him just to keep the boat from being driven against the rocks as waves slammed into them side on and threatened to tip them over. Fin cast his eyes towards the cliffs and the deep fissures that cracked them open, seawater boiling all around the reefs at each entrance, throwing spray thirty feet and more into the air.

It was fully twenty minutes before they reached the tip of the peninsula at Gallan Head where for a moment they were fully exposed to the anger of the incoming ocean. Kenny’s boat had vanished two minutes ahead of them. A distraught George Gunn crawled on his hands and knees to the back of the boat, where he saw his vomit whipped away on the wind.

But once they had rounded the headland they were sheltered from the wind, and the ocean calmed to a deep, steady swell. The water was impenetrably green, and there was no sign of Kenny’s boat.

Fin frowned and peered along the line of the shore ahead of them. In the very far distance he could see a stretch of empty beach, and off to their left, beyond the next headland, the islands of Pabaigh Beag and Pabaigh Mor lifting themselves in a rise of glistening blue cliffs out of the heaving waters of An Caolas.

‘Where the hell are they?’

Donnie eased off on the throttle, and they reduced speed to a gentle cruise. ‘There are inlets and caves all along the coastline here, Fin. He could be anywhere.’

Gunn stumbled unsteadily back to the cockpit. He was the same colour as the sea. ‘The helicopter’s on its way,’ he said. ‘They might be able to spot him.’

For the next ten minutes they cruised slowly along the ragged line of high cliffs that cast their shadow on the water. They could hear the sea sucking and growling as it snapped around the rocky openings to caves and chasms. Fin looked up as he heard the rotors of the helicopter, which just half an hour before had been taking joyriders on flights over the mountains. Gunn’s phone rang and he pressed it to his ear. He nodded and his eyes flashed towards Fin.

‘They can see his wake. It seems to disappear right into the cliffs. He’s either gone down or he’s gone into a cave.’

‘How much further on?’ Donnie called over his shoulder.

‘About half a kilometre, they say.’

Donnie accelerated forward then, and they picked up speed over the next several hundred yards, their bow rising into the waves, sending yet more spray back in their faces. Fin was shivering almost uncontrollably now.

‘There,’ Donnie said, and they slowed again. Fin saw the pale wash left by the wake of Kenny John’s boat, clearly visible in the deep, dark green. It turned in towards stacks of rock rising out of swirling froth, and they saw the treacherous teeth of granite and gneiss that would rip their inflatable open if they were to deviate even fractionally from the course that Kenny had taken before them. Either he knew these waters like the back of his hand, or he was being driven by God knew what emotional turbulence into taking insane risks.

Donnie slowed to one or two knots. They drifted gently forward between the rocks into a deep natural arch that curved darkly over their heads. It had been chiselled by the elements out of the oldest rock on the planet over millions of years, and daylight reflected off every salt-soaked face of it. Now, in the shelter of the cliffs, the wind dropped to a murmur and the sound of the Yamaha engine clattered back at them off the walls of the tunnel. The helicopter overhead vanished from sight and the sound of its rotors was lost. The water sighed and sloshed and echoed around them, until they emerged into a tiny bay, completely encircled by cliffs, rock white-streaked with guano. The roar of the rotors returned, reverberating off every hard surface of the confined space. Gulls turned and screamed above their heads, scattering in the downdraught.

Fin turned to Gunn. ‘For God’s sake, George, tell them to stand off. We can’t hear a thing.’

Gunn barked into his phone and the chopper wheeled away out of sight. An eerie silence fell. Only the sea whispered to them in the gloom, beneath the dull, repetitive idle of their motor.

The pale wake of Kenny’s boat crossed the short stretch of enclosed water and vanished into a deep cleft in the cliff face. Sharply cut seams of vividly coloured rock folded themselves over the entrance to what appeared to be a cave. Layers of lucent blue and yellow, orange, green and red. Foam gathered in an eddying circle at its entrance, and deep inside the darkness of the cave itself the sea moaned like some distressed sea mammal.

Donnie inched them forward, daylight fading behind them, the way ahead obscure and uncertain.

‘Cut the motor,’ Fin said, and in the silence that followed they could hear the idling of Kenny’s engine somewhere further on, and the shrill sound of querulous voices echoing around the dark of this naturally vaulted cathedral cave. Fin reached above his head and found one of several spotlights bolted to the crossbar. He fumbled for a switch to turn it on, and suddenly the cave was flooded with light, the colours of the rock startling and lurid.

Kenny’s Delta rose and fell on the gentle interior swell about thirty feet deeper into the cave. He and Anna were standing up in the bow of the boat arguing, her voice rising higher than his in anger and confusion. Both turned wide eyes towards the light, then screwed them up in the glare of it. Kenny raised an open palm to cast a shadow across his face, like someone caught unawares by the flash of a camera. In the darkness, it was a face burned out by the light. Mouth, nostrils and eyes black holes configured only to convey his fear.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ It was Anna Bheag’s voice that echoed around the cave.

Fin ignored her and focused everything on Kenny. He called out to him from the dark behind the light. ‘This is madness, Kenny. Give it up.’

Kenny stared back like a startled deer caught in the headlights of a car. ‘I can’t, Fin. I can’t.’

Fin saw spittle accumulating at the corners of his mouth. ‘Roddy told me what happened the night he ditched the plane, Kenny. That you stumbled on them up in the mountains. What were you doing up there?’

Kenny was breathing hard. He shook his head. ‘I was still at agricultural college that year. I spent my summers working for the estate as a watcher.’

‘You thought they were poachers?’

‘I had no idea. I was coming up the valley when I heard the plane. And then saw it coming in, far too low, before it disappeared from sight, and I thought it must have crashed. By the time I got over the shoulder of the hill and into the next valley, it was in the middle of the loch and sinking fast. But still in one piece. That’s when I saw Roddy and Whistler on the far shore.’

‘How in God’s name did you and Whistler keep that secret for all these years, Kenny?’

‘It’s what bound us, Fin. A bond stronger than marriage break-ups or custody battles.’

‘But in the end it was a bond you broke. They swore you to secrecy, Kenny.’ It came like a bullet out of the dark. An accusation of betrayal.

Kenny retaliated. ‘They lied. They never told me there was a body in the plane.’

Fin shook his head. ‘Whistler never knew. That was Roddy’s dark secret. Whistler didn’t know anything about it until he and I found the plane the other day. He was shocked, Kenny. Shocked to the core.’

Kenny appeared agitated by this. But whatever thoughts were going through his mind, no words came to his lips.

Fin said, ‘What happened the morning you went to see him, Kenny? What did you do? Threaten to shop him unless he dropped his claim on Anna?’

A strange feral sound, like an animal in pain, issued from Kenny’s mouth. He closed his eyes then opened them wide, raising them to the darkness above, before lowering them once more to gaze back at Fin. ‘I love that girl with my life, Fin. I see her mother in her every time I look at her.’ Just as Fin saw only Whistler. ‘I thought if I threatened to tell the police what I knew about the plane Whistler would give up on the court case. I mean, it wasn’t Roddy in that cockpit, and I knew it. So if Whistler really had been involved in the death of the guy you found he’d have lost Anna for ever.’ He paused, still breathing hard. ‘But I never would have told, Fin. I wouldn’t. I thought the threat of it would be enough. But he went berserk.’ The use of the word was not lost on Fin. If anyone fitted the role of Berserker, then it was Whistler. A man who had lived his life on a short fuse, with a temper that took him over the edge, time and again, negating any intelligent thought he had ever formed. ‘He came at me like a maniac, Fin. I never expected that. Jesus Christ, I never meant to kill him. It was all I could do to stop him from killing me.’

‘For God’s sake, Kenny. You were threatening to take his daughter away from him. Couldn’t you imagine how he would take it?’ Fin felt sick. It was clear to him now that in a strange and unforgiving twist of fate, Whistler had sown the seeds of his own destruction by agreeing to help Roddy with his subterfuge seventeen years before. And it was Kenny’s threat to break the bond of silence the three old friends had kept all that time which had killed him.

Kenny raised his hands helplessly and shook his head, the tears on his face glistening in the spotlight. And he said again, ‘I never meant to kill him.’ As if somehow by repeating it he could change what had happened.

The scream that reverberated around the cave turned Fin’s blood to ice. He had no time even to open his mouth to shout ‘No!’, before he saw the light glinting off the curve of the boathook, as wee Anna swung it two-handed in an arc of fury, to bury it deep in Kenny John’s chest.