The Chessmen (31 page)

At the top of a rise in the road, Mairead suddenly turned right, and the X-Trail tipped nose-first down into a steep concrete drive between high, white-painted gateposts, the name of the villa cemented on one of them in blue and white tiles.
Finca Sòlas
.

They descended into a flat, walled parking area, and Mairead turned the vehicle to point back up the drive before switching off the ignition. When he stepped down on to the concrete, Fin felt a blast of heat that was almost shocking after the chill of the air conditioning.

Below the wall to their right, beyond a screen of trees, a turquoise-blue swimming pool lay shimmering invitingly in the afternoon sun. Fin followed Mairead down steps and through a garden of prickly pear cactus and wild aloe vera. They passed beneath an archway that led to a cool, covered passageway which opened out at its far end on to a terracotta-tiled terrace of fountains and fish-ponds.

At the far end of the terrace, beneath the shade of a fleshy-leaved fig tree, a man sat at a table, his back to them, looking out over the view towards the sea. There was a tall glass of something red at his right hand, ice not yet melted, condensation gathering on the table beneath it. A MacBook laptop was open in front of him, and he was tapping at the keyboard.

He turned as he heard the gate opening on to the terrace, a man in his middle years, quite bald on the top of his head, but with hair growing in thick, luxuriant curls all around the sides and back. Once fair, perhaps, it was already turning grey. He carried more weight than was good for him, nutbrown legs in three-quarter-length shorts and open sandals, a white shirt hanging open over the bulge of a large, tanned, beer gut. His brown face cracked into an all-too-familiar smile, and he extended a still-slender hand. He looked to be in rude health for a man they had buried twice.

‘Hello Fin,’ Roddy said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

They left Mairead sitting in the dappled shade provided by rush matting stretched across a frame above the table. She had been subdued, with clouded eyes, and said very little. Perhaps she had realized that this first crack in their seventeen-year silence could only mark the beginning of the end.

Roddy, by contrast, was larger than life, animated in the extreme. Fin followed the ghost of his one-time friend up steps to another level, and they crossed an east-facing terrace towards a large outbuilding at the back of the villa.

‘We have six bedrooms in the house,’ Roddy said. ‘Enough to accommodate the whole band when they come to rehearse and record. Of course, Strings is here more often than the others. We still write together.’ He pushed open a heavy soundproofed door and flicked a switch to flood the studio control room with light, rows of knobs and switches, faders and dials, peppering the shallow angle of an enormous mixing desk. Through a window that ran the length of one wall, shadows reached back into the studio itself, which was littered with sound baffles and hanging mikes. A drum kit was permanently mounted in its own soundproofed
booth, the carpet-tiled floor around it a Sargasso Sea of twisted cables.

‘We’re on our twelfth CD now. Most of it’s already recorded. I’m just working on the mix.’ He leaned across the desk and pressed a switch. The room filled with the beautiful sound of Amran. Synthesizer, violin, the haunting swoop of a Celtic flute, all overlaying the repetitive beat of rock drums and bass, and the sad, pure voice of Mairead singing so painfully of Hebridean longing for a lost past. Roddy switched it off abruptly, and the room resounded with the resultant silence. His eyes were moist. ‘It’s the only way I can go home,’ he said. ‘In my music.’ And then the moment passed and he smiled his genuine affection. ‘It’s great to see you again, Fin, it really is.’

But Fin was ambivalent. From the moment he had seen the post-mortem report he had suspected that Roddy might still be alive. But to be confronted with him in this way, in the flesh, after mourning him twice, and believing him dead for seventeen years, was more than faintly surreal. He said, ‘I don’t know how I feel, Roddy, about seeing you again. Confused, that’s for sure. And right now pretty angry.’

Roddy laughed and took his arm to steer him back out into the sunshine. ‘Don’t be angry with me, Fin. None of this is my fault. Not really.’ They crossed the terrace and looked out over the view. Fin was aware of Mairead’s upturned face watching them from the terrace below. ‘The band will go off on a US tour next year to promote the new CD. But, of course, I won’t be with them. Even though I still write the songs with Strings, and it’s me you hear on the
recordings, I’ve never once been able to play live with Amran since that awful night seventeen years ago. You have no idea how frustrating that is.’

He turned to look Fin in the eye, and waved a hand vaguely towards the villa.

‘Look around you, Fin. It’s paradise, this place. Sunshine all year round. A view to die for. Africa just across the water. They come every seven years to strip the cork off the trees. They’ve done it twice since I’ve been here. You might think I’d be happy. But it feels like a fucking prison.’

He turned and gazed sightlessly towards the Strait of Gibraltar, gripping the railing in front of him. Fin saw the white-knuckled tension in his hands. ‘You have no idea what I’d give to be standing right now on Tràigh Uige, looking across the mountains to Harris. Feeling the wind in my face. Aye, and the rain. I’d trade all this for just five minutes of home any day.’

He released his tension, and the railing, and relaxed again into a smile.

‘But what am I thinking about? Terrible host, I am. Never even offered you a drink.’

Fin stared out over the tops of trees in the valley below. To his left, where the forest had been cut back, the shaved peaks of the Sierra Bermeja scraped the sky. Steps led down into a steeply sloped garden of gnarled trees and dusty shrubs, fig and olive, cactus and oleander. All the grasses and wild flowers, this late in the season, were parched and burned brown. He turned, leaning against the rail, to look
back at the house with its roofs sloping at odd angles, a covered balcony high up behind a row of arches, bedrooms opening off it through French windows. A Buddha sat crosslegged below a covered fish-pond, and Mairead perched on the edge of a chair at the table, smoking. She had not addressed a word to Fin since their arrival.

Roddy emerged through an arched doorway from the kitchen carrying a tray of drinks, tall glasses of red, fizzing liquid and chattering ice cubes. ‘Come and get it.’

Fin pushed himself off the railing and crossed the terrace to climb the two steps to the eating area. He drew up a chair and sat opposite Mairead in the shade as Roddy distributed their drinks and a wooden dish of macadamia nuts.

‘I’ll make us something to eat in a while,’ he said. ‘Paella okay?’ He grinned. ‘Very Spanish, but they probably ship the prawns down from Stornoway.’ He raised his glass. ‘
Slàinte
.’

It was odd to hear Gaelic spoken in this place, so many miles from home, in a climate and culture so alien to its origins.

Roddy took a long pull at his drink. ‘Refreshing, eh?
Tinto de verano
, the Spanish call it. Literally, wine of summer. Red wine mixed with a sweet fizzy lemon drink. I love it.’ He took another sip. ‘They tell me there’s a distillery at Uig now. Abhainn Dearg. Red River whisky. Any good?’

Fin nodded. ‘It’s a fine whisky.’ He took a small sip of his
tinto de verano
and fixed Roddy in his gaze. ‘Who killed Whistler, Roddy?’

It was as if someone had thrown a switch, and a light went out somewhere behind Roddy’s eyes. His face darkened. ‘I don’t know, Fin. But I’d like to meet him, because he wouldn’t be breathing for long.’

Fin said, ‘Seems to me there was never any love lost between you and Whistler.’ He glanced at Mairead who sat staring sullenly into her drink. ‘Over the affections of a certain young woman.’ She threw him a dark glance.

But Roddy just shook his head. ‘Sure. We had our differences over the years, me and Whistler.’ He chuckled sadly. ‘Whistler fell out with everyone at one time or another.’ He raised his eyes to meet Fin’s. ‘But I always considered him to be one of my best and oldest friends. He was like a big fucking dog, Fin. He might bite you from time to time, but he never stopped loving you.’ And Fin thought he had never heard Whistler so well summed up in so few words. Roddy laid his glass on the table and turned it around with his fingertips, gazing thoughtfully into its fizzing redness. ‘I owed him more than most people will ever know.’

‘In relation to . . . your “death”?’ Fin said.

Roddy nodded without looking up.

‘Tell me.’

Roddy glanced at Mairead, absorbing but ignoring her disapproval. He drew a long breath. ‘I suppose I should start at the beginning.’

‘Well, since we already know how it ends,’ Fin said, ‘maybe that would be a good idea.’

*

Roddy leaned back in his chair and reached into his shirt pocket for a pack of cigars. He drew one out and lit it, and puffed on it reflectively for some moments. Blue smoke rose around his head in gently curling strands in the still heat of the afternoon. ‘You probably remember a girlfriend I had during our second year in Glasgow. Caitlin. She was the one whose parents had the big fuck-off house with the swimming pool in Pollokshields.’

Fin nodded. He remembered her well. The blonde girl who had been skinny-dipping with Roddy in the swimming pool the night Fin and Mairead first got together.

‘And her big fucking brother, Jimbo.’ Roddy almost spat out his name. ‘Smug bastard with a face you’d never get tired of kicking.’

Fin was taken aback by Roddy’s ferocity. He remembered Jimbo, strutting about his parents’ house as if he owned it. A spoiled little rich kid.

It was almost as if Roddy had to force himself to relax to continue his story. He tipped his head back and blew smoke towards the rush matting above them, chinks of sunlight falling through it to sprinkle light like fairy dust across the table. ‘My own fault, really, I suppose. I was head over heels in love with Caitlin. Obsessed.’ He glanced at Mairead, embarrassed it seemed to confess it in her presence. ‘And I thought she felt the same way about me.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘Though maybe I always knew there was an element of the star-fucker about her.’ He added, unnecessarily, ‘We were just starting to make it big, then.’

Mairead said, ‘Just stick to the facts, Roddy.’ Her distaste was clear.

Roddy took another draught from his glass. ‘You saw yourself from her parents’ house that they were pretty well off. Her father was in banking, she said. And she had expensive tastes. Clothes, shoes, good food, good wine. But the thing I could give her, Fin, that no one else could, was the thrill of flying. Learning to fly that old Piper Comanche was the best investment I ever made. She loved it. Couldn’t get enough of it. Wanted to go up in the air every spare moment we had. Even expressed an interest in learning to fly herself.’ He blew air through pursed lips. ‘And like an idiot I even offered to pay for lessons.’

He sat for a long time, then, lost in his own thoughts, puffing gently on his cigar. Fin looked across the table at Mairead, but she was assiduously avoiding his eye.

Finally, Roddy said, ‘It was Caitlin’s idea to fly up to North Uist and land at Solas Beach.’ His eyes flickered towards Fin. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? Solas. Minus the accent, of course. And the place name doesn’t derive from
comfort
. Anything but that.’ Fin saw him clench his jaw. ‘Anyway, she’d read about it somewhere, she said. In some magazine. That it was possible to land a small aircraft on the sands at low tide. It was almost midsummer, and she thought it would be romantic if we could fly up there and land on the beach at midnight, and picnic through the summer solstice. Maybe even stay overnight. Sleep under the stars.’ He shrugged and smiled his regret. ‘Sounded good to me.’

He drained his glass and stood up, overcome by a sudden restlessness, and turned to the edge of the terrace where he stood leaning with his hands on the rail.

‘I’d flown up to the Hebrides before. That was no big deal. But I didn’t know if it would be possible to park up on the beach, so I might have to fly back. And I’d need night and IMC ratings for that. Even though it never really got dark at that time of year. But there was time enough to get my licence amended so I could fly at night, or in limited visibility, and I did that. We kept our eye on the weather forecasts, and it looked to be just about perfect for June 21st. So we made it a date.’

He turned around then, half-sitting on the rail, arms folded across his chest. Mairead had her back to him, lighting another cigarette, and it appeared to Fin that Roddy was looking straight through him, lost in a world of distant memory.

‘Official sunset around the summer solstice on North Uist is 10.30 p.m., and I knew I couldn’t land there in the dark. So we set off in plenty of time to arrive before sunset. It was a beautiful night, Fin. Perfect for flying. I’d never seen the sky such a deep, dark blue, and the red fire of sunset lighting up the ocean, streaking orange and yellow along the horizon. The last light of the day was catching the mountains of Harris against the sky to the north as we circled low over the beach. An almost flawless crescent of sand exposed at low tide. I made two passes over it to make sure conditions were okay for landing, then on the third turn prepared to set her down.’

Fin could see that he was back there in his mind, in the cockpit of that tiny single-engined aircraft, preparing to land her on a strange beach on a midsummer’s night, breathless, excited, scared. And with a woman beside him to impress.

‘I was nervous, that was for sure. And I kept the power on very slightly to make the landing as soft as possible, coming in faster than usual because there was no length restriction. And keeping the nose up as long as possible to make sure she didn’t dig in to soft sand.’ His face lit up in relived recollection, pride in his voice. ‘And then she was down, and I brought her to a halt, and Caitlin was all over me as if I’d just turned water into wine.’ He shook his head. ‘It was a great feeling, Fin, landing on the beach like that. And jumping down on to hard, compacted sand with the wind in my face, and the last of the day sending shadows across the water from the dunes. I turned to help Caitlin down off the wing and held her in my arms, and kissed her . . . and never noticed how cold she was. And I don’t mean to the touch.’ His expression hardened. ‘That was when I turned around and saw three men crossing the sand towards us. I didn’t really think anything of it at first. I had no reason to be alarmed. I mean, I hadn’t done anything wrong.’ He drew a long, slow breath. ‘Which is when I realized that the man leading them was Caitlin’s brother, Jimbo.’