The Blackhouse (29 page)

A man came out from the front door of the crofthouse as they slammed the car doors shut. He wore moleskin trousers tucked into knee-high black boots, and a thick woollen jumper under a jacket with leather patches at the shoulders and elbows. He had a shotgun broken over one arm, and a canvas satchel hanging from his shoulder. His black hair was cropped short and his face lean. But even a deep summer tan could not hide the yellow remains of bruising around it, and there were several healing scars on badly split lips. He had striking pale green eyes, and Fin decided that he was about the same age as himself. The man paused for a moment, then closed the door behind him and sauntered towards them with the hint of a limp in his gait. ‘Can I be of any assistance to you gentlemen?’ He was softspoken, his gentle cockney cadences barely audible above the racket of the wind. But his voice did not reflect the wariness in his strange green eyes, or the tension Fin could see in the way he held his body, something of the cat about him, all wound up and ready to spring.

‘James Minto?’ Fin said.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘Detective Sergeant Finlay Macleod.’ Fin nodded towards Gunn. ‘And Detective Constable George Gunn.’

‘Identification?’ Minto was still eyeing them cautiously. They both showed him their warrant cards, which he examined, and then nodded. ‘Okay, you’ve found him. What do you want?’

Fin cocked his head towards the shotgun. ‘I take it you’ve got a licence for that?’

‘What do you think?’ Wariness was turning towards hostility.

‘I think I asked you a question which you haven’t answered.’

‘Yes, I’ve got a licence.’

‘What are you thinking of shooting?’

‘Rabbits, if it’s any of your business, Detective Sergeant.’ He bore all the hallmarks of a soldier in the ranks displaying his contempt for a senior officer.

‘Not poachers.’

‘I don’t shoot poachers. I catch them and I hand them over to you people.’

‘Where were you on Saturday night between eight and midnight?’

For the first time Minto’s confidence wavered. ‘Why?’

‘I’m asking the questions.’

‘And I’m not answering unless I know why.’

‘If you don’t answer I’ll put you in handcuffs in the back of that car and take you to Stornoway where you’ll be charged with obstructing a police officer in the course of his duties.’

‘Fucking try it, mate, and you’ll end up with two broken arms.’

Fin had read Gunn’s printout on Minto. Ex-SAS, serving in the Gulf and Afghanistan. And something in Minto’s tone told him that he meant what he said. Fin kept his voice level. ‘Threatening a police officer is also an offence, Mr Minto.’

‘So handcuff me and throw me in the back of your car.’

Fin was surprised by the quiet menace in Gunn’s voice at his side. ‘I think you’d better answer Mr Macleod’s questions, Mr Minto, or it’s you who’ll have the broken arms, and it’s me who’ll break them while I’m putting them in cuffs.’

Minto flicked him a look of quick appraisal. Hitherto, he had paid little attention to Gunn. If he had dismissed him as a junior officer of no consequence, he was now clearly rethinking. He reached a decision. ‘I was at home Saturday night. Watching the telly. Not that you get a very good picture down here.’ He dragged his eyes away from Gunn and back to Fin.

‘Can anyone verify that?’ Fin said.

‘Yeh, like I’ve got a lot of mates round Uig. They’re always dropping by for a beer and a chat.’

‘You were on your own, then?’

‘You’re quick for a copper.’

‘What programmes did you watch?’ Gunn asked with the authority of someone who had probably been watching TV himself on Saturday night.

Minto threw him another wary glance. ‘How the fuck should I know? Bloody telly’s the same every night. Crap.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Look, the sooner you ask me what it is you want to know, the sooner I’ll tell you, and we can put an end to this little game, okay?’

‘Maybe we should do this indoors,’ Fin said. ‘And you could make us a cup of tea.’ It seemed like a good way of defusing hostilities.

Minto thought about it for a few moment. ‘Yeh, okay. Why don’t we do that?’

For a man who lived alone, Minto kept his house in perfect order. The tiny sitting room was spartan and clean, devoid of pictures or ornaments, except for a chessboard on a table by the window, opposing chessmen in various stages of conflict across the black and cream ivory squares. Fin could see into the kitchen as they sat waiting for Minto to come through with the tea. There wasn’t a dirty dish in sight. Cutlery hung in neat racks on the wall, and dish towels hung drying, carefully folded above a heater. Minto carried in a tray with a pot of tea and three cups and saucers, a small jug of milk and a crock of sugar cubes. Fin had been expecting mugs. There was something faintly manic in Minto’s fastidiousness, a tidiness and discipline dinned into him perhaps by years in the army. Fin wondered what motivated a man to come to a place like this to live on his own. His job, by its nature, would not lead him to make many friends. But he seemed to go out of his way to make enemies. Nobody liked him much, Big Kenny had said. And Fin could see why.

As Minto poured, Fin said, ‘Not easy to play chess with yourself.’

Minto glanced across the room towards his chessboard. ‘I play by telephone. My old commanding officer.’

‘You have the Lewis Chessmen, I see.’

Minto grinned. ‘Yeh, not the originals, unfortunately. Ain’t figured out how to break into the British Museum yet.’ He paused. ‘Beautiful things, aren’t they?’

Beautiful was not a word Fin had expected to hear passing Minto’s lips. If he had suspected for a moment that Minto might have been aware of life’s aesthetics, he would not have thought him likely to appreciate them. But the one thing Fin had learned from his years in the police was that however much you believed you had them figured out, people invariably surprised you. ‘Have you ever seen the originals? They keep a few of them at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.’

‘Never been to Edinburgh,’ Minto said. ‘In fact, I haven’t been anywhere in Scotland except here. And I haven’t been off the island since I arrived fifteen months ago.’ Fin nodded. If that was true, it would rule Minto out of any connection with the Leith Walk murder. ‘I thought at first maybe you’d come to tell me you’d got the bastards who did this to my face.’

‘Afraid not,’ Gunn said.

‘Nah,’ Minto drawled. ‘Don’t know what I was thinking. Like every other bugger round here, you’re more interested in looking after your own. Right?’ He sat down and dropped two lumps of sugar in his tea and stirred in some milk.

‘A lot of your poachers turn up pretty badly marked themselves,’ said Gunn.

‘A lot of my poachers don’t like getting caught.’

Fin said, ‘Do you work alone?’

‘Nah. There’s a couple of other guys on Sir John’s payroll. Locals, you know, probably out poaching themselves when they’re not out with me.’

‘Sir John’s payroll must be quite hefty then,’ Fin said. ‘Three of you on a salary just to catch poachers.’

Minto laughed. ‘A drop in the bloody ocean, mate. You know, there’s consortiums of fishermen come up here, stay in the lodge, and pay ten grand a week just for one beat. Over a season that’s a lot of dosh, know what I mean? And these guys ain’t too happy paying that kind of money if there ain’t no fish in the river. A hundred years ago, over on Grimersta Estate, they was catching more than two thousand salmon a year. Back then, they say the guy who owned the place caught fifty-seven of the buggers off the same rod in one day. These days we’re lucky if we pull a few hundred in a season. The wild salmon’s a dying breed, Detective Sergeant. It’s my job to see they don’t become extinct.’

‘By beating the living daylights out of anyone you catch taking them illegally?’

‘You said that, I didn’t.’

Fin sipped reflectively on his tea, momentarily startled by the unexpected perfume of Earl Grey. He glanced at Gunn and saw that the detective constable had put his cup back on the table, the tea undrunk. Fin refocused on Minto. ‘Do you recall a man called Macritchie? You caught him poaching on the estate here about six months ago. Handed him over to the police, in a bit of a state apparently.’

Minto shrugged. ‘I’ve caught a few poachers in the last six months, mate. And every one of them’s been a Mac-something-or-other. Give me a clue.’

‘He was murdered in Port of Ness on Saturday night.’

For a moment, Minto’s natural cockiness deserted him. A frown gathered itself around his eyes. ‘That’s the guy that was in the paper the other day.’ Fin nodded. ‘Jesus Christ, and you think I had something to do with that?’

‘You got beaten up pretty badly a few weeks ago. By an assailant or assailants unknown.’

‘Yeh, unknown because you bloody people haven’t caught them yet.’

‘So they weren’t just poachers that you stumbled on?’

‘Nah, they was out to give me a doing. Lying waiting for me they were.’

‘And you couldn’t identify them, why?’ Gunn asked.

‘Because they was wearing bloody masks, wasn’t they? Didn’t want me to see their faces.’

‘Which means they were probably faces you knew,’ Fin said.

‘Well, knock me down with a feather. I’d never have thought of that.’ Minto took a large gulp of tea as if to wash away the bad taste of his sarcasm.

‘Must be a lot of folk around here who’re not too fond of you, then,’ Fin said.

And finally Minto saw the light. His green eyes opened wide. ‘You think it was this guy Macritchie. You think I knew it was him and killed him for it.’

‘Did you?’

Minto’s laugh was mirthless. ‘Let me tell you something, mate. If I’d known who did this to me,’ he pointed to his face, ‘I’d have dealt with it quickly and quietly. And I wouldn’t have left any marks.’

Outside, the wind was still bending the long grasses. The shadows of clouds raced across miles of compacted sand, and they saw that the tide had turned and was rushing across the flats with indecent haste. At the car they stopped and Fin said, ‘I‘d like to go up to Ness, George, and talk to a few folk.’

‘I’ll need to go back to Stornoway, sir. DCI Smith keeps us on a tight leash.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to ask him for a car.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Mr Macleod. He’d probably just say no.’ Gunn hesitated. ‘Why don’t you drop me off at the station and take my car. Better to be forgiven than forbidden, eh?’

Fin smiled. ‘Thanks, George.’ He opened the car door.

Gunn said, ‘So what do you think?’ He nodded towards the crofthouse. ‘About Minto.’

‘I think if it wasn’t for the drive down and back, we’d have been wasting our time.’ Gunn nodded. But Fin had the impression it was a nod of acknowledgement rather than of agreement. ‘You don’t agree?’

‘No, I think you’re probably right, Mr Macleod. But I didn’t like the fella much. Gave me the willies. With his kind of training he’d know how to use a knife alright, and I don’t believe he’d think twice about using it.’

Fin ran a hand back through the fine, tight curls of his hair. ‘They’re pretty highly trained, these SAS types.’

‘Aye, they are.’

‘And you think you could have broken his arms?’

Gunn shot him a look and blushed, a tiny smile stretching his lips. ‘I think he could have probably broken every bone in my body before I even got near him, Mr Macleod.’ He inclined his head slightly. ‘But he wasn’t to know that.’

II

The Pottery had been there at the foot of the hill for as long as Fin could remember. When he had first taken over the old croft, Eachan Stewart had been a long-haired, wild-eyed man of about thirty who had seemed very old to all the children of Crobost. Fin and the other boys in the village had thought him a wizard, and for once had obeyed parental advice and stayed away from the Pottery, fearing that he might cast an evil spell on them. He did not belong to the island, although his grandfather was said to have come from Carloway, which was the Lewis equivalent of the Wild West. Born somewhere in the north of England, he had been christened Hector, but returning to his roots had called himself Eachan, its Gaelic equivalent.

As he pulled Gunn’s car on to the grass verge opposite, Fin saw Eachan sitting outside the front door of his cottage. He was well into his sixties now. The hair was just as long, but pure white, and the eyes a little less wild, dulled like his brain by years of smoking dope. On the peeling white gable of the house, the red-painted legend,
The Pottery
, was still visible where he had daubed it across the wall thirty years before. A shambolic garden, filled with the accumulated detritus of decades of beachcombing, was festooned with green fishing nets draped between rotting fenceposts. Stakes of bleached driftwood flanked a rickety wooden gate. A cross-beam was tied to them by lengths of frayed rope and hung with buoys and floats and markers – orange, pink, yellow, white – blowing and rattling in the wind. Stunted and wind-blasted shrubs clung stubbornly to the thin, peaty soil where Eachan had planted them when Fin was still a boy.

A great attraction, then, for the kids on their way to school, had been the mysterious earthworks which Eachan Stewart had begun shortly after his arrival. Over a period of nearly two years, he had laboured in amongst the reedy and unproductive bog that surrounded his house, digging, and wheeling barrows of soil across the moor to pile in great heaps, like giant molehills, thirty or forty feet apart. Six of them altogether. The kids would sit up on the hill and watch him at work from a safe distance as he levelled them off and seeded them with grass, only realizing belatedly that he had built himself a mini, three-hole golf course, with tees, and greens with flagpoles stuck in the holes. They had gawped in amazement the first day he appeared with his chequered pullover and cloth cap, a golf bag slung across his shoulder, to tee up on the first hole and christen the course by playing his first round of golf. It took him only fifteen minutes, but from then on it became a routine that he followed with religious fervour every morning, rain or shine. After a while, the novelty of it wore off for the kids, and they found other things to engage their interest. Eachan Stewart, eccentric potter, had stitched himself into the fabric of life there and become, to all intents and purposes, invisible.