The Blackhouse (45 page)

Outside, the storm was blowing itself out. But the wind still whistled and screamed in every crack and crevice in the rock, through all the gullies and caves, among all the cairns left by the generations of guga hunters who had gone before. Gigs said, ‘We’d hauled you up fifty feet by the time he went, Fin. No one pushed him, except maybe the hand of God.’

TWENTY

I

He heard someone call his name. Bright, hard and clear.
Fin
.
Fin Macleod.
But distant. From somewhere beyond the fog. He rose swiftly, as if from the darkness of the seabed, and broke the surface of consciousness, startled and blinking in pain at the light that blinded him. Shapes and shadows were moving around him. Someone had pulled back the tarpaulin, flooding the blackhouse with the soft, yellow light of sunrise. Smoke from the smouldering fire swirled and eddied in the wind that sneaked in with it.

When Gigs had said they should try to get some sleep before dawn, Fin had been unable to imagine how that might be possible. And yet now he could not even remember curling up on the stone shelf along the far wall. Some self-protective mechanism had simply shut him down. The same mechanism, perhaps, which had hidden all his troubled memories in a dark and inaccessible corner of his mind for eighteen years.

‘Fin Macleod!’ The voice called again, but this time Fin detected the wheeze in it. Artair. Fear slid through him like a frozen arrow. He jumped down from the shelf and staggered across to the door, pushing past bodies to reach it. Gigs and several others were already outside. Fin put a hand up to shade his eyes from a sun still low in the eastern sky and saw, out on the edge of the cliff beyond the lighthouse, two men silhouetted against the dawn. The sky was almost yellow, streaked with pink cloud, and ten thousand gannets filled it with their huge beating wings, screaming their contempt for the men below.

Artair and Fionnlagh were a good two hundred yards away, but Fin could see the rope tied around Fionnlagh’s neck, looping into his father’s hands. The boy’s own hands were bound behind his back and he was teetering perilously close to the edge of the cliff, kept from tipping over the edge and dropping the three hundred feet to the rocks below only by the tension that Artair maintained on the rope.

Fin stumbled and slid across the boulder-strewn soup of mud and seaweed that lay between him and the two figures on the clifftop. Artair watched him with a strange smile fixed on his face. ‘I knew it was you. When we saw the trawler come in last night. We watched you trying to land the dinghy. Fucking mad! But we were rooting for you, boy.’ He looked at Fionnlagh. ‘Weren’t we, young Fin? It’s better than I could ever have hoped for. A father’s first-hand fucking view of his boy going over the edge.’ He turned back towards Fin. ‘Come on, Macleod. Closer. You’ll get a grandstand view. I suppose the DNA results are through.’

Fin was no more than fifty feet away now. He could almost smell the boy’s fear in the wind. He stopped, gasping for breath, and looked at his old schoolfriend with a mixture of hatred and disbelief. ‘No,’ he shouted back. ‘You threw up one of your pills, Artair. Prednisone. For asthmatics. It could only have been you.’

Artair laughed. ‘Christ, I wish I’d thought of that. I’d have done it on purpose.’

Fin began moving more cautiously towards them now, anxious to keep Artair talking for as long as he could. ‘You killed Angel Macritchie just to get me here.’

‘I knew it wouldn’t take you long to work that one out, Fin. You always were too fucking smart for your own good.’

‘Why Macritchie?’

Artair laughed. ‘Why the fuck not? He was a piece of shit, Fin. You know that. Who’d fucking miss him?’

And Fin thought about the tears in the eyes of the boy that Angel had crippled all those years before.

‘And anyway …’ Artair’s smile curdled on his lips, ‘he had it coming. He was here, remember, eighteen years ago. He knew what really happened that year. And there wasn’t a day went by that he didn’t remind me of it, that he didn’t hold out the prospect of public humiliation.’ His face was twisted by anger and hate. ‘Do you remember now, Fin? Did Gigs tell you?’

Fin nodded.

‘Good. I’m glad you know. All that loss of memory shit. I thought for a long time you were putting it on. And then it came to me. Naw, it was real. And you’d fucking escaped. The memory, the island, everything. And here was me, stuck looking after a mother who needed fed through a straw, married to the only woman I ever loved – a Fin Macleod cast-off, pregnant with
his
son instead of mine. Stuck with the memory of everything my father did to us. Stuck with the humiliation of knowing that a whole lot of others knew it, too. Because of you. And you got off scot-fucking-free. Jesus!’ He tipped his head back and glared at the heavens. ‘Well, not any more, Fin. You’re going to get to watch your boy die, just as I watched my father die on these same cliffs. Because of you.’

‘I suppose you knew about my kid being killed in the hit and run.’

Artair grinned. ‘Saw it in the paper, boy. Punched the fucking air when I read it. At last some shit was sticking to the teflon kid. It’s what crystallized the idea for me. The chance to ruin your life the way you ruined mine.’

Fin was no more than ten feet away now. He saw the madness in Artair’s eyes. And the terror in Fionnlagh’s.

‘That’s close enough,’ Artair said sharply.

Fin said, ‘If you’d wanted the pleasure of seeing me watch my own son die, you should have been at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary last month. He was just eight, that wee boy. I was there in intensive care when he flatlined.’ And he saw the merest hint of humanity flicker for the briefest moment in Artair’s eyes. ‘You could have seen my misery close-up, Artair. You could have known for yourself how my life was blighted for ever by the loss of my child. But you won’t see that today.’

Artair frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It would make me sick to my stomach to see young Fionnlagh die here like this. But I wouldn’t be witnessing the death of my son.’

Artair’s consternation was turning to anger. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Macleod?’

‘I’m talking about the fact that Fionnlagh’s not my son, Artair. Marsaili only told you that in a fit of anger. Some stupid revenge for having to settle for what she saw as second-best. For having to settle for you. Just so you wouldn’t think it had all come too easy.’ He took several more tentative steps towards them. ‘Fionnlagh is your boy, Artair. Always has been, always will be.’ He saw the look of shock on the boy’s face. But he pressed on relentlessly. ‘All those years of beating that poor kid. Taking out your revenge on the boy instead of the father. And all the time it was your own son you were abusing. Just like your father before you.’

Fin could see from Artair’s face that every conviction he had ever held, every certainty he had ever known, had just been stripped away. Leaving him to face a truth that he could never live with.

‘That’s crap! You’re lying!’

‘Am I? Think about it, Artair. Remember how it was. Remember how many times she tried to take it back. How many times she told you she’d only said it to hurt you.’ Fin took two more steps.

‘No!’ Artair turned his head slowly to look at the boy he had punched and kicked and punished for seventeen hellish years, and his face contorted with pain and misery. ‘She told me the truth. Then realized it was a mistake.’ He turned wild eyes on Fin. ‘And you can never take back the truth, you know that, Fin.’

‘She lied to hurt you, Artair. You were the one who wanted it to be true. You were the one who wanted the boy to blame in my absence. To have a scapegoat. To have a punchbag for all the hate you had for me.’

‘No!’ Artair almost screamed it now. And he released a feral howl that raised all the hairs on Fin’s arms and legs and back. He dropped the rope and Fin stepped quickly forward to pull the boy away from the edge of the cliff. He immediately felt the shivering that racked the teenager’s fragile frame. Whether from fear or from cold, he couldn’t tell. Artair stood staring at them bleakly, his eyes burning with tearful fury.

Fin reached out a hand towards him. ‘Come on, Artair. It doesn’t have to end like this.’

But Artair was staring right through him now. ‘Too late. Can’t take it back.’ He looked at the boy hanging grimly on to Fin for support. And all the tragedy of his life was captured in his eyes, every nuance of every moment of pain, every twist of a knife he had ultimately turned on himself. ‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was barely a whisper carried on the wind, a distant echo of his own father’s apology to Fin eighteen years earlier. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He met Fin’s eye for the briefest of moments, before turning without another word and dropping into the void, gannets rising up around him like the fiery angels that would carry him to Hell.

Fin untied Fionnlagh and led him back across the rock towards the blackhouse. Several men came to meet them and put blankets around the boy’s shoulders. He had not spoken, but his pain was clear for all to see. His face was a bloodless grey-white. Two hundred feet below, in the creek between the promontories, the crew of the
Purple Isle
stood watching on the deck, and from somewhere out of the wind in the south-west, they heard the sound of blades beating turbulent air.

Fin turned as the Sikorsky dropped from the sky, scattering clouds of seabirds before it, a great red and white bird whose motors thrummed and filled the air with their roar. He saw the words
H.M. Coastguard
emblazoned black on white along one side beneath the rotors as it dipped and bucked in the air rising from beneath the cliffs, before settling finally with a gentle grace on the helipad beside the lighthouse. A door slid open, and uniformed and plain-clothes police officers streamed out on to the concrete.

Fin and Fionnlagh and the guga hunters stood and watched as the policemen picked their way across the glaur towards them, slithering and stumbling among the rocks. DCI Smith led the party, his raincoat blowing out behind him, hair whipping around his head in spite of his Brylcreem. He slid to an unsteady halt in front of Fin and glared at him. ‘Where’s Macinnes?’

‘You’re too late. He’s dead.’

Smith cocked a head full of suspicion. ‘How?’

‘He jumped off the cliff, Detective Chief Inspector.’ And when he saw Smith purse his lips, Fin added, ‘Every man here saw him do it.’ He glanced at Gigs, who gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head. Whatever ended up on the police report would only ever be half the story. The whole truth would never leave the rock. It would stay here among the chaos of boulders and birds, whispered only in the wind. And it would die in the hearts and minds of the men who were there that day, when
they
died. And then only God would know.

II

He looked down on the steel-cold waters of Loch a Tuath, the downdraught from the rotors sending concentric circles of broken light across the bay, and then they tipped and veered east, swinging sharply to drop down to the apron behind the terminal building. A clutch of police vehicles and an ambulance were gathered there, blue lights flashing in the sunlight that fell in handfuls through flitting gaps in the cloud, sprinkling like fairy dust across the moor before vanishing again in an instant.

Fin glanced once more at the boy, wrapped in blankets by the door. He had remained impassive for the duration of the flight. Whatever turmoil there might have been in his head was not reflected outside it. Fin himself felt hollowed out. A husk. Emptied of everything that might once have defined him. He looked away again in despair and saw Marsaili waiting for them by the ambulance, George Gunn standing awkwardly at her side. She was wrapped in a long black coat over jeans and boots, and her hair blew back in a stream from a face as pale as an August moon. She looked tiny beside Gunn. And Fin saw in her again the little girl with the pigtails who had sat beside him that first day at school, full of stubborn determination, but vulnerable now in a way she had never been as a child. Artair’s death had been radioed ahead. She averted her face from the blast of air and dust thrown out by the blades as the coastguard helicopter touched down on the tarmac.

Fin turned and saw Gigs and Pluto sitting in grim silence at the back of the cabin, their presence demanded by Smith, who wanted to take formal statements back in Stornoway. The others had stayed behind to pack up and make the return trip on the
Purple Isle
. Without a single bird culled. For the first time in centuries there would be no guga eaten on the Isle of Lewis that year.

As the engines wound down, and the door slid open, Marsaili searched anxiously among the faces of the men disembarking. Fin saw her catch her breath as her eyes fell on Fionnlagh, and she ran across the taxiway to throw her arms around him and hold him as if she meant never to let him go. Fin climbed down from the hatch and stood there, helpless, impotent, watching them uncertainly. Gunn approached and slipped Fin a piece of paper torn from a notebook and put a hand gently on Marsaili’s shoulder. ‘We need to get the boy checked out at the hospital, Mrs Macinnes.’ Reluctantly she released her son, before taking his face in both her hands and looking into his eyes, searching perhaps for some sign that he didn’t hate her too much. ‘Talk to me, Fionnlagh. Say something.’ But it was towards Fin that he turned his head.

‘Was it true? What you told my father out there on the rock?’

Marsaili looked at Fin with wide, frightened eyes. ‘What
did
you tell him?’

Fin clutched the piece of paper Gunn had given him, afraid to look at it. ‘That Fionnlagh was his son.’

‘And am I?’ Fionnlagh looked from one to the other, anger rising visibly in his chest, as if he believed he was being excluded from some secret that only they shared.

Marsaili said, ‘You were only weeks old, Fionnlagh. You were crying every night. I had post-natal depression, and every other kind of depression you can think of.’ Her blue eyes briefly found Fin’s, then slipped away into some distant place from which she had a view back in time. ‘We had a terrible argument, Artair and I. I can’t even remember what it was about now. But I wanted to hurt him.’ She looked at her son, guilt etching the frown gathering in furrows across her forehead. ‘And so I used you. I told him you were Fin’s son, not his. It just came out. How could I ever have imagined what it would lead to, that it would end like this?’ She raised her eyes to a sky rushing past overhead. ‘I wished right there and then that I could have bitten my tongue off. I told him a thousand times that I’d only said it to hurt him, but he would never believe me.’ She lowered her head and ran the tips of her fingers lovingly down the side of her son’s face. ‘And you’ve had to live with the consequences ever since.’