The Lewis Man

TWENTY-ONE

It was dark when Fin dropped George Gunn in Stornoway and headed across the Barvas moor to the west coast. It was a black, wet night, the Atlantic hissing its fury into his face as he drove west. Just like the night his parents were killed on this very road. He knew the dip in it like the back of his hand. He had passed it every week on the bus that took him to the school hostel in Stornoway on Monday, and then back again on Friday. Although he couldn’t see it now, he knew that the green-roofed shieling was only a hundred yards or so away to his right, and that it was just about here that the sheep had leapt suddenly up from the ditch, causing his father to swerve.

There were still sheep on the road now. Crofters had long ago given up trying to fence off the grazing. Only a few rotted posts remained to give witness to the fact that they had once tried. At night you saw the eyes of the sheep glowing in the dark. Two luminous points of light, like devil’s eyes reflecting your headlights back at you. They were stupid beasts. You never knew the minute they would startle, and run out in front of you. On still days they would congregate on the road, leaving the bog to escape the tiny, biting midges that were the curse of the West Highlands. And you knew that if the sheep were troubled by them, then it must be bad.

Over the rise he saw the lights of Barvas flickering in the rain, a long string of them following the line of the coast before vanishing into darkness. Fin followed intermittent beads of them north until the scattered lights of Ness spread more densely across the headland, and he turned up towards Crobost. The ocean was hidden in obscurity, suffocated by the night, but he heard it breathing its anger all along the cliffs as he parked and got out of his car at Marsaili’s bungalow.

Her car was not there, and he realized that she must already have left for Glasgow. But there was a light burning in the kitchen window, and he made a dash for the door through the rain. There was no one in the kitchen and he went through to the living room where the television was playing the evening news in the corner. But there was no one here either. He went out into the hall and called upstairs to Fionnlagh’s bedroom.

‘Anyone home?’

A line of light lay along the foot of the door and he started up the stairs. He was only halfway up when the door opened and Fionnlagh came out on to the top landing, shutting it quickly behind him. ‘Fin!’ He seemed startled, surprised, oddly hesitant, before hurrying down the stairs and squeezing past Fin on the way. ‘I thought you were in Harris.’

Fin turned and followed him down to the living room, where he could see in the light that Fionnlagh was slightly flushed, self-conscious, almost embarrassed. ‘Well, I’m back.’

‘So I see.’

‘Your mum said I could use the plumbing whenever I needed to. Until I get things fixed up at the croft.’

‘Sure. Feel free.’ He was clearly uncomfortable, and moved now through to the kitchen. Fin followed in time to see him opening the fridge. ‘Beer?’ Fionnlagh turned, holding out a bottle.

‘Thanks.’ Fin took it, twisting off the cap, and sat down at the table. Fionnlagh hesitated before taking one himself. He stood leaning back against the fridge and threw the cap across the kitchen into the sink before taking a long pull at the bottle.

‘So what did you find out about Grampa?’

‘Nothing,’ Fin said. ‘Except that he’s not Tormod Macdonald.’

Fionnlagh stared at him, a look of vacant incomprehension on his face. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Tormod Macdonald died at the age of eighteen in a boating accident. I’ve seen his death certificate and his grave.’

‘It must be some other Tormod Macdonald then.’

Fin shook his head. ‘It’s the Tormod Macdonald your grandfather claims to be.’

Fionnlagh took several swigs of beer, trying to digest this. ‘Well, if he’s not Tormod Macdonald, who is he?’

‘Good question. But not one he’s likely to give us an answer to any time soon.’

Fionnlagh was silent, then, for a long time, staring into his half-empty beer bottle. ‘Do you think he killed that man they found in the peat bog?’

‘I have no idea. But he was related to him, that’s for sure. And if we can establish the identity of one, then that’ll probably tell us who the other is, and maybe what happened.’

‘You sound like a cop.’

Fin smiled. ‘It’s what I was for most of my adult life. The mindset doesn’t change overnight just because you quit your job.’

‘Why did you?’

Fin sighed. ‘Most people spend their lives never knowing what lies beneath the stones they walk on. Cops spend theirs lifting those stones and having to deal with what they find.’ He drained his bottle. ‘I was sick of spending my life in the shadows, Fionnlagh. When all you know is the darkest side of human nature, you start to find the darkness in yourself. And that’s a scary thing.’

Fionnlagh tossed his empty bottle into a box of them by the door, and the dull clunk of glass on glass filled the silence in the kitchen. He still appeared ill at ease.

Fin said, ‘I hope I haven’t interrupted anything.’

Quick eyes flashed towards him, then away again. ‘You haven’t.’ Then, ‘Mum went to see Grampa this afternoon.’

‘Any joy?’

The boy shook his head. ‘No. He was sitting out in the rain, apparently, but seemed to think he was on a boat. Then he started wittering on about collecting seaweed to fertilize the crows.’

Fin scowled. ‘Crows?’

‘Aye. He used the Gaelic word, feannagan. Crows.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

Fin hesitated. ‘Fionnlagh …’ The boy looked at him expectantly. ‘Better let me tell your mum about your grandfather.’ And Fionnlagh nodded, only too happy, it seemed, to be relieved of the responsibility.

The wind whipped and tugged at the outer shell of his tent, straining at the guys, while the inner tent inhaled and exhaled partially and erratically, like a failing lung. The rain driving against the thin plastic exterior skin was almost deafening. The glow of Fin’s battery-powered fluorescent filled it with a strange blue light, by which he sat wrapped in his sleeping bag reading Gunn’s illicit autopsy report on the body in the bog.

He was fascinated by the description of the Elvis tattoo on the left forearm, and the legend, Heartbreak Hotel, although it had been the headplate which had definitively established death as being some time in the late fifties. Here was a young man with a passion for the world’s first rock star, whose intellectual powers had been diminished by some accident that had left him brain-damaged. Related, in some way, to Marsaili’s father, whose own identity was now shrouded in mystery.

It had been a brutal murder. Tied up, stabbed, throat slit. Fin tried to imagine Marsaili’s dad as his killer, but simply couldn’t. Tormod, or whoever he was, had always been a gentle sort of man. A big man, yes. Powerful in his day. But a man with such an even temperament that Fin could not recall a single occasion when he had even heard him raise his voice.

He laid the report to one side, and picked up the open folder containing the details of Robbie’s hit and run. He had spent nearly an hour going through it once more when he got back to the tent from Marsaili’s. Futile, of course. He had lost count of the number of times he had read it. Every statement, the smallest measurement of every tyre track on the road. The description of the car, the driver. The police photographs he had photocopied in Edinburgh. He knew every detail by heart, and yet every time he read it hoped to stumble upon the one vital thing he had missed.

It was an obsession, he knew. An unreasonable, illogical, unviable obsession. And yet, like the addicted smoker, he was simply unable to put it aside. There couldn’t be closure until the driver of the car had been brought to book. Until that day there would be no steering his life out of the rut, no getting it back on to the open road.

He cursed under his breath and tossed the folder away across the tent, before switching off the fluorescent, and throwing himself back to lie on his groundsheet, head sunk in the pillow, so anxious for sleep to take him that he knew it wouldn’t.

He closed his eyes and listened to the wind and the rain, then opened them again. There was no difference. No light. Just absolute darkness. He doubted if he had ever felt quite so lonely in his life.

It was impossible for him to guess at how much time had passed. Half an hour, an hour? But at the end of it he was no closer to sleep than when he had first lain down. He sat up again and switched on the light, blinking in the harshness of its glare. There were some books in the car. He needed something to take him away from here, from who he was, who he had been, where he was going. Something to stop all the unresolved questions in his head endlessly repeating themselves.

He pulled his oilskin on over his vest and boxers and slipped bare feet into his boots, grabbing his sou’wester before unzipping the tent to face the rain and the wind. A twenty-second dash to the car, and he would be back in under a minute shedding dripping waterproofs in the outer tent, to slide back into the warmth of his sleeping bag. A book in his hand, escape in his heart.

Still, he hesitated to take the plunge. It was wild out there. It was why generations of his ancestors had built houses with walls two and three feet thick. How foolish was he to believe he could survive weeks, even months, in a flimsy little tent like this? He breathed out through clenched teeth, screwed up his eyes for a moment, then made the dash. Out into rain that stung his face, the force of the wind almost taking the legs away from him.

He reached his car, fumbling for keys with wet fingers, and a light came on in his peripheral vision. He paused, peering down the hill through the rain, to see that it was the light above Marsaili’s kitchen door. It threw a feeble yellow glow up the path towards where Fionnlagh’s car stood idling. He couldn’t hear the engine, but he could see exhaust fumes belching from the rear of the old Mini to be whipped away into the night.

And then a figure with a suitcase dashing from the kitchen door to the car. Just a silhouette, but recognisably Fionnlagh. Fin called out his name, but the bungalow was a couple of hundred yards away, and his voice was lost in the storm.

Fin stood, hammered by rain that ran in sheets off his oilskin, blowing into his face, running down his neck, and watched as Fionnlagh opened the boot and jammed his case inside. He ran back to the house to turn off the light, and was the merest shadow as he dashed up the path again to the car. Fin saw his face caught for a moment in the courtesy light as the door opened and then closed again. The car pulled away from the side of the road and started off down the hill.

Fin turned to his own car, unlocked the door, and slid into the driver’s seat. He started it up, slipped into first gear and released the handbrake. As long as he kept Fionnlagh’s lights in sight, he could keep his own turned off. He rolled down the hill after the Mini.

Fin kept a good two hundred yards between the cars, and slowed to a stop as the Mini pulled up outside the Crobost stores at the foot of the hill. By the light of Fionnlagh’s headlamps, he saw the tiny figure of Donna Murray dart out from the shelter of the shop doorway, hefting a carrycot in both hands. Fionnlagh jumped out to tip the driver’s seat forward and she slid it inside before running back to fetch a small suitcase.

Which was when the headlamps of a third car flooded the scene with light. Fin could see the rain driving through them, and the figure of a man stepping out to interrupt their beam. He lifted his foot from the clutch and accelerated down the road towards them, turning on his headlights to throw this midnight drama into sharp relief. Three startled faces turned towards his car as he braked, skidding to a stop on the gravel. He let the door swing open and stepped out into the rain.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Donald Murray had to bellow to be heard over the roar of the storm. His face was liverish pale in the light of the cars, his eyes sunken in shadow.

‘Maybe I should be asking you that,’ Fin shouted back.

Donald punched an angry fist through the air towards his daughter and her lover, a solitary finger pointed in accusation. ‘They’re trying to run off with the baby.’

‘It’s their baby.’

A sneer curled Donald’s mouth. ‘Are you in on this?’

‘Hey!’ Fionnlagh bellowed red-faced at the night. ‘It’s none of your business! Either of you. She’s our baby and it’s our decision. So you can all go to hell.’

‘That’s for God to decide,’ Donald Murray shouted back at him. ‘But you are going nowhere, son. Not with my grandchild, you’re not.’

‘Try and fucking stop me!’ Fionnlagh took Donna’s bag and threw it into the car. ‘Come on,’ he said to her, and dropped into the driver’s seat.

Donald was there in two strides to reach in and pull out the ignition key, turning to throw it into the teeth of the gale. He moved swiftly around the car to reach in and grab the carrycot.

Fionnlagh leapt out to stop him, but Fin got there first. His sou’wester blew off and vanished in the dark as he grabbed the Reverend Murray by the shoulders and pulled him away from the car. Donald was still a powerfully built man, and he pushed back hard to try to break free of Fin’s grip. Both men stumbled backwards and tumbled to the ground, rolling over on the gravel.

The fall expelled all the air from Fin’s lungs, and he gasped for breath as Donald got back to his feet. He managed to rise to his knees, still fighting for air, and looked up as Donald reached out a hand to help him to stand. He caught a flash of white at Donald’s neck. His dog collar. And for a moment the absurdity of their situation flashed through his head. He was fighting with the minister of Crobost Church, for God’s sake! His boyhood friend. He grasped the hand and pulled himself up. The two men stood glaring at each other, both breathing hard, both faces wet with rain and shining in the light of the headlamps.

‘Stop it!’ Donna was screaming. ‘Stop it, both of you!’

But Donald kept his eyes fixed on Fin. ‘I found the ferry tickets in her room. The first sailing tomorrow for Ullapool. I knew they’d try and get away tonight.’

‘Donald, they’re both adults. It’s their baby. They can go where they like.’

‘I might have known you would take their side.’

‘I’m not taking anyone’s side. You’re the one who’s driving them away. Refusing to let Fionnlagh come to the house to see his own daughter. You’d think we were still living in the Middle Ages!’

‘He has no means of supporting them. He’s still at school for God’s sake!’

‘Well, he’s not going to make much of himself by dropping out and running away, is he? And that’s what you’re forcing him to do. Both of them.’

Donald spat his contempt at the night. ‘This is a waste of time.’ He turned again to try and take the carrycot from the car. Fin grabbed his arm, and in that moment Donald swung around, his fist flying through the light to catch Fin a glancing blow on the cheek. The force of it knocked Fin off balance and he went sprawling backwards on the tarmac.

For several long moments, the scene was frozen, as if someone had flicked a switch and put the movie on pause. None of them could quite believe what Donald had just done. The wind howled its disapproval all around them. Then Fin struggled back to his feet and wiped a smear of blood from his lip. He glared at the minister. ‘For Christ’s sake man,’ he said. ‘Come to your senses.’ His voice was almost lost in the roar of the night.

Donald stood rubbing his knuckles, staring back at Fin, his eyes filled with disbelief, guilt, anger. As if it were somehow Fin’s fault that Donald had struck him. ‘Why the hell would you care anyway?’

Fin shut his eyes and shook his head. ‘Because Fionnlagh’s my son.’