The Blackhouse (8 page)

Fin was surprised only by the complaint of assault. ‘Unless he’d changed since I knew him, Angel Macritchie was always fighting. But these things were aye settled one way or another, with fists in the car park, or a pint in the bar. No one ever went to the police.’

‘Oh, this wasn’t a local. Not even an islander. And there’s no doubt that Angel gave him a doing. We just couldn’t get anyone to admit they saw it.’

‘What happened?’

‘Och, it was some bloody animal rights campaigner from Edinburgh. Chris Adams is his name. Campaigns Director of a group called Allies for Animals.’

Fin snorted. ‘What was he doing here? Protecting sheep from being molested after closing time on a Friday night?’

Gunn laughed. ‘It would take more than an animal rights campaigner to put an end to that, Mr Macleod.’ His smile faded. ‘No, he was here – still is – trying to put a stop to this year’s guga harvest.’

Fin whistled softly. ‘Jesus.’ It was something he hadn’t thought about in years.
Guga
was the Gaelic word for a young gannet, a bird that the men of Crobost harvested during a two-week trip every August to a rock fifty miles north-north-east of the tip of Lewis.
An Sgeir
, they called it. Simply,
The Rock
. Three hundred feet of storm-lashed cliffs rising out of the northern ocean. Encrusted every year at this time by nesting gannets and their chicks. It was one of the most important gannet colonies in the world, and men from Ness had been making an annual pilgrimage to it for more than four hundred years, crossing mountainous seas in open boats to bring back their catch. These days they went by trawler. Twelve men from the village of Crobost, the only remaining village in Ness to carry on the tradition. They lived rough on the rock for fourteen days, clambering over the cliffs in all weathers, risking life and limb to snare and kill the young birds in their nests. Originally, the trip was made out of necessity, to feed the villagers back home. Nowadays the guga was a delicacy, in great demand all over the island. But the catch was limited by Act of Parliament to only two thousand, a special dispensation written into the Protection of Birds Act, passed in the House of Commons in London in 1954. And so it was only by good luck, or good connections, that a family would get a taste of the guga now.

Fin could still recall with mouth-watering clarity the oily flavour of the flesh on his tongue. Pickled in salt, and then boiled, it had the texture of duck and the taste of fish. Some said it was an acquired taste, but Fin had grown up with it. It had been a seasonal treat. Two months before the men left for the rock, he would begin to anticipate the taste of it, just as he relished each year the rich flavour of the wild salmon during the poaching season. His father always managed to acquire a bird or two and the family would feast on them in the first week. There were those who would store them in kegs of salt water and ration them through the year. But stored like that, they became too gamey for Fin’s taste, and the salt would burn his mouth. He liked them fresh from the rock, served with potatoes and washed down with milk.

‘You ever tasted the guga?’ he said to Gunn.

‘Aye. My mother had Ness connections, and we usually managed to get a bird every year.’

‘So these Allies for Animals are trying to stop the trip?’

‘Aye, they are.’

‘Angel was a regular on the rock, wasn’t he?’ Fin remembered that the only time he had been among the twelve men of Crobost, it was already Angel’s second time there. The memory was like a shadow passing over him.

‘Regular as clockwork. He was the cook.’

‘So he wouldn’t take too kindly to someone trying to sabotage it.’

‘He didn’t.’ Gunn shook his head. ‘And neither did anyone else. Which is why we couldn’t find anyone who saw what happened.’

‘Did he do much damage?’

‘A lot of bruising about the body and face. A couple of broken ribs. Nothing too serious. But the boy’ll remember it for a while.’

‘So why’s he still here?’

‘Because he’s still hoping to stop the trawler from taking the men out to the rock. Mad bloody fool! There’s a bunch of activists arriving on the ferry tomorrow.’

‘When are they due to leave for An Sgeir?’ Just forming the words in his mouth sent a slight shiver through Fin’s body.

‘Sometime in the next day or two. Depending on the weather.’

They had reached the far end of the beach, and Fin started climbing up over the rock.

‘I’m not really wearing the right footwear for this, Mr Macleod.’ Gunn slid dangerously on slick black rock.

‘I know a way up to the top of the cliff from here,’ Fin said. ‘Come on, it’s easy.’

Gunn scrambled after him, almost on his hands and knees as they struggled up a narrow scree path that cut back on itself before leading to a series of natural, if uneven, steps that took them finally to the top. From here they could see across the machair to where the houses of Crobost nestled in the dip of the cliff road, gathered around the grim, dominating presence of the Free Church where Fin had spent so many cold and miserable childhood Sundays. The sky behind it was blackening for rain, and Fin could smell it on the wind, just as he had done as a child. He was exhilarated by the climb, and enjoyed the soft pummelling of the stiffening breeze, all thoughts of An Sgeir banished. Gunn was breathless, and concerned by the scuffs on his shiny black shoes. ‘Haven’t done that in a long time,’ Fin said.

‘I’m a townie, Mr Macleod.’ Gunn was gasping. ‘I’ve never done that.’

Fin smiled. ‘It’s good for you, George.’ He was feeling better than he had done in quite a while. ‘So, do you think your animal rights man murdered Angel Macritchie in revenge for his beating?’

‘No, I don’t. He’s not the type. He’s a bit …’ He searched for the right word. ‘Fey. You know what I mean?’ Fin nodded thoughtfully. ‘But I’ve been around long enough, Mr Macleod, to know that the most unlikely people sometimes commit the most terrible crimes.’

‘And he comes from Edinburgh.’ Fin was thoughtful. ‘Has anyone checked to see if he has an alibi for the Leith Walk murder?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Might be an idea. DNA evidence will rule him in or out of the Macritchie killing, but that’ll take a day or two. Maybe I should have a word with him.’

‘He’s at the Park Guest House in town, Mr Macleod. I don’t think Allies for Animals has the biggest of budgets. And DCI Smith has told him not to leave the island.’

They started walking across the machair towards the road, sheep scattering before them as they went. Fin raised his voice over the wind. ‘And sexual assault, you said. What was all that about?’

‘A sixteen-year-old girl accused him of rape.’

‘And
did
he rape her?’

Gunn shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s very difficult to get the proof you need to bring a charge in a lot of these cases.’

‘Well, it’s probably not an issue. Not in this case, anyway. I’d have said it was virtually impossible for a sixteen-year-old girl to have done to Macritchie what his killer did.’

‘Maybe so, Mr Macleod. But her father would have been more than capable.’

Fin stopped mid-stride. ‘Who’s her father?’

Gunn nodded towards the church in the distance. ‘The Reverend Donald Murray.’

FOUR

Guy Fawkes night was just three days away. We had collected a huge stash of old rubber tyres and were looking forward to the biggest bonfire in Ness. Every village had one, and every village wanted theirs to be the best. It was a competition we took very seriously in those days. I was thirteen, and in my second year of secondary school at Crobost. The exams I would sit at the end of that year would pretty much determine my future. And the rest of your life is a lot of responsibility to carry when you’re thirteen.

If I did well I would go to the Nicholson in Stornoway and sit my Highers, maybe Sixth Year Studies, even A levels. I would have a chance of going to university, the opportunity to escape.

If I did badly I would go to the Lews Castle School, still at that time in the castle itself. But there my education would be vocational. The school had a proud tradition of turning out first-rate mariners, but I didn’t want to go to sea, and I didn’t want to learn a trade and be stuck in some building yard like my father when the fishing no longer offered him a living.

The trouble was, I hadn’t been doing too well. The life of a thirteen-year-old is full of distractions. Like bonfire night. I had also been living with my aunt for five years by then, and she kept me busy on the croft, cutting peats, dipping the sheep, tupping, lambing, bringing in the hay. She wasn’t interested in how well or badly I was doing at school. And it is not easy at that age to motivate yourself to burn the midnight oil over some dry history book, or mathematical equation.

That was when Artair’s dad first came to see my aunt and offered to tutor me. She told him he was daft. How could she afford a private tutor? He said she didn’t have to. He was already tutoring Artair, and it would be no more bother to tutor me as well. Besides, he told her (and I know this because she relayed it to me later, word for word, and with no little amount of scepticism in her voice), he believed that I was a smart boy who was underachieving. And that with a little push in the right direction he was sure I could pass my exams at the end of the year and graduate to the Nicholson. And, who knows, maybe even university.

Which is how I came to be sitting at a table that night in the little back room of Artair’s bungalow that his dad liked to call his study. One whole wall was lined with shelves that sagged under the weight of books stacked along their length. Hundreds of books. I remembered wondering how it was possible for one person to read so many books in a lifetime. Mr Macinnes had a mahogany desk with a green leather-tooled top and a matching captain’s chair. It was pushed against the wall opposite the bookshelves. There was a big, comfortable armchair where he sat to read, a coffee table beside it with an Anglepoise lamp. If he cared to look up, he would have a view out of the window to the sea. Artair and I were tutored at a fold-up card table that Mr Macinnes placed in the middle of the room. We sat in hard chairs facing away from the window, in case we would be distracted by the world outside. Sometimes he would take us together, usually for maths. But more often he took us separately. Boys together have a habit of encouraging each other to a failure in concentration.

I don’t remember much, now, of those long tutoring sessions through dark winter nights and early spring light, except that I didn’t enjoy them. Funny, though, the things I do remember. Like the chocolate-brown colour of the felt-topped card table, and the pale, sharply defined coffee stain that marred it and looked like a map of Cyprus. I remember an old brown water stain on the ceiling in the corner of the room that made me think of a gannet in flight, and the crack in the plaster which transected it, running at an angle through the cornice before disappearing behind cream-coloured anaglypta wallpaper. I remember, too, a crack in a window pane, seen during stolen glances to that other world out there, and the smell of stale pipe smoke that always seemed to hang about Artair’s dad. Although I don’t ever remember seeing him smoking.

Mr Macinnes was a tall, thin man, a good ten years older than my father had been. I suppose the seventies were the decade when he probably finally admitted to himself that he was no longer a young man. But he clung on to a hairstyle well into the eighties that was longer than fashionable then. It’s odd how people can get locked into a kind of timewarp. There’s a time in their lives that defines them, and they hang on to it for all the subsequent decades; the same hair, the same style of clothes, the same music, even though the world around them has changed beyond recognition. My aunt was locked in the sixties. Teak furniture, purple carpets, orange paint, The Beatles. Mr Macinnes listened to The Eagles. I recall tequila sunrises and new kids in town, and life in the fast lane.

But he wasn’t some soft academic. Mr Macinnes was a fit man. He liked to sail, and he was a regular on the annual trip to An Sgeir to harvest the guga. He was irritated with me that night, because my concentration was poor. Artair had been dying to tell me something when I arrived, but his dad had hustled me into the backroom and told Artair to keep his peace. Whatever it was could wait. But I could feel Artair’s impatience from the other side of the door, and eventually Mr Macinnes realized he was fighting a losing battle and told me to go.

Artair couldn’t wait to get me out of the house, and we hurried up the front path to the gate in the dark. It was a freezing cold night, the sky as black as you might ever see it, and inset with stars that seemed fixed like jewels. There was no wind, and a thick white frost was settling already, like dust, across the moor, slow sparkling as the moon lifted itself into its autumn elevation, casting its wonderful light on a rare, tranquil sea. There was a high-pressure zone sitting right over the Hebrides, and they said it was going to be there for a few days. Ideal weather for bonfire night. I could hear Artair’s excitement wheezing in his breath. He had developed into a big, strong lad, taller than me, but cursed still with the asthma that threatened at times to shut down his airways. He took a long pull on his puffer. ‘The Swainbost boys have got hold of an old tractor tyre. It’s more than six foot in diameter!’

‘Shit!’ I said. A tyre like that would burn better than anything we had. We had collected more than a dozen, but they were just car tyres, and bike tyres, and inner tubes. And no doubt the Swainbost boys would already have stockpiled something not dissimilar themselves. ‘Where did they get it?’

‘Does it matter? The fact is they’ve got it, and they’re going to have a much better bonfire than us.’ He paused, watching for my disappointment, and then smiled. ‘Maybe.’

I felt myself frowning. ‘What d’you mean,
maybe
?’

Artair became conspiratorial. ‘They don’t know we know they’ve got it. They have it stashed away somewhere, and they’re only going to wheel it out on bonfire night.’