The Chessmen (19 page)

I have heard people say that in the seconds before a crash, or a life-threatening accident, time seems to stand still and
you have all that you need of it to rewind your life, spooling back through those moments that exist only in your memory and are about to be lost for ever. I didn’t experience it like that.

The first thing I felt was pain as I was dashed against a rock dividing the flow of water. The force of the impact and the current of the water itself lifted me out of it for a few vital seconds. I could see how the stream dropped away below me, white water breaking over boulders and cascading in spumes and spray through the rain that continued to fall. And I found myself almost beached on the slab of rock which had broken my downward momentum, sliding over its slippery black surface, face down, feet first, knowing that unless I could hold on to it I would certainly be smashed and broken by the succession of drops that lay ahead.

As I slid inexorably across the angle of its face, water breaking all around me, I tried desperately to find a handhold, fingers seeking anything they could grab. I felt myself going, and the conviction of death returned before, at the very last, my fingertips found a seam that broke across its smooth surface, and they locked into the two inches of ledge it provided.

For those few vital seconds, I felt my body washing about below me in the flow, as if hands were trying to grab me and pull me down. But my tenuous grasp on the rock stopped that downward drag. At least long enough for me to swing my right arm across the rock and find a crack in the gneiss that gave me something more substantial to hold on to.

It seemed somehow incredible to me, that only seconds
before I had been about to cast a line to fish for trout, without a care in the world. And here I was now, fighting for my life, against what felt like impossible odds.

In the speed with which it had all happened, I hadn’t given Whistler a single thought. Now, above the roar of the water, I heard him shouting. ‘Hang on, Fin! For Christ’s sake, hang on!’ I inclined my head to my right, water breaking over it and almost obscuring my vision. I saw him on the bank, no more than six or eight feet away. He had one foot forward in the flow of the water, an arm outstretched. But it was a long way from reaching me, and I knew that if he tried to wade into it, the force of the water would sweep him away. I could see the desperation in his face. It would be suicide to try to reach me, but there was a limit to how long I could hold on, a limit that was not far away now.

His thought processes were almost visible in his eyes. There had to be something he could do.

Suddenly he bellowed, ‘I’ll be right back. I promise. Just don’t let go.’ And he was gone. Out of my field of vision. And in that moment I felt as lonely as I have ever felt in my life. The sight and sound of the water filled my eyes, my ears, my mind, and I focused very hard on maintaining my hold on the rock. I trusted absolutely that Whistler would be back with some way of getting me out of this, but I doubted my ability to hold on for long enough. I could feel the cold numbing my body, the strength ebbing from my arms. I had almost no sensation in my hands now at all.

I let my head rest against the rock and closed my eyes, total concentration on not letting go. In a strange way, I
could almost have slept and just released my hold, like drifting off in a dream from which there would be no waking. And there was something oddly comforting in that thought. Until I was startled to consciousness by the revving of a motor that felt very close.

A Land Rover was backing up to the very edge of the water, wheels spinning and sliding, and then locked suddenly in place with the ratcheting sound of a handbrake. I heard a door slam, and Whistler came running around to the back. He had a coil of rope in his hands. He quickly tied one end around his waist, and knelt down to loop the other around the tow bar to secure it. He stood up, then, and without a moment’s hesitation came wading through the water towards me. Almost immediately he was swept off his feet by the force of the flow. As he went down, I saw his outstretched arm, and the rope looped around his hand and wrist, preventing him from being carried off.

Amazingly he found footholds, something beneath him to anchor his feet, and his upper body lifted up out of the flow like Neptune rising out of the sea. And suddenly there he was, right next to me, the veins on his forehead standing out like ropes, a big lad straining every sinew, pitting himself against all the forces of nature to try to save his friend. The water crashed all around him in a fury, white and frothing, as he literally scooped me up in his arms. In an enormous leap of faith I relinquished my hold on the rock and grabbed the rope, feeling his arms lock themselves around my waist. And in the same moment he lost his foothold, and we were both carried off in the surging water. Lost for just a second
to a power so much greater than we could ever have imagined. Until the rope held, and we swung crazily to the side, smashing up against the near bank. Whistler somehow found the strength to reel us in on the end of the rope until we reached the Land Rover and fell gasping and wordless in the reeds and rain-sodden peat beneath the rear wheels. The water passed just inches from our faces, hissing and spitting and cursing. Cheated somehow. And it occurred to me that Whistler’s great-grandfather must have used John Finlay Macleod’s line from the
Iolaire
in much the same way to save my grandfather’s life.

Whistler rolled over on to his back and started laughing at the sky. I fought to find my breath, and heard my trembling voice demand to know what was so damned funny. He turned his big grinning face towards me. ‘You, daft bastard. Biggest bloody fish I ever pulled out of the river, and totally inedible!’

On the drive back down the valley, pitching and bumping through the potholes that the rain had scoured out of the hard core, hot air belted out of the heater and slowly brought life back to my frozen bones. I sat shivering next to Whistler, who handled the Land Rover as if he’d been driving it all his life. But I wasn’t sure he even had a licence.

‘What the hell’s Jock Macrae going to say when he finds his Land Rover’s gone?’ I said.

Whistler just laughed again. ‘I’d love to know. I can see the air turning blue. And he’s going to have to walk back home.’

‘We’re going to be in trouble.’

‘Nah.’ Whistler shook his big head, like a dog shaking water from its fur. His grin was almost maniacal. ‘He’ll never know it was us. And who’s going to tell him? Not me, not you. Just be grateful the old bugger was up there, and keeps a tow rope in the back.’

At the house, we got out of our wet clothes, and Whistler set them drying on a clothes horse in front of a roaring peat fire and put the kettle on. He got dressed, and I recognized the shirt my aunt had bought him. ‘Back in a few,’ he said, and when he went outside I heard the Land Rover start up and drive off. In fact it was half an hour before he was back, on foot, to find me huddled at the fire, hands cupped around my second mug of hot tea. ‘I’ve got something that’ll warm you up better than that.’ He vanished into a back room and returned with a half-empty bottle of whisky and poured a good measure of it into my mug. He grinned. ‘Central heating. My old man thinks I don’t know where he hides it.’ He disappeared to return it to its place of concealment, and then sat down next to me.

I looked at him. ‘Are you not having any?’

But he just shook his head. ‘Who knows what’s in the genes. Don’t want to end up like him.’

I sat staring into my mug for a long time before taking a stiff draught and turning my head towards him. ‘You saved my life, Whistler.’

But he just shrugged. ‘That’s my job, Fin.’

I learned later that Jock Macrae had been apoplectic when he returned to find his Land Rover gone. At the end of a
long walk back in the rain, he had gone into the first croft he came to and phoned the police to report it stolen. To his, and their, consternation, it was found a short time later parked outside his house. No one ever did find out who took it, or why.

‘Marsaili said I might find you up here.’

Fin was startled by the voice behind him, and looked up to see George Gunn looking down at him. Beyond him he saw the policeman’s car pulled up at the roadside, a hundred yards or so beyond the house where Fin had grown up. He had not heard Gunn approach over the noise of the wind. He got to his feet and shook the other man’s hand.

Gunn wore a white shirt, dark tie fluttering in the wind beneath a quilted black anorak that hung open. Trousers a little too long for him gathered around highly polished black brogues. His appearance here, crashing into Fin’s reflections, felt ominous.

‘How did the autopsy go?’

Gunn shrugged and pulled a face. ‘It was pretty unpleasant, Mr Macleod. And didn’t really throw any further illumination on the circumstances or cause of death.’ He sucked in a breath. ‘But the brass have arrived from Inverness. And they’re treating it as murder.’

Fin nodded.

‘The advance guard of the fourth estate has arrived, too. On the first flight this morning. God knows how the press
gets hold of these things, but given Roddy Mackenzie’s status in the music world, and the manner of his disappearance, we can probably expect a flood of them over the next few days. And I imagine most of them will be wanting a word with you, as the man who found him.’

Fin smiled grimly. ‘Then I’ll make sure to stay out of their way, George.’

‘Aye, that would be a good idea.’ Gunn rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. ‘Did you ever manage to have that word with your friend, Mr Macleod?’ The question seemed almost casual, but Fin knew that it wasn’t.

‘Whistler?’

‘John Angus Macaskill,’ Gunn confirmed.

‘No, I didn’t.’ He hesitated. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘The Detective Inspector would like a word with him.’

‘Why?’

‘As I told you yesterday, we need his statement. About the finding of the plane.’ He paused. ‘Also, he knew the deceased.’

‘So did I.’

‘Yes, sir. But you haven’t disappeared.’

Fin frowned. ‘And Whistler has?’

‘Well, it seems he’s not to be found, or doesn’t want to be. I’m assuming you went looking for him yesterday?’

Fin nodded his affirmation.

‘And we sent the local bobby to go fetch him first thing this morning. But he’s not at his croft, and appears not to have spent the night at the house. You wouldn’t know where he might be?’

‘No idea, George. Whistler’s a free spirit. Goes where the fancy takes him. He probably spent the night in a shieling somewhere, in shock about Roddy.’

Gunn pushed out a thoughtful lower lip. ‘Local intelligence would have us believe that Whistler Macaskill and Roddy Mackenzie were known to have had their differences.’

Fin almost laughed. ‘If anyone thinks that Whistler had anything to do with Roddy’s murder, they’d be barking up the wrong bloody tree, George. And anyway, he was as upset by finding the body in the plane as I was.’

‘That’s as may be, Mr Macleod. But it seems more than a little odd that he should just vanish off the face of the earth, don’t you think?’ He hesitated. ‘At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll ask again. Is there something you’re not telling me?’

Fin felt the first spits of rain in his face as the wind freshened from the west. And he wondered again what it was that Whistler hadn’t told him. ‘No, George. There isn’t.’

Whistler’s blackhouse had a deserted look about it, even from the road. Fin could not have said quite why, but he knew that he wasn’t going to find Whistler there. It wasn’t until he had climbed the hill that he realized the door was not closed, but lying several inches ajar, swinging back and forth in the wind, as if the house were breathing.

Carefully, he pushed it open wide, scraping it over the flags, and letting his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom before stepping inside. He half expected that he might find wee Anna there, as he had done the day before. But the house was empty. He walked in and felt the chill of the place, a smell of damp in the air. The remains of a days-old peat fire in the hearth were as cold as death. The house felt oddly abandoned, as if there had been nobody here for days. And for the first time Fin began to fear for his old friend. The Lewis chessmen stood lined up along the wall, silent witnesses lurking in the dark. But witnesses to what?

It was with a creeping sense of foreboding that Fin stepped back out into the wind. The tide was in, emerald water a foot deep over acres of golden sand, splinters of distant
sunlight stabbing through breaks in the cloud, firing light in fast-moving flashes across the far machair.

A Range Rover pulled up on the road below, and two men stepped out. Fin had to squint to see their faces against the glare of sea and sun behind them, but he knew from the vehicle that the driver was Jamie. It was only as they began the climb up to the blackhouse that Fin recognized the set of the other. Solid and square, with his cap pulled low over his brow. Big Kenny.

Jamie came to a stop in front of Fin, breathing a little heavily from the climb. Kenny remained a couple of paces behind him, catching Fin’s eye briefly, then averting his gaze almost as if ashamed.

‘Is he there?’ Jamie said.

‘Who?’

Jamie tutted his irritation. ‘Macaskill, of course.’

‘No.’

‘Where is he, then?’

‘I haven’t the first idea.’

Jamie tilted his head and cast a sceptical eye over Fin. ‘You were with him when you found that plane.’

‘Can’t keep a secret around here.’

If Jamie suspected insolence, there was nothing in Fin’s tone to betray it. ‘So you took the bait, went up to Tathabhal after him that night?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing.’

‘He wasn’t poaching?’

‘No.’

Jamie sighed, barely able to conceal his annoyance. ‘So what happened?’

And Fin wondered just how much, or how little, he should tell him. His own stupidity was an embarrassment. The only other witness to events up at the loch the night before the storm was James Minto. And Minto, Fin was sure, was unlikely to say anything. Although he regretted now that he had ever involved the man.