The Blackhouse (7 page)

Fin wandered over to the bench where the pathologist had laid out the photographs taken at the crime scene. It looked as if the boatshed had been lit by an overzealous theatrical lighting director. The colours were lurid and startling, blood already dried to a rust brown. Angel’s dead weight seemed impossibly large, layered folds of blue-white flesh. The intestine looping from his grinning abdomen appeared unreal. It all had the cheap and nasty veneer of a bad sixties B-movie. But Fin was beginning to get a picture of Angel’s last hours.

He had gone into Stornoway for a curry, returning afterwards to Ness, where he had consumed several pints at the Crobost Social Club. He had either accompanied his killer to the boatshed at Port of Ness or met him there. For what reason, it was unclear. But in any event, he must either have known his killer, or been sufficiently unsuspecting to turn his back on him, allowing the opportunity to attack him from behind. Knocked unconscious by a blow to the back of the head, he had been turned over and strangled. The murderer must have been in a state of high nervous tension, excitable, adrenaline pumping. He had vomited all over his victim.

Undaunted, apparently, he had proceeded to strip Angel of his clothes. That would have taken some time, and been a far from simple task, given the dead weight of a man of around two hundred and fifty pounds. Even more incredibly, he had proceeded to tie a rope around his neck, thread it through a beam in the roof and hoist him upright so that he was eventually hanging with his feet more than six inches clear of the ground. Which told them something about the murderer. This was a powerful man. And in spite of the act of murder making him physically sick, very determined. The longer it took, the greater the risk of being caught. He must have known that the boatshed was a Saturday night haunt for young lovers, and that he might be discovered at any moment. Murder interrupted instead of the more usual coitus interruptus. And yet not content simply with killing him, he had undressed him, hanged him and disembowelled him. Time-consuming and messy. Something in all these thoughts made Fin uneasy.

He turned back towards Professor Wilson. ‘How do you think it compares with the Leith Walk murder? Are we talking about the same killer here?’

The professor pushed his goggles up on his forehead and pulled his mask down below his beard. ‘You know how it is, Fin. Pathologists never give you a straight answer. And I’m not about to break with tradition.’ He sighed. ‘On the face of it, the MO is very similar. Both men attacked from behind, struck on the head, rendered unconscious and strangled. Both men stripped of their clothes and found hanging by the neck. Both men disembowelled. Yes, there are differences in the angle and depth of the wound. And our Angel’s killer was agitated to the point of throwing up over his victim. We don’t know if that happened in Edinburgh. There were no traces of vomitus on the body, and we never found the clothes. What we did find on that body, you’ll recall, were carpet fibres, suggesting that perhaps the victim had been murdered elsewhere and brought to Leith to be strung up for exhibition. There was certainly less blood in Edinburgh, which probably meant that some time had elapsed between the victim’s death and the disembowelling.’

The professor began the process of reassembling the carcass on the table in front of him. ‘The thing is, Fin, the circumstances and the setting are so very different, the detail is bound to be different, too. So the truth is, that without definitive evidence pointing one way or the other, it is impossible to say whether these killings were carried out by the same individual or not. Perhaps the ritualistic nature of the murders might lead you to think that they were, but on the other hand salient features of the Leith Walk murder were carried in some detail by several of the tabloids. So if someone had wanted to replicate the murder they could do so fairly easily.’

‘But why would somebody
want
to do that?’ Gunn said. He looked a little less green around the gills now.

‘I’m a pathologist, not a psychiatrist.’ The professor cast Gunn a withering look, before turning back to Fin. ‘I’ll take skin swabs, and we’ll see what, if anything, toxicology turns up. But don’t expect much in the way of further illumination.’

III

The Barvas road wound up out of Stornoway, leaving behind spectacular views towards Coll and Loch a Tuath and Point, sunlight coruscating across the bay, torn clouds chasing their own shadows over the deep, blue water. Ahead lay twelve miles of bleak moorland as the road straightened out and took them north-west towards the tiny settlement of Barvas on the west coast. It was a brooding landscape that in a moment of sunlight could be unexpectedly transformed. Fin knew the road well, in all seasons, and had never ceased to marvel at how the inter-minable acres of featureless peatbog could change by the month, the day, or even the minute. The dead straw colour of winter, the carpets of tiny white spring flowers, the dazzling purples of summer. To their right the sky had blackened, and rain was falling somewhere in the hinterland. To their left the sky was almost clear, summer sunlight falling across the land, and they could see in the distance the pale outline of the mountains of Harris. Fin had forgotten how big the sky was here.

Fin and Gunn drove in silence, thoughts filled by the images of clinical post-mortem carnage they had witnessed at the mortuary. There was no greater reminder of your own mortality than to witness another human being laid bare on a cold mortuary table.

At just about the halfway point, the road took a dip before rising again to a peak from which the Atlantic was distantly visible, venting its relentless anger on a crumbling coastline. In the hollow of the dip, about a hundred yards from the north side of the road, stood a small stone house with a brightly painted green tin roof. A shieling, once used by coastal crofters as a home during the summer, when they would move their beasts inland for better grazing. They were everywhere on the island. Most of them, like this one, had long since fallen into desuetude. Fin had seen the green-roofed shieling on the Barvas moor every Monday on his way to the school hostel in Stornoway. And again on the way back on the Friday. He had seen it in all weathers. And he had seen it often, as it was today, lit by the sun from the south, standing in vivid outline against the blackest of skies in the north. It was a landmark that almost every man, woman and child on the island would recognize. For Fin, however, it had a special significance, and the sight of it now filled him with a pain he had long since forgotten, or at least buried in a dark place he had no wish to revisit. But for as long as he was on the island, he knew that there were memories from his past he could not avoid. Memories which, like childish things, he had put away when he became a man nearly twenty years before.

The drive up the west coast was a trip that took him deeper into that past, and Fin sat silently in the passenger seat while Gunn drove. Long stretches of empty road linked bleak and exposed settlements huddled around churches of various denominations. The Church of Scotland. The United Free Church of Scotland. The Free Church of Scotland. The Free Church of Scotland Continuing – the
Wee Frees
, as the free churches were universally known. Each one was a division of the one before. Each one a testimony to the inability of man to agree with man. Each one a rallying point for hatred and distrust of the other. He watched the villages drift by, like moving images in an old family album, every building, every fencepost and blade of glass picked out in painfully sharp relief by the sun behind them. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere. Just an occasional car on the road, or at the odd village store, or filling station. The tiny village primary schools, too, were empty, still shut for the summer holidays. Fin wondered where all the children were. To their right, the peatbog drifted into a hazy infinity, punctuated only by stoic sheep standing firm against the Atlantic gales. To their left, the ocean itself swept in timeless cycles on to beaches and into rocky inlets, creamy white foam crashing over darkly obdurate gneiss, the oldest rock on earth. The outline of a tanker, like a distant mirage, was just discernible on the horizon.

At Cross, Fin saw that the tree which had once grown tall in the shelter of the Cross Inn had been cut down. A landmark gone. The only tree on the west coast. The village seemed naked without it. The Cross Free Church still dominated the skyline, dark granite towering over the harled and double-glazed homes of stubborn islanders determined to see off the elements. And occasionally their prayers were answered. For sometimes, on days like today, the wind took pity and the sky let the sun through to soften its razor edge. Hard lives rewarded with fleeting moments of pleasure.

Not far beyond the church the road peaked, and they had a view down towards the northernmost tip of the island. The gable ends of white-painted cottages caught the sunlight all along the eastern horizon, in between the ruins of old black-houses, textured stone in random patterns pushing up out of the turf. And Fin saw the familiar curve of the land dipping away to the village of Crobost on the cliff road, and the distinctive silhouette of a church built to show the people of Cross that the people of Crobost were just as devout.

The road took them down through Swainbost and Lionel to the tiny village of Port of Ness, past the single-track roads that turned off towards Crobost and Mealanais. There the road ended, and the cliffs formed a natural harbour at the the north-west end of half a mile of empty golden beach. Man had enhanced nature by building a breakwater and harbour wall. At one time trawlers and fishing boats had plied their trade in and out of the harbour. But nature had struck back, smashing down the breakwater at one end, where great chunks of semi-submerged rock and concrete had fought and failed to stand firm against the irresistible assault of the sea. The harbour was all but deserted now, used as a haven only by small fishing boats, crabbers and dinghies.

Gunn parked outside Ocean Villa opposite the harbour road. A black and yellow crime-scene tape whipped and snapped in the wind, stretched across the road to prevent public access. A uniformed officer, leaning against the wall of the Harbour View Gallery, hastily ditched his cigarette as he recognized Gunn getting out of the driver’s side. Some comedian had obliterated the
s
from the
To the Shore
sign pointing towards the harbour. Fin wondered if it was a comment on the succession of teenage girls who had lost their virginity over the years in the boatshed where, on Saturday, a fallen angel had died.

They stepped over the tape and followed the winding road down to the shelter of the quay. The tide was in, green water over yellow sand. A crabber and a group of dinghies were tied together at the inner wall, creels piled on the quay above them beside a tangle of green netting, and pink and yellow marker buoys. A larger boat, dragged up out of the water, was tilting at a dangerous angle in the sand.

The boatshed was much as Fin remembered it. Green corrugated-iron roof, white-painted walls. The right-hand side of it was open and exposed to the elements. Two window slits in the back wall opening out to the beach beyond. There were two large wooden doors on the left-hand side. One was shut, the other half-open, revealing a boat on a trailer inside. There was more crime-scene tape here. They stepped into the semi-dark of the closed-off half of the building. Angel’s blood still stained the floor, and the smell of death lingered with the diesel fumes and the salt water. The wooden cross-beam overhead revealed a deep groove cut by the rope where Angel’s murderer had hauled him up to hang there. The sounds of the sea and the wind were muted in here, but still a presence. Through the narrow window openings, Fin could see that the tide was just turning, seawater starting to recede over smooth wet sand.

Apart from the staining, the concrete floor was unnaturally clean, every scrap of debris carefully collected by men in Tyvek suits for scrupulous forensic examination. The walls were scarred with the graffiti of a generation.
Murdo’s a poof; Anna
loves Donald;
and that old classic,
Fuck the Pope
. Fin found it almost unbearably depressing. He stepped outside and into the open half of the shed and took a deep breath. A crudely fashioned swing hung from the rafters, two strips of wood bound together with plastic orange rope to create the seat. The same orange rope which had been used to suspend Angel from the rafters next door. Fin became aware of Gunn at his shoulder. He said, without turning, ‘So have we any idea why someone might have wanted to kill him?’

‘He wasn’t short of enemies, Mr Macleod. You should know that. There’s a whole generation of men from Crobost who suffered at one time or another at the hands of Angel Macritchie or his brother.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Fin spat on the floor as if the memory brought a bitter taste to his mouth. ‘I was one of them.’ He turned and smiled. ‘Maybe you should be asking me where I was on Saturday night.’

Gunn cocked an eyebrow. ‘Maybe I should, Mr Macleod.’

‘Do you mind if we walk along the beach, George? It’s been a long time.’

The beach was bordered on the landward side by low, crumbling cliffs no more than thirty feet high, and at the far end the sand gave way to rocky outcrops that reached tentatively into the water, as if testing it for temperature. Odd groups of rock, clustered together at points in the bay, were always just visible above the breaking waves. Fin had spent hours on this beach as a boy, beachcombing, catching crabs in the rock pools, climbing the cliffs. Now he and Gunn left virgin tracks in the sand. ‘The thing is,’ Fin said, ‘being bullied at school twenty-five years ago is hardly a motive for murder.’

‘There were more people it seems, Mr Macleod, who bore him a grudge, than just those he bullied.’

‘What people, George?’

‘Well, for a start, we had two outstanding complaints against him on the books at Stornoway. One of assault, one of sexual assault. Both, in theory, still subject to ongoing inquiry.’