Authors: Peter May
But he let it hang, and she became uncomfortable.
‘It was somewhere in Edinburgh, I remember that. Some kind of laboratory. But where, exactly, I really don’t remember.’
Gunn nodded. ‘Mrs Macdonald told me he had a PO box here.’
‘Oh, did she?’ And something in Mrs Macleod’s tone told him that she would be having words with her old friend from Luskentyre.
‘So he has all his mail delivered here?’
‘No, no. Most of it goes to Dune Cottage with the postie. The mail that comes to his PO box is usually Special Delivery, too. From the laboratory he sends his packages to. Though he doesn’t always pick it up straight away.’
‘Is there anything waiting for him to pick up right now?’
She gave him a look. ‘No, there is not, Mr Gunn. And even if there were, I’d need permission to let you see it.’ Then she relented a little. ‘He’s not had anything for about ten days or so.’
Gunn reached into the inside pocket of his anorak and produced the photograph of the man whose body they had found on Eilean Mòr. ‘Have you ever seen this gentleman in here?’
She lifted the reading glasses that hung on a chain around her neck and put them on to squint at it closely. But she shook her head. ‘No, Mr Gunn, he doesn’t look at all familiar to me.’
*
The bright early sunshine which had accompanied Gunn on his drive down from Stornoway was intermittent now as cumulus bubbled up from the south-west, blown in on a strengthening wind and casting more shadow than sunlight across the southern half of the island.
Occasional rain spots spattered on his windscreen as he headed down through Northton and past the Seallam genealogy centre, to Leverburgh. But it didn’t come to anything, and was brighter when he reached the southern coastline and headed through the hills on the long straight road to Rodel.
It was a long time since Gunn had been here. He had once brought his wife on a weekend drive from Stornoway, and they had eaten the most marvellous seafood in the Rodel Hotel. But he imagined it would only be a matter of weeks now before the hotel would shut down for the season, and the little harbour below it was quite deserted. Despite the absence of people, there were plenty of boats. Fishing boats and motor launches, a couple of sailing boats and a handful of rowing boats which had seen better days, all lined up side by side, nudging each other playfully on the incoming swell, pulling on ropes and creaking in the wind. Many more boats than Gunn remembered from his previous visit.
He was about to walk up to the hotel when a voice called from the far side of the harbour. ‘Can I help you?’ Gunn turned to see a man walking round the quay towards him, and could only assume he had come from one of the boats, because there had been nobody there a moment ago. He wore heavy boots and yellow oilskin overtrousers, and an intricately patterned Eriskay jumper. His weathered face was young, but thinning hair aged him.
Gunn showed him his warrant card. ‘That all depends,’ he said. ‘You are . . . ?’
‘Coinneach Macrae.’ He held out a hand to shake Gunn’s and very nearly crushed it. ‘I run a boat-charter business out of the harbour here.’
‘Ahhh,’ Gunn said. ‘Didn’t think there were this many boats last time I visited.’
‘It’s my first year at Rodel,’ Macrae said. ‘Used to be based at Leverburgh, but Rodel’s a bigger attraction for the tourists.’ He turned and ran his eye around the harbour. ‘Doesn’t come much prettier than this.’
Gunn nodded. ‘Gone well, then, has it? Your first season.’
Macrae’s shoulders rose and fell noncommittally. ‘Could have been worse. So what can I help you with, Detective Sergeant?’
‘I’m wondering if you know a fella called Neal Maclean.’
‘I do indeed.’
‘He keeps his boat here, I believe.’
‘He does that.’
Gunn turned towards the boats tethered in the harbour. ‘And which is his?’
‘It’s not here.’
Gunn frowned. ‘So where is it?’
Macrae ran a hand back through what was left of sandy hair. ‘No idea. It’s all very odd, really.’
‘What is?’
‘Well . . . five, maybe six days ago, he went off to the Flannans, like he quite often does. But he never came back. His car sat parked over there in front of the hotel for a day or so. Then he shows up with a woman I’ve seen him with a few times. A Mrs Harrison.’ He crinkled blue eyes and turned them skywards, thinking hard. ‘Sally,’ he said suddenly. ‘That’s what he calls her. Anyway, they arrive in her car to get his, and he seems surprised that his boat’s not here.’ Macrae took in Gunn’s expression and laughed. ‘I know, I know. Sounds crazy. How would he not know his boat wasn’t here? Anyway, she jumps in with this cock and bull story about them having berthed it up at Uig, and he shuts up. I didn’t believe a word of it.’
‘So where do you think his boat is, then?’
‘I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea, Mr Gunn. But he shows up here again the next day wanting to hire one of mine.’
‘And you hired him one?’
‘Why wouldn’t I? He’s an experienced sailor, and he paid me in cash right there and then.’
‘So that would have been when? Two days ago?’
‘No . . .’ Macrae scratched his chin. ‘Must have been the day before that. I’ll have a record of it in the books.’
‘And did he say where he was going?’
‘Aye, the Flannans. I was a wee bit worried, because the weather was on the turn.’
‘But he brought it back?’
‘Oh, aye, he did. A few hours later. Looking like he’d seen a ghost, too. Face so white it was green. You know, like folk get when they’re seasick.’
Gunn knew only too well.
‘Only, a man like him doesn’t get seasick, Mr Gunn. So I’ve no idea what his problem was. But he was in no mood for chit-chat, and he was off like a bat out of hell.’
Gunn dug out his photograph of the dead man. ‘Ever seen this fella at all?’
Macrae took it and examined it closely before handing it back. ‘Afraid not.’ He paused. ‘Is that the dead man, then?’
Gunn scowled. ‘How do you know about that?’
And Macrae grinned. ‘It’s a small island, Mr Gunn. You should know that better than anyone. It bothered me, you know, Mr Maclean’s story about taking his boat up to Uig. So I called Murray at Seatrek last night, just out of curiosity. Turns out Maclean’s boat’s not at Miavaig at all. And, of course, that’s when he told me all about taking you folk out to Eilean Mòr yesterday, and what it is you found there.’
Gunn slipped the photo back into his inside pocket and breathed his annoyance. ‘Tell me, Mr Macrae, how would you get out to the Flannan Isles if you didn’t have a boat yourself?’
Macrae pushed his hands deep into his pockets and sucked air in through his teeth. ‘There’s a few excursion operators that run trips out to St Kilda and the Flannans, Mr Gunn. One at Leverburgh, another at Tarbert, and then of course there’s Seatrek itself.’
‘Scotland The Brave’ began playing in Gunn’s pocket, and he fumbled to pull out his mobile. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and turned to walk, swishing, away along the quay to take the call. It was the desk sergeant at Stornoway to say he had just dispatched a constable to Luskentyre with the search warrant from the Sheriff.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It is after three thirty when I drive off the ferry from Uig on to the ramp at Tarbert. Brightly coloured yellow railings guide the disembarking traffic on to the road that leads out of the town, past the Harris tweed shop. It is spitting rain, and my windscreen wipers smear it across the fly-spattered glass.
It is hard to say that I am glad to be back, but this feels more like home to me than anywhere I went to in Edinburgh. Wherever I might truly belong, I have spent the last eighteen months of my life on this island, and so there is a sense, however illusory, of returning to the womb. Here, for better or worse, there are people who know me, or at least know me in the part I have been playing this last year and a half.
But, during all the long hours of the drive back from Edinburgh, I have been wrestling with the concept that I have no name I can answer to. The only name I am known by is that of a dead man. Since I have no past, I am without a present. And without a present I have no future. It is a thought that has driven a wedge of depression deep into my consciousness, and I am falling into a trough of sheer despondency.
I am tired now, my concentration shot, and I almost collide with another vehicle as I turn south on the main road. The blast of the other car’s horn sets my heart racing and clears from my mind the cloud that has been obscuring my immediate future in all its uncertainty. I have no idea what I am going to do when I get back to the cottage. I desperately want the comfort of Sally’s arms around me, soft and warm. I want to breathe in her scent, drift off in her embrace, like a child. And, who knows, maybe waken with tomorrow’s dawn, memory fully restored, knowing exactly who I am and why I am here.
Everything on the drive to Luskentyre feels reassuringly familiar. The sign on the left for the Episcopalian Church, the roadsigns for Rodel and Geocrab and Manais. The Golden Road. Even the roadworks on the brae leading down to the fabulous expanse of silver and turquoise in the bay.
The bizarrely wind-sculpted Scots pines to the right of the single-track seem to be welcoming me home as I turn at the cottage before the cemetery and come up over the rise to see a phalanx of police and other vehicles crowded on to the tarmac behind my house.
It comes like a punch in the gut. Debilitating and painful, suffusing my entire being with a sense of utter hopelessness, and very nearly robbing me of the ability to turn the wheel and guide my car over the cattle grid. For the briefest of moments I consider driving past, as if just passing by. But the road goes nowhere, except to the beach at the end of it, and I would have to turn and come back. And then what? I have to face up to the reality of my situation some time.
As I draw in behind all the other vehicles parked in my drive, I cut the motor and close my eyes. There can only be one possible reason for this congregation of policemen at my house. And I see once again the face of the man I found dead in the ruined chapel on Eilean Mòr, the blood and brain tissue, and know that they, too, think that I killed him.
The afternoon is blustery, grey and depressing as I step out of my car. The clouds over the beach are low, almost purple on their underside. The wind is fierce and I feel it filling my mouth and bringing tears to my eyes. A uniformed policeman climbs out of one of the cars and approaches me. ‘Excuse me, sir, what’s your business here?’
And I hear myself saying, ‘I live here.’
I see his eyes open wide. ‘You’re Mr Maclean?’ I nod, knowing that it is absolutely not who I am. ‘Better come with me, sir.’ I feel his fingers closing around my upper arm, and he is leading me down the drive towards the door of the cottage, which is standing wide open. We reach the foot of the steps and I can see several uniformed officers moving about inside my house. The constable who has my arm calls, ‘George!’ And after a moment a stocky man in a black quilted anorak appears at the door. His face is pink and round and shiny, and a black widow’s peak cuts a V into his forehead. He looks at the constable, then at me, and the constable says, ‘Detective Sergeant Gunn, this is Mr Maclean.’
I see Gunn’s expression change in an instant. He looks at me again, but with different eyes this time. ‘Mr Neal Maclean?’ he says.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask, although I know perfectly well.
Gunn comes down the steps and a wedge of his gelled hair lifts up in the wind. ‘Three days ago, Mr Maclean, you were seen by several witnesses, running from the old ruined chapel at Eilean Mòr, out on the Flannan Isles. Yesterday, the body of a dead man was discovered in that building. A death we are treating as murder. I’m wondering how you could have entered that building without seeing the body and, if you did, why you didn’t report it.’
Thoughts tumble through my head, disordered and incoherent. I know that I have to come up with a convincing story, but I am finding it almost impossible to think clearly. And it occurs to me in that moment that I should just tell him the truth. The whole truth. What kind of relief might that be? But equally, I realise that the truth will sound even more unlikely than anything I might invent. And it seems to me now that the black cloud which has been masking my memory since I washed ashore on the beach must be obscuring something worse even than murder. Because it is still there. So I rush into a lie. ‘You probably know by now, Detective Sergeant, that I am writing a book on the disappearance of the Flannan Isles lighthouse men.’
‘So I’ve been told, Mr Maclean.’ There is a strange little sardonic smile playing about his lips. ‘I’d be interested in seeing that manuscript, sir, if you wouldn’t mind showing me it a little later.’ And I know he knows that I am not writing a book. Still, we both keep up the pretence.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Anyway, I was out at the lighthouse for a bit of research and got caught in a squall. I was going to take shelter in the chapel, but the rain eased off a bit, and I decided to make a dash for the boat instead. So I never actually went into the building.’
That little sardonic smile has gone. He seems quite impassive now, and it is impossible to read anything into his face. But I am sure he doesn’t believe me. After a moment he nods his head beyond me, towards the garden shed. ‘Would you mind unlocking that shed for me, sir?’
I turn and glance at the shed, surprised. The large padlock hooked firmly through the clasps is locked. I remember that I couldn’t get into it when I was looking for stepladders. ‘I don’t have the key,’ I say, and fish my keys out my pocket. An ignition key for the car, and a couple of smaller keys for the house. ‘These are the only ones I have.’
Gunn purses his lips. ‘The owner of the house tells us that a key to the padlock on the garden shed was among the keys that she gave you when you first moved in.’
I shrug. This is probably true. But I have no idea where that key might be now. ‘Then I must have mislaid it,’ I say. ‘I’ve never had any cause to use the shed.’ And no sooner do I say it than I wonder if I have.
‘You won’t mind if we force the lock then, sir?’
‘Not at all.’ There is a sick feeling evolving in my stomach. ‘Perhaps the owner won’t be too pleased, though.’ I cannot imagine how my attempt at a smile comes across to the policemen standing watching me. Their expressions remain grave.
Gunn nods to one of the uniforms, and he goes to the boot of the nearest vehicle, returning with a wheel brace, a single length of iron with a socket wrench at one end. The constable steps past us and goes to the shed, inserting the other end through the loop of the padlock and levering it hard against the door. The sound of splintering wood is quite clearly audible above the howling of the wind, and the clasps held together by the padlock rip free of the door, screws and all. And I wonder why anyone ever bothered to padlock it.
The officer who is still holding my arm passes me over to Gunn, who leads me to the shed. With his free hand he forces it open against the wind, then uses his body to keep it there, before reaching inside to feel for a light switch. When he finds it, the late afternoon gloom is banished and the darkness of the interior is thrown into sudden, sharp, fluorescent relief.
For a moment, I could almost believe that the wind had stopped blowing. For, in that instant, I simply can’t hear it. And I can feel the sense of shock and confusion all around me, as everyone crowds around to look inside.
The first thing that hits us all, I think, is the smell. The powerful, sweet, pungent odour of cedar wood and honey. And the reek of old smoke, like a cold chimney when you clean out the hearth. But we are distracted by what we see.
‘Jesus,’ I hear someone say. ‘It’s like a bloody laboratory.’
And that’s exactly what it is. A makeshift laboratory that must have cost a small fortune to equip. Worktops lining three sides, rows of shelves above them cluttered with bottles and jars and flasks. Pieces of equipment, large and small, on the worktops or on the floor. A scattering of microtweezers and scissors, micropipettes and rows of yellow tips in a bright red holder. Boxes of latex surgical gloves. To my amazement, much of it seems familiar to me. A hand-held field microscope with an XY slide indexer. A white box, about the size of a laser printer, with a screen set into its bevelled front. The make and model, SureCycler 8800, is engraved into the plastic above the screen, and I know that this machine is used for amplifying DNA. A small freezer unit sits on the floor against the back wall, and, on the worktop above it, what looks like a fridge, with a black box set into the top of it. But I know that it is not a fridge. It is a digital image system used for DNA gel photography. I see the gel tank itself on the counter beside it, and its small black power pack.
There are piles of padded envelopes, kitchen scales, and larger, industrial hanging scales dangling from a hook on the wall. A MacBook Pro laptop computer sits next to an SLR digital camera set into a holding frame and bracket, and the wall above it is pinned with dozens of printout photographs of honeycomb frames. A laser printer/photocopier/scanner sits on a low table in one corner. Hive frames and foundations, and a shallow wooden drawer that I know to be a pollen trap, are propped all along the right-hand wall, from which hang a beekeeper’s protective clothing. Hat and mask, gloves, jacket, wellington boots beneath them. There is a hive tool dangling from a hook, a smoker with its carrying cage and nozzle for directing smoke into the hive, and rolls of cardboard tied with string on a shelf next to a red plastic cigarette lighter engraved in white with the logo
Ergo
. The top shelf groans with jars of rich, amber honey. Makeshift wasp traps fashioned from old plastic Coke bottles hang from the ceiling. They are filled with clusters of drowned wasps, attracted into the shed by the honey in the jars, then drawn into the traps by a mix of jam and water. And black electric cables loop back and forth bringing power to sockets set at intervals along the worktops.
I can feel the skin of my face burning red as Gunn turns to look at me with the strangest sense of incomprehension in his eyes. ‘So you’ve never had cause to use the shed, sir?’
I cannot think of a single thing to say. The silence that hangs in the air is blown away in the wind, which I hear again, suddenly, as if someone has just pressed the un-mute button. I do not need to look around me to know that every eye is upon me. They have no idea that I am as lost for an explanation as they are. And I hear myself say, stupidly, ‘I can’t explain it.’
‘May I see your hands, please?’
Confused, but compliant, I offer him my hands, and he takes them in his, turning them over, and I see the odd bee sting on my fingers. Small red lumps with tiny scabs at their centre.
He lets go of my hands and takes me by the arm again. ‘Come with me please, sir.’ And he leads me through the silent, standing police officers, up the steps and into my house. Everything is in chaos as we pass through the boot room and into the kitchen. Beside the laptop on the kitchen table, the briefcase I found in the attic sits with its lid up, exposing the bundles of banknotes inside. The folder of newspaper cuttings on Neal Maclean is open, its contents spilled across the table. ‘Maybe you’ll have more success in explaining this,’ he says. And hell simply opens up beneath my feet.