The Chessmen

EPILOGUE

Sunlight spilled across the green slopes of Salisbury Crags, sweeping up to the cliffs that swooped high above the Edinburgh skyline. Fin’s taxi turned into St Leonard’s Street and dropped him outside No. 14, the sand-coloured brick building that housed the city’s A Division police station.

There was something more than faintly surreal about being here again. Like dropping in on a past life to discover that everything which had once been so familiar was alien now. Smaller, meaner, dirtier. Not like you remembered it at all. St Leonard’s Lane felt narrower, squeezed in by the sand-blasted tenements on either side, and the Crags beyond it smaller somehow, less impressive.

It was a week since Donald’s interment, the longest funeral procession in Crobost that anyone could remember. A funeral that had received coverage on the national news. Coverage which had already passed into archive, along with the police search for his killer. Fin doubted he would ever be caught. It had been a professional hit. Revenge, almost certainly, for the killing in Eriskay. The shooter had vanished without trace, the weapon never recovered. All that was left for Fin in its aftermath was a feeling of emptiness, if it could be described as a feeling at all.

Mona was standing waiting for him outside the tall glass facade of the entrance. By contrast she looked younger. Perhaps life without Fin had been good for her. She wore a long fawn coat, and a new, shorter haircut suited her. Like a return to her youth. It showed off her still strong features. Not exactly pretty, but in some ways almost beautiful. He felt a pang of regret as he greeted her, taking her gloved hand in his and kissing her cheek.

She canted her head. ‘Do you know what this is about?’

‘Robbie, I imagine. I can’t think why else they would want us both here.’

DCI Black’s call had been short and pointed. He didn’t want to do this by phone or by letter, he said. Would it be possible for Fin and Mona to meet him in person?

Black’s face had the pasty complexion of a man who rarely saw daylight. The curve of his nose and his small black eyes gave him the appearance of a hawk always on the hunt for prey. His desk was a mess, and Fin smelled stale cigarette smoke on his clothes, and saw that his fingers were still nicotine yellow. He was a man of little ceremony. Beyond the briefest of acknowledgements he lifted a clear plastic folder with a crumpled handwritten note pressed between its leaves. He held it out to the couple on the other side of his desk, and Fin took it from him. He turned it towards the light so that he and Mona could both read it. Scrawled words in blue ink.

This has been on my mind for some time. I know most people will not understand why, especially those who love me, and whom I also love. All I can say is that no one knows the hell I have lived through. And these last weeks it has become, simply, unbearable. It is time for me to go. I am so sorry.

Fin raised his eyes towards Black for elucidation.

‘It took some weeks for that note to make its way to the officers investigating your son’s hit-and-run. Connections were not immediately apparent. It was a collection of tormented ramblings in his diary that led officers finally to a link with Robbie.’

Mona’s face was flushed. ‘This is the man who killed Robbie?’

Black nodded. ‘If it’s any consolation, it would appear that really his life ended that day, too. And when he couldn’t live with himself any longer, he fed a tube from the exhaust pipe of his car into its interior and turned on the engine.’

Fin shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s no consolation.’ He glanced at Mona. ‘But at least it’s over.’

Mona’s taxi stood belching fumes into the chill November air. They had parted before, but this time it was harder, because it seemed certain to be the last. And Fin thought how difficult it was to let go of such a big part of his life. He remembered the moment she had dropped into his lap at the party the night they met, and seeing her face leaning over him the next morning as she shook him awake with the news that Roddy’s plane had gone missing.

‘You’ll go back to the island, I suppose.’

‘I suppose I will.’

She held his arm as she leaned in to kiss him one last time. ‘Goodbye, Fin.’

He watched as she got into the cab, and it accelerated away towards the city. Just one more part of his life consigned to memory. And he wondered if he and Marsaili really had a future. If it would ever be possible to rediscover the love they had felt that teenage summer before leaving for university.

And he wondered, too, about the life that awaited him on the island of his birth, the place from which he had tried so hard to escape but which had, in the end, drawn him back. He thought about everything that had been, and everything that lay ahead. The big, blank, unwritten chapter that was the rest of his life. And only two things were certain. He had a son who would require his guidance. And there was a fifteen-year-old girl who needed an advocate. The last living trace on this earth of the man who had been his friend and saviour. A tortured, orphaned little girl who had need of someone to stand up and speak for her and steer her towards some kind of hope for the future.

And he knew that it could only be him.