The Chessmen (16 page)

Fin wondered if feeling responsibility for Fin’s life had made Whistler care any more about his. Somehow he didn’t think so. But he didn’t share the thought with Donald.

‘Pure chance, too, that I met her down there,’ Donald said. ‘You must remember her from school. She was a couple of years behind us at the Nicolson.’

Fin nodded.

‘I used to think that God had sent her to rescue me.’ He paused. ‘But maybe I was wrong about that.’

‘Did you ever go flying with Roddy, Donald?’

‘Hell, no! I’ve got no head for heights, Fin. I hate flying at the best of times.’ He scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘As I recall, after he and Mairead split up he had his own circle of friends. Whether he went flying with them or not, I wouldn’t know. I remember he got involved with some Glasgow girl. No idea what her name was. But she was quite classy. A real looker. And not short of a few quid.’

‘Yes, I remember her.’ Fin had a picture of her in his mind’s eye at a party in a large sandstone villa on the south side of Glasgow. A beautiful, willowy, blonde girl.

‘That was just before I left for London.’ Donald smiled. ‘Roddy never did have any trouble finding himself a woman.’

‘Neither did you, Donald.’

There was a flicker of his old self in Donald’s eyes before he forced the focus back on Roddy. ‘It’s strange, though.’

‘What is?’

‘How the band went from strength to strength without Roddy. Just goes to show that for all his high opinion of himself, it was Strings who was the bigger musical influence.’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t listened to them once in all these years. God teaches us to forgive, but it’s very hard to forget. And I know that just the sound of Mairead’s
voice would bring it all back. And I don’t need that pain as well.’

He tried to light another cigarette, but the wind was too ferocious now and he gave up. They felt the first spots of rain whipping into their faces.

‘Roddy wasn’t universally popular, Fin. I know that. God knows, I had reason enough to hate him myself. But who would have wanted to murder him? And why?’

Fin shook his head. ‘I haven’t the first idea, Donald.’

The rain turned into a deluge then, and the two men ran from the jetty towards the boat shed at the end of the beach. Donald slid one of the doors open and they slipped inside, soaked already. It smelled of diesel and fish in here, and the shadows of small boats were canted at odd angles between windows that gave out on to the beach and the sound of the sea. There was almost no light left before Donald’s lighter suddenly illuminated his face, painting it orange by its flickering light, then red in the glow of the lit tobacco, before fading back into darkness.

Neither spoke for a moment, gripped unexpectedly by a sense of being in the presence of the dead. For it was here that Angel Macritchie had met his death. The murder that had brought Fin back to the island of his birth after an absence of eighteen years. In the dark, with their memories, the ghost of Macritchie made its presence felt, the chill wind whipping through ill-fitting doors and open windows, wrapping itself around them.

Fin stamped his feet, more to exorcize the ghost than to warm himself. His voice sounded abnormally loud. ‘I don’t
suppose the Presbytery have fixed a date for your hearing yet?’

‘It’ll be within the fortnight. In the Free Church hall in Kenneth Street in Stornoway.’ As Donald pulled on his cigarette his face again reflected its glow. ‘They’ve engaged legal counsel, I’m told. I’ve read up on the Acts of Assembly that set out the conditions for establishing a judicial commission. It seems that the hearing will pretty much follow the same course it would in a court of law.’

‘Then presumably you can appoint counsel yourself?’

Donald’s laugh came like a gunshot out of the dark. ‘Aye. If I could afford it.’

‘They’ll be calling Fionnlagh and Donna to give evidence, too, I suppose.’

‘I’ve asked them not to.’

Fin was astonished. ‘Why not? There’s nobody closer to what happened that day than the two of them.’

‘They’ve suffered enough,’ Donald said. ‘I’ll not put them through it all again.’

Fin thought about raising an argument, but realized even before he opened his mouth that there would be no point. Donald had sacrificed everything to save them once. Why would he subject them to a repeat performance? He would rather they threw him out of the Church.

‘Anyway, hopefully George Gunn will testify. He took statements from them both, and has to be seen as a reliable and unbiased witness.’

‘He is, Donald. But that very lack of bias could work against you.’

Donald nodded solemnly. ‘I know.’

More silence in the dark. Fin could smell Donald’s cigarette smoke. He said, ‘How do you think it will go?’

‘I think,’ said Donald, ‘that before the month is over I’ll be out of a job, and out of my house.’

‘And Catriona?’

Donald’s face gave away nothing in the light of his cigarette. ‘You’d have to ask her that, Fin.’

It never failed to affect him, seeing his aunt’s house lying derelict and forgotten. Peeling whitewash, broken slates, windows smashed or boarded up, like missing teeth in a neglected mouth.

Oddly, he never thought of it as anything other than his aunt’s house. Never his home. And yet he had spent the greater part of his childhood here, in a cold, damp bedroom with its rusty-framed dormer window looking out over the rocky bay below. He remembered the first time she had brought him here to live. Just days after the death of his parents. A handful of possessions in a small brown case that she had placed on the bed, telling him to pack them away while she went and made something for their tea. And he had sat on his own, feeling the cold damp of the mattress beneath him seeping into his very soul, and wept.

He stood now on the pitted tarmac in front of the house, looking up at the window of that room, a window that gave on to a past he had no wish to revisit. And yet somehow it was always there. In good memories and bad. Of a life long gone, populated by people long dead. And there was no escaping it.

As he frequently did, he wondered what point there was in it all. Were we really just here to procreate and pass on, leaving our seed upon the earth to do as we had done, as our fathers had done before us, and theirs before them? A meaningless cycle of birth, life, death?

He walked to the edge of the path that led down to the shore, a shingle beach in a boulder-strewn cove where he had often played among the ruins of the old salting house. He almost expected to see himself down there: a lonely boy seeking solace in the world of his imagination.

It was a long, sleepless night which had sparked his mood. Images of Roddy’s broken, decayed body in the plane. The look on Whistler’s face. The big man walking away, climbing back up to the ridge only to disappear. And Fin had woken from shallow dreams in a sweat, with the certainty in his heart that Whistler knew something he wasn’t telling. And yet his shock at the discovery of the body had been as great, if not greater, than Fin’s.

He had risen early, leaving Marsaili sleeping, and set off along the cliffs above Crobost, until he reached the sheltered inlet where generations earlier his ancestors had built the small harbour. A steep ramp down to a short jetty and a deep pool among the rocks where they kept live crabs in cages until they could be shipped out to foreign markets. It seemed that everything good about this island left it. Its resources. Its people. And all their ambitions.

The wind blew strong in the sunshine, cumulus bubbling up and tracking across a vast, ever-changing sky. And still it was not cold, even though October was just an exhalation
away. Fin sat himself down among the dry grasses, pulling his knees up to his chest to hug them, gazing out over choppy green water that rose and fell in gently coruscating swells across the bay.

And he remembered the day that Whistler had first come to spend the night here with him and his aunt.

It’s strange that history should have affected us the way it did. But the discovery that our antecedents had survived the
Iolaire
together, one because of the other, formed a bond between me and Whistler that no one else could really understand. We were very different animals, he and I. I was quite a self-contained boy as a teenager, I think. I didn’t make friends easily. And perhaps that’s the only thing that Whistler and I really had in common. I was a cool, even-tempered lad, not much prone to depression, although there was plenty I could have got depressed about when I think back on it. Whistler, on the other hand, could fall into a black funk in the blink of an eye if things didn’t go just the way he planned. Other times he would be irresistibly funny, the life and soul of any party.

He never appeared to know, though, when he had crossed the line between what was funny and what was offensive. I saw him get away with murder. Putting his hands on a girl’s breasts and somehow managing to make a joke of it. And then another time getting his face slapped for making some wildly inappropriate remark. Which would
send him off into one of his moods. He had meant no offence. Why hadn’t anyone seen the funny side?

He was brilliant and mercurial, talented and unpredictable. To be his friend you had to work at it. But you also had to be accepted by him. And I had been granted exclusive access to that club, a club with a membership of one.

I didn’t often stay over at Whistler’s house. His father was seldom sober, and when he was drunk he was unpredictable, liked to throw things around the place and bellow at the top of his voice. He never did us any physical harm, but I was scared of him, and so was Whistler.

Although already growing into the giant of a man he would become, Whistler was still no match for his dad, who was two sizes bigger. Derek Macaskill had spent half his life at sea, first in the merchant navy and later on the trawlers. But he was a man hopelessly addicted to the drink, and had become not only unemployed but unemployable. He was a liability aboard a boat. He had lost an eye in an accident on a trawler and was still, apparently, on some kind of disability benefit all these years later.

The glass eye they had replaced it with never moved, and no matter where you were in the room, or where his other eye was pointing, it always appeared to be looking at you. Occasionally he would take it out and polish it in some filthy handkerchief, with a big malicious grin on his face. He only did it because he knew it gave us the willies.

I’ve never seen such big hands on a man, fists you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of. His hair was cropped close to his scalp, dark once but rapidly turning grey. A long scar
ran through it from his forehead to a point behind his left ear. Whether he had acquired it in the same accident that lost him his eye I never knew.

Following the death of his mother, when he was just nine, Whistler had spent a couple of years living with relatives of hers at Miabhaig, until big Derek Macaskill, fresh from being banned from the boats, came one day to claim him and take him back to live with him at Ardroil.

I’d always wondered where he got the money to buy his drink. He was, after all, an unemployed man on benefit. But I would find out soon enough.

Sòlas were really beginning to make their name then, playing gigs all over the island, at ceilidhs and school dances, in pubs and village halls. It was how I spent most of my Friday and Saturday nights, and sometimes week nights, too. Humphing gear. Me and Big Kenny. Kenny had turned seventeen before me, and was the first to get his driving licence. So it was only natural that he would become the roadie.

None of us knew it then, but Whistler had already taken his decision not to go to Glasgow, and his interest in the band had begun to wane. There were nights when he simply didn’t turn up. He never told anyone, not even me, and the band would frequently find themselves having to perform without their flute player.

Not that it made a radical difference to the quality of their performance. They were always great. At least, I thought so. But the haunting wail of that Celtic flute, particularly
in tandem with Mairead’s violin, was the grace note that made them better than great. It made them magical. And it made Roddy mad when Whistler didn’t show up.

It all came to a head one night after a gig at the Cross Inn at Ness. After three straight gigs without showing, Whistler turned up as if nothing were amiss. He was in one of his manic good moods, and oblivious to the ill will festering towards him among the other members of the band. There had clearly been meetings to discuss his absences, discussions to which I had not been privy. But I knew that something was brewing.

Kenny and I had gone into the bar behind the hotel for a pint while the band was playing. When we came out at the end of the show, night was leaching the last light out of the sky. We went to take the van around to the front. Kenny had parked it beside the big tree that grew in the car park then, the only real tree on the whole of the west coast. A giant of a tree. God knows how it had survived the winds that drove in off the Atlantic all these years, but it must have seen a few generations come and go.

Roddy and Whistler were standing in its shadow almost screaming at each other. We heard them before we saw them. The crowds streaming out of the lounge bar in the hotel, to cars and minibuses, turned heads in their direction.

‘For Christ’s sake keep it down, boys.’ Kenny was self-conscious. But neither of them took any notice.

‘It’s just not fair on the rest of us,’ Roddy shouted. ‘All our arrangements, all our rehearsals, are based around us being a six-piece band. A lot of it built around your fucking
flute. There’s a big bloody hole in our sound when you’re not there. It’s embarrassing.’

Whistler stood his ground, unfazed apparently by their embarrassment. ‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you started trying to ease me out.’

Which came with the unexpected force of a slap in the face to Roddy. ‘Ease you out? What are you talking about, man? No one’s trying to ease you out.’

‘You blew into Uig with your mainland money in your pocket and just took over. Everything. The band, the girls, the limelight. A real fucking star.’